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EdgeLeft: Libya, NATO, and International Law.

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2011

The original UN resolution, pressed for by France, Great Britain, and the U.S. (all three led by men who have never been in armed combat) was to use such force as was needed to protect the civilian population of Libya. It was explicit that the NATO operation was not designed to force a regime change — though Obama has since made it clear that in his view Gaddafi must leave.

The events in Libya are tragic because they are a civil war, not part of the North African Spring. Far more violence has been used in Syria, with no word of NATO intervention. At last report Saudi Arabia had over a thousand troops “loaned” to Bahrain, with no hint of NATO intervention. What makes Libya different? It has oil.

I’m not writing a brief for or against Gaddafi. I am saying that NATO has violated the UN Resolution, that it should cease combat, and accept any of several offers put forward by other countries for an immediate cease fire. In particular the use of air attacks in a transparent effort to murder Gadaffi are completely indefensible.

But it is NATO which I want to look at first, and this carries us back to the early days of the Cold War. There have been books written on the origins of the Cold War but we have time only for a sketch. When WW II ended in 1945, it was won, in Europe, by the extraordinary losses of life by the Soviet Union. From the Western side there was a fear of the masses of Soviet troops and tanks and the reality of the mass Communist Parties in France and Italy.

The Soviet theory, at that time, not to be revised until Khruschev became the Soviet leader, was that conflict (and by this one assumed war) between capitalism and communism was inevitable. The one ace in the hole of the West was the nuclear bomb, and the speed with which the U.S. surrounded the Soviet Union with air bases which would make possible nuclear strikes deep in Soviet territory.

From the Soviet side, their massed troops were exhausted, the lines of communication made any serious attack on the West impossible. What the Soviets did want — what would have been true of any government in Moscow, regardless of its politics — was a buffer zone between Russia and Western Europe.

Russia has no natural defenses, no oceans, no rivers, no mountains. It had suffered from the Napoleonic invasion in the 19th century and from two German invasions in the 20th century. The Soviets sought at first to gain security through getting a U.S. and British agreement to a neutral Germany, along the lines that had been worked out with Austria and Finland. But in the climate of 1948 when nerves were raw on both sides and at a time when, possibly, wiser heads on either side might have changed the course of events, the Soviets moved to take control of Czechoslovakia, bringing it into the East European Bloc.

(There was an unintended tragedy here — in the last free elections in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party had a strong share of the vote — the Soviet moves to bring it into the Soviet Bloc was a death blow to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia).

The same year saw the raw testing of nerves when the Soviet Union cut off the land route from West Germany into Berlin, and the West responded with the Berlin Airlift.

Western Europe, essentially under the control of the U.S. (though a much gentler control than Eastern Europe faced from Moscow) responded to events in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin crisis by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — a military defensive shield. That was in 1949.

The Soviets established the Warsaw Pact in 1955, several years after the founding of NATO. The Soviets had waited, still hoping for some kind of demilitarization of Germany, but this hope was ended when West German military forces were admitted to NATO in 1954.

In theory (and in the eyes of almost everyone in Europe), the two military pacts were “mutually defensive pacts.” But it was Professor Johan Galtung, a Norwegian academic (and pacifist — who served time in prison rather than doing military service) who advanced a theory I think proved more accurate.

Galtung felt that the NATO and WARSAW Pacts were never intended to protect from outside forces (ie., the West realized Moscow was in no position to send forces into Western Europe, while the NATO forces knew that massive public opposition would make it untenable to invade the Warsaw Bloc). Rather, Prof. Galtung suggested, the two pacts were designed for “vertical control.”

If one goes back to that period there is a great deal of evidence of plans by the U.S., and by the military and police forces in France and Italy, to prevent even a free election of the Communist Parties in those countries, and to use NATO forces to achieve this — ie., a “vertical control”

Looking to the East the examples abound. On June 17, 1953, there was a major workers’ uprising in East Germany, put down with Soviet military forces, with at least 125 killed. In Poznan, Poland, in 1956 there were substantial working class riots, put down with Soviet forces, with something close to 200 people killed. Finally, and most dramatically, in Hungary, in October of 1956, there was a revolution which overthrew the government.

