Metal Works

Richard Serra’s new show of monumental sculptures heralds the artist’s first exhibition in London for 16 years. In a rare interview, he talked with Adrian Searle about the evolution of his ideas and his plans for the future

For over 40 years, American artist Richard Serra has tested the limits and possibilities of sculpture, film and drawing. In the 1960s he began his investigation into the imaginative and physical potential of materials and their relationship with the site and viewer. Since the early 1970s Serra has become best-known for the monumental sculptures he has created for various architectural, urban and landscape settings. In 2007 New York’s Museum of Modern Art honoured Serra’s career with a retrospective and earlier this year his major work Promenade was installed at the Grand Palais, Paris. His current show at Gagosian Gallery, London, runs until 20 December, and includes three new steel sculptures. It is the first exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK since Weight and Measure was presented at the Tate Gallery in 1992. He gave a rare interview to Adrian Searle in London in late September.

ADRIAN SEARLE You have mentioned that Mark Rothko’s late paintings remind you of the poems of Fernando Pessoa, after whom you’ve named a recent sculpture. Could you elaborate on that?


RICHARD SERRA I recently read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet [which was written in the 1920s but first published in 1982]. In it Pessoa constantly probes his thought and analyses his personal sensations. The book is made up of fragments by a writer who is obsessed with his own emotions. His voice is one of unsparing introspection. The questions he asks over and over again are: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why do I write?’ By extension, I find myself asking: ‘Why do I make what I do?’ The same probably held true for Rothko. For Pessoa, to think is to live and to feel is merely food for thought. These fragments deal with an endgame, they are Kafka-like, and similar to Rothko’s last 12 years. 


AS Pessoa really only wrote for his friends, which was a problem with the arts in Portugal for much of the 20th century; he was talking to a small bunch of people.

RS Portugal feels very nostalgic. The Portuguese constantly look back to their lost empire. Although it is part of Europe, when you are there, you feel like you are on an island. 


AS Yes, in fact, in José Saramago’s novel The Stone Raft (1986) Portugal drifts away from the coast of Europe. I found myself, not long ago, reading something you wrote for Steve Reich, for his 70th birthday tribute. You were talking about Yvonne Rainer and the whole gang in New York in the 1960s and how you were each others’ critics, which is not unlike Pessoa writing for his friends.


RS We were a small group making work for each other – and the women led the charge. 


AS Yvonne Rainer was here in London a few weeks ago, talking about dance. 


RS I wonder if young people now know anything of the pivotal role she played in the 1960s. She opened up and carried much of the scene for six or seven years.


AS The talk was full, although it was 90 percent dance people; but I was chatting to a successful young choreographer working in London, and he’d never heard of her.


RS She was one of the best performers I’ve ever seen. She would bring all kinds of objects into play. Her dancers would throw powder, dirt, each other and mattresses around and use different sorts of people and different body types: young, old, fat and thin, running and jumping and falling constantly. I remember in one performance she lowered an enormous transparent flat, a grid, in front of the entire width and height of the stage, held it for a couple of seconds and lifted it. This was one grand mocking gesture: the frontality, the stage, the grid, the perspective measure, every part of it dissected. I never forgot it.


AS I know you think a lot about duration as one of the dimensions of sculpture.


RS Duration is a subtext of how the space of the work is experienced: the diversity of time, the intensity of time or time in particular is what individuates us more than anything else. Everyone’s relationship to their own time is more personal, more private and more singular than anything I can think of. My interest is in what animates movement, what fragments movement, what dislocates movement, what disorients movement. For me temporality is a value.


AS There is still so much interest in the conversations artists were having in the 1960s, when there wasn’t much of an audience for art.


RS I’ll give you an example. We’d all go to Max’s Kansas City, and one night, when I was with Michael Snow, we heard there was a performance across the street and we went over to watch it on the 22nd floor. The choreographer and dancer Simone Forti was going to present a performance along with Rauschenberg. When we arrived, the Rauschenberg performance had already begun. He was pulling a series of boxes across the floor with people underneath them accompanied by random musical sounds, a predictable Cageian event. All of a sudden the performance ended, the room went dark and light appeared in the space outside of one window and then someone fell outside the window; then another, and another, and another. At least two dozen people dropped through space. It was then that you realized that the first person who had fallen by, fell by again. This was repeated four or five times. What was out of view was that mattresses had been piled on the roof of the 21st floor so that the performers could land, run up the stairwell and return to jump again from the 23rd floor. Michael was completely stunned. I remember what he said: ‘This is a Muybridge framing device in real time.’ These were performances we did for each other and afterwards we would always pass a hat around. Talk about a cohesive group, we were each other’s audience. At the time I was living with Joan Jonas and Robert Smithson was my best friend.


AS These kinds of dialogues happen against a work and a context that have been lost. 


RS I think every generation defines itself; only the issues and options change. In the 1960s there was no cultural industry. Large scale merchandising did not exist. It could be that the over-emphasis on merchandising has become problematic for a younger generation. But I don’t know.


