by Robert Freeman

“Gentlemen, I warn you. Though the violence is not yet upon us, we are sleeping on a volcano.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, addressing the French parliament, January, 1848

In 1848, a series of revolutions convulsed Europe. From Berlin to Budapest, Venice to Vienna, Paris to Prague, people rose up and overthrew the authoritarian monarchies that Metternich had installed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It was these revolutions that prompted Karl Marx’s opening words of The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting Europe. It is the specter of communism.”

Of course, Marx was wrong. The specter of rebellion was more one of nationalism, and to a lesser extent, liberalism. More importantly, all the revolutions ultimately failed. They were all defeated by monarchical forces which mounted counter-revolutions and routed the insurrectionists. Though many governments made token concessions to the rebels, all maintained, and in some cases strengthened, their authoritarian rule until finally, decades later, they could no longer suppress the impetus for change.

This is the important lesson that history has for the rebels of 2011. Euphoria is not victory. The removal of symbols is not the change of regimes. Whether in Athens or Cairo, Bahrain or even Wisconsin, the revolutions will not be won in the streets. They will not be won early. They will be resisted fiercely, cleverly, tenaciously, and with all the resources that the assaulted powers can muster, including the most important resource of all: time.

If the revolutions of 2011 are to succeed – and it’s a big if in every case – several things need to occur. The grievances must be extended beyond the core of protesters and taken up by their larger populations. The protesters must seize control of not just city squares and capitol buildings, but the institutions of power themselves. And the protests must be sustained, for years if necessary, until fundamental change is secured. These will be extremely high hurdles to clear but unless they are, the revolutions will ultimately fail.

The revolutions of 1848 had a variety of different characters, just as do those of 2011. In Paris they were about the ascendant bourgeoisie wanting access to the levers of state power. In Berlin, they reflected a hyper-intellectual liberalism that sought to unify the disparate German states under the aegis of a constitutional republic. In Budapest and Vienna, they were impelled by nationalist forces seeking autonomy from the Austrian empire of the Hapsburgs.

In every case, a small group of committed protesters took to the streets and overwhelmed local security forces. And their immediate impacts were dramatic. In Paris, Louis Philippe of the Bourbon family abdicated. In Berlin, Frederick William III of the Hohenzollern dynasty acceded to a new constitution. In Vienna, the Hapsburg royal family actually left the city and moved to Innsbruck. The effect was electric. But like electricity, it was evanescent.

In each case, the forces of reaction took stock of the situation, assessed theirs and the rebels’ resources, and mounted carefully conceived, methodically executed counter-revolutions. Two factors proved critical in reversing the gains of the revolutions. First, there were stark class divisions among the revolutionaries which the reactionaries easily exploited. And second, in none of the revolts had the revolutionaries taken control of the instruments of power. These factors proved decisive in the monarchs regaining control of their states.

For example, the class divisions in Paris were notorious. It was the urban workers (Marx’s proletariat) who provided the muscle by manning the barricades. But once the bourgeoisie – the merchants, the professionals, the civil servants – won their concessions, they abandoned the workers and sided with the new government. Similarly, in Berlin, liberal intellectuals were played off against agrarian peasants and urban artisans. In Austria, once the peasants were released from forced farm work they quit the cause, hanging their former compatriots – the students and the nationalists – out to dry. The inability of the people to unite around a singular cause allowed the governments to play them off against each other. It was fatal to the revolutionaries’ cause.

In the use of force, the monarchs were equally effective. In Paris, the army restored order after the riotous “June Days.” More than 20,000 revolutionaries were killed, jailed, or sent to exile in Algeria. In Berlin, the state let the liberals debate until their fervor was spent. Then they used the army to restore order. A decade later, Bismarck would famously comment, “The issues of the day will not be decided by speeches and debate. 1848 showed us that. They will be settled by iron and blood.” Bismarck would come to be known as the “Iron Chancellor.”

In Vienna, which faced the most extensive revolts, the collapse of the revolutions in France and Prussia gave the rulers heart. The Hapsburg rulers had the army shell its own capital cities until the insurrectionists surrendered. Prague, Vienna, and Budapest were ruthlessly bombed and besieged by both the Austrian, and, in the case of Hungary, the Russian armies. In every case, the revolutions were reversed and the empire returned to power.

What can we learn from this not-so-ancient history that might improve the chances of success for the revolutions of 2011?

The first thing is that nobody should have any illusions that the existing orders are going to go quietly into the night. They are too deeply entrenched, too convinced of their entitlement to power, have too many resources at their disposal, and have too much to lose by easy capitulation. They will use every trick in the book to undermine the cohesion, commitment, and resilience of the protesters.

In Jordan and Bahrain, for example, the governments have nakedly moved to buy off the protesters. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the extremely authoritarian, honestly, medieval, government announced mass disbursements to all citizens amounting to thousands of dollars per person.

Each of these countries are critical to U.S. strategy in the Middle East. Jordan is critical to U.S. support for Israel. Jordan supported Jews against Palestinians in the war of 1948 that made Israel a state. Bahrain hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet which keeps control of the Persian Gulf. And Saudi Arabia sits atop 25% of the world’s known oil reserves. We may assume each has a blank check on U.S. resources to help defeat their peoples’ revolutions.

In each of these states, the revolutionaries, though righteous and adamant, have no experience in the exercise of state power, or of any institutional power for that matter. This proved fateful for all of the revolutions of 1848. No one thought enough to seize control of the army, which was then used against them. This is conspicuous in the upheaval in Egypt: that the army has not been converted to the cause of the revolutionaries.

Indeed, Egypt is almost a case study in how all of the tools of reaction will be used to thwart the revolution. It is both the most populous state in the Arab world, and the first state to formally make peace with Israel: the Camp David accords of 1979. While the revolutionaries occupied Tahrir square, Obama played a cagey game of who the U.S. was supporting. When it became clear Mubarak was no longer viable, the U.S. readily threw him under the bus, an artful act of strategic jui jitsu.

Ballasting Mubarak removed the symbolic locus of Egyptian rage, though it did nothing to change the underlying levers of power. His immediate successor, Suleiman, was simply Mubarak with less hair, the anointed choice of Israeli intelligence. All of the resources of U.S. intelligence and military remain supporting a regime that is deeply committed to serving U.S. and Israeli interests, and that is, ahem, pharaohically rewarded for doing so .

Finally, there is Madison. Is there a lesson from 1848 there?

The conflict in Madison is really a final-stage battle by the rich to undermine unions that has been underway since Ronald Reagan moved to destroy the air traffic controller’s union in 1981. And even that battle was just a small skirmish in a still-larger war whose goal is to shift power, wealth, and income from working and middle class people to the very wealthy. It’s worked, beyond anyone’s imagining.

Since 1979, the top 1% of income earners have gained $740,000 in real annual income. Each. The lowest 80% of income earners have lost income. The U.S. actually has greater income inequality today than does Egypt! NAFTA, enacted under Bill Clinton, shipped jobs and entire industries to Mexico, undercutting the security of American workers. And Bush added China to the list of countries favored to receive U.S. jobs. The period from 2000 to 2010 is the only decade in American history in which there were no net new jobs added to the U.S. economy. The result has been a significant growth in poverty, a dramatic write-down in middle class wealth, and growing economic insecurity.

So, the policies of the rich to undermine everyone else, carried out through their puppets in both parties, have been extraordinarily successful. They have been multi-faceted, broad-based, bi- partisan, and sustained. The rich will use every tool in their seasoned arsenal, every suck-up in their rolodex of sycophantic whores, to continue their self-enrichment.

The most powerful tool they will use is the class resentment that Reagan was so deft at manipulating. This proved amazingly effective in 1848. When standards of living are falling, it is easy to foment discord among people by finding some who are not sinking as fast as everyone else and telling the rest that their misfortune is caused by those who have not yet been drug down. This is the essence of the Republican strategy against public sector unions: try to make it look like they are the cause of everyone else’s misfortune. Sadly, it’s working.

