The Rag Blog

Welcome to the Age of Insuffiency: As oil prices hit new highs and supplies sink, our way of life will drastically change.

This past May, in an unheralded and almost unnoticed move, the Energy Department signaled a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. The department stopped talking about “oil” in its projections of future petroleum availability and began speaking of “liquids.” The global output of “liquids,” the department indicated, would rise from 84 million barrels of oil equivalent (mboe) per day in 2005 to a projected 117.7 mboe in 2030 — barely enough to satisfy anticipated world demand of 117.6 mboe. Aside from suggesting the degree to which oil companies have ceased being mere suppliers of petroleum and are now purveyors of a wide variety of liquid products — including synthetic fuels derived from natural gas, corn, coal and other substances — this change hints at something more fundamental: we have entered a new era of intensified energy competition and growing reliance on the use of force to protect overseas sources of petroleum.

To appreciate the nature of the change, it is useful to probe a bit deeper into the Energy Department’s curious terminology. “Liquids,” the department explains in its International Energy Outlook for 2007, encompasses “conventional” petroleum as well as “unconventional” liquids — notably tar sands (bitumen), oil shale, biofuels, coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids. Once a relatively insignificant component of the energy business, these fuels have come to assume much greater importance as the output of conventional petroleum has faltered. Indeed, the Energy Department projects that unconventional liquids production will jump from a mere 2.4 mboe per day in 2005 to 10.5 in 2030, a fourfold increase. But the real story is not the impressive growth in unconventional fuels but the stagnation in conventional oil output. Looked at from this perspective, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the switch from “oil” to “liquids” in the department’s terminology is a not so subtle attempt to disguise the fact that worldwide oil production is at or near its peak capacity and that we can soon expect a downturn in the global availability of conventional petroleum.

Petroleum is, of course, a finite substance, and geologists have long warned of its ultimate disappearance. The extraction of oil, like that of other nonrenewable resources, will follow a parabolic curve over time. Production rises quickly at first and then gradually slows until approximately half the original supply has been exhausted; at that point, a peak in sustainable output is attained and production begins an irreversible decline until it becomes too expensive to lift what little remains. Most oil geologists believe we have already reached the midway point in the depletion of the world’s original petroleum inheritance and so are nearing a peak in global output; the only real debate is over how close we have come to that point, with some experts claiming we are at the peak now and others saying it is still a few years or maybe a decade away.

Until very recently, Energy Department analysts were firmly in the camp of those wild-eyed optimists who claimed that peak oil was so far in the future that we didn’t really need to give it much thought. Putting aside the science of the matter, the promulgation of such a rose-colored view obviated any need to advocate improvements in automobile fuel efficiency or to accelerate progress on the development of alternative fuels. Given White House priorities, it is hardly surprising that this view prevailed in Washington.

In just the past six months, however, the signs of an imminent peak in conventional oil production have become impossible even for conservative industry analysts to ignore. These have come from the take-no-prisoners world of oil pricing and deal-making, on the one hand, and the analysis of international energy experts, on the other.

Most dramatic, perhaps, has been the spectacular rise in oil prices. The price of light, sweet crude crossed the longstanding psychological barrier of $80 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange for the first time in September, and has since risen to as high as $90. Many reasons have been cited for the rise in crude prices, including unrest in Nigeria’s oil-producing Delta region, pipeline sabotage in Mexico, increased hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico and fears of Turkish attacks on Kurdish guerrilla sanctuaries in Iraq. But the underlying reality is that most oil-producing countries are pumping at maximum capacity and finding it increasingly difficult to boost production in the face of rising international demand.

Even a decision by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to boost production by 500,000 barrels per day failed to halt the upward momentum in prices. Concerned that an excessive rise in oil costs would trigger a worldwide recession and lower demand for their products, the OPEC countries agreed to increase their combined output at a meeting in Vienna on September 11. “We think that the market is a little bit high,” explained Kuwait’s acting oil minister, Mohammad al-Olaim. But the move did little to slow the rise in prices. Clearly, OPEC would have to undertake a much larger production increase to alter the market environment, and it is not at all clear that its members possess the capacity to do that — now or in the future.

A warning sign of another sort was provided by Kazakhstan’s August decision to suspend development of the giant Kashagan oil region in its sector of the Caspian Sea, first initiated by a consortium of Western firms in the late ’90s. Kashagan was said to be the most promising oil project since the discovery of oil in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in the late ’60s. But the enterprise has encountered enormous technical problems and has yet to produce a barrel of oil. Frustrated by a failure to see any economic benefits from the project, the Kazakh government has cited environmental risks and cost overruns to justify suspending operations and demanding a greater say in the project.

Like the dramatic rise in oil prices, the Kashagan episode is an indication of the oil industry’s growing difficulties in its efforts to boost production in the face of rising demand. “All the oil companies are struggling to grow production,” Peter Hitchens of Teather & Greenwood brokerage told the Wall Street Journal in July. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to bring projects in on time and on budget.”

That this industry debilitation is not a temporary problem but symptomatic of a long-term trend was confirmed in two important studies published this past summer by conservative industry organizations.

The first of these was released July 9 by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of major industrial powers. Titled Medium-Term Oil Market Report, it is a blunt assessment of the global supply-and-demand equation over the 2007-12 period. The news is not good.

Predicting that world economic activity will grow by an average of 4.5 percent per year during this period — much of it driven by unbridled growth in China, India and the Middle East — the report concludes that global oil demand will rise by 2.2 percent per year, pushing world oil consumption from approximately 86 million barrels per day in 2007 to 96 million in 2012. With luck and massive new investment, the oil industry will be able to increase output sufficiently to satisfy the higher level of demand anticipated for 2012 — barely. Beyond that, however, there appears little likelihood that the industry will be able to sustain any increase in demand. “Oil look[s] extremely tight in five years’ time,” the agency declared.

Underlying the report’s general conclusion are a number of specific concerns. Most notably, it points to a worrisome decline in the yield of older fields in non-OPEC countries and a corresponding need for increased output from the OPEC countries, most of which are located in conflict-prone areas of the Middle East and Africa. The numbers involved are staggering. At first blush, it would seem that the need for an extra 10 million barrels per day between now and 2012 would translate into an added 2 million barrels per day in each of the next five years — a conceivably attainable goal. But that doesn’t take into account the decline of older fields. According to the report, the world actually needs an extra 5 million: 3 million to make up for the decline in older fields plus the 2 million in added requirements. This is a daunting and possibly insurmountable challenge, especially when one considers that almost all of the additional petroleum will have to come from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, Kazakhstan and Venezuela — countries that do not inspire the sort of investor confidence that will be needed to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into new drilling rigs, pipelines and other essential infrastructure.

Similar causes for anxiety can be found in the second major study released last summer, Facing the Hard Truths About Energy, prepared by the National Petroleum Council, a major industry organization. Because it supposedly provided a “balanced” view of the nation’s energy dilemma, the NPC report was widely praised on Capitol Hill and in the media; adding to its luster was the identity of its chief author, former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond.

Like the IEA report, the NPC study starts with the claim that, with the right mix of policies and higher investment, the industry is capable of satisfying US and international oil and natural gas demand. “Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources,” the report bravely asserts. But obstacles to the development and delivery of these resources abound, so prudent policies and practices are urgently required. Although “there is no single, easy solution to the multiple challenges we face,” the authors conclude, they are “confident that the prompt adoption of these strategies” will allow the United States to satisfy its long-term energy needs.

I have seen the horror of the death penalty and the violence it propels. It is time for a global ban.

For most of the 20th century the majority of the world’s nations used the death penalty. But, as the millennium approached, many societies questioned whether killing their citizens through the judicial system served a positive purpose. I am delighted that the death penalty is being removed from the globe. To a Christian whose belief system is rooted in forgiveness, the death penalty is unacceptable.

Either in law or in practice, 130 countries have now abolished the death penalty. And since 1990, 50 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Last year only 25 countries carried out executions.

So strong is the global sentiment against the death penalty – with some notable exceptions, such as the United States, China and Singapore – that a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions and the abolition of capital punishment is scheduled to go before the United Nations general assembly tomorrow. The world community will decide its view on the morality of capital punishment.

I have experienced the horror of being close to an execution. Not only during the apartheid era of South Africa, when the country had one of the highest execution rates in the world, but in other countries as well.

And I have witnessed the victims of the death penalty the authorities never speak of – the families of those put to death. I remember the parents of Napoleon Beazley, a young African-American man put to death in Texas after a trial tainted by racism. Their pain was evident as the killing of their son by the state to which they paid taxes approached. I can only imagine the unbearable emotional pain they went through as they said their final goodbye to their son on the day of his execution.

It is often asked by those favouring the death penalty: “What if your child was murdered?” And it is a natural question. Rage is a common reaction to the homicide of a loved one, and a wish for revenge is understandable. But what if the person condemned to death was your son? No one raises a child to be a murderer, yet many parents suffer the grief of knowing their child is to be killed. In 1988, the parents of those on death row in South Africa wrote to the president, saying: “To be a mother or father and watch your child going through this living hell is a torment more painful than anyone can imagine.” We must not put these children to death. It is to inflict horrific and unacceptable suffering upon them, and their mothers and fathers.

Retribution, resentment and revenge have left us with a world soaked in the blood of far too many of our sisters and brothers. The death penalty is part of that process. It says that to kill in certain circumstances is acceptable, and encourages the doctrine of revenge. If we are to break these cycles, we must remove government-sanctioned violence.

