Debt jubilee: Revolutionary change or reform to stabilize capitalism?

Debt has been a crucial lever in implementing austerity, both as an instrument and a moral cudgel. Eliminating debt, private and public, would have transformative effects — but would doing so be revolutionary or merely a reform to stabilize world capitalism?

Those are not the only two choices, of course, and the mere thought of a debt jubilee would send many a set of teeth gnashing. Debt jubilees are not a new idea; in fact they have existed since long before capitalism was born. But given the unprecedented level of debt, a jubilee today would entail unprecedented complexity.

The Australian economist Steve Keen has for several years energetically promoted the concept of a debt jubilee. His concept is to bail out people instead of banks, reasonably arguing that people would spend the money, reviving the economy. So in this formulation, radical as the concept of a jubilee is (and radical as the idea of helping working people instead of the super-wealthy is), it is conceived as a reform.

Professor Keen conceptualizes a jubilee in a form that would not cause damages to debt holders not responsible for the crisis, such as pension funds:

“Whereas only the moneylenders lost under an ancient Jubilee, debt cancellation today would bankrupt many pension funds, municipalities and the like who purchased securitized debt instruments from banks. I have therefore proposed that a ‘Modern Debt Jubilee’ should take the form of ‘Quantitative Easing for the Public’: monetary injections by the Federal Reserve not into the reserve accounts of banks, but into the bank accounts of the public — but on condition that its first function must be to pay debts down. This would reduce debt directly, but not advantage debtors over savers, and would reduce the profitability of the financial sector while not affecting its solvency.”

“Quantitative easing” is a government program of massive buying of assets from banks in an effort to promote increased lending and liquidity through increasing the money supply. A “quantitative easing for the public” would give money to everybody. Those with no debt would be free to spend it as they wish, and those who received more money than the size of their debt would similarly have no obligations once they wiped out their debt. Dramatic as this idea is, Professor Keen is no revolutionary; he seeks to put capitalism on a firmer footing:

“Returning capitalism to a financially robust state must involve a dramatic fall in the level of private debt — and the size of the financial sector — as well as policies that return the financial sector to a service role to the real economy.”

His reasoning is that economic recovery is impossible until private and government debt is paid down:

“The standard means of reducing debt — personal and corporate bankruptcies for some, slow repayment of debt in depressed economic conditions for others — could have us mired in deleveraging for one and a half decades, given its current rate. … That fate would in turn mean one and a half decades where the boost to demand that rising debt should provide — when it finances investment rather than speculation — will not be there. The economy will tend to grow more slowly than is needed to absorb new entrants into the workforce, innovation will slow down, and justified political unrest will rise — with potentially unjustified social consequences. … We should, therefore, find a means to reduce the private debt burden now, and reduce the length of time we spend in this damaging process of deleveraging.”

A radical idea, then, to save the system. A radical idea that is not at all revolutionary in the hands of Professor Keen. Considering the mass political movement required to force what would be an extraordinary change in the policies of the world’s central banks and finance ministries — institutions staffed by and run on behalf of financiers — would we be simply content to say, “Well, that’s it, then, we can all go home now”?

Revolutions as ‘transformations of common sense’

The U.S. activist and economist David Graeber also calls for a debt jubilee but, in contrast, conceives this as a revolutionary demand. Writing in the latest edition of The Baffler, Professor Graeber argues that world revolutions consist “above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.”

Drawing upon the works of “world systems” theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, he argues that the revolutions of 1848 were successful even though none took power because the ideas behind it and the French Revolution widely took root. He similarly sees Russia’s October Revolution as responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states and, on less firm ground, that 1968 “changed everything” because of the personal liberations that grew out of it, including feminism.

Fear of communist revolutions, and large mass movements, did lead to the many advances of the mid-20th century. But as most of those advances have been reversed, it is more realistic to see them as simply reforms — and reforms can, and will, be taken back when movements subside. People can’t stay in the streets forever. The changes of personal liberation spawned by 1968 and beyond are not as susceptible to reversal, and, as with LGBT movements, continue to advance in some ways but, nonetheless, feminist gains in particular are under sustained assaults.

We should be careful to differentiate advances that threaten the system — such as major structural changes in the economic sphere — and those that don’t, such as same-sex marriage or women shattering glass ceilings, however much individual religious fundamentals or tradition-minded men believe themselves to be “threatened.” In no way do I wish to minimize the social gains made by women, LGBT communities, and racial and national minorities, nor ignore that social divisions are integral to the functioning of any system based on inequality and hierarchy. Such freedoms — still only partially attained and still requiring organized defense — are prerequisites for any concept of a better world to have meaning.

Economic inequality has steadily widened as class repression intensifies; objectification of women in mass media is ubiquitous, as exemplified by the pornification and coarseness of corporate-controlled mass culture; and nationalist and other xenophobias are gaining new traction under the impact of economic disintegration and the accompanying social disruptions. It seems premature to declare everything has changed, even keeping in mind that leaps in social zeitgeists are a process rather than a sudden jump.

A jubilee linked to other demands

Given the interconnectedness of struggles, is the idea of a debt jubilee in itself a “revolutionary demand,” as Professor Graeber declares it? In other words, would it actually overturn the current world system, or would it be simply a reform, albeit a welcome and thorough-going one on the scale of the New Deal? He does link the idea of a jubilee with the necessity of slowing down growth:

“We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt — sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal — is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? … [Producing more is] precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.”

Thus, Professor Graeber argues:

“Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also … begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be. … The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.”

Such an outcome would require an extraordinarily strong global movement; in this conception a debt jubilee would be a means to an end and linked to broader structural change. For a debt jubilee to be “revolutionary” it would have to be one piece of a more comprehensive struggle. A debt jubilee by itself, in isolation, would be, as Professor Keen intends, a method of stabilizing capitalism. Indeed, he has shown that a jubilee could be brought about using standard capitalist-management tools in a different way.

Saving the current world system would be a temporary salve and nothing more; all the contradictions within it would resurface. But that system is of human creation. When new ideas gain secure social foundations, revolutions can happen — whether it is sovereignty residing in the people rather than a royal family designated by a god, or that democracy is possible only with everyone able to participate on an equal footing rather than only men of a society’s dominant ethnic or racial group, or that political democracy is an empty shell without economic democracy.

A better world can only arise from unleashed human imagination and creating unbreakable links among struggles.

Greece’s depression is IMF’s idea of ‘progress’

The International Monetary Fund congratulated itself last week for the splendid job it is doing in Greece, declaring the country “is making progress in overcoming deep-seated problems.” With an unemployment rate of 27.2 percent, an economy that has shrunk by at least 20 percent and children going hungry, one has to shudder at the thought of what a lack of success might look like.

Temple of Zeus photo by Andreas Trepte (www.photo-natur.de)

The depression in Greece is the logical conclusion of austerity, but while Greece is the first in Europe to arrive it is not alone — the composite eurozone unemployment rate reached a record 12.1 percent in March. The eurozone unemployment rate rose to 24 percent for men and women below the age of 25; the European Union-wide rate is nearly as high.

