We destroy the present because we come from the future

Statement of proletarians from the occupied ASOEE [Athens University of Economics and Business]

"Τhe first dawning light comes out of the deepest darkness"

Up until the Saturday night of 06/12/08 we could say that "jusqu' ici tout va bien", watching everyone's personal fall into the desert of the capitalist system. Then the crash came, and the destructive madness seized large parts of the youth of the country. At first, like so many times in history, it was the actions that did the talking. First the cop gun talked, shouting in the crudest manner the repulsion of Authority of every kind toward the phenomenon of life. The blood of a teenager was spilt, and immediately another cry instantly transmitted from Exarchia to the economic center of the metropolis and other big cities, a cry made out of collapsing glass and flames, transforming banks and malls into a raging cloud with the inscription: REVENGE.

Two days later the christmas centers of the cities looked as if they had been the targets of war bombing, while the already crisis-ridden economy took another deadly blow in its heart by hordes of "hooligans" looting commodities. "The Varkiza Treaty is broken, we are at war again". We are talking about the return of class struggle to the foreground, we are talking about the solution to the crisis: For us. And we're only getting started. Let's go…

We are part of the revolt of life against the daily death the existing social relations impose on us. With the destructive power that was latent in us we realize a wild (but contradictory) attack on the institution of private property. We occupy the streets, we breath freely despite the tear gas, attacking the most despiteful image of ourselves: the image of ourselves as the bosses' slaves, that in its most extreme, most repugnant form is the cop. We erect a steadfast barricade against the loathsome normality of the cycle of production and distribution. In the current conjunction, nothing is more important than consolidating this barricade against the class enemy. Even if we retreat under the pressure of the (para-) state scum and the insufficiency of the barricade, we all know that nothing will ever be the same in our lives.

We also position ourselves in the historical conjunction of the recomposition of a new class subject, that carries from long ago the promise of assuming the role of the gravedigger of the capitalist system. We believe that the proletariat was never a class because of its position, on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a class for itself on the ground of the clash with the bosses, first acting and only later gaining consciousness of its actions. The recomposition is taking place by groups of subjects that become aware that they have no control over their own lives, from groups that have been -or are getting- squeezed on the bottom of the barrel, and are now entering a contradictionary trajectory toward unification.

Wage work has always been a blackmail. Nowdays this holds even more, as the number of workers that are employed only circumstancially and precariously in sectors which, while necessary for the reproduction of capitalist domination have no social usefulness whatsoever, is also growing. In these sectors, class struggles, exiled from the field of self-management of production, move into the field of the generalized blocking and sabotage. Simultaneously, the automatization of production and the abandonment of the politics of full employment create whole reserve armies of jobless proletarians who are pushed to the fringes of society and resort to insecured labor or turn to crime economy in order to survive. Jobless, precarious workers, highschool and university students destined to become future wage slaves, migrant workers of the first and second generation that daily live the marginalization and the repression constituted along with radical workers' minorities the community of the insurgents of December, a community based on the common condition of alienation and exploitation that defines a society based on commodity-work. Let's remind ourselves that the eve of this feast-day was celebrated from those even lower, from those who have lost every joy in the places of torment of democracy, from the prisoners of the greek prisons.

The owners of the commodity labor-power who had it invested in the stock exchange of social security and in the hope of seeing their offspring exiting this condition through social ascension, continue to observe the insurrectionary party without taking part, but also without calling the police to dissolve it. Along with the substitution of social security with police security and the collapse of the stock market of class movability, many workers, under the burden of the collapsing universe of petit-bourgeois ideology and the state hybris, are moving toward a (socially important) moral justification of the youth outbreak, but without yet joining the attack against this murderous world.

They kept on dragging their corpse on three-month litanies of the professional unionists and on defending a sad sectional defeatism against the raging class aggressiveness that is rapidly coming to the fore. These two worlds met up on Monday, 8/12, on the streets, and the entire country caught on fire. The world of the sectional defeatism took the streets to defend the democratic right of the separated roles of the citizen, the worker, the consumer, to participate in demonstrations without getting shot at. Nearby, not that far away, the world of class aggresiveness took the streets in the form of small organized "gangs" that break, burn, loot, smash the pavements to throw stones onto the murderers. The first world (atleast as expressed in the politics of the professional unionists) was so scared by the presence of the second, that on Wednesday, 10/12, attempted to demonstrate without the annoying presence of the "riff-raff". The dilemma regarding how to be on the streets was already layed in: Either with the democratic safety of the citizen, or with the clash solidarity of the group, the aggressive block, the march that defends everyone's existence with sharp attacks and barricades.

