The Rag Blog

The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn

By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog /

On December 13, Marilyn Buck, U.S. anti-imperialist political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer, would have been 63 years of age. Scheduled for parole last August after nearly 30 years in federal prisons, Marilyn planned to live and work in New York. She looked forward to trying her hand at photography again, taking salsa lessons, and simply being able to walk in the park and visit freely with friends.

Instead, after 20 days of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

Her death was a great blow to her friends and supporters, to fellow poets around the world, and to the many women she mentored while a prisoner, teaching literacy, solidarity, and survival skills without condescension or pride. In Oakland and in New York last month, hundreds gathered to mourn her and to celebrate her life. As a poet of oppression, as a friend, and in fortitude and selflessness, she had no peer.

Yet the acts of violence for which she was sent to prison cloud Marilyn Buck’s revolutionary legacy. Was she a mixed-up kid who had good intentions but fell in with the wrong crowd? Was she a cold-blooded terrorist? Will she be remembered only for her remarkable empathy with the oppressed? Or will she come to be seen as a revolutionary icon worthy of respect for her mind as well as her heart?

Here, a long-time friend and artistic collaborator sets out to mourn Marilyn in a manner appropriate to her life, placing her in the context of her times and showing how she rose above the crowd.

— Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog

You’ve gone past us now.
beloved comrade:
north american revolutionary
and political prisoner
My sister and friend of these 40 years,
it’s over
Marilyn Buck gone
through the wire
out into the last whirlwind.

With time’s increasing distance from her moment of death on the afternoon of August 3, 2010, at home in Brooklyn New York, the more that I have felt impelled to write a cohesive essay about Marilyn, the less possible such a project has become. She died at 62 years of age, surrounded by people who loved and still love her truly.

She died just twenty days after being released from Carswell federal prison in Texas. Marilyn lived nearly 30 years behind bars. It was the determined effort of Soffiyah Elijah, her attorney and close friend of more than a quarter century that got her out of that prison system at all.

Her loss leaves a wound that insists she must be more than a memory and still so much more than a name circulating in the bluest afterwards. If writing is one way of holding on to Marilyn, it also ramifies a crazed loneliness. Shadows lie down in unsayable places. I’m a minor player in the story who wants to be scribbling side by side with her in a cafe or perched together overlooking the Hudson from a side road along the Palisades. This work of mourning is fragmentary, impossible, subjective, politically unofficial, lovingly biased, flush with anxieties over (mis)representation, hopefully evocative of some of the ‘multitude’ of Marilyns contained within her soul, strange and curiously punctuated by shifts into reverie and poetic time.

It’s my hope that others, who also take her life and death personally, will publish rivers of articles, reminiscences, essays, tributes, poems, in print and online. May the painters paint, the ceramicists shape clay, and the doers Do works and with her spirit! Will someone come
to write a book length biography, one capable of fairly transmitting Marilyn Buck’s many sided significance: her character, political commitments, creative accomplishment and all-too-human failings to people who never knew about her life? Is such a work possible
about someone who lived nearly thirty years behind bars?

Shift: From the back pews of reverie a tinny reel-to-reel replays my voice in 1975 chanting the words of the legendary, early 20th century, labor organizer and member of the International Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn, Organize!”. But right now, across the cemetery of dogmas, I have neither strength nor militant nostalgia for any such renunciation of mourning. Others may, but I cannot exhort myself or anyone else to refuse the dolorous walk.

Her precise twang shreds the air: cautioning against overindulgence saying, Felix, brother, you better chill. I know you’re sentimental just don’t you dare go too far. It’s true. I’m from schmaltzy Brooklyn and she’s straight out of the lanky plains of west Texas (as her friends
say: “the Buck started here”). Parts of this piece are written with a 1960s-1970s vocab and it’s more my own writerly failing than anything else, because for sure she’s not a relic of the bygone at all. If I write that she was amazing would it be better to say awesome? Marilyn was a writer, a dialectical materialist, a freedom fighter, yoga teacher and Buddhist meditator who did not suffer fools gladly. She was modest and graceful. Behind the wall she was a teacher and a mentor to young women new to being locked up. Decade after decade in the drab visiting rooms of MCC-NY, DC Jail, Marianna Florida, Dublin-Pleasanton California, dressed first in her own clothes — then later in mandatory uniform khaki-she emanated dignified
Marilynness: that unforgettable, natural style. Nowadays, when things go inexplicably lost in the house or pictures fall from the walls of her studio my partner Miranda (who was Marilyn’s commune roommate in 1969-1970) says….oh that’s Marbu moving stuff around
again….one night in late September, I dreamed that a note was slipped under our front door. It read:

Dear anguish, you know an end is not the end it’s never only an end at all

When I woke up I wrote:

Keywords: woman, sister, freedom lover, contra racismo y sexismo, yogi, theorist from internal exile, poet, collective worker, student, madrina,, artist, reader/writer, comrade-compañera, john brown, antigone, she who cuts through revolutionary enemy of the state

Accounts of mourning sometimes cross over or, more accurately because mourning is a resistant, and achingly tender verb, create a transient bridge from the bereaved privacy of the self — to some sense of shared community. Some will, accurately, point out that this human connection is always a bridge-too-far but even so, gaps and all; it’s what we have.

