The campaign for the September 26 National Assembly elections will be a
crucial battle between the supporters of socialist President Hugo Chavez and
the US-backed right-wing opposition.

But these battles, part of the class struggle between the poor majority and
the capitalist elite, will be fought more in the streets than at the ballot
box.

So far this year, there has been an escalation of fascist demonstrations by
violent opposition student groups; the continued selective assassination of
union and peasant leaders by right-wing paramilitaries; and an intensified
private media campaign presenting a picture of a debilitated government in
crisis — and on its way out.

Chavez warned on January 29: “If they initiate an extremely violent
offensive, that obliges us to take firm action — something I do not
recommend they do — our response will wipe them out.”

The comment came the day after two students were killed and 21 police
suffered bullet wounds in confrontations that rocked the city of Merida.

Chavez challenged the opposition to follow the constitutional road and a
recall referendum on his presidential mandate if they truly believe people
no longer support him.

Under the democratic constitution adopted in 1999, a recall referendum can
be called on any elected official if 20% of the electorate sign a petition
calling for one.

He said if the capitalists continued down the road of confrontation, he
would “accelerate the revolution”, which has declared “21st century
socialism” as its goal.

*Offensive*

The stepped-up campaign of destabilisation is part of the regional offensive
launched by the opposition’s masters in Washington.

Last year, the US installed new military bases in Colombia and Panama,
reactivated the US Navy Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American waters, and
helped organise a military coup that toppled the left-wing Manuel Zelaya
government in Honduras.

This year, the US has occupied Haiti with 15,000 soldiers after the January
12 earthquake and US warplanes have been caught violating Venezuela’s
airspace.

A February 2 report from US National Director of Intelligence, Admiral
Dennis Blair, labelled Venezuela the “leading anti-US regional force” —
placing the Chavez government in Washington’s crosshairs.

A US military invasion cannot be ruled out, but the main aim of the US
military build-up and provocations is to apply pressure on those sections of
Venezuela’s Armed Forces, and others in the pro-Chavez camp, that would
prefer to put the brakes on the revolutionary process to avoid a
confrontation.

This is occurring hand-in-hand with a campaign of media lies, combining
claims that Chavez’s popularity is rapidly declining with rumours of dissent
in the military and government.

The US and Venezuelan elite hope to isolate and ultimately, remove Chavez.

The campaign is similar to the one unleashed in 2007 to defeat Chavez’s
proposed constitutional reforms, which would have created a legal framework
for greater attacks on capital to the benefit of the poor majority but were
narrowly defeated in a referendum.

The opposition hopes to fracture Chavez’s support base — the poor majority
and the armed forces — and win a majority in the National Assembly (with
which it is likely to move to impeach Chavez).

At the very least, the opposition is seeking to stop pro-revolution forces
from winning a two-thirds majority in the assembly, which would restrict the
ease with which the Chavistas could pass legislation. The current assembly
has a large pro-Chavez majority as a result of the opposition boycotting the
2005 poll.

*Revolution advances*

The global economic crisis is hitting Venezuela harder than the government
initially hoped. Problems in the electricity sector, among others, are also
causing strain.

The government’s campaign to raise awareness about the effects of climate
change and wasteful usage has minimised the impact of the opposition and
private media campaign to blame the government for the problems in the
electricity and water sectors.

Far from fulfilling right-wing predictions that falling oil prices would
result in a fall of the government’s fortunes, Chavez has continued his push
to redistribute wealth to the poor — and increased moves against capital and
corruption.

This is occurring alongside important street mobilisations supporting the
government (ignored by the international media, which gave prominent
coverage to small opposition student riots).

There are new steps to increase the transfer of power to the people, such as
incorporating the grassroots communal councils further into governing
structures.

In November, Chavez announced interventions into eight banks found to be
involved in corrupt dealings. A majority were nationalised and merged with a
state bank to form the Bicentenary Bank.

Together with the Bank of Venezuela, nationalised in 2007, the state now
controls 25% of the banking sector — the largest single bloc.

Nearly 30 bankers were charged and face trial over the corruption
allegations. Significantly, a number of these had been closely aligned with
the government.

One of them, Ricardo Fernandez Barrueco, was a relatively unknown
entrepreneur in the food sector who rose up the ranks of the business elite
to own four banks and 29 Venezuelan companies.

Much of this meteoric rise was due to his ties with a section of the Chavez
government, which provided him with generous contracts to supply
government-subsidised Mercal food stores with produce and transportation.

This earned Fernandez the nickname the “Czar of Mercal”.

The arrest of another banker over corruption allegations, Arne Chacon, led
to the resignation of his brother Jessie Chacon as Chavez’s science
minister.

State institutions, militants of the Chavez-led United Socialist Party of
Venezuela (PSUV), and the National Guard have also moved to tackle price
speculation following the January 8 decision to devalue the local currency,
the bolivar.

More than 1000 shops were temporary shutdown for price speculation in the
first week after the announcement.

On February 13, Chavez announced that the government had come to an
agreement with French company Casino to buy out 80% of its shares in the
CADA supermarket chain, which has 35 outlets across the country.

Together with the recently nationalised Exito supermarket chain and the mass
importation of various essential goods, the government is moving to take up
a much larger share of the retail and distribution sector.

The bolivar devaluation means imported goods have become more expensive,
lowering workers’ purchasing power. To compensate, the government decreed in
January a 25% increase in the minimum wage (10% to be implemented in March
and 15% in September).

Government sources told *Green Left Weekly* it is also studying a further
wage increase and steps towards establishing a state monopoly over foreign
trade.

*Grassroots organising*

Despite the violent protests and slander campaign, a January poll by the
Venezuelan Institute of Data Analysis (IVAD — generally accepted as one of
Venezuela’s least biased polling companies) found more than 58% of
Venezuelans continue to approve of Chavez’s presidency.

The same poll also found 41.5% believed the opposition should have a
National Assembly majority, compared to 49.5% who didn’t.

Some 32.6% said they would vote for pro-revolution candidates, 20.8% for the
opposition and an important 33.1% for “independents”.

That 33.1% will undoubtedly shrink by September. The question is whether
this section will abstain (as in the 2007 constitutional referendum) or the
revolutionary forces can organise themselves to win them over and deal a
decisive blow to the right.

Three massive pro-revolution demonstrations have been held already this
year, dwarfing the small, but violent, opposition protests.

A new grouping of revolutionary youth organsations, the Bicentenary National
Youth Front, has also been created to organise the pro-revolution majority
of youth and students.

The injection of organised youth into the revolution is vital for its
future. This is needed, as Chavez noted in his February 12 speech to a mass
demonstration of students in Caracas, to tackle the serious problems of
reformism and bureaucratism that hamper the revolution.

Chavez has argued against those sectors of the revolutionary camp that
insist it is possible to advance by strengthening the private sector and
wooing capitalists. Chavez has repeatedly said the “national bourgeoisie”
has no interest in advancing the process of change.

Chavez has emphasised the “class struggle” is at the heart of this process.

He said it was vital to combat the inefficiency and bureaucracy of the state
structures inherited from previous governments that hold back and sabotage
the process. “We have to finish off demolishing the old structures of the
bourgeois state and create the new structures of the proletarian state.”

To help achieve this, the government has encouraged the creation of 184
communes across Venezuela. Communes are made up of a number of communal
councils and other social organisations, bodies directly run and controlled
by local communities.

