See Part I for how RAND and its creed “systems analysis” was created and how Albert Wohlstetter would ultimately become the kingpin of RAND.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: the Fabian Society

For us to understand what ultimately made Albert Wohlstetter the man he became we must first start with the story of Bertrand Russell. And for this, we must begin with the Fabian Society.

The Fabian Society was founded on January 4^th, 1884 in London as an offshoot of The Fellowship of the New Life, which in turn was founded just one year earlier by Scottish philosopher Thomas Davidson. The Fellowship advocated pacifism, vegetarianism and simple living, under the influence of Leo Tolstoy’s ideas. (1) Some of its members also wanted to become politically involved in transforming society which led to the formation of the Fabian Society.

One of the nine founding members of the Fabian Society was Frank Podmore, who was also an influential member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Alfred Russell Wallace, William Crookes, F.W.H. Myers and renown psychologist William James’ work on mediums, telepathy and materializations led to the founding of the Society of Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society and their American branches.

Alfred Russell Wallace was a close associate of T.H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) and co-founded the theory of natural selection alongside Charles Darwin.

The Fabian Society was extremely influenced by the ideas of Darwinism. Much of what they supported in terms of ideologies and philosophies was for the purpose of advancing Darwinism and saw Karl Marx’s newly published system as the perfect vehicle to carry Darwin’s logic into a controlling ideology to organize the masses.

Karl Marx himself was very much drawn to the ideas of Darwin, including two explicit references to Darwin and evolution in the second edition of Das Kapital. (2)

Marx would write in a letter that:

“Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.”

In a book review of the first volume of Das Kapital, Engels wrote that Marx was “simply striving to establish the same gradual process of transformation demonstrated by Darwin in natural history as a law in the social field.” (3)

The Fabian Society would define itself as a socialist movement, influenced by Karl Marx and the Marxist Social Democratic Federation soon founding England’s Labour Party in 1900. The party’s constitution was written by Fabian Society leader Sidney Webb and borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society.

Immediately upon its inception, the society featured such prominent eugenicists such as George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Huxley’s protégé H.G. Wells, Arthur Balfour, founder of Geopolitics Halford Mackinder and Bertrand Russell.

Prominent Theosophist Annie Besant would also become a member of the Fabian Society upon its inception, and was the leading speaker for both the Fabian Society and the Marxist Social Democratic Federation.

At the core of the Fabian Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who would also help co-found the London School of Economics (LSE), with Rothschild funding, to propagate the Fabian Society outlook in 1895.

Harold Laski, one of Britain’s most influential intellectual spokesmen for Marxism, would become a Fabian Society member, a professor at the LSE (1926-1950), and a chairman of the British Labour Party (1945-1946).

Bertrand Russell would teach social democracy at LSE from 1895-1896 and from 1937-1938 lectured on the science of power. On the official site of LSE, Russell is credited as “one of the spiritual and financial founders of LSE…[whose] involvement in the early life of the School helped to define its ethos.”

The Coefficients club was also set up by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and included among its membership H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, as well as Leo Amery, Harold Laski, Halford Mackinder (who was Director of the LSE from 1903-1908), Alfred Milner and Clinton Edward Dawkins (the three times great uncle to the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins).

The name “Fabian” is derived from the Roman General Quintus Fabius, known as the Cunctator from his strategy of delaying his attacks against the invading Carthaginians until the right moment, and who’s fame is founded on having beaten Hannibal by never engaging in direct combat.

In the founding Fabian document it is written: “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.”

Fabians would advocate the strategy of permeation, whereby you affect the change you want to see by slowly permeating all levels of society’s controlling structures. Once you have permeated sufficiently you can strike collectively and essentially take over from within. It would be a technique that the Trotskyists would become notorious for, such as with the French Turn.

As Matthew Ehret wrote in his “Origins of the Deep State”:

“The Fabian society program focused on broad social welfare programs such as universal health care, mass education, and better working conditions which were designed to attract the disenfranchised masses. Under the Fabian program, such programs held no substance in reality, as the true means to justify their creation was banned…[that is]…true scientific and technological progress…

This ruse was thus designed to merely bring the will of the lower classes under the deeper influence of a ruling oligarchy via the promise of ‘democratic socialism’ and a naïvely utopian ‘end of history’ ideal…The controllers of Fabian Socialism are not, nor have they ever been ‘democratic socialists’…”

At its heart, Fabianism was merely fascism with a “scientific” socialist face.

Matthew Ehret writes:

“The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. It worked in tandem with the Coefficients Club, the Fabian Society, and the Rhodes Trust, all of whom witnessed members moving in and out of each others ranks.”

Historian Carrol Quigley, wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment”:

“This organization [the Round Table]…has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation…it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it.”

H.G. Wells was chairman of the League of Free Nations Association and published his call for “world peace” in his book “The Idea of a League of Nations” published in 1919.

The purpose was again to lure people in with glorious promises of a “social democracy” while in fact weakening nation states such that they would be unable to resists the coming of a new world empire.

H.G. Wells would publish “The New World Order” in 1940, and was no doubt the guiding influence on Julian Huxley’s outlook when he wrote the manifesto for UNESCO.

Bertrand Russell’s “Proposed Roads to Freedom”

In 1918, Russell publishes “Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism”. Here are some relevant quotes:

“My own opinion – which I may as well indicate at the outset – is that pure Anarchism, though it should be the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate, is for the present impossible…On the other hand, both Marxian Socialism and Syndicalism, in spite of many drawbacks, seem to me calculated to give rise to a happier and better world than that in which we live. I do not, however, regard either of them as the best practicable system…The best practicable system, to my mind, is that of Guild Socialism, which concedes what is valid both in the claims of the State Socialists and in the Syndicalist fear of the State by adopting a system of federalism among trades for reasons similar to those which have recommended federalism among nations.”

“The terrorist campaign in which such men as Ravachol were active practically came to an end in 1894. After that time, under the influence of Pelloutier, the better sort of Anarchists found a less harmful outlet by advocating Revolutionary Syndicalism in the Trade Unions and Bourse de Travail.”

“In England Marx has never had many followers. Socialism here has been inspired in the main by the Fabians…What remained was State Socialism and a doctrine of ‘permeation.’ Civil servants were to be permeated with the realization that Socialism would enormously increase their power. Trade Unions were to be permeated with the belief that the day for purely industrial action was pasts, and that they must look to Government (inspired secretly by sympathetic civil servants) to bring about, bit by bit, such parts of the Socialist programme as were not likely to rouse much hostility in the rich. The Independent Labour Party…was largely inspired at first by the ideas of the Fabians…It aimed always at cooperation with the industrial organizations of wage-earners, and chiefly through its efforts, the Labour Party was formed in 1900 out of a combination of the Trade Unions and the political Socialists. To this party, since 1909, all the important Unions have belonged, but in spite of the fact that its strength is derived from Trade Unions, it has stood always for political rather than industrial action.”

“Anarchism, which avoids the dangers of State Socialism, has dangers and difficulties of its own…Nevertheless it remains an ideal to which we should wish to approach as nearly as possible, and which, in some distant age, we hope may be reached completely…The system we have advocated is a form of Guild Socialism, leaning more, perhaps, towards Anarchism than the official Guildsman would wholly approve. It is in the matters that politicians usually ignore – science and art, human relations, and the joy of life – that Anarchism is strongest… ”

In his “Proposed Roads to Freedom” Russell makes it clear that he is most sympathetic to the philosophy of Mikhail Bakunin and Prince Kropotkin, who were both involved with the Mounte Verità society, a sister branch to the Theosophists (refer here for the relevance of this).

Interestingly, Russell’s proposed roads to freedom, that is, socialism, anarchism and syndicalism all lead to the same destination point…the League of Nations.

Russell writes:

“If the peace of the world is ever to become secure, I believe there will have to be, along with other changes, a development of the idea which inspires the project of a League of Nations.”

Thus, Russell is all for minimising the power of the State until we can reach the “ideal,” in the form of a world empire.

The Unity of Science: Radical Positivists, Eugenicists, and Anarchists Unite

The Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism was a group of philosophers and scientists who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna. The Vienna Circle’s influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy, is immense up to the present day.

The philosophical position of the Vienna Circle was called logical empiricism (aka: logical positivism). It was greatly influenced by such members as Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, and Bertrand Russell. The Vienna Circle was committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment and its aim was to make philosophy “scientific” with the help of modern logic.

This was very much along the line of what David Hilbert (member of the Vienna Circle) had called for at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900, whereby Hilbert put forth the thesis that all scientific knowledge should be reduced to the form of mathematical “logic.” Thus, all “scientific” knowledge would henceforth be solely deducible from mathematical models.

In 1900, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead (who taught Russell) set forth to achieve Hilbert’s challenge which resulted in the three volume “Principia Mathematica” published thirteen years later. The Principia would be the new Bible in many ways for generations of analytical philosophers and logical positivists.

Continuing along these lines, the Unity of Science Movement was organized in the late 1930s by former members of the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricists, such as Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and new members such as Ernest Nagel. The greatest aim being to create an encyclopedia that would establish how the unity of sciences should proceed, bringing together intellectuals to establish a fortress against the chaotic terrain of politics, which was extremely adverse to the “ideals” of a scientific way of life. All contributors to this process agreed that the progress of science should eventually create a “scientific world-conception,” helping to build (or control) a big picture of what science means.

“Encyclopedia and Unified Science” would be published by the movement with this aim. The first edition came out in 1938 and was co-written by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Charles Morris, John Dewey, Niels Bohr and Bertrand Russell.