The December events ("Dekemvriana") of 2008 in Greece are the latest link in a series of insurrections that are sweeping through the capitalist world. In its decadent phase, capitalist society neither can, nor does it aim at gaining the consent of the exploited through the integration of partial demands. All that remains is is repression. With the restructuring that began in the mid-seventies (to repel the proletarian mutiny that is known as "movement-68"), capital faced the following contradiction: while it had the ability to create a human mass of passive tv-viewers and commodity-consumers, it had to simultaneously refuse them (by lowering their wages) the possibility of buying these commodities. From this point of view, the looting of a mall in Stadiou str. by people who are daily sharing the promises of a false consumer happiness, while being refused the means to realize these promises, shouldn't come out as a surprise.

The insurrection of December didn't put out any concrete demands, exactly because the participating subjects daily experience, and therefore know the denial of the ruling class to meet any such demand. The wisperings of the left, that initially demanded the removal of the government were replaced by a mute terror and a desperate attempt to relieve the uncontrollable insurrectionary wave. The absence of any reformist demand whatsoever reflects an underground (but still unconscious) disposition toward a radical subversion and surpassing of the existing commodity relations and the creation of qualitatively now ones.

Everything begins and matures in violence – but nothing stops there. The destructive violence that unleashed in the events of December caused the blocking of the capitalist normality in the center of the metropolis, a necessary yet insufficient condition for the transforming of the insurrection into an attempt for social liberation. The destabilation of capitalist society is impossible without paralysing the economy – that is, without disrupting the function of the centers of production and distribution, through sabotage, occupations, strikes. The absence of a positive, creative proposal for a different form of organizing the social relations was –up until now– more than self-evident. Nevertheless, the insurrection of December must be understood within the historical context of an enlivement process of class struggle that takes place on the international level.

A series of struggle practices – some have surfaced in elementary form in many countries where significant class conflicts took place recently – propose and realize in a germinal level the human community that abolishes and creatively transcends the alienated commodity relations: occupied schools can be used as regrouping centers to reclaim the streets and the public space in general; public anti-lessons organized within the context of the recent movement of precarious workers/students in Italy, putting knowledge under the service of the forming community; collective appropriations of supermarkets and bookstores, and the collective life in the occupation as a self-fullfilment of the demands for free feeding, housing, books; the radical contestation of the property relations, cooperation instead of personal appropriation (and sometimes reselling) of the appropriated commodities; neighborhood assemblies linking up, starting from the local issues, prefiguring thus a society where decisions are taken and are executed without the mediation of any separated power whatsoever (sf. Oaxaca); free transportations with the public transportation, the déménages (invading into employment agencies and throwing all their stuff into the street) as were systematically made during the anti-CPE movement in France. These (and countless others, that can be born out of the personal and collective intelligence) are the practises that can enrich and fertilize the powers of negation, so that through the turmoil of insurrection, the free, communist society will start to take shape.

We do everything within our reach not to abandon the occupations and the streets, because we don't want to go home. We get miserable and unhappy with the "realistic" thought that sooner or later we will have to return to normality. We get full of joy with the thought that we are in the beginning of a historical process of enlivenment of class struggle, and that if we want to, if we fight for it, if we believe in it, it can lead us out of the crisis, into the revolutionary getaway from the system.

Proletarians from the occupied ASOEE

~ From Greece unrest eyewitness reports - 18 December 2008 ~

Musical Innerlube: Jerry Leake - Tabla solo

Wow, he studied under my old friend Todd Nardin.

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Cheney confessed to war crime

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley believes that not only did Vice President Dick Cheney "unambiguously" confess to a war crime during an ABC interview on Monday, but the US' future as a nation may depend on taking action.

Asked by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann whether Cheney had just confessed to a war crime on national television, Turley at first replied wryly, "It's an interesting question, isn't it? ... If someone commits a crime and everyone's around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime?"

"It most certainly is a crime to participate, to create, to in many ways monitor a torture program," he added. "What [Cheney] is describing is most certainly and unambiguously a war crime."

During Monday's interview, Cheney was asked, "Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohamed?" and replied, "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared."

