A Map without Utopia is worthless!
by Marc Batko
[This essay posted on June 16, 2024 is available on the Internet at freetranslations.foundation.]
This quote from Oscar Wilde is a fitting beginning for this essay on remembrance and hope, memory and present fixation.
Beware of post-modernism that says the present is everything and dismisses the past and the future!
The future is only intelligible when seen in the context of the past. The joys and mistakes of the past are concrete guardrails for what is to come. Remember you were strangers in the land of Egypt! Historical consciousness marks us as a peculiar people who cannot be blinded any more by momentary or passing fads!
Is the Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets now finally rejected by both the prosperous West and the global South? Did inequality of wealth explode when regulations were abandoned, speculation was encouraged and the social state was dismantled on the quiet? Are cities overwhelmed by skid-rows, ghost hotels and ghost condominiums? Are cities and states plagued by revenue shortfalls since most multinational corporations shift their profits to tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Delaware and Wyoming?
Is the bourgeois state stealing away from feeding and housing its citizens while corporations steal away from paying their fair taxes? Didn’t Chief Supreme Court Justice Oliver Holmes declare that taxes were the irrevocable price of democracy?
Socialism for the super-rich and the ruthless market for everyone else seems to be the unwritten law of anything goes capitalism or democracy for the rich! From 1990 to 2000, Grover Norquist and the neocons proscribed taxes and prevailed with their trickle-down economic mythology. In 1980, Reagan reduced the top tax rate from 70% to 28% and changed taxation from corporate to individual. In the 1960s, 40% of federal revenue came from corporate taxes; in 2024, only 7% originates from corporate profits. Trillions are now spend in stock buybacks. Apple spent a record $101 billion in stock buybacks in 2023 according to Robert Reich, former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and now emeritus professor at UC Berkeley.
In his 2022 article in the German journal Luxemburg “Multi-crisis and Catastrophe,” Alex Demirovic explained that bourgeois societies repress and ignore failure, tragedies, catastrophes and collapse saying only temporary setbacks are on the horizon. In truth, the financial markets are in the emergency ward kept alive only by monthly injections of hundreds of billions from the FED. Neither the media nor politics tackle the crises of taxation, affordable housing or bank security. As George Orwell warned, wars become a domestic necessity to divert the people from economic contradictions and the geopolitical fall.
Profit-making is worlds away from profit-maximizing. When profit-maximization is worshiped without debate, we are in an idolatrous dystopia where stakeholders, rising generations and nature are not considered in future plans. Hope is possible when we have a fair taxation system. Maximizing profit is an irrational end-in-itself based on the fatal myth that nature protects itself without regulations and laws and that the state only serves capital and protects the corporate facade or charade!
Do we only see the speck in our brother’s eye and not the log of militarism, indebtedness, and enrichment in our own system? Are we trained to only clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside filthy?
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 13) When we praise and glorify what is small and unpretentious , we will be sharing Jesus’ orientation. Be spiritually-minded! “Seek first the kingdom of God and everything else will be added to you!” He who united past, present and future was and is God’s representative, the Messiah and eschatological prophet who promised new life in his eternal word. Peace, tolerance, interdependence, humility and anti-militarism should be “no-brainers”! The old man dies, Pink Floyd explains. The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring (poet Rainer Rilke). The swan that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory (existential German philosopher Martin Heidegger). The post office, the fire department, and the chair you are sitting on are all concrete examples of socialism (political writer and philosopher Michael Parenti).
For centuries, education and universities praised dissent and critical thinking as indispensable human rights. Now in 2024, human rights are like an endangered species in the era of laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberalism. Universities have become “the tentacles of the police state” (economist Michael Hudson). Professors and graduate students must be published in leading journals to advance and gain tenure. With Clinton’s abrogation of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999, the financial markets made themselves independent of the real economy. Commercial and speculative banks were no longer separated by a legal firewall!
