From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

The last installment of excerpts from Magil and Stevens' 1938 antifascist polemic, "The Peril of Fascism," focused on some of the fascistic characteristics of the early New Deal, particularly the National Recovery Administration ("We do our part"). This was a particularly interesting observation to me because the hagiography of FDR and the New Deal doesn't allow for these sorts criticisms of the Roosevelt efforts to tame if not end the Great Depression.

It was interesting to me partly because from the time I first learned about the New Deal, I was aware that it was at least partially based on fascist models, and the N. R. A. was among its most fascistic elements. It might be hard to imagine now, but at the time, there were only two activist models for dealing with the recurring Crisis of Capitalism: Communism and Fascism. The Standard Model for dealing with economic downturn and the suffering it caused was for government to do nothing, the theory being that the downturn would be rectified shortly by usual economic means and forces, bugger the sufferers (the herd could always benefit from a good cull, after all. Haw. Haw.)

But the Standard Model was tried during Hoover's Administration -- he was much more of an economic activist than he is usually given credit for, but he (like Obama)  delivered almost all of his activism at the top of the economic pyramid and left those in the middle and those on the bottom to fend for themselves -- and get severely punished if they got out of line.

This installment of Magil and Stevens looks into some of the characteristics of the pre-Depression "boom" and the Hooverite acts against the People:

Revealing the whole character of the "prosperity" era are the estimates of the distribution of income in 1929 published by the Brookings Institution, in a study, America's Capacity to Consume. According to these figures, 36,000 of the wealthiest families -- or one-tenth of one percent of all the families in the United States -- received an aggregate income of 9.8 billion dollars. At the other end of the social scale were 11,653,000 families, 42 per cent of the total receiving an aggregation of about 10 billion dollars -- or approximately the same as that of the 36,000 families at the top of the heap.

...

In the period of apparent prosperity, the weaknesses and contradictions of capitalism, not only in the United States but throughout the world, were combining to make inevitable the crash of 1929. These weaknesses in the New Era were discernable to all who cred to see, but there were not many who were willing to look. Marxists who attempted to call them to the attention of the country were denounced as crackpots too demented to glance at the soaring lines on the stock market charts for confirmation of the New Era of permanent prosperity. The loudest denunciation of these sour prophets of collapse came from the gentry in high offices of the American Federation of Labor, who assured the workers that those who doubted the New Capitalism and the benefits of collaboration with employers were troublemakers in the pay of Moscow.

In November of 1928, workers, farmers, and lower middle class people went to the polls and in overwhelming numbers cast their votes for Herbert Hoover or Alfred Smith -- the tweedledum and tweedledee of capitalism, both closely connected with the most powerful groups on Wall Street. The combined vote of the Socialist and Communist parties was less than half a million.

...

The 1929 crash came as a profound and bewildering shock to a country which had been fed the New Era buncombe. All classes shared in the bewilderment and incredulity, unable to believe that the rosy promise of the New Capitalism could end in the wreckage which they saw accumulating around them.
...

The great majority of workers were desperate and confused; they had been forced by the crisis to abandon the New Era philosophy and they had not yet acquired a clear conception of the source of their difficulties or of the method of solving them. But life, rather than formulated doctrine, dictated militant struggle. Gigantic unemployment demonstrations and hunger marches swept the country, striking panic in the "well-stocked clubs" where bankers and businessmen fearfully discussed the possibility of imminent revolution. The more clear-sighted and progressive sections of the labor movement demanded that the capitalist class shoulder the burden of the crisis, for which it was responsible, and they succeeded in mobilizing large mass movements behind demands such as adequate unemployment relief, social insurance, and a shorter working week without a reduction in pay. In these movements, the Communist Party played a leading and the most dynamic role.

Gradually, under the pressure of its membership, even the top leadership of the A. F. of L. was compelled to revise its position. During three years of acute crisis, Green, Woll, and other chieftains of the A. F. of L. stubbornly opposed unemployment insurance, echoing Hoover's pronouncement that the "dole" was un-American and more degrading than picking scraps of refuse from garbage pails.