The Soviets at first agreed to withdraw and permit the formation of a new government, but then sent in troops. It is estimated that at least 700 Soviet troops and 2500 Hungarian were killed. (Matters were not helped by the fact that in October, 1956, when the world should have been focused on Hungary, Britian, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to seize control of the Suez Canal — a lesson reminding us that workers should never look to imperial powers for help at a time of need!).

It was at this moment when, if more rational minds were in control in the West, the leaders of NATO would have put through a call to Moscow saying “Look, it is obvious that the Warsaw Pact cannot possibly attack us — you can’t even control the countries in your own bloc. So we are now, unilaterally, dissolving NATO and we urge you to join us, and together see if we can work out some plans for genuine demilitarization of Europe.”

But rational minds were not in control. Even when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in a remarkable series on nonviolent revolutions, the West did not say, “Hey, we don’t need NATO anymore — the Warsaw Pact has dissolved, and our only excuse for existing dissolved with it.”

No, the “realistic” political minds in Washington, Paris, London, and Bonn began to talk of ways of finding new functions for NATO, admitting the nations that had been under Soviet control, and pushing the Western military machine closer to Russia’s borders. Part of this is the fulfillment of the sociological law that no organization goes quietly into the night.

When the March of Dimes realized it had won the fight against polio, it didn’t dissolve — why dissolve when so many people had jobs? They just found a new disease. NATO provides all kind of jobs for Generals and for ordinary bureaucrats in Brussels. To dissolve NATO might threaten the survival of Brussels itself.

And so NATO found new purposes. It deployed military forces to Afghanistan! A most remarkable deployment, since not one of the countries in NATO (with the exception of the earlier ill-fated British Mission) had ever even been to Afghanistan. A new war! A new purpose! No need for generals to find honest work! The bureaucrats at Brussels were safe!

So in this sense it is not surprising that NATO, finding itself firmly locked out of events in North Africa, not invited to play a key role in Tunisia or Egypt or Bahrain, decided it could play a role in Libya, and at least Libya had oil!

My first point has been that NATO — an organization which probably should never have been formed, and which in any case was formed entirely in relation to tensions in the middle of the 20th century — should be dissolved now. It should have been dissolved long ago. “Out of NATO” should be the slogan of every socialist and peace group in the NATO bloc.

The second point is international law, which has surfaced since the European courts issued a writ for the arrest of Gadaffi. I do not know if Gaddafi qualifies for the writ — there is much that I don’t know. But I do know that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair qualifies for such a writ, as does the former President of the United States, George Bush. I write this not because I have a special dislike for Blair or Bush, but because the force of law must carry with it some element of logic.

I am very glad that some of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge are being brought to trial. But even in that case I am worried over the process by which the international courts selected who should be prosecuted. All scholars who have followed the deep tragedy of Cambodia know that both China and the United States maintained support for the Khmer Rouge long after the Vietnamese Army had driven it from the cities. Scholars of events in Indochina know that it was the CIA action in installing Lon Nol in Cambodia, which in the process, drove the King from his throne, and opened the door to the Khmer Rouge. Again, scholars know the the heavy air attacks on Cambodia, ordered by Kissinger and Nixon, gave the Khmer Rouge a legitimacy. Nixon, of course, is gone, But Henry Kissinger still makes guest appearances on TV shows. He is still a paid consultant for at least one network.

In no way am I trying to excuse the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge from their day in court — Cambodia deserves no less. I have been to Cambodia. I have seen the death pits, the skulls with the bullet holes. I want justice.

But the “trick” of international law is that if it is too obviously selective — in the case of Cambodia we have only four Cambodians on trial — we are surely mocking the dead, and in the process, using that trial to mock the law itself.

And if — with the memory of Iraq on our minds, and knowing all that we know about it, knowing all the civilians in Iraq who were killed, all our own men and women who were killed, or who bear injuries that will twist their minds to the final days — if, given those realties, we bring in a writ only against Gadaffi, does this not turn international law on its head?

