Defrocked Priest of Peace? Trudeau Aims Missiles at Moscow

Paul Bentley

 September 26, 2024
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10-year-old Justin touring the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille in France with his father in 1982. Photograph Source: PBA Lille – CC BY-SA 4.0

Pierre Trudeau must be rolling in his grave over his heir’s Ukrainian policy. While other more powerful allies waver, Trudeau “le petite” said he “fully supports” firing long-range missiles deep into Russia. He said nothing about the risk of nuclear war, something about which his father was very concerned.

Already as a youth, Pierre Trudeau staked his claim as a peace activist when he spoke at a rally in 1942 in support of Montreal mayoral candidate Jean Drapeau, “candidate of the conscripted.” Like many Quebecois Trudeau was opposed to conscription, and did not volunteer for military service.

Writing in Cite Libre in 1963, Pierre Elliot Trudeau mocked Canada’s Nobel Peace winning Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for deploying nuclear weapons, calling him the “defrocked priest of peace.”

When he succeeded Pearson as Prime Minister, Trudeau made good on his anti-war activism by denuclearizing the Canadian military, which remains the case today.

In fact, Canada was the first country with significant nuclear capability to reject nuclear weapons. This policy was reinforced in 1970 when Canada signed the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in 1978 when Trudeau proposed his ambitious strategy of “suffocation in the laboratory” of the nuclear arms race to the United Nations.

I myself got involved as a student at Mount Allison University in Trudeau’s “Peace Initiative” of 1983. Perhaps intended as his final piece de resistance, Prime Minister Trudeau toured the world’s capitals in his last months in office, begging leaders to “lower the megaphones” in order to avert nuclear war after the downing of KAL 0007.

At the time I was on the Student Council, and passed a motion of support for the Trudeau “Peace Initiative.” This caught the attention of the Prime Minister’s office and the Globe and Mail! I was interviewed by Steve Paikin, now anchor of TV Ontario’s The Agenda, about our plan for an international peace dialogue at the student council level in the USA and USSR.

With this personal history in mind, you can imagine my alarm when I read that, despite claims of pursuing a “feminist foreign policy,” the current Trudeau government has loudly proclaimed support for the use of long-range weapons against Russia. Here the dangers posed by the influence of Canada’s infamous Ukrainian nationalist Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, reveal themselves in their most potent form.

President Putin of Russia has made it clear that such use of long-range weapons would, “change the very essence of the conflict.” It would no longer be a “special operation” aimed at resolving territorial disputes between Russia and Ukraine, but “would mean that NATO countries are at war with Russia.”

Strangely, the corporate media does not seem to notice the danger of nuclear escalation in such a scenario, as was the case during the Cuban missile crisis. Rather, the focus of media coverage is on the efficacy of such missile attacks as part of Zelensky’s “Victory Plan.”

Even in 1962, it would seem the media’s role was similarly to mollify public fears of nuclear holocaust. Walter Cronkite’s special report of October 24^th 1962 used such phrases as “rocket fire,” “missiles” and “offensive weapons” but studiously avoided use of the word “nuclear” weapons.

Unlike President Kennedy, who was quite explicit that “nuclear” weapons of “mass destruction” were being stationed on the “imprisoned isle” of Cuba in his televised address of October 22^nd, 1962, Prime Minister Trudeau’s only concern is that Ukraine “must win” (as if there are ever any winners in war) whatever the consequences.

And yet, if worst comes to worst, what better target for an initial Russian nuclear attack than Canada, a country that borders the USA like Ukraine borders Russia, but is not part of the USA?  It may be a matter of debate whether the United States would sacrifice Chicago for Bonn, but would they for Saskatoon? Or Iqaluit?

Canadian eagerness to support Ukraine, epitomized by the Ukrainian Nazi in Parliament scandal involving Yaroslav Hunka, is like painting a giant red bulls-eye on our back. Perhaps that is why there has been no media coverage of Canada’s refusal to accede to the Russian request for the extradition of Hunka, “charged in absentia with genocide of civilians on the territory of Ukraine during World War II, when he served in the SS Galicia division.”

As we peer across the arctic tundra toward our northern neighbor, Canadians may take some comfort in the fact that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has recently said that “nobody wants a nuclear war.” But he has also said that Moscow will “defend its interests in the Arctic both in diplomatic and military terms,” so which is which?

