Tuesday, February 14, 2023

PARTICIPATORY ECONOMY (PARECON)
Coordinatorism vs Managerialism

A critique of an aspect of Albert and Hahnel’s class analysis and economic vision
February 11, 2023

Introduction

This paper begins with a brief presentation of participatory economics. The presentation focuses on the class aspect of the model. It outlines the thinking behind Albert and Hahnel’s three class analysis. It takes a critical look at their thinking behind the corporate division of labour and the coordinator class. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about this third class, their source of power etc., which have implications for the model. As a result, the necessity of one of the model’s main features is questioned. The motivation for writing this paper comes from a desire to improve participatory economics by clarifying and simplifying the model in such a way that advocacy and organise become easier.
Participatory Economics in Brief

The participatory economics model was developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel and presented as an alternative to both “free” market capitalism and 20th century socialism. The model is a product of Albert and Hahnel’s experience of activism in the 1960s and 1970s, their critique of the Left, their broader analysis of 20th century history and the left-libertarian tradition more generally. One of their central insights is that the Left neglects the development of vision and therefore doesn’t really understand what it wants when it asserts “Another World is Possible!” or similar sounding slogans designed to inspire. Writing in the late 1970s, they stated:

“Making a socialist revolution […] requires a clear vision of what the socialism we want will be like. How will it work, what will be its institutional and human relations, and how will its quality of life be superior to that we now endure?” [1]

The model that they developed to address this concern is made-up of five main features. They are:

1. Either non-ownership or collective ownership of the means of production 2. Self-managed worker and consumer councils

3. Balanced job complexes (BJCs)

4. Remuneration for effort and sacrifice

5. Participatory planning

One of the central objectives of the participatory economics model is to generate classlessness. Like all socialists, Albert and Hahnel see capitalism as being based on a system of class exploitation and oppression. However, unlike many socialists, Albert and Hahnel also see 20th century socialism as a system of class oppression and exploitation. This is because they reject the typical two class analysis (i.e. capitalists and workers) that is generally accepted within socialist circles. Instead they see a third class that sits between these two main classes. In addition to the capitalist class and the working class, Albert and Hahnel insist that a third class – what they call the “coordinator class” – also exists. They define this third class as follows:

“Planners, administrators, technocrats, and other conceptual workers who monopolise the information and decision-making authority necessary to determine economic outcomes. An intermediate class in capitalism; the ruling class in coordinator economies such as the [former] Soviet Union, China and Yugoslavia.” [2]

From their point of view, what is generally referred to, by both those on the Right and the Left, as socialism (in both its market and centrally planned forms) is better understood as coordinator economics: “An economy in which a class of experts / technocrats / managers / conceptual workers monopolise decision-making authority while traditional workers carry out their orders”. [3] Importantly, for Albert and Hahnel, the origins of coordinatorism can be traced back to the “original Marxist theoretical framework” [4]:

“On average, the Marxist concepts that organise Marxists’ thought, and the organisational structures and strategies that Leninists abide, together have a built-in logic that causes Marxist-Leninists – even against their best inclinations and aspirations – to elevate coordinators.” [5]

“Unfortunately, for all its emphasis on class analysis, Marxism blinded many fighting against the economics of competition and greed to important antagonisms between the working class and the new, professional managerial class, or coordinator class.” [6]

The above reference to the “professional managerial class” points to the work of two other important thinkers who Albert and Hahnel credit for their development of the idea of the coordinator class: “…our own view derives more from the work of Barbara and John Ehrenreich.” [7] This refers to a lead article on the professional managerial class by the Ehrenreich’s that was published in 1979. The reasons given, by Albert and Hahnel in that book, for the rebranding of this third class from the professional

managerial class to the coordinator class are that they saw the Ehrenreich’s conception as “flawed” and “imprecise”. [8] Nevertheless, the significance of the Ehrenreich’s work on their thinking is captured in Albert’s memoir:

“The book matters to me not only for the essay that Robin and I did but because writing that essay crystallised our views about class and helped set us off on the journey to what we later called participatory economics.” [9]

Understanding Albert and Hahnel’s class analysis is crucial to understanding the thinking behind most, if not all, of the features that make up the participatory economics model. For example, participatory planning has been developed as a means of arriving at an equitable and efficient plan but in a way that makes both markets and central planning redundant. In making central planners redundant, participatory planning removes the need for the coordinator class positions, and with it the class dynamics, within the planning process of centrally planned socialism.

A similar argument could be made for the development of self-managed worker and consumer councils. Once again, these proposed institutions are designed to make coordinator class rule over workers and consumers superfluous and in-so-doing removing oppressive class dynamics from the economic system. However, it is perhaps the proposed feature of balanced job complexes (BJCs) that is most explicitly designed to address coordinator class dominance.

As we have seen, according to Albert and Hahnel, the coordinator class derives its social-economic power by monopolising knowledge and skills and decision-making authority within the workplace and broader economy. Furthermore, the ability of the

coordinator class to garner this power is facilitate by a specific institution, found in both capitalist and (20th century) “socialist” economic systems. That institution is called the “corporate division of labour”:

“Corporate divisions of labour will ensure that a few would give orders and most obey, and these are not conducive to all participating equality.” [10]

What is important to understand about this institution is that all economies have a division of labour of some kind and that it can be adjusted to have more or less egalitarian / hierarchical outcomes. This is because the division of labour has to do with how jobs (which are just bundles of tasks) are formulated. If we design jobs where empowering tasks are shared out evenly then we get an egalitarian division of labour. But if we design jobs so that empowering tasks are concentrated in a small number of jobs then we get a hierarchical division of labour. As the name suggests, the corporate

division of labour refers to a hierarchical formulation. And as already noted, it is this particular institution, say Albert and Hahnel, that facilitates the privileged position of the coordinator class.

This is where balanced job complexes (BJCs) come in. They are defined as:

“A collection of tasks within a workplace that is comparable in its burdens and benefits and in its impact on the worker’s ability to participate in decision making to all other job complexes in that workplace […] and often for additional tasks outside to balance their overall work responsibilities with those of other workers in society.” [11]

As we can see, the basic idea here is to replace the hierarchical outcomes of the corporate division of labour with an egalitarian structure and dynamic. This is Albert and Hahnel’s way of systematically undermining coordinator class privilege and replacing it with an arrangement that institutionalises classlessness and facilitates self-management.

We can see from the above definition that BJCs have two aspects to them. One aspect has to do with creating conditions in which workers can “participate in decision making” in meaningful ways within the workplace / economy. The other has to do with sharing out the “burdens and benefits” equally amongst workers. In other words, in a participatory economy – as conceived of by Albert and Hahnel – jobs are balanced for both empowerment and desirability:

“So in a participatory economy every worker council is called upon to create a job balancing committee to distribute and combine tasks in ways that make jobs more “balanced” with regard to desirability and empowerment.” [12]

“We need balanced job complexes for desirability and empowerment in each and every workplace, as well as guarantee that workers have a combination of tasks that balance across workplaces.” [13]

We can conclude that, for Albert and Hahnel, reformulating jobs for both equal empowerment and desirability is a necessary and crucial aspect of participatory economics as a proposed vision for economic justice.
A Critique of Albert and Hahnel’s Analysis and Vision

Above we have seen some of the ideas and reasoning behind participatory economics with a focus on Albert and Hahnel’s class analysis and the implications of this for their

vision for a just economic system. I would now like to take an even closer look at certain aspects of their argument. To assist in this we will explore the following questions.

1. Isn’t the analysis that informs the coordinator class confused and confusing?

As we have seen, for Albert and Hahnel the third class – what they call the coordinator class – can be traced back to Marx’s ideas and in particular to his two class analysis that has a “built-in logic” that “blinded” socialist to the existence of this third class. However, they also characterise the coordinator class as an “intermediate class in capitalism”. So on the one hand we have a dominant class in socialist economies that was informed by Marx and on the other the same class in capitalist economies that, presumably, was not informed by Marx.

If correct, this seems to suggest that the emergence of this third class has something to do with a more general historical trend that was taking place. That general trend was the emergence of management culture as a specialised field based on its own particular knowledge and skill-set. Furthermore, this is a trend that has a much longer and richer history than that suggested by Albert and Hahnel’s formulation of the coordinator class. As one Social and Organisational Theory scholar puts it:

“So what we see is the emergence of the word [“management”] really around the 17th and 18th centuries in English. It has got Italian roots from mano, the hand, or it is sometimes tracked back to maneggiarre, which is the activity of looking after or training horses. But in terms of its application in the English language you see it sometimes in the theatre, from the 17th century onwards, but much more intensely after the industrial revolution to refer to a particular class of people who were basically overseeing the new factories and offices of the time. So, we are talking about a certain class fraction if you like. The term itself has some quite interesting roots, particularly the idea of managery, a certain kind of skill at organising. But I think in terms of its contemporary application, I find it very troublesome. Largely because it assumes that what managers do is something that ordinary people can’t do. In other words it assumes insufficiency in most of us. And that is why we need managers to coordinate us. And that is not that often remarked on. In that sense of giving up our autonomy, our control over our everyday lives to a cadre of people called managers, we are also admitting a sort of insufficiency in ourselves, as if we couldn’t do this because we are too stupid to arrange matters ourselves. That seems to me a fundamentally repressive technique of organising.” [14]

A more appropriate term for this third class, therefore may be the managerial class. As we shall see, this suggested name for the third class also complements the argument presented in response to the next question.

2. Can the monopolisation of empowering tasks really set this third class up to perform the role of managing the workplace / economy?

According to Albert and Hahnel, the corporate division of labour must be dismantled because it is this institution that facilitates the coordinator class to “monopolise the information and decision-making authority necessary to determine economic outcomes”. But does this make sense? How, for example, does monopolising the knowledge and skill-set for brain surgery (for example) translate into decision-making authority on economic matters? For that matter, how does monopolising knowledge and skills from any empowering job – that is not related to management – lead to the monopolisation of decision-making authority necessary to determine economic outcomes? The answer, I think, is that it doesn’t.

The point being made here is that having specialised knowledge and skills in a specific field does not automatically translate into the knowledge and skills necessary for the specific role of management, as Albert and Hahnel’s argument seems to suggest. So, if it is not the corporate division of labour that is facilitating the coordinator class to monopolise the information and decision-making authority necessary to determine economic outcomes, then what is it? One possibility (that is in line with the answer given to question 1) is that this third class derives it authority from an ideology called managerialism:

“Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systemically in organisations and society while depriving owners, employees (organisational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies.” [15]

Clearly, this definition refers to managerialism in capitalist economies. However, it could easily be expanded to include what Albert and Hahnel refer to as coordinator economies. For example, in the following excerpt the “expert organiser” could be understood as a synonym for the Leninist vanguard party:

“Anti-authoritarian critiques of managerialism are clearly entangled with a variety of other complaints, but they all share a deep mistrust of the notion of the expert organiser. The centrality of the manager, as someone with more status and reward who is not involved in day-to-day organising, is entirely antithetical to most anarchist, socialist, feminist and environmentalist thinkers.” [16]

3. Are BJCs really necessary?

If the above is correct – if the coordinator class are better understood more generally as the managerial class and the source of power for this third class is not an institution called the corporate division of labour but an ideology called managerialism – then this raises a question regarding the aspect of Albert and Hahnel’s vision, namely: Are BJCs a necessary part of the model?

As we have seen, BJCs are proposed as a solution to two important issues within economic justice; empowerment and desirability. However, if the source of power for the third class is the ideology of managerialism and this is replaced by a popular culture of self-management then the empowerment aspect of the argument already seems to have been addressed, and with it the argument for dismantling the corporate division of labour and replacing it with BJCs seems to disintegrate. This part of the argument relies on the assumption that in a functioning participatory economy / society citizens would be educated in what we might generally refer to as self-organisation including, in the economic sphere, self-management. This would begin in school and extend into adulthood. Therefore, in a functioning participatory economy, all workers would be proficient in self-management, making the elitist ideology of managerialism a thing of the past.

As for the desirability aspect of the argument for BJCs, once again it may also be suggested that in a popular and functioning culture of self-management, workers would naturally address the issue of desirability without the necessity of a formal institutional arrangement and all of the additional work entailed in establishing and maintaining BJCs. Likewise, it could also be argued that another feature of the model already takes care of this concern. As Albert has stated:

“…differences in quality of life at work could be justly offset by appropriate remuneration.” [17]

In other words, the fourth feature of the participatory economics model outlined above – i.e. remuneration for effort and sacrifice – can address the desirability issue without the need for BJCs.
Conclusion

It has been suggested that Albert and Hahnel are correct in highlighting the existence of a third class that sits between capitalist and workers in capitalist economies and that became dominant in socialist economies during the 20th century. However, their use of the term “coordinator class” as a descriptor of this third class has been questioned. The “managerial class” has been suggested as a better alternative. Albert and Hahnel’s claim that this third class derives its power from the corporate division of labour has also been challenged. The ideology of managerialism has been proposed as an alternative explanation for the source of power for this third class. It has also been suggested that, with these changes in place, two existing features of the model already address the issues of empowerment and desirability that BJCs are proposed to address. They are (1) a popular culture of self-management and (2) remuneration for effort and sacrifice. If correct, this appears to make BJCs redundant. Finally, introducing these proposed changes into the model would make both the advocacy and implementation of a participatory economy a simpler endeavour.

Notes

1. Unorthodox Marxism: An Essay on Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution. (p253)

2. From the Glossary of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century (p151-153).

3. Same as above.

4. Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century (p7). 5. Michael Albert, Realising Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism (p159).

6. Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation (p65).

7. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Marxism and Socilaits Theory (p140) 8. See Chapter 9 of Between Labour and Capital (edited by Pat Walker) for details.