The antidote is class solidarity through education. People need to understand that the long-term decline in their standards of living is not an accident. It is precisely the goal of the game in which they are the scripted losers. They need to know that pursuit of that goal is what Republican politicians are sired and hired for. The Koch brothers don’t underwrite the slimy likes of Scott Walker because of his compassion or vision or executive ability. They hire him to break legs and take no prisoners, to gut union protections and destroy the funding base of democratic opposition.

People need to know that the “Golden Age” of growth, prosperity, and economic well-being in this country was precisely that age, from the 1950s and 1960s, when unions were strong and the middle class was vibrant. They need to know that the decline in living standards and economic security since that time have come hand-in-hand with the decline in unions and the protections they afforded jobs and incomes.

People need to understand that if they break ranks, if they turn on each other as will be so tempting, they will be picked off one by one and used as examples to intimidate everybody left. They will be pitted against each other and, indeed, against workers in China making $.57 an hour. They will be fired at will for the least temerity and blackballed for life. There will be no bottom to the downward spiral of poverty, misery, destitution, and despair.

There will be no institution in America left to stand up to the rapacious predations of the big corporations. Certainly it will not be the government, which has become little more than a tool in the hands of the corporations to break the backs and the will of the people. It has been the federal government that has refused to enforce laws protecting union elections. It has been the federal government that has given tax breaks to big corporations so they can more profitably ship jobs overseas while recycling their swelling profits back into Republican election coffers.

It is the federal government that will not go after Caribbean tax havens for billionaires but will go after the home mortgage deduction for working class families. It will not reverse the Bush tax cuts that favor the same billionaires but will reverse its commitment to the most successful social program of the last seven decades: Social Security.

Finally, people need to understand that this is a long term game. The rich have been at it since Roosevelt decried the “economic royalists” that had caused the Great Depression, and passed legislation protecting workers and unions. They have bought countless politicians at all levels of government, all of them only too happy to sell out their countrymen in exchange for a well-laundered campaign contribution. The rich own the media who relentlessly re-cycle their ideologically biased narratives about hating the government, lauding free markets, and blaming the people for their own plights. They have installed the best judiciary that money can buy – witness the Citizens United decision that allows corporations to pour unlimited amounts into election campaigns.

This ring of power, from corporations to the government to the media to the judiciary, is now closing in for the final kill against the working people of the country. Its goal is the re-installation of the autocratic monarchies that dominated Europe in the nineteenth century. It demands no less than the complete subjugation of workers and the surrendering of their rights. It also aims at complete expropriation of the wealth and the independence that they have spent generations amassing. The handing over of trillions of dollars to the banks in the duress of the collapse of 2008 is only a harbinger of things to come.

The revolutions of 1848 were crushed by the authoritarian monarchs of their day. But the forces that had propelled those revolutions – the Industrial Revolution and the longing of people for national autonomy – would eventually secure their ends. Monarchies would retreat from the world of power and people would gain economic prosperity and political freedom. It is likely that similarly such powerful forces of transformation are at work today. Unfortunately, they do not portend the same optimistic ending.

Today, the powerful forces rocking the world are the exhaustion of oil and the imminent end of industrial civilization, the rise of China to challenge the U.S. for global supremacy, and the cataclysmic onset of global climate change. Any one of these will upset the architecture of global power as nothing before has ever done. This is why it is so important that the present revolutions be resolved in favor of empowerment and choice. Without such resolution, adaptation to the new world will be imposed by force, and in the interests of those already most enriched. It will not be pretty.

As in 1848, whether the revolutions succeed depends on whether people become aware, aroused, and angry, and whether they can sustain their indignation for longer than the next commercial, the next season of re-runs, the next election cycle. It will certainly require years, probably decades, maybe generations, to reclaim the country and the rights people assume to be their inheritance. But without it there is only the degradation of destitution and the servility of serfdom, a humiliating patrimony to hand down to their children. We escaped from that once. Let us hope we don’t return to it again.

Robert Freeman writes on economics, history and education. He teaches history and economics at Los Altos High School in Los Altos, CA. and is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American students build schools in the developing world through contributions of one dollar. He can reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

Here is from David Fenton’s blog:

“To hear the mainstream discourse tell it, clean energy may be a nice idea, but it’s prohibitively expensive. Going green, it’s said, will cost jobs and strangle growth at a time when America must do whatever it takes to get our economy and people working again. Environmentalists are going to raise everyone’s energy bills. We’re the ‘job killers.'”