Luckily, the one good thing about nuclear weapons is their disciplinary power. It seems that the modern Leviathan can only restrain itself from the worst excesses of violence, as we witnessed during the world wars, because a thermonuclear “sword” hangs over its head by a thin frayed wire.

However, everything has its breaking point. If we take seriously the Russian government’s repeated claim that the “collective west” is bent on its “strategic defeat”, then it may very well start to behave like the cornered rat of Putin’s childhood:

 There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered. There were hordes of rats in the front entryway. My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks. Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me. It jumped across the landing and down the stairs. Luckily, I was a little faster and I managed to slam the door shut in its nose.

There were no rats in the corners of 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa where the entitled son of a Prime Minister grew up, unlike the “horrid” little communal apartment in St. Petersburg from which Vladimir Putin emerged. It may therefore not be surprising that Trudeau “le petite” is chasing the Russian hordes around, though with missiles not sticks, oblivious to the impending dangers.

Paul Bentley holds an MSc. (Econ) in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and an Ed. D. in the History and Philosophy of Education from the University of Toronto. He has worked as a History Teacher and Head of Department in Ontario High Schools for over 25 years. He is the author of Strange Journey: John R. Friedeberg Seeley and the Quest for Mental Health — Academic Studies Press.

 

Is it Nicaragua that is “weaponizing” immigration or is it Washington?

by John Perry / September 20th, 2024

Claims that Nicaragua is “weaponizing” immigration by allowing free passage of migrants towards the U.S. border have been appearing regularly in the media over the last twelve months. The claim was made on NPR in January, in the Associated Press last October, in El Pais last November and by the BBC this July, to cite just a few. In May, the Biden administration accused the Nicaraguan government (the “Ortega-Murillo regime”) of “repressing people and preying on migrants,” imposing new sanctions on those it believed responsible. Is there any basis to these claims?

Behind all such stories is Manuel Orozco of The Inter-American Dialogue, who has been accusing his former country of “weaponizing” immigration since at least early 2023. Orozco’s most recent appearance is in an article by Robert Looney for World Politics Review (WPR),which quotes him extensively. Orozco’s main argument is summarized in this sentence by Looney: “Unlike other Central American countries that have implemented more stringent visa regulations to control migration to the U.S., Managua permits citizens from around 90 countries to enter visa-free, allowing them to bypass the dangerous Darien Gap route through Panama on their way north.”

Let’s take a look at what this really means.

First, it’s true that Nicaragua does allow migrants from different countries to arrive without visas, some of them on charter flights, also allowing them to head north towards the U.S. However, it is not the only country to do so: Brazil does too, and El Salvador gives passage to many foreign nationals, albeit with high visa fees. Furthermore, while Mexico and Guatemala have taken steps to deter migrants, other Central American countries allow them to pass through freely – such as Honduras, Costa Rica and (until recently) Panama. In the latter case, migrants arriving from Colombia through the notoriously dangerous Darién Gap have been obliged to take buses north to Panama’s border with Costa Rica, facilitating their rapid passage through the country.

Second, for many migrants transiting Nicaragua the only realistic alternative to arriving in Managua by air is to start their journey in South America and cross the Darién Gap, where at least 141 migrants died in 2023 alone. Indeed, a recent report by Human Rights Watch decries the neglect by countries in the region of the extreme dangers facing migrants in Darién, and calls for safe alternatives. Enabling people who are determined to reach the U.S. border to avoid facing these dangers by landing in Managua is surely one of them.

Third, WPR claims that the landing fees and visa charges linked to migrant charter flights primarily benefit the “Ortegas and their associates” rather than stimulating broader economic development. This is a completely evidence-free statement, since the fees collected at Nicaraguan border controls enter the government’s general revenue accounts, as they would in most countries. Nicaraguan government spending strongly prioritizes poverty reduction and investment in public services (unlike the US federal budget, two-thirds of which goes on defense spending).

In reality, Nicaragua is picked out by Washington, and sanctioned, because “weaponizing” immigration is a convenient addition to U.S. criticisms of the Sandinista government. When other countries facilitate the passage of migrants by land, the Biden administration turns a blind eye.

