Rag Radio : Carl Davidson on Mondragon and Workers' Cooperatives

Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz (left) and Thorne Dreyer, with guest Carl Davidson at the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, Sept. 9. Photo by Jim Cleveland / KOOP Radio / The Rag Blog.

Noted writer and political activist Carl Davidson on
Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project brought writer and political activist Carl Davidson to Austin to give a multi-media presentation on "The Mondragon Corporation and the Workers' Cooperative Movement" at the 5604 Manor community center last Thursday, Sept. 8, and Carl also discussed the subject with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio the next day.

Carl talked about the history of Mondragon, its unique organizational structure -- involving factories, schools, and credit unions -- and its role as a model and an inspiration for the cooperative movement worldwide. The Mondragon Corporation is a 50-year-old network of factories and agencies, involving close to 100,000 workers (who are also, collectively, the owners) -- centered in Spain’s Basque country, but now spanning the globe.

Carl also discussed the thriving cooperative movement in the United States, as well as his concept of 21st century socialism and how it differs from the socialism of the last two centuries. Socialism for a new century, he said, must incorporate ecological thinking and sustainable development; must acknowledge that markets will be a part of any socialist society; and must affirm human rights as a natural "attribute of our humanity."

Carl Davidson, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also author of several books, including, with Jerry Harris, CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age, and New Paths to Socialism, essays on worker coops, Marxism, and the green economy.

Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

• Read articles about the Mondragon Corporation by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog

Musician Bill Oliver leads a group in singing labor songs after Carl Davidson's presentation at 5604 Manor in Austin. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
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The Rag Blog Presents : Carl Davidson on Mondragon and Workers' Cooperatives

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The Rag Blog, Rag Radio, and the New Journalism Project
Present Noted Writer and Political Activist Carl Davidson:
'Mondragon and the Workers' Cooperative Movement'
A Multi-Media Presentation

Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011, 7-10 p.m.
At 5604 Manor Community Center,
5604 Manor Road, Austin, Texas

Austin singer/songwriter Bill Oliver will perform.
Refreshments, including beer and wine, will be available.
$5 Suggested Donation

Go to our Facebook event page.

Carl Davidson in Austin:
'The Mondragon Corporation and
the Workers' Cooperative Movement'

The Rag Blog, Rag Radio, and the New Journalism Project present noted writer and political activist Carl Davidson with a multi-media presentation on "The Mondragon Corporation and the Workers' Cooperative Movement," from 7-10 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011, at 5604 Manor Community Center, 5604 Manor Road, Austin, Texas. There is a suggested donation of $5. After the presentation, Austin musician Bill Oliver will perform live. Refreshments, including beer and wine, will be available.

The Mondragon Corporation is a 50-year-old network of factories and agencies, involving close to 100,000 workers -- centered in Spain’s Basque country, but now spanning the globe. Mondragon is an experiment, at once radical and practical, in how the working class can become masters of their workplaces and surrounding communities.

Carl Davidson, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also author of several books, including, with Jerry Harris, CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age, and New Paths to Socialism, essays on worker coops, Marxism and the green economy.

Bill Oliver, known as the “Environmental Troubadour,” is an Austin-based singer/songwriter and entertainer.

5604 Manor is a community center run by the Workers Defense Project, Third Coast Activist Resource Center, and the Third Coast Workers for Cooperation.

The Rag Blog is a progressive internet newsmagazine based in Austin, Texas. The Rag Blog is published by the New Journalism Project, a 501(c)(3) Texas nonprofit corporation. Rag Radio is a weekly public affairs program hosted by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, Fridays, 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin.

Carl Davidson will also discuss the Mondragon Corporation and workers cooperatives on Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 9, from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7-FM, and streamed live on the World Wide Web.

• Read articles about the Mondragon Corporation by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog

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Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries V: Innovation and Transformation

Image from Mondragon website.
Mondragon Diaries, Day Five
Innovation and transformation
towards a third wave future

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / October 6, 2010

“The world has not been given to us simply to contemplate it, but to transform it. And this transformation is accomplished not only with our manual work, but first with ideas and action plans.” -- Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragon Coops

[This is the fourth of a five-part series by Carl Davidson about the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a 50-year-old network of nearly 120 factories and agencies, involving nearly 100,000 workers -- centered in the the Basque Country but now spanning the globe. Go here for the series so far.]

BASQUE COUNTRY, Spain -- Today the Mondragon valley is misty and grey, with small clouds drifting close to the valley floor between the mountain peaks. It's somewhat otherworldly, I think to myself on the bus ride up the slopes, almost like a scene from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Today is also our last day, and we're full of mixed feelings. Melancholy that our week-long seminar is coming to a close and that the new friends we've made will scatter. But there's also excitement that we'll soon be back home and able to share it all with our communities.

Our first stop is another component allied with Mongragon University called SAIOLAN. It's an incubator project for helping to launch new coops and high-tech businesses.

We're greeted in a classroom by a young woman from Mexico, Isabel Uriberen Tesia, who is also our presenter. She wastes no time bringing up her powerpoint on the screen and getting into the topic.

“Our aim is generating employment, creating new jobs,” she says. “our purpose is to do this by developing new business projects and training new entrepreneurs.”

A few years back, as the economic crisis was developing, nearly 60 percent of the students graduating in the Basque Country were having a hard time finding employment. The government, the MCC coops, and other businesses, as well as the students themselves, all turned to SAIOLAN to help launch new enterprises that could put young people to work.

“There are five levels in the training of entrepreneurs,” Isabel explained. “First is motivation. Second is finding opportunities. Third is defining a suitable project for the student, in tune with his or her interests and ideas. Once you get past these three, the next two, planning the startup and launching what you have developed, also involves finding resources, such as grants and loans, that can get the new businesses operating.”

What kind of businesses were being started? One involved processing plants for cleaning waste water in a new and better way, another was called "micro-manufacturing," producing very small components accurately, quite a few were new software products. One from FAGOR, the large home appliance worker-cooperative, involved finding new uses for stainless steel, including exterior products, like one-piece transit stop structures.

Some in our group were concerned that many of the new startups were simply new businesses rather than also coops. This was 80 percent, or 138 out of 172 new small enterprises over the last few years, with 2,281 new employees. SAIOLAN didn't seem worried. “It's their choice,” was the explanation. “Some of them will later transform into coops, and in any case, it's good to create new employment for our entire Basque community, not just the minority in cooperatives.”