Interestingly, science fiction was considered just as important as the logic of science to this world-conception.

Though H.G. Wells was not an official member of this movement, we should keep in mind that he was always committed to the same goals as Russell. Wells was not only a world famous writer of science fiction, but was also working on his own new secular Bible series in three books designed to unite all forms of knowledge. (4)

Among this trilogy is “The Science of Life” co-written with Julian Huxley, and meant to give a popular account of all major aspects of biology as known in the 1920s. It is credited with introducing modern ecological concepts and emphasised the importance of behaviourism and Jungian psychology (Jung was a member of the Mounte Verità society).

It also promoted Eugenics.

Julian Huxley, Vice President (1937-1944) and President of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962) was the one to coin the term “transhumanism.” Julian was also the first director-general of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1946, to which he wrote its mandate “UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy.”

Norbert Wiener was taught by Bertrand Russell at Cambridge and by David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen. He would go on to found “cybernetics.”

John Dewey, a member of the Unity of Sciences movement, would greatly dictate and shape a global educational reform, which was promoted by UNESCO, and has immense influence to this day.

It was clear that along with a world government, you would need a world-conception of what is regarded or approved of as “scientific,” all else would be thrown into the dust bin and would be considered unfit to shape policy. This was enforced by the construct of a global education system to implement the “right” sort of ideas and forbid the “wrong” sort.

Russell would put it forth most succinctly in his “The Scientific Outlook” (1931):

“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play… all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.”

In 1953, Russell would update this creepy piece of work and make it even creepier, writing:

“It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment… This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”

If you think that sounds awfully similar to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” it is because it is, in fact Russell was contemplating charging Aldous with plagiarism.

Albert’s Radical Days

Albert Wohlstetter started at City College of New York (CCNY) in 1931. It was here that he would be mentored by Morris Raphael Cohen, a professor of philosophy and mathematics and a Russian émigré with a nihilist background.

In the 1930s, City College had developed a reputation as the “proletarian Harvard,” and this was very much due to Cohen, who started a Marx Circle at CCNY. This Marx Circle met regularly at the Henry Street Settlement House, which had been established by followers of the Fabian Society.

The Henry Street Settlement House was purchased by Jacob Schiff in 1895, likely through Rothschild funding (recall Rothschild also funded the London School of Economics which was started by the leading Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb). By the 1930s the settlement house was being used for classrooms and residences. Schiff was a financier who went on to receive the Medal of the Rising Sun from Japan in exchange for providing $200 million for the Japan-Russo war and then went on to pour millions into the Bolsheviks that overturned Czarist Russia in 1917.

While a Professor of Philosophy at CCNY (1912-1938), Morris Raphael Cohen came under the influence of philosopher Thomas Davidson, founder of the Fellowship of the New Life from which the Fabian Society arose in 1884. Cohen’s “Marx Circle” continued within Davidson’s enterprise. Cohen also studied under William James, co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research (connections to the Theosophists), while at Harvard University.

Cohen was also strongly influenced by Bertrand Russell, who in turn held Cohen in high regard. Cohen would write in his autobiography “A Dreamer’s Journey”:

“It was the study of Russell’s Principia Mathematic which I began soon after I was appointed to teach mathematics at City College in 1902, that finally liberated me…Russell came closer to being my philosophical god than any one before or since…”

Cohen would also mentor Ernest Nagel and Sidney Hook at CCNY. All of these men were close mentors/friends to Albert Wohlstetter. Hook would become a leader of the Marxist faction at CCNY.

Nagel cowrote “An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method” with Morris Raphael Cohen, in 1934.

Ernest Nagel, one of the founders of the Unity of Science Movement, earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1931 and went on to spend his academic career there, becoming the first John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at the University in 1955.

Upon graduating from City College in 1934, at the age of twenty- one, Albert enrolled at Columbia Law School. Albert abandoned law school, after a year, for a graduate program in mathematics. He wrote his MA thesis under the supervision of Ernest Nagel and under the watchful eye of his friend, the philosopher and mathematical logician Willard Van Orman Quine. (5)

Alfred North Whitehead was Willard Van Orman Quine’s thesis supervisor for his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1932. It was Whitehead who introduced Quine to Bertrand Russell which began their correspondence.

Morton White was another one of Ernest Nagel’s doctoral students, and a close friend of Albert (6) who would join the Fieldites (a Trotskyist splinter group) along with Albert.

It should be clear thus far that, Albert was heavily under the influence of the Unity of Science movement thinkers, with Fabian Society overlap, since his days at City College New York.

During Albert’s time as a student at Columbia University (1934-1939), he would become very close friends with militant philosopher and Trotskyist Sidney Hook and found a mentor in Columbia’s highly respected Art Historian and Trotskyist intellectual Meyer Schapiro. (7)

The reader should be aware that Sidney Hook is credited as having converted James Burnham (who, like Hook, was also a professor in philosophy at the New York University) to Trotskyism, acknowledged by Burnham himself in his autobiography. In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the socialist organization, the American Workers Party (AWP).

In 1934, Trotskyists in the Communist League of America (CLA) did a French turn on the American Workers Party (AWP), in a move that elevated the AWP’s James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief adviser.

Sidney Hook earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, under the supervision of John Dewey. It was at Columbia that Hook began the project that was to occupy him throughout the 1930s, of seeking a synthesis between Karl Marx’s “dialectical materialism” and Dewey’s pragmatism.

In the late 1930s, Hook assisted Trotsky in his efforts to clear his name in a special Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey, otherwise known as the Dewey Commission.

The Dewey Commission was initiated on March 1937 by the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. The commission proclaimed that it had cleared Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials (8) and made the claim that Stalin had framed Trotsky.

This Commission was a pseudo-judicial process set up by American Trotskyists and its sympathizers. It had no power of subpoena, nor official imprimatur from any government.

Thus, we find a very clear overlap between the Unity of Science Movement and the Trotskyists.

Albert would co-write at least one article with Morton White an article for the “Partisan Review” (9) which was a very influential Marxist magazine that had become more Trotskyist in its leaning. This was due to a new cast of editors, including Dwight Macdonald.

Dwight Macdonald is another close friend of Albert. (10)

Albert would actually join a communist group called the Fieldites, also known as the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party (LRWP), a splinter group from the “official” Trotskyists. In the case of the Fieldites, they had a reputation of having an even more aggressive stance against Stalin’s Soviet Union than the typical Trotskyists. So even more militant.

Interestingly, the founder of the Fieldites was Max Gould (his pseudonym was B.J. Field) a former Wall Street petroleum analyst and graduate from Columbia University. Field had been personally close to Trotsky (11) in the early 1930s and was one of the leaders of the CLA during the heated 1934 period before he was expelled. It was at this point that Field founded the LRWP in May 1934.

The LRWP soon found itself under investigation by the FBI for subversive activities.

Thus, one very big question that comes to mind is, if Wohlstetter was a card carrying member of the LRWP (12), how did he manage top security clearance as a leading nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation during the McCarthyite era and to which the House Committee on Un-American Activities acted as a standing committee from 1945-1975?

Even Herman Kahn, another prominent RAND nuclear strategist had his security clearance temporarily removed due to his wife’s affiliation with a communist group. So why was Albert’s past never brought up?

Alex Abella offers a possible explanation for this in his “Soldiers of Reason,” where he writes:

“…the records of the group [LRWP] were lost when Field, moving files surreptitiously from an office in a horse-drawn lorry—this was 1934, after all—became involved in an accident at a busy intersection after his horse died. Afraid that he would be charged with the accident and that his radical activities would land him in an even greater jam. Field fled the scene, leaving all the files, publications, and membership rolls to be disposed of by New York City sanitation.”

It is this rather dubious story that is used to explain how all records of the LRWP were lost, never to be found again, and how Albert was very conveniently given a fresh start.

So yes, if we are going to be “fair” with Albert, he was never a faithful Trotskyist, but then again, who ever was? The entire group was notorious for infighting, factions, splintering and permeation tactics, with a long list of renunciations. The importance is rather on what were all these groupings, notably the Fabians, Unity of Science Movement and the Trotskyist all working towards, since it was no coincidence that they were always revolving in each other’s orbits.

Albert was steeped in Marxist doctrine in tandem with the ideologies from the Unity of Science Movement by a network of socialist philosophers that spans three generations, and thus it is absurd to claim that this was all just a coincidence or a “brief” phase of radical experimentation on Albert’s part.

Renunciations, switching titles and mock conversions were all part of the game.

A Road to Damascus? Trotskyists “Convert” to Radical Positivism

James Burnham would remain a “Trotskyist intellectual” from 1934 to 1940. Before this, James Burnham graduated from Princeton, followed by Balliol College, Oxford University (recall Carroll Quigley’s quote on Balliol’s connection to the Round Table and the Fabian Society) before becoming a professor in philosophy at the New York University where he met Sidney Hook and was converted to Trotskyism.

In February 1940, Burnham renounced both Trotsky and Marxism altogether, writing “Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky,” explaining his reasons for this and why from now on he would be a follower of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead and the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science:

“Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

In 1941, Burnham would publish “The Managerial Revolution” which was a sort of guidebook to Fabian Society thinking at the time of how the world was to be ruled. In fact, Burnham was of the viewpoint that this vision had already won (for more on this refer here).

In his “The Managerial Revolution,” Burnham echoes the Fabian Society methodology and Russell’s “The Scientific Outlook,” writing:

“Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called ‘socialist.’ In those nations – Russia and Germany – which have advanced furthest toward the new [managerial] economy, ‘socialism’ or ‘national socialism’ is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite. The word ‘socialism’ is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favourable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.”

