Bigger is Not Always Better: Drivers and Implications of the Recent Agribusiness Megamergers

Jennifer Clapp

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Mergers & Acquisitions,

Food Policy,

Agriculture,

Agricultural Biotechnology,

Multinational Corporations

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Abstract: The global agrifood industry is undergoing profound upheaval, with a spate of mergers, acquisitions and deals that are consolidating the sector. The mergers announced in 2015 and 2016, for example -- including Dow and Dupont, ChemChina and Syngenta, and Bayer and Monsanto -- are poised to change the face of the agricultural inputs sector. This paper examines the political and economic dynamics surrounding these large transnational agribusiness megamergers and reflects on the broader implications of these deals for global environmental and food politics. The paper advances two arguments. First, it makes the case that the current wave of mergers is in some ways similar to past waves of consolidation in the sector, but also different in important ways. Past mergers in the sector were driven largely by technological innovation and integration along with strengthened intellectual property protection. Further technological innovation and integration remains important for today’s mergers, but it is not the only driver. The current mergers are also deeply shaped by increased financialization in the agrifood sector that has prioritized investor demands for profits in ways that encourage corporate consolidation. Second, the paper argues that past episodes of consolidation in the sector had important implications for questions of economic fairness, farmer autonomy, environmental sustainability and political power, and that the proposed mergers are likely to result in even more pronounced effects on these fronts. Yet while these concerns are wide-ranging, the evaluation measures used by regulatory bodies to assess the impacts of the mergers only partially capture the ways in which they affect economic fairness, and say little on questions of environmental impact, farmer autonomy, and power inequities.

https://www.academia.edu/34400144/Bigger_is_Not_Always_Better_Drivers_and_Implications_of_the_Recent_Agribusiness_Megamergers?pls=RWLSxnqyad

Monsanto: Origins of an Agribusiness Behemoth

Brian Tokar

2019, The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides, edited by Mitchel Cohen

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Today’s Monsanto (now part of Bayer) is a far more specialized operation than it was in the 1990s. While the Monsanto of the early 2000s to 2010s focused almost entirely on biotechnology, seeds, and a limited range of agrochemicals, especially its Roundup brand herbicides, it was once a broadly diversified chemical manufacturer, one of only four to be listed among the top ten U.S. chemical companies in every decade from the 1940s - 1990s. To better understand the company’s emergence as the leading developer and promoter of genetically manipulated agriculture and Roundup herbicides, it is important to first examine its history.

https://www.academia.edu/38057991/Monsanto_Origins_of_an_Agribusiness_Behemoth

'Reckoning for Roundup Rolls On': Ninth Circuit Court Upholds Verdict in Case Against Monsanto

Edwin Hardeman was awarded $25 million in his case which showed Monsanto was responsible for his cancer diagnosis after decades of using Roundup.

by Julia Conley, staff writer

Published on Friday, May 14, 2021
by Common Dreams



A customer shops for Roundup weed killer in San Rafael, California, on July, 9, 2018. (Photo: Josh Edelson//AFP via Getty Images)


"The reckoning for Roundup rolls on."

So said George Kimbrell, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, on Friday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco affirmed a lower court ruling against Monsanto (since acquired by Bayer) which found the chemical giant responsible for the cancer suffered by users of its signature herbicide Roundup.

The 9th Circuit rejected an appeal by Bayer in Hardeman vs. Monsanto, in which Edwin Hardeman accused the company of failing to disclose the dangers glyphosate poses to human health. Hardeman was awarded $80 million in the case, which was later reduced to $25 million.

"Today's appeals court ruling is another reminder the Biden administration should act and revoke the registration of glyphosate immediately."
—George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety

Hardeman was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2015 after two decades of using Roundup as an herbicide on his 56-acre property. His case was one of several high-profile lawsuits against Monsanto over its use of glyphosate. The company agreed to pay $10.9 billion to a total of about 125,000 people last year, all of whom alleged the use of Roundup was to blame for their cancer diagnoses.

The Environmental Protection Agency backed Bayer in its latest appeal in Hardeman's case, in which the company claimed the jury verdict should be nullified because states don't have the authority to deviate from federal regulations for herbicides.

The three-judge panel ruled that California's failure-to-warn law was consistent with the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).

"FIFRA did not impliedly preempt Hardeman's state failure-to-warn claims," the court said.


Bayer also claimed that the World Health Organization's classification of glyphosate as a carcinogen should not have been entered into the court record as evidence. The judges ruled that "that the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting" the evidence.

The Center for Food Safety, which filed an amicus brief in support of Hardeman last year, called the ruling a major victory "for all those who care about protecting human health and the environment and holding corporations accountable for the harm they cause."

Kimbrell said the group was "gratified that the Ninth Circuit unanimously rejected Monsanto's arguments that Mr. Hardeman and thousands of others harmed by their products are prohibited by federal law from suing to redress their injuries. The Court also properly upheld the reliance on the World Health Organization's classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen."

Despite international experts' warnings about glyphosate and decisions by policymakers in Austria, Germany, and other countries to phase out or ban the chemical, the EPA still claims that glyphosate is "unlikely to be a human carcinogen."

