WAPO Editorial 01-01-12: Is 2012 the end of the world as we know it?

By Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, Published: December 30 The last New Year’s Day in human history is here. You may not believe so, but millions do. They’re convinced that ancient Maya priests calculated Dec. 21, 2012, as the end of the world as we know it. These claims and warnings, prognostications and reassurances are on bookstore shelves, on Web sites, in museum exhibits and in tourist promotions. The global doomsday industry even has a name — 2012ology.

This is an interesting opinion piece, and it raises at least one question: Just WHY do people WANT to believe that the ancient Maya priests got this right? Clearly they DO want to believe it, because they CHOOSE to believe it. Just how much other stuff did the Maya priests get correct? How good has their track record been? How successful were they are preserving (conserving) mayan culture, saving it from the depardations of the Spainiards?

Apocalyptic anxiety is, if anything, reassuringly familiar. This most recent phenomenon taps into a well-established tradition in our society. Just this past year, religious broadcaster Harold Camping took two swings at predicting doomsday, pinpointing one date in May and, when the world emerged unscathed, one in October.

Perhaps the idea of the world coming to an end appeals because then, the question, "what can we do to prevent the world from coming to an and?" need not be asked. If the fate is sealed, we merely need to sit back and await the inevitable. This is an incredibly weak point of view as to either the power of human kind to shape events, or even of the God of Human Kind to answer prayers from His faithful. This is, to my mind, the lazy person's way out. Chicken little: "The sky is falling; the sky is falling!"

What makes 2012ology different is the starring role it gives to the ancient Maya. Among numerous native cultures in the Americas, the Maya seem to have captured the popular imagination. They are cast as a mysteriously wise civilization, one that disappeared into the tropical forests of Central America, taking with it a sacred knowledge that has only recently started coming to light.

Just WHO casts them as such? The Mayans were a popular group of people amongst some of the cartoon shows my son used to watch back in the late 80's and early 90's. And if the sacred knowledge disappeared into the tropical forests of Central America, why in the world do we permit all the deforestration of the tropical forests of Central America to continue unabated? Again, this has a ceretain fatalist, doomsday, over tone that is quite disturbing -- EXCEPT, perhaps to the extent, that this crappolla has been going on for a lo9ng enough time, the rape, pillage and plunder of the earth, and the economy sucks so badly - all the world over - that perhaps entirely expectedly and naturally, people's attitudes are colored darkly by current events.

Although the disaster flick “2012” — early to the game in 2009 — featured no Maya priests and portrayed largely tongue-in-cheek science, its promotional tag­line succinctly captured the assumptions underlying 2012ology: “First, the Mayan calendar predicted it. . . . Now, science has confirmed it.”

But that was an advertisement for a fake movie, about a lot of fake stuff - we ought not give or put credibility to the part about "science has confirmed it." That is just some ad writers propaganda, written to induce you to WANT to see the movie, and get you to promote it amongst your friends.

The only problem is, the ancient Maya predicted no such thing. Nor has anything been confirmed by science.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPsss!!! Now, THIS presents a problem; or not. People are willing to believe whatever they are willing to believe, and need no facts, and no science to back up and support and confirm their beliefs. Educational systems failing, left and right!

During the heyday of their civilization, circa A.D. 250 to 900, the Maya produced thousands of artworks and hieroglyphic texts, a dazzling legacy of literature and learning, art and architecture. But they weren’t preoccupied with apocalypse. Maya creation mythology recorded tales of a past world, but it did not detail how and when the current world would end — or even if it would. Instead, the Maya appear to have been particularly fascinated with re- creation, as it figured prominently in myth and in ritual performance. The Maya perceived time as a complex set of infinite cycles, not a clock ticking toward doomsday. One of these cycles, known by scholars as the Maya Long Count, consisted of more than 5,000years. In our calendrical system it began in August 3114 B.C. and is due to end on Dec. 21, 2012 — or, in Maya numerology, 13.0.0.0.0.

This becomes much more interesting, to me. A complex set of infinite cycles - this seems utterly consistent with my understanding of and beliefs about the Creator of all the worldss, and seems pretty consistent with re-incarnation theories.

But there is nothing to suggest that the Maya thought this date would be the world’s last. If anything, they might have worried a bit about the roundness of the number, like we did about Y2K. But 13.0.0.0.0 was not the end. One glyphic text that records the date 13.0.0.0.0, a carved stone plaque from the Mexican site of Tortuguero, was ambiguously read by Maya scholars in 1996 as possibly predicting an ominous event — the “descent” of a deity associated with the underworld.

You mean, worse than George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton?

The scholars posted their interpretation online, and that reading spread rapidly across the Internet in the following years, promoted by 2012ologists as evidence of a specific Maya prophecy. Meanwhile, epigraphers — those who study the glyphs — gave the Tortuguero plaque a closer look. The consensus today is that the text refers to a future commemoration of that date, when the local ruler will impersonate or represent that deity. It is not a doomsday prophecy but a bold assertion that the seventh-century building once marked by the plaque would still stand in 2012. For 2012ologists, however, the original interpretation is the true one. End-times believers are also convinced that a carving made 2,300 years ago in Izapa, Mexico, depicting a caiman, a macaw and an elaborately dressed man is a cosmic map. While scholars of ancient Mexico debate the meanings of this image, 2012ologists have gone several steps further, insisting that it is a chart of the galaxy’s future — one that predicts a world-changing galactic alignment in the 2012 sky. This despite the fact that Izapa was a pre-Maya city whose people neither wrote nor recorded any dates. And despite the fact that most astronomers dispute the claim that galactic alignment is rare or ominous.

Quite interesting. Arguing with assuredness about a thing which is pure speculation. How very human; how very dangerous!

If the evidence for Maya doomsday predictions is so flimsy — if the impending Maya apocalypse is a mere myth — then why are so many people so willing to believe it is true? Why do some seem to want Dec. 21 to be the long-awaited end of the world? One explanation is the persistent power of ancient wisdom. All societies are drawn to knowledge that seems time-worn, mysterious, coded — and to the magic of its decoding. That is partly why “The Da Vinci Code” has sold 100 million copies, why people listened to Camping’s predictions about Judgment Day and even, in a sense, why billions are attracted to religion.

Perhaps we just want an easy way out, where we have no agency in our own salvation of the world for future generations?

That is also why we are drawn to ancient civilizations whose knowledge has been buried — literally — for hundreds or thousands of years. A century ago, ancient Egypt was in the limelight, as archaeologists excavated the tombs of pharaohs. In recent decades, the Maya have taken a star turn, as more of their ancient cities in Mexico and Central America have been unearthed and their hieroglyphic texts deciphered. Another explanation lies deep within our own Western civilization and religious traditions, which include teachings about the end of the world. In stark contrast to the Maya, medieval Europeans generated a vast body of literature and artwork predicting and describing the world’s end. Nobody questioned that it would come; the issue was how and when. Some were willing — then, as now — to stick their necks out and predict a specific day. When Joachim of Fiore insisted that 1260 would be the end, many thousands in Europe listened. They listened, too, across the English-speaking world when William Miller in Vermont picked 1843(and then 1844) as our final year. Likewise, Camping generated huge publicity for his 2011 predictions. Apocalyptic imaginings and doomsday gullibility are woven into the very fabric of Western society. A final explanation lies in the comfort of belief, in the security of taking a leap of faith. The great revolutions in science, industry and technology have profoundly transformed life on Earth. But science has not replaced religion. Instead, the two have developed a complicated relationship. Science is a religion; religion has become a science. Anxiety and skepticism abound. The more answers science offers, the more questions we have. Overwhelmed by the evidence for a phenomenon such as global warming, some choose to believe in it or not. In a similar way, what evidence exists — or does not — for Maya predictions, biblical prophecies and astronomical prognostications is less important than what we simply choose to believe. In the end, for some, 2012 is a matter of faith. But this doesn’t need to be disquieting. You can choose to ignore the evidence that the Maya did not predict that the world would end this year, to dismiss the fact that science has not confirmed such an apocalypse, and still be optimistic about Dec. 21. There is an upbeat tendency emerging even among hard-core believers in 2012ology. They see the “end” as a wonderful new beginning — that this year will bring the dawn of a new and better world. Let’s hope that those optimistic 2012ologists are right and that the ancient Maya — who most likely saw Dec. 21, 2012, as little more than a massive new year’s celebration — were wrong.

outlook@washpost.com Matthew Restall and Amara Solariare the authors of “2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse.” They teach art history, history and anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.