Turning to Libya. To admit I do not know enough about Libya, is not to say I know nothing about it. Sheila Cooper, a friend of mine and a woman who liked secretarial work, had been secretary to Peggy Duff, also a good friend, and a leader in the British (and international) peace movement. Of Peggy, Noam Chomsky said she was “one of those heroes who is completely unknown, because she did too much… she should have won the Nobel Peace Prize about 20 times.”

When Peggy died in 1981, Sheila took a secretarial job in Libya. The pay was good and she hoped to make enough to retire. I was in touch with Sheila about Libya, she never conveyed a sense of living in a dictatorship, she chatted about the differences among the Libyans depending on what part of Libya they were from. Sheila, sadly, died of cancer before her retirement, but on the one occasion when I visited her in London, while she was on leave, she did not express any sense of horror or dismay about Libya.

Most of us who are old enough to remember World War II know of Libya from the surge of Allied or Nazi tank battles across the desert, or from an old Humphrey Bogart film set in Libya. What we don’t know is that the Nazis, Italians, British, and American armies left vast numbers of land mines behind, but never gave the Libyans the maps which could make possible finding the mines. As a result, even when I visited Libya in 1989 there were still farmers being blown up somewhere in Libya almost every week.

Nor do most of us have any idea of the patriotic struggle of the Libyans against Italy. We may be aware that the name of Libya’s leader, Gaddafi, is spelled several different ways. The Libya we know today came into being in 1969, when Muammar Gaddafi took power in a coup, overthrowing the monarchy. But already oil had been discovered and Libya, which had not held much interest to other countries (the exception would be the U.S., which had a major air force base at Wheelus, Libya), was suddenly very much “on the map of world politics.”

(This was not the first contact the U.S. had with Libya — in fact, the first U.S. foreign military action was in 1805 in Tripoli against the “Barbary Pirates.”)

One of the first things Gaddafi did was to expel the U.S. from Wheelus — something for which I don’t think the U.S. has ever forgiven him. Libya, under Gaddafi, entered world politics in ways that are confusing. I have a good friend who thinks he is insane. Certainly, with his strange ways of dressing, it is obvious he is not your ordinary political leader. He holds no title, and while he is considered a dictator by his opponents, I think our problem is trying to find some way to think about Libya and Gaddafi — and it is hard.

Shortly after taking power he changed the name of Libya to “Jamahiriya,” an Arabic term generally translated as “state of the masses.” Gaddafi did not line up, politically, with either the Soviet Union or the Peoples Republic of China. Instead, he wrote the Green Book, of which I had a copy at one time but found close to incomprehensible and have (I think) lost it.

Remember, he was only 26 when he took power, he found himself in charge of a country which had, almost overnight, moved from being one of the poorest to being one of the most wealthy. He used that wealth of build universities, housing, medical centers. The form of government was — in theory — to be based on “direct democracy” without any political parties, governed through local popular councils named “Basic People’s Congresses.”

Clearly he had to have had considerable charisma to hold things together, and he seems to have hoped that his views, as set forth in his Green Book, would be a guide for the Third World. The best we can do in trying to translate “Jamahiriya” into English is to say it can be rendered as “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahirya.” And that really leaves us more confused than before!

Gaddafi’s foreign policy has been, at best, erratic. He has extended financial aid to a wide range of groups, acted as a friend to people such as Idi Amin, given aid to the Irish Republican Army, supported armed Islamic rebels in the Philippines, etc.

At some point in the early 1980’s (I don’t have exact notes) I got an invitation to a conference on Peace and Liberation to be held at Malta. I checked with my friend Sheila Cooper, and she said the Libyans had asked her for any names that she could think of — and she had sort of turned over her address book. In addition to me and Daniel Ellsberg, there was an old friend from the independent left movement in Japan, a woman from Yugoslavia, two people from the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the U.S. — perhaps two dozen in all.

My guess that Libyan money was behind it was true enough — we had to raise the air fare to get to Rome, but from there we had tickets to Malta, and our costs in Malta were covered. The one real give-away was the huge table with Gaddafi’s Green Book.

