Iron fist of the US state comes down hard in Boston

The reaction to the Boston marathon attack reveals a dangerous degeneration at the very heart of the US state, from president Barack Obama downwards. In truth, if you want to know what martial law looks like in the 21st century, what happened in Boston says it all.

Immediately after the explosions, a gross state attack on rights and civil liberties began in the same city where the citizens took up a revolutionary struggle against British colonial rule in the late 18th century in the famous "Tea Party" revolt. 

Heavy armoured vehicles, soldiers, the FBI, local and state police turned the city into an armed fortress in the hunt for just two men. This was a blatant attempt by a nervous state machine to intimidate a whole city.

After some wavering, Obama pronounced the Boston marathon bombings as a “terror attack”. But the truth is, it is still not clear if the Chechen-American brothers involved were actually part of any wider network. The elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was politically motivated, but any connections with al-Qaeda have yet to be shown.

Whatever the case, the reaction by the American state and its agencies demonstrates its abject failure to protect its citizens on almost every front. The reaction to the bombings showed disarray within the security forces combined with massive infringements of the rights of Bostonians. The facts include:

• The FBI received warnings from Russian intelligence about the brothers and interviewed the family in 2011. Nothing followed. This “security lapse” appears serious enough to fuel rumours that the FBI or the CIA may have been using one of the brothers as a double agent.
• An “unbelievable over-reaction” in the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, leading to a state of siege being imposed by the Boston police. One million people were ordered to stay home and lock their doors, even after the police knew that Dzhokhar was a 19-year-old on the run. The Boston public transport and Amtrak rail services to New York were closed down.
• Despite the huge deployment of every SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team and paramilitary vehicle from surrounding New England states descending on Boston, it was a home owner who found the second bomber. “There was no cause and effect relationship between the state show of power and the apprehension of the suspect,” rights campaigner Tom Mullen, writing in the Washington Times has noted.
• The refusal to read the remaining suspect his legal rights (known in the US as Miranda) on grounds that he represents a “public danger” – even though he is critically ill and handcuffed to his hospital bed is being widely criticised by the American Civil Liberties Union, Slate website and many others rights organisations. As they point out, the “public danger” exception from the right to the fifth amendment (to keep silent) does not remotely apply to this situation.
• Adding to the crimes and misdemeanours of the state were the actions of some amateur detectives on social media sites like Reddit and 4chan which led to some media accusing perfectly innocent bystanders.

Mullen asks: “How did we get here? 238 years to the day, the inhabitants of the very same city started a war and seceded from their union over a mere infantry brigade attempting to disarm them. Now they cheer those who violate their rights much worse than the British ever did.” 

Well, events in Boston deepen a process under way for some time. The American revolution of 1776 has come full circle. Representative democracy invented by the Founding Fathers has given way to a corporatocracy, where economic and financial power have fused with politics. This realignment is, naturally, enforced by vicious state power at home and abroad. Time to renew the American Revolution.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Political system 'incapable' of solving crisis, warns leading Tory

The ConDem government’s plan to, in effect, engineer a state-financed, speculative housing boom in a bid to stimulate expansion, sums up the increasingly desperate state of both the economy and the political classes.

So much so that a leading Tory commentator suggests that yesterday’s Budget signals the absolute inability of representative democracy to tackle the crisis. A Coalition brought together to tackle the budget deficit and restore some balance to the economy, has patently failed to do either. Moreover, there are indications that the ConDems don’t really have a clue what to do next.

Chancellor George Osborne’s package of tax cuts for big business and state funding to underwrite house buying, combined with cheaper beer and a continuing pay freeze for public sector workers, was announced against a background of a worsening economy.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised its forecasts for growth down (yet again) and its projections for government debt up (yet again). Despite the savagery of Osborne’s austerity policies, the total of state debt is actually rising.

According to yesterday’s figures, it is scheduled to stand at approximately £1,400 billion in 2015, up from the £800 billion inherited from Labour in 2010 – a rise of £600 billion in just five years. Net debt is forecast to peak at 85.6% per cent of GDP in 2016-17. Back in June 2010, it was forecast to peak at 70.3% of GDP this year.  

The expansion of the economy that would bring the levels down through greater tax receipts exists only in the imagination. As the Financial Times gloomily commented: “Growth is, once again, jam tomorrow but never jam today.”

As to underwriting house buying through mortgage guarantees, the verdict is pretty unanimous. Builders and estate agents will get rich quickly, while house prices will soar and create another asset bubble ready to go pop when someone misses a payment.

Ian Williams, analyst at Peel Hunt, said: “As a policy for driving economic growth – limited. For solving the national shortage of housing – no impact. For wrecking long-term affordability of housing – tremendous.”  

With incentives to extract shale gas and various other concessions, the chancellor budget’s will accelerate climate change in pursuit of growth that simply won’t happen, in Britain or anywhere else. Today’s news about deepening downturn in leading eurozone economies confirms that.