As far as mental health and the so-called "mental illnesses" go, we are drugging the wrong people.

My mother was the most committed rule follower you ever met in your life. You tell her (provided you had some constituted authority) to do something, and she would DO it. Except ... for taking her anti-depressants. She'd take them, start to feel better, then stop, cold turkey, and within about a month, the bottom would fall out again, as she failed to ever get talk therapy to help get a handle on the root source of her depression. EVEN the most obedient patient in the world wanted off the anti-D's! NOW, consider this. In my life I have encountered one and only one psychiatrist who ever suggested that one day I might be able to go off my meds. The others insist that I must take these meds forever. This suggest that I have a chronic condition. Let me accept (for the moment) that proposition - I have a chronic MEDICAL condition. Okay, then, somewhere within my body resides a diseased area, or impaired arterial blockages, or fouled up bio-electo-magnetic impulses; something. That being the case, when I die, they can perform an autopsy on me to check out (confirm) the presence of the disease, or at least the degenerated condition. This, after all, is what MEDICAL illness is all about. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), the diagnosis of Alzheimer's is only 90% correct, in the absence of an autopsy! This leads me to conclude, that in point of fact, I DO NOT HAVE A MEDICAL CONDITION that can be detected by modern medical SCIENCE. I do however, have a LABEL, that has been inflicted upon me, and I have suffered greivously for it. Now, for three years, I WAS a good little obedient psychiatric patient, and I took my meds, as prescribed. Fortunately (for me anyway) my pain management doctor (pain management? came down with a disease and is now in a wheel chair. While he rehabbed, his sister, another pain management shrink, took on my case. When I wnet to see her brother, initially, I was in psychic and physical pain, but, I would have grown out of those; I always had before. But, I took the drugs he recommended, eventually increasing my dosage of EFFEXOR from 37.5 mg per day to 225 mg per day, a six-fold increase. What his sister soon noticed, was that I didn't seem so depressed (I didn't seem to her depressed at all; HOWEVER - I did manage to gain 95 pounds in three years, and had enough energy to get out of the house twice a week, each event inspiring me to bath; otherwise, I spent 22 hours / day lying in bed, or watching TV, or glued to the puter; I never left the house - not to go to the library (which I so love); not to go to the used vinyl record store, to see my good buddy John, who kept asking about me, and telling my folks to tell me to go over there;; and I didn't even go to church or the mosque -- this is what life looks like when your anti-depressants work well; you are no longer depressed, you CAN function (I read, I blogged, I played duplicate bridge online) and I suppose this was quite a good enough life, for me to be living, after all, Social Security had deemed me totally disabled, and I had begun to collect SSSDI benefits ($383 / month for meds and the shrink - out of $434 total). Now, that is what an undepressed life looks like. Everybody was pleased, pleased that I had gone ahead and filed the paper work to get the SSSDI bennies, pleased that I was taking my meds, pleased that I ... was not making waves; no splahses. And they didn't really take into account that a man who had formerly played duplicate bridge at the local clubs at least 3 times a week, had taught duplicate bridge at the clubs, and at the park district, who used to play golf 100 times or so a year, who used to play the piano, who sang in the church choirs all his life, who accompanied (when asked) the congregation for certain of the liturgical settings, who rang hand bells in the choir, who auditioned for and was accepted by the New Oratorio Singers (now the Chicago Master Singers) and loved to rehearse with them (I was not so excited about the concerts; for a 240 pound man who did not walk, standing in one spot for several hours is VERY difficult on the knees), that a man who delighted in his son's weekly week end visits no longer saw his son, no longer attended church, no longer attended bible study, no longer attended the mosque (where he HAD taught Sunday School), no one seemed to think about how much I had shrunk (well, there was the additional 95 pounds, that's not much shrinkage), that the man who used to work out 4 days a week at the health club, now had a difficult time drawing breath when walking up the stairs from the family room to the kitchen, NO, it never dawned on these people, my family, (they were the only ones I saw) - no, wait, my parents, my social worker, my shrink, that it never occurred to them that I WAS NOT A HAPPY CAMPER, although, I most assuredly was a non-depressed camper, and I could carry off a conversation quite well enough, it never occurred to them that I was NOT IN A GOOD PSYCHIC or even PHYSICAL place. And then I stopped taking the meds, and I started to play golf again; I started to go to church again; I started to drink again; I started to ride the weekend rails and talk with strangers again; I started to go to bars and talk with both strangers and old friends again, I started to go to the library again, I started to bring homeless people home for shelter, warmth, and food again, I started to play duplicate bridge again, I started to teach bridge again, I started to write poetry again, I started to walk for the pure pleasure of walking again, I started to ride my bicycle again, I started to flirt again! In other words, I went off the meds, and I started to LIVE again! And so you see, the wrong person was taking the meds. Since it is my behavior off the meds that so worries people, (actually, what they think I might do at some indeterminate future moment). So, for all you out there who buy into your loved one having a mental illness that causes him to behave in ways you disapprove - here's my free advice: Take anti-depressants, continuously increasing the dosage until you think about suicide 24 hours a day. Also, take a mood stabalizer. When you start to constantly contemplate suicide, begin the very slow process of going off the anti-depressant. Continue taking the mood stabalizer for the rest of your life. Nothing your beloved one does will ever bother you. Nothing will ever bother you. You will never cry, and you will never know unbridled joy. Welcome to my world!

Three Commentaries: Repairing Ourselves -- Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt -- Kwanzaa: The Challenges of a New Season --

Worrill’s World By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD BlackCommentator.com Columnist Repairing Ourselves Day in and day out we can observe the increased number of African people killing each other, mentally and physically abusing each other, stealing from each other, being dishonest with each other, and the list goes on and on. These negative incidents occur, in part, because segments of the African community in the United States are disconnected from the moral and ethical traditions that have characterized relationships among African people in the past. It is critical that we repair ourselves as we build the Reparations Movement. The problem with segments of African people in this country being disconnected from the great contributions of African people to the civilizations of the world has resulted in far too many of us believing that the current situation in which we find ourselves cannot be changed. Many African people believe that the condition of African people in America is permanent and there is nothing we can do to change our circumstances. Therefore, this disconnected group of African people has chosen the easy road. They travel on the road of cooperating and collaborating with the forces of white supremacy who continue to demonstrate they will do any and everything in their power to keep African people in this country, and the rest of the world on the bottom. This has resulted in many African people in America (and the world community), developing a “bottom mentality.” In other words, many of our people buy into whatever the white supremacy forces feed us through the media, (mis)educational institutions, and religious institutions. What we are constantly being fed is that we are on the bottom and we will remain on the bottom. What the white supremacy forces offer individual African people in America is that, as an individual, you can get off the bottom if you join us, if you “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Never mind your group, your family and your cultural ties, “there is nothing that can be done with those people. Join us and everything will be alright.” If you join us, “you can obtain a good job, buy a nice house in a good neighborhood, buy a nice car, take nice vacations, and some of you, whom we chose, can even live with us.” We were not always like this as a people. We did not have a “dog-eat-dog” mentality and this is what we must examine as we continue to struggle to overthrow the system of white supremacy and its impact on us as a people. The Creative Force of the universe has endowed us with the capacity to make great contributions to the world. A simple inspection of the ancient Nile Valley civilization of Kemet (Egypt) should inspire all African people to respect their history and to hold themselves in high esteem. Kemet and the Kemetic people, our ancestors, were the creators of math, science, architecture, writing, governance, astronomy, astrology, medicine, art, and so much more. The Kemetic people amassed great wisdom that was left as instructions written in Medew Netcher (Divine Speech) or what Europeans call hieroglyphs. One place we can examine this ancient Kemetic wisdom is in a book titled, Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt gives insight into how our ancestors viewed life, death, human relations, marriage, parenting, use of power, God, family, and the standards of moral and ethical conduct. Reading these spiritual texts elicits strong feelings in and for African people in a most profound and spiritual way. Peruse these words from The Husia: The Book of Ptah Hotep:

”Do not terrorize people for if you do, God will punish you accordingly. If anyone lives by such means, God will take bread from his or her mouth. If one says I shall be rich by such means, [he] she will eventually have to say my means entrapped me.”