...

Hunger and destitution were rampant among those who grew the nation's foodstuffs.

Stubbornly, the farmers resisted foreclosures and fought for farm relief. Farm strikes broke out throughout the rural middle west. Farmers, who had been bullwarks of "law and order," picketed highways with clubs and pitchforks and dragged foreclosing judges from the bench. Throughout the great  corn and hog belt, where private property rights had been regarded as sacred , there arose a cry: "Human rights above property rights" -- a slogan which revealed the profound changes among the farmers of the middle west.

...

The profound unrest of these vast masses of people expressed itself in growing demonstrations for unemployment relief and unemployment insurance, in the farm strikes, in resistance to foreclosures of small homes, in student strikes and demonstrations, in war veterans bonus marches, in the leftward movement of intellectuals. Everywhere there was ferment. Millions began to question the fundamentals of the existing order, vaguely realizing there was something basically wrong with a system which condemned men and women to die of hunger next to warehouses bulging with food and to gather decaying food from garbage heaps while wheat was burned in the fields and vegetables and milk were dumped into rivers.

...

As growing numbers of workers and farmers demonstrated their refusal to starve quietly and loudly voiced their demand for relief, the capitalist class, and the government authorities representing it, increasingly resorted to force. In scores of cities, unemployment demonstrations were broken up with police bullets and tear gas; troops were sent out against strikers; Negro sharecroppers attempting to organize unions were hunted down and lynched; a wave of deportations swept the country; states revived old criminal syndicalism and sedition statutes and professional patriots clamored for new repressive laws.

As the lines on business charts dropped, the number of violations of civil liberties rose. By 1930 the wave of suppression had reached the highest crest since the post-war hysteria of 1921. One survey of civil liberties in 1930 says:

There was a marked increase in 1930 in official and mob violence, a continued and a greater violation of the rights of labor, a larger number of deportations, and increased official interference with the expression of civil liberties... The year brought 25 lynchings, compared with 12 in 1929; 27 cases of mob violence, compared with 5 in 1929; 121 meetings and demonstrations forbidden, contrasted with 52 in 1929; a nation-wide drive against Communists; denial in 6 cases of citizenship to aliens for pacifist or radical views; a large number of deportations, mainly of Communists...

Not since 1921 has official interference with freedom of speech reached such proportions as in 1930... The 1930 cases are exclusive of the police attacks on the Communist-led demonstrations of February, March, May Day, August and Labor Day. Hundreds of arrests took place at these demonstrations all over the country, accompanied by brutal police tactics, resulting in the injury of scores of persons.

An incomplete compilation by the International Labor Defense listed the arrest of 5,851 persons in civil liberties cases -- including 1,137 in strikes, 860 for distributing leaflets and other literature, and 1,703 in unemployment and other demonstrations.

Police raided headquarters of workers' organizations in Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Buffalo, Portland, and other cities, destroying property, seizing private correspondence, and arresting hundreds... in California, where the criminal syndicalism law was invoked for the first time since 1924, eleven organizers of an agricultural workers strike were railroaded to long jail sentences...

Official and mob violence further increased in 1931. The most acute terror prevailed in the Harlan, Kentucky, coal fields where a local regime of fascist terror was established by coal operators in an effort to suppress a walkout by 18,000 mountaineer miners. Twelve miners were killed in the Harlan fields by deputy sheriffs and gunmen imported from the slums of Chicago; scores were wounded; several kidnapped and beaten; workers' headquarters [were] destroyed. In Texas, Iowa and South Carolina, labor organizers were seized in the dead of night by armed mobs (some of them acting with police connivance) and brutally beaten. At Pontiac, Michigan, a "vigilante" mob seized and flogged fiver men who had participated in an unemployment demonstration, and (parroting the methods of the Italian fascists) compelled one of the victims to drink castor oil. The year 1931 also witnessed an intensification of the terror against Negroes in the South, exemplified by the arrest and frame-up of the nine Scottsboro Boys in the spring.