Chavez has referred to the communes as the “building blocks” of the new
state, in which power is intended to be progressively transferred to the
organised people.

The recent creation of peasant militias, organised for self-defence by poor
farmers against large landowner violence, is also important.

However, the biggest challenge is the continued construction of the PSUV, a
mass party with millions of still largely passive members, as a
revolutionary instrument of the masses.

In its extraordinary congress, which began in November and continues meeting
on weekends until April, debates are occurring among the 772 elected
delegates. Differences have arisen between those who support a more moderate
reformist approach and those arguing for a revolutionary path.

An important debate is over whether to back Chavez’s call for a new
international organisation to unite revolutionary forces globally to
strengthen the fight for “socialism of the 21th century”.

The debates also included whether party members will elect National Assembly
candidates, or whether this important decision would be left in the hands of
a select committee (as more conservative forces prefered).

After the decision to hold primary elections for candidates was announced,
Chavez said on February 11: “I have confidence in the people, I have
confidence in the grassroots, they will not defraud us.”

[Federico Fuentes is a member of the *Green Left Weekly* Caracas bureau.]

The shiny knight was distinguished from other Democratic candidates like
Hillary Clinton and John Kerry because as a state senator he had made “the
speech” opposing the illegal attack on Iraq.

But did he ride in on a Trojan horse?

It’s now clear Obama favors the same failed policies as the Bushites.
Obama embraces the same “the surge is working” mantra, simply shifting the
location from Iraq to Afghanistan. He echoes W’s nonsensical rhetoric that
the massive US forces in Iraq and being dispensed to Afghanistan are
“fighting for our freedom”.

To make his presidency even more absurd, his war-fo- oil policies are
compounded by a bold initiative for building nukes throughout the United
States. Eerily reminiscent of Bill Clinton and the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the supposedly eco-friendly “green” Obama, once
firmly embraced by progressive Democrats, decides to go full metal nuclear.

As Free Press Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman writes, the Obama plan is to
spend $645 million in lipstick for a dead radioactive pig.

Meanwhile, the New York Times tells us that there actually is a Green New
Deal – in China. The Times notes that “China bolted past competitors in
Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the United States last year to become the
world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even
further this year”.

Moreover, “China has also leap-frogged the West in the last two years to
emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels”, the Times
writes. The Times concludes that “… the West may someday trade its
dependence on oil from the Mideast for reliance of solar panels, wind
turbines, and other gear manufactured in China”.

While the Chinese “dominate renewable energy technologies”, according to
the Times, Obama is coddling back CEOs and cutting billion of dollars in
checks to the financiers.

Obama pushed the largest corporate bailout plan in US history to further
reward his supporters at Goldman Sachs. Opensecrets.org documents that
Goldman Sachs employees were the second largest cash donors to Obama’s
election campaign coffers. It’s easy to understand why. They had plenty of
money to corrupt change and hope and turn it into the Bush status quo,
supporting robber barons.

The Sunday, February 7 2010 New York Times details how Goldman Sachs
helped tank the US economy. As the Times notes: “Goldman stood to gain
from the housing markets’ implosion because in late 2006, the firm had
begun to make huge trades that would pay off if the mortgage market
soured”. Those bets were insured by AIG, now the recipient of $180 billion
subsidy courtesy of US taxpayers. Mainly, AIG served as little more than a
conduit for the casino capitalists at Goldman Sachs who bet heavy on
sinking the US housing market and the dreams of homeownership and equity
for millions of Americans.

In the same way Bill Clinton sold US working people and their deluded
union leaders down the road during the 1992 election by shipping jobs to
Mexico and China, Obama has done little to relocalize an American
industrial base and re-hire laid off American workers. Obama continues the
Reagan-era policies of so-called “free trade” that sees American
manufacturing as a dirty word. The only manufacturing job is seen as a Red
job.

The majority of Americans voted for Roosevelt, but instead got the third
Bush administration. This has caused some journalists, like Wayne Madsen,
to explore Obama’s CIA connections through Business International
Corporation (BIC), a company generally regarded as a CIA proprietary.

Obama spent a year after graduation from Columbia University working fro
BIC. Madsen reports that Obama wrote for two BIC publications, Financing
Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, the latter a
weekly newsletter.

Obama’s early ties to the CIA help to explain the reprising of the second
Bush administration. Take for example the recent decision by Obama Justice
Department attorneys not to recommend punishment for infamous Bush
administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

The initial Justice Department investigation correctly found that Yoo and
Bybee had committed “professional misconduct” in issuing their notorious
series of torture memos dating from August 2002. Their bizarre
reinterpretation of torture that allowed anything short of acts leading to
eminent death due to failure of major body organs has tainted the US
reputation throughout the world.

Yoo and Bybee’s roles in conspiring with the Bush administration to cover
up torture and provide legal cover for Bush and Cheney to say their
torture techniques were “sanctioned by law”, or at least “counsel”, were
all part of a fundamental sea change in American history.

If an attorney told you that it was all right to punch your spouse,
waterboard your mother-in-law, and rip out your children’s fingernails
because it’s not going to kill them – you would realize it was
unacceptable legal advice and that your attorney was violating
professional ethics and advising you that criminal action is allowed.

Obama signaled, prior to taking office, that he didn’t think anyone in the
Bush administration should be criminally prosecuted for the “enhanced
interrogation” program.

Obama’s first year in office has served notice on the American people that
the policies and precedents set by George W Bush will continue. Obama sees
himself as the great compromiser. In reality, he’s the great continuation
- the Trojan horse.

_____

Click http://solartopia.org/ to visit Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia.org.

The Columbus Free Press, 1240 Bryden Road Columbus, Ohio 43209 Ph/Fx
614.253.2571 Email truth@freepress.org

All content (c) 1970-2010

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2010/1814

We can see this in clever way propaganda has reversed the idea of revolt in the stupidity of the Tea Party movement. etc, etc….
These phenomena were foretold fairly well by Marx/Engels.
The right wing is trying to destroy American democracy, and in the process have distorted the meaning and usage of the terms ’socialism’ and ‘liberalism’.

Michael Harrington, although his book is out of date, has some nice pieces that endure in this text from the days before even Nixonian conservatism.

He makes the case for the democratic Marx in the wake of 1848, and as a consistent socialist clarifies the way in which Lenin along with the right wing destroyed the socialist idea.
It is not complex: any right thinking citizen-voter untouched by the Fox News poison machine would naturally embrace basic elements of socialism, or, at least, welfare economics and social democratic pseudo-socialism.
One can disagree with these statements, but the idea of socialism should at least be used in a proper usage even by critics.
Harrington would have a hard time in the current scene where unrepentant leftists of crypto-Stalinist persuation have coopted the idea of socialism as badly as those on the right. Harrington was a rare thinker, and insisted on the need for the left to resurrect socialism after and apart from the Bolshevik theft of the idea.
Anyway, his book is a minor classic of reasonable and intelligent socialist discourse.
It might help, even for critics of socialism, to insist at least on the right use of the term, instead of the current systematic mystifications of the increasingly fascist right in the the US.

Everything that Marx predicted is rapidly coming to pass in the US, and the result could be catastrophic very soon.
An archaeological study of the ideas of socialism and the left are essential, but that is very difficult because of the kind of distortions of the record, right and left, that Harrington uncovered with considerable foresight in the seventies.

