Does It Have To Be This Way? Bank Fees Pile Debt Upon Workers

By Gregory Williams

We live in a capitalist society, that is, a dictatorship of the rich. As we look around us, it’s obvious that the game is rigged against everyone except the billionaires. We’re so used to the B.S. that we start to believe it has to be this way. But does it?

The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. banks made over $30 billion in overdraft fees in 2016. Most of us who live from paycheck to paycheck have experienced this. You pay the rent, for instance, and your account goes into the negative. You’re already broke; then you get hit with a fee.

The banks are intentionally preying on the poorest among us. Often, they rearrange the order of a day’s transactions so as to slam you with multiple fees. Your landlord might cash your rent check a week after you write it. On the day it’s cashed (which you have no control over) you make several small purchases; the bank processes these after the whopping rent check is cashed, and there you are!

Like most other things in capitalist society, this is a racket. Banks are cashing in on struggling people, laughing all the way to…the bank. And yet, when the banks themselves were struggling during the last financial crash, their lackeys in Washington gladly bailed them out giving them $1.2 trillion of our money. The rich and powerful do what they can get away with. If workers organize, fight back, and say “No more!” it would not have to be this way.

Tax Bill is an Attack on Workers – We Must Fight Back

By Gregory William

The Republican tax overhaul is the most sweeping change in the U.S. tax system in over 30 years. The bill is complex, but overall it is designed to make the rich richer. For example, the corporate tax rate drops from 35% to 21%. The Trump family and other billionaires will also reap huge savings because of changes to the estate tax; individuals can shelter up to $11.2 million in assets from estate taxes, and couples can shelter up to $22.4 million.

Perhaps more importantly, the tax cuts will increase federal debt, giving Republicans an excuse to cut healthcare, housing programs, programs for children, the elderly, and disabled including Social Security and Medicare. In short, their agenda is to attack the poor and working class, outright stealing from ordinary, struggling people. These programs are run using our tax money. They are not “entitlements,” except in the sense that, yes, we are entitled to what is already ours. We know that this will come down especially hard on people of color, LGBT folk, immigrants, the elderly, and women.

It is likely that we are entering a period of increased hardship and austerity. However, we should be clear that these policies are not coming out of nowhere. This is a continuation of a 40+-year trend. We are under the shadow of the great reversal. Even in supposedly progressive countries like France and Canada, the capitalist class has systematically attacked the social programs that workers fought for tooth and nail. Worldwide, wealth and resources are more and more being redistributed to the top.

A new U.N. report has confirmed what we already knew: Extreme poverty is prevalent in the U.S. and rising. Philip Alston, the report’s author, has said that in the U.S “if you’re born poor, guess where you’re going to end up – poor.”

This situation did not suddenly come about when Trump was elected. Inequality has risen through Republican and Democratic presidencies, and regardless of which party controlled Congress. The people have long given the Democratic Party the benefit of the doubt. But time and again, they have shown that their allegiance is to the billionaire class. It was Obama who bailed out Wall St., leaving the people behind in the so-called economic recovery following the financial crash. And the Democrats overwhelmingly voted in favor of the recent $700 billion military budget (more money for war profiteers means less money for workers).

We cannot afford to keep putting our faith in the Democrats. In this period of increasing inequality and oppression, we must focus on building up our own organizations and movements, truly independent of the Democratic Party. Most of all, it is necessary that we build a revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalism itself. We must fight for socialism.

Book Review: “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” by Corey Robin


The 2011 edition is available at the New Orleans Public Library.

By Gregory William

Political science professor, Corey Robin, has been hailed as the man who predicted Trump. He does not appear to be a psychic; but in 2011 he did publish a remarkable book (the Reactionary Mind), which traces the historical development of the political right. His analysis shows figures like Sarah Palin and Trump to be very much in keeping with recurrent aspects of this long tradition. They are not the absolute outsiders that they have been described as being (the image of the anti-establishment outsider is something that they themselves have cultivated).

The book traces the long arc of right-wing thought and political movements from the English Civil War of the 1600s, to the French Revolution, to our own time. He finds common features in the thinking of white slave-owners in the American south down to the political machinations of the G.W. Bush administration and its imperialist “war on terror.”

What is right, what is left?

The book is certainly useful for learning about an array of historical episodes, but also because Robin develops a framework for differentiating right from left, based on concrete analysis.

