Temecula Valley Reflective Liberal

The Janus of Empire

2012-02-05T17:51:00.000-08:00

January 24^th 2012 saw two hugely contrasting events that portray the sick, delusional militarism of this country.

One was President Obama's State of the Union speech in which his repeated effulgent praise of the military was strikingly noticeable. One line of that praise was "We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world." Respected?

The other was the final phase of the Hidatha massacre trials for the sergeant who ordered his men to shoot first and ask questions later as they burst into a dwelling and proceeded to kill children, one of whom was a toddler, women and men one of whom was a septuagenarian. Neither the sergeant nor his men, who pled that they were obeying their superior will serve any time in prison for their horrendous crime. The "superior order" defense did not work for the Nazi criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, but it does for American criminals. So much for the arrogance of empire. This was an act of vengeance pure and simple for an earlier roadside bomb that killed a member of the squad and wounded several others.

The glaring contrast between Obama's praise and the murders in Haditha reflects the profound rise of an uncritical militarism in this country.

After every war prior to World War II this country had disarmed. After World War II the military was not only kept intact, but began a life of increasing budgets. This nation was kept on a semi-wartime footing called the Cold War for forty-five years. Over two generations of Americans were raised under this continuing threat, including home bomb shelters and classroom drills in "duck and cover." When the Cold War finally ended there was no peace dividend. The military budget remained high while we went looking for other enemies that might justify this huge distorting expenditure for armaments. We attacked Panama because, it was said, its president was dealing in drugs. With the attack on the Twin Towers we finally had an enemy which, even though it was few in numbers, had no borders and was not a country. Nonetheless, we declared war on it. Even this was not enough to satisfy the lust for war. We attacked Iraq on the trumped up charge that it was preparing nuclear weapons to attack us. In all this long sad sequence Americans learned perpetual fear and their leaders learned to govern through that fear.

We are now in the process of militarizing our domestic law enforcement in flat contradiction to our Constitution. The passage of military technology through the Homeland Security Department to local police is now customary and the military has recently begun direct training exercises with local police in Los Angeles. We have again, in contradiction of our Constitution, given the military, per the National Defense Authorization Act, the right to detain any American citizen indefinitely without warrant or trial.

As all of this is in such sharp contrast to this nation's previous disposition toward the military, I sometimes wonder whether the American people were traumatized by the Cold War and the continuing threat it represented for so long a period that they became inured to the loss of freedom that threat imposes as people seek protection. Both Obama and G. W. Bush justified our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq as protecting us from terrorism. I submit that by our actions we have increased that threat by enhancing the recruitment power of the Taliban and other terrorist groups enormously and that we have spread a virulent anti-Americanism world wide. Contrary to Obama, we have not won respect. We have inculcated a widespread fear that has generated protests demanding that we leave Iraq and Afghanistan. I also suggest that fear and dislike of American influence was one element used by the Islamic Brotherhood to capture controlling power in Egypt and that we shall see increasing resistance to American influence in the Muslim world. Drone attacks generate fear, not respect and any respect paid to fear is always accompanied by hate. Democratically disposed groups in Egypt and Israel who could use our help can no longer seek it because we have so sullied our reputation by wanton aggression that these groups would experience backlash. The neocons laid out the plan for world domination. G. W. Bush and Barack Obama have carried it out. Now we reap the whirlwind.

If and until we get over this imperialism that identifies world domination with our national interest, things will only get worse and someone else will have to carry the banner of democracy, that is, if democracy is to survive. Recalling Dennis Kucinich's 2008 campaign plea "Wake up America," I strongly recommend Chalmers Johnson's book "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" to understand the connections between American imperialism, American militarism, and a failing American democracy. Chalmers notes that that as the Roman Empire grew larger and more complex the deliberative body, the Roman Senate, found that it could no long administer it. Eventually it passed its powers on to Octavian who became the first Emperor of Rome. In short, size matters if democracy is to function. There are significant similarities to this country's current state of affairs, as presidents engage in wars without consulting Congress and there has been a call for a "unitary" presidency. We are on the brink of losing our democracy. Does it really matter to this country's citizenry? Looking backward we see the consequences of empire for Rome. Looking at the present we are staring at the prospects for the future. Dennis Kucinich's call to America to "Wake up!" should be the loudest rallying cry of this election, especially for progressives.

Bob Newhard

Future Shock

2012-01-22T21:07:00.000-08:00

There is a fundamental bifurcation in the human animal between its brain and the rest of its organism. The brain unlike the rest of our being is not tied to the real world. The brain can envision what the rest of our human organism can never experience. This ability to abstract has been both the source of immense human accomplishment and immense human destruction. Our brains have created myth which many of us believe in with the same conviction that we believe the sun will rise tomorrow, if not more so. It is willing to kill other human beings who do not share that belief. This is how tenacious our brain constructs can be.

That same human brain has, using that same capacity to abstract, by carefully observing the world around it, constructed elaborate systems that allow it to place our species on the moon. For most of my adult life this bifurcation has been fundamental to my understanding of human behavior and society. For example, it led me to view human life as essentially tragic because we could conceive more than we could ever be.

However, Ray Kurzweil's latest book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology argues that the brain is breaking its shackles and probably within the first fifty years of this century, certainly by the end of this century, it will have done so. (The term "Singularity" in the title refers to the point at which machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence. The term is derived from its use in physics where it refers to the point in a black hole at which gravity is so intense it destroys space-time. Nothing is the same afterwards.) The driving force behind this development is the relentless exponential increase in technological comprehensiveness and power, especially in artificial intelligence, biometrics and computer capacity. Kurzweil and other scientists, applying Moore's law (the power of computers will double about every two years) to the whole of technology, sees these technologies doubling their capacities every 24 to 30 months. For example, in 1997 IBM's Deep Blue computer, designed to play chess, defeated world champion Gary Kasparov, who five years earlier had scoffed at the idea that a computer could do this. In 2011 IBM's Watson computer defeated the two most winning contestants of the Jeopardy game. The computer was not specifically designed to play the game in which any question can be asked. It won its match. In 14 years this form of computerization had advanced from a single game machine to one that had to deal with every possible question, decide whether it should answer or not and if it answered to be reasonably sure it was correct. (In this game there is a significant penalty for a wrong answer.) The real purpose of Watson is to quickly extract reliable information from very large, complex, databases.

As the power of artificial intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate, so is the rate of global warming and human population growth. All three are expected to reach some sort of threshold in this century. Understanding the full implications of this convergence is, to put it mildly, mind boggling and may require Watson generation 3 or 4 to provide that understanding.

The joker in all this is, of course, that humans are designing these initial iterations. Will they build in their customary human aggression and fear reactions and will this machine intelligence be devoted to military and other human-destructive uses? Kurzweil serves on the five member Army Science Advisory Board. The military, in an effort to minimize battlefield casualties, is moving increasingly to robots. A major problem is to what degree they make the robots autonomous, independent of human control. Technology, it should be constantly kept in mind, is a two edged sword. Kurzweil, however, believes wars are becoming less destructive, especially of human life, as a result of advanced technology. He compares the war technology of World War II, e.g. carpet bombing, with its millions of casualties to those of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I find this dubious, especially when one looks ahead to the destructive potential of such biological warfare weapons nano-sized viruses.

Yet in spite of all this, and there is far more to it than I have mentioned, if Kurzweil and other technologically savvy academics and innovators are right about an immanent explosion of artificial intelligence, then the run up to it as well as its consequences will mark one of the most dramatic shifts in human existence. Some compare it to the introduction of agriculture and language.

One of the useful things one can do is look for the signs of the run up to the Singularity. For example there is a current controversy as to whether astronomy or atoms should be the measuring source for time. The problem is that atomic time, and time measured by the rotation of the earth, are getting increasingly out of sync. While on the one hand the atomic source is more accurate, on the other hand all of human behavior has been molded from the very beginning of evolution by astronomical time. How much of what we are as humans, of our institutions and our accounting for ourselves, is tied to astronomical time? Is one more link between man and his environment being broken?

The same issue without the apparent conflict can be seen in a video clip in which owners of Sony's robot dog Aibo gathered to discuss their dog's latest tricks and other behaviors. The emotions and attachments to their dogs were obviously the same as if they had been real dogs. Simulation is one of the technologies that will smooth the passage to and through the Singularity as humans identify ever more closely with their creations.

The conflict between human values and human technology is not new. A hundred years ago John Galswothy published his story of a bootmaker know for the high quality of his boots, losing out to factory-made boots of lesser quality. That quality, i.e. human care and competence, no longer mattered, was incomprehensible and devastating to the bootmaker.

My stepfather was born in a covered wagon heading to Canada where his father had heard farming opportunities were better than in his native Iowa. He lived to see a man on the moon. I have often asked myself, given the increasing rate of technological change, what change I might see that could approach such a dramatic difference. I think I may be seeing the initial stages of that change in which the human brain creates an intelligence vastly superior to itself and must live with the consequences.

This rapid coalescing of major global-scale trends, i.e. global warming, population increase and the shift of intelligence to machines, portends a future of enormous complexity. Will human beings finally realize that intelligence is the only tool they have for dealing with this complexity and can this be done without surrendering their humanity? Will the bifurcation in man's brain become the bifurcation in his future?

Bob Newhard

A Way Out?

2012-01-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

It is generally agreed that humanity has to develop a sustainable economy; otherwise we will consume ourselves out of house and home. Various proposals have been made for achieving sustainability such as retuning to a simpler life in which we consume less and much of what is consumed is produced locally thereby reducing the many adverse environmental impacts of the global market. When one considers proposed solutions such as this the problem of how to get from here to there inevitably becomes daunting because of the apparently insurmountable social and economic changes that would be required, which would, past human behavior indicates, create enormous suffering and violence. It would take stark awareness of impending doom to bring humanity to this point.

There may be, however, a method of transitioning humanity to a substantially less environmentally demanding economy than the one we have. Additionally, we have already incorporated a great deal of this less demanding economy into our everyday lives. I suggest that we look carefully at the service economy as a device for segueing to a less destructive economy.

Given the low wages that many people associate with service jobs, e.g. waitresses, store clerks, gardeners, etc., this may seem like a real downer. Consider however that doctors, lawyers and teachers are also service jobs. In a World Bank Report titled Growth of the Service Sector, which may be found at http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/beyondco/beg_09.pdf, another dimension to the service economy is that it can handle growth with much less adverse impact than the commodity capitalism that now prevails.

We thus have in the service economy an existing and growing economy. Mike Davis in his book Planet of the Slums observes that the so called informal economy, in which individuals work for other individuals under terms arbitrarily stipulated by the employer, e.g. domestics, gardeners, constitute as high as 70% of total employment in some poorer countries. The service economy is already there. It has to be made more rewarding. One way of doing this is to impose a cost-to-the-environment tax on the producing of things. Notice that we now allow oil and mining companies to deduct a depreciation allowance from their taxes for the materials they remove from the earth, not to mentions such allowances on equipment made from mined ore. The environment requires that we make far fewer things than we have in the past, yet we subsidize that activity. That subsidy could be put to far better use by increasing the wages in the poorer parts of the service economy.

To my mind, the service economy offers other benefits as well. By its very nature it brings people closer together in shared undertakings in a time when the fascination with technology is displacing the fascination with people. The world of things we have created has introduced a substantial level of individual isolation. Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone notes some of the fallout from this. The service economy is also much more directly focused on human beings than our economy of production. It keeps humanity at the center of things, not some arbitrary function called profit. Keeping human beings as the focus in something as bedrock serious as employment is necessary as the so-called economies of robotization dictate that humans compete increasingly with their machines for existence. Economies are created by humans and humans must insure that their economies serve them well, including preserving their home.

Bob Newhard

A Neglected Consequence of Our National Decisions

2011-12-27T21:49:00.000-08:00

When we initiate massive undertakings, especially wars which are so emotionally charged, we will weigh many consequences such as world opinion, effect on other counties, even regional balances of power that may result. One we seldom, if ever, consider is the mindset of the American people that may result.

A mindset is a cultural phenomenon. Societies have them as a result of unusual experiences or as a means of accounting for what they do or have done. In this context slavery was a mindset in addition to a practice. When the practice of slavery was abolished the mindset remained, even to this day. Mindsets, being held for reasons usually immune to rational criticism, can be very dangerous to a society. They are vulnerable to political and other manipulation and, more importantly, they prevent a society from productively engaging in solutions to societal problems.

By way of example, let us consider what I believe to be one of, if not the most, significant changes in the American mindset to occur in the 20^th century, the militaristic mindset of the American people. After every major war until World War II America always disarmed and returned its focus to domestic issues. After World War II it did not.

By way of personal experience let me illustrate the depth of disarmament to help in understanding what disarmament meant and hence the magnitude of the change in the American mindset over the period discussed herein. As a child in the 1930s I lived within a few blocks of Fort MacArthur whose mission was to protect the port of Los Angeles from any enemy. The fort had an upper and lower reservation. The lower reservation had the barracks and officer housing. It was open to the public and I, a civilian, got my haircuts there for 25 cents. The upper reservation had the 14 inch disappearing gun battery that could hurl a 1, 560 pound projectile 14 miles in defense of the port. I ran around the tunnels of the gun emplacements and dug bullets from the small arms firing range to melt and make lead soldiers. Additionally, San Pedro was then home port for the Pacific Fleet. When the fleet was in anyone could ride the gigs that transported naval personnel to and from the ships. As youngsters we tried to get a gig going to a battleship, but sometimes wound up disappointed by being delivered to a tender. This was the state of disarmament about 15 years after World War I. There was no effort to keep the public mindset on war.

By the end of World War II the powers that be had already decided that the Soviet Union would probably be our next enemy. Even before the end of the war Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech on March 5, 1945 at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. About the same time Henry Stimson, Secretary of War (it was then called the War Department, not the current euphemistic and deceptive Defense Department) under Truman wrote in his diary that it might be necessary to take on the Russians over their invasion of Manchuria. He said this in connection with the importance of dropping the atom bomb to demonstrate our power to the Russians. In brief, there was no intention to disarm after World War II.

This so-called Cold War produced two hot wars as well as many proxy wars around the globe. For our purposes the most significant of these was the Vietnam War.

The first of these hot wars, Korea, came barely five years after the end of World War II. Fearing the displeasure of an American public that had so recently been through a long war, the Korean War was officially called a police action.

The second, and most important for the purpose of this article, was the Vietnam War. The American defeat in this war was attributed by the military to U.S. civilian opposition to the war, especially to the draft. In consequence the U.S. military sought and won approval to convert itself from a citizen conscript organization to an all volunteer one. This created a military that was considerably less a concern for ordinary Americans who would no longer have to weigh going to war in terms of possibly sacrificing their sons. With this burden off their shoulders the Americans could more easily view war as a kind of video game played with other people's children. This new volunteer military is paid in advanced educational opportunities, medical care for themselves and their families plus a modest salary. We had in effect a paid standing army, which brought us, at least psychologically, one step closer to accepting a full mercenary army whose precursor we now employ for the State Department in Iraq. This has been a major enhancement of the change in the American mindset regarding engagement in war.

During the 1980s we also invaded two small nations. The navy was sent by Reagan to attack the island nation of Granada because it had a socialist government and H. W. Bush sent the army to attack Panama because its leader was said to be trafficking in drugs. These two events were so bizarre they suggest a desire to keep war and "the enemy" in public focus and to discourage any thoughts of challenging the American hegemony in South and Central America.

The next major event in hardening the American appetite for world dominion and the militarism that goes with it was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This left the United States as the oft declared "sole remaining super power." As such, the neocons Cheney et al began planning, during the presidency of H. W. Bush, with their document Project for a New American Century for an American empire to rival Rome in the scope of its dominion. For this a well-funded military would be essential, which I suggest is the real reason we never saw the peace dividend many thought would follow the end of the Cold War.

September the 11th of 2001 came as a godsend for the neocons who had, during H. W. Bush's presidency, laid out their plan for a new American empire analogous to that of Rome in its dominion. An analysis of what was done in rapid sequence after the attack of 9/11 evidences a pre-made plan. It was immediately called a war rather than a police action so the full involvement of the military could be justified. The Patriot Act curtailed civilian freedoms. The federal government was reorganized to facilitate a continuing integration of military and police, and citizens who protest what is going on are now increasingly treated as the enemy.

We are now an empire with over 700 military facilities world wide. Empires generate enemies more readily than almost any other form of political organization. As such, we are continuously on the alert for potential enemies. We are easily led to treat those who may not accept American hegemony as enemies to be dealt with by the military. The latest episode in this world-wide game of containment is our response to China's increasing power. We have moved troops to northern Australia and we are trying to induce Burma to side with us against China.

This whole process from initial reluctance to get involved in one more European war to the creation of an American empire out of the ashes of World War II has had as its backdrop the American mindset nurtured by a media that kept public attention focused on "the enemy." That media and the American people paid far less attention to the efforts of the United Nations to spread some of the global wealth to the world's neediest. We often treated the U.N. as the enemy and any adherence to its rules as anti-American.

One day the full extent of what the Americans and the mindset they developed after World War II have done to this world may be thoroughly articulated. This is now being done with respect to our unnecessary use of the atom bomb. This articulation will not be pretty. It will be filled with large-scale avarice, pursuit of power and dominance, which became global after World War II. It will have events of unconscionable brutality. We Americans may have to face the kind of collective guilt that Germany has had to deal with. Despite the rhetoric we use to describe ourselves and our motives we have managed to betray our heritage despite many opportunities as our performance on the world stage unfurled. Franklin Roosevelt understood this. During World War II he pushed the creation of the United Nations in which the smallest of nations would finally have a voice. He rejected Churchill's efforts to reestablish the British Empire. He articulated his Four Freedoms, which included a freedom from want and in which the Marshall Plan was rooted. With his death we lost the kind of leadership a nation conceived as was ours requires. We took the first step toward world domination with the dropping of the atom bomb, which to my mind, Roosevelt, with his profound concern for humanity, would never have authorized. Perhaps one of the larger tragedies of the last 300 years is an America, which was conceived with so much promise for humanity, played out as simply one more empire.

Bob Newhard

India, the Other Path

2011-12-11T17:17:00.000-08:00

One of the salient issues facing humanity is whether democracy can survive the monumental changes that will engulf it, or will we humans find no other way to continue our existence than to rely on high levels of authoritarianism. As an example, China has slowed its population growth by fiat of authority requiring most families to have only one child. India, a democracy, has made not such demands. As a result India's population will surpass that of China in 2013.

India, in my judgment, should be a focus of interest to those concerned with the future of democracy. It is an emerging economic powerhouse, a global player. On the one hand it is fractured by an addiction to the new, fostered by a robust economy of technology and on the other hand deep attachment to the old as a country with long standing traditions that go far toward being definitive in a country not long out from under the heel of colonialism.

One policy that demonstrates the difference between China's authoritarianism and India's democracy is population control. China mandated a one child per family policy in the 1970s. Exceptions were made for farm families and some others. As a result, according to Chinese authorities, 400 million births have been prevented from 1979 to 2011. A Chinese spokesperson has said that currently about 35.9% of China's population is encompassed by the program. If a woman becomes pregnant and the family already has a child the woman is forced to have an abortion.

India tried a policy of sterilization instead of abortion in the 1970's, but abandoned it in the face of backlash it occasioned. Recently, the Indian state of Rajasthan has begun a policy of voluntary sterilization for men and women. Sterilization is rewarded with various appliances such as food processors or television sets and includes eligibility to win a new Indian-made Tata Nano automobile. In short, and with an adherence to the objectivity that the threats of overpopulation present to the future of our species, we must ask ourselves which of these two approaches is most likely to accomplish the population reduction required.

Another prominent current display of Indian democracy in action is the furor over the government's permitting foreign big box stores such as Wal-Mart and the British Tesco to open stores throughout India. Due to India's particular form of parliamentary government, a decision of this sort can be made by the government without parliamentary discussion or approval. From its independence to 2006 kirana, small mom and pop neighborhood stores, seldom larger than 500 square feet, and including even cart and sidewalk vendors, were by law the primary form of retail operation permitted in India. There are millions of these shops throughout India and, combined, they represent about 15% of India's gross domestic product (GDP). In 2006 large foreign retailers were permitted to operate, but only as suppliers to small Indian-owned stores. By fiat of government order in November 2011, these large foreign retailers were permitted to establish and operate their own supermarkets if they had no more than 51% foreign ownership. The government's action caused an uproar in the Indian Parliament with one parliamentarian declaring that he would personally set fire to the first Wal-Mart store to appear. Within days the ruckus in parliament became so great that the government had to rescind its order; with what degree of permanence is yet to be seen. I find it significant that this revolt in behalf of the little people took place immediately in Parliament without the need for massive demonstrations by those affected kirana owners. Can one imagine this response to government dictate taking place in China?

Part of the argument for permitting this form of foreign investment had been that both China and Thailand had permitted this kind of foreign investment and their economies have boomed. Regardless, the Indians chose tradition rather than modernization. In India's case the people spoke, in China's case a wealth- dominated government decreed that foreign investment would be permitted albeit under government oversight. (We have seen what happened when Google incurred the government's wrath over Google's resistance to China's demand that it censor its content.) One interesting question is which of these two major influences on the world's future, both developing at break neck speed, will, in the long run, be successful? No matter what we may think humanity ought to do, this is the real world in which democracy and authoritarianism will be tested.

I have tried to think out some of the pros and cons of this issue because I believe it reflects a fundament source of conflict in the future of our species. For example, it is said that the big box stores will eliminate many of the middle men in the kirana supply chain and thereby make goods, especially food, cheaper at a time of ever rising prices. But, I ask myself, at what energy and pollution costs as people have to travel further to a big box store rather than their corner kirana. Could, for example, the big box stores, being regional, create an additional impetus to automobile purchase? In brief, does it do less environmental damage and perhaps societal stress, to move people or products? Lest this seem trivial, it is important to keep in mind that we are talking of a society of nearly one billion people, over three times the population of the United States.

Some kirana vendors rely on local food sources more than the big box stores can be expected to. One kirana butcher said he did not fear Wal-Mart because his customers, like most Indians, preferred fresh meat to frozen meat and he slaughtered his own animals, assuring that his meat was fresh. If you have ever noticed, poor people, lacking refrigeration, buy their meat alive, hence the popularity of chicken, and slaughter it immediately prior to cooking. Ecologically, this considerably reduces the energy consumption of refrigeration and the accompanying CO2 pollution. Of additional concern, will the increased advertising and sophistication of that advertising by the big box stores accelerate overconsumption as it has in our country?

There is a significant movement in India to preserve Indian ecology, even to the point of returning to the land. Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Little Things, a prize winning novel, and activist for global social reform, comes close to taking this view in an interview in the Guardian UK newspaper, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger. People like she and Bill McKibben are driven to much smaller units of human organization in their search for a viable sustainable economy.

As a final note, I would ask if one can imagine a people-centered economist like India's Nobel Laureate Armartya Sen arising and prospering in China? Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in rigorously demonstrating that economics can be most productively viewed as a device for improving human life.