What is remarkable is that WPR and similar articles in mainstream media simply accept the premise that it is entirely reasonable for Washington to expect Nicaragua’s help in deterring migrants. This ignores the fact that the Ortega government’s lack of cooperation might be an understandable response to the Biden administration’s unremitting public attacks and, more especially, economic sanctions, which have led to cuts in its development programs of at least $2,500-3,000 million over the past five years.

Washington’s brazen arrogance in expecting Nicaragua’s assistance while doing its best to undermine its government is perhaps not surprising, but might at least be questioned by the media. The administration’s actions might reasonably be noted as an obstacle to cooperation and a possible explanation for Nicaragua’s indifference. Instead, Nicaragua is even accused (by the Christian Science Monitor) of using migration as a “bargaining tool” to get concessions from Washington (which, if it were true, would have been a remarkably unsuccessful tactic on the part of the Ortega government).

There is another, related charge made against Nicaragua by the WPR and in other articles: that its government is actively “encouraging the emigration of Nicaraguans” themselves, because of high unemployment levels in their homeland and because they will send money (“remittances”) to their Nicaraguan families. Supposedly, remittances are “a crucial source of revenue preventing the collapse of the Nicaraguan economy.”

There is little or no evidence to support this argument either. While Nicaragua does not prevent its citizens from migrating, it certainly does not encourage them. Indeed, given that the whole emphasis of government spending is on poverty reduction and the provision of better health, education and housing for its inhabitants, achievements that are promoted enthusiastically at almost every opportunity, it would be decidedly two-faced if the government were also to encourage Nicaraguans to leave the country.

In another absurd claim, WPR credits Washington with trying to alleviate the “push factors” which might tempt Nicaraguans to migrate, giving as an example its sanctioning of two of Nicaragua’s gold-mining companies and its imposition of visa restrictions on 250 individual Nicaraguans. Quite how these aggressive measures are expected to disincentivize migration is not made clear. In fact, the prospect of ever tighter U.S. sanctions is a much more likely “push factor”.

If the question arises as to who, then, is encouraging Nicaraguans to leave, at least part of the answer can be found not in Managua but in various “pull factors” created by Washington itself. The U.S. government long gave Nicaraguans arriving at its southern border preferential (so-called “Title 8”) treatment compared with similar arrivals from the rest of Central America, a fact well known to potential migrants. However, for the past two years it has been promoting its more attractive “humanitarian parole” program, via regular publicity from the U.S. embassy which is faithfully repeated by opposition media (the same media which two-facedly blame the Sandinista government for encouraging migration).

Surprisingly, and contrary to claims regularly made by Manuel Orozco, Nicaraguan migration north is rather low, despite Washington’s tempting offers. For example, in fiscal year 2023 just 38,113 Nicaraguans were granted “parole”, accounting for only four per cent of all parole cases approved that year (and, of course, not all those granted parole will actually migrate). While it’s also true that Nicaraguans featured strongly for a short period (2021-23) in southern border “encounters” by U.S. agencies, those numbers have returned almost to their previous miniscule levels (2,666 in August 2024, less than two per cent of all encounters). And all this is despite Nicaragua having one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the hemisphere.

A parallel argument from Orozco, which Looney calls Central America’s “forgotten” migrant crisis, is that massive numbers of Nicaraguans have also been forced to go south to Costa Rica. It is true that some 308,000 Nicaraguans have sought asylum since 2018, the vast majority in Costa Rica, but it is also true that its government has been remarkably reluctant to grant their claims, partly because it believes they mostly come from Nicaraguans trying to regularize their status in a country to which they have travelled looking for work. Costa Rica has a fluid population of more than half a million Nicaraguans, on which its economy depends, and its own statistics show that they travel freely back and forth to their home country (over 300,000 did so in the last 12 months, slightly more than travelled in the opposite direction).

Of course, all this could change if Nicaragua were to be at the receiving end of much tougher sanctions, as has happened with countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. When there was a short-lived attempt to encourage a consumer embargo of Nicaraguan meat exports to the U.S. (so-called “conflict beef”), producers said it put the livelihoods of 600,000 Nicaraguan workers at risk. This is perhaps why Washington now only slings insults at Daniel Ortega rather than instigating another coup attempt as it did in 2018. It views the Sandinista government as a severe irritant because it refuses to kowtow to U.S. demands, but it might find a surge of uncontrolled Nicaraguan migration to be far more problematic.

