Managerial Feudalism: The Real New World Order

     Capitalism is dead! Long live managerial feudalism!

     I see that you don't know what that is. Let me explain.

     A long time ago on this blog I used to use "corporate feudalism" to describe our economy because I believed the problem was that our society wasn't properly capitalist and needed a lot of regulation to make capitalism work better. As I fell out of the habit of writing regularly I also became more convinced capitalism was the problem and that our system was capitalist after all. When I started writing again I was long out of the habit. "Capitalism" has been my go to description of our economic disease. I have come to reconsider.

     Approximately a year ago now, Professor David Graeber wrote the simple and yet profound book "Bullshit Jobs." That's pretty direct for an academic type isn't it? I'm not going to give a recap or review of the book because I am far more interested in plugging the book's existence out of respect for the author and swiping Profressor Graeber's excellent scholarly term and using it to make my own point about the modern, post-capitalist society; naturally, also out of respect for the author! If you want to read a review of the book there's a really good one at Current Affairs!

     The main point is that in this book, Professor Graeber coined the phrase "managerial feudalism." Like any good writer I came to an immediate conclusion. "I remember I used to say something like this to say something similar, but this sounds better so I'm going to steal it!" Being neither a gentleman nor a scholar, I am too far beneath Professor Graeber for it to be socially acceptable for him to challenge me to a duel. So here we are.

     I have referred to our political system as a "stakeholder democracy" and I still think this term is good. Feudalism and a form of democracy among the aristocratic landlords who controlled the country held up far longer than it had any right to expect to last in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This is actually an excellent model for our modern corporate society, where billionaires take the place of barons. Our constitutional government is the hapless King of Poland in this system, easily checked if a single baron chooses to exercise their veto.

     Managerial feudalism is its economic twin. When capitalism ate our social democracy in the 1970s, it died of indigestion in the 1980s and was replaced by managerial feudalism in the 1990s when Bill Clinton broke the government's half of the New Deal.

     You're still looking at me like you don't know what that is. I suppose I had better tell you then, hadn't I?

     Feudalism is a system in which economic power is based on property ownership and economic produce is controlled by landlords who own the property on which it occurs. This is actually very similar to capitalism, except property and the control of labor bound to that property matter more than ownership of the means of production. Our form of modern feudalism is managerial for the self-explanatory reason that the greatest economic power is often wielded not, directly, by the owners of the property but by employees who manage the labor. If billionaires take on the role of barons in this system, CEOs and the tight circle of high level executives around them are the knights who enforce their will. These managers have the most contact both with the labor force and the governing elite while their billionaire liege lords engage in a life of leisure and political skullduggery.

     Managerial feudalism works in simple, straightforward fashion based on the right of contract. In theory, rational individuals engage in binding agreements in a free market. Only their enlightened self interest and their means restrict their freedom. In actual fact, economic coercion forces unequal agreements in which the employer holds all the real rights and the employee has only their freedom to quit. Even then, if they do not give their agreed upon two to three weeks notice, they may not get their final paycheck on time. In a country where we are constantly a $400 expense away from bankruptcy or homelessness, not getting your final paycheck on time is a big deal.

     In effect, employees are peasants bound to their agreed upon employment until they are fired or voluntarily quit. Since employees rarely become billionaires, all these peasants do when they do voluntarily quit is to exchange one corporate overlord for another. This happens fairly frequently as alienation and tedium wear at the employees. The frequent turnover helps keep wages low and allows the worst employers to hire and fire people on regular schedules to maintain the ideal sized workforce at all times. This increases economic coercion in the whole system.

     It is this system of managerial feudalism that governs most of our day to day working lives. Small business owners are frequently involved in this system as franchise holders or "owner-managers" within a larger organization. Others exist outside it like the merchants, tradesmen and yeoman farmers of the Middle Ages, surviving as best they can through cooperation or pure cussedness. Most small business, remember, fails. If unable to maintain their economic independence their owners are forced back into the peasantry.

     There are three classes in this society, not counting the proto-bourgieousie that tries to survive outside it. There are landlords (billionaires and mega-millionaires, mostly board members and large shareholders but numbering some CEOS of particularly successful corporations as well), bosses (the various executives who fill the roll of corporate knights to the billionaire barons) and employees.