SOCIALISM HAS KNOWN increments of success, basic failure and
massive betrayal. Yet it is more relevant to the humane con-
struction of the twenty-first century than any other idea.
The American system has struggled and failed for over a century for simple health care, an achievement pulled out of a hat by Bismarck in the nineteenth century (to coopt the left). As that point a grave danger arises, as the ‘enough is enough’ tipping is reached.

This book is about the future of the socialist past. It is not
a narrative or a chronology, but a search for a living tradition,
and it will therefore dwell on what has been only insofar as it
touches on what might be. That, however,does not mean that
I approach history like a fundamentalist preacher rummaging
through scripture to find authority for his own favorite apoca-
lypse. Such amoralistic account of socialism would not in the
least help in changing the world. So it is in the interest of my
intense partisanship to be as ruthlessly honest as possible: my
subjectivity forces me tobe as objective as I can.

I begin, like every student of the past and future, with a con-
viction about the present. Man has socialized everything except
himself. He has rationalized his work and nature and the very
planet in every respect save one: with regard to their underly-
ing purpose. And, just as the socialists predicted more than a
century ago, he is in conflict with an environment that he himself
has brilliantly, and thoughtlessly, created. His genius threatens
to overwhelm him.

Under capitalism, an intricate system of antagonistic coopera-
tion makes a single individual more productive than a thousand
once were. Science, the community of human knowledge, is
casually employed for private purposes with revolutionary pub-
lic consequences. This creates the highest living standard ever
known, rots the great cities, befouls the air and water, and em-
bitters classes, generations and races. Under Communism, these
contradictions are collectivized, not resolved. The state owns the
means of production, and a bureaucratic elite owns the state.
Its interests, which are every bit as egotistic as those of corpora-
tions, are imposed upon the system by totalitarian command. The
anti-social is thus consciously planned rather than being dictated
by the “will” of the market.
Unfortunately, most of the people of the world do not even
have the luxury of suffering from such sophisticated ironies. In
the age of space exploration they struggle to satisfy primordial
needs for food and shelter. More often than not the unification
of mankind has made them more miserable. Trade more effec-
tively than ever exacts a tribute from the poor nations to the rich,
both capitalist and Communist; medicine saves a baby from an
ancient plague only to deliver him up to a new kind of hunger;
a miraculous seed threatens rural unemployment and even starva-
tion because only elite farmers can use it.
The ultimate in these contradictions is both unprecedented and
obvious to the point of banality. Nuclear science has penetrated
the innermost secrets of our world and discovered there the possi-
bility of annihilating it. It is as if the human race had perse-
vered through the millennia only to reenact the drama of Adam
and Eve. In the goodness of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
there is the taste of evil.
These things need not be. Even the most superficial critic of
society now realizes that it is not our knowledge, but the way in
which it is organized, that menaces us. But beyond that humanist
cliche there must be the specifics of a tough-minded, socialist
solution: exactly how are we going to socialize the already social
means of production? For one need not any longer ask whether
the future is going to be collective-if we do not blow ourselves
to smithereens, that issue has already been settled by a technology
of such complex interdependence that it demands conscious regu-
lation and control. The question is: What form will twenty-first-
century collectivism take? Will it be a totalitarian, a bureaucratic
or a democratic collectivism?
Socialism answers: Our technology could indeed be the instru-
ment of enslavement; or it could, for the first time ever, provide
the material base for a genuine human community that would
democratize economic and social as well as political power. That
socialist possibility, which will be detailed in the last three chap-
ters, is not the insight of some radical prophets. It is, as the next
chapter will show, either an observable tendency of social reality
or it is a delusion. The history of socialism, then, is not simply
the accumulation of a certain wisdom; it is the process whereby
men and women have themselves defined what socialism is in
the course of struggle. The past I am concerned with here is,
in short, alive.
Indeed, I have often been struck by the way in which the
theorists of some of the most daring and vanguard ideas of the
contemporary Left are only faint and unwitting echoes of some
long-dead socialist giant. Among the college-educated and upper-
middle-class American activists of the sixties and early seventies,
I have glimpsed the wraith of that most proletarian of French
revolutionaries, Auguste Blanqui. He, too, thought that the work-
ing class had been so stupefied by the capitalist system that it
would have to be saved from itself by an elite conspiracy which
could only permit democratic freedoms once the people had been
properly reeducated. Or, to take an even more remarkable an-
ticipation, in the debates of Gracchus Babeuf and his Con-
spiracy of Equals in the 1790S, one glimpses Stalin and Mao
waiting in the wings.
So the early socialists asked the questions that still bedevil us,
and that is one of the many reasons they deserve our attention.
But I do not propose to people this book with a race of prophetic
supermen. On the contrary. It is important to root out every bit
of messianism from the socialist vision, to reject the notion of a
secular redemption that, like the incarnation of Christ, claims
to make all things new. Every time men have acted upon that
kind of chiliastic definition, the result has been totalitarian. There-
fore the rich history of socialist tragedy and error is as important
as the record of its profundity. Marx and Engels, to cite a single,
spectacular instance, mistook the rise of capitalism for its decline.
Only if socialists learn a chastened empiricism from such facts
is there any hope for the plans and projects outlined in the last
chapters of this book.
More generally, the demystification of Marx and Engels will
be a central theme in this analysis. Their words are now used to
justify theories and practices they would abominate. They are
seen by most people as the fathers of totalitarianism and as ma-
terialistic simpletons who taught that economic interests neatly
determine the entire course of society. As long as that falsifica-
tion of the socialist past prevails-and it is a state religion in
Russia, China and other Communist countries-the graven images
of Marx and Engels are among the greatest obstacles to the so-
cialist future.
There also are socialist classics that must be recovered if the
next century is to be decently created. In 1914 Lenin wrote that,
since they had not studied Hegel’s Logic, for almost half a
sentury “none of the Marxists understood Marx.?” My attitude
is almost as extreme and arrogant. I believe, as Chapter V will
document, that Das Kapital has been barbarously treated by its
contemporary academic critics, like Paul Samuelson, and even
unfairly handled by sympathetic thinkers, like Joan Robinson. As
a result, there is much in that magnificent book that, despite the
fact that it was published more than one hundred years ago, is
new. I propose to rescue it from the distortions of the professors
and the rigidities of the keepers of holy writ. For it could help
us, not simply to understand the world, but to change it.
An overview of socialist history also illuminates an idea that
is crucial for understanding what is happening today under Com-
munism, in the Third World and within the welfare state. This
is the concept of anti-socialist “socialism.”
Bismarck was, as will be seen later on in greater detail, the
first of the anti-socialist “socialists.” In 1878 he outlawed any
organization that even advocated socialism, By 1882 he was tell-
ing the Reichstag, “Many of the measures that we have adopted
for the welfare of the land are socialistic and we need more so-
cialism in our state …. ” Clearly, the Junker leader had not
undergone a sudden conversion between 1878 and 1882, moving
from the Right to the Left. He had shrewdly understood that
the socialists had mass appeal, and he was determined to use
socialist slogans in order to fight socialism.
Even before Bismarck attempted to co-opt the socialist appeal,