A quick Google search will show that Manuel Orozco’s claims appear very widely in mainstream media. Not surprisingly, his employer, The Inter-American Dialogue, is a think tank funded by the US government, Ford Foundation and others aligned with U.S. foreign policy. He claims, on the kind of flimsy evidence discussed here, that nearly a quarter of Nicaraguans live abroad, blaming this (of course) on government repression. Yet published statistics show Nicaragua’s population growing almost every year since 1960. As a long-time opponent of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, Orozco could fairly be accused of “weaponizing” immigration himself.FacebookTwitterReddit

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John Perry is based in Masaya, Nicaragua and writes for the London Review of Books, Covert Action, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Counterpunch, The Grayzone and other publications. Read other articles by John.

 

When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free

by Vijay Prashad / September 26th, 2024

Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.

In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère is the monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had been confined four decades earlier (1889–1890) and where he completed around 150 paintings, including several important works (among them The Starry Night, 1889).

Ex OPG, Naples (Italy), 2024.

I was thinking about both Fraisse and Van Gogh when I visited the old Ospedale Psichiatrico Giudiziario (OPG) in Naples (Italy) in September for a festival that took place in this former criminal asylum, which once held those who had committed serious offences and were deemed to be insane. The vast building, which sits in the heart of Naples on the Monte di Sant’Eframo, was first a monastery (1573–1859), then a military barrack for the Savoy regime during Italy’s unification in 1861, and then a prison set up by the fascist regime in the 1920s. The prison was closed in 2008, and then, in 2015, occupied by a group of people who would later form the political organisation Potere al Popolo! (Power to the People!). They renamed the building Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo, ‘ex’ meaning that the building is no longer an asylum, and Je so’ pazzo referring to the favourite song of the beloved local singer Pino Daniele (1955–2015), who died around the time the building was occupied:

I’m crazy. I’m crazy.
The people are waiting for me.
….
I want to live at least one day as a lion.
Je so’pazzo, je so’ pazzo.
C’ho il popolo che mi aspetta.
….
Nella vita voglio vivere almeno un giorno da leone.

Today, the Ex OPG is home to legal and medical clinics, a gym, a theatre, and a bar. It is a place of reflection, a people’s centre that is designed to build community and confront the loneliness and precarity of capitalism. It is a rare kind of institution in our world, one in which an exhausted society is increasingly isolated and individuals, encaged in a prison house of frustrated aspirations, nonetheless hope to use their meagre tools (a spoon, the handle of a chamber pot) to carve out their dreams and to reach for the starry sky.

Anita Rée (Germany), Self-Portrait, 1930.
Rée (1885–1933) killed herself after the Nazis declared her work to be ‘degenerate’.

Even the World Health Organisation (WHO) does not have sufficient data on mental health, largely because the poorer nations are unable to maintain an accurate account of their populations’ immense psychological struggles. As a result, the focus is often limited to the more affluent countries, where such data is collected by governments and where there is greater access to psychiatric care and medications. A recent survey of thirty-one countries (mostly in Europe and North America, but also including some poorer nations such as Brazil, India, and South Africa) shows a shifting attitude and increased concern about mental health. The survey found that 45% of those polled selected mental health as ‘the biggest health problems facing people in [their] country today’, a significant increase from the previous poll, conducted in 2018, in which the figure was 27%. Third in the list of health challenges is stress, with 31% selecting it as the leading cause of concern. There is a significant gender gap in attitudes towards mental health amongst young people, with 55% of young women selecting it as one of their primary health concerns, compared to 37% of young men (reflecting the fact that women are disproportionately impacted by mental health issues).

While it is true that the COVID-19 pandemic heightened mental health problems across the world, this crisis predated the coronavirus. Information from the Global Health Data Exchange shows that in 2019 – before the pandemic – one in eight, or 970 million, people from around the world had a mental disorder, with 301 million struggling with anxiety and 280 million with depression. These numbers should be seen as an estimate, a minimum picture of the severe crisis of unhappiness and maladjustment to the current social order.

There are range of ailments that go under the name of ‘mental disorder’, from schizophrenia to forms of depression that can result in suicidal ideation. According to the WHO’s 2022 report, one in 200 adults struggle with schizophrenia, which on average results in a ten- to twenty-year reduction in life expectancy. Meanwhile, suicide, the leading cause of death amongst young people globally, is responsible for one in every 100 deaths (bear in mind that only one in every twenty attempts results in a death). We can make new tables, revise our calculations, and write longer reports, but none of this can assuage the profound social neglect that pervades our world.