AS There’s certainly a real break between generations – perhaps we all felt that. When I was an art student, I didn’t want to hear about David Hockney or about the American Greenberg acolytes we were being told about either. Perhaps it’s the same now – art students now don’t want to hear about Damien Hirst. For you, were you trying to break with something or make with something?


RS Breaking or making did not seem to be on the radar. Postmodernism has created an overt interest in historical references. It was not our problem. Back in the mid-1960s, if I had to give a brief on what I thought sculpture needed to be, it was to do away with the object, to get sculpture off the pedestal and expand the space of the field, to open up the container and to foreground time and bodily movement in relation to the intensity of place and context. I am basically still doing that. When I graduated from Yale in painting, I went to Paris for a year, got a Fulbright and went to Florence where I stopped painting and decided to start over again. I began to stuff animals. I did not have the faintest idea what I was doing.


AS You did taxidermy?


RS Yes, I was stuffing animals. I started juxtaposing live animals with stuffed animals, making surrogate zoos. I collected 22 animals of all kinds – some live, some dead – and a lot of other debris. In a broad sense it was a kind of assemblage that was an extension of what was going on with Rauschenberg and a lot of other people who had come out of the American scene. I had reduced it to barnyard Surrealism. Even then, I thought of it as student work, nothing more, and went back to America. But it did get me into using the diversity of non-art materials.


AS Facts, factual materials, real materials. Which is a kind of distinction, isn’t it? I was thinking earlier today, of a nice resonance between your installation in the Tate’s Duveen Galleries in 1992, Weight and Measure, and Martin Creed’s piece Work No. 850 which is taking place now.


RS What is he doing?


AS Every 30 seconds a runner appears at one end of the empty Duveen Gallery and runs as fast as they possibly can to the other end of the empty gallery, where they disappear around the corner, go downstairs, walk the length of the Duveen Gallery, climb the stairs again, go up near the entrance and run. 


RS He’s a performance artist? 


AS Martin makes sculptures and performances and works with orchestras. I feel it’s about the body and it’s about time.


RS It seems to be about measuring a space.


AS There are no barriers. 


RS I like it. 


AS The runner has to dodge gallery visitors, and they have to dodge the runner. It’s a bit like something that was happening between those two blocks you placed there.


RS I told Nicholas Serota, prior to mocking up Weight and Measure, that it would have three components, but then I realized that the centre of the Tate’s Duveen Hall with its circular intersection was an obvious magnet; a collecting zone for the viewer. I decided that I did not need a weight in the middle so I reduced the sculpture to two blocks of differing heights and weights at either end of the hall. I wanted to deal solely with the elevation over the distance. I remember Nick came down to see what I was up to, and for a minute he was taken aback, but he came around. David Sylvester was a big help. He was one of my closest friends at the time.


AS I think Sylvester compared it to an ice-cream van that had somehow arrived in his front garden – a big, ­obdurate mass outside his window blocking the daylight. I remember him trying to deal with his physical relationship to it. There was this strange thing happening between the two related sculptures you showed at Gagosian in New York just after 9/11: you had to go into two different rooms. It’s sort of doing that here in your new show in London. It’s about the presence of the piece you can see and the other one, which you can feel behind your back and which is nearby but not visible. One also had this same sensation walking between the five enormous elements of Promenade (2008) in the Grand Palais in Paris.

RS Promenade was totally driven by the context. The internal relationships of measurement and placement related to the central axis of the site. The placement of the rectangular plates followed a strict logic in that the plates tilted away and towards the center line in an asymmetrical counterpoint. However, the perception of the sculpture contradicts the logic of its relation to the site. As you walk inbetween the plates you see fragments, you see the work in part, you cannot grasp the whole. The plates appear and disappear, lean away or toward you depending on your location. I work in different ways with space. Take Open Ended (2008) in my new show in London which belongs to a series of sculptures that combine toruses and spheres. Open Ended grows out of a piece called Blindspot (2002–3), which comprises three toruses and three spheres that diminish in length as they create a path that leads to a dead end: you have to reverse to exit. The corners where toruses and spheres join are not on axis. Each path as you turn the corner leads you directly into a wall, so you have to counter step and it throws off your cadence.


AS Because you don’t actually see the turn until a little too late.


RS Yes, it dislocates your orientation and then you have to step off in another direction, and you are not quite sure where you are headed.


AS That’s part of the control of the piece, isn’t it? 


RS The control of your duration. It breaks your cadence. 


AS Exactly, and you don’t want to turn it into a fairground ride, so it’s mis-stepping you without becoming some squeaky entertainment. It’s not playing with your body in the way that a roller-coaster might. 


RS The experience of these works has nothing to do with entertainment. There is an obvious disorientation and at some point you lose your sense of direction. You are trying to navigate an unknowable condition.


AS When I was inside Open Ended, I kept thinking, this is too big. 


RS There seems to be more space than can possibly occupy this place and the room has completely evaporated. 


AS It is as if the space that’s outside is too small for the space inside.