What is right-wing politics, or political reaction (Robin uses the terms interchangeably)? The question is difficult because we see that different figures associated with the right have advocated different things over the course of history. Early conservative figures in France, for example, were pro-monarchy and suspicious of the capitalist market. Today’s U.S. right-wingers, on the other hand, usually say that their commitment to unregulated markets is precisely what makes them conservatives; being pro-market, they say, is the essence of conservativism. Or, they say that the defining feature of conservativism is a commitment to “individual liberty” or “traditional values.”

Making the situation even more confusing, rightists (including neo-fascists) make appeals to the working class, or at least sections thereof (i.e. white workers, or “native” workers against immigrant workers), promising all sorts of things.

Is there a consistent way to distinguish right from left?

Robin argues that, yes, there is. Here is one of his most direct definitions of the right offered up in the book: Conservative thinking comes from “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” He makes a strong case that, in every historical period, conservativism stems from the reaction of the elites (whether monarchs, aristocrats, slave-owners, or present-day capitalists) to progressive movements for liberation and equality. It is a politics of maintaining power, or of restoring power.

The Old South, Guatemala, and the oppressed’s right to speak

One especially interesting aspect of Robin’s analysis is the attention he gives to the politics of the slave-owning class of the old south. He suggests that—in many accounts of the right—too much emphasis is placed on reaction to the French Revolution, whereas, some of the most developed right-wing politics came out of the U.S. south, and that this politics is much more the precedent to the right-wing movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

For example, he analyzes the statements of John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), the southern politician from South Carolina and seventh vice president of the United States who is often regarded as the chief theorist of the pro-slavery stance. Robin shows how Calhoun was horrified by even the most minimal protests of the oppressed. When the petitions of the enslaved and formerly-enslaved were read in Congress, Calhoun reacted violently. He felt that even allowing the speech of the oppressed in public discourse was tantamount to the beginning of revolution, to the beginning of the end of the “southern way of life,” i.e., the slave system.

One can see parallels in the way that present-day white supremacists have reacted to black athletes kneeling in protest against the widespread murder of black people by police. For these racists, taking a knee is going too far; on the flip side, we can see how these kinds of simple gestures can, in fact, radically shake things up, altering the terrain of struggle in a given period. Unlike Calhoun, we regard that as a good thing.

Similarly, Robin observes how Guatemalan elites (including Catholic clergy) reacted to the 1951-1954 presidency of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Árbenz, as he is usually known, was the second democratically-elected president of Guatemala. With massive popular support— in a coalition with the Communists and other forces— the Árbenz government enacted a series of progressive policy changes including agrarian reform (breaking up large agricultural estates and giving land to the poor farmers, who were mainly indigenous and who had lacked power since the time of Spanish colonization). Elites were horrified by the mere fact that the poor and oppressed were suddenly entering public life and were allowed to speak. This, in itself, they found intolerable.

The United Fruit Company, which was active in the country, felt that their profits were being threatened by the Árbenz government, and they called on Washington to overthrow the democratically-elected leader. This was one of the opening salvos of the Cold War. The alliance of the U.S. government, the United Fruit Company, and the old Guatemalan elites imposed a regime of terrible reaction, in the form of military dictatorship, leading to civil war in the following decades. Robin explores all of this in detail.


U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the advocate of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état that installed the right-wing dictatorship

At any rate, in today’s struggles, we need the kind of sharp lens that Robin affirms. Revolutionaries should be able to see the politics of Trumpism for what it is, but also look at our times more broadly. We have to be able to pose certain questions before the masses. For example, is the Democratic Party a left-wing or a right-wing party? The ultra-reaction of the present-day Republicans should be clear enough.

But if right-wing politics is about preserving existing power arrangements, then the Democratic Party’s consistent militarism, commitment to capitalism, and more, suggests that it is a right-wing party as well. We should not forget the concise statement to this effect from Democratic Party leader, Nancy Pelosi. At a 2017 “town hall meeting” organized by CNN, NYU sophomore, Trevor Hill, suggested to Pelosi that many in the country (especially young people) want the party to move to the left—a claim which he backed up by referencing a Harvard University poll which found that 33% of 18-29 year-olds favor socialism over capitalism. Pelosi responded that, “we’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is.” This is not a party of the working class and oppressed.

We need to have sharp discernment, give that our goal is to strike down the forces of oppression once and for all. We must be able to distinguish friend from foe.