This passage continues:

”If one says I will rob another, he will end up being robbed himself. The plans of men and women do not always come to pass, for in the end it is the will of God, which prevails. Therefore, one should live in peace with others and they will come and willingly give gifts, which another would take from them through fear.”

Written about five thousand years ago, the wisdom of these words of instruction should cause African people to reflect on their significance as we struggle to create a greater good for our race. The wisdom of our ancestors should give us the inspiration to rededicate ourselves to the continued struggle for the liberation of African people worldwide. As a race of people our survival and development is dependent upon each other. A greater responsibility is placed upon those of us who proclaim the African Way after the ravaging of African civilizations, African culture, African minds, and African lands. As I have repeated many times in previous columns, we have a responsibility and a duty to our brothers and sisters to build institutions based on African spirituality, ethics, and morals, and give back that which the Creator has given us, “All Life, Power, and Health, like the Sun Forever.” I urge all African people to take a meditative moment and look deeply inside of ourselves as a people. Let us restore what the ancient Black people of Kemet called Maat: Divine Order, Harmony, Balance, Truth, Justice, Righteousness, and Reciprocity. We had, and lived by Maat before the coming of Europeans. We must return to the ways of Maat so we can survive the white supremacy genocidal onslaught. We must look deep into ourselves! And as our respected ancestor Dr. John Henrik Clarke often said, “If we did it once, we can do it again!” In view of what is happening in the world, we must never lose sight of who we are and our condition. Get Ready For Kwanzaa 2011 In the wake of the rising African Centered Movement in America, it is important that every segment of the African Community in America begin preparing for the Kwanzaa Season. It is estimated that more than 30 million Africans in America participate in some sort of Kwanzaa activity or event. In order for this occurrence to continue, parents, teachers, principles, ministers, business people, and community activists must begin preparation immediately. The first question, that obviously should be asked in preparation for the 2011 Kwanzaa Season is: “What is Kwanzaa and why is it so important for African people in America to celebrate?” In 1966, the Black Power explosion shook up America. The call for Black Power was a major shift away from the Civil Rights Movement, during that era. The Civil Rights Movement had successfully dismantled the system of racial segregation (by law) in the southern region of the United States. However, among the masses of Black people in America, there was a deeper meaning to the idea of freedom, justice and equality that had not been advocated by the Civil Rights Movement. The call for Black Power by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) and others, gave a new impetus for the Black Liberation Movement in America. When the smoke cleared from the Watts Rebellion in 1965, an organization emerged in the Los Angeles, California area, called US. Its leader was Dr. Maulana Karenga. After intense study of African cultural traditions, Dr. Karenga and the US Organization established the only nationally celebrated, indigenous, non-heroic Black Holiday in the United States and they called it Kwanzaa. The concept of Kwanzaa was established for Africans in America and was derived from the African custom of celebrating the harvest season. In Dr. Karenga’s own words he says, “The origin of Kwanzaa on the African continent are in the agricultural celebrations called the ‘first fruits’ celebrations and to a lesser degree the full or general harvest celebration. It is from these first fruit celebrations that Kwanzaa gets its name which comes from the Swahili phrase Matunda Ya Kwanza.” Further, “...Matunda means fruits and ya Kwanza means first. (The extra “a” at the end of Kwanzaa has become convention as a result of a particular history).” Kwanzaa is officially celebrated December 26th to January 1st and each day a value of the Nguzo Saba (seven principles of blackness) is celebrated. The Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) are:

Umoja~ Unity To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race. Kujichagulia ~ Self Determination To define ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined, named, created for, and spoken for by others. Ujima ~ Collective Work and Responsibility To build and maintain our community together, to make our sisters and brothers problems our problems, and to solve them together. Ujamaa ~ Cooperative Economics To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together. Nia ~ Purpose To make as our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness. Kuumba ~ Creativity To do always as much as we can, in the way we can in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than when we inherited it. Imani ~ Faith To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

With the assistance of current Malcolm X President Anthony E. Munroe, the Kwanzaa Celebration Committee, over the past several years, has sponsored Kwanzaa Celebrations and activities during the seven day observance. These celebrations have drawn thousands of people and added to the growing Kwanzaa Movement in the Chicago area. Kwanzaa is a step in helping African people in America to fulfill the need and desire to be a united people, with a common set of experiences that lead us toward a common set of goals and objectives for freedom, independence and liberation. Kwanzaa: The Challenges of a New Season As we enter a New Kwanzaa Season, we must remind ourselves of the continued challenges that we face. The fundamental issue that Africans in America must face is centered around the continued assault by the systems of racism and white supremacy that keeps us in bondage, servitude, and often times, confusion. What is at stake is our survival as a race of people. We must come to grips with the following challenges as we enter a New Kwanzaa Season. Family Development: There is no question that the African in American family is in major disarray and is in need of major repair. Without strong African in America families, raising and nurturing our children, the future will remain bleak. Families are the foundation for the survival and development of a people. African men and women need to close ranks and reestablish the tradition of strong Black families in America. Economic Development: Many Africans in America women and men continue to remind us that we earn in excess of 600 billion dollars a year in this country. The tragedy of this economic potential in the African Community in America is that the overwhelming majority of this income we earn, we spend with other people and not with our own. Other people still continue to dominate and maximize profits from our communities for their own advancement. When are we going to stop this awful practice of allowing other people to benefit from the dollars we earn? Political Development: We have often said that politics is the science of who gets what, when, where, and how. And in this regard, we should recognize that the white power structure and its Black allies are doing everything possible to rupture our continuing movement for Black political empowerment. In electoral politics the lessons are clear. Personality clashes and individual personal conflicts have no place in the world of politics! The only thing that matters is what is best for African people in America. If we don't remain unified politically, we will not benefit from our efforts to increase Black political power in Chicago or in any other cities in which we live. Cultural Development: Why should other people profit from our artistic and creative endeavors? It is clear that we are a creative people with a unique culture of our own. However, in this area the writers, poets, musicians, dancers, singers, actors, etc. must strive to control what we create and the entire African Community should aggressively support their efforts. International Affairs: We must work harder to support the struggle of our brothers and sisters in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America in their continued liberation struggle for land and independence. Historical Discontinuity: It appears the more we are oppressed under the system of racism and white supremacy, the more we forget our history. One generation from the next has difficulty remembering our great struggles, battles, and movements. Harold Cruse points out in his book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “The farther the Negro [Black person] gets from his [her] historical antecedents in time, the more tenuous become his conceptual ties, the emptier his [her] social conceptions, the more superficial his visions.” It must be clear, at this point in history that African people need to determine for ourselves solutions to the many serious problems we face. We should realize going into this New Kwanzaa Season that no one will do for us what we really need to do for ourselves. It is time we begin providing for ourselves in all areas of life. No longer should we listen and adhere to how other people define us and our struggle. Accomplishing the objective of elevating our struggle to a higher level will require that we become more skilled in organizing our communities toward our liberation and freedom. As an old African proverb points out, “Those who are dead have not gone forever. They are in the woman’s womb. They are in the child who whimpers.”

