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Friday, February 18, 2022

The Dynastic Wealth of US Oligarchs Is a Threat to Democracy

A new report estimates that $21 trillion of that wealth will pass internally within America's already dynastically wealthy families between now and 2045.

A billboard truck from MoveOn calls on Senator Marco Rubio's office to increase

federal taxes to big corporations on May 17, 2021 in Tampa, Florida.

(Photo: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images for MoveOn)

CHUCK COLLINS

February 7, 2022

by Inequality.org

There is an understandable focus on new wealth technology billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, especially as their wealth surges during the pandemic.

But it is equally important to understand how multi-generational wealth dynasties are deploying dynasty trusts and other elaborate tax dodges to sequester trillions and dodge inheritance taxes.

A recent ATF report on billionaire campaign contributions found that US billionaires made a combined $1.2 billion in political contributions in the 2020 election cycle, ten percent of all campaign contributions.

Wealth managers have pointed to a substantial intergenerational transfer of wealth, recently estimated at $68 trillion, as baby boomers pass on wealth to the next generations. But most of this wealth is passing within the upper canopy of the wealth forest, between the already wealthy and their heirs.

A new report, from the Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), estimates that $21 trillion of that wealth will pass internally within America's already dynastically wealthy families between now and 2045. The report, "Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation," estimates that these wealthy families will avoid as much as $8.4 trillion in estate and generation-skipping taxes between now and 2024, by using dynasty trusts and other currently legal loopholes (assuming current estate tax rules).

"Dynasty trust" is the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes. They typically are employed by estates of $10 million or more.

The ATF report points out that the $8.4 trillion sum—an average of $350 billion a year over 24 years—is equivalent to the cost of over four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over ten years. About half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of 24 years of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), that was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%. The expanded CTC costs about $1.6 trillion over 10 years, or roughly $160 billion a year.

The report describes the activities of the wealth defense industry—the tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers—who are "paid millions to hide trillions" on behalf of their wealthy clients.

"The choice is clear," the report declares. "We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America's wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies."

The report underscores the warnings from an June 2021 IPS report, "Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America's 50 Largest Inherited Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality." Without reforming estate and gift-tax laws, the U.S. will continue to see the concentration of wealth within several hundred ultra-high net worth families, forming oligarchic power blocks.

History buffs will enjoy the sections of the new ATF report that traces the history of U.S. wealth-transfer taxation from Teddy Roosevelt's 1910 clarion call for an estate tax that increased "rapidly in amount with the size of the estate" and was "properly safeguarded against evasion."

The report further documents the aggressive moves of estate-planners to diminish or zero-out tax liabilities and the usually delayed and often ineffective efforts by the IRS to block their ploys. For example, many of the loopholes deployed by the ultra-wealthy artificially depress the value of family assets for tax purposes and create trusts that enable families to aggressively avoid estate and gift taxes. This allows for virtually unlimited intergenerational transfers of wealth from one generation to the next.

Tax avoidance isn't the only concern, as these oligarchic concentrations of wealth and power pose political threats to our democratic system. A recent ATF report on billionaire campaign contributions found that US billionaires made a combined $1.2 billion in political contributions in the 2020 election cycle, ten percent of all campaign contributions.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org, and is author of the new book, "Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good." He is co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good, recently merged with the Patriotic Millionaires. He is co-author of "99 to 1: The Moral Measure of the Economy" and, with Bill Gates Sr., of "Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes."

Why $73 million Sandy Hook settlement is unlikely to unleash a flood of lawsuits against gun-makers

While the settlement is a notable victory for the families of Sandy Hook’s victims, it’s still unclear if it’s a game changer for gun control advocates.

Timothy D. Lytton

February 18, 2022

SOURCEThe Conversation

Families of the victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School reached a historic US$73 million settlement with gun-maker Remington Arms. The Feb. 15, 2022, deal marks the first time a firearms manufacturer has settled a lawsuit brought by gun violence victims since Congress granted the industry sweeping immunity from civil liability in 2005.

Since it was filed in 2015 in Connecticut, the Sandy Hook case has focused media attention on claims that the firearms industry bears some responsibility for the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. As part of the settlement, Remington agreed to release thousands of pages of internal company documents about its marketing strategy for the semiautomatic rifle used in the massacre. The Sandy Hook families hope that these will provide clues as to how manufacturers can reduce the criminal misuse of their weapons.

Prior to the settlement, some media reports suggested the case could unleash a flood of litigation or significantly change the landscape of lawsuits against the gun industry. However, as a legal scholar who has studied the history of lawsuits against the gun industry, I believe that’s unlikely.

To see why, we need to first review the federal liability shield protecting gun-makers at the heart of the case.

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An Uncertain Legacy

That law, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, grants gun manufacturers immunity from lawsuits that arise out of the criminal misuse of a weapon.

But the Sandy Hook families argued that their lawsuit fell under an exception to this federal immunity. The exception allows gun violence victims to sue a manufacturer who “knowingly violated a state or federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing” of a firearm.

The families claimed that Remington Arms “marketed, advertised and promoted the Bushmaster XM15-E2S for civilians to use to carry out offensive, military style combat missions against their perceived enemies.” They said that this marketing was unethical and therefore violated Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, which they argued is a state statute applicable to the marketing of a firearm.

The Connecticut high court agreed and, importantly, interpreted the term “applicable” broadly. That is, the court said that a relevant statute only had to be “capable of being applied” to gun sales, not that the law needed to be specifically about firearms, as other courts had held.

It is this interpretation that could potentially prompt a flood of lawsuits across the country.

Since many states have unfair trade practices laws like Connecticut’s, it seems likely that gun violence victims will bring similar claims elsewhere. Victims are thus likely to allege that a gun manufacturer’s aggressive marketing of combat-style weapons violates a state statute – like an unfair trade practice law – that is applicable to the sale or marketing of a firearm.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court has the last word on the interpretation of federal statutes, and the justices refused in 2019 to hear Remington’s appeal of the case. Presumably, the Supreme Court wanted to wait until the litigation had run its course in the Connecticut state courts before weighing in.

