Billy Wharton : Our National 'Promissory Note'

National Debt Clock in midtown Manhattan, July 13, 2011. Photo by Brendan McDermid / Reuters.
The national debt:
A tribute to militarism and the rich

By Billy Wharton / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2011

During his much heralded 1963 “I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of a promissory note to describe the civil rights that had long been promised in theory, but denied in practice.

Today, America faces a promissory note of larger proportions -- one that is much less of a metaphor. Democrats and Republicans are currently negotiating whether to allow the U.S. federal government to raise the debt ceiling beyond its current level of more than $14 trillion. Raising the ceiling is just one part of the talks. In the process, the two parties are drawing ever closer to a consensus on sharp reductions to federally funded Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security programs.

The media has portrayed these negotiations as a sort of contentious quarrel between two political parties with vastly different ideas about the debt and the future of the economy. Such a distortion employs two falsehoods aimed at confusing the American public. The first is that the debt is the responsibility of the “American people.” Taken at face value, it seems that each person in the country is somehow personally responsible for the $14 trillion dollar budget deficit. This is clearly rubbish.

We should remember that nearly 50% of the federal budget, last year some $1.3 trillion, was spent on the military. Some of this was spent on maintaining the current bloated armed forces, but this figure has been vastly accelerated by the recent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the drone war in Pakistan.

These military adventures have been wildly unpopular with the American public and were rammed through thanks in large part to a series of carefully calculated lies concocted by the regime of George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Much in the same way that people should not be held responsible for debts run up by dictatorial regimes, the American people should not be made to feel “personally responsible” for debts run up by their rulers against their will. Debts that served to enrich weapon makers and project American corporate hegemony over foreign markets.

The second major falsehood is that the deficit is produced by overly generous “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. In fact, these programs are quite meager when compared to the welfare state enjoyed in many parts of Europe.

The “big three” public support programs grew out of upsurges in the labor and civil rights movements. They represent key gains for the poor and working class and, as such, should be vigorously defended. These successful programs should be viewed as blueprints for the expansion of human rights in America not, as the media would have people think, obstacles to a more “balanced” economy.

The deficit is more correctly understood as the direct result of tax policies designed and agreed upon by both Democrats and Republicans. This is where the squabble portrayed in the media falls apart. Simply put, since the mid to late 1970s, successive Democratic and Republican regimes have massively reduced the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans, thereby clearing the ground for the current crisis.

Some simple statistics can illustrate the change enacted by the two parties. When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 the highest income bracket in the U.S. was taxed at a rate of 70%. Today the highest tax bracket stands at 35% and a myriad of loopholes drive that rate even lower. And corporate America is an even bigger offender when it comes to paying taxes, as many corporations this year, including General Electric, paid nothing in taxes. Is it any wonder then that the Federal Government now holds a $14 trillion debt?

The national debt is the clearest representation of the militarism and pro-rich taxation strategies that are rotting our country away. In no way, shape or form are the American people themselves -- the poor and working class people who have been throttled by the rich for decades -- responsible for this debt. Lay it at the feet of those who greedily consumed it -- the war-making elite.

Undoubtedly, the debt ceiling will be lifted and, given the limited political options available at this moment, it should be lifted. Not lifting it would risk a national default that would unleash mass suffering on a scale unseen in this country and would give a free hand to the extreme union-busters and privatizers. This is simply not an option.

However, simultaneously, the American people should say with one loud voice that we will not be made to suffer for the debts accumulated by the elites. There are no acceptable cuts to the Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security programs, regardless of whether the Congressional Democrats, Republicans, or President Barack Obama come peddling them.

Each must be resisted and each is evidence that the government is a tool of the rich and corporations. The simple solution to the deficit crisis, the only way to resolve this debate over the long term, is to make the rich pay.

A democratic socialist government, one that has interests of the poor and working class in mind, would certainly enact an immediate special tax that targets the richest 5% of the population and the top 500 corporations to wipe out the $14 trillion in debt. This would be a first step toward creating a just taxation system -- that would take back trillions in wealth ciphoned off by the rich.

