BIO
– RONALD D. GLOTTA
Attorney Ronald D. Glotta is a long-time human rights champion who
has turned his passion into an effective and successful law career
defending the rights of workers “ravaged by the excesses of
capitalism.” He has been quoted or featured in numerous progressive
books and publications, including Black Rage by William Grier and
Price Cobbs; Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin
Surkin; Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American
City
by Heather Ann Thompson; and Muscle & Blood, by Rachel Scott.
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I am a child of Kansas. I learned about individual responsibility
standing on a washtub at 5:00 a.m., washing dishes, though that concept
didn’t do much for me when I played basketball later on that
day. I learned about individual responsibility by watching my parents
work all their lives, and later following their example. I’ve
learned to take responsibility for the employees and partners in my
law firm, and to take responsibility for the individuals whom I represent
regardless of what it costs.
Contrast
that with the corporation. In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose
Bierce famously defined a corporation as “an ingenious device
for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”
Capitalist historians and capitalist economists alike speak only of
the efficiency of the corporation. They are efficient because they
externalize all costs placing the burden of sustainability on the
government for which they refuse to pay. In addition, today’s
mega-corporations, those heavily subsidized institutions who by their
nature are shielded from competition through legislation, are no longer
private. They are instead publicly created institutions that were
originally designed to be subservient to the government, something
that has now been turned upside down.
Kate
Jennings in a New York Times article quoting Bierce describes the
internal structure and for that matter the political perspective
of the modern corporation:
“I make these observations as someone who worked for
much of the 1990’s as a speechwriter at two major Wall Street
financial service corporations. Until then I’d had no experience
of closed societies and rigid hierarchies; perforce, to survive
I had to turn myself into something of an anthropologist.
“One paradox was hard to miss: When I crossed the thresholds
of those downtown skyscrapers, I went from one person, one-vote
democracy—messy, noisy, infuriating, but democratic—to
a netherworld where fear was the primary management tool and dossiers,
censorship, misinformation and various forms of surveillance were
standard practice. To me, corporations seemed not merely autocratic
but totalitarian; the engines of America’s fabled society
are anything but [democratic].” New York Times, July 14,
2002, page 15.
Corporations
destroy competition; democracy must nurture loyal opposition. Opposition
both within and without the corporation must be destroyed, stamped
out, eliminated, anything but nurtured. In democracy, there must be
a loyal opposition to ensure the competition of ideas and the development
of all people and most importantly the protection of the minority.
Historians
who ignore this aspect of fascism are at best short sighted. Economists
who praise efficiency but refuse to calculate the cost to society
are at best disingenuous and harsher words are appropriate.
All eyes
are on the United States. The disasters created by the Bush cabal
are undeniable. The ideological foundation for their actions is clear:
globalization works, the market works and people must be punished,
controlled or killed if they disagree. We cannot pretend that these
are simply ‘bad people’ corrupting a good system, because
this system is designed specifically to produce the kind of group
that now controls our government and the world.
In other
words, we must look at the system itself. Remember: it didn’t
start with Bush. If we take just a cursory look, we can find evidence
of the system’s catastrophic consequences in Reagan, Bush I,
and Bush II. The list of catastrophes is amazingly large and diverse:
Iraq,
Darfur, Palestine, Colombia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Argentina,
Haiti, Chechnya, Bosnia, El Salvador, Bolivia.
In fact,
there is nowhere in the world where privatization has worked. There
is nowhere in the world where working people benefit as a result of
globalization. Even in the United States, working people are now marginalized
and their incomes are depressingly decreasing.
Exhibit
A: Iraq
Any thinking person feels outrage about what has happened in Iraq.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the history of Iraq is one of
colonization, war, murder, chaos, exploitation, poverty, and social
disintegration, all revolving around immense wealth created by gigantic
oil reserves.
With the
theft of the presidency in 2000, Iraq’s problems and now the
world’s problems were magnified one-thousand-fold. All the evidence
establishes that Bush & Company intended to establish chaos and
thereby justify a continuous war against terror.
In The
Nation, 8/12/05, Naomi Klein describes this.
Hussain
Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London’s
failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators
that they prepared for the attacks by watching “films on the
war in Iraq,” La Republica reported. “Especially those
where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British
and Americans soldiers…of widows, mothers and daughters that
cry.”