While she was alive and even more humbly now, I find myself in far reaching debt to Marilyn Buck and hope through the process of writing to move closer to what this relation means and might aspire to. Debt implies relationship. In ancient times, the symbol of suspended balance scales signified a weighing of life/death, good/evil and justice/injustice, not money-debt. It’s no accident that in western myth and culture these scales are balanced by the figure of a woman — often blindfolded to signify impartiality and holding a sword, which represents the power to enforce justice (re-balance).

In her fascinating 2008 non-fiction book, Payback (Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) Margaret Atwood clarifies that in ancient Egyptian Africa a miniature of the goddess Ma’at (or her featherrepresenting justice and truth) was used on the cosmic scale to weigh good and evil in the heart of one who has died. The heart needed to be as light as a feather for the soul to be granted eternal life. Atwood goes on to say that along with justice and truth, Ma’at
meant balance, the proper comportment towards others and moral standards of behavior. I don’t know if Marilyn ever read about Ma’at, but she tried her best to embody these principles in steady resistance to our death-driven culture, which equates human value with money.

In our culture, psychologically “normal” citizens are produced to be
consumers in the market. That’s the bottom line for this dang
shabang. Wrap around, cradle-to-the grave conditioning (branding)
creates a default position for the self that our worth =money.
People are left fearful, commodified and habitually driven: hating the
never-ending lack (of money, power, status, looks, products & sex) in
themselves and envying one another. Marxists refer to this as
commodity fetishism. The tragic human dimension of vulnerability,
loss, failing, mortality and mourning, which is also at the core of our
being, is manically denied. Remember how after the terror attacks of
September 11, 2001, the government exhorted everyone to go out
shopping to show that our society was unbowed? Then we were
taken into a seemingly endless series of wars. Without the humility
of mourning there is no learning from experience. Along with the
three interlocking oppressions more traditionally named by the left:
race, class and gender, envy and the avoidance of mourning
constitute a base from which evil acts and fascist movements spring.
Marilyn worked to renounce this deathly dynamic and sustained, in
her everyday life, a radical ethic of gratitude, care and equality
among people. She studied history/herstory and understood that
human rights must be fought for and defended if they are to exist at
all. There was nothing bogus about her.

I do not believe that I’m alone, among the many, many people who
visited and who she befriended after she was captured, in this feeling
of a political and personal obligation to, or better to say: with
Marilyn.

Those of us fortunate enough to have known her before she became
‘notorious’ and ‘iconic’–representations that never sat well with her
and which being in Marilyn’s presence were easily dispelled–
remember how serious, determined, outspoken, beautiful and far
from perfect she was. It’s no secret that she made political mistakes
along the way. The collective political-resistance project she was part
of was defeated. Its members paid and some are still paying a very
high price.

She came of age in the red-hot crucible of the 1960s and ’70s when
large movements from every corner of the earth were on the upsurge,
challenging capitalist-imperialism with demands for revolution. It
was an era of overturnings and extremes. Marilyn grew up in Texaswhere
racist and sexist dominator culture combined the toxic
violence of america’s segregated south and cowboy west. She
witnessed racism everyday and, by high school and college, grew
determined to do something to help bring an end to war and white
supremacy.

Keywords: Mercurial time, oh old space Capsule: Go ahead crack
the kernel’s hard discontinuous shell; revisit our more innocent and
less destitute history with this bite-sized Almanac backgrounder:

When Marilyn left home to find her way into the popular
movement(s), Dylan was singing The Times They Are A Changin’ &
Masters of War, the SNCC Freedom Singers, Motown, R&B galore
and Nina Simone’s thunderous Mississippi Goddamn! got people up
and moving. It was the overflowing era of Vietnam, Black, Brown,
Native and Asian people’s power movements, the war of the cities:
Watts, Detroit, Newark and hundreds of urban rebellions brought
the fire this time. Draft cards were torched and many G.I.’s revolted
against the war. Feminism and Gay liberation insisted that the
personal-is-political. Student and youth cultural revolt(s) on a
worldwide scale (including, although quite uniquely, the massive
Chinese cultural revolution) had not yet been pacified and coopted
by the market. National liberation movements in Southern Africa
were bringing an end to direct, foreign and settler- colonial
domination of their countries. The Palestinian people began
asserting their national rights. Revolutionary organizations and
guerilla movements, partly inspired by the Cuban example, were
organizing above and below ground to strike against ‘imperialismo
yanqui’ in Latin America. Radicals spoke of creating “2,3 many
Vietnams” against empire.

Inside the United States, the vital foundation of all radical cultural
and political developments was the civil rights and Black liberation
struggle. Black people sang, “I aint scared of your jail ’cause I want
my freedom!” This movement’s organizing cry of Black Is Beautiful
and Black Power! actually inspired people all over the world to
throw off internalized oppression and fight the power.

Marilyn joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society-the country’s
largest student organization) and helped edit their newspaper: New
Left Notes in Chicago. She stood up against sexism in the
organization. Moving to the Bay Area in late 1968, Marilyn joined in
building the San Francisco Newsreel collective, which, like its
counterpart in New York, made and distributed radical film
documentaries about contemporary struggles. Some influential S.F.
Newsreel films taught people about the Black Panther Party, The San
Francisco State student strike (led by a coalition of Third World
organizations, this was the longest student strike in U.S. history), On
Strike-about the Richmond California oil refinery worker’s strike,
Mission High School Rebellion and many others. These films, used by
organizers spreading news across the country, were an important
part of an alternative press movement made up of hundreds of
underground newspapers, radio and press services.