"What happens if the next administration does not press this?" Olbermann asked. "Do we let the International Court at the Hague come in and take over all our responsibilities for policing our own act here?"

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Günter Wallraff: Undercover journalist

Günter Wallraff (born October 1, 1942 in Burscheid near Cologne) is a famous German writer and undercover journalist.

Wallraff came to prominence thanks to his striking journalistic research methods and several major books on lower class working conditions and tabloid journalism. This style of research is based on what the reporter experiences personally after covertly becoming part of the subgroup under investigation. Wallraff would construct a fictional identity so that he was not recognizable as a journalist. In this way, he created books which denounce what he considers to be social injustices and which try to provide readers with new insights into the way in which society works.

Wallraff first took up this kind of investigative journalism in 1969 when he published 13 Unerwünschte Reportagen (“13 Undesired Reports”) in which he described what he experienced when acting the parts of an alcoholic, a tramp, and a worker in a chemicals factory.

He traveled to Greece in May 1974 at the time of the Ioannides dictatorship. While in Syntagma Square, he protested against human right violations. He was arrested and tortured by the police, as he did not carry, on purpose, any papers on him that could identify him as a foreigner. After his identity was revealed, Wallraff was convicted and sentenced to 14 months in jail. He was released in August, after the end of the dictatorship.

In 1977 Wallraff worked for four months as an editor for the tabloid Bild-Zeitung newspaper in Hanover, calling himself “Hans Esser”. In his books Der Aufmacher (“Lead Story”) and Zeugen der Anklage (“Witnesses for the Prosecution”) he portrays his experiences on the editorial staff of the paper and the journalism which he encountered there, which at times displayed contempt for humanity.

In 1987 the journalist Hermann L. Gremliza claimed that he, rather than Wallraff, had written parts of Der Aufmacher. The book also formed the basis for the English-language film The Man Inside, starring Jürgen Prochnow as Wallraff.

Ganz Unten (“Lowest of the Low”) (1985) documented Wallraff's posing as a Turkish guest worker, and the mistreatment he received in that role at the hands of employers, landlords and the German government.

Wallraff has been heavily criticized by those on the receiving end of his style of investigation, as they consider he breached constitutional rights to privacy or revealed trade secrets. Attempts were therefore made on a number of occasions to legally prevent Wallraff's investigative methods, but his actions were regularly ruled as constitutional by the courts. The courts opined that freedom of the press and public interest in areas concerned with the formation of public opinion favored Wallraff's actions. In balancing public interest with the competing interests of those immediately affected by his actions it follows however that private conversations, for example, may not be published.

Wallraff has been publicly accused of several cases of plagiarism and falsifications, especially concerning his books Lead Story and Lowest of the Low.

Wallraff was one of the first people in Germany to invoke his constitutional right not to do armed military service. Despite this refusal, Wallraff was obliged to serve time in the Bundeswehr.

In January 2003, Russia turned away Wallraff and two other Germans, the former labour minister for the CDU Norbert Blüm and Rupert Neudeck, head of the relief organization Cap Anamur, as they tried to enter the country to work on a human rights article about Chechnya.

In September 2003, investigations were made by the BStU (the federal commission set up to deal with the files of the Stasi) into the Rosenholz files on Stasi workers which somehow got into the hands of the CIA; as a result, it was claimed that Wallraff had had connections to the Stasi in the 1960s. Wallraff disputes that he ever actively worked for them. On December 17, 2004, the Hamburg district court ruled on a suit brought by Wallraff that he must not be described as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or Stasi collaborator (he was being called this above all in newspapers belonging to the Axel Springer Verlag – the publishers of Bild-Zeitung) as no proof of collaboration could be furnished in the documents which had been presented.

In May 2007, Wallraff announced that he had started yet another undercover journalist work, this time at a German call centre.

His investigative methods have led to the creation of the Swedish verb 'wallraffa' meaning “to expose misconduct from the inside by assuming a role” which has been officially included in word list of the Swedish Academy.

~ LearnHub ~

Bailout for the People: "The Cook Plan"

Basic Income Guarantee Network Annual Conference, New York , N.Y. , February 27-March 1, 2009

 

This system is not free enterprise, and it is not capitalism.

It is a cancer that is destroying the world.

 

Isn't it Finally Time to Enact a Basic Income Guarantee?