There were only about four Libyans present for the conference, they did not “guide us” to any conclusions. I was interested that there were no representatives from the World Peace Council — the Soviet Union’s front group. It was clear that this was an experiment in trying to reach out beyond the usual group. My own feeling was that the money spent on us was at least not spent on Irish terrorists.

In 1989 the Fellowship of Reconciliation sent a team, including myself, Virginia Baron, an academic — Dirk Vandewalle — and a half dozen others for a week to take a look at Libya. Having Prof. Vandewalle with us was very helpful, as he could give us what clearly Obama needs and doesn’t have — a short course in the history of Libya.

We did not meet Gaddafi, but we met with pretty much all the key people in government. But even to say that is tricky. I realize much has changed since 1989, but there were no civil associations as we would know them, no trade unions, no lawyers associations, no political parties. The question of “how” decisions were made was not clear.

None of us found the political climate oppressive. Our hosts were frank and easy in their talks with us, we visited Tripoli without any “minders,” and had a chance to see some of the real wonders of the ancient history of Tripoli. And of course we saw the home of Gaddafi, which was hit, on orders from Reagan, in revenge for Libya’s alleged involvement in a bombing in Berlin.

(Proof of that involvement is sketchy — but the impact of the U.S. bombing was very clear. Not only had one of his daughters been killed, but we saw a part of the French Embassy which had been hit, and an apartment building in a clearly residential neighborhood which had been totally destroyed, along with everyone in it.)

The only contact I had had since was indirect. Someone I’ve been in email contact with, an American, had gone to Libya recently for a job, and then when the “troubles” began early this year, she had to leave, but in her notes to me after she left she expressed no sense of horror at Gaddafi — nor any great love for the man. She said that he probably had a fair amount of popular support, wryly noting that even Nixon won two free elections.

The most painful link to Libya was the Lockerbie bombing, since two good friends of mine lost their daughter — their only child — who was on the plane when it was destroyed. There are arguments about whether the Lockerbie bombing was actually the responsibility of Libya but the fact is that Libya had been the source of funds for terrorism (or, if you look at it from the Libyan standpoint, the source of funds for various struggles for national liberation). There is also no question that Libya had, on at least one occasion, sent out hit squads to silence Libyans who had left Libya but remained openly critical of Gaddafi

One does need to remember that the late Soviet Union did the same thing, Israel has done this, and I’m afraid the U.S. has also had a hand in this miserable game.

What is interesting is that in recent years Libya seemed to have made a major change in policy, settling British claims over the Lockerebie bombing, agreeing to end any further research into nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. It is this most recent period that I know so little about — but how strange that Gaddafi and Libya would now have moved to the top of a hit list.

Two things are clear. This is not a revolution but a Civil War. I don’t know what forces are involved among the “rebels” but how little real support they have is provided by the fact that months after the French, British, and Americans have destroyed any Libyan air force, and after the murder of one of Gaddafi sons, and repeated attacks on his various compounds, Gaddafi is still there, he has been seen in public, he has received foreign guests, and Tripoli remains in his hands.

It is not surprising that various officials have “defected” since I think any of us might consider defecting as we realized guided missiles are being sent to track down key officials. This is less an appeal to a moral reason to leave the government, than an urgent sense of survival.

The other thing which is clear is that the rebels have also killed people. In one case (documented from press reports) the rebels admitted to having killed a number of prisoners of war they had captured “because they were black and we assumed they were hired killers.”

Civil wars are very nasty things. We lost more men in our Civil War than were killed in almost all our wars combined — WW I, WW II, and the Korean War — until late in the Vietnam War the total military dead was greater. We lost those men from a much smaller population. Civil wars are not civil. This one is tragic and we should be urging the European forces to rush to the negotiating table.

Certainly the Libyan adventure is one very good reason not to leave NATO in existence — it is a weapon that has already killed many in Afghanistan and may yet kill many more in Libya.