Marx had understood the potential of anti-socialist “socialism.”
In the 1850S he analyzed the Credit Mobilier under Napoleon III
in France as “Bonapartist” or “imperial” “socialism.” And in an
attack on Proudhon he used an even more telling phrase. “Com-
munism,” Marx wrote, “must free itself from all the ‘false broth-
ers’ ” of the fashionable socialisms of the time. He did not realize
that in the twentieth century the “false brothers” were to become
world powers, and worse, that they would call themselves Marxist.
. Early on, then, a sophisticated conservative understood that
socialism had accurately anticipated two of the most important
tendencies of the modern age. Technology was indeed making
economic, social and political life more collective, even when it
operated under the auspices of laissez-faire; and millions dreamed
that this process could be made the instrument of their emanci-
pation from poverty and servility. The collectivizing trend meant
that the state would have to take a role in directing the economy.
The socialist aspirations among the people could be used to
provide popular support for such policies-even when they were
in the service of some new, or more efficient, form of exploita-
tion.
Thus from Bismarck to the present moment, dictators and
charlatans as well as democratic socialists have fought for the
possession of the word “socialism.” Joseph Stalin invoked it to
justify psychopathic purges and the totalitarian accumulation
of capital; Clement Attlee used it to help build a democratic
welfare state in Britain after World War II. But the most mon-
strous single definition of the term was unquestionably the
“National Socialism” of the Nazis. Gregor Straser, the “Left-
wing” Nazi, said that Hitler was responding to the “anti-capitalist
yearnings” of the masses.
If, then, socialism is to have any meaning-past, present or
future-a way must be found to distinguish between the various,
and often murderously hostile, claimants to its name. And this
is particularly important in the 1970S when one is confronted by
Russian, Chinese, Yugoslavian, Israeli, African, Cuban, Chilean,
Indian, Arab and other “socialisms.” In the Tower of Babel that
is the Left, is there any empirical test that can establish the differ-
ence between the authentic and the spurious socialisms?
It was one of the many accomplishments of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels to demonstrate how this can be done. One must,
they said, go behind the socialist rhetoric of a given movement
and discover who is making the decisions and what interests
are being served. Using those criteria, they realized as young men
in the 1840S that the times were giving birth to two new move-
ments: to socialism and to “socialist” anti-socialism. In The
Communist Manifesto they pointed out that there were reac-
tionary and conservative “socialisms.” They told of aristocrats
~ho hated capitalism because it was anti-feudal and wanted to
march back to medievalism in the name of “socialism.” And
there were small businessmen who wanted the capitalist giants
who threatened them to be controlled; intellectuals with blue-
printed panaceas; and even utopians among the bourgeoisie
itself who dreamed of a harmonious capitalism free of conflict.
They all called themselves “socialists.”
The hallmark of these “socialisms” was that they were the
creations of ~seeking minorities, ruses whereby feudalists or
\ shopkeepers or businessmen sought to cloak their special interests
in soaring universals. But capitalism, Marx and Engels said-and
they were, as will be seen, both right and wrong-was creating
a new and vast majority which owned no means of production
and whose common good required nothing more than the democ-
ratization of the economy and society. A genuine socialist move-
ment was one that led the struggles and articulated the needs
of these people.
Marx died in 1883 and thus did not have the opportunity to
see how Bismarck would turn the/anti-socialist “socialism” de-
scribed in the Manifesto into a state policy. But Engels lived
long enough to see through this trick and his disciple, Karl Kaut-
sky, the famous “pope” of Marxism before the First World War,
even gave it a new name. He called it “state socialism,” a strategy
of government intervention into th€economy, including the
nationalization of certain enterprises, for the purpose of shoring
up capitalism.
These distinctions from the socialist past must be carefully
explored for they are crucial to the present and future. In 1917
a socialist revolution triumphed in a Russia that lacked the pre-
conditions for socialism. Eventually, most of the revolutionists
were murdered in the name of the Revolution and a new form of
class society, anti-capitalist and anti-socialist, came into being.
Variants of this bureaucratic collectivism have now appeared in
Eastern Europe, China and; in new and. unexpected mutations,
throughout the Third World. Do these cases then prove that the
socialist vision of the people emancipating themselves is a hoax?
The welfare state poses a similar problem in a radically differ-
ent context. The reform of capitalism was achieved largely be-
cause of the presence of a mass socialist movement (or, in the
United States, of the unions) and over the outraged protests of
businessmen, who gained enormously from the change. The ad-
vances that were thus made are quite real and the result of a
democratic struggle. They are the very opposite of those “revolu-
tions from above” carried out by a Bismarck or a Stalin. But the
danger is that the welfare state is then equated with socialism
itself. In their daily battle to make capitalism more tolerable,
socialists could lose their vision of a fundamental transformation
of social relationships. The classes would remain and the domina-
tion of private, minority priorities would take on much more
sophisticated forms. With the unwitting cooperation of the so-
cialists themselves, their dream would become the new facade
of an old order.
So it is possible that, in quite different but parallel ways, the
socialist ideal will be expropriated under Communism and the
welfare state and in the Third World. That would mark the cor-
ruption of the future.

Class -societies have, of course, always justified themselves in
the name of the highest values of religion or honor or freedom.
But if socialism were to be effectively turned into a rationale
for new modes of exploitation, then there would be no hope of
a just order of things. That has not yet happened, for despite the
monstrous crimes committed in its name, the socialist vision still
speaks to the majority of mankind. In the Communist sphere, for
instance, every movement of opposition and protest-the East
German general strike of 1953, the Polish and Hungarian up-
risings of October, 1956, the Czechoslovakian spring of 1968 and
the Polish strikes in the winter of 197a-1971-was trying to
create the “human face of socialism,” not to return to capitalism.
Paradoxically~ as Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted, in Eastern Eu-
rope, “socialism has wide •popuiar support whereas Communism
as an institutionalized belief has not.” Thus the distinction be-
tween the socialist ideal and its manipulation, first formulated by
Marx and Engels, has enormous practical significance for the
present and future
But if the people were to accept the anti-socialist “socialisms”
as genuine, then one of the most crucial elements of the socialist

possibility-a conscious mass movement-would disappear. The
millions would have internalized the definition of dictators or
bureaucrats that the people cannot rule and must passively ac-
cept orders from on high. That would be the death of socialism.
And that is why I will take such pains in this book to understand
anti-socialist “socialism.”
Finally, this book describes the necessity of socialism, not its
inevitability.
I am not at all sure that there will be a socialist alternative to
Communism and the welfare state. It is certainly quite possible
that the twenty-first century will belong to bureaucratic collectiv-
ism and that the dream of human self-emancipation will turn
out to have been mankind’s noblest deception. But I am sure that
if men are to master their own genius-if the fantastically pro-
ductive and destructive and interdependent technological society
we have blundered into is to be our homeland and not our prison
-then they must socialize themselves along with everything
else. So after so many failures and betrayals the socialism de-
fined here does not pretend to be the wave of the future. It is
simply our only hope.’

No policy prescription commands greater consensus among economists than
that of free trade based on international specialization according to
comparative advantage. Free trade has long been presumed good unless
proved otherwise. That presumption is the cornerstone of the existing
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the proposed North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The proposals in the Uruguay Round
of negotiations strengthen GATT’s basic commitment to free trade and
economic globalization.