Although Albert would never make such a dramatic public declaration as did fellow technocrat Burnham, it is clear where he ultimately pledged his allegiance by his promotion of systems analysis (part of the trifecta of information theory and cybernetics) behind everything he did at the RAND corporation. (For more on this story refer to Part 1 of this series)

Burnham would go on to work for the OSS, followed by the CIA and would become “the real intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement and the originally proselytizer, in America, of the theory of totalitarianism.”

This helps us to understand why so many of Alfred Wohlstetter’s acolytes were prominent neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

RAND, under the guidance of Albert Wohlstetter, would gain the power to execute the mission of the Fabian Society. The Hannibal moment of victory had come with their entry into the JFK administration as McNamara’s Whiz Kids, who would not only “manage” the Vietnam War, but all wars that ensued under the American flag.

With entry into the government, they now had access to influencing all national policy including housing, healthcare, and education. Their permeation had become absolute.

Albert and Roberta would continue living in Laurel Canyon (a center of the counterculture movement), promoting an image of Albert as the ever-loving and patient teacher to an endless stream of doting students who would see him as a father figure, rather than for what he truly was, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Notes

(1) Colin Spencer (1996), The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism, Fourth Estate, pg. 283.
(2) I. Bernard Cohen (1985), Revolution in Science, Harvard University Press, p. 345.
(3) Ibid.
(4) The three books to H.G. Wells’ self-declared “new Bible” were: “The Outline of History” (1919), “The Science of Life” (1929), and “The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind” (1932)
(5) Ron Robin (2016), “The Cold War They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter,” Harvard University Press, p. 40.
(6) Ibid, p. 38.
(7) Ibid, p. 40.
(8) The Moscow Trials occurred between 1936-1938 and concluded that Trotskyist cells were at the heart of a fifth column operation within Russia which were committed to overthrowing Stalin and bringing Russia into a pro-Fascist program.
(9) Wohlstetter, Albert; White, Morton Gabriel (Fall 1939). “Who Are the Friends of Semantics?”. Partisan Review. 6 (5): 50–57.
(10) Wreszin, Michael (1994). A Rebel In Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. New York: HarperCollins. p. 113.
(11) Ron Robin (2016), “The Cold War They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter,” Harvard University Press, p. 45.
(12) Alex Abella (2008), “Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire,” Harcourt Books, p. 76.

[Part 3 will go over Albert’s role in shaping the RAND/Whiz Kids management of the Vietnam War, and his relationship to Team B, the false dichotomy of Kissinger vs Brzezinski, and the Trilateral Commission.]

Georgy Arbatov, the witty Soviet diplomat, remarked for an American audience at the end of the Cold War: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” His observation at the time seemed to be an oxymoron.

Arbatov died in 2010 at the age of 87. But how true his words have proven nearly 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what was presumed to be the end of the Cold War and America’s historic victory. As it turns out, there were no winners.

The seasoned diplomat served as an advisor on U.S. relations to five Soviet leaders. He traveled to the United States frequently and was the U.S. media’s go-to Soviet spokesman. Arbatov knew intimately how the Cold War worked as an organizing principle for the edifice of U.S. society, politics, economics and military.

He knew how and why the Soviet Union was cast as the “evil empire” by the U.S. The portrayal had little to do with the Soviet Union objectively presenting a mortal threat. But the waging of a Cold War and forging a supposed Soviet nemesis to “the American way of life” was a vital necessity for the operation of U.S. global power.

The militarism was essential for the functioning of American capitalism and its vast taxpayer-funded Pentagon budgets every year.

Having a Soviet enemy also provided the United States with an apparent purpose of “defending the free world” and acting as a patron over European and NATO allies. In less benign terms, the relationship is seen more as one of hegemony and Washington’s dominance.

A third vital reason for Cold War against the Soviet Union was the cover it gave to U.S. military adventures around the world. Under the guise of protecting the world from “Godless Communism”, the Americans prosecuted imperialist wars and subterfuges that can otherwise be seen as criminal aggression and genocides.

A fourth crucial benefit from having a supposed dastardly foreign enemy was the national unity it provided for American rulers. Citizens would rally around the flag and the mythology of “American exceptionalism”.

When the Soviet Union disappeared from the global map in 1991, incisive analysts like Georgy Arbatov discerned that it would also herald the demise of the United States.

For a brief moment, there was euphoria from “winning the Cold War”. President HW Bush declared a “new world order” under American leadership. State Department scholars hailed the “end of history” had arrived in the form of “liberal democracy” and market capitalism. How fleeting do these celebrations seem now.

The loss of a Soviet enemy also in a very real way spelled the end of the United States. So much of the modern U.S. state since World War II has been shaped by Cold War militarism. Without the cover of a Soviet bogeyman, the United States became visible for the imperialist monster that it is. The emperor was naked.

No sooner had the Soviet Union dissolved than the United States embarked on a seeming non-stop rampage of wars across the globe. The relentless warmongering has been largely about finding a purpose for wielding U.S. power under a myriad of pretexts from “defending human rights” to “war on drugs”, from “preventing weapons of mass destruction” to “war on terrorism”, and so on.

One baleful outcome of this degenerate conduct has been the corrosive effect on international law, the United Nations Charter and, ironically, the presumed moral authority of the U.S. The international standing of the U.S. has plummeted as the world comes to abhor its unilateral arrogance and tyrannical, pathological caprice. The avowed pretexts for military interventions were never sufficiently plausible despite having a global media machine (conceitedly called the “free press”) to sell those pretexts to the public.

Without a seemingly credible international mission – fighting the evil Soviet empire – the United States has lost the ability to cohere its own nation. The Wizard of Oz is an impotent charlatan. It is no coincidence that a mere 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the U.S. is a cauldron of internal political chaos and seething enmity. Republicans and Democrats are riven by mutual contempt as one party accuses the other of treason and treachery.

The U.S. military spending of over $700 billion a year appears as a grotesque and shameful obscenity. All the more so in the face of a plethora of neglected American social needs and infrastructure collapse.

That is why the U.S. political class has needed to revive the Cold War as an absolute necessity. Without the Cold War, the United States is in mortal danger of collapsing from its own internal failures as a hyper-militarized national security state.

This explains the madcap media propaganda campaign over recent weeks to stoke dangerous tensions in Europe with Russia. It explains, too, why the U.S. has continually slated China as a global adversary. And why the Pentagon has sought to portray a growing natural partnership between Moscow and Beijing as an alarming pernicious development that “threatens Western democracy”.

However, reviving the Cold War is a futile endeavor. The United States and its allies are not threatened by Russia or China in any objective way. Thus, the demonization of Russia and China – while acting as a short-term cover for the United States and causing wanton geopolitical tensions even to the point of risking confrontation – will in the end not suffice as a pretext. The U.S. has a date with destiny as it faces up to its own inherent failings and its very real enemy within – the national security state.

As the old joke says: capitalism’s centuries are numbered. Everybody knows that Marx’s millenarian predictions went wrong: the New Man didn’t come, and we are still here in a world divided between the haves and have nots, as Hemingway titled his most social novel. But the Western economy’s contradictions are indeed stronger than ever. Take the recent World Economic Forum Global Risks Report. It draws on the views of over 12000 country-level leaders: after two years of the pandemic, the most perceived medium-term risk for societies are “social cohesion erosion“, “livelihood crisis”, and “mental health deterioration”.

Notably, “Social cohesion erosion is a top short-term threat in 31 countries — including Argentina, France, Germany, Mexico and South Africa from the G20”. In the long term, the threat of “involuntary migration” lurks. The majority of the people interviewed judge the efforts to contain or regulate migration and refugee waves as absolutely inconsistent.

You can argue that Davos is “about rich men arriving on private planes to discuss climate change, sexism and inequality” and “most of its predictions are worthless”, as Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times. But the reality that our societies are crumbling away before of our eyes is difficult to deny. Instead, the Davos paradox is whether the very elites that create these problems are able or only willing to solve them.

WEF report says that by 2030, 51 more million people are projected to live in extreme poverty compared to the pre-pandemic trend. “Income disparities exacerbated by an uneven economic recovery risk increasing polarisation and resentment within societies”. In the U.S., these divisions are taking a unique and disruptive form. A recent poll in the United States found “division in the country” to be voters’ top concern: they expected it to worsen in 2022. The attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 was one clear sign of the instability that political polarisation risks may create.

You can call it a democracy’s crisis. The Western system, largely symbolic and confined to the theatrical moment of the ballots, seems no more capable of answering the people’s fears. The impact of migration on Western countries is fated to grow dramatically. Davos’ gurus are not reassuring. In the following years: “A bifurcated recovery is likely to prompt an upsurge in economic migration. At the same time, worsening extreme weather and rise in political instability, state fragility and civil conflict, are likely to further swell refugees numbers”.

While in the West, ordinary people were receiving the vaccine booster against COVID-19, the super-rich’s richness was boosted by the circumstances created by the same virus. It is the conclusion of the recent Oxfam report “Inequality Kills: the unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19”. “A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began — the document says — The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty. Meanwhile, an estimated 17 million people have died from COVID-19—a scale of loss not seen since the Second World War. These issues are all part of the same, deeper malaise. It is that inequality is tearing our societies apart”.

Everywhere the same sad music. The perception of social decay is faced with mild desperation or the neoliberal choir’s same old song: “there is no alternative”. But, as Noam Chomsky said, in a 2021 interview on Jacobin Magazine, the corporate sector is “running scared”. “They’re concerned with what they call “reputational risks,” meaning “the peasants are coming with their pitchforks.” All across the corporate world — at Davos, and at the Business Roundtable — there are discussions of how “We have to confess to the public that we’ve done the wrong things. We haven’t paid enough attention to stakeholders, workforce, and community, but now we realise our errors. Now we’re becoming what, in the 1950s, was called ’soulful corporations,’ really dedicated to the common good.”

