Ismael Hossein-zadeh Counterpunch 3/12/10

The “golden” years of the U.S. economy in the immediate post-WW II period, along with the recovery and expansion of the economies of other industrialized countries, afforded the working class of these countries a decent, even middle-class, standard of living. Combined with extensive social safety-net programs such as the New Deal reforms in the U.S. and Social-Democratic reforms in Europe, the economic recovery and high employment rates of that period paved the way for a relatively cooperative relationship between the working and capitalist classes in these countries.

This led many pundits of historical developments to argue that perhaps Karl Marx had underestimated capitalism’s ability to carry out reform and share the fruits of economic progress with the poor and working class, thereby obviating revolution. They pointed to guaranteed employment and labor-management cooperation in a number of industrialized countries such as Germany and Japan as indications of “erroneous” Marxian judgment of the antagonistic capital-labor relationship.

These pundits failed, however, to point out the fact that the New Deal and Social-Democratic reforms that evolved out of the Great Depression and World War II were not courtesy of “benevolent” capitalism, voluntarily bestowed upon the poor and working people. They did not bother to explain that those reforms were, rather, the product of years of struggle by the working class and their allies against the brutalities of the capitalist system—struggle that often entailed great sacrifices, including occasional loss of life. The anti-Depression and anti-war struggles of the 1930s and 1940s compelled the capitalist class to “carry out reform in order to prevent revolution,” to paraphrase President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The laissez-faire doctrine, which firmly believed in the self-correcting ability of unbridled market mechanism, was the dominant economic principle before to the Great Depression. The financial crash of 1929 and the consequent long Depression shattered this long-held, religious-like belief. The Depression, precipitated largely by predatory loan-pushing and the resulting unsustainable bubble of asset (stock) prices, made living conditions for the overwhelming majority of people extremely difficult. The ensuing economic distress, in turn, precipitated popular unrest.

Large numbers of the discontented frequently took to the streets in the early 1930s. Their desire for change swelled the ranks of socialist, communist, and other opposition parties and groups. Left activists gained certain influence among labor ranks and workers’ movement for unionization, illegal in many industries until 1935, spread rapidly. Labor and other grassroots support for third party candidates in the 1932 presidential election resulted in unprecedented number of votes for those candidates. Third-party votes were even more impressive in congressional and local elections. “The union literature was like the labor literature of a century ago—looking toward a successor to capitalism,” wrote the late Studs Terkel in his Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (Pantheon Books, p. 309).

Business and government leaders clearly understood the gravity of the situation and the need for action. The pressure from “below” created consensus and coalitions at the “top” as the need for reform to fend off revolution became evident. “. . . F.D.R. was very significant in understanding how best to lead this sort of situation. . . . The industrialists who had some understanding recognized this right away. He could not have done what he did without the support of important elements of the wealthy class. They did not sabotage the programs. Just the opposite” (Ibid., pp. 268-69).

Two principles lay at the core of the ensuing big business-government consensus reforms, which came to be known as the New Deal reforms. The first was that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was not capable of resuscitating the badly depressed economy; it needed government’s visible hand. The second principle was that government intervention must be limited to stimulative and distributive measures, and that the management of industries and businesses should be left to the private sector. Facilitating and maintaining a certain level of purchasing power in the market was considered crucial to the New Deal package. While this would provide relief to the economically hard pressed, and thus reduce social tension, it would also stimulate the economy and promise stable growth and rising profitability.

Regardless of the degree of the effectiveness of the New Deal reform package, the fact remains that it rescued U.S. capitalism—just as Social-Democratic reforms rescued the economies of West European countries. Combined with what the late Ernest Mandel called “extra-economic” factors (such as pliant labor leadership and peaceful trade unionism, establishment of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, Cold War ideology and the suppression or pacification of any possible dissent, and relative decline in the price of oil and other raw materials in the immediate post-WW II period), the New Deal and other government-sponsored reforms ushered in a period of rapid economic expansion that came to be known as the “golden years of US capitalism,” which lasted until around 1970.