Yet that presumption should be reversed. The default position should favor
domestic production for domestic markets. When convenient, balanced
international trade should be used, but it should not be allowed to govern
a country’s affairs at the risk of environmental and social disaster. The
domestic economy should be the dog and international trade its tail. GATT
seeks to tie all the dogs’ tails together so tightly that the
international knot would wag the separate national dogs.

The wiser course was well expressed in the overlooked words of John
Maynard Keynes: “I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize,
rather than those who would maximize, economic entanglement between
nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are the things
which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun
whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; and, above all, let
finance be primarily national.” Contrary to Keynes, the defenders of the
proposed Uruguay Round of changes to GATT not only want to downplay
“homespun goods”, they also want finance and all other services to become
primarily international.

Economists and environmentalists are sometimes represented as being,
respectively, for and against free trade, but that polarization does the
argument a disservice. Rather the real debate is over what kinds of
regulations are to be instituted and what goals are legitimate. The free
traders seek to maximize profits and production without regard for
considerations that represent hidden social and environmental costs. They
argue that when growth has made people wealthy enough, they will have the
funds to clean up the damage done by growth. Conversely, environmentalists
and some economists, myself among them, suspect that growth is increasing
environmental costs faster than benefits from production – thereby making
us poorer, not richer.

A more accurate name than the persuasive label “free trade” – because who
can be opposed to freedom? – is “deregulated international commerce”.
Deregulation is not always a good policy: recall the recent experience of
the US with the deregulation of the savings and loan institutions. As one
who formerly taught the doctrine of free trade to college students, I have
some sympathy for the free traders’ view. Nevertheless, my major concern
about my profession today is that our disciplinary preference for
logically beautiful results over factually grounded policies has reached
such fanatical proportions that we economists have become dangerous to the
earth and its inhabitants.

The free trade position is grounded in the logic of comparative advantage,
first explicitly formulated by the early nineteenth century British
economist David Ricardo. He observed that countries with different
technologies, customs and resources will incur different costs when they
make the same products. One country may find it comparatively less costly
to mine coal than to grow wheat, but in another country the opposite may
be true. If nations specialize in the products for which they have a
comparative advantage and trade freely to obtain others, everyone benefits.

The problem is not the logic of this argument. It is the relevance of
Ricardo’s critical but often forgotten assumption that factors of
production (especially capital) are internationally immobile. In today’s
world, where billions of dollars can be transferred between nations at the
speed of light, that essential condition is not met. Moreover, free
traders encourage such foreign investment as a development strategy. In
short, the free traders are using an argument that hinges on the
impermability of national boundaries to capital to support a policy aimed
at making those same boundaries increasingly permeable to both capital and
goods!

That fact alone invalidates the assumption that international trade will
inevitably benefit all its partners. Furthermore, for trade to be mutually
beneficial, the gains must not be offset by higher liabilities. After
specialization, nations are no longer free not to trade, and that loss of
independence can be a liability. Also, the cost of transporting goods
internationally must not cancel out the profits. Transport costs are
energy intensive. Today, however, the cost of energy is frequently
subsidized by governments through investment tax credits, federally
subsidized research and military expenditures that ensure access to
petroleum. The environmental costs of fossil-fuel burning also do not
factor into the price of gasoline. To the extent that energy is
subsidized, then, so too is trade. The full cost of energy, stripped of
these obscuring subsidies, would therefore reduce the initial gains from
long-distance trade, whether international or interregional.

Free trade can also introduce new inefficiencies. Contrary to the
implications of comparative advantage, more than half of all international
trade involves the simultaneous import and export of essentially the same
goods. For example, Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes
import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more
efficient. It would also be more in accord with Keynes’s dictum that
knowledge should be international and goods homespun (or in this case,
homebaked).

Another important but seldom mentioned corollary of specialization is a
reduction in the range of occupational choices. Uruguay has a clear
comparative advantage in raising cattle and sheep. If it adhered strictly
to the rule of specialization and trade, it would afford its citizens only
the choice of being either cowboys or shepherds. Yet Uruguayans feel a
need for their own legal, financial, medical, insurance and educational
services, in addition to basic agriculture and industry. That diversity
entails some loss of efficiency, but it is necessary for community and
nationhood.

Uruguay is enriched by having a symphony orchestra of its own, even though
it would be cost-effective to import better symphony concerts in exchange
for wool, mutton, beef and leather. Individuals, too, must count the
broader range of choices as a welfare gain: even those who are cowboys and
shepherds are surely enriched by contact with countrymen who are not
vaqueros or pastores. My point is that the community dimension of welfare
is completely overlooked in the simplistic argument that if specialization
and trade increase the per capita availability of commodities, they must
be good.

Let us assume that even after those liabilities are subtracted from the
gross returns on trade, positive net gains still exist. They must still
offset deeper, more fundamental problems. The arguments for free trade run
afoul of the three basic goals of all economic policies: the efficient
allocation of resources, the fair distribution of resources and the
maintenance of a sustainable scale of resource use. The first two are
traditional goals of neoclassical economics. The third has only recently
been recognized and is associated with the viewpoint of ecological, or
steady-state, economics. It means that the input of raw materials and
energy to an economy and the output of waste materials and heat must be
within the regenerative and absorptive capacities of the ecosystem.

In neoclassical economics the efficient allocation of resources depends on
the counting and internalization of all costs. Costs are internalized if
they are directly paid by those entities responsible for them – as when,
for example, a manufacturer pays for the disposal of its factory wastes
and raises its prices to cover that expense. Costs are externalized if
they are paid by someone else – as when the public suffers extra disease,
stench and nuisance from uncollected wastes. Counting all costs is the
very basis of efficiency.

Economists rightly urge nations to follow a domestic program of
internalizing costs into prices. They also wrongly urge nations to trade
freely with other countries that do not internalize their costs (and
consequently have lower prices). If a nation tries to follow both those
policies, the conflict is clear: free competition between different
cost-internalizing regimes is utterly unfair.

International trade increases competition, and competition reduces costs.
But competition can reduce costs in two ways: by increasing efficiency or
by lowering standards. A firm can save money by lowering its standards for
pollution control, worker safety, wages, health care and so on – all
choices that externalize some of its costs. Profit-maximizing firms in
competition always have an incentive to externalize their costs to the
degree that they can get away with it.

For precisely that reason, nations maintain large legal, administrative
and auditing structures that bar reductions in the social and
environmental standards of domestic industries. There are no analogous
international bodies of law and administration; there are only national
laws, which differ widely. Consequently, free international trade
encourages industries to shift their production activities to the
countries that have the lowest standards of cost internalization – hardly
a move toward global efficiency.

_______________________________

How Comparative Advantage Works

When there is no international trade, each country’s production is limited
entirely by its own capital and resources. Some products are comparatively
less expensive to produce than others on a per unit basis.

When there is free trade, countries can specialize based on comparative
advantage. All of a country’s capital can be invested in making one
product. Absolute cost differences between the countries do not matter.
The hidden assumption is that capital cannot cross borders.

If capital is also mobile, capital can follow absolute advantage rather
than comparative advantage. One country may end up producing everything if
it has lower absolute costs.
_______________________________

Attaining cheapness by ignoring real costs is a sin against efficiency.
Even GATT recognizes that requiring citizens of one country to compete
against foreign prison labor would be carrying standards-lowering
competition too far. GATT therefore allows the imposition of restrictions
on such trade. Yet it makes no similar exception for child labor, for
uninsured risky labor or for subsistence-wage labor.

