Circumscribed Debate on Rising Unemployment Shows Need for Genuine Left Wing in American Politics

It's rather disheartening to see the way that the ongoing economic downturn gets spun in the news media. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the official unemployment rate went up into the double-digits for first time since April 1983. Specifically, 10.2 percent of American workers - 15.7 million people - were out of work in October. Up from 9.8 percent in September. And that's just the narrow U-3 analysis of the job loss numbers. The more accurate U-6 analysis - that includes more categories of unemployed and underemployed workers - now indicates that we have 17.5 percent unemployment. One bright spot in this situation is that the Obama administration's BLS seems to be working assiduously to produce more accurate numbers than they did under the Bush administration. But the numbers themselves are dismal. The latest Massachusetts numbers are also approaching historic highs - 9.3 percent unemployment in September, but we'll have to wait for November 19th for the October numbers - and we can expect them to continue matching the upward trend of the national numbers in the near term.

However, the center-left Democratic and the center-right Republican analysts and politicians regularly quoted in the news media do not seem as exercised about the huge job losses as average Americans of all stripes are on the ground. The Democrats - including left Democrats like economist Paul Krugman - hold the opinion that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year has generally worked to plan. The Gross Domestic Product is up, and President Barack Obama's forces are laying claim to helping create 3 million new jobs since the stimulus plan went into effect. Left Democrats believe that more stimulus - in the form of a big federal jobs program rather than just more huge cash infusions to huge corporations and banks - is needed, and that a "jobless recovery" isn't a real recovery at all. Sentiments that I'd say we certainly agree with here at Open Media Boston. But Democrats across the board have generally accepted the wisdom dating back to the end of the Bush administration that we were going to have double-digit unemployment this year and next, no matter what.

Republicans like Irwin M. Stelzer of the neoconservative publication The Weekly Standard agree - although they spend most of their time laying the blame for the economic crisis on the Obama administration. Which is more than a little disingenuous given the role both major parties played in the creation of last year's financial collapse.

And I just don't think that's an acceptable response to a crisis of this magnitude. Not that the left Democrats aren't at least on the same planet as I am. They are. Witness, for example, how deftly Krugman deflects conservative attempts to overstate the long-term risks of increases to the national debt on today's younger workers caused by concomitant increases in stimulus spending by pointing out that younger workers who begin their working lives during economic downturns never recover financially from the losses they sustain. Putting a stronger burden on public spending when they get older. Far better, he says, to make sure that jobs programs are created that benefit unemployed and underemployed workers - which in turn can spark a full economic economy that floats all boats, not just the boats of the rich.

Yet even Krugman doesn't go nearly as far as is needed to truly reverse economic course to the benefit of working people. And as I've said, he's on the left of the Democratic Party spectrum. He is among the best they have to offer in my estimation. But the mainstream Democrats in the highest levels of government, think tanks, foundations and academia espouse positions indistinguishable from the trickle-down nostrums of mainstream Republicans - who want to see stimulus money go almost entirely to big corporations with little or no aid to working families. While the right-wing of the Republicans has taken to calling openly for destruction of government and its replacement by some kind of hyper-nationalist, nativist, Christian theocratic state and/or a more strongly corporatist state.

Now I don't want to "wave high the red banner" in every editorial, nor do I want to simply repeat the same sentiments over and over again, but I have to protest public discourse that starts with fairly weak social democrats like Krugman on the center-left and ends with ... well ... the likes of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck on the far right.

To give an idea of what I think is missing from public discourse, let's look at the Bush and Obama stimulus plans from the perspective of the actual left-wing. The broadly socialist left in this country which doesn't yet really have a party vehicle to hang its collective hat on - although the Green Party, the Labor Party and a few other small parties fill that bill as best they can. To the socialist left, the so-called financial services sector - the giant banks and investment houses whose primary business is making money turn into more money through the use of increasingly complex financial tricks - is anathema and should be abolished. Not fawned over. Not treated with kid gloves. Or even sternly regulated as social democrats like Krugman would do if in power. But wiped out entirely as parasitic entities that produce nothing of value and cause massive social destabilization and dislocation with every investment they make without thought to consequences. We would certainly not give them more money to play with or call them "too big to fail." We'd say "you have succeeded in enriching yourselves and your investor cronies, and you've hurt billions of other people and the planet with your business decisions, but you have failed as any kind of vehicle for social investment and economic progress ... so you are done now."

We would arrest and prosecute the leaders of virtually all financial services firms for various "high crimes and misdemeanors." We'd use the billions in public money that are currently flowing in their direction to fund, for example, the swift expansion of non-profit financial services entities like credit unions that already operate under strict guidelines that ensure that they serve the broad public interest. Any small or regional independent banks that remained would be enjoined to behave like credit unions. We would expand the amount of money available for public spending by an order of magnitude by reinstituting progressive taxation in this country. We would then cut the military budget to something like one-tenth of its current size - withdrawing all troops from all foreign adventures in the process - and stand-down all nuclear forces as a prelude to negotiating a comprehensive nuclear disarmament treaty. These measures would release a further flood of money for social spending within a few years of their implementation.

