Is Capitalism on Trial? Or Just Big Business? Or Just Romney?
Plus, Newt the Nutty Professor....
*Friends and Colleagues: *
*Is Capitalism on Trial?* -- The Occupiers have been evicted from their
encampments, but the movement continues to have a huge impact on our
culture and politics. More than three-quarters of Americans – and more than
half of Republicans -- agree that “there is too much power in the hands of
a few rich people and corporations.” And 61 percent of Americans believed
that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.”
President Obama gave a speech in Kansas last month criticizing the
“breathtaking greed” that has led to a widening income divide, and repeated
that theme in his State of the Union speech this week. The GOP primary has
turned into a debate over Romney’s corporate business practices and over
capitalism itself. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that roughly the
same number of eighteen-to-twenty-nine year old Americans have positive
views of socialism as of
capitalism< http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/?src=prc-headline> .
In my new piece in *Dissent*, I ask “Is Capitalism on Trial?” You can read
it here: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=578
*Newt, the Nutty Professor* – On the campaign trail, Gingrich constantly
refers to himself as a “former professor,” a “scholar,” and as an
“historian,” as though that gives him credibility for saying the outrageous
things he says. He even claims that Freddie Mac paid him $1.6 million as an
“historian,” rather than as the lobbyist and influence-peddler he was.
Media stories about Gingrich repeat his self-description and suggest that
he’s brilliant and erudite. So far, the media have failed to inform voters
that Gingrich’s short career as a history professor was a failure. He
didn’t publish anything and he was denied tenure at West Georgia College.
Over the years, Gingrich has changed his story about why he didn’t get
tenure. The media – and the moderators at the presidential debates -- give
Gingrich a free pass, allowing him to bloviate about his academic
credentials, without challenging him to explain his less-than-stellar
academic career (and then to correct him once he lies about it, as he no
doubt would do). A few media outlets, however, have dug into Gingrich’s
past, interviewed his former colleagues at West Georgia College, and
examined his academic career. Myra MacPherson takes down Gingrich a few
notches in her article on the Nieman Fellows blog:
http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=2530 . On the *GQ *website earlier this
month, Trent Macnamara interviewed the professor who was chair of West
Georgia College’s history department when Gingrich was teaching there:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/01/newt-the-early-years.html .
And in the *Wall Street Journal *last week, reporter Elizabeth Williamson
digs into Gingrich’s academic career and finds that the traits we now
identify with him – his grandiosity and self-importance – were evident back
then:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203735304577167041714568630.html#project%3DPROFNEWT0117%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive
*Gingrich Puts Saul Alinsky is Back in the News* – It looks like Gingrich
is now using the late Saul Alinsky (often called the founder of community
organizing) to attack Barack Obama. In doing so, he’s engaging in the same
kind of red-baiting that Sarah Palin (with the help of Rudy Giuliani) used
against Obama in the 2008 election (as David Moberg and I described in an
article at the time:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/palin-attacks-on-communit_b_129568.html ).
At the 2008 GOP convention, Palin and Giuliani attacked Obama for his years
as a community organizer. The following Sunday, on "Meet the Press,"
Giuliani added to the attack by claiming -- wrongly -- that "the group that
recruited [Obama] was a Saul Alinsky group that has all kinds of questions
with regard to their outlook on the economy, their outlook on capitalism."
Giuliani then tried to link Obama to what he called "a very core Saul
Alinsky kind of almost socialist notion that [government] should be used
for redistribution of wealth." During the rest of the 2008 campaign, and
after Obama took office, extreme right wingers like Glenn Beck, Bill
O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, the Tea Party, and others, consistently linked Obama
to Alinsky as a way of labeling the president as a dangerous radical. Over
the years, Gingrich picked up this theme and used it to defame Obama,
including in his 2010 book, *To Save America: Stopping Obama's
Secular-Socialist Machine.* In a 2010 interview with a right-wing website,
Gingrich said: “Alinsky had a deep contempt for the American system.
Classic Alinsky is deceit, dishonesty, and deception. Any level of
dishonesty is appropriate if it undermines the bourgeois middle class.”
Gingrich repeated this line of attack on Obama in a recent South Carolina
debate: "And we disdain the Saul Alinsky European secular socialism
advocated by those who would change our country on behalf of a different
view." (Reported here by Charles Pierce:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/newt-gingrich-south-carolina-campaign-6641357#ixzz1knoEPyUD ).