The time has come to abolish the death penalty worldwide. The case for abolition becomes more compelling with each passing year. Everywhere experience shows us that executions brutalise both those involved in the process and the society that carries them out. Nowhere has it been shown that the death penalty reduces crime or political violence. In country after country, it is used disproportionately against the poor or against racial or ethnic minorities. It is often used as a tool of political repression. It is imposed and inflicted arbitrarily. It is an irrevocable punishment, resulting inevitably in the execution of people innocent of any crime. It is a violation of fundamental human rights.

WASHINGTON (Nov. 13) – The economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to total $1.6 trillion — roughly double the amount the White House has requested thus far, according to a new report by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.

The report, released Tuesday, attempted to put a price tag on the two conflicts, including “hidden” costs such as interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars, lost investment, the expense of long-term health care for injured veterans and the cost of oil market disruptions.

The $1.6 trillion figure, for the period from 2002 to 2008, translates into a cost of $20,900 for a family of four, the report said. The Bush administration has requested $804 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, the report stated.

For the Iraq war only, total economic costs were estimated at $1.3 trillion for the period from 2002 to 2008. That would cost a family of four $16,500, the report said.

Two years ago Norman Mailer came to Portland for a big book event portentously marketed as WordStock. Mailer had been battling his failing body for the last couple of years. He inched his way across the stage on crutches and lowered his frail bones down in a big chair. Then he launched into a white-hot excoriation of the Bush administration and the complicity of the Democrats. The mind was still as lethally sharp as ever.

After the talk, women huddled around him. One of them was my wife, Kimberly. I was in San Francisco that weekend, hawking my own books, and she was out flirting with Norman Mailer. Mailer told her they came from the “same tribe.”

Kimberly gushed to Mailer that she had read all of his novels, except for The Naked and the Dead, Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.

“But, darling,” Mailer said slyly. “Those are my best books!” Still a salesman even at 82.

Of course, Kimberly bought the most expensive collector’s copy of The Naked and the Dead. And that thick book squats in a position of honor on the bookshelf, its pages still unblemished by a single fingerprint.

For some reason, Kimberly told Mailer she was my wife. Mailer responded warmly about the vital service CounterPunch had performed during this dark decade. She said him she would gladly send him some of our books (anything to get them out of the garage). “No,” he interjected. “The last thing I need is more fucking books. Have Jeffrey send me the email edition of CounterPunch.” I did as I was told.

I met Mailer for the first time in 1978 in Indianapolis, where he was giving a reading before a thin and bland crowd. Somehow Mailer had offended his host, who had abandoned him after the event. I offered to take him to dinner (secretly hoping he would pay, which, of course, he did) and drive him to the airport for a late flight to Chicago. I was twenty then, and almost certainly not the type of company he may have been longing for that evening. If so, he didn’t let on. He was generous to young writers–generous to a fault, which is how he landed in so much trouble with Jack Henry Abbott.

Somehow we ended up in that architectural artifact of the Seventies, a fern bar. There was so much foliage creeping through the place that it could have been a scene from The Naked and the Dead. I was braced for Mailer to begin draining a vast amount of alcohol, fretted over whether I could keep up and still get him to the airport. Instead, he ordered a nice bottle of French wine, a vintage he said Jimmy Baldwin had recently recommended to him-a minor miracle that such a wine was available in an Indianapolis fern bar. We eased into a relaxed conversation about music, movies and Muhammad Ali, who I had just met a few days earlier in an elevator at the Hyatt-Regency.

At some point, I told Mailer that I was working feverishly on a novel. “Imagine An American Dream, set in a cow town like Indianapolis,” I said.

He laughed loudly.

“Novel?” he said. “Hell, don’t you know the novel is dead? Give it up, Jeffrey. Go write a screenplay or a book about The Clash. Just get out there and mix it up.”

This advice was coming from a man who hadn’t written a novel in ten years. Of course, in the next decade he would publish three big ones, The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.

I met Mailer again six months later at Blues Alley, a jazz club in Washington, D.C., where I was bussing tables trying to pay my way through college. Mailer was there to hear the great saxophone player Dexter Gordon, who was then making a radiant American comeback after a decade of exile in Paris. Although Mailer wasn’t sitting at my table, he recognized me, called me over between sets and introduced me to the most beautiful woman in a room of beautiful women. I don’t remember her name, but she looked a lot like the woman who would soon become his wife, Norris Church.

“How’s that novel coming, Jeffrey?” Mailer inquired to my astonishment.

“But … ” I began, trying to explain that I had followed his advice and incinerated 500 pages of my juvenile novel about sex, death and black magic (none of which I knew much about at the time) in the crossroads of America.

“Oh, forget that all that crap. Just write, man. And do it every fucking day.”

Mailer lived his own advice in that regard. He wrote furiously against implacable deadlines, which in his case weren’t set by publishers and editors but came in the form of mercilessly scheduled alimony payments.

Some of those texts don’t stand up all that well: the Picasso biography reads like notations from an art history lecture at the MOMA, Tough Guys Don’t Dance a mediocre Ross McDonald novel, The Deer Park, his novel about Hollywood, should have been better, the Marilyn books are almost as pathetic as his long-running obsession with Jack Kennedy.

Still for fifty years Mailer stood at the top of the pile: The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore (a novel about official paranoia that is perhaps more relevant today than when it was published), An American Dream, Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Harlot’s Ghost. All better books than anything written by that favorite of the book critics Philip Roth. Only Vidal comes close to Mailer’s long-running achievement.

It’s hard to name a better novel written in the 1970s than The Executioner’s Song. Even Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow seems dwarfed by that sprawling portrait of Gary and Nicole Gilmore and the inexorable descent toward the firing squad in that spooky prison outside Provo. It’s a big book with an immediate voice: clear and chilling. Among other virtues, Mailer captures the strangeness and beauty of life in Utah better than any book since Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country.

At the news of his death, I found myself drawn to the oddities: Advertisements for Myself, Cannibals and Christians, The Faith of Graffiti and, most of all, Ancient Evenings. After a prolonged drought of fiction, in 1983, Mailer unloaded a 700 page novel set in the decadent Egypt of Ramses the Second. All the old obsessions are there: sex, war, violence, scatology, architecture, mysticism, power and the existential life of an individual poised against the imperial state. The prose is dark and elegant. I think of Ancient Evenings as something of a tweak to his old rival, Gore Vidal. You want a historical novel, Gore? Well, take a bite out of this.

Here’s a taste of Mailer at full-throttle from Miami and the Siege of Chicago. He’s writing about the origins of the Yippies and the entropy eating at the American soul:

So the Yippies came out of the Hippies, ex-Hippies, diggers, bikers, drop-outs from college, hipsters up from the South. They made a community of sorts, for their principles were simple-everybody, obviously, must be allowed to do (no way around the next three words) his own thing, provided he hurt no one doing it-they were yet to learn that society is built on many people hurting many people, it is just who does the hurting which is forever in dispute. They did not necessarily understand how much their simple presence hurt many good citizens in the secret valve of the heart-the Hippies and probably the Yippies did not recognize the depth of schizophrenia on which society is built. We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches-the cross was well designed! A land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small-the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode into schizophrenia-life went on. Boys could go patiently to church and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.

I don’t believe we will ever see writing with that kind of electricity again.

A few years back, Ishmael Reed titled one of his books, “Writin’ is Fightin’.” That phrase could also serve as a fine epitaph for Mailer, who slugged it out to the very end.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Nov. 13) – Texan mayors opposed to a planned border fence with Mexico want to widen and deepen the Rio Grande river instead, and say it will be more effective in keeping out illegal immigrants.

The U.S. government aims to build 700 miles of new fencing along the frontier with Mexico to boost security and try to stem the tide of immigration from the south.

But the Texas stretch of the fence, which would be built on the Rio Grande’s desert flood plain, would cut off some ranchers’ access to the river, the main source of fresh water in the arid region. Mayors say it would also damage trade and centuries-old ties with Mexico.

The calm brown waters of the Rio Grande, famed in Western movies and cowboy ballads, have marked the Texan border with Mexico since the 19th century.

Known in Spanish as the Rio Bravo, or “Rough River,” it is nevertheless shallow enough to wade across in parts.

Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans try to swim it or cross over with tire inner tubes.

Six mayors in mainly Hispanic south Texas on the Mexico border call the fence a wall of shame and have vowed to take the federal government to court to block its construction.

They say a wider, deeper waterway along the lower Rio Grande would create a more formidable barrier than a fence that immigrants can cut, climb over and tunnel under.

“We already have a virtual fence and we should work with that,” said Brownsville’s mayor, Pat Ahumada, who has proposed 42 miles of river widening at a cost of $40 million.

“A widened river would be a bigger deterrent to illegal immigration and the project doesn’t send the wrong message to Mexico that the wall does,” he added.

The city of Laredo is also pushing to widen a stretch of its river front and the other four mayors along the Mexico-Texas line say they are evaluating similar plans.

The Brownsville and Laredo projects involve digging out the river bank on the U.S. side to triple the river’s width to up to 500 feet and deepening the river from 2 feet to about 10 feet at its shallowest, and up to 24 feet in the deepest sections.

By constructing a series of low dams, or weirs, at different parts of the river, water would gradually back up behind them and fill the widened river channel, engineers say.

MORE DEATHS?

A wider river would increase the time it takes to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico to up to four or five minutes, making it easier to spot would-be immigrants and allow Border Patrol speed boats to monitor the river and make arrests more easily.

But a government official who requested anonymity said Washington was concerned a bigger river may cost more lives.

“A wider, deeper river means more people may drown,” the official said.

Texan mayors reject that claim and are lobbying hard to convince the government that the project is safe and feasible, holding a series of meetings this month with Department of Homeland Security officials.

“A wider river is a huge disincentive to cross and is no more dangerous than a wall that people will risk their lives to get over,” said Horacio de Leon, who heads the Laredo project.

President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act last year, requiring the construction of the border fence as part of a plan to have “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexico border by 2013.