China is rigorously, and sometimes callously, planning its future. Humanity is viewed in its depersonalized mass. To get a feel for the enormity of Chinese planning I suggest reading relevant passages from Mike Davis' Planet of the Slums in which he describes Chinese plans for a megalopolis extending from the delta of the Pearl River (Hong King) to the delta of the Yangtze River (Shanghai) with a population equivalent to that of the entire United States. As I say, the Chinese are planning on an enormous scale. India, in contrast, exhibits much of the people-centered decision making. I have asked myself, and continue to ask, which is the most likely scenario for humanity's future? As the watersheds on both sides of the Himalayas continue to shrivel, as their populations continue to increase, as they each pursue a rate of development not seen before, their differing ways of dealing with much the same problems will be highly instructive for those concerned about the future of mankind.

Bob Newhard

Capitalism's Inherent Inequality as a Global Economic System and a Possible Alternative

2011-11-28T07:27:00.000-08:00

I think it is obvious that humanity will require, in some sense, a global economic system. We humans have gone too far in technological development, overpopulation and planetary destruction to assume otherwise. Further I think such a global economic system must have the welfare of human beings, in their totality, as its fundamental objective. Given these assumptions and values, can capitalism, no matter how modified, measure up?

I suggest that the European Union (EU), having as members a mixture of nations and their national economies can serve as the best example of what capitalism, as a global economic system can be expected to do. But why is Greece, for example, so wanting in productivity to elicit from Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and David Cameron the openly expressed regret that Greece was ever admitted to the eurozone? Could it be that Greece does not have the natural resources, e.g. coal, major rivers, a variety of mineral resources, that their northern neighbors do and therefore must do with less in health care, education, etc. than those northern neighbors? It would seem so. Is this not the naturally wealthy nations dictating to those of less endowed nations how they must live if they are to be loaned a portion of that natural wealth as a bailout? Again, this division of nations along the lines of natural resources would, if capitalism is the governing global economic system, condemn billions of the worlds population to, at best, second class global citizenship.

The EU's economic system, commonly called the eurozone, is much like any national bank. Not all member of the EU are members of the eurozone. An EU member nation must have a sufficiently viable national economy to become a eurozone member. Every EU member that has such an economy must join the eurozone. There are no protocols for withdrawal, either voluntary or otherwise, from the eurozone once admitted. The eurozone, as any nation, has its own central bank (ECB) which, among other things, issues its own currency and bonds.

Given this background what has capitalism done as this amalgam of nation states seeks to survive and prosper in the global capitalist market place as it currently exists?

As we know, the eurozone did not protect the citizens of the EU from the greed-driven shenanigans of Wall Street's securitized mortgage fragments. Some EU national economies, i.e. Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy are all being required to impose severe cutbacks in social services in return for eurozone bailout funds. This is causing riots in Greece and Portugal and, as noted above, a variety of disparaging remarks from the French, Germans and English to the effect that Greece for example, should never have been admitted to the eurozone. Here we see a group of nations struggling to form a more perfect union to avoid the wars that so frequently have plagued their lands and, in consequence struggling to form a common economy, being defeated in that attempt by capitalism's single focus on wealth. Indeed, Spain, in its recent election, has decided to opt out of its social programs and follow the ER/IMF imposed drastic reductions in social services. This, despite the fact that Wall Street was the ultimate cause of their social distress. Extrapolate this to a global scale, with much greater natural economic potential, and billions of human beings will not qualify for membership in a global economic system. Wealth once again trumps human need and human potential.

Well, what can we do? David Korten in his book Agenda for a New Economy, articulates 12 steps to be taken to achieve an equitable and sustainable world economy. Korten presents no utopian construct, but takes the real world seriously in his proposals. While I agree with much of what he proposes as a remedy for what we now have, I believe his call for more local units of economic organizations flies in the face of the level of technological integration and population density that humanity has developed. Humanity, if it is to survive, will require a global economy to assure a sufficient measure of equality in the distribution of the world's economic productivity.

One possibility I find heartening is to view humanity itself as our primary resource. By way of illustration let us consider Japan and South Korea. Both countries are exceptionally short of natural resources, yet both countries have thrived economically. However, initially in Japan and in South Korea the population was viewed as their only significant resource. More specifically, the brains resident in that population, as with all human brains, were known to be very powerful. All they needed was sufficient education to become a major resource for doing all the things those humans do well, such as innovate and organize. This, by the way, is an illustration of what I meant by an economy based on understanding rather than power in an earlier column.

Here, however, because this reliance on human intelligence had to function within a capitalist system, the educational process was highly competitive and resulted in significant numbers of student suicides.

Nonetheless, these countries have demonstrated that it is possible to develop viable economies when the only significant resource is human intelligence. The fact that this resource is widely distributed on our planet provides the basis for mitigating the problems created by maldistributed natural resources. In brief, human intelligence provides one of the essentials for a viable world economy--equitable resources.

The other essential requirement, in my judgment is that we must move the basis for exercising that economy from competition to cooperation. An economy in which people contribute to achieving societal goals and through that personal satisfaction will, for example, devote sufficient resources to insure that everyone can get as good an education as he/she can master instead of competing to the point of suicide to win acceptance to a university. Culturally we must pass from being focused on winning to being focused on creating a better society and the development of human potential. This may sound like it is expecting too much of humanity, but as our options continue to diminish we may be forced to focus on our better selves instead of surrendering to our lesser selves as we have done for so long.

Bob Newhard

Here We Go Again

2011-11-13T15:30:00.000-08:00

In an interview with Al Jazeera Jin Liiqn, the supervising chairman of China Investment Corporation, China's sovereign wealth fund, was asked whether China intended to invest in the European Union's new bailout fund. He did not think so unless Europe's labor laws, which provide for shorter work weeks and longer vacations than found elsewhere, were made more demanding of the workers. He accused European workers of being given to "sloth and indolence."

This from a high official of a government that allows its corporations to work people so hard they commit suicide as in the company that produces Apple's iPad; allows deceptive recruitment of young, poor, rural women to work in immense factories working long hours cheek by jowl as they sew clothing and assemble electronic parts only to then be housed in controlled corporate dormitories when off work; that is throwing peasants off their land in Africa as they plant massive, GM laden monoculture crops to feed its population. In China we are witnessing the worst aspects of capitalism being played out once again, but with all the "efficiency" trappings of the 21dt century. We have been here many times before. The initial Industrial Revolution in England forced peasants off their land in order to graze sheep and provide wool for the new machines of textile factories. The resultant poverty, slums, and other social dysfunctions are powerfully depicted in the engravings of William Hogarth and the novels of Charles Dickens. In the United States it resulted in the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146, mostly teenage immigrant girls, died because of locked doors and grossly inadequate fire escapes. Many chose to leap to their death on the concrete 9 stories down rather than burn to death. Some apparently 'froze', their skeletons still bent over their sewing machines. Would that the greed-driven connections between Goldman Sachs' Commodity Index and its speculative increases in the price of grain-based food, causing death by starvation, could be so explicitly drawn. Now, after three hundred years of this repeated barbarity, we have China, with the world's largest population going hell-bent down the same road focused on becoming the world's next dominant economy, not on the welfare of its people. Reading Arundhati Roy, India is little better and it is expected to exceed China's population soon. The enormous slums of Mumbai India, substantially created by the same process of driving rural farmers off their small land holdings, abut the skyscraping condos of the rich. All of this vicious imposition on a poor and desperate humanity is, of course, called progress.

In contrast, the object of this Chinese economic disdain, Europe, is the only area on this planet where a sustained effort has been made to insure that capitalism's capacity to produce goods and services is harnessed to human welfare. After World War II, amid its massive destruction, Europe was so focused on making its society and its economy function for human benefit that the British, within three months of the end of the European phase of that war, rejected their charismatic war-time leader, Churchill, and elected Clement Attlee's Labour Party. They, as Wikipedia notes, presided "over a policy of nationalizing major industries and utilities including the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, telephones and inland transport including railways, road haulage and canals. It developed and implemented the "cradle to grave" Welfare State conceived by the economist William Beveridge. To this day the party considers the 1948 creation of Britain's publicly funded National Health Service under health minister Aneurin Bevan its proudest achievement.^[68] Attlee's government also began the process of dismantling the British Empire." That, I suggest, is reform, in contrast to the pusillanimous efforts made in this country.

Recently Al Jazeera presented a video report on China's expanding military might. It showed Chinese military jets flying in formation, not unlike the Blue Angels (What a name for a killing instrument!) of the United States. Chinese civilians, men, women, and children were ecstatic at the display of military might. More often than not, achievement of economic prominence has led to military prominence and then military dominance. The political mechanism for this process is called "national interest." As every "great power" has done, China can be expected to define its national interest in ever widening spheres of influence. America's national interest requires 737 military facilities around the world, often at the host country's reluctant acceptance. The enormous Okinawa military base, occupying a large amount of prime farm land, is a constant source of resentment by the Okinawans. This sequence of economic power being converted into military power and the constant threat of war it engenders is very well know, yet our species has yet to be the fundamental concern of humanity and we repeats this sequence again and again with an ever increasing power of destruction. Indeed, as of this writing it has just been announced that the United States will establish a new Marine base in Darwin, Australia said to be directed at containing China. As Denis Kucinich cried out during the 2008 presidential campaign, "Wake up America! Wake up!," so we need a clarion call to humanity to wake up to the deceptions it practices on itself.

Now let us consider some of the consequences for this planet and humanity as the world's two most populous countries, China and India, rush to produce and consume at the ever increasing rates that human technology can produce.

Not long ago Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute published a small book titled "Who Will Feed China?" to draw attention to the impending global food shortage. The answer is, of course, we all will, but the burden, given the price structure that will govern food distribution and availability, will be the poor of this earth. As noted above, Goldman Sachs is already playing its role in this impending disaster as well as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the agricultural corporate conglomerate converting corn from food to fuel. According to the United Nations, there is already famine in parts of drought stricken Somalia. Delivery of sustaining food is compromised by warring faction, a phenomenon we may expect to accompany food shortages elsewhere. This, again, is a scenario that most of humanity will not take seriously.

Additionally, as wealth and its concentration increases in these two countries, food tastes will move to meat and the vast waste accompanying the consumption of animals will make itself felt, especially in the consumption of water, already in short supply. Add to all this the increasing trend toward agricultural monoculture and the patent control of seed and you have the makings for further sources of conflict. Finally, add to this the still increasing world population and you have the basis for massive conflict, not just over national sovereignty, but over the basics of human life, i.e. food and water, and those conflicts will taking place in the context of weaponry that can destroy civilization if not our species.

In this context the United States, China, Russia, etc. are planning their military strategies in terms of winning any confrontation or, at least, reaching some level of fear-driven mutual detente, however fragile.

Much of this scenario is known with a probability verging on certainty, yet the powers that be do not for a moment consider a policy and practice of cooperation in dealing with the massive problems we humans have created. We will waste enormous portions of what the planet has left fighting for ever-diminishing resources. This is childish schoolyard behavior! Every institution that either practices or promotes practices inimical to the continued survival of our species should be called vigorously to account, whether religious groups against abortion and birth control, the over consuming wealthy of the planet, financiers and their spurious economies of investing money in money and not for human needs, advertisers aiming to induce people to consume the unnecessary, and any number of other destructive practices.

In all of this we are not talking about niceties, but about necessities.

All of this mad rush down the road of unfettered capitalism and the greed, waste and conflict it entails must be stopped. It is clear that competition is, as this list of consequences notes above, a wasteful means to get things done. It also distorts or misses its objectives because it tends to focus on the competitor, not the problem. Cooperation takes far less of human effort and planetary resources to get better things done than does competition. Cooperation to deal with what we have done globally requires that we see with clear and distraction-resistant perception our common human destiny and, if we survive, our common human ability to understand ourselves and our potential for understanding the universe we inhabit. To constantly remind ourselves of our common destiny we need to use this planet as the basic frame of reference in dealing with all that would divide us. This is our common home. This is what we should pledge allegiance to. This is the only frame of reference that can address the massive problems we have created for ourselves. In 1940 Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate running against FDR, articulated his vision of one world so effectively the after the election Roosevelt asked him to become a roving ambassador for Roosevelt's efforts to persuade the nations that would be left exhausted by that conflict, that creation of a world organization would be imperative. Without commenting on what Republicans from Ronald Reagan to G. W. Bush have done to that party since, we need to reinstall Roosevelt's and Willke's vision and articulate the necessities that then and now make it imperative that we change our human mindset from nation, religion, or any other subset of human thought and attachment, to articulating our commonality in fact and in destiny.

Bob Newhard

Power and its Alternative

2011-10-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

To my mind, one of the great cultural cleavages in humankind is that between power and understanding. Basically, power seeks to change things, at root, by brute force. Understanding, in and of itself, seeks to perceive the way things are, and hence sees the exercise of power, per se, as a threat by the very fact that it disrupts what needs to be understood. Power, per se, takes no notice of understanding whatsoever. Both of these proclivities are essential to human survival and, as is so frequently the case with human values, can be fundamentally at odds with each other.

I suspect power is earlier in the course of human evolution than understanding. As a species, humans were as much prey as predator, if not more so. Thus, living in constant fear, they were both impressed with the power of the animals that preyed on them and, perhaps, longed for the power they witnessed. It is instructive that the animals that received so much honor in human religions were the powerful ones, especially the lion, in India the elephant, and in Mayan culture the leopard. It is not surprising that power being so long and deeply ingrained in human nature should be more suasive in human affairs than understanding. In daily discourse we often hear people say what do I have to do?; not what do I have to know when confronted with a problem.

Understanding, being of more recent evolutionary development, is less firmly ingrained in our nature. It is, however, what finally allowed humans to redress their power imbalance with their predators. Using the two together the human species became the dominant species, for good and bad.

One of the continuing imbalances in our human and social affairs is that between these two influences. We so easily take the fruits of our understanding and wantonly place them at the service of our power proclivities. Through understanding, our brains continually create new technologies, new ways of dong things, which we, almost gleefully, pursue to their, often bitter ends. We created extremely useful computers, cameras, sensors of all kinds and produced the Predator and Reaper drones used to hunt and kill human beings as if in a video game.

Of late, there has been a movement to adhere to a "precautionary principle" which would require an assessment of all technology for its potential impacts before it is released for use. Genetically modified grains are a case in point. On a much larger scale, notably weaponry, this way of thinking needs to be implemented and rooted deeply in the human response to the inventions of its brain. For example, malaria, until the 19^th century, was thought to be caused by bad air. With the discovery that it was transmitted by mosquitoes their breeding grounds were drained, netting used over beds at night, etc. People hailed the conquering of this disease that had been a primary source of childhood mortality, and made building the Panama Canal feasible. As a result many more humans survived to child bearing age and populations increased globally. This along with many other beneficial sanitary developments based on increased understanding greatly increased the human life span as well. Both contributed to increased population growth, which if not stopped, will destroy our species. We can ask, should we have required a reduction in birthrate as these consequences of disease mitigation took place? This is an old problem going back to Thomas Malthus who saw in the 19^th century that mankind could out grow the resources necessary for its survival and therefore must control its growth. Seeing no other way to control that growth, he assumed it was one of the functions of famine, disease and constant war. This is the kind of problem that has become critical for human survival, largely because of our technological capabilities. It is also, obviously, a fundamental human problem to be resolved by humans if they are to continue to survive. By obvious implication, if technology is the primary source of this kind of dilemma, then the science that is technology's birthplace must be taken into account.

Science, in and of itself, is the fundamental cultural expression of the human proclivity to understand. We often undertake scientific efforts that have no practical use and thus no potential for our power impulse: the astronomy of intergalactic space is a case in point. Along the way we may find some uses for the knowledge we thus acquire, but that is not the reason for the undertaking. The more narrow minded among us, especially those politicians seeking the vote of the uninformed, often decry the uselessness of such, often expensive, knowledge quests, e.g. NASA, as a waste of money. The word "use," so employed, is an expression of power.

An interesting feature of understanding and one that I suspect may become fundamental to human survival is that understanding is much less culturally restricted than power. If you notice, understanding can break the bonds of cultural parochialism that cause so much conflict and human destruction. Physics, chemistry and mathematics remain the same whether in America or China or Timbuktu. This bodes well for the basis of a global human society. We have the basis for a common understanding. We have a way to get beyond the cultural divisions that plague us. This implies that the current attempt to deal with the dysfunctions of cultural diversity, i.e. to celebrate diversity, is in the long run inadequate. While I understand the intentions behind this approach of cultural identity awareness, I think it is clear that mankind needs a human identity if it is to survive on a planet of increasingly known limitation.

With respect to science, a world of fact and evidence, generating a moral system, you may find the book "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, significant. I am finding it so.

A Case in Point:

The history of Japan and the United States over the last 50 years offers an instructive example of these two proclivities in action. During that period the United States spent its energies on power, specifically the power to dominate the world. Japan, a small nation with few natural resources, substantially by a major emphasis on education, developed an economy that was the second largest in the world, after that of the United Sates. I am aware of some of the usual arguments made for this glaring difference, e.g. Japan did it under the military protection of the United States and hence did not have to invest so immensely in armaments. Protect them from what, the fantasies that led to General MacArthur's deliberate provocation of China and its entry into the Korean conflict? In any event, all that says is that peace, per se, can be more productive than war. In matters of such large scale as mankind's future, all the caveats usually lodged against Japan's achievement still leave this difference between it and the United States highly instructive.

The Learning Society

The Learning Society is an ongoing effort by UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to base economic development on life-long education. Far too often, indeed I suspect in the majority of cases, nations have built their economies on conquest, i.e. power, as did the United States as it pushed indigenous people from one ocean to another. The hegemony-declaring Monroe Doctrine asserted our power over the western hemisphere. Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet, a flotilla of warships, around the globe to emphasize our power and our willingness to use it. I submit this whole posture crushed the potential for an understanding-based society that could have sprung from the passion to understand found in some of our nation's most prominent founders, e.g. Jefferson and Franklin, had we heeded Washington's advice against entangling foreign alliances.

The point of these kinds of large-scale and admittedly very complex examples is that our species cannot continue to exist if we rely on power as the driving mechanism of our future as we so thoroughly have in our past. We have developed the capacity to destroy ourselves and yet behave like children with a new toy at each technological advance in the exercise of power. We, as a species, have demonstrated the capacity to develop through understanding. Our problem has been that we then insist on wantonly turning that understanding into power. We must learn to be satisfied with understanding, tread lightly on this earth and each other and be far more careful about turning understanding into power.

The Precautionary Principle

By way of developing a method to inhibit our largely uncontrolled practice of turning understanding into power there is an effort to define and implement deterring practices known as the Precautionary Principle. There are various definitions of this principle due to the complexity of the many issues and the vested interests of various segments of the world's population. Basically the principle would prohibit the introduction of new technology and the accompanying processes unless it was proven to be safe with respect to mankind and the environment. A Google search will turn up a plethora of information, and complexity, for those who may be interested.

As The Learning Society initiative evidences, there are people and groups concerned to deal with the problems our species faces by the use of mankind's unique capacity to understand. We need to bring this need and this approach to general public awareness accompanied by the urgency it deserves. We must think our way out of our massive dilemmas lest we destroy ourselves in the emotional responses we customarily make.

Bob Newhard

Are Humans Becoming Redundant?

2011-10-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

There is a latent, but pervasive, sense among Americans that the rich need the rest of us as a market. As Henry Ford is said to have believed, he had to pay his workers decently if he expected them to buy his automobiles. However, this serf-like view of humanity is true only if wealth is being generated by mass production for mass consumption and that production cannot be moved from one region to another. The truth is, however, that markets are not people, they are money. If money is concentrated in relatively few hands, the market cannot be "mass:" to wit nobody markets to poor people because they have no money--except in a scam such as subprime mortgages.

The message here is that an unregulated, market-driven economy cannot meet the needs of humanity at large, which in substantial measure, is why we are seeing the global turmoil being generated by the fallout from the Great Recession.

It follows that as the market-driven economy continues to concentrate increasing amounts of wealth in fewer individuals that the demographic size of the market shrinks and increasing numbers of humans cease to be effective members of the economy.

Sam Pizzigatti, editor of the online publication Too Much, which is concerned with economic inequality, has published an article detailing one major indicator of this phenomenon-- advertising. Sam reviews a report in Ad Age, the major trade journal of the advertising industry, which tells advertisers to forget marketing to individuals who make less then $100,000 a year. Useful amounts of money are not to be made there. Additionally the report advises that long term marketing strategy should focus on 20-30 year olds who make at least $100,000 a year because the probabilities are that they will be the wealthy cohort from which future profits are to be made. Here we have one of the most wealth sensitive segments of our economy, advertising, laying out their assessment of our economic future, which envisions increasing concentration of wealth and the power that accompanies it as well as increasing numbers of economically deprived human beings. We shall address some of the social consequences of this below. Sam's article titled, Madison Ave. Declares 'Mass Affluence' Over, may be found at http://toomuchonline.org/madison-ave-declares-mass-affluence-over/.

In another article titled, Are the American People Obsolete? Michael Lind, political policy director at the New America Foundation, examines the fate of the American worker if wealth continues to concentrate. Here I would observe that the reason that the wealthy oppose public employment is, at root, because the public sector is the only place that people cashiered by the private sector have to go to get employment. It is difficult to think of a more economically vicious catch 22. But as Grover Norquist, a patron saint of the wealthy anti-taxers, said of government "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

The wealthy, in so many words, see government as the enemy standing between them and total domination of society.

Michael begins his article by asking "Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes." He then goes on to unfold a scenario in which increasing joblessness forces Americans, like the citizens of so many poorer countries, to migrate elsewhere in search of employment. Americans have not seen this possibility before, but it is common to the rest of the world, indeed, it was migrating poor Europeans who created this country.

Perhaps a couple of quotes from Michael's article will encourage you to read the complete article, which I highly recommend.

This is a message that must be made as clear to the American people as that greed is a primary Wall Street motivator.

" The point is that, just as much of America’s elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported."

You want to know how to stop incessant war?

"The American people also could put a stop to any thought of an American Foreign Legion and declare, through their representatives, that a nation of citizen-workers will be protected by citizen-soldiers, whether professionals or, in emergencies, conscripts. The American people, in other words, could insist that the United States will be a democratic republican nation-state, not a post-national rentier oligarchy." Michael's article can be found at http://news.salon.com/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete/.

Again, the message is if the rich have no need for you, you become redundant. Obviously this cannot be a continuing process. Obviously it must be stopped either within the capitalist system or through a replacement system.

Let us now look at some of the social fallout from this attack by the wealthy on government and, hence, on us. Support for public universities and colleges has diminished to the point of canceling some courses and outrageously increasing enrollment fees, reducing or eliminating monetary aid to students from poor families and reducing teaching staff. At the same time the wealthy continue to get tax deductions for their extensive gifts to their private colleges and universities. As I say, vicious! The concentration of wealth in the few has left public schools strapped for resources. Teachers have been let go thereby increasing class sizes, when everyone knows class size is one of the most significant determinants of effective education. This also increases the numbers of unemployed. Deliberate and vicious! There could be a direct transference of money, by way of a transaction tax on pure speculative investing, to public schools both to correct this awful imbalance and demonstrate to the American people the direct connection between the speculation-ridden life of the wealthy and the working life of most Americans. Of course, however, the wealthy would then claim their enormously wasteful and economically distorting practices support public education. Similar transfers of wealth by this kind of tax should be made to the victims of mortgage fraud and to the millions homeless with parents and children frightened of the future and desperate for some sort of security. And the Republican party of wealth and privilege would have us believe they care? Liars of the thousand lights of charity! These are but a few of the known, deliberate, consequences of increased wealth concentration and those who benefit from it. As we have said before wealth, especially concentrated wealth, is an enemy of the people and of democracy. It should be an object of social scorn instead of the focus of envy and icon of achieving that it now is.