     I'm going to try to remember to be consistent in my use of this language going forward. Thanks for indulging me.
   

What's With All the Vote Splitters?

   
     Norman Solomon recently wrote an excellent piece about the importance of credible primary challengers in Truthdig. I couldn't agree more. I think he's dead on and I'm glad he gave shoutouts to great challengers like Mark Gamba and Jessica Cisneros; but he touched on something that I have been thinking about a lot lately too. As Solomon says, "... it's best to field only one progressive challenger; other the chances of ousting or jolting the incumbent are apt to be greatly diminished." So, to put it in plain English, splitting the progressive vote is usually bad. It makes it harder for progressives to win.

     Yet we have a lot of progressive candidates splitting the vote in quite a few district primaries. There are several reasons for this embarrassment of riches. I believe the biggest is that there really aren't a lot of ways for aspiring civic leaders to make their mark anymore. The gutting of local media to satisfy corporate greed means that you need to make it onto television to get attention. That usually requires a national profile that the local city councilman just doesn't have. Local tv news still exists, of course, but it's increasingly controlled by the corporate robber barons as well. Running for Congress can get one an audience. That audience can get the candidate into media, politics or business in a variety of ways that weren't open before.

     A more disturbing reason is that some candidates may be running to split the vote in order to stop someone else from winning. The best example of this is the CA-12, where the strongest of 2018's band of progressive challengers to Nancy Pelosi is facing two rivals for the progressive vote. Shahid Buttar is, on paper, a perfect focus for progressive energy in the district. He performed much better than expected in 2018 despite a late entry. He is a lawyer, activist and writer who has massive credibility as an advocate for civil liberties. So why are there two other candidates?

     The answer rests in the shadowy alleyways of San Francisco politics. Buttar's late entry into the race engendered bad blood from the progressive candidates who he outperformed. In the style unfortunately common in the Democratic Party today, he was blamed for taking "their" votes and "giving the second spot in the general election to the Republican." Indeed, this is Tom Gallagher's rationale for running and he clearly expressed it during a debate between the three progressive candidates. It's also the reason one of those candidates, Stephen Jaffe, has endorsed the third entry, Agatha Bacelar.

     Bacelar's reasons for running, and her progressive bona fides, are less cut and dried. She used to work for the Emerson Collective, a combination philanthropic trust and venture capital concern founded and run by Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs alongside managing partners Arne Duncan and Michael Klein. This is the kind of fake progressive influence shop popular with American billionaires today. The fact that Bacelar used to work for them and still vocally advocates for them raises serious questions about her credibility as a progressive. The Emerson Collective has deep roots in national politics and may have an interest in making sure Nancy Pelosi is re-elected.

     A very different dynamic exists in the NJ-06. Javahn Walker previously challenged incumbent Frank Pallone in 2018 and is running again. Russ Cirincione announced his candidacy because he didn't think Walker could win a second attempt and he believed he would stand a better chance. Yet I have spoken to both candidates since they started running and have only the best impressions of both. While he thinks he has a better chance of winning, Cirincione has nothing bad to say about Walker and quite a bit of good. The two candidates are amicable and their campaigns aim to remove all the oxygen from Pallone's campaign by proving the district is progressive now. I can't help but think just one candidate would be better, but both men are determined to take their shot for now.

     The immediate way to solve the problem would be for candidates to sit down like adults and make mature decisions. Perhaps state office would be a good choice for some of these vote splitters. Progressive Democrats have never focused on statehouses the way conservative Republicans have and it's time for that to change. The simple fact of human ambition make that kind of maturity impossible in today's political climate. The media loves the concept of "the next AOC" and this encourages young candidates like Agatha Bacelar to run as progressives even if they may not be.

     In the long run we need more cohesive and coherent progressive movement with a basic litmus test and enough organization to channel the right candidates into the right races. The problem is that such an organization would need to avoid the corporate taint that inevitably overtakes progressive groups. Is that possible in today's political world?

When Is A Bill Bad? When It Isn't Any Good!