In 1932, suppression and murder of demonstrations and demonstrators intensified, culminating with the violent eviction of the Bonus Army from Washington, DC. 

That's just a taste of how the official and its allied suppression worked in those days. Surely we can see stark echoes of those tactics in the suppression of the Occupy Movement nowadays. And of course the reasons why are very similar. Those who sponsor and own the government were the same forces then as they are now, and they demand the silencing of all but "approved" dissent, and the crushing of any movement which might threaten their hegemony.

We are right back where we were -- except for the fact that there is no Communist vanguard any more -- despite the chattering of some "progressives" who are so fearful one will re-emerge from somewhere in the shadows and take over the pleasant and secure movements for (eventual) change that have long been underway, though more as academic exercises than as real movements for fundamental changes to a failed economic and political system.

"The Peril of Fascism" is written from a CPUSA point of view. It is strikingly familiar, but at the same time we don't see the kind of ferment today as was so paramount then, and one of the reasons is that there is no ideological counter to the rising tide of fascism today as there was then. Fascists will win under the circumstances...

The Obama Problem (Repost)

[I wrote this during the Debt Crisis Crisis. While I usually don't repost things from the past, it seems to me that Mr. Obama is struggling in the political arena once again, largely because people are dissatisfied with his performance on economic matters. The problem is his continued devotion to Hooverite economic principles. That's not to say that FDR and the New Deal were necessarily all that much better in an academic sense. They were far better in a political and popular sense. FDR understood the necessity of politically popular programs and policies, regardless of whether they were scientifically or academically sound; Hoover not so much, and not because he was such a bad man, or because he believed in "doing nothing" with regard to the economy -- neither was true about him.

No, the difference between Hoover and FDR, I think, was largely due to the fact FDR spent his entire adult life in politics and he came from a politically well connected and highly astute family. Hoover, not so much. Hoover was more of a bloodless technocrat, and the difference showed.

In the present case, of course, Romney has got Obama beat in the bloodless category. But Obama is obviously flailing as he goes around the country promoting economic policies that have actually resulted in an astronomical increase in unemployment and poverty. The People's answer is going to be, "NO!" There's no way around it.

The following essay written last July speaks of Obama as man of Principle whose primary Principle is that of Transcendence. And he will stick with it no matter what.]

The Obama Problem

I have from time to time offered both criticisms and defenses of His Serenity, Barack "Hoover" Obama -- mostly critical observation of what he is doing and why I think he's doing it. I don't think he is particularly evil or smart for that matter, but I do see him as increasingly self-possessed, self-actuated, and increasingly rigid in his core principles and beliefs.

President Carter with better looks and no Southern accent.

Well, yes. The Carter comparison has been raised since forever, on the presumption that Obama would be a one term president -- which he might well be, and I don't think he really much cares about that.

But lately, the fashion mavens in the Blogosphere have decided to push the notion that Obama is somehow The. Worst. President. Ever. (Excuse me, no.) Aware observers are more than willing to point out that the premise itself is stupid and unworthy, but it's hard not to succumb to the silliness because it is based in a human need to be on a "team" and support or defy the conventional wisdom.

Someone who supports his team feels validated, especially if his captain wins the game. And one thing I can say about Obama -- which I have in other fora -- is that he is a true believer in his own principles and his abilities to institute them through his agency as President.

His primary principle is that of Transcendence. He believes, truly, that it is his role to transcend the partisan divide, to bring the parties together, if not in harmony at least in agreement that something must be done and can be done, and to help hammer out whatever deal is necessary to Make It Happen.

That's what this Debt Crisis Crisis is all about. And it is -- sort of -- looking like he might pull it off.

Meanwhile, I came across a couple of considerations of The Obama Problem today that I think help clarify the picture. The first, via Digby, is by Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast, and it is very good. The upshot is that Obama is doing what he is doing -- which often seems incomprehensible to observers -- because he really believes in the principle of transcendence and he is determined to stick with his principles no matter what.