So, is the bulk of humanity headed for economic irrelevance? If you look at the major trends as Michael did the answer would be "yes." None of the forces in play naturally encourage societal development. Labor requires less and less human endeavor. This is called efficiency, but efficiency presupposes a goal which one process is more efficient than another at accomplishing. What is the goal of this kind of efficiency? Simply more money called profit. Notably not human well being. Being as neither technology nor the power of the wealthy is directed at creating a viable, rewarding society for the majority of mankind, the only mechanism for changing human destiny is the informed will of the vast majority of mankind. Our operating principal is that we still outnumber them. Many people understand this. One union speaker at the Occupy Wall Street rally on the occasion of union support showing up, said to these predominantly young protesters "Well, we finally got together." Unions have been pitting manpower against wealth for years. This is a place to begin learning. Unions, like other organized efforts, whether corporations or religions, are subject to corruption, which requires a vigilant membership, but at least they are focused on human beings not merely money. As Benjamin Franklin said "We must all hang together or, assuredly, we will all hang separately." To do this we must develop a new understanding of what it means to be human at our best and to build a value system based on this reality. This is a tall order, but we are faced with a tragic reality. I still remember Denis Kucinich crying into the microphone during a candidates forum in the 2008 election "Wake up America, wake up!" This was by far the most powerful utterance in that whole devious, manipulative charade.

Corrective action.

For starters corrective action must begin with the realization that excessive concentrated wealth is a threat to mankind and must be eliminated at its first appearance. The methods of its accumulation must be as continuously monitored as we monitor the rise of an epidemic-causing virus. Instead of encouraging our young to "go forth and make their fortune," we need to encourage them create a better world, to live modestly and help make this planet the livable place it should be. We need to create a global value system that will take precedence over any existing cultural system. Because of overpopulation, over consumption, maldistribution of wealth, and the increasing efficiency of weapons technology, we have got to the point that humanity is its own worst enemy.

Bob Newhard

The Individual and the Collective

2011-10-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

Evolution itself first articulated this distinction. Some forms of life are loners from the moment of birth, e.g. the sea turtle. Others are largely functions of the group, e.g. schooling fish. We humans having evolved a larger brain that has led to a greater awareness of self have lived in a largely bifurcated world of self and society. Unfortunately that larger brain has been much less successful in developing the capacity to bridge this gap than it has in exacerbating it and in developing destructive technologies that make this failure ever deadlier to its continued existence.

In addition to the problems generated by our bifurcated nature we also have a pronounced tendency to over emphasize the discoveries of our brain. In current literature this is often described as "overshoot." When Darwin presented his Origin of Species and the mechanism of survival of the fittest, this notion was almost immediately converted into a societal, especially business, motif. The wealthy not only did in fact dominate the poor, it was only natural that they did so. Being wealthy, and hence powerful, they were the ones "fit" to dominate the rest of mankind. What these titans of greed did not understand was that evolution had produced a social species with a sense of justice based on a moral sense of equality. This social sense was as necessary for human survival as being "fit." To this day the notion of the survival of the fittest permeates the ethos of libertarianism and its free market economics. Their version of freedom is nothing more than Darwin's survival of the fittest. Indeed, if you listen to the utterances of today's business tycoons their use of the word "war" to describe competition is often heard. The Art of War, an ancient Chinese work authored by Sun Tzu, is a best seller in business circles. Yet in times of financial crisis many of these business bravados flee to the relative safety of public coffers in the form of government bonds to protect them from the ugly world they have created. Individualism of the form espoused by libertarians and free marketers is a child's game of "king of the mountain," although a very dangerous one, in which the collective must bail the individuals out. When will we learn that the seductive siren call of uncontrolled economic freedom is a chimera that will inevitably destroy the ship of state and its cargo of fools. Productivity should be aimed at human well being not human wealth.

Neoliberalism, little more than a play on words

Neoliberalism is a current example of conservative radical individualism. It is also a very irksome term for anybody who takes liberalism seriously. Let us look at how the libertarians and free market economists converted liberalism into conservatism.

Liberalism arose in the 17th century from thinkers such as John Locke for whom property was almost a synonym for freedom because the Crown, aristocracy and Church owned almost all of it, John Stuart Mill whose essay "The Subjection of Women" early demonstrated liberalisms concern for improving social conditions and Jeremy Bentham whose "greatest good for the greatest number" utilitarianism was intended to replace religion as the foundation of morality. This was a time when freedom was increasingly in the air, at least among philosophers. The predominant enemies

of freedom were the king for whom other humans were subjects, not citizens and the landed aristocracy and the Church. It was against this background that people such as Jefferson believed the less government the better. Keep in mind that the British Crown controlled everything. The colonies were created to serve the crown either directly or indirectly through its grantees. The American Revolution was largely a merchant's revolution aimed at freeing merchants to trade with whomsoever they pleased and freeing them from increasingly onerous taxes by an absentee monarch.

Now let us step forward to 1933. The major oppressors were the Wall Street financiers and industrial tycoons. They were the ones oppressing workers in the coal mines, think the Ludlow massacre; in the meat packing houses, think Upton Sinclair's, the Jungle; in the auto plants, think Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times; in rapacious railroad freight charges, think the farmer's Grange movement. Freedom of the individual at this time meant freedom from economic domination. The government under FDR became the instrument for restoring freedom. Why? Because this country had become a democracy not a monarchy and the people were able to use government for their own purposes. It, obviously, was not easy, but equally obviously, it did not require a French Revolution.

In both 18^th and 2o^th centuries liberals sought the freedom of the individual within the context of society. Neoliberalism is an effort by conservatives to recreate the economic oppression of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by leading people to think the economic world of the 18^th century, before corporations dominated the economy, is germane to the world of the 21^st century. That it has resulted in little more than economic colonialism should be evident to all. In a world of increasing overpopulation and decreasing resources it is clear that an ethos that sacrifices the group to the individual is a breeding ground for escalating conflict and violence, and this in the context of an expanding capacity to kill and maim.

The following is an excerpt from Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s essay titled Liberalism in America: A Note to Europeans in which he makes clear the consistency of liberalism and by implication the stealing of the word liberal by conservatives to engender confusion in America's political process.

"Enough should have been said by now to indicate that liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain. Liberalism in America has been a party of social progress rather than of intellectual doctrine, committed to ends rather than to methods. When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all -- as it did in the time of Jefferson -- liberals believed, in the Jeffersonian phrase, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state."

Corporate power and the poverty it has spread are today's fundamental enemies of freedom.

Franklin Roosevelt clearly understood the meaning of "liberal" in the context of a corporation, rather than a monarch, dominated society when he included a freedom from want in his four freedoms speech. We must realize and articulate the fact that poverty is as much the enemy of freedom as dictatorship and that we have a Republican Party prepared to impose poverty on millions of Americans, indeed to move as many middle class citizens into poverty as possible. To some this claim may seem a drastic overstatement, but I think the extensive and vicious attacks on government services and economic support of the citizen combined with a radical decrease in taxes on the wealthy leave no other explanation. This is the fundamental purpose and result of their attacks on government. Ordinary people have no other defender than government and they need to take it back.

We must ask ourselves whether, in the face of overpopulaton, human-replacing technology and extremely high concentration of wealth, whether humanity is becoming redundant and is this situation being manipulated by the multibillionaires of this planet for their own purposes. In a democracy they need us as long as we have the vote, hence the Koch brothers and the Tea Party. However, it is more than possible that they can subvert this democracy into an authoritarian state, perhaps via the Religious Right's stated desire for a theocracy and the political machinations behind the "unitary presidency" floated by G. W. Bush, especially in the chaotic times this country will experience.

Democracy has no defense other than the will and energy of its citizens. The real question is whether the American citizenry is up to it.

Bob Newhard

Let Us Remember

2011-09-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

As we remember the horror of the falling Twin Towers, the caved in Pentagon and the self sacrifice of those who crashed their plane headed for the White House as well as the self sacrifice of public employees who died trying to rescue others and are still severely affected by the debris of the crashing buildings, let us also remember and ponder some things that led up to and followed from this event.

Let us remember a Middle East carved up to their desires by the winning allies of World War One regardless of racial, ethnic or cultural differences.

Let us remember a democratic Iran whose government was overthrown by the United States and the dictatorial Shah installed in place of their socialist government to insure that their oil would go to us and our corporations. The invasion of Iraq was, in many respects, a replay of this consummate arrogance.

Let us remember our bargain with the autocratic Saud family to protect them against all enemies in return for access to their oil.

In all these and other precursors to 9/11 let us remember the term blowback and seek cooperation rather than domination when dealing with other countries. Let us cease letting corporations drive our foreign policy. Let us remember, contrary to Donald Rumsfeld, that it does matter that they hate us even if they also fear us.

Let us remember the thousands of Iraqi children who died as a result of the embargo we were instrumental in imposing and enforcing following the Gulf War.

As for 9\11 and all that flowed from it:

Let us remember the monumental extent to which we were lied to. Let us remember that "war" was immediately declared against a then unknown, but perhaps suspected, enemy which had no country, no army and no geographic borders.

Let us remember that no alternative, such as a cooperative global Interpol effort, was sought by the Bush administration despite widespread support for the United States. Obviously a large, concerted and cooperative police action by the many countries sympathetic to the United States was called for. The term "war" tapped into the military might we had been accumulating for over 50 years and into an American mind set of almost continuous war or preparation for war that characterized the 20^th century.

Let us remember the deer-in-the-headlights look on G.W. Bush's face when he was informed of the attack while reading stories to children. Let us ask did he know the scenario?

Let us remember the Project for the New American Century plan hatched by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al to insure American dominance of the world and that 9/11 was used to put it into play. Let us remember the massive death and suffering, not to mention wasted resources this arrogant ego trip cost. Let us pursue their accountability.

Let us remember the rapid restructuring of our government to let military concerns override all else. Remember the hyped fear of colored warnings of likely terrorist activity. Remember the Patriot Act that threatens any domestic dissent.

Let us remember that by attacking Afghanistan we were able to supply the geographic boundaries and other prerequisites for war, albeit against one of the world's poorest nations. We were also able to expand the enemy from a few al Qaeda members to the ruling Taliban. In all this let us remember how we were manipulated into war.

Let us remember that in responding as we did we supplied all the manpower Osama bin Laden could wish for and converted his attack into a broad contest between religions and cultures.

Let us remember the lies by the Bush administration that led to our murderous attack on an absolutely innocent Iraq and the hundreds of thousands of innocent people we have killed or maimed. Let us reflect on the trashing of the cultural artifacts, the barbarism of Abu Ghraib, the laying waste of Fallujah and the vast destruction of Iraq's infrastructure, which despite our promises to repair, remains to this date 10 years later.

Let us remember the flag waving patriotic jingoism that preceded our "piece of cake" invasion of Iraq. Let us remember the coordinated media hype, the Pentagon-appointed experts, as one more Madison Avenue advertising campaign and that we Americans were so vulnerable to it.

Let us remember the perfidy of being told our soldiers would leave Iraq only to see them transferred to Afghanistan and greatly added to as well.

Finally, and most importantly, let us remember that the mindset of the American people has been radically and thoroughly shifted from the euphemisms of economic dominance to the stark awareness of the brutality of imperialism and the fear and folly it engenders. Unlike our erstwhile naiveté, we can no longer ask why they hate us. The fear and shame that our actions have induced have prompted us to blindly provide billions of dollars to the military presumably to keep the terrorists busy in foreign lands, as we are mentally whipsawed by the media, body scanned at airports, detained without court order, put on "no fly" lists because we peacefully demonstrate against government policies. We must now protest behind chain link fences far removed from the elected offices we protest against. We have, like despots, rendered people for torture, imprisoned them indefinitely without formal charges and deprived them of trial by a jury of their peers. Such are the consequences of fear. We are a substantially different people than we were prior to 9/11. We should acknowledge that and work to remedy it. The courage that the Norwegian people and their leaders demonstrated when faced with terrorist slaughter of their children, the courage to reemphasize democratic values and their open society, warrants considerable thought and emulation by the American people.

As Paul Krugman so simply and eloquently says in the New York Times of 9-11-11 under the title of The Years of Shame

The Years of Shame

Paul Krugman blogs today:

"Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued? Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd. What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Let us remember how easily we have been led by lies into the massive killings of Vietnam and Iraq. Let us heed the pleas of the recently deceased Chalmers Johnson in his last book Dismantling the Empire: American's Last Best Hope that we demolish the American Empire before it demolishes us. Let us value our common humanity higher than our historical and cultural differences.

Bob Newhard

Needed, a Global Moral System

2011-09-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

On the one hand we have unprecedented global pressures on the human species, e.g. over population, global warming, food and water shortages, ecological destruction. On the other hand we have developing global social chaos that some, e.g. Samuel Huntington, believe will lead to a massive conflict of civilizations in a world of nuclear armaments. I suggest there is a dire need for a global moral system, which can be used to ameliorate the human condition before we destroy ourselves in the all too familiar manner our history evidences.

Being as moral systems are cultural artifacts, it would seem the best way to begin such an effort is to consider how human cultures have accommodated themselves to each other in the past. The last two centuries have produced two major models of cultural accommodation in the United States. One is the "melting pot" in which people of many cultures agree to substantially surrender their native culture in order to participate in a new culture. The mass migrations to the United States in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were certainly not without conflict, e.g. attacks on Chinese, the denigration of the "shanty Irish," but they willingly kept coming anyway. Many avidly sought to integrate into the melting pot, changing or anglicizing their name in order to better fit in. The melting pot converted all cultures to an American culture, which by historical dictate was substantially English.

In the 1960s dissatisfaction with loss of cultural identity prompted a rebellion against the melting pot and a substitution of multiculturalism, sometimes metaphorically called the salad bowl. It has become the dominant form of cultural acculturalization. I believe I am correct in asserting that multiculturalism is now believed to be the best way to accommodate the cultural fragmentation of our species. While I can understand the push to multiculturalism, I think in the long run for the purpose of a global culture and a moral system derived from it, that the melting pot metaphor will be found more serviceable. The melting pot had the advantage of establishing a common identity, which is what humanity will need if it is to create a global moral system. In lieu of subordinating all existing cultures to one existing culture, as happened in the United States, it will be necessary to fashion a new culture. I suggest that system will have to recognize the de facto imperatives increasingly imposed on mankind by the limitations of the natural world, not, as currently, the fictions of religion as has been the case so often up to this point. In this regard it will not do to create one more myth, e.g. Gaia. Our understanding of our world and its processes and of ourselves must be the focus of any value system that would sustain us and the planet we inhabit. Thus creating a sustainable environment as quickly and thoroughly as possible must become a moral imperative of a global moral system.

Therefore, at bottom, nature will dictate the terms of any system of human behavior that aspires to preserve humanity and the planet. This places a premium on science, the one institution with the background, integrity and self-correcting processes necessary for this endeavor.

One sign that the need for such a global moral system is being increasingly recognized is the increasing need of nations to seek United Nations sanctions before engaging in conflict. This is far from perfect and is unduly subject to the will of the more powerful nations, but it is a process fairly new in international relations.

A global moral system will have to be rooted in our species, not race, culture, language, religion or any other traditional nexus of cultural grouping. To create this, it will be necessary to repeatedly demonstrate in a wide variety of dimensions that we will survive, if we do, only as a species.

If the primary objective of a global moral system is to assure the continued existence of the human species, then the first order of business should be identification of the basic needs of sustainable human survival. We then need a path for human development. I suggest something analogous to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Within the context of assuring species survival, optimum opportunity for human development must be perused if humans are to remain human and realize their full potential. Humans have to see the value of a limited sustainable population. There is a need to clearly elucidate the interdependence of all life and, perhaps, extend our moral system to what microphysicist Sam Harris calls sentient beings in order to assure that our excessively powerful species will not unwittingly destroy that with which we share so much of our DNA and millions of years of co-evolution.

In sum, we humans have the capacity to do this. It is imperative that we do it if we are not to perish. There is evidence that we can change our value system. China has taken a hard step toward population reduction. The United Nations is playing an ever larger role in international relations. And today Al Jazeera reports that the Libyan rebel government is pushing an end to tribalism in that country. Once again a progressive perspective on the human future needs to be developed and deployed.

Bob Newhard

Another Economic System, Another Culture

2011-08-21T22:17:00.000-07:00

Since posting my last column on Norway's exceptionally mature response to terrorism we have had the riots in England eliciting a very different response from their government. In what follows I want to get to what I believe is a root cause for the difference.

First, it should be kept in mind that the violence and destruction of the riots were abundantly displayed, often in real time, by television. This elicited immediate emotional response from millions of British citizens. This was not true of the deliberate horror that Norway had to digest.

This fact let Prime Minister David Cameron respond with declarations that the rioters and looters, which included 13 and 14 year old children, were criminals and would be hunted down and prosecuted as such. This was property damage and loss. Four people were killed, one by police, the remaining three by the murderous use of a car to run over three people trying to defend their neighborhood. The Norway rampage killed 85, but the acts were not televised.

While this difference between televised and non-televised crime is important, I think it is not the most important difference between the British and Norwegian governments' response.

The major difference is, in my judgment, the economic, and in consequence, the socio-political context in which they occurred. Norway has a people-centered democratic socialist society. Great Britain has a free market economic system that still reflects the economic views of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a primary tutor of Ronald Reagan.

David Cameron responded to the riots by repeatedly declaring that the rioters were criminals. Yet it was obvious, especially in the earlier days of the riots, that many of the participants were teenagers in tennis shoes. As far as I have been able to determine, Cameron has not once mentioned the dire impact of the austerity program that has been unleashed on the poor and middle class population of the working class neighborhoods in which the riots took place. His concept of social causes of the riots consists of culture criticisms such as "disrespect for authority, gang culture, and children growing up in dysfunctional families." This is the usual conservative misconstruence of social issues as moral issues. Progressives have to deal more effectively with this moralistic dodge if they are to get society to effectively focus on social needs. As erstwhile wealthy countries become poorer this argument will be increasingly used to account for the disturbances that arise as societies become less equal.

For example, the Daily Mail on April 21, 2010 carried a report by Professor Danny Dorling that found that London is the most unequal city in the Western World and that the gap between the rich and the poor is the largest in 200 years or since slavery as they put it. Does Prime Minster Cameron really believe this startling fact and the austerity program it has imposed on the poor and middle class, has nothing to do with the riots? Does the Prime Minister actually believe this fact has nothing to do with the "irresponsibility" of children destroying property while laughing? Is the Prime Minister so ignorant that he does not understand how poverty, especially in the presence of extreme wealth, angers the deprived poor? Has he never heard of the French Revolution? He chose to exercise the cruel hoax that mass uprisings against radical inequality are simply demonstrations of character defects. Even Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, which has come to remarkably resemble our current Democratic Party, could not avoid lamenting the destructive behavior of the young rioters, although he did mention some economic factors.

Does Mister Miliband not understand that released pent up anger is not a rational process? Miliband could easily and correctly said the Conservative government's exemption of the wealthy from its austerity program was a major cause of the riots, but he did not. We progressives must articulate the deliberate confusion employed by the wealthy to divert attention from the suffering and chaos they have inflicted on the less fortunate.

But why the difference between the Norwegian response to social calamity, which saw the danger to its democracy by repressive actions and the response of the British government to the violence it encountered? I think an important part of the answer lies in the fact that Norway's socialist government is focused on the welfare of the people while Britain's is focused on the welfare of the wealthy. Norway has a much more cohesive society because everyone participates in its economic productivity. In Great Britain it has become obvious that the benefits of the economy flow heavily in one direction only. In short, the economic structure of a nation has a lot to do with the nature of its culture.

This observation is, of course, as old as Marx, but it continues to escape the ideologues of today's conservatives. As one author says of Marx's basic theory," Any analysis of society and its problems must, according to Marx, start in an examination of its processes of production. All human societies have to be concerned, before anything else, with the production and distribution of the means of life. By using tools and instruments to effect changes in nature, humans are able to satisfy their material and other needs through productive labour." I would add, not by nonproductive financial speculation.

It follows from this type of analysis that if one would change society, a good way to begin is to change the economic structure. This, I suggest, is what progressives need to aim for. It is much of what was done by FDR's New Deal.

Bob Newhard

The Democracy Lovers

2011-08-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

"I have a message for those who attacked us…. You will not destroy our democracy or our commitment to bringing about a better world." Norway Prime Minister Jens Stolteberg

"We will punish the guilty. The punishment will be more generosity, more tolerance, more democracy." Oslo Mayor Fabian Stang

The response of the Norwegian people and their leaders to the horrendous attack by a Far Right bigot has astonished many people for its rejection of the divisiveness of hate and a bold affirmation of democracy and the tolerance it requires. Glen Greenwald has written an excellent comparison of the Norwegian response to terrorism and that of the United States. It may be found at http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html I highly recommend it.

My purpose in this article is to try to understand why the Norwegian response was as it was and why it was so different from other countries, especially the United States, which have been subjected to similar attacks.

Norway has been a largely homogenous country. It is predominantly Caucasian and predominantly Lutheran and has a common language. Some may say that when you have eliminated three of the major fault lines found in more socially complex societies, a social consensus is easier to obtain. However, the above characteristics can also be a formula for social arrogance, e.g. the sense of cultural superiority demonstrated by Japan or cultures of the "chosen people." To me this suggests that Norwegian culture per se is not enough to account for the depth of social understanding in the Norwegian response to the Breivik attacks.

Let me pause here and emphasize the dimensions of what I mean by deep social understanding. Let it sink in. How many heads of state can you visualize that could stand before a country just after they have suffered an exceedingly vicious attack, which on a per capita basis was worse than the 9-11 attacks in this country, and tell his fellow countrymen that they must not let this disaster destroy their democracy by destroying its openness. The high level of societal sophistication and social understanding that he called upon was available in the society. Why?

I think a substantial portion of the reason can be found in the political culture of the country. It is a democratic socialist country with a heavy emphasis on social welfare. The Labor Party, founded in 1887, currently leads a coalition government. Its logo is "Include everyone." Its slogan is "Work for everyone." In short, the Norwegian government has long been a people-centered government. It has seen that society is the proper focus for government and that government is essential to ensuring that this social value is maintained. This, in my judgment, goes a long way toward explaining why Norway and its government have reacted the way they have.

Additionally, Norway has long had a coalition-based government. There are currently seven political parties represented in its parliament as well as many others vying for seats in parliament. The current government consists of a coalition of the Labor Party, Socialist Left Party and the Centre Party. Coalition governments have the distinct advantage of allowing citizens to find their political home in a nation's politics and allows politics to be more responsive to changing circumstances. The coalition process, like the focus on a welfare state, insures that people will be the focus of government.

The ethos of the United States has been its vaunted individualism. The flips side of this individualism is individual vulnerability, which generates the fear so pervasive in this country. This individualism has led us to distrust government and to abandon trust altogether or, under heavy media influence, place our trust in business, especially corporate business. For us the price of individualism has been pervasive fear. For the Norwegians the value of societal confidence has been unusual bravery and the freedom that confidence generates.