"Center for Food Safety is currently challenging the federal approval of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as unlawful for a number of reasons—including cancer risks to farmers and farmworkers from exposure," said Kimbrell. "Today's appeals court ruling is another reminder the Biden administration should act and revoke the registration of glyphosate immediately."

Who Funds the Climate Crisis?

For fossil fuel companies, what drives their profit is ownership of carbon in the ground. That's why they have spent billions of dollars stoking the climate denial industry and fighting regulations.

by Cynthia Kaufman
Published on Friday, May 14, 2021
by Common Dreams



A protester holds a banner at the rally outside JP Morgan Headquarters in Manhattan, New York. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)


First the good news: The technology needed for a carbon-free economy in every country in the world already exists. It is affordable, most of it will make our lives better, and making that transition rapidly would cost less than cleaning up the disasters anticipated by inaction on climate.

Now the not so good news: To achieve the very ambitious goals scientists have put forth to keep the planet habitable, such as reducing emissions and carbon capture, we need to act quickly; because the human and social costs to those living in the path of destruction, a disproportionate number of whom are low-income people of color, is incalculable.

Who is slowing the transition to a just and sustainable society?

There are many businesses still profiting off antiquated and destructive technology; many politicians who are still funded by them; and many in the world of finance who still see them as business partners.

Fossil fuel companies, like all corporations, are designed for generating profit. As society changes to require sustainable practices, many companies will be able to shift their business models to achieve the triple bottom line of profit, people, and planet. But for fossil fuel companies, what drives their profit is ownership of carbon in the ground. That’s why they have spent billions of dollars stoking the climate denial industry and fighting regulations.

We are not all on the same side in the fight for a sustainable future. There are many businesses still profiting off antiquated and destructive technology; many politicians who are still funded by them; and many in the world of finance who still see them as business partners. A company like Enbridge’s core business is building fossil fuel infrastructure. They are not going to shift to a green business model.

Stop the Money Pipeline


While the fossil fuel companies themselves cannot be counted on to become champions of the transition to a sustainable economy, the world of finance can change and remain profitable. And it is this group of actors that we need to pressure. Stop the Money Pipeline shares information on those funders and fights to expose their work. The key funders of Enbridge’s Line 3—a 1,097-mile crude oil pipeline extending from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin—are Liberty Mutual, Blackrock, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan chase. They are direct funders and insurers of the pipeline. If they withdrew their support the project would be stopped.

Less direct, but equally important in propping up the fossil fuel industry are the pension funds, such as California’s CalPERS and CalSTRS. They are among the largest investment funds in the world, and as public entities they should be acting in the public interest. These investors give companies like Enbridge a social license by investing in them.

Institutional investors and banks are not likely to stop funding the fossil fuel industry until we pressure them to do so. Earlier this year activists succeeded in getting the $246 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund to begin divesting from fossil fuels. Fossil Free California has been working for seven years to get CalPERS and CalSTRS to divest. It has been a strange fight, since the funds have already lost billions of dollars in value by staying in what is clearly a dying sector of the economy and Governor Newsome has asked them to use their investment strategies to speed the transition to a sustainable economy.

As the major fossil fuel companies are beginning to lose value, some investors are moving away from them. But passive funds still include them in their indexes. And fossil fuel companies are seen as legitimate businesses operating according to community norms. Big pension funds such as CalPERS and CalSTRS are holding onto passive funds arguing that they can help the fossil fuel industry to become better social actors. Enbridge and Exxon-Mobil might be heading for the precipice, but the banks and pension funds are the ones who fill their gas tanks.

Our role in the fight

For years the climate fight was seen by many as a matter of consumers voting with their dollars to shift how society functions. The concept of the personal carbon footprint was popularized in a 2005 British Petroleum campaign and encouraged people to look at individual consumers as the cause of the climate crisis. We need to come out of the fog of individualistic thinking and get clear about who is slowing us from making the transition from fossil fuels as quickly as we need to. And we need to take away the social license of the fossil fuel companies as quickly as we can. The way to do that is by focusing on their funders.

Scientists predict we have until 2030 for human society to make massive shifts in how we use energy that would allow the world can remain habitable. The present fight against the expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 gas pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline is a test of grassroots mobilization. Right now, indigenous leaders, water protectors, youth climate activists, and people who live in the vast areas likely to be destroyed by spills and leaks from the pipelines, are engaged in a big fight to stop the expansion.

For those of us living in the rest of the country, we can support those activists by taking away the social license of the funders and insurers of those projects to make it impossible for them to go forward. By moving investments to climate-safe pension funds, pressuring J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest funder of the fossil fuel industry and Blackrock, the world’s largest investor in the fossil fuel industry to divest, we can help stop the pipeline of money that is fueling the climate crisis before it’s too late.



Cynthia Kaufman is the author of "The Sea is Rising and So Are We", "Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World" (2020), "Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope" (2012), and "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change" (2016). She is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College. She blogs at cynthiakaufman.wordpress.com.

Canada’s Refusal to Waive Intellectual Property Rights on COVID-19 Vaccines Should Be a Crime Against Humanity

The COVID-19 vaccine production process fails its own capitalist sniff test.

by Shree Paradkar

Published on Sunday, May 16, 2021
by Toronto Star


Protesters picket outside Johnson & Johnson Offices during the Global Day Of Action For A People's Vaccine on March 11, 2021 in Cape Town, South Africa. The group demanded that governments suspend patent rules at the World Trade Organization on COVID-19 vaccines. (Photo: Brenton Geach/Getty Images)

The U.S. surprised the world last week by throwing its weight behind waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines. Under pressure to respond similarly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “I can assure you Canada is not interfering or blocking. Canada is very much working to find a solution.”