Adolf Wölfli (Switzerland), General View of the Island Neveranger, 1911.
Wölfli (1864–1930) was abused as a child, sold as an indentured labourer, and then interned in the Waldau Clinic in Bern, where he painted for the rest of his life.

Neglect is not even the correct word. The prevailing attitude to mental disorders is to treat them as biological problems that merely require individualised pharmaceutical care. Even if we were to accept this limited conceptual framework, it still requires governments to support the training of psychiatrists, make medications affordable and accessible for the population, and incorporate mental health treatment into the wider health care system. However, in 2022, the WHO found that, on average, countries spend only 2% of their health care budgets on mental health. The organisation also found that half of the world’s population – mostly in the poorer nations – lives in circumstances where there is one psychiatrist to serve 200,000 or more people. This is the state of affairs as we witness a general decline of health care budgets and of public education about the need for a generous attitude toward mental health problems. The most recent WHO data (December 2023), which covers the spike in pandemic-related health spending, shows that, in 2021, health care spending in most countries was less than 5% of Gross Domestic Product. Meanwhile, in its 2024 report A World of Debt, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows that almost a hundred countries spent more to service their debts than on healthcare. Though these are foreboding statistics, they do not get at the heart of the problem.

Over the course of the past century, the response to mental health disorders has been overwhelmingly individualised, with treatments ranging from various forms of therapy to the prescription of different medications. Part of the failure to deal with the range of mental health crises – from depression to schizophrenia – has been the refusal to accept that these problems are not only influenced by biological factors but can be – and often are – created and exacerbated by social structures. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, one of the founders of the Critical Psychiatry Network, writes that ‘none of the situations we call mental disorders have been convincingly shown to arise from a biological disease’, or more precisely, ‘from a specific dysfunction of physiological or biochemical processes’. This is not to say that biology does not play a role, but simply that it is not the only factor that should shape our understanding of such disorders.

In his widely read classic The Sane Society (1955), Erich Fromm (1900–1980) built on the insights of Karl Marx to develop a precise reading of the psychological landscape in a capitalist system. His insights are worth re-considering (forgive Fromm’s use of the masculine use of the word ‘man’ and of the pronoun ‘his’ to refer to all of humanity):

Whether or not the individual is healthy is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers. An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility, distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton. Society can have both functions; it can further man’s healthy development, and it can hinder it; in fact, most societies do both, and the question is only to what degree and in what directions their positive and negative influence is exercised.

Kawanabe Kyōsai (Japan), Famous Mirrors: The Spirit of Japan, 1874.
Kyōsai (1831–1889) was shocked, at the age of nine, when he picked up a corpse and its head fell off. This marked his consciousness and his later break with ukiyo-e traditional painting to inaugurate what is now known as manga.

The antidote to many of our mental health crises must come from re-building society and forming a culture of community rather than a culture of antagonism and toxicity. Imagine if we built cities with more community centres, more places such as Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo in Naples, more places for young people to gather and build social connections and their personalities and confidence. Imagine if we spent more of our resources to teach people to play music and to organise sports games, to read and write poetry, and to organise socially productive activities in our neighbourhoods. These community centres could house medical clinics, youth programmes, social workers, and therapists. Imagine the festivals that such centres could produce, the music and joy, the dynamism of events such Red Books Day. Imagine the activities – the painting of murals, neighbourhood clean-ups, and planting of gardens – that could emerge as these centres incubate conversations about what kind of world people want to build. In fact, we do not need to imagine any of this: it is already with us in small gestures, whether in Naples or in Delhi, in Johannesburg or in Santiago.

‘Depression is boring, I think’, wrote the poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974). ‘I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave’. So let’s make soup in a community centre, pick up guitars and drumsticks, and dance and dance and dance till that great feeling comes upon everyone to join in healing our broken humanity.FacebookTwitterReddit

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, andThe Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

 

Economic Conditions and Hollow Victories

by Greg Godels / September 24th, 2024

Among the very few things to look forward to on Labor Day is Jack Rasmus’s annual report on the state of US labor. Rasmus, an accomplished political-economist, riffs on the famous Frederick Engels book with Labor Day 2024: The Condition of the American Working Class Today. It may come as a surprise to some, but academically-trained economists are among the most intellectually shallow and ideologically tainted practitioners of the social sciences. Some are so in awe of their own academic specialty that they paint all economic trends through specialist lenses. Still others are so tied to their political biases that they cannot resist slanting their conclusions to reinforce their loyalties to one of the two political parties that we are currently allowed.

