At the risk of repeating myself, I want to put yesterday’s post in a wider context:

As spring makes demonstrating less uncomfortable, Europeans are taking to the streets by the tens of thousands to protest the austerity measures their leaders have come up with to combat the crisis induced by the 2008 financial debacle.

In a tribute to the movement that began more than a year ago in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and and is still on-going, yesterday, tens of thousands, fed up with 25% unemployment, gathered in Madrid’s main square, Puerta del Sol and and in 80 other cities across Spain.

In London, hundreds of protesters gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where an Occupy protest camp was removed in February, and marched peacefully through the financial district.

Smaller protests have taken place in the Portuguese capital Lisbon and in Germany’s financial centre, Frankfurt.  German demonstrations come as the 13.2 million people eligible to vote for the state legislature in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous and industrialized state, elect a new regional government.  Not all Germans agree with Chancellor Merkel’s austerity measures, which have included greater freedom to fire workers, putting about one fourth in temp positions.

1,000 marchers converged on Tel Aviv to protest the cost of living, with marches also reported in other Israeli cities. Prime Minister Netanyahu has just consolidated his power by bringing the main opposition party Kadima on board, none too soon to undertake domestic reforms. Fareed Zakaria noted today that he can no longer invoke the fragility of his support to delay making peace with the Palestinians, while Iran’s Ahmedinejad noted that this failure represents a greater danger to Israel than any military attack.

The common thread in all these situations is epitomized by the oft heard criticism of the international Occupy Movement of failing to offer concrete proposals for change. But at this point popular pressure, combined with brutal government crackdowns, may make the emphasis on reform too little, too late.

If you think this is an exaggeration, Iraq Veterans Against the War are circulating an on-line petition asking the commander of the Illinois National Guard to refrain from sending in the National guard when they gather for the NATO Summit, where they will as I wrote yesterday:

“…..ceremoniously return our NATO service medals to denounce the disastrous 11-year war in Afghanistan.

The Illinois National Guard Deputy Director of Domestic Operations recently stated publicly that he stands ready to deploy National Guard troops on peaceful NATO protesters.

Send an email to Major General L. Enyart, head of the Illinois National Guard, and urge him not to activate troops against fellow veterans.”

A few minutes after I signed the petition and hit ‘send’ I received the following email:

‘Symantec Mail Security detected prohibited content in a message sent from your address. (SYM:13657982411663453303).’  

It was from the IL-ExchangeService@ng.army.mil, Recipient, MG Enyart.

When I went to look for the Vets’ email in my inbox, it had been remotely moved to the trash.

While European protesters have inherited a long tradition of solidarity, the heritage of American activists emphasizes individualism. As a result, the latter campaigned for changes to SOPA in the name of the free sharing of artistic works. It was, it seems, less motivated to prevent the Patriot Act from assimilating citizen organizing through “wire, oral and electronic communications’ to terrorism, which brings us back to the beginning of this post.

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Americans know little about French political life, and many readers may be to young to have been aware of the 1981 French Presidential election which brought the socialists to power for the first time since the the late nineteen fifties.

Francois Mitterrand’s election was greeted with the same euphoria as Francois Hollande’s, and the bouquet of red roses presented to Hollande upon his victory was a clear reference to the symbol of the Socialist Party under Mitterrand.

Although Mitterrand served two seven year terms, during which many social programs were enacted, his presidency is remembered as the caviar left.

If Francois Hollande is to garner a different reputation, he will have to continue as Mr. Normal, his chosen nickname. That shouldn’t be too difficult: until now he has zipped around Paris in a three-wheeled scooter, and is reported to never have worn smart suits, even when he was a graduate student at the posh National School of Administration.

Hollande’s three degrees – administration, politics, economy – having made him a policy wonk, they should serve him well as he launches his campaign to bring Europe back from the brink, opposing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence on austerity.

Francois Mitterrand was elected at the end of the growth period known as the Thirty Glorious Years. For sure, life for his socialist successor will not be a bed of roses.