“The big question is whether the plan falls within the language of that law. We believe it does,” said Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass.

Mexico, which must also approve the project because the river is a binational waterway, has shown support for the plans, although Brownsville and its Mexican sister city Matamoros have yet to agree on the position of the weir.

Some Border Patrol officials are also warming to it.

Tallulah is a small town in Northeastern Louisiana, one of the poorest regions in the US. It is about 90 miles from the now-legendary town of Jena, and like Jena it is a town with a large youth prison that was closed after allegations of abuse and brutality. Also like Jena, residents of Tallulah are involved in a modern civil rights struggle. Their town has become a battleground in the national debate on whether to spend money to educate or incarcerate poor, mostly Black, youth.

On a recent Saturday afternoon I visited Hayward Fair, a civil rights movement veteran from Tallulah. Mr. Fair is one of the founders of People United for Education and Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to transforming the local prison (now called Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center and primarily holding adults convicted of nonviolent offenses) into a “success center” which would give classes and training. If they succeed in their struggle it will be the first time in this country – where for decades funding for education has been cut while prisons have been built–that a prison has been shut down and replaced by a school, a groundbreaking reversal of the nationwide trend.

When I met with Mr. Fair he was going door to door with activists from the grassroots organizations Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Southern Center for Human Rights and Safe Streets Strong Communities. At nearly seventy years old, with muscular arms and a shaved head, he shows no sign of slowing down. “I’ve been doing a little community organizing,” he explained, modestly. As he went from house to house, it seemed everyone in the city knew and respected him, and everyone had an opinion about both the prison and what Tallulah needs. Wielding respect from both his age and his reputation for fighting for justice locally, Fair was bringing a vision of a new Tallulah to residents who have seen a town die around them.

Speaking in a gravelly voice and a deliberate step weighted with experience, Mr. Fair led me to the site of the prison. “When the prison came to town most people weren’t even aware of what it was going to be,” he said. “It was something that produced jobs and people needed jobs so there wasn’t no real resistance to it.” But now, the local economy is devastated, and Fair blames the prison, at least in part. “It’s killing the economy of the area, in my opinion,” he claims. “Prisons only bring money to the owners.”

When you enter the city limits, the first thing you see after you pass the “Welcome to Tallulah” sign is the prison, a large complex of 33 buildings surrounded by fence and barbed wire. Standing nearby, Fair gestures down the street. “We’re about a block and a half from the junior high school, we’re about 5 blocks from the senior high school. Our children have to walk out from the classroom and the next thing they see is all these bars and towers and all these big buildings. It had a psychological effect on the children and the adults as well. It really just devastated this whole city.” For several years, the people of Tallulah, aligned with Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, have fought this struggle, to not just close the local prison, but to open something different in its place, to demonstrate that small rural towns don’t have to turn to prisons for jobs.

Tallulah, which is seventy percent Black, used to be a town that Black folks would travel from all around the region to visit. To demonstrate his point, Fair took me to the downtown, to a street of shuttered storefronts, with virtually no people out. “On a day like this, on a Saturday evening, you could hardly walk down the streets of Tallulah, you’d be bumping into people. You had all businesses on this end of town,” he gestured across the street. “All the way down, nothing but businesses; grocery stores, cafes, clothing stores, barrooms, you name it. The town was wide open, stayed open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Now Fair says, the town is a very different place. “We are working trying to bring our image back up, but we are now labeled as a prison town.” As in much of the country, prisons are a big business in rural Louisiana, and this part of the state has several. “You go east you got a youth prison. West down here you got this facility, you go south you got two prisons right outside the city limits.” Tallulah is now far removed from its former glory. Young people move away as soon as they’re able. “We lose maybe 70% of our young people,” he says. “Why should they stay? There’s no opportunities here for them.”

The prison in Tallulah has a long and notorious reputation. Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone visited in 1998, and incarcerated kids broke onto a roof to shout out complaints about their treatment. The New York Times wrote several articles that same year, including a front page report calling Tallulah the worst youth prison in the US, and the US Justice Department sued the state of Louisiana over the systematic abuse at the prison, where even the warden said, “it seemed everybody had a perforated eardrum or a broken nose.”

New Orleans-based journalist Katy Reckdahl chronicled the beginnings of the struggle to transform this prison in an important series of articles several years ago. But now the effort is nearing its final days. Activists have lined up local and statewide support for this important transition, from the community level to meetings with the Governor, to support of national allies such as the Center for Third World Organizing and the Southern Center for Human Rights. With a new Governor on the way, the next few weeks will be crucial for this struggle, and for the fate of Tallulah. If the people of Tallulah win, it will be an important victory for people everywhere concerned about issues of race, education, and criminal justice.

Mr. Fair is proud of the civil rights history of Tallulah, which is located not far from where the Deacons for Defense, a pioneering Black armed self-defense group active during the civil rights movement, was formed. “We had some people here that went off to world war two, then they come back here and were second class citizens,” he explained. “They had to ride in the back of the bus. They said were not going to put up with this. So we started a movement ourselves, to eliminate that.”

Fair experienced intense white resistance to basic rights for Black folks. “At one point the Klan met about three miles outside of town and had a rally and they was going to come into town that evening. They thought they were going to run all the Blacks out of town,” Fair says. But resistance in the town was strong. “When they came into town the streets was crowded. People were walking stiff legged, with their shotguns down under their pants. We told the police were going to take care of ourselves; we don’t need you to take care of us. They thought they were going to scare somebody, but nobody here was afraid of them.”

I asked Fair how Tallulah fits into a wider struggle. “All the eyes of the world is focused on the Jena Six. But every small community in the south, and in the north, has its Jena Six. Maybe you can’t visualize it or maybe you don’t want to visualize it, but this is not just small rural towns. Look at New Orleans, during the storm. When the people was trying to cross the bridge to get out of the flood, there were people on the other side, armed, that would not let them cross. In the rest of the nation people are being treated the same way. Chicago, New York, it don’t matter where you are.”

Before leaving, I asked Fair what kept him in the struggle. “I ain’t struggling, I’m free,” he answered, explaining that this struggle is not about him. “I’m gonna do what I know is right, and I don’t care who you are. I see the young people in the community that need help. That’s what keeps me going. If you see something and you feel it aint right, don’t say they ought to change it, get in there, roll your sleeves up and say let’s change it. That’s the only way. You gotta keep a cool head and do the thing that’s right. When you know right and fight for it, you’re gonna win.”

11/11/07 “ICH” — – Whew! What a week for the stock market. On Wednesday the market took a 360 point nosedive followed, two days later, by a 220 point belly-flop. By the time it was over, the trading pits looked more like a sausage-packing plant than the world’s financial epicenter. After the bell, downcast traders could be seen tiptoeing through the carnage on their way to the local liquor store to load up on “Stoly” and boxes of Franzia—anything that would steady their nerves and put the week behind them.

Everyone could see it coming; the train-wreck. It was mostly carry-over from the night before when Asian stocks took a thumping on reports of slower growth in the US and growing troubles in the credit markets. That put the first domino in motion. Fed chief Bernanke’s announcement that the economy will face “a sharp slowdown from the housing market’s contraction” and an “inflationary surge from sharply higher oil prices and the weaker dollar”, didn’t help either. His remarks triggered a blow-off in the currency markets while equities were frog-marched to the chopping-block.

The Shanghai market took the worst hit dropping nearly 5% before the trading-day ended. Taiwan and Hong Kong followed suit, sliding 3.9% and 3.2% respectively. Share prices in Japan fell 2%. The next morning, Wall Street crashed. It was a massacre.

This is a bear market now. The last bull was dragged from the Street on Friday with a harpoon in its chest.

The subprime contagion has now spread beyond the US and Europe to markets in the Far East. No one is fooled by Bernanke’s sunny predictions that the economy will bounce back next year with a strong showing in the first quarter. That’s baloney and everyone knows it. The economy has stumbled down the elevator shaft and is just waiting to hit bottom. Consumer confidence is flagging, housing is falling, foreign capital is fleeing, and the greenback is one flush away from the sewage-treatment plant. Bernanke’s soothing bromides are meaningless.

“I don’t see any significant change in the broad holdings of dollars around the world. Dollars remain the dominant reserve asset and I expect that to continue to be the case,” Bernanke said to the Congressional Economic Committee.

Really? So why is the greenback plummeting if people aren’t dumping it, Ben? What an absurd comment. The dollar has lost 63% against the euro and dropped to record lows against a basket of world currencies. Foreign central banks and investors have been ditching it as fast as they can before it loses more value. The dollar’s tumble has been the most dazzling currency-flameout in modern times and Bernanke is acting like he’s still asleep at the switch. It’s madness.

The greenback is getting clobbered by the Fed’s “low-interest” snake oil and the gargantuan current account deficit. If Bernanke clips rates again to bail out the stock market, the dollar will slip into irreversible respiratory failure. Food and oil prices will shoot to the moon overnight and the remains of the greenback will be carted off to the nearest boneyard.

September’s trade deficit was another blow to the waning dollar. The Census Bureau reported on Friday that the deficit clocked in at $56.5 billion. That’s $684 billion per annum! Bush has been crowing about the “shrinking deficit”, but the numbers are nothing to boast about. We’re still borrowing more than we’re producing. We’re still living beyond our means. The lower numbers just reflect the decline in home construction which is import-intensive. The fact is, we’re addicted to debt-fueled consumption and forgotten that, eventually, the trillions that we’ve borrowed from foreign creditors, will have to be repaid. If the dollar is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, then we’ll have to pay back $9 trillion of outstanding debt. We might as well hang out the “Foreclosed” sign right now and get fitted for Chinese workers-suits.