In western Europe & the USA, especially, white people in motion
mainly expressed a middle class idealism, rage and utopian
aspiration. Some younger white folks were learning that struggling in
alliance with Third World peoples at home and abroad could actually
help end the genocidal war in Vietnam, and advance civil and human
rights. A new left was born. For many radical activists, leadership
flowed-not from the Democratic Party- but from movements of color
and figures like Dr. King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou
Hamer, Cesar Chavez. Importantly, we worked with and looked to
grassroots leaders of color, in our schools, workplaces and
communities for direction. We challenged our personal racism and
the social system of white supremacy. Consciousness raising and
women’s liberation broke through to identify and challenge
patriarchy. By the later 1960s, lesbian and gay liberation was
gathering force. This was a cultural revolution(s) involving radically
new, alternative sources of authority and legitimation which
threatened the (mostly white, male, straight) powers that be. The
rejection of 1950’s jim crow apartheid/segregation and northern
white suburbia, begun by the civil rights movement in the south,
communist resisters to McCarthyism, early 2nd wave feminism and
artists from the beat/hip/hippie generation(s) ignited a mix and mojo
that many people, including yours truly, embraced.

You might say, without falling for romantic nostalgia, that a
historical crack opened up through which it seemed just possible to
break through the myopia, prejudice and privilege of empire into a
better world. Or put it another way we, and this was by no means
limited or merely conditioned by the exuberance of youth, had the
experience of being deeply engaged with living history. Even as
society was fast becoming more of a spectacle, during this brief prepostmodern,
pre-internet era, we knew that we wanted to be more
than spectators. It was as if sleepwalkers in death’s hollow empire
were suddenly waking up.

In the advanced capitalist areas of Europe, Japan and the U.S. antiempire
activity led some small, yet significant sectors of the new lefts
to move towards increased clandestine militancy, including
bombings and armed actions against their repressive governments.*

*This is a very incomplete and utterly heterogeneous list. UK: The Angry Brigade; France: Accion Directe; West
Germany: Red Army Faction & Revolutionary Cells; Italy: Red Brigade & Prima Linea. Japan: United Red Army; The
IRA in Ireland and the Basque ETA in Spain (both larger and with more support) grew out of centuries long
colonization. Within the U.S. some of the revolutionary armed organizations were: Black Liberation Army, Fuerzas
Armadas de Liberacion Nacional & EPB-Macheteros(Puerto Rico), Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation
Army, New World Liberation Front, George Jackson Brigade, Red Guerilla Resistance and United Freedom Front. To
my knowledge, there has been no serious historical study of this global phenomenon from a left
perspective. Undoubtedly, there are many still secret CIA and FBI files about this.
** London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 20 21 October 2010

Inside the U.S. solidarity with Black, Puerto Rican, Native American,
Chicano/ Mexicano as well as international liberation movements,
were a powerful motivating force for Marilyn and others.

The spirit of this global, historical moment is revealed by Karma
Nabulsi, a Palestinian, writing about being a young revolutionary in
the 1960s and 70s working to free his country:

The experience of revolutionary life is difficult to describe. It is as much
metaphysical as imaginative, combining urgency, purposefulness, seriousness
and hard work, with a near celebratory sense of adventure and overriding
optimism – a sort of carnival atmosphere of citizens’ rule. Key to its success is
that this heightened state is consciously and collectively maintained by tens of
thousands of people at the same time. If you get tired for a few hours or days,
you know others are holding the ring.**

keywords: the hammer this time

Within the Unites States, all movements, organizations and
individuals ranging from Dr. King to Malcolm X, from artists Nina
Simone to John Lennon were targeted because they inspired people
to organize for real change. Under the rubric of FBI-COINTELPRO
(short for Counter-Intelligence Program) a vast campaign of ruthless
and unconstitutional counter-insurgency against the people was
sanctioned by both Democratic and Republican Whitehouses.

Far from a ‘rogue’ program led by a ‘racist and demented’ J. Edgar
Hoover, what we call Cointelpro grew to involve the coordination of
Pentagon, CIA, local and state police as well as the FBI. Its mandate
was destroy/neutralize radical leaders, organizations and grass roots
people through assassinations, fratricidal murders, frame-ups,
psychological warfare and forced exile.*

* See the books: Agents of Repression & The Cointelpro Papers, by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. The
Reports of the U.S. Senate Hearings (The Church Committee) 1975, U.S. Government Printing Office. And, the new
film, Cointelpro 101 available from www.freedomarchives.org

Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King Jr., Fred Hampton, scores of Panthers and American Indian
Movement members were assassinated as were some key members of
the Chicano/Mexicano and Puerto Rican movements. Several Black
Panther members were tortured so badly in New Orleans –in a
manner consistent with current government torture practices–that
trial courts threw out cases against them. The federal government
unleashed a wave of high profile conspiracy trials, most of which,
after sowing fear and draining resources, ended in acquittals. Nasty
blackmails and bribery were used to recruit informers. This low
intensity warfare, along with inner city drug plagues, wars on drugs
leading to criminalization of Black and Brown youth, concessionary
pacification (i.e., temporary poverty programs) and the end of the
Vietnam war, succeeded in halting much of our forward motion. We
were young idealists and we didn’t see this coming.