We got deeper into the subject in our next session. It was further up the mountainside at Otlalora, and we had as our resource person Jesus Herrasti, one of the senior MCC leaders, the head of the “Innovation Group," who had been with Mondragon for 48 years.


After laying out some of the basic features of innovation -- infrastructure, science, technology, strategic planning -- Herrasti made it much more real by talking about a fundamental conflict facing all manufacturing businesses, not just MCC.

Take FAGOR, our home appliance manufacturing coop. It's a mature business. We can continue to compete by making some additional improvements in quality, or cutting our profit margins. But in the end, it's going to be very hard to compete with similar products produced in Asia. We should keep at it as long as we can operate in the black and our worker-owners can maintain their standards, but where, really, is our new growth potential?

He named three broad areas -- renewable energy, health and eldercare, and information technology. It got even more interesting to me as he became more specific about new product lines -- fuel cells, wind turbines, photovoltaics, embedded software, wireless, ambient intelligence, and bioprocessing in supercomputers. He was presenting the shift from second wave manufacturing to the high-design and high-touch products of a third wave future in a knowledge economy, and he had 200 people working full time on coming up with new ideas and plans.

I asked a question.

Have you had any inquiries from those countries trying to define a new 21st century socialism, in whatever way, such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, Vietnam, or even South Africa, on how they might use Mondragon's ideas and services? Do you think you have something to offer here?

“Yes and no,” was the cautious answer.

We get queries from all of them. We've been to China and other places, and there is some genuine interest, to a point. But since spreading knowledge and worker's power at the workplace also often runs against the clinging to control by bureaucrats, socialist or otherwise, the interest often comes to a dead end. But it's not always the case, and we keep working on doing what we can.

He went on to discuss the problems of cultural differences.

We Basques are often risk-adverse when it comes to business, unlike Americans. We often avoid risks when we shouldn't. On another hand, when we talk with Mexican workers about taking over and owning the firms we start there for themselves, and where they elected the leadership, they simply don't believe us. They want to know where "the trick" is hidden, since businesses, in their culture, are always owned by bosses, never by workers. There is no trust, at least trust with us, that it can be otherwise.

So what are the basic things needed to start worker-cooperatives in our countries, asked one of our group?

First the workers themselves must FEEL THE NEED. Without that, it's hard to get anywhere. Second there must be a culture of TRUST, since you are sharing money, sharing risks, and supporting new leaders. Third, is to BE REALISTIC. You need successes, especially in the beginning. Too many early mistakes, and you are finished. Finally, you need friends and collaborators -- but pick them carefully!

This had us inspired and buzzing all through lunch, another amazing sampling of Basque cuisine. I had steamed artichokes with a delicious sauce and braised pork, finished off with dark strong coffee and ice cream with slivers of dark chocolate.

The afternoon session featured a presentation of one of the students in MUNDUKIDE, a small overseas assistance program with the people of Mozambique, Brazil, Cub, and a few other countries. One discussion was largely about microloans, which weren't working very well, and another about road-building, which was rather successful.

Our final session was with Fred Freundlich, the American professor, who was a veteran of the movements against plant closings in the U.S. a few decades back, who now was a faculty member at Mondragon University. Since he understood both our realities and those at MCC, he could handle any outstanding questions.

There were a lot of them. The first was how much was MCC's success a result of factors unique to the Basque Country. “It's somewhat important, but not decisive,” Fred answered.

One very important factor was it started at just the right time. If it had started 10 years earlier, conditions may have been too harsh. But the first coops were launched at a time when people really needed a lot of things, and finally had a little savings to spend. Many businesses grew in this period. If it started 10 years later, MCC may have had much stronger competition, and may not have gotten off the ground so well.

I asked what was the response of the socialist and communist groups in the Basque County and Spain to MCC? “Mixed and confused,” was the answer. Some thought it utopian. Others dismissed it as a diversion, as making workers into capitalists. "But they still keep sending delegations for visits, and going away impressed," Fred noted. The Basque left was also fragmented over violence, when ETA, the Basque armed resistance group, assassinated a former leader of one of the MCC coops who was also a socialist official.

After a thoughtful pause, Fred made a point that applied to the U.S. Left as well. “There's two trends in the left,” he explained. “Those who think long and hard about business and what to do with it. And those who mainly like to discuss left ideas.” The implication was that the two trends most often didn't overlap, even if it was wise to do so, both tactically and strategically.

Mikel brought the session to an end by asking us all for our new ideas on how we might implement what we had learned, and possible projects for doing so. There were all sorts of plans in the works on the part of our group, from networking food coops, to producing new green products, to making a new film about Mondragon for a U.S audience.

We clearly all had our imaginations fired up by the experience. Mikel gave us each a certificate for completing a 40-hour study seminar, which was a lovely touch. But the truth was that most of us would need no reminder hanging on our walls. What we had learned here had changed us, in some ways deeply, and we would be looking at people and projects in new ways for some time to come.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. His website is Keep on Keepin' On, where this series also appears. Davidson is also available to speak on the topic. Contact him at carld717@gmail.com. For more info on these tours, go here.]

Also see:

• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries I: Bridges to Socialism / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2010
• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries II: It Starts With a School / The Rag Blog / September 23, 2010
• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries III: Visions of the Future / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2010
• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries IV: Banking on the Future / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2010

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BOOKS / Jerry Harris : Carl Davidson's 'Lost Writings of SDS'

Collection of 'lost' SDS writings reveals
depth of Sixties radical thinking

By Jerry Harris / The Rag Blog / December 19, 2011

[Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class: Lost Writings of SDS, edited by Carl Davidson; (Pittsburgh PA: Changemaker Publications, 2011.)]

Carl Davidson has done a tremendous service to anyone who studies the history of social movements or anyone interested in the 1960s rebellion. This "lost" collection of papers reveals the depth and richness of radical thinking coming out of the student movement as the war raged in Vietnam and militant protestors marched through the streets of America.

The most important document is the "Port Authority Statement," by SDS members David Gilbert, Robert Gottlieb, and Gerry Tenney. Although at the time not widely circulated, it offers great insight into the thinking and analysis of SDS as it turned to revolutionary theory and debate. This is an impressive document, detailed in statistical and economic analysis, grounded in revolutionary social theory, and innovative in its thinking and insights.