     I want to start by thanking Dr. Christine Eady Mann for telling me to read the Feinstein Assault Weapons Ban that she supports. It was very educational. I would not have known what a colossally bad bill it is if Dr. Mann had not been so clear that I needed to read it to understand her position. Now that I do understand her position I'm afraid that it either leaves a lot to be desired or she really hasn't read the details of the bill she asked me to read. I don't want to assume which.

     The first thing you have to understand about the Feinstein crime bill is that it doesn't ban semi-automatic handguns (which kill the majority of people killed by guns) or even require their registration beyond existing state licensing and registration requirements. Why is this important? It's important because it ignores the biggest part of the gun violence problem in America (64% of gun deaths are caused by handguns, according to the FBI) entirely in favor of making political points by banning "semi-automatic assault weapons."

     It's a gun violence bill that does nothing to prevent gun violence and they're not really even pretending.

     "Wait," you cry! "But what about the 4% of gun deaths that actually are caused by assault rifles?" You're impassioned and you know this a small number but you are sure it must do something to prevent a tiny bit of gun violence. This was what I thought before I actually read the bill, as Dr. Mann asked me to do. I was wrong.

     The one thing that most frightens centrist Democrats is the idea that the NRA's biggest talking point, "They're coming for your guns!" can never be allow to come true. If this right-wing talking point actually came to be, the centrists fear, the political consequences would be disastrous. By which I mean that they are worried they might stop getting donations from various corporate lobbies allied to the gun lobby. If your secret dream is that liberals really will come for conservatives' guns, prepare to be disappointed.

     A grandfather clause exempts every single banned weapon currently in someone's possession. So the bill only bans the sale, manufacture, transport and import of the weapons on the list. It does nothing about the guns waiting to be sold illegally, loaned to a friend or stolen. It may prevent gun deaths in a few years, that might otherwise have happened at the muzzles of weapons not yet manufactured or imported. It prevents the legal sale of the weapons you already own but it doesn't even include a buyback provision if you actually want to be rid of them!

     So it won't prevent a mass shooting with an AR-15 today, tomorrow or next week and it won't ever prevent a drive-by shooting with a handgun or a pump action shotgun. It won't ever prevent a violent spouse from shooting their partner with a revolver. It's an empty shell of a bill. It's exactly the sort of centrist do-nothing "Problem Solver" approved solution to a major social problem that the corporate robber barons of our modern society can donate money to pass! It's the bill I would expect to see on Dianne Feinstein's website.

     Congress can and should do better than this bill! The background check provision should be strengthened by making them free to both the buyer and the seller of the weapon; let law enforcement eat the coast because we certainly give them more than enough to pay for it! The bill should require registration for all grandfathered weapons and all semi-automatic pistols not covered by the Assault Weapons Ban! The bill should require mental health evaluations and gun safety exams to maintain registration and these should also be free to the gun owner.

     The bill should specifically allocate funds for the exams and evaluations; the bill should also fund a buyback program so that guns can be removed from circulation if the owners want to sell them to the government. My friend Steve Cox has a great argument for why it won't actually recover many guns, but I believe it's fair to let buyback advocates have a chance to prove it can work. If it doesn't, we save some money.

     What's really important is that the common sense gun reform I noted above should be combined with a robust single payer health care system and laws requiring higher pay and greater workplace democracy. People who are healthier, happier and less financially strapped are less likely to shoot up the neighborhood!

Democratic Leadership Is The Problem

     I'm going to take a moment to say that the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party really sucks. That's my firmly held opinion and I stand by it. They're to blame for much of their own inability to properly deal with President Trump. They're to blame, in many ways, for his election in the first place. They've gotten us into this fine mess.

     Yes, I know, the last piece I wrote for this blog was about how the United States of America is already well into the constitutional crisis starting our slide toward fascism. I stand by it. Resistance is about a lot more than simply defeating Donald Trump and installing a Democratic President. Resistance is about fighting those fascist tendencies in society, in business and in politics. This is a much bigger project than any one President or party and it's unfair to a host of other American villains to place all the blame on Donald Trump's broad shoulders. The usual suspects of the Bush Administration should not escape our rage just because so many of them have been given new respectability as Never Trumpers. Nor should we forget that President Obama chose not to prosecute them and, indeed, gave important jobs to several war criminals.