Vastly expanded federal and state prison systems became the
leading form of long-term social control over people of color. Today,
with at least 2 million people warehoused under criminal justice
control, the U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate. One
result of the hidden, domestic war is that there are over 100 political
prisoners, essentially Cointelpro captives of the FBI, courts and
prisons, who remain locked up for the past 25-40 years. They are
some of, if not the, longest held political prisoners on earth.**

** The Jericho Amnesty Campaign: www.TheJerichoMovement.com has been involved in efforts to win
amnesty for many years. A campaign is underway to win the release of N.Y. State political prisoners.

There are also people in permanent foreign exile, one of whom died
this month at 63 years of age in Zambia. Michael Cetewayo Tabor
was a former Black Panther leader in New York, a member of the
Panther 21 conspiracy case (for which all were acquitted) and author
of the incisive pamphlet: “Dope + Capitalism= Genocide.” While
countries the world over have released their political prisoners from
the 1960s and 70s, some through amnesty and others paroled after
serving long sentences, the U.S. still refuses to do so.
All this was a long time ago, but I believe that in many telling ways,
when applied to empire and resistance, what the writer, William
Faulkner, said in another context is true:

The past is not dead. In fact, it isn’t even past.

In the introductory essay to her translation of Christina Peri Rossi’s
poetry book, State of Exile* Marilyn writes of the trauma of
imprisonment as an exile:

Exile may also be collective, as in the case of the Palestinian people, forced
from their homeland, or the people of Darfur, murdered and driven from their
lands. And there is another form of exile as well–internal exile–in which one is
taken from the location of one’s home and life and is transported to some other
outlying, isolated region of their own country. We think of the gulags of the
former Soviet Union, for example, or stories from centuries past, but the fact is
that internal exile exists here and now, in the United States a country of exiles,
refugees and survivors. Prison is a state of exile.
…I a political militant did not choose external exile in time and was captured. I
became a U.S. political prisoner and was sentenced to internal exile, where I
remain after more than twenty years.

Type rest of the post here

Source /

The Rag Blog

‘Raising Taxes Kills Jobs’
or
Why Obama Accepted the Extension of the Bush Tax Cuts

By Sid Eschenbach / The Rag Blog / December 14, 2010

“With little time left in this Congressional session, legislative scheduling should be focused on these critical priorities. While there are other items that might ultimately be worthy of the Senate’s attention, we cannot agree to prioritize any matters above the critical issues of funding the government and preventing a job-killing tax hike.”

With this passage in the letter sent to Majority Leader Reid from the entire Republican caucus, the Republicans again assert one of the central myths of Chicago school economics — that raising taxes kills jobs. It is repeated endlessly, this lie, this wholesale fabrication. This straw man specifically constructed in order to give greed a veneer of respectability (not to say virtue) is at the heart of modern economic myth — and is at the heart of current American national economic failure.

It is the industrial sized fig-leaf used to confuse and convince the ignorant while it protects both the money and the power of the wealthy, and until this lie is disproven and the liars that advance it unmasked, there can be no hope of holding a fact-based national conversation regarding the proper funding of the government.

Indeed, given the ease with which it can be disproven both empirically and theoretically, it makes one wonder about the real agenda of the Democratic Party, a party that has since the time of FDR understood that a system of strong progressive taxation is in the best economic interests of the nation. But Democrats have thus far chosen not to contest the neoliberal framing.

Could it be that there is, under certain circumstances, a reason that cutting taxes is indeed stimulative and thus in the best interests of the Obama administration?

Historical Proof that high taxes don’t kill jobs

Empirically, the evidence is clear: there is not now nor has there ever been — since personal income taxes were instituted in 1913 — any real statistical relationship between low tax rates and job-creating prosperity — or the alleged and corollary relationship between high tax rates and unemployment.

A statistical analysis of the data (historical tax rates vs. historical unemployment rates) shows that, to the degree a statistically valid (p<.05 relationship exists at all employment and general prosperity are more directly related to higher taxation but the conditions aren linked statistically. past years have shown that unemployment can be high under both low tax regimes just as it regimes. therefore there is either no between rates or so weak easily overcome by other stronger economic factors. whatever case fact remains empirical historical proof this over nearly a century of taxes kill jobs. while many specific examples could following example simple short clear. world war i was watershed in history american income were raised significantly order pay for huge additional expenditures. before advent another neoliberal fantasy cutting>increases government revenue.

Therefore, as shown in the chart below, in 1917 the top marginal rates were raised from 7% to 67%, and they stayed high through 1921 to allow the government to get rid of the budget obligations created during the war. As a result of these rate increases, the share of revenue gained from income tax continued to rise after the war, reaching a peak of 69 percent in 1920.

By 1920, with the debt generally paid, the consensus of government was that tax rates could and should be cut, especially from the upper brackets. The results were the income tax cuts in 1921, as well as following cuts again in 1924 and 1926 due to a continued growth in government surpluses. Rates changed during this period according to the following table:

Income 1913-16 1918 1921 1924 1926
$2,000 6% 4% 2% 1.5%
$10,000 15% 11% 6% 5%
$20,000 1% 20% 16% 10% 9%
$50,000 2% 35% 31% 23% 18%
$100,000 4% 60% 56% 42% 24%
$500,000 6% 75% 71% 45% 25%
$1,000,000 7% 76% 72% 46% 25%

Reviewing the data, we see that in 1918 rates were raised to pay for the war, which indeed generated the greater revenue sought. After the debts were paid off, marginal rates were again lowered in 1924, and as a result, government revenues from income tax diminished. The most salient point of this data, however, is that from start to finish, with rates changing from 7% to 76% and back to 25% (the largest rate changes in the history of U.S. taxation), the national unemployment rate never varied more than 3%.