But:

Clean energy transformation is the best—perhaps the only—path to economic and job growth, including rebuilding our industrial base and competitiveness…. Renewable energies, if properly financed and combined with energy-saving investments, will lead to lower net energy bills for Americans, cheaper transportation and price stability…. McKinsey & Company’s 2009 report “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy” shows that for every dollar spent making buildings and appliances more efficient, we’ll get two in return. What other investment can match that?…

Meanwhile, it is well established that labor-intensive investments in solar, wind and increased building efficiency create far more jobs than similar investments in fossil fuels. These technologies will most likely go down in cost while fossil prices will only go up long-term….

Yet, despite this mountain of evidence, clean energy supporters have allowed themselves to be tarred as the public’s economic enemy by the very fossil fuel forces whose policies will guarantee the economic decline of America. As long as the public conversation remains tethered to these ridiculous assumptions, you can be sure there will be no progress made in Washington against the major challenge facing our civilization—climate destabilization….

[S]ticking to fossil fuels will guarantee the economic decline of our country. It will lead to much higher gasoline and food prices, as world demand increases; losing the next industrial wave to China and Korea; the transfer of even more of our wealth to the Middle East; trillions more for resource wars; the enormous costs of climate adaptation and climate disruption. Droughts, floods, snowpack loss, loss of agriculture and drinking water—not exactly economic benefits….

It’s time we claimed our position as the true pro-growth forces, painting the tiny group of companies standing in the way, and their corrupt political agents, as anti-growth. Because that’s what they are. Anti-growth for everyone but themselves.

The Wall Street Journal—anti-growth. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—anti-growth. Exxon, Peabody, the Koch brothers, Midwestern utilities resisting change, BP, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Sarah Palin—all standing in the way of a better economic future for America. All leading us to further industrial decline, decaying infrastructure, job loss and much higher energy and food prices.

When are the White House and the Democratic leadership going to come out swinging? The real job killers are the Republicans. Do you think rejecting science is good for economic and technological innovation? Do flat-earthers generate economic growth?

We also need to get more aggressive about the science, not just the economics. Climate and Congressional skeptics need to be put on the defensive, and the media must be challenged to stop placing industry propagandists on an equal footing with published, peer-reviewed climate scientists. It’s time to attack the Washington flat-earthers leading their city to the inevitable flooding of the nation’s monuments and heat deaths from weeks of scorching temperatures….

Read the entire article, people.

See this excellent article by Rebecca Solnit.

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians’ sense of themselves — and our sense of them — is forever changed.

The article gives perspective on Alexander Dubcek, Mohammed Bouazizi, Khaled Said, Thich Quang Duc, El General, Bradley Manning, Rosa Parks, and Asmaa Mahfouz, and on the minds and hearts they inspired. It explores the mysteriousness about the timing and scope of revolution.

In this country, economic inequality has reached a level not seen since before the stock market crash of 1929.

Hard times are in store for most people on Earth, and those may be times of boldness. Or not. The butterflies are out there, but when their flight stirs the winds of insurrection no one knows beforehand.

So remember to expect the unexpected, but not just to wait for it. Sometimes you have to become the unexpected, as the young heroes and heroines of 2011 have. I am sure they themselves are as surprised as anyone. Since she very nearly had the first word, let Asmaa Mahfouz have the last word: “As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”

As reported by ANSWER coalition (check the link for pictures):

On March 19, thousands of people took to the streets to demand an end to U.S. war and military intervention abroad and funding for people’s needs at home. Mass demonstrations took place in Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and many other cities across the United States and the world. Below are some initial reports.

Los Angeles

Thousands of people hit the streets in Los Angeles in a spirited, youthful demonstration to stop the wars. Led by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, including active-duty soldiers and marines, the march of well over 4,000 people chanted, “Money for jobs and education, not for wars and occupation!”

A huge student contingent from high schools and community colleges in Long Beach, Orange County and L.A. participated, along with large numbers from the Muslim community. Speakers included Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic, students, teachers, union leaders and anti-war activists. Chris Shiflet, the lead guitarist for the Foo Fighters, spoke and played a song.