Now that the case has settled, it will never reach the high court – which means the scope of the exception to federal immunity based on a violation of state unfair trade practices law remains unclear.

Regulation through litigation

To many, it seems absurd to hold gun-makers liable for marketing a legal product that did precisely what it was designed to do.

Although the Second Amendment undoubtedly imposes restrictions on the civil liability of gun manufacturers, the idea of holding them liable for carelessness is actually not so far-fetched.

The ultimate goal of litigants in lawsuits against the gun industry is to use civil liability to encourage companies to look for ways to make their products less susceptible to criminal misuse and to prevent the diversion of their products into illegal markets.

This is essentially the tactic being used by states, local governments, tribes and others suing pharmaceutical companies over their role in America’s opioid epidemic. After two decades of litigation, claimants are winning jury verdicts in state courts around the country, and the industry is attempting to negotiate a $26 billion dollar global settlement for federal cases.

But while drugmakers aren’t protected from such lawsuits, gun-makers are – thanks to Congress. That means using civil litigation to regulate the gun industry will require either a repeal of the 2005 law, which seems unlikely, or finding a way around it.

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The Sandy Hook settlement leaves unanswered the scope of the federal immunity shield, which thwarted all prior attempts to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the criminal misuse of their weapons. What’s more, Remington’s reasons for agreeing to settle may have more to do with the company’s struggle to reemerge from bankruptcy than a newfound willingness among gun-makers to settle claims.

While the settlement is a notable victory for the families of Sandy Hook’s victims, it’s still unclear if it’s a game changer for gun control advocates.

This article incorporates background from articles published on June 21, 2016, and March 25, 2019.

Inside the campaign to abolish the subminimum wage in 25 states by 2026

"This is the only future for the service sector and the economy overall: wages must go up or there will be no future.”

Rebekah Entralgo

February 18, 2022

SOURCEInequality.org

As the economy recovers from a global pandemic, many business owners are pointing to labor shortages caused by the “Great Resignation” as a source of frustration.

The term refers to the more than 33 million U.S. workers who have quit their jobs since the spring of 2021, largely due to low wages and burnout. The restaurant and service industry is experiencing one of the largest shockwaves to its workforce, adding just 108,000 jobs in January 2022, and remains 900,000 jobs short of where it was prior to the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But restaurant workers and their allies are offering a different perspective: This is not a “Great Resignation,” but rather a Great Rejection of low-wage work.

On Valentine’s Day, 2022, One Fair Wage – a national coalition organized around the movement to increase wages for service workers – announced it is embarking on a $25 million campaign to remove the subminimum tipped wage in 25 states by 2026, marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.

“Typically Valentine’s Day is the highest-grossing day in the restaurant industry, but this year the restaurant industry is struggling,” said Saru Jayamaran, President of One Fair Wage, during a virtual event. “Not because of Covid-19 and the decline of business and sales, but because this is the worst staffing crisis in the history of this industry in the U.S. […] One million workers have left the industry, and of those who remain, 54 percent say they are leaving, and 80 percent say that the only thing that would make them stay or come back is a full, livable wage with tips on top.”

According to Jayamaran, the breaking point came when pandemic conditions required restaurant workers to do so much more for so much less – enforcing masks and Covid-19 vaccination requirements on the same people for whom they rely on for tips. Learn more Racial equity & the tipped wage

In 43 states and on the federal level, tipped workers are paid as little as $2.13 per hour in direct wages, with tips making up the balance of the federal minimum wage, which remains stagnant at $7.25 per hour. Ending the subminimum wage for tipped workers, recent analysis from the Center for American Progress suggests, would help alleviate poverty, sustainably grow the economy, and advance gender, racial, disability, and economic justice.

Ending the subminimum wage would also abolish a shameful relic of slavery. Tipping became prevalent in the United States after the Civil War, when restaurants and railway companies embraced the practice because it meant they didn’t have to pay wages to recently freed slaves. The racial biases that created the practice of tipping are still prevalent in the industry today.

Although Black workers represent the majority of the tipped service industry, they are also the ones making the least. A survey by One Fair Wage found that prior to the pandemic, Black tipped workers’ income, including tips, was already substantially lower than their white counterparts’ earnings, with 60 percent of them reporting earning less than $15 per hour, compared to 43 percent of white workers. Since the pandemic, 88 percent of Black tipped workers, compared to just 68 percent of all workers surveyed, have seen their tips plunge by half or more.

Ending the subminimum wage would not just benefit workers, but employers as well.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Russell Jackson, a supporter of One Fair Wage and the head chef and owner of Reverence NYC in Harlem. “For us, we pay a living wage, we have a fair tip share, and we think about how we treat our staff. […] What we need is legislation with teeth that will help us to be consistent across the board.”

Progress has already been made in Washington, D.C., where organizers recently gathered enough signatures to place an initiative to phase out the tipped wage back on the ballot. Similar legislation is making its way through the state houses in Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts, among others. If they are successful, they will join the seven states that have already eliminated the subminimum wage for tipped workers.

On the federal level, the House passed legislation in 2021 that would eliminate the subminimum wage and boost the federal minimum to $15 by 2025, but that bill has stalled in the Senate.

“It’s time for states—and the policymakers who represent them—to follow the lead of millions of workers refusing to work for poverty wages and thousands of independent restaurants raising wages to recruit staff, and permanently raise wages and end subminimum wages once and for all,” said Jayaraman. “This is the only future for the service sector and the economy overall: wages must go up or there will be no future.”

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M IN SPACE

MOVE OVER NASA
Why Musk’s biggest space gamble is freaking out his competitors

Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors, which are watching its progress with a mix of awe and horror.

SpaceX's Elon Musk provides an update on Starship on Thursday, near Brownsville, Texas. | Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald via AP

By BRYAN BENDER
02/12/2022

Elon Musk is planning yet again to rocket beyond the status quo. And if he succeeds, the aerospace giants that won the first space race may never catch him in this one.