RS Open Ended makes me more anxious than Blindspot. Now you’d say it’s open-ended, and it ought not to be because there’s a release in this piece in that you have two entrances/exits. I am not interested in the number of parts but I am interested in their interlocking or their spatial unfolding. The interest for me is not the specificity of form, the fact that they are toruses and spheres. I am interested in what they can do. The interlocking of three sets of toruses and spheres sets up a seemingly irrational continuation of spaces. In effect, you lose track of where you are and you cannot anticipate where you are going. The internal differences explain the various moments of tension and release. The singular dynamic of bodily movement close to the surface of the curvature is responsible for the intensity of the experience of space.

AS Your body is a pendulum. 


RS Yes, and you want to get out of there, so your cadence speeds up.


AS It engenders feelings of anxiety and of losing one’s place, and being made very aware of one’s equilibrium or lack of it. And yet we habitually suppress these feelings of doubt and uncertainty, or we wouldn’t be able to cross the road, would we? 


RS Or we deny them, because we don’t want to take the time to investigate them. I got interested in curves because I felt it was very difficult to understand them, to understand what is on the opposite side, to understand the difference between convexity and concavity. Not too many contemporary architects or sculptors have worked with curves.


AS Oscar Niemeyer has, a bit.


RS In Brazil, OK, and maybe Le Corbusier, but very few people have dealt with that problem. I think that one of the things that really outraged people about Tilted Arc (1981) was not that it was a big sculpture that bisected a plaza, but that it was a big curve.

AS Most curves can only be seen from the air.


RS In circulation, maybe, but not in structure. And certainly no one was using reverse curves in structure.


AS Is that for technical reasons? Is it easier to do that now than it was 20 or 30 years ago?


RS There was not much interest in the invention of form. It was easier to mass produce right angles than to mass produce curves. Today you can easily mass produce curves because of developments in computer technology. The right angle reflected the zeitgeist of the 20th century but that is over. I think the speed of the skin dominates now. 


AS There’s a lot of globby architecture and blobs. Norman Foster’s done a few, but I’m not a fan of them at all. Zaha Hadid has made some wonderful maquettes of forms that curve, of envelopes, so you’re not sure whether you’re on the inside or the outside, like undersea molluscs.


RS I’m interested in the structure of the form that makes the space. I’m not so interested in the free-flowing blob, although I can understand why people are interested in them. When I was working in rubber, very early on, I actually made a piece called Blob.


AS So you made a blob, and you made Charlie Brown (2000). How did you get from the blob to Fernando Pessoa?


RS I also named pieces after David Sylvester, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Charlie Chaplin.

AS It seems to work very well. They have something to do with the people and nothing at all to do with them.


RS Well, they have nothing to do with them. But somebody may ask, who’s Pessoa? And if that encourages curiosity about him, that’s all to the good.


AS He should be much better known than he is. Or perhaps he is known just enough, in the right way, at the moment.


RS That might be true. The people who need to will find him.


AS It’s true of art too in some ways. All that debate about Tilted Arc – wasn’t there a stage play about it, or a novel? Did William Gass write a novel about it? 


RS I think a lot of people used it for a lot of purposes, I didn’t follow it. For a while it just got to be an albatross.


AS There was a bit of a fuss about your Abu Ghraib drawing (Stop Bush, 2004) in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, wasn’t there? It was then reduced to Stop BS, I think, when it was turned into a poster.


RS It wasn’t the Whitney that made the fuss. In order to mass produce posters for distribution by political action committees we couldn’t use Bush’s name.


AS It means the same thing anyway, bullshit or something, one or the other. In a way it was contiguous with the sculptures, or your other oil-stick drawings. That silhouette is so unmistakable now. That silhouette has become the ideogram of the entire war.


RS It also has a multiple read-out. In the States it’s the Ku-Klux-Klan, racism, atrocity, Bush, American aggression, it’s all of it. I tried to reduce the detail in order to open the image up to multiple readings.


AS We reduce, and we read things, and just as we walk through a sculpture we think we know, we imagine what the other side of the concavity is going to be like, and then when we meet it, it’s even more of a surprise because we’ve got a mental image.


RS I think that a lot of depiction and illustration leads you back to the references that are contained within them, not within you.


AS Are you still looking at a lot of younger art?


RS I try to look at as much as I can. In New York right now there’s a lot of neo-assemblage, a lot of bricolage and photographs. The big influential figure once again seems to be Rauschenberg.


AS Yes, I saw the sculpture show at the re-vamped New Museum in New York and that was very much the mode, and also at the Whitney Biennial. Have you ever wanted to use lighter materials – straw or balsawood?


RS I’m interested in weight and mass and measure; it’s what my sensibility responds to. 


AS When you were in Paris for the Grand Palais show earlier this year, talking with the curator Alfred Pacquement, you described walking the space and thinking about it, and then going back to your sandpit where you arrange elements like a model. How big are those maquettes?


RS Small – some an inch to a foot, but mostly half inch to a foot.


AS Do you approach a work in the landscape in the same way?


RS If I can, I mock up full scale. I mocked up a full-scale piece recently for a collector. He didn’t want it. It happens.


AS I guess this has probably always been a problem between artists and their patrons, going back hundreds of years. Now it seems that the market is king. 


