News from Neptune

The Lincoln birthday celebrations seem to have included little attempt to learn from the past. Lincoln is celebrated — by few more than the current president, who insists upon a resemblance — but there’s little critique of the devastation over which Lincoln presided. The end of chattel slavery is taken to be a retrospective justification of his launching of the war. (The actual economic and social position of American slaves and their families in the years after the Civil War is less attended to.)

I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day American politician:

Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have been done as the British empire did — buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans? And the hatred lingered for 100 years. Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. (Ron Paul)

Lincoln was not a principled opponent of slavery (altho’ he may have become so). His position before secession was that the federal government did not possess the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already existed; he supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly prohibited Congress from interfering with slavery in states where it existed.

In the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote (to Horace Greeley),

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

And what was “saving the Union” about? All would admit today that the effect of Lincoln’s policy was to establish a much more powerful central government in the United States. (Hence the old line that the Civil War was about a verb: “the United States is” vs. “the United States are.”) But the cause of the war was the conflict between two ruling groups who exploited labor differently — by slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in the North. They came into conflict after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that followed it.

Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect of competing against a forced-labor system. But favoring free soil did not mean agitating to free the black man. The majority of Western farmers were not abolitionists … Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace. That goal, and the attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party. (W. A. Williams)

The Radical Republicans (and Lincoln) were not necessarily abolitionist and only adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi empire farmed with wage-labor, not slave-labor. (Hence the central Republican party plank was “no extension of slavery.”)

Options other than war were available to Lincoln, and he was aware of them. Advice came from the most distinguished American military figure of the day, Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). He served on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history and may have been the ablest American commander of his time; he devised the Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat the Confederacy.

In a letter addressed to Governor Seward (leading Republican and Lincoln’s Secretary of State) — and obviously meant for Lincoln’s eyes — on the day preceding Lincoln’s inauguration (March 3, 1861), Scott suggested that the president had four possible courses of action:

[1] adopt the Crittenden Compromise (which restored the Missouri Compromise line: slavery would be prohibited north of the 36° 30′ parallel and guaranteed south of it);
[2] collect duties outside the ports of seceding States or blockade them;
[3] conquer those States at the end of a long, expensive, and desolating war, and to no good purpose; or,
[4] say to the seceded States, “Wayward sisters, depart in peace!”

Scott clearly preferred the fourth. In retrospect, it probably would have been best. (Scott was retired from the service Nov. 1, 1861, and was succeeded by General George McClellan.)

I think a true democrat (therefore necessarily a socialist) would have opposed the war in 1860 — but obviously not because s/he would have supported slavery. When Karl Marx wrote on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election (1864), he gave as his principal reason that, with the distraction of slavery removed, the struggle between capital and labor was clearer: slavery had been the reason Northern workers “were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

One of the few recent scholarly studies not to observe the Lincoln cult is William Marley’s Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (2006). From a review:

Focusing on the North’s road to war in 1861, he argues that Abraham Lincoln made armed force a first choice, rather than a last resort, in addressing the Union’s breakup … Marvel describes the president’s course of action as ‘destructive and unimaginative.’ The confrontation at Fort Sumter ended any chance of avoiding conflict, he writes … Lincoln’s early and comprehensive infringement of such constitutional rights as habeas corpus set dangerous precedents for future autocratic executives.

Illustrating the important principle that the poets often get there first, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: A Novel (1984) made a similar argument a generation ago. But the theme was absent from this week’s celebrations.

–CGE

David Green writes to recommend “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe” by Avi Shlaim in The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009. (”Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state’s legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions.”) He describes Shlaim’s piece as “An historical, detailed passionate summary,” and he’s quite right.

I do think however that Shlaim gets one point wrong, a point that has some significance for understanding the factions in the US government. Writing about the national unity government formed in the spring of 2007 by Hamas and Fatah (after Hamas had won a democratic election in 2006) “that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel” — Shlaim says

Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives [sic] participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

But David Rose’s article (”The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, April 2008) describes how

the White House [sic] tried to organize the armed overthrow of the Hamas-led government after Hamas swept Palestinian elections [in  2006] … the administration boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose.

The point is that this plot was carried out not by neocons but by the “realists” in the administration — and the neocons were outraged, because the plot involved arming the Fatah faction, while the neocons insisted that all Palestinians of whatever faction should simply be suppressed.  Their detestation of the realists’ policy led two leading neocons, David Wurmser and John Bolton, to become the primary sources for Rose’s expose — revealing how marginalized the neocons had become in Bush’s second administration. (Wurmser resigned as Cheney’s Mideast adviser in July 2007.)

The point is important because the same people who were running US Mideast policy in 2007-08 will be running it in 2009-10 — and not just SecDef Gates. The “loss” of Gaza to Hamas was not due to the neocons but to the realists of the “permanent government.”  –CGE

Perhaps it betrays my essentially reformist rather than revolutionary disposition to think that there is something wrong with what Eliot has Abp. Becket say in Murder in the Cathedral –

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

However much that may be a guide for oneself, Christians at least (and Eliot thought of himself as one) are cautioned against judging the motives of others. We’re reduced to trying to descry the good action and leaving alone the heart’s reasons that the reason does not know (in others at least).