At a campaign stop in South Carolina, Gingrich also said: “Obama
believes in a Saul Alinsky radicalism which the press corps was never
willing to look at. When he said he was a community organizer, it wasn’t
Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It was radicalism taught on the south side of
Chicago by Saul Alinsky.” (Reported in the National Journal:
http://nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/gingrich-revives-questions-about-obama-s-community-organizing-20111130 ).
The Washington Post published a analysis of the Alinsky-Obama frame:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/saul-alinsky-would-so-disappointed-sotu-breaks-rules-for-radicals/2012/01/24/gIQAt1cVPQ_blog.html .
And although the story poked some holes in Gingrich’s efforts to link Obama
with Alinsky, the fact that we’re discussing the connection at all means
that Gingrich and other conservatives have framed the debate.
In a recent posting on the Community Organizing website, Dave Beckwith (a
former community organizer who is now the Executive Director of The* **Needmor
Fund <
http://www.needmorfund.org/index.php> ), had some interesting insights
about why Gingrich is resorting to the Alinsky-Obama attack. Beckwith
wrote:*
*I tracked the last debate. Gingrich mentioned Alinsky more often than
Reagan! Demonizing with a Jewish-sounding name, a secret knowledge - like
blaming the Masons or the Illuminati... another "dog whistle". These secret
knowledge attacks are very exciting to the true believers, and the audience
for the talk show hosts and Fox News. Just as the "insiders" of the inverse
side like to show how much we know about the real story by talking about
the origins of the Tea Party in the John Birch Society, and the money from
the Koch Brothers. Not to be equating the "two sides", but I don't think
the narrative plays very far beyond the core in either case, but it
energizes that core, confirms their insider status and keeps them insulated
from rational argument. I think.*
*Hull House Closes Its Doors* -- If Alinsky was the “father” of community
organizing, then Jane Addams was its “mother.” One of the greatest
Americans in our nation’s history, Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in
1889 in a low-income immigrant neighborhood to help organize and uplift the
poor. Hull House became a hotbed of progressive activism in Chicago and
helped inspire the settlement house movement around the country.
Unfortunately, as Addams’ biographer, Louise Knight, reports in *The
Nation*this week, Hull House has had to close its door because of lack
of funding.
Read Knight’s report on Hull House’s history and its continuing relevance:
http://www.thenation.com/article/165848/chicagos-hull-house-closes-its-doors-time-revive-settlement-mod
*Union Gains in 2011 *-- The GOP’s attacks on Obama for the country’s high
joblessness rate are ridiculous, since it is the Republicans who have
consistently opposed the President’s efforts to pass a jobs bill to invest
in public works and public sector jobs, including teachers, cops, and
firefighters. The government’s monthly reports on overall job growth are
also misleading, unless you separate private and public sector jobs.
Private sector jobs have increased significantly, but much of that good
news has been offset by cuts in public sector jobs. That, of course, is
exactly what conservative and Republicans want – they want, as Grover
Norquist once said, to make government so small you can drown it in the
bathtub. In particular, we’ve seen in the past year an attack on public
sector unions, particularly by several Republican governors and state
legislatures. So it should come as no surprise that union membership among
government employees declined in 2011. As economists John Schmitt and
Janelle Jones of the Center for Economic and Policy Research report, the
total number of union members in the public sector declined 61,000, as
squeezed federal, state, and local governments cut back employment. What’s
remarkable is that union membership in the private sector increased by
about 110,000. And union density (the percentage of all workers in unions)
in the private sector held steady at 6.9 percent, because the rate of
private sector job growth increased at about the same pace as union
increases. Read their report here:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/data-bytes/union-membership-bytes/union-membership-holds-steady-in-2011 .