The most practical solution is to permit nations that internalize costs to
levy compensating tariffs on trade with nations that do not.
“Protectionism” – shielding an inefficient industry against more efficient
foreign competitors – is a dirty word among economists. That is very
different, however, from protecting an efficient national policy of
full-cost pricing from standards-lowering international competition.

Such tariffs are also not without precedent. Free traders generally praise
the fairness of “antidumping” tariffs that discourage countries from
trading in goods at prices below their production costs. The only real
difference is the decision to include the costs of environmental damage
and community welfare in that reckoning.

This tariff policy does not imply the imposition of one country’s
environmental preferences or moral judgments on another country. Each
country should set the rules of cost internalization in its own market.
Whoever sells in a nation’s market should play by that nation’s rules or
pay a tariff sufficient to remove the competitive advantage of lower
standards. For instance, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, all tuna
sold in the US (whether by US or Mexican fishermen) must count the cost of
limiting the kill of dolphin associated with catching tuna. Tuna sold in
the Mexican market (whether by US or Mexican fishermen) need not include
that cost. No standards are being imposed through “environmental
imperialism”; paying the costs of a nation’s environmental standards is
merely the price of admission to its market.

Indeed, free trade could be accused of reverse environmental imperialism.
When firms produce under the most permissive standards and sell their
products elsewhere without penalty, they press on countries with higher
standards to lower them. In effect, unrestricted trade imposes lower
standards.

Unrestricted international trade also raises problems of resource
distribution. In the world of comparative advantage described by Ricardo,
a nation’s capital stays at home, and only goods are traded. If firms are
free to relocate their capital internationally to wherever their
production costs would be lowest, then the favored countries have not
merely a comparative advantage but an absolute advantage. Capital will
drain out of one country and into another, perhaps making what H Ross
Perot called “a giant sucking sound” as jobs and wealth move with it. This
specialization will increase world production, but without any assurance
that all the participating countries will benefit.

When capital flows abroad, the opportunity for new domestic employment
diminishes, which drives down the price for domestic labor. Even if free
trade and capital mobility raise wages in low-wage countries (and that
tendency is thwarted by overpopulation and rapid population growth), they
do so at the expense of labor in the high-wage countries. They thereby
increase income inequality there. Most citizens are wage earners. In the
US, eighty percent of the labor force is classified as “nonsupervisory
employees”. Their real wages have fallen seventeen percent between 1973
and 1990, in significant part because of trade liberalization.

Nor does labor in low-wage countries necessarily gain from free trade. It
is likely that NAFTA will ruin Mexican peasants when “inexpensive” US corn
(subsidized by depleting topsoil, aquifers, oil wells and the federal
treasury) can be freely imported. Displaced peasants will bid down wages.
Their land will be bought cheaply by agribusinesses to produce fancy
vegetables and cut flowers for the US market. Ironically, Mexico helps to
keep US corn “inexpensive” by exporting its own vanishing reserves of oil
and genetic crop variants, which the US needs to sustain its corn
monoculture.

Neoclassical economists admit that overpopulation can spill over from one
country to another in the form of cheap labor. They acknowledge that fact
as an argument against free immigration. Yet capital can migrate toward
abundant labor even more easily than labor can move toward capital. The
legitimate case for restrictions on labor immigration is therefore easily
extended to restrictions on capital emigration.

_______________________________

Raising the incomes in the more populous, less wealthy nations will be
difficult. Over the next forty years, world population will double.
Fifteen percent of world population now earns $21,000 per capita per year.
85% of world population earns $1000 per capita per year. To reach the
higher level of per capita income, the low- and middle-income countries
would have to increase their use of resources by a factor of almost 36 (21
x 2 x 0.85). To avoid augmenting the damage to the environment, they would
need to boost resource-use efficiency by the same factor.
_______________________________

When confronted with such problems, neoclassical economists often answer
that growth will solve them. The allocation problem of standards-lowering
competition, they say, will be dealt with by universally “harmonizing” all
standards upward. The distribution problem of falling wages in high-wage
countries would only be temporary; the economists believe that growth will
eventually raise wages worldwide to the former high-wage level and beyond.

Yet the goal of a sustainable scale of total resource use forces us to
ask: What will happen if the entire population of the earth consumes
resources at the rate of high-wage countries? Neoclassical economists
generally ignore this question or give the facile response that there are
no limits.

The steady-state economic paradigm suggests a different answer. The
regenerative and assimilative capacities of the biosphere cannot support
even the current levels of resource consumption, much less the manyfold
increase required to generalize the higher standards worldwide. Still less
can the ecosystem afford an ever growing population that is striving to
consume more per capita. As a species, we already preempt about forty
percent of the land-based primary product of photosynthesis for human
purposes. What happens to biodiversity if we double the human population,
as we are projected to do over the next thirty to fifty years?

These limits put a brake on the ability of growth to wash away the
problems of misallocation and maldistribution. In fact, free trade becomes
a recipe for hastening the speed with which competition lowers standards
for efficiency, distributive equity and ecological sustainability.

Notwithstanding those enormous problems, the appeal of bigger free trade
blocs for corporations is obvious. The broader the free trade area, the
less answerable a large and footloose corporation will be to any local or
even national community. Spatial separation of the places that suffer the
costs and enjoy the benefits becomes more feasible. The corporation will
be able to buy labor in the low-wage markets and sell its products in the
remaining high-wage, high-income markets. The larger the market, the
longer a corporation will be able to avoid the logic of Henry Ford, who
realized that he had to pay his workers enough for them to buy his cars.
That is why transnational corporations like free trade and why workers and
environmentalists do not.

_______________________________

Maquiladoras, or factories near the border between the US and Mexico, have
become a troublesome source of pollution for that area. Some US
manufacturers have built such factories in Mexico to take advantage of
that country’s lower labor costs and pollution-control standards. If
commerce becomes less regulated, such problems may become more common.
_______________________________

In the view of steady-state economics, the economy is one open subsystem
in a finite, nongrowing and materially closed ecosystem. An open system
takes matter and energy from the environment as raw materials and returns
them as waste. A closed system is one in which matter constantly
circulates internally while only energy flows through. Whatever enters a
system as input and exits as output is called throughput. Just as an
organism survives by consuming nutrients and excreting wastes, so too an
economy must to some degree both deplete and pollute the environment. A
steady-state economy is one whose throughput remains constant at a level
that neither depletes the environment beyond its regenerative capacity nor
pollutes it beyond its absorptive capacity.

Most neoclassical economic analyses today rest on the assumption that the
economy is the total system and nature is the subsystem. The economy is an
isolated system involving only a circular flow of exchange value between
firms and households. Neither matter nor energy enters or exits this
system. The economy’s growth is therefore unconstrained. Nature may be
finite, but it is seen as just one sector of the economy, for which other
sectors can substitute without limiting overall growth.

Although this vision of circular flow is useful for analyzing exchanges
between producers and consumers, it is actively misleading for studying
scale – the size of the economy relative to the environment. It is as if a
biologist’s vision of an animal contained a circulatory system but not a
digestive tract or lungs. Such a beast would be independent of its
environment, and its size would not matter. If it could move, it would be
a perpetual motion machine.