And we all know what happened next: from the 25% top tax rate of 1926, Income tax rates remained low right into the Great Depression and the highest unemployment rates the country has ever seen — something that would be technically impossible if low tax rates did in fact create jobs.

To be sure, our century of taxation repeats this theoretically impossible feat time and again, most recently from 2003-2008. However, as Goebbels proved, a lie repeated often enough can defeat even reality, and “high taxes kill jobs” is no exception. In the famous words of the unfaithful husband trying to reassure his angry wife: “Honey, who are you going to believe: me, or your lying eyes?”
In its latest iteration, it’s sold to a gullible and vain public with variations on the theme of: “You can spend your money more wisely than the Government” — which is itself just another emotional link to the underlying and insulting Republican trope of inept government: the oft used “Hello, I’m from the government and I’m here to help!” joke. Moreover, while this general argument that private spending is somehow more “efficient” than government spending has never been true, it is especially not true in today’s import dominated economy.

What is ‘economic stimulus’ anyway?

In traditional capitalist theory, when economists speak of “stimulating” an economy (usually with the goal of lowering unemployment), what they are trying to do in “econo-speak” is to “increase aggregate demand,” and this is done by adding money to the system. Theory and reality are at this point in agreement, because people do indeed always spend more when they have more. So the idea behind ‘stimulation’ is simple: to somehow get more money into society’s pockets, its hands, its stores, banks and businesses.

There are really only two generic ways to “increase aggregate demand”: either economically, by somehow “juicing the pot,” or entrepreneurially, through creating a new demand that drives new and greater spending. An example of the second is the creation of the IT industry and the 22 million jobs it spun off during the Clinton administration.

Unfortunately, as a policy tool it’s beyond the reach of economics, as no economist has as yet figured out a way to create, at will, transformative technologic revolutions and the growth that comes with them. For practicing economists and government functionaries, therefore, the tools available are the traditional — economic fiscal and monetary policy — and the use of either of these does indeed have an impact on growth and jobs.

Monetary and Fiscal Stimulation

Economists use the formula “GDP = CS + BI + GS + BT” to calculate the size of national economies and measure their movement. The total, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is considered to be equal to the sum of consumer spending (CS), business investment (BI), government spending (GS) and net balance of international trade (BT). In order, then, to stimulate the economy, one or more of these must increase, thus creating a larger total sum of the parts.

As noted above, economists can do this in one of two ways: using monetary or fiscal policy. What most people don’t understand, however, is that both are tools of debt. The ignorance of this fact even among those who should know better was shown most recently in the last electoral cycle, when an ad for a tea party candidate had her listeners in hysterics when she pointed out that the Democrats advocate spending their way out of the recession! Very funny!

However, as Greece and other nations have proven, austerity in recession only further kills growth, so there is no there there. Contrary to common sense, the time for austerity is not when in recession, but when in surplus. Recessions stipulate spending, while prosperity calls for balanced budgets.

Debt as Stimulus

Using the tool of private debt as stimulus – monetary policy — the central bank lowers interest rates in order to stimulate the economy. This is because lower rates generally lead to increased bank lending, and lending is the most direct and usually fastest way to create and circulate the new money needed to stimulate growth, increase the GDP and exit the recession.

Lower interest rates generally increase both consumer spending (CS) and business investment (BI), because both sectors tend to borrow more money at lower rates. When CS and BI go up, the total GDP goes up — which is the essence of stimulus. In terms of the Great Recession, the Fed has, of course, ridden this horse until it can run no more, having reduced interest rates to near 0% some time ago.

Fiscal policy, on the other hand, refers to increasing GDP via either a) increased government (deficit) spending (GS), or b) lowering tax rates. The a) part of the fiscal stimulus theory, that deficit spending by the government is stimulative, is straightforward. When one calculates the GDP, it doesn’t matter if the amount of government spending is paid for… or not. Therefore, when the government spending (GS) is increased, it directly increases the total amount of capital in circulation, thereby increasing “aggregate demand” — or GDP — which, again, is the goal of the exercise.

In the Great Recession, along with reducing the federally controlled base interest rate to nearly 0% (monetary policy), fiscal policy was both the vehicle of choice and necessity for the Obama administration, and it did so primarily by borrowing and then spending the famous $700 billion dollar stimulus package of deficit spending.

It had to do this to try to stem a massive deflationary spiral created by the bursting of the global real estate bubble. It was an effort to support GDP through government spending in the absence of consumer or business spending — and thus avoid the very real possibility of a second Great Depression.

In summary, both monetary and fiscal policies are about one thing: increasing total capital by increasing debt. Monetary policy encourages both consumer (CS goes up) and business (BI goes up) debt, while fiscal policy refers to an increase in government debt (GS goes up).

What about b), the ‘cutting taxes is fiscal stimulus’ part of fiscal theory?

The argument made by neoliberal economists is this: that cutting taxes increases the amount of disposable income in the hands of consumers, and thus increases spending and demand in the consumer sector — which is certainly true. However, both history and math shows us that cutting taxes by itself creates no new money, as the amount “given” to consumers (increase CS) through a tax cut is the same amount ”taken” from the government (decrease GS).

Therefore, a tax cut cannot possibly create an increase in total aggregate demand any more than a tax hike decreases it. What goes up in one column is what goes down in another: the classic “Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Furthermore, the argument that any increase in consumer demand increases business hiring to meet that demand is equally true for government spending, whether the government spends it or it’s spent by the wage earners themselves, it’s the same money with essentially the same net results.