Standing in front of the towering Starship rocket at Space X’s southwest Texas “Starbase” on Thursday night, Musk pledged that his most ambitious spaceship yet will make its first journey in the coming months.

“At this point, I am highly confident we will get to orbit this year,” he said in the first update in two years on the invention he acknowledged “does sound crazy.”

“It will work,” he declared. “There might be a few bumps along the way, but it will work.”

Starship is designed to be the first all-purpose space vehicle: a reusable and refuelable spacecraft that can take scores of people and millions of tons of cargo from Earth directly to the moon and eventually Mars — and do it over and over again.

“There might be a few bumps along the way, but it will work.”
Elon Musk

If he can pull it off, Musk’s previous breakthroughs — electric cars, reusable rockets for launching satellites, the first commercial space capsule to dock with the International Space Station — might seem, by comparison, to be modest achievements.

“It is the kind of thing we used to talk about as ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could do these kinds of things?’” said Scott Altman, a former astronaut who is now president of ASRC Federal, a space R&D company.

But NASA officials — and their longtime aerospace contractors — are watching with a mix of awe and horror.

“They are shitting the bed,” said a top Washington space lobbyist who works for SpaceX’s competitors and asked for anonymity to avoid upsetting his clients.

Launch teams monitor the countdown to the launch of Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket carrying NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on Dec. 25 in Kourou, French Guiana. |

Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images

NASA and its major industry partners are simultaneously scrambling to complete their own moon vehicles: the Space Launch System mega-rocket and companion Orion capsule. But the program is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule — and, many would argue, generations behind SpaceX in innovation.

The space agency’s first three Artemis moon missions over the next three years — including a human landing planned for 2025 — are all set to travel aboard the SLS rocket and Orion capsule, which are being built by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne and numerous other suppliers and engineering services firms.

But with the SLS’ first flight this year further delayed at least until late spring, concerns are growing that even if it succeeds, the system, at an estimated $2 billion per launch, could prove too costly for the multiple journeys to the moon that NASA will need to build a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.

That makes Starship, which conducted a successful flight to the edge of space last year, especially threatening to the contractors and their allies in Congress.

As Starship progresses, it will further eclipse the argument for sticking with SLS, according to Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and space consultant.

“Once the new system’s reliability is demonstrated with a large number of flights, which could happen in a matter of months, it will obsolesce all existing launch systems,” he said.

“If SLS is not going to fly more than once every couple of years, it’s just not going to be a significant player in the future in space, particularly when Starship is flown,” he added.

Neither Boeing, the main contractor on the SLS rocket, nor NASA responded to requests for comment on the criticism of the program or Musk’s latest plans for Starship.

Simberg said the biggest breakthrough of Starship would be the “radical cost reduction” it potentially offers, particularly the plan to use tankers in low-Earth orbit to refuel it, which could significantly bring down the long term cost of operations in deep space.

“If the company can demonstrate that its new heavy-lift rocket is not just reusable but, in Elon Musk’s words, rapidly reusable — it will revolutionize spaceflight,” he wrote in a recent paper titled “Walmart, But for Space.”

Musk on Thursday also said “the essential technology — the holy grail breakthrough that’s needed — is a rapid and completely reusable rocket system.”

“So this has never been accomplished before and a lot of people for the longest time thought this was not possible,” he added.

A SpaceX Starship test vehicle descends during a flight test in Boca Chica, Texas.

| SpaceX via AP

Robert Walker, former chair of the House Science Committee and a space industry consultant, said that if Starship succeeds, the value of the NASA launch vehicle will be seriously imperiled simply because it is not designed to fly nearly as often as Starship.

“If the first Artemis flight is successful, it may be two years until we can get to the second one,” he said. “Musk can roll things out pretty quickly.”

SpaceX has already beat its competitors on transporting astronauts to the International Space Station.

The Dragon space capsule has made three successful trips, with another planned for April, while the first flight of Boeing’s Starliner, which was developed under the same NASA public-private partnership, continues to be delayed.

And SpaceX is already playing a key role in NASA’s moon program.

The company was hired last year to use its Starship technology to provide the Human Landing System that will take astronauts to the lunar surface on the third Artemis mission.

It beat out competitors including Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that is developing its own fleet of rockets and spacecraft in the Texas desert, but has yet to launch anything into orbit.

Altman, the former astronaut, said SpaceX and its Starship could play a much bigger role in NASA’s moon program beyond the landing now set for 2025. “We’ve been trying to get the SLS and Orion together for the Artemis program,” he said.

“Right now Starship is a link in that chain,” he added, referring to the role it will already play in the moon landing. “It’s a technology, it’s a capability we’re going to need.”

It’s unclear how exactly NASA might contract with Starship for future missions. But it could establish a public-private partnership, similar to its arrangement for rides to the space station or for the moon lander.

The implications also go beyond exploring the heavens.

The Pentagon, which has hired SpaceX to launch some of its spy satellites, is also eyeing the new vehicle for “point to point” cargo missions on Earth.

“Starship can carry a C-17 load of cargo and get it anywhere in the world in an hour,” said Walker, who previously served on a SpaceX advisory board but no longer has any ties to the company.

“There are just major uses for this if, in fact, he can pull it off,” he added.

If he can pull it off, Elon Musk’s previous breakthroughs might seem, by comparison, to be modest achievements.

| Jae C. Hong/AP Photo

Even Musk himself sounded a cautionary note on Thursday, warning that there will likely be technical setbacks before Starship proves its reliability.

“Orbital flight is really just the beginning,” he said. “There will probably be a few bumps in the road, you know, but we want to iron those out with satellite missions and test missions and get to a high flight rate and have and have something that’s extremely reliable.”

The potty-mouthed D.C. lobbyist, a longtime detractor of SpaceX, described the reaction among his clients to Musk’s presentation on Thursday as “promises, promises, promises.”