[David McReynolds is a former chair of War Resisters International, and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He was recently the subject, along with Barbara Deming, of a dual biography by Martin Duberman titled A Saving Remnant. He is retired and lives with two cats on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He posts at Edge Left and can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com. Read more articles by David McReynolds on The Rag Blog.]

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The power — and limits — of social movements

Dissidents not only have to be willing to tell the truth about the delusions of the dominant culture, but make sure we don’t fall into delusions of our own.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2011

[A version of this essay was presented in a talk to the Houston Peace and Justice Center conference on July 9, 2011.]

In mainstream politics in the United States, everyone agrees on one thing: We’re number one. We’re special. We’re America. We’re on top, where we deserve to be.

In dissident politics in the United States, we have long argued that this quest for economic and military dominance can’t be squared with basic moral and political principles. We’re on top, but it’s unjust and unsustainable.

Whether or not the United States has ever had a legitimate claim to that top spot — or whether there should be spots on top for any nation(s) — the days of uncontested dominance are over: Our economy is in permanent decline and our military power continues to fade. We are still the wealthiest society in history, but we are no longer the dynamic heart of the global economy. Our military is still able to destroy at will, but the wars of the past decade have demonstrated the limits of that barbarism.

How should the U.S. public react to this shift? One approach would be to acknowledge that predatory corporate capitalism based on greed and First World imperialism based on violence have produced obscene levels of inequality, both within societies and between societies, that are inconsistent with those basic moral and political principles. Our task is to reshape systems and institutions before it’s too late.

That kind of critical self-reflection also leads to the conclusion that our society not only fails on the criterion of social justice but also is ecologically unsustainable. We are a profligate, consumption-mad society, in a world in which unsustainable living arrangements are the norm in the developed world and spreading quickly in the developing world.

We can’t predict the time frame for collapse if we continue on this trajectory, but we can be reasonably certain that without major changes in our relationship to the larger living world the ecosphere will at some point (likely within decades) be unable to support large-scale human life as we know it.

These crises, if honestly acknowledged and squarely faced, would test our capacity to analyze and adapt — there’s no guarantee that enough time remains to prevent catastrophe. Without such honesty, there is no hope of a decent future.

So, the bad news is that we’re in trouble.

The worse news is that the mainstream political culture cannot face this reality.

Dissident political organizing must take into account the fact that contemporary America is deeply delusional. Our collective life is shaped by a propaganda-driven political system that ignores and evades. Political leaders — from the reactionary right of the Republican Party to the liberal left of the Democratic Party — are not interested in creating new systems to face these challenges but instead are mired in trivial debates about how to duct-tape together the existing social, economic, and political systems to allow us to live in our delusions a bit longer.

In addition to critiquing the delusions of the dominant culture, we dissidents have to make sure we don’t absorb those same delusions. We have to be honest not only about the promise of social movements but their limits.

My fear is that many — maybe even most — people who identify with progressive/left/radical politics are in denial about the depth of the crises and, therefore, prone to misjudge the potential of traditional social movements. Those of us who define ourselves by our commitment to social justice and ecological sustainability — those who want to make the world a better place — have to be careful to avoid delusions of our own. Here’s how this often plays out:

A dissident speaker offers a critique of some aspect of the dominant culture’s political, economic, or social systems. The task of taking on those systems seems overwhelming, and someone in the audience asks, “Is there any hope that we can change things?” The speaker acknowledges the difficulty of the task, but points out that social movements in the past have faced great challenges, lost many battles along the way, and persevered to make the world a better place.

In the United States, the speaker often cites the civil rights movement as an example: Courageous people organizing over centuries to challenge the deeply entrenched white supremacy that defined the country, ending first slavery and then formal American apartheid. The speaker reminds the audience that the work of popular movements remains incomplete and that we owe it to generations past and future — and to ourselves — to press on.

I’m familiar with that exchange because I’ve both been in those audiences and also been the speaker offering that analysis. It’s an honest response — historically accurate and morally defensible — but these days I’m less comfortable with that stock answer. Yes, we must remember the promise of social movements, inspired by past successes. But we also need to be clear about their limits in the present and future.

