Counterpunch
*The Iron Heel and the Resistance* *Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, USA, 4 November 2011 *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 -- oneaccelerated 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 intohard 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 Taverniseheadlined "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 aboutcapitalism 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 without huge government outlays, and the answer is obviously No. Michael Doliner has an amusing piece on the weekend's website addressing the conservative absurdities and contradictions on this issue of "the free market."
Writing these lines at the start of November, after digesting CounterPunch writers' daily reports from the national OWS battlefield (Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Oscar Grant Plaza on Oakland, kindred venues in Austin, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, Portland...), my eyes flicker across the world map to Greece, and my heart beats faster. Here surely is the core class conflict of our times, brilliantly evokedby the OWSers, in starkest form: finance capital v. the have-less and have-nots.
With Greece an optimist can savor the whiff of a pre-revolutionary situation and a pessimist can seize on a central truth about the European Union, that with each year that passes it is more visibly the Iron Heel of international capital. The one thing the EU's Iron Heel cannot countenance is any formally expresseddemonstration of popular rejection. Last week it was the threat of a popular referendum on the Papandreou coalition's submission to the Iron Heelin Greece. In years gone by there were the referenda in Ireland, France and Portugal, all overwhelming in their rejection of the emerging contours of the EU, all instantly overridden and dismissed by the EU's oligarchs.
I've no doubt that if by chance the left in Greece today were to evict the local political agents of the international banks, it would not be long before a NATO intervention, covert and then overt, was under way, using the usual arsenal of assassination, drone attacks and armed support for whatever security forces do not defect to the left.
Having briefly tasted batons and pepper spray, OWSers should know that when capital feels it is being pushed to the wall, it will stop at nothing to crush any serious challenge. The cop puts away his smile. The indulgent mayor imposes a curfew. "Exemplary" sentences are handed down. The prisons fill up. The FBI dusts off the Cointelpro blueprint. Organized repression can only be defeated by organized resistance, nationwide. How to mount this is the OWSers' long-termchallenge. These are very early days in the formation of themovement. In Oakland, on Wednesday, OWS staged a rally calling for a General Strike. That was optimism of the intelligence. That was most certainly thinking along the right lines.
*From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/04/the-iron-heel-and-the-resistance/*
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