RS We are all implicated in the market, we can’t get away from it. But your work does not have to be market-driven, and you don’t have to produce merchandise. I think right now for a lot of artists the market is the context and that explains the recent mass production of luxury goods.


AS It’s just that everyone else’s interests become implicated in your interests when you’re asked to do things, and you have to say no, a lot. That’s the big thing.


RS The fact that the market has become the context is just a recent phenomenon. I think there’s a fiction perpetrated by the market that the aesthetic value is synonymous with price. The art market is probably one of the only unregulated speculative markets out there.


AS They haven’t got someone trying to punch 70 billion dollars into it. 


RS No, I think the bubble might just burst. 


AS It’s terrifying. The physical experience of being with someone’s work – your work, for example, doesn’t just resist the lie: it resists all that flim-flam. It slows you down.


RS My work is not motivated by resistance.


AS It seems to be a function of its physicality and its specificity.


RS It brings you back to yourself and the place where you are. You have to deal with your internal relationships, both physical and psychological and you either deal with it or you don’t.


AS Fernando Pessoa, which is a rectangle, is positioned so one longer side faces the window. The other side is always in shadow. It holds its space, and it invites a particular physical relationship with it and with the space it occupies.


RS It was the most simple and most singular statement I could make and it deals with everything that’s relevant to my work.

Richard Serra with Fernando Pessoa  (The poet is a faker who is so good at his act… He even fakes the pain of pain he feels in fact)


AS There’s such a nakedness with the kind of work you make too: it will either cut it or it won’t. 


RS That’s what artists do: they deal with their vulnerabilities. But you can’t foresee how you’re going to be misused. 


AS They have Mark Rothko T-shirts at Tate Modern and scarves in his autumnal russets and oranges and what looks like a tie-dye T-shirt in grey and black, which is, for me, a horrible apotheosis and an appalling idea. Anyway, what are your plans now?


RS I went to Dunkirk. There’s a possibility of building a piece there. Then I’m building a piece for Norman Foster for his home in Geneva, and two pieces for the Prado.


AS Dunkirk is amazing. Hard to escape the history of that coast. 


RS I’m going to have to deal with it. That is the context. 


AS All those incredible concrete structures from both wars.


RS What’s interesting about those concrete structures is that there is no foundation to them, so they’re continually shifting in the sand.


AS Do you think about getting older?


RS It’s interesting, yesterday someone asked me that, and I said, I try not to. I never want to look over my shoulder. 


AS There’s a great last interview with Frank Zappa when he had prostate cancer. They said, how do you want to be remembered, and he said, it doesn’t matter, really, if I’m remembered or not. It’s not the point.


RS Exactly, and all he was really interested in was making his work. There is a purpose and dignity to that.


AS So, will Barack Obama win? That’s the other thing.


RS I hope so. But there’s a strong racist element in America and it is hard to predict how that will influence the outcome of the election. When people pull that lever, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I met Obama and I found him intelligent and intellectually adroit. It may be that America can’t deal with a statesman of that stature.

                                 Serra portraying ‘The Architect’ in Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster 3′

Adrian Searle is art critic for the Guardian. 

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About this article

Published on 27/10/08

Richard Serra, TTI London (2007), weatherproof steel, installation view

Hope in Common
David Graeber

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction—even of “progressives”—is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.

The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market—to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be—at least for the moment—simply nothing left.

The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us—from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act—would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win.

But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge—particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action—the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the “War on Terror.”

But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911, combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene.

Of course it hasn’t really.

We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism—and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone—and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors—that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair.

This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative—even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s—can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form—this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least five thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt—this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel.

Perhaps so—but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism—its moral foundation—now revealed to be a collection of broken promises—but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

Why Obama’s Futurama Can Wait

Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package

By Mike Davis

America’s “Futurama” is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century’s equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain’s high-speed rail network will become the world’s largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: “For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America.” Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His “Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” vows to “create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we’ll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.”

Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Rolling Out the Dozers

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials — from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi — have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the “win-win” approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM’s shareholders), but that infrastructure spending — if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama’s first 100 days — can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush’s “socialist” efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

If one accepts the reasonable principle of supporting the new president whenever he makes policy from the left or addresses basic social needs, shouldn’t progressives be cheering the White House as it rolls out the dozers, Cats, and big cranes? Aren’t high-speed mass transit and clean energy the kind of noble priorities that best reconcile big-bang stimulus with long-term public value?

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I’m not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis — a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales — has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis — from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly — is its potential universality.

Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie’s choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made — with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

Saving Schools and Hospitals

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

Personally, I would love to commute via a sleek Euro-style bullet train from my home in San Diego to my job in Riverside, 100 grueling freeway miles away, but I’ll take gridlock if the cost of rationing federal expenditure is tolerating the closure of my kids’ school or increasing the wait in the local emergency room from two to ten hours.