The ANSWER Coalition initiated the March 19 protest in Los Angeles. Over 100 additional community and progressive organizations endorsed the action.

San Francisco

Despite cold, steady rain, 1,800 people marched and hundreds more rallied in San Francisco demanding an end to the wars and occupations around the world and the war on working people here. Speakers at the opening rally condemned the launching of a new war against Libya, which had begun just hours before.

A strong contingent from UNITE HERE Local 2, the SF hotel workers union, helped lead the march, which ended with a massive picket line in front of the boycotted Westin St. Francis hotel at Union Square. The demonstration was organized by the March 19 Coalition, which was initiated by the ANSWER Coalition.

Washington, D.C.

Over 1,500 people participated in a veterans-led civil resistance action initiated by Veterans for Peace that led to the arrest of 113 people at the White House. The ANSWER Coalition, March Forward! and many other organizations supported the event.

At the rally in Lafayette Park, Brian Becker, the national coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, said: “The U.S. government never tells the people that ‘we’ are going to invade or bomb another country in order to control and exploit its natural resources—especially oil and natural gas—or the labor of the occupied people. That is, of course, the truth. But no mother or father would allow their child to go to war for the crass function of exploitation. The U.S. government always states that each Pentagon invasion or bombing attack is for humanitarian rather than imperial objectives.

“Today, on the eight anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq, the United States, Britain and France are poised to begin a massive bombing of Libya–again, they say, for noble, humanitarian reasons. That is a lie that we must expose. Libya is the largest producer of oil on the African continent and the imperialists want to re-conquer the country and its resources. We, in the ANSWER Coalition, stand against any military action against Libya. The Libyan people, and they alone, must be the masters of their own destiny.”

Caneisha Mills, an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition, also addressed Libya in her talk, saying: “The U.S. government claims it will bring democracy and freedom to Libya; these are the same terms used to invade Iraq! After the massive and ongoing slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan we know that is not true!”

Ryan Endicott, a member of March Forward! and an Iraq war veteran who served in Ramadi, told the crowd: “We know firsthand that our enemy is not the people of Iraq, who for eight years have been struggling to survive a brutal occupation. It is not the people of Afghanistan who for over a decade have been struggling to survive a brutal occupation. The biggest threat to the people of the United States is not thousands of miles away, but hundreds of yards away, right here in the White House, in the Pentagon, on Wall Street. It’s the bankers that take our homes, the CEOs that lay off from our jobs only to take million dollar bonuses.”

Chicago

On March 19 in Chicago, 1,000 people marched on Michigan Ave. to demand an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Protesters carried signs that read “No War on Libya!” and “Stand Against War and Racism: Money for Jobs and Education, Not War!” A very popular chant was “End, End the War! Tax, Tax the Rich!”

The many contingents in the march included Palestine solidarity groups, free Bradley Manning activists, youth and student contingents, many neighborhood peace groups and the ANSWER Chicago contingent, which carried Egyptian and Wisconsin flags, and a banner that read: “From Egypt to Wisconsin to Chicago … : Time to Fight Back!”

Protests also took place around the country, including in Phoenix, Arizona; Fort Bragg, Fresno, Laguna Hills, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, California; Evergreen, Colorado; New Haven, Connecticut; Daytona Beach, North Miami and Orlando, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Dubuque and Iowa City, Iowa; Boston, Massachusetts; St. Paul, Minnesota; Biloxi, Mississippi; Kansas City, Missouri; Keene, New Hampshire; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Highland Park, New Jersey; Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton, Ohio; Eugene and Portland, Oregon; King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; Hilton Head Island, South Carolina; Austin, Dallas and Houston, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Seattle, Washington; Racine, Wisconsin.

For jobs, healthcare, education, mortgage relief, housing, infrastructure, environmental protection, veterans benefits, childcare, city and state budget relief–to restore vital social programs and to meet urgent human needs:

Bring all the troops and war $$$ home now!