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

Solidarity America

The Fraud of “Free Trade,” Part II By John Funiciello BlackCommentator.com Columnist There never was a great cry from the American people for what we now call free trade in a “global economy.” The only persistent call came from Corporate America, from commodity traders, from banks, from investment houses, from manufacturers (the shrinking base that existed), from everyone who had a stake in the exploitation of natural resources or the production of low-wage workers in other countries. It was the most powerful economic entities in the nation that called for “free trade” and, over the years, they convinced enough of the people that free trade was a good thing and that, if a worldwide system of free trade were accomplished, all would benefit. It was the powerful corporations that called for opening up the world to trade on their terms, and those terms included the demands that factories in the developing world (where most of them eventually went for their goods) produce at the lowest possible cost, which meant that workers in those countries would be paid slave wages. And, in the case of the U.S., the government was manipulated to look the other way, when threats were made to government leaders or bribes were paid to keep production costs at rock bottom. Corporate America developed such power that it influenced Congress to embrace the “free trade” agreements all around the world. The U.S. government, in fact, provided subsidies for companies that moved their operations overseas, so there was further incentive to empty the country of its manufacturing and industrial base, along with millions of the best-paying jobs available. How did corporations get to be so powerful that they outstripped the power of the people in what was once a democratic republic? The frauds included more than just free trade, such as the continued attack on workers’ rights to a union, the continuing lowering of wages, the evaporation of benefits and pensions, and unpaid-for wars, to name a few…many catastrophes that have been visited upon American workers. How did they achieve such preeminence that they could perpetrate such massive thefts and frauds? We were reminded recently how corporations came to rule America as we reflected on the recent death of Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (POCLAD), at the age of 68. Grossman was a man who was long engaged in the struggle to free the people from the overpowering influence of corporations. POCLAD is a small group of about a dozen men and women who for two decades slowly and steadily began to make Americans aware of the influence of Corporate America on their lives. He and the others taught the history of undue corporate influence, stretching back to the beginning of the republic. It was not last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case alone that gave corporations the rights of citizenship, but precedent had been set in a progression of decisions and other official actions, but they were given a great boost in 1886, when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were natural persons under the law. According to a pamphlet co-written by Grossman and Frank T. Adams titled, “Taking Care of Business,” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas 60 years later wrote of the case, “There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view.” Even though Santa Clara was a fraudulent ruling, from that time on, corporations were seen as having many of the rights of a citizen, such as access to rights under the Bill of Rights. In that era, while giving corporations citizen rights, some judges went so far as to rule that trade unions were civil and criminal conspiracies. American workers found it difficult enough to organize to protect themselves and their families, but this attitude about unions prevailed in legislative halls and the judiciary well into the 20th Century and made organizing even more difficult. This kind of corporate power was something that the founding fathers feared might happen, if corporations were not held under tight control, so they made sure that the issuance of a charter of incorporation was among the most serious undertakings and they gave the control of those charters to the various state legislatures, which were thought to be closer to the people. The founders were fearful of the untrammeled power of the budding corporations (they had experienced the great trading companies of the imperial powers) to the extent that Thomas Jefferson early in the country’s history wrote in a letter, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” They gave state legislators the power to issue corporate charters and the power to regulate corporations, to detail what they were allowed to do and what they were prohibited from doing, and the power to revoke the charter and distribute the assets among the shareholders. Finally though, last year, the U.S. Supreme Court gave corporations what they had been seeking for generations, when the justices ruled that corporations were, indeed, citizens and that their money was speech, under the First Amendment. The power of corporate money finally overcame the regulatory structures set up by the founders and made America’s headlong plunge toward oligarchy possible. Richard Grossman sounded the alarm through POCLAD, which set up “conversations” about corporations and democracy around the country in the 1990s…their way of educating participants, believing that small numbers of people could move others, to bring the realization to Americans, in general, that corporations are now in charge. At the beginning of the republic, Grossman noted, laws and structures were set up to benefit a propertied class, but now, the control has passed to a corporate class, which many call Corporate America. POCLAD calls for the elimination of “corporate personhood,” which means that the corporation needs to be recognized for what it is, a “legal fiction,” and that no corporation has the rights of a citizen under the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Among other things, the “Occupy” movement addresses this wrong and there are other efforts under way (such as movetoamend.org) to overturn Citizens United legislatively and constitutionally, to do exactly what Grossman and POCLAD have been working toward for a couple of decades. In noting his passing, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, for which he worked for a time, said, “While he didn’t believe that many organizations correctly framed the problem that we face - and hence, the solution to that problem - strains of his thinking and strategy continue in the organizations which worked with him. Echoes of it can also be found in the Occupy movement, in addition to other groups. But messaging and bumper stickers were not his work. Rather, it was his unfailing, uncompromising commitment to uncolonizing our brains (as the first step to figuring our way out of this mess) which will remain his legacy.” The influence of endless amounts of corporate money has corrupted the political system, the regulatory system (for food, water, air, the environment, and jobs, in general), the education system, and the means by which the people should be informed, such as television, newspapers, mass-marketed magazines, and radio. That’s what Richard Grossman was trying to say. It was not just “free trade” that has been the fraud of the corporatist era, but it just may be the lynchpin of corporate control of all of our societal systems. So pervasive has been the influence of Corporate America that average citizens years ago took to spouting their line for years without thought, and politicians have taken up their cry as if it were their own. For example, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) recently noted an example of a politician mouthing their creed without thought: “In October, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley suggested that gradually repealing the state’s corporate income tax should be a priority for lawmakers in 2012. Haley’s idea was alarming, but hardly surprising: in the past year, governors in Arizona and Florida have proposed similar plans, and lawmakers in a number of other states have moved to enact expensive new corporate tax breaks or reduce the corporate tax rate. Noticeably absent from the policy debates in these states, however, has been any discussion of whether businesses in each of these states are currently paying the corporate income tax to begin with.” Such is the state of our politics, when no thought is given to reality. CTJ, in a recent report, noted that scores of corporations paid no state income taxes in one or two of the years 2008-2010. That reality never dawns on the ideologues who perpetually defend the small minority against the 99 percent (the people). It’s why, to a great degree, only about half of the electorate votes in any given election. They feel that their participation, even just to cast a vote once in a while, does not make any difference. What that small number of corporations failed to pay to states amounted to some $47 billion. That amount would make a considerable dent in the “holes” in various state budgets. Yet, Corporate America and their politicians are asking for more “tax relief” and their minions in Congress and the state houses are jumping to comply. The latest manifestation against the rule of the few is the “Occupy” movement. A long line of individuals and organizations have preceded them, starting with the union movement, the civil rights movements, the anti-poverty organizations, community groups, and many more. Most of them have functioned with little money, so it always is a constant struggle to counterbalance the power and wealth of Corporate America. The struggle against the plutocrats has been a long one in America, but the sleeping giant is beginning to awaken. Even if the 1 percent hasn’t noticed, the 99 percent is, indeed, the majority and they will express their will in an intelligent way very soon. That’s why the Occupy movement will not be going away soon, even if the encampments are attacked and destroyed by mayors and their police. As most of us have always known, there are more of us than there are of them and justice will prevail. Click here to read any of the commentaries in this series

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

Imagine Victories in the New Year!

The point Dr Daniels makes here, that we must IMAGINE victories is the most critical step that needs to be taken in any undertaking to go about changing the world. Until you can IMAGINE the possibility of change, there can be no change. A simple sports analogy ought to do: Without Dr J (Julius Irving) do we have Michael Jordon? MJ saw what Dr J could do, and then, he imagined greater, soaring to incredible heights, making time, space, and the laws of physics look inoperative. Or in golf, Tiger Woods quite early on in his career set records for margins of victories that made it appear as if he was an unstoppable force of nature. What happened? The younger generation looked very closely at what Tiger did: he pumped iron, he was incredibly disciplined in his practice habits, and they emulated him in these arenas, and when th;ey now play him face to face, head up, they do not back down; they do not fear him. They are ready; they have prepared; they have imagined greater!

Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board The Big Idea they had in mind to fill the national void was world hegemony, a level of military mastery without ‘historical precedence’: ‘Full Spectrum Dominance.’ -Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire If building more prisons for those of us who are unlike yourselves is to be your strategy, then, I promise you, you cannot build enough to hold us all. -Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance The U.S. continued the legalized execution of its citizens this year. In our name and for our safety, Troy Davis, whom many believed innocent, was murdered. Seven of the nine who testified against him, recanted. Coercion! The U.S. injustice system, its practitioners, gathered affidavits of lies and forced an innocent man to serve 20 years on Death Row in Georgia before the Board of Parole, ignoring the appeal to sanity from family, friends, lawyers, and prominent figures, including former President Jimmy Carter, Bishop Tutu, Former FBI Director William Sessions, and Pope Benedict XVI, among others, to refrain from taking yet another life, executed Tory Davis. This year, too, Davis’ sister, Martina Correia, lost her battle with cancer. But Correia’s struggle, that also included not only a campaign to end the Death Penalty but one also to inspire citizens to recognize their collective power over the political power that enables authority figures, has not ended. That fight to end the framing, detaining, and killing of the poor and the working class has not ended. This week, as I write this article, people around the world are preparing to gather at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on December 9, 2011, to call attention to the framing of Mumia Abu Jamal and his illegal incarceration, along with the entire injustice system within (and without) the U.S., particularly since September 11, 2001. It has been 30 years now of upholding the crimes of the Philadelphia Police Department, the local injustice system, and politicians. But at the end of this year, 2011, we should truly imagine, echoing activist Claude Marks (freedomarchives.org) “the victories of 2012.” Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS), more U.S. citizens recognize the criminals determined to condemn the 99% to death or what amounts to the same - life without freedom! At year’s end, thanks to the exposures of uncompromising OWS protesters, more Americans are willing to admit that the 1% commit crimes against humanity: a budget of 50% for defense spending and an austerity program of cuts to services, a proliferation of bi-partisan propaganda and lies, Wall Street selected donkeys and elephants who then shuffle taxpayers’ money to banking executives, corporate personhood and the expansion of poverty and unemployment, the Wars on Drugs and on Terrorism, fusion centers and Homeland Security, illegal detention, torture, assassinations and invasions for regime change, drones and more drones and civilian deaths and the highest incarceration rates in the world. The 99% are the ones subject to being framed and sentenced to Death Row! Another political prisoner, the 22-year old Army private, Bradley Manning, detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, may receive a maximum sentence of life in prison if he is found guilty of revealing the contents of “restricted” material from the State’s databases to WikiLeaks. That is, if we consider Manning the criminal! That is, if we consider the 36 counts against him as legitimate counts of wrongdoing. To focus on Manning’s or Julian Assange’s crimes, according to the injustice system, is to dismiss how we, too, are coerced into signing affidavits against ourselves, the 99%, the poor, the workers, the legal or so-called illegal immigrants, coerced into assigning guilt to our determination to pursue and maintain our freedom. Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time). Do I really want to forget on which side of history should I stand? At years end, we do have something to seriously consider if the U.S. Congress has its way: a routine of indefinite detention of U.S. citizens - without trial - an Orwellian daily life in which citizens are disappeared and no other citizen dares to even remember their existence! The unthinkable has happened, repeatedly, and happens and usually begins with a germ of an idea, lit on fire by the arsonists. It is not just that the Senate, with its bill S1867, passing 93-7 on Thursday, December 1, 2011, handed over $662 billion for defense spending; it is the little germ, a provision for military detention of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists or associates. The legislation is now in the House. Well, you think - Al Qaeda terrorists! Native Americans in those days of the Colonies and Frontier! Negroes in the South and then Black militants in the North! Jews in Europe! The Irish! The Algerian! But one people almost always linked to another and others and the fire continues to evolve. Here is an image, then, of real terror: Al Qaeda start to look like OWS protesters! Law and Disorder’s (www.lawanddisorder.org) Michael Ratner, Heidi Boghosian, and Michael Smith on December 5, 2011 presented the scenario: What are the chances of the law that might go through in terms of indefinite detention of American citizens…is there a danger it could be used against the social movement here in the U.S.? It could be used against protesters at some point…not particularly with this legislation…[But] when it comes to the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS), this law certainly sets the groundwork for rounding up people in the U.S. who are leading huge oppositional movements and saying these people have to be detained until the emergency crisis is over… This is a very bad step. Paraphrasing now…Boghosian adds, these laws are there to protect the “financial infrastructures and corporate entities under attack by OWS protesters,” protesters who could be labeled “domestic terrorists.” “Domestic terrorists”! Yet the U.S. State Department on November 22, 2011, warns Egypt: Take care to restrain from the use of violence on your protesters! And we are expected to consider legitimate the New World Order and future it offers us? What kind of future does this order of repression offer when 30 years of illegal incarceration is not enough? When being innocent is meaningless? When protest and bravery is condemned and criminalized? On New Years 2001, who imagined a New Years 2012 in which the U.S. government’s surveillance apparatus would have expanded to include the militarization of local police forces and surveillance of everyone, so that many have come to accept Big Brother as the norm? Answer: Only those who believe that the “Full Spectrum Dominance” of the U.S. technological might could trump the Bill of Rights. But, we have to remember: “Government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend the equal right of everyone to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Howard Zinn continues, “I interpreted ‘everyone’ to include men, women, and children all over the world, who have a right to life not to be taken away by their own government (Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times). This is not a government by and for the people; it is a chamber of horrors! “If this is so,” writes Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, “one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk - eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion…” Because the criminals will never give up, they will never rest, we, the 99%, must imagine victories in the New Year and the years to come! We must do our work in Freedom! BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

Black LGBTQ Community Doesn’t Support Its Own

Inclusion By The Reverend Irene Monroe BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Just last month, Gay Black Men News (GBMNews.com) folded. It was a unique online eZine because it brought a perspective of the news as it related specifically to gay men of African descent. And its circulation was global. Ralph Emerson, publisher and founder of GBMNews said: "We are blessed with a large following of avant garde, artistic people. While most of our site visitors are in the USA, we have a good following around the globe. This we believe is largely due to our global prospective and the fact that the global people of color community are a priority with us." Emerson has operated this publication out of pocket. And while clearly the cost of operation was prohibitive causing the eZine to cease publication, another reason, according to Emerson, is the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) communities of African descent's lack of support for the online site. "Our folk don’t rally around and support their own. When GBMNews started everyone rushed to it, but with the advent of Facebook the attention had shifted." Emerson told "Out in Jersey" reporter Antoine Craigwell. "We didn’t have a groundswell of support for the site and for the newspapers as I thought it should have had from the community. As a community, we don’t seem to work together and support each other as a collective, and as a result, it collapses,” Emerson stated. In November 2009, when the "Washington Blade" folded, the nation's oldest LGBTQ weekly, soon after it's 40th Anniversary, it sent a message about this era of digitized news, and the nation’s growing interest in Facebook. But Emerson's statement that LGBTQ people of African descent don't support their own cannot be summarily dismiss as Emerson's anger and bitterness for having to close shop. Rather his statement speaks about our black LGBTQ’s history of not financially supporting projects that are beneficial for us. “Many of us sit in these homophobic churches and put money in the offering plate. Surely we can send money toward a healthy goal, Glen Glover of Roslindale stated. Issues of race, gender expression, and sexual orientation invite a particular type of news reporting. One of the biggest losses will be the unreported and underreported news of our lives. GBMNews did local, national and international coverage of us. A lack of financial support from the black LGBTQ community has contributed substantial to all the print and online black LGBTQ publications folding. I've had the pleasure of writing for all these magazines but sadly my tenure with these zines were short-lived In 2007, GBMNews was founded, an all-volunteer contribution site devoted to the LGBTQ community of color, by Ralph Emerson. In 2009, Emerson launched GBMMagazines and in 2010, he launched RadioGBM, a ground breaking Internet radio station with exceptional coverage of the music industry and emerging artists. I joined GBMNews in December 2009 when Emerson wrote, " I noticed your article submissions and I’m contacting in hopes that you will become a regular GBMNews contributor. I am certain our site visitors would enjoy your journalistic dispatches, your opinions, analysis and distinctive observations." But this November 28th GBMNews, GBMMagazines and RadioGBM shut its doors for good. "I’m going to take a few months off to think about my next direction. I’ve toyed for years with starting an arts business,” Emerson stated In 2000 Arise was founded by Glenn Alexander and the Rev. MacArthur H. Flournoy, Associate Director of the Religion and Faith Program @ HRC. The publication's readership was the same gender loving community of people of African descent. Its mission was "to challenge the mind, encourage the sprit and affirm the value of all sexually diverse people of African descent." In November 2003 the paper celebrated its 3rd Anniversary of publication, and had become a national icon for the African American LGBTQ community. Sadly a month later, "Arise folded. In an email blast to "Arise" supporters, the publishers wrote, "Despite our best efforts to remain in print, it has become cost prohibitive to continue to produce ARISE as we know it. It is not our desire to compromise its quality to remain in existence. Therefore, effective immediately we are closing the pages of ARISE Magazine." Eight months since the decision was made to close the pages of ARISE, a relaunch issue was slated for January 2004, but that too failed. In 1990's Venus Magazine was founded by Charlene Cothran, a publication that for 13 years targeted the Black LGBTQ community. As a staple in the African-American community, Venus Magazine was the first and only queer magazine owned and operated by a black lesbian that spoke to and about the unique intersections of being black and LGBTQ in both the African-American and white queer communities. And Venus' loyal readership had hoped the magazine would do for its queer population what revered publications like Ebony and Jet magazines did for all people of the African Diaspora - that is, change society's negative and misinformed perceptions about us. Charlene E. Cothran sent shock waves throughout African-American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities nationwide when she wrote an article entitled, "REDEEMED! 10 ways to get out of 'The Life' if you want out!" In it, she wrote that she's now not only "saved," having turned her life over to Jesus, but "straight" as well. And as a fledgling magazine with the threat of folding always hanging over its head, Cothran opted to take financial support in 2007 from black churches funded by white right-wing Christian organizations that emphasize "reparative therapies." In fact, she opted to be her own magazine's "ex-gay" poster girl, rather than let the magazine fold. Those of us who read GBMNews will feel its absence, hopefully remembering why it's not here with us. BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of the African-American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She was recently named to MSNBC’s list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible Prayers for Not’So’Everyday Moments. As an African-American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website is irenemonroe.com. Click here to contact the Rev. Monroe.