Why the Obama administration agreed to an extension of the Bush tax cuts

As noted above, however, there is a way that cutting taxes can be stimulative, but only under one particularly cynical outcome: the case wherein there is no commensurate cut in government spending that would offset the cut in taxes. In that event, by simple mathematics there is a net growth of money in circulation, because, if revenue is reduced while spending is not, there will be an unavoidable increase in deficit spending in order to make up for the tax revenue lost — and we’re right back to good old fashioned fiscal stimulus. And that, we know, grows the economy perforce.

Therefore, the interests of both the nation and the Obama administration are being met by the politically contra-indicated policy of extending the Bush tax cuts, and that is why the Obama administration, after doing the math, agreed to the deal. As they are not and will not be paid for, it requires the government to borrow the new money to pay for them and thus stimulate the economy — something the Republicans would never allow the Democrats to do any other way,, because it is not in their political interests that Obama get the country out of the recession.

It’s not coincidental that the Republicans under Democratic administrations fight for “balanced budgets,” while ignoring them during their own party’s rule: they too have done the math and know that fiscal stimulus works. Fortunately, on the issue of tax cuts, they drank a bit too much of their own Kool-Aid and forgot the real reason behind the reason given publicly that tax cuts are stimulative — and by this “win” are forcing the Democrats to do what they won’t allow them to do any other way: to fiscally stimulate the economy.

This is something that is most definitely not in their political interests, as the last thing they want is for Obama to be a success. However, sometimes lies take on uncontrollable lives of their own, and the lie that cutting taxes is stimulative — because, “Everybody knows that you don’t raise taxes in a recession” and because “Consumers spend their money more wisely than the government” and “Raising taxes kills jobs” — has just given the Obama administration a new $200-$700 billion dollar economic stimulus package. And contrary to common sense and absent new trade or industrial policy, spending is in fact the only way out of this or any recession.

It would have been far preferable, both economically and politically, to end the tax cuts and also pass another large stimulus of the same amount based around infrastructure spending, but it’s a simple fact that given the realities of the modern Tea-publican party, that was not to be. Therefore, the bottom line is this: while this may be terrible politics both for Obama as a person and for the Democratic party as a whole, absent structural reforms of trade and industrial policy, it is tragically and paradoxically the best anti-recession economics that the country can hope for.

The Rag Blog

CONSERVATIVE HEARTLAND TOWN APPRECIATES JOBS PROGRAM

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2010

At the east end of town, at the foot of the hill
Stands a chimney so tall that says “Aragon Mill.”
But there’s no smoke at all coming out of the stack.
The mill has shut down and it ain’t a-coming back.

Well, I’m too old to work, and I’m too young to die.
Tell me, where shall we go, My old gal and I?
There’s no children at all in the narrow empty street.
The mill has closed down; it’s so quiet I can’t sleep.

Yes, the mill has shut down; it’s the only life I know
Tell me, where will I go, Tell me, where will I go?
And the only tune I hear, is the sound of the wind
As it blows through the town,
Weave and spin, weave and spin.

— Si Kahn, “Aragon Mill”

President Obamacomes to town

On a cold and sunny Tuesday morning Air Force One flew into the Grissom Air Base just north of Kokomo, Indiana, carrying President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Just two days before Thanksgiving the presidential team had programmed a trip to highlight job stimulus successes in this declining factory town in North Central Indiana. Democratic leaders, outgoing Senator Bayh, and Congressman Joe Donnelly were part of a delegation to welcome the visitors.

According to press reports, bigger welcomes than from politicians were noted among Kokomo UAW workers and children from local elementary schools. Kokomo is one of Indiana’s small manufacturing towns dominated by the auto industry (along with Anderson, and Indianapolis).

Kokomo, with a population of only 46,000, houses 10 parts plants operated by General Motors, Chrysler, and Delphi. As recently as 1990 Indiana was ranked tenth in union density, largely due to auto and steel plants around the state. Kokomo’s UAW Local 685 played a pivotal role in the campaign to pressure Indiana Congressmen to vote “no” on NAFTA in 1994.

Because of declining manufacturing and the crisis in the auto industry, unemployment in Howard County (where Kokomo is located) topped out at 20.4 per cent in June, 2009. With the federal program to save the auto industry and various stimulus packages to save local jobs, including Kokomo fire stations, unemployment has been cut to 12.7 per cent. Jerry Price, president of UAW local 685 representing three Chrysler transmission plants pointed out that “The bailout has meant the survival of Kokomo.”

The White House reported that a Recovery Act grant of $89 million helped open a plant to make parts for hybrid vehicles. Also Chrysler invested $300 million in transmission plant renovation leading to the retention of 1,000 jobs. In addition, government funds stimulated the opening of 12 new businesses in the city’s downtown, including Sweet Poppins, a popcorn shop.

Tashia Johnson-St. Clair, the shop’s owner, said the downtown area used to be like a ghost town. After the government funds stimulated new businesses downtown, she said: “It’s absolutely beautiful. It looks like a scene off a TV show.”

The Kokomo Tribune noted in muted terms the general appreciation of Kokomo residents for the government’s job saving and creation programs:

The workers, many of whom undoubtedly voted to end the president’s Democratic House majority two weeks ago, applauded the speech, particularly when both Obama and Biden referenced the news that the American automakers are gaining market share for the first time in 24 years.