He apparently really believes—still!—in civic-republican notions of government as an arena for reasoned deliberation. That he could still think this is akin to a child believing in Santa Claus until he’s 15—but apparently he does. The journalist Alec MacGillis captured this conviction well in a profile he did of Obama for the British New Statesman back in 2008. Barack Obama, he wrote, “was running not on a record of past achievement or on a concrete program for the future, but instead on the simple promise of thoughtfulness.” From this perspective a unilateral action would be almost impious—or at least, if you’d rather aim a little lower than God, anti-Madisonian. Obama would be giving up on his ideal. Of course he should have long since given up on it. I was with him at the beginning—his conviction that politics could be better and more deliberative was one of the things I found appealing about the man. But that ship sailed long ago, and Obama’s position has declined from admirable principle to indefensible fetish. Politics simply isn’t going to get better and more deliberative any time soon.
The third reason the president probably won’t do it is related to the second, but it’s more personal. Unilateral action would be at odds with Obama’s image of himself. In his article, MacGillis defined thoughtfulness Obama style as “the notion that the leadership of the country should be entrusted not on the basis of résumé and platform, but on the prospect of applying to the nation's problems one man's singularly well-tempered intelligence.” This is pretty obviously a dead-on description of Obama’s view of himself and his potential as president.

I think it is really a good description of what is going on. Of course Tomasky, like many others, is OUTRAGED!!!!™ and wants Obama to Stop This Nonsense Right Now!!! Yes, well. Good luck with that. At no point during his reign on the Throne has Obama shown even a hint of giving up his principles -- though he will cheerfully give up just about everything else.

The other Worst. President. Essay I read today was by Sterling Newberry via Ian Welsh. Sterling, gosh, goes back a long way, into the mists of Internet times, and he's always been an acute observer and analyst of what's happening. In today's essay at The Sorcerer's Apprentice he examines what is wrong, desperately wrong, with the Obama Reign, and I think he gets it mostly right.

I especially like his historical notes and this part:

The President who Obama most resembles is Herbert Hoover, another one of those chief magistrates of government who became inflexible and iron willed. His idea of compromise is that he cuts out what he thinks is a compromise, and then relentlessly grind on it. He's dealing with people whose idea of compromise is a woman having an orgasm while she is raped. Neither of these two sides have actually compromised very much, other than compromising on extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy.

Hoover was a malfortunate president. Unfortunate is not a sufficient adjective to describe it. He inherited an economy that was about to explode. He takes office in March of 1929, the move to January would, to no small extent be because the long gap between election and inauguration paralyzed the country when later he would lose the Presidency, and in October of 1929, the stock market plunges in what is know as "The Crash." In reality such a crash was essentially inevitable after the Olmstead Break in August. In effect he had 5 months of Presidency. The rest was a long grind and heavy flail. His response was not without compassion and, within his understanding, he worked hard to do what was right. He simply was a mammoth in a lake that had been swamped by a breaking glacier dam, to be found, frozen, as an oddity. His failure was that as his policies failed, he doubled and tripled down on them. In essence, he turned a single large downturn, into three back to back downturns, and left the very faith in capitalism and democracy bruised behind him.

FDR and Hoover had once been political friends, but his rants and threats, the most famous being his offer to let FDR be President early, if FDR would scrap the "so-called New Deal." FDR replied tartly that he was still a private citizen until inauguration, his term as Governor of New York having ended.

Like me and a number of others, Newberry is relating Obama to Hoover's presidency, and he explains why very well.

On the other hand, when it comes to the Debt Crisis Crisis, I think he is somewhat off the mark in that he doesn't seem to be able to relate it (or actually much of anything Obama has done) to Obama's principle of transcendence.

That's why I highlight both articles today: the one by Tomasky which gets into the underlying reasons why Obama is doing what he is doing -- though Tomasky is calling it wrong in all kinds of ways -- and Newberry's, take which relates Obama's actions with those of other Worst Presidents and takes him to task for missing so many opportunities to please The People (and his more leftward critics) by taking bold(er) and more authoritative/authoritarian action.