While the pressure from below played a key role in compelling the ruling establishment to carry out the New Deal and other welfare state programs, a number of other factors also contributed to the realization of those programs. One such factor was the emergence of an alternative economic model to capitalism from the ruins of the two world wars and Great Depression: the centrally-planned economies of the Soviet Union and its allies. The emergence of the rival economic system, despite its bureaucratic and dictatorial character, further exposed the unjust character of market mechanism because while in the 1930s the capitalist West was suffering from economic depression, unemployment, and poverty, the Soviet and other centrally-planned economies were enjoying impressive rates of growth—with no unemployment, homelessness, or hunger.

The popularity of the Soviet-type economic system at the time also meant that many of the colonial and other less-developed areas of the world combined their anti-colonial and anti-imperial national liberation struggles with demands for government-sponsored models of socialist-oriented or “non-capitalist” development. In the core capitalist countries of the West, too, demands for reform and voices of revolution were frequently heard during the widespread protest demonstrations of the 1930s. Anti-capitalist sentiments and demands to harness or to do away with the skittish, unreliable and, at times, brutal forces of market mechanism in favor of regulating and/or managing national economies were heard not only among the Left and working classes but also in the ranks of the middle and lower-middle classes.

Although the fear of total economic collapse in the face of the Depression, and the “threat of revolution,” compelled government and business leaders to embark on reform in order to fend off revolution, proponents of unbridled market mechanism never really accepted or reconciled with those reforms as permanent features of capitalism. Not surprisingly, soon after the Depression turned to expansion in the immediate postwar period, and Western capitalism regained its lost confidence, the financial oligarchy and government leaders began to introduce “restructuring” measures that would undermine the New Deal reforms and revive the pre-Depression model of market fundamentalism.

Just as the rival economic system of the Soviet Union and its allies, which guaranteed basic needs and job security for their citizens, indirectly contributed to the implementation of the New Deal and Social-Democratic reforms in the industrialized West, the collapse of that rival system is now contributing to the retrogressive process of reviving pre-Depression market orthodoxy. Not only has the collapse of the Soviet-type economies opened up vast markets and huge reservoirs of cheap labor in places such as the former Soviet Union, China, and India, it has also served as grounds for capitalist triumphalism—and its self-assured or self-righteous promotion of trickledown economics.

Many people believe that efforts to reverse the New Deal reforms began with the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980. Evidence shows, however, that such efforts, pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations, began long before the election of Ronald Reagan to presidency. As Alan Nasser, professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia (Washington), points out, “The foundations of neoliberalism were established in economic theory by liberal Democrats at the Brookings Institution, and in political practice by the Carter administration.”

Reagan picked the Democrat’s timid agenda of gradual return to economic liberalism and ran with it, replacing the rhetoric of capitalism-with-a-human-face with the imperious, self-righteous rhetoric of rugged individualism that greed and self-interest are virtues to be nurtured.

Neither President Clinton changed the course of neoliberal corporate welfare policies of Reaganomics, nor is President Obama hesitating to carry out those policies. This is clearly reflected in his administration’s supply-side restructuring  policies whose core principle consists of redistributing national resources in favor of the rich and powerful—cutting the critically-need social spending on basic needs to pay Wall Street gamblers and Pentagon contractors.

Perhaps a most sinister neoliberal strategy to roll back the New Deal and other poverty-reducing reforms has been deliberate creation of budget deficits in order to force cuts in social spending. This has often been accomplished by a combination of drastic tax cuts for the wealthy along with drastic hikes in military spending. As this combination creates big budget deficits, it then forces cuts in non-military public spending as a way to fill the budget gaps that are thus created.

The Obama administration has, indeed, escalated this creepy strategy by bailing out the Wall Street gamblers, financing multiple wars of choice and more than 800 military bases around the world, and then cutting social spending in an effort to reduce the national debt and budget deficits thus generated.

Another strategy of reviving the pre-New Deal laissez faire economics has been the increasing use of various schemes of outsourcing and privatization. The outsourcing of public services to private hands pervades all areas of state responsibility. Perhaps a most notorious example of this policy is the case of the Pentagon/security contracting. The services outsourced by the Pentagon are no longer limited to the relatively simple or routine tasks and responsibilities such as food and sanitation services. More importantly, they include contracts for services that are highly sophisticated and strategic in nature, such as the contracting of security services to corporate private armies, or modern-day mercenaries.

