What are politicians for? What do they do?

At school we are taught that politicians are chosen by us, the voters, to represent us in the making of laws and in the government of our city, state, and country. This arrangement supposedly ensures that the views of the majority prevail – the essence of democracy (rule by the people).

This picture is not totally false, but it is also very far from the full truth. It does not account for the persistent divergence that researchers have found between policy outcomes and public opinion.[1] For example, no mainstream politician favors ‘Medicare for All’ even though the scheme has the support of a clear majority of Americans – 69% according to one recent poll. 

The main problem with this picture is what it leaves out. It leaves out the most powerful people in our society, who are not the politicians but the capitalist class – that is, the wealthy and those who represent their interests in the top management of big banks and corporations. (There is admittedly some overlap between the two groups – Donald Trump, for instance.)

Almost all candidates for public office depend on capitalists for money – it is extremely expensive to stand for office – and for coverage in the capitalist-owned media. Capitalists play a crucial though largely hidden role in narrowing the range of choices offered to the voters.[2] Capitalists exploit this dependence to exert a strong influence on the processes of lawmaking and government, either directly or through lobbyists and trade associations. 

To understand the role played by politicians we must therefore examine the triangular relations between capitalists, politicians, and voters. The basic relationship is that between the capitalist class and the mass of the population – the 1% and the 99%, to use the terms favored by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Apart from a few mavericks, however, capitalists prefer to remain in the shadows and deal with the public through hired intermediaries such as pollsters, specialists in Public Relations, and politicians. These people, and politicians in particular, are the public face of the capitalist class in the realm of public policy.

ALEC

One institution specifically designed to facilitate interaction between politicians and capitalists in public policy is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Founded in 1973 by conservative activist Paul Weyrich and a group of Republican state legislators, ALEC aims to ‘make national policy by acting incrementally at the state level.’[3] Through an array of ‘task forces’ – currently ten of them — ALEC prepares ‘model bills’ for the use of its members. State legislators belonging to ALEC need not know how to draft legislation: they can just select texts from ALEC’s online library of model bills, introduce them in state legislatures, and push them through the legislative process into state law.

The internal structure of ALEC accurately reflects the division of labor between capitalists as the power behind the scenes and politicians as their public face. There are two boards of directors – a public board consisting solely of state legislators and a ‘private enterprise board’ consisting solely of representatives of big corporations. Only the identities of members of the public board are made public. Meetings of task forces are held in secret, so outsiders do not know how the legislators and corporate representatives on them interact.

ALEC has recently extended its activity down to the city/county level by setting up a new division named the American City County Exchange ‘for local elected officials and the private sector.’

Of course, ALEC does not represent all local and state politicians – only those most subservient to the capitalist class. Nevertheless, it has an extensive presence and is very active. The Center for Media and Democracy has identified about a thousand current state legislators in all fifty states, mostly Republicans, ‘known to be involved in’ ALEC as well as hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions.[4]

How politicians talk to us

As we have seen, capitalists wish to conceal the extent of their influence from the general public. In general, they seek to minimize their presence as political actors in the public consciousness. That is why politicians, when they address the public, never so much as mention their close relations with capitalists. A taboo is placed on an essential aspect of their professional activity in order to sustain the pretense that the picture painted in civics textbooks corresponds to reality. 

This also helps explain why communication between politicians and the public is so one-sided. They talk to the public. No opportunity is provided for open-ended dialogue. The only questions tolerated are those posed by establishment journalists who can be trusted to observe ‘the rules of the game’ — and politicians can evade even their questions with impunity if they wish. Members of the audience who interrupt politicians’ speeches with comments or questions – ‘hecklers’ – are ignored or told off like naughty children. They are liable to be thrown out or even beaten up.

Perhaps fearing that they may inadvertently break a taboo, politicians are loath to talk in public at length about substantive policy matters. Consider the victory speeches of Harris and Biden on November 7. Harris spoke first. Most of her speech consisted of vague rhetoric and personal recognition of colleagues, friends, and relatives, but she did devote a few carefully chosen words to policy issues (omitting healthcare, no doubt in deference to Biden’s opposition to ‘Medicare for All’). Biden said nothing at all about policy.  

It is worth pondering why American politicians feel obliged to sacrifice their domestic privacy and put their whole family on public display, including young children or grandchildren – arguably a form of child abuse. Isn’t this a desperate attempt to compensate for the alienation caused by their structural inability to relate to their fellow citizens in an open and honest way? They cannot reveal to voters the factors that shape and constrain their policy positions, but at least they can grant them the illusion of an intimate connection. What should be private is made public because what should by rights be public has to be kept private.    