Indeed, the corporate world needs a new mammoth global PR campaign. The Green Economy is ready to be just another example of commodification of every life’s aspect and not the beginning of a more human business’ era. The electric automotive big new frontier rush is not bound to really reduce the global pollution but only to open a new market with many environmental unsolved questions. A ridiculous result of this neoliberal “Greenwashing” wave is the European plans to allow gas and nuclear to be labelled as “green” investments. You can see here Western democracies’ crisis in action: instead of confronting the challenges, they change the meaning of the words.

It is not a surprise that the Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 found a world “ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust, fuelled by a growing lack of faith in media and government. Through disinformation and division, these two institutions are feeding the cycle and exploiting it for commercial and political gain”.

The Edelman’s Barometer has been polling the world’s nations for years on trust in their governments, media, business and NGO. Today it says that “anger wins the clicks”, creating a “government-media distrust spiral”.

“The public has become widely aware that the media does not play it straight”. “We really have a collapse of trust in democracies,” said Reuters Richard Edelman, whose communications group published the survey of over 36,000 respondents in 28 countries interviewed between Nov. 1-24 of last year. The biggest losers of trust over the previous year were institutions in Germany, down 7 points to 46, Australia at 53 (-6), the Netherlands at 57 (-6), South Korea at 42 (-5) and the United States at 43 (-5). Russia wins the palm of the more sceptical nation. The very fact that countries not famous for their democracy, like China, United Arab Emirates and Thailand, are at the top of the trust’s index may show that their citizens do not share so much the faith in Western’s democratic ideals. They value more a “sense of predictability about policy” a “coherence” among the national leaders that the Western public seems to lack at all. China shows a staggering 83% public trust in institutions. Definitely, optimism about the future lies more in the East than in the West.

The Davos report rightly stresses that our world needs more than ever a “global governance and a more effective international risk mitigation” not only for the Covid’s threat but also to cope with “geo-economic confrontation”. Unfortunately, the numbers are telling a different story. The main characters of the global game are dealing mostly unprepared with the contradictions of the future world. Weak governments of divided European countries face geopolitical crises, as the Ukrainian one, trapped in the old American imperial scheme, entirely against their national interest. The West needs a “colour” revolution, not the East.

This is fairly trivial, but it is such an excellent example of how wokeness has conquered the collective brain of the Left that I can’t pass it by. It was flagged on N.S. Lyons’s excellent Substack newsletter, The Upheaval.

It’s a call for grant proposals by the Ploughshares Fund, a major philanthropy funding projects that combat nuclear weapons proliferation, and advance the goals of peace. Nothing wrong with that. But look at what the San Francisco-based philanthropy is after in the 2022 funding cycle:

“Challenging racism and white supremacy in nuclear policies and institutions”? Like, I dunno, the fact that nuclear-armed powers don’t have their missiles pointed at African countries, thus othering them? What about Chinese nukes? Are they problematic? Should we send nuclear weapons to Africa and Latin America for the sake of equity? Are we trying to avoid a future headline: “US-Russia Nuclear Exchange Causes Global Apocalypse; BIPOCs, LGBTQQIA+ Worst Affected”?

More:

Wow. You can get up to $75,000 if you can figure out how to extend the woke grift to (checks notes) the nuclear proliferation cause. You don’t even have to have experience in the field! Just be a BIPOC or LGBTQQIA+, and be able to string intersectional jargon together, and these agonized woke philanthropists will open their purse and throw money at you.

In case it isn’t clear to you yet that this is a scam to separate wealthy leftie do-gooders from their money, and redistribute it to wokedom’s Chosen People:

What’s funny about this is that Ploughshares signals that it is not serious about spending its resources to figure out ways to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war, which is says is its reason for being. It is more concerned with appeasing its own woke conscience by buying indulgences with woke constituencies. Are the donors — both individuals and philanthropies — cool with that? Look, Ploughshares can do whatever it wants to with its money, but it means something when the purpose for which the organization exists takes a back seat to advancing woke goals. They would rather throw cash behind a third-rate grant proposal that ticked all the right intersectional boxes than actually advance the work of nuclear non-proliferation.

In this, though, they are no different than Woke Capitalists, who are less interested in their theoretical prime directive — making money by providing top-quality goods and services — than they are in feeling virtuous about themselves. It’s fun and easy to laugh at these ideologues for wasting their money on virtue signaling, but the loss of a sense of mission within companies, institutions, and organizations, all led by people who have gone crazy for ideology, is yet another sign of decadence.

theamericanconservative.com

The concept of Oligarchy is not new, it dates back to the days of Aristotle and before. Rule by a wealthy rich and powerful minority goes back to the earliest recorded civilisations. This pernicious and often obscured ruling class have long exercised power over the political and governing institutions, nominally presumed to represent the interests of the majority. By virtue of wealth or birth, this minority has deemed themselves entitled to rule over the majority and loot any surplus produced by their lessers.

For the international capital class the creation of an Oligarchical elite is an essential component of any plan to infiltrate and corrupt existing political institutions. The European banking elite could gain little traction in the young United States. The founding fathers, in particular Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, had dealt with them as they attempted to raise funds for their War of Independence, they quickly came to understand the game. The Declaration of Independence was as much a rejection of this capital class as it was of King George and the Monarchy. The powers that be were threatened by America’s bad example, and a constitution that declared, “all men are created equal” was bound to elicit a negative response from those who thought they ruled the world. The then dominant British empire never forgave the upstart Americans and embarked on a century long war of capitalist revenge.

The creation of an American Oligarchy was how the banking elite dragged America back under control of the European bankers. Often referred to as “The Robber Barons”, Rockefeller in oil, Carnegie in steel, Harriman in railroads and J.P. Morgan in banking, and many other monopoly capitalists, were all covertly financed by London banks. It took this nascent Oligarchy a few years, but in 1913 they managed to pass the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act. The American money system was now in the control of the European bankers, where it remains to this day. This was the point when America became the very thing it was established to oppose. The foundational myth of the American dream, became just that, a myth.

Today the American Oligarchs are not in steel or railroads, they are in finance and tech, all essential components of complete societal control. The “charismatically challenged” Bill Gates is such a creation. Funded by the national security state he had the financial backing to ensure Microsoft obtained a virtual monopoly over the global software business. Unknown was that his software contained backdoors accessible to U.S. security agencies that they may spy on the world. Bill now apparently feels qualified to lecture the world on vaccines and health while concurrently pushing his de-population agenda. The equally odious Mark Zuckerberg is a more recent version of this same phenomena.

In recent years, the term Oligarch has often been preceded by “Russian”. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 it presented the capital class with the opportunity of a lifetime. The vast Russian landscape was abundant in oil, gas and other natural resources. The Russian state sector, inefficient and bankrupt, was particularly ripe for plunder. Seemingly out of nowhere appeared a new generation of Russian “businessmen” who began to buy up, for pennies of the dollar, distressed state sector assets. These newly aspiring western-backed Oligarchs looted the country of their birth with impunity and without compunction. Through these proxies the Neo-liberal west feasted greedily on the Russian corpse. In Francis Fukuyama’s book the “End of History”, he declared the west had won, the Cold War was over, and Neo-liberalism reigned supreme. Not so fast…

Assumed to be another corrupt aspiring Oligarch, Vladimir Putin was not opposed by the west when he ran for the Russian presidency. Putin insinuated that it would be “business as usual “if he became president, that was sufficient reassurance for the West and he was elected Russian president in 2000. However, it transpired that Vlad was neither corrupt nor an aspiring Oligarch, he was in fact a fiercely patriotic Russian nationalist who despised what the West had done to Russia and was determined to reverse it. Of specific ire were the Russian traitors who had so callously raped the Russian economy and impoverished its already blighted people. Putin summoned the eighteen most prominent Oligarchs and laid down the law. They could keep a portion of their ill-gotten gains, but they would pay tax, and they would not influence or interfere with the political process. Many took it onboard and fled Russia for the safe, Oligarch-friendly haven of London and stayed out of Russian affairs. Not all however, Mikhail Khodorkovsky continued to meddle, and Putin, true to his word, put him in jail.

Putin had fooled the West and taken back Russia for the Russian people, and the West hasn’t forgiven him and since then Russia has been subject to every trick in the playbook of revenge capitalism. Under Putin, Russia has regained its status as a great power. His popularity with the Russian people is due to their understanding of the forces he is battling.

China, while enjoying its spectacular rise from the ashes of its western-imposed “century of shame’ has been fighting the same forces of “money power” as Putin’s Russia. Jack Ma, the head of mega tech conglomerate Alibaba discovered how seriously China is on the subject. Just prior to Alibaba’s long anticipated IPO, Jack felt emboldened enough to criticise the Chinese state banking system. His IPO was cancelled and he was advised to go live quietly somewhere and enjoy his money, he has wisely done so. In fact, Jack Ma is just a creation, a front for the rich and powerful Jiang family faction from Shanghai. One of its sons, Jiang Zemin, was Chinese premier in the early 2000’s. and was always considered too sympathetic to Western interests. The real power needs frontmen, and like Gates, Zuckerberg et al., Jack Ma was just such a front.