But he said such dismissals are passé. “It’s like you keep saying ‘he can’t do it’ but it keeps working. It keeps working. I think people are scared. He’s starting to make people who were never believers think he might.”

“When all you have is a hammer…”: why Agamben’s ideas were bound to lead to this

February 8, 2022

LONG READ

Length:5342 words

Summary: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s attack on public health measures during Covid 19 is linked to undialectical perspectives rooted in Nietzsche, and contrasted to other thinkers like Toni Negri, Naomi Klein, and Peter Linebaugh – Editors

Padua, Italy — When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who for decades has warned us about the seemingly unstoppable ability and will of even democratic states to impose a “state of exception” – a state of emergency powers overriding all law, constitutional restraints, and citizen or human rights – has now become the most sophisticated spokesperson for the anti-vax and other forces opposed to the public health restrictions due to the Covid 19 virus crisis. He has founded an intellectual group opposed to the restrictions, public health measures, vaccination requirements and other actions taken by public officials to combat the spread of the virus and its lethality.

Agamben is one of the most influential philosophers of recent years, and he was especially “hot” and in fashion during the Bush/War on Terror years after 9/11, when his analysis seemed to help explain the restrictions on constitutional and human rights. Agamben has many admirers, and his work has influenced that of many in and out of academia. His recent insistence, however, that the entire Covid pandemic is a manufactured crisis, whose true intent has been to impose a “biopolitical” regime that “reduces us all to mere biophysical existence”, making us into “lemmings” who, bending to the will of state power and direction have been stripped of all ethical, moral and cultural traits, leading us to stand naked in front of the sovereign, willing to accept the destruction of our liberties for the sake of presumed security, has led many to wonder whether his current stance throws light – or better shadow – on his previous work which has been so widely celebrated.

Since in 2011 I wrote and got published a lengthy attack on Agamben and his work[1] , an essay I wrote when he was at the height of his popularity and his work at its most in fashion, I have to say that I saw something like this coming from a mile away, and think this seeming turn to the irrational Agamben was entirely predictable. But the problem with being a no-name independent scholar and activist publishing in a fine, reputable but hardly widely-read and followed journal an attack on the work of an intellectual superstar, is that you don’t have the impact you wish you had. So only now are people wondering what went wrong with Agamben. To which, the only reply is: nothing, his work was always wrongheaded. I hope to briefly explain why here.

Agamben is known mainly for his concept of the “state of exception” and for arguing, and seeming to demonstrate empirically, that the overriding of all constitutional or legal limits by state power has become the norm, not a “crisis” or a “state of emergency” but a sort of permanent state of emergency. So crushing of human and legal rights by reference to some crisis or emergency is the principal form of government – or better governance in the world today, including in the western democratic states. He uses categories from the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt to show how sovereignty is essentially the power to impose one’s will on others, that is, the power of the state or of its executive branch to declare a state of emergency at will and use that situation to put society into a Hobbesian state of nature – one where law does not yet exist, because law itself must be based on a prior condition in which law is made in the first place so that other laws can be fashioned based on this “constituent power”. Constituent power is a concept of Schmitt’s that the Italian autonomist Marxist Toni Negri has used with some creativity to describe the potential founding of new societies by social movements and revolutions, but which for Schmitt and Agamben instead describes the true power of the state that precedes law and constitutions, that power that makes law and constitutions in the first place, and so is mainly a menace, not a possibility, for popular forces. For Negri, this is the moment of revolution, when a movement is in a position to become the new order of society. For Agamben, it is instead the moment of state power that reveals the state’s real essence, as raw power to impose its will, the Leviathan of Hobbes. In the face of that state power, all of us, citizens and refugees alike, are mere Homo Sacer – an ancient Roman category that referred to persons who had no rights, nor any right to have rights, who could be killed with impunity. For Agamben, the Jews in the Nazi camps are the prototype of the human condition for all today.

I criticized Agamben ten years ago in my article of the time, and hold to my criticisms today, on the grounds of his not addressing any history or relationship of the state to capitalism and its processes, and of not addressing in any way the long history of struggles against capitalist expropriation and exploitation – the anti-slavery movement, the anti-colonial movements, the movements for women’s equality and the working class movements, as well as the democratization – partial as it is – of state power. By ignoring capitalism and the struggle against it, Agamben ignores the experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, of colonized peoples, of women, of slaves and of proletarians, whose survival under capitalism is always contingent. Ignoring these central experiences of the modern world enables him to treat the states of emergency around the world and historically that are so important to him as more novel and more urgent and as new norms. Instead, as my list of social actors shows, the experience of being homo sacer in one form or another – of the very state he is warning us about, has in fact been the main experience of the majority of people around the world for centuries. And, until recently, with the end of slavery, advances in women’s rights, labor unions, democratization and advanced welfare state and social democracies, it has been the experience of the majority of people in every society since the rise of classes. I think these criticisms of his work still hold today, even before his recent seeming descent into madness over vaccinations, Covid restrictions and public health measures, positions I see as entirely in keeping with and consistent with his previous work, indeed their logical trajectory and outcome.

But it is the contrast of his work with that of Toni Negri’s on the shared concept of constituent power that I think can best show what problem is at the heart of not just both their work, but that of an entire field of works by various authors, of which Agamben is merely currently the worst and most extreme example.

Negri sees the state of exception as a potential moment of revolutionary reconstitution of society as a whole, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, Agamben as the moment of greatest peril, as the expression of a state power whose guarantees to citizens of their rights is worth no more than the paper it is written on, since those rights can be annulled at will at any moment and apparently are being so as the new norm across the world.