The ultimate function of the politician is to be like a buffer protecting the capitalist class from mass discontent. In order to be effective as a buffer he may sometimes find it necessary to give voice to the grievances of ordinary people, but this need not lead to any corrective action. 

Barack Obama was a master at this double game. Campaigning in the mid-West, he thundered against regional companies such as Maytag and Exelon. And yet these same companies, confident that he would do nothing to harm their interests, gave him large donations. Speaking to audiences of workers, Obama denounced Maytag’s decision in 2004 to close the refrigerator plant in Galesburg, Illinois, entailing the loss of 1,600 jobs to Mexico. But he never raised the issue with Maytag directors Henry and Lester Crown, despite his ‘special relationship’ with them.[5] Later, as president, having bailed out the banks during the financial crisis of 2008, Obama expressed dissatisfaction that they were continuing to operate as before. When he met with the CEOs of fifteen top banks in spring 2009, they complained about his ‘populist rhetoric’; his riposte was that his administration ‘are the only ones standing between you and the pitchforks’ – a vivid expression of the buffer metaphor.[6] Obama never did do anything to reform the banks.

What about Bernie? 

Some politicians do not depend on capitalist donors but collect small donations from ordinary people. This occurs mostly at the local level, where campaigning does not require so much money. At the national level Bernie Sanders pursued this strategy with a measure of success in his bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He broke the taboo and spoke openly in public about the dependence of his political rivals on ‘the billionaire class.’ I suspect that this, rather than any of his specific policy positions, is the main reason for the hatred that the political establishment has for Sanders.   

However, when Biden won the nomination Sanders undertook to support him and stopped talking about this subject. Since then he too has observed the taboo. His silence has not sufficed to win him the trust of the establishment or a place in the new administration. 

Notes

[1] Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press, 2008). The author teaches at Vanderbilt University. See also: Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (Routledge, 2016) 

[2] See: ‘Selecting a US President: The Invisible Primaries,’ World Socialist Review, No. 22, pp. 68-70.  

[3] For more detailed discussion of ALEC, see: Joe R. Hopkins, http://www.wspus.org/2016/09/who-or-what-is-alec/. 

[4] https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

[5] ‘The Politics of the “Lesser Evil”,’ World Socialist Review, No. 22, p. 75. 

[6] Barack Obama, A Promised Land (Crown, 2020), pp. 295-6; https://www.politico.com/story/2009/04/inside-obamas-bank-ceos-meeting-020871

Stephen Shenfield

 In Guatemala security forces used batons and tear gas to beat back another  caravan of deperate migrants bound for the United States. 

Between 7,000 and 8,000 migrants, including families with young children, have entered Guatemala since Friday, attempting to flee poverty and violence in a region suffering from the coronavirus pandemic and back-to-back hurricanes in November.

“We want the Guatemalans to let us past,” said Joaquin Ortiz, a Honduran in the caravan. “Because we’re not leaving here. We’re going to carry on. I want to get through because it’s horrible in our country. There’s nothing in Honduras.”

Espinal, a Honduran native explained, “I want a future for my girls … there’s no work over there in Honduras.”

If the migrants do get past, Mexico is preparing to halt them with its security forces.

Those who do reach the US border it is questionable that the newly installed Biden administration will welcome them. A Biden transition official advised the migrants not to make for the United States. Those who are seeking to claim asylum in the first few weeks of the new administration “need to understand they’re not going to be able to come into the United States immediately.” The official also emphasized that any immigration legislation proposed by the Biden administration will be for undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S., not those who are considering arriving now. Migrants “will not find when they get to the U.S. border that from Tuesday to Wednesday, things have changed overnight and ports are all open and they can come into the United States.”

Biden does wish to end the Trump administration practice that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico, known as the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP), but it will not be allowing all migrants to enter the U.S. at once as soon as Biden takes office, the official said.

“…now is not the time to make the journey,” the official said.

Incoming Biden administration to migrant caravan: Don’t come, you won’t get in immediately (nbcnews.com)

 In Guatemala security forces used batons and tear gas to beat back another  caravan of deperate migrants bound for the United States. 

Between 7,000 and 8,000 migrants, including families with young children, have entered Guatemala since Friday, attempting to flee poverty and violence in a region suffering from the coronavirus pandemic and back-to-back hurricanes in November.

“We want the Guatemalans to let us past,” said Joaquin Ortiz, a Honduran in the caravan. “Because we’re not leaving here. We’re going to carry on. I want to get through because it’s horrible in our country. There’s nothing in Honduras.”

Espinal, a Honduran native explained, “I want a future for my girls … there’s no work over there in Honduras.”

If the migrants do get past, Mexico is preparing to halt them with its security forces.

Those who do reach the US border it is questionable that the newly installed Biden administration will welcome them. A Biden transition official advised the migrants not to make for the United States. Those who are seeking to claim asylum in the first few weeks of the new administration “need to understand they’re not going to be able to come into the United States immediately.” The official also emphasized that any immigration legislation proposed by the Biden administration will be for undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S., not those who are considering arriving now. Migrants “will not find when they get to the U.S. border that from Tuesday to Wednesday, things have changed overnight and ports are all open and they can come into the United States.”

Biden does wish to end the Trump administration practice that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico, known as the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP), but it will not be allowing all migrants to enter the U.S. at once as soon as Biden takes office, the official said.

“…now is not the time to make the journey,” the official said.

Incoming Biden administration to migrant caravan: Don’t come, you won’t get in immediately (nbcnews.com)

There are apparently two anthropological camps, dubbed hawks and doves. The hawks argue that war is an evolved predisposition in humans dating back to when they had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Doves, meanwhile, argue that war has only emerged in recent millennia, motivated by changing social conditions.

 Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent more than 40 years researching the origins of war. Ferguson, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, notes that war is not the same thing as interpersonal violence or homicide. War implies organized, armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group. 

Ferguson argues that current evidence suggests that war was not always present but began as a result of societal changes—with evidence of war’s origins appearing at widely varying timestamps in different locations around the world. He estimates that the earliest signs of war appear between 10,000 B.C., or 12,000 years ago.

“But in some areas of the world you don’t see any signs of war develop until much more recently,” he says, noting that in both the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains there is no evidence of war until around 2,000 years ago.

Ferguson has studied the anthropological and archaeological records throughout ancient, and sometimes into more modern, human history. He says there is a lack of evidence of war or large-scale violence, in many places around the world throughout various periods of history. He has spent four decades researching and historically contextualizing the various origin points of war around the world. He has also contextualized incidents of group violence in humanity’s closest ape cousins, chimpanzees. He argues that war is not innate, evolutionary nor inevitable behavior for humans.

Ferguson writes: “Humans, they argue [doves], have an obvious capacity to engage in warfare, but their brains are not hardwired to identify and kill outsiders involved in collective conflicts. Lethal group attacks, according to these arguments, emerged only when hunter-gatherer societies grew in size and complexity and later with the birth of agriculture. Archaeology, supplemented by observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, allows us to identify the times and, to some degree, the social circumstances that led to the origins and intensification of warfare.”

Ferguson concludes: “It’s important for people to see that a world without war is a realistic possibility. Maybe not now, but a world without war is something we can aspire to realistically, and work toward. If you think that’s something that can never happen, well that fatalism is one of the main props that is keeping war going. It’s good to break out of that mindset.”

The full interview can be read here 

This historical anthropologist wants to upend the conventional wisdom about human nature and violence – Alternet.org

 Obama’s  administration made little to no progress in bridging the vast racial wealth divide. The failure to bridge racial economic inequality is not unique to the Obama presidency. Whether under Trump, Clinton, or either Bush, there has been little to no progress in bridging the economic divide for African Americans in wealth, home-ownership, and income.

Over Obama’s presidency, median Black wealth never returned to even its modest $10,700 from before the Great Recession. By 2013, it had dropped to just $1,700 — virtually nothing — even as white wealth rebounded.

The racial wealth divide in the latter half of the Obama presidency was the largest it’s been in the last 30 years. 

Income inequality remained virtually unchanged, too. In 2007, Black Americans earned about 60 percent as much as whites. By 2016, that had fallen to 58 percent.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, homeownership — the key source of wealth for most middle-class families — decreased for most Americans. But new Black homeowners were hit hardest, driving the Black homeownership rate down from 49 to just 44 percent, nearly 30 percentage points lower than the rate for white Americans.

Can we expect Joe Biden be the reversal of all this?