The lesson to be learned from Norway's response to a heinous terrorist attack is that a deep sense of the importance of democracy and its requirement for an open society allowed them to immediately understand that what was threatened was not their lives, but their open society.

It is in the social stress of such an attack that a nation's true attachment to democracy comes to the surface. The Norwegian people understood this, I am tempted to say instinctively, and responded with a wisdom unfortunately lacking in our country.

The bottom line is that freedom is a function of society, not the other way around.

Bob Newhard

The Ultimate Cold War

2011-07-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist

Humanity, since the rise of civilization, has been dominated primarily by political and religious institutions. Gradually a third major institution began to emerge, initially with vastly expanded trade resulting from Europe's Age of Exploration, then increasingly with the Industrial Revolution and now with highly integrated transnational global corporations. While, by the 18^th century it was common for European monarchs to turn to bankers such as the Rothschilds to finance their wars, the political power remained the province of the monarch.

In the early United States corporations were often viewed with suspicion because of their history in the establishment of a number of the colonies. The history of settling colonies with indentured servants, of misleading the poor of Europe to induce migration to the colonies and their remote control by English investors, all contributed to this distrust. As a result corporations were authorized for specific purposes, e.g. building roads or canals, and were sunsetted when the project was finished. The Civil War saw a vast expansion of the corporation to meet the demands of that war, especially in the building of railroads. After the war the building of the transcontinental railroad and a plethora of others, placed the corporation, as an institution, as a firm feature of the American economy. Indeed, it was a law suit between the Southern Pacific railroad company and Santa Clara County California, by way of a clerk of the court's titling of a case, that first introduced the notion that corporations were persons. Upton Sinclair's novel, The Octopus, dealt with the stranglehold the railroads had on California politics.

The Progressive movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was largely a political reaction to these new corporate kids on the power block. The revolt against the excessive freight rates these increasingly monopolistic railroads charged became a focus of the Grange and other progressive agricultural groups. Geographically, where we had progressivism then, the Midwest and the South, we now have conservatism. Could the vast increase in corporate farming have anything to do with this change?

The Muckrakers like Ida M. Tarbell whose detailing of the economic practices of John D. Rockefeller in her book History of the Standard Oil Company, revealed the corporate world of interlocking directorates. These directorates facilitated the corporate response to regulations and other common objectives.

All this economic activity engendered the rise of mammoth financial corporations such as that of J. P. Morgan who became so powerful that he, along with other financiers, hatched a foiled plot to overthrow the government of FDR by force shortly after he became president. In effect, the corporation had arrived as the third major force in humanity's organized life.

Following World War II the corporation became an increasingly global entity as a result of its fundamental requirement to grow. It is now beginning to challenge government, the last frontier for growth other than religion. Whether it seeks to privatize this institution for profit is yet to be seen, but it poses an interesting question.

In dealing with government or, as some prefer, the state, corporations have sought to control the state rather than directly administer it. Mussolini made clear that Italy under his governance operated in the interests of corporations. Recently the Chinese Ambassador asked a group of American economists to meet with him at his Embassy to discuss, as he put it, "Now that free market capitalism has failed what do you think of state capitalism?" In state capitalism the state sets the economic agenda by either owning major corporations (this happened briefly in this country when the U.S. government took over General Motors) or the state owns a controlling interest in the corporation. It will be interesting to see if, over time, the state succumbs to the corporation due in part to the fact that corporations are generally much more flexible the political units. Their governing boards may see opportunities for growth too tempting to neglect.

Corporations are single-mindedly focused on profit and it is imperative that they grow or they will perish. They, therefore, do not have to weigh as many factors in reaching their decisions as do governments, which is why China's government control of its capitalist economy is finding success while the Soviet Union's government controlled economy did not. As global capitalism seeks ever greater markets and merges into ever greater economic organizations with ever fewer people making the decisions, the corporation can outperform any government, which is why government is society's last defense against corporate takeover of the global economy. In my judgment, one need only ask why major transnational and global corporations meet annually in the Davos World Economic Forum or the G8 or G20 have their frequent summits. These are little more than meetings at which corporate interests are the focus.

The World Social Form, deliberately created as the people's offset to the corporate World Economic Forum, is attended by a relatively chaotic mass of multicultural humanity. The emphasis is on improving human life. This differs starkly from the relatively few, but powerful by invitation only, attendees at Davos. One need only compare these gatherings to see the dimensions of the struggle humanity is faced with as it seeks to deal with the enormous power that its collective brain has created, but which that collective brain has failed to control. We want to retain our humanity, but we continue to create a world hostile to that desire.

There are some proposed alternatives to the above scenario.

David Korten in his book Agenda for a New Economy recognizes the fundamental inadequacy of our current free market model, especially the deleterious effect of what he calls phantom wealth, that is, wealth that is detached from real objects and services. This is the immense wealth of the major financial institutions and of the wealthiest among us. One of his remedies is to tax this kind of wealth until it does not exist or is reduced to ineffectiveness. He also makes a case for smaller regional economies rather than national or global ones. His remains a capitalist economy, but highly regulated to generate an economy measured by values such as health, degree of education, elimination of poverty, etc., not by money.

Joe Stiglitz, a former director of the World Bank, in his book Making Globalizaatio Work, while fully cognizant of the profound failures of free market globalization, believes globalization can and must be made to work for human benefit.

Chris Hedges, former head of the New York Times Middle East Bureau and now prolific author on the sad, self-destructive nature of much of modern culture, has declared that he is now a socialist. Some of the best writing on the current social catastrophes that our economic and social practices are generating is being done bye socialists, notably Mike Davis' Planet of the Slums and Eric Hobsbawn's Age of Extremes. If and as I feel I have these adequately in hand, I may be able to expand on the matters addressed in this post.

Bob Newhard

The Return of the Ideologues

2011-07-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

If you search Google for "Age of Ideology" or some variant thereof you will find that the vast majority of results deal with the ideological struggles of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I would argue that with the election of Ronald Reagan this country entered a new Age of Ideology, at least in so far as the Republican Party is concerned. What follows are but two examples of this now 21^st century phenomenon.

Each year when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gets a new batch of court clerks, he invites them to his home for a showing of the movie The Fountainhead, a film rendition of Ayn Rand's novel of the same title. In the novel, Rand, the founder of Libertarianism, pits the architect Howard Roark against the elected officials, who find the building they commissioned too modern for their traditionalist tastes. The officials eventually succeed in subverting Roark's creation to a more traditional building, which Roark eventually blows up in esthetic revenge. This was Rand's first successful novel and reflected her repeated theme of the creative individual against the collective society. Rand, a native born Russian, had given a 20^th century voice to American individualism and it has come home to roost with a vengeance.

Notably, Rand chose an architect as her protagonist. An architect is said to be an artist whose art form is buildings. This being the case, the architect must inevitably use other people's money to create her/his art. The logic of Rand's novel is that society should be put at the disposal of its great creators. (In our money-dominated society the great creators inevitably became the corporate honchos.) Art, it must be observed, is arbitrary at its core. It is the vision of the artist and is not subject to any test other than that its creator imposes. This is one of the reasons that art is a lousy metaphor for societal leadership. It must eventuate in dictatorship if the artist as politician is to realize her/his vision. This is, in effect, what Plato argued for 2,500 years earlier when he proposed that the state be governed by a philosopher king. Will we never learn! The only significant difference is that Rand has the additional problem of what happens when talent and ability arise in more than one person, not to mention hundreds or thousands. Presumably you have the battle of the titans in which the mass of mankind suffer.

I first read The Fountainhead in my 20s and was suitably impressed with Roark's valiant efforts to realize his dream and the dead weight of those representing society who sought to suppress it. I eventually worked out the implied scenario, especially after reading Nietzsche. I find it appalling that a Supreme Court Justice should think that this piece of romanticism has anything to do with governance in one of the world's most powerful countries.

Alan Greenspan, our erstwhile Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is another Libertarian disciple of Ayn Rand. Reflecting the tutelage of Rand and the economist Milton Friedman, who taught that the market was always self-correcting if left to itself, Greenspan said he was "shocked" by the recession caused by the securitization of fragmented mortgages, which he admitted he did not understand. This is the expression of an ideologue or, as Eric Hoffer said for the Communist mentality, a "true believer." That ideologues can rise to such positions of power and influence in our erstwhile democracy betrays the political naiveté of its populace, especially its inability to deal with incessant propaganda.

One of the most dangerous aspects of an ideology is its resistance to change. The real world is subject to continuous change and in these times of coalescing megatrends demanding concerted action from an extremely fractious global population, the last thing we need is rule by ideologues. This, however, is what we will have if humanity cannot get a grip on itself. Most modern tyrannies have arisen out of social chaos. Our future will be no different unless those concerned with society both for itself, and as a vehicle to enable humanity to deal effectively with its future, become vigorous, numerous and, dare I say it, creative enough to persuade humanity that it is one at root and that its only chance for survival is to respond to our immense challenges not as nations, not as races, not as religions, not as cultures, but as a species.

As I was writing this, President Obama announced his willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the bargaining table in an effort to get Republican support for raising the U. S. debt ceiling, something the Republicans did seven times During G. W. Bush's administration. That a Democratic president would offer up Social Security and Medicare for any kind of political deal would have been unthinkable before the Democrats began to cave after Reagan's election. What Obama is dealing with, and he surely knows it, is the politics of ideologues. Ideologues who care nothing for human welfare or any other societal requirement except their ideology, which in this case comes down to no government at all unless absolutely necessary. Grover Norquist, the Republican no-tax godfather, is now arguing that any increase in governmental revenue should be regarded as a tax and so is to be avoided. He infamously stated that he wished to see government small enough so he could drown it in a bathtub. When Obama first announced, after his election, that he intended to "reach out" to Republicans, he betrayed a naiveté belying his education, intelligence and political experience or, more likely, his intention to accommodate the wealthy, especially their corporations. These were the people who did not shy from bringing the Federal Government to its knees by denying it all funding, as Newt Gingrich did. These were the Republicans that did not hesitate to lie, big time, to the American people about the non-existent threat that Iraq posed to this country. The magnitude of the lie can be grasped when one recalls that G. W. Bush immediately declared "this is war" in response to the 9-11 Twin Towers attack. It was "war" because these ideologues, as exposed by a plan concocted by Cheney and others in the 1990's, were looking for a pretext to launch the New American Empire.

Obama could have dealt with these ideologues by proposing a Tobin tax on the securities transactions of the very wealthy, which the European Union is now considering and which it projects will raise 200 billion euros annually. This transaction tax is analogous to the sales tax we pay on our purchases, except it is applied to the buying and selling of investment transactions, e.g. the millions of daily currency differential trading transactions. Had this been done and the radical economic unfairness aggressively revealed to the public the Republicans and their constituency of wealth would have been the objects of popular scorn as they were during FDR's New Deal. To appreciate what Obama had to work with consider the People's Budget of the House Progressive Caucasus at http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/The%20CPC%20FY2012%20Budget.pdf In the end, as events of the Arab Spring again evidence, the only antidote to the arrogance of excessive wealth is popular resistance.

Bob Newhard

The Octopus

2011-06-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

In 1901 Frank Norris wrote a famous novel with this title about the many ways the railroads inserted their tentacles to control California. Today we have the Koch brothers doing the same on a national scale. Let us look at a few of those tentacles.

Global warming tentacle: The April 4, 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times reports on a study funded by the Kochs to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The scheme was to throw doubt on the statistics that support global warming. This, because they knew they could not refute the evidence. A team of physicists, including one Nobel Laureate, engineers, one statistician, a graduate student, and one climatologist was assembled. Unfortunately for the Kochs, at the end of their analysis the team found themselves in substantial agreement with the work they had set out to debunk. It is evident that the report was not done in the interest of science, but rather in the interest of the Kochs, because, unlike a genuine scientific report, it did not undergo peer review prior to publication. In this regard, the Koch's team was like the Utah scientists who asserted they had created cold atomic fusion. This was shown to be false once it was subject to review by competent scientists.

Science and the integrity it has introduced into human affairs in its relatively short time is one of mankind's most precious possessions. Traducing it is a fundamentally heinous act. The Kochs sought to corrupt it for their venal purposes, much as Stalin corrupted the science of genetics by imposing Lysenko's anti-Mendelian theories on Soviet agriculture because it agreed with Soviet political views. The evidence on global warming is there. It continues to accumulate. We can no longer avoid many of its consequences. In the face of this dire threat to our species we have the Kochs trying to delay even further any attempts to deal with the consequences. The enormity of what the Kochs are doing can be grasped by reading Lester Brown's new book "World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse" or "The Great Disruption" by Paul Gilding. Both authors make it clear we have passed the tipping point. The question is not can we avoid the consequences, but how can we deal with the consequences if we are to survive.

The Kochs need to be continuously vilified for what they are attempting to do. They are neither just mistaken business men nor are they ordinary crooks; they are political con men using the billions our laws allowed them to accumulate to the great harm of this nation and this world.

The attack on human well-being tentacle: The Kochs want no employer except the private sector and they want that sector unhindered by any laws stipulating how the workers should be treated or compensated. They are now bent on denying pensions to public employees. They want rampant insecurity to guarantee them the cheapest labor pool possible. This is evident from their funding of Wisconsin's Governor Walker and his immediate post-election attack on public unions even though this was not a feature of his campaign.

The war against the working class tentacle: Rick Santelli, a prominent commentator on CNBC, has a regular financial broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange. On one occasion he launched into a rant against President Obama's effort to provide some assistance to people at risk of losing their home through mortgage default. Santelli's rant about the unfairness of such use of taxpayer funds brought the trading to a halt as the assembled stock brokers took up the demand that there be no assistance for people they considered too dumb or negligent to have incurred mortgages they could not afford and that others, especially including themselves, should not be expected to bail them out through federal assistance. With the massive bailouts of the bankers who caused the recession in full view, Santelli and these stock brokers had the colossal gall to seek denial of any assistance to the victims. From this rant and this response of the financial community, the Tea Party was born with the quick fiscal support of the Kochs. One of the sickest signs of cultural corruption in this country is a populist political party born on the floor of a stock exchange able to elect senators and representatives on its first try.

The Supreme Court tentacle: With disastrous effect on our democracy the Supreme Court recently declared corporations to be persons with the right to directly fund political candidates without any acknowledgement of their doing so. Two of the Justices, Scalia and Thomas, have been regular attendees at the Koch's twice yearly conferences focused on furthering the Far Right agenda. This transparent effort to not just weaken government, but to make it an agent of the wealthy now has Grover Norquist, the anti-tax, anti-government lobbying powerhouse of the Far Right now declaring that any increase in government revenue should be considered a tax.

As Norris' novel led to the breakup of the railroad holding company and its monopoly, so we need to seek and vigorously promote suitable taxing of the obscene wealth that the Kochs represent so that it can no longer pose the threat to our democracy and to its people that it does.

A special note: Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the Koch brothers. It may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/kochmansions/ Interestingly, it uses the octopus as the video's logo.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the continuing efforts of the Koch brothers to destroy Social Security. The video may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/socialsecurity/

Bob Newhard

Beyond Good and Evil, With Apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche

2011-06-13T00:07:00.000-07:00

The language of good and evil stops short of considering the facts. Long before the appearance of good and evil, mankind had to deal with survival. Because mankind has been successful in meeting the challenges of survival, at least for many people, we, using our brains and captive to our emotions, created cultural artifacts such as the morality of good and evil. However, with the prospect of irreversible damage to our species and much other life on this planet, we must again make survival a priority.

One need only contemplate the amount of human energy and natural resources consumed in our conflicts over cultural, religious and other value issues or the sheer will to dominate, to see the dissonance between values and the facts of survival. This is especially glaring when one compares them to the energy and resources expended on threats to our survival, e.g. global warming, massive food and water shortages and pandemics.

A paradigm for much of what is going on in this world because of the failure to look beyond values to reality may be found in the small country of Yemen. What began as a protest by the people for greater representation and a government focused on their needs has now been hijacked by the rivalry between two tribes that has now killed hundreds and continues to do so. This is happening in a country that UNESCO says is one of the poorest on the planet, with 40% living below the poverty line and suffering from severe water shortages, fuel shortages to deliver water by tanker trucks and by rapidly rising food prices.

This is not so different from Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent trip around the world visiting many American military installations and foreign countries declaring that America must and will remain strong in Asia and elsewhere to protect its access to global resources and markets. Our well-being requires control of a substantial portion of the planet? Why? Sweden and other small Scandinavian countries have a higher standard of living than we do and have no such pretensions. Do I smell the odious stench of corporate profit demands in the pronouncements of Gates? His comments were intended to reassure America's allies and especially to warn China, which is now the focus of Pentagon war planning. Shall we now return to the "evil yellow peril" of the 19^th century? Will we again talk about evil empires while our planetary home suffers the ravages of our over population and over consumption? Will we now engage in an extremely wasteful global competition and perhaps a global conflict? Will we demand of our government a halt to this idiocy? Or once again will we be led down the path of good and evil, killing wantonly and understanding nothing?

If we are to think productively and act appropriately we will have to continually focus on human survival and what it requires of us, not on others and what they have done and are doing wrong. The language of good and evil is a linguistic trap that goes nowhere except to a polarized world. It cannot lead to insights or deal with the complexity of human nature. Additionally, it is easily manipulated because the terms are so emotionally loaded. Witness how Ronald Reagan used it to describe the Soviet State as an evil empire, despite the fact that it had transformed a quasi-feudal society into a major technical power, and was the major reason the Nazis were defeated and put the first satellite into orbit in a little over seventy years. Did not we try to kill it in its cradle with our invasion of 1918-1919? Was it a tyranny? Was it brutal in perusing its ends? Did its citizens, in the main, have a high regard for it? Yes, it was all of these and more, but Reagan, the ideologue, would sum it all up with the word "Evil." In this he differed not a bit from the Ayatollah Khomeini who called the United States "the Great Satan."

In all of this I am aware that, if carried too far, humans can peruse the facts at great harm to others as the Nazi human experimentation projects and the science practiced by Doctor Mengele demonstrate. Nothing was done here that humans have not done to other animals, which is why Sam Harris insists that the so-called value of human life, so easily dismissed in war and ideological differences, be extended to all sentient life. This observation points to the fact that while values are necessary to some extent they are usually prejudiced in the interest of those promoting them, e.g. the value of human life. This alone should be enough to keep us on our guard when we hear of the politics of values.

In any event, we live in a time when the values entertained by humans and their institutions pose a far greater threat to our continued existence than does a robust pursuit of the facts. T. S. Eliot supposed we would end with a whimper not a bang. I suggest we may end a badly confused species, never having understood itself sufficiently to distinguish between its own creations and those of thee plant it inhabits, unless by something unforeseen allows us to get a grip on our collective selves.

Bob Newhard

Meritocracy

2011-05-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

Meritocracy, a society ruled by those possessing merit, is founded on the belief that merit is or should be the only measure of personal and social value. Meritocracy is a foundation belief of libertarians. The term first appeared in 1958, but the same notion was prevalent in the 19^th century when it was called social Darwinism. In the 21^st century it has again become a virulent doctrine heavily influencing every thing from economic policy to education.

There is much in our cultural history to suggest that merit has merit. If you look at the advances that human beings have made, especially in the last 400 years, they were discovered or initiated by a miniscule portion of the human beings that existed over that period. We, as a culture, express our belief that a person has a right to everything he or she creates or legally acquires, that is, he or she merits whatever they legally acquire. However, let us ask how merit functions as a social philosophy, which is what libertarians and their founder Ayn Rand intend.

Merit is one among a number of human virtues. One of the problems of any social philosophy founded on a human virtue is that the resulting society almost inevitably winds up as an authoritarian one, usually a dictatorship. Plato, for example, argued that knowledge was the primary human virtue. His proposed state, elucidated in his work entitled The Republic, eventuated in a monarchy ruled by a philosopher king. Merit, however, is but one among a number of human virtues such as empathy, generosity, etc. Additionally it can be found in some human beings combined with selfishness, a lust for power or incompetence in areas in which the meritorious person has no competence. In short merit, like many other human virtues, is a lousy criterion by which to allocate wealth and power. Yet merit along with a notion of unmitigated freedom is the rubric under which much of this nation's business and allocation of its resources are conducted. In these and other areas merit has replaced need and equality.

Let us now contrast what I shall call social virtues with these personal virtues. Among social virtues are equality, fairness and empathy. The libertarian and the massive political right wing condemn these virtues, often as socialism, as governing principles because, they say, they can lead to dictatorship. While this is true, it is also true of their free market capitalism, as witness Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet even had Milton Friedman, the father of free market capitalism, as an advisor. The point here is that any political economy can lead to dictatorship; hence, this criticism is irrelevant. The only way a democracy can avoid becoming a dictatorship is by constant citizen vigilance.

Among the insufficiencies of the libertarian view are the internal conflicts of an ethos predicated on notions as vague as "merit." Presumably, in the current libertarian view, the "merit" of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, George Soros and take your pick of Wall Street financiers, say Timothy Geither, is that they all made a bundle of money far in excess of what they could personally need. I included George Soros , even though he supports liberal causes, because he made his millions gambling on the continuously changing values of the world's different currencies. On the basis of human need and well being this is one of the most deleterious uses of money, differing little from the Wall Street casino mentality that produced our current finance-generated recession. In 1921 Thorstein Veblen, one of the more gifted thinkers this country has produced, wrote a book titled The Engineers and the Price System. In this book Veblen explored the conflicts between what he called "business" and "industry." Business was solely interested in making money. Industry, in which he included workers, was interested in making things. Veblen pointed out that industry was often hampered in its efforts to make things, especially new things, by the profit concerns of business. A current example would be the Koch brothers fighting clean energy technology in order to protect their fossil fuel business. Libertarians have no way to choose between the merit of money making and the merit of production without going outside their sacred merit-based ethos to social values such as human welfare. Of course, what Veblen called industry in his day has been largely taken over by what he called the price system. Major industries became more interested in making money than making things. Hence through exporting our "making" capability to the cheap labor of China et. al., the major segment of our economy moved from manufacturing to finance.

Perhaps more basic to the failings of libertarianism is its destructiveness. Libertarianism, like ideologies in general, suffers from focusing on one human virtue to the exclusion of any others thereby creating the basis of an authoritarianism, which now characterizes our society, although it is generally disguised as the rule of money. When the Supreme Court deemed corporations to be persons with all the rights of a person, including supporting the political candidates of their choice, it was clear that we no longer had a democracy, we now have a plutocracy, which is the arbitrary rule of the many by the wealthy few. At a deeper level we are witnessing what happens, as it so often does, when personal virtues (the merit of making one's fortune) are made public virtues (this is the way society should be run.)

The bottom line in all this is that converting private virtues into public virtues leads almost inevitably to arbitrary government and is a dangerous and often unrecognized enemy of democracy. The individual values of freedom and merit are the two most prominent examples of what happens when individual values are made into public values. We need to understand what is happening when Murdoch and the Koch brothers and their Cato think tank push merit and freedom. In view of the propaganda we daily and voluminously face it is imperative that people understand that there is no virtue in wealth otherwise Donald Trump would be a paragon of virtue. It must be equally realized that excessive wealth is destructive of democracy and is a constant threat to the social fabric. We need to ask whose merit and whose freedom. We need, in short, to return to our social values and find expression for our private values within that social context lest our species perish from this earth.