Rasmus is the rare university-educated purveyor who knows where to look, looks critically, and clearly synthesizes the data to draw broad and useful conclusions for working people. For a philosophically-trained skeptic and self-styled Historical Materialist, I have grown to trust Rasmus’s digest of the meaning of arcane, jargon-filled, often-misleading government reports.

Of course, we have had earlier times when similar data were available. For over three decades, Labor Research Associates — a group of Communist and left researchers — published a comprehensive Labor Factbook every two years that addressed “labor trends,” the “social and labor conditions” of the period, “people’s health,” the “trade unions,” “civil liberties and rights,” “political affairs,” and “Canadian labor developments.” This comprehensive book armed working people who cared to advance the cause of workers with a cache of ammunition in the class war. We don’t have Labor Factbook, but we are lucky to have Jack Rasmus’s report.

What does his report tell us?

● Despite $10 trillion in stimulus since the pandemic, the US economy has only produced an anemic recovery: GDP of 1.9% (2022), 2.5% (2023), and 2.2% (2024, to date).

● And the US worker fared even worse: “…with regard to wages, the American worker has not benefited at all from the $10 billion-plus fiscal-monetary stimulus. Real Weekly Earnings are flat to contracting. And take-home pay’s even less.”

● The great US job creation machine that US politicians celebrate is not performing so well: “It is important to also note that the vast majority of the net new jobs created have been part-time, temp, gig and contractor jobs. In the past 12 months, full-time jobs in the labor force [have] fallen by 458,000, while part-time jobs have risen by 514,000.”

Typical of an election year, official reports grab headlines, exaggerating job gains, only to be corrected later: “The jobs reports over the past year are revealing as well. They continually reported monthly job gains of around 240,000. But the Labor Department just did its annual revisions and found that for the period March 2023 thru March 2024 it over-estimated no fewer than 818,000 jobs!” [The September 6 employment report downgraded June and July’s job growth by a further 86,000 jobs!]

“The Wall St. Journal further reported that up to a million workers have left the labor force due to disability from Covid and long Covid-related illnesses. Neither of those statistics [is] factored into the government’s unemployment rate figures.”

● For working-class citizens, debt has been a paradoxical life-saver, supplementing slack wage growth. But it continues to grow at a dangerous pace and with increasingly unsustainable interest rates: “The last quarter century of poor-wage increases has been offset to a degree by the availability of cheap credit with which to make consumer purchases in lieu of wage gains and decently paying jobs. Actually, that trend goes back even further to the early 1980s at least.”

“Household US debt is at a record level. Mortgage debt is about $13 trillion. Total household debt is more than $18 trillion, of which credit-card debt is now about $1 trillion, auto debt $1.5 trillion, student debt $1.7 trillion (or more if private loans are counted), medical debt about $.2 trillion, and the rest installment-type debt of various [kinds].

American households carry probably the highest load of any advanced economy, estimated at 54% of median family-household disposable income. And that’s rising.

Debt and interest payments have implications for workers’ actual disposable income and purchasing power. For one thing, interest is not considered in the CPI or PCE inflation indexes and thus their adjustment to real wages. As just one example: median family-mortgage costs since 2020 have risen 114%. However, again, that’s not included in the price indexes. Home prices have risen 47% and rents have followed. But workers pay a mortgage to the bank, not an amortized monthly payment to the house builder.

One should perhaps think of workers’ household debt as business claims on future wages not yet paid. Debt payments continue into the future for purchases made in the present, and thus subtract from future wages paid.”

Since Rasmus penned his report, the Census Bureau released its report on household incomes. While there was an uptick in 2023, median household income adjusted for inflation remains below the levels of 2018, explaining why poll respondents (and voters) are feeling insecure about the economy. In fact, household incomes have only increased around 15% over the last twenty-three years– hardly a reason for a victory lap by the last four administrations… or the capitalist system!

