Two days ago, here in Utah just as all over the country, thousands of Christmas shoppers lined up outside stores like Walmart and Target, seeking deals on commodities manufactured in factories all over the world. As in any other shopping season, these consumers probably gave little thought to where the items they bought came from. They only cared if these goods were cheap, or if they could get the latest branded shirt or popular toy.

Over the next two days, a massive fire broke out in a garment factory in Bangladesh. According to the New York Times,

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor record of fire safety. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in garment factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group based in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have been easily avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods, have too few fire escapes and widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, mostly women.

While consumers in the US were hiding away their newly bought presents under beds, in attics, or in closets, these workers were cramming into too-few staircases in a 9 story building, lying low on floors in a futile attempt to escape smoke, or jumping out of windows.

This is the price of low prices: hundreds of burned bodies and hundreds more injured people. This a fraction of a global workforce dedicated to bringing us the names brands we want at the prices we can’t beat. Their wages are low, and the safety and environmental standards they work in are even lower. Their work is a large part of what makes Black Friday work.

These same Bangladeshi workers have been agitating for better wages and working conditions. I doubt any Christmas shopper here in Utah would begrudge them those things – especially after this tragedy – but of course the result would be prices at Walmart and Target going up, and perhaps that’s untenable for us. We live in a system where such price changes are anathema, because it’s not about decent wages anymore, it’s about the ability to maintain a consumer lifestyle just as our parents did. Our wages, in fact, are going down, too, but just so long as we can get cheap stuff from underpaid people in Asia we don’t notice. And as long as we don’t notice, the owners of the giant retailers, factories, sourcing firms, importers, and distribution companies make tremendous profits and widen the gap between them and us.

So, what do we want for Christmas? Less stuff. Less consumption, less demand for cheap goods at any cost. Less environmental destruction. Lesser lines outside global companies that push wages down around the world and push dangers up. More worker control of these factories. More worker control of retailers. Far less profit going to owners. Far more going to the people who actually do the work.

That would make for a fine Christmas.

Posted: 06 Nov 2012 10:45 PM PST

Tonight, Barack Obama was declared the winner of the U.S. Presidential election. Obama ran a centrist, lackluster campaign that was fueled by an avalanche of campaign donations from corporate America.  The losers were poor and working class people all over the country.

By Billy Wharton

Although, Mitt Romney was the other corporate funded candidate in the race, it will be regular Americans who will have to live with repercussions of a second Obama presidency.  Over the next four years, the administration will continue to extend the damage it has initiated since 2008.

On the healthcare front, four more years of Obama will mean that the terms of his Obamacare legislation will be frozen into place.  The possibility of re-initiating grassroots campaigning for single-payer healthcare will be mostly foreclosed until the causalities of this new system emerge en masse.  Obama made sure to protect the pharmaceutical companies and further entrench private health insurers into the healthcare system. No wonder then that a major healthcare company such as Kaiser Permanente lavished more than $500,000 on the Obama campaign while ignoring Romney. Private healthcare companies were the real winners in the first Obama presidency and they will certainly consolidate these gains in the next four years.  Poor and working class Americans will pay the price for this.

And the same will be true as the hysteria about the “fiscal cliff” gets ramped up.  This discussion will be the pretext for bringing the kinds of harsh austerity measures currently being enacted in Europe across the Atlantic to America.  The Obama administration has already begun negotiations with Republican members of Congress for what they are calling a “compromise budget.”  The compromise will entail cutting social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and social security in return for slightly higher taxation on the rich.  Such cuts will bring the federal government in line with state and local governments who have been engaged harsh budget cuts for the past four years.  What once were called the “third rail” programs of American politics – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – will instantly be converted into a target for an Obama administration intent on slashing the federal budget.

A second Obama term will also mean more of the same for foreign policy. Far from advancing a peace agenda, the Obama administration had intensified aspects of the military aggression in the Middle East initiated by George W. Bush and has, in some cases, accelerated the erosion of civil rights.  The two symbols of this militaristic approach are the homicidal drone bombing campaign that Obama has personally overseen and Private Bradley Manning who currently sits in a military detention facility.  The drones demonstrate that even if Obama slightly reduces the military budget, he will remain committed to using the military industrial complex as a tool to enforce American global interests even if this violates international human rights.  Manning is Obama’s prisoner – a brave whistle blower who refused to comply with criminal military aggression.  He stands as a permanent symbol of Obama’s war on civil rights and his case should be a point of struggle for left-wing activists.