This is from Bloomberg News:

“As the dollar tumbles, concern is growing that its weakness may augur the end of the U.S. currency’s 62-year reign as the world’s specie of choice for trade, financial transactions and central-bank reserves…..The dollar owes its position as the world’s premier international currency to its status as a haven during times of turmoil, the absence of a suitable rival, weak domestic demand in other countries and plain old inertia. Geopolitics also play a role.”

Nonsense. Who believes this rubbish? The dollar is the so-called “international currency” because the Federal Reserve and its well-heeled patrons are the directors of the US-Euro-Japan banking cabal which is at the center of the global Fiat money scam. There’s nothing more to it than that. Notice the recent “unilateral” clamp-down on Iran by the US-led banking syndicate. The action was initiated without UN approval for the simple reason that the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and thousands of NGOs are just more of the Central Banks’ prime properties. Don’t expect the father to ask the child for permission to punish one of his errant children. The banks are the one’s who really call the shots and—behind the curtain of feigned respectability—they are the driving force behind the endless wars.

The Fed’s plan to “devalue” our way to prosperity appears to have hit a few ill-placed speed-bumps. The stock market is hanging by a thread and consumer confidence is at its lowest ebb since the start of the Iraq War. The falling dollar is expected to put a damper on Christmas spending and knock equities for a loop. That can’t be good for economy—especially when 72% of GDP comes from consumer spending.

We’ve already begun to see the telltale signs that the consumer is loosing ground and about to slip into a debt-induced coma.

According to data from the University of Michigan:

“Consumer confidence reached its lowest level in more than two years this month amid concerns over record-high oil prices, continued trouble in the housing market and higher inflation…Although consumer attitudes deteriorated across the board, the substantial drop in expectations contributed heavily to the sizeable decline in the overall index.”

The average working stiff doesn’t put any stock in Bernanke’s palavering. He sees what’s going on for himself every time he pulls up to the gas pump or goes the grocery store. He doesn’t need the University of Michigan to tell him he’s getting screwed; he knows it! The economy is sinking, inflation is skyrocketing, and the country is adrift. Every farthing in the public till has been shoveled into a black hole in the Middle East. Does Bernanke really think working people don’t know that? Everyone knows that. Everyone knows the economy is on life-support; just like everyone knows the country is collapsing from mismanagement. Even the flag-waving, war-mongering maniacs on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page are starting to shutter from the avalanche of bad news. They see what’s going on and they’re scared—scared sh**less.

Unfortunately, the sudden shift in consumer sentiment is the hurting retailers who depend on Christmas to carry them through the year. We’ve already seen the sluggishness in housing and auto sales. Now it’s showing up in retail. Abercrombie, American Eagle, Ann Taylor, Chicos, Dillards, The Gap and Nordstrom are all reporting sagging sales. Walmart, Lowes and the other big-box stores are lowering their projections as well. It’s going to be a lean Christmas.

The poor US consumer is finally maxed-out and can’t tap into his home equity anymore for presto-credit. He’s mortgaged “to the hilt” and he’s already run up 6 or 7 credit cards to their limit. In fact, credit card debt is a growing concern for the banks, too.

The commercial banks are the victims’ of their own success. After years of seductive promotions and saturation mailings the credit card industry is at its zenith leaving consumers with a staggering bill of nearly $1 trillion. ($915 billion) More and more customers are finding themselves unable to make even minimum payments on their balances and defaults are piling up at a record pace. This is the next phase of the subprime fiasco and it has the potential to be nearly as disruptive as the housing meltdown. The problem is complex, too. After all, most credit card debt in the last 6 years has been “securitized” and passed on to investors in the secondary market. (pension funds, hedge funds etc.) That means we can expect more tremors in the stock market as corporate earnings go south after credit card-backed bonds are downgraded. It’s just more of the same “structured finance” chicanery; debt stacked on debt, until the whole edifice caves in.

It’s looking more and more like Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” was erected on a mountain of toxic debt. It’s a wonder it hasn’t sunk already.

The country is headed for recession and there’s nothing that Bernanke can do to stop it. The only question is whether we’ll be facing a colossal economy-busting meltdown like 1929 or a milder 5 or 6-year slump. That’s up to the Federal Reserve. If the Fed chief decides to pit himself against the falling markets by slashing rates and destroying the currency; then we are likely to be digging-out for years. But if Bernanke steps aside, and lets the chips fall where they may, then the pace of recovery will be quicker.

Whatever choice he makes, there’s no avoiding the inevitable downturn. The hammer is poised to strike the anvil. The stock market will fall, the over-extended banks and hedge funds will collapse, and the country will go into a protracted, economic tailspin. That much is certain. Economic fundamentals can only be shrugged off for so long. When markets correct it’s like a tidal-surge that sweeps-away the deadwood of bad bets and over-levered investments leaving behind a broad-expanse of empty beach.

Recession is a normal part of the business cycle. It can’t be avoided. The economy needs to unwind so debts can get written off and businesses can retool for the future. The upcoming recession is shaping up to be worse than its predecessors—a real doozey. The damage caused by the Fed’s excessive credit has been considerable. It’ll take years to mop up the red ink and set the house aright. The markets are in a shambles, investors have been battered and confidence is gone.

Structured finance has been an unmitigated disaster. It needs to be scrapped. We need a new financial system for a new epoch; a system that is heavily regulated and supervised to discourage the crooks and con-artists; a system that it maintains its essential link to the real, productive underlying economy and avoids the galaxy of complex derivatives, “securitized” liabilities, and opaque debt-instruments that have brought on the present crisis; a system that responds to the needs of working people and takes into consideration the looming problems of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and climate change; a system that reinvests in communities, education and health-care rather than fattening the bottom-line of corporate racketeers and brandy-drooling elites. It’s time to remove the rotten scaffolding and rebuild the whole contraption brick by brick.

In his article “The Hillarycare Mythology” (The American Prospect, October 2007, pp. 12-18), Paul Starr, a senior health policy advisor to President Bill Clinton and a leading figure in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House task force on health care reform, analyzes the origins, development, and final outcome of the Clinton administration’s health care reform–referred to by Republicans as “Hillarycare.”

Starr dates the origins of Bill Clinton’s commitment to health care reform to the special congressional election held in Pennsylvania in November 1991, when Harris Wofford won against all odds by making reform of the health care sector a major campaign issue. According to Starr, this event triggered a great deal of interest in health care reform; even the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) supported some types of reform such as an employer mandate to provide health benefits coverage. As noted by the editor of JAMA, “there was an air of inevitability about health care reform.” It was this surge of interest that candidate, and later President, Clinton tried to capitalize on by developing a proposal to provide universal health care coverage for all Americans (meaning all U.S. citizens and residents).

Once elected, Bill Clinton established the 500 member White House task force, led by Mrs. Clinton, to work on the details of a proposal developed within a framework defined by the President. According to Starr, the proposal failed when President Clinton presented it to the U.S. Senate after completion of, rather than before, the budget discussions. The Senate did not support the proposal, because it would require extra revenues (making senators susceptible to Republican charges of fiscal irresponsibility) and particularly because–again, according to Star–the proposed benefits coverage was too extensive and too large for many senators to swallow. The final message of Starr’s article is that it was President Clinton’s fault, rather than Hillary’s, that the reform proposal failed.

Starr reproduces a widely held interpretation of the failure of the Clinton health care reform that (limiting the analysis to the relationship between the President and Congress) attributes this failure to a calendar error -­ bad timing–and to the excessive generosity of the proposed health care benefits. I believe there is a need to correct such an interpretation of the events that led to the death of the reform proposal and to challenge the assumptions behind the interpretation. This is important because we might face a similar situation very soon. The majority of the U.S. population is dissatisfied with the funding and organization of the health care sector, and this dissatisfaction has reached unprecedented levels. Once again, all indicators show that people want change. But we could face another failure unless some major changes take place in the U.S.–changes that, I admit, are unlikely to occur with the current correlation of forces in the country and in the Democratic Party.

Let’s start with some corrections to Starr’s assumptions. The commitment of the Democratic Party and candidate Bill Clinton to universal health care coverage for all citizens and residents started much earlier than Starr suggests. It began in the presidential primary campaigns of 1988, when Jesse Jackson (for whom I was senior health advisor), running for the Democratic nomination, made a commitment to universal, comprehensive health care benefits coverage a central component of his platform. This proposal was dismissed by the Democratic Party establishment as “too radical,” but it had already mobilized large sectors of the party’s grassroots (especially labor unions and social movements) to support Jackson, with more than 40% of the delegates at the Democratic Party Convention in Atlanta. This shook the Democratic establishment and stimulated responses from Governor Clinton, Senator Al Gore, and Congressman Richard Gephardt to block this rise of the left in the Democratic Party, which they did by establishing the Democratic Leadership Council, among other interventions. (Gore and Gephardt have changed since then; Bill Clinton hasn’t.) (I describe these effects of Jackson’s health proposals on the Democratic Party in “The 1988 Presidential Election,” in The Politics of Health Policy: The U.S. Reforms 1980­1998, Blackwell, 1994. pp. 99-110.) To control this growth of the left, something had to be done. And as liberals always have done when faced with the left, they recycled its progressive proposals, adopting much of their narrative but emptying them of their content. This is what Clinton did in his 1992 campaign. He used the title, narrative, and symbols of Jesse Jackson’s campaign, calling his platform “Putting People First” (the title used by Jackson in 1988) and including the call for universal health care benefits. As the perceptive Financial Times wrote, “Clinton [has borrowed] extensively from Jesse Jackson 1988. He sounds like a Swedish social democrat.” While borrowing the language and the symbols, however, Clinton changed the content dramatically.

Whereas Jackson had called for a single-payer program similar to that in Canada, Clinton chose the opposite pole of the political spectrum: managed care competition. Managed care competition basically meant the insurance companies exercised full control over health care providers, with doctors working in group practices called Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). As stated by Paul Elwood, a leading member of the White House task force, “insurers-controlled HMOs, under managed care competition will stimulate a course of change in the health care industry that would have some of the classical aspects of the industrial revolution–conversion to larger units of production, technological innovation, division of labor, substitution of capital for labor, vigorous competition and profitability as the mandatory condition of survival” (“Heath Maintenance Strategy,” Medical Care, 9 (1971), p. 291). This industrial revolution in medical care would indeed have revolutionized the practice of medicine.

It is important to note that the idea of managed care competition was first proposed as a solution to the irrationality of the U.S. health care sector by Alain Enthoven, personal advisor to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Enthoven was in charge of developing the “body count” as an indicator of military efficiency. After the Vietnam fiasco, Enthoven retired to the Rand Corporation, choosing to focus his intellectual efforts on the reform of U.S. health care. A strong ideologue and market fundamentalist, and completely ignorant of the mechanics of the medical care sector, Enthoven thought the best way to control out-of-control costs in the health sector was to increase competition in the sector, letting health insurance companies compete for consumers–meaning patients–based on the price of services. The problems with such a naïve and unrealistic scenario are many. First, patients do not determine the cost or price of medical care services. Second, patients have very little choice in the U.S. health care sector: employers choose which plans are available to employees. Third, the market does not exist in the health care sector. Fourth, the insurance industry’s financial viability depends on its ability to discriminate against heavy care-users. I could go on and on detailing just how wrong Enthoven’s proposals were.

Not surprisingly, managed care was the proposal chosen by the insurance industry and by employers. As Bill Link, Executive Vice President of Prudential and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country, stated: “for Prudential, the best scenario for reform–preferably even to the status quo–would be enactment of a managed competition proposal.” Link envisioned the corporatization of U.S. medicine, breaking the long dominance of health care providers in the medical care sector. As Enthoven wrote in an article co-authored with Richard Kronick, another leader of the White House health care reform, “what about traditional fee-for-services individual and single specialty group practices? We doubt that they should generally be compatible with economic efficiency. . . . Some would survive in private solo practice without health plan contracts, serving the well-to-do.” It could not have been put more clearly: managed care competition was corporate assembly-line capitalism for the masses and their health care providers, with free choice and fee-for-service medicine for the elites.

This proposal was actively promoted in the White House task force by the staff of Democratic Representative Cooper and members of the so-called Jackson Hole Group, who even distributed the group’s manuals on implementing managed care competition to task force members. They were particularly active in the Governance of the Health System (chaired by Richard Curtis, who had been an official of the HIAA) and Global Budgeting working groups. Outside the task force, managed care competition was actively promoted by the insurance companies. Mr. Weinstein, a disciple of Enthoven and a member of the editorial board of the New York Times (a third of the Times board members then had connections with insurance companies), wrote nine editorials in support of managed care competition.

Paul Starr sold managed care to candidate Bill Clinton. Of course, Starr and another leader of the White House task force, Walter Zelman, were aware of some drawbacks of this scheme, and they modified it to allow for some form of regulation of the ill-defined market forces–without specifying, however, who would do the regulating. They spoke of Health Alliances that would regulate the rate of growth of premiums and would allow, in theory, for consumer choice of health plans, with large employers operating on their own outside the regulatory process but still within the framework of managed care competition (with budget constraints); health insurers and health care providers could be integrated in the same organization, or Health Plans. While managed care competition was the proposal favored by insurers and large employers, it was not favored by health care providers. Providers had already had enough experience with insurance companies to know that they could be more intrusive, abusive, and nasty than government. And managed care was certainly not the choice of the grassroots of the Democratic Party–labor unions and social movements.

Concerned that managed care was not backed by the majority of the progressive base of the Democratic Party, Jesse Jackson, Dennis Rivera (then president of Local 1199, the foremost health care workers union), and I went to see Hillary Clinton. We complained about the commitment to managed care competition without due consideration of a single-payer proposal supported by large sectors of the left in the Democratic Party. We emphasized the need to include this proposal among those to be considered by the task force. Mrs. Clinton responded by asking Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition to appoint someone to the task force with that point of view. And this is how I became a member of the White House task force. I later found out that there was considerable opposition from senior health advisors, including Starr and Zelman, to my becoming part of the task force. According to a memo later made public and published in David Brock’s nasty book The Seduction of Hillary Clinton, Starr and Zelman disapproved of my appointment “because Navarro is a real left-winger and has extreme distaste for the approach we are pursuing”­ which was fairly accurate about my feelings, but I must stress that my disdain for managed competition and the intellectuals who supported it did not interfere with my primary objective: to make sure that the views of the single-payer community would be heard in the task force. They were heard, but not heeded. I was ostracized, and I had the feeling I was in the White House as a token–although whether as a token left-winger, token radical, token Hispanic, or token single-payer advocate, I cannot say. But I definitely had the feeling I was a token something.

It was at a later date, when some trade unions and Public Citizen mobilized to get more than 200,000 signatures in support of a single-payer system, that President Clinton instructed the task force to do something about single-payer. From then on the battle centered on including a sentence in the proposed law that would allow states to choose single-payer as an alternative if they so wished. In Canada, after all, single-payer started in one province (Saskatchewan) and later spread to the whole nation. I have to admit that I made that proposal with considerable misgivings, since the insurance companies can also be extremely influential at the state level. For example, Governor Schaeffer (a Democrat) of Maryland had asked insurance companies to interview the various candidates for state insurance commissioner. Still, including this proposal was a step toward giving single-payer a chance in the U.S.

It is interesting that in my debates with Alain Enthoven, he dismissed my proposals with the comment that “the U.S. Political System is incapable of forcing changes in such powerful constituencies as the insurance industry.” Such candid admission of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the U.S. political system was refreshing. The splendid opening of the U.S. Constitution, “We the people . . . ,” should be amended with a footnote reading “and the insurance companies.” Actually, Enthoven’s statement came very close to Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which defines democracy as a class dictatorship in which the corporate class controls the state. Empirical support in the U.S. for that statement is strong. But the statement is not 100% accurate. I lived under a dictatorship in my youth (in Franco’s Spain) and I recognize a dictatorship when I see one. The U.S. is not a dictatorship. People in the U.S. do have a voice. Marx and Engels (and Enthoven) were not completely right: U.S. history shows that people’s mobilizations can win the day. But, while not a dictatorship, U.S. democracy is profoundly undermined by the enormous influence of the economic and corporate lobbies, components of the corporate class. I documented this in Medicine Under Capitalism, published in the 1970s. And things have become much worse during the Reagan­Bush Sr.­Clinton­Bush Jr. era. The huge limitations of U.S. democracy are evident in the difficulty with which the importance of people’s voice gets noticed. And this is why the Clinton proposal failed. He did not include in his plans any effort to mobilize people in support of the reform. Quite to the contrary. He allied himself with the major forces responsible for the sorry state of the U.S. medical care sector–the health insurance industry. The insurance companies ultimately opposed the final proposal because of its regulatory components, added by Starr and Zelman. But, apart from these components, the insurance companies would have continued to manage the health care system.

Starr’s explanation of why the reform failed is dramatically insufficient. The failure had little to do with timing, with when and where President Clinton presented the proposal. It had to do with how the Clintons related to the progressive constituencies, including labor and social movements. No universal, comprehensive coverage will ever be achieved in the U.S. without an active mobilization of the population (especially progressive forces) so as to balance and neutralize the enormous resistance from some of the most important financial lobbies in the nation. Starr’s social engineering approach, lacking any understanding of the dynamics of power, explains failure as a consequence of problems of the electoral calendar or the types of benefits offered.

In reality, the Clinton administration ignored the majority of the country’s progressive forces from the very beginning of its mandate. President Clinton made his first priority a reduction of the federal deficit (a policy not even included in his program), approved NAFTA (against the opposition of the AFL-CIO, the social movements, and even the majority of the Democratic Party), and committed himself to perpetuation of the for-profit health insurance system–the primary cause of the country’s inhumane medical care system. When NAFTA was approved, Clinton signed the death certificate for the health care plan, and for the Democratic majority in Congress. The number of people who voted Republican in 1994 was no larger than in 1990 (the previous non-presidential congressional election year). The big difference was in the Democratic vote. Abstention by working-class voters increased dramatically in 1994 and was the primary reason why Democrats lost their majority in Congress. This is a point that Starr ignores. The Gingrich Revolution of 1994 was an outcome of voter abstention, particularly among the working class, who were fed up with President Clinton. But NAFTA was also the death knell for health care reform. One could see this in the White House task force. NAFTA empowered the right, and weakened and demoralized the left.

A continuing shift to the right (erroneously called the center) has been the Democratic Party’s strategy for the past 30 years, abandoning any commitment to the New Deal and the establishment of universal entitlements that make social rights a part of citizenship. David Brock writes in his book “that Navarro had told Mrs. Clinton that if the President went ahead with a managed care competition plan, it would cost the election to the Democratic Party.” Brock’s credibility as a reporter is extremely limited, but on that point he was right. I told Mrs. Clinton that the only way of winning, and of neutralizing the enormous power of the insurance industry and large employers, was for the President and the Democratic Party leadership to make the issue one of the people against the establishment. It was a class war strategy that the Republicans most feared. My good friend David Himmelstein, a founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, told Mrs. Clinton the same thing. And as I judged by her response, she seemed to think we did not understand how politics works in the U.S. The problem is, we understood only too well how power operates.