Critics of the Obama/Biden visit

Not every Hoosier politician or activist appreciated the presidential visit or the policies it was trumpeting. Governor Mitch Daniels was too busy to attend the Kokomo celebration. Indiana state party chairman Murray Clark said that members of the presidential team “are here today to cherry pick a single success story: at worst, it further proves how out of touch this administration is with an electorate that sent a clear message on Nov. 2.”

Local Tea Party activists condemned Obama’s stimulus policies arguing that businesses should be allowed to fail, rather than “throwing money” at them. (Labor activists have concluded that Kokomo would have been destroyed as a city without the emergency assistance.)

Perhaps the most telling commentary appeared in an editorial in the Lafayette Journal and Courier on Monday, November 29, 2010. It denied that Kokomo’s economic rejuvenation should be seen as an indicator of a more general economic recovery. The editorial reminded readers that Kokomo still had almost 12 per cent unemployment and the state and nation close to 10 per cent unemployment.

The Journal and Courier argued that the accolades and pep talks provided by Obama and Biden were misguided. What the president should have done was to “discuss how he planned to work with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives to reach compromises for job creations… Tuesday’s visit was a missed opportunity for Obama to celebrate Chrysler’s investment in Kokomo while reassuring workers across the country how he planned to create jobs working with a split Congress.”

The Kokomo dilemma

As the song says, “The mill has shut down: it’s the only life I know.” Under capitalism production and reproduction of life requires work — wage labor — for most people. Jobs are central to life. But in an era of financialization and economic crisis jobs are declining, workers are pitted against each other worldwide to work for less, and with declining incomes demand for products declines. Towns and cities are destroyed by lack of investment. The industrial base of the Midwest has been in decline for years. Whole regions of countries have experienced economic devastation. And employed workers everywhere live in fear for their economic security.

Government stimulus packages don’t resolve the growing contradictions between the shift toward jobless economies, declining wages, and reduced demand for goods and services. But they do provide relief for those who suffer. Kokomo, Indiana, is a success story. It needs to be replicated all around the country. And tales of successes need to be heralded from coast to coast.

The political dilemma, however, is reflected in the newspaper editorial cited above. Critics of government efforts to create and maintain jobs, such as reflected in this editorial, rather than encouraging greater efficiencies and improvements in government programs, demand the Obama administration “reach compromises” with political opponents who have made it clear they will never work with the administration.

The dilemma the Kokomo story poses for progressives is how to force the administration and its allies in Congress to fight for job creation programs in the face of an opposition that is inalterably opposed to these goals.

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The Rag Blog

In his revealing essay, Bruce Melton tells us that there is a serious disconnection between climate science and the public’s knowledge of climate change — a “fundamental blindness” he calls it. The information being discovered by the scientists is staggering — the evidence in the academic literature is overwhelming — but the means to mine this information out of the academic jargon and deliver it to the people is lacking. Bruce says we are now facing what scientists call “dangerous” or “catastrophic” climate change that “threatens our very existence on this planet.”

MUSIC HATH CHARMS TO SOOTHE THE STINKING BREATH

A recent revelation: rehearsing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I was in the cello section mentally drooling over the carpet of harmonies we were laying down under the solo violin during the gorgeous slow movement. Not much to concentrate on other then how very beautiful this moment was.

As I breathed in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn, I realized that this music, this moment, and others like it, were SPECIFIC antidotes to the poison spewing from the mouths of politicians. I realized too, that without my frequent hits from the music inhaler I would probably be dead, or at least reduced to zombiedom. My life’s balance was suspended between the poison of politics and the healing of music, which interaction created a space for my writing.

I had long been aware of “the healing power of music” inasmuch as it was the arena of “music therapy” and the tool of music therapists. But I had never been so acutely aware of its specific purgative and remedial effect.

Coming up soon are Beethoven’s two birthdays, December 16 and December 17. As one of the characters in my novel, Insect Dreams, says: “Extraordinary people do extraordinary things.” (Not to be coy, there are two different documents with two different birth dates. I celebrate both.) And this week, too, Donna and I begin rehearsals for a New Year’s Day performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which will hopefully become a tradition here in Burlington. In any case, Beethoven is often on my mind.

It’s somewhat predictable, then, that the combination of Beethoven, music, and healing would find its way into my writing. I want to share with you this week a particularly ridiculous scene based on a particularly amazing piece of music–a movement of the A minor String Quartet which Aldous Huxley called “proof of the existence of God”. The movement was labeled by Beethoven “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Gesenenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”–a “Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead, in the Lydian Mode”.

Beethoven was known to have serious stomach problems which bothered him increasingly as he aged. I put this all together and came up with the following note in my recent novel, The Annotated Nose.

The hero, Alexei Pigov, has become the Glenn Gould of the accordion. He is befriended by a fellow lab tech, William Hundwasser, who exploits and markets his strangeness, creating from him the public figure of a medieval plague doctor come to heal The Contemporary Plague. Here he is in Hundwasser’s lab, experimenting with Beethoven on Hundwasser, and Herman, the tarantula:

44. Studying tarantellas and subtly applying them was my first experience of being a healer. Hundwasser kept several in a terrarium in his lab as a conversation starter for the “pretty young things in their white lab coats” he enjoyed cultivating. I began with one named Herman.