With the Financial Times, describing the Budget as a “failure” which won’t make a difference, what will? The paper that speaks for significant sections of capitalism demands “greater radicalism”, without further elaboration.

As  resistance to austerity grows across in Britain and the rest of Europe, the ruling classes are faced with a serious problem. There are no rabbit-in-the-hat solutions, as the Budget shows. Political elites are struggling to cope, which brings us back to Peter Oborne of the Daily Telegraph.

An astute commentator, whose Triumph of the political class is worth reading, he now concludes that the political system is incapable of doing what’s necessary. He derides not only the chancellor but Labour for not having “the faintest idea how to confront the economic crisis” or appreciates of “the scale, let alone the nature, of the disaster we are now facing”. In other words, the political will to take the axe to public spending is not there (not that would actually do the trick, anyway). Oborne adds:

 “So we should all ponder whether there is an ugly truth lurking out there: is the British electoral system simply incapable of coping any more with serious economic crises?  Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that: 'The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money.' This observation is just as true of British representative democracy.

“The Coalition, brought together to confront the national economic emergency, has failed in its mission. So we are entering a momentous period in our national life: if the politicians cannot address the problem – and they can’t – who will?”

So we have a combined crisis of the economy, politics and ecology which parliament cannot address. The implication of Oborne’s article is that some form of dictatorship may be the outcome. With the Bank of England getting new powers and the Privy Council dusted down for action, you can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

  

An inconvenient truth for Al Gore

Promoting his new book, former US vice-president Al Gore says that the country’s democracy has been “hacked” by corporate interests. Well, despite hacking being deemed a criminal offence, no arrests appear imminent when it comes to big business.

Hacktivists, however, are routinely arrested because they are taking action against the system. Nevertheless Gore, who made the successful film on climate change An Inconvenient Truth, has once again indicted the US democratic process in a way few other tackled politicians have dared do..

Gore told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show : "It can be fixed, but we need to recognise that our democracy has been hacked … It has been taken over … and is being operated for purposes other than those for which it was intended."

Previously, he used the term “hollowed out” in pointing out that the democratic process was effectively a shell whose content was dominated by money interests. In his BBC interview Gore said government decision-making was "feeble, dysfunctional and servile" to corporate interests. 

In another media appearances associated with his book The Future, he said: “Congress is incapable of passing any reforms unless they first get permission from the powerful special interests that are most affected by the proposal.” But that’s not new or news.

When he was vice-president to Bill Clinton, the administration had a chance to stand up to money. But it didn’t. Who can forget the way the White House caved in to the big insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations when it tried to legislate a comprehensive health care plan in 1993?

Or how during the eight years of the Clinton presidency, financial deregulation took off.

As Time magazine noted: "Among his [Clinton’s] biggest strokes of free-wheeling capitalism was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighbourhoods.”

So when Gore says that the role of money has “greatly increased”, he ought to take some political responsibility for that. But he can’t and he won’t because, in the end, he is unable/unwilling to identify the root cause of this and other issues.

On climate change, for example, Gore will talk about human activity but not about the incessant, profit-driven drive for growth, which is not surprising as he himself is extremely rich. His new book identifies what he considers are the emerging forces that are shaping the world.

While they include “unsustainable” population growth (joining hands here with David Attenborough) you won’t be surprised to find that capitalism as a social system doesn’t get a look in.

He wants the role of money to be “diminished” and a grassroots movement “to demand that politics be opened up”. Gore hopes that individuals empowered by the new communications infrastructure “will be able to reclaim their birthrights as free citizens and redeem the promise of representative democracy."

This is a highly improbable agenda. Firstly, real change doesn’t happen because a load of people get blogging or use Facebook. In the end, they have to be out there in numbers, acting collectively in the material world as shown in the Arab Spring.

Secondly, the American revolution that threw off British colonial rule established the world’s first representative democracy with a purpose. One of the aims of James Madison, the father of the constitution, was to keep power within the hands of the political class and out of the hands of ordinary citizens.

After the Civil War had freed the slaves and created the conditions (and a workforce) fit for the development of a ruthless American capitalism, it wasn’t long before money had subsumed politics. The recent period of corporate-driven globalisation completed the process.

With due respects to Gore, the revolution in communications will have to be accompanied by a new American Revolution that goes beyond representative democracy. It will have to have as its goal the government of the people, by the people, for the people that Lincoln promised at Gettysburg in 1863.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Reclaim democracy now!

Just because global elites are always harping on about “democracy”, claiming it as the ideal political system, doesn’t mean that we abstain from the question. The challenge is to fight for a more advanced democracy than society has achieved so far.

We shouldn’t accept the present democracy as the last word on the subject but see in its historical and social context. While the Russian Marxist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin considered bourgeois democracy, a “great historical advance in comparison with medievalism”, he qualified this by adding:

But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich… in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

Before him, Fred Engels, who collaborated with Karl Marx to produce ground-breaking analysis, wrote his seminal work on the origins of private property, family and the state. In it, Engels explained that however democratic the modern representative state was, its function was to maintain the rule of one class over another.