The IMF’s solution? Eliminate more jobs. In its latest report on Greece, issued on May 3 following its latest inspection visit, the IMF graciously mentioned that Greece’s wealthy don’t pay taxes:

“Very little progress has been made in tackling Greece’s notorious tax evasion. The rich and self-employed are simply not paying their fair share, which has forced an excessive reliance on across-the-board expenditure cuts and higher taxes on those earning a salary or a pension.”

But the IMF report quickly followed up by grumbling that:

“[T]he over-staffed public sector has been spared, because of a taboo against dismissals.”

Perhaps you will not fall off your chair in shock, but it is the latter of these two concerns that gets the attention when the IMF gave its verdict on what it expects the Greek government to do:

“A strong recovery will need to be built primarily on deepening structural reforms. … The government’s welcome public commitment to improving the business environment and accelerating privatization now needs to be matched with results.”

Diktats masquerading as democracy

Those bland-sounding words take on deeper meaning when we examine the “structural reforms” already imposed on Greece by the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, the “troika” that dictates Greek policy. In February 2012, for instance, the Greek government agreed to reduce the already low minimum wage by more than 20 percent, to freeze all public-sector wages until the unemployment rate falls below 10 percent and to deep cuts in pensions.

The Greek minimum wage is €751 per month (equivalent to US$990 or £636). How well could you live on such a sum?

Overall, wages have fallen 40 percent and health care spending has been cut 25 percent. Meanwhile, most of the money released by the troika goes straight back to lenders, not for internal relief. As a result of this austerity, it is no surprise that retail sales in Greece have declined by 30 percent over the past three years and an estimated 150,000 small businesses have closed. Poverty has become so widespread that an estimated 10 percent of Greek’s children go to school hungry.

All this in a country where its biggest and wealthiest industry, shipping, pays no taxes — its tax-free status guaranteed in the constitution. Greece’s wealthy pay little or no taxes, stashing their cash outside the country. Government employees are the people who can’t evade paying their taxes — yet they are the ones scapegoated for economic troubles. (A common pattern in many countries.)

The IMF made no mention of its own role in bringing about this depression in the May 3 report, instead blaming a “lack of confidence” for Greece’s struggles:

“Looking over the period 2010–2012, the much deeper than expected recession was overwhelmingly due to a progressive loss of confidence. … With fiscal adjustment set to remain a drag on GDP growth for several years to come, the key challenge is to generate the improvement in confidence needed for a recovery in investment to begin to more than offset this drag. This cannot happen unless Greece can secure broad domestic support for the program and the political stability that would come with this.”

Yes, if only Greeks would believe that hunger is a sign of progress, everything would be better! In lieu of a sudden spasm of optimism, generating “broad support” for bleeding the country dry to pay back financiers who made reckless gambles might be difficult.

Ideology masquerading as economics

Although it might be tempting to note that doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is unreasonable, reasonableness is besides the point here: Austerity programs are designed with ideology in mind, not with economics based on the real world. One clue to this is that “structural re-adjustment” programs invariably demand sell-offs of public assets — holding fire sales of state enterprises means private capital can scoop them up at very low prices, and profit nicely from doing so at public expense.

The neoliberal concept is that people exist to serve markets rather than markets existing to serve people. Entire countries have been harnessed to the dictates of “markets.” This has long been the pattern imposed by the North on the South through institutions like the IMF; now the stronger countries of the North are imposing it on their weaker neighbors. Taxpayers in those stronger countries are on the hook, also, as some of their taxes go toward the bailout funds, for which bailed-out countries are merely a conduit to pass the money to financiers, often from their own country. Much of the money Europeans lent to Greece was used to bail out German and French speculators.

The race to the bottom, of which austerity programs and the continual shifting of production to locations with ever lower wages constitute crucial components, represents an intensification of market dominance over human life. It is also a result of a scramble to maintain profits, which have been under continual pressure from the economic crisis.

But neoliberalism is not the product of a cabal “hijacking” economies or governments; it is the natural progression of a system that insists “markets” should be the arbiter of all human problems and the model for social relations and institutions. Capitalist markets are not neutral abstractions perched loftily above the Earth; they are the aggregate interests of the wealthiest industrialists and financiers as expressed through the corporations and other institutions they control.

“Markets” dictate that school children faint at their desk due to hunger while billionaires grab ever more. We can do better than this.

Austerity or Keynesianism: Can’t we do better than this?

Austerity. Keynesianism. Voting for the Center-Right. Voting for the Center-Left. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Five years of the economic crisis has yet to shake the stubborn idea that, if only the right policy were implemented, prosperity would be here again. And so this week’s two turns of the electoral wheel — agreement on a “grand coalition” government in Italy and the return to power in Iceland of the two parties that presided over that country’s collapse — demonstrate that traveling in a circle leads you to where you just were.

(Photo by Jim Champion)

The outgoing Icelandic government earned a reputation for “standing up” to banks and the International Monetary Fund, and refusing to saddle its citizenry with the massive debts of Iceland’s swollen banks. At first glance, it seems curious that Icelanders would vote out such a government and return to office the same government coalition that presided over the country’s meltdown. But a closer look reveals a much different story. So different, in fact, that the IMF praised the outgoing Social Democrat/Left Green coalition government of Jóhanna Sigurđardóttir. Here is an excerpt from an IMF report on November 19, 2012:

“Directors commended the progress made in fiscal consolidation, noting that it is broadly on track.”

That doesn’t mean that Iceland’s dose of austerity is coming to an end. The IMF report goes on to say:

“While welcoming the recent monetary tightening bias, Directors viewed the policy stance as still accommodative. They agreed that further monetary tightening is needed to bring inflation back to target and to normalize monetary conditions in advance of capital account liberalization.”

Iceland’s banks are too big to fail

Iceland didn’t tell the IMF, or the world’s bankers, to take a hike. Iceland, until recently, was unlikely to be at the center of any financial controversy — a country of 300,000 people with an economy traditionally based on fishing. Somewhere along the way, it was decided to convert the Icelandic economy into one based on financial speculation, with the result that the country’s banking sector grew to nine times the size of its gross domestic product. Iceland’s banks offered interest rates well above that of other countries, drawing in foreign depositors (much like Cyprus). Big pots of money led to the irresistible temptation to speculate, with bank-officer compensation tied to the volume of loans made. The usual result followed.

Not that regulators, or parliament, were zealous in checking the financial sector. An official report by an Icelandic parliament committee states:

“It appears that both the parliament and the government lacked both the power and the courage to set reasonable limits to the financial system. All the energy seems to have been directed at keeping the financial system going. It had grown so large, that it was impossible to risk that even one part of it would collapse.”