*Organizing Wal-Mart Workers* -- Wal-Mart has used a variety of repressive
and illegal tactics to keep unions out of their stores, the warehouses
where they store their goods (mostly in the Inland Empire outside Los
Angeles), and the factories that make those goods (mostly in Asia). So far,
the labor movement has been unsuccessful at organizing workers at Wal-Mart,
the world’s largest employer. But the United Food and Commercial Workers
has now embarked on a new long-term effort to organize Wal-Mart employees,
learning from past failures and utilizing new strategies. You can read
about it in this article by Spencer Woodman from the January 23 issue of *The
Nation*:
http://www.thenation.com/article/165437/labor-takes-aim-walmart-again . The
workers who load and unload goods headed for Wal-Mart and other big-box
stores work in unsafe conditions for miserable pay. An organizing drive
among warehouse workers is now underway, led by Change to Win. Read about
the “Warehouse Workers United” organizing campaign here
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/18/news/la-state-fines-warehouse-companies-for-safety-violations-20120118
and
here:
http://labornotes.org/blogs/2012/01/california-warehouse-workers-fight-retaliation
.
*Apple’s Chinese Sweatshops*: The *New York Times* just ran a remarkable
series of front-page articles about the working and living conditions of
Chinese workers who make Apple’s Ipad and other electronics products sold
in the United States. These outrageous conditions should give pause to
anyone who thinks that “free trade” is a great idea. Here is one of those
article, describing these outrageous conditions, that should give pause to
anyone who thinks that “free trade” is a great idea or that consumers’
obsession with the latest electronics devises improves conditions for the
workers who produce them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=1&emc=eta1 .
You can also listen to an NPR interview with one of the NY Times reporters
who uncovered this story:
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apples-china-supply-chain-exposed . Not
surprisingly, the Times also ran a story last week on its business page:
“Apple’s Profits Soars”:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/daily-report-apples-profit-soars . The
San Francisco Chronicle recently published a Bloomberg News story entitled
“Apple CEO's Stock Awards Lift Compensation to $378 Million” --
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/10/bloomberg_articlesLXLOLS6K50XY.DTL#ixzz1ko0a252m .
*Bill Moyers on the Fight Against Corporate “Personhood”* -- Corporate
money and campaign contributions from the super-rich has long corrupted
American democracy. The Supreme Court’s *Citizens United* ruling –
effectively eliminating limits to corporate cash in campaigns by saying
that corporations have free speech rights, just like people -- has made
this corruption much worse, as we’ve seen in the current elections, with
the rise of the so-called Super-PACs. Over the past few election cycles,
business has outspent labor unions by more than 10 to 1 in campaign
contributions. Now that gap will get even wider. Read Bill Moyers article
for *Truthout *about the battle over corporate “personhood”
http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-fighting-back/1327630978 . Moyers is
back with a new weekly TV show, “Moyers and Company,” and it is off to a
great start over the past three weeks. Find out where you can see his show
in your local area by going to his website:
http://billmoyers.com
*Muhammad Ali Turns 70*: Muhammad Ali turned 70 earlier this month. He is
one of the most important public figures since the 1960s, not only for his
exploits in the boxing, but also – and more importantly – for his political
stances and human rights activism. I recently recounted Ali’s life and
legacy in an article for *Huffington Post*:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/the-greatest-muhammad-ali_b_1211828.html
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*Dave Zirin on Joe Paterno and Phil Knight*: On the other end of the
sports spectrum is the sordid story of child abuse by a Penn State
assistant football coach, the cover-up by the University’s authorities, and
the moral fence-sitting of Joe Paterno, the beloved football coach who died
a few days ago. Some Penn Staters rallied to Paterno’s defense, but the
most outrageous defense was by Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, who makes millions
by supplying athletic uniforms, t-shirts, sweatshops and other items to
teams and students at Penn State and other universities. Read sportswriter
Dave Zirin’s critique of Knight in this column in *The Nation:*
http://www.thenation.com/blog/165916/final-insult-nike-ceo-phil-knight-eulogizes-joe-paterno .
You can subscribe to Zirin’s weekly sports column – where he combines love
of sports with insightful political analysis – at his website:
http://www.edgeofsports.com/bio.html . Also check out Zirin’s books about
sports and politics, including *Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the
Games We Love <
http://bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org/book/9781416554752> **
and* *A People’s History of Sports in the United
States<
http://bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org/book/9781595584779>
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*Apologizing for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul’s Bigotry*: The New Republic
has an excellent editorial this week, criticizing pundits, left and right,
who say supportive things about Rick Santorum and Ron Paul’s stances on
some issues, which gives them legitimacy as candidates to espouse racist,
sexist, and homophobic views. These views aren’t just impolite. They are,
as the New Republic points out, repugnant and outside the boundaries of
civil discussion.****Now this is a post worthy of sharing.