9. Michael Albert, Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism, (p189).

10.Michael Albert in ParEcon: Life After Capitalism (p46).

11. From the Glossary of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century (p151-153).

12.Robin Hahnel in Of the People, By the People: The Case for a Participatory Economy (p55-56).

13.Michael Albert in ParEcon: Life After Capitalism (p104).

14.From an interview I did with Martin Parker for Collective 20 titled Management: Past, Present and … Future?

15.From Thomas Klikauer Managerialism: Critique of an Ideology (p2).

16.Martin Parker in Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education (p60).

17.Michael Albert in ParEcon: Life After Capitalism (p104-105).

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Mark Evans
Mark was born in 1968 in the industrial heartland of England to working class parents. He has two older sisters. Over the years He has lived in a number of cities and have had many different jobs. However, over the past 20 years he has lived in Birmingham (UK) where he works in healthcare on the nursing side of things. He has two main interests in life. They are mental health and social justice. His main interest in social justice has to do organising for a participatory society. More precisely, He is interested in helping to establish an international network of geographically based self-managed groups as a basis for a participatory society. It is this that motivated me to help set-up, in 2020, Real Utopia: Foundation for a Participatory Society. Mark is also a member of Collective 20 writers collective.

1 COMMENT
Michael on February 11, 2023 11:42 am

Hi Mark, I’ll comment for me, though I think Robin would agree, and others. I will try to keep it short, here, as just a comment but the issue is obviously important so I won’t keep it too short!

First, as noted at the end of Mark’s piece, the remunerative approach of participatory economics provides income for duration, intensity, and also onerousness of socially valued labor so it address desirability differences in jobs. Honestly, I was surprised to see that we ever said it was critical to balance not only for empowerment effects, but also for desirability/onerousness. I haven’t checked the quotes to see whether the remunerative aspect is noted each time. On the other hand, it is certainly true, I believe, that in balancing for empowerment one will likely go a considerable ways toward balancing desirability/onerousness, though not all the way. But I agree with Mark that participatory economy doesn’t require balancing onerousness/desirability and I say so, regularly.

The key point of Mark’s article, though, I think, is about balancing jobs for empowerment. Interestingly, Mark’s changing the name of the class from “coordinator” to “managerial” corresponds in considerable part to our reason for changing the name in the opposite direction. That is we preferred to use a new name, not “professional managerial class” (or as early anarchists called it, “intellectual class”), partly because we think this class is not confined to managers, or even managers and professionals. It is, rather, those who have positions in the economy that afford them access to decision-making levers, confidence, information, skills, etc., needed for decision making. But the bigger reason for preferring the label coordinator class was actually the one Mark evidences in reverse. We felt calling it managerial would over time distract attention from the economy, perhaps even completely, to mainly and perhaps exclusively schooling, culture, ideology, and the like. We felt it would lead to a whole lot of attention to ideas, attitudes, values, training, schooling, etc. and too little attention, maybe none, to economic institutions that would need to change to attain classlessness. That is what I see ocurring in Mark’s essay.

If the economy has a corporate division of labor, not only will roughly 20 percent do empowering tasks and 80 percent do rote tasks, with 20 percent deciding and 80 percent obeying because that is what their jobs call for and allow, but there will also be an accommodation between the rest of social relations and that hierarchy. Mark seems to me to be saying, change schooling, change attitudes, and that will automatically remove or render unimportant the class division. To me it sounds sort of like saying change schooling, culture, views, etc. and we don’t have to worry about some people owning workplaces and other people not.

It is certainly true that part of getting rid of the coordinator/working class division is changing attitudes, schooling, and much else — but in the economy itself what needs to be changed is, for one, the division of labor. Suppose that without addressing the work place organization, movements could change the overall culture, training, schooling, expectations, etc., so the whole workforce, not just 20 percent of it, expects to be and has prior training to self manage outcomes. Even if you could, you would then have to replace the corporate division of labor precisely because, in that hypothetical situation, people would not want to dominate or be dominated. What do you change too? Balanced job complexes. So whether one says you change the economic institutions and the rest changes, or one says the rest changes and then folks all participate fully in workplace decision making so the jobs change, or, as I think is the case, the two happen hand in hand, nonetheless to achieve classlessness we need to get rid of economic structures that impose rule by a few of many.

A classless economy can’t have private ownership of productive assets, an economic institution, because that institution insures by the circumstances it imposes a class division. Similarly, a classless economy can’t have a corporate division of labor, an economic institution, because that institution insures by the circumstances it imposes a class division between those empowered, who make decisions, and those disempowered who don’t make decisions.
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Woke Imperialism
Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state.

February 6, 2023
Source: Scheerpost

Identity Politics – by Mr. Fish

The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.

Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.

We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018. “These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties. African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.

Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control.

Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them.

A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feign that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ.

My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.

August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Meme, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks:

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.

Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.


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Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism’s Court Jester?

By Gabriel Rockhill, Gregory Wilpert
February 9, 2023


The philosopher Slavoj Zizek is perhaps the world’s best-known leftist philosopher, often making “top intellectuals” lists, appearing in countless talk shows, and publishing one or more new books every year for the past thirty years. He claims to be a communist and a Marxist. But if he is as radical as he appears to be, why does he enjoy such widespread notoriety in the media? Villanova Philosophy Professor Gabriel Rockhill argues that it is because he is actually an unserious and unthreatening “court jester,” who ends up propping up the very system that he claims to be against.

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To Change the World, Our Unions Must Change
By David Story
February 12, 2023
Source: Labor Notes

To strengthen our unions, we need to cut away the underbrush of personal loyalties and make our unions less secretive and hierarchical. (Photo: Jim West)

Unionism has seen a resurgence in popularity the past few years. The problem is, it’s very difficult to get our members organizing in their communities when they hate the way our leadership (I use that word loosely) is operating.

Our unions shouldn’t be, and I’d argue weren’t meant to be, transactional—yet by and large that is what they have grown to be. By transactional I mean: I pay dues, you provide a service, and my duty ends with my dues.

Instead, our unions should be conduits for radically changing society and the economy as we know it. Even as conservative as my own union, the Machinists, is, the preamble to our union constitution begins, “Believing that the right of those who toil to enjoy to the full extent the wealth created by their labor is a natural right…” and goes on to say that worker organizations should use “the natural resources, means of production and distribution for the benefit of all the people.”

It’s apparent that our founding members believed we deserved every single penny we worked to generate, and that all the natural resources and means of production and distribution should be used by us to benefit our communities.

Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed union staff to be elected or appointed who believe that we should concede management rights clauses and no-strike clauses, that the rank and file shouldn’t be involved in negotiating our own contracts, that in some cases they can override our vote against a contract and accept it on our behalf, and that we should bend a knee and be thankful we have a job.

These staff positions are paid by our dues; they should be answerable to us alone. Our unions have grown to function much the same way as corporate America, with a hierarchical structure where despots sit in leather chairs behind mahogany desks and dare anyone to question their authority.