Herman was a dancin’ fool. He (?) would jump out of hiding — or hibernating, or estivating, or whatever tarantulas do for sleep — at the first peep of the accordion, and would then stand thoughtfully, taking the music into his ganglia. Then he would begin to sway, and after a minute to dance, and to dance appropriately to whatever I was playing, almost in rhythm, but definitely fast for allegros and slowly for adagios. When I stopped, he stopped — and waited. He could outwait me. When I left, I would just leave him there, waiting.

I figured if an insect person could react this way, with so few nerve cells, human persons must be able process such signals with far more complex consequences than simply dancing.

As you probably know, Beethoven suffered from chronic abdominal problems and severe intestinal inflammation. Fortunately Hundwasser suffered similar symptoms. An experiment was staring me right in the face. The famous Heilige Dankgesang in the A minor quartet, the “Holy Song Of Thanks From A Convalescent To The Godhead“, was written after recovering from a serious bout with abdominal pain. Surely the tones, the great ideas of that movement, beyond being “proof of the existence of God” (Huxley), the successive integrations of disparate elements, must have something to do with disease, and with (Beethoven’s) stomach disease in particular. It was worth a try.

I made an accordion arrangement of the three adagio sections, and played them daily to Hundwasser during lunch break. We used the animal room for privacy. He just sat and listened. I suppose the rats listened too, but I had no parameters to measure the effects on them.

Hundwasser, however, had lots of parameters. Or, like the hedgehog, one big parameter: the number of Rolaids he popped each day. It took a week or so before R began to drop. From an average of 20 to an average of 12. On weekends, no music, R rose again. Come weekdays, it began to fall by Tuesday. In a sustained three week experiment, no days off, R fell to 3, then climbed to 12 again with a week off. We were on to something.

Neither of us had the time for a full and lasting cure, but after we stopped the experiment, he bought a record of the Budapest playing it, and has used that routinely to calm his symptoms. Saves him money on Rolaids, and he can listen while washing the dishes during the rare moments that he washes the dishes.

Flush with success, I looked more closely into the tarantella situation, the Antidotum Tarantulae. I would need to study the phenomenon first hand.
But there aren’t a lot of tarantula bites in Manhattan. There aren’t many tarantas [women bitten by tarantulas] to whom I could offer treatment — especially if it were just an experiment by a newbie. What to do?

Herman to the rescue! I could get him to bite me, and then, in the heroic tradition of the great doctors and medical researchers, I could try to cure myself. I admit such research is small potatoes compared to the guy who shoved a catheter into an arm vein and guided it up into his heart, or the guys from Walter Reed’s team who invited malaria mosquitoes to bite them, so they could test drugs, or even the guy who gave himself ulcers so he could prove it was bacteria that caused them. Small potatoes unless I died. But I know that though tarantula bites were toxic, they were not often fatal.

And of course, we have to remember Dr. Curt Conners, aka, the Lizard in Spiderman Comics, who lost his arm in a war, and experimented with reptilian DNA to try and grow it back, a great example of be careful what you wish for: the therapy caused him to mutate into a creature half-human and half-reptile. He became a villain, too, and even uglier than I am. I wondered if I might turn into a tarantula person — from the saliva — but it wasn’t very likely.

I knew this self-experimentation would be looked down upon at the Berg Institute for Experimental Physiology, Surgery and Pathology, even though experimental physiology, surgery and pathology was exactly what I was doing. So it was 1 A.M. when I let myself into Hundwasser’s lab, took Honey [his accordion] out of her case, and aroused Herman with the traditional slow, lamenting introduction to Borodin’s Polovetsian Dance #2, “The Wild Dance of the Men”. Out he came on cue, staring at me through the Adagio, and when the fast part started, gave a shiver, and went into nothing short of a frenzy, leaping high off the terrarium floor, doing 90º, 180º, 270º, and 360º spins in the air, landing on his feet, rolling over on his back, and dragging himself miraculously by hyper–extended forelegs reaching up, over and behind his head, engaging the sand. It was so amazing, I almost forgot what I had come for. He must have been a Polovetsian spider, or at least have Polovetsian blood, perhaps from the Russian steppes.

When the both of us stopped to get our breaths, I thrust my left arm into the terrarium, and, though normally a pacifist, he leaped at it, and sunk his fangs in midway between wrist and elbow. Good Herman! I had to pull him off. Within a minute and a half, I was, as they say, possessed by the spider.

Though being somewhat atypical myself, I was that night afflicted with all the typical tarantula bite symptoms: feelings of prostration, anguish, psychomotor agitation, clouding of my sensory apparatus, difficulty standing, stomach cramps, nausea, paresthesia, muscular pains, extraordinary itching, and best and worst of all, vastly heightened sexual desire. I took a cab home; the cabbie thought I was way-drunk.

Lying in my bed, I felt wounded and weary, and aware of the deep tediousness of all things. Still, after a short sleep, I was able to drag Honey out of her case, and begin a medly of tarantellas I had learned.

Somewhere toward the end of the 1490s, the great Neopolitan scholar Alessandro d’Alessandro described the treatment of stricken tarantas by the local folk musicians: “they play different dances according to the nature of the poison, in such a way that with the vicitms entranced by the harmony and fascinated by what they hear, the poison either dissolves inside the body and dissipates, or else is slowly eliminated through the veins.” And with (wouldn’t you know it?) one of the Neopolitan tarantellas, I could feel just that effect, a veritable exorcism, a return to life, possibly to love. By the next day I was weak, but feeling basically normal via my iatromusical practice.

Plague doctoring is not so much different, though I suffer less, and my patients suffer more.

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