Each, we see, has a one-sided view of the whole thing, and of the relationships involved. What is missing, in other words, is any dialectic in either of their analyses, though to be fair Negri’s work does utilize dialectics in other ways in its analysis of the relationship of social movements, capitalism and state forms. But not in seeing the side of constituent power that Agamben sees and vice-versa. In each case, missing is an opposing side, or even an interlocutor, and so no dialectic is possible. Put differently, with Agamben, there is no vision of what victory would constitute or look like, and with Negri, the possibility of defeat never really enters the picture or the analysis. The role of ruling classes opposing the movements Negri theorizes, most usefully is his master work Potere costituente, translated into English and published by the University of Minnesota Press as Insurgencies, or that of the pre-existing state institutions in re-shaping the efforts of revolutionary movements plays no or little role in his otherwise often admirable work. And the role of movements for democratizing the state, ending or abolishing concrete historical forms of “homo sacer” such as slavery, Native American genocide, the worst oppressions of patriarchy, colonial occupations, child labor, the conditions of labor before the ten-hour and eight-hour movements and so on, do not play any role at all in Agamben’s work. Not even the European Resistance to the very Nazi occupations and states of exception that are the center of his view of the modern state makes an appearance.

In my article of ten years ago, and still today, I contrast these one-sided accounts with two other works, in my view more useful for our needs in the service of struggles today. One is that of Naomi Klein, in her bestseller Shock Doctrine, and the other is the work of Peter Linebaugh in his Magna Carta Manifesto. The dialectic in Klein’s work is that the struggles that gave rise to social democracy, the end of colonialism and apartheid, and to even the welfare state elements of Stalinist regimes are what capital is working to overcome through neoliberalism – privatization, deregulation, governance by central banks and openness to capital markets and global markets for goods. Since these policies are deeply unpopular, a state of emergency of some sort or another, permitting “shock therapy” –a swift reorganization of the economy in favor of capital, is needed. So Agamben’s states of exception are directly the result of the class struggle and a particular capitalist strategy to overcome working class, democratic and popular opposition. It happens because nothing else would enable the reforms that shift the balance of power in favor of capitalism. And it is needed, because capitalism finds itself in crisis or facing eventual crisis if profit rates cannot be increased through these neoliberal mechanisms.

For Linebaugh, our legal rights, our constitutional rights, have an economic basis in access to subsistence and in control of common lands and common goods. When these are expropriated, our legal rights do become, or risk becoming if a new form of class struggle does not emerge to protect them, merely the paper they are written on. Our rights and freedoms, which Agamben is so concerned about, always risk becoming dead letters, except when struggles and movements emerge to defend them, movements and struggles for whom the legal rights are tools. But movements and struggles for whom the real objective is the concrete meeting of needs and control over or access to common goods and resources we need for our lives, and guarantees and access to subsistence. These analyses by Linebaugh and Klein are light-years ahead of those of Agamben on the very question that tortures him and informs his whole body of work, because in each there is a dialectic at work – the struggle between capitalist forces and those of people defending their access to livelihoods and needs. The form of the state, its policies, and its institutions, and the balance of power between these in the formal constitutions of states – and in what Negri usefully calls the material constitutions – are both the outcome of, and themselves actors in these struggles.

Historic struggles against states of exception, be they antislavery or anticolonialism, the resistance to capitalist coups in Chile in 1973 (unsuccessful) or Venezuela in 2002 (successful) or Honduras or Brazil in recent years, or even the seizure of the Bastille by the people of Paris on July 14, 1789 to prevent Louis XVI’s attempt at a state of exception, all these are nowhere to be found in Agamben’s view of the world. Yet WE need to know about these cases, who the actors were, what they wanted and why, how and why they succeeded or failed.

Marxists Humanists and readers here of course, don’t need me to tell them how important to an analysis dialectics are, but I would like to show how lacking a dialectic in social and political analysis leads directly to Agamben’s disastrous current project of anti-vax, anti-public health measures in the face of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives around the world. The point is, that lack of a dialectic has been a central part of his work all along, and not only of his. So I will conclude after the analysis of Agamben’s accusations regarding Covid requirements with a comment on some other recently fashionable thinkers and political stances.

All Agamben has is a hammer: the state is bad, it is Nietzsche’s Will to Power personified, its “biopolitics” (Foucault) is deadly in nature and reduces us to bare life, naked homo sacer stripped of ethical, moral, legal and cultural features before it, requiring us to do everything for mere survival, especially now when it requires us to stay home, or get a vaccine, or wear a mask, or not interact with each other. As if this reduction of human being’s cultural and ethical characteristics to “mere worker” – a means to an end were not already a primary feature of capitalism as Marx showed as long ago as his manuscripts on Alienation in 1844. But Agamben’s state is entirely one-sided: it is only repression.

As Hal Draper showed in his monumental Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, the state takes on basic and necessary public functions – community collective defense, roads, schools, law and a judicial system – that will exist in any society or community of any kind – as paradoxically Graeber and Wengrow’s recent celebrated work The Dawn of Everythingdemonstrates. In a class society, however, the state, under the primary influence of the dominant class and defending its interests, will carry out these basic functions in a distorted way, in a way that both carries them out and enhances the wealth and power of the ruling class and the inequalities of wealth and power in society as whole, at least more often than not. When the two conflict, the struggle between classes, within the state and across society as a whole decides which will win out. The state’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to carry out these essential functions for society, and its failure to do so can lead to it, or at least its leaders, losing the support of society’s larger membership, something that the Chinese “Mandate of Heaven” being lost due to inability to provide for people during famines, floods or earthquakes, the dangers to the Egyptian Pharaohs if they failed to organize the Nile flooding and agricultural adequately, and even George W. Bush’s failure to secure New Orleans from the Mississippi’s overflowing the levees, stand as examples of. So, there is a dialectic within the state: legitimate social functions versus state power qua ruling class power. And on the side of legitimate social functions stand the social and physical needs of the non-ruling class part of the population. This conflict is at least as old as Hammurabi’s Code, which both protected the poor, widows, orphans and slaves, and codified the class power and privilege of nobles. With the rise of democracy, this struggle becomes even more central, as structural and institutional pressure by popular forces are also written into the form and content of the state, even as capitalist power and dominance are as well. Thus, the dialectic inherent to the state in a class society is directly tied to the class struggle in society itself. With the rise of democracy, this dialectic is now written into the relationships between the institutions of the state themselves. Some agencies, institutions and actors lean toward basic social functions, and are more directly linked to and under the pressure of popular needs and demands. Others are more well-sheltered from popular pressure and democratic power – this is where Klein’s emphasis on the role of shifting decision-making to Central Banks for instance is important – leaning toward a more one-sided preoccupation with ruling class and capitalist interests.