Iceland took over its three big banks, but quickly sold two of them to creditors, who in turn sold most of their interests to foreign hedge funds. The Icelandic government did agree to all conditions demanded by foreign creditors, the IMF and the British government, but had to somewhat back off only because the package was voted down in a national referendum. So it’s not accurate to say that the outgoing government stood up to anybody. As the Icelandic blog Studio Tendra pungently put it:

“Iceland didn’t bail out the collapsed banks, but that wasn’t for the want of trying. … [T]he Icelandic government tried everything it could to save the banks, including asking for insane loans to pay off the banks’ debts. … So the true story is that Iceland tried and tried and tried and tried as hard as we could to save the creditors. The only reason why we didn’t is that the Icelandic government, then and now, is completely incompetent.”

The outgoing Icelandic government did follow two Keynesian prescriptions in imposing capital controls and currency devaluation, but these did not do much to ameliorate the pain — Iceland can’t detach itself form global capitalism.

For the years 2009 and 2010, Iceland’s gross domestic product declined more than ten percent and its household consumption fell nearly 23 percent. Recovery has since been at a snail’s pace. Making matter worse, Icelandic personal debt is mostly pegged to the country’s inflation rate. As Iceland continues to suffer from inflation, the amount a debtor owes grows as his or her wages decrease. (Wages since 2008 have lagged the consumer price index, according to IMF statistics.)

The suicide mission of Italy’s “Left”

So much for the “Icelandic miracle.” Icelanders have yet to question the economic system that brought them misery, instead opting to swap one set of mainstream parties for another set. That has been the pattern in advanced capital countries. Italy is not yet an exception, although the dramatic rise of the Five Star Movement — sort of an electoral Occupy movement — as a third force in the Italian parliament may be the start of a pushback. Or it could be a brief protest vote without lasting effect. For now, however, Italy’s Center-Left standard-bearer, the Democratic Party, has apparently chosen to complete its suicide mission by forming a “grand coalition” with the main Right party, the wildly misnamed People of Freedom Party.

Italy’s post-war political parties may have collapsed two decades ago, but the same personalities and the same policies and the same interests nonetheless continue to dominate the political sphere. The Democratic Party is the main remnant of the Communist Party of Italy, and is also is a receptacle for the late Christian Democratic Party, a centrist formation that once dominated Italian politics. The new Democratic prime minister hails has roots in the Christian Democrats, but is the nephew of an important aide to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s morbid combination of Rupert Murdoch, George W. Bush and the U.S. right-wing corporate “populist” Ross Perot.

Mr. Berlusconi is one of Italy’s richest persons, owns most of Italy’s mass media and is continually mired in multiple legal entanglements; he dealt with the last of these by forming his own political party, the recently renamed People of Freedom, which catapulted him into the prime ministership. “Freedom of Capital” Party or “Silvio’s Get Out of Jail Card” Party would be more accurate, but nonetheless Italians voted this personal vehicle into office three times.

Italy’s Democratic Party is as eager to implement austerity as the Italian Right — voting for it changes nothing. Italy’s outgoing “technocratic” prime minster, Mario Monti — appointed without the tiresome pretense of elections — and the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, both enjoy Democratic Party support, and the new finance minister has worked closely with Mr. Draghi.

The main potential fracturing point in the grand coalition is personality, which might make for interesting reading but is nothing more than a diversion from a serious discussion of alternatives.

The Five Star Movement’s leader, Beppe Grillo, now the main opposition in the Italian parliament, characteristically didn’t mince words in his blog this week:

“In the last few decades many sides have admitted that this political class lacks credibility, this same class that for the umpteenth time is asking for your vote of confidence. It’s as though this governing team had come down from the moon, as though they are not the ones directly responsible or jointly responsible for what has happened up until now.”

Alternating parties but the same austerity

There’s nothing unique about Italy here. With the exception of Greece, where Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) missed winning the last Greek election by two percentage points, voters in all advanced capitalist countries have been content to alternate the main capitalist parties in office while beginning to voice displeasure through social movements and in polls. One important reason is that the dominant alternatives to the Right — Socialist, Social Democrat, Labour, Democratic & etc. — offer no alternatives to the Right; at best they offer “austerity lite.”

Various reasons, each with some measure of validity, can be assigned as the cause: dependence on corporate money, corruption, domination of the mass media by the Right, philosophical and economic myopia, cowardliness. Although these factors form a significant portion of the answer to the puzzle, an underlying cause has to be found in the exhaustion of social democracy in Europe and liberalism (as the term is used there) in North America. These political formations are trapped by their fervent wishes to stabilize an unstable capitalist system.

They wish to discover the magic reforms that will make it all work again. They do have criticisms, even if they are afraid of saying them too loud, but are hamstrung by their belief in the capitalist system, which means, today, a belief in neoliberalism and austerity, no matter what nice speeches they may make.

The Right, on the other hand, loudly advocates policies that are anathema to the working people who form the overwhelming majority but have the mass media, an array of institutions and the money to saturate society with their preferred policies. But, perhaps most importantly, they have something they believe in strongly — people who are animated by an ideal, however perverted, are motivated to push for it with all their energy.

In contrast, those who are conflicted between their belief in something and their acknowledgment that the something needs reform, and are unable to articulate a reform, won’t and can’t stand for anything concrete, and ultimately will capitulate. When that something can’t be fundamentally changed through reforms, what reforms are made are ultimately taken back, and society’s dominant ideas are of those who can promote the hardest line thanks to the power their wealth gives them, it is no surprise that the so-called reformers are unable to articulate any alternative. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly bleat “me, too” when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what it to be done.

The reformers can call themselves Socialist, Social Democrat, Labour, Democratic or Liberal, but the label makes no difference. The are dancing to the same tune as their legislative rivals. All dancers will back reforms when there is concentrated public pressure; when the pressure subsides, the reforms are taken back and austerity attacks are relentlessly pushed forward. Major reforms in the United States came in the 1930s and in Europe following World War II thanks to rulers’ fears of being swept away; when the movements responsible for forcing these major reforms became content with reform, the rollback began.

Keynesian reforms would be better than austerity, but would be no more permanent than those of last century; moreover, Keynesianism keeps the capitalists in the saddle, allows them to regain their confidence and gives them the breathing space necessary for them to methodically take back the reforms.

The working peoples of the world’s advanced capitalist countries are living through a structural crisis of capitalism, not simply a rather nasty downturn similar to the repeated recessions of the past. Reforms, not even those on the scale of the mid-20th century, are a panacea. The solution is to be found not on a ballot but rather in organized mass action working for a more humane system not content to settle for reforms that will be taken away. If not today, when?

Mirror images and ideological straitjackets on the path from Solidarity to sellout

For much of the 20th century, there was a curious mirror effect between orthodox Soviet and Chicago School ideologies — both saw the other as the only other possible economic system. Although both time and the ongoing global crisis of capitalism has begun to chip away at such a ridiculous binary, to a maddening degree this ideological straitjacket continues to assert itself. A straitjacket that does not spontaneously materialize but is crafted for the maintenance of power.