Bob Newhard

Reflections on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

2011-05-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

As I thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden I wondered what has happened to this society in the last 60 years. At the end of World War II we sought to reestablish the rule of law on a war-shattered planet. We brought to justice the malefactors in a war that had killed millions, wounded many more, and massively displaced populations. As heinous as the crimes were we did not summarily kill these practitioners of terror. With bin Laden we made no attempt to capture him and bring him to a trial in which the world could hear the evidence and judge the verdict. Instead we summarily killed him, even though others in the building were handcuffed. He was unarmed. We dumped his body into the ocean, an act that Muslim clerics condemn as against their religion and which, they fear, will incite further violence against the United States. In short, we had become our enemy. This was an act of barbarity that the America of 1946 did not tolerate, although we did tolerate incinerating thousands of innocents with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When World War II was over President Roosevelt sought to eliminate colonialism by establishing the United Nations in which all nations would have a voice. He tried to create a mechanism for peace. This time, Bush, one of the worst presidents we have ever had and his imperialist buddies sought to dominate the rest of the world. How could we be so retrograde?

One answer is that we are now dealing with terrorism, not states with defined borders and their armies. While this is true it is, in my view, insufficient as an explanation. We knew we were dealing with terrorism from the beginning, yet we said we were going to war with them. The fact that terrorism made all the difference between our behavior at the end of World War II and our behavior in killing bin Laden should have called forth a different approach. The fact that it did not betrays the worst sort of societal manipulation to lead us into the bloody morass we have created. The fact that 80 well trained men carried out the mission makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starkly irrelevant in necessity and tragically calamitous in their results. Prior to the attacks on the Taliban and the uncalled for invasion of Iraq many people drew attention to the fact that the responsible reaction to the 9-11 attack was a global police action, which would have resulted in an operation much like the one that located him and could easily have captured him had not the Bush and now Obama administrations had other goals in mind. The Obama administration has said that they did not want a trial during which bin Laden could stir up additional enmity. The same could have been said of the Nazi criminals, but we deemed preserving the rule of law was more important than not stimulating continuing Nazi propaganda. Nazism did not die and still has many adherents in Germany,France and the United States. Similarly the summary killing of bin Laden will not staunch the animosity of many of those of his persuasion toward this country. Keeping Chalmers Johnson's articulation of blowback in mind, we have done nothing to reduce terrorism, much less understand it and seek a way to defuse it. For those of good will, stopping this misuse of terrorism to justify our own terrorism, e.g. drone attacks, must be an ongoing and accelerated process.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Human Well Being

2011-05-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

At a recent group discussion of public employee pensions I noticed that the issues revolved around who deserves what and who pays for it, not what is good for society. This, in my judgment, is another manifestation of the "me generation," still hanging on. While I understand the above concerns, they are misconstrued. Had the focus been on society rather then the differing individual claims, it could have been seen that the real problem is a gross maldistribution of wealth that is a social cancer that will kill our democracy if it is not redressed. As I have noted before, wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. In democracy, which is based on distributed power, i.e. the citizens, such accumulations of wealth are deadly. A democracy demands a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth to insure the independence of the citizen. Jefferson understood this when he argued for a nation of small farmers whose farms would provide them with a measure of independence that the factory worker did not have in the industrial society preferred by Hamilton. As our nation became a manufacturing-dependent one, we had to find a surrogate for the family farm to control wealth concentration to a degree that it would not threaten democracy. We did this with a graduated income tax. We have, however, largely destroyed the effectiveness of the graduated income tax by capping that tax at a ridiculously low level, i.e. a million dollars in an era of multibillionaires and by granting massive tax breaks to the wealthy. We have also allowed tax havens for the wealthy in which massive amounts of profit provide no tax revenue at all.

This effort to persevere democracy by preventing excessive wealth accumulation has the added economic benefit of making the society's wealth more productive by insuring that said wealth will be spent on actual human needs and not on the disruptive, often disastrous, speculations of the very rich. Again, this becomes axiomatic without any concern for equity between individuals. The motive is the preservation of democracy.

As evidence that the pursuit of democracy, requiring an equitable distribution of wealth, leads directly to a public ethos of citizen well being we need only look at the state of our democracy and citizen well being under FDR's New Deal. Income taxes on the wealthiest among us were high, reaching slightly over 90% for a time after World War II. It was 70% as late as the 1970s. As a result we were able to afford the GI Bill allowing millions to get a college degree and subsidize loans so that returning veterans could afford their own home. This era also saw an unprecedented rate of building public schools and libraries and a high level of job security. When Ronald Reagan came to power, and since, we have seen the reverse. Money locked up in the coffers of the rich and their corporations does not go to improve the society as evidenced by a level of college tuition that ordinary people cannot afford, the closing and privatizing of public schools and homes being torn from people because of the shenanigans of an unregulated financial market, to mention just a few.

It is, to me, politically axiomatic that a democracy will far more likely target its resources on the well being of its citizens than will any other form of government. It is also axiomatic that the increasing destruction of democracy that we have seen since Ronald Reagan will move increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer people, thereby weakening our society as a whole to the point of a dictatorship, known under George W. Bush as a unitary presidency. Having observed that wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power, I will add Lord Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Bob Newhard

A Bridge Over Troubled Waters?

2011-04-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

We know that major disruptive trends are in the works. Global warming, overpopulation, food shortages, water shortages are the lot of humanity as it now exists. To these can be added the problems humanity causes itself, partly as it responds to these environmental pressures, e.g., war, racism, cultural antagonisms; and the multiple ways humans have of making these conflicts even worse. When one thinks of productively dealing with these matters, it is clear that we must start with those that humanity generates on its own. One of the greatest inhibitants to dealing effectively with our environmental problems lies in dealing with global human problems and fundamental to this is developing a global perspective, indeed a global mind set. Up to this point we have tried to deal with global environmental issue through our national and international institutions. However each of these has a primary interest in its particular national, economic, religious or cultural institutions. We keep preaching to ourselves that we must love diversity all the while rejecting it because we can find no effective functionality in it. What is needed is an overriding concern common to a large portion of humanity around which they can organize and exert their common energy.

I believe I may have seen the beginnings of such an effort in the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, especially in Egypt. First of all the youth of Cairo organized themselves into a major component of the protests. They are known as the April 6 movement. Second, they took full advantage of modern communication technology, especially Facebook and Twitter, as their vehicle of organizing. Third, they want a secular state. Fourth, a notable feature was that these young people were dressed in the ubiquitous blue jeans, not traditional or cultural apparel and there were far more women in their protests than those dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, these young people reached beyond Egypt's border seeking solidarity. They e-mailed their support to the protesters in Madison Wisconsin. In short, here is a constituency capable of organizing on a global scale and with the energy to do so. All they need is a unifying global cause generated by a common fundamental issue.

A little investigation indicates that this issue may be jobs. A close examination of the cause of such vigorous youth protest in Egypt reveals that a want of jobs for youth was a fundamental driver for reform, especially among the well educated, yet unemployed. This issue also generated protest in the dockyards of Suez and in the steel and textile mills in other parts of Egypt. The issue of jobs is basic to youth throughout the world. In France Muslim youth rampaged burning cars and destroying storefronts a few years ago. In 2008 Greece experienced substantial youth riots for the same reason. In our own country rapidly increasing numbers of young people, even after they have married, are living at home because they cannot find jobs that would permit paying for their own home. In 2010 the United Nations issued a report on the global youth unemployment problem. Perhaps this quote from the report will indicate the enormity of the matter, "About 152 million young people, or a quarter of all the young workers in the world, are employed but remain in extreme poverty in households surviving on less than $1.25 a person a day in 2008, the report said" Because of automation, business consolidations and other factors, jobs can be expected to decrease on a per capita basis. This means the problem will be continuous and continuously worsening unless a solution is found, e.g. shortening the work period either in hours, days, or years, thereby consuming production efficiency in bettering human lives rather than making the rich richer.

Given the above factors and given the fact that people at this stage of life are at their most vigorous biological selves and given that they are more at home in today's electronic communications, it would not be surprising if the multitude of young people will find global common cause in their quest for jobs. If this were to eventuate there would globally be several hundred million people with a common bread and butter issue for the first time in human history. The youth of Egypt demonstrated the ability, the political perception, and the willingness to reach out to others undertaking protest despite the fact that they shared little in common culturally. Whether this eventuates or not, it demonstrates that humans comprising very diverse cultural backgrounds can reach out to others in an effort to resolve shared problems. In this the youth of this world may build the first span over the cultural, religious and national turbulence that roils and will continue to roil the earth's human population. In this the young may be demonstrating a way for humans to get past their cultural barriers to peace and on to an economically decent, personally rewarding life.

Bob Newhard

The Future as a Guide to the Present

2011-04-03T19:07:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, we try to understand our situation by examining the past for cognates otherwise known as lessons of the past. However, as our future as a species becomes clearer, e.g. global warming, water and food shortage, etc. we may, I believe, profitably use the future that is increasingly being laid out before us, to understand the present. We can determine what our options are, what humans are likely to do if an option is exercised (history as well as our psychological and sociological knowledge can be helpful here) and therefore what we should do.

I ended my last column with the question " What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?" Both of these novels are depictions of how society may end up. 1984 describes a world in constant conflict and in particular a dictatorial society controlled by pervasive fear and lack of privacy.
Brave New World depicts a society in which citizens are biologically bred from selected embryos to optimally perform the tasks for which they are intended and therefore to be perfectly happy in carrying out their tasks. In the event they become overstressed and perhaps a source of societal discontent they may take a drug soma to induce pleasure and restore satisfaction.

In 1962 Huxley delivered an address titled The Ultimate Revolution at the University of California, Berkeley. A transcript of the talk may be found at http://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/huxley_ultimate_revolution_032062.htmh/ In this lecture Huxley argued that the ultimate fate of human social/political organization favors the Brave New World scenario. While he greatly admired Orwell's work, he nonetheless believed that the cost of continuous control by the threat, fear and violence of 1984, when comared with that of breeding compliant humans in the first place, will eventually be too high for continued social survival. In either case, as I see it, the result would be dehumanizing as we now consider that term.

Both these scenarios of the future may appear far-fetched, although Orwell's may be much less so. However,they may be instructive as we attempt to gage our future as a species, assuming following blind emotion does not end us first. We have a plethora of precursors of Orwell's 1984. Its basic mode of operation is control through fear of violence and the intense surveillance of individual lives. The Stasi in East Germany, prior to the fall of its master the Soviet Union, was notorious for the pervasive spying on citizens by citizens, indeed parent by child. The autocratic regimes of North Africa and the Middle East practice this kind of domestic control. However, as we now see in those countries, people eventually rebel against such anti-social practices and, at the risk of death, rise in protest. The lesson here, I believe, is that humans can endure the internal stress of fear only so long before they erupt. In his lecture Huxley, citing Pavlov's experiments, notes that periodic release of this stress sinks deep into the human psyche and that doing this is why some dictatorships can be made to last longer than others.

In support of his own thesis Huxley notes the advances that had been made at the time of his lecture over 45 years ago, in both biological and psychological understanding of human beings. Today, especially with the advent of DNA understanding, people now talk of designer children, that is human beings bred to the parent's specifications by manipulating human cells at the DNA level. The lesson here is that we are at the point in which we are about to take charge of our own biological destiny. This, given what we know of the human tendency to self-aggrandizement and our socio/economic tendency to let that self-aggrandizement rise to power through our free enterprise system, is scary indeed.

While there is currently substantial resistance to modifying the human genome, as population wars continue, (for example, Catholics and Muslims trying to dominate through population majorities) some form of genetic or psychological modification may be necessary to eliminate this ancient form of rivalry and keep human population within earth's carrying capacity. In any event, if humans can do it, history demonstrates they will do it.

My last column was concerned substantially with modifying the human mind through psychology. That process will, in my judgment, favor Huxley's scenario for the same reason that his biologically managed society will prevail in the long run, namely, it is more economical to target the human brain than the human body.

With all the evidence that the world prefigured by Huxley is well underway in fact and even more so in potential and taking note of the abundant occasions for conflict latent in major global trends, it becomes relatively clear that human social organization is in its most perilous state since the last ice age.

Having seen in these last two posts how unprepared human emotions are for dealing with the huge, unprecedented, problems we face, the importance of our thinking ability becomes clear. If we are to survive the future with any semblance of what we now regard as human, we must think our way through. We have several hundred years of applied reason in science. We know the power of the reasoning brain. The current tragedy, however, is that when we most need to apply our powers of thought and investigation, we are rejecting thinking for feeling. We willingly substitute the fantasy of creationism for evolution. Our energy corporations, their political henchmen, and media servants, convince millions of our citizens that multiple and well-documented evidence of global warming due to our continuing uses of fossil fuels is a fable concocted to scare people into doing with less. This rejection of the most reliable source of information mankind has ever devised in favor of feel-good fantasy is, to my mind, the ultimate tragedy of the scientific revolution.

In this dire situation all that our species has going for it is its intellect. Those who care for the continued existence of our species have to make science and critical thinking the focus of a vigorous political effort because, unfortunately, truth itself cam no longer prevail against the massive self-deception that pervades this society and the massive amounts of wealth and power determined to keep it that way.

At a personal level we can exercise this faculty with the discipline it requires to take evidence seriously and revise our beliefs and actions as intelligence and evidence requires.

In what I have written in this and my previous column I have been hard on the emotions. The emotions obviously play a large role in what it means to be human. They provide us with some of the most fulfilling experiences of our lives. They make society possible. But we must always remember a basic prerequisite for mankind's continuing survival, namely, that thought validates emotion, not the other way around.

Bob Newhard

The Politics of the Emotions

2011-03-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

One of the most inexplicable political events of recent history has been the ability of the Far Right to reverse its losses in two years despite the fact that their people caused the worst recession in the last 80 years and that recession was still in effect during the midterm elections which they handily won. Why did this happen and what have we to learn from it?

There are, no doubt, a number of things that played in to it, but the primary one in my judgment is the role that emotions and their manipulation now play in our elections. For example, we must have candidates with charisma, preferably celebrities. That is an emotional test for political viability. The issues chosen to create candidate electability must be "hot" issues or made to be hot. Making an issue hot is best done by those used to making any product hot, namely advertising professionals or, in short, Madison Avenue. The Republican power structure has, in itself, nothing to offer the ordinary citizen. Yet they succeeded in a context thought to assure their defeat. In this advertising saturated and driven economy the tools for emotional manipulation are well honed by Wall Street's well-paid colleagues on Madison Avenue.

Progressives, on the other hand have tried to persuade the electorate primarily with reason and evidence. For example, they cite the millions of children without health care; they cite the scientific evidence for global warming; they quantify the damage to and death of people due to pesticides, air and water pollution, etc. Progressives draw attention to the human suffering consequent on each of these issues hoping to arouse the voter's emotions enough to get the votes needed. It doesn't work.

The manipulation of the emotions on the other hand provides a rich field for fabrication, innuendo and half truths to cultivate and an abundance of votes to be harvested. A brief example of this type of politics can be seen in President Clinton's failed attempt to get a health-care bill through Congress. Even though it was heavily weighted with corporate rewards it failed to satisfy the pharmaceutical and health insurance greedheads. All they had to do to defeat the effort was place and repeat the "Harry and Louise" ad in which a husband and wife discussing the issue at home agreed that something should be done, but doubted this bill would do it. All Madison Avenue had to do was instill doubt, not disproof, to deprive the effort of the support it needed. In this case the emotion appealed to was that of domesticity and the trust that engendered. Nothing like the home fires to soften the harshness of facts.

As noted above, a more powerful demonstration of getting people to use their emotions to make societal decisions was the astonishing change in the electorate's views in the two years between the Democrat's sweeping election of 2008 and the 2010 midterm elections despite ongoing home and job loss and the glaring economic inequity made clearly evident by the disaster. Granted, it was the money of the Koch brothers, which bought the advertising skills of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks astroturf factory, that pulled it off, but why did so many change their point of view? There are certainly a number of reasons, but a very prominent one lay in the manipulations of human psychology.

Let me suggest the following scenario, which occurred to me as I pondered why was there such a pronounced effort to pin the label of "socialism", although honorable to me, on such an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama? How could it be made to stick on someone so obviously pro-business?

Given the deep hole the Far Right had dug for itself the political plotters began by assessing what they had to work with if the wealthy were not to lose their shirts. They knew the American public had been bombarded with anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades thereby creating an available mindset so pervasive and uncritical that people easily confused communism, socialism and even Nazism. The plotters also knew that the Obama administration might have to launch a massive public works program, a la FDR, to remedy the economic damage they had caused. Putting these two perceptions together would allow Democratic efforts to rebuild the economy through public works rather than private enterprise to be defeated by associating such efforts with labels Americans had been taught to hate. The tea party created for this purpose had no remedy for correcting the enormous damage done by conservatives. They did, however, bring forth an old bugaboo, that is an old cold war emotion, and they were able to elect Congresspeople and senators and return the party of disaster to a control of the lower house. Such is the power of the emotions when politically deployed.

But if that is all there is to it, this country and mankind are in the deepest of poo. The facts are out there and in the long run they will not be denied, whether it's global warming or effective health care for the increasing billions of this planet's population--each one of which can be a disease vector to cause the deaths of others. A major problem for progressives is how to make the facts more effective than the emotions in societal decision making.

To lend further dimension to the importance of this issue, I would draw your attention to the U.S. military Psychological Operations (PSYOP) command. This command was created in November, 1990. It says "The purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is to demoralize the enemy by causing dissension and unrest among his ranks, while at the same time convincing the local population to support American troops." Put this together with another of its objectives, to wit, "In addition to supporting commanders, psychological operations provide interagency support to other U.S. government agencies." and it becomes clear that there is nothing to prevent the use of this type of mind control on the American people. Indeed the military targeted Senators Carl Levin, Al Franken and others for this treatment in an effort to get their support for more funds and troops for the Afghan War. (Full story at http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/02/al_franken_targeted_by_us_army_psy-ops.php ) In many respects there is nothing new about the many means people have adopted to persuade others ranging from bribes to torture. Nor is there anything new about applying such measures against large numbers of people as is evidenced by the wide scale immersive application of advertising in this society. What is new is to see the military organized and funded to apply mental and emotional manipulation to those deemed to be the enemy and to understand the easy transfer of these techniques to the control of the domestic population via the Homeland Security Department. What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?

Bob Newhard

Freedom and Society, the Libertarian Example

2011-03-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

In my last post I argued that absolute freedom was the freedom of the jungle, in which the top predators deprived the rest of the jungle's inhabitants, including humans, of their freedom through fear and death and that humans banded together to create their freedom. However, some may say that we humans are now the dominant predator and therefore we no longer need to band together. In this simple observation a good deal of our social and economic behavior is encapsulated. Our technology has increasingly allowed us to be independent of each other or seemingly so. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, has pointed out some of the social consequences of this phenomenon.

However, we still have the dominant predator to fear, it is us or at least some of us. As an example let us consider libertarianism as a philosophy of predation.

Libertarians would have us believe that freedom is an individual right and, ironically, that society should guarantee it, which is obviously another way of saying society bestows freedom upon us. This appeals to the American mindset which tends to be simplistic and given, more than some other societies, to ideological solutions to complex problems. However, as in the jungle, the freedom of the powerful is obtained at the expense of the freedom of the less powerful. A recent and glaring example is the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are humans and can use their massive wealth to pursue their political objectives.

The Internet is replete with articles associating Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas as well as Alito with libertarianism. I found the following quote in an article on theses allocations titled The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court. The quote gives some historical and philosophical scope to the libertarian misrepresentation of freedom: "There are two dimensions to the gun lobby's individual right to gun ownership. One is the libertarian fantasy that we reverse the process described by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government, declare individual sovereignty, dissolve political community, and return to the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The libertarian fantasy mixes with other political ideologies, across the political spectrum, and expresses a defeatist retreat from political life." The complete article can be found at http://www.potowmack.org/997cthom.html. One consequence of libertarian influence is thus the legal baptism of corporate personhood and the unleashing of corporate wealth to subvert the democratic process.

Libertarian influence on our economic policy has been profound. Milton Friedman was the father of trickledown economics in which the rich get the economic benefits first and the rest of society get whatever trickles down after their orgy of greed. Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago (think Obama?), was an economic advisor to Peruvian dictator August Pinochet, and a mentor of Alan Greenspan, a fellow libertarian.

Greenspan expressed "shock" when our Great Recession occurred because he expected the market to correct itself as Friedman had taught him. This is what happens when ideologues address the real world with all its variables. The "law" of the self-correcting market is analogous to Marx's necessity of history in its blind adherence to doctrine. If there is one pronounced tendency in human affairs it is applying certainty, whether of the arbitrariness of morality (think the politics of values) or the arbitrariness of ideology to the vicissitudes of reality. It is a recipe for disaster, human suffering and death. This is the ultimate folly of libertarianism as it was for Soviet communism.

Bob Newhard

Freedom's just another word for everything to lose

2011-02-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

When one becomes of an age, one can no longer be sure that common knowledge of his earlier years is still common knowledge. Some forty or fifty years ago Kris Kristofferson wrote a poignant song about loss and the meaninglessness of life titled Me and Bobby McGee. One line in that song that resonated heavily in those days was "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose;" hence, the title of this post.

"Freedom" has been the watchword of the political right in this country designed to carry a massive burden of deception and destruction. It is high time Progressives start dealing with this term instead of shying away from criticizing such a foundation term for Americans.

Freedom has many meanings and those meanings are derived from the context in which the term is used. Absolute freedom in the real world verges on being a contradiction in terms. Absolute freedom would be the freedom of the jungle because this is the world of predator and prey in which only the predator is free. Only the tiger is free, every other creature's freedom is conditional upon not meeting up with the tiger. Does this remind anybody of corporate capitalism? It was this fear of more powerful animals that first encouraged humans to band together for mutual protection. Society was born of the effort to avoid absolute freedom; however, humans living in groups soon found that they needed rules, frequently in the form of taboos or religions. These rules, given the perversity of human nature, had to be enforced, hence the beginning of government. Thus human freedom has meaning only in the context of a society held together by some degree of force. With this understanding of the necessity of government, the next question is how much government. Mankind has fought violently over this issue. I think a useful way to address this issue is to go back to freedom's evolutionary roots, namely, mutual protection.

Mutual protection places a primacy on the group. A fundamental fallacy of the regressives is that one can have freedom without the group. This view, I believe, is considerably a consequence of technology's beneficent impact. In an earlier age, when the frontier was vast and wild, a few people ventured forth, but they formed communities as soon as they could and most people remained in cities and small towns. Go back three or four hundred years and most people in Europe were living in villages and towns. Go back to the Crusades, when most people lived in villages, these societies were so small and compact and fear of wandering too far from the village and its protection was so pronounced that many crusaders never found their way home. The point is that technology has permitted humans to live in such large groups and with a seeming independence of other humans that people now believe that the group is no longer necessary for their protection. In place of the mutually obligated group they now hire the police or arm themselves for individual protection to the detriment of the group. This is one of the ironies arising when humans become their own worst enemy.