President Xi addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos by video link last week. If the attendant Davos crowd were expecting any softening on China’s position, they were to be disappointed. In typically nuanced fashion he referred to the capital class and its ambitions. He made it clear that China intended to strictly adhere to its policy of zero tolerance towards foreign interference in the affairs of China. He restated the Chinese commitment to a multi-polar world. At an ensuing internal summit on anti-corruption the language was less nuanced. “The collusion between capital and power” (Oligarchy) was the main cause of corruption and would not be tolerated.

The spectacular economic and societal rebirths of both Russia and China should serve as an example to the world of what can be achieved without the insidious influence of a parasitic money class. As the west continues to slide inexorably towards a dystopian economic and societal abyss, its people still fail to recognise the true enemy. The Russian and Chinese fight against this Oligarchical class is everybody’s fight. Once the rest of the world realises that, it will be a better place for all decent people.

There is one last hope for the United States. It does not lie in the ballot box. It lies in the union organizing and strikes by workers at Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, John Deere, Kellogg, the Special Metals plant in Huntington, West Virginia, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the Northwest Carpenters Union, Kroger, teachers in Chicago, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, fast-food workers, hundreds of nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

Organized workers, often defying their timid union leadership, are on the march across the United States. Over four million workers, about 3% of the work force, mostly from accommodation and food services, healthcare and social assistance, transportation, housing, and utilities have walked away from jobs, rejecting poor pay along with punishing and risky working conditions. There is a growing consensus – 68% in a recent Gallup poll with that number climbing to 77% of those between the ages of 18 and 34 – that the only way left to alter the balance of power and force concessions from the ruling capitalist class is to mobilize and strike, although only 9% of the U.S. work force is unionized. Forget the woke Democrats. This is a class war.

The question, Karl Popper reminded us, is not how we get good people to rule. Most of those attracted to power, figures such as Joe Biden, are at best mediocre and many, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, or Mike Pompeo, are venal. The question is, rather, how do we organize institutions to prevent incompetent or bad leaders from inflicting too much damage. How do we pit power against power?

The Democratic Party will not push through the kind of radical New Deal reforms that in the 1930s staved off fascism and communism. Its empty political theater, which stretches back to the Clinton administration, was on full display in Atlanta when Biden called for revoking the filibuster to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, knowing that his chances of success are zero. Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, along with several of the state’s voting rights groups, boycotted the event in a very public rebuke. They were acutely aware of Biden’s cynical ploy. When the Democrats were in the minority, they clung to the filibuster like a life raft. Then Sen. Barack Obama, along with other Democrats, campaigned for it to remain in place. And a few days ago, the Democratic leadership employed the filibuster to block legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz.

The Democrats have been full partners in the dismantling of our democracy, refusing to banish dark and corporate money from the electoral process and governing, as Obama did, through presidential executive actions, agency “guidance,” notices and other regulatory dark matter that bypass Congress. The Democrats, who helped launch and perpetuate our endless wars, were also co-architects of trade deals such as NAFTA, expanded surveillance of citizens, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world and a raft of anti-terrorism laws such as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that abolish nearly all rights, including due process and attorney-client privilege, to allow suspects to be convicted and imprisoned with secret evidence they and their lawyers are not permitted to see. The squandering of staggering resources to the military — $777.7 billion a year — passed in the Senate with an 89-10 vote and in the House of Representatives with a 363-70 vote, coupled with the $80 billion spent annually on the intelligence agencies has made the military and the intelligence services, many run by private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, nearly omnipotent. The Democrats long ago walked out on workers and unions. The Democratic governor of Maine, Janet Mills, for example, killed a bill a few days ago that would have allowed farm workers in the state to unionize. On all the major structural issues there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.

The longer the Democratic Party does not deliver real reforms to ameliorate the economic hardship, exacerbated by soaring inflation rates, the more it feeds the frustration of many of its supporters, widespread apathy (there are 80 million eligible voters, a third of the electorate, who do not cast ballots) and the hatred of the “liberal” elites stoked by Donald Trump’s cultish Republican Party. Its signature infrastructure package, Build Back Better, when you read the fine print, is yet another infusion of billions of government money into corporate bank accounts. This should not surprise anyone, given who funds and controls the Democratic Party.

The suffering and instability gripping at least half the country living in financial distress, alienated and disenfranchised, preyed upon by banks, credit card companies, student loan companies, privatized utilities, the gig economy, a for-profit health care system that has resulted in a quarter of all worldwide COVID-19 deaths—although we are less than 5% of the world’s population—and employers who pay slave wages and do not provide benefits is getting worse. Biden has presided over the loss of extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on evictions and now the ending of the expansion of the child tax credits, all as the pandemic again surges. The handling of the pandemic, from a health and an economic perspective, is one more sign of the empire’s deep decay. Americans who are uninsured, or who are covered by Medicare, often frontline workers, are not reimbursed for over-the-counter COVID tests they purchase. The Supreme Court – five of the justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote – also blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers. And on the horizon, fueled by the economic fallout from the pandemic, are large-scale loan defaults and another financial crisis. The worse things get, the more discredited the Democratic Party and its “liberal” democratic values become, and the more the Christian fascists lurking in the wings thrive.

As history has repeatedly proven, organized labor, allied with a political party dedicated to its interests, is the best tool to push back against the rich. Nick French in an article in Jacobin draws on the work of the sociologist Walter Korpi who examined the rise of the Swedish welfare state in his book “The Democratic Class Struggle.” Korpi detailed how Swedish workers, as French writes, “built a strong and well-organized trade union movement, organized along industrial lines and united by a central trade union federation, the Landsorganisationen (LO), which worked closely with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden (SAP).” The battle to build the welfare state required organizing – 76% of workers were unionized – waves of strikes, militant labor activity and SAP political pressure. “Measured in terms of the number of working days per worker,” Korpi writes, “from the turn of the century up to the early 1930s, Sweden had the highest level of strikes and lockouts among the Western nations.” From 1900–13, as French notes, “there were 1,286 days of idleness due to strikes and lockouts per thousand workers in Sweden. From 1919–38, there were 1,448. (By comparison, in the United States last year, according to National Bureau of Economic Research data, there were fewer than 3.7 days of idleness per thousand workers due to work stoppages.)” There are a few third parties including The Green Party, Socialist Alternative and The People’s Party that provide this opportunity. But the Democrats won’t save us. They have sold out to the billionaire class. We will only save ourselves.

Unions break down political divides, bringing workers of all political persuasions together to fight a common oligarchic and corporate foe. Once workers begin to exert power and extract demands from the ruling class, the struggle educates communities about the real configurations of power and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that have driven many into the arms of the neofascists. For this reason, capitulating to the Democratic Party, which has betrayed working men and women, is a terrible mistake.

The rapacious pillage by the elites, many of whom bankroll the Democratic Party, has accelerated since the financial crash of 2008 and the pandemic.

Wall Street banks recorded record profits for 2021. As the Financial Times noted, they milked the underwriting fees from Fed-based borrowing and profited from mergers and acquisitions. They have pumped their profits, fueled by roughly $5 trillion in Fed spending since the beginning of the pandemic, as Matt Taibbi points out, into massive pay bonuses and stock buybacks. “The bulk of this new wealth—most—is being converted into compensation for a handful of executives,” Taibbi writes. “Buybacks have also been rampant in defense, pharmaceuticals, and oil & gas, all of which also just finished their second straight year of record, skyrocketing profits. We’re now up to about 745 billionaires in the U.S., who’ve collectively seen their net worth grow about $2.1 trillion to $5 trillion since March 2020, with almost all that wealth increase tied to the Fed’s ballooning balance sheet.”

Kroger is typical. The corporation, which operates some 2,800 stores under different brands, including Baker’s, City Market, Dillons, Food 4 Less, Foods Co., Fred Meyer, Fry’s, Gerbes, Jay C Food Store, King Soopers, Mariano’s, Metro Market, Pay-Less Super Markets, Pick’n Save, QFC, Ralphs, Ruler and Smith’s Food and Drug, earned $4.1 billion in profits in 2020. By the end of the third quarter of 2021, it had $2.28 billion in cash, an increase of $399 million in the first quarter of 2020. Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen made over $22 million, nearly doubling the $12 million he made in 2018. This is over 900 times the salary of the average Kroger worker. Kroger in the first three quarters of 2021 also spent an estimated $1.3 billion on stock buybacks.

“Kroger is the only employer for 86 percent of their workers, making it their sole source of earned income,” Economic Roundtable in a survey of Kroger workers found. “Working full-time to earn a living wage would require Kroger to pay $22 per hour for an annual living wage total of $45,760. The average annual earnings of Kroger workers, however, equal $29,655. This is $16,105 short of the annual income needed to pay for basic necessities required for the living wage. More than two-thirds of Kroger workers struggle for survival due to low wages and part-time work schedules. Nine out of ten Kroger workers report that their wages have not increased as much as basic expenses such as food and housing have increase. Since 1990, wages for the most experienced Kroger food clerks have declined from 11 to 22 percent (adjusted for inflation) across the three regions surveyed. Across the entire grocery industry, 29 percent of the labor force is below or near the federal poverty threshold.”

More than one-third (36%) of 10,000 employees at Kroger-owned stores in Southern California, Colorado, and Washington said they were worried about eviction. More than three-quarters (78%) are food-insecure. One in 7 Kroger workers faced homelessness in the past year. Nearly 1 in 5 (18%) Kroger employees said they hadn’t paid the previous month’s mortgage on time.

More than 8,000 unionized Kroger’s King Soopers employees went on strike on Jan. 12 in Colorado, demanding higher wages and better working conditions from the country’s largest grocery store chain and fourth-largest private employer.

This is where one of the emerging front lines in the class struggle are located. It is where we should invest our time and energy.