So, we might join in with the words of Dr. King, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” It is high time that we open this bank of justice for business in America. We hold the keys.

[Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and the editor of the Socialist WebZine. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Indypendent (NYC), Spectrezine, and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly@gmail.com. This article was originally posted to the Bronx County Independent Examiner.]

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Martin Luther King in the Age of Obama : Why We Can't Wait

Martin Luther King, Jr., June 8, 1964. Photo by Walter Albertin / World Telegraph and Sun / Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons.
Elections do not deliver social change:
Reading Dr. King in the Age of Obama

By Billy Wharton / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2010

Albert Boutwell’s election as Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor in 1963 might have signaled the end of the modern civil rights movement. As a moderate Democrat, Boutwell promised to temper the harsh repression unleashed by the city’s notorious chief of police and his mayoral opponent Eugene “Bull” Connor.

Mainstream leaders of the Black community were told to wait it out -- let the storm pass and incremental changes could begin. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to wait. Instead, he launched Plan “C” (confrontation), a large-scale protest campaign that broke the back of Southern segregation.

Today, Barack Obama is held up as the logical outcome of the movement King led. Such a claim avoids a basic fact of American history. Elections do not deliver much in the way of social change. More often they provide sleeping pills -- skillfully crafted illusions meant to de-mobilize, to dull the senses and to prevent serious demands for justice from emerging. King understood this process well.

One can assume that if King were faced with two active wars, 48 million people without health care and more than 20 million unemployed, he would be able to see through the illusions being offered at the top of the state. The good news is that a new movement for justice need not start from scratch -- it can learn the lessons of history. The Civil Rights movement offers nearly all the instincts necessary for movement building -- a skepticism about elections, an unquenchable desire for grassroots mobilization, and a firm conviction that the movement is operating on the side of justice.

King’s small essay entitled “New Day in Birmingham” should be seen as a blueprint to the pivotal Birmingham campaign. In it, he rails against the request by the white population to accept “polite segregation.” He views the election of Boutwell as less a sympathetic act by white voters, than an expression of how little they understood about the aspirations of the Black community.

When the hardcore segregationists dug in and filed a lawsuit to maintain themselves in office, even greater pressure was applied to the Black community to wait. The judicial process was then held up as the ultimate arbiter of justice. A simple formula was offered -- the polite segregationists would prevail in court, Connor and his allies would be removed, and peace would be restored to Birmingham. According to mainstream commentators, all the established Black leaders needed to do was keep agitators like King out.

Instead of backtracking, King and the movement entered the city and launched 65 nightly meetings held at various churches in the Black community. Each was aimed at mobilizing the base of the community and exerting enough moral force to stiffen the will of local leaders. Freedom songs with provocative titles such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” captured “the soul of the movement.”

All along, King and others understood that, “we possessed the most formidable weapon of all -- the conviction that we were right.” Mass meetings were the method to build what King called a “special army” of civil rights protesters armed with soul force not military force. Those unwilling or unable to participate in mass arrests still had a place in the movement, contributing to the organizational structure by answering a phone or running an errand. Community building and movement building were tightly linked.

Despite the energy generated by the mass meetings, King identified two challenges that threatened to stifle Plan C. “The Negro in Birmingham,” he argued, “had been skillfully brainwashed to the point where he accepted the white man’s theory that he, as a Negro, was inferior.”

The consciousness of inferiority bred a social paralysis fueled by fear. Authorities from Birmingham to Washington sensed this weakness and used it to market the idea that the proposed demonstrations were “ill-timed” and organized by outside agitators. Critics claimed to agree with the cause of civil rights, but to disagree with the tactics of this movement. This was a time, they proposed, for patient negotiations not impulsive escalation.

King cut through this Gordian knot with a simple, yet powerful argument. “It was ridiculous,” he wrote, “to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.” To the charge of being an outsider, he remarked that any American seeking to enhance the cause of freedom and justice ceased to be an interloper.