This is typical non-confrontational Canadian prevarication. “Not blocking” in this case still functions as a block.

Callous capitalism dictates that we get what we pay for. Ergo, the rich get more, the poor … bring their suffering on themselves. The proposal to waive certain patents on vaccines and medicines was brought forward in October by South Africa and India, well before any vaccines had been approved to prevent COVID-19. It has the support of some 100 nations, but the World Trade Organization works by “consensus,” meaning every one of its 164 members has to agree to the proposal. If you’re ever looking for the quintessential definition of structural discrimination, this is it. Create a coalition in the name of progress, but build in foundational structural barriers to equal access.

All this is happening against the backdrop of rich nations over-ordering vaccines, hoarding them, while blocking badly hit poor nations from accessing them.

By some counts, Canada has ordered enough vaccines to inoculate our population four times over. Meanwhile, where the virus feasts on humans, it continues to mutate dangerously making life unsafe for all — and exposing our myopic decision-making in the bargain.

So when Trudeau says he wants Canada to play mediator, to bring about a balance between protecting companies and improving vaccine access to poorer countries, he’s talking about a balance between profit and life. “Our” profit, “their” lives.

Callous capitalism dictates that we get what we pay for. Ergo, the rich get more, the poor … bring their suffering on themselves.

Except, the pharmaceutical companies claiming ownership to the recipes to the vaccines didn’t even bring these products to the market with their own funds. The COVID-19 vaccine production process fails its own capitalist sniff test.

As intellectual property rights expert Achal Prabhala outlines on The Dig podcast, the U.S. and other rich nations gave companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca billions of dollars — billions — in no-strings-attached grants to do the research, meaning no risk to the companies if they failed. Then they paid the companies billions of dollars — billions — in preorders so the companies were guaranteed buyers even before coming into the market. Now, they enjoy a global monopoly — largely funded by taxpayer labor.

As a result, poorer countries might not get vaccinated until 2023, according to some estimates.

We’ve seen this circus before with the same criminal consequences.


In 1996, antiviral therapy for HIV/AIDS was developed but was inaccessible to about 95 percent of the world’s people living with HIV, according to The Lancet.

That’s because one year prior, the creation of the World Trade Organization allowed companies to turn what were domestic patents into global ones. Nongeneric drugs cost about $10,000 a year at the turn of the century and were well out of the reach of many people. Calls for affordable generic antiretroviral drugs met by threats and lawsuits from pharmaceutical corporations. It took years to battle monopoly rights and finally make therapy affordable.

Meanwhile, people simply died.

In the case of smallpox, another deadly disease eradicated from the West but ravaging the developing world, it took a 1965 pledge by then U.S. President Lyndon Johnson to fund a program to wipe the disease off the Earth.

What about COVAX, the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access program, that is supposed to offer equitable access to vaccines? The U.S. and G7 nations committed to vaccinating at least 20 percent of developing countries by the end of 2021, but herd immunity requires 70 to 85 percent of the people to be vaccinated.

COVAX is so underfunded the vaccines don’t even reach front-line workers in poor countries. It has also been undermined by rich nations that jumped to the front of the queue by striking their own bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies.

Opposition to the patent waiver has come with healthy doses of paternalism: Is this really the answer to the problem? Nations outside the U.S. and Europe don’t have the know-how to produce it. The waiver process is so long, it’s not worth it. And so it goes.

Look deeper and it gets messier.

The Indian government halted all exports of vaccines to combat its own deadly surge, leaving 91 countries depending on it in the lurch. “This colossal mess was entirely predictable, and could have been avoided at every turn,” Prabhala and pharmaceutical lawyer Leena Menghaney wrote in The Guardian. If only rich nations had nipped vaccine monopolies in the bud, they say.

Meanwhile, thousands die of this disease, daily. The patents remain in place. Canada is still “considering” supporting the waiver.

Shree Paradkar, a Toronto Star race and gender columnist, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. Shree has been a journalist in Bangalore, Mumbai, Singapore, and Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

Report Reveals Major Corporations Are Funding Lawmakers Behind Anti-Democracy Bills

"It is now more urgent than ever to build a just transition away from fossil fuels and fight off attacks against protest and our freedom to vote, so that we can have a planet our communities can thrive on."

by Brett Wilkins, staff writer

Published on Monday, May 10, 2021

by Common Dreams

A participant holds a sign at a march celebrating the defeat of President Donald Trump in Manhattan on November 7, 2020. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Numerous corporations have funded the political action committees of state lawmakers backing the recent spate of anti-voter and anti-protest bills, even as many of the companies have spoken out in defense of voting rights and democracy, a report published Monday by Greenpeace USA revealed

"Even though a growing number of companies have spoken out in defense of democracy and voting rights, many of these same companies contributed to legislators sponsoring anti-voter or anti-protest bills during their most recent election campaigns."
—Greenpeace report

The report (pdf)—entitled Dollars vs. Democracy: Companies and the Attack on Voting Rights and Peaceful Protest—says that 44 state lawmakers sponsored at least one anti-protest bill and one anti-voter bill in the past year. It also reveals that 53 of the 100 top corporate donors to lawmakers sponsoring anti-voter bills also rank among the top 100 contributors to anti-protest measures.