The effects of this mirrored duality are still very much with us, and are a crucial factor in the path the countries of the former Soviet bloc have traveled. The usages of this ideological construct are obvious enough in the capitalist world, distilled into “there is no alternative” by the just departed Margaret Thatcher. Less obvious were the usages further East; perhaps the nearest equivalent of the prime minister’s “TINA” is Leonid Brezhnev’s declaration of the Soviet system as “irreversible.”

When the general secretary’s formulation began unraveling in the late 1980s, what was a Soviet bloc economist to do? For many, the answer was to pick up a copy of a book by Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, and jump through the looking glass. And when their new mirror seductively told them to apply shock treatment to their own countries, they did — the mirror told them there was no alternative.

There is always an alternative, Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik reminds us in his book From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland.* Professor Kowalik, drawing on his decades of experience as a reform socialist often on the outs with the communist authorities for his willingness to challenge orthodoxy, his work as an adviser with the Solidarity trade union and his personal knowledge of the key players, reminds us that Poland — and, by implication, the Soviet bloc as a whole — had an opportunity to create a different economy, one built on cooperatives and democratic participation in the economy.

Such an outcome was widely desired by Poles, and the outlines of such a system emerged in the “Round Table” negotiations held between Poland’s communist authorities and representatives of opposition groups, led by Solidarity, from February to April 1989. Economic democracy was already an established concept, embodied in the “Self-Governing Republic” program of Solidarity, adopted at its first national congress in 1981. In it, Solidarity, which consciously identified itself as a labor union and a broad social movement, declared:

“In the organization of the economy, the basic unit will be a collectively managed social enterprise, represented by a workers’ council and led by a director who shall be appointed with the council’s help and subject to recall by the council. The social enterprise shall … [work] in the interests of society and the enterprise itself.  … The reform must socialize planning so that the central plan reflects the aspirations of society and is freely accepted by it. Public debates are therefore indispensable. It should be possible to bring forward plans of every kind, including those drafted by social or civil organizations. Access to comprehensive economic information is therefore absolutely essential.”

Solidarity’s program forgotten, but the looking glass not on agenda

Although Solidarity’s original program was tossed aside, the Round Table negotiators envisioned significant changes without any “leap” into a capitalist market. The two sides did not have serious disagreements, ultimately agreeing in principal, on the political side, on pluralism, freedom of speech and freely elected local governments. On the economic side, there was agreement on facilitating employee ownership, for employee control of state-owned enterprises and a uniform policy toward enterprises, regardless of ownership form. Summarizing the agreement in Solidarity to Sellout, Professor Kowalik wrote:

“Of primary importance here are the provisions concerning protection of labor and employment, written out in ten settled upon and two contentious points. All these detailed settlements distinctly show that the participants of the agreement had no such thought in mind as a ‘leap’ into a market economy.” [page 60]

Yet a particularly harsh brand of capitalism was instituted; “Thatcherism” or “Reaganism” in the parlance of then and “neoliberalism” in today’s vernacular. Professor Kowalik cites several factors leading to the imposition of shock therapy in contradiction to popular opinion, negotiated agreements and pre-existing platforms:

• The centralization of Solidarity while underground during the period of martial law during the 1980s converted it into a top-down organization with a severe cut in membership and an isolated leadership that drifted to the Right.
• The grabbing of state property by the nomenklatura (the bureaucracy managing enterprises and overseeing that management from within the government) for themselves.
• A blurring of Catholicism with socialism, particularly on the part of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who would become the first non-communist prime minister, but also by other influential people.
• The adoption of undiluted neoliberal ideology by the Polish economists who would become the architects of economic policy by becoming ministers and government advisers.

One of the agreements arising out of the Round Table was that one-third of the seats to the Polish parliament (the Sejm) would be contested later that year (1989) in June. Solidarity won all but one of the contested seats — so sweeping was the rout that Solidarity became the effective government even though the communists still held a parliamentary majority. Mr. Mazowiecki became prime minister when the next government was formed three months after the election. Solidarity activists dominated the new government, although communists retained some portfolios, including the Interior and Defense ministries.

Critically, however, the new finance minister/deputy prime minister was Leszek Balcerowicz, a proponent of neoliberalism who was distant from Solidarity’s struggles and whose writings were of an abstract nature; “his interests were limited to pure theory,” according to Professor Kowalik. Prime Minister Mazowiecki’s leading economic adviser was Stanisław Gomułka, who converted to neoliberal ideology while at the London School of Economics. And Western advisers beat a path to Warsaw as they did to other Soviet bloc capitals; Jeffrey Sachs, who oversaw shock therapy in multiple countries, perhaps was the most prominent. The International Monetary Fund was also on the scene.

Abstract theorizing instead of examination of concrete reality

Other economists who had imbibed starry-eyed ideas of how market forces would shortly create paradise played roles as well; but the finance minister’s role was so important that Poland’s shock therapy became known as the “Balcerowicz Plan.” Professor Kowalik wrote of his obfuscating tendencies:

“Balcerowicz made great efforts to compromise — like the term ‘social interest’ — the adjective ‘social.’ … Such a standpoint was bound to lead him to extreme individualism, a negation of the role of the state as a general social institution, with only the interest of the authorities being important. Balcerowicz does not write this outright, but his reasoning resembles a lot the well-known view of Margaret Thatcher, that there is no such thing as society (and thus it does not exist). He rejects the very notion of social justice and often simply avoids this subject. … Balcerowicz’s knowledge, of course, remained theoretical, abstract, and distant from real economic policies.” [pages 112-114]

Such an approach and outlook dovetails with orthodox capitalist economics, as distilled through the wellspring of neoliberalism, Chicago School economics: highly abstract, built on mathematics and based on airy concepts such as “perfect competition” rather than on the real world. Firms and individuals are not seen as part of a social structure; factors such as wealth and property are taken as given. Production is alleged to be independent of all social factors, the employees who do the work of production are in their jobs due to personal choice, and wages are based only on individual achievement independent of race, gender and other differences.

Such is the underlying rationale for neoliberalism, which seeks to make “market forces” — the aggregate interests of the wealthiest industrialists and financiers as expressed through the power of the corporations they control — the sole arbiter of outcomes in all social spheres. Neoliberalism, as Henry Giroux recently put it, “construes profit-making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational belief in the market to solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations.”