Francois Hollande who tonight won the French presidency seventeen years after the end of the Mitterrand presidency, has been a party insider for his entire career.  A graduate of three major post-graduate schools – political, business and administration – he has never held high elected office, but is in the words of the French English language channel a household word in France.

The fact that Hollande had four children with another French Socialist leader, Segolene Royale without marrying her, shows that at least on a personal level, he lives his convictions.  He is expected to continue his current relationship while inhabiting the Elysee Palace, something the American right will surely seize upon.

Astonishingly, the well-known Washington Post columnist and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for international commentaries confessed tonight that he has no idea who Francois Hollande really is.  For someone who spent considerable time in France, this is either shocking – or an illustration of American indifference to socialist leaders.

For the rest of the world, the most significant thing about Hollande’s election is his determination to re-roll back the center-right rollback of Francois Mitterrand’s social measures, and to work on better integration of France’s Muslim population. Significantly,  the flags of France’s ex-North African colonies, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, can be seen floatingat the post-election rally in Place de la Bastille, where one could hear the typical throaty celebratory cry.

With Europe in full-blown economic crisis, Hollande will confront German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her determination to impose more austerity measures than pro-growth policies.  Already, on France 24, pundits are criticizing his agenda, especially those associated with British or American institutions.

One French commentator noted that he and President Obama have similar social agendas, which isn’t doing the American President any favors.

What happens in the coming months in a country where the extreme right-wing National Front received 18% of the vote in the first round of this election should be of particular interest to the American Occupy Movement: Having finally succeeded in bringing American labor to celebrate May 1st as the internationally recognized workers’ holiday, its next task will be to make the French battle to reinstate the left’s social policies an example to its followers.

The world is alive with revolts, regime change and revolutions – but also presidential elections.  Russia just had one, Egypt is trying to organize one, France will vote in a runoff this Sunday, May 6.  As America finally joins the rest of the world in celebrating the workers’ holiday on May 1st, and the Occupy movement picks up steam again, the French presidential election in which a socialist is tipped to win provides a unique occasion for voters to become aware of the benefits they can only aspire to, but which have been available to the French and other Europeans since the end of World War II.

Before reviewing Hollande’s’ platform, readers need to know that there are twelve political parties represented in the French Parliament:

• Union for a Popular Movement (313) Socialist Party (186) New Centre (22) Radical Party (18) French Communist Party (17) Radical Party of the Left (8) Europe Écologie–The Greens (3) Democratic Movement (3) Left Party (3) Movement for France (2) Arise the Republic (2) National Centre of Independents and Peasants (2) Citizen and Republican Movement (1)

The existence of so many parties is considered a disadvantage. In the case of France has led to a sometimes dizzying succession of Prime Ministers, and half a dozen constitutions since the Revolution of 1789.  But it can be argued that at any given moment, the political landscape is more in synch with society than one which is hemmed in by a 200 year old constitution that has been amended only 27 times.

This year, the French Socialist Party and the Radical Party of the Left jointly held the first ever open primary, in which participants were required donate at least one Euro and sign a pledge to the values of the Left to be eligible. The audacity of commitment!

Before we look at Francois Hollande’s platform, let me mention a few of the benefits that I have been familiar with living in France for a total of 28 years, beginning in 1947 and ending in 1999, (with extended periods in several other countries):

1) Near free health care: a modest co-payment for doctors’ visits, hospital, rehab (including medical massages.  Reasonable co-pays for dental and eye care.

In 1981, I had emergency surgery.  A social workers visited me in hospital to inquire whether my two teen-age children needed to be taken care of, and offered me a three week stay in a convalescent facility at no charge.

2) Workplace benefits: Did you ever wonder how there can be so many restaurants in France? This is partly thanks to the fact that companies which do not have a cafeteria must provide restaurant vouchers so that employees can eat out at low cost.  The arrangement not only makes for a pleasant break in the daily routine, but keeps restaurants in business.