Reporting on the steadily rising trend of outsourcing, Scott Shane and Ron Nixon of the New York Times reported, “Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.”

The policy of privatization and outsourcing has led the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means, to surreptitiously “move a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002,” reports Pam Martens, a freelance investigative reporter. Martens further writes:

“From 2002 to 2005, HUD transferred in excess of $2.4 billion of defaulted mortgages insured by its sibling, the FHA, into the hands of Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns while providing the firms with wide latitude to foreclose, restructure or sell off in bundles to investors. HUD retained a minority interest of 30 to 40 percent in each joint venture. Citigroup was awarded the 2002 and 2004 joint ventures; Lehman Brothers the 2003; Bear Stearns the 2005.

“What the program effectively did was allow the biggest retail banks in the country to get accelerated payment on their defaulted, FHA-insured, single family mortgage loans while allowing another set of the biggest investment banks to make huge profits in fees for bundling and selling off the loans as securitizations. Once the loans were securitized (sold off to investors) they were no longer the problem of HUD or the Wall Street bankers. The loans conveniently disappeared from the radar screen and the balance sheet. The family’s fate had been sold off by HUD to Wall Street in exchange for a small piece of the action.  Wall Street then sold off the family’s fate to thousands of investors around the world for a large piece of the action.”

Outsourcing policies are bound to be further accelerated by the rising budget deficits of many states and municipalities, and their need to sell off public property or outsource their traditional services in order to raise funds to finance their budgetary needs. These include outsourcing the maintenance of parks, the management of toll roads, the collection of waste, the operation of municipal neighborhood centers, and more. For example, according to a recent MSNBC report, in the two years since Mitch Daniels was elected governor in Indiana, “the state has leased the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road to an outside company for the next 75 years for $3.8 billion, hired vendors for $1.16 billion over 10 years to process welfare applications, and brought in a company to serve food at a mental hospital.”

While cash-strapped states and other local governments can generate quick cash by privatizing public property or outsourcing public services, they forgo long-term opportunities of income generation from such properties and services.

Another Wall Street plot to rob the people of their social safety net programs is the recently renewed attack on the once-sacred entitled programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Having piled up huge sums of national debt and deficit (through bank bailouts, military spending, and tax cuts for the affluent), Wall Street champions, firmly ensconced at the Congress and the White House, are now singing the “fiscal responsibility” song as a prelude to chip away at Social Security and other entitlements. This ominous scheme is clearly reflected in  President Obama’s recently appointed “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” a bi-partisan group that is tasked with reviewing the Social Security and other entitlements in an effort to further “trim” social spending in order to pay for the sins of major banks and military contractor.

The bipartisan nature of the attack on Social Security indicates that the plan to undercut economic safety net programs cannot be blamed solely on the blatently neoliberal Republicans. It shows that, with few exceptions, Democrats are as much indebted and committed to the powerful financial interests as are Republicans. The neoliberal economic policies of the Obama administration, crafted by his economic team of ex-bankers/Wall Street advisors, should dispel any illusions that he is committed to “change” in favor of the people.

The New Deal and other basic needs programs were put in place not so much because of F.D.R.’s or Keynes’s genius, or the goodness of their heart, as they were because of the compelling pressure from the people. Freed (or feeling free) from that pressure, the government, as the executive body of the financial/economic oligarchy, is now trying to undermine those social safety net programs, and revive the pre-New Deal/pre-Keynesian economic orthodoxy, that is, the economic model of the survival of the fittest. This sinister, profit-driven effort at undermining the poor and working people’s hard-won basic needs programs can be stopped only through a renewed and compelling pressure from the grassroots—pressure that must be exerted not through the Democratic Party machine but independent of the so-called two-party system.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, teaches Economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

There seems to be some confusion about who are the real terrorists these days. Allow me to shed some light on the issue.  (more…)

Dear Paul Riede,

Thank you for changing the caption on the photograph that accompanied the article about the vigil for Dr. Dhafir. Dr. Dhafir was very upset about the caption and he will be pleased to hear that it has been corrected.