Our capitalist democracy from the start was rigged against us. The Electoral College permits presidential candidates such as George W. Bush and Trump to lose the popular vote and assume office. The awarding of two senators per state, regardless of the state’s population, means that 62 senators represent one quarter of the population while six represent another quarter. The founding fathers disenfranchised women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property. Most citizens were intentionally locked out of the democratic process by the ruling white male aristocrats, most of them slaveholders.

All the openings in our democracy were the result of prolonged popular struggle. Hundreds of workers were murdered, thousands were wounded, tens of thousands were blacklisted in our labor wars, the bloodiest of any industrialized country. Abolitionists, suffragists, unionists, crusading journalists and those in the anti-war and civil rights movements opened our democratic space. These radical movements were repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the early 20^th century in the name of anti-communism. They were again targeted by the corporate elites following the rise of new mass movements in the 1930s. These popular movements, which rose again in the 1960s, moved us, inch by bloody inch, towards equality and social justice. Most of these gains made in the 1960s have been rolled back under the onslaught of neoliberalism, deregulation, and a corrupt campaign finance system, legalized by court rulings such as Citizens United, which allow the rich and corporations to bankroll elections to select political leaders and impose legislation. The modern incarnation of 19th-century robber barons, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each worth some $200 billion, summon us to our radical roots.

Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. It is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history, have cyclically awoken to throw off their chains.

scheerpost.com

This may sound either arrogant or forgetful, but I could not possibly remember the number of times I was in the same room or at the same protest as Desmond Tutu. And the main reason I know he was there is because I was there listening to him speak, often from a distance of not more than two meters or so.  I say this not to associate myself with the great man — though I’ll forgive you for thinking I’m a terrible, narcissistic name-dropper — but just to be sure we all know this all really happened, because I saw and heard it.

It seems very important to mention, because of the way this man is already being remembered by the world’s pundits and politicians.  As anyone could have predicted, Tutu is being remembered as the great opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa, who was one of the most recognized and most eloquent leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle there, for most of his adult life.

Being a leader in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa was probably the greatest achievement of the man’s life work, and it should come as a surprise to no one that this is the focus of his many obituaries, along with the Nobel he was awarded in 1984.  After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, he was remembered by the establishment in much the same way, as a leader of the movement against apartheid in the US.  The fact that he had become one of the most well-known and well-loved voices of the antiwar movement in the United States and around the world at the time of his death has largely been written out of the history books, a very inconvenient truth.

But as with Martin Luther King, many of the same political leaders commemorating Tutu today would have been unlikely to mention him a day earlier, lest Tutu take the opportunity to speak his mind.  This is certainly why he was not invited to commemorate his friend and comrade, Nelson Mandela, at Mandela’s funeral eight years ago.

Like King and so many others, we can be sure that all the praises of Desmond Tutu as the great moral compass of the world will be made safely, after he’s dead.  Before then would have been much too dangerous, and he was best ignored until then — at which point his passing can be used as an easy way for liberals and conservatives alike to talk about how they also opposed South African apartheid, eventually.

Looking back at Desmond Tutu’s life, searching for various references to protests I recall him speaking at, there’s a headline from the Washington Post on February 16th, 2003 — “thousands protest a war in Iraq,” in New York City the day before.  There were at least half a million people at the rally, on one of the coldest winter days anyone could remember.  What I recall most vividly is being behind the stage, which was even colder than most anywhere else at the protest, because it was also in the shade.  Huddling amid the frozen metal scaffolding were a variety of leftwing luminaries, including Desmond Tutu, Danny Glover, and Susan Serandon, who were getting all the attention from the media, allowing me to hang out with Pete and Toshi Seeger, since no one else wanted to talk to them, or me.

The following year there was a rally in Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts against Israeli apartheid.  It was very windy, and there were hundreds of people filling the area in front of the big church there on Boylston Street.  I don’t remember who else spoke, but Tutu was the main speaker, and he spoke at length, after I sang “They’re Building A Wall” and other songs related to the anti-apartheid struggle in Palestine, as it was an event in solidarity with Palestinians.  Being such a well-known leader in the struggle against South African apartheid, when he would compare Israeli apartheid to the South African version, this was just the kind of support the movement to boycott Israel needed, and Tutu did his best to provide it, over and over again.

There were three overlapping social movements in the early 2000’s that I was involved with as a musician, all of which Tutu was deeply involved with.  I apologize for speaking of these movements in the past tense, but none of them are anywhere near as big or active as they were in the early 2000’s.  I’m talking about the global justice movement and the movement to cancel debt in the Global South, the movement against Israeli apartheid, and the movement against the US/UK invasion of Iraq.

At the time I wondered how it was that Desmond Tutu was showing up at so many of the same protests, conferences, and other events I was attending, promoting, or singing at.  There was a lot going on, and at the time I didn’t know Tutu was actually living in the United States much of the time in the early 2000’s, as a visiting professor in both Georgia and Massachusetts.  There were a lot of other South African radicals at so many of the rallies, especially around the global justice movement, such as representatives of the South African trade unions.  The South African poet, the late Dennis Brutus, was everywhere back then as well.

Journalism, they say, is the first draft of history.  The journalists, when given the job to cover Desmond Tutu, generally did so when it had something to do with South African apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which he chaired, etc.  The journalists aren’t present elsewhere.  Their bosses didn’t send them to cover the protests Tutu was speaking at in Boston or New York, for the most part.

Lots of other drafts of history are then rewritten, for the text books, and for the obituaries, when once again Desmond Tutu’s centrality to the struggle against South African apartheid will be highlighted, with most everything else papered over or ignored entirely.  Others will recall Tutu’s service to the global social movements that arose in the decades after apartheid, to which he gave the full weight of his moral standing — whether these movements were covered by the corporate press or not, whether most of us knew these movements existed or not.

Yes, for those of us who were involved with the social movements that were active when Tutu was a spry young man of 70 or so, we will remember him as a fierce critic of capitalism, of Israeli apartheid, and of US and British wars of aggression.  And we know why he is being praised now by media outlets and politicians who have had no time or space for him since 1998 or so.

Desmond Tutu failed to remain in his historical place.  Had he played his cards differently in the post-South African apartheid period, he could have been a very rich and even more venerated man, winning lots more awards and schmoozing with the world’s power brokers.  Instead, before his official retirement from public life at the age of 79, he spent his seventies campaigning around the world as part of social movements for equality, dignity, and peace, and being a thorn in the side of so many of the rich and powerful people praising him today.

Dead people can’t speak out in their own defense, which makes them much less dangerous than when they were alive (especially if they died of natural causes).  So it’s up to those of us who are still here to speak, and to remember.  Long live Desmond Tutu.  Long live Desmond Tutu’s vision of a world free of oppression — a world in which so many of the politicians praising him today would be in front of a truth and reconciliation commission tomorrow, if Tutu were calling the shots.  Amandla awethu.  Our time will come.

counterpunch.org

One of the great things about not being obsessed with racism is not having to go through the mental twisty turns required to see racism in everything. Of course not being obsessed with racism still allows me to understand that racism has played a sordid role in our country’s history. I can understand anger and the sting of discrimination because I, too, am a human being. But I don’t have to pretend moving from New Jersey to Manhattan to find a new job was for a free black man in the 19th century was the same thing an Irish immigrant underwent boarding a “coffin ship” hoping to survive the journey across the Atlantic knowing his only alternative was to die of starvation amidst the Potato Famine.

That unexpected example infiltrated my life a week ago because of an article I wrote criticizing New York’s Tenement Museum for including an exhibit about a (black) person who was neither an immigrant nor lived in the tenement building the museum occupies, two of the criteria that kept the museum from telling the story of say any Haitians, Spaniards, Japanese, and blacks until now. The museum has told, magnificently, the stories of a handful of the 7,000 actual residents of its building on Orchard Street since 1988 — German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian families. I should know; I worked there as an educator in 2016, quitting after the Trump election turned the institution into some sort of woke bunker fighting imaginary fascism.

After my article suggesting the black family from New Jersey’s story could be best told elsewhere, I became a racist. I’m not, but no less than the liberal coven at the Daily Beast sort of called me that. They wrote a story calling my argument nonsense, said I’d provoked an ugly fight by even asking questions, took a headline from a New York Post reprint of my article and attributed it to me as a quote, mangled another quote, and hinted I might just be a disgruntled employee seeking revenge over a minimum wage job I quit almost six years ago. Every story needs a villain and in 2021 that would be a old, white, straight man writing for a conservative outlet. The Beast even selected their “race and diversity” editor to interview me. They go hard in the paint, these folks.

That’s how I found out how difficult it was to be woke. In order to shoehorn the Jersey guy into the immigrant world, the Museum told the Beast that the black guy, who was born free in America and was never a slave, left New Jersey for New York in 1857. The Museum claimed “though he was not an immigrant in terms of leaving one country for another, he was still embarking on a new life in a society with social norms that differed from what he was accustomed to.”

So an immigrant from New Jersey? That sounds like the set up for an SNL gag except wokeness has no sense of humor. If you surgically remove the woke, here’s what the Museum should have said. Jersey, seriously? The immigrant experience involves being desperate enough to leave absolutely everything you have ever known behind on often a one-way trip, including but not limited to language (the early Irish immigrants spoke mainly Gaelic), culture, religion, food, profession, and family, cross an ocean at direct risk of life, and fight your way out of the status that you’re given when you step ashore in a new land overtly hostile to your presence, except for those standing by to exploit you as you cross that stern barrier at Ellis Island. I cannot see anyone seriously claiming that was the experience from someone moving from New Jersey to Manhattan, black or white.