Biden Needs to Make Closing the Racial Wealth Divide a Priority on Day One (truthout.org)

Finally, justice is being served concerning the 2014 lead contaminated water and cases of legionnaires disease that caused deaths and irreparable damage to many in the Michigan city of Flint. The former governor of the state,Rick Snyder, and key members of his administration have been charged…with misdemeanor crimes, not felonies.

 In 2019, a special prosecutor who spent three years leading a criminal investigation of the Flint water scandal, was fired then the state’s prosecutors drop all criminal charges against eight people in the Flint water scandal and pledge to start the investigation from scratch. The state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, assumes responsibility. Whereas unofficial sources claim that the original investigators were seeking that the ex-governor should be charged with more serious crimes, such as involuntarily manslaughter. 

 The Socialist Standard once carried an article on the anti-humanitarian nature of imposing sanctions upon ones perceived enemies and describes such policies as akin to medieval siege tactics that hurt the civilian population rather than those who hold political politics.

Such strategies still persist despite a record of santions failing to achieve their aims. The government of Bashar Al-Assad has endured a decade-long civil war that has created its worst food and economic crisis. Yet the Assad regime still stands. The imposition of international sanctions has failed to bring any resolution.

Joshua Landis is a US-based Syria expert who heads the Center for Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University said it was naive to think that sanctions will merely affect al-Assad and his cronies.

 The lives of ordinary Syrians in regime-controlled territory has worsened immeasurably. The Syrian economy is in tatters. Syrians are grappling with hyperinflation, food shortages and joblessness with no end in sight. Queues outside bakeries and fuel stations have become the new normal while a shortage of electricity has adversely affected local businesses and exacerbated unemployment. When Lebanon went bankrupt last year, many Syrians who put their money in Lebanon’s banks lost their savings, too.

Until 2008, Syria exported wheat to neighbouring nations. But a drought in 2008 and a decade-long civil war turned Syria into a wheat importer. As production fell by half.  Syria needs to import 1.1 million tons (one million tonnes) of wheat a year to meet its requirements, and most of it used to come from Russia. But in 2020, Russia reduced its supplies. The price of bread shot up. Syria’s northeast, the breadbasket of the country that produced 60 percent of the total requirement, is under the control of the Kurdish.  US sanctions may permit limited  types of trade but often deters banks, insurers and shipping companies. NGOs estimate that prices of most daily products have gone up 30 percent due to sanctions

“Syria is a small market and it is simply not worth risking a US government lawsuit,” said Aron Lund, a researcher at the Swedish Defence Research Agency. “By restricting Syria’s fuel supply through oil trade sanctions and by backing Kurdish control over the eastern oil fields, the United States hurts the Syrian economy as a whole,” Lund said. “Tanks need gasoline to wage war, but farmers also need it to run their tractors, factories need the electricity, and civilians on all sides of the war depend on cars, buses and trucks being able to deliver people and goods.” 

US sanctions are intended to obstruct Syria’s reconstruction. Europe Union, too, has banned aid for Syria’s reconstruction. But reconstruction is a matter of the welfare of Syrian citizens. Authoritarian autocrats have never relinquished power for the well-being of their people.

As Lund explains,  pretending like you can wreck the regime’s economic base without simultaneously hurting ordinary Syrians – that’s dumb and dishonest.”

From here

  Many South Korean women are choosing not to have children. South Korean women are shunning marriage and family life. South Korea’s population declined for the first time, with 275,815 recorded births and 307,764 deaths last year. In 2019, the country’s fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has during her lifetime – stood at 0.92, the lowest among OECD countries.

The previous month, data revealed that almost one in five couples who married in 2015 were still childless. According to Statistics Korea, about 18% of the 216,008 couples who married that year had not had children, compared with just under 13% in 2012.

South Korea’s government has had little success in encouraging couples to have more children, despite incentives that include a one-off payment of 1m won [£666] for pregnant women and 6m won to married couples if they each take three months off work to look after their young children. Government incentives for young couples announced by the president, Moon Jae-in, ignore much bigger financial obstacles to starting a family, such as high education and housing costs.

“Since many South Korean women have jobs these days, they are reluctant to have babies because it is extremely difficult to work and raise a child at the same time,” said Kim Seong-kon, a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University. “Besides, pregnant women have to face serious disadvantages at work in South Korea. To make matters worse, many childcare facilities are not trustworthy, and good ones are hard to get into.”

‘Luxuries I can’t afford’: why fewer women in South Korea are having children | South Korea | The Guardian