According to the report, the top 10 corporations that have invested the most money in lobbying for anti-protest bills since 2017 are all fossil fuel companies.

The 10 companies that have contributed the most to state lawmakers sponsoring both anti-voter and anti-protest bills are: AT&T, Dominion Energy, Zurich North America and its subsidiaries, Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries, UnitedHealth Group, Mednax Services, Charter Communications, State Farm Insurance and its subsidiaries, Phillip Morris USA, and Vistra Energy (FKA Energy Future Holdings) and its subsidiaries.

"Even though a growing number of companies have spoken out in defense of democracy and voting rights, many of these same companies contributed to legislators sponsoring anti-voter or anti-protest bills during their most recent election campaigns," the report notes.

It states:


Of the 100 companies who endorsed the April 14 "We Stand for Democracy" statement opposing "any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot," 12 contributed to the sponsors of 43 anti-voter bills analyzed.

Five of the 10 companies that donated most to sponsors of state anti-voter legislation also rank among the top 10 corporate donors to sponsors of anti-protest bills. Similarly, in the wake of the white supremacist attack on the Capitol, at least 130 companies "paused" political action committee (PAC) contributions to members of the "insurrection caucus." But at least 47 of these companies contributed to the sponsors of anti-voter legislation introduced since the January 6th insurrection.

Additionally, the report says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the For the People Act—a sweeping plan to expand voting rights, rein in dark money, and strengthen federal ethics rules passed by the House of Representatives in March—even though many individual chamber members have raised concerns about the types of attacks on democracy that the bill aims to address.

Executives from Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, and United Airlines who have voiced opposition to state-level anti-democracy legislation currently serve on the chamber's board of directors, according to the publication.


BREAKING
We just released a report on the corporations funding the elections of extremist politicians behind the bills attacking our freedom to vote and our right to protest https://t.co/wfxhasMhpg
— Greenpeace USA (@greenpeaceusa) May 10, 2021


The report notes that anti-protest bills target communities of color and "are a direct response to Black Lives Matter and other BIPOC-led movements, laying bare their racist intent."

Folabi Olagbaju, director of democracy campaigns at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement that "a healthy democracy is a precondition for a healthy environment. When everyone's vote counts and when everyone's constitutionally guaranteed right to peacefully protest is protected, our government becomes more accountable and capable of meeting the demand for racial justice and enacting solutions to the rapidly accelerating climate crisis."

"We hope this report sheds light on who is behind the attack on our democracy and right to protest, and that it will push corporations to take a stand for strong national standards for voting rights and election reform, and quit supporting politicians who sponsor or vote for anti-voter and anti-protest legislation," Olagbaju continued. "It's time to ensure all of us have a say in key decisions that affect us all and our elections reflect the will of the people, not corporations."

"It is now more urgent than ever to build a just transition away from fossil fuels and fight off attacks against protest and our freedom to vote, so that we can have a planet our communities can thrive on," he added.

"Corporate platitudes are not enough—we must build a system that ensures our elected leaders listen to every American. Our time is now: Democracy cannot wait."
—Jana Morgan, Declaration for American Democracy

Jana Morgan, director of the Declaration for American Democracy coalition, said that "despite the promising news of corporations speaking out against anti-voter laws in states like Georgia, Greenpeace's latest report demonstrates that there's more to be done to make the promise of democracy real for us all."

"It's time to end the dominance of big corporations and big money in our politics, and ensure that our politicians are held accountable to the will of all Americans, and not just the wealthy and powerful," Morgan continued. "To do so, corporations and our political leaders must support passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. These transformative bills will ensure that politicians govern in the best interest of the people, and ensure the freedom to vote for all Americans."

"Corporate platitudes are not enough—we must build a system that ensures our elected leaders listen to every American," she added. "Our time is now: Democracy cannot wait."

The new Greenpeace report follows a Sunday Insider article revealing that several companies have broken their vows to stop contributing to the PACs of U.S. lawmakers who supported the so-called "Big Lie" that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Offenders include Cigna, JetBlue, Koch Industries, and Toyota.

After the January 6 Capitol siege, several companies vowed to stop PAC donations to lawmakers who voted against Biden’s certification.

Others made vaguer statements — and since have restarted donations.https://t.co/BRT6ZQkGWG pic.twitter.com/q0Ww8iAmpm
— Insider (@thisisinsider) May 9, 2021

Additionally, corporate PACs are indirectly funding some of the 147 U.S. lawmakers who voted against certifying President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory by donating to congressional committees including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. AT&T, Cigna, Intel, and Pfizer have all donated thousands of dollars to such committees, according to Insider.

Michael Harrington

by Tom Gallagher

Published on Saturday, May 15, 2021
by Common Dreams

Michael Harrington, dust jacket photo from Twilight of Capitalism (1977)

A talk given to the San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America.

During the dark ages of American socialism, well before the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, a friend of mine used to say that he thought our role as American socialists was similar to that of the medieval Irish monks who would spend their days transcribing ancient manuscripts that would be largely ignored in their day but available to hoped-for future readers. His notion was that even if what we socialists were saying wasn’t exactly catching fire now, we were at the least preserving the idea for a hoped-for more enlightened future. And so, if you will accept the metaphor for the moment, if we were to ask who might be considered the abbot of those imagined modern-day socialist preservationist monks, a logical choice might be Michael Harrington.

And indeed, probably not coincidentally, one of Harrington’s earliest political affiliations – in 1951, when he was 23 – was with the Catholic Worker, an organization that has run hospitality houses serving meals to the down and out since 1933. The organization, by the way, continues in 187 locations today, including two each in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland.

But as for Harrington, he soon shifted his efforts permanently to organizations that viewed themselves as part of an American socialist tradition dating back to Eugene Debs. The young Harrington, like many a young socialist before and after him, cobbled together a living. He was one of the original writers for the Village Voice, and as an outgrowth of an article he wrote for the magazine Commentary, in 1962 he published The Other America, a book dispelling the illusion that the title of another prominent book of the day, The Affluent Society, actually described the entire nation. If there was one single book that became associated with the War on Poverty programs passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration,The Other America was the one, and Harrington eventually parlayed the notoriety that came with the book into becoming virtually the only socialist of that Cold War era with access to national media – as a socialist.

In 1968, he became something of a figurehead president of the Socialist Party which he then quit in 1972. By that point, the Socialist Party was no longer running its own presidential candidates, and the rift came about because the bulk of the leadership of the party did not support the anti-Vietnam War presidential candidacy of George McGovern against Richard Nixon. (Something that was also true of the leadership of the AFL-CIO.)

But by now, what was loosely described as a New Left had sprung up in America. Based primarily in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and centered in the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this New Left found little to love in either of the two main claimants to the American socialist tradition – the Communist Party that had steadfastly defended the Soviet Union right through the Stalin years, or the Socialist Party, whose anti-Communism now extended to supporting the Vietnam War. (They had supported the Korean War, too, but no one much paid attention to that one – then or now.)

Harrington was about half a generation older than the leadership of the New Left and got off on the wrong foot in his relations with them by pressing them to more forthrightly declare their lack of sympathy with the Soviet Union. He would later come to regard his inability to establish better relations with the New Left as the greatest failure of his political life. As a result, the new Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) that emerged from the Socialist Party split in 1973 was never, properly speaking, a New Left organization.

What was distinctive about the new socialist organization was that it was not a political party. The highpoint of American socialist presidential candidacies had occurred back in 1912, which also was – and remains – the only presidential election since 1852 when the top two spots were not taken by a Democrat and a Republican. So the thinking was that it was probably time to try a different tack and take the fight inside – an approach that would not actually be fully vindicated for another forty years – in the 2016 campaign.


DSOC and DSA were never very large in Harrington’s day – maybe 10,000 at the most. But members included two Congressional Representatives, Ron Dellums of Berkeley and Major Owens of Brooklyn. These two self-identified socialists actually matched the highest number the Socialist Party ever had in the House – and was not exceeded until this current congressional term. The organization’s members also at one point or another included the mayor of New York City, the borough president of Manhattan, a smattering of state legislators, and a variety of local officials. (All of these numbers have also been exceeded by the current organization).

Harrington chaired DSOC – and later DSA, after its formation in 1982 – until his death in 1989. Along the way, he more or less inherited the mantle of Mr. Socialist from Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader and six-time presidential candidate who had followed Debs. In a memoir, Harrington once mused of perhaps being remembered in the future as a “lesser Norman Thomas.”

While it was his authorship of The Other America that first brought him the invites for such as writing columns for the New York Times or commenting on National Public Radio, it was what he had to say that got him invited back. Some may have thought the democratic portion of DSOC and DSA’s name was redundant in a socialist organization because, after all, socialism was already supposed to be a higher form of democracy that extended the public’s control past the government and into the economy. But the organizations’ founders considered it a necessity to reassert socialism’s commitment to democratic principles, due to the obviously undemocratic nature of various governments that claimed that what they were building was socialism.

Harrington wrote 16 books, and in his speaking and writing continually reflected that democratic commitment – both substantively and rhetorically. With the civil rights movement’s struggle for voting rights of paramount importance to so many – as it is again today – Harrington, for instance, would never make dismissive references to mere “bourgeois democracy,” as some others on the left might. He called socialism “the left-wing of the possible.” While operating and thinking very much in the tradition of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, he also thought that with his talk of the eventual “withering away of the state,” Marx himself arguably qualified as the last of the utopians.

Harrington believed that just as capitalism had been built within the world of feudalism, we had to build socialism within the capitalist world we have inherited. His was an ongoing effort to convince Americans that the socialist ideal was not some exotic, dangerous fantasy that would be foisted upon them. He always avoided archaic phraseology such as “smashing the bourgeois state” or establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead, he relentlessly made the case that ultimately only a socialist approach could deal with the ever-increasing complexity of the modern world – in a democratic fashion.

Harrington thought that (and I’m quoting here) “the vocation of a radical ... is to walk a perilous tightrope ... to be true to the socialist vision of a new society ... constantly develop and extend its content ... and ... bring” it “into contact with actual movements fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread.”