One of the most important sections of the paper was its class analysis with its focus on the new working class and the relationship of students to an economy shifting from manufacturing to services and technology. The document notes that, "Modern American capitalism is characterized by rapid technological change with scientific knowledge growing at a logarithmic rate." This will result in the "elimination of unskilled labor (as) the blue-collar sector will decrease (and) jobs that require high degrees of education and training" will increase. (pages 88-89)

That analysis was made in 1966. Now read a recent article by Edward Luce from the Financial Times (Dec. 11, 2011) : "the middle-skilled jobs that once formed the ballast of the world’s wealthiest middle class are disappearing. They are being supplanted by relatively low-skilled (and low-paid) jobs that cannot be replaced either by new technology or by offshoring -- such as home nursing and landscape gardening. Jobs are also being created for the highly skilled, notably in science, engineering and management.

Decades later the paper's main thesis still holds up.

Continuing its class analysis the Port Authority document examined the capitalist class and the debate over ownership and control. The authors focused attention on the growing trend towards paying executives with large stock rewards, merging management and ownership.

Again we can turn to a recent article by Richard Peet, published in the December 2011 Monthly Review that reads, "More recently, David Harvey has argued that ownership (share holders) and management (CEOs) of capitalist enterprises have fused together, as upper management is increasingly paid with stock options." This "recent" argument now being made by a leading Marxist trails Port Authority by some 45 years.

Although the authors grasped the sweeping impact that technology would have on American workers, what they could not see would be globalization and the advent of neoliberalism as a governing ideology.

As the paper noted at the time, "Corporate liberalism implies that the dominant economic institution is the corporation and that the prevailing political and social mode is liberalism." (page 68) Of course it's understandable how such changes would be all but invisible in 1966; it's also a good reminder why political tactics and strategy must remain flexible and activists should always be willing to reevaluate their analysis.

The above are but a few of the enticing insights that are contained in page after page of these documents. As new social movements gather force throughout the world, a look into the thinking of activists from the last great social movement can help give direction to coming future battles.

I would highly recommend this book to all activists and academics interested in building a better world.

[Jerry Harris is National Secretary of the Global Studies Association and author of The Dialectics of Globalization.]

Find articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.

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Carl Davidson : Time to Get Serious About Full Employment

WPA image via Keep on Keepin' On
Time to get serious about full employment:
We need a jobs program that
doesn't tinker around the edges

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / August 24, 2011

The Rag Blog will present noted writer and political activist Carl Davidson with a multi-media presentation on "The Mondragon Corporation and the Workers Cooperative Movement," on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011, 7-10 p.m., at 5604 Manor Community Center, 5604 Manor Road, Austin, Texas. For more information, go here. Carl will also be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 9, from 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live here.

My regional daily newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to its credit, came out with an editorial Monday, Aug. 22, 2011, urging President Obama to push for a substantial jobs program over Republican opposition.

Action on jobs: Obama must push hard to get people back to work" is the headline, and a key point stresses "Mr. Obama now needs to offer proposals equal to the size of the problem. That means bold strokes, not half-measures. If his Republican antagonists in Congress are determined to stand in the way of getting Americans back to work, the president must say so publicly -- and then go over their heads to enlist the nation in his effort.

Terrific, a good framing of the question. Unfortunately, however, once you get into the substance of the piece, it turns into a muddle. The Post-Gazette offers up a hodgepodge of proposals that tinker around the edges of the problem -- more tax cuts and credits for jobs created, more unemployment benefits, and oddly, more trade deals, even though these deals mostly result in net job losses.

Here's the heart of the matter. In a down economy, jobs are created by increasing demand, by more customers with bigger orders coming to a firm's doors. The problem is that consumer demand has taken a nose dive since the credit bubble burst.

People don't have money to spend. They're cutting back on everything, and trying to unload their debt. This means business-to-business orders shrink as well. Companies may be cash-rich and have high profits, but with no increase in orders or customers at their door, they aren't likely to hire people to do nothing just to get a tax credit.

This is where government has to become the key customer. It has to make huge productive purchases for local work and local materials to build productive infrastructure -- county-owned green energy plants, new and improved schools, modernized locks and dams, Medicare for all, investment in young students and veterans like we did with the GI Bill, investment in research in new industries, and so on.

Most important, to work well, it can't be nickel-and-dimed to death. It has to be on the scale of the expenditures for World War II. That's when the "multiplier effect" can kick in, and related growth in manufacturing can take off in turn. And it has to be paid for by going to where the most appropriate money is, imposing a financial transaction tax on unproductive and destabilizing speculation by Wall Street.

The best the Post-Gazette does on this matter is to support Obama's proposal for an "Infrastructure Bank," while urging him to find a way to bypass a GOP roadblock in Congress.

But even that is too passive. It says, in effect, here's a small pot of money. If you want to repair some roads, come and get some.

What we really need is something like the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority and Works Progress Administration, but on steroids, a TVA-WPA-CCC 2.0. We need to pass John Conyers' HR 870 Full employment Bill. We need the Department of Energy and the Department of Labor to go to every county in the country with a fully-funded proposal to build new green energy wind farms and solar power arrays as public energy utilities, hiring local workers at union scale, with no obstacles to a union election. And that's just for starters.

Yes, we need a serious jobs program. But it's time for everyone who utters that phrase to get serious themselves. Why? Because it's going to take a massive upsurge in class struggle to get it -- by removing those standing in the way.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age. He serves as webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net and Beaver County Blue. This article was first published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Carl Davidson : Obama, the Democrats, and the Months Ahead

Carl Davidson. Photo by Thomas Good / Next Left Notes.
A report and perspective from the rust belt:
Obama, the Democrats and the months ahead

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / December 28, 2009

Carl Davidson will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, December 29, 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. Carl will reflect on Obama's year and take a look at what's ahead for the Left. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

BEAVER COUNTY, PA -- I've been hearing from too many left activists who are simply fed up with the Democrats and want to leave the electoral arena -- and just when the battles there are getting really interesting, even if we don't have prospects of major victories. To my way of thinking, our present task is to deepen the divisions there, not walk away from them.

The sooner we stop thinking of the "Democratic Party" as if it were a single entity, the better off we will be. That's why "Democrat control of Congress" is an illusion. The GOP Blue Dog faction in the Democratic Party combined with the regular GOP make it at least a draw. That's why everything positive gets gutted and turned into its opposite.

The progressive majority's forces are pretty much limited to the Progressive Caucus, the Black Caucus and the Latino Caucus, and not even all of them. We are a minority force in those upper spheres, not an emerging majority like we are at the base. We can grow to a larger minority in Congress, but to get a true majority, we'd likely have to split both major parties, and we are not close to having that strength yet.

Otherwise, we are mainly limited to passing things where there is a deep divide in finance capital and other big capital at the top, and where one side of it becomes an indirect ally. That may be shaping up on the Afghan war.

But small and medium-sized capital, as well as some larger sectors of productive capital, have yet to stand up to finance capital on HR 676 even though it's in their interest to do so. We'll just have to continue our "long march through the institutions" to get it. A carbon tax, immigration reform, and EFCA are going to be even more difficult.

At this point, we have two interconnected mass democratic tasks. Building the left-progressive pole inside and outside the Dems with groups like PDA and other independent forums, and dividing the GOP right to smash the Teabaggers and their allies. Neither is easy, but starting with a clear head helps a lot.

Here in Beaver County in western Pennsylvania we have about 200 or so PDA people and another few dozen Beaver County Peace Links activists. Almost all are blue collar workers or retirees. We, in this sense, are the active antiwar forces here, as well as the active left-progressive side of the spectrum among the unions and a few other groups.

There isn't much else, save for the Tom Merton Center, the religious-liberal-green-anarchist bunch in nearby Pittburgh. Together with the unions, they pulled out 10,000 for the G20. We took part in it as best as we could. All told, about 6,000 of the 10,000 were from the wider Pittsburgh region and the nearby campuses. That's our activist core viewed more widely.

Nonetheless a majority of our county, and certainly a majority of Dem voters, are critical of the wars -- but they have yet to take any action other than voting. It's our task to find the activities they will take up, like coming to a vigil or attending an antiwar educational, or even just honking their horns at our weekly vigils.

For the Healthcare not Warfare Afghan war protests here a few weeks ago, we got out about 60 people in the rain and cold. Not bad, considering. At least half those attending were wearing their union jackets. Besides us, the speakers were union folks and local Dem officials, plus Tim Carpenter from PDA. The speeches pushed and warned Obama, but didn't attack him personally. They told him what he had to do in order to succeed.

If we didn't take this approach, working with local Dems, I'd guess we could get out less than 10 people, if anyone bothered at all.

Our next project is to make use of Bob Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan from Brave New Films. One of our allies showed it last month at a college in the next county. Plus finding ways to work with the Steelworkers on their new collaborative with the Mondragon Coops.

If you think our strategy is reducible to "supporting Obama," you don't understand it. To be precise, our strategy here is to aim the main blow at low-road neoliberal finance capital and its right wing populist allies, allying with high road neoKeynesian initiatives at the top, while developing the left-center coalition among labor, minorities, women and youth at the base.

We do that in the form of expanding our PDA group; it's platform is Out Now, HR 676, Green Jobs, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), Carbon Tax and Debt Relief. Within that, among the advanced, a few of us do revolutionary socialist education that targets neo-Keynesianism as well. We work with Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and that way we grow CCDS in size, too.

That's the political and class substance of it. Where Obama stands, and where we stand in relation to him, depends on the ebb and flow. We oppose him where he's wrong, support him where he's right, and defend him versus the racist onslaughts of the right.

So yes, I'm suggesting that people elsewhere do likewise -- although I'm well aware that conditions vary, and adjustments are required.

If one of the left antiwar coalitions thinks they can pull off a march on DC, we'll probably rent a bus or two, fill them, and go to it. If we do, we'll try to network horizontally with others like ourselves, perhaps even meet after the march for a confab of some sort.

But we are not interested in wasting energy or resources getting into national pissing matches and intrigues over slogans and speakers. We'll simply bring the slogans that make sense to us. But in the end, the antiwar forces need to be reoriented and rebuilt at the base, in alliance with the growth in class struggle activity around the economy.

That's what we're doing, and have been doing for some time. Other approaches may point to the future as well, and I'm wide open to hearing about them.

Carl Davidson became widely known in the American left as a national officer of SDS (1966-68), as a writer and editor of the New Left newsweekly The Guardian, and as a leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement. In later years, he took up the study of the social impact of technology and the revolutions in communication and high-tech production. Together with Jerry Harris, he is the author of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age.

Most recently Carl worked as webmaster for Progressives for Obama, an independent left-progressive voice in the campaign (now renamed as Progressive America Rising). He is also a leader in the U.S. socialist movement, serving as a national co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. A longtime resident of Chicago, he recently moved back to the Western Pennsylvania milltowns where he was born and his family resides.

• For previous articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog, go here.
• Also see One Worker, One Vote: U.S. Steelworkers to Experiment with Factory Ownership, Mondragon Style by Carl Davidson / SolidarityEconomy.net / Oct. 27, 2009.

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Carl Davidson : Why Neoliberals Have Trouble Telling the Truth

Newt on Fox. Image from Keep on Keepin' On.
Media wars and manufacturing consent:
Getting people to vote against themselves

Why neoliberals have trouble telling the truth.

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2011

The Rag Blog will present noted writer and political activist Carl Davidson with a multi-media presentation on "The Mondragon Corporation and the Workers Cooperative Movement," on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011, 7-10 p.m., at 5604 Manor Community Center, 5604 Manor Road, Austin, Texas. For more information, go here. Carl will also be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 9, from 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live here.

"Newt Gingrich: Obama's 'Bureaucratic Socialism' Kills Jobs" is one of many similar headlines appearing on dozens of web-based news portals in this 2012 election season. This one keeps popping up, and I'm getting sick of seeing it.

The reason? It manages to pack several major lies, each of which you could write a book about, into just five words -- and hardly an editor anywhere takes a blue pencil to it.

Don't get me wrong. I've got no problem with "socialism." My shoot-from-the hip response when someone spits the "S" word out in a political argument is, "Socialism? I've been a socialist all my life, and proud of it. We should be so lucky as to have some socialism around here. Unfortunately, we're not even close."