Finally, both Obama and Romney have almost entirely disregarded issues related to climate change.  Obama’s administration has the advantage of actually recognizing that climate change exists.  Yet, this has meant little in regards to either pro-environment legislation or  even a shift to renewable energy sources. Obama’s environmental bankruptcy has been on vivid display during the periodic environmental disasters.  He was asleep at the wheel during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, coddling the multinational corporate offenders at BP as they foot dragged through a clean up.  More recently, he was purely reactive during Hurricane Sandy, offering consoling words, but nothing in the way of a strategic plan of action to ensure safety today and environmental balance in the future.  Four more years of Obama will bring us no closer to this vision that lies at the heart of Eco-socialism.

Not surprisingly, the challenge faced by regular people all over the country will be the same with a second Obama administration as it would be with a new Romney regime.  We must build the capacity to fiercely resist the austerity policies that are sure to be imposed on us.  No fiscal cliff, grand compromise or economic common sense should be allowed to be used as a justification for these cuts.  Resist, resist, resist should be the clarion call of the next four years.

Throughout this process, democratic socialism will remain a viable alternative to the politics of austerity. Socialism’s critique of capitalism and counterposing of the global commons to American hegemony offer a vision of a different future – one in which the great wealth of the world is put to work to make life better for everyone, one in which the people of America are reconnected to the world by bonds of solidarity and one in which humanity regains equilibrium with the natural world.  This is what we continue to fight for -  a world based on the socialist values of solidarity, compassion and justice.

***
Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and co-chair of the Socialist Party USA. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly[at]gmail[dot]com.

This does not mean that Venezuela has become some sort of socialist paradise.  What it does mean is that when a regime begins to intentionally address the problems faced by poor and working class people, serious progress can be made.  

by Billy Wharton

Long before Occupy Wall Street, long before the radical elements in Europe coalesced after the 2008 economic crisis and long before the electoral rise of mass democratic socialist parties in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, a serious crack was made into the global capitalist system.  Not surprisingly, the new political space for socialism came from Latin America, more specifically from Venezuela where former military officer Hugo Chavez was democratically elected as President in 1999.  Chavez represented more than just a protest against the worst features of capitalism.  The Bolivarian Revolution promised to transform Venezuela and provide a direct challenge to Global Capitalism.  Tonight’s re-election of Hugo Chavez allows this project to continue – it demonstrates that millions of voters in Venezuela continue to support the ideals of a democratic socialism for the 21st century.

The accomplishments of the Chavez regime over the past 13 years are undeniable.  When he entered office, Chavez took command of an economy that had been ravaged by IMF structural adjustment plans that had devastated most of the welfare subsidies and social guarantees that had been built up by the progressive nationalist regimes of the 1970s.  This process reached a critical head in 1989 as the rumor of more IMF cutbacks set off mass riots in poor and working class communities that came to be known as “El Caracazo.”  Chavez’s leadership emerged out of this rebellion.

Using conservative sources, we still find that since Chavez was elected President in 1999, unemployment has been cut in half – declining from 14% to 7%.  Increased access to medical care, particularly through community clinics staffed by Cuban physicians, has led to a decline in infant mortality from 20 deaths per 1,000 live births to 13 deaths per 1,000.  Per capita GDP has increased from $4,000 in 1999 to $10,000 today.  And extreme poverty has declined from 23% of the population when Chavez entered office in 1999 to 8.5% today.

This does not mean that Venezuela has become some sort of socialist paradise.  What it does mean is that when a regime begins to intentionally address the problems faced by poor and working class people, serious progress can be made.  Some of these changes have had an anti-capitalist flavor – especially the strategic nationalization of essential industries, the political support of local communal councils and the economic muscle created to support worker-owned cooperatives.  Others relate to the re-direction of oil export profits into an expanded social welfare state.

The election of right wing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles would have meant an immediate end to this process of social transformation.  After years of deep disorganization and marginalization, the Venezuelan right-wing has now re-organized itself.  It speaks the language of social-democracy while representing the social elements in Venezuela who lustily seek a return to the good old days before Chavez.  They have certainly been helped in this effort by the pressure placed on the economy by the global economic crisis, by deep contradictions inside of the Chavez regime and by their deep-pocketed benefactors in the United States.