The Mockery Called 'Democracy' in the USA

Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board The irrefutable reality in the United States is that ordinary everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people do not have or enjoy a genuine people's democracy. Rather, the people of this nation are the victims of a continuing singular sham - the greatest mockery of democracy this world has ever known - and it is the objective of the present U.S. corporate /military elite to perpetuate this sham against the ordinary people of this nation and world. Voting and elections in this nation have been made utterly irrelevant by conniving and spineless politicians in the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives, etc., whose de facto allegiance is to the accumulation of wealth and who are in fact bought and paid for by an avaricious corporate elite whose tentacles horribly impact every single aspect of the daily lives of everyday people. Concomitantly, the so-called U.S. 'news and information' mass media [i.e. the corporate-stream media] is a sick joke in service to its corporate masters. The U.S. corporate-stream media is all about manufacturing and manipulating public opinion, and has little or nothing to do with honestly and forthrightly informing the populace and serving to facilitate and stimulate relevant debate by an 'educated' people who are truly informed. There is no such thing as simultaneously having democracy for the wealthy corporate elite and democracy for everyday people. The desires and objectives of the corporate elite always trump ascertaining a genuine people's democracy. In this vein, the comments of the late great people's historian Howard Zinn are very pertinent: "The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history...There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media -- none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty." Pertaining to elections in this nation, Zinn further notes this poignant fact: "The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world." The corporate Democrat and Republican parties are jointly the callous political pimps of everyday people, even as they rhetorically feign their sham of political warfare with one another in their endless quest of manipulating the populace for power and financial gain. As with so many alleged 'journalists' who are a part of the fake U.S. news and information mass media, so it is that in this nation's colleges and universities there is an inordinately large and growing segment of persons who pass for being supposed 'scholars,' but who in fact are systemic manipulators - historical revisionists and propagandists for the elite of the U.S. corporate/military state. Their role is to infest the minds of college and university students with an uncritical and inaccurate perspective. The very last thing that many of these college/university instructors and/or professors want to occur is that their students become critical thinkers and seriously question the validity of this U.S. corporate system of government. None of these things represent a genuine people's democracy. To the contrary, they represent hypocrisy - the continued mockery of democracy. As corporate-government subterfuge, perpetual wars abroad, and economic austerity against the masses of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people abound, there is the need to understand that what is needed is genuine and serious systemic change, not reform. It is imperative that we everyday people of all colors intensify in this struggle - agitating, educating, and organizing - to bring about real systemic change. Joe Hill was correct when he said so many years ago, "Don't mourn. Organize." We must remember the poignant words of Frederick Douglass, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress." Onward, then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Pall over the Holidays - the Joblessness Crisis Intensifies