First of all, Barack Obama is not a socialist. Even back in his more youthful years in Illinois, at best on a good day, he was simply a neo-Keynesian liberal with a few high tech green ideas. Keynesians believe, among other things, that when markets fail, government has the task of being the consumer of last resort, even hiring people directly to build infrastructure and put people to work,

But these days, surrounded by a "Team of Rivals" largely from Wall Street, Obama has set aside any earlier Keynesian policies he held and has been, wittingly or not, sucked into the black hole of the prevailing neoliberal hegemony.

What's a "neoliberal hegemony?" That's a shorthand phrase for the current domination of our government by Wall Street finance capital. It simply wants to diminish any government initiatives or programs, except for those that line their own pockets.

Keynesians and others, in and out of government, have opposed the neoliberals. They've advocated a range of reasonable proposals for getting us out of the current crisis -- ending the wars, Employee Free Choice Act, Medicare for All, the People's Budget submitted by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. John Conyer's HR 870 Full Employment Bill -- but these proposals all keep getting declared "off the table" by the neoliberals.

On Gingrich's second charge, far from being "bureaucratic," Obama, wisely or not, has actually reduced the number of federal employees, and made other cuts that will cause the states to do likewise.

On the third charge, far from "killing jobs," Obama's initial proposals regarding employment have actually created a few jobs, but not nearly enough. Why? Because of the real job-killing votes of Gingrich's Republican allies in the House.

It doesn't take a chess champion to figure any of this out. Any decent checker player could make an honest call of the false moves in the "socialist job killer" gambit of Gingrich and other GOP presidential pretenders running the same rap.

But why distort the truth this way? Newt Gingrich is a smart man. He knows that Keynesianism is designed to keep capitalism going, and that socialism is something quite different and has very little to do with this debate. So why does he keep this "big lie" business up?

It's a smokescreen. At bottom, Gingrich, the GOP and the far right are promoting a grand neoliberal project to repeal the New Deal and the Great Society, the primary past examples of liberal government dealing with market failure.

The right's problem is that too many things that came out of those periods had some success and are still popular with a majority of voters -- the elderly like Medicare and Social Security, labor likes the Wagner Act and the right to bargain collectively, Blacks and other minorities like the Voting Rights Act, and women like Title Seven.

To take them all down, which is what the neoliberal-far right alliance wants, means you have to attack them indirectly, rather than directly.

So how does it work? You have to start with what most people fear most -- losing their jobs -- and then combine it with the darker demons of our past, such as anti-communism, racism, and sexism. Next you mush all your potential adversaries -- the socialist left, the liberals and progressives, and the FDR-loving moderates -- into one huge combined bogey man. You make it into a hideous package that's going to scare voters into casting ballots against themselves.

To put a fancier term on it, it's called manufacturing consent to combine with outright coercive force in getting you to submit to a renewed hegemonic bloc.

That's what Newt is doing here. In short, it's when they get you to think all your neighbors and co-workers are your enemies, while all the guys on Wall Street are your friends. You're going to hear a lot of it over the next year. Don't fall for it.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age. He serves as webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net and Beaver County Blue. This article was first published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries IV: Banking on the Future

Arrasate-Mondragon in the Basque Country of Spain. Image from SolidarityEconomy.net.
Mondragon Diaries, Day Four
Worker coops, worker banks, worker skills:
Weathering today's crises

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2010

[This is the fourth of a five-part series by Carl Davidson about the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a 50-year-old network of nearly 120 factories and agencies, involving nearly 100,000 workers -- centered in the the Basque Country but now spanning the globe. Go here for the series so far.]

BASQUE COUNTRY, Spain -- Most new small businesses fail. That's a fact, whether they are in the Basque Country or in the U.S. Or anywhere else. Yet the Mondragon Coops, which all started as small worker-owned businesses, have hardly ever failed. Why? The key is in Father Jose Maria Arizmendi's original founding conception of cooperatives as the interlocking of school, factory, and credit union.

This was the thought I was rolling over in my mind as our bus again climbed the slopes on the Arrasate-Mondragon valley, this morning with grey skies and a light drizzle. We were headed for an administrative office of Caja Laboral, the worker-owned banking network of the MCC Coops. The ride wasn't far, and we were soon whisked into a small auditorium. Our mentor, Mikel, introduced the staff member who would introduce us to the world of banking, and Mondragon's modification of one corner of that reality.

Some people might question why workers for social change would want to be involved with banks at all. But certain kinds of credit and finance are important components of any society -- capitalist, socialist, or somewhere in between.

Father's Arizmendi's conclusion that two of the many reasons cooperative movements failed in the past was the lack of reliable credit and the lack of innovation and new ideas. Hence the reason he started with a school, but was soon to add a small credit union formed from the small deposits of his parishioners and their neighbors. To start a factory, you had to borrow some money, and borrowing the money of people close to you at low cost was the best way to go.

By 1959, the small credit union had grown and transformed into Caja Laboral. Today it is one of the major banks in Spain, with assets of 21 billion euros and 1.5 billion in equity. It has 18.6 billion in customer deposits, offset by 16.4 billion in credit loans. It has 1,2 million clients, only 120 of which are the MCC coops.

It has 2,000 people working for it, and all are worker-owners. Actually, the bank is owned 55% by the MCC coops and 45% by the staff workers. But the rule they have adopted is that the factory coops pick eight of the board members, while the staff workers elect four. Since Caja Laboral, is a coop of coops, it is what MCC calls a "second degree" coop. Other second degree coops are their schools, medical clinics, and insurance agencies.

“We are rated the best bank in Spain in customer satisfaction,” says our presenter. “One reason is that we are worker-owners ourselves, and not socially distant from them. We work closely with our clients. We are prudent and conservative

Mikel gave a wry laugh from the back of the room, and interjected: “Except for the Lehman Brothers fiasco...” It turns out Caja Laboral had taken a hit of 160 million euros it had tied up in Lehman Brothers securities when the Wall Street investment bank collapsed at the beginning of the financial crisis two years back. Not only had MCC's bank been hurt, but

“Yes,” said our presenter. “But we followed our rule of transparency. You and everyone else knew it the same day, and we announced it to the press the next morning.”