It was not just the US State Department that was deeply implicated in attempts to de-stabilize the Chavez regime.  Mainstream media sources in the US served as virtual mouthpieces for the the right-wing opposition in Venezuela.  While officials from the Carter Center conducted intensive checks on the country’s electoral system, the US media trumpeted the paranoid claims of the opposition that Chavez supporters were setting themselves up to steal the election.  Despite the public claims made by all Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, to respect any decision made by the electorate, the US media still felt comfortable highlighting reports that Venezuelan National Guardsmen with AK47’s were roaming the streets of Carcas – a not so subtle implication that a coup would follow a Chavez defeat.  Once again, the US media provided the soft imperialist power – dumbing down public opinion in the US while supporting the moral claims of a right-wing opposition bent on the deeply immoral annihilation of social justice in Venezuela.

The electoral victory leaves the Chavez regime with much work to do.  One place to start might be addressing the severe housing crisis.  Although the government has created 250,000 new homes, this has fallen far short of the demand coming from poor and working class communities.  In response, Chavez has launched an ambitious public housing project, known as the Great Housing Mission, before the elections.  Some 3.6 million families have registered for the program and the mission hopes to create 2 million new homes in the next seven years. US media coverage of this effort painted it as a cynical and even cruel attempt to harvest votes.  This might be because the need for affordable quality public housing reverberates far beyond the border of Venezuela into all capitalist societies.  Creating a model socialist public housing sector for the 21st century would provide a signal that the Bolivarian Revolution is still engaging with the process of social transformation that was at the heart of its creation.

Being able to further confront the old elites and eventually the new Boliburguesía, the new elites created by the Chavez regime, will mean that the next phase of revolution has begun.  For now though, the electoral victory of Chavez should send the signal to socialist organizations internationally that mass electoral socialist campaigning can yield concrete results.  Millions of formerly unemployed Venezuelan workers, millions who once lived in extreme poverty, millions of children who survived childbirth and now millions of Venezuelan voters provide testimony to the transformative potential of socialism in the 21st century.

***
Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and co-chair of the Socialist Party USA. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly[at]gmail[dot]com 

Writing in the New York Times’s The Stone blog, Jason Stanley argues that we Americans have given up on hearing politicians or pundits speak any truths:

The expectation is that any statement made either by a politician or by a media outlet is a false ideological distortion. As a result, no one blames politicians for making false statements or statements that obviously contradict that politician’s beliefs. I believe that the unfolding presidential campaign provides a compelling demonstration of my previous claims….  Americans no longer expect or care about candidates making honest assertions in the public sphere. They no longer expect consistency and honesty from politicians, and the savvy political campaigner recognizes that there is no cost to making statements that contradict even their most well-known beliefs.

The Romney campaign’s outright lies are many: Paul Ryan claimed that Obama’s Medicare budget would cut funding for Medicare recipients (wrong). Romney claims Obama has gone around apologizing for America (wrong). Michelle Bachman engaged in creative reading of a study to argue that unemployment will rise under Obama (wrong).

Obama et al aren’t off the hook. The Great Transparency President has been far less than transparent, failing to expose special interest tax breaks on the Internet as promised. He has lied about Romney’s stance on abortion. He has lied about where his campaign finances are coming from. Not to mention his whole posturing as a hopey-changey president who has continued the War on Terror, killed American citizens without due process, and surrounded himself with Wall Streeters.

So the question is: why? Why lie? Lying is wrong, isn’t it?

They are lying to us because the only consequence of lying anymore is losing an election. That’s a small price to pay when the consolation prize seems to be a life of punditry, speaking engagements, cushy academic appointments, and corporate gigs. The grand prize, of course, is gaining office and thus gaining power, becoming ensconced in offices awash in corporate funding with the only burden of having to sign bills pre-written by lobbyists.

They are lying because sentimentalism (Obama will kill your Grandma! The Republicans hate women!) trumps honesty on television. And since television journalism isn’t fact-checking anymore, everyone’s happy: politicians get to say what they want and media owners get plenty of pre-formatted soundbites to sell commercial time around.

They are lying because the truth hurts: The Democrats are the party of finance capitalism. The Republicans are the party of finance capital. They talk about being for Americans, but really they’re for a global elite comprised of the extremely wealthy.