     Yet it's very important to remind everyone that none of this lets Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer off the hook. It makes their guilt that much worse. They knew what had happened under Bush. Nancy Pelosi had been given the heads up on the CIA torture program in 2002. In 2006, when she became Speaker for the first time, she declined to impeach George W. Bush for crimes she knew he had committed. In 2006 we didn't know that she had been aware of the CIA torture program for four years. Now that we do know, what does that say about her refusal to take the necessary Constitutional steps to address those crimes?

     Steny Hoyer is guilty of his own complicity. Where Pelosi at least voted against the Iraq War in the first place, Hoyer voted for it. In 2007 he still had no regrets and thought it had been the right vote. To call Steny Hoyer anything other than a nakedly imperialist stooge for Republicans, as it relates to the Iraq War or the War on Terror, would be a lie. I don't want to lie to my readers. It sets a bad precedent. So: Steny Hoyer was a nakedly imperialist stooge for Republicans during the Iraq War. He's still way too supportive of the Israeli military's brutal repression of the Palestinians.

     Can we really say that the One Who Kept The Secrets and the Warmonger are progressive when it comes to foreign policy? I think we can safely toss any such ideas out the window. They're RINOs on this shit when it really matters.

     When we take a look at domestic policy and more recent Democratic Party squabble the evidence only piles up that much higher. Nancy Pelosi is against impeaching Trump. She has absolutely no enthusiasm for the Green New Deal. She doesn't even support Medicare For All! What are Steny Hoyer's postions on impeachent, Medicare For All and the Green New Deal? Pretty much the same as Pelosi's at best!

     With Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer we don't even need Republicans to oppose us. Our own leaders will oppose us out of fear! This isn't really very good for our chances of actually winning on any of these issues, you know that?

All This and Concentration Camps Too!

   
     I wrote on Wednesday about Rich Lowry's rather stupid decision to attack Rep. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (D - NY) in a ridiculous little shit post on the magazine's website. The topic was whether or not temporary detention centers for asylum seekers coming to the United States from Central America qualify as "concentration camps." The definition is as follows: "a place where a large number of people, particularly political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or too await execution."

    Rep. Occasio-Cortez, naturally, came down on the side of rational common sense. We can all see how legal asylum seekers being treated as illegal aliens qualify as "political prisoners." The only reason they are being imprisoned at all is because the Trump Justice Department made the entirely political decision to lock them up! The idea that Rep. Liz Cheney (R - WY) chose to take issue with AOC's description was anything other than shit-posting is pretty silly. Yet Rich Lowry chose to double down despite the facts. Masha Gessen, of the New Yorker, chose instead to get to the real heart of the problem: that conservative denials of the facts are a gas-lighting of history that renders real atrocities as something unimaginable and unique instead of things that happen all the time.

     Nor are concentration camps the only ongoing assault on our liberties. As Chris Hedges wrote for Truthdig, the ongoing political persecution of Julian Assange by the Trump Justice Department is a very real attack on the fundamental underpinnings of our so-called Constitution. The fact that there is no powerful free speech movement in the streets, protesting in Assange's defense, is proof of how well the Ministry of Propaganda of the United States of Authoritarianism has successfully twisted our perceptions of Assange. This brutality towards the free press is only magnified by what is happening to journalists on the US-Mexico border. What will happen to reporters covering the concentration camps if Assange is convicted? If you have ever read Stephen King's "The Stand," you have seen images of the narrow line between committing atrocities and committing new atrocities against those who expose them. Will the reporters try to tell us the truth about those concentration camps end up the next people sent to them?

     I hear you shouting about alarmism, conspiracy theories and tin-foil hats. No one is more critical of the "Illuminati" model of political opposition than I am. I would say that conspiracy theories end up serving the robber barons a lot more than they help us defeat them. The Illuminati are both all-powerful and totally incompetent so all we have to do is eradicate the conspiracy. Do you see how that plays right into the hands of someone like Trump rather than helping us? I definitely don't believe in the Illuminati; but not believing in ridiculous conspiracies about secret governments doesn't mean that I don't understand how the government we have works.