And that remains the case today in the democracies like Britain, the United States and France. Since Engels and Lenin, however, the fusion of capital with politics, particularly in the last 30 years, has further emasculated representative democracy. The Real Democracy Now movement that has flowered in Spain immediately and correctly identified the merging of the political system with corporate and financial power as the source of the problem.

So what should we struggle for? What about replacing democracy for the rich with a democracy for the dispossessed, the poor and the disenfranchised? What about extending democracy in new ways, by freeing people from the rule of the corporations and the banks, not to say the reactionary media? What about bringing democracy to the workplace, the school and the university through co-ownership and self-management?

Achieving these objectives will without doubt require the dismantling of the present state which in innumerable ways maintains and sustains the status quo. The is because, as others have shown, the present limited democracy is the political form that capitalism has assumed for itself.

It is both democratic and undemocratic at the same time, allowing certain freedoms while denying access to real power itself. You cannot imagine an advance in the nature and content of democracy within the present state because the two stand in contradiction to each other.

Opportunities for resolving this apparent puzzle are emerging through the movement of society itself in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and now Spain. We have to go beyond demands for participation and transparency. Important as they are, they sidestep the question of the nature of the state itself.

Arguing for and building people’s assemblies is a way forward in Britain and internationally. They can build on the growing resistance to the ConDem government on a range of issues and practice democracy by seeking to represent the widest range of social and political interests. They will challenge sectarian behaviour and undemocratic practices and discourage closed committees and pre-planning fixed agendas.

Assemblies established on a permanent basis can discuss the nature of the present democracy and what could be better; the nature of power – who’s got it and how do ordinary people win it. They can encourage sovereign decisions and direct action. They are both a means to bring people together across sectoral lines as well as the potential means by which we can democratically transform society and replace the state with a network of assemblies. Let’s reclaim democracy!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Staying out of the hands of the state

The flowering in the numbers of civil society, non-state organisations, groups and campaigns is the reverse side of an historic decline in participation in formal political processes in Britain and an ever-increasing alienation from existing power structures.

That much is clear from a new report Making good society, which was produced by a commission set up by the Carnegie Trust under the watchful gaze of former New Labour advisor Geoff Mulgan. What is less certain is the path mapped out by the report for civil society in reshaping Britain.

The strength of civil society organisations is their relative independence from the state. It is where, as the report puts it, “people come together to pursue their shared interests, enthusiasms and values” on a not-for-profit basis, adding:

“In civil society, people come together freely as equals. Civil society has grown as an expression of the values of co-operation, solidarity, mutual commitment and freedom. It has complemented, influenced and challenged the formal institutions of democracy. And it has always stood for visions of a good society, as well as meeting more immediate needs.”

In 2006–7, the UK had 870,000 formal civil society associations with assets of £210 billion. Uncounted, but probably in still greater number, are the thousands of informal community groups that do anything from improving public spaces to campaigning for fee-free cash points, the report says.

Modern capitalist state structures, of course, stand for everything civil society doesn’t. The “values” of the state are about ruling over people, a partisan commitment to vested interests such as high finance and corporate power and a “freedom” so circumscribed that anything meaningful will certainly get you on to a more-or-less secret database. No wonder the commission found civil society so much more positive!

So much so that it would like to harness the untapped power and potential of civil society in “responding to the triple crises of our time: those of political trust, economics and the environment.” Don’t get too excited, however. We’re not talking revolution here. Quite the opposite.

For example, the commission wants a greater role for civil society in creating “stable, responsible and transparent financial activity”. This would be achieved, suggests the report, by “strengthening its capacity to influence financial institutions and regulators through building its own specialist institutions that have the knowledge and authority to challenge conventional financial thinking.” Or by “mobilising citizen investors, the millions of ordinary people with pension plans and savings, so that their future incomes are derived from companies that operate responsibly and sustainably.”

In reality, however, the financial system is on the edge of a precipice and pension schemes are in meltdown. Final salary pension schemes are being unilaterally wound up while the state has had to take on limited obligations of companies that have gone under. Now the state scheme itself is under threat.

After correctly pointing out that representative democracy in Britain was created in large part by pressure from below, principally through the struggle of the Chartists and Suffragettes, the report advocates using civil society to breathe new life into the political system through a bigger role for civil society in “organising deliberation, argument
and decision-making”.

However well-meaning, this is surely the wrong approach to civil society organisations. They flourish precisely because they are operate and exist in an environment that is largely self-created. Drawing them, as the report suggests, into solving society’s deep problems will lose them their independence. Nor would this answer the related crises of democracy, the economy and the environment. That will only come when the state itself is transformed and democratised through mass action because it is certainly beyond reform.



Paul Feldman
Communications editor