Having effectively wiped out major credit card companies, we'd move to wipe out the credit card debt of working Americans. (We'd also eliminate student debt, but let's not stray to far from my main argument here.) New and heavily regulated credit instruments could be issued by the credit unions and perhaps some kind of national bank - depending on what we decide to do with the Federal Reserve System (an open question since not all of its functions would be objectionable to left-wingers).

The stock market would then also have to be heavily regulated and its operations possibly restricted to non-essential industries. Core industries would be restructured along more democratic lines, followed by direct government investment and oversight. The giant jobs programs we need to make a full recovery would then be directed towards those industries with an eye to rebuilding crumbling public infrastructure as a first order of business. Money would also be poured into support for small businesses in the ancillary and service sectors. Labor regulations would be beefed up across the board, and unions would play a vastly expanded role in political and economic affairs. It should be mentioned that most left-wingers do not, as a rule, think we should nationalize every industry and the financial system in general. There has been much debate about centralized and decentralized economic models on the left. Anarchist and Green thinking have played important roles in furthering this debate, and will continue to do so. So it's a red herring to assume that we'd just wreck the economy by trying to run every aspect of it directly from Washington. Or that every kind of left-wing view is just warmed-over Stalinism.

I could go on, but I think the viewing public catches my drift.

The thing is, such left-wing views aren't simply ignored, they are actively kept off the table by the leadership of both major political parties and pretty much all elite opinion-making institutions - in government, think-tanks, foundations and academia.

The absence of a real left in public discourse thus creates a vacuum on key political and economic issues. And those forces that block the rise of a socialist left, should think well about the fact that growing anti-corporate sentiment among the U.S. population is being now crystallized not just by the suppressed left, but also by the far right of Nativists and Racists and Teabaggers (oh my!). And those forces are trying to take power in the Republican Party. Something Krugman expressed well-considered anxiety about just this week. Now on the left there is perennially a hue-and-cry raised by one quarter or another that fascism is just over the horizon. But when you add a corporatist ideology to a populist right-wing mass movement - and then you give it real political power, rather than allowing an opening to the left - that's what you get. Fascism. I don't think that will quite come to pass. And I sure as hell hope that doesn't quite come to pass.

That's one big reason why my colleagues and I work hard to make Open Media Boston larger and more relevant publication with each passing week. We want to help push left-wing ideas more into the mainstream in our editorial and opinion pages. We think they deserve to be there, and they are needed if we are going to have a sane outcome to the ever-expanding list of crises that beset our city, state, nation ... and world.

"Socialism or Barbarism" was the famous slogan popularized by the Marxist humanist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis - a fellow Greek - in the middle of the last century. I know it sounds like a dramatic thing to say, but if you were to ask me why I founded Open Media Boston, I'd say "well, because I fundamentally agree with old Castoriadis and his contemporaries ... we either get to a more equitable, democratic and just political economic system or we'll get leaders like Sarah Palin who will take us all to perdition."

People like Obama and Governor Deval Patrick are not going to be able to stop the coming right-wing populist storm - at least not as long as the Democratic Party works tirelessly to keep the a genuine left from rising up angry. Modern neoliberal Democrats - and their intellectual cadres in think tanks, foundations, academia and allied non-profits - are bred to be guardians of the corporate status quo, not standard bearers for human liberation. But as the bases of the capitalist economy - most especially our carbon-based energy systems - disintegrate, more people will be immiserated. And immiserated people are desperate people. And desperate people listen to demagogues. And since the demagogues of the far right are not children of the Enlightenment like most of the rest of the American political spectrum, and desperate working people are not particularly interested in the niceties of formal debate, but are instead looking for simple clear answers of the type that the far right excels at providing, there is a clear and present danger that the far right will really achieve political dominance over the next decade. When the neoliberal nostrums like the current corporate stimulus plan fail to put Americans back to work, the stage will be set for state and federal leaders that will make Bush Jr. look like a ACLU member (and we've already got a few now). If we aren't able to establish a solid left pole in American political life by that time, then I fear for the future of this nation.

But do I also fear that an ascendant left might throw up demagogues of our own and push some Soviet-style totalitarian mockery of democratic socialism? Yes, I do. However, I think that the left has done a great deal more soul-searching about the dangers of totalitarianism than the other parts of the political spectrum. I think we understand it better, and I think we have much more effective mechanisms for checking its potential dominance democratically than the political center or right-wing do. In fact, I think we've gone so far away from that kind of organization that we've undercut our own effectiveness. That, though, is a discussion for another day. This reverie has gone on long enough. Holla back in the comment section below if you have something to say about this editorial.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston