Except increasingly for pseudonymous blogging, much of the left in the U.S. long has been intimidated into keeping its heterodox political economic views to itself. Certainly for all the red-baiting on the right, even after Occupy the traditional print and broadcast media long has assumed we were dead or isolated to university campuses. And, sure, like the faux libertarians and Christian right, some of us may also from time to time get sucked up into embarrassing conspiracy theories. Best for the rest of us to hold onto our tongues and our jobs if we still have them. The lack of a parliamentary system also keeps those of us who wish to actually win elections pinned for the most part to the Democratic Party, so we may not even bother remembering what we believe. Or perhaps we inhale deeply a natural herbal product and remember fondly when we were giants who walked the earth like the Nephilim of the Old Testament.
Into the intellectual vacuum created by the fall of the Soviet Union, in the world's largest "economy" as well as in most of the rest of the world, entered global neoliberal triumphalism, with heavy doses of outright financial chicanery. The William F. Buckley-reading cocky cowboys had been tanned, rested, and ready to reassert imperial rule since at least the Goldwater campaign. Many a neoliberal chest has been proudly beaten about the wonders of bringing democracy to the heathen we have often chosen to bomb or knock off with our American snipers.
Like the drones that are now our most recognized calling cards in much of the world, ironically the trade deals produced by neoliberalism are often synonymous not with democracy but with oppression and sell-outs by the local oligarchy.
Meanwhile, back in the most heavily-armed nation in the world, good ole' USA, our oligarchy would never do that to us. Supposedly it is in our collective best interest to let the triumphalist grownups make the decisions for the plebes, and many of us not being familiar with this thing called organized labor go along with this.
Then all of sudden, there is something blowing in the wind. Can you hear it? Out there, in the distance, but approaching? TPP, TPP, TPP.
I think that this may be one of those big semi-revolutionary moments in the land of the free, home of the brave, the first one since the Vietnam War, although Occupy came close and laid the groundwork. And, even more ironically, the very grandiosity of the imminent humiliation of the U.S. worker once again, may, just may, revitalize U.S. democracy and give the left back its voice. But not if we let our president intimidate us into silence.
Perhaps now, finally, we will feel it is long overdue for us to once again give our repressors the finger, to reopen our minds and our mouths, and to, if necessary, get off the well-worn couch and march, unless we want the neoliberals to complete the destruction of not only our jobs but also the planet itself.
Not that you asked, but while I am anti-TPP, I am not an isolationist or a Luddite. I want us, the we, the workers of the world wherever we live, the real people, as opposed to the legally-fictitious people, to unite. We have no choice if we want to survive on one heating up and overpopulated planet. We need to learn both to hold hands around the planet and to give each other our space to sense in our own way the mystical in the mundane.
Whether within or between borders, we cannot unite if we each view others primarily as competitors and not primarily as other human beings wanting and deserving to have decent lives.
Capitalist trade is about profit. It is consuming the earth with its endless need to accumulate capital, as Rosa Luxemburg observed a hundred years ago. The solution to this problem is not nationalism or attempting to otherwise retreat into a cocoon of advantaged sameness.
Love is both inward and outward looking. We should want to live in a loving world of affectionate comradeship. I know that I, as an anti-capitalist democrat internationalist, look forward to trade among a global community of freely associated individuals. But we will not get that under global capitalism.
Plutocracy is effectively in control in much of our world, even where we democratically through elections hand the power to their surrogates. Plutocrats effectively decide how our world does business, and what it even defines as the business of the world and its member societies.
It is the true business of a society to make itself humane not profitable. While counting and pricing resources requires accountants' skills, fair distribution of those resources and the products of the labor applied to those resources is a moral issue, not an economic issue.
Healthy societies have healthy social compacts. A healthy world society would have a healthy world social compact. The U.S. is less healthy than it should be not because it does not have enough international trade but because it does not have a healthy enough social contract.
To keep the affected public out of international trade negotiations that will, after all, affect the public is grossly undemocratic. We should all have a seat at the table, and the Internet can make that easy.
True enough that it is shame on President Obama for wanting to deny us that democratic right, and he himself should take advantage of this teachable moment to self-correct his ways. But, in a great piece of candor, during what seems like a long time ago involving health care, he told us that we needed to push him to do the right thing. We are honoring his own finest notions of democracy when we "go out and make [him] do it."
He wasn't the first president to supposedly say that. The statement is first attributed to FDR:
One of the most oft-cited incidents from FDR’s presidency is a policy meeting he held with labor leaders shortly after his election, which he concluded by telling them “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Did Roosevelt ever actually say those words? Who knows? Like Washington and his cherry tree, what matters is why we tell the story and what it says about how we view the man in question. FDR understood that regardless of what he personally believed, change had to happen from the bottom up, not just from the top down. He was a bold leader who was never afraid to take on a fight as long as he had the American people on his side. If we stop assuming that politicians will simply deliver progress without our involvement or that the process of policymaking is out of our hands once our votes are cast, then we might start to see elections in a very different light.
[Roosevelt Institute.]
We must respect the president's best intentions and most importantly ourselves enough to begin to see not only elections but also our own ability to take direct action in a very different light. We must begin by knowing our rights as human beings and proceed from there to define and enforce decent social compacts.
When we the people "sit down" through "our" trade representatives, it had better be streaming over the Internet to keep things more honest. We should accept nothing less than this, and we should shut down the Capital if this is denied to us.
And as we approach our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world about trade, we should first have an honest and, again, necessarily open, discussion with these brothers and sisters about our respective social compacts, where we each need improvement, and how trade between our peoples may or may not help us to improve our social compacts for all of our peoples, including especially the least of these.
The ultimate need for the workers of the world is the manifestation of a humane global social compact, the beginnings of which were envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt, and even more so by Eleanor Roosevelt, who led the work to make it part of the U.N. Because of the Republicans, the U.S., to its shame, has never ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Eleanor Roosevelt papers project provides an excellent short synopsis of the back and forth on that covenant, including this important acknowledgement of socialism:
The covenant’s provisions clearly reflect the socialist emphasis on economic rights, which is what the General Assembly had intended when it took the matter up in 1951. As a result, the United States and other western democracies remained unconvinced of the covenant’s merits and refused to ratify it. Despite a lack of support from these countries, however, the covenant entered into force on January 3, 1976 for those states that had approved it. As of 2002, the United States had still not ratified the covenant.
The Republicans should stop blocking ratification of this covenant if they want the U.S. to have a foundation for fair trade, not neoliberal triumphalism, and the Democrats led by President Obama should accept nothing less. Ratification should also be part of the Democratic Party platform until and unless it occurs.
Please read on for a brief discussion of some things we can learn from E. F. Schumacher in troubling trading times like these. My special thanks to SaraBeth for informing/reminding me about his important writing just the other day. (I greatly look forward to an upcoming piece by her on defining democratic socialism.)
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