Obama, unlike his predecessor, has a bold vision, shared with his powerful supporters in high-tech industries, of catching up with the Spanish and Japanese, while redeeming America as the synonym for modernity. Lots of new infrastructure will, however, become so many bridges to nowhere (especially for our children) unless he and Congress first save human-needs budgets and public-sector jobs.

A good start for progressive agitation on Obama’s left flank would be to demand that his health-care reform and aid-to-education proposals be brought front and center as preferential vehicles for immediate macro-economic stimulus. Democrats should not forget that the most brilliant and enduring accomplishment of the Kennedy-Johnson era was Head Start, not the Apollo Program.

If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect’s original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

Through the Glasses Darkly

What if the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion?

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

When the hero of John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live puts on a pair of weird sunglasses that he has stumbled upon in an abandoned church, he notices a billboard that once invited us to a Hawaii beach holiday now simply displays the words:

“MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Ad copy on another billboard — this one for a new color TV — says, “DON’T THINK, CONSUME!”

The glasses, then, function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable him to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface.

What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses?The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies:

• Their call to reach across party lines — while waging the cultural war politics of “us” against “them.”

• Their warning that the candidates’ family life should be off limits — while parading their families on stage.

• Their promises of change — while offering the same old programs (lower taxes and less social welfare, a belligerent foreign policy, etc.).

• Their pledge to reduce state spending — while incessantly praising President Reagan. (Recall Reagan’s answer to those who worried about the exploding debt: “It is big enough to take care of itself.”)

• Their accusations that Democrats privilege style over substance — which they deliver at perfectly staged media events.

The next thing we would see is that these and other inconsistencies are not a weakness, but a source of strength for the Republican message. Republican strategists masterfully exploit the flaws of liberalism: Its patronizing “concern” for the poor that is combined with a thinly disguised indifference toward — if not outright contempt for — blue-collar workers, and its politically correct feminism that is usually combined with an underlying mistrust of women in power. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was a hit on both counts, parading both her working-class husband and her femininity.

The earlier generations of women politicians (Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and even, up to a point, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton) were what can be referred to as “phallic” women. They acted as “iron ladies” who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be “more men than men themselves.”

Writing in Le Point, a French weekly, Jacques-Alain Miller, a follower of the late French philospher Jacques Lacan, pointed out that Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a “castrating” effect on her male opponents, not by being more manly than them, but by sarcastically downgrading the puffed-up male authority. According to Miller, Palin instinctively knows that male “phallic” authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer.

Palin provides a “post-feminist” femininity without complexity, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public figure and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the “first dude” as a phallic toy. The message is that she doesn’t lack anything — and, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who realized this left-liberal dream. It is as if she simply is what left-liberal feminists want to be. No wonder the Palin effect is one of false liberation: “Drill, baby, drill!” Feminism and family values! Big corporations and blue collars!

So, back to Carpenter’s They Live. To get the true Republican message, one should take into account not only what is said but what is implied.

Where we hear the message of populist frustration over Washington gridlock and corruption, the glasses would show a condoning of the public’s refusal to understand: “We allow you NOT to understand — so have fun, vent your frustration! We will take care of business. We have enough behind-the-scenes experts who can fix things. In a way, it’s better for you not to know.” (Recall Vice President Dick Cheney’s hints at the dark side of power, as he successfully orchestrated an expansion of presidential executive power.)

And where the message is the promise of change, the glasses would show something like this: “Don’t worry, there will be no real change, we just want to change some small things to make sure that nothing will really change.” The rhetoric of change, of troubling Washington’s stagnant waters, is a permanent Republican staple. (Recall former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s populist anti-Washington rise to power in 1994.)

Let us not be naïve here: Republican voters know there will be no real change. They know the same substance will go on with changes in style. This is part of the deal.

Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry lost because he was President Bush with a human face. Today, Sen. John McCain is Bush with a lipsticked face. It’s a rhetorical lipstick of “No bullshit!” When Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of the bestselling On Bullshit, was asked which U.S. politician breaks out of the predominant bullshitting, he named McCain — and thereby tragi-comically missed a key point. Talking straight, displaying no-bullshit honesty, can be the cleverest form of bullshitting, a mere populist pose.

What if, however, the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion, not the secret truth? What if there really will be a change? Or, to paraphrase the Marx brothers: McCain and Palin look like they want a change and talk like they want a change — but this shouldn’t deceive us, they might very well accomplish a change!

Perhaps this is the true danger, since it would be change in the direction of “Country first!” and of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Luckily, as an electoral blessing in disguise, a sobering thing happened to remind us where we really live: in the reality of global capitalism. The state is planning emergency measures to spend hundreds of billions of dollars — if not $1 trillion — to repair the consequences of the financial crisis caused by free-market speculations.

The lesson is clear: The market and state are not opposed. Indeed, strong state interventions are needed to keep markets balanced.

The initial Republican reaction to the financial meltdown was a desperate attempt to reduce it to a minor misfortune that could easily be healed by a proper dose of the old Republican medicine (a proper respect for market mechanisms, etc.). In short, the Republicans’ between-the-lines message was this: We allow you to continue to dream.