This, then, is why the Clintons failed. And unfortunately, Hillary Clinton will fail again if she lacks the courage to confront those responsible for the predicament in the nation’s health care system. The insurance-controlled system imposes enormous pain on the population. It is not just that 46 million people are now without health insurance, but the system also fails the huge numbers of people who have insufficient coverage and don’t discover this until they need it. This cruel system has been supported by large employers because it gives them oppressive control of the labor force. When workers lose their job, they lose not only their income but also health benefits coverage–for themselves and their families. The alliance of two of the most powerful forces in this country–insurance and large employers–is at the root of the problem.

A final observation. Love of country is measured by the extent to which one promotes policies that support the well-being and quality of life of the population and, most particularly, the working and middle classes that make up the vast majority of the population. Judged by this standard, most super-patriotic, right-wing forces fail miserably on the love-of-country front. People in this nation die due to lack of health care. The estimates vary from 18,000 to 100,000 a year, depending on how you measure preventable deaths. But even based on the most conservative number of 18,000 (from the conservative Institute of Medicine), this is six times the number of people killed on September 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda. And these deaths continue year after year. The deaths on 9/11 are rightly seen as the result of enemy action. But why do the 18,000 deaths each year go unnoticed? Why aren’t they seen as the outcome of hostile forces, whose love for their country is clearly nil? Mark Twain said, “You cannot love people and then go to bed with those who oppressed them.” Why is it so difficult to understand such a basic truth?

A few decades ago, the FBI regularly conducted “black-bag jobs” that involved sneaking into homes, hotel rooms and offices with the cooperation of the building’s owner or even a neighbor with a spare key. Locks were picked otherwise.

Because no judge had authorized the FBI’s black-bag job, they were incredibly illegal. In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee famously disclosed the bureau’s clandestine operations.

Now President Bush is backing a bill that seems to encourage the FBI to revert to some of its old habits.

The FISA Amendments Act, approved by a Senate committee last week, seems to immunize people who cooperated with the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency–and other even more shadowy agencies–that conduct black-bag jobs.

Although most of the attention has focused on how the Senate bill might offer telecommunications service providers retroactive immunity (and derail the lawsuits against AT&T), the actual language appears to cover physical intrusions too:

ASSISTANCE–The term ‘assistance’ means the provision of, or the provision of access to, information… facilities, or another form of assistance

PERSON–The term ‘person’ means…a landlord, custodian, or other person who may be authorized and required to furnish assistance…

IN GENERAL–Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no civil action may lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be promptly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the court that…any assistance by that person was provided pursuant to a directive under sections 102(a)(4), 105B(e)…

ELEMENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY–The term ‘element of the intelligence community’ means an element of the intelligence community as specified or designated under section 3(4) of the National Security Act… [Ed. Note: That includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and any other agency the president chooses.]

Let’s translate that. A hotel manager who lets FBI agents into a guest’s room to copy a laptop’s hard drive in secret would not be liable. An apartment manager who gives Homeland Security the key to a tenant’s unit to place a key logger in a PC would not be liable. A private security firm that divulges a customer’s alarm code would not be liable. A university that agrees to forward a student’s e-mail messages to the Defense Department would not be liable. An antivirus company that helps the NSA implant spyware in an unsuspecting customer’s computer would not be liable.

No court order is required. And if an eventual lawsuit accuses the hotel manager or antivirus firm of unlawful activities, it’ll be thrown out of court as long as the attorney general or the director of national intelligence can provide a “certification.” The “certification” is, of course, secret–all a judge may say publicly is that the rules were followed, and then dismiss the case.

The wording of 105B does seem to narrow this substantially. Enacted in August as part of the Protect Act, 105B says that non-judicial orders by the attorney general or director of national intelligence are limited to “information concerning persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

105B does require “minimization procedures,” which would mean that any key loggers or spyware inserted in a black-bag job would supposedly be programmed to discard information about domestic-to-domestic communications.

Now, perhaps I’ve misread portions of the bill, but the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn’t in the mood to answer questions about it on Monday, so we don’t know its reasoning or explanation. There are other implications that are too far afield to get into now, such as whether FBI contractors breaking into telecommunications or software companies’ offices (or computers) for surveillance-related purposes would be immunized as well.

Too often, the Bolivarian Revolution currently underway in Venezuela is dismissed by its critics—on the right and left—as a fundamentally statist enterprise. We are told it is, at best, a continuation of the corrupt, bureaucratic status quo or, at worst, a personalistic consolidation of state power in the hands of a single individual at the expense of those “checks and balances” traditionally associated with western liberal democracies. These perspectives are erroneous, since they cannot account for what have emerged as the central planks of the revolutionary process. I will focus on the most significant of these planks: the explosion of communal power.

By viewing the process through the Leninist concept of “dual power”—that is, the construction of an autonomous, alternative power capable of challenging the existing state structure—we can see that the establishment of communal councils in Venezuela is clearly a positive step toward the development of fuller and deeper democracy, which is encouraging in and of itself. But the councils’ significance goes beyond that. The consolidation of communal power says much about the role of the state in the Venezuelan Revolution. Specifically, what is unique about the Venezuelan situation is the fact that sectors of the state are working actively to dismantle and dissolve the old state apparatus by devolving power to local organs capable of constituting a dual power. Transcending the simplistic debate between taking or opposing state power, a focus on dual power allows us to concentrate on what really matters in Venezuela and elsewhere: the revolutionary transformation of existing repressive structures.

‘An Entirely Different Kind of Power’

Lenin—standing at what he felt to be an unprecedented and unforeseeable political crossroads—spoke of the emergence of “an entirely different kind of power,” one fundamentally distinct from that of prevailing bourgeois democracies.1 Alongside the Provisional Government of Kerensky, an alternative government of Workers’ Soviets had emerged, a dual power—or dvoevlastie—standing outside and against the existing state structure. This still “weak and incipient” alternative structure Lenin describes as “a revolutionary dictatorship, i.e., a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralized state power.”

What was it that made this power “entirely different”? According to Lenin, this dual power was defined above all by its unique political content, for which the clearest historical reference point was the 1871 Paris Commune.2

The fundamental characteristics of this type are:

(1) the source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas—direct “seizure,” to use a current expression;

(2) the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves;

(3) officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people’s first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding “jobs” remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special “arm of the service,” whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary pay of a competent worker.

As we will see, this concept can clearly be applied to Venezuela, but to do so entails a double movement: it reveals some of the limitations of the concept itself as originally formulated, and also alerts us to some of the dangers confronting the revolutionary process in Venezuela. By speaking in terms of dual power, the hope is that we might enrich our understanding both of the concept itself and of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Explosion of Communal Power

In the aftermath of Chávez’s landslide electoral victory in December 2006, the Bolivarian Revolution has taken a radical turn. The enemies of the process soundly defeated, the way has been cleared for the deepening and radicalization of the process. Moreover, with six years of leadership ahead of him, Chávez now enjoys a brief respite from the demands of his “allies,” one which has allowed him to take serious steps against those corrupt bureaucrats within the Chavista ranks who would halt the revolutionary process. The program for this radicalization has been described in terms of the “five motors” driving the revolution, the fifth and most substantial of which is “the explosion of communal power.” This refers to the expansion of local communal councils and their authority throughout Venezuela, a process which began with the 2006 Law on Communal Councils and which has taken off in recent weeks and months.3 At present, there are an estimated 18,320 organized communal councils, and some 50,000 are expected by the end of the year.4

The committee that authored the Law on Communal Councils was chaired by Communist Party member David Velásquez—recently named Minister of Participation and Social Development—who sees the councils as the basis for the revolutionary transformation of the state, arguing that: “what is sought is to transfer power and democracy to organized communities to such a degree that the State apparatus would eventually be reduced to levels that it becomes unnecessary.”5 But as we will see below, this view also differs from Lenin’s understanding of dual power in that it has operated in part through the legal system and the state apparatus. This difference can be explained by the fact that Velásquez’s vision draws directly upon Antonio Negri’s distinction between “constituent” and “constituted” powers, a distinction which Chávez himself has cited on several occasions and which emphasizes the constant need for the intervention by the “constituent” masses in opposition to the sterility of legality and the adherence to already-constituted structures.6 This distinction—which does not dismiss constituted, institutional, or legal power from the outset, but instead subjects that power to revocation by the people—is much more useful for a discussion of dual power than a homogeneous view of the state structure, and has arguably contributed significantly (partly through Velásquez’s own intervention) to the construction of a serious dual power in Venezuela whose ethical-legal foundation is the constituent intervention of the masses.7

Considering the popularity of constituent power in Venezuela, it shouldn’t surprise us to find that the role of law in contemporary Venezuela is peculiar to say the least. The situation is what one might call a “revolutionary reverence” for the law: not an a priori respect for the law but rather an admiration derived from the experience of revolutionary legislation imposed from below, and specifically the organized defense of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution (a defense which gave rise to the revolutionary base organizations known as Bolivarian Circles). As the spokesperson for a communal council in the Naguanagua sector of Valencia recently told me—Communal Council Law in hand—“we can’t read the law like a reactionary lawyer, but instead, without violating it, we need to make it fit our social reality in order to restore the true protagonism to the people.” This radical view of the law is, in fact, a manifestation of the Venezuelan emphasis on constituent power: while it is necessary to make use of existing constituted power (in this case, the law), one must never forget that this constituted power relies fundamentally upon the constituent power that enacted it.

According to Article 2 of the 2006 law, communal councils are “instances of participation, articulation, and integration between various community organizations, social groups, and citizens,” the goal of which is to “permit the organized people directly to manage public policy and projects oriented toward responding to the needs and aspirations of communities in the construction of a society of equity and social justice.” These councils, moreover, are required to operate according to criteria which include “mutual responsibility, cooperation, solidarity, transparency, accountability, honesty, efficacy, efficiency, social responsibility, social control, equity, and social and gender equality” (Article 3), and are broadly empowered to “adopt those decisions essential to life in the community” (Article 6). According to the law, councils are to be governed by way of committees whose spokespersons are elected for a tenure of two years (Article 12), and as with elections at other levels, mandates are revocable (Article 6).