We would also be grateful if you would make a correction for your print edition of the Post-Standard and put some mechanism in place so that this error does not continue to happen.

We hope you will publish attorney Steve Downs OpEd on the case to help your readers have a better understanding of the case.

Sincerely,
Katherine Hughes
For the Dr. Dhafir Support Committee

FYI – I corresponded with your reporter, John O’Brien (who covered the Dr. Dhafir case for 14 weeks) on this very issue of whether Dr. Dhafir’s case was a “terrorism” case or not.  And your paper has written several editorial including this one, Playing Loose With Terrorism, so we are perplexed as to why your paper continues to smear Dr. Dhafir.

In a time and place where Muslims have learned it’s prudent to be silent, we should be especially grateful to Shamshad Ahmad for having the courage to write his book “Rounded Up.” (more…)

When Najibullah Zazi pled “guilty” to “plotting a suicide bomb attack on New York City subways with al Qaeda training” last week, the Feds assured us yet again they’d thwarted “one of the most serious terrorist threats to our nation since September 11, 2001, “as Attorney General Eric Holder put it. No wonder anyone with even a shred of decency cries for an end to the War-on-Liberty-Disguised-as-a-War-on-Terror: the case against Mr. Zazi is about as substantive as a politician’s promise.

Which explains why the man has steadfastly asserted his innocence since his arrest last September – until the goons railroading him threatened his parents: “The U.S Attorney in the Eastern District did a very good job exerting pressure,” crowed New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. “[Zazi’s] mother stood the chance of being arrested [on immigration charges] … he realized if he didn’t cooperate his family would be significantly impacted.”

Twenty-four-year-old Najibullah Zazi is one of those cunning terrorists whom only our rulers would suspect of being more than a nice guy. After his arrest last September, one friend said, “I never saw any wrong acts.” Said another, “He was a very normal, very life-loving guy.” A third remembered how typically American Najib seemed after emigrating from Afghanistan with his family to Queens, New York ten years ago: “he and Zazi used to play pool and computer games and … Zazi was interested in brand names – ‘nice clothes, nice shoes, everything.’” That dovetails with his ambition to earn money rather than blow people up: “He said he didn’t want to go to college,” one employer reported of the high-school drop-out. “He wanted to make money.” A step-uncle called the wannabe tycoon “a dumb kid, believe me,” but a devoted son, “basically a left shoulder for his father.” Everyone professed shock at his arrest, period, let alone for terrorism. “He was not such a person,” an imam who knew the teen-aged Najib recalled. “He was busy with his work.”

Never mind: the government claims Najib is a terrorist, and the media dutifully lynches him while readers shriek for his blood. And what did this “dumb-kid”-cum-mastermind plot? According to an indictment from the United States Eastern District Court, he “together with others, did knowingly, intentionally, and without lawful authority conspire to use one or more weapons of mass destruction [and of course, we want only lawful authority conspiring to use WMD’s so we wind up with Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than Oklahoma City], to wit: explosive bombs and other similar explosive devices, against persons and property within the United States…” Translation: Najib supposedly hoped to bomb New York City’s subways a la the explosions that killed 52 people in London’s Tube during the summer of 2005. Adding insult to injury, he scheduled his mayhem for the new federal holiday of 9/11.

Much of the “proof” for this is what prosecutors used to dignify as “circumstantial evidence” and the rest of us call “gossip” – but the Amerikan Homeland now considers a sufficient basis for arresting a man and holding him without bond. For starters, Najib has travelled to his native Afghanistan “at least four times since” 1999, the year he and his family moved to the U.S., likely because he had agreed to an arranged marriage with a cousin still living there. The couple has two children, which probably made his visits all the more important. Alas, Najib’s wife resides in his home-town of Peshawar. Aficionados of the War on Terror will recognize that region as one renowned for its terrorists’ training camps. And, indeed, the FBI extracted a confession from Najib that he attended Al Qaeda’s tutorials. Recall that the Bush Administration proudly tortured “terrorists” for confessions, a.k.a. “intelligence,” while Obama’s prefers to “look ahead,” i.e., it refuses to indict officials for war crimes.