New laws accelerate grabbing of state property already in progress

Privatization, however, was already under way by the time the Round Table negotiators hammered out their agreement. A 1987 law enabled the creation of private businesses with the assets of state enterprises and a January 1989 law stipulated outright that state assets could be transferred to private individuals for conducting economic activity. Such transfers were not necessarily done with full value paid, and private firms were given preferential treatment. Professor Kowalik wrote in Solidarity to Sellout:

“[T]he players of the nomenklatura offshoot of privatization consisted of managers of various rank, government and party functionaries associated with them, along with their families. The process, commonly called ‘enfranchisement of the nomenklatura,’ deserves attention because it was then that the phenomenon of corrupt privatization, or arranged clientelistic privatization, developed. …

“The state sector shortly became a cash machine, which was made easier by the authorities through relevant legal regulations. … These laws sanctioned the plunder of the state sector earlier begun by its own managers. The state sector was highly taxed to maintain the entire state infrastructure and doomed to hopeless competition with the nearly tax-free private firms that were also paying infinitesimal customs duties.” [pages 204-205]

The pace was accelerated when the parliament, in late December 1989, hurriedly passed nearly unanimously a series of bills implementing the Balcerowicz Plan, with the plan going into effect on January 1, 1990. Noting the later contrition of the parliament speaker, who said Finance Minister Balcerowicz and Professor Sachs “plainly tricked us,” Professor Kowalik summed up the vote this way:

“Advantage was simply taken of the immense trust that the people had in the first non-communist government. There could be no serious debate, because without a general document presenting a synthesis of the systemic contents of eleven laws and the simultaneously ratified budget, such a discussion was not possible. The parliamentarians acted under the pressure of a race with time, imposed on them by the executive authorities.” [page 133]

One scheme for privatization was the creation of “National Investment Funds” — state companies disposed in this program were to be 15 percent owned by employees, 25 percent by the state treasury and 60 percent by the funds, with the public allowed to buy shares in the funds. Only a minority of privatized enterprises were disposed of this way (more were simply sold to foreign buyers), but the funds were a failure, Solidarity to Sellout reports, because inflation and a declining stock market caused the shares to steadily lose value; moreover, most of the public shares wound up in foreign hands.

What capital remained in Polish hands also became concentrated as, similar to the pattern in Russia, the nomenklatura-turned-privatizers were soon dwarfed by a new class of oligarchs.

Actual cooperatives faced consistent hostility from the government, which saw coops as a temporary “transition” to what it termed “real” privatization. Pre-existing cooperatives were simply  “administratively eliminated,” new coops had barriers placed in front of them and foreign capital, which soon controlled Polish banking, was also hostile. At the same time, state farms were immediately thrown into competition with subsidized Western European agricultural with all domestic subsidies removed at a stroke, devastating Polish farmers. This was in contrast to the buildup of Western European agriculture after World War II, which was nurtured through protective measures.

Results of shock therapy differ widely from promises

The results of the Balcerowicz Plan were devastating, in contrast to promises of a short-lived downturn followed by rapid growth and transition to Poland becoming a “normal” European country, a concept dangled by Western advisers skillfully playing on Polish antipathy toward Russia:

• A 50 percent drop in real wages and a 30 percent drop in industrial output in the first month of the Balcerowicz Plan.
• From 1996 to 2005, the percentage of Poles whose income was so low as to be insufficient for biological survival tripled to 12 percent even though the national income rose by one-third.
• Wage inequality became the highest in the European Union.
• The number of Poles living below the official poverty level ballooned to 58 percent by 2003; the statistics bureau then stopped publishing this figure.
• Before entry into the European Union, the average unemployment rate was 16 percent, topping 20 percent during the early 2000s, more than a decade after the imposition of shock therapy; the rate declined after E.U. ascension due to a stream of emigration.

Having told this story in a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless compelling style, Solidarity to Sellout ends, surprisingly, on an unimaginative note by championing the Scandinavian model of capitalism, seeing Sweden as the model for Poland to emulate. In part, the conclusion follows from Professor Kowalik’s acknowledgment that a lack of organized anger and the sellout by trade unions has allowed the Polish Right to flourish, and a tacit understanding that creating a cooperative economy is drastically more difficult in a privatized economy than it would have been when enterprises were in state hands. He writes:

“[I]t was enough for the trade unions to become involved in support of anti-employee systemic changes and the shock operation. That is why rebuilding he strength of the trade unions in Poland is going to be an extremely difficult task.” [page 298]

Professor Kowalik calls the Scandinavian countries “centers of economic excellence,” contrasting them to Poland’s “role of subcontractor.” The former model by any reasonable measure is superior to neoliberalism, but the professor has perhaps not fully considered that Poland, and the rest of the Soviet bloc, were destined by the dynamics of capitalism to become a source of cheap labor, akin to Latin America’s relationship to the United States. Nor are the more powerful capitalist countries likely to acquiesce to a subcontractor becoming a serious competitor.

Having become completely entangled in the global capitalist system, Poland can only transcend to a better system as part of an international bloc; it can’t be an island unto itself. Given the structural crisis of global capitalism, the aim will have to be higher than simply emulating Sweden, where capitalist pressures are not unknown and the European Union methodically imposes downward pressure.

But regardless of one’s opinion of the conclusion, Solidarity to Sellout provides an outstanding analysis of the capitalist restoration of Poland on neoliberal grounds, as could only be written by an economist with an intimate understanding of Poland, economics, the Solidarity movement and the key individuals in the process. Professor Kowalik’s book is well worth pursing by anybody interested in understanding the post-Soviet path of Central Europe, or, more generally, the dynamics of neoliberalism.

* Tadeusz Kowalik, From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland [Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012]

Social security cuts: Work until you drop

A social movement to preserve Social Security has never been as urgent as it is today. Tempting as it might be to send a dictionary to the White House explaining the difference between “compromise” and “capitulation,” we should not be overly generous — Barack Obama’s intention to gut Social Security is not so much a pre-emptive capitulation as it is yet another demonstration of his adherence to neoliberal ideology.

By now, such a demonstration should not be necessary. Remember that one of the president’s first appointments was Lawrence Summers, who once wrote a memo while chief economist at the World Bank advocating industries creating toxic waste be transferred to Africa because the continent is “vastly UNDER-polluted” (emphasis in original). Professor Summers’ appointment in 2008 as President Obama’s leading economic adviser after his career of promoting Reaganite, neoliberal policies, including leading the Clinton administration’s deregulation of banking and scrapping of regulations for derivative contracts, set the tone for what was to come.

Let us not fall out of our chairs — neoliberal austerity is a bipartisan policy. Voters alternate between their dominant parties in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, yet the train stays in motion. Fans of the movie Avatar likely remember an early scene in which Sigourney Weaver’s character mocks the macho, militaristic approach of the Marines who intend to unilaterally take the mineral “unobtainium” from the Pandora natives by bulldozing their homes and forest. Her intention was to negotiate with the natives and have them agree to give up their homes and forest.

Note that there was no difference in the goal of the Marines, exemplar of the conservative approach, and that of the would-be negotiator, representative of the supposedly more enlightened approach. I remember thinking to myself while watching Avatar that Ms. Weaver’s character represented the Democratic Party wing of neoliberalism. Indeed, Democrats and their “left-of-center” counterparts among the world’s advanced capitalist countries — even parties in Europe that call themselves “socialist” — routinely implement ever more harsh policies that punish working people to further enrich the wealthy.

So we have something here bigger than Barack Obama and whatever character flaws he might be perceived as possessing. Republicans want to privatize Social Security — the ultimate dream of Wall Street and good for industrialists, too, as retirements become a quaint relic of the past. More people are forced to remain in the job market longer; more competition for jobs means lower wages and more profits. President Obama simply wants to phase this in more slowly.