Whether he is ultimately remembered as a “lesser Norman Thomas,” or something else, what we do know is that when Bernie Sanders put democratic socialism into play in the national discussion, there was an organization already in place that made sense to many of the newly motivated and newly converted socialists. And that fact is in no small part due to the lifelong efforts of Michael Harrington.

Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco. He can be reached at TGTGTGTGTG@aol.com HE STILL USES AOLOL

Why Michael Harrington Matters

BY HAROLD MEYERSON

JACOBIN 07, 2019

In a time when America and the world were moving rightwards, Michael Harrington kept the socialist flame burning.

As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — newly grown to more than sixty thousand members — prepare to meet in Atlanta this weekend, it will have been exactly thirty years since the death of the organization’s founder.

Michael Harrington, who kept the idea and promise of democratic socialism alive and relevant in a time when the world was moving to the right, died of esophageal cancer on July 31, 1989. He’d spent his final months writing the last of his sixteen books — an account of the global corporate autocracy he feared would dominate the twenty-first century, and a scholarly, nuanced, yet impassioned case for the socialism he saw as the only alternative to capitalism’s brave new repressive world.

When Harrington founded DSA’s predecessor, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), in 1973, it was not a propitious moment for socialism. The New Left had shattered into sects, the New Deal coalition had irreparably broken apart, the labor movement was losing both members and direction, and Soviet communism, however sclerotic, still loomed large enough to constitute most Americans’ idea of socialism.

Perhaps most damaging to socialist prospects, however, was the fact that the economic legacy of the New Deal — the broadly shared prosperity created by decades of union density, progressive taxation, social benefits, and public investment — was just then peaking. Americans’ median incomes hit an all-time high in the year of DSOC’s birth, only to begin a plodding, tortuous descent.


Harrington would speak in those years of “a slow 1929” (a phrase he borrowed from a French economist), but slow 1929s had few of the radicalizing effects of fast ones. Unlike his great predecessors — Eugene Debs, who spoke for and to early-twentieth-century workers excluded from both prosperity and the polity, and Norman Thomas, whose Depression-era listeners needed little schooling in the bankruptcy of capitalism — Harrington made the case for socialism in a time when even many progressive activists saw that case as a matter of largely academic interest.

That was partly because they didn’t foresee what Harrington saw — that the social democracies of postwar Europe and the watered-down welfare state that had brought a modicum of economic equality to America were far from being permanent. He knew that they were the results of social struggles that could be overturned by capitalist power, and that that power was growing as our working-class coalitions stagnated and decayed. “This nation must go as far beyond Roosevelt as Roosevelt went beyond Hoover,” Harrington would say repeatedly during the 1970s and ’80s, “or it’s going back to Hoover.”

Even when progressives didn’t believe Harrington’s prophecies, many were wowed by the scope and depth of his vision. That’s not all that wowed them. Harrington was a more accomplished writer than either Debs or Thomas, but like them, he won most of his converts through the power of the spoken word.

Harrington delivered more than a hundred speeches a year, traveling to campuses, union halls, and rallies for social justice, invariably meeting both before and after with DSA members and prospective members over drinks. A Harrington speech was both a tour de force and a tour de horizon. He invariably made the case for the moral vision and practical advantages of democratic socialism, tailored to the causes and controversies of the moment, buttressed by scholarly consideration of social trends and statistics, strengthened by his habit of entertaining opposing arguments before dispatching them.

Harrington provided listeners with something that was none too easy to find elsewhere on either the liberal or socialist left: a sense of historic context, of how his listeners’ own activism fit into a larger pattern they might otherwise have trouble discerning, of where they stood, broadly speaking, in the flow of history. And he provided them — subtly — with one more thing: an overwhelming sense of the moral urgency that underlay his critique of capitalism.

Harrington was schooled in a culture of speaking that would be impossible to replicate today. He learned rigor and logic from the Jesuits he studied with as a schoolboy; rigor, irony, and modes of attack from the Shachtmanites (a socialist sect that looked to Trotsky as the model rhetorician) he joined when he left the Catholic Worker; and leavened these influences with his affinity for poetry, his vestigial Irish lilt and Midwestern twang, his Greenwich Village cosmopolitanism, his generosity of spirit, and his willingness to confess doubt. No one else could weave Marx, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Virgil, Proust, Willy Brandt, and Jimmy Hoffa into a talk and still sound like the boy — the brilliant boy — next door.

Underpinning it all was a deep moral intensity. Mike held out the prospect of neither certitude nor salvation in his talks, but there was always an unspoken subtext to his speeches: If this cause is as urgent as I’ve demonstrated, as plausible as I’ve shown, and so important that I’m devoting my life to it — why, then, so should you.

And probably more than any other factor, that’s how DSOC, and then DSA, grew.
Keeping the Socialist Flame Burning

Whether through the synoptic force of his talks and writing, his strategic sense, or his considerable charisma, Harrington played a double role on the American left — socialist leader and the programmatic and strategic convener of the broader left.

As early as 1964, the liberal journalist James Weschler wrote that Harrington was the person most likely to unite the fledgling New Left, the labor movement, the civil rights activists, and liberal middle-class reformers into a powerful new force. He was one of only three people over thirty, Tom Hayden wrote in those years, that the student left trusted. But it was right then, in the early sixties, that Harrington forfeited that trust.

In 1962, Harrington attended SDS’s Port Huron Conference as a kind of (slightly) elder counselor on matters strategic and ideological. He ended up attacking the SDSers for insufficient anticommunism, with an intensity that the Shachtmanites generally reserved for hard-line Stalinists and their dupes — terms that described nobody who’d come to Port Huron. Harrington soon came to deeply regret his outburst, which helped create the rift between New Left and Old that no one else was able to bridge throughout the sixties.

In founding DSOC, Harrington parted company with many of his old socialist comrades who’d grown to detest the New Left and the middle-class progressives who’d walked precincts for Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern. As Mike saw it, DSOC, and later DSA, offered an opportunity not only to begin again the rebuilding of American socialism, but also, in the process, to bring together the various progressive constituencies that Vietnam had ripped asunder.


To that end, DSOC began building a progressive coalition within the Democratic Party, under the aegis of Democratic Agenda, a loose organization pushing for federally guaranteed full employment — the sine qua non, Harrington argued, for progressive advances. With full employment, white workers, who’d been drifting toward George Wallace and Republicans, would feel less threatened by the extension of long overdue rights to minorities and women, by their ascent into more and better jobs, and by the just demands of environmentalists. (Harrington also argued that when it came to electoral politics, given the United States’ entrenchment in a two-party system, socialists would reach a much wider audience and more effectively promote socialism by working within the Democratic Party — an argument that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have since validated.)

Democratic Agenda became a rallying point for those unions opposed to the hard-line Cold War politics of George Meany’s AFL-CIO — chiefly, the United Auto Workers, AFSCME, the Machinists, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and various regions of SEIU. These were the unions where onetime New Leftists, occasionally through the intercession of DSOC, found jobs and, ultimately, careers. More broadly, Democratic Agenda became the political vehicle for Democrats opposed to the party’s drift to the right after George McGovern’s defeat, which intensified during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Under Harrington’ leadership, Democratic Agenda spearheaded the opposition to Jimmy Carter’s economic policies at the 1978 Democratic Midterm Convention in Memphis, where Arkansas’s young governor-elect, Bill Clinton, led the Carter forces and Harrington led the 40 percent of the delegates who opposed Carter and backed the Democratic Agenda platform of federally provided universal health care, full employment, and a shift away from fossil fuels. Democratic Agenda’s successes at Memphis so stunned the party establishment that the Democratic National Committee voted shortly thereafter to abolish midterm conventions.

As the United States descended from Carter to Reagan, Harrington continued his missionary work for democratic socialism, and increasingly warned about the rise and perils of globalized capitalism. He foresaw the possibility of a reactive nationalism among American workers, and endeavored to redirect their anger to the corporations that were shuttering American factories in search of cheap labor abroad.

I was present for a speech he gave to the 1983 convention of the UAW where he told delegates their enemies weren’t Mexican workers but the companies that pitted workers against each other. The delegates were largely silent at first, but as Harrington’s logic unfolded and his passion exploded, they raised the roof with their cheers.

Harrington died in 1989, just sixty-one years old. He did not succeed in building a mass socialist organization — that would require two decades more of capitalism’s erosion of democracy and economic security, the crash of 2008, and the elite recovery that followed. But no one who’d read Mike’s writing or heard him speak could be completely surprised at the instability and cruelty of capitalism, nor by the current democratic-socialist surge against the devastation that capitalism has wrought.

In a time when America and the world were moving rightwards, Harrington kept the socialist flame burning, and fitted the socialist idea to the global challenges of the twenty-first century.

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large of the American Prospect. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he was a leader of the Los Angeles local of DSOC and DSA, and served on the groups’ national executive committee.

 

Israel's slaughter in Gaza goes on. Mercilessly following Ben-Gurion's Zionist edict for " maximum territory, minimum Arabs,” at least 120 Palestinians have been killed - a pregnant woman, an older couple, an entire family, chicken farmers, bystanders, 31 children. As 100 Democrats urge the U.S. to hold the lies, drones, money for ethnic cleansing, the victims clamor, "We are bleeding here." From one small furious boy, "All you nations sleeping through our pain - children are dying."

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'Palestinian Lives Matter,' Declares Bernie Sanders in NYT Op-ed

"If the United States is going to be a credible voice on human rights on the global stage, we must uphold international standards of human rights consistently."

by Kenny Stancil, staff writer

Published on Friday, May 14, 2021
by Common Dreams

THERE ARE TWO BRANDS HERE THAT SHOULD BE SHOWING SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE AND DENOUNCING ISRAEL, PUMA AND NIKE

A Palestinian man carries the body of Ibrahim Al-Rantisi, a young child who was killed during an Israeli airstrike, before his burial in Rafah, located in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo: Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Offering further evidence that the rights of Palestinians are receiving more vocal support from U.S. Congress members than at any time in living memory, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday published an opinion piece in the New York Times demanding a more "even-handed" and morally consistent approach to Israel and Palestine that promotes peace.

"We must recognize that Palestinian rights matter. Palestinian lives matter."
—Sen. Bernie Sanders

Early in his essay, the Independent senator from Vermont posed a question: "Why do we only seem to take notice of the violence in Israel and Palestine when rockets are falling on Israel?"