In my own union, the members directly elect our entire executive board. These elections provide a minute amount of accountability to the membership—but not nearly enough. As in U.S. politics, elections rarely hold people accountable for their actions (or inactions). Plus, most union staff are unelected, and accountable only to those who appointed or hired them.

I love many of the union staff I’ve worked with—but I believe the labor movement has systemic problems that are holding us back. I’ll address three problems here.

IMPLIED HIERARCHY

The first problem is an implied hierarchy.

A few years ago, our stewards’ committee was dealing with a layoff and wasn’t getting the information we needed. As a committee, we voted to file charges with the National Labor Relations Board. We brought it to the members and they unanimously agreed.

Traditionally, our district business rep had been the one who had handled filing charges. But our local was getting blown off by Human Resources and we decided it was time to bring some power back to the shop floor. I was designated to file the charge.

Within a week, our business rep was on the phone to me, demanding I withdraw the charge. I refused, and he mentioned an Official Circular—a letter from our union’s international president—stating that local lodges shouldn’t file NLRB charges.

I understood the reasoning, because in some cases an unfavorable NLRB could rule against us and set precedent. But this was a simple charge over failure to provide information. Business reps should be a last resort in making demands, not the first.

Our job as unionists is to build power on the shop floor and wield that collectively. By shifting the union’s power to the business rep, we encourage H.R. to see our membership and committees as weak.

The organizational structure of locals, districts, and regions shouldn’t imply hierarchy. The union should be a participatory democracy where locals help each other out with cooperative collective action.


PERSONAL LOYALTY

The second problem is personal loyalty. When staff members are appointed, they’re inevitably loyalty to the appointer. Most people want to progress in their fields, and unionists are the same.

In the Machinists, many positions higher than district level are appointed by the international president. After our local’s NLRB charge, the general vice president was quick to point out at a State Council meeting that the charge was a violation.

A violation of what? There is nothing in our union constitution or bylaws that reserves the right to file charges to any specific body. On the contrary, the constitution states that anything not covered in it is at the discretion of the membership, so the circular that we previously mentioned wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

I assume that this statement was at the behest of the president, who appoints all the general vice presidents—making them ultimately loyal to him.

Elections are our only path to ensure that the members are allowed to make the decisions that matter. We need people who believe in transparency, a true democratic process (not a representative, transactional one), and members with true integrity who can’t be swayed by the promises of an appointment if they go along to get along.

SECRECY

A third problem I’ve run into is secrecy.

Serving on several negotiating committees for my local, I’ve seen firsthand how agreeing to ground rules to keep bargaining details confidential can strangle the elected committee’s ability to communicate with the membership.

Never agree to ground rules that require loyalty to the committee over loyalty to the membership. Our own representatives have attempted to ban our committee from direct communications with our membership several times over the years, and we’ve always ignored them—at least until our last negotiations that I resigned from.

Every union member should demand transparent communications from your committee… if you even have a committee of elected local membership.

There are always excuses, but ultimately it’s the members who pay for, benefit from, and have the most to lose at negotiations. They deserve nothing less than complete transparency.

We will never build power by allowing our collective demands to be transferred to a single person or a small group. Building a directly democratic union takes more work—but it pays dividends to the membership.

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Economists’ Obsession With “Efficiency” Is Just an Endorsement of Greed

The global economy is “efficient” alright: it efficiently funnels wealth to the top while leaving most of humanity behind.
February 12, 2023
Source: Jacobin


When discussing markets, “efficiency” is a trick word. In everyday use or in disciplines like engineering, efficiency has a positive meaning, typically implying wise allocation of resources. But in economics the word is what translators call a “false friend,” a term you think you recognize but which others aren’t using in a way that matches your definition. Markets are frequently said to be “efficient” when they are in fact wasteful, chaotic, unethical, and harmful to the people they’re supposed to serve — as long as they swiftly deliver profit to the top.

Thankfully, the mix-up is becoming more visible to some influential economy watchers. In her book Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World, journalist Rana Foroohar hopes that “Panglossian ideas about the efficiency of unregulated markets will begin to fade.” She observes that industrial agriculture has an almost universal reputation for being efficient, when in fact its so-called efficiency “has come at great cost to everything, from our health to our food security to working conditions . . . not to mention the treatment of animals, and of course the disastrous consequences of it all for our environment.” What passes for efficiency often comes at the expense of resilience, Foroohar writes, and as a result severe system-wide fragilities have been introduced into the global economy, which guarantee supply-chain issues whenever there’s a disruption like war or a pandemic.

Foroohar is not alone in her observations. Sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman’s book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy recounts the rise of an “economic style of reasoning” in the policy-making of both Democrats and Republicans — let’s call it econ-mode. In this process, efficiency was enthroned as “the cardinal virtue” of policy, becoming a substitute for the idea of public interest. Cost-benefit analysis became mandatory; where once pollution could be considered just plain wrong, econ-mode could justify it if the benefits could be made to look greater than the costs. Ethical reasoning came to be considered “economically illiterate.” Berman writes that econ-mode “does not allow for commitments to absolute principles.” And since “claims about rights, justice, or liberty [shouldn’t be] weighing their costs,” we must be alert to the risks of efficiency-only arguments.

In his paper “Is Efficiency Biased?”, legal scholar Zachary Liscow concludes that “efficient policy-making places a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of the rich.” Since the 1980s, the ruling “law and economics” school has used econ-mode arguments to tacitly impose a “rich get richer” principle — the fruits of a long libertarian billionaire–funded effort to convert lawyers and judges to extra-shallow, short-course econ-mode doctrines. What Liscow usefully calls the “hidden meaning of efficiency” lurks in the mechanics of maximizing benefits. In econ-mode, benefits are best assessed by “willingness to pay,” and since the wealthy are more able to pay, their preferences are systematically prioritized. For example, Liscow writes that if “the monetary benefits of saving an hour of time for a rich person tend to be higher than . . . for a poor person, spending on transportation will be rich-biased.” Bus upgrades will lose to airport improvements.

Cases of abysmally bad cost-benefit kabuki abound. In their paper “Pricing the Priceless,” legal scholars Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling tell of one cost-benefit analysis they encountered that concluded that kids’ lives are valued too highly. The well-credentialed analyst studied child safety seat usage to assess the “true” cash value mothers put on kids’ lives. The time to fasten seats correctly versus that actually spent was converted to cash using hourly wage rates, yielding $500,000 per kid (less for poorer parents). In a blog post titled “Cost-Benefit Jumps the Shark,” Heinzerling cites an effort to curb sex crimes in prisons in which econ-addled analysts weighed how much prisoners were “willing to pay to avoid or to accept to endure” sexual assault.