One needs, however, to expand the awareness of threats to humankind to see the continuing need of group primacy. We have a planet of increasingly limited resources with a population of seven billion and counting and in which mankind has become its own worst enemy. The threat is enormous, so enormous that we must now consider all humans on this planet as part of a single group, sometimes called a global village. Freedom needs to be defined in the context of this group just as the first humans defined it within the context of the clan. We need the rules which will allow this global village to protect itself from itself. This, needless to say, is a new experience for mankind. It is why some people have argued that to avoid killing ourselves as a species we need an external enemy because that is what societal protection has always meant. There is no external enemy. The enemy is us as Pogo so observantly said.

The regressives have tried to divorce freedom from society and society's necessary governance. The logic is not there so they have used the emotional connotations of freedom to motivate people against their own government. A modicum of thought would quickly reveal that it is not the government that is the problem, despite Reagan's declaration to the contrary, it is who is controlling the government. Our War for Independence was not fought to turn people loose in the jungle as prey, but as the Constitution declares, to form a more perfect union. We wanted a society in which the people had a say in how they are to be governed, but governed they would be.

What does all this mean for Progressives? We must, I think, clearly and repeatedly demonstrate that there is no human freedom without government. We must measure a society by how much freedom is available to every citizen in the society, not just the affluent. We must understand freedom in much clearer terms than is currently the case. Freedom from fear is as essential now as when humans first formed their mutual defense against predators. Freedom from want is as necessary as freedom from assault, because severe want generates violence, not to mention the adverse impact on human development. In short, FDR's Four Freedoms should be added to our Constitution as rights of this country's citizens. There is, of course, no freedom if a single person, i.e. the tiger, is capable of destroying any and all others. Fear is a fundamental enemy of freedom, eclipsed only by the destruction itself. People feared Hitler and his Gestapo and military machine. What they feared was what millions experienced--death. This is why a dictatorship cannot have free citizens. We must make this clear to people

As noted above, we no longer have to fear predation by lions and tigers. We face corporate predators. The casualties of their predation are, in the popular mind, mainly "losers" not casualties. It is doubtful that early humans considered a clan member devoured by a lion a "loser." This is an indication of how grossly we have let corporate and wealthy America distort the popular perception. The corporation, now deemed a person, is the primary predator loose in our society. We must use our society to protect us from this predator as did our ancestors to protect themselves from their predators.

Bob Newhard

Sea Anchors

2011-02-06T19:29:00.000-08:00

As you may know, a sea anchor is a device for stabilizing a ship in the grip of a storm. In the age of sail it was frequently a large sail thrown overboard with a rope attached to the ship. The sail's drag against the water provided sufficient resistance to wave and wind to create a modicum of stability.

As I read of the effort to crush the rising resistance in the Middle East, as I heard President Obama's State of the Union speech, which was so full of platitudes and irrelevancies, and as I read of the eighth secretive meeting of the Koch Brothers and their billionaire/millionaire allies in Rancho Mirage and the fact that two Supreme Court Justices (Scalia and Thomas) have been regular attendees of these political plotting soirées, I was, to put it mildly, at sea. An engulfing chaos seemed to be the reality of the day.

But then I heard Governor Jerry Brown's short, no nonsense, and very knowledgeable speech and read of the Common Cause-led, almost 1000 person protest at the Koch Brothers' event and asked myself "Is the left finally starting to find itself?"

The political left has been abandoned by mainstream politics in this country. The Democratic Party, the Lefts' traditional home, has, sometimes angrily, rejected it despite the critical role it played in getting Obama elected. Obama, like Clinton, is taking the Party to the center as fast as he can. There is nothing in the middle of the road, as Jim Hightower so uniquely said, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. However, I believe that in the protest against the Koch Brothers' billionaires political plotting and in Jerry Brown's State of the State address the Left may yet mount a major resurgence.

Why so? Let me take the protest at Rancho Mirage first. The protest was reported to have had about 1,000 demonstrators. It was organized by Common Cause. They bussed demonstrators from all over Southern California. It was a well organized effort, but the thing that struck me most forcefully is that unions of low wage earners, e.g. janitors and domestic workers, were providing much of the transportation. The people, in a very basic sense, were involved. This indicated a major shift in union emphasis. In my youth unions were focused on manufacturing workers and as such they were organized in and through the plants where people worked. The corporate business community exported most of those jobs, so the unions began organizing the next lower tier of employee. These people did not work in one place. They worked in a variety of buildings and homes. Yet union membership and organization still worked. I found that fact very heartening. The poor of this country are finding institutions of an earlier age are still viable and they are willing to use them. However, there is a lesson for Progressives here. As with factory workers, until we have government focused on the people's and society's well being, technology will continue to be directed at eliminating jobs and eventually today's union members will face the same fate as yesterday's factory workers. This is why we need a developed, informed and articulated Progressive perspective. We have to stop reacting and anticipate the future. As Dennis Kucinich repeatedly pleaded in the 2008 Presidential election, "Wake up America, wake up" so we should be urging "Wake up Progressives."

Jerry Brown's State of the State address struck me as the first honest, developed, well communicated speech I have heard from a politician in many a decade. Gone were the shibboleths, the euphemisms, the deceptive use of language so common to current political speech. His strategy is solid for these times; take the budget issue to the people. He has made his recommendations and encourages others, so far with no success, to make theirs. As a case in point, he noted the massive resistance by local governments to his proposed elimination of redevelopment agencies. However, in an excellent display of honest politics, he pointed out that these agencies use this tax-payer-supplied money, which could be better used for schools and safety services. Academic research has shown repeatedly what most of us know, that municipal politics and decision making are far more controlled by the local business community than by any other segment. This pot of money, in effect, allowed the business community to spend tax dollars on whatever projects appealed to them. Is it little wonder that the Republicans don't want Brown's proposals, hard as they must be for all of us, taken to the voters?

As we float and bob in this sea of political and social chaos, caused mainly by the manipulations of excessive wealth that now engulfs us, it is both consoling and energizing to see a plank or two that we can grab onto. I think Common Cause and the unions involved in the protest of the Koch brothers' billionaires plot against democracy and the efforts of Jerry Brown to bring sanity and responsibility to California's government should receive strong Progressive support. The image of janitors and domestic servants opposing the third wealthiest people in the country after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a people's organization like Common Cause seeking a law suit to have Scalia and Thomas removed from the Supreme Court for unconscionable bias should be energizing to all of us. Let us turn these sea anchors into visionary Progressive foundations.

Bob Newhard

How Did We Get Here?

2011-01-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

An observation: consider a recent string of murders--the abortion doctor George Tiller, the guard at the Holocaust museum, the intended slaughter at the progressive Tides Foundation in San Francisco thwarted by Oakland police, the 1998 bombing of the Olympics in Atlanta, and now the slaughter in Tucson. These and more were all committed by white men. Can you imagine the difference in response by this nation if they had all been committed by black men? There would have been an immediate and prolonged search for conspiracy, perhaps even the invention of a conspiracy a la WMDs in Iraq. However, does that mean that there is no conspiracy?

In what follows I will argue that there is a conspiracy of sorts involved in all of these events, although not an obvious one.

The "conspiracy" was called "the Southern Strategy." It was a Republican response to the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. Let me explain. In 1968 Richard Nixon implemented the Republicans' Southern Strategy. This strategy consisted basically of replacing the century-long Democratic "solid South" with a Republican solid South. I should point out that FDR had constant problems with these Dixiecrats and on at least one occasion had to ask Eleanor to cease going to the Southern states and advocating for the civil rights of blacks because he needed their votes in Congress. Southerners were infuriated with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision requiring integration of public schools. They were even more so with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pushed by Lyndon Johnson. This disaffection, indeed violent opposition, of white Southerners to such Democrat-supported legislation led Nixon and other Republican leaders to strike while the iron was hot. They succeeded. The Republican Party deliberately introduced racism, the single most heinous feature of American culture, into mainstream politics to gain votes. It was almost as if the Civil War had never been fought. For this they should never be forgiven. This is the "conspiracy" that I speak of. The South became Republican in very short order and the Republican Party became dominated by Southerners and the Southern ethos. Interestingly in 2005 Ken Mehlman the then RNC chairman confessed this motive and apologized to the NAACP for doing this.

While racism remained the foundation of the Southern political and social ethos, it was not totally foreign to other parts of the country, indeed to the nation as a whole. In World War II blacks and whites were segregated into separate military units. I found it interesting that the Army's white and black units that built the Alcan Highway competed with each other even though the black units labored with debilitated equipment. However, more than racism was involved. Along with racism Southerners brought a host of long-standing grudges against the North, which was epitomized by the federal government. The federal government was the agent that sent many of the carpet baggers south and they installed blacks in positions of power over whites. While white Southerners eventually got the power back through Jim Crow laws, the resentment remained. There was the oft repeated assertion that the South would rise again and the Confederate flag remained the flag of choice. In this connection, while I have a high regard for Howard Dean, I was appalled when he suggested going south for bubba's gun tooting, rebel flag flying pickup vote. The last thing the Democratic Party needs is an infusion of Southern sentiments.

However the story, as I see it, does not end there. When the Republican Party invited Southern white racists into their party they brought more than a hatred of blacks. They brought a century old hatred of the federal government and they brought their inherent belief that some people are, by nature, better than other people. They brought an ethos of confrontation, which was endemic to their opposition to the federal government. They brought their gun culture reflected in their gun rack pickups. The gun and the rope were their symbols of superiority as practiced by decades of KKK popularity, which spread to the Middle West before retreating again to the south. While these are things found in many parts of our country, they were profoundly developed artifacts of Southern culture. I was stationed for several months in Florida during World War II. I still remember the shock this California boy experienced when he saw separate drinking fountains and public toilet facilities for "negroes" and whites. On one occasion, on a crowded bus, I offered my seat to a black woman overburdened with packages. I was promptly reprimanded by the bus driver. A long history of slavery and a hundred years of Jim Crow become deeply imbedded in a culture, which means they find a wide range of cultural expression. This political use of racism by the GOP is aptly demonstrated by a quote from Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan's campaign manager. "Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[6]
What perhaps Nixon and other Republican leaders did not anticipate was that these newly minted Republicans would take over their party."

But to continue. These newly minted Southern Republicans quickly took over the Republican Paty, which rapidly moved from negotiation in legislation to confrontation. This is, in my opinion, the source of the political antagonism that so pervasively characterizes today's politics and is decried by so many. An example of the depth of the Republican policy of confrontation can be found in Newt Gingrich's shutdown of federal government non-essential services by withholding funds in a budget dispute with the Clinton administration.

But how, you may ask, could an old line political party of the wealthy find common cause with Bible Belt, poorly educated proletariat of the South? I believe the link can be found in the corporation. Let me cite some congruences between the Southern sentiment and corporate desires.

First, and perhaps most fundamental, the Southern hatred for the federal government and the corporate desire to keep government as small and weak as possible, except for the military, bred instant soul mates. When Ronald Reagan said that government was not the solution, but was the problem, he was inciting the energetic support of both groups.

Second, the Southern love of the military coincided with the corporate desire to use the military to gain its global objectives, particularly oil and the military as a source of major profit.

The religious charismatic fundamentalism of the South would seem in irreconcilable opposition to the more modernist churches of the North. I suspect the militarism intimately associated with Southern protestant religion helped as corporations saw an excellent recruitment motivator for its military. There are few greater military motivators than religion. Recruitment went center stage when the military went all volunteer after the Vietnam war.

I also think that as the textile industries of the North moved south for cheaper labor that many in the South viewed the corporation as a means of economic advancement.

These are some of the congruences. I am sure there are many more, possibly more significant than those I have mentioned.

The penetration of Southern culture into national politics by way of its takeover of the Republican Party has been so thorough that I think we are able to say that the South has indeed risen again. In a world of increasing violence-oriented technology I think this cultural, socio/political development poses a significant threat to this nation and the world it still hopes to dominate.

A caveat: When I use the term Southern culture I of course do not mean every white Southerner. Bill Moyers, Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins are all Southerners. However, they all are or were at odds with the culture they were raised in. Molly did, however, write an article in defense of "bubba", whom she felt was misguided, but of good heart.

Cultures generally have three major groups; the fanatic at one end and the skeptic at the other. Most people however are somewhere in the middle, primarily focused on their own lives, taking the culture for granted. However, when cultural values seem threatened they can easily become energized, even to the point of fanaticism. The salient point is that criticism of a culture does not necessarily imply criticism of a particular member of the culture.

In 1944 Gunnar Myrdahl published his 1,500 page landmark study of racism in the United States and its threat to democracy titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In the last two years we have seen the rapid rise of the corporation-created, racist Tea Party. Will we never learn?

Bob Newhard

On a Remedy for the Grossly Lopsided Economy of this Nation and the World

2011-01-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

Given that human beings are the most powerful animals on this planet and given that economic inequality has historically been a primary cause of the destructive unleashing of that power, it is imperative that we find a means to eliminate gross disparities of wealth and income. In this connection and others I wish to once again discuss the Tobin Tax, or as it is now frequently called, the transaction tax.

James Tobin was an American Nobel Laureate in economics. He was concerned with the plight of the billions of profoundly and perennially poor humans on earth. He saw this poverty as a function of gross economic inequality, especially between the African continent and the affluent nations of the northern hemisphere. To transfer more of the world's wealth to these impoverished nations and to accomplish several other objectives he proposed a small 0.5 percent tax on one of the least productive of economic activities, the "spot" market portion of the global currency market. In this market national currencies are bought and sold, using immediate transactions, as their relative values constantly change. While it has a non-unique function of providing currency equivalencies for purposes of trade, it is a highly speculative market with no overall regulation. The total global currency market had, as of April 20, 2010, an average daily turnover of an estimated $3.98 trillion dollars. This represents a market growth rate of approximately 20% since 2007. The spot market portion of the total global foreign exchange market, as of April 2010, had an average daily turnover of 1.450 trillion. It operates world wide 24 hours a day every day except weekends. The volume and immediacy of spot market transactions means that computers do a good deal of the investing based on formulas. As such it is a financial playground of the very rich.

As one can see, if this amount of money with this amount of transactions had a transaction tax, not unlike the sales tax you and I pay, a very substantial resource for alleviating the world's suffering and advancing the worldwide quality of life is within our grasp. In fact, Tobin argued that the 0.5 percent tax on spot market transactions would raise the $300 billion dollars a year that the United Nations says is required to eliminate the worst poverty and provide a basic education to all children world wide.

But this is not all that Tobin saw in his proposed tax. By taxing the highly volatile transactions of the spot market the wildest forms of speculation would be suppressed because in the small margins (but immense quantities) of currency trading a small tax would be enough.

Additionally, Tobin saw this process as the beginning of the establishment of a world currency, e.g. a Euro type currency applied world wide. This would not only eliminate speculation in money differentials, it would provide a strong impetus to world peace. National currencies, like national flags, are symbols of national significance. Every nation strenuously defends its currency. One tactic in international conflict is to try to destroy the value of the enemy's currency. A single global currency would also provide an icon around which people would increasingly find their common identity as citizens of one world.

Of course a transaction tax could be applied to any exchange of money. With the sales tax, we decided to tax the monetary value of the goods when they are sold. We, however, refused to tax food because it is too essential to human survival. This suggests a rule for applying transaction taxes, namely, the less important to human well being the higher the transaction tax.

My thoughts on the Tobin Tax, now generally called a transaction tax, were reignited by recent developments, especially in Europe. The transaction tax has become such a hot issue in Europe that the Austrian government says it will go ahead with this tax even if the other countries in the EU do not. The EU is, in effect, demanding more time so a Union-wide Tobin tax can be implemented. The European Union is creating an economic paradigm for a process by which humanity may yet find a way to coexist without a species-destroying conflict.

Bob Newhard

On Being a Progressive Legislator

2010-12-26T19:59:00.000-08:00

"It’s the hardest vote I've taken;" so said Al Franken of his vote for Obama's tax deal with Republicans. Franken explains his vote by declaring in a post on Huffington Post that "This isn't a great deal by any stretch of the imagination. But I got into this line of work because I wanted to stand up for Minnesota families trying to put food on the table and build a better life for their kids. And, for them, the only thing worse than a bad deal would be no deal at all. That's why I voted yes yesterday -- and why I will continue my fight for economic policies that create jobs, address our deficit problem, and build new opportunities for Minnesota." I find thus mea culpa disingenuous, shallow, and short sighted.

Disingenuous, because he would have us believe that those who voted against the Deal did not face the same fundamental issue of deciding between the immediate and the momentous. Does he really believe that Bernie Sanders, who made the role of excessive wealth in producing our current situation so clear in his eight hour filibuster, did not face the same situation?

Shallow, because Franken apparently believes that his job as a progressive is to pass laws for the benefit of the people. That belief leads directly to beltway politics in which the decisions, indeed the debate, is the province of a few elected "representatives." To the contrary, the job of a progressive is to educate and inform his constituency so that they can be the force he or she brings to the national legislature and so that when push comes to shove, as in this case between the wealthy and the rest of us, the people are prepared to fight. Had Franken done what Sanders has done his whole political life, namely meet with small groups of constituents not just at election time but routinely and in that context listened acutely and intelligently putting what he knew to be the case in Washington together with what his people knew to be the case at home and, in discussion, had offered a synthesis to be considered with those of his constituents, had he done these things, as Bernie has, he would not have to indulge in such childish angst. I have watched videos of Bernie interacting with small groups of his constituents. I have watched him conducting a high school class in civics which consisted largely of listening to their answers to questions he posed and responding to questions they posed. Bernie sees the job of the politician as including a large commitment to create an informed, comprehending constituency and listening carefully and intelligently to them. These are things that, I suspect, have never occurred to Al Franken. They are however essential to an effective progressive candidate. In progressivism the people are the power, not money. It is therefore incumbent upon progressive politicians to develop the best informed, most comprehending, constituency possible so that when push comes to shove, when you have to decide between immediate benefits and long-term disaster your people understand and are with you. People will sacrifice the immediate for the future if the alternatives and consequences are clearly laid out. The people who accepted FDR's leadership were not afraid to occupy General Motors' plants in a massive sit down strike. Their wives brought food to them despite the threats from General Motors. Earlier than that workers had to confront hired thugs in the Pullman strike and were machine-gunned in their tents in the Colorado miners' strike.

Finally, Franken's defense that he voted for the Deal so hungry people would continue to have food and shelter, if not a job, is even in this context, short sighted. Did he explain to his people that the social security tax, Franken disingenuously refers to it as a payroll tax, was a first step to weaken social security by depriving it of revenue and was intended to condition people to this process? Did he remind them that ever since LBJ used it to fund the Vietnam War they have let government raid their Social Security fund and that Congress had not seen fit to protect these funds by prohibiting their use for other purpose? We now have billions of dollars in IOUs that Congress now says there is no money to repay. Again, by continuing the Bush tax cuts we are transferring even more money to the wealthy. Did Franken lay out the enormity of the debt that this generation is imposing on those very children he seemed so concerned for?

In short, sacrifice, big time, is going to be necessary if the people are to wrest control of America from the wealthy. Due to technology and corporate and political takeover, the wealthy are deeply entrenched in our society. They control the production and distribution of our national product. They control our means of communication. They are heavily in the business of defining life for our citizens. It reminds one of the military's complaint about the difficulty of fighting insurgents because they are so thoroughly integrated into their society. Think of corporations as huge multidimensional insurgents focused on overthrowing our democracy and what we face becomes clearer. The insidious power of these proponents of privilege make it clear why progressives have a primary duty to educate, to communicate and to listen so that the people and the leadership progressively become one.

I have used Bernie Sanders as something of a paradigm of what a progressive politician should look like in our search for more of the same. However, I am conscious of the fact the Sanders functions in a small state with many small towns and it may be said that large states and major cities may not be susceptible to this level of citizen involvement.

To such concerns I would point out that large cities have realized Bernie's style of progressive politics. In the 1960s Saul Alinsky, using collegial and intensive involvement with Chicago's primarily Black poor people was able to develop organizational structures that empowered these people to better their lot through effective political measures. This was done on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. A second way for progressive politicians to emulate Bernie's approach in the context of larger jurisdictions is by focused television or radio engagement. FDR did this on a national scale with his Fireside Chats in which he conveyed to ordinary people the state of things and what was being done. I remember, as a young teenager, our family sitting around our Majestic radio listing to these chats. Everybody respected Roosevelt and knew he would have something of substance to say. Again, you may have noticed that television evangelists are able to accrue a substantial audience by the intimacy they convey over television. That same intimacy can be conveyed over radio. I member (old people are forever uttering that phrase) when the soap opera "Ma Perkins" had a favorite character eliminated. There was massive outrage and mourning. These things demonstrate that we can create the intimacy necessary for politicians and people to work together in a joint effort to educate and improve a world that we have let technology dominate. Progressives need to investigate the use of public access channels on their local television cable stations. They need to investigate low power television, which can provide well-targeted, cheap broadcasting to local communities. Religious groups and now corporations are actively scooping there up. Why have we not seen Amy Goodman, Al Franken, Ralph Nader and other progressives pushing an effort to acquire some of these licenses for progressive purposes? I think the answer is that we are too focused on issues and candidates to focus on the people. We can create an environment for progressive, people-powered, politics to flourish. Where is the organized, MoveOn-like effort to do this?

Bob Newhard

On Rescuing Hostages

2010-12-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

President Obama would have us believe that the best he could do in dealing with Republican's on extending the Bush tax cuts was to save the paltry middle class tax cuts and extend unemployment benefits historically granted when unemployment reached 7.2% which were being held hostage by the Republican concern for the wealthiest one tenth of one percent and their estate tax. This is so putrid with pusillanimity it stinks. Paul Krugman has an excellent analysis of Obama's game plying in an article that can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/opinion/10krugman.html?pagewanted=print

However, I want to consider the undeclared ramifications and implications of this sickening fiasco.

To begin with, the real hostage was not the existing middle class, grievous though their situation is, the real hostage is our democracy. If we let the wealthy of this country continue to call the political tune we will loose the democracy that was born 234 years ago and which so many have fought to preserve from those who would destroy it. As a class, the wealthy of this country and their corporate institutions have made it abundantly clear that they do not want a democracy. They want an oligarchic plutocracy and their religious constituency wants a theocracy. They have suborned every democratic institution we have from our legislature, to the presidency to the Supreme Court. They have corrupted our societal communications and the national dialogue our democracy requires. This is the enemy Lincoln feared; the enemy from within. We are down to our last line of defense; the people in whom democracy ultimately puts its trust. There is no "reaching out" to those who are corrupting our national dialogue with fear and innuendo, who suborn our government with bribes and political payoffs, who divert vast sums from our national productivity to their own satiated ends. This enemy must be put in the searchlight of truth and justice so that its repellent selfishness is clear to all.

The duplicity and manipulativeness of Obama's rescue of the middle class becomes glaringly apparent when we consider that he knew from the day he began to campaign for President that the Bush tax cuts were due to expire during his term in office, if he won. Presumably he knew this was a monstrous gift to the wealthy, which was denying adequate education to the majority of American children, which adversely affected a broad range of government services required by the increasing homeless and jobless population, created by the financial shenanigans of this same wealthy class and, above all, is exacerbating a rapidly increasing wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us that is now threatening the continued existence of our democracy. I repeat, he knew these things going in. This being the case, where was the effort to raise the public consciousness of the seriousness of the threat posed by the excessively rich and the degree to which these tax cuts had contributed to it. Where was the connection between the wealthy recipients of these tax cuts and their financial institutions that created our current "Great Recession?" Where was the effort to use his bully pulpit and oratorical gifts to redress the long standing rule of wealth rather than people in this country? This tax issue was pregnant with all sorts of political potential to greatly improve our society and the quality of life within it. Why was it so tragically wasted?

