Harry Targ : Speaking Truth About Violence

Window into violence: A boy and his bird in Gaza. Image from chemicalcollisions / Tumblr.

Towards a just society:
Speaking truth about violence

Violence engendered by the rich and powerful and responses from the poor and powerless are embedded in the system of structural violence.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 1, 2013

Establishing causal connections between “variables” and violence is a form of mystification. The reality of this world is that of grotesque inequalities in wealth, power, respect for humankind and the environment, a world awash in instrumentalities of death, and a global culture that celebrates it. Recent reports from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum (of all places) document the continuing and growing inequalities in wealth and income on a worldwide basis.

Could it be a surprise that seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence occur all across the globe? Only a humane global movement for fundamental change can radically transform the world we live in but movements of protest can make constructive changes along the way.

-- Harry Targ, Facebook, April 23, 2013

Each violent tragedy in the United States brings an outpouring of wrenching and “expert” analyses of what was behind the acts that led to so much pain and suffering. Most of the soul-searching about tragedies from Arizona, to Colorado, to Connecticut, to Boston is about domestic events (the repeated killings of Iraqis, Afghan peoples, Pakistanis, Yemenis and others generate much less empathy).

Explanations usually involve deranged “others,” usually poor “others,” “others” of color, and “others with fundamentalist religious beliefs.” Their crimes are described as perpetrated against victims who are the “normal” people.

Make no mistake about it, violence against any individuals, communities, and nations must be opposed, even among those who in the end are the root cause of it. But we need to be clear about the economic, social, political, cultural, and military/police context in which violence occurs. And, in no small measure, violence itself is celebrated in the societies where it is most prevalent.

Peace researchers have written about “direct,” “cultural,” and “structural” violence for years. While each of these is seen as having its own characteristics and causes, for the most part analysts regard the three as inextricably interconnected.

Direct violence refers to physical assault, shooting, bombing, gassing, and torture. It is about killing people. Cultural violence refers to dominant cultures whose apparatuses, such as the media and laws, portray their own institutions and values as superior to others and rituals that seek to honor the violence engaged in by one’s own country or group while demeaning other countries or groups. What is most vicious about cultural violence is its effort to make the victimized groups hate themselves.

Structural violence occurs when economic, political, cultural, and military institutions create relationships in which some human beings gain disproportionately from the labor, the talents, and the pain and suffering of others. Structural violence is institutionalized violence most often organized around class exploitation, racism, and patterns of gendered forms of domination and subordination. The key concepts that shape efforts to understand the causes and effects of structural violence are class, race, and gender.

Ironically, reports issued this year between the Newtown and Boston massacres by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum tell us much about the fundamentals of structural violence on a worldwide basis. These reports clearly describe why we do not live in a better world, why people do not treat each other with more respect, and why vast majorities of humanity and their natural habitats are in danger of extinction.

And they imply that violence engendered by the rich and powerful and responses from the poor and powerless are embedded in the system of structural violence.


The World Bank Report

The World Bank issued a press release on April 17, 2013 summarizing “The State of the Poor: Where are the Poor and Where are the Poorest?” It reported that the number of the world’s citizens living on less than $1.25 a day has declined markedly between 1981 and 2010 from half the world’s population to 21 percent. But still, they say, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty (below $1.25 per day). Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than one-third of those who live in such poverty worldwide.

A World Bank spokesperson noted that “We have made strides in cutting down poverty, but with nearly one-fifth of the world population still below the poverty line, not enough.” (This particular World Bank report does not include data on those living just above the poverty line. For example, another 20 percent live on $2 per day.)


Oxfam reports on the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risk Report”

In an Oxfam Media Briefing (January 18, 2013), the authors site a recent World Economic Forum warning that rising global inequality constitutes one of the top “global risks of 2013.” Oxfam points out that lifting masses of people out of absolute poverty has been the goal of economic elites over the last decade but “inequality and the extreme wealth that contributes to it were seen as either not relevant, or a prerequisite for the growth that would also help the poorest, as the wealth created trickled down to the benefit of everyone.”