I honestly don't think Obama is doing what he is doing for political gain. He is doing it both because he can, and because he must. He is a believer, in other words, and a man of Principle. Unshakable Principle.

This is what Principled Governance looks like. It isn't pretty. And I don't think it is what we really want.

Some Notes: Ways of Thinking

Currently in Salon is a long and intriguing article detailing the bitter rivalry between Hoover and Roosevelt, and consequently between Hooverites and Rooseveltians for the "soul" of America -- well, at least the economic part -- which, as we know, the Hooverites are winning hands down.

I recommend reading it because it helps to challenge conventional wisdom and thinking about the differences between the Hooverite and Rooseveltian viewpoints, and it helps to understand that neither president was quite what their caricatures would have use believe.

For example, I've long felt that something "changed" Hoover from the radical activist who had literally saved Belgium and then Europe and then even the newly hatched Soviet Union from starvation during and after WWI, who would let nothing stand in the way of his mission -- to feed the starving masses -- and who was able to act quite forcefully over agricultural policy in the United States during the War, into someone who was indifferent to the plight of the masses during the Great Depression and who insisted it was neither desirable nor possible for him to act on their behalf. What changed him? The article doesn't really say, but it notes the stark difference in his approach to crisis abroad as opposed to his apparent indifference to suffering at home.



And then there is a long and really quite stunning article in Truthout, translated from the French, that essentially re-envisions the world as it ought to be -- or at least could be if we and our leadership and governments had the vision to go forth.

By all means, sit with them, read, review the past, contemplate A Better Future.

We've been in a downward spiral for many a long year, and the Rightists sense the Bottom is near for them too. Their predatory and destructive natures are ruling the roost so to speak. The way forward is not with them -- it never was -- but finding the alternative path is still a work in progress to say the least.

Whatever it turns out to be, it cannot be based entirely on preserving scraps of the status quo.

Brazil!

According to reports in the New York Times the other day, everybody's favorite G-Man, J Edgar Hoover, prepared a plan to round up and "detain" twelve thousand dissidents and suspected subversives for Harry Truman's approval in 1950. The Korean War was on, and Hoover believed that the Nation was crawling with com-symp fifth columnists whose detention in camps was the only way to prevent the overthrow of The American Way Of Life by Our Sworn Enemies and Stalin.

The Times says that there is no indication that Harry S Truman ever approved this plan, nor that any particular dissidents, com-symps and fifth columnists were rounded up because of it. Habeus Corpus survived. That time. The Existential Threat of Korean Hordes paddling ashore at Santa Monica faded.

But McCarthyism and the long reach of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee did the job that Hoover and his G-Men wanted to do, without round ups or detentions. They did their job through innuendo, accusation, and intimidation.

The Times doesn't name any of these 12,000 potential detainees, but isn't it more than likely the Lists were circulated during the early years of Post-WWII Anti-Communist Hysteria?

How many names are on the NoFly Lists and Other Homeland Security Lists circulating today? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? And when will our favorite cadaver, the Honorable Michael Chertoff, find it convenient to commence "dealing" with these suspects?



Just remember: You're next.

Brazil!

Commenter Dirigo over at Greenwald's Place brings up today's WaPo frontpage story about the FBI's data and identity sweep of everyone in the whole wide world who is of "interest" to them. They have an underground storage locker in the Appalachians somewhere for all this data, and they will use it, so goes the story, for apprehension of criminals and terrorists who infest the globe these days.

The story was also on the front page of my hometown rag, so it's getting a little play in the MSM. Of course. That's the Point. Let everybody know They're Watching You.

DARPA and TIA are alive!

Combine them with Jane Harman's cheery little "Homegrown Terrorism Suppression Act" now sitting on Holy Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee desk, and we see where this is leading.

Before you start hollering "Conspiracy Theorist!!!" and pointing your finger and screeching like the Pod People in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers,", it's worth remembering that the original Patriot Act was sitting on the shelf ready to go when those planes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, and convicted felon Adm Poindexter is still available for... consultations...

All of a piece.

The National Security State is battening down. Must think there's something in the wind.

I wonder what?