These cases show how quickly cost-benefit analysis can become a “bogus quantification” bonanza. Can we go on allowing efficiency aficionados to paint “morally objectionable” moves as economically rational? Training in econ-mode seems to risk turning humans into “logic aliens,” to borrow a fabulously useful phrase from the philosophy of logic. What cost-benefit analysis concludes is smart is often alien and offensive to ordinary norms of decency. Econ-mode enthusiasts preach that cost-benefit and efficiency “maximize consumer welfare” by lowering prices. But low prices often depend on systemically oppressive practices which undervalue the needs, interests, and rights of the poor. Efficiency is too easily achieved by exploitation.

The problem persists at the planetary scale. Consider the twisted econ-mode logic of a leaked World Bank memo signed by former treasury secretary Larry Summers: since “costs of health impairing pollution depend on the foregone earnings . . . a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the . . . country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.” Unless we forcefully reject this sort of “impeccable” econ-mode efficiency logic, it will continue to surreptitiously but systematically enforce pro–rich world biases in global affairs. Through econ-mode goggles it looks 2,700 times more impeccable to impose pollution on people in the planet’s poorest decile than to inconvenience the average top global 1-percenter (that’s how sinfully bad global rich-to-poor income ratios are now). And econ-mode experts likewise ignore that poorer nations are less equipped to cope with those efficiently distributed harms.

Innocent souls who’ve bought into the capitalism’s-got-this narrative of great progress on global poverty may be surprised to learn that 85 percent of humanity lives on less than thirty dollars a day, which is the rock-bottom poverty line in the rich world. Half of humanity makes less than one-fifth of our poverty level. The idea, cherished by elites, that economic growth is synonymous with alleviating poverty falls apart under the lightest scrutiny. In truth, the planet’s poorest decile gets 0.07 percent of global income gains, while the richest decile captures 24 percent. The global economy is efficient alright: it efficiently funnels wealth to the top while leaving most of humanity behind.

As philosopher of economics Lisa Herzog writes in her essay “The Epistemic Seductions of Markets,” markets and their zealous evangelists impose a rigorous one-dollar-one-vote regime. In that way they ruthlessly and, yes, efficiently allocate resources to whomever pays most, while the poor suffer.

Take for instance our global food system. We produce more than enough calories to feed all humans, but 77 percent of global farmland “efficiently” fattens meat for the wealthy, while rich-world pets are less food insecure than 2.37 billion people, or one in three humans. Meanwhile 150 million kids are permanently stunted by malnutrition, and grain for biofuels “eats up enough food to feed 1.9 billion people annually.” And under the guise of enhancing market efficiency, some the world’s richest people and institutions, like hedge-funders and elite university endowments, invest (which is to say gamble) in food commodity markets. Stripped of elaborate econ-mode euphemisms, this means that greed-driven ghouls are profiting by taking calories out of the mouths of the planet’s poorest and most vulnerable children.

Meanwhile, speculation-driven price increases triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war forced the World Food Program to cut rations, risking a collateral mass murder by markets. As I argue elsewhere, there’s a risk that “for-profit” famines could kill more people than combat will in the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s sheer econ-mode lunacy to suggest that markets allocate our food abundance rationally or efficiently, never mind ethically. Under-regulated markets are a highly mechanized way to put greed above need.

Letting “the market decide” routinely leads to ludicrous and often lethal priorities. The United States spends twice as much on cosmetics per year than has been allocated to the clean energy transition — $80 billion versus $37 billion. To see more clearly what’s happening here, that $37 billion per year in per-capita terms comes out to $9.34 per month, which is less than the cost of a monthly Netflix subscription to combat the climate crisis. Far better big-picture collective thinking is urgently needed to protect the planet, and the interests of the bulk of humanity, but markets just aren’t built to do that sort of work. Aggregating individual purchases in greed-driven markets doesn’t result in collective material prudence. Governments must step up and prioritize resource usage in the public interest. But they can’t do that well if they rely on the same efficiency-centered logic and rhetoric of econ-mode zealots.

Our economy is a gigantic Rube Goldberg expression of our collective ethics. But under the halo of efficiency, the distributional logic of markets often produces a deadly parody of decency. We can’t afford to let efficiency be an excuse for evident economic evils. We must learn to recognize when market efficiency acts as a materially and morally regressive force, and to break the mental monopoly that econ-mode has on our leadership class. We need what Berman calls an “alternative intellectual infrastructure” and a plurality of big-picture thinking methods — modes of reasoning that make room for ethics, morality, and sacredness. In other words we must reverse the “efficiency” revolution before it does any more harm.

















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Rescue Our Democratic Society: Constitutionally Render Corporations Unequal to Humans

February 14, 2023
Source: Counterpunch


No other institutions consistently Rule over as Much in the World as the Giant Global Corporations – not governments, not armies, not religions and certainly not trade unions. These fictional corporate entities have largely achieved transcendent imperial status, as they amass coordinated control over capital, labor, technology and governments because they have secured the rights bestowed upon human beings. In a confrontation or a conflict or even a contract, it is no contest: mere people don’t have a chance.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned in 1933, we have created a “Frankenstein monster” in our midst, whose unifying lust for power and control on behalf of their profits know few limits.

In last week’s column, I described a dozen sectors in which the privileged legal advantages of corporate supremacy over real people make the former more powerful every day. And every day people start with a massive disadvantage whether in the marketplace, the workplace, the environment, the taxation realm, the electoral and governmental arena, and access to justice. Yes, in cultural appropriations as well.

For about 150 years the courts have arbitrarily accorded corporate personhood the same rights as real humans even though the words “corporation” or “company” never appear in our Constitution. This blatant fictional identity has upset some pretty serious jurists. In his dissent against the justices who, breaking precedent, decided in 2010 that corporations could give unlimited money to oppose or support candidates for public office, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote: “Corporations have no conscience, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires … they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom the Constitution was established.” He called the deciding Justices’ claim that “money is speech” for purposes of the First Amendment, “…a conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons…” in the political sphere.

Ronald Dworkin, a well-regarded legal philosopher, declared: “The argument – that corporations must be treated like real people under the First Amendment – is in my view preposterous. Corporations are legal fictions. They have no opinions of their own to contribute and no rights to participate with equal voice or vote in politics.”

Long ago Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine warned about early commercial giants in their day. In 1910 former President Theodore Roosevelt told a gathering of Union Army Veterans: “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.” (Through state charters that bring corporations into existence.)

None of these and other similar commentators wished to deny full constitutional rights to people working in these legal fantasies called corporations. They just didn’t want corporations to be able to utilize corporate personhood per se as a juggernaut for their pursuits.

What is happening with each passing year, with fearsome perils, is that large corporations are attaching their special privileges and immunities to technologies. These privileges and immunities include artificial intelligence (robots), biotechnology (changing the nature of nature) and nanotechnology (used in autonomous weapons, etc.) and, of course, nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction. Corporate lawyers will soon be advocating those corporate-owned, complex, self-activating robots have the same legal fictional rights as their owner, lessor or breeder.

As law professor George J. Annas observed: The artificial person fantasy continues to grow, as does the destructiveness of major corporations. He heralded “climate change” as one devastating example.