Blood in the Cane Fields: An Interview with Chris Dier

By Gregory William

Chris Dier was born and raised in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. He was displaced by Katrina, but returned home in 2010. Like his mother, he is a history teacher at Chalmette High School, and author of a new book, Blood in the Cane Fields: The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre.

W.V.: What was the St. Bernard Parish Massacre?

Chris Dier: In St. Bernard Parish there was a massacre in 1868, right after the Civil War. Following the war, many black males had gained the right to vote and that threatened the economic relations of these parishes, where white supremacy ruled the land. Around New Orleans, there were sugar-producing regions where black people were the majority, and had been locked into slavery. When they were emancipated and gained voting rights, many voted for the Republican Party, which in that time had sided with liberation. This threatened the white political and economic elite. That elite pushed the narrative that all the problems after the Civil War were caused by the freed people and a lot of poor whites bought into it…1868 was the first presidential election after the war. The Republican candidate was Union veteran, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Democratic candidate was Horatio Seymour, an opponent of Reconstruction and rights for African Americans…Days before the election, armed white groups, many poor planters – not the elites themselves, who had been stoking the fire – carried out one of the most violent episodes of the Reconstruction era in Louisiana. These groups went from plantation to plantation and executed up to 135 people in the streets.

W.V.: So this was a reaction to Reconstruction, which was coming down from the federal level, but did you also uncover information about what freed people were doing in the region at a grassroots level to secure their rights?

Chris Dier: Yes. The first Republican meeting in St. Bernard was a group of freed people coming together. They had their own processions and meetings. There were a lot of grassroots efforts in Louisiana. Interestingly, 19 years after the massacre, in 1887, black and white St. Bernardians marched in unison against the planter elite. That unity is terrifying to the rich…The idea of race had to be strongly imposed over the centuries, going back to the 13 colonies, where there were many instances of poor whites joining in struggle with enslaved people… During the labor movement in New Orleans, blacks and whites came together in 1892 and 1907 along the Mississippi River fighting for their common rights, and this is what brought about some of the harshest reactions from the rich…There are many lessons in this history for the struggle now.

W.V.: How have your students responded to this research?

Chris Dier: My students have been very eager to explore this event. Many see their last names in the book. Some of the last names of perpetrators as well as victims are those of students sitting in the same classroom today. This is their history and most knew nothing about it…It is so important for young people to learn about history, because they are the ones who are going to carry struggle forward.

Book Review: “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts, and Revolutions” by John Catalinotto


By Gregory William

World View Forum has published a new book by John Catalinotto, a long-time anti-war activist and working class revolutionary. In the late 60s and early 70s, Catalinotto was an organizer of the American Servicemen’s Union, or ASU.

The ASU was an important organization in the struggle against the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam. The union brought together rank and file soldiers on the basis of class, helping to intensify mass resistance to the military brass who were carrying out the directives of U.S. capitalists—the capitalists being the enemy of both the U.S. soldiers and the Vietnamese people.

Catalinotto brings together excerpts from period documents (many letters from G.I.s stationed in Vietnam and around the world, sent to ASU headquarters) with his newer analysis of these events. The book can be read as an exciting panorama of the 60s and 70s, told from the heart of the anti-war movement. It also details how this resistance did not develop in isolation, but rather in conjunction with the Black Power, Chicano, women’s, and other movements of the time.

Additionally, Catalinotto analyzes many other revolutionary situations in their military aspect, for example the Paris Commune, which in 1871, was the rst instance of modern working class revolution. They were successful (however briefly) because, at a pivotal moment, soldiers broke the chain of command and refused to fire on the armed workers—hence the title of the book, “Turn the Guns Around.” This was the case in the Russian revolution. He also demonstrates that the rebellion in the military even facilitated the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
Countless soldiers deserted or went AWOL, the highest rates in modern history. And from 1969-1972, there were 900 documented incidents of U.S. troops killing their officers or sergeants.

The author has an overarching argument that he builds up with all these examples. He agrees with Karl Marx who concluded that workers must carry out armed resistance in order to break the power of the capitalist (or bourgeois) state; otherwise any resistance will be smashed by the capitalists who control repressive institutions such as the police. And in one revolutionary episode after another, rebelling soldiers, breaking the chain of command and joining workers in revolt, have played a decisive role.