But there can be as we might say operational differences in opposing the war (a) because it’s wrong, or (b) because it’s done wrong.

They’re obvious as soon as an appropriate remedy is proposed: the alternative is (a) stop doing it, or (b) do it better.

It may be that this distinction — indeed antithesis — has been exploited to neutralize the anti-war movement in the five years since the largest anti-war demonstrations in human history. In any case, that movement does seem to have been successfully neutralized, and it wasn’t an accident.
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This is a sample of the new video version of News from Neptune (radio with pictures), from the studios of Urbana (IL) Public Television, with thanks to Jason Liggett.  It features CGE and David Green. Topics include *elitism and contempt*, *class in America*, and *the Pareto principle*.

New programs will be posted inshallah in the new year.

Don’t tax productive economic activity, tax wealth. Remove all corporate taxes (that’s practically been done) but also remove the civil rights of corporations as “legal persons.”

But wealth owned by corporations should be assigned to individuals (principally shareholders) for accounting purposes and then taxed. (We do that now informally — that’s why we say Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are rich.)

Wealth should be taxed in a way that reverses the accelerating trend to inequality (and plans for that exist). Under the pressure of neoliberalism, those European countries that had (small) wealth taxes have removed them (except France and Switzerland).

Removing taxes from productive investment (but not speculation — the Tobin tax) would presumably create jobs, as would the removal of income taxes (a much larger stimulus than is being contemplated). But the existence of jobs shouldn’t depend on whether they enrich corporations. People have a right to exercise their talents of head and hands in a useful way, and government must organize and apply that work. Everyone has a right to a job and a livable income.

I defended these proposals — which are hardly original — when I ran for Congress in Illinois’ 15th Congressional district in 2002. –CGE

Friday’s NYT has an obit for an Italian anti-fascist, Vittorio Foa, who recently
died at 98. Jailed by Mussolini, he led a left-wing labor union after WWII and
was a socialist senator. The Times describes him delicately as “a leading
intellectual of the non-Communist left [who] in the 1960s inspired some
extra-parliamentary leftist groups.”

La Repubblica published his impatient answer to the question of what today’s
left should do:

It’s a waste of time and sense to try to define a leftist identity. You have to do what’s right and necessary for the country. It’s up to posterity to decide whether it came from the right or the left.

Amen. Requiescat in pace. La lotta continua.

Senator Barack Obama said Wednesday he would order a surge of U.S. troops – perhaps 15,000 or more – to Afghanistan as soon as he reached the White House [Globe & Mail 20081022].

Obama’s position has been clear for some time. But it’s been expressed in such a way that he and the Democrats have been able to eviscerate the anti-war movement, owing to the false notion that he was an anti-war candidate.

Remember that the largest anti-war demonstrations in human history occurred before the Bush administration’s descent upon Iraq, with more than a million dead? Where did that sentiment go? In fact, it never went away — three-quarters of he American populace still disapprove of the war. But the American parody of democracy has made that fact irrelevant.

It testifies to a form of control — of media, of propaganda, of politics, and of what is generally thought — that any 20th-century totalitarianism would envy, that the Democrats and Obama have been so successful in co-opting and neutralizing the anti-war movement.

The only answer we have is to begin to build a serious movement in opposition to the Obama administration and its war policy, in the first place by exposing its lies — such as his lie that we are deterring terrorists by killing children in AfPak.

“The people can vote for whoever they want.
I control the nominations.”
–Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, ca. 1870

The presidential election campaign was primarily a distraction.  There were serious issues presumably at stake, notably the war and the economy, and the campaign not only ignored them but purposely obscured them.

The reason’s not far to seek.  As the late Australian social scientist Alex Carey wrote, “The 20th century was characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”  A trillion dollars spent every year on marketing in the US — where political candidates are sold like cars or coffee — has some effect.
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[A DC lawyer of my acquaintance sends the best analysis of the bailout I've seen, and a counter-proposal.]

Taxpayers receive preferred stock and collateral from a bank borrowing from the Taxpayers, both in the full amount of the loan sought by the bank.  In other words, stock plus collateral in double the amount of the loan. Taxpayers profit from a bailout before anyone else does.

Thanks to Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs for the heads-up by disclosing the terms of their deal, which should be the low water mark for any Taxpayer bailout.  A higher water mark would be the terms suggested above, which are not uncommon in private equity deals and chapter 11 bailouts.

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[1. US WAR POLICY] Perhaps the most ominous story of the week is that of the attack by American ground troops inside Pakistan.  US soldiers were landed from helicopters and killed as usual women and children — but inside Pakistan.  The Pakistani military was outraged. Within Bush’s war council Defense Secretary Gates has been advocating for months a secret plan for a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces inside Pakistan, and a new step seems to have been taken that way on Wednesday. [NYT 9/3]

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