Let’s push the example of the civil rights movement a bit:

When Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 1963 March on Washington, he spoke of “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” He argued that “the architects of our republic” had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” which guaranteed “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

For black Americans, that note “has come back marked insufficient funds,” King said. “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

In 1963, King was speaking in a world that promised endless bounty, and his claim was that black people had a right to their fair share of that bounty; the metaphor of checks and banks was not only metaphorical. He spoke of political liberty, but the assumption was that with the “riches of freedom” would come, if not actual riches, certainly a more equitable share of the country’s wealth.

White America didn’t particularly like letting black — or indigenous, Latino, Asian — people into the winner’s circle, but once it became impossible to maintain apartheid-by-law, white folks gave a bit of ground. White society grudgingly gave that ground in the middle of a post-World War II boom that promised endless expansion. The fight for racial justice took place on a relatively stable platform of U.S. global political power and economic growth.

The same context applies to other social movements of that period fighting for workers’ rights, women’s rights, lesbian/gay rights, ecological awareness. Moving into the 1990s, it also applies to the global justice movement that focused on the economic imperialism of the First World, and even to the anti-war movement of the early 2000s.

There were, of course, ups and downs in these decades. The U.S. debacle in Southeast Asia led to doubts about U.S. power and methods, but those were washed away by the demise of the Soviet Union and the American “victory” in the Cold War at the end of the 1980s.

There were economic recessions, but they didn’t disturb a widely shared belief that the economy, over the long haul, would grow indefinitely. There was a brief period of concern in the 1970s about environmental limits, but when predictions of short-term disaster proved imprecise, most people quit worrying.

Most of the dissident political analysis and organizing of the past half century also has gone forward with an assumption of economic growth and ecological stability. The goal of much of this organizing was to make that stable, growing world a fairer place with a more just distribution of power and resources. I believe that even many of those fighting against U.S. domination of the world expected — and wanted — to live in a world in which the United States remained if not central and obscenely wealthy, at least important and comfortable.

To borrow a phrase from songwriter John Gorka, that is the old future, and the old future’s gone — dead and gone, never to return. While the dominant culture may indulge its delusions of endless bounty, that’s not how the cards are falling. What does that mean for political dissidents? With so many variables and contingencies, any attempt at specific prediction can’t be taken seriously. But we have to do our best to anticipate what is coming so that we can organize as effectively as possible.

The key shift: We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).

That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.

My concerns about this are exacerbated by two trends in contemporary society: a diminished capacity for empathy and a dwindling connection to the natural world.

On empathy: Capitalism defines human beings as primarily greedy, self-interested animals designed to maximize their own position, especially in the acquisition of material goods and status. That instinct obviously is part of our nature, but — just as obviously — that is not all there is to human nature; given the long evolutionary history of humans in band-level societies defined by solidarity and cooperation, we should assume the greedy instincts probably are not primary.

Yet in capitalism that sociopathic instinct is rewarded and reinforced. With each generation that lives in such a system, our capacity for empathy is undermined. This is not an argument against individuality or for complete subordination to the collective, but merely recognition of one of the ugliest aspects of capitalism — the belief that we can ignore the fate of others and still make a decent world.

On nature: In a high-energy/high-technology society that is increasingly mass-mediated, with each generation we grow more alienated from the larger living world. Just as capitalism undermines our connections to each other, industrial society undermines our connections to other species and the ecosystems on which we depend. The industrial world is a dead world, and our immersion in that world makes it harder for us to see what is dying.

This is not an argument against all technology or human’s use of our creative capacity to change our environment, but merely recognition of one of the scariest aspects of modernity — the belief that we can ignore the living world and still live in the world.

There is nothing terribly new in these warnings. Let’s go back to the civil rights movement and another of King’s memorable speeches,”Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. In his critique of the U.S. attack on Vietnam and the larger forces behind that attack, King said:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Ask yourself, where do we stand on the struggle to move from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society? What about our obsession with machines and computers? The culture’s worship of profit motives and property rights? How much progress have the past four decades of progress brought?