I think the answer can initially be found in Bill Clinton's administration and the advent of his Democratic Leadership Council. With this came the political notion, that one could win more political battles by "out Republicanizing" the Republicans. Why, one might ask, would Democrats think that winning legislative battles and elections by emulating Republicans be even considered as a strategy. The answer, I believe, is that Democrats had been so often out of power since the Reagan Revolution, that they would do anything, even out-Republican the Republicans, to obtain political power. In brief, an obsession with politcs rather than with the welfare of the people overtook the Democratic Party and, in so doing, rendered it spineless.

I also believe that Clinton came to believe that money was more important than people in getting elected and staying in power. Money could buy television commercials, which politicians found more effective overall than speaking to and mingling with many groups at many places. Jim Hightower in one of his books recounts an episode in which a young congressional candidate, with a very active support group, was invited by the Democratic Party to Washington D. C. along with a number of other promising candidates for orientation and help in developing their campaigns. At the gathering he was introduced to a number of PAC leaders and lobbyists. The group of candidates was told that these were the people they needed to get to know because they provided the money for extensive television ads, etc. They were there, in short, to enable match making between candidates and lobbyists. The young candidate protested that these were the people and this was the process, namely beltway politics, which he and his campaign were opposed to. He was immediately counted out. His primary opponent who had lost to the Republican in the two previous elections received the funding, won the primary and again lost to the Republican. Obama, in my opinion, bought into this Clintonesque, DLC, beltway-centered Democratic politics.

Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee tried to initiate a 50 state rejuvenation of the
Democratic Party structure. This would have done much to distribute Party power and resources more widely. He was vigorously opposed by Rahm Emanuel. One of the first things Obama did was appoint Emanuel as his chief of staff and remove Dean from his chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

Obama is but one of many who would call themselves Democrats, but who were at best powder-blue dogs.

However, things may be changing. With Nancy Pelosi's refusal to let Obama's tax deal come to the House floor and Bernie Sanders' filibuster challenge not only to Obama's tax deal, but more importantly to the destructive role of excessive wealth in this society, we may have discovered the long-sought political nexus for a Progressive challenge to the Democratic-Republican political duopoly of wealth. Now is the time, I believe, for Progressives to speak out and demand not only government of by and for the people, but that progressive leadership become as bold and energetic as Pelosi and Sanders in their attack on wealth and privilege. Ralph Nader has called for a Progressive candidate to oppose Obama in 2012. Let us end this nightmare of rampant plutocracy and, as Howard Dean urged, return America to its people. Let us rise up and free the hostages. Perhaps we are responding to Denis Kucinich's plea in the 2008 Presidential campaign, "Wake up America, Wake up." Nancy and Bernie may be our alarm clocks.

Bob Newhard

Depression and War

2010-11-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

The other day my wife Eleanor was reading a book on the psychology of decision making. The author rather gratuitously threw in the remark that Roosevelt's New Deal did not end the Great Depression. World War 2 did. We all hear this remark, usually from those who prefer governance by corporations rather than governments of, by, and for the people. This remark is both true and deceptively false.

It is true that Roosevelt's policies did not bring the economy back to the exceptionally high levels preceding the 1929 crash. We should be grateful that it did not because that economy was based on the speculation that led to the depression in the first place..The other day my wife Eleanor was reading a book on the psychology of decision making. The author rather gratuitously threw in the remark that Roosevelt's New Deal did not end the Great Depression. World War 2 did. We all hear this remark, usually from those who prefer governance by corporations rather than governments of, by, and for the people. This remark is both true and deceptively false.

It is true that Roosevelt's policies did not bring the economy back to the exceptionally high levels preceding the 1929 crash. We should be grateful that it did not because that economy was based on the speculation that led to the depression in the first place. However, his policies did bring the economy back about half way by 1935.

The argument is deceptively false because it is meant to imply that government did not bring back the economy. The economy of World War 2 was a government economy, par excellence and vitiates this old conservative argument completely.

The interesting question is, "Why does one form of government spending (war) work so much better than another (peace)?

Examining major economies victimized by the Great Depression, which was world wide, we find that war and the preparation for war, was the effective antidote to the depression. The German economy, which was far worse than ours due in part to the continuing reparations the World War 1 allies imposed, was brought back by Hitler's militarization program. The English by the need to rearm, the United States by the need to rearm, Japan came out of the Great Depression in 1932, perhaps, bcause it had been militarizing since militarism became a dominant feature of Japanese development with the Meiji Restoration of 1869. Its 1905 victory over Russia greatly enhanced its prestige, and culminated in Japan's aggressive colonialism, a hallmark of world powers at the time.

But why is war so much more effective than other efforts to reconvert from major economic downturns? Some would say that war affects everybody. This is to say that, short of war, not everybody is affected seriously by a depression. And this is to say that those least affected, the wealthy, are unwilling and not required to contribute to fight this kind of national calamity to the extent they are in war. I ask why not? The answer to that question, I believe, can be found in American economic mythology, namely, that anyone can be an economic success and if they are not it must be their own fault. My own father, a mechanic who was able to hold on to his job throughout the depression, although at meager pay, looked down on WPA workers who, by his definition, had gone on the dole. The rich have this myth working for them day and night. Poor people will blame each other for their economic plight rather than the wealthy who have caused the situation and continue to profit from it. This is the sad tale of American economic naiveté.

This line of reasoning is, I believe, prima facie evidence that it is the wealthy that insure that this level of societal effort is not launched against depressions. If we now look at some facts surrounding World War 2 that made it effective in finally ending the Great Depression the substance of this argument will be further vindicated.

For one, the federal tax rate on the wealthiest was 94%. It had even been 77% under Herbert Hover. Ronald Reagan dropped it from 70% to 28%. It is now 35% and Obama's effort to raise it to 40% is being labeled "socialist" by Republicans. One of the major reasons the 2nd World War brought back full employment was that the wealthy were required to pay their fair share of the cost of that war. This along with government planning and rationing of resources is the real meaning of World War 2 as an end to the depression. Everyone had to contribute their fair share. This is the democratic method of dealing with economic downturns once under way. Preventing or minimizing those downturns inherent in the capitalist system is a matter of vigilant, continuous regulation so that capitalism's ever present excesses are not allowed to create economic havoc.

One of the best metaphors for capitalism is fire. Capitalism should be viewed as a hazard similar to fire and should be controlled with the same diligence. Capitalism, like fire, can be useful, but also like fire it is very destructive when out of control. Like fire, it must be kept away from combustible fuel, i.e. excess profits that feed a frenzy of speculation; we must have mechanisms at hand when it bursts into flame, i.e. legal fire hoses; it must be subject to constant vigilance and checked on frequently by competent watchdogs. Capitalism is not good or bad, it simply is. We need a population not subject to the blandishments of speculation, but capable of placing capitalism in a place where it can do no harm. Children have been taught the need to protect our environment and it is paying off. Similarly they need to be taught the destructiveness of uncontrolled capitalism and the need and mechanisms for controlling it.

Bob Newhard

However, his policies did bring the economy back about half way by 1935.

The argument is deceptively false because it is meant to imply that government did not bring back the economy. The economy of World War 2 was a government economy, par excellence and vitiates this old conservative argument completely.

The interesting question is, "Why does one form of government spending (war) work so much better than another (peace)?

Examining major economies victimized by the Great Depression, which was world wide, we find that war and the preparation for war, was the effective antidote to the depression. The German economy, which was far worse than ours due in part to the continuing reparations the World War 1 allies imposed, was brought back by Hitler's militarization program. The English by the need to rearm, the United States by the need to rearm, Japan came out of the Great Depression in 1932, perhaps, bcause it had been militarizing since militarism became a dominant feature of Japanese development with the Meiji Restoration of 1869. Its 1905 victory over Russia greatly enhanced its prestige, and culminated in Japan's aggressive colonialism, a hallmark of world powers at the time.

But why is war so much more effective than other efforts to reconvert from major economic downturns? Some would say that war affects everybody. This is to say that, short of war, not everybody is affected seriously by a depression. And this is to say that those least affected, the wealthy, are unwilling and not required to contribute to fight this kind of national calamity to the extent they are in war. I ask why not? The answer to that question, I believe, can be found in American economic mythology, namely, that anyone can be an economic success and if they are not it must be their own fault. My own father, a mechanic who was able to hold on to his job throughout the depression, although at meager pay, looked down on WPA workers who, by his definition, had gone on the dole. The rich have this myth working for them day and night. Poor people will blame each other for their economic plight rather than the wealthy who have caused the situation and continue to profit from it. This is the sad tale of American economic naiveté.

This line of reasoning is, I believe, prima facie evidence that it is the wealthy that insure that this level of societal effort is not launched against depressions. If we now look at some facts surrounding World War 2 that made it effective in finally ending the Great Depression the substance of this argument will be further vindicated.

For one, the federal tax rate on the wealthiest was 94%. It had even been 77% under Herbert Hover. Ronald Reagan dropped it from 70% to 28%. It is now 35% and Obama's effort to raise it to 40% is being labeled "socialist" by Republicans. One of the major reasons the 2nd World War brought back full employment was that the wealthy were required to pay their fair share of the cost of that war. This along with government planning and rationing of resources is the real meaning of World War 2 as an end to the depression. Everyone had to contribute their fair share. This is the democratic method of dealing with economic downturns once under way. Preventing or minimizing those downturns inherent in the capitalist system is a matter of vigilant, continuous regulation so that capitalism's ever present excesses are not allowed to create economic havoc.

One of the best metaphors for capitalism is fire. Capitalism should be viewed as a hazard similar to fire and should be controlled with the same diligence. Capitalism, like fire, can be useful, but also like fire it is very destructive when out of control. Like fire, it must be kept away from combustible fuel, i.e. excess profits that feed a frenzy of speculation; we must have mechanisms at hand when it bursts into flame, i.e. legal fire hoses; it must be subject to constant vigilance and checked on frequently by competent watchdogs. Capitalism is not good or bad, it simply is. We need a population not subject to the blandishments of speculation, but capable of placing capitalism in a place where it can do no harm. Children have been taught the need to protect our environment and it is paying off. Similarly they need to be taught the destructiveness of uncontrolled capitalism and the need and mechanisms for controlling it.

Bob Newhard

What Have We Learned from This

2010-11-13T20:20:00.000-08:00

The political debacle of our recent election is and will be the subject of many explanations. That the American people could, after two short years of indecisive efforts to mitigate the damage, return to considerable power the very people responsible for the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, will elicit many explanations. I want to try to put some pieces together that may offer some insight into what happened.

Politically, I found the fact that Harry Reid, a powerful and rewarding Senate Majority Leader from the small state of Nevada, was nonetheless in great jeopardy from a political unknown and a new small party. What populace would trade the benefits flowing from a powerful politician for a political unknown? The salient fact in this anomaly is that Reid never the less won, but only because of the Black and Latino vote. He got a minority of the white vote.

Another relevant observation can be found in a report by MIT economist David Autor in which he looked at the shifting employment landscape in America. He found that automation has had a far deeper impact on employment than is commonly understood, especially on the middle class. He argues that it is a prime factor in the shrinking middle class in America because the jobs it primarily eliminates are those that have traditionally been held by the middle class, e.g. manufacturing, which he notes is about as productive as it has always been except it uses robots rather than humans. Service jobs, another major category of middle class employment also are shrinking, e.g. grocery clerks replaced by automatic check-out machines. The middle class has been subject to increasing economic stress since the beginning of automation in the 1950s according to Autor.

Putting the political phenomena we have recently been experiencing together with this economic impact on the middle class suggests that white people increasingly sense a diminution of economic and political power and are in a crazy kind of rebellion. The Tea Party, predominantly middle class whites, attacks Wall Street on the one hand and big federal government, which is the only power that could possibly control Wall Street, on the other hand. The fact that the populism that usually accompanies a major economic downturn is conservative this time instead of its usual liberal expression further validates this connection between job loss and the nature of the current political chaos. In this connection Autor argues that outsourcing is a precursor to automation and will be increasingly vulnerable to automation.

The middle class has been generally regarded as the social prerequisite for democracy. In this country the middle class has, since its emergence, been predominantly white. Autor describes a hollowing out process in which professional, e.g. lawyer and managerial jobs are at the high end and low wage jobs such as gardening at the low end and the declining middle class between these two.

These two factors, Reid's political survival courtesy of two minority groups, hence the increasing importance of minorities, and an automation-driven shrinking of the middle class, may be salient factors in the political craziness we are witnessing. A socio-political craziness of this kind, rooted in the fear caused by a relentless economic process can be a very dangerous phenomenon. Think of Germany in the depths of the depression following World War I and paying its former adversaries reparations at the same time. As you see the Far Right, including the Religious Right, emphasize "tradition," i.e. family values, at the expense of the Bill of Rights, think of white retention of power.

But, unfortunately, that is not all. Autor makes it clear that we have not yet seen the full impact of automation. He describes a manufacturing plant in Japan. The plant uses robots to make robots. The plant runs in the dark 24 hours a day. Obviously "the job" is going to have to be vastly reinterpreted or a substitute found. The job has been more than a source of income for most Americans. It is and has been an easily available source of human significance. The psychological trauma of being unemployed, especially long term, will be a source of deep discontent. I read recently of a man's utter despair as he packed up the company tools he had used for 15 years, to be shipped to his company's replacement plant in China.

It is, in my judgment, incumbent on progressives to develop and vigorously promote antidotes to this impending disaster. We must not be dissuaded by accusations of socialism or social planning, generally from those who have no idea of what they are talking about. I was struck by FDR's inclusion of the word "planning" in his 1932 nomination acceptance speech. We have been so heavily indoctrinated by the Right, especially since Ronald Reagan, that many view the term as subversive.

The impact of technology on humanity, of which automation is an instance, needs to be a major focus in the development of a progressive perspective.

As I finished this article I stumbled upon an excellent article by Chris Hedges on his analysis of the fundamental message of the recent election, which sees fascism at work in the political craziness. I strongly recommend reading Chris' article titled "A Recipe for Fascism", which can be found at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_recipe_for_fascism_20101108/

Bob Newhard

The Ecology of Capitalism

2010-10-31T19:22:00.000-07:00

An ecologist studies the relationships between living organisms. But first he must understand the organism itself. To do this he studies its behavior patterns so that, among other things, he can determine whether those behaviors are good, bad or indifferent for his own species. Capitalism, I suggest, is in and of itself just one more of those wild beasts whose behavior patterns need to be identified and made widely known so that a democratic society can develop appropriate responses to its natural behaviors.

An initial observation will reveal that capitalism has no inherent restraints. It is a cannibal devouring its own kind as readily as other prey. It will consume resources with no regard for anything but its own appetite. Another initial observation will be that said appetite is insatiable. It will, left to its own devices, literally eat itself out of house and home. It is especially aggressive when civilization seeks to defend itself by fencing this wild beast in. It will, as Grover Norquist infamously said, drown an infant government in its bathtub.

Our ecologist of capitalism will discover additional behaviors of this wild thing. Number one perhaps is that it will seek to turn everything it captures into a profit making market and it is tenacious in this pursuit. It never stops from satiation. The occasion for this column was a recent report on how banks, having exhausted much of their traditional sources of profit are now turning to Baby Boomers and other senior citizens for the money they have squirreled away for the exigencies of old age. They are looking for ways to pry this money, which they regard as a disposable resource, loose for investment in more risky instruments than a savings account or a certificate of deposit.

It is important to understand the dimensions of this insatiability. It is the major source of the increasing triviality and shallowness of this society. In its search for markets capitalism will turn the most pressing needs of society, e.g. crime prevention, into a reality show so media corporations and advertisers can make money. It will make a video game out of the mass killing of warfare for the same purpose. In this process it will create distorting images of everything from people to history in order to more easily turn the individual's emotions into a key to unlock his purse. A Disney version of history comes to mind or Hollywood's battle of the Alamo. By this process it creates an empire of illusion, to use Chris Hedges' words, in which the emotional content of illusion trumps truth. It will change everything from clothing fashions to automobile fashions as frequently as consumers will part with their money and deliberately weaken both by planned obsolescence in order to preserve a market. It will stimulate envy and greed in order to create or enhance a market. Finally, it views government as its prime competitor and will do whatever it can to either control or destroy it, much as it would any other capitalist competitor. All these things, and vastly more, this wild beast will do if left to its own natural behaviors. It is so very obvious that this beast must be assiduously controlled lest it destroy our planet and us.

Capitalism, like any wild carnivore, has one virtue. It has energy. Human beings have a natural predilection for entropy. As a species that learned to grow things, we found the sowing of crops preferable to the risks of the hunt. We preferred to stay in one place rather than roam the unknown in search of prey. The vibrant self interest released by capitalism provides energy not unlike that which war generates and perhaps for the same basic reason. Energy, like fire, can be destructive or, if suitably controlled, can produce very useful products and services. We cannot allow ourselves to be dazzled by its occasional displays. We must be continuously cognizant of the danger it poses. We must not, as we advise small children, play with fire.

Until we as a nation begin to treat capitalism as science treats a natural organism, we will forever be its victims. Put conversely, as long as we regard capitalism ideologically, we will be its victims. A number of so-called "mixed economies" such as those of Scandinavia and much of Western Europe have, since World War II, understood this necessity. They have taken large steps to insure that capitalism serves society.

In the long run we know this planet cannot tolerate a human economy of compound growth. In the shorter term we know that capitalism's insatiable appetite will greatly, probably violently, exacerbate the competition for decreasing resources. In the immediate world we see it grossly corrupting democracies, fomenting wars and destroying the democratic process. We know we will have to develop a much better economic process if humanity is to survive.

It is high time this nation realized that the ideological approach to politics, social thinking, and most especially our economy is massively counter productive. These social functions must be based on the study of and well-being of humanity. To get people to understand this should be a major focus of the progressive agenda.

Bob Newhard

Greed is more than a personal fault.

2010-10-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

Your mother, no doubt, impressed upon you that greed was bad and, not always to your liking, that sharing was good. What happened on the way to becoming an adult where, obviously, greed is rewarded and sharing is at best, propaganda as in President H. W. Bush's "thousand points of light" surrogate for tax supported public assistance? I suggest the difference is between the small world of the family and neighbors and a world of money cut loose from the ties of the world in which humans matter most.

Greed, as a social phenomenon, has become increasingly acceptable. We have had, for example, the clichés "Greed is good" and "He who dies with the most toys wins" bandied about. Why this metamorphosis? I suspect it is a consequence of maintaining a "free market" capitalist economy. When you have saturated a market based on need, as technology has with increasing efficiency done, it is imperative that some substitute for need be found lest an economy begin to collapse for want of markets. Rapidly moving from a market of need to a market of greed is a feature of a modern affluent society.

It is not hard to see this process in action in our society. Manufacturing used to be the major segment of this country's economy. It is now finance, otherwise known as debt. In my youth the bellwether of economic activity was the price of steel. It is now consumer confidence. This is due substantially to the uncontrolled, indeed encouraged, migration of jobs to places with cheap labor, a process Karl Marx delineated over a hundred years ago. As a result, we now have a consumer economy not a production economy. Either consume or go bust!

A consumer based market offers several advantages to business. A need-based market is relatively narrow, limited by what is required to maintain basic human requirements, which do not change that much. The only way to substantially expand this market is to breed more humans. A consumer based economy driven by human desire rather than need, is, obviously, as large and variable as the human imagination and greed can make it. This being the case those profiting from markets greatly value greed and will do what they can to make it culturally acceptable. Hence the need to create a constant greed stimulus using, for example, the feeling of inferiority if one does not keep up with the Joneses. Thus greed has become an economic imperative, modifying our culture in ways destructive of society and the environment. These ways may often be subtle but none the less effective. For example, it would be interesting to know how massively the values of this society have been trivialized by the culture of constant novelty this process has created.

Greed is thus a major factor in the economy that has been developed in this country. As such, greed has become destructive of our society by focusing more resources on the frivolous at the expense of the necessary; on the desires of the few in preference to the needs of the many. This syndrome, I might point out, was the immediate cause of the French Revolution.

The need to constantly develop and promote markets is, in my judgment, a root cause of our massive over consumption. It is relatively easy to see how rampant consumerism eventuates in a cultural acceptance of greed. This market-driven, hyper-consumerism has led to the enculturation of greed. We have an economic system whose masters would make greedheads of us all. In my judgment, the problem of acculturated greed indicates that we do not yet understand the perils of affluence. "Shop 'till you drop" is more ominous than one might think.

Bob Newhard

Why We Have Had and Why We are Doomed to Endless War

2010-10-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

For those who may think that the military does not set national policy I submit as evidence to the contrary the endless war we have had and can expect to have.

It all began with the military's determination to eliminate the kind of citizen opposition to war that the Vietnam escapade produced. The solution was to convert a citizen draft army to a volunteer-based army. The military believed, rightly it seems, that the only substantial reason for the mass objection to the Vietnam War lay in all young men being eligible for military service. (Why the resistance to the draft was so vigorous in this war but not World War II apparently was not asked.)This, obviously, included the children of the middle and wealthy classes. The concern for the casualties, both American and Vietnamese, was distinctly secondary to that of keeping one's child out of harms way. The military believes that people will never permit a return to the draft and the endangerment of their children as long as we have a paid military to do the job.

With the removal of the only major restraint on the military, it follows from the above observation that there will be no end of war until there is a return to the draft or our economy collapses entirely from the economic burden of endless war. The likelihood of people voting to restore the draft is next to nil. Therefore endless war. We have got to the place where war is no longer an instrument of policy, but policy is an instrument for the pursuit of successful war. Military domination of the government budget, and, hence, military priorities will continue to be the national priorities. In short, the United States military has finessed the country into endless war and the populace is continually diverted from understanding this by a barrage of ingenuous sentiment about troop heroism and sacrifice by our corporate media. It is doubtful that even President Eisenhower in his farewell warning about the military-industrial complex could have seen how far this duopoly of destruction would go.

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling in his article The Founders’Wisdom, published in the Armed Forces Journal gives a quite detailed account of what we have lost and what we can expect by abandoning the draft. The article, which I highly recommend, can be found at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2010/02/4384885/. Colonel Yingling, for example, points out that the decision to go to war is much easier to reach with our volunteer army. There is greatly diminished opposition because people, especially the middle and upper classes, no longer need fear that their children might have to go. Congress was freed from the intense citizen pressure of concerned parents and their children and has surrendered its Constitutionally mandated responsibility to declare war. Thus, immediately after 9/11 G. W. Bush could declare "This is war." The media did not point out that only Congress, not the President, can declare war. Bush may not have even known this. However, the voluntary military has obviously cut the executive branch of government loose from the oversight of Congress, which our Constitution-based separation of powers was intended to prevent. Without the draft, citizen opposition is not felt by Congress and Congress is free to regard the interests of the defense contractors who contributed to their campaigns. Thus the absence of a draft leads to a corruption of government and a fundamental abrogation of the Constitution.