This opened up a discussion among all of us on the proper role of banking and credit unions, including cooperative ones. It's not a subject progressive activists are all that familiar with, but we had it anyway.

First it was clear that Caja Laboral's big sin in the Lehman Brothers case was believing in the validity of the AAA ratings of its securities, set by U.S. Government agencies, which turned out to be a sham. Second, it was also clear from the numbers presented that Caja Laboral was really something on the order of a strong and relatively cash-rich savings and loan operation and consumer services bank. Its managers didn't get rich, but had incomes within the same narrow and modest salary spread as all MCC coop members. Its profits were plowed back in to building new coops.

It was not in the same league as the giant Wall Street speculators in derivatives, with their billion dollar bonuses, who were trying to gain wealth not by creating new wealth, but by pure gambling with other people's money.

Most of us concluded that Caja Laboral was a sound and necessary part of MCC and its growth, but the arguments continued out the door and on the bus ride further up the mountainside to our next talk at the Otalora conference center.

Here we had a new topic, the training of governing boards of the coops. It did no good to elect workers to coop governing boards, and then just let them sink or swim. A skills transfer and training program was in order.

Our presenter was Juan Ignacio Aitpunea. He was a well-seasoned and tough-minded older Basque worker with strong cooperative values in his heart.

“We use a Basque word, ORDEZKARI, for our program,” he started off. “It means 'representative,' because that's the task of the boards, to represent the workers. Our boards are elected to four-year terms, but we stagger them. Every two years, only 50% change, but with 120 coops, that means we have about 1,000 new board members to train every two years.

“We do it in steps. In the first six months, we get the new people to do self-evaluations, to find out their competencies, or the lack of them, so we know what to stress over the next year or so.

What were the skills needed?

“First,” Juan continued, “you have to know the basics, the laws on cooperatives and the functions of coop leaders. Second, you need common skills -- teamwork, how to communicate, how to lead, how to make timely decisions. Third, you have to know how to design and work through a followup plan."

All this was crucial because the governing board not only shaped policy, it hired and fired managers. Worker-owners, by their nature, cannot be fired. Over 50 years there was only one case, where a small group got caught embezzling.

Juan went into more detail on this, but our crew had other questions: how were people nominated, and what was involved in running?

First, if there are two vacancies, there must be at least three candidates, he explained. Any worker could volunteer to run, but he or she had to get signatures of 10% of the workforce. Next, the workplace's social council, which serves some of the functions of a trade union, could suggest a candidate. Finally the old board could name one new candidate itself. But an initial vote was taken so each of the final minimum of three candidates to get a 50% minimum, then the vote was held to determine the final two.

“We need this to make sure board members have a wide respect throughout the workplace,” Juan added. “This is especially important in hard times, like now, when hard decisions often have to be made." This meant firing the temp workers or cutting salaries to deal with the downturns.

"Leading is not just about friendship, or making friends. This is not mainly a place for that. But it is a great school where you can learn what it means to be responsible. You may also make a few new friends. In fact, in tough times, that's when you can make the best and truest friends.”

Juan also stressed the need for diversity and the need to bring forward younger leaders. “When you get old like me, you get too used to having your own way. A time comes when you need to let new people in, but still find other ways to make a contribution.”

Mondragon University. Image from Universidad.es.
Our last stop of the day was Mondragon University. It was formed as a second degree coop by joining the engineering school, the business studies program, and the humanities and pedagogy teaching coop. It currently has about 3,600 full time students. Tuition is about 5,000 euros a year, considered moderate for a European university. Most of the students are from middle-income families in the area or from the workers in the coops.

Fred Freundlich was our faculty presenter, an American who had been in the coop movement in the U.S. in the 1980s, but had lived in the Basque County for a good number of years. He gave frank and critical answers to our questions.

I raised my hand, and asked: “Suppose I'm a young worker in one of the local industrial coops, and I decide I want to become part of the management. How does MU help me? Do they?”

The short answer was, "Yes." But Fred added that management usually required a college degree, and you didn't necessarily need to get it from MU. If you had a good resume and vita from elsewhere, you'd still be considered. On the other hand, if your coop saw that you were eager to gain new skills, they would give you a good deal of support, including financial, and going through MU for your degree would be a plus.”

Others raised the general question of activism among youth.

Frankly, Basque youth aren't all that active inside the coops. They're into third world global justice issues, environmentalism in general, and Basque nationalism. About the coop managers, I'd say a strong minority, maybe 30 percent, have solid cooperative values at heart, another minority pays lip service to them, and the rest are somewhere in between. We clearly need a new surge of activism to spread cooperativism beyond the factories, but my guess is only about 30 percent of the workers today are activists on the matter. You really need to talk more with Mikel, who's really a leader on this topic.

Mikel went up front and drew us a wave-like graph, showing an initial surge in the early MCC decades, then a leveling off, then a dip at the beginning of the crisis, and now a small upward turn.

“This is the beginning of a rich discussion, how we need to redefine and reinvent ourselves for the 21st century? But the bus is waiting to take us to dinner in San Sebastian. We can return to it tomorrow.”

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. His website is Keep on Keepin' On, where this series also appears. Davidson is also available to speak on the topic. Contact him at carld717@gmail.com. For more info on these tours, go here.]

Also see:

• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries I: Bridges to Socialism / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2010
• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries II: It Starts With a School / The Rag Blog / September 23, 2010
• Carl Davidson : Mondragon Diaries III: Visions of the Future / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2010

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Carl Davidson : The Pundits' Obsession About 'Specific Demands'

Occupy Wall Street poster from Lalo Alcaraz / laloalcaraz.com.
Occupy and the pundits:
Do we really want 'specific demands?'

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog/ December 6, 2011

I’m getting fed up with pompous pundits lecturing the "Occupy!" movement for not having a set of specific demands.

A case in point: A case in point: New York Times financial columnist Joe Nocera quoted at length in a story by Phoebe Mitchell in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on November 29. He was speaking at the Amherst Political Union, a debate club at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Nocera starts off with the now usual tipping of the hat to the protestors:

Nocera believes the anger caused by income inequality, a divisive issue across the country in this prolonged economic downturn, is the fuel for both popular uprisings. "If we lived in a country that had a growing economy and where the middle class felt that they could make a good living and had a chance for advancement and a decent life, there would be no tea party or Occupy Wall Street," he said.