Photo by A. Blackman, England

Specifically, President Obama is unilaterally offering Republicans the first step in the gutting of Social Security — reducing benefits. His method to do this is to change the formula for calculating cost-of-living increases from the standard Consumer Price Index to a different methodology known as the “Chained Consumer Price Index,” under which the rate of inflation is lower.

In the standard CPI, the basket of goods used to calculate inflation does not change. In the “Chained CPI,” items that rise in price are substituted with a cheaper product under the theory that consumers will switch to lower-priced alternatives. That may sometimes be so, but such actions do not alter the fact that the desired product is more expensive and thus represents the true extent of inflation. Nor does it account for the fact that many high-cost expenses, such as rent and electricity, don’t have readily available alternatives.

If they want inflation to be less, they shall make it so

This substitution of the standard CPI for the “Chained CPI” is a long-standing demand of Right-wing ideologues, and President Obama has offered it to them on a silver platter. The New York Times, the first to report of the proposed Social Security cuts (and which, uncharacteristically, called the cuts cuts instead of using a euphemism), anonymously quoted Obama administration officials who intimated that this was part of an elaborate plan to force Republicans in Congress to agree to modest tax increases. The Times quoted an official as claiming:

“That means … that the things like [Chained] C.P.I. that Republican leaders have pushed hard for will only be accepted if Congressional Republicans are willing to do more on revenues.”

But the president’s offer contains far more cuts for working people and retirees than attempts to make corporations and the wealth pay taxes at a slightly more reasonable level. The Times reported:

“He will propose more than $600 billion in new revenues — his last offer had called for $1.2 trillion in taxes — mostly by limiting to 28 percent the deductions that individuals in higher tax brackets can claim. Congress has ignored that idea in past years. Deficits would be reduced another $930 billion through 2023 as a result of spending cuts and other cost-saving changes to domestic programs. … Mr. Obama’s proposed spending reductions include about $400 billion from health programs and $200 billion from other areas, including farm subsidies, federal employee retirement programs, the Postal Service and the unemployment compensation system.”

That sounds like a whole lot of new austerity. Austerity hasn’t been working out so well in Europe, where, for instance, eurozone unemployment is at 12 percent and rising. That, sadly, is not the point. The ongoing economic crisis is an opportunity for corporate executives and financiers to push through what they’ve always wanted anyway. An oft-quoted summation of this thinking was offered several years ago by Stephen Moore of the far right Club for Growth and the Cato Institute: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”

Both groups are dedicated to cutting taxes for corporations and putting an end to any social safety net. The Club for Growth founder is connected to groups like the Heritage Foundation and to Tea Party impresario Dick Armey, while the Cato Institute recently experienced a power struggle in which the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, ousted the leadership for being insufficiently severe. Cato sent six alumni to the Bush II/Cheney administration, four of whom served on the latter’s Orwellian named “Commission to Strengthen Social Security.”

A better slogan than ‘work until you drop’

Because “work until you drop” is not an effective slogan to rally people to your side, Wall Street financiers and those opposed to social safety nets float scare stories that Social Security will soon run out of money, and you’d do better putting all your money in the stock market. Neither is true. Let’s start with the second of these two mythologies. In 2005, I researched the historical performance of the U.S. stock market for an article published in Z Magazine and found that the gains are small, when adjusted for inflation, and the gains only materialize when bubbles are near their peak.

As bubbles peak about once every 35 years, it is difficult to time these just right. When adjusted for inflation, the Dow Jones Industrial Average — the ultimate index of stock-market health and which has its components continually adjusted so as to replace low-performing stocks with high-performing ones — was below its 1929 peak as late as 1991. Here are some long-term results:

• The Dow peaked at 995 in February 1965. Adjusted for inflation, that was 42 percent more than it was worth at its previous bubble peak in 1929, not so impressive when it took 36 years to get there.
• The ensuring crash bottomed out in December 1974. At this point, the Dow, adjusted for inflation, was worth only half of what it was worth in 1929 and little more than one-third of its 1965 peak.
• The most recent crash bottomed out in March 2009, at which point the Dow was three percent below its 1965 peak, adjusted for inflation.
• Yesterday’s Dow closing of 14,673, when adjusted for inflation, is almost precisely double that of its 1965 peak, but a 100 percent gain over 48 years isn’t terribly dazzling.

And with the price/earnings, or P/E, ratio, of the S&P 500 Index now at 18.35, stocks are again over-valued when measured historically. The ratio’s average, calculated back to 1872, is 14. Five times in history this ratio, which is a company’s yearly profit divided by one share, has surpassed 20; each time was followed by a crash.

The biggest canard, however, is how financial chicken littles frame their case. The claim that Social Security will run out of money in perhaps three decades is based on predicting a low rate of future stock-market gains while the claim that privatizing Social Security will produce more money is based on predicting a rate of future stock-market gains double that of the former rate.

There are examples of privatizing social security systems, and the results have been a bonanza for financiers and disastrous for retirees. In Chile, where the privatization was done at the end of a gun barrel during the Pinochet dictatorship, a worker who retired in 2005 received less than half of what he or she would have received had he or she been able to stay in the old system. The six companies that administer the private plans, not coincidentally, constitute one of Chile’s most profitable industries.

It took tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of arrests, torture sessions, “disappearances” and exiles to implement Milton Friedman’s Chicago School shock therapy in Chile. Nowadays, such levels of violence are not necessary as elected governments implement neoliberalism in a series of measured doses, and four decades of incessant propaganda has acculturated the peoples of the world to the ahistorical idea that “there is no alternative.” Violence nonetheless remains the system’s handmaiden, as the coordinated crushing of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the tolerated rise of fascist groups like Golden Dawn in Greece demonstrate.

There is an alternative — ceasing to placing your hopes in parties that disagree only over the best method to implement neoliberalism, whether the one’s candidate sneers at “government-dependent” voters or the other’s candidate makes speeches vowing to tackle inequality while acting to make it worse. Change comes social movements, not from elections.

Those who do the work in the workplace should get the rewards

A cooperative enterprise rests on a basic concept — the people who do the work earn the money. Strange, isn’t it, that this straightforward idea is considered radical.

It shouldn’t. Yet it is. The modern capitalist system is advertised as a “meritocracy” — those who work the hardest earn the most. In reality, this is a fairy tale; those who accumulate the most are those who have the most capital, often inherited. The system is called “capitalism” for a reason.

Not even the hardest-working chief executive officer works 340 times harder than his or her average employee. The financier who manipulates numbers on a computer screen, indifferent to the humanity that produces those revenues and net incomes, surely does not work hundreds of times harder. Or, likely, even as hard, particularly if the corporate raider is looting a manufacturing company with a factory floor.