Long ago the world was relatively empty of human beings and their
belongings (man-made capital) and relatively full of other species and
their habitats (natural capital). Years of economic growth have changed
that basic pattern. As a result, the limiting factor on future economic
growth has changed. If man-made and natural capital were good substitutes
for one another, then natural capital could be totally replaced. The two
are complementary, however, which means that the short supply of one
imposes limits. What good are fishing boats without populations of fish?
Or sawmills without forests? Once the number of fish that could be sold at
market was primarily limited by the number of boats that could be built
and manned; now it is limited by the number of fish in the sea.

As long as the scale of the human economy was very small relative to the
ecosystem, no apparent sacrifice was involved in increasing it. The scale
of the economy is now such that painless growth is no longer reasonable.
If we see the economy as a subsystem of a finite, nongrowing ecosystem,
then there must be a maximal scale for its throughput of matter and
energy. More important, there must also be an optimal scale. Economic
growth beyond that optimum would increase the environmental costs faster
than it would the production benefits, thereby ushering in an antieconomic
phase that impoverished rather than enriched.

One can find disturbing evidence that we have already passed that point
and, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass (1872), the faster we run the
farther behind we fall. Thus, the correlation between gross national
product (GNP) and the index of sustainable economic welfare (which is
based on personal consumption and adjusted for depletion of natural
capital and other factors) has taken a negative turn in the US

Like our planet, the economy may continue forever to develop
qualitatively, but it cannot grow indefinitely and must eventually settle
into a steady state in its physical dimensions. That condition need not be
miserable, however. We economists need to make the elementary distinction
between growth (a quantitative increase in size resulting from the
accretion or assimilation of materials) and development (the qualitative
evolution to a fuller, better or different state). Quantitative and
qualitative changes follow different laws. Conflating the two, as we
currently do in the GNP, has led to much confusion.

Development without growth is sustainable development. An economy that is
steady in scale may still continue to develop a greater capacity to
satisfy human wants by increasing the efficiency of its resource use, by
improving social institutions and by clarifying its ethical priorities -
but not by increasing the resource throughput.

_______________________________

National Self-Sufficiency is a good commonly overlooked by free traders.
Just as nations are better off having their own symphony orchestras and
other cultural offerings, they should also keep their vital industries
local.
_______________________________

In the light of the growth versus development distinction, let us return
to the issue of international trade and consider two questions: What is
the likely effect of free trade on growth? What is the likely effect of
free trade on development?

Free trade is likely to stimulate the growth of throughput. It allows a
country in effect to exceed its domestic regenerative and absorptive
limits by “importing” those capacities from other countries. True, a
country “exporting” some of its carrying capacity in return for imported
products might have increased its throughput even more if it had made
those products domestically. Overall, nevertheless, trade does postpone
the day when countries must face up to living within their natural
regenerative and absorptive capacities. That some countries still have
excess carrying capacity is more indicative of a shortfall in their
desired domestic growth than of any conscious decision to reserve that
capacity for export.

By spatially separating the costs and benefits of environmental
exploitation, international trade makes them harder to compare. It thereby
increases the tendency for economies to overshoot their optimal scale.
Furthermore, it forces countries to face tightening environmental
constraints more simultaneously and less sequentially than would otherwise
be the case. They have less opportunity to learn from one another’s
experiences with controlling throughput and less control over their local
environment.

The standard arguments for free trade based on comparative advantage also
depend on static promotions of efficiency. In other words, free trade in
toxic wastes promotes static efficiency by allowing the disposal of wastes
wherever it costs less according to today’s prices and technologies. A
more dynamic efficiency would be served by outlawing the export of toxins.
That step would internalize the disposal costs of toxins to their place of
origin – to both the firm that generated them and the nation under whose
laws the firm operated. This policy creates an incentive to find
technically superior ways of dealing with the toxins or of redesigning
processes to avoid their production in the first place.

All these allocative, distributional and scale problems stemming from free
trade ought to reverse the traditional default position favoring it.
Measures to integrate national economies further should now be treated as
a bad idea unless proved otherwise in specific cases. As Ronald Findley of
Columbia University characterized it, comparative advantage may well be
the “deepest and most beautiful result in all of economics”. Nevertheless,
in a full world of internationally mobile capital, our adherence to it for
policy direction is a recipe for national disintegration.

Further Reading:

For the Common Good. H E Daly and J B Cobb, Jr. Beacon Press, 1989.

International Trade and the Environment. Edited by Patrick Low. World
Bank, 1992.

Population, Technology and Life style: The Transition to Sustain ability.
Edited by Robert Goodland et al. Island Press, Washington, DC, 1992.

Myths and Misconceptions of Free Trade. Ravi Batra. Scribner’s, 1993.

International Trade and Environment. Edited by Carl Folke et al. Special
issue of Ecological Economics, Volume 9, Number 1; February 1994 (in
press).

Herman E Daly is senior economist in the environment department of the
World Bank in Washington, DC. Before joining the bank in 1988, he was
alumni professor of economics at Louisiana State University. He holds a BA
from Rice University and a PhD from Vanderbilt University. Daly has taught
in Brazil as a Ford Foundation Visiting Professor and as a Senior
Fulbright Scholar. He has also served as a research associate at Yale
University and as a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.
Co-founder and associate editor of Ecological Economics, Daly has written
several books, including Steady-State Economics (1991). The views
expressed here by Daly should not be attributed to the World Bank.

Copyright 1993 Scientific American, Inc.

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Le Monde (October 31 2009)

Capitalist ideology – according to which the market can resolve all
problems – has, in these last few days, reached the apex of the
absurd. We have learned, thanks to Green Euro-deputy Claude Turmes,
that European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has been
blocking a proposed energy-efficiency action plan. This text is
supposed to compel member states to reduce their energy consumption
by twenty percent and to propose specific measures to attain that
objective. Reducing energy consumption is the best way to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason for this obstruction by the Commission? The
implementation of energy efficiency would bear on carbon market
prices. Consequently, there would be fewer “emission rights” on the
market. Consequently, their price would drop. Now the European
Commission – with Member State approval – has based its fights
against climate change on the emissions market.

So they have just rejected the most efficient solution in favor
of … a method that has not yet really proven itself. Implemented
since 2005, it moves painfully forward, given the drop in prices
evading VAT. At this time, the price for a ton of carbon dioxide is
fifteen Euros – below the energy tax French consumers are going to
pay. In fact, the rules of the emissions market’s operation, the
result of a compromise with the industries it affects, are too lax:
in consequence, the price that develops remains too low to
stimulate a rapid reduction in emissions.

Moreover, by means of another type of market, the so-called
“mechanism for clean development”, the European Union means to
avoid realizing a big part of its reduction commitment. Indeed, I
would need to write ten articles like this one to comprehensively
explain how this whole system works. The carbon market is
fractionally simpler than the derivatives market, if you see what I
mean.

The basic problem is that it amounts to confiding management of the
fight against climate change to the financial industry. The latter
has, as we know, caused the current crisis and demonstrated its
ability to escape all government control. Do you trust Goldman
Sachs to act in the interests of humanity in the carbon market? In
reality, as long as government – which in principle represents the
public interest – has not resumed control over the financial
system, we cannot hand over responsibility for the fight against
climate change to the market.

In the short term, one thing is clear: the European Union must
settle on true energy conservation objectives. If it gives that up,
it will lose all credibility with respect to climate change, and,
above all, the principal means to confront it.