After much documentation of large corporate predations savagely out of control by mere nation-states, outwitting most civic and political challenges to their sprawling hegemony, it is time to move from skirmishes to fundamental constitutional subordinations of the corporate entity to the supremacy of natural persons. This will require two streams of parallel, deliberative action. First, citizen groups who know better must elevate their experience by taking on big business and moving from symptoms to root causes that enable these “Frankenstein monsters” uber alles. Civic groups need to educate people about the fact that corporate birth certificates, which allow companies to exist, are created by governments and can be conditioned or abolished by that same authority.

People understand the cruelty of uneven playing fields at the starting gates. Continual public education is essential for transformative displacement of the corporate entities to a secondary status to prevent or contain commercially-driven abuses of power.

The second stream must come from the recognition that the necessary constitutional amendment placing the corporate entity in a distinctly unequal status vis-à-vis human beings will require rigorous research and thought. Establishing inferior legal status for corporations within our political economy is essential. New corporate structures for non-commercial activities will need to be explored, and other forms of collective organizations will need to be developed or recalled from history. Many academic disciplines and their practitioners in real life need to be enlisted.

Make no mistake, the leading reversal of the contrivances of corporate attorneys, must come from lawyers and scholars in the public interest who know how corporate attorneys have constructed the corporate state. It is time to rein in unaccountable, cost shifting, autocratic, hierarchical “Frankenstein monsters” that create their own out of control engines.

Drafting the enforceable statutes to implement the basic constitutional amendment is a task of unravelling and creating never before attempted. Ever more widely perceived runaway corporate controls of our daily lives, (already decried by over 70% of people in polls) with their associated manifestations of corporate coercion, corporate violence and corporate takeover of public institutions, will generate this last clear chance. Act before the concentrated automation of these global forces, bereft of actionable legal and ethical frameworks, turn omnicidal.

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Ralph Nader

Nader is opposed to big insurance companies, "corporate welfare," and the "dangerous convergence of corporate and government power." While consumer advocate/environmentalist Ralph Nader has virtually no chance of winning the White House, he has been taken quite seriously on the campaign trail.

Indeed, he poses the greatest threat to Sen. John Kerry. Democrats fear that Nader will be a spoiler, as he was in the 2000 election, when he took more than 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes. The win gave Bush the election. Nader, an independent candidate, who also ran in 1992 and 1996, is on the ballot in 33 states, including Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Mexico—tough battleground states. Kerry stands a chance of losing those vital states if Nader siphons away the votes of Democrats. President Bush and Kerry have been in a statistical dead heat in nationwide polls, and votes for Nader could well tip the balance in favor of Bush.

Many Kerry supporters contend that a vote for Nader is in reality a vote for Bush and have made concerted efforts to persuade Nader to throw his support behind the Democratic candidate. Nader, however, has held fast to his convictions that the two candidates are nearly indistinguishable and are pawns of big business.

Designing Cars for Everything but Safety

Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut, on Feb. 27, 1934 to Lebanese immigrants Nathra and Rose Nader. Nathra ran a bakery and restaurant. As a child, Ralph played with David Halberstam, who\'s now a highly regarded journalist.

Nader with Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter outside of Jimmy Carter\'s home on August 7, 1976, discussing Consumer Protection. (Source/AP)
Nader graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1955 and from Harvard Law School in 1958. As a student at Harvard, Nader first researched the design of automobiles. In an article titled "The Safe Car You Can\'t Buy," which appeared in the Nation in 1959, he concluded, "It is clear Detroit today is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance, and calculated obsolescence, but not—despite the 5,000,000 reported accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000 permanent disabilities, and 1,500,000 injuries yearly—for safety."

Early Years as a Consumer Advocate

After a stint working as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, Nader headed for Washington, where he began his career as a consumer advocate. He worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Department of Labor and volunteered as an adviser to a Senate subcommittee that was studying automobile safety.

In 1965, he published Unsafe at Any Speed, a best-selling indictment of the auto industry and its poor safety standards. He specifically targeted General Motors\' Corvair. Largely because of his influence, Congress passed the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Nader was also influential in the passage of 1967\'s Wholesome Meat Act, which called for federal inspections of beef and poultry and imposed standards on slaughterhouses, as well as the Clean Air Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

"Nader\'s Raiders" and Modern Consumer Movement

Nader\'s crusade caught on, and swarms of activists, called "Nader\'s Raiders," joined his modern consumer movement. They pressed for protections for workers, taxpayers, and the environment and fought to stem the power of large corporations.

In 1969 Nader established the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, which exposed corporate irresponsibility and the federal government\'s failure to enforce regulation of business. He founded Public Citizen and U.S. Public Interest Research Group in 1971, an umbrella for many other such groups.

A prolific writer, Nader\'s books include Corporate Power in America (1973), Who\'s Poisoning America (1981), and Winning the Insurance Game (1990).
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The Market Will Never Solve the Climate Crisis
February 14, 2023
Source: Jacobin


When oil prices plummeted during the pandemic, fossil fuel companies made vague efforts to invest in clean energy. Now pulling in bumper profits, Big Oil is discarding those initiatives to maintain their business model: capital over climate.

In the midst of the pandemic, climate-conscious financiers became excited by a relatively obscure piece of market news. NextEra Energy — the largest renewable energy company in the United States — surpassed ExxonMobil in market capitalization.

In other words, NextEra briefly became the most valuable energy company in the United States. This reversal was all the more shocking given that ExxonMobil was generating vastly more revenue than NextEra, raking in $265 billion in 2019 next to NextEra’s $19.2.

Exxon eventually overtook NextEra once again, but the shift was seen as a harbinger of future market movements by many investors.

While it may be difficult to imagine today, oil prices briefly fell to near zero in the midst of the pandemic. The collapse in prices was down to a combination of a dramatic slowdown in demand for fossil fuels and a quirk in commodities markets that encouraged investors to offload their oil futures all at once.

The big fossil fuel companies took a big hit from collapsing energy prices. The shock was particularly deep for Exxon, which is notorious for its refusal to countenance a shift away from fossil fuels.

The company’s former CEO, Rex Tillerson, who went on to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, was adamant that climate change was simply a new trend to which the world would have to adapt. In 2016, he stated outright that “[t]he world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”

Exxon is also currently on trial for concealing information about the impact of burning fossil fuels on the climate. As far back as the 1970s, scientists working for ExxonMobil found strong evidence of the greenhouse effect. The company’s response was to slash funding for its science department and divert the cash into promoting climate denialism.

Exxon’s utter failure to signal its willingness to shift away from fossil fuels is a big part of why investors punished the company so heavily during the pandemic. In the first few months of 2020, ExxonMobil lost nearly half its market value.

When the company was overtaken by NextEra, market watchers took it as a clear signal that investors had had enough of fossil fuels.

There was a significant amount of triumphalism at this moment among the world’s capitalist class. The market had finally provided a solution to climate breakdown.