Well, check that. A white woman (photos show 11 of the 14 Museum senior staff are white, ten are women) so guilty her Museum doesn’t have a black guy in it that she is willing to ignore the base realities and somehow claim a guy who took the ferry over from New Jersey is an immigrant. That is what wokeness drives otherwise intelligent people to do, twist facts to match a narrative (“we have a winner, folks, nobody suffered more than black people”) rather than allow facts to create a narrative (America treated its 19th century white immigrants poorly, visiting upon them many of the same discriminations as it did slaves, because class and capital, not race, is controlling.)

No less than The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) said it is also concerned about the Tenement Museum’s replacing its Irish single family tour with a hybrid story of Irish and black families. The Museum was quick to respond they aren’t doing away with the Irish, just pushing them toward the back of the bus a bit to make room for some 2021 white guilt. “The history of anti-Irish Catholic bigotry in the U.S. is little told,” stated the AOH. “The Museum proposal to eliminate it in favor of a ‘hybrid program’ only furthers the trend of airbrushing it from American history… The Museum’s strategy of pitting the story of one heritage against another is a recipe for enmity, which is the last thing we need in these divisive times. It would indeed be sadly ironic that the telling of the story of the 19th-century history of ‘No Irish Need Apply’ at the Tenement museum should fall victim to a 21st-century incarnation.”

I am glad I remain unwoke. Unwoke, I see no special reason to celebrate a transperson won Jeopardy. I see no progress in an endless series of wordplays that means nothing actually changed, things like “raised awareness” or “increased representation.” Unwoke, I do not skip a beat when some made up superhero character is cast as Asian or gay or disabled. I remain free to ask troublesome questions. Wokeness, and flippant accusations that anyone who disagrees is a racist, shields society from asking questions, and creates a stage where any intellectual bull is accepted as long as it sells the narrative, whether at the Tenement Museum or the Daily Beast.

At its heart wokeness is anti-intellectual, almost medieval, with today’s canceled comedians or perhaps the Irish of the Tenement Museum, as the modern Galileo.

wemeantwell.com

For many years now there has been a contingent of alternative economists working diligently within the liberty movement to combat disinformation being spread by the mainstream media regarding America’s true economic condition. Our efforts have focused primarily on the continued devaluation of the dollar and the forced dependence on globalism that has outsourced and eliminated most U.S. manufacturing and production of raw materials.

The problems of devaluation and stagflation have been present since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was officially formed and given power, but the true impetus for a currency collapse and the destruction of American buying power began in 2007-2008 when the Financial Crisis was used as an excuse to allow the Fed to create trillions upon trillions in stimulus dollars for well over a decade.

The mainstream media’s claim has always been that the Fed “saved” the U.S. from imminent collapse and that the central bankers are “heroes.” After all, stock markets have mostly skyrocketed since quantitative easing (QE) was introduced during the credit crash, and stock markets are a measure of economic health, right?

The devil’s bargain

Reality isn’t a mainstream media story. The U.S. economy isn’t the stock market.

All the Federal Reserve really accomplished was to forge a devil’s bargain: Trading one manageable deflationary crisis for at least one (possibly more) highly unmanageable inflationary crises down the road. Central banks kicked the can on the collapse, making it far worse in the process.

The U.S. economy in particular is extremely vulnerable now. Money created from thin air by the Fed was used to support failing banks and corporations, not just here in America but also banks and companies around the world.

Because the dollar has been the world reserve currency for the better part of the past century, the Fed has been able to print cash with wild abandon and mostly avoid inflationary consequences. This was especially true in the decade after the derivatives crunch of 2008.

Why? The dollar’s global reserve status means dollars are likely to be held overseas in foreign banks and corporate coffers to be used in global trade. However, there is no such thing as a party that goes on forever. Eventually the punch runs out and the lights shut off. If the dollar is devalued too much, whether by endless printing of new money or by relentless inflationary pressures at home, all those overseas dollars will come flooding back into the U.S. The result is an inflationary avalanche, a massive injection of liquidity exactly when it will cause the most trouble.

We are now close to this point of no return.

The difference between a crisis and a real crisis

As I have said for some time, when inflation becomes visible to the public and their pocketbooks take a hit, this is when the real crisis begins.

A Catch-22 situation arises and the Fed must make a choice:

1. To continue with inflationary programs and risk taking the blame for extreme price increases
2. Taper these programs and risk an implosion of stock markets which have long been artificially inflated by stimulus

Without Fed support, stock markets will die. We had a taste of this the last time the Fed flirted with tapering in 2018.

My position has always been that the Federal Reserve is not a banking institution on a mission to protect American financial interests. Rather, I believe the Fed is an ideological suicide bomber waiting to blow itself up and deliberately derail or destroy the American economy at the right moment. My position has also long been that the bankers would need a cover event to hide their calculated economic attack, otherwise they would take full blame for the resulting disaster.

The Covid pandemic, subsequent lockdowns and supply chain snarls have now provided that cover event.

Two years after the pandemic started and the Fed has pumped out approximately $6 trillion more in stimulus (officially) and helicopter money through PPP loans and Covid checks. On top of that, Biden is ready to drop another $1 trillion in the span of the next couple years through his recently passed infrastructure bill. In my article ‘Infrastructure Bills Do Not Lead To Recovery, Only Increased Federal Control‘, published in April, I noted that:

“Production of fiat money is not the same as real production within the economy… Trillions of dollars in public works programs might create more jobs, but it will also inflate prices as the dollar goes into decline. So, unless wages are adjusted constantly according to price increases, people will have jobs, but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. This leads to stagflation, in which prices continue to rise while wages and consumption stagnate.

Another Catch-22 to consider is that if inflation becomes rampant, the Federal Reserve may be compelled (or claim they are compelled) to raise interest rates significantly in a short span of time. This means an immediate slowdown in the flow of overnight loans to major banks, an immediate slowdown in loans to large and small businesses, an immediate crash in credit options for consumers, and an overall crash in consumer spending. You might recognize this as the recipe that created the 1981-1982 recession, the third-worst in the 20^th century.

In other words, the choice is stagflation, or deflationary depression.”

Lies, damned lies and statistics

According to official consumer price index (CPI) calculations and Fed data, we are now witnessing the largest inflation surge in over 30 years, but the real story is much more concerning.

CPI numbers are manipulated and have been since the 1990s when calculation methods were changed and certain unsavory factors were removed. If we look at inflation according to the original way of calculation, it is actually double that reported by the government today.

In particular, necessities like food, housing and energy have exploded in price, but we are only at the beginning.

To be clear, Biden’s infrastructure bill and the pandemic stimulus are not the only culprits behind the stagflation event. This has been a long time coming; it is the culmination of many years of central bank stimulus sabotage and multiple presidents supporting multiple dollar devaluation schemes. Biden simply appears to be the president to put the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. economy (or perhaps Kamala Harris, we’ll see how long Biden maintains his mental health facade).

But how bad will the situation get?

“Collapse” is not too strong a word

I think most alternative economists have called the situation correctly in predicting a “collapse.” This is often treated as a loaded term, but I don’t know what else you could call the scenario we are facing. The covid lockdowns and the battle over the vax mandates have perhaps distracted Americans from an even larger danger of financial instability. That fight is important and must continue, but stopping the mandates does not mean the overarching threat of economic chaos goes away, and both serve the interest of central bankers and globalists.

Some of the key policies within the literature for the “Great Reset” and what the World Economic Forum calls “The 4^th Industrial Revolution” includes Universal Basic Income (UBI), the “Sharing Economy” and eventually a global digital currency system using the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket as a foundation. Essentially, it would be a form of global technocratic communism, and if you enjoy individual freedom, being forced into total reliance on the government for your very survival does not sound appealing.

To obtain such a system would require a catastrophe of epic proportions. The Covid pandemic gets the globalists part of the way there, but it’s obviously not enough. Covid has not convinced many hundreds of millions of people around the world to give up their freedoms for the sake of security.

But maybe a stagflationary collapse will accomplish what Covid has not?

Accelerated price spikes in necessities including housing and food will generate mass poverty and homelessness. There is no chance that wages will keep up with costs. The government might step in with more stimulus to help major corporations and businesses increase wages, but this would basically be the beginning of a universal basic income (UBI, or free money for everyone) and it would only cause more dollar devaluation and more inflation. They could try to freeze prices as many communist regimes have in the past, but this only leads to increased manufacturing shut downs because the costs of production are too high and the profit incentives too low.

I suspect that the establishment will bring back regular checks (like the Covid checks) for the public now struggling to deal with ever increasing expenses and uncertainty, but with strings attached. Don’t expect a UBI check, for example, if you refuse to comply with the vax mandates. If you run a business, don’t expect stimulus aid if you hire non-compliant workers. UBI gives the government ultimate control over everything, and a stagflationary crisis gives them the perfect opportunity to introduce permanent UBI.

The mainstream can no longer deny the fact that stagflation is happening and it is a threat, so hopefully those people that have not been educated on the situation will learn quickly enough to complete the preparations necessary to survive. Countering stagflation will require localized production, decentralization and a move away from reliance on the global supply chain, the institution of local currency systems, perhaps using state banks like the one in North Dakota as a model, barter markets and physical precious metals that rise in value along with inflationary pressures. There is a lot that needs to be done, and very little time to do it.

At bottom, the fight against economic collapse and the “Great Reset” starts with each individual and how they prepare. Each person caught by surprise and stricken with poverty is just another person added to the hungry mob begging the establishment for draconian solutions like UBI. Each properly-prepared individual is, as always, an obstacle to authoritarianism. It’s time to choose which one you will be.