If the chief executive, or any manager, is elected from the ranks of the workforce by those same co-workers due to his or her meritorious effort and/or willingness to obtain a degree in management, then indeed an enterprise can be said to operate on a meritorious basis. Such enterprises already exist; some were created as cooperatives at the start and some were taken over by their workers to forestall closure or abandonment.

If you gave the average employee the choice of working in a cooperative, in which everybody shares in the rewards if the enterprise succeeds and everybody has a vote in strategic decisions in a democratic process, as opposed to being an exploited, powerless cog in the traditional authoritarian, top-down capitalist enterprise, there would be considerable support for the former option. If the person given this choice were to be told that wages, benefits and working conditions would be better in the cooperative (as in fact is the case), the decision becomes easier.

But what do we say to a small-business owner? Mom-and-pop businesses form part of the backbone of communities and, unlike a large corporation in which ownership shares are traded among speculators far removed from the actual underlying business, the small businessperson is present, often for long days. Here we have people who do put in more hours than others, and have put their limited capital at risk.

Why should anyone have to work 14 hours a day?

Two recent conversations have gotten me to think about this particular question. One was a debate conducted on another blog in direct response to a question from a small business owner who said he works 14 hours a day, six days a week. The other was a debate with a passerby I had last weekend while staffing an Occupy Wall Street literature table who insisted she was more deserving than others because she worked 12 or more hours a day when others weren’t willing to do so.

If someone chooses to work such hours and is personally fulfilled by doing so, that is that person’s business and not mine. But if you are at your job 14 hours a day, six days a week, your family is missing all the other things you have to offer them. And no matter how nice a house you may have, you’re not there to enjoy it.

Nobody should have to work such punishing hours. There are those who choose to do so out of personal conviction, but there are many millions of people in sweatshops working such hours, or still longer hours, who earn starvation wages — and they have no choice about it. The big capitalists of the world — people who have far more than any small-business owner — earn their fabulous wealth by exploiting such people, and by exploiting relatively more privileged people in advanced capitalist countries who work lesser hours but nonetheless work long, hard days.

Capitalists become rich by paying their employees less than the value of what they produce — usually far less. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t capitalists who don’t work, but a person who runs a small family business is not in the same category as a big capitalist. The passerby with whom I debated last weekend said if the people whom she claimed were jealous of her house were to run businesses like she does, and put in as many hours, they could have what she has.

But there is only so much space for such businesses; under capitalism, most people are going to have to work for somebody else. Moreover, opportunities are vastly unequal. I grew up in a middle class household where the expectation was always that I would go to college (which I did), and we lived in a town with an excellent public-school system, so I received a better education than most students. I had advantages that many people do not have, had I wished to pursue a business career.

Yes, some folks do climb out of disadvantageous situations, but only so many can do that in a (capitalist) system that puts tremendous roadblocks in front of people. Saving is difficult when mere survival is an increasingly difficult struggle.

A small-business owner may object that s/he puts in more hours than employees do (if they have any) and has capital at risk. That may be true, but having to do so is a requirement imposed by the capitalist system; it is not something ordained by some natural order. The capital put at risk was undoubtedly lent by a bank, which collects high interest — in other words, the bank is exploiting the small businessperson. The banker did nothing but sign a piece of paper while the owner works 14 hours a day. Why should the banker earn such big money? Quite likely, the banker, who repeats this exploitative operation with others, earns far more money and works far fewer hours.

The small businessperson is exploited by capitalists, too, just in a different way than an employee is.

The proprietor works, the landlord takes

Let’s take a concrete example. For more than 30 years, including two decades at his last location, a vegan baker much loved by the community operated a bakery before being forced out of business by a landlord who continually jacked up his rent, at three times the rate of inflation. The baker always gave to the community, frequently donating goodies at public events; I was far from the only person routinely greeted with a hug and often offered a free tea when I stopped in. During those years, the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City changed from a unique enclave of Puerto Ricans, Ukrainians, Poles, artists, squatters, community gardeners, anarchists, communists and beatniks to its present-day state of gentrification run amok.

[Credit: VegGuide.org]

The baker worked from early afternoon to midnight six, and usually seven, days a week, just so all of his money could go to the landlord, who merely needs to sit in his comfortable office many miles away and let the money roll in. For landlords, the neighborhood is nothing but a cash cow to exploit, cynically taking advantage of the cachet created by the residents they are squeezing out by their exorbitant rents. The baker’s fate has been the fate of countless small businesses; only faceless chain stores are able to afford the rents. This corporatization has been replicated in countless other neighborhoods.

The free-lance worker gets the short end as well. For years, I was self-employed, and had to, for tax purposes, operate as my own small business and fill out tax forms the same way an actual small business would. But I was no businessperson — I was a worker who didn’t have a regular job. I was exploited; in fact I was more exploited than I now am with a regular job because I had no health insurance and I had to pay double the usual Social Security taxes (my half and the employers’ half).

People are taught to have a 19th century, romantic notion of capitalism — a myriad of small enterprises competing in a free market. But a “free market” has never existed. Capitalism was built on pushing people off their farms and passing draconian laws to force them into the new factories; markets are expanded through force both military (World War I is one particularly bloody example) and financial (such as International Monetary Fund diktats); and the largest competitors become a handful of oligarchs whose wealth enables them to get governments to give them yet more advantages and who compete by cutting wages rather than through competition that exists only in textbooks.

Employees are exploited through this system, regardless of collar color, by being paid only a small fraction of what they produce and forced to compete for a dwindling number of jobs, but also because they, as consumers, have to pay the high prices that result when competition reduces an industry to a small number of oligopolistic behemoths who dominate a market. Small businesses are also at the mercy of larger corporate entities, including rapacious bankers, and are hurt when their customers have less money.

In a cooperative economy, no individual must assume all the risk. The cooperative can do so, taking loans at reasonable rates by making a good case to a publicly accountable bank operated as a public utility. Enterprises would relate to other enterprises in a cooperative, not competitive manner, eliminating much of the anxiety inherent in a capitalist system in which humans serve markets instead of the other way around.

Hard workers such as the small businesspeople under discussion would be valuable to a cooperative enterprise. Someone possessing such drive would likely wind up being elected to an administrative or management post by their collective. Talents and hard work would still be recognized; such a driven person would still have the personal satisfaction of a job well done; and s/he could work fewer hours, allowing more time to be spent with family and friends.

Others, too, will contribute talent and work to the cooperative enterprise while sharing the burden. Everybody who works should have a say in what is produced, how it is produced and how it is distributed, with community input — after all, it is the community that would be supporting the enterprise, and the enterprise in turn would be operated by people from the community. Production should be for human need, not for a minuscule elite’s private profit with no regard to the greater good. Benefiting the community and earning a comfortable living while working a humanistic workday shouldn’t be oxymoronic.

Republicans, corporate interests intentionally destroying Post Office

Privatization is a polite word for corporate self-interest. When calls for privatization arise, it is always useful to see who’s interest is being served.