None of this is a call to abandon organizing or sink into the paralysis of despair. It’s simply a suggestion that we deal with reality. Is the sky falling? Of course not, because the sky doesn’t fall — that’s the wrong metaphor. Better to ask, is the sky darkening?

What is my program for organizing in a world beneath a darkened sky? I have no program, only some observations and tentative conclusions, maybe nothing more than gut instincts.

First, we should focus on creating more actual physical spaces and real human networks based on progressive/left/radical values, putting as much energy as needed to anchor and solidify them, even if it takes time away from issue-oriented campaigns. As we work on specific policy issues, let’s organize with an eye toward building not coalitions but communities. In hard times, coalitions evaporate, but communities have a shot at surviving.

Second, whatever projects we pursue, there should be a component that connects people to the non-human world and includes physical work in that world. We need not disconnect completely from our abstract analytical work and computers, but every project should give us a chance to do physical work with others, outdoors as much as possible.

Those first two instincts have led me to redirect a considerable amount of my time, energy, and money to a progressive community center we are building in Austin, Texas, called 5604 Manor. There is important and exciting organizing and advocacy work going on there, but just as important is the community-building activity as we renovate the building, clean up the back yard, plant gardens, and get to know each other across lines of age, race, and language.

These instincts are captured in the first stanza of William Stafford’s poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

My third instinct may seem obvious: We need to tell all the truths that we know and feel. My sense is that this is our most difficult task, to speak honestly of the darkening sky. In the dominant culture, such talk is most often ignored — people either refuse to listen, laugh it off, or deride it as defeatist. Even in dissident circles, attempts to discuss these subjects bluntly often lead people to disengage or demand that I only speak in a positive manner.

But every day there are more people — though still a small minority — who want to face what is coming, even though such a reckoning deepens our grief. Our task is to speak aloud what others may feel but may be afraid to voice. Perhaps the most radical act today is to speak the truth about a darkening sky and remain committed to organizing, knowing there is no guarantee we can endure, let alone prevail.

This spirit is captured in the last stanza of Stafford’s poem:

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes, no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The potential power of social movements at this moment in history flows from this commitment to speaking the truth — not truth to power, which is too invested in its delusions to listen — but truth to each other.

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By Arlene Goldbard / The Rag Blog / July 12, 2011

Recently I read a piece on executive pay in the business section of The New York Times. Ever since, I have been wondering how to write about it.

Here are some of the images I did not want to include: bad apples spoiling a whole barrel; pirates (and other types of marauding bandits); weeds spoiling the garden. Why not? Because the obscene excesses of executive pay practices are not aberrations, but the inevitable products of a complex system.

To redeploy a phrase beloved of judges on TV crime shows (where it refers to something quite different, evidence obtained illegally), they are “the fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Most of the images still circling my mind are from the Ancient History 101 version of the fall of Rome: Rome fell, the history teacher told us, because those in power pursued personal wealth and privilege at the expense of collective well-being. Such explanations were illustrated with lurid depictions of toga-clad degenerates cramming whole roast birds and huge bunches of grapes into their gaping mouths.

Nowadays they are garbed in gray flannel and power ties, but the facts are equally shocking.

While ordinary working people (and the unemployed) were being exhorted to “share the pain” by accepting pay cuts, job losses, and limits on unemployment benefits, executives’ slice of the roast goose got bigger:

Let’s begin with the view from 30,000 feet. Total executive pay increased by 13.9 percent in 2010 among the 483 companies where data was available for the analysis. The total pay for those companies’ 2,591 named executives, before taxes, was $14.3 billion.

That’s some pile of pay, right? But Mr. Ciesielski of the Times puts it into perspective by noting that the total is almost equal to the gross domestic product of Tajikistan, which has a population of more than 7 million.

It’s not even the sheer dollars so much as the fact that the standard rationales for such expenditures no longer provide even as much cover as the flimsiest toga for the self-regarding indifference that drives so much of the corporate sector.