Thus, during a crisis such as the Covid crisis, we should turn our attention to these dialectics – is capital taking advantage of a crisis to further its project of privatizing wealth and power and public policy? – an issue at the center of Klein’s work on “disaster capitalism” but nowhere to be found in Agamben; are capitalists profiting off the now vital and emergency needs of people in the face of a public health catastrophe? Are the restrictions that a basic and necessary social function of the state – the protection of society and its members in the face of a natural or public health disaster – designed and implemented in a way that is appropriate to the crisis and its resolution? Can the state act as an organizer of production and distribution of basic necessities such as medical products and implements, and if so, will it do so with an eye toward production for use or for exchange and capital accumulation? Are policies designed and implemented in ways that are fair and equitable and take into account the needs of various social actors – teachers and students and parents, workers and employers, health providers and patients, the marginalized and the majority, or are they clearly or subtly means of only favoring the interests of, and shifting of power to, employers, large firms versus small business, the rich and well-connected? These are the kinds of questions we need to, and have every right to ask.

But if instead one has no sense of these dialectics within and between the state, civil society and social classes and actors, then one cannot see the reality of the pandemic. To see the pandemic as real means to see that some public health measures are called for, as well as some changes in individual and collective behavior for the period of the crisis, realizing that merely because extreme measures are needed temporarily, they are not necessarily – and indeed are not intended – to be permanent. States of emergency over short-term natural disasters are a frequent occurrence, but are usually lifted as soon as the hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake is over or its consequences have been sufficiently cleaned up. At times public interest would be better served by prolonging states of emergency lifted too quickly in order to satisfy business interests. Other times, they are lifted too slowly, as the concerns of everyday people are not listened to and taken into account. And legitimate struggles and protests may ensue in these cases and sometimes do. Indeed, in some extreme cases, the state utterly fails in its social obligations and allows people to suffer from such emergencies without assuming emergency powers to help, or even doing so, but then not really helping. But if there is no such dialectic within the state as a complex entity, between legitimate public power in the service of social needs, and the distortion of these powers and their use due to the influence of dominant class interests and power, then all one sees is the bad state imposing its will. The pandemic itself has to be, according to the already existing logic of Agamben’s work, wished away as non-existent, since any emergency or crisis must be manufactured by the state as an excuse to impose a state of exception. And this is what Agamben claims, in ever-escalating and insulting rhetoric, is happening now and has been for the past two years.

Thus, Agamben refers to “The Invention of a Pandemic” (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia ) in a widely-read article of February 2020, at the start of the Covid impact in Italy, which was the first country outside of China to have a major wave of Coronavirus cases. Comparing the virus to the flu, and downplaying its dangers, Agamben accused Italian media of “spreading a climate of panic”. He has more recently claimed in on Twitter that “Today in my country measures are applied against “anti-vaxxers” that are 10X (ten times) more restrictive than the fascist legislation of 1938 against ‘non-Aryans’” (https://twitter.com/Agonhamza/status/1489978672215904257 )– by which he means Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws that led tens of thousands of Italian Jews to the death camps. A more insulting and false set of claims would be hard to imagine, and here Agamben’s rhetoric is at one with that of the American far right, not something we would expect from a supposedly left-wing philosopher. In November 2020 in a talk with students in Venice, Agamben claimed that these restrictions are bringing humanity “towards extinction – if not physical at least ethical and political”. (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-intervento-al-convegno-degli-studenti-veneziano-). I would be tempted to suggest that Agamben, in clinging to his February 2020 view, based on early information and misinformation as to the real nature of the virus and its impact, is engaging in what Hegel termed “Understanding” – maintain rigid fidelity to categories based on old realities that they no longer explain under newer conditions. But for Hegel, Understanding did correspond to reality, was a right or least useful way of explaining or defining phenomena at one time at least. Instead, in the case of Agamben, all we have is what in Organizational Behavior is called “anchoring” – sticking with your initial way of understanding something that is happening, and not changing your view when more or new information comes about, because you have already made up your mind.

To claim that the efforts to stop the spread of, and reduce or end the fatalities it has caused and continues to cause lack ethical, political, moral, cultural, or even religious characteristics from a humanist point of view, as Agamben does, is sheer madness and falsehood. The vast majority of the population in every country has recognized the ethical need to vaccinate oneself and to wear masks and engage in social distancing. This reality is something we should find cause of hope and cautious optimism in – an affirmation of basic ethical concerns overriding even economic interests and needs. This extended even to the patience with which populations around the world accepted total or near total lockdowns – NOT as Agamben claims, because we are lemmings, an echo of the “sheeple” insult by the US right to those who act to protect others and themselves, but out of a sense of ethics born of a sense of collective belonging and interdependence.

And though predictably capital has lobbied hard, used its influence and in general has done all it could as a class interest to reopen business, and to continue to have work done in very unsafe conditions, the majority around the world have made clear that they want workplaces and classrooms to be safe. In many cases, as in the mass refusal that has come to be known as the Great Resignation in the US and UK, millions of workers have stayed home, quit jobs, or refused to take new ones if they are not satisfied as to the conditions, including the public health ones. In other words, most people – even if hardly unaware that government can be repressive or unfair or corrupt – are aware of the two-sidedness of the state – that in this case it is at least to a great extent acting in the legitimate public interest of protecting public health and lives. People get angry at corruption, but stop at traffic lights. There is a difference. Where people aside from the anti-vax minority have made demands, these have been completely legitimate demands that if one’s workplace or small business must shut down directly as a government policy, that compensation be made to keep people’s livelihoods protected; that parents needing to work at home have their privacy protected from employers; that schools be made safe and opened whenever possible, and so on. These demands reflect the clear understanding that the crisis must not be used to expropriate or exploit their work and small businesses by capital, while accepting the legitimate side of state policy in the public interest. Such demands led to job and payroll guarantees in Denmark, the UK and elsewhere and the – even if minimalist – direct payments by the US government to citizens to provide some income, as well as rent and student debt moratoriums. Public pressure has led even to the Italian government’s distribution of small funds to certain categories of unprotected workers and self-employed people, and some job protections here. And in Italy and elsewhere demands were made on the EU to act as a legitimate public power and provide aid, materials for health care, and money to Eurozone countries that can’t produce their own currency, demanding in other words that it be more than a mere institutionalization of the power of finance capital.