Financial markets, tax havens, stock buybacks, insider trading and micro-second betting (the casino economy) are taboo subjects in economics departments. Stores close and security guards bump into one another. The 2008 financial meltdown led to millions of lost jobs and millions of foreclosures. By 2024, inflation of food, health care and housing prices became unprecedented once again. The insular US, driven by anti-communist propaganda and blissfully ignorant of fascist political and economic pressures, watched while republicans blocked any job creation during Obama’s 8-years and Trump amassed more debt than all US presidents combined (according to MSNBC).
The richest 1% of Americans have increased their wealth by $15 trillion since the start of the pandemic. As Sen. Bernie Sanders says, “While the rich become much richer, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.” The richest three Americans have more wealth than 160 million!
Elon Musk is one of those billionaires getting much richer. Tesla just approved Musk’s pay package of $48 billion. Meanwhile, Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage since 2009. It’s insane that GOP lawmakers want to give away more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy while giving away OUR tax dollars in subsidies to some of the richest companies on earth. This must change if we’re going to fight wealth inequality and protect the social safety net.
Fight back against efforts to extend the Trump tax cuts for Elon Musk, billionaires and giant corporations. Tax the rich and ensure they pay their fair share!
The power held by wealthy CEOs and billionaires is a threat to our democracy and our most important social programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education and more. As Bernie said recently,, “We must have the guts to take on and defeat a powerful and greedy ruling class.”
Citizens United was the Supreme Court’s 2010 moment of corruption and irrationality. Justice John Paul Steven’s dissent deserves a wide readership. Money was declared speech and corporations were called persons. Elections became auctions although they always were auctions when incumbents won over 90% of the time.
The state serves capital. Instrumental reason is a narrowed reason focused on optimizing and blind to the broader systemic and structural contradictions. Labor is extolled as the source of wealth while made superfluous by computerization, robots and artificial intelligence.
Biden had a 23-point advantage among 18-30 year olds in 2020 but that has faded. Many are disappointed and depressed over the eight-month massacre in Gaza just as many Ukrainians are disappointed about not learning about NATO’s eastward expansion.
NATO increased from 16 to 31 countries with the addition of Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Russia felt encircled and pleaded for its rights of sovereignty and security since 2000 without any understanding from the West.
Hatred leads to blindness. Wars always have two losers, the poet William Stafford warned. The US empire is in rapid decline and is already surpassed by China and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) alliance.
Peace training should replace military drills as the multi-polar world should replace the uni-polar world or US dominance. China has built 600 schools in Iraq and airports in Africa. For half a century, people had to grow strawberries and tulips for Miami instead of rice and beans for their survival. Under NAFTA Investor-state agreements, corporations could sue states for lost profits but states could not sue corporations. In 1990, Metalclad sued Mexico for not being able to run an air-polluting incinerator. In this case litigated in Vancouver Canada, Metalclad admitted they had never operated an incinerator before!
Human rights fight a constant battle in the era of neoliberalism. Colin Crouch’s book “The surprising survival of neoliberalism” helps unravel the mystery of the nightmare’s acceptance. Jorg Goldberg wrote “The Cure is the Disease” in 1990. The Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets had imploded as capitalist banditry. The Corporate European Observatory website documented the growing anti-free trade movement. Global Exchange founded by writer Kevin Danaher had stores in Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco and everywhere.
The global South was beginning its recovery. Now self-determination gains belated recognition as the political parties, media, and the educational system ignore the financial markets. Once 90% of investment was productive; now 90% of investment is speculative (cf. Noam Chomsky).
Qualitative growth and expansion of the public sector are necessary along with taxation of corporation and the super-rich and shrinking the unproductive financial sector. These are lessons from the 2008 financial meltdown when millions lost their jobs and millions of homes were foreclosed. This meltdown upended the US. In the past, the US had shifted the economic crisis to Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Russia or other countries. Ben Bernanke, the head of the FED, was given a Nobel Prize for the economic charade!
The truth will set us free and is its own reward but the truth is a process, not a cudgel! Truth must well up within individuals and cannot be coerced, Soren Kierkegaard emphasized.