The executive pay study shows clearly that top-level salaries and bonuses swelled even at the expense of shareholders, of research and development, and of market capitalization. Consider a few facts:

The report calculated that at 179 companies in the study, the average value of stockholders’ stakes fell between 2008 and 2010 while the top executives at those companies received raises.

Moving on to R.& D. costs, the report examined the 62 technology companies in its sampling that reported such an expense, excluding certain costs associated with acquisitions.

Mr. Ciesielski found that the median level of executive pay was equal to 5.3 percent of these companies’ R.& D. expenditures.

Eleven companies analyzed in the report gave top executives a combined pay package amounting to 1 percent or more of the companies’ average market value over the course of the year. The Janus Capital Group, the mutual fund concern, topped the list, with pay totaling almost $41 million for five executives. This accounted for 1.95 percent of the company’s average market value over 2010.

“To earn their keep,” the report said, “managers would have to create stock market value in the full amount of their pay.” The executives at Janus failed to increase value in 2010, when the stock closed out the year roughly where it had begun it. This year, the company’s shares are down almost 30 percent.

It’s hard to skip over the fat-cat bad-apple imagery and give such information its full import, because — in a culture that generally ignores class while focusing on individuals — we tend to think in terms of specific cases rather than a whole system.

But it’s really a mistake to allow the facts of executive pay to pull us toward a personalized moral critique of the executives who stockpile wealth at the expense of shareholders, or R&D, or general economic well-being. Focusing on this as individual aberrations misses the most important questions:

The facts of executive pay put the lie to loudly persistent protestations by corporate spokespersons that they’re only following capitalism’s prime directive, to maximize shareholder profit. They are prioritizing the accumulation of personal wealth over shareholder income, which hurts business, shareholders, and the economy in general. Why is everyone else allowing this?

Despite corporate profits being at an all-time high, few corporations are rehiring or replacing laid-off workers, preferring to export jobs to less expensive markets overseas, or simply to work with fewer employees to keep the profit figures high. How many workers could have been paid a living wage for, say, half of the $14.3 billion that was paid to a mere 2,591 executives?

The people who work, share, care, without exploiting others outnumber the fat cats by a magnitude. It’s not Corporation Nation yet; we still have a constitution, and the right to regulate commerce, even if we’ve put Emperor Nero’s crew in charge of our collective commonwealth. Why aren’t we taking the facts seriously and demanding accountability from the piratical system that allows and encourages this?

To find out more about people who are spreading information and taking action, here are a few links:

• An information-rich site by the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, which also has a good page of links to other groups.
• Take a look at the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, if only just to clarify that this is not about individuals, but a system, and that people in all income-brackets support positive social change.
• Watch the video from Van Jones’s recent launch of The American Dream Movement’s “Rebuild The Dream” campaign, a promising effort to build a united front for liberty, equality, and justice — more or less along the lines of the tea party movement, but with very different values.

The antidote to our trance of indifference is a passion for truth.

In ancient Rome, Cicero popularized a question he attributed to Lucius Cassius, whom he said the Roman people used to regard as a very honest and wise judge: “…He was in the habit of asking, time and again, ‘cui bono?’ — ‘To whose benefit?'” A simple question we mostly seem to have forgotten: if we can’t move ourselves to ask it now, when?

I really wanted to link to a video of Tommy’s Castro’s “No One Left to Lie to But Myself,” but I couldn’t find one, so here’s a bit of the lyrics:

The truth hurts but I know I can’t deny it
Can’t sell nothin’ when there’s no one left to buy it
I made this bed and I guess I got to lie in it tonight
But deep down inside I know it’s just as well
Cause now there’s no one left to lie to even if it tried to
Got no one left to lie to but myself
No there’s one left to lie to but myself

On the off chance the universe is pushing me toward an optimistic ending, I’ll go instead with his version — click to it here — of “My Time After Awhile”: “It’s your time now, baby/But it’s gonna be my time after awhile.” May it be so.

When the Empire falls, who benefits?

[Arlene Goldbard, a writer, speaker, social activist, and advocate on behalf of community-rooted art, is chair of the board of The Shalom Center. Her website is ArleneGoldbarb.com.]

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