The fiscal autonomy of the communal councils is significant, despite the fact that most funding comes—somewhat unavoidably in an oil-rich nation—via the central government. Chávez has announced on several occasions that in the future, a full 50 percent of the profits derived from the state-owned petroleum company PDVSA—profits totaling more than $6 billion during the first half of 2006—will be transferred directly to communal councils. These funds had been previously directed toward state governors and mayors, but will now be managed directly on the communal level. Toward this end, 590 billion bolívares ($274 million) had already been earmarked for 2,500 communal projects by February 15, 2007, and that figure has only been increasing since.8 So, too, has the breadth of their specified competencies: in response to the recent controversy over meat shortages caused by hoarding, a law was passed giving power to the government to take over businesses engaged in hoarding, and this law gives the same authority to communal councils. While these remain but hints as to the future importance of the councils, they are nevertheless encouraging ones. But what is the relation between the nascent communal councils and the concept of dual power outlined above?

Against Bureaucracy

To take Lenin’s criteria in reverse order, it should be pointed out that the explicit purpose of the councils is to subject the official bureaucracy to the will of the people expressed through direct participation on the local level. While some tentative and insufficient steps have been taken to attack corruption and bureaucracy within the central government, the councils can be seen as taking this fight to another level, both in the “social oversight” authority they are granted over the central government and in the transparent and egalitarian norms which govern their internal operations. In terms of Lenin’s two criteria—revocable leadership and the elimination of wage differentials—it is worth noting that revocable mandates have been a central plank of the Bolivarian Revolution from the beginning, and are enshrined in the 1999 Constitution.9 In terms of wages, the Venezuelan government has begun to take steps to impose ceilings on public sector wages: in January, the National Assembly—citing the fact that some high court judges earn more than twenty-eight million bolívares ($13,000) a month—began work on a law that would limit salaries for government officials to six million bolívares ($2,800) monthly.10

The capacity of the councils to attack bureaucracy and corruption begins with their capacity to supervise other levels of government: every council elects a five-person committee for “social oversight [contraloría]” which in the words of Lenin, places bureaucrats “under special control.” These committees are empowered to oversee “programs and projects for public investment budgeted and executed by the national, regional, or municipal government” (Article 11). This authority represents a powerful weapon against the corrupt bureaucracies that exist on the state and local level, and against those governors and mayors whom many hope the councils will eventually replace entirely. But this is far from certain, as Fernando—an organizer with the Simón Bolívar Cultural Foundation in the historically revolutionary 23 de Enero neighborhood and official promoter of Chávez’s nascent United Socialist Party (PSUV)—expresses a common concern at this stage of the formation of communal councils: “most mayors are playing too big a role in the creation of communal councils, trying to control them. The role of state officials should only be to provide information and facilitate the councils.”

There is also the hope that, in bypassing these various levels of government bureaucracy, the councils will be able to avoid or at least minimize the corruption that comes with the transfer of funds from the national to the local level. “If a local organization wants to request funding from the government,” Fernando explains, “that money needs to pass through so many hands [e.g. ministries, governors, and mayors] that corruption is inevitable. We hope that the councils will eliminate or at least minimize the possibility of corruption by establishing a direct link between funding and the communities.” While he doubts that fiscal reliance on the state as a whole will be eliminated in the near future—“How else,” he asks, “can petroleum money reach the communities?”—his hope is that the councils will reduce the possibility that the institutions involved remain alienated from the people.

On the local level, moreover, we find the second key element to the councils’ attack on bureaucracy and corruption: direct democracy on the local level. Turning again to Lenin’s emphasis on revocable mandates and limited wages, committee members in communal councils are elected through the direct participation of the community, for short terms (two years), and can be revoked much easier than elected officials at higher levels. When we get to the communal councils, moreover, remuneration has disappeared entirely, and all elected posts are explicitly “ad honorem” (Article 12). Whereas in the capacity of overseeing the central government, the councils serve as a counterweight to the higher levels of power. The directly democratic nature of participation in the councils coupled with the non-remuneration of their elected leadership militate against the corruption and bureaucratization of the councils themselves, thereby making them a more stable and self-sufficient reservoir of dual power. These are structures which simultaneously prefigure a future participatory society while tentatively building forces to attack those elements of the existing state which oppose that transformation.

But the ability of the councils to live up to this hope is far from guaranteed, and up the street at the council election, Carlos Rodríguez—younger brother of one of 23 de Enero’s most famous martyrs—while optimistic, insists that “only time will tell whether the councils will be able to fulfill their function.”

An Armed Populace

Lenin’s second criterion for dual power—that of a directly armed populace—is a more complicated question, since the communal councils are not armed in any official sense. Rather, they must be considered in a broader context, and the history of armed organizations outside and against the state runs deep in Venezuela. Decades of rural and urban guerrilla struggle in the pre-Chávez years have given way not to a pacification and disarmament after his election, but rather to the proliferation of networks of armed, local self-defense units concentrated in the poorest parts of Venezuela. As merely one example, we could mention the various groups concentrated in the 23 de Enero sector of western Caracas, where decades of urban insurgency gave birth to the Coordinadora Simón Bolívar (CSB), the Revolutionary Tupamaro Movement, the Revolutionary Carapaica Movement–Néstor Zerpa Cartollini Combat Unit, and the Colectivo Alexis Vive, just to name a few. Similar organizations exist in the other large barrios of Caracas—Petare, La Vega, El Valle, etc.—and throughout the country as a whole, to which we could add the mysterious activities of the decentralized Bolivarian Liberation Front which operates in rural areas.

These groups have even on several occasions received logistical support from national and local government (especially current Metropolitan Mayor Juan Barreto), though this support has not included arms as the opposition has often claimed. This, moreover, has been a reciprocal relationship: when Chávez was briefly overthrown in April 2002, several of his ministers were offered safe haven in barrios like 23 de Enero and La Vega. So while the space for armed self-defense on the local level has certainly expanded and been encouraged as elected Chavistas have taken over the various levels of the state apparatus, we should bear in mind that this has been a slow and uneven process, both because Chavista hegemony is only now becoming consolidated, but more importantly because, as a revolutionary organizer who is currently working to facilitate local preparations for asymmetrical warfare in the event of aggression against Venezuela by the United States tells me: “Despite Chávez’s pronouncements on the need for a citizens’ militia, many of those within the structure still believe in the state’s need to maintain the monopoly of violence.”

As was the case with the attack on bureaucracy and corruption, this tension emerges on two levels: both within formal military structures (between the Armed Forces and the reserves) and more importantly between those military (and police) structures and local armed organizations. As to the first, I spoke recently with a member of the National Reserve, who weighed in on the current controversy over what relation the reserves should have to the official Armed Forces. While the current inclusion of the reserves within the Armed Forces might be interpreted as a recognition of the democratic counter-power of militia organization, it is better interpreted as an effort at co-optation and subordination. “The reserves shouldn’t be part of the Armed Forces,” Victor tells me, “we should be invisible, anonymous, waiting and ready to attack any aggressor without being identified.”

This view is echoed by former commander of the reserves and recently named Defense Minister Gustavo Rangel Briceño, who argues that “the reserves should not be a component of the Armed Forces” since they lack the rigid structure of the latter and “should adopt the characteristics of a popular organization.”11 This force he currently estimates at 880,000, with the long-term objective of 15 million reservists (i.e. more than half the population). Rangel Briceño hopes that Chávez will reform the 2005 reserve law to provide the force with full autonomy, in which case the Venezuelan reserve might more closely approximate Lenin’s notion of “the direct arming of the whole people” than any force in recent history. This, at least, is Chávez’s own self-professed objective: “The military reserve must be linked to popular organization…the goal isn’t to have only reserve troops in the battalions, no, it’s the people as a whole.”12

But no matter how popular and autonomous, a centralized reserve structure would nevertheless maintain a degree of alienation from local organs of dual power, and in this sense the communal councils reside in a space between the reserves and local self-defense organizations which rupture the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.13 Even prior to the establishment of the councils and in the absence of armed self-defense organizations, a widely held distrust of the police led many communities to take measures to ensure local safety and security. While the communal councils are not in any sense armed revolutionary cadres (as was arguably the case with some of the Bolivarian Circles), the call to decentralize power to the bases has extended to questions of local self-defense and the establishment of local security and defense committees. These “integral security committees” are enshrined in the 2006 Communal Council Law (Article 9), but their existence was largely theoretical until after the December 2006 election. In late February of this year, reserve commander Rangel Briceño—also a member of the presidential council for communal power—announced that the government would be emphasizing the need to establish security and defense committees in the communal councils, adding notably that, “these will be oriented not only toward defense from external military aggression, but as a point of internal security, in the carrying out of our daily tasks.”14

This internal security situation in the barrios was explained to me by Rigoberto, who I met at around noon on the day of the communal council elections for block five of 23 de Enero, at which point he was already drinking cold Polar Negra and shots of rum. Given that he was running for the security committee, perhaps it was lucky that he was not elected (he came in fourth place, but insisted that he had actually come in second). Despite his intoxicated state, Rigoberto explained to me how security worked in the zone even prior to the existence of the community council or security committee. “If we catch someone dealing drugs in our neighborhood,” he tells me, “first they get a warning. If they show up again, they get a beating. And if they show up a third time….” He trails off, indicating with a hand gesture that the outcome will not be pleasant. He also recounts a recent situation in which members of the community caught a local malandro, or criminal, robbing the Cuban doctor in the local Barrio Adentro health module: an unarmed crowd of neighbors seized the man, beat him, stripped him naked, and sent him on his way. While this sort of autonomous, local self-management of security matters may seem insignificant, it is a fundamental precondition for the deepening of dual power in Venezuela, and while it didn’t begin with the councils their empowerment in the area of security and defense promises to contribute to it.