But we don’t live in such times, and the more interesting story is that OWS and its trade union allies are displacing the Tea Party, and energizing the progressive grassroots. Nocera, however, makes OWS the target.

He believes that for the Occupy Movement to be successful, it must frame clear demands that outline a plan for creating jobs and refashioning Wall Street to benefit the entire country and not just a select few wealthy investors. Without a solid plan for moving forward, he said, the Occupy protestors will be continued to be viewed by Wall Street supporters as little more than “a gnat that needs to be flicked from its shoulder blades.”

A "gnat" indeed. In due time, a progressive majority may well come to view our dubious "Masters of the Universe" on Wall Street as bothersome gnats to be flicked away.

But to get to the main point, Nocero knows perfectly well that there are any number of short, sweet and to the point sets of demands aimed at Wall Street finance capital and the Congress it works to keep under its thumb. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO has been hammering away at his six-point jobs program -- one point of which is a financial transaction tax on Wall Street as a source of massive new revenues to fund the other five.

The United Steel Worker’s Leo Gerard has been tireless for years working for a new clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy that could create millions of new jobs and get us out of the crisis in a progressive way.

So what happens when these demands are put forward? With our Wall Street lobbyists working behind the scenes, the best politicians money can buy declare them "off the table." Nocera and others of like mind in punditocracy put the cart before the horse.

OWS arose as a result of a long train of abuses, year after year of sensible, rational, progressive demands, and programs swept off of Congress’s agenda like so many bread crumbs from a dining table. Not even brought to a vote. OWS and a lot of other people are fed up with being dismissed.

The pundits should watch what they wish for. The demands and packages of structural reforms will be back, much sharper and clearer, and with the ante upped by hundreds of thousands in the streets, as well as millions turning out for the polls.

In fact, the solutions have always been there for anyone with ears to hear. We’ll see if our voices are loud enough to crack the ceiling at the top, and let some light shine through.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, a writer for Beaver County Blue, the website of PA’s 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and a member of Steelworkers Associates. He is the author of several books, including New Paths to Socialism, available online. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. This article was also published at Beaver County Blue. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

• Read more Rag Blog coverage of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Austin.

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Carl Davidson : Who's Waging 'Class Warfare'?

Art from RepublicanDirtyTricks.com / Keep on Keepin' On.
Talk about your 'class warfare':
Shameless opposition to jobs bill
reveals GOP hatred of working class

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2011

If you want to have your class consciousness raised a few notches, all you have to do over the next few weeks is listen to the Republicans in Congress offer up their shameless commentary rejecting Presidents Obama's jobs bill.

Last week's doozy came from Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, who was outraged that capitalists were being restricted from discriminating in hiring the unemployed, in favor of only hiring people who already had jobs elsewhere. I kid you not. Here's the quote:

"We're adding in this bill a new protected class called 'unemployed,'" Gohmert declared in the House Sept. 13, 2011. "I think this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough work. We heard from our friends across the aisle, 14 million people out of work -- that's 14 million new clients."

One hardly knows were to begin.

First, the Jobs Bill does no such thing as creating a "new protected class." It only curbs a wrongly discriminatory practice.

Second, so what if it did? Americans who uphold the Constitution, the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, and the expansion of democracy and the franchise generally, will see the creation of "protected classes" as hard-won progressive steps forward from the times of the Divine Right of Kings.

Third, if Gohmert had any first-hand knowledge of the unemployed, he'd know they usually can't afford lawyers, especially when the courts are stacked against them.

Fourth, to create even more confusion, Gohmert raced to the House clerk to submit his own "Jobs Bill" before Obama's, but with a similar name. Its content was a hastily scribbled two-page screed consisting of nothing but cuts in corporate taxes.

What's really going on here is becoming clearer every day. The GOP cares about one thing: destroying Obama's presidency regardless of the cost. They don't even care if its hurts capitalism's own interests briefly, not to mention damaging the well being of everyone else. Luckily, Obama is finally calling them out in public -- although far too politely for my taste.

The irony will likely emerge if and when they ever do take Obama down. I'd bet good money that a good number of the GOP bigwigs would then turn on a dime and support many of the same measures they're now opposing.

But most of them, especially on the far right, would still likely press on with their real aim, a full-throated neoliberal reactionary thrust that repeals the Great Society's Medicaid and Medicare, the New Deal's Social Security and Wagner Act, and every progressive measure in between.

Their idea of making the U.S. labor market "competitive" and U.S. business "confident" is to make the whole country more like Texas, with its record volume of minimum wage work and poverty, and then Texas more like Mexico -- the race to the bottom. They're not happy with 12% unionization; they want zero percent, where all of us are defenseless and completely under the thumbs of our "betters."

In brief, prepare for more wars and greater austerity.

If you think I'm exaggerating, over the next months observe how the national GOP is trying to rig the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and a few other big states. Our Electoral College system is bad enough, but they are going to "reform" it to make it worse by attaching electoral votes to congressional districts, rather than statewide popular majorities.

This would mean Obama could win the popular vote statewide, but the majority of electoral votes would still go to the GOP. Add that to their new "depress the vote" requirements involving picture IDs, which are aimed at the poor and the elderly, and you'll see their fear and hatred of the working class.

We've always had government with undue advantages for the rich. But just watch them in this round as they go all out to make it even more so. We have to call it out for what it really is, and put their schemes where the sun doesn't shine.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age. He serves as webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net and Beaver County Blue. This article was also published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Sept. 9, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Carl Davidson about the Mondragon Corporation and the workers' cooperative movement, here:
  
  

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Carl Davidson : 'Lazy' People and Voting Rights

Political cartoon by Adam Zyglis / The Buffalo News / The Cagle Post.
‘Lazy’ people, voting rights, and
Republicans caught with their pants down

As the saying goes, most people work for their money, but a few people are able to let their money work for them

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / October 3, 2012

Sometimes Republicans just can’t help themselves. Put a little heat on them, and they blurt out the truth, showing what they’re really thinking.

The latest case in point: The retrograde Pennsylvania "Voter ID" law was rejected on October 2, at least in part, by a state judge, Robert Simpson, allowing people to vote normally at least on this November 6. The decision was a victory for labor, the NAACP, retiree groups, and all who care about defending civil rights and liberties.