Consider, as you file your 2010 taxes, the wars our country is continually fighting. It’s so easy to forget about them, since they are off the media’s “radar screen.” Someone came up to an antiwar protester with a large sign against the war and actually, sincerely, asked: “War? Are we still at war?”

Before you do anything else, please click “Cost of War” and watch the numbers grow right before your eyes.

$1.168 trillion–and counting. Think about it. More than a trillion dollars since 2001. What does that number mean? A trillion seconds takes 32,000 years to elapse!

Still on the “Cost of War” counter, click Trade Offs (or just click here) and enter your state, county, city, or Congressional District. Then examine the trade-offs between different military spending “programs” and what you might have instead of that program: healthcare, education, renewable energy, veterans’ benefits, firefighting, police protection–whatever. Think about it.

From U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW):

It’s time for new priorities. It’s time to move the money!

Did you know?

• Military spending now consumes 58 cents of every discretionary tax dollar.
• The government will spend more than $1 trillion to support the direct and indirect costs of our national security in 2010.
• The White House’s annual budget request for the Defense Department ($534 billion for 2010) is only a portion of what the United States spends on its military.
• Each year other federal agencies, such as the Department of Energy, contribute additional billions to the official annual defense budget.
• This annual defense budget does not include the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The U.S. ranks #1 in the world for military expenditures.
• The U.S. spends 45% of all world military expenditures.
• U.S. military expenditures are greater than the total military budgets of the 14 next largest countries–combined.
• Again, since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars together have cost $1.168 trillion. And with projected future costs, the total will exceed $5 trillion. (Perspective again: 5 trillion seconds = 160,000 years!)
• The cost of those two on-going wars amounts to $3,300 for every man, woman, and child in this country. (But you can be sure, that the greatest burden falls on the middle class, not on the tax-evading rich.)
• Each troop we keep in Afghanistan for a year costs taxpayers $1.2 million, equivalent to 24 good, green union jobs.
• From 2001 to 2008, federal budget authority increased twice as fast as federal grants to state and local governments. During the same period, federal military expenditures increased THREE times as fast as the overall federal budget.
• What we’ll spend this year on Afghanistan alone would cover all the state budget deficits combined, with money left over for other needs.

Consider: militarism is essentially an institution of domination. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967 about our country: “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” As Frederick Douglass noted a century and a half ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand from below.”

Yes, state and local governments are in fiscal trouble. Yes, the federal deficit and the national debt are huge problems. But we should not balance the budget on the backs of the middle class and the poor, who have already given so much. We need to go after the corporate rich–and we need to curtail the military profligacy.

Here are the principles of USLAW, as documented in its mission statement:

To protect our members and the lives and livelihoods of working people everywhere, we will advocate, educate, and mobilize in the U.S. labor movement for:

• A just foreign policy that will bring genuine security and prosperity to working people. A policy that strengthens international treaties, supports human rights institutions, respects national sovereignty, and upholds the right of self-determination for all peoples.
• A foreign policy that solves disputes by diplomacy rather than war.
• A policy that promotes global economic and social justice rather than the race-to-the-bottom, job-destroying, discriminatory practices favored by multinational corporations.
• An end to U.S. occupation of foreign countries, replaced by the reconstruction of war-devastated nations with the full support of the international community and the full participation and decision-making power of affected peoples.
• Redirecting the nation’s resources from inflated military spending to meet the needs of working families for health care, education, a clean environment, housing, and a decent standard of living based on principles of equality and democracy.
• Supporting our troops and their families by bringing the troops home now, by not recklessly putting them into harm’s way, and by providing decent compensation, veterans’ benefits, and domestic policies administered without discrimination that prioritize the needs of the working people who make up the bulk of the military.
• Protecting workers’ rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and the rights of immigrants by promoting democracy, not subverting it. Ethnic, racial, and religious profiling and stereotyping must be replaced by policies that promote dignity, economic justice, and respect for all working people.
• Solidarity with workers and their organizations around the world who are struggling for their own labor and human rights, and with those in the U.S. who want U.S. foreign and domestic policies to reflect our nation’s highest ideals.

by Ralph Nader

The tumultuous managerial shakeup at National Public Radio headquarters for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete with left-leaning or leftist programming. Ludicrous, that is, unless this criticism’s yardstick is the propaganda regularly exuded by the extreme right-wing Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These “capitalists” use the public’s airwaves free-of-charge to make big money.