However important reserves may be as a “direct arming of the whole people” in Lenin’s terms, we should recall that the reason that Lenin advocated the “replacement of the police and the army” is that these are “institutions divorced from the people and set against the people.” While an autonomous militia might reduce this alienation of security forces—and in this sense is certainly a positive step—the true replacement of the army and the police requires a more substantial break with the “monopoly of violence,” a decentralization of coercive force that is more firmly rooted in local structures. Such decentralized control over security matters has a long history in Venezuela—from guerrilla armies to urban Tupamaros (a Maoist-type self-defense organization)—and the communal councils have the potential to continue and build upon this history.

‘We Created Him’

Given the central role of Chávez in the Venezuelan process, any discussion of the Bolivarian Revolution in terms of dual power clearly requires an adjustment of prevailing categories to account for Chávez’s peculiar role as, in his own words, “a subversive in power.”15 This need to adjust our concepts to accommodate Venezuelan reality is perhaps best put by Oswaldo, a veteran of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle (himself no friend of constituted power). While agreeing that the concept of dual power has much to contribute to an understanding of the Venezuelan process, he nevertheless cautions that “we wouldn’t want to compare Chávez to Kerensky.” This is more than mere piety toward a leader: it demarcates the particular twist that the Venezuelan experience introduces into the dual power framework.

This tension between concept and reality becomes most acute when we turn to Lenin’s third criterion: that dual power is not legislated, but rather directly seized from below. While opposing dual power—the “direct initiative of the people from below”—to “a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament” might at first glance seem to objectively exclude the experience of Venezuela’s communal councils (these were, after all, a legislative creation), the reality is not so simple. This is because from the beginning, the Bolivarian Revolution has been fundamentally driven from below, and not in the pedestrian, electoral sense.16 For example, Chávez’s 1992 attempted coup—although unsuccessful—was in many ways a direct result of the 1989 Caracazo riot, a massive and spontaneous week-long popular rebellion which spread across the entire country in response to neoliberal structural adjustment. As Juan Contreras, head of the revolutionary Coordinadora Simón Bolívar, puts it: “Chávez didn’t create the movements, we created him.”

The importance of base-level organization, moreover, did not dissipate after Chávez was elected in 1998. In the run-up to the 1999 referendum approving the new Constitution, spontaneous reading groups formed with the goal of studying, understanding, and later defending their new Magna Carta. These reading groups would become the Bolivarian Circles, revolutionary neighborhood organizations (and arguable predecessors to the communal councils) which while fervently supporting Chávez and the revolution have consistently resisted all efforts at formal institutionalization. During the 2002 coup against Chávez, these same Bolivarian Circles as well as other base organizations proved their revolutionary dual power credentials as clearly as they had during the Caracazo: first on April 11 on Llaguno Bridge, where armed Chavistas and members of Bolivarian Circles battled the opposition-controlled Metropolitan Police, holding them at bay for hours to protect unarmed crowds, and later on April 13 when millions of Chavistas swarmed around Miraflores Palace, Fort Tiuna in Caracas, and the Parachute Regiment in Maracay, playing a key part in the military effort to oust the illegitimate interim government and return Chávez to power.

Such events are crucial moments in the history of Venezuelan dual power, demonstrating the capacity of the populace to, in Lenin’s terms, directly seize power from below. But this is not all they show: the relationship between the 1989 Caracazo and the failed 1992 Chávez coup, and between the April 11, 2002, opposition coup against Chávez and the April 13 popular insurgency that returned him to power also indicate a complex top-bottom dialectic between Chávez and the bases which has been a defining feature of the Venezuelan experience. As a result, we find ourselves in the peculiar situation in which even the most radically anti-state and anti-institutional segments of popular base organizations recognize Chávez’s importance for the process of building dual power.

This is perhaps clearest in the Tupamaros, one of the most important dual power forces active in Venezuela. In a 2003 manifesto, the Tupamaros attack those corrupt party politicians who would “re-institutionalize the country,” thereby maintaining the traditional structures of the bourgeois state.17 For the Tupamaros, the revolutionary path is an explicitly anti-institutional one: “The state and its networks, woven through years of domination, do not allow reformist solutions.” Their goal is instead “to encourage dual power by strengthening popular participation, to link, organize, and multiply autonomous social forces.” To this end, they propose communal councils composed of workers and peasants which would represent a “local power that through popular assemblies, without the institutional influence of any sort, would be able to plan, orient, and execute the social force capable of demystifying constituted power.” Here we see the Tupamaros linking the building of dual power directly to communal councils, and doing so precisely through a distinction between constituent and constituted power.

This anti-institutionalist vision—emphasizing as it does the harnessing of constituent power to build a viable dual power alternative—does not exclude participation by those within the state apparatus: for the Tupamaros, the line dividing revolutionaries from reformists cuts across the state structure itself. Specifically, the National Assembly (circa 2003) was seen as a reformist talking-shop, the spearhead of the bourgeois offensive against the revolution. Chávez, in contrast, falls on the side of the revolutionary forces as a result of his “historical role,” that of “a statesman dedicated to the voice of the people.” Despite being surrounded by opportunists, the Tupamaros credit Chávez with “having awakened the abandoned from their lethargy to put the people on the offensive,” that is, Chávez is seen as having activated constituent power toward the construction of dual power. In order to counteract efforts by some sectors of Chavismo to demobilize the population and thereby halt the revolution, the Tupamaros even advocated that the president invoke constitutional powers to dissolve the Assembly.

This seemingly paradoxical effort to construct dual power in alliance with certain segments of the state has also entered into Tupamaro strategy. In 2004 the electoral wing of the Tupamaro movement supported Chavista mayoral candidate Alexis Toledo in the state of Vargas, and upon being elected, Toledo named Tupamaro leader José Pinto police chief of Vargas. To put this development in perspective, we might compare it to Huey P. Newton being put in charge of the Oakland Police Department, and while some Tupamaros have expressed concern about entering into electoral politics, few could argue that to have an anti-state revolutionary in charge of the police represents a step backward in terms of the construction of dual power in Venezuela.

Roland Denis has expressed a similar vision of dual power animated by the intervention of the constituent masses. Contemporary revolutionary movements, Denis tells us, “now focus their attention on cultivating and extending popular power through the permanent reanimation of the constituent power of the people. The old slogan of ‘dual power’ (bourgeois and working-class) valid for the summit of the revolutionary movement today becomes a permanent strategy in accord with the need for the organization of a socialized and non-state power.”18

He proposes “governments of resistance” to carry out local administration tasks, and in fact Denis claims that the councils themselves resulted from a series of meetings held with popular organizations during his short-lived stint as vice-minister of planning and development following the 2002 coup.19 For Denis as for the Tupamaros, the communal councils are central to a dual power strategy informed by constituent power, and perhaps the best evidence of applying the concept of dual power to the Venezuelan context lies in the fact that this proponent of “non-state power” heads up an organization deemed the “April 13th Movement,” named for the day that the Venezuelan masses showed their true dual power credentials, invoking their authority as a constituent power to return Chávez to his position within the structure of constituted power.

In an attempt to clarify Chávez’s peculiar role in the construction of dual power in Venezuela, former Vice President José Vicente Rangel puts it bluntly: “Chávez is anti-power; Chávez is the one that moves things, within power and outside power. Why? Because Chávez is a man who has decontextualized power, demystified it, brought it closer to the people, managed to connect it with the common and everyday citizen.”20

Rangel also refers to this role as that of a “counterpower…exercised outside of constituted power” and against that established structure.21 This, of course, is insufficient: Chávez is neither anti-power nor counter-power. It is only the revolutionary base movements and the nascent communal councils that merit such a title. But against many of Chávez’s critics, we must recognize that the Venezuelan leader has indeed contributed to this anti-power or counter-power—in short, to the construction of dual power—in a significant and decisive manner.

Dual Power and the State

In most contemporary debates regarding the Venezuelan Revolution, both sides have remained mesmerized and thereby blinkered by an overly simplistic view of the state as a homogeneous unit. The resulting debate has been less than useful: must we change the world without taking power, or is it only by taking power that we can indeed change the world?22 By concentrating on the construction of dual power in Venezuela, we can avoid this naïve debate by focusing on the more constructive question: that of distinguishing between those forces working within-and-for the perpetuation of the traditional state structure and those working within-and-against that same structure, toward its dissolution.

Dual power situations are by definition unstable and ridden with threats. Given the role that some sectors of the state apparatus have played in fostering the construction of dual power in Venezuela, these threats are all the more complex and difficult to discern. What is clear is that the most fundamental of these threats is that the communal councils will never manage to assert their autonomy from the state. This will be all the more difficult given their current reliance on oil income, and so the long-term process of endogenous local economic development and the transition away from an oil-based economy is of the utmost importance to the strengthening of communal power. But since any significant transformation in the structure of the Venezuelan economy is unlikely in the short term, what is more likely is that Venezuelan revolutionary movements will continue to operate as they have for decades: strategically, advancing where the enemy retreats, gradually consolidating the communal councils as a viable dual power force capable of competing with and radically transforming the existing state structure.

George Ciccariello-Maher is a doctoral candidate in political theory at UC Berkeley, who is writing a dissertation on revolutionary subjectivity in Sorel, Negri, and Fanon. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Black Studies, Qui Parle, Radical Philosophy Review, The Commoner, Human Architecture, and Listening. He lives in Caracas, where he contributes to Counterpunch and MRzine.

Notes