What Agamben and others could usefully be doing instead is making clear the danger of the finally arriving EU funds to Italy being turned over primarily to the banks and large corporations and corrupt political organizations. The near-unanimous consensus among ruling class spokespeople is that former EU Central Bank President Mario Draghi, now Italy’s unelected prime minister is a genius, a wizard, the zeitgeist on a white horse. But his government seems determined to distribute the EU funds and most likely to the class forces that Draghi has represented all his professional life. Here indeed we have an example of the capitalist interests overriding, or seeking to override, the legitimate public functions of the state in a crisis. Draghi replaced a popular and elected government that, whatever its errors and failings had, under Giuseppe Conte, guided the country through the worst with palpable compassion and empathy, and with continual communication and responses to the public and press. the Draghi government has already lowered taxes on the very rich, and seems prepared to be the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole.” But even in this case, popular outrage was reflected in the decision of Italy’s parliament not to make Draghi the next President of the Republic, Italy’s head of state. To ignore popular struggles, to ignore the dialectics of society and state, will lead one into trouble every time. Agamben seems unconcerned with the real threats to democracy of technocratic governance in the interests of capital, on one side, and the rising and growing fascist threat – one that he is either knowingly or unwittingly feeding with his stance on Covid restrictions – on the other, and their mutual reinforcement. Instead, his attacks are on the legitimate role of the state in protecting public health and the ethical actions and legitimate class demands of the people. These latter are manifested most people abiding by the requirements of being vaccinated, and of having the “Green Pass” confirming one’s vaccination status as a requirement to be in public restaurants and on public transportation, and living with the requirements to wear masks and social distance. All while demanding that state policies meet economic needs arising from these restrictions, and not protect privileged sectors instead.

But Agamben should also, I believe, be seen in a wider context of a number of influential thinkers that sees the state as the main, indeed usually the only threat to liberty and human well-being, to the exclusion of the dynamics of capitalism, or at least playing down the role of the latter. Each of these has a one-sided view of the state, based either loosely, or closely, either unconsciously and indirectly or consciously and directly on the ahistorical Nietzschean will to power, or on a one-sided view of the state as entirely and exclusively capitalist in form and content. This field stretches from Foucault’s biopolitics with its concern about the state being ever more involved in questions of health care, science, housing, employment and livelihoods with the rise of the welfare states, a view that deeply informs Agamben’s, to John Holloway’s call to avoid the state at all costs as an entirely capitalist enterprise, and to change society exclusively by not taking power, to Guattari and Deleuze’s writings that ignore the longest part of human history of hunters and gatherers and egalitarian societies, but then go on to theorize state power ahistorically on the basis of the questionable category “nomadism”, to Raul Zibechi’s writings on Latin American social movements, James Scott’s anthropology of grain-based societies, and Graeber and Wengrow’s recent bestseller. All see the state as only bad. A default anarchism has taken hold of a considerable part of the intellectual left in recent years and while we must gain what we can from the insights that these present us with, we need to see that such one-sidedness, such lack of dialectic, can only lead one to grave errors. Agamben has not gone mad recently, his work was always flawed, and he is not alone. We need better theoretical ways of understanding what is happening, and the ways things are; ones that see the all-sidedness of crises, struggles, states, societies, institutions and ideas, that can grasp what Marx called “the ensemble of social relations”. We can only hope that those who have instead decided to guide themselves by such deeply wrong ideas about ethics, public health and public authority, democracy and freedom, will not lose their lives in the process to this still dangerous and terrible pandemic is indeed very real, nor cost the lives of others.

Addendum: As I was writing this article, the crisis in Canada grew, such that, on Saturday February 6, 2022, the mayor of the capital city of Ottawa declared a state of emergency, in response to a blockade and mass occupation of the city’s streets by mostly self-employed truckers and right wing, including openly neo-Nazi militants, protesting requirements that truckers entering the country from the United States, where Covid remains rampant, and other public health measures, including mask wearing. The protesters have been threatening and harassing neighborhood residents, entering shops maskless en masse, forcing many to remain shut and essentially keeping a large part of the population of the nation’s capital hostages, shut up in their homes fearing for their safety. The protests have spread to Quebec City and Toronto. For Agamben, the danger is the declaration of a state of emergency. In reality, the danger, to the health and physical safety of the people living in these cities, and to Canadian democracy and the freedoms enjoyed by Canada’s people, is to the very forces Agamben now justifies openly, and with whom his analysis was always in danger of justifying: the fascists threat of a few thousand aggressive and violent activists who demand a right to put the lives of others in danger, the right to have no concern for the lives and safety of others, and who refuse even the most innocuous limits on their personal license and activities, regardless of the consequences for other people or for society. Just as in the time of Lincoln and the US Civil War, a state of emergency is the recognition of reality: a genuine threat to democratic government that needs to be addressed by organized self-defense of society by society, a concept lacking in Agamben, and most of the other thinkers criticized above.

The people of Canada, or anywhere else, we, have a right to resist this will to power by a fascist minority, through collective struggle, through the use of law and institutions, through self-organization, and yes, if necessary through the use of force organized collectively in democratic states and public authorities in defense of democracy and of our collective lives and well-being. That is no state of exception, that is legitimate popular government. And if we need to go beyond it to an even more democratic, more egalitarian system, we will do so while dialectically maintaining the good in what we have already won through centuries of popular struggle, or not at all.