     Much of the legitimate Resistance's time has been wasted by Russia conspiracy theories without a lot of clear facts to back them up instead of the obvious targets: one of the most corrupt and incompetent administrations in history. Have any of those allegedly criminal cabinet secretaries been brought to justice yet or have the Congressional authorities bothered to refer Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke for prosecution? Has the Trump Justice Department begun to prosecute them? It's easy to see why at least one CNN writer thinks Trump's administration is succeeding beneath the utter shit-show. Can we really argue with his logic?

     We've got a massive lack of accountability for corruption and public fraud going back to the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations.Trump's cabinet shit-show is just one symptom. The way former Bush supporters all guilty of lying us into war with Iraq have been rehabilitated by the opposition media is another symptom and we can't blame it on Trump. Nor can we blame the way past Democratic congressional criminals like Jane Harman are treated by the opposition media on Trump. The Obama Justice Department never prosecuted the grifters and war criminals of the Bush Administration and Obama-friendly media has washed them clean of their sins.

     With all this, the concentration camps are really just the cherry on top of the sundae. Our freedom is at stake. We have never had much of it but we have the opportunity to win more now!

Rich Lowry Is A Tool

Rich Lowry is the editor of the National Review. Why does this matter?

It matters for a few reasons. The first is that the Review is still considered the creme de la crème of intelligent conservative writing. The second is that the National Review is still a major mouthpiece for conservative thought in this country. With the many conflicts of Trumpism, libertarianism and traditional conservatism going on right now one would expect a flowering of debate, ideas and moral conflict on the right!

That's not happening. Why?

That brings us to the third reason it matters that Rich Lowry is the Editory of the National Review.

Rich Lowry is an idiot.

Congresswoman Alexandria Occasio-Cortez rightfully accused the Orange Troll of operating concentration camps on the US-Mexico border. Was this language inflammatory? Absolutely and I'm very glad that Congresswoman Occasio-Cortez is willing to be inflammatory! Her willingngess to put herself out there like this allows us to see what the enemy really thinks.

Rich Lowry has been kind enough to show us what he really thinks. We should believe him. He’s an intellectually dishonest Nazi apologist who is willing to split hairs in order to score political points with an uneducated audience that prefers owning the libs to facts or truth.

All the internal conflicts brewing in his own bedroom and Rich Lowry is using a nationally read platform to troll a Congresswoman he doesn't like!?

That's right. What's more is he is stepping into this fight knowing that it's a loser. The simple fact is that there was a distinct difference between the phrases “concentration camp” (which can be used to describe everything from a PLO refugee camp in Lebanon in the 1970s to the German internment camp at Crystal River, TX during WWII) and a “death camp.”

Has Rich Lowry never seen Conspiracy? It was kind of a big deal when it came out. He might want to go back and watch it.

I will raise the stakes. Not only are we building concentration camps on the border but we put our citizens in actual gulags and set them to forced labor to enrich corporations! How will Rich defend gulags?

Original Sins: White Supremacy in America

          This weekend I’m writing about America’s original sin. Everyone knows about it. Black people, Native Americans and Latinx people deal with it on a daily basis. Asian-Americans face it less brutally, but no less real, in a variety of stereotypes that have become cultural tropes. Most white people either actively participate in it or perpetuate it by trying to ignore it. Every white person in this country benefits from it in some way. This sin touches everything in the United States in some way. Until we face it, confess it and atone for it we will never be a free land of free people.

            It’s called white supremacy and it has been the engine that drives America from the very beginning. In the very first report that Columbus sent back to the Spanish Court he said that he thought the Arawak natives of the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Jamaica and Hispaniola would be excellent slaves. He took advantage of the Arawak’s hospitality, murdered several of their citizens, took more hostage in attempt to extort gold from them and left an armed band behind on San Salvador when he returned to Spain. When he came back he found that his armed party had angered the Arawaks by raiding and had been killed to a man by a unified Native force.