A Left Margin By Carl Bloice BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board It was fascinating to observe the response, across the political spectrum, to the November unemployment statistics. Pundits on the right and left were quick to correctly point out that there was hardly anything positive or hopeful about the numbers. Republican Michele Bachmann, who opposes extending jobless benefits, hypocritically crowed that “the lower numbers are being propped up by huge numbers of Americans dropping out and giving up on trying to find a job. The labor participation rate dropped again to a tragically low percentage.” She must be overjoyed. Earlier this year she expressed hoped that high jobless numbers would help her Presidential campaign. Others have pointed to what is, under the circumstances, dismal news pointing to the urgency of the crisis, its human toll, and the imperative need for action to stimulate the economy to create jobs. For U.S. working people, “these are the worst times since the depth of the Great Depression,” wrote Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of US News & World Report in the Financial Times last week. “The unemployment rate, the highest and most sustained in seven decades, improved last month primarily because more than 300,000 people left the labor force. And the situation is even grimmer than suggested by the dismal statistics, calculated from a base of only 60,000 families. Analysts have concluded that the combined unemployment and under-employment rate is slightly above a staggering 20 per cent of the labor force.” “Worse, 40 per cent of the jobless have been out of work for six months or more, compared with 10 per cent in 2007,” wrote Zuckerman, also a real estate executive. “The average period of unemployment now exceeds 26 weeks, well above the previous peak in July 1983 of just 21.2 weeks. This is critical because the longer that people of any age are out of work, the less likely they are to find another job.” Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted that “Pretty much every sector of the economy saw a decline in jobs, but those declines seemingly were offset by a rise in the retail sector. We can speculate that the rise in retail was a result of anticipating the holiday season and therefore temporary jobs.” Jobs in construction fell for the month in a row while manufacturing employment stayed about the same and public worker jobs decreased by 20.000, bringing to 278,000 the number of public sector jobs lost over the past year. “Over the last three months, overall job growth has averaged 143,000. It takes roughly 90,000 jobs to keep even with the growth of the labor force,” wrote Baker. “At this rate, it will take close to 200 months, or 16 years, to make up for the 10-million-job deficit in the economy.” Zuckerman says, “For hiring to occur at a pace that would support recovery, we would need at least 500,000 more hires per month. Instead, payrolls today are more than 7 million shy of where they were when the Great Recession began.” According to the Department of Labor, employers added 120,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate dipped from 9 percent in October to 8.6 percent. Experts say this was a result of more people getting jobs and others giving up on their job search altogether. And, it goes without saying, the situation is much worse for African Americans and in other minority communities. The black jobless rate rose slightly from 15.1 percent to 15.5 percent compared with 8 percent for whites. For Black workers the decline in labor force participation is a major factor in what is actually a worsening situation “The drop in participation was entirely among women and especially black women,” economist Baker wrote December 2 (Among married women, employment rose by 194,000, so this was not a case of women as second earners dropping out of the labor force.) Participation numbers among white women fell by 199,000, a decline of 0.2 percentage points. The drop among black women was 164,000, a drop of 1.2 percentage points. These monthly numbers are highly erratic, and it is likely that at least part of this drop will be reversed in future months. Nonetheless there had been a trend of declining participation rates among both white and black women even prior to the November plunge. This suggests that there is a real issue of women losing access to jobs; although the December figures may show some reversal.” The decline in women’s workforce participation rate is directly related to the political right’s ongoing assault on public workers. “Buried in the relatively positive numbers contained in the November jobs report was some very bad news for those who work in the public sector, the New York Times said editorially December 4. “There were 20,000 government workers laid off last month, by far the largest drop for any sector of the economy, mostly from states, counties and cities. “That continues a troubling trend that’s been building for years, one that has had a particularly harsh effect on black workers. While the private sector has been adding jobs since the end of 2009, more than half a million government positions have been lost since the recession. “In most cases, states and cities had to lay off workers because of declining tax revenues, or reduced federal aid because of Washington’s inexplicable decision to focus more on the deficit in the near term than on jobs.” “Those layoffs mean a lower quality of life when there are fewer teachers, pothole repair crews and nurses,” the Times continued. And then, citing a report by its reporter Timothy Williams the previous week, the paper noted that the cutbacks “hit black workers particularly hard.” “Millions of African-Americans - one in five who are employed - have entered the middle class through government employment, and they tend to make 25 percent more than other black workers,” the editorial continued. “Now tens of thousands are leaving both their jobs and the middle class. Chicago, for example, is laying off 212 employees in the upcoming fiscal year, two-thirds of whom are black.” “Many Republicans, however, don’t regard government jobs as actual jobs, and are eager to see them disappear. Republican governors around the Midwest have aggressively tried to break the power of public unions while slashing their work forces, and Congressional Republicans have proposed paying for a payroll tax cut by reducing federal employment rolls by 10 percent through attrition,” said the editorial. “That’s 200,000 jobs, many of which would be filled by blacks and Hispanics and others who tend to vote Democratic, and thus are considered politically superfluous. “The layoffs are not expected to end any time soon,” Williams wrote. “The United States Postal Service, where about 25 percent of employees are black, is considering eliminating 220,000 positions in order to stay solvent, and areas with large black populations - from urban Detroit to rural Jefferson County, Miss. - are struggling with budget problems that could also lead to mass layoffs. “The postal cuts alone - which would amount to more than one-third of the work force - would be a blow both economically and psychologically, employees say.” “But every layoff, whether public or private, is a life, and a livelihood, and a family. And too many of them are getting battered by the economic storm,” said the Times. There was also scant good news for the group that is consistently hit the hardest historically by joblessness and particularly amid the current economic crisis. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for African Americans between 16 and 19 years old was 39.6 percent in November. That’s down from 46.3 percent a year ago but up from 37.8 in October. The black youth workforce participation rate – 37.4 percent – has remained practically the same over the past 12 months. The average jobless level for young African Americans for the third quarter of this year is 43.4 percent, up from 40.7 for the same period last year and 30.9 percent in 2008. For white teenagers the jobless rate is 21.4 percent, up from 20.8 percent in November 2010 and down from 21.8 percent this October. As could be expected, the policy responses of the two sides of the aisle have been quite different. With most – but not all – of the Democrats seeking to extend existing jobless benefits and the Republican mostly united around a proposal to reduce them. GOP Congressional leaders are actually proposing to decrease the number of weeks jobless benefits would be available, execute new spending cuts and curb the pay of federal employees. They have actually introduced a measure to that effect into the House of Representatives that could be voted on this week. Meanwhile, according to the Times, “If Congress does nothing, benefits for the long-term unemployed will begin to expire early next year, and two million people could lose benefits by mid-February.” It is estimated that if Congress does not act before New Years to extend benefits nearly 6 million people will lose federally funded unemployment compensation over the course of next year. According to the Center for American Progress, 1.2 million African Americans and 1 million Hispanics would benefit from an extension of unemployment benefits. The proportion of unemployed African Americans over the age of 16 who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer as of October 2011 is 48 percent. For Hispanics it’s 39 percent. Then there are the 99ers, those workers who have already exhausted their unemployment benefits and about whom there is ever hardly a mention in the major media (about half the jobless are currently receiving no assistance at all). There is a measure before Congress – HR 589 – which would give them some assistance. During a recent House of Representatives debate on jobless benefit extension, the only member to bring the matter up was Rep. Barbara Lee (D - Ca) who has, as noted by Crewof42.com, brought the issue up “repeatedly in conversations with the White House, on the House floor, at press conferences and in meetings.” In California alone an estimated 305,000 workers will be left without income if the benefits are not extended. The state’s unemployment rate for young people 20 to 24 years old is 19 percent. For African Americans as a whole the rate is nearly 20 percent and close to 15 percent for Latinos. “With California unemployment hovering around 12 percent, job seekers far outnumber actual jobs,” said California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski. “It’s deplorable that Republicans in Congress and their special interest friends are attempting to sever the one remaining lifeline for California’s jobless. California’s Republican members of Congress need to get their priorities in order. Our state’s jobless need an extension of benefits far more than the richest 1 percent needs yet another fat tax break.” “The outlook is bleak,” wrote Zuckerman. “Over 20 per cent of companies say that employment in their firms will never return to pre-recession levels. Another 40-plus per cent say revenues would have to rise around 40 per cent to return to pre-recession employment levels. Moreover, most of the new jobs available don’t match the pay, the hours or the benefits of the positions that vanished during the recession. Millions of Americans face a lost decade, living from paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay their bills, having to borrow money and go deeper into debt.” “The prospect of losing benefits during the holiday season takes a tremendous toll on those suffering the hardship of unemployment,” said Pulaski

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.

Rick Santorum Has Become a Master at the Science of Nutrition The African World

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Just when you thought that you had heard enough ignorance, Rick Santorum opens his mouth. In a speech this past week he announced that given the obesity problem in the USA there was no longer a great need for food stamps. When i first read the posting regarding Santorum's statement I assumed that this was someone lampooning Santorum. I did not think that the level of idiocy represented in such a statement could come from even the biggest nitwits in the political class. I was wrong. My apologies. I underestimated the stupidity and meanness of the political Right. Obesity is a serious problem in the USA and it is particularly serious for Black America. It is not, in the main, the result of overeating. It is the result of poor eating. Nutritional education in the USA has plummeted and too many people are eating too much of the wrong things, e.g., fried foods, junk food, soda. But the problem is not simply nutritional education. The reality is that in order to eat well, one must have access to good food, and specifically good food outlets. Yet in poor communities, and often in Black communities irrespective of whether they are poor, there is an absence of food stores providing high quality foods. So, we often pay more for less, literally and figuratively. Yet another factor is cost. If you go to places like Whole Foods you can get some great food, but it comes at a significant cost, a cost that cannot be taken for granted when we are experiencing a profound economic crisis. In hearing Santorum's remarks I had to wonder whether he assumes that obesity is simply the result of overeating or whether he assumes that obese individuals can just burn off the fat and not have to rely on the introduction of new foods. In either case, the fact that Santorum was not run out of town on a rail after such a remark not only speaks to his ignorance and mean-spirited political agenda, but also speaks volumes regarding those who listen quietly and respectfully when a political figure pronounces starvation as a means of addressing budget deficits.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.

We Are the 99.9% By PAUL KRUGMAN

November 24, 2011 “We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general. If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population. And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline. Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers. The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent. For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains. Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs? Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies. After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment. But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do. Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do. For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution. Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door. Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.” So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

