The Iron Heel and the Resistance

Three years of President Obama, as of today. Count and weep. Just over a year from now Americans will be deciding whether to reelect Barack Obama or… probably Mitt Romney. In the latter case this is to assume that that Mitt, a Mormon and family man – both danger flares —  doesn’t get caught up in the minefield known as “charges of sexual harassment,” as has Herman Cain, one of his rivals for the Republican nomination. Study recent photographs of a broken Frenchman named Dominique Strauss-Kahn if you want to be reminded of what such charges can do to a candidate for high office.

Do any of the present candidates, Obama included, offer an answer to America’s crisis – one  accelerated by forty years of neo-liberal onslaught? No they don’t, because there is no answer available within the terms and boundaries of the present political system.

The middle class has – at least two thirds of it – crashed into  hard times. Americans’ store of value and savings – the house – is worthless; the always pathetic social safety net has eroded. Thirty million Americans are without work or working part-time. Nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States have disappeared since 2000, and more than 40,000 factories have closed. African-Americans have endured the greatest loss in collective assets in their history. Hispanics have seen their net worth drop by two-thirds. Millions of whites have been pitchforked into desperation. Students emerge from higher education crushed by debt.

This is the mulch that has created the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Its strength lies in the simplicity and truth of its basic message: the few are rich, the many are poor. In terms of its pretensions the capitalist system has failed. There was amusing confirmation of this in Friday’s New York Times, which carried a big article by Jason deParle, Robert Gebeloff and Sabrina Tavernise  headlined “Bleak Portrait of Poverty is Off the Mark, Experts Say.”  The story focused on the fact that the official government poverty measure  “overlooks hundreds of billions of dollars the needy receive in food stamps and other benefits”, also  “the similarly formidable amounts they lose to taxes and medical care.”

There threatens to be a new government measure, long promised, which in current political conditions will no doubt perform the sort of chicanery practiced by the Clinton administration when the Consumer Price Index inflation measure dictating such important items as Social Security payments suddenly had energy and food removed from the basket.

But if we’re talking about  capitalism as the system that best addresses the collective needs of a society, the issue is whether the “free market” can deliver the goods to keep millions of people from starvation or death from exposure...