3) Family benefits: Regardless of income, all French families with school-age children receive a monthly benefit, depending on the number of children and their ages. This was instituted after the Second World War in order to boost the birthrate. The lack of an income ceiling has been the subject of fierce debate, but France’s upper classes  are determined to hang on to this benefit, which allows them to increase the percentage of the population having the ‘right’ ideas.) Families receive an extra benefit before the start of the fall term to help with supplies.  Francois Hollande promises to raise this amount by 25%.

Now to some of the highlights of the Socialist candidate’s platform:

With respect to health insurance, Hollande would again make hospitals public service institutions, reversing their assimilation to the private sector under Sarkozy. Hollande also intends to institute greater access to medical care in the provinces, with the goal of making travel to the nearest facility take no more than half an hour. Hollande promises to limit the amount doctors can charge for their services when operating outside the standard fee system, and to encourage lower prescription prices.  He will also propose that terminally ill patients suffering physical or psychological pain that cannot be alleviated be allowed to die with dignity. These are good examples of the way alternations in power between left and right affect everyday life.

The Socialist candidate also promises to create a public investment bank, and a special savings account whose assets would be used to encourage small business.

In another move that would be unheard of in the United States, Hollande promises not to privatize the electric company, trains, or post office, and to call for a European directive to protect the public sector; he promises to protect small farmers vis a vis industrial food distribution channels, and to promote the modernization of the fishing industry.

France has a large pubic sector, and Hollande intends to protect it, reversing Sarkozy’s policy of not replacing every other retiree.

In terms of income and taxes, French revenues above 150 000 Euros (about 175,000 Dollars) will be taxed at 45%. Those who have accumulated 42 years of social security taxes will again be able to retire at 60, instead of 62, as under Sarkozy.

Hollande will also propose that companies limit remuneration disparities to 1-20. He promises to combat racial profiling, and to hire 60,000 people in the education sector, for which he proposes many reforms.

If they win the election, the socialists will reinstate rent control, and promote construction of low income housing, making state-owned land available to local communities.

With respect to finance, they will forbid banks to trade with customer money and create a tax on financial transactions.  (This latter, known as the Toobin Tax, has been in discussion in France since the early nineteen eighties…) Hollande also proposes to review the value of the Euro vis a vis the dollar and the Yuan, and calls for a new international monetary policy.

The socialist presidential candidate wants to reduce French nuclear energy from 75% to 50% by 2025 and promote renewable energy solutions, as well as instituting progressive rates for electric gas and water consumption so that basic needs can be met without bankrupting low income families.

This is a typical social democratic platform, not unlike those of socialist candidates in other European countries, which come in way ahead of the United States on quality of life indices.

It’s true that most people work for the state for about half a year (as a self-employed translator I calculated that my earnings went to the state until about July 10th).  And while it is not a good idea to get behind in one’s payments, when all is said and done, most French working people feel that the security they get for their taxes is well worth the burden. That security includes the knowledge that even when the 1% are in power, they can only nibble away at long accepted benefits for the many.

American ignorance about the socialist movement, and the timidity with which even MSNBC hosts refer to a more than 100 year old worldwide holidy, was just brought home to me as I watched the end segment of Chris Hayes’ weekly show ‘Up’ on MSNBC.  It could be called ‘Peeping Out of the Closet’.

In a time-limited soundbite, one of Chris’s guests, whose name I regrettably did not catch, noted that events in Chicago over a hundred years ago gave rise to a holiday which has ever since been celebrated around the world – but not in the U.S., which celebrates Labor Day in September.

Pursuing the history, the only detailed article I found on the internet at www.marxists.org/glossary/events/m/a.htm#may-day, relates the Haymarket riots in Chicago, which occurred in 1896 after employers had been refusing to institute the eight-hour day demanded two years earlier by the U.S. Federation of Organized Trade and Labor.  A general strike on May 1st, 1886 in which 350,000 workers participated countrywide, turned bloody on the third day in Chicago when police opened fire.

You can read the details at the above link, but what I want to point out here is that three years later, in 1889, the Second Congress of the Socialist International voted to commemorate the Haymarket massacre, and the following year, massive demonstrations were held across Europe, calling for an eight-hour day and other benefits.  Gradually May 1st became workers rights day throughout the world – except in the United States.