            Rather than stay on San Salvador he instead established himself as Governor of Hispaniola and set about trying to prove his hypothesis that the Arawak would be excellent slaves. Unfortunately for the Arawak it turned out they had no immunity to communicable European diseases. So the slaves died a lot. Columbus was forced to raid for new slaves almost constantly, which killed more Arawak in the fighting. Eventually it was so hard to find slaves that Columbus forced Spanish colonists to do the work the slaves had been doing. So they fired his ass immediately. Treating white people like “Indians” was monstrous!

            The downfall of the first would-be American emperor came from the same white supremacy that had motivated his imperialism in the first place. His successors would solve the labor shortage by buying African slaves from the Portuguese in exchange for Caribbean sugar. The lesson from this is that we can’t treat the Native American genocide and the Pan-Atlantic Slave Trade as isolated historical events resting in their own beds until checked upon. Columbus intended to create a slave society from the very beginning. The Native Americans died faster than they could be replaced. The white Spaniards did not want to work. African captives were purchased instead. The empire began to flourish.

            America was built on this foundation of white supremacy and imperialism. When the first Spanish colonists settled Florida they brought slavery with them and drove the native Seminoles away from their settlements. When the first English and Dutch colonists arrived in what are now Virginia, New England and the Mid-Atlantic States, they bought slaves from the Portuguese and the Spanish. They couldn’t enslave entire Native American populations but they could and did enslave the prisoners they took and didn’t simply massacre.

            Slavery and Native American displacement became the story of the original expansion of the Thirteen Colonies and the catalyst for independence. The number one resentment against the British government by wealthy Colonists of property was that the British crown had placed limits on their westward expansion by virtue of agreement with Native allies. It was easy for them to use the propaganda of opening new western lands for poor farmers to form a power bloc with poor white tenant farmers and indentured servants who might otherwise be more sympathetic to their fellow oppressed, the slaves.

            It could be argued with some credibility that white supremacy and imperialism, in this specific form, were the real catalyst for American independence. 

            During the fight for independence white supremacy was only strengthened by the British promise to American slaves that they could have their freedom if they joined the British Army or Navy to fight their masters. The first black Canadians were Loyalist soldiers who couldn’t stay in the newly independent United States without being returned to their masters. The Treaty of Paris included a clause (never fulfilled by the British, because the king believed slavery was morally wrong) to compensate Americans for “stolen property.” This didn’t mean the Redcoats were looters. It meant Thomas Jefferson wanted to be paid for slaves who had run away and joined the British army.

            Once independence was won imperialistic white supremacy was soon enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Louisiana Purchase vastly increased the size of the United States of America. All of this meant that Native Americans died. All of this meant a greater need for black slaves. Even after the Trans-Atlantic Trade ended, there were still plenty of surplus slaves available from Virginia, North Carolina and the Caribbean. Soon the Southern slave-owning class became the unofficial aristocracy of the nation. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, and Zachary Taylor owned slaves. Washington, Jackson, Polk and Taylor largely became wealthy(-ier) by the selling of slaves. Jefferson used the selling of slaves to keep himself out of debt.

            Whether or not the active conspiracy imagined by many Northerners ever existed it is not inaccurate to refer to the American political class of the time as the “Slave Power.” The Slave Power certainly drove the Mexican War during the Polk administration. It was pushed upon the country by a largely pro-Slavery Democratic Party that wanted to channel immigrants into the army to “Americanize” them while carving out new lands for slave-holders. The (very weakly) anti-slavery Whig Party opposed the war and then consistently opposed appropriations for spending for the war. This opposition cost them their Congressional majority and sowed the seeds for the death of the party.

            It’s very important to understand that both the Slave Power and the government of Mexico saw this as a war for imperial might. The difference was that what we now call the US/Mexican border was then a largely rural mestizo society ruled by creoles who saw themselves as “white” but who were seen as “Mexicans” by the Anglo-Americans who still formed the dominant U.S. culture. For this reason, in addition to slavery (which Mexico had already abolished and the U.S. hoped to expand), the notion of fighting heathens who were not quite truly white people added a strong element of white supremacy to the Mexican War.