The truth is that the frightened executives at public TV and radio have long been more hospitable to interviews with right of center or extreme right-wing and corporatist talking heads than liberal or progressive guests.

PBS’s Charlie Rose has had war-loving William Kristol on 31 times, Henry Kissinger 55 times, Richard Perle 10 times, the global corporatist cheerleader Tom Friedman 70 times. Compare that guest list with Rose’s interviews of widely published left-of-center guests: Noam Chomsky twice, William Grieder twice, Jim Hightower twice, Charlie Peters twice, Lewis Lapham 3 times, Bob Herbert 6 times, Paul Krugman 21 times, Victor Navasky once, Mark Green 5 times, and Sy Hersh, once a frequent guest, has not been on since January 2005.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the widely-quoted super-accurate drug industry critic, who is often featured on the commercial TV network shows, has never been on Rose’s show. Nor has the long-time head of Citizens for Tax Justice and widely respected progressive tax analyst Robert McIntyre.

Far more corporate executives, not known for their leftist inclinations, appear on Rose’s show than do leaders of environmental, consumer, labor, and poverty organizations.

In case you are wondering, I’ve appeared 4 times, but not since August 2005, and not once on the hostile Terri Gross radio show.

The unabashed progressive Bill Moyer’s Show is off the air and has not been replaced. No one can charge PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer with anything other than very straightforward news delivery, bland opinion exchanges, and a troubling inclination to avoid much reporting that upsets the power structures in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, or Wall Street.

The longest-running show on PBS was hard-line conservative William F. Buckley’s show-Firing Line-which came on the air in 1966 and ended in 1999.

Sponsorship by large corporations, such as Coca Cola and AT&T, have abounded-a largesse not likely to be continued year after year for a leftist media organization.

None of this deters the Far Right that presently got a majority in the House of Representatives to defund the $422 million annual appropriation to the umbrella entity Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). About 15% of all revenues for all public broadcasting stations comes from this Congressional contribution.

Though he admits to liking National Public Radio, conservative columnist David Harsanyi believes there is no “practical argument” left “in the defense of federal funding in an era of nearly unlimited choices.”

Really? Do commercial radio stations give you much news between the Niagara of advertisements and music? Even the frenetic news, sports, traffic and weather flashes, garnished by ads, are either redundant or made up of soundbytes (apart from the merely 2 minutes of CBS radio news every half-hour). If you want serious news, features, and interviews on the radio, you go to public radio or the few community and Pacifica radio stations.

Harsanyi continues: “Something, though, seems awfully wrong with continuing to force taxpayers who disagree with the mission–even if their perceptions are false–to keep giving.”

Public radio’s popular “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” are the most-listened-to radio shows after Rush Limbaugh’s, and any taxpayer can turn them off. Compare the relatively small public radio and TV budget allocations with the tens of billions of dollars each year–not counting the Wall Street bailout–in compelling taxpayers to subsidize, through hundreds of programs, greedy, mismanaged, corrupt, or polluting corporations either directly in handouts, giveaways, and guarantees or indirectly in tax escapes, bloated contracts, and grants. Can the taxpayer turn them off?

Here is a solution that will avoid any need for Congressional contributions to CPB. The people own the public airwaves. They are the landlords. The commercial radio and TV stations are the tenants that pay nothing for their 24-hour use of this public property. You pay more for your auto license than the largest television station in New York pays the Federal Communications Commission for its broadcasting license–which is nothing. It has been that way since the 1927 and 1934 communication laws.

Why not charge these profitable businesses rent for use of the public airwaves and direct some of the ample proceeds to nonprofit public radio and public TV as well as an assortment of audience controlled TV and radio channels that could broadcast what is going on in our country locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally?

(See: Ralph Nader & Claire Riley, Oh, Say Can You See: A Broadcast Network for the Audience, 5 J.L. & POL. 1, [1988])

Now that would be a worthy program for public broadcasting. Get Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s companies off welfare. Want to guess what their listeners think about corporate welfare?