However, all the political posturing of lower state spending became irrelevant after this sudden brush with the real. Today, even the strongest advocates of diminishing the excessive role of Washington accept the necessity for a state intervention that is sublime in its almost unimaginable quantity. Confronted with this sublime grandeur, all the “no bullshit” bravado was reduced to a confused mumble. Where, today, are McCain’s steely resolve and Palin’s sarcasm?

But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed

NOAM CHOMSKY

Fri, Oct 10, 2008

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals – the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been “politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties”. Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures”.

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,” concluded America’s leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”.

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the “reserve currency” for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times

© 2008 The Irish Times

The 700 Billion Dollar Question… THAT THESE ASSHOLES NEED TO FUCKING ANSWER 

THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT!

Using the shock doctrine, Wall Street and Washington’s wrecking crew aim to get the most expensive free lunch in American history

By DAVID SIROTA

             

If a museum in the next superpower nation ever commemorates the decline of the last great superpower, it will make the two-and-a-half page bill introduced this week the center of the display.

Just as they do today at the National Archives’ Declaration of Independence exhibit, tourists in the future—perhaps in Beijing, perhaps somewhere else—will line up to see a framed draft of this week’s White House legislation demanding Congress surrender its power of the purse, and give an unelected appointee—in this case, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—the power to hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to “any financial institution,” “without limitation…on such terms and conditions as determined by [him].” In a nation priding itself on separating powers between the branches of government, the bill explicitly states that decisions by Paulson may not even “be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Whether the bill passes or not, the drafting of it—even the mere thinking of it—is the single most clear sign that all of the major tenets of American democracy are on the auction block these days: from constitutional checks and balances, to legislative and judicial oversight to electoral accountability itself.

In the immediate aftermath of what could be the starting gun of a second Great Depression, the public this week will face a wave of propaganda from Washington. Using the same playbook that succeeded in passing the Patriot Act and the Iraq War authorization with almost no questions, politicians will inevitably invoke love of country, fear, loathing and red-alert emergency—all designed to ram this bill into law as fast as possible, with as little scrutiny as possible. Put in book terms, we will see Thomas Frank’s wrecking crew using Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine to justify a bigger free lunch than David Cay Johnston ever imagined.

Here are five key questions we should all be asking:

1) What will prevent the bill from allowing both parties to use the guise of purchasing worthless mortgages to further enrich their largest campaign donors?

Other than a top-line limit of $700 billion, the White House proposal includes not a single reference to how much taxpayers can be forced to pay private investment firms for their worthless mortgages. To the untrained eye, the omission may seem like a minor oversight, but it is almost certainly deliberate not just as a power grab, but in its potential to convert the Treasury Department into a Tammany Hall graft machine with international reach.

Paulson came directly to government from Goldman Sachs, and with these new powers, he could posture as the 21st century’s Boss Tweed, completely free to pay inflated prices for those mortgages as a means of financially rewarding his former Wall Street colleagues who created this mess. And in his initial round of interviews this weekend, he made barely any effort to stem concerns that this is precisely his plan of action. When asked how he would “decide what to buy and what to pay,” he stumbled through an evasive answer, saying “Well, we’re going to have some professional asset managers and some real experts working with us, and we’ll use a — you know, we’re working through the processes.”

Sure, he would have to report semiannually to a presumably Democratic Congress. But that offers almost no safeguard either, as Democrats are just as awash as Republicans in campaign contributions from the companies that would benefit from government overbuying.

Since the deregulatory splurge of the 1990s began, the financial industry has donated almost $600 million to both parties—splitting their donations almost 50-50. That includes an astounding $9.8 million to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, and $6.8 million to Republican nominee John McCain. On top of that is another $500 million dollars in lobbying expenditures in the last decade.

Thanks to the proposal’s omissions, those expenditures could generate a $700 billion return on worthless mortgage investments—well above the 100-to-1 ratio of return on investment that lobbying expenditures typically reap corporate clients in Washington. Alas, in the Halliburton age, such government-corporate profiteering would be anything but rare.

2) How are Americans and investors supposed to feel confident that the crisis will be solved, if the very people who engineered the crisis are being relied on to solve it?

McCain and Obama are campaigning hard on the concept of “change,” and both are playing that message off the Wall Street meltdown. Yet, in brandishing their “change” credentials on economic issues, both are relying on the same cadre of Wall Street and Washington insiders who engineered today’s crisis.

According to Mother Jones, McCain’s campaign is run by at least 83 staffers who have recently lobbied for the financial industry. Their clients included AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Citigroup, i.e.. all the major corporations that caused the financial implosion, and who stand to gain from the bailout.

Likewise, McCain’s economic guru is Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm. He is the vice-chairman of the investment bank UBS, which according to the Politico.com wrote down “more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.” As a Texas senator, Gramm spearheaded Congress’s radical deregulatory agenda in the 1990s, including authoring the bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (i.e., the Depression-era law preventing consolidation that many experts say could have prevented, or at least softened, the current emergency).