After his marriage, Najib grew a beard – a “bushy black” one, no less. He also “gave up American fashion for tunics and more modest traditional clothing.” We civilians might suppose he was trying to please his new wife or perhaps even preparing to move to Afghanistan to join her and the kids, but Warriors on Terror know better. Najib was radicalizing.

Hence his move to Colorado. I know, I know: shouldn’t a terrorist serious about jihad have remained in densely populated New York? Not diabolical Najib. He not only “passed a criminal background check,” throwing us even further off guard, he also began working as a driver for ABC Airport Shuttle. Airport: get it? And he continued his act as a good American. “Dispatcher Tony Gonzales described Zazi as a ‘hardworking guy. No trouble, no problem whatsoever,’ Gonzales said. ‘Very quiet guy. He’s always on time. When we give him a pickup, he always does it.’”

The government does allege a couple of actual problems – if we can believe lying Leviathan and ignore its totalitarian methods of collecting evidence. First, the State claims that Najib’s laptop contained nine pages of handwritten notes on making bombs. And how does it know that? By approaching him openly with a warrant? No. By searching his car after pretty much stealing it: AP reported that “Zazi’s rental car [was] towed for a parking violation, according to Zazi’s attorney, Arthur Folsom. FBI agents search[ed] the car and [found] a laptop…” Yet thieves and liars who pull such dirty tricks expect us to believe them when they tell us what they found.

A real war needs no such gimmicks. But the fake wars the Feds now fight, whether on terror or drugs, require suborning poor or otherwise vulnerable people, preying on disillusioned teens, inciting folks who would otherwise mind their own mundane business to embroil themselves in what may seem the thrilling demimonde of illegal drugs or fatwa against the U.S.

Najib and some of his friends were also caught on a surveillance tape purchasing more hair dye than our rulers assume anyone needs (some commentators pooh-pooh the quantity’s being “unusual”). Najib also surfed the net for information on buying other questionable products, such as muriatic acid. He may have a reasonable explanation – a form of hydrochloric acid, muriatic acid cleans “really filthy bathrooms” – but should he have to divulge it? The Constitution never empowers the Feds to spy on citizens; anything unconstitutional remains so even if Congress legalizes it. Domestic spying under the USA Patriot Act and FISA unearthed these details about Najib; that same spying could selectively assemble minutiae from my life or yours to “prove” us terrorists, too. But even if every one of the government’s charges is true, even if Najib were planning the worst attack since 9/11, the damage he might have inflicted doesn’t begin to compare with Leviathan’s destruction of our liberty while allegedly pursuing “terrorists.”

After buying too much hair-dye, Najib drove to his old stomping grounds of New York City last September. The FBI’s timeline has him “conduct[ing] the attack on Manhattan subway lines on Sept. 14, Sept. 15, or Sept. 16, 2009,” but what the heck – that’s close enough to September 11 for government work. Cops tossed his car at the George Washington Bridge after using a subterfuge similar to the “parking violation” with which they later swiped it: they “stopped” him to conduct “a random search of his vehicle for drugs.” They also pestered his friends during his time in the City; in one of the apartments they searched, this time with a warrant, “agents found, among several other items, an electronic weight scale in the closet. The scale and batteries both contained Zazi’s fingerprints.” Also setting the Warriors on Terror atwitter was a cache of backpacks – yes, I kid you not, that common tote among New Yorkers who, sans cars, must carry their bottles of water, books, and snacks around town with them somehow. Even more menacing: the backpacks were “new.” I don’t know about you, but items cluttering almost any American home hardly spell “terrorist” to me. If touching a scale and batteries or buying backpacks has become a criminal act, we’d all better hunt a good lawyer. Or perhaps they’re only criminal acts for Moslems.

One piece of evidence authorities didn’t uncover in all this searching is the bomb Najib was supposedly concocting. There were no explosives in his home, those of his family and friends, or in his car. The Feds claim they did find traces of acetone in the kitchenette of a hotel room Najib rented: that supposedly proves he was cooking up explosives from the ingredients he’d bought. But acetone is a common solvent.