● Rasmus brings a necessary sobriety to the discussion of the state of the organized trade union movement in the US. While there are many exciting developments, the goal of building a formidable force to advance the interests of working people remains far off: “Since 2020 union membership has declined. There were 10.8% of the labor force in unions in 2020. There are 10.0% at end of 2023, which is about half of what it was in the early 1980s. Unions have not participated in the recovery since Covid, in other words, at least in terms of membership. Still only 6% or 7.4 million workers of the private-sector labor force is unionized, even when polls and surveys in the past four years show a rise from 48% to 70% today in the non-organized who want a union.”

“Recently the Teamsters union under new leadership made significant gains in restoring union contract language, especially in terms of limits on temp work and two-tier wage and benefit structures. The Auto workers made some gains as well. But most of the private-sector unionization has languished. And over the past year it has not changed much.

About half of all Union members today are in public-sector unions. It has been difficult for Capital and corporations to offshore jobs, displace workers with technology, destroy traditional defined-benefit pension plans, or otherwise weaken or get rid of workers’ unions. The same might be said for Transport workers, whose employment is also not easily offshored but is subject to displacement by technology nonetheless. But overall, union membership has clearly continued to stagnate over the past year, as it has since 2020.”

Rasmus’s candid conclusion: “The foregoing accumulation of data and statistics on wages, jobs, debt and unionization in America this Labor Day 2024 contradicts much of the hype, happy talk, and selective cherry picking of data by mainstream media and economists. That hype is picked up and peddled by politicians and pollsters alike.”

*****

And speaking of politicians…

A recent Jacobin piece stands as a sterling example of torturing facts and logic to build the case that Democratic Party politicians got the “stop the genocide” message at the Party’s national convention. Waleed Shahid writes that “the Uncommitted movement didn’t win every immediate demand…” in his article Why the Uncommitted Movement Was a Success at the DNC. The Uncommitted Movement didn’t win any demand — immediate or otherwise — at the DNC!

It takes some skill and determination to recast a near totally effective effort to stifle the voice of pro-peace and pro-justice participants and protesters into “not just a fleeting victory — it is the beginning of a strategic shift in how the Democratic Party grapples with its own contradictions.” Sad to say, it takes a twisted perception to see “victory” and “a strategic shift” while convention-goers derisively and dismissively stroll past demonstrators reciting the names of civilians murdered by the Israeli military.

Shahid attempts the impossible in likening the 2024 Democratic Convention to the 1964 Convention, when brave civil rights activists shamed the Democratic Party before television cameras and journalists into negotiating with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (See this sharp comparative account in Black Agenda Report). There was neither shame nor negotiations in 2024.

Like Democratic operatives before him, Shahid scolds those expecting more from Democrats to– in the future– “out-organize” the Neanderthals controlling the party. In other words, force them to do the right thing!

When one finds a credible political party to support, it should not be one that must be coerced to support justice.

*****

It is a commonplace on the soft left to advocate a broad coalition or united front to address the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America. Building on the ineffectiveness of the long-ruling centrist parties, the French RN, Germany’s AfD, the US’s Trump, and a host of other populist movements have mounted significant electoral campaigns. The knee-jerk left reaction is to advocate a broad popular front of all the oppositional parties or movements, a tactic modeled crudely and inappropriately on the Communist International’s anti-fascist tactic.

Most recently, the French left conceded to an electoral “popular front” with the ruling president, Emmanuel Macron’s party and other parties in opposition to Marine Le Pen’s RN. To the surprise of many, the left won the most votes and should have — by tradition — organized a new government. But President Macron “betrayed” popular-front values and appointed a center-right career politician, hostile to the left, as prime minister. To add insult to injury, Macron consulted with Le Pen for approval of his appointment.

Consequently, despite commanding the largest vote, the popular front is in a less favorable position and the right is in a more favorable position than before the electoral “victory” (see, for example, David Broder’s Jacobin article for more).

This move by Macron should sober those who glibly call for a popular front as the answer to every alarm, every hyperbole regarding the populist right.

Because of this gross misapplication of the united-front tactic, I can enjoy an I-told-you-so-moment. I wrote in late June: “The interesting question would be whether Macron’s party would return the favor and support this effort in a second round against RN. I doubt they would. Bourgeois ‘solidarity’ only goes so far.” Where the left selflessly threw its support behind Macron’s party where it needed to win, Macron through his deal with Le Pen, threw the left under the bus!

Hollow victories, indeed.FacebookEmail

Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.