While the European campaign for the eight-hour day followed the American campaign, American workers were deprived of a potent symbol of worker power. They are allowed a day off at the end of summer, in an emasculated version a holiday which, in the rest of the world, emphasizes workers‘ rights.

Better late than never, this year the Occupy Movement is putting May 1st back on the American labor calendar.  See your local Occupiers for details.

This morning I tweeted this: “iPad etc: fawning over pictures, Americans ignore war famine climate change and government destruction of their rights, including internet.”

Tonight I find this in my email:  www.tomdispatch.com/post/175532/tomgram%3A_lewis_lapham%2C_machine-made_news/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=683deec048-TD_Lapham4_22_2012&utm_medium=email#more.

Yet again my apologies for not writing.  Just want o let people know that Julian Assange will start a program on RT (see your local publi ctelevision channel) this coming Tuesday, with a presentation tomorrow Monday.

It is truly amazing that the future of health care in the U.S. will be determined by the opinion of the Supreme Court concerning the meaning of our 236 year old Constitution.

Surely, the Founding Fathers who argued over Article One, Section Eight, which includes the Commerce Clause, could not have foreseen that their concern with regulating trade between the colonial states, the Indians and foreign powers, would one day be used to deprive a sigificant minority of Amerians of health care.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is unique among nations in being governed by an ancient document.  Americans are made to worship the stability of their system of government, contrasted to the succession of constitutions that have typified other nations.  But there comes a point where ‘stability’ becomes paralysis. The campaign to amend the Constitution so that it reflects the modern world should get a boost from the Supreme Court’s decision as to whether President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (known derogatorily as Obamacare) is constitutional – even if, by some miracle, it goes against the challengers.

The tendency of the mainstream media to pretend that anything the political establishment does is okay, is as damaging as its tendency to ignore political actions by other powers.  A couple of years ago I noted in this blog that then-President Putin was calling for the dollar to no longer be the world’s reserve currency.  Now the BRICS countries (the major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are holding their fourth annual summit in New Delhi, at which they are actually discussing the creation of alternatives to the Western dominated IMF and World Bank.

Such a project might have appeared as nothing more than a pipe-dream a few years ago, but the financial meltdown – better weathered by the BRICS countries than by the West, by the way – is making it ever more likely.

Stay tuned to places like France 24, (France’s English language service which still pronounces its name in French) RT, or Al-Jazeera – all of which you can find on the web – to know what’s really going on in a world where progressive change rather than paralyzing tradition is operating.

If, like many progressive Americans, you despair of the major news channels, but are lucky enough to live either in the Northeast, D.C., California, the Chicago area, or the Carolinas, you have an alternative:  Russian Television, coyly known as ‘RT’ has been available since October on your local MIND TV channel.  Staffed with American, British and other native English speaking newscasters and hosts, and featuring progressive writers like Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann, and many others, RT  broadcasts 24/7 to over 100 countries on five continents from its studios in Moscow and D.C.  It’s motto is: “Question More”.

Of course you’ll get Russian news with a Russian slant, but you can allow for that, whereas the world news covered by RT is usually absent form MSNBC or Democracy Now (though some of it may be found on Grit TV – I haven’t checked).

Today, Friday, March 23, I learned that the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, unanimously approved a new law which should make it easier to create and register political parties, requiring only 500 members instead of the 45,000 threshold that contributed to widespread dissatisfaction with the last election.  Also, major Russian energy companies have been trying to delay or opt out of the government’s ambitious privatization program ahead of an imminent power change in the Kremlin.  (You can see these stories at RT.com.)

In international news I learned that a European Security Conference is wrapping up in Moscow, at which President Medvedev called on the United States to get with it: although the U.S. is participating in this conference, Americans don’t hear about it.  Someone may mention in passing that the Russians want our guarantee that a projected missile defense shield will not be targeted at them in writing, making it sound like an unreasonable demand.  This item is particularly interesting because it illustrates the fact that other major players, such as the European Union, are increasingly united and bold in their opposition to America’s plans to rule the world.