_____

In Spite of Strong Growth, the Country at Present Remains a Model of
Energy Sobriety

by Herve Kempf

Le Monde (November 02 2009)

And what if India were a model of energy efficiency? Received
wisdom has it that developing countries waste their energy in the
absence of adequate technologies, while developed countries
supposedly use energy more efficiently. A study by the Indian firm
Prayas, presented during the conference of the International
Federation of Environmental Journalists (FIJE) in Delhi on October
28, shows that’s not the case at all.

Entitled, “An Overview of Indian Energy Trends”, it reveals that
between 1990 and 2005 the country’s GDP increased 2.3 times, but
its energy consumption rose 1.9 times. Moreover, energy intensity
(energy consumption related to production) is much less than
China’s, but also less than the United States’ and comes close to
the European level.

A good part of this performance may be explained by the price of
electricity to industry – among the highest in the world. In
transportation also, India demonstrates great efficiency: India’s
total consumption of gas and diesel in 2005 was less than the
simple increase in consumption in China and the United States
between 1990 and 2005. The high price of fuel plays a significant
role, but so does the density of Indian cities, which limits the
length of trips.

Vegetarian Diet

For domestic energy uses, there is better energy intensity by
income level than in the United States. That may be explained by
the significant use of biomass, but also by the very widespread
vegetarian diet, which limits cooking needs: on average, an Indian
consumes one twenty-fifth as much meat as an American.

However, India has not succeeded in eliminating poverty. Economic
growth has benefited the upper and middle classes primarily, and
forty percent of the population does not have access to electricity.

Solar energy and natural gas seem to be the way of the future, but
also adoption of supercritical coal-combustion technology (which
improves yield and reduces polluting emissions), as well as
reduction of energy losses in the grids.

Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

http://www.truthout.org/1104094

Spot the Difference
12/12/09
A SHORT historical quiz: Which state:
(1) Arose after a holocaust in which a third of its people were destroyed?

(2) Drew from that holocaust the conclusion that only superior military forces could ensure its survival?

(3) Accorded the army a central role in its life, making it “an army that had a state, rather than a state that had an army”?

(4) Began by buying the land it took, and continued to expand by conquest and annexation?

(5) Endeavored by all possible means to attract new immigrants?

(6) Conducted a systematic policy of settlement in the occupied territories?

(7) Strove to push out the national minority by creeping ethnic cleansing?

For anyone who has not yet found the answer: it’s the state of Prussia.

But if some readers were tempted to believe that it all applies to the State of Israel – well, they are right, too. This description fits our state. The similarity between the two states is remarkable. True, the countries are geographically very different, and so are the historical periods, but the points of similarity can hardly be denied.

http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.”

This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story. A century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked: Why is there no socialism in America? There are many answers to this question. Some have to do with the sheer size of the country: shared purposes are difficult to organize and sustain on an imperial scale. There are also, of course, cultural factors, including the distinctively American suspicion of central government.

And indeed, it is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.

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Conversely, where immigration and visible minorities have altered the demography of a country, we typically find increased suspicion of others and a loss of enthusiasm for the institutions of the welfare state. Finally, it is incontrovertible that social democracy and the welfare states face serious practical challenges today. Their survival is not in question, but they are no longer as self-confident as they once appeared.

But my concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Our shortcoming—forgive the academic jargon—is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, some history is in order: as Keynes once observed, “A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.” For the purposes of mental emancipation this evening, I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to “economism,” the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.

Published on Thursday, December 10, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Making an American ‘Impenetrable Underground Wall’ the Laughing Stock of
the World
by Ann Wright

No doubt at the instigation of the Israeli government, the Obama
administration has authorized the United States Army Corps of Engineers to
design a vertical underground wall under the border between Egypt and Gaza.

In March, 2009 the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32
million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security
devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza.
Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7
miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.

The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw
puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It
will be “impenetrable,” and reportedly will take 18 months to construct. (

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8405020.stm)

The steel wall is intended to cut the tunnels that go between Gaza and
Egypt.

The tunnels are the lifelines for Gaza since the international community
agreed to a blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the citizens of Gaza for
their having elected in Parliamentary elections in 2006 sufficient Hamas
Parliamentarians that Hamas became the government of Gaza. The United
States and other western countries have placed Hamas on the list of
terrorist organizations.

The underground steel wall is intended to strengthen international
governmental efforts to imprison and starve the people of Gaza into
submission so they will throw out the Hamas government.

Just as the steel walls of the US Army Corps of Engineers at the base of the
levees of New Orleans were unable to contain Hurricane Katrina, the US Army
Corps of Engineers’ underground steel walls that will attempt to build an
underground cage of Gaza will not be able to contain the survival spirit of
the people of Gaza.

America’s super technology will again be laughed at by the world, as young
men dedicated to the survival of their people, will again outwit technology
by digging deeper, and most likely penetrating the “impenetrable” in some
novel, simple, low-tech way.

I have been to Gaza 3 times this year following the 22-day Israeli military
attack on Gaza that killed 1,440, wounded 5,000, left 50,000 homeless and
destroyed much of the infrastructure of Gaza. The disproportionate use of
force and targeting of the civilian population by the Israeli military is
considered by international law and human rights experts as as violations of
the Geneva conventions.

When our governments participate in illegal actions, it is up to the
citizens of the world to take action. On December 31, 2009, 1,400
international citizens from 42 countries will march in Gaza with 50,000
Gazans in the Gaza Freedom March to end the siege of Gaza. They will take
back to their countries the stories of spirit and survival of the pople of
Gaza and will return home committed to force their governments to stop these
inhuman actions against the people of Gaza.

Just as American smart bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq have not conquered the
spirit of Aghans and Iraqis, America’s underground walls in Gaza will never
conquer the courage of those who are fighting for the survival of their
families.

One more time, the American government and the Obama administration has been
an active participant in the continued inhumane treatment of the people of
Gaza and should be held accountable, along with Israel and Egypt for
violations of human rights of the people of Gaza.

Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserve Colonel and a former U.S. diplomat
who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in
as a US diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She is the co-author of
“Dissent: Voices of Conscience ” . Her
March 19, 2003 letter of resignation can be read at

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0303/032103wright.htm.

The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy
By Adrienne Mayor
Princeton Univ. 448 pp. $29.95
“The Poison King” is, as its subtitle makes clear, the story of the life of Mithradates, leader of the ancient Black Sea kingdom of Pontus, who, in the 1st century B.C., did everything he could to overthrow the Roman Empire. I read this biography as a layperson, not a scholar, but I can say without reservation that it’s a wonderful reading experience, as bracing as a tonic, the perfect holiday gift for adventure-loving men and women. A finalist for this week’s National Book Award, it’s drenched in imaginative violence and disaster, but it also wears the blameless vestments of culture and antiquity. You can have all the fun of reading about a greedy villain being put to death by being made to “drink” molten gold, but still hide safe behind the excuse that you’re just brushing up on your classics.

Mithradates, as the royal heir of Pontus, was trained in all the manly sports and modeled his life on heroes of yore like Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Perhaps because of his suspicious, murderous mother, he took a lively interest from his earliest years in poisons and their antidotes. Quite a few of his relatives had been or would be poisoned, so this was a sensible precaution.