The pressure to abandon the mobilization, the precarious position of the hardcore segregationists, and the increasingly boisterous demands and bold acts from the Black community created a volatile situation. Small-scale sit-ins at white churches and segregated libraries began and a large march accompanied the opening of the voter registration drive.

On April 10, 1963, the final fuse was lit as the segregationists were granted an injunction to prevent the protests from going forward. The movement was faced with a difficult choice. Never before had they violated a court injunction, yet King knew that the segregationists had vowed to employ a “century of litigation” to force an end to the mobilizations. Things became even bleaker two days later as a court stripped the movement’s bondsman’s ability to issue bonds for bail. All bail would have to be paid in cash.

After another round of community consultations, King opted to escalate the campaign into its final phase. Connor responded by unleashing the police armed with dogs and fire hoses, to repress demonstrators, thus producing scenes of brutality that have come to define the Southern part of the Civil Rights movement.

King was arrested almost immediately and placed in solitary confinement for more than 24 hours. While in jail, King issued his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” now a seminal document in American history. On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Such mighty historical moments were made possible by people “more concerned about reaching our righteous aims than about saving our skins.” No compromise would do, no election result could de-mobilize and no judicial decision could reverse the conviction that they, and not the segregationists or Northern liberals who preached patience, were operating in the name of justice on the right side of history.

Today, Americans suffering from the effects of a massive financial crisis would do well to familiarize themselves with the version of Dr. King that appears in the pages of “New Day in Birmingham.” This is no McDonalds “I Have a Dream” commercial. This is Martin Luther King Jr. as a militant, a self-described extremist for justice, and a brilliant activist dedicated to community building in the service of social change.

What this country needs most right now is a new “Plan C” that confronts the increasingly unbearable problems of lack of health care, homelessness and unemployment. The Civil Rights Movement is proof positive that no election or any judicial decision, no matter how slick the public relations scheme, can replace the powerful ability of regular people to create movements that change history and society for the better. Eventually, the time for waiting will end.

[Billy Wharton is the co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and the editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.]

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Barack Obama : The Audacity of Imperial Hubris

Famed graffiti artist Banksy's statement on war and peace. Protest poster in Parliament Square, London.
Imperial hubris:
Barack Obama and Nobel's preemptive strike

Obama might have used the Nobel stage to mark a break from [the] geopolitical approach to U.S. hegemony through militarism... This was clearly the intention of the Nobel Committee...

By Billy Wharton / The Rag Blog / December 17, 2009

Princeton University Philosopher Cornel West brings such an infectious optimism to his social analysis that it is difficult to avoid discovering a sense of hopefulness in even the most mediocre of news.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to an American president managing two active wars and commanding a military force spread throughout the globe seemed to offer little opportunity for a progressive spin. Yet, West quickly discovered a potentially positive edge. “It's gonna be hard,” he offered during a lecture at a public library in Los Angeles, “to be a war president with a peace prize. Gonna be difficult. Very, very difficult.” The award it seemed could be a “pre-emptive strike for peace.”

West had captured a certain consensus that developed about the award nomination. U.S. President Barack Obama would be so overcome with the honor of receiving the prestigious award that it would trigger an immediate crisis of conscience that would call the country’s military adventures in the Middle East into question and perhaps even hasten a quick retreat.

Obama was certainly aware that he would walk in the footsteps of previous recipients such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Theresa. Panelists on the Nobel nomination committee were likely motivated by this neat equation when they arrived at their decision.

Unfortunately for West and others, the one person not in on the scheme was Obama. Instead of imbibing the spirit of peace, he delivered two bombshells. The first came prior to the Nobel ceremonies when he announced that the U.S. would send another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, in an attempt to establish control of the AfPak border region. Larger than this, his speech at West Point Military Academy bought into large parts of the Bush war rationale.

The Afghanistan invasion, he argued, was forced upon the U.S. A natural response to the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001. Nervous cadets in the crowd stood blank-faced as they realized that there are many more years of active combat to come. Though Obama made a vague reference to an 18 month time-frame for withdrawal, Secretary of Defense William Gates made the rounds with the media the following day to clarify that it would take years, at least two or three, before an exit from the war-torn country could be considered.