The Oxfam Media Briefing suggests reasons why the WEF might correctly regard growing global inequality as a “risk.” They highlight the following:

• Extreme wealth and inequality are reaching levels never before seen in history and are getting worse. Inequality is growing in the industrial developed countries such as the United States and Great Britain, rapidly developing economies such as China and South Africa, and many of the poorest countries in the world. The incomes of the top 1 percent have increased by 60 percent over the last 20 years. The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012. “The IMF has said that inequality is dangerous and divisive and could lead to civil unrest.”


• Extreme wealth and inequality is politically corrosive. Oxfam makes the obvious but important point that growing inequality in wealth and income relates to growing inequality in political power. They quote economist Joseph Stiglitz who contends that financial deregulation in the largest capitalist countries led to greater economic inequality and further consolidation of political power by financial elites.


• Extreme wealth and inequality is socially divisive. For Oxfam, the consolidation of wealth and power reduces the life chances and even human sustainability of the vast majority of populations. People work harder for less and suffer more. “If rich elites use their money to buy services, whether it is private schooling or private healthcare, they have less interest in public services or paying taxes to support them.” And, as Oxfam reminds us, inequality is linked to growing alienation, mental disorders, crime, anomic violence, and sheer desperation.


• Extreme wealth and inequality is environmentally destructive. Oxfam reiterates the fact that rising inequality increases demands by the rich for access to and consumption of scarce resources that the earth can no longer provide. “Those in the 1 percent have been estimated to use as much as 10,000 times more carbon than the average U.S. citizen.”

So if you grow up in urban America or rural Africa, the Middle East, or almost anywhere else, and you are young, intelligent, and experience the world through the globalization of a racist, sexist, violent media, does your view of the world look bright? No job, no respect, hungry, alienated, and imbued with the cultural values about violence and racism that are used to define you, you may act in the same ways the rich and powerful act against you and your people.

The conversation that should come out of Newtown, Boston, and West, Texas, or Baghdad, Kabul, and Gaza, or almost anyplace else, is how to change the structural violence that gave rise to direct and cultural violence. This discussion should lead to the mobilization of progressives to create a just society, one in which people will not want to kill each other.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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David P. Hamilton : Change You Can, You Know, Believe In...

Graphic from Pyrrhic Defeat.
Consumer choice division:
Change you can believe in

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / April 4, 2012

I could no longer tolerate the bell chamber of American cable news. Its obsessive fixation on the still months-away American presidential election pitting two candidates approved by the 1% was driving me up the wall. I would regurgitate involuntarily if forced to watch one more of that repulsive manifestation of all the worst features of America, the Republican primary debates.

So, I dumped Time Warner for the Dish to get access to better news sources. The Dish gets us Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, and RT (Russia Today -- media home of numerous American leftists), Link TV, Free Speech TV, and several other international sources of information. What a relief. Now I had a much wider selection of biases. But there remain issues.

This enhanced news selection prominently includes the various shows of Thom Hartmann, most notably, the “Big Picture” that appears on both RT and Free Speech. He also does a couple of hours of live call-in, just him talking and answering calls on camera.

Thom is very busy and generally very sharp. We are fortunate that he is there. Sometimes he does a feature where he debates two rightists at the same time. They are perpetually on the defensive. We first caught his show on San Francisco’s cable television. Then we found a way to get him in Austin.

After watching a few days and getting a bit excited, I called Thom's show and asked the following question:

Thom, you support a constitutional amendment to take corporate money out of politics and revoke corporate personhood. So do I. But to enact a constitutional amendment, it must be passed by two-thirds of the members of the Congress and then in three-fourths of the state legislatures.

If our democracy is already seriously corrupted by corporate money, how can we expect legislators who are already largely sycophants of corporate America, to act against the interests of those who pay so handsomely for their services by voting for this amendment?

Thom’s answer, confirmed by his Washington reporter guest, was that they have heard many legislators say that they really hate having to raise money all the time. If only enough of the electorate pressured them, they would vote for the amendment. They essentially argued that these are good people who just need a little support in order to do the right thing.