They are lying, simply put, because we expect it, we accept it, and we have stopped caring.

I am struck by the resignation of Andrea Seabrook of NPR. She had covered Congress for a decade. And then she gave up. She gave up because she had to report outright lies from members of Congress, and she was never afforded the time and space to debunk lies. She’s gone rogue (pax, Ms. Palin) on a new blog, DecodeDC, which will be an attempt to dig into Congressspeak and sift out a more accurate reality from the language of politicians. (Good luck!)

And yet, in the internet age, I am not sure how well DecodeDC will fare against the tide of lies. We live in a time in which we choose what to believe and we ignore what we don’t. Politicians know this – and their corporate owners know this – and so they will continue to lie to us, and we will believe them.

Or, perhaps you’re fed up. If so, we suggest voting for a third party. The Socialist Party USA has a Presidential ticket of Stewart Alexander and Alex Mendoza, and if they aren’t on your ballot in November, you can write them in. Doing so is your right, and in many ways is probably more effective than voting for President in the Electoral College.

Hell, if you want to vote for another party, Green, Libertarian, you’re still doing something besides voting for liars. The Greens, the Libertarians, the Socialists – we’re all on the outside of the mainstream, which basically means we have far less incentive to lie!

Like the title of the PJ O’Rourke’s book says, Don’t Vote; It Just Encourages the Bastards. We just suggest that he means, Don’t Vote for Republicrats and Democrans – it just encourages the liars.

The YoSoy132 Movement in Mexico is gaining power, dogging presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto at every turn.

Professor Wolff takes a look at the Mondragon Cooperative as a model for economic justice and worker-controlled production.

Bangladeshi garment workers are clashing with “industrial police” as they protest low wages while factory owners get richer by the year.

We already have this formula: money = speech. Do we want this one: computer algorithms = speech? No, we do not, argues Tim Wu.

What do we say? Stand with the students of Mexico, Greece, Spain, and of course the nascent student movements here in the US | Start looking around – socialized production is more common than you think, even here in the US | Marx had it right – put workers together in factories and they will organize | More algorithms != more speech. Otherwise, HAL will be president.

Obama and Romney are spending most of their time in wealthy homes begging for money. Who do you think either will listen to when it comes time to execute policy? Not us.

Libcom.org has a Quebec Protest photo gallery.

Louis Proyect on Brand Obama and all that hopey-changey imperialism.

We can whine about police and government surveillance done to “fight terrorism” (in this case against American citizens who just happen to be Muslim), or we can organize against it. Your choice.

Speaking of which, it seems as if new surveillance technologies (license plate scanners) won’t be used on Utah’s Highway 15, after all. At least not yet.

Our response to these events: Move to amend to overcome Citizen’s United‘s hijacking of democracy | Support the students of Quebec and Canada | Stop being blind to the Democrat Party’s status as the Other Corporate Party | Remember that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” so do not stand for the monitoring of Muslims because you’re next | Thank the sheriffs of Beaver and Washington counties!

To counter the charge that it’s unrealistic, and overly idealistic, to want to bring about real change in our world, as well as the trusty “life isn’t fair” rationale always used to justify injustice, is why we’re striking. We didn’t accept that line of reasoning during the civil rights movement, and we don’t accept it now. We think it’s far more unrealistic to think that a small cadre of elites will be able to keep up their never-ending pursuit of power consolidation and mass manipulation without waking us up in the process. We think it’s far more unlikely that in 1000 years, humanity will still be playing this game of perpetual one-upmanship, instead of picking up the far more efficient and beneficial manner of interacting with each other in honesty, cooperation and genuine respect.

Read the original in its entirety. It’s excellent.

We wish everyone around the world a wonderful May Day!

The Wasatch Socialist Party will take part in May Day demonstrations in Salt Lake City. Our own Josh Belka will be speaking, and of course many of us will be marching.

The march begins at 5 pm at the County Building and proceeds to the Capital. We hope you can join us!

Don’t know much about May Day? This holiday is international, transcending many national and religious differences. It is a day by, of, and for working people the world over. In many countries, May Day is a day off from work. In the US, of course, it is hardly recognized. We know many people cannot take the day off from work, but we are working for a day when May Day is recognized and we all have the freedom to enjoy the day with our families and to remind governments the world over of the power of working people.