Things to Tax By PAUL KRUGMAN

November 27, 2011 The supercommittee was a superdud — and we should be glad. Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal? And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s? Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions. About those high incomes: In my last column I suggested that the very rich, who have had huge income gains over the last 30 years, should pay more in taxes. I got many responses from readers, with a common theme being that this was silly, that even confiscatory taxes on the wealthy couldn’t possibly raise enough money to matter. Folks, you’re living in the past. Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal. But that was another country. The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals. For example, a recent report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out that before 1980 very-high-income individuals fell into tax brackets well above the 35 percent top rate that applies today. According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007, or more than half a percent of G.D.P. I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit. It’s instructive to compare that estimate with the savings from the kinds of proposals that are actually circulating in Washington these days. Consider, for example, proposals to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, dealing a major blow to millions of Americans. How much money would that save? Well, none from the point of view of the nation as a whole, since we would be pushing seniors out of Medicare and into private insurance, which has substantially higher costs. True, it would reduce federal spending — but not by much. The budget office estimates that outlays would fall by only $125 billion over the next decade, as the age increase phased in. And even when fully phased in, this partial dismantling of Medicare would reduce the deficit only about a third as much as could be achieved with higher taxes on the very rich. So raising taxes on the very rich could make a serious contribution to deficit reduction. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise. And then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on. Still, nobody is proposing a punitive tax. On the table, instead, are proposals like the one recently made by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio for a tiny fee on financial transactions. And here’s the thing: Because there are so many transactions, such a fee could yield several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade. Again, this compares favorably with the savings from many of the harsh spending cuts being proposed in the name of fiscal responsibility. But wouldn’t such a tax hurt economic growth? As I said, the evidence suggests not — if anything, it suggests that to the extent that taxing financial transactions reduces the volume of wheeling and dealing, that would be a good thing. And it’s instructive, too, to note that some economies already have financial transactions taxes — and that among those who do are Hong Kong and Singapore. If some conservative starts claiming that such taxes are an unwarranted government intrusion, you might want to ask him why such taxes are imposed by the two countries that score highest on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Now, the tax ideas I’ve just mentioned wouldn’t be enough, by themselves, to fix our deficit. But the same is true of proposals for spending cuts. The point I’m making here isn’t that taxes are all we need; it is that they could and should be a significant part of the solution. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: November 28, 2011 An earlier version of this column referred incorrectly to Hong Kong’s political status. It is one of China’s special administrative regions, not an independent country.

Send in the Clueless By PAUL KRUGMAN

December 4, 2011 There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident. Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!). And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security. So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless. Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts — but that doesn’t stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn’t stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama’s “massive defense cuts.” Mr. Romney’s strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn’t a stupid man — but he seems to play one on TV. Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party’s nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless. And that’s why the Republican primary has taken the form it has, in which a candidate nobody likes and nobody trusts has faced a series of clueless challengers, each of whom has briefly soared before imploding under the pressure of his or her own cluelessness. Think in particular of Rick Perry, a conservative true believer who seemingly had everything it took to clinch the nomination — until he opened his mouth. So will Newt Gingrich suffer the same fate? Not necessarily. Many observers seem surprised that Mr. Gingrich’s, well, colorful personal history isn’t causing him more problems, but they shouldn’t be. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, conservatives often seem inclined to accept that tribute, voting for candidates who publicly espouse conservative moral principles whatever their personal behavior. Did I mention that David Vitter is still in the Senate? And Mr. Gingrich has some advantages none of the previous challengers had. He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be, but he’s a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. And my sense is that he’s also very good at doublethink — that even when he knows what he’s saying isn’t true, he manages to believe it while he’s saying it. So he may not implode like his predecessors. The larger point, however, is that whoever finally gets the Republican nomination will be a deeply flawed candidate. And these flaws won’t be an accident, the result of bad luck regarding who chose to make a run this time around; the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process. Of course, given the terrible economic picture and the tendency of voters to blame whoever holds the White House for bad times, even a deeply flawed G.O.P. nominee might very well win the presidency. But then what? The Washington Post quotes an unnamed Republican adviser who compared what happened to Mr. Cain, when he suddenly found himself leading in the polls, to the proverbial tale of the dog who had better not catch that car he’s chasing. “Something great and awful happened, the dog caught the car. And of course, dogs don’t know how to drive cars. So he had no idea what to do with it.” The same metaphor, it seems to me, might apply to the G.O.P. pursuit of the White House next year. If the dog actually catches the car — the actual job of running the U.S. government — it will have no idea what to do, because the realities of government in the 21st century bear no resemblance to the mythology all ambitious Republican politicians must pretend to believe. And what will happen then?

All the G.O.P.’s Gekkos By PAUL KRUGMAN

December 8, 2011 Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the release of the movie “Wall Street,” and the film seems more relevant than ever. The self-righteous screeds of financial tycoons denouncing President Obama all read like variations on Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech, while the complaints of Occupy Wall Street sound just like what Gekko says in private: “I create nothing. I own,” he declares at one point; at another, he asks his protégé, “Now you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you, buddy?” Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the movie went a little off at the end. It closes with Gekko getting his comeuppance, and justice served thanks to the diligence of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In reality, the financial industry just kept getting more and more powerful, and the regulators were neutered. And, according to the prediction market Intrade, there’s a 45 percent chance that a real-life Gordon Gekko will be the next Republican presidential nominee. I am not, of course, the first person to notice the similarity between Mitt Romney’s business career and the fictional exploits of Oliver Stone’s antihero. In fact, the labor-backed group Americans United for Change is using “Romney-Gekko” as the basis for an ad campaign. But there’s an issue here that runs deeper than potshots against Mr. Romney. For the current orthodoxy among Republicans is that we mustn’t even criticize the wealthy, let alone demand that they pay higher taxes, because they’re “job creators.” Yet the fact is that quite a few of today’s wealthy got that way by destroying jobs rather than creating them. And Mr. Romney’s business history offers a very good illustration of that fact. The Los Angeles Times recently surveyed the record of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mr. Romney ran from 1984 to 1999. As the report notes, Mr. Romney made a lot of money over those years, both for himself and for his investors. But he did so in ways that often hurt ordinary workers. Bain specialized in leveraged buyouts, buying control of companies with borrowed money, pledged against those companies’ earnings or assets. The idea was to increase the acquired companies’ profits, then resell them. But how were profits to be increased? The popular image — shaped in part by Oliver Stone — is that buyouts were followed by ruthless cost-cutting, largely at the expense of workers who either lost their jobs or found their wages and benefits cut. And while reality is more complex than this image — some companies have expanded and added workers after a leveraged buyout — it contains more than a grain of truth. One recent analysis of “private equity transactions” — the kind of buyouts and takeovers Bain specialized in — noted that business in general is always both creating and destroying jobs, and that this is also true of companies that were buyout or takeover targets. However, job creation at the target firms is no greater than in similar firms that aren’t targets, while “gross job destruction is substantially higher.” So Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980. Now I’ve just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular? Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That’s a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts — and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both. So what do we learn from this story? Not that Mitt Romney the businessman was a villain. Contrary to conservative claims, liberals aren’t out to demonize or punish the rich. But they do object to the attempts of the right to do the opposite, to canonize the wealthy and exempt them from the sacrifices everyone else is expected to make because of the wonderful things they supposedly do for the rest of us. The truth is that what’s good for the 1 percent, or even better the 0.1 percent, isn’t necessarily good for the rest of America — and Mr. Romney’s career illustrates that point perfectly. There’s no need, and no reason, to hate Mr. Romney and others like him. We do, however, need to get such people paying more in taxes — and we shouldn’t let myths about “job creators” get in the way.

Depression and Democracy By PAUL KRUGMAN

December 11, 2011 It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege. On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight. Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood. First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony. Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power. Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening. Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe. Last month the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the “new E.U.” countries, the nations that joined the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not surprisingly, the loss of faith in democracy has been greatest in the countries that suffered the deepest economic slumps. And in at least one nation, Hungary, democratic institutions are being undermined as we speak. One of Hungary’s major parties, Jobbik, is a nightmare out of the 1930s: it’s anti-Roma (Gypsy), it’s anti-Semitic, and it even had a paramilitary arm. But the immediate threat comes from Fidesz, the governing center-right party. Fidesz won an overwhelming Parliamentary majority last year, at least partly for economic reasons; Hungary isn’t on the euro, but it suffered severely because of large-scale borrowing in foreign currencies and also, to be frank, thanks to mismanagement and corruption on the part of the then-governing left-liberal parties. Now Fidesz, which rammed through a new Constitution last spring on a party-line vote, seems bent on establishing a permanent hold on power. The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs program — and has been following the Hungarian situation closely — tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party. Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues. It’s not clear what can be done about Hungary’s authoritarian slide. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, has been very much on the case, but this is essentially a European matter. The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start — in part because the new Constitution was rammed through while Hungary held the Union’s rotating presidency. It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe’s leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for. And they also need to rethink their failing economic policies. If they don’t, there will be more backsliding on democracy — and the breakup of the euro may be the least of their worries.