Whether due to demand for green investment products among retail investors, regulatory innovations like ESG scoring and carbon pricing, or simply the realization that green energy was the future, investing in fossil fuels no longer seemed like a sensible strategy for your average investor.

This transition, many argued, would put a great deal of pressure on companies like Exxon to shift investment away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. And sure enough, the fossil fuel companies were quick to respond.

Total rebranded itself as “TotalEnergies” in a bid to become a “world-class player in the energy transition.” Shell announced it would increase the amount it was investing in renewable energy. BP bought a significant stake in a renewable energy company. Even Exxon finally caved to market pressure and said it would invest billions in “lower greenhouse gas emissions initiatives.”

The upshot of the “success” of these market-based solutions to climate breakdown was, of course, that the world no longer needed to toy with “socialistic” solutions to climate breakdown like the Green New Deal.

But under the surface, the situation was a lot murkier.

Most of the pledges made by the big oil companies were vague and slow to be implemented. In some cases, the announcements amounted to nothing more than greenwashing. The oil companies were betting that the age of oil was far from over.

A number of savvier investors agreed. Several hedge funds quietly started to make big bets that the price of oil would recover quickly as the world transitioned back to fossil fuels once the pandemic was over.

And they were right. After the worst of the pandemic was over, it wasn’t long before the price of oil recovered to pre-pandemic highs. Then it started to skyrocket. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of natural gas also soared, which proved a significant boon for the US fracking industry.

The fossil fuel companies, and the investors quietly channeling money into them, had made the right bet. Without a coordinated shift away from fossil fuels, led by the public sector, the world was going to continue to rely on dirty energy.

The market, in other words, was never going to provide a solution to climate breakdown.

ExxonMobil recently announced that it made record profits of $56 billion in 2022. This isn’t only a chart-topping profit for Exxon, it represents an “historic high for the Western oil industry.”

Five percent of these profits will be directed into Exxon’s climate pledges, many of which center on expensive and relatively untested work-arounds like carbon capture and storage. Meanwhile, it continues to ramp up its investments in oil and gas.

BP, which also made record profits of £22 billion last year, has been even more brazen. Alongside a massive share buyback to enrich its investors, BP announced that it would be slowing the shift away from oil and gas. As the think tank Common Wealth points out, the company is spending ten times as much on share buybacks as it is on “low carbon” initiatives.

During the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world missed out on an historic opportunity. With the value of fossil fuel companies tanking, governments could have bought up large chunks of these companies and pressured them to shift toward renewable energies.

And when both demand and inflation were relatively low, they could have announced stimulus packages that promoted decarbonization.

Instead, the oil companies were left to their own devices, Joe Biden’s climate plan was torpedoed by a senator in the pocket of ExxonMobil, and the EU announced a pretty pathetic attempt at their own “Green Deal.”

The result has not only been higher greenhouse gas emissions, it has also been a massive transfer of wealth from households to some of the largest energy companies in the world.

“The market” was never going to solve climate breakdown — and it was either naïve or, more likely, deeply cynical to pretend otherwise.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

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Mexico’s AMLO Announces Campaign Against US Blockade of Cuba, Denounces Neoliberalism

By Ben Norton
February 14, 2023
Z Article


Mexico’s progressive President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that his country will lead an international movement to end the US government’s illegal blockade against Cuba.

The Mexican president, known popularly by his initials AMLO, condemned the six-decade US blockade of Cuba as “inhumane”. He said the global campaign to overturn it must be more “active”, complaining that, while the vast majority of countries on Earth vote against the US embargo every year at the United Nations General Assembly, nothing ever changes.

AMLO also praised the Cuban Revolution for creating “one of the best health systems in the world”. He thanked Cuba for sending doctors to provide medical attention to people in underserved rural areas in Mexico and other countries around the world.

Criticizing the “neoliberal oligarchy” who ruled before him and “the corrupt neoliberal privatizers” who sold off many of the Mexican state’s assets, López Obrador explained that his government’s goal “is to establish a system of public healthcare, to guarantee the people’s right to healthcare”.

“The right to healthcare is a fundamental human rights, and it cannot be treated like a market”, AMLO declared.

The Mexican leader made these comments in a February 11 press conference in the southern port city of Campeche, alongside Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who addressed the two countries’ collaboration in public health.

The event featured dozens of Cuban doctors who were sent to Mexico as part of a solidarity mission.

López Obrador has consistently spoken out against the US sanctions and embargo against Cuba, which violate international law.

In June 2022, the Mexican president denounced the US blockade as a “type of genocide” and “tremendous violation of human rights”.

At the February 2023 event, AMLO honored Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro as “a visionary, a giant to whom we pay tribute”, adding, “Conservatives in Mexico and around the world can say whatever they want, but they will never, ever be able to counteract the teaching, the example of solidarity, of brotherhood that the revolutionary movement and its leaders have left Cuba”.

In the fiery speech, AMLO stated:

Such vision Commander Fidel Castro had! While the neoliberals [in Mexico] were preventing the training of doctors, in Cuba they were driving the training of doctors, and consolidating one of the best health systems in the world.

That is not done by a mere man of the state; that is done by a man of the nation, a visionary, a giant to whom we pay tribute for this great work that you all have continued (referring to the Cuban doctors in the audience).

Conservatives in Mexico and around the world can say whatever they want, but they will never, ever be able to counteract the teaching, the example of solidarity, of brotherhood that the revolutionary movement and its leaders have left Cuba.

For this, our respect, our gratitude, our support.

We are going to continue demanding that the blockade against Cuba be lifted, that it be eliminated. It is inhumane.

And not only when it comes to voting in the UN, where it is always only one or two countries who vote in support of it, while the vast majority of the countries in the world abstain or vote for the blockade to be eliminated. But when the [General] Assembly is over, it is back to the same old.

I offer to President Miguel Díaz-Canel that Mexico is going to lead a more active movement, so that all countries unite and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba, and never, ever treat it as a ‘terrorist’ country, or put its profoundly humane people and government on a blacklist of supposed ‘terrorists’.

Long live the dignified people of Cuba!

In his remarks at the public health press conference, Cuban President Díaz-Canel stressed the “deep and historic ties” that his country has enjoyed with its “brothers” in Mexico.

He recalled that Castro and other Cuban leaders planned the revolution while living in exile in Mexico.

Díaz-Canel highlighted the medical support that Cuba and its doctors have provided to Mexico over the decades.

The Cuban leader also thanked Mexico, noting it “has supported us historically in the battle for the lifting of the blockade, which has done so much damage to our economy, and especially to the health sector”.

While Díaz-Canel was visiting, López Obrador gave the Cuban leader the prestigious Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest state honors for a foreign national.

López Obrador is one of the world’s most popular leaders, and has a consistent approval rating of between 60 and 70% since he came to power in late 2018.
Mexico’s President AMLO condemns neoliberalism, pledges support for public healthcare and education

AMLO also used his speech to denounce the “neoliberal period, which lasted 36 years in our country”.