Birch Gold Group via activistpost

Over the past year, the massive upheaval in the United States from workers going on industrial strike and walking off jobs signifies an increasing awareness of class politics. In the following interview, Harriet Fraad says that American workers are overcoming decades of suppression from anti-communist propaganda as well as a betrayal by the two main political parties.

Workers are becoming aware of their rights and their conditions of exploitation under the corporate capitalist system. They are angry and restless for an alternative economic system. For the first time in a long time the words “capitalism” and “socialism” are now entering conscious public discussions. Workers, says Fraad, are well aware of their betrayal by the Democratic Party which has sold out their class cause for the benefit of the party’s leadership from corporate sponsorship.

More than ever, she contends, the working majority of the United States needs the representation and leadership of a new political party that galvanizes their needs and rights under a socialist program.

Historically, Fraad points out, the United States always had a strong movement of working-class politics and socialist parties, for example at the end of the 19th century and during the early 20th century. Unfortunately, much of that tradition was destroyed by the pro-capitalist establishment using Red Scare tactics during the Cold War, including the Democratic Party, the corporate media and official trade union bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the recent acute exploitation of workers during the pandemic period and the grotesque growth in wealth inequality are forcing American workers to question the entire system and to realize their collective political power as a working-class constituency that comprises the vast majority of the 330 million U.S. population.

However, as Harriet Fraad warns, the potential for progressive change in the United States could still be hijacked and destroyed by the rise of right-wing populism under demagogues like Donald Trump. The Republican rightwing and the ineffectual Democratic Party under President Joe Biden are creating the base for fascism which may vanquish the potential for progressive socialism. Thus, America is coming to face an ominous crossroads, in her view, which boils down to this: will the United States embrace socialism or will it descend into fascism?

Dr Harriet Fraad lives in New York City. She has been a practicing psychotherapist and hypnotherapist for nearly four decades. She is also a political activist, a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the United States during the late 1960s and co-founder of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Fraad is co-author of several books, including Class Struggle on the Home Front and Imagine Living in a Socialist USA. She broadcasts a weekly commentary Capitalism Hits Home covering current labor and economic issues as part of the Democracy at Work channel. Fraad is particularly critical of how the Democratic Party in the United States has elevated so-called “identity politics” over the more central issue of class politics, the fight for workers’ rights and the advancement of socialism. That subject of how the CIA and the Democratic Party played the U.S. population into the trivial pursuit of identity politics will be returned to in a future interview for Strategic Culture Foundation.

Interview

Question: Despite a lack of mainstream media coverage, nevertheless there is an unmistakable impression that the United States is undergoing widespread labor strikes and resignations over the past year. Can you give us some figures on this development in worker protests? How significant are these demonstrations in the historical perspective of the American economy, industrial relations and society?

Harriet Fraad: There are over 100,000 people currently on strike in the U.S. At least four million have dropped out of the labor force. There have been over 1,000 separate industrial actions during the past year. These are low estimates. With the exception of Mike Elk’s Payday Report, strikes and labor actions are routinely under-reported by our corporate media. As reported elsewhere, billions of dollars in profits were made by U.S. corporations during the pandemic and the recession that accompanied it. Billionaire wealth surged by 70 percent, or $2.1 trillion, during the same period that saw massive impoverishment of workers and their families; U.S. billionaires are now worth a combined $5 trillion. Meanwhile, wages were not raised.

Question: Do the mass labor strikes across the United States signal an increase in workers becoming more aware of issues of class politics and an increase in militancy to demand their rights as workers?

Harriet Fraad: The class awareness of U.S. workers is, at least up to now, not a conscious class awareness. It is not informed by a socialist media presence, any socialist daily newspapers, television stations, or socialist internet. Historically, class awareness was effectively crushed by a national anti-communist crusade with the public trials of hundreds of people suspected of belonging to the Communist Party or what they considered its fellow travelers in the Socialist Party and the left. The confederation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, expelled the activist left and its communist and socialist organizers. They were the militants that kept the unions vital. Without them, the union movement lost its wider purpose of worker power. In the 1950s, 35 percent of U.S. workers were organized in unions. Now there is barely 10 percent in unions.

However, class consciousness was re-introduced with the Occupy Movement of 2011. There, the idea of the 1 percent super-wealthy and the 99 percent of the rest of society took root in popular perception. It is significant that former President Barack Obama, a supposed “progressive” Democrat, crushed Occupy sites across the nation in 2012. Having said that, class consciousness across the U.S. is just beginning to be revived.

Question: Can it be discerned that America’s workers and their families – who represent a majority of the 330 million population – are becoming: a) more critical of capitalism as an economic system; and b) more receptive to and supportive of an alternative socialist politics?

Harriet Fraad: For the first time since the 1950s, capitalism can be named as a system rather than the implicitly assumed only system for organizing an economy. U.S. grotesque inequality is exposed and becoming increasingly conscious among workers, especially for the young whose future is dire. Young Americans are mired in student debt, deprived of jobs with a future, and may even lose their planet due to capitalism.

Question: Traditionally, in the two-party U.S. political system the Democrats are viewed as being pro-labor and pro-union, but it seems that over recent decades the Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Republican Party as being loyal and pliable servants of Big Business. Can you explain this trend with historical reference?

Harriet Fraad: The big sell-out of the Democratic Party to corporate interests was launched by Bill Clinton in 1993. He had been elected with union energy and union financial support. Yet, he was most instrumental in making the Democratic Party a party serving corporate capitalist interests and taking corporate money.

When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he allowed jobs in the United States to be outsourced to Mexico and he gave his blessing to the exodus of millions of U.S. jobs to nations with low wages, terrible working conditions and weak or no ecological protections.

Clinton initiated the Democratic Party’s new corporate strategy of verbally celebrating racial, gender and sexual equality and justice while advancing corporate interests and abandoning the poor and the white working-class. In just one instance, he killed cash assistance for needy families and ripped a huge hole in the American social welfare safety net. He threw millions of poor black and white women and children into bad jobs and terrible poverty while claiming “progressive” treatment for all.

Question: Does this historical background partly explain the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump as a “populist hero”?

Harriet Fraad: Yes. The neglected white working-class gave up on the Democrats that sold them out and they were ripe for Trump’s empty promise to “Make America Great Again”. They were outraged by their perception that the gains made by people of color and women were what took their jobs away. That was a misperception distorted and presented to them by Trump. People of color and women still earn less than white men. It was not people of color and women but rather corporate profiteering that took their better-paid manufacturing jobs to nations like Mexico, China and India with terrible job conditions. It was corporate capitalists like Trump and their servants like Clinton who took their jobs. Trump exploits white working-class rage. In the absence of a powerful present socialist analysis, Trump alone speaks to their outrage. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, had a chance to win as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Sanders was defeated. He was outvoted by traditional African-Americans who chose Hilary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s defeat was aided and abetted by the Democratic Party leadership.

Question: If the modern Democratic Party is a hindrance to the cause of workers, shouldn’t workers then seek to establish a new third party that actually fights for their class interests?

U.S. workers are now beginning to reclaim class consciousness.

America direly needs a unified socialist voice that connects the various movements like Black Lives Matter, Climate Extinction, the Feminist Movement, MeToo# and Timesup#, Labor rights, transsexual rights, socialist and communist parties and the movement to transform capitalist business and all other forms of organizations into cooperatives. They need a movement and a party that is against all arbitrary divisions between people. The movement and party should be an umbrella organization. The handle and stem represent class justice. The spokes and their multicolored fabric are all of the movements that are needed to create class, race, gender, and sexual justice for all.

Question: The corporate news media and academia suggest that somehow socialism is antithetical to ordinary Americans. Is a mass movement for socialism possible in the United States? What would that take for it to mobilize and achieve governance?

Harriet Fraad: A mass socialist movement is certainly possible in the United States. In fact, there has been a long history of socialism in America from cooperative communal movements to official socialist and communist parties.

The Socialist Party was a powerful force in the U.S. from the turn of the century until the First World War. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate won a million votes even though he ran from prison in 1920. Socialism and communism are not antithetical to Americans. However, when they actually threatened capitalism as mass movements they were severely repressed by the federal government in the service of corporate capitalism.

Question: The social discontent and political disorientation in the United States seems to have reached unstable levels. If a viable democratic socialist direction is not harnessed by the people, do you fear that a reactionary alternative is a real danger? That is, for fascist politics to fully emerge from the incipient forms we see already in an increasingly rightwing Republican Party?

Harriet Fraad: The U.S. empire, like the USSR, is imploding out of its own corruption. America is polarized. There is far greater acceptance of a socialist alternative to capitalism as well as the danger of a well-financed turn towards fascism. On the socialist side, labor, a mass base, is awakening to the outrage of super-exploitation by the 1 percent. People are politically active on the left as they have not been since the 1960 and 1970s. A majority of young people prefer socialism to capitalism. However, the U.S. left does not have a centrally organized national organization around which to unite. If it did, it could mobilize the majority of Americans.

The Trumpian right in the Republican Party has no positive program except for gun rights and police and military support. Instead, they rage at Democrats, progressives, people of color, immigrants and abortion rights. They have a strong presence in our capitalist media. They are well-funded and have a populist and visible leader.

Germany became fascist because when its capitalism failed and wild inflation wiped out the livelihoods of the mass of workers, although Germany had a powerful Communist Party at the time, the German corporate wealth supported fascism as an alternative to socialism.

The spontaneous labor uprisings in the U.S. are promising. But we do not know how it will turn out in the United States.