Basically, I asked Thom whether or not democracy was already dead in America and Thom answered by saying no, just on life support.

As much as I admire Thom, there is some fuzzy thinking here. He is campaigning hard for an amendment that is premised on the idea that democracy in America is quite seriously compromised already. Yet he appeals to the corrupted institution to rise up and cleanse itself. You can’t have it both ways.

You can hardly expect the utmost beneficiaries of the burgeoning economic inequality that so heavily compromises our democracy to instruct their functionaries in the so-called “public” sector to rectify the situation in our favor.

Most legislators are already virtual employees of the less than 1%, the capitalist class who own the controlling interests in the major corporations. They are in that role because they are highly adapted to the corrupted system. They like money and power, the respectful recognition and bounteous benefits they acquire by being political operatives of the rich and powerful.

Thom’s answer posits that they are actually there to do what's best for the country and the general population and are only inhibited from doing so by the need to raise millions to run their necessarily expensive campaigns, money readily supplied by the dastardly corporations. That's nonsense. If that were true, they would have passed public financing of political campaigns years ago.

The amendment to overturn “Citizens United” may be a wonderful device to focus the public on the issue of how economic inequality corrupts our democracy, but it will pass when pigs fly.

Which brings us to a fundamental question. Is economic reform that measurably effects income distribution in the U.S., and consequently the class structure, still possible given the current level of political corruption by corporate money?

The answer is not very possible, if at all, and the potential is diminishing. The ruling economic elite can only be expected to instruct their political servants to minimize their social responsibilities as much as possible and to increase their access to government money. They have unswerving faith in a religion called the "Free Market” -- and Social Darwinism that allows them to take this course without the least guilt.

What is the difference in corporate deference between Democrats and Republicans? The former have progressive voting constituencies that must be placated to some small degree, but just enough to distinguish them from Republicans.

The most crucial arena is the tax structure. Specifically, will the Democrats end the Bush tax cuts for the rich when they again have the chance? Despite the fact they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for two years, they did not do so when it was last up for a vote. Will they risk bing labeled as those who raised taxes or will they again “bargain it away”? I advise you to limit your expectations.

Before the “Citizens United” decision, the barriers limiting corporate control of the political process were already full of holes. With that decision, they fell by the wayside entirely.

As a direct result, we today have the spectacle of a Las Vegas gambling tycoon openly giving $15 million to Newt Gingrich to run his campaign. Given the donor’s reputed wealth of many billions, that’s pocket change. That example is just the egregious tip of the iceberg. It would be hard to argue that most legislators are not already at this point, beneficiaries of significant corporate largesse.

This system, like others, produces politicians that are adaptive to it. Insofar as there are still shining examples of probity in regards to corporate cash, given this burst of judicial activism by the Supremes, they are a dying breed.

Witness the strenuous effort that has been exerted for years to get rid of Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Austin. Eventually, his right-wing detractors will find the right district, the right flunky, and enough big bucks to take him down.

Their personhood is immoral, devious, relentless, and infinitely well financed. Corporations will continue to own the controlling interest in an enterprise known as the U.S. government and they will expand their holdings, because there is nothing to stop them and very little chance that things will change.

Consider also the important role the federal government now plays in relation to the private sector. Forbes magazine recently reported that of the 10 richest counties in the U.S., half of them bordered on Washington, D.C. Average household income in these counties hovers around $100,000 per year.

In recent decades northern Virginia has become an economic dynamo, driven by a private sector that feasts on government contracting. These counties are also home to corporate lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who work in or around the nation's capital, soaking up federal government spending.

There is no other prize more valuable to corporate elites than maintaining their control over the power and wealth of the federal government for their private gain. They are firmly in the driver’s seat now and have the power to change the rules to their further advantage. No election occurring in other than catastrophic conditions will change that and in such conditions, they probably won’t allow elections.

As American anarchist Emma Goodman once said, "If you could change things by voting, it would be illegal."

Whatever may have been the case in the past, serious reform that alters the class structure or the political institutions of American society in favor of the 99% is no longer possible by electoral means.

[Rag Blog contributor David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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