The lack of individual and family income security in the midst of a highly-developed economy is a travesty under any circumstances, but the basic contradiction of “poverty in the midst of plenty” that has plagued the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution is becoming much worse in the early years of the 21^st century as the Recession of 2008 picks up speed.

Winston Churchill spoke on the subject when giving the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on June 19, 1930, a few months after the crash of the U.S. stock market that started the Great Depression. He said:  

“Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them? Who would have thought that cheap and abundant supplies of all the basic commodities would find the science and civilization of the world unable to utilize them? Have all our triumphs of research and organization bequeathed us only a new punishment: the Curse of Plenty? Are we really to believe that no better adjustment can be made between supply and demand? Yet the fact remains that every attempt has failed. Many various attempts have been made, from the extremes of Communism in Russia to the extremes of Capitalism in the United States . They include every form of fiscal policy and currency policy. But all have failed, and we have advanced little further in this quest than in barbaric times. Surely it is this mysterious crack and fissure at the basis of all our arrangements and apparatus upon which the keenest minds throughout the world should be concentrated.

Evidently we've learned nothing since Churchill spoke. Isn't it shameful—or just surprising—that since the proponents of “post-modern” economics restructured the U.S. economy around the concept of a deregulated financial sector over the past 30 years, income and wealth disparities between rich and poor have become much worse?

Perhaps we are finally ready to reopen the question of whether human beings have a right to a sufficient income to keep body and soul together. This question has been mostly lost since President Ronald Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural address that, “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.”

 But it is only government that can authorize and implement what is today called a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG). Otherwise, if government is trapped in the ideological straightjacket Reagan and his fellow conservatives put it in, then the only possible paradigm is Social Darwinism—survival of the fittest. Today it is not difficult to see that implementation of a BIG, had it been put in place when the concept still had political life in the 1960s and early 1970s, would have gone a long way toward ameliorating human distress from poverty along with assuring a degree of economic justice. And we would clearly be much better off today.

The last serious efforts at a BIG were President Richard Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, which passed the House but was defeated in the Senate in 1970, followed by implementation of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income families, enacted in 1975. Since then, every step toward economic “reform” has been one permutation or another of trickle-down economics, including the supply-side tax cuts of the Reagan and Bush II administrations.

Of course, the purpose of the move to deregulate the financial industry that has been going on for the past generation was supposed to have been to create a new “ownership” society based on having our money “work for us.” But the deregulated bubble economy has now blown up, exposed as the biggest fraud in history.

 Yet even in the midst of massive government bailouts for the banks and the as-yet-to-be-implemented economic stimulus proposals for the people, a BIG is never mentioned, not even by progressives. One problem with BIG is that its proponents always presented it as a transfer-of-wealth program, where a portion of the earnings of people with earned incomes would be diverted to support those in need. Even the idea of diverting military expenditures to a BIG could be viewed as a transfer program, since a smaller war machine would mean a reduction of salary and benefit payments to military personnel and civilian contractors.

In other words, even those in favor of BIG have viewed it as a kind of charity. As such, it is likely safe to say that BIG has little, if any, chance to be implemented within the U.S. at any time in the foreseeable future, at least in an amount to have an impact.

But there are other ways to look at the problem. One way is that of the Social Credit movement, where a regular dividend payment to individuals is seen not only as fair but is viewed as a necessary balancing force within a developed economy. But Social Credit concepts, while once a force in the British Commonwealth nations, is virtually unknown in the U.S. Another way is shown by the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), where residents enjoy by right a share of the resource wealth of the state.

Both Social Credit and the APF as models for action will be discussed in this paper. The paper focuses on the U.S. , though the concepts are universally applicable, and proposes a method of providing a BIG as part of a program to rebuild the economy from the bottom up. I call this program, based on dividend-type approaches, a “Bailout for the People,” as opposed to the bank bailouts that are adding trillions of dollars to the national debt. I have presented it previously in articles on the internet as “The Cook Plan.” (Richard C. Cook, “How to Save the U.S. Economy,” Global Research, October 10, 2008 at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10508)

Such a program is urgently needed. There is no time to waste in rescuing our citizens from the onrushing catastrophe that is befalling an economy where both manufacturing and family farming were long ago gutted to create today's anemic service economy. If things continue to go as they are today, there could be U.S. citizens starving within a year, and Congress knows it.   

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