            There were two consequences of American victory that created opportunities for the U.S. to begin to throw off its basis in white supremacy. The first was an alliance between the U.S. Army and the caballero class in Texas and California that insured these territories were conquered with a minimum of actual fighting compared to the rest of the war. Anglo-Americans in the new territories had married into these families and purchased land from them even before the war. This should have created a sense of common clan that admitted at least the Mexican upper classes into “polite society” in the United States. That’s not what happened.

            The second was the Northern opposition to the Slave Power that would lead to the Civil War. These included genuine moral abolitionists and even a small number of genuine antiracists. It also included a general theory among Northern businessmen that slavery was ultimately bad for capitalism by making the stakeholder class lazy and arrogant. This united rich and poor against the Slave Power and allowed them to forget their problems with each other. This faction of the Antislavery Opposition was no less racist than the Slave Power and often attempted to exclude even free black people from “free soil.” Capitalists have always used white supremacy to unite white people against black people and prevent poor white people from naturally siding with black people against the stakeholders. The Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction presented a bold chance to make amends for black slavery. That’s not what happened.

            Instead a double tragedy occurred. First the Latinx people of California and Texas were largely dispossessed of their lands and properties by a combination of legal action and direct violence. A prime example of the former was Mariano Vallejo, who went bankrupt fending off lawsuits claiming title to his family lands. He had to sell the land to pay his legal debts and the Anglo developers won. An example of the latter is legendary California outlaw Joaquin Murrieta, who engaged in retaliatory killings and robberies against Anglo-Americans until his death at the hands of the California Rangers after his wife and brother were killed by land-grabbers who accused his brother of stealing a mule.  The unfortunate antihero’s head allegedly ended up pickled in a jar. Whether or not it is a true story it certainly captures the white supremacy that changed Murrieta’s life and then ended it.

In the words of our president, he was an animal and was treated like one.

Black people were no more fortunate than Latinx people. Reconstruction offered some efforts at enforced equality in the South but fell due to Southern opposition and a lack of real Northern commitment to racial equality. Though President Rutherford B. Hayes spent the rest of his life, after his single term, trying to get the vote for black men his ascent to the presidency destroyed Reconstruction and any hope of racial justice at the time. The freed slaves and their children were terrorized and brutalized until they fled the South in large numbers. In the South, Jim Crow laws and work permits continued slavery. Worse, penal slavery revived it in the North.

There is a lot more for which I don’t have space. The Chinese Exclusion act, the imposition of quotas on immigration from Roman Catholic and Orthodox Catholic countries in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, the imperialism of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine War and the internment of the Japanese during WWII all figure prominently. So does the shameful treatment of the people of Puerto Rico by the US government since the end of the Spanish-American War.

It’s very important to understand that this white supremacy is not just something from the past. It’s not a series of historical incidents that we have put behind us. The Native American genocide is still ongoing. The state of Massachusetts recently declared the Wampanoag Council extinct despite the fact that its members are still alive. DNA tests showed they weren’t “really Native American.” Is it any wonder some Cherokee intellectuals are so angry at Elizabeth Warren right now?

Black slavery is still ongoing in its own way as well. The police violence that terrorizes much of the black community is a descendant of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Southern slave patrol. The prison-industrial complex and prison slavery have taken the place of chattel slavery. They are no less important to the economy now than chattel slavery was in its own day. The words “tough on crime” are particularly weighted against black people and in favor of these forces that hold many poor black people in a form of de facto slavery.

Likewise, the white-washing of the American Southwest continues in a very obvious way in the administration of President Donald Trump. The Orange Troll has ascribed all the stereotypes to Latinx immigrants that were ascribed after the Mexican War to ethnically cleanse many portions of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. ICE attacks immigrants and deports them in a fashion clearly designed to send Latinx (and other non-white immigrants) people back to their countries of origin.

When you understand how central white supremacy is to every political and economic fiber of this country you will begin to understand the problem we face. Solutions for these problems have to be found if we wish to overthrow our stakeholder democracy and achieve social democracy. Frederick Douglas said it best, at the United States’ 100^th birthday. Reconstruction had ended and white reconciliation had begun between North and South.

“What will peace among the whites bring?”

            Defeating white supremacy means accepting a simple motto and really learning to live bit. Solidarity with the oppressed and no peace among the whites.