This embarrassing lack has cops resorting to “the-dog-ate-my-homework” sort of excuses the rest of us abandoned after grade school: “One possibility being considered by counterterrorism agents is that whatever device or devices were built in the hotel room, they were detonated at some isolated location in Colorado as a test run of the bomb recipe. In recent weeks, agents in that area have been searching for a possible location of such a test explosion, the two officials said.” We all know how fiendishly clever terrorists are, but come on: Najib managed to shake his heavy surveillance so he could set off loud BOOMS raising very noticeable plumes of smoke and debris? Why am I reminded of Lt. Dunbar and his fire that alerts his Indian neighbors in Dances With Wolves? Alas, and not surprisingly, the “search for a possible location” has yielded zip.

When Najib flew from New York back to Colorado, “authorities” interrogated him for three days before arresting him. “Why would I have an issue with America?” their bewildered victim asked the media covering this circus. “Nobody wants to leave America. People die to come here.” He told another reporter, “’This is one of the best countries in the world. … It gives you every single right.’” Except when its regime needs a foil to justify its tyranny.

Najib withstood the Federal thumbscrews until the government dragged his mother into things. Since then he’s been “cooperating,” to America’s vast shame. Meanwhile, the Feds distract us from their brutality, their persecution of a taxpayer without many resources who’s desperately sacrificing himself for his family, by turning the case into a debate over trying “terrorists” in civilian versus military courts. Beneath such unconstitutional heartlessness lie the ruins of a young man’s life, his hopes and dreams and blasted future.

It’s difficult to assess the government’s allegations when it withholds so much. Despite its lies, its trumped-up “evidence,” and its spurning of Constitutional search warrants for the fishing expeditions FISA and the Patriot Act allow, Najib may be guilty. Perhaps he really was about to bomb New York’s subways. But we’re unlikely ever to know: in the best tradition of the Star Chamber and in violation of the Sixth Amendment, the Feds throw the cloak of “national security” around cases like this and operate largely in secret. Maybe they really are concerned about the country’s safety. But secrecy also hides ginned-up accusations, sloppy investigations, arbitrary whims, and tyranny. Meanwhile, officials insist we trust them, that we accept their judgment rather than weigh the evidence for ourselves: “Holder offered no new details of the investigation, but said the case has shown counterterrorism agencies succeeded in disrupting the plot.”

“There are people both in this country and also abroad who are committed to harming the American people and they’re actively plotting to do so,” Holder intoned last October. Yep. And like the Attorney General, they work for the U.S. government.

Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.

Reprinted with permission. Originally published at www.thenewamerican.com

Thursday, March 25th, 7 p.m.  New York City

“Homegrown terrorists” stopped dead in their tracks, or victims of FBI entrapment? A panel of speakers will discuss these cases in light of the FBI’s campaign since 9/11 that includes preemptive prosecution, the targeting of Muslim communities and the use of agent provocateurs and informants to entrap innocent people.

Panelists include:

El-Hajj Mauri’ Saalakhan, Director of Operations for The Peace and Justice Foundation – a Muslim led grassroots human rights organization based in Metropolitan Washington, DC, and lead convener for the May 6, 2010, mass mobilization for political prisoner, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

Alicia Mc Williams, aunt of David Williams, one of the Newburgh Four, the men charged with the attempted bombing of the Riverdale Temple.

Faisal Hashmi, brother of Fahad Hashmi, who has been in pre-trial solitary confinement for over two years under the charges of providing material aid to Al-Qaeda.

Lynne Jackson, founder and director of Project Salam, an organization devoted to researching and documenting the United States Justice Department’s post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecutions and convictions to determine whether, in each case, there was substantial evidence of criminality or simply evidence unfairly concocted and/or twisted to convict innocent Muslims.

Sponsored by: National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Middle Eastern Law Students Association (MELSA), Islamic Law Students Association (ILSA), Law Students for Human Rights (LSHR), WESPAC

More Information

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.

At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.

At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time.

Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions.

There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.

The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who authorized illegal torture.

At the same time another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect.

The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare coverage and killed and maimed in elective wars and being the world’s police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?

In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world – much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela – combined.

The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer views of sites, and travel.

The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the world.

The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big businesses.

Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.

Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

It is time. Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Quigley77@gmail.com