Whenever this happens, Sanders noted, Democratic and Republican administrations declare, as President Joe Biden did earlier this week, that "Israel has the right to defend itself."

"Why is the question almost never asked: 'What are the rights of the Palestinian people?'" Sanders continued.

"Israel has the absolute right to live in peace and security," the lawmaker wrote, "but so do the Palestinians. I strongly believe that the United States has a major role to play in helping Israelis and Palestinians to build that future."


"Israel has the absolute right to live in peace and security, but so do the Palestinians. I strongly believe that the United States has a major role to play in helping Israelis and Palestinians to build that future,” writes @BernieSanders. https://t.co/vNABZWX5L4— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) May 14, 2021

"While Hamas firing rockets into Israeli communities is absolutely unacceptable," Sanders wrote, "today's conflict did not begin with those rockets."

The senator proceeded to highlight just some of the recent steps taken by the Israeli government and settlers to violently oppress Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

As examples, Sanders cited the forced expulsion of Palestinian families living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied West Bank as well as the ongoing blockade on Gaza that "makes life increasingly intolerable for Palestinians."

"In the Middle East, where we provide nearly $4 billion a year in aid to Israel, we can no longer be apologists for the right-wing Netanyahu government and its undemocratic and racist behavior."
—Sanders

In addition, Sanders denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to "marginalize and demonize Palestinian citizens of Israel, pursue settlement policies designed to foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution, and pass laws that entrench systemic inequality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel."

Sanders emphasized that "in the Middle East, where we provide nearly $4 billion a year in aid to Israel, we can no longer be apologists for the right-wing Netanyahu government and its undemocratic and racist behavior."

"We must change course and adopt an even-handed approach, one that upholds and strengthens international law regarding the protection of civilians, as well as existing U.S. law holding that the provision of U.S. military aid must not enable human rights abuses," wrote the senator.

"If the United States is going to be a credible voice on human rights on the global stage," he added, "we must uphold international standards of human rights consistently, even when it's politically difficult. We must recognize that Palestinian rights matter. Palestinian lives matter."

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Israeli Bombs Destroy Gaza Media Center; AP, Al-Jazeera, Others Taken Out

Israel destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera and other media outlets on Saturday, the latest step by Israel to silence reporting.

by

Common Dreams staff

Published on

Saturday, May 15, 2021

 

by

Common Dreams

Smoke billows as an Israeli air bomb is dropped on the Jala Tower during an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, on Saturday, May 15, 2021. Israel's air force targeted the 11-floor Jala Tower housing Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television and the Associated Press news agency among many other media outlets. (Photo by Mahmud Hams / AFP via Getty Images)

IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY AT THE TOP OF THE PICTURE YOU CAN SEE THE SECOND ISRAELI MISSLE COMING IN FOR A HIT

Israeli bombs destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera and other media outlets on Saturday, the latest step by Israel to silence reporting from Gaza amid its military bombardment. The  Israeli air raid totally demolished the structure.

The 11-storey residential building called Al-Jalaa has now collapsed. pic.twitter.com/VUFxxJCuW3

— Arwa Ibrahim (@arwaib) May 15, 2021

Live Al Jazeera video showed the 11-story al-Jalaa building, which also houses a number of residences and other offices, crashing to the ground after being bombed as dust and debris flew into the air.

The strike came just hours after another Israeli bombing of a densely populated refugee camp in Gaza City killed at least eight Palestinian children and two women from an extended family, in the deadliest single strike of Israel's current assault.

AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt has released the following statement:

We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza. They have long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there. We received a warning that the building would be hit.

We are seeking information from the Israeli government and are engaged with the U.S. State Department to try to learn more.

This is an incredibly disturbing development. We narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life. A dozen AP journalists and freelancers were inside the building and thankfully we were able to evacuate them in time.

The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.

That's why Israel bombed the AP's HQ. ⤵️ https://t.co/ACKnkTuvwZ

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) May 15, 2021

Al Jazeera’s Safwat al-Kahlout, reporting from Gaza City, said he had worked at the building for 11 years, and often did live reports from its roof.

“I have been covering lots of events from this building,” he said. “We have lots of good memories with our colleagues”.

It was not immediately made clear why the building was targeted by Israel.

“Now, no one can understand the feeling of the people whose homes have been destroyed by such kind of air attacks,” al-Kahlout said. “It’s really difficult to wake up one day and then you realize that your office is not there with all the career experiences, memories that you’ve had.”

Israel targeting media sources is so the world can't see Israel's war crimes led by the apartheid-in-chief Netanyahu.

It's so the world can't see the killing of babies, children and their parents.

It's so the world can't see Palestinians being massacred. https://t.co/AvDp3IuxUA

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) May 15, 2021

If journalistic solidarity means anything whatsoever, it should mean, at the bare minimum, unreservedly speaking out about Israel wiping out the building housing media organisations such as Associated Press and Al-Jazeera pic.twitter.com/0rBdIt7dhU

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) May 15, 2021

BREAKING: Israel airstrike flattens building housing Associated Press, Al Jazeera offices.

Latest: https://t.co/6uVfDHJhk0

Ashraf Abu Amrah / Reuters

Mohammed Salem / Reuters pic.twitter.com/O0S1GcSP6e

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 15, 2021

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