Take the United States Postal Service. The Republican Party is doing its best to destroy a national institution that provides hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs. (The Democratic Party is doing nothing, perhaps waiting for a signal from its corporate benefactors.) Merely reading “unionized” in front of “jobs” leads to the conclusion that ideology is behind this latest attack on working people, and surely a Right-wing desire to eliminate large unions and drive down wages further is a significant motivation.

Not the sole motivation, however. Privatizing the Postal Service would mean big new business for delivery services and companies that supply postal products. Advocates of privatization recently sought to inject more wind into their sails with the release of a study by a “think tank” with the bland-sounding name of National Academy of Public Administration. The “study” has yet to published in full, but its four authors, described as “postal industry thought leaders,” have published their conclusion — a call for a near total privatization.

Just who are these four “postal industry thought leaders”? With one exception, they are people who have a vested interest in privatization. Surprise! Here they are:

• Ed Gleiman, a former member of the Postal Rate Commission, has since become a lobbyist for the Direct Marketing Association, a group representing large mailers.
• John Nolan, a deputy postmaster general during the Bush II/Cheney administration, is currently a board member for Streamlite, a business-to-consumer lightweight package delivery service. He is also a senior advisor to The Western Union Co., another corporation that stands to benefit from dismantling the Postal Service.
• Edward Hudgins is a director of the Atlas Society (“Atlas” as in Ayn Rand) and previously worked for the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. The latter two organizations are manically dedicated to destroying all protections for employees, while the phantasmagorical absurdity of Ayn Rand’s novels bear as much relation to reality as an elephant that flies.
• George Gould, a former political director for the National Association of Letter Carriers union, doesn’t appear to have an ideological axe to grind as do the other three “leaders” and perhaps is guilty of nothing more than absorbing neoliberal ideology. Critics of the NALC say that the union has failed to fight for its membership, and Mr. Gould’s participation in this “study” might provide those critics additional fuel.

Direct funding by a corporation that stands to benefit

To round out the picture, the major funder of the postal privatization “study” is Pitney Bowes Inc., which stands to directly benefit. Greg Bell, executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union, writes:

“Pitney Bowes, the company that is funding the review, stands to be a major beneficiary. The company is widely known as a provider of mailing equipment, but it is also a major mail ‘pre-sorter.’ The company takes advantage of generous pre-sort discounts offered by the Postal Service to provide outsourced services to high-volume mailers. In 2011, Pitney Bowes operated 41 mail processing facilities and generated $5.3 billion in revenue. Pitney Bowes would certainly snatch up a major portion of USPS revenue if it were given the chance.”

FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., the two largest U.S. private delivery services, also stand to benefit from the destruction of the Postal Service. FedEx is one of the heaviest spenders on political donations and lobbying, and employs several dozen lobbyists who formerly worked in government, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. UPS is also a heavy spender on donations and lobbying, while employing its own team of lobbyists who formerly worked in government.

The National Academy of Public Administration “study” advocates a bizarre “hybrid” scheme in which all postal activities will be privatized, except for the “final mile” — a Postal Service worker would deliver mail and packages to mailboxes and other final destinations. The paper states:

“In the ‘final mile’ package strategy, private sector consolidators compete to pickup, process, and transport hundreds of millions of packages. Shippers pay the consolidators to prepare and transport the mail for ‘last mile’ delivery by USPS letter carriers. The consolidators pay USPS a delivery charge. Upstream competition among private sector providers promotes efficiencies that lead to better service and lower overall prices.”

Private oligopolies are not known for lowering prices, however, and the paper’s assertion that regulation counter excesses is refuted by the many industries in which regulation is toothless, and in which agency chiefs routinely cycle back to their primary roles as corporate executives. We need only look at vastly inflated pharmaceutical prices, runaway financial legerdemain and a lack of resolve in food safety to know that private delivery companies will easily evade any serious scrutiny, piling up profits while cutting jobs, wages and benefits. The only certainty is that large numbers of jobs will be lost.

Who can fund 75 years of pensions in 10 years?

A government institution painted as financially troubled is easier to be targeted for corporate plunder than one on firm footing, so, voilà, congressional Republicans cooked up a devastating scheme. A congressional bill signed into law in 2006 requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its pension costs for the next 75 years in only 10 years. This is unheard of; certainly no private business would or could do such a thing. This preposterous requirement — why do I keep seeing sneering villains twisting their mustaches like in those movies of a century ago? — has saddled the Postal Service with a $16 billion deficit.

Hoping to maintain corporate momentum, a leading congressional Republican, Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has pushed a bill that would allow an oversight committee to modify union contracts. Representative Issa’s bill, if passed, would allow unilateral cuts to previously bargained wages.

The National Association of Letter Carriers, however, has already approved wage cuts. The latest contract increases the number of “temporary” mail carriers who have inferior wages and benefits, setting a up a two-tier system in which newer workers have lower pay, not fundamentally different than the new two-tier pay systems at General Motors — taxpayers loaned the money to GM to keep it afloat, and the reward is more austerity. These deals in turn serve to depress wages elsewhere by setting lower standards.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of Postal Service jobs have already been eliminated. A statement issued by Detroit Workers’ Voice, analyzing the attacks on postal unions, says:

“Postal workers are being run over time after time, and the strategy of the leadership of the postal unions has proved completely ineffective in stopping this. Yes, the union leaders sometimes have snappy criticisms against management. But they collaborate with management. Thus, when new contracts with management help the USPS decimate the workforce, the main union officials hide the setbacks or justify them. Insofar as there is struggle against the USPS bosses, it is within strict limits. Organizing the rank and file for struggles within the postal facilities is avoided. Public actions of any kind are rare. Militant action that would really press management is off limits.”

Postal Service unions, of course, are hardly unique in their timidity. Fightbacks are possible, as the Chicago teachers’ union demonstrated last year. The Chicago teachers spent months preparing parents and the city as a whole for a possible strike as neoliberal Mayor Rahm Emanuel sought to break the union and replace public schools accountable to the public with private, non-union charter schools under corporate control.

There were critics who complained that the teachers didn’t win many advances and ended the strike too quickly, but it is more realistic to analyze the strike in a fuller context — given the totality of the circumstances, the Chicago teachers won as much as they could have and would have begun to jeopardize the massive public support behind them, an indispensable force as the city’s other unions did nothing to help.

No union, no matter how militant, can win substantial gains without a movement that mobilizes sustained support from those unionized, non-unionized and unemployed — a movement that acts on the understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all. Unions aren’t making efforts to create that support, instead at most narrowly attempting to slightly slow down the defeats to their specific memberships. The structural causes of our present-day world of austerity are far larger than any union federation nor are they contained with any single geographical unit. The entire history of capitalism has led us to today’s world.

An injury to one, or to one group of employees, truly is an injury to all. Enormous power is concentrated into the hands of financiers and industrialists, and there are no limits to the injuries they and the politicians who serve them intend to inflict. Putting our heads in the sand and hoping it’s the other person who gets it only delays the injury to one’s self and makes it worse when they come for you.