Obama, meanwhile, has long relied on Gramm’s boss, UBS chairman Robert Wolf, as one of his top economic advisers and fundraisers. Worse, during his emergency meeting to discuss the crisis last week, five of the nine people he said would be directing his response have played a role in the crisis they claim expertise in fixing. They are:

** Former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin (now an executive at Citigroup, which is embroiled in the meltdown) and Lawrence Summers, who the Politico notes both “supported and helped negotiate the bill [repealing Glass-Steagall].”

** William Daley, the Clinton administration architect of corporate-friendly trade pacts like NAFTA and now a top official at J.P. Morgan Chase.

** Gene Sperling, the top economic adviser in the Clinton White House that deregulated Wall Street.

** Paul O’Neill, the former Bush Treasury Secretary, who despite occasionally criticizing the White House, is a lockstep conservative on economics.

Other than Joseph Stiglitz, Obama included not a single progressive, nor even one of the many visionaries like economist Dean Baker, who has for years been predicting exactly this kind of meltdown. Indeed, the one major labor-affiliated economist officially affiliated with his campaign, Jared Bernstein, “was not part of the crisis meeting,” according to the Washington Post.

Just as the media establishment still grants more credibility to humiliated Iraq war proponents than the original—and now vindicated—war critics, both party standard-bearers are telling Americans that the best people to solve the economic conundrum are those who had a hand in creating it. How, exactly, should this fox-in-the-henhouse situation inspire any confidence in Americans or investors that our political leaders are serious about fixing the problem?

3) How is this meltdown a failure of “oversight” if it has almost nothing to do with illegality?

Most politicians and pundits are bewailing the lack of “oversight” that allegedly led us to the brink of disaster. The rhetoric suggests that the real perpetrators were negligent regulators failing to enforce—or “overseeing”—existing laws. And while there’s certainly a bit of that, CBS’s Bob Schieffer said it best when he reported that, “This is not the work of those who broke the law, it is the work of those operating within the law—those who pushed the law to the limit, making loans the law allowed but common sense dictated should not have been made.”

Substituting a debate about “oversight” for a debate about regulation isn’t merely a semantic error, nor a harmless accident. It allows incumbents to avoid culpability for their votes that gutted existing regulations and helps challenger candidates make a deceptive argument claiming the only change necessary is the specific officeholder, not the system of free-market fundamentalism itself. They get to make a self-servingly partisan case while eschewing the wrath of their regulation-averse business donors.

Crushed, of course, is the potential election mandate. Candidates elected on pledges to beef up “oversight” have only to staff agencies with new faces to fulfill their campaign promises, rather than doing the hard work of passing much-needed new laws.

4) When did a crisis suddenly mean that giving away taxpayer cash to campaign donors is laudably apolitical, but spending taxpayer money on taxpayers is inappropriately “political?”

During initial meetings with Congress about the bailout, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rejected “calls to include tighter regulations, corporate reforms or limits on executive compensation as part of the measure,” according to the Associated Press. He also stated his opposition to using a fraction of the money to help homeowners struggling with their bills, shore up the social safety net, or stimulate job growth through public infrastructure spending.

Almost universally, his position was praised by lawmakers and reporters as a judicious and apolitical one worthy of bipartisan praise. At the same time, demands to make sure taxpayers get something for their money were labeled unacceptably “political,” divisive and extraneous.

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly,” Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd gushed to the New York Times after meeting with Paulson.

Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace praised the White House proposal as “clean” and berated those who he said were trying to “Christmas tree” the bill with relief for homeowners, prompting Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) to enthusiastically agree.

“There is a crisis in our country,” Kyl said. “We’ve got to come together as House and Senate, Democrat and Republican, and deal with this crisis as Americans, for the American people, and not try to bring on all of our political agendas.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) echoed the sentiment, telling Politico.com that he does not want the bailout to become a vehicle for other “partisan plans and pet projects.”

This framing comes directly from the financial industry itself. The Wall Street Journal reports that congressional leaders are already meeting with lobbyists from the nation’s largest banks, securities firms and insurers “whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don’t load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.”

So, handing over $700 billion of taxpayer money to Wall Street speculators with no conditions whatsoever is now so supposedly apolitical that reporters and politicians take offense at any suggestion otherwise. Meanwhile, proposing to better regulate Wall Street or help ordinary citizens in exchange for that bailout is an unacceptably partisan “political agenda” inappropriate at a time of “crisis in our country”—as if the wage, housing, and health care crisis afflicting workers, homeowners and families is far less critical to the national welfare than the crisis hitting millionaire speculators.

5) How are we going to pay for this?

In the Bush age of unending deficits, even considering affordability strikes some as silly and old fashioned. But we’re talking about adding $700 billion to the national debt—or $2,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Moreover, if, as bailout proponents say, the ultimate goal of a bank rescue is to keep the credit markets liquid and interest rates under control, then adding $700 billion to the interest-rate-exacerbating national debt seems an odd economic analgesic, to say the least. This is to say nothing about the insanity of responding to what is inherently a debt crisis by simply firing up the national credit card and incurring more debt.