“It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable
to terror because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman’s
comments suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers
was rage at what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we
call the belief—so prevalent we barely notice it—that
American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs
and Muslims, so much more that their deaths in Iraq are not even
counted?”
It’s not the first time that this kind of raw inequality had
bred extremism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed
as the intellectual architect of radical political Islam, had his
ideological epiphany while studying in the United States. The puritanical
scholar was shocked by Colorado’s licentious women, it’s
true, but more significant was Qutb’s encounter with what
he later described as America’s “evil and fanatic racial
discrimination.”
Exhibit
B: The Tsunami
In 2004, the unthinkable happened. We all watched in horror from our
more comfortable perches as Indonesia was rocked by the largest wave
ever to hit its shores in modern history. The damage was devastatingly
complete, and we immediately moved to raise money, send money, and
help people rebuild.
But we
lost sight, as we so often do, of cause. Because these are such complex
issues, the media is able to bend, twist and propagandize to conceal
the cause of these disasters. This human catastrophe was the outcome
of faulty business and misguided, myopic, and self-centered economics.
“The
magnitude of the disaster was only exacerbated by neoliberal economic
policies that pushed economic growth at the expense of human life.
It was the outcome of an insane economic system—led by the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-that believes
in usurping the environment, nature and human lives for the sake
of unsustainable economic growth for a few.”
~Devinder
Sharma, “Tsunami, Mangroves and Market Economy,” Third
World Resurgence,Issue #173-174, January/February 2005, p.2.
The only
reason this sounds strange or extreme or unfamiliar is because we
live in a controlled environment where facts are buried or denied.
But Devinder Sharma succinctly explains the basis for his conclusion.
‘Rape
and run’
Since the 1980’s the Asian seacoast region has been plundered
by large industrialized shrimp farms that brought environmentally
unfriendly aquaculture to its sea shores. Shrimp cultivation, rising
to over eight billion tons a year in the year 2000, played havoc
with the fragile ecosystem. The ‘rape-and-run’ industry,
as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
once termed it, was largely funded by the World Bank. Nearly 72%
of shrimp farming is confined to Asia.
The expansion of shrimp farming was at the cost of tropical mangroves
– amongst the world’s most important ecosystems. Each
acre of mangrove forest destroyed results in an estimated 676-pound
loss in marine harvest. Mangrove swamps have been nature’s
protection for the costal regions from large waves, weathering the
impact of cyclones, and serving as a nursery for three-fourths of
the commercial fish species that spend part of their life cycle
in the mangrove swamps. Mangroves were already one of the world’s
most threatened habitats but instead of replanting the mangrove
swamps, faulty economic policies only hastened their disappearance.
Despite warnings by ecologists and environmentalists, the World
Bank turned deaf ear. Sharma, supra.
The shrimp
farming [Rape and Run] is just one aspect of this disaster. Capitalism
always necessarily and inevitably concentrates wealth in the hands
of the most greedy, selfish, petty-minded and short-sighted.
Five-star
hotels, golf courses, industries and mansions sprung up all along,
the concern expressed by environmentalists disregarded. These two
ministries worked overtime to dilute the Coastal Regulation Zone
(CRZ) norms, thereby allowing the hotels to even take over the 500-metre
buffer that was supposed to be maintained along the beach. In an
era of the market economy, which was reflected through the misplaced
‘Shinning India’ slogan, the bureaucrats are in league
with the industrialists and big business interests. Much of the
responsibility for the huge death toll therefore rests with the
government and the free-market apologists. Sharma, supra.
With the
Tsunami, we tragically realize how globalization reaps maximum profit
and then requires people to pay the price in life and money. People,
humanely touched by the devastation reached into their pockets to
give while the multinational corporations, the primary cause of the
devastation, use the disaster as a way to take more. Real solutions
to resolve the human tragedy are never discussed, except in obscure
journals to which individuals like Sharma contribute:
Myanmar
and the Maldives suffered very much less from the killing spree
of the tsunami because the tourism industry had so far not spread
its tentacles to the virgin mangroves and coral reefs surrounding
the coastline. The large coral reefs surrounding the islands of
the Maldives absorbed much of the tidal fury, thereby restricting
the human loss to a little over 100 dead. Coral reefs absorb the
sea’s fury by breaking the waves. The tragedy however is that
more than 70% of the world’s coral reefs have already been
destroyed.
The island chain of Surin off the west coast of Thailand similarly
escaped heavy destruction. The ring of coral reef that surrounds
the islands did receive some punching from the furious waves but
kept firm and thereby helped break the lethal power of the tsunami.
Mangroves help to protect offshore coral reefs by filtering out
the silt flowing seawards from the land. Tourism growth, whether
in the name of eco-tourism or leisure tourism, decimated the mangroves
and destroyed the coral reefs.
~Sharma, supra.
A natural event like the Tsunami reveals clearly the effects of globalization
in “natural” phenomena. We would not normally expect the
corporate corpus to be implicated in such a disaster, but clearly
it is. In the Tsunami, we see how maximum profit always sacrifices
long term sustainability for immediate gain—and how globalization
escapes culpability because of the complexity of the issues and the
irresponsibility of the media.
If only
the mangroves were intact, the damage from the tsunami would have
been greatly minimized. Ecologists tell us that mangroves provide
double protection – the first layer of red mangroves with
their flexible branches and tangled roots hanging in the coastal
waters absorbs the first shockwaves. The second layer of tall black
mangroves then operates like a wall withstanding much of the sea’s
fury. Mangroves in addition absorb more carbon dioxide per unit
area than ocean phytoplankton, a critical factor in global warming.
Sharma, supra
The same
process is occurring in Africa, where the multinational corporations
take natural resources of gold, oil, diamonds, etc and then disingenuously
“forgive” the debt of Africa. The debt is not Africa’s.
The debt is the multinational corporations who have raped and exploited
Africa for the last three hundred years. Yet the media portrays it
as an act of philanthropy.
This is
the dangerous myth of globalization, and proof of the extent to which
its proponents will go to hide its deadly failures.
Exhibit
C: Katrina
Katrina has exposed to the world the utter bankruptcy of globalization.
Some have said Americans have to see it to believe it. The absolute
desolation wrought by Katrina, the failure of the Bush cabal to prepare
for and to respond to the devastation proves the unsustainability
of conservative philosophy and of capitalism at the stage of globalization.
The Bush
cabal blocked repairs of the levees for three reasons: 1) ideological—conservatives
oppose investment and infrastructure because it requires taxes on
the wealthiest; 2) the rich and privileged care nothing for those
who work everyday to survive; 3) the warmongering of the conservatives
leave no resources for infrastructure—in fact, many conservative
philosophers openly express the position that government only has
one purpose and that is to make war.
Under the
current system of capitalism/globalization, corporations are not satisfied
to make huge profits. They are not satisfied to make gigantic profits.
There demand is to make maximum profit no matter how much destruction
flows in its wake. More importantly, the demand is to make immediate
maximum profit. No investment that requires long term planning and
protection of the environment and protection of the community is tolerated.
In community
after community, globalization has failed. In the name of maximum
profit, it destroys communities and leaves, it makes sustenance and
sustainability impossible, concentrates wealth in the hands of the
smallest possible number and leaves the rest impoverished. Finally,
and probably most importantly, it leads inevitably to fascism in the
dominant imperialistic power, in this case the United States.
Retrieving
the Wreckage: Where Do We Start?
Are We There Yet?
While consolidating the basis for becoming a war president, the Bush
strategy has also created a huge progressive constituency. The program
of the Bush cabal, with its extreme and highly visible actions, naturally
generates its own counter force.
Bush &
Company, and especially Karl Rove, have created a number of wedge
issues. These are basically hate issues. Whether it is gay marriage,
abortion, or affirmative action, and the subtle and not so subtle
hatred of all Muslims, these issues are designed to consolidate the
base of the Republican Party by generating the energy of hate. The
strategy is to focus on the most vulnerable, generate hate, and then
generalize from that group. In the 2004 campaign, it was homophobia.
But the tactic has a long and nefarious history. In the 1920’s
and 1930’s, the Negro community was the focus of hatred and
the right wing could then bring in hatred for Jews and Catholics.
It is a tried and worn tactic.
The anger,
outrage and disgust at the war crimes, the racism, the male supremacy,
the homophobia, the thievery, the arrogance, the lies of this administration
has and will create a tremendous, disciplined constituency. The media
has ignored and will ignore the degree of the opposition to this administration—but
grow it will nevertheless. The hijacking of American democracy for
crass commercial interests will create a constituency with a long
memory and great discipline.
The antiwar
movement will grow as the correctness of their position is proven
everyday in Iraq. African-Americans continue to oppose the Bush cabal
at approximately 90%. The women’s movement will soon climb up
to that percentage as the Bush cabal implements one anti-woman program
after another. With the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Bush
II will strike the cruelest blow of all to the women’s movement
with an appointment to the Supreme Court that will be mean and embittering.
Meanwhile
soldiers and Iraqis continue to die while Bush II rewards the richest
of the rich. The responsibility of the left is to explain how we got
to such a miserable state of affairs and most importantly to expose
the source of this suffering—capitalism at the stage of imperialism.
The first
step that we must take is to expose the utter bankruptcy of the current
political system. The problem is that the global system has convinced
almost everyone that there is no solution, that there is no way to
overcome the massive global juggernaut.
A Roadmap
for Progressives
Katrina and Rita have exposed every contradiction of race and class
in this country.
That makes the first step in the building a movement of resistance
to the fascist government which has now captured the U.S. government—naming
and exposing it—almost easy. We cannot back away from this challenge;
it is the moral imperative of the 21st century. We cannot reform,
dress it up, make it more human. We must name it, expose it, reject
it and destroy it.
The second
step is the recognition that this system is weak and it is vulnerable.
The very strength of globalized capitalism is its weakness. Globalization
is powerful because of its very nature; with it, capitalists can amass
resources in different locations. But the strength of globalized capitalism
is racism; it depends always on racism for complete control. You see,
racism is not only an ideological perspective, but a power relationship—it
is an ideology that protects the capitalist class. The African American
community is the most politically sophisticated populace in this country;
that is why it votes consistently at a 90% rate in opposition to Bush.
It is the base, not only of the Democratic Party, but also of the
working class. Since globalized capitalism depends on racism, it cannot
and will not ever appease the African American community. Therefore,
the world’s oppressed people who also oppose globalized capitalism
look to the African American community for support and will return
support in every way possible; and, more importantly, they are a group
ready at a moment’s notice to unite, if an organized front and
a viable program is presented
This is
the irony of the system: globalized capital hands power to the one
political group—in fact, the one most politically sophisticated
political group—that steadfastly opposes its political perspective.
It is important to remember that revolution is not a process of the
poor and dispossessed rising against the rich and powerful. The revolutionary
process is one where every institution turns on itself, where every
contradiction exists within every movement. That is occurring in the
United States. Obviously, there are other, powerful interests in this
country that do not support fascism.
The constituency
of the progressive movement continues to grow and the question is
whether the progressive movement can provide the leadership to oppose
fascism in this country and take over the Democratic Party at its
base. The programmatic demands are clear. Can the progressive leadership
muster the skill and diplomacy to take over a marginalized Democratic
Party?
What does
it meant to “take over the Democratic Party?” At the present
time, the leadership of the Democratic Party is divorced politically
from its largely African American base. While the overwhelming majority
of the base of the Democratic Party is outraged by Bush’s response
to Katrina, Clinton joins with Bush’s father to raise private
funds. Why should already impoverished working people dig deep into
their pockets (and they will) when the rich cronies of the Bush cabal
have already stolen trillions of dollars from the American treasury?
An immediate emergency tax on the richest people in this country is
appropriate but not even being discussed by the Democratic Party.
It is the
global reach of American imperialism that is both its strength and
its weakness because any action within the United States has a global
impact. The African American community’s opposition to the economic
and political machinations of the Bush cabal becomes a key to changing
the world economic system. The battle therefore within the Democratic
Party will be to force it to take an antiracist position that addresses
the needs and positions of its base. Fifty million people voted against
the Republican Party. Nevertheless, it continues to move to the right,
now trying to steal money from the Social Security trust fund.
When the
overwhelming majority of the Democratic Party base favors immediate
withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Democratic Party leadership does
not even call for a date to be set for withdrawal.
African
Americans can and will provide leadership for the programmatic battle.