The last Mexican head of state who pursued policies of economic nationalism was José López Portillo. In 1982, Miguel de la Madrid took power, and he began implementing neoliberal reforms – largely in response to a disastrous debt crisis and hyperinflation that were fueled by a skyrocketing increase in interest rates under US Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker.

AMLO referred to this neoliberal period as the era of “Neo-Porfirismo”, referencing former military dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911.

Díaz’s rule ended with the Mexican Revolution. AMLO invoked the historical legacy of this revolution to explain the “Fourth Transformation” that he is leading today.

In the neoliberal period, “Policies were applied to benefit the minority, the oligarchy. They talked about democracy, but in reality it was an oligarchy”, AMLO said.

“No one wanted to go and work in rural hospitals, where specialists were needed”, he added. “Because of that, we are very grateful for the doctors from the brotherly people of Cuba… for helping us, so that doctors and specialists could cover all of the country”.

“It is something truly terrible, even unbelievable”, AMLO continued. “In the 36 years of neoliberal politics, they sold off the public companies, the nation’s banks, the railroads, the mines, the ports, the airports. They also carried out privatization of the electricity and oil industries”.

“And they didn’t stop, not even in relation to education and healthcare. The so-called structural reforms aimed to put education and healthcare on the market, as if they were goods for sale, with the goal so that those who wanted to study or get medical attention had to pay”.

“Fortunately, the people said ‘Enough!’, and, in a democratic way, decided to change these politics and carry out a transformation”, AMLO said. “Also to confront the tremendous decay that we suffered. The corruption brought about a process of gradual degradation in all of the fields of public life”.

“And to confront decay, there is no alternative option other than a deep transformation, to pull out the roots of the regime of injustices, of corruption, of privileges. And that is what is being done in Mexico”, López Obrador declared.

“We are pushing forward on education, pushing forward with healthcare, so that they aren’t like what the corrupt neoliberal privatizers wanted, as privileges, but rather as rights for our people”.

“The state cannot fail in its social responsibility. The state is obligated to guarantee public education, free and of good quality, at all levels”.

Today, AMLO said, his government’s “goal is to establish a system of public health, to guarantee the people’s right to healthcare”.

He said his priority is also expanded access to inexpensive medicines. “Because, in the times of neoliberal, the sale of medicines was a big business”, López Obrador recalled. He noted large pharmaceutical companies made huge profits through corruption, selling overpriced medicines to the government at unfair prices.

“Because the right to healthcare is a fundamental human right, and it cannot be treated like a market”, he added.

AMLO revealed that his government has opened nearly 100 medical schools to train doctors and nurses, and he plans on creating 55 more across the country before his term ends. His administration also doubled the number of scholarships available.

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Rents Push Up U.S. Consumer Prices; Inflation Gradually Cooling

By Lucia Mutikani
02/14/23 
A shopping cart is seen in a supermarket in Manhattan, New York City

U.S. consumer prices accelerated in January as Americans continued to be burdened by higher costs for rental housing and food, suggesting that the Federal Reserve was far from pausing its interest rate hiking campaign.

The report from the Labor Department on Tuesday also showed the pace of disinflation in the annual consumer price measures slowing last month. Still, the continued gradual slowdown in inflation likely keeps the Fed on a moderate interest rate hiking path. Sticky inflation and a stubbornly tight labor market have led some economists to expect that the U.S. central bank could continue hiking rates through summer.

"Inflation is easing but the path to lower inflation will not likely be smooth," said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial in Charlotte, North Carolina. "The Fed will not make decisions based on just one report but clearly the risks are rising that inflation will not cool fast enough for the Fed's liking."

The consumer price index increased 0.5% last month after gaining 0.1% in December. A 0.7% rise in the cost of shelter, which mostly reflected rents, accounted for nearly half of the monthly increase in the CPI.

Inflation was also boosted by rising gasoline prices, which rebounded 2.4% after declining for two straight months. Americans also paid more for natural gas and electricity.

There were also increases in prices of food, which rose 0.5% after advancing 0.4% in December. The cost of food consumed at home climbed 0.4%, lifted by rising prices for meat, fish and eggs. Prices for cereals and bakery goods rose as did nonalcoholic beverages, but fruits and vegetables cost less.

January's increase in the CPI was in line with economists' expectations. Economists said some of the rise in the monthly CPI reflected price increases at the start of the year, mostly evident in the 2.1% surge in prescription drugs and 1.2% jump in motor vehicle fees.

"In today's higher-inflation environment, firms are likely to implement larger price increases when they reset their prices than they normally would when inflation was low and stable, leading the seasonal factors to underestimate inflation at the start of the year when price resetting is more common," economists at Goldman Sachs wrote in a note.

The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also updated the seasonal adjustment factors, the model that it uses to strip out seasonal fluctuations from the data.

Spending weights used to calculate the CPI were also updated effective with January's report. The new weights, reflecting consumer spending in 2021, were seen as inflationary for January's report. Housing now has a bigger share in the CPI, while weights for transportation and food were lowered.

In the 12 months through January, the CPI increased 6.4%. That was the smallest gain since October 2021 and followed a 6.5% rise in December. The revisions to 2022 CPI account for the modest slowdown in the year-on-year CPI.

The annual CPI peaked at 9.1% in June, which was the biggest increase since November 1981.

President Joe Biden said in a statement that the CPI report "reinforces that we have made historic progress and are on the right track, and now we need to finish the job."

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower. The dollar was steady versus a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices fell.



GOODS DEFLATION PAUSES

The moderation in annual inflation reflects tighter monetary policy, which is weighing on demand, as well as improved supply chains. But it will be a while before inflation moves back to the Fed's 2% target.

The Fed has raised its policy rate by 450 basis points since last March from near zero to a 4.50%-4.75% range, with the bulk of the increases between May and December. Two additional rate hikes of 25 basis points are expected in March and May. Financial markets are betting on another increase in June.

"The risks lie on the upside for further rate increases," said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide.

Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI increased 0.4% after rising 0.4% in December. In addition to the 0.7% advance in owners' equivalent rent (OER), a measure of the amount homeowners would pay to rent or would earn from renting their property, the so-called core CPI was also supported by higher prices for apparel. OER increased 0.8% in December.

Independent measures, however, suggest rental inflation is cooling, leading many economists to believe that price pressures could decelerate considerably in the second half. The rent measures in the CPI tend to lag the independent gauges.

Healthcare costs fell 0.4%. Excluding food, shelter and energy, the CPI rose 0.2% after gaining 0.1% in December. Prices for used cars and trucks fell 1.9%, while the cost of apparel increased 0.8%, the largest gain since December 2021. Core goods prices rose 0.1%, increasing for the first time since August.

In the 12 months through January, the core CPI advanced 5.6%, the smallest gain since December 2021, after rising 5.7% in December.

"We continue to look for inflation to trend lower, but we believe getting back to an inflation rate the Fed can live with on a sustained basis will neither be quick nor painless," said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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