The main author of the bill, State Rep Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler), however, chimed in with this comment:

Justice Simpson’s final decision is out of bounds with the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances for the individual branches of state government, and most importantly, the will of the people. Rather than making a ruling based on the constitution and the law, this judicial activist decision is skewed in favor of the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic to meet the commonsense requirements to obtain an acceptable photo ID.

Yes, you heard that right. This guy thinks those objecting to this bill are "the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic." And all of us here in Western Pennsylvania not fresh out of the pumpkin patch know exactly who he thinks he’s talking about.

When Gov. Romney went over the top in a recent closed session with his upper crust friends talking about a 47% of the population who wouldn’t "take responsibility" for their lives, I thought things had pretty much hit bottom in the racist dog whistle department. Little did I know!

Metcalfe has done us all a favor in self-exposing the racist mindset behind this GOP voter suppression effort, and revealing exactly why they thought that, if implemented, it could tip the state to Romney. Now they’ve been monkey-wrenched, at least for the time being.

But here’s an interesting thought. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, even though I’ve studied it some. But, where in the Constitution, or in our state voting laws, does it suggest that lazy people or people with a hampered work ethic don’t have the same right to vote as energetic workaholics?

The wealthy had best be careful here. As the saying goes, most people work for their money, but a few people are able to let their money work for them. They can laze about, enjoying the good life of the idle rich. There’s a slippery slope here they may want to avoid for the future.

[Carl Davidson, a longtime activist and author, is a member of Steelworker Associates. He lives in Western Pennsylvania and writes for BeaverCountyBlue.org, the website of the 12th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and blogs at Keep on Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Carl Davidson : Winter of Our Discontent?

Summer of our discontent: Buildings set on fire in Tottenham, a poor neighborhood in north London. Photo from Politicol News.
Son of 'Shock Doctrine':
The approaching winter of our discontent

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011

Watching the rebellions of the young and poor continue in London and now spread to other industrial centers in the UK raises an interesting question: Will the Arab spring and the European summer lead to a fall and winter of discontent here in the USA?

All the makings for it are there. We have impoverished communities of the unemployed where there are huge numbers of young people who have never had a regular job of any sort. Now that any form of taxing the rich for funding a jobs program like that proposed by Rep. John Conyers' HR 870 has been declared "off the table," it doesn't appear likely to change, either.

Add to that the GOP-led "Shock Doctrine" (with an assist from the White House) of creating a neoliberal deficit hoax to take from the working class and give to Wall Street, and you spread deeper misery across all of Main Street.

Now the AFL-CIO, thank goodness, is calling for a new round of mass actions against austerity and in defense of the tattered safety net. Add to that the October2011.org project, where the peace and justice movement is planning to camp out in downtown DC's Freedom Plaza until all the troops are brought home from the wars.

It's a perfect storm shaping up. Hopefully, many of our young unemployed and underemployed will be drawn to them. But any police outrage could set off a chain reaction -- we've seen this many times in our history.

We have a few decent politicians facing up to the problem, like the 80 votes of the Congressional Progressive Caucus behind the People's Budget. But our top political class has declared their efforts "off the table," too.

In brief, they're telling us our views don't count and we have nowhere to go.

That's what the bigwigs in London thought, too. Now they're all in a tizzy about riots and violence. In contrast, in one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Of course, many small shops and working-class homes, unfortunately, are being harmed in the UK events. Street heat is best when the target is narrowed on the upper class, and you keep the moral high ground. That way you can draw even more millions into relatively peaceful assembly with powerful and lasting implications. But when long-ignored social dynamite explodes, things don't always work out that way, with the well-controlled niceties of a tea party, no pun intended.

It is right to rebel against outrages and unjust conditions imposed from above. The "Shock Doctrine" is a two-way street, and once it erupts, more than you might think will know which side of the barricades to gather on.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age. He serves as webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net and Beaver County Blue. This article was first published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Carl Davidson : Shameless Republicans and the State of the Union

Newt and the "Food Stamp President." Image from The Economist / Keep on Keepin' On!
We're all in the same boat?
On the topic of Obama, the
GOP can't even blush anymore

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / January 25, 2012

If Hollywood gave Oscars for shamelessness, the Republican responses to President Obama's State of the Union speech last night, Tuesday, January 24, would have swept the field.

Take Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the official GOP response:

"No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others," he said. "As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat."

Amazing. One top GOP candidate, Newt Gingrich, is running around the country attacking Obama as the "Food Stamp President," while the other, Mitt Romney, whose newly released tax returns show he takes in more in a day than a well-paid worker does in a year, critiques Obama's business skills using a shuttered factory as a stage prop.

Obama, of course, never shut down a single factory, yet that was precisely the business Mitt Romney -- and his outfit, Bain Capital -- was famous for, including shutting down a factory in Florida, where his video message was being recorded.

"All in the same boat" and "castigating others" indeed. Governor Daniels uttered these words as the state he presides over is currently engaged in a notorious "right-to-work-for-less" battle to strip Indiana's workers of their ability to bargain collectively.

Like many Americans, I watched the President's speech with a critical eye. As he detailed a number of manufacturing and alternative energy industrial policies, I thought, finally, he's giving some voice to his "inner Keynesian" and forcing a crack in the neoliberal hegemony at the top. I cheered when he took aim at Wall Street and declared, "No more bailouts, no more handouts, and no more cop outs."

On the other hand I winced more than once at the glorification of militarism and the defense of Empire -- I'm one quick to oppose unjust wars and who has long believed a clean energy/green manufacturing industrial policy needs to trump a military-hydrocarbon industrial policy.

This speech was also Obama in campaign mode. One thing we've learned over the last four years is that his governing mode is not the same thing, and requires much more of us in terms of independent, popular, and democratic power at the base to make good things happen.

But one thing is clear. My critical eye has nothing in common with what's coming from the GOP and the far right. The first Saturday of every month, the pickup trucks from the local hills and hollows, growing numbers of them, fill the parking lot of the church on my corner, picking up packages from the food pantry to help make ends meet.

In these circumstances and lacking better practical choices, I'll go with the "Food Stamp President" any day of the week.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, a writer for Beaver County Blue, the website of PA’s 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and a member of Steelworkers Associates. He is the author of several books, including New Paths to Socialism, available online. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. This article was also published at Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On!. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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