RT reporting on the Syrian crisis tends to mirror Russia’s support of President Assad, but it also features members of the opposition.  Of late it has been highly critical of Al-Jazeera’s handling of the crisis, which tends to mirror the American position.  About a week ago RT reported with obvious glee that several anchors and at least one high-ranking manager had quit over what they considered ‘the supposedly third-world friendly’ Dubai-based channel’s pro-Americana bias.

In American news, RT reported today that a woman was injured Wednesday during a police crackdown on OWS, and that the Occupy Movement is calling for a general strike on May first.  This date will probably not mean anything to most Americans, but it has been the rest of the world’s Labor Day for decades.  The call itself is highly significant, since the last time a general strike affected large parts of the U.S. was in 1877 with the Great Railroad Strike.

There is a lot of business news on RT, including what sounds like pretty detailed analysis by several of the channels young, female anchors perched on high stools in short tight skirts.  (Most of the male feature anchors tend to be older and not very attractive…)

Who would have thought that some day Americans would have to rely on Russian Television to find out what’s going on in the world – and at home:

A Marine based in Camp Pendleton, California, created a Facebook page called “Armed Forces Tea Party,” which currently has approximately 19,000 likes and slogans such as “NObama” and “One Nation, under Obama, with poverty and unemployment for all.” Authorities say he has been under the microscope since 2010.

Serendipitously, only days after it cleared Congress, President Obama signed H.R. 347, which makes it a felony to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.

A feature currently being shone analyses our infatuation with guns, featuring lengthy interviews with Virginia gun owners on the occasion of that state’s lifting of the law the limits gun purchases to one a month.

In sum, all our dirty laundry is hung out to dry by the country we think we defeated twenty years ago. Worldwide.

Family matters have prevented me from posting anything since March 6th.  I hope to be able to return with an imiportant story in the next few days.  The title will be ‘Russia to the Rescue’!

Meanwhile, I urge my readers to go to the following link for the results of some impressive studies about the ethics of the 1% vs the 99% in daily life:

http://www.accountingdegreeonline.net/rich-people-are-unethical/

It was sent to me by Tony Shin, of the Occupy  Wall Street movement.

It is just as wrong to believe the American Occupy movement is leading the worldwide protest, as it is to see it as a mirror image of the protests occurring worldwide, both in terms of its origins and aspirations.

Europeans may have adopted the slogan ‘we are the 99%’, but for them this is merely the up-dated handle of a two-hundred year revolutionary history. The saga that began in a privately-owned square in lower Manhattan on September 17th, 2011, was not organized by unions or other established move-ments or political parties.  It was inspired by first-hand reports of the Arab Spring as well as of the encampments of the Spanish Indignados , victims of the European financial crisis.  Although there are hundreds – even thousands – of ad hoc activist groups in the United States, only a few individuals, mostly academics, are in touch with foreign movements or organizations. In fact, ‘Occupy’ was the result of a dare launched by a brash anti-Madison Avenue magazine called ‘Adbusters’, published in Canada, with a 250,000 circulation.

Straight from Adbusters’ ‘About’ page:

We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist network of the information age. Our aim is to topple the existing power structure and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.

Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance.

On July 13th Adbusters sent out a call: “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” and that idiosyncratic message set in motion what followed.

A collectively written book entitled ‘Occupy Wall Street’, recently published by OR Books, traces the entire evolution of a phenomenon that continues to grow outside the tradition of both European social movements and Arab liberation movements.

A detailed description of the encampment in a privately-owned park a few blocks from the U.S. Stock Exchange, reveals the existence of two philosophically separate areas, one where reformists set  up their tents, and the other where more radical participants organized communal sleeping quarters.  The reformists appear to have constituted the main participants in the daily General Assemblies that became the hallmark of the movement, but facilitators (as opposed to ‘leaders’) quickly evolved working groups for every aspect of daily life. During its two-month existence, librarians, medics, artists, cooks, security kept the encampment running, while others planned actions, handled communications and outreach.  Tourists came to admire the phenomenon, and thanks to the ubiquitous availability of the internet, sympathizers from around the world phoned in orders for food to be delivered from nearby restaurants.  Lawyers volunteered to be on call when people were arrested for their activities: activists inked their telephone numbers on their arms.