For years, African Americans have been out in front on some of the
most critical and important progressive issues of our time, from worker’s
rights to racial discrimination to peacemaking. But this statistic
is the most startling one we’ve seen in years, and it lets us
know that African Americans, ever on the front lines of struggle and
always the first in this country to feel the brunt of capitalist,
imperialist policies, truly understand the nature of these times:
In October of 2005, after Hurricane Katrina exposed the abject failure
of the Bush II administration, only 2% of African Americans supported
George W. Bush, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal news poll.
Now a couple
of weeks before Katrina, about 14% of Blacks supported Bush, and about
11% actually voted for him in 2004—primarily due to his emphasis
on wedge issues such as abortion and gay marriage, which resonated
with many religious African Americans. Washington Post columnist Dan
Froomkin called it a “free-fall” in Black support (Dan
Froomkin, “A Polling Free-Fall among Blacks,” Special
to washingtonpost.com, 10/13/05).
Here’s
the irony, and in this argument lies perhaps the core reason why the
Democratic Party continues to fail in national elections. The Democratic
organization is founded on a precinct delegate structure which is
far, far more progressive than the Washington leadership. The Republican
Party mobilizes its base, provides money and resources at the precinct
level, and implements a program that first addresses the needs of
its base. By contrast, the Democratic Party starves the precinct delegate
system and always addresses the needs of the “Bubba” vote,
the soccer moms or the suburban vote. Why?
This is
the inherent contradiction within the Democratic Party: its own racism.
The base of the Democratic Party is black, Hispanic and single working
women—these groups vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party—but
they receive little or no support.
That is
also why progressives have a tremendous opportunity to seize power
within the Democratic Party. Katrina has laid bare the race and class
contradictions not only that exist in this country but also that exist
inside the Democratic Party.
Taking
over the Democratic Party first and foremost involves programmatic
development. That obviously is an organic process where every individual
and every organization makes a contribution. The formulation of a
program must always the center of discussion. In doing that, we can
politicize the base of the Democratic Party and ultimately the entire
working class. More importantly, we can prove that the demands of
African Americans, of the Spanish speaking population, the working
poor help all people, even the rich.
Here are
some other specific recommendations for progressives within the Democratic
Party to champion:
•
A surcharge tax of 7% on the wealthiest in this country and
on the wealth stored in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens throughout
the world. This money should be used to rebuild the Gulf
Coast region in an environmentally friendly manner. We must call for
an immediate suspension of municipal bond payments and possible elimination
of debt in the devastated area.
•
Advocate for the prohibition of racist employment in rebuilding
the Gulf Coast, and that contracts be socially friendly.
That is, they are not to be directed towards maximum profit but for
maximum benefit for the community, and the parameters of that should
be clearly defined.
•
The corporations that have impoverished state and local governments
and now control the federal government should pay an immediate tax
of 10%, again to rebuild the poorest sections of this country.
There will be a huge problem to provide resources to evacuees; because
of race and class contradictions in this country, people gravitate
to the inner cities and that is where resources should be allocated.
•
There must be an immediate elimination of all student debts.
These loans now owed by students must not be simply suspended but
eliminated. In that way, the youth of our country can participate
in rebuilding the destruction that has been wrought by the neglect
of the corporations of this country particularly for the last 25 years.
•
There must be an immediate repeal of Taft Hartley laws
to allow the trade union movement to participate in the rebuilding
of our country. There must be a rewriting of corporate laws. These
are public institutions created by the state. These corporations therefore
must be publicly responsible. The continuous blackmailing of cities
and states by multinational corporations must cease.
•
We must have a national health plan controlled by the government not
insurance Companies. The thousands of people devastated by Katrina
must have health care. The drug companies should pay a 20% surcharge
tax to set up the system.
•
We must implement a true pro-family agenda including protection of
women’s rights to choose, equal pay for equal work, childcare,
and welfare for families. We must reject the patriarchal system.
•
The laws of this country must insure sustainable economics.
The unrelenting destruction of farmland and of the environment must
end. The cities must be made livable and sustainable based upon a
fundamental anti-racist program.
Significantly,
Katrina has exposed in broad relief the failure not only of the capitalist
highway system, but of capitalism itself. The role of the progressives
is to give voice to the outrage and to give programmatic direction
to the movement. We do not have to go down this road.
Yours in Struggle,
Ronald D. Glotta
220 Bagley, Suite 808
Detroit MI 48226-1409
(313) 963-1320 - (313) 963-1325/Fax
rglotta@glottaassociates.com