[1] Available through the following sites:

http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf ; https://www.academia.edu/29698373/Nothing_Exceptional_Against_Agamben .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Colatrella is the author of the recent book, Looking Over the Abyss: The US and Europe Beyond Capitalism, Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ 2021.

Wagging the dog? America and the UK respond to the crisis in Ukraine

Derek Royden

February 18, 2022

SOURCENationofChange

Although it existed before and had a somewhat different meaning, the term ‘wag the dog’ to describe the use of or threat of the use of military force in other countries to distract from domestic troubles was popularized as part of the discourse around politics, especially in the United States, in the late summer of 1998.

Within days of the release of the film version of a popular book by this name that portrayed a U.S. president threatening a war with Albania to distract form a sex scandal at home, it was reported that the then real president, Bill Clinton, had had an affair with an 21 year old intern in the White House and had lied to investigators about it.

Just 3 days after Clinton’s taped testimony before a grand jury, the then president seemed to pull a real world version of what happened in the book and the film when he ordered strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan that he claimed would punish Osama Bin Laden and his support network for attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa earlier that month.

The strike on Sudan destroyed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant, which the U.S. government said had financial ties to the Al Qaeda leader and was producing chemical weapons. It turned out that the plant mostly produced antibiotics, had no Bin Laden connection and that innocent lives would be lost as a result of the bombing beyond the 12 who were killed when the facility was leveled, a real world consequence of ‘wagging the dog’ that wasn’t contemplated in the fictional versions that preceded it.

But Clinton wasn’t done with lying and using force in other countries to distract from his domestic troubles. Just prior to the start of impeachment proceedings, he ordered the bombing of various sites in Iraq that his administration claimed were involved in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. The next president, George W. Bush would use this same pretext to illegally invade that country, where no WMD were found.

As if to demonstrate his cynicism, Clinton called off the strikes as soon as the impeachment vote had taken place.

One major difference between the Clintonian ‘wagging of the dog’ and what seems lke a current version involving the the leaders of the UK and U.S., who, along with allies like Canada have created a panic about Russian saber rattling in regards to Ukraine, is the relative danger represented by the possible reactions of the countries targeted then, who couldn’t retaliate, and the much more dangerous brinkmanship that the world is watching as these NATO allies engage in a war of words with the Russian Federation. In economic terms the country may be a shadow of its former self but it still has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Although President Biden has ample reason for a ‘rally around the flag’ moment considering his domestic failures and low numbers in terms of polling, of the two leaders, the one with the most to gain by creating the illusion of competent crisis leadership is surely Boris Johnson, who has been continuously embarrassed in recent weeks by parties held at his residence and workplace during the Covid 19 crisis that were never supposed to have happened under the rules put in place by his own government.

Johnson, or ‘Bojo’ as he is often called with a mixture of affection and derision by supporters and foes alike, has long cultivated an image as something of a lovable rogue. The former London mayor never really came across as a rightwing populist, a role fulfilled by UKIP leader Nigel Farage prior to the political opportunity offered by the surprising result of the Brexit referendum in 2016 that would take the country out of the European Union and make the country even more reliant on its ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

The racheting up of tensions by these two powers has provoked worried responses and diplomatic overtures from allies France and Germany, who have their own political and economic reasons to end the war of words.

It was reported on Tuesday, that the Russian Federation would be removing some troops from the border in a move that at least temporarily de-escalated tensions. As we might expect, despite some skepticism on the part of some in Ukraine like its Defense Minister, Dmytro Kuleba and Boris Johnson who accused the Russian government of sending “mixed signals”, both sides declared victory.

For its part, Russia’s government wants assurances that Ukraine, whose history is entwined, often tragically, with its own, and which has a large Russian speaking minority in two administrative regions in the country’s east, which they collectively call Donbas and which has been the site of a low level insurgency since the Spring of 2014, will remain neutral and not become a NATO member or join the EU.

Unlike many commentators on the right (and some who have the nerve to call themselves ‘leftists’ or ‘anti-imperialists’) who seem to admire President Putin’s populist nationalist style, I’ve never been comfortable making excuses for him and the United Russia Party that is his main basis of support. Besides brutal policies attacking already vulnerable LGBTQ+ communities in the Russian Federation up until the present day, shortly after former President Clinton launched his missiles, Putin’s government began committing war crimes in Chechnya that that country has yet to recover from.

It’s interesting that the right of Chechens to self determination was not considered an issue at the turn of the century but these same rights for Georgia and Ukraine have been widely defended in the Western press in the years since.

It’s also true that war games in Belarus and in the Azov and Black Seas are provocative, but no more so than those NATO routinely holds on its borders are from the Kremlin’s point of view. Militarism is always inexcusable regardless of the country or countries engaged in it, more so when it’s used as a distraction from domestic problems.

Rather than acting as the unbiased watchdogs they portray themselves as, the major English speaking periodicals and other media like the BBC and CNN have only stoked the flames of conflict making claims, usually based on ‘anonymous official sources’ that an invasion was imminent, with some even claiming that the Russian president had told his forces to be ready for war by Wednesday, February 16th.

Despite this, on Thursday it was reported the U.S. president still fears an invasion could occur over “the next several days” and Russia expelled the second highest ranking U.S. diplomat in the country.

Likely the best way to understand the reaction of the U.S., UK and other English speaking countries to the latest ‘crisis’ in the Ukraine is that there is, as always, plenty of money to be made out of it, with multiple countries promising and sending arms to Ukraine, all in the hope of ensuring peace. On Tuesday, Joe Biden promised that no Americans will have to fight in Ukraine, nor does it seem likely that the UK will send combat troops there. Instead they and other NATO countries have promised arms, music to the ears of purveyors of death like B&E Systems, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

This is one of the things about wagging the dog, barring a cataclysmic conflict, a real if unlikely possibility in this case as opposed to most others, arms manufacturers and the politicians and think tanks they support always win.