Put aside the escalation speech for a moment. The second bombshell, Obama’s much anticipated Nobel Prize acceptance speech, proves not only that there is almost no chance that the Democratic Party will bring an end to the wars, but that Obama himself has accepted the imperial mantle passed down through generations of American presidents.

Among the first casualties of a speech that can only be described as an expression of American chauvinism, were King and a non-Nobel recipient Mahatma Gandhi. Obama dispensed with them as naïve idealists. “As a head of state,” he argued, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”

Obama went on to endorse the use of force as being based upon, “a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason” not “a call to cynicism.”

Two objections are obvious -- one elucidated upon later in his speech, the other quickly tossed aside. First, the notion that war is curative to evil in general and that the U.S., in particular, is an acceptable dispenser of such a cure should raise a skeptical eye.

Obama went further by making the Orwellian claim that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” and, in a language endorsed by every imperial president, “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” History offers different lessons.

Far from a neutral operator interested only in the preservation of global peace, the U.S. has engaged in acts of military aggression that substantially contributed to the lessening of peaceful relations amongst nations. Sometimes, as in Iraq, there were direct material motivations. In other cases, political motives or the simple desire to express military superiority fueled the act of aggression.

The military invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan so obviously violate the notion of the U.S. as peacemaker that little comment is needed. Even more insidious are the indirect military conflagrations underwritten by the U.S. government. The annals of Latin American history are littered with them -- Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador and Operation Condor throughout the region.

Obama might have used the Nobel stage to mark a break from this geopolitical approach to U.S. hegemony through militarism. He could have announced the closure of at least a few of the more than 700 U.S. military bases worldwide. Perhaps Oslo was an ideal site to announce a 50% reduction in the more than 5,000 nuclear missiles the country has.

This was clearly the intention of the Nobel Committee and the hope of Cornell West -- to create enough moral pressure to move the president a few steps away from the imperial mantle. No such luck. To have done so, would have necessarily required the help of King and Gandhi, who Obama had dismissed early on.

To say that his role as “a head of state” precludes him from employing the lessons of King and Gandhi is to deny some basic facts of history. Neither King nor Gandhi were intellectuals isolated from social policy or geo-political decision making. The two were not sequestered off from society, like cloistered monks, happy enough to invent a few intellectually engaging, but practically useless, ideas.

They were, instead, historical actors, able to craft new political realities through practical implementation of theories of non-violence. The consequences of which, in terms of both specific policies and broader political inspiration, had global reverberations that are still being felt.

The catch that now separates them from Obama is that both recognized the idea that it is people, mostly regular people, who make history and who often do so against the will of governments both foreign and domestic. India’s anti-imperialist campaign, carried out under Gandhi’s leadership, provides a stinging rebuke to the notion of military occupation. Equally, King’s brave opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam sharply contradicts Obama’s claim that the U.S. has spent six decades underwriting global security.

Both men offer a notion of social solidarity through peaceful association that works from the local level up into national and international relations. Such lessons might have allowed the U.S. to avoid the military aggressions of the past and to play a significant role in supporting the creation of the kind of peaceful global economic development that both King and Gandhi championed.

Perhaps, in the end, West offers a useful concept, but the wrong social actor. It may eventually be difficult for Obama to manage two wars with a peace prize hanging from his neck. But Obama won’t be the one to determine that. He has left a significant opportunity to offer an alternative to the typical American imperial hubris at the podium in Oslo.

Now it is up to us regular folks, the ones who were so important to King and Gandhi’s movements in the past, to turn the Nobel Prize into a burden. A revitalized anti-war movement in the U.S. that reads deep into the inspirational wells of non-violent movements of the past could be next year’s nominee for the coveted prize. What a righteous replacement that would be for a president committed to war and occupation, arrogant enough to attempt to play this off as a part of global security.

[Billy Wharton is the national co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.]

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