To date, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the only lawmaker who has laid out a specific plan to both re-regulate the financial markets and responsibly finance a bailout. He proposes to impose a 10 percent surtax on those making over $500,000 a year, raising roughly $300 billion. “The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush’s economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout,” he said.

How that fiscal conservatism is met on Capitol Hill will expose the real motives—and interests—behind the bailout package.

It’s Capitalism, Stupid!

Tuesday, September 23 2008 @ 07:03 PM CDT

Contributed by: Oread Daily

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

IT’S CAPITALISM STUPID!

“The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York’s well-to-do reeling. The people who fuel the area’s economy with their spending on art, fashion, cars, restaurants, plastic surgery and other luxe goods and services are starting to cut back once-lavish budgets. As a result, those who cater to their every whim — from nanny agencies to jewelers to yacht builders — are seeing clients tighten their belts on expenses from the millions to the thousands.”
- By Ellen Gamerman, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and Francine Schwadel in Sep. 20, 2008, Wall Street Journal

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

Already protests of the $750 billion proposed rescue of the rich plan have occurred from Los Angeles to Burlington, Vermont.

In LA Alvivon Hurd from ACORN told the local ABC affiliate, “I hope Congress does the right thing. I hope that they don’t okay it, and I hope they let them sink in their own muck.”

Trouble is all those Congress folks have been playing in the same much as the rich Americans they represent.

In Miami, site of another protest, Onial Merceus lost his North Miami home to foreclosure Tuesday. No one came to bail him out. At the protest Wander Adderly of Fort Lauderdale told the Miami Herald, ”If they can bail out AIG, they can help bail us out of the foreclosure crisis.”

Thing is Onial and Wander aren’t rich enough to get bailed out.

Truth of the matter is governmental and business leaders haven’t a clue as to what to do about the latest capitalist crisis. They are putting huge bandaids on a system in need of a complete overhaul at least, and elimination at best.

Wealthy Democrats and Republican leaders are lost in a quandary of bailout soup. They all tout the “free market” until it hits them and their rich buddies in their wallets, then suddenly the market is too free.

Gerald Celente Founder/Director, The Trends Research Institute, is well respected for his track record of picking business, consumer, political, and economic trends before they come to pass. Celente predicted an economic 9/11 more than a year ago (of course, my wife predicted it long before that). Celente says the worst is yet to come. He has little use for this federal bailout and writes about it in a piece in the Hudson Valley Press:

“On the evening of September 18th 2008, the American democratic system was replaced by a financial dictatorship.”

What was billed as a “Federal Bailout” was nothing less than a bloodless coup. The Wall Street Gang had taken over the White House and control of Washington. Congress promised not to resist, and pledged to pass legislation as demanded.”

…Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, spearheading the coup, sought unrestricted authority to spend the nation’s money as he saw fit. The first order of business by the Economic Czar was to take trillions of dollars of bad debt from crumbling investment banks and insurance companies and transfer it to the backs of already debt-burdened citizens.”

…In simple language, with cameras rolling, in broad daylight, the American public was robbed blind. This wasn’t a magic show. There were no hidden tricks or sleights of hand. “We want this to be clean, we want this to be quick,” demanded the Economic Czar. “We need to get this done quickly, and the cleaner the better,” intoned President Bush, with the urgency of his “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud” logic he used as a pretext to invade Iraq.”

…Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to “fully support” the plan and called on Congress to take “immediate action.” Republican challenger John McCain said he would further review the proposal before passing judgment while Congressional leaders from both parties have signed on with their support.

Americans were told they would have to pay to rescue the very companies whose unregulated greed, fraud and recklessness had created the crisis in the first place. Considered nobodies by the authorities, the people had no voice and had no choice.”

Anybody heard tell of the long dismissed REVOLUTION lately.

The following is from Indypendent.

Get Out the Pitchforks and Lighted Torches: Protest at Wall St. This Thursday at 4 p.m.
By John Tarleton

There is a polite debate going on Inside-the-Beltway as well as on the presidential campaign about how exactly to give away the $700 billion that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is demanding as a bailout for the bankers and financiers who presided over last week’s economic meltdown. What hasn’t been visible is the shock and outrage that much of the public is feeling over this proposed looting of the public treasury. That, hopefully, will change on Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. when protesters plan to gather (see announcement below) at Bowling Green Plaza, just south of Wall St.

With the world famous financial district as a prop and the eyes of the national and global media on us, those of us who live in New York can make visible the anger and concern so many people and we can do so at a strategic moment as Congress appears set to pass legislation by the end of the week before adjourning for the fall campaign season.

There is no central group organizing this event. But as the call to action that began circulating Monday afternoon noted, “Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?”

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THURSDAY’S PROTEST

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout

Everyone,

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest
robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall
Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like
with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the
“therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children,
perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s
evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street
pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection,
to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to
rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the
debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below).
We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like
they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this
omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from
the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up
stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who
already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York
Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,”
and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration
wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want,
whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us.
Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this
Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park,
which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the
northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave
work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can
still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse
other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks
pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of
connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and
community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and
distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media
activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the
event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all
your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be
silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest
two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud
demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t
know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start!