The encampment lasted until November 17th, when it was violently dispersed by New York Police at the order of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  But not before it had organized resistance to foreclosures in the lower middle class borough of Brooklyn, across the East River, and staked out an indoor meeting place in the atrium of a skyscraper at 60, Wall St.

In this massive, elegant, brightly lit space with waterfalls and palm trees, bankers and traders of the neighborhood come for a quiet sandwich, while homeless take refuge from the street, just sitting or perhaps playing chess – not a surprising Manhattan scene.  Occupy working groups hold meetings there, in full sight and sound of the other users of the space.

As with this out of the ordinary meeting place, what has probably gone unreported outside the U.S. (where the phenomenon itself has only been consistently reported in the blogosphere!) is the vast number of protests that were organized across New York.  The City University of New York alone counts 480,000 (four hundred and eighty thousand) students, and there are in addition about one hundred private colleges and universities in the city, including Columbia.  Students, young workers and the unemployed with time to spare make up the major portion of Occupy activists, and this is what distinguishes the phenomenon from the myriad of anti-war, pro-reform, groups that have persisted since resistance to the war in Vietnam and the nationwide civil rights movement.  These have been kept alive by members of the ‘old left’, who are gradually dying out, participation by anyone under fifty a rarity. Through a medium uniquely familiar to them, the Occupy Movement re-activated American youth. They have been joined and supported by the ‘old Left’,  and  include every segment of that population:  radical women, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, LGBTs and any other minority you can think of.

For two months, Zucotti Park renamed Liberty Plaza, was a unique venue for artists, and tourists flocked to the oblong space as much for its festive atmosphere as to witness the now ubiquitous ‘mic check’. This unique communication tool came into being when the mayor banned microphones, speakers and even battery-powered bullhorns from the encampment, promising thirty days in jail to violators. To overcome this impediment, the participants in a rally or meeting repeat, phrase by phrase, what a speaker says, until those farthest away have heard the phrase.  Speaking in unison builds a powerful sense of togetherness, which more than made up for the slowness of proceedings.

In Philadelphia, where I live, the Occupiers, camped on an enormous plaza in front of City Hall, welcomed the homeless, who often suffer from addiction, and tried to help them. When they realized the problem could not be solved in an encampment, they leaned on city authorities to become more active.  Following a two-week notice by the mayor, the camp was evicted on December 6th, with the participation of mounted police.   It has since repaired to various indoor locations, mainly a neighboring Quaker Meeting House and a Methodist church.  (American Churches are where most anti-war and other progressive groups have been welcome, in a tradition that goes back to the Underground Railroad and reached its zenith with the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King.)

Through daily actions and meetings, OccupyPhilly.org actively creates community, while exploring the modalities through which community can effect change.  From deep breathing to the incredibly quiet atmosphere of more than a hundred people weighing in on both process and content through hand signals, the Occupiers debate issues of non-violence vs violence, elections vs. alternative solutions, and the best way to join forces with other groups.

Which is a nice segway to  the crucial difference between the Occupiers and the 99%ers in the rest of the world: Occupy brings together ‘people of faith’ or ‘belonging to faith-based traditions’, Anarchists, Democrats (especially Black Democrats) who hope that somehow Obama will get it together in a second term, libertarians (who make it easy for some to claim/wish that in reality the Occupiers and the Tea Partiers have a lot in common), ‘faint-hearted’ liberals and those who think social democracy would be a good thing.

Almost since the beginning, the media has been asking: “What do they want?  What’s their program?” Journalists are aware that around the world the 99% have very definite ideas about what they want, but they never reveal what those ideas are, because they’re usually farther left than social democracy. Even ‘The Swedish model is only mentioned in the American press when it runs into a snag, implying that our 99%ers are not missing anything. No matter the evidence, ‘liberal democracy’, which gives each citizen a vote, is touted, in the oft-quoted phrase of Winston Churchill, as ‘the worst system with the exception of all others’. If people want the financial system to be regulated, that’s up to the Congress that results from the one man one vote system, and if there are lobbyists, why that’s part of free speech, even if the idea would make Churchill turn over in his grave.

It’s important for the worldwide 99% to know that the Occupy Movement is coming from a long history of declining trade-union membership and effective-ness. In the early fifties, as the Cold War ramped up, Senator Joseph McCarthy held months of infamous hearings for the purpose of identifying Communists in and out of government, and its legacy has been a total lack of American ideological literacy even among most activists.  It appears that the majority of Occupy participants continue to assume that system reform represents the best hope for a better America, as it fights desperately to maintain an Empire fast slipping from its grasp.

However during the course of the winter, the dichotomy represented by the two areas of encampment at Liberty Park has given rise to a separate group calling for world-wide revolution http://occupywallst.org/.  According to its website: “OccupyWallSt.org is the unofficial de facto online resource for the growing occupation movement happening on Wall Street and around the world. We’re an affinity group committed to doing technical support work for resistance movements. We’re not a subcommittee of the NYCGA (New York City general Assembly) nor affiliated with Adbusters, anonymous or any other organization.”

Ideology is slowly coming to the fore, and I discover that Philadelphia has a long Anarchist tradition.  I ponder whether that is why the space for Marxism and its offshoots has remained empty here in my home town where there is so much Brotherly Love.

The January 21st issue of The Economist has a fascinating supplement on State Capitalism: everything you need to know but didn’t know it. The daily news needs to be reframed in this context.

As rebellion ramps up across the world, for the same reasons as always – the trampling of the many by the few – leaders and pundits still think in terms of the old paradigms: capitalism vs socialism.  But there’s a new system taking shape which is no better than the old one and could be worse in terms of saving the planet.

Any system that relies on continued growth contributes to the end of the planet as a human habitat. Capitalism, socialism and state capitalism all belong in that category.

According to The Economist , under state capitalism, the state holds a significant share in major economic institutions and industries, enabling it to  regulate and encourage activities it deems in the national interest.  It is being practiced in China, Russia, Brazil, India, and through sovereign funds in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, among others. Interestingly, the British conservative journal admits that ‘the long era of state activism has left a surprisingly powerful legacy’, mentioning that France’s electric company is 85% state-owned, Japan’s tobacco company is 50% owned by the government, and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is 32% state-owned.  What it does not mention is that this situation evolved as part of Europe’s hundred plus year old history, of ‘enlightened’ state control over valuable resources and services.

As America’s railroads were being built by private money, Europe’s were built by nations.  Nineteenth century German Chancellor Bismarck invented the welfare state, and if Russia and China are today the foremost state capitalist systems, that is not unrelated to their communist past.

Humans will eventually breed themselves out of existence, thanks to ‘growth’, ‘progress’, and modern medicine (birth control having come too late), unless the pollution considered necessary to their survival is stopped. We have a choice between seeing 10 billion inhabitants living at an early  agricultural level by mid-century, or making drastic changes to our lifestyle now. (I beg science buffs not to dispute this deliberately grand generalization. Pay attention, instead, to the gist.)

The gist is that the choice is no longer between capitalism and socialism, but between state capitalism and decentralization. Between worldwide military/industrial/fascist power that is blinded by hubris, and small, participatory communities. Increasingly, some will try to overthrow the most powerful machine man has created, and others will build new ways of relating to one another, as they wait out the machine’s inevitable demise through war and depletion of the resources which enable it.

While the U.S. and Europe worry about the fate of their market economies, with Greece, the cradle of democracy, speeding to default, the new economic giants are inventing new ways to run their economies. The question is whether state capitalism will eventually contribute to saving the planet or not. And whether worldwide protesters and Occupiers will succeed in creating a different kind of society if they do not.

Today the Indian government proposed setting up a multilateral bank exclusively funded by developing nations to finance their projects. The proposal has been circulated to the BRIC group: Brazil, Russia, India and China – as well as to South Africa, and will be discussed alongside the meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers in Mexico City this weekend.

The World marches on without the Greatest Empire ever known.