It has been argued that the Founders did not envision the need for an immediate response to a threat to the nation. Yingling points out that the Founders drew a distinction between the Amy and the Navy. They viewed the Army as a small corps of regulars to be complemented by male civilians in time of need. This way their great fear of the threat a standing army posed to citizen freedom and well being could be avoided. The navy, on the other hand, was viewed as a continuously full-complemented armed service because of the continuing need to protect commerce and, not so incidentally, because it was stationed at sea and hence not among the citizens and their civilian affairs. The distinction between the two services was so significant that they are treated in separate articles of the Constitution. Today we see one manifestation of their concern, in the ease with which military practice and technology flow to Homeland Security and thence to local police. SWAT teams are versions of military assault teams turned loose in a civilian, often neighborhood, context.

Col. Yingling asserts that there probably is no more fundamental constraint on executive power in the Constitution's scheme of checks and balances, than the restriction of habeas corpus. The Constitution declares “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Yet, under the sway of the military we have cooked up devices such as imprisoning American citizens without trial on so-called foreign soil, as if the Founders had to spell out for children that habeus corpus applied to the treatment of American citizens by the American government no matter where that treatment is applied. In brief, we have gimmicked our way around our own constitution.

To sum up, the military has been empowered to defeat our basic American rights, to ruin our economy, to gain political sway over our legislature, and to insinuate itself into the everyday fabric of our society. As an example, our own local Californian now has a weekly military supplement, as though it was as common as the sports or business section. All this has been accomplished with the willing cooperation of our corporate-controlled all-pervasive media. Until the public realizes the extent to which this nation is controlled by its military and appreciates the immense threat to our democracy that it represents, we will not even see the beginning of a return to the fundamental values of a democratic society. The enormity of such a sea change in our national ethos is elaborated on by John Feffer in his article Gorbachev of the Pentagon?, which can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/gorbachev-of-the-pentagon_b_742180.html. Feffer compares the task of bringing the Americana military under control (he like Chalmers Johnson uses the term "dismantling,") to that of Gorbachev's successful effort to break up the Soviet Union. He describes the unique talents and knowledge that Gorbachev' brought to this monumental task and why it will take someone of his caliber to break the hold of the American military. More than one civilization has collapsed under the burden of its military. May we recover our founding concern for democracy before it is too late.

Bob Newhard

P.S. A rebuttal to Yingling's article by Curtis L. Gilroy, titled Defending the all-volunteer force, may be found at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2010/04/4537015

Yingling's response to his critics, titled The All-Volunteer Force: The Debate, may be found at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/07/the-allvolunteer-force-the-deb/

The Originists

2010-09-19T21:55:00.000-07:00

Originist appears to be the in vogue term for Supreme Court justices who believe the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of the members of the Constitutional Convention that created the document. Just how the intentions of a group of men in a meeting kept secret from the public, relying on the notes of members, well over two hundred years ago, using terminology no longer in use, with a vastly different experiential background is to be ascertained is a matter that has been given heightened concern by the Republican appointees to the current Court who have now confirmed that corporations are persons and can spend their vast wealth to support candidates of their choosing.

However, my concern is not to dwell on the dispute between Originists and what are now being called Living Constitutionalists, who argue that the Constitution was created to be modified as time and conditions change. Rather it is to note that the Original Intent interpretation is always preferred by conservatives and to explore one of the reasons I think this is so.

Interpreting the Constitution as closely as possible to the intent of men in circumstances substantially different from our own generates an increasing gap between the Constitution we live under and the circumstances we live in. In a large, technology-driven, multiethnic, society such as ours and in a world of transnational mega-corporations, rapidly moving information, not to mention movement of people and cultures, the Constitution is at risk of becoming an ancient artifact, venerated but of little use in dealing with the real world in the interests of "we the people." What, in other words, does free speech for a Rupert Murdoch mean other than the ability to drown out other speech with his Hannitys, O'Reillys and Becks. What does our right to vote mean when the Constitution is subverted by supporting the powerful corporations rather than protecting the electoral environment of the people. The veneration of the past that is a consequence of the Originist doctrine makes the Constitution almost a sacred document as incapable of meaningful change as was the Catholic Church when faced with the doctrine-challenging evidence of science and not inconceivably, with the same results.

Let us focus a little more on the corporation as a case in point. The corporation began as a device by which investors could avoid the full impact of corporate failure. Only the money invested in the corporation would be lost, not the rest of the investor's funds. While this diminution of personal risk freed up the flow of money, it also created a different class of people. An individual, even a partnership risked their total resources in case of failure. This form of business can be expected to breed more caution than the corporate enterprise, e.g. Enron. Initially the corporation also had the legal advantage of having a monopoly, as in the case of the East India Company, generally regarded as the first corporation. It was granted a charter by the English crown in return for a share of the profits. It was this monopolistic form of the corporation that Thomas Jefferson urged killing at its birth.

One question I ask is who benefits by the increasing gap between the Constitution and the circumstances it is used to govern. I think it is the corporations. As the gap increases there is an increasing amount of economic activity that is only marginally controlled at best simply because the Constitution makes no mention of it, at least as interpreted by the Originists. This lack of control means wealth and power gradually shift to the corporations, which become major power centers seeking to either wrest control by the state for their own purposes or to control the state by economic subversion of its electoral, legislative and administrative processes. This has become increasingly the case as corporations, unlike nations, have become global in their structure and access to resources.

The corporate power that has built upon this gap is sufficient not only to challenge the power of government, it is more flexible and devious in controlling the populace than the more rule-bound government and can infiltrate government via many channels, not the least of which are our representatives. In brief the Constitution needs either a major overhaul or replacement if it is to be of continuing use to our citizens. In my judgment the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a bad place to begin. For example, article 24 states " Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality." Wouldn't that be a switch?

Bob Newhard

Moral Values and Mankind's Survival

2010-09-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

As I have noted previously, morality is a two edged sword.
On the one hand it may promote community harmony by way of common consent; on the other it may promote some of the worst violence when the morals of one society are opposed to those of another society. Obviously, the threat posed by radically differing moral systems, especially in a world of increasing lethality of weaponry, must be addressed if our species is to survive. This is the subject of a new book by Sam Harris (Previous books: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason; Letters to a Christian Nation) titled The Moral Landscape Thinking About Human Values in Universal Terms. The book is due out in early October this year.

At least since Socrates asked "What is the Good?" humans have been asking what moral values are. Are they derived from other sources, if so what sources? Many societies, having a deity to protect them against adversity derived their moral values from said deity as did the Hebrews when Moses descended from the mountain top with their god's commandments. With the Age of Reason humans began to think about other origins for moral values. Emmanuel Kant supposed they were derived from social necessity, e.g. The injunction against lying was necessary because no society could persist if everybody lied. However, many people continue to believe that morality is derived from their god. As such there is no way to challenge those values without impiety or worse. Hence Christians can require everyone in a society to observe their religious days and Muslims can deny females an education. This feature of moral judgments, namely, their absolute arbitrariness, makes them impervious to any other human needs. This is the basic reason that such values present considerable danger to a world of different moral systems, which is being increasingly forced to live closer to each other and more interdependently.

That this issue has immediate practical and major significance can be illustrated by the following. One of the most influential books of the last few years, especially in conservative circles, is Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in which it is argued that with the end of the Cold War the origins of conflict shifted from ideological differences to cultural differences. Thus the basic issue in our invasion of Iraq is not oil, but an episode in a fundamental clash between East and West. In this clash Huntington urges America and Europe to stand firm, indeed assertively, in support of Western values, such as human rights, democracy, and capitalism, as though democracy and capitalism are inherently compatible. Can you imagine a planet torn by such conflicts, where every resource conflict becomes a cultural conflict and all this embroilment in the context of increasingly lethal modern weaponry? In all probability it would be the end of civilization, if not our species. An instance of this kind of shift from political to cultural alignments can be found, especially since the "coalition of the willing" has been so gravely depleted, in the media's increasing use of "West" and "Western" when referring to the troops of the United States and its remaining allies. It is now referring to our invasion of Afghanistan as a fight between the insurgents and the West. This change in terminology is insidious, morally reprehensible, and extremely dangerous. The corporate powers that be and their religious cohorts are willing to risk a global conflict between cultures to further their own narrow and pecuniary interests. This is but one episode in the malicious use of global cultural fault lines. A brief, but articulate favorable review of Huntington's book by retired United States diplomat Marc E. Nicholson may be found at http://www.amazon.com/Clash-Civilizations-Remaking-World-Order/product-reviews/0684844419/ref=undefinedhist_5?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addFiveStar

In his criticism of Huntington's book, William McNeill, the eminent historian emeritus from the University of Chicago, agrees with Huntington on the increasing importance of world cultures in international relations, but argues that this will result in greater tolerance of diversity as it generates increasing amounts of cultural sophistication. His critical essay may be found at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jan/09/decline-of-the-west/?pagination=false. A very powerful argument for the necessity and reality of diversity by Edward Said can be found at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6705627964658699201#.

Another solution to this dilemma, promoted especially by liberal religionists, has been to identify the elements of the world's value systems and therefrom create a value system for mankind. Eclecticism in religion-founded value systems has never gotten very far perhaps because these common values, few though they be, are seldom as important to a religion and its cultural aura as are the specific practices of a religion.

Many people seem to think that Huntington's thesis and those of his critics like McNeill exhaust the possible responses to this critical dilemma for mankind. However, Sam Harris in his above referenced new book seeks a new moral value ethos. It would find its roots in the human condition as science reveals it. Why the human condition?, because it is that which is most common to all humanity. Why science?, because it has the disciplinary universality that a moral system for mankind requires and it is rooted in the only human enterprise based on reality as assessed by scrupulous and testable honesty. Harris is prepared to take on issues long avoided by both scientists and philosophers when he argues that there are moral facts just as there are natural facts. Sam, as a kind of preface to his book, offers answers to 12 major questions he expects to be lodged against his thesis. These may be found on the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/the-moral-landscape-q-a-w_b_694305.html.

Thinking about how the world may organize (disorganize?) itself in the not too distant future can help articulate a progressive posture. This is much needed if we are to avoid the disaster attendant upon a nation motivated by conservative patriotic hoopla and the militarism which can so easily subvert American democracy. Here are three scenarios for the future, i.e. 1) cultural warfare, 2) increasing cultural diversity and mutual accommodation continually vulnerable to those who would exacerbate and exploit the sublimated differences, to wit Yugoslavia, 3) creation of a new value system based on science and human happiness; an example of which could be the increasing global environmental movement.

The ideological differences of the Cold War, in which there were only two primary protagonists, killed millions, maimed millions more and consumed enormous amounts of the world's resources. The enormity of a conflict between many cultures, (Huntington thinks primary conflicts will be between Western culture and the Confucian culture of China and between Western culture and Islam), makes World War II pale by comparison. Whatever the operating motif is, people will pour every difference into them. Civilizations are much bigger funnels than nations and we can expect every difference people have, e.g. resource competition, population growth, to be poured into these funnels of arbitrary cultural values with absolutely disastrous consequences for mankind. Huntington's thesis is being avidly adopted by the political right and used to galvanize resistance to everything foreign from Muslims to immigrants to the rising economic power of South America led by socialist governments. The opportunity to confuse, mislead and manipulate people in this mix of values, resources and power is enormous. Progressives can provide a nexus for keeping the public eye on the ball, namely the influence of corporations and the wealthy, and also provide the context for organizing citizen resistance to the process. Barbara Tuchman in her book The Guns of August points out that European socialists tried to stop World War I by calling a general strike in the opposing nations. It fell apart as party members followed their nationalist allegiances rather than their political allegiance. Hopefully we can make the tyranny, insidiousness and sheer power of corporate wealth clear so that people will finally see their commonality as a species in time to prevent the disaster which shall surely eventuate from the conservative Huntington scenario.

Bob Newhard

Thinking about the Forgotten

2010-08-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Blood on our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq by Nicolas J.S. Davies. Early in his account Davies draws attention to this country's criminal disregard for international law. He finds this doubly egregious because Article 6 of the United States Constitution specifically declares "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land;"

The burden of this portion of his book is that we, as a people and as a government, no longer pursue the rule of law in international issues. It was not always this way. At the end of World War II people were so impressed with the horrific loss that war incurred (62 to 78 million of which 40 to 52 million were civilians) that it was clear that national differences could no longer be addressed in this fashion and that a rule of law must exist among nations by which national conflicts could be arbitrated; hence the establishment of the United Nations, largely under the urging of Franklin Roosevelt who coined its name. This time, unlike the Senate's rejection of the League of Nations Treaty, the United Nations treaty easily passed the Senate with only two nay votes. This was recognition that the nation state was no longer to be regarded as the end-all of socio/political organization. For purposes of preventing war it was to be subservient to the rule of international law as administered by the United Nations. However, Roosevelt's successors soon reverted to the anarchy of nationalism, initially by trying to use the United Nations as a instrument of United States foreign policy. e.g. the Korean Conflict, which we refused to call a war, but rather a "Police Action." While it is the case that the newly minted United Nations was immediately presented with the unprecedented burden of two nuclear superpowers contesting for global domination, the United States, a prime mover in establishing the U.N. made little effort to support the U. N. in its role of peacekeeper. Indeed, as time wore on Americans began to regard the U.N. as an enemy, indeed many Conservatives urged our withdrawal from the organization. We withdrew our obligatory funding of the U.N. and denigrated it at every opportunity. All this without once recalling the monumental horrors it was designed to prevent. As a result we have had 65 years of continuous global conflict with millions more humans killed, maimed and deprived of a decent life. We have squandered the resources of this planet, condemned our posterity to the effects of global warming, diminishing water supplies, incipient food shortages and the chaos of a collection of nations armed to the teeth with an ever increasing capacity to kill, maim and destroy. One result of our self-perceived role as the world's "sole remaining superpower" was our embarking on a largely lawless journey in world affairs, e.g. the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and now threats to bomb Iran.

In my judgment what has to change is a mass perception of ourselves as humans living together on the only home we have, the earth. We must cease seeing the nation as the ultimate socio/political unit and ourselves primarily as citizens of a country. The nation must become an instrument through which we pledge our allegiance and efforts to our world. But how?

The global environmental movement has shown us that humans can seek solutions to global problems. As reflected in a recent article in WorldWatch magazine the environmental movement is beginning to realize that it will have to expand its vision and efforts to include economic issues if our ecological problems are resolved. This suggests to me that the need to address socio/political concerns will be seen as a prerequisite to accomplishing the ecological goals of environmentalists. The environment is shared by all humans and is therefore a fit vehicle to begin shifting the human mind-set from nation to world. Yet another task progressives could take the lead in.

Bob Newhard

Democracy is Not Enough

2010-08-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting contrasts between the conservative political posture and that of progressives is that conservatives emphasize personal values, which are by their nature abstract. They stress morality which, when pressed for instances, amounts to little more than convention. They stress individuality no matter what the economic circumstances; they stress courage, e.g. Reagan's "walk tall", no matter how stupid the goal. Progressives stress equality and fairness, which are social virtues. We have a host of programs to achieve various aspects of these values, which we tend to stress more than the values themselves. The result is that conservatives make personal attributes the center of their political mantra. Progressives make society the center of theirs. The personal will always trump the social in the minds of the majority of people. This is a fundamental problem for progressives and is why progressives make headway mainly when society has fallen apart and its value is starkly reduced to personal terms.

In what follows I will try to articulate a way to begin bridging this gap by suggesting that progressives need to get personal and a way to do this without sacrificing the need for major social change.

As I read Thomas Jefferson, he not only tried to establish the basis for democracy, i.e. all men are created equal, but also the fundamental purpose of democracy, i.e. the optimization of the citizen's potential. I think this is why he laid such a heavy emphasis on education. I think Hilary Clinton had this in mind when she published her book It Takes a Village, a phrase taken from an African tribe that believes the group is fundamental to human beings. She was taken to task in the 1996 presidential election, by Bob Dole who countered that it takes a family to raise a child. Given the looseness and irresponsibility of political propaganda this dispute could go on endlessly and this is all the conservatives need to retain credibility and relevance. Get most people to identify with the personal or near personal, e.g. family, and they will relegate social justice to the back burner.

However, let us try to understand "individual" in a more developed fashion. Suppose we use Maslow's hierarchy of human needs to define the individual for political purposes. The conservative argues that human freedom is preeminent. What is done with that freedom is of less consequence. If it is used to deprive others of their freedom by producing an elite of wealth and hence power, that is ok. Nobody, in their view, ever promised anything resembling a level playing field. Hence the wealthy, whose wealth continually accrues more wealth, deserve to grasp and hold all the wealth they can. I submit this is nothing more than the law of the jungle. Republican's since the 19th century have advocated social Darwinism as the modus vivendi for our society. Corporate leaders are fond of regarding business competition as war and advocate The Art of War by Sun Tzu as a strategy manual for corporate competition.

Maslow, however, proposed and it has been widely accepted in sociological circles, that individuals are a bundle of needs. At the bottom of his needs hierarchy are survival needs, e.g. food. Near the top of the hierarchy are needs for self-esteem, achievement and the respect of others. At the top of the hierarchy are a collection of needs he calls "Self actualization" needs, e.g. morality, creativity, spontaneity. I suggest democracy can be viewed as an instrument for meeting this hierarchy of needs with the objective of producing citizens whose lives are optimized as they move from necessity to self optimization. The conservative view of democracy, at best, leaves human beings with the freedom of the jungle to be victimized by those who dominate the jungle. Hence we have the hopeless poor, the haggard job holder and the dominating rich. Some conservatives, when faced with the brutality of their sociopolitical philosophy, proclaim their advocacy of charity. Indeed Bush 1 advocated the charity of a "thousand points of light" to replace government aid programs. Conservatives do not aim at producing a society, but rather a continuous warfare of competing classes, with many people at Maslow's survival level, many more in jobs held mainly to avoid sinking to a survival level and a few with the resources to seek self optimization.

Looked at this way, progressivism is far more concerned for the individual than is conservatism. Progressivism, so understood, can bring far more of that overwhelming concern of libertarians, i.e. merit, to the surface than can a society ruled by the so-called meritorious.

I want to underscore the absolute barbarity that underlies the conservative view of society. Theirs is that of a collection of human beings seeking their own ends at the expense of others. Notably, these are the same people who have the unmitigated gall to call those who seek social justice advocates of class warfare. I suggest that progressives devote considerable energy to thinking out, articulating and pushing its concern for the civilized individual rather than the self-centered barbarism that issues from conservative ideology.

Bob Newhard

Complexity and the Understanding of Our Times

2010-07-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

I have written before on what I call "abstraction." I have remarked the human capacity to form general observations, e.g. that all of the same kind of thing have common properties, and then to treat those properties as independent elements for thought. As an example, the Egyptians knew the common properties of the right triangle. They used it to reallocate land to the appropriate owners after the annual flooding of the Nile. However it was a Greek, Pythagoras, who formulated the abstraction that in the right triangle the square of the long side (hypotenuse) equaled the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

Humans have applied this capacity in a variety of ways ranging from religion to science. In sociopolitical fields it is, for example, rampant in the fictions of law. In terms of our immediate situation it is what permitted the economic debacle which we are living through. Alan Greenspan, who was hired to watch over this process admitted he did not understand the process of securitizing mortgages, but idiotically and ideologically he assumed the "market" would control any such process: this meant he believed investors and sellers would understand even if he did not. The Indian government did not invest in these securities because, as they said, they did not understand them.

I have been reading recently of what I take to be another dimension of this human capability, namely, complexity. I have been reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. We have had a number of works of late on societal collapse, perhaps because of concerns about our own future, that attribute such events to exhaustion of resources by disastrous agricultural practices or other processes or by overpopulation, war, climate shifts, etc. Tainter sees sociopolitical complexity as another reason for societal collapse. The underlying thesis is that primitive societies, e.g. hunter gatherers, direct all their resources to survival. As societies become more complex, i.e. functions other than hunting and gathering are adopted, such as social organization, religion, etc. they impose a greater energy demand upon the society. As long as the increased complexity pays off in added benefits everything works. However, when the burden of this continually increasing sociopolitical complexity outstrips the energy available to support it the society begins to decline at an increasing rate until a tipping point is reached and collapse takes place.

Using, as so many have in the past, the Roman Empire as a primary, although not the only, example of this process, Tainter asks why should the most dominant, powerful, empire of its time collapse, and in comparatively short order? It did not exhaust its immense and diverse resources. Rather it became so complex it was no longer governable. If you will recall, in this process of decline and disintegration the Empire had to be split into the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.

Let us look at some of the steps along the path to decline and collapse:

• The time came when the Roman army could no longer be supplied with manpower from Roman citizenry alone. "Barbarians" were recruited and could earn Roman citizenship and a retirement farm through military service. We did away with the draft after Vietnam and are now giving citizenship to those who serve in our volunteer (paid) military.

• The early success of Rome's military operations and the economic benefits it brought to Rome through loot, tribute and taxes sustained a vastly improved standard of living in Rome thereby addicting Romans to militarism.

• As complexity continued to rise with the increasing vastness of the empire the gains relative to the cost of this militarism began to decline. Eventually further expansion was halted and imperial policy shifted to maintenance of the Empire, especially against the increasing pressure of the barbarians.

• In defense of the Empire's perimeter the Romans began to recruit barbarians in their home areas rather than move them from one point to another as pressures required. This identity of soldiers and their home contributed to the rise of local power, which eventually contributed to the fragmentation of the Empire. Rome had been sensitive to this issue under the Republic, which forbade an army commander to bring his army any closer to Rome than the Rubicon river. As you know, Julius Caesar disregarded this rule and Rome became a despotic imperium as a result. Maxim: A standing army is a two edged sword. It inevitably breeds militarism and thereby distorts democracy's goals, it inevitably creates an elite focused on controlling that army's power, it devours resources with little societal benefit and it is not focused on human wellbeing. I admit that is a little long for a maxim, but the consequences of militarism, which our society increasingly suffers from cannot be overemphasized.

To continue with sociopolitical complexity; Tainter offers four concepts fundamental to understanding sociopolitical collapse

Four concepts discussed to this point can lead to an understanding of why complex societies collapse. These concepts are:

1. human societies are problem-solving organizations;

2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;

3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and

4. investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

Let me see if I can illustrate some of this process using a fundamental sociopolitical component - communication. This activity is at its simplest when one human being we'll call "A", communicates with another we'll call "B", although, as a retired public librarian I know that his situation is anything but simple. Now bring a third human being "C" into this process. Not only do A and B have to figure out what the other is communicating, including all those variables such as intention, frame of reference, etc. they now have to figure out the same variables regarding C. Most importantly A and B now have to figure out how C's communication modifies that between them with regard to all the variables of human discourse. This is where the exponential increase in complexity begins. C of course is presented with this more complex problem for starters. It is easy to see how rapidly complexity with regard to this component of society can progress exponentially to criticality. This is not to say that complexity in itself is always the problem. We put men on the moon and built the Large Hadron Collider using complexity. We also created our current financial debacle, the near destruction of New Orleans and the Deepwaater Horizon oil well explosion relying on complexity. One of the major differences between these two results of communication complexity is the extent to which a passionate and determined effort to understand underlay these efforts, or did not. If understanding is the goal the resulting complexities, while not free from mistakes are decidedly less prone to them. Complexity of communication because it so rapidly increases the problems of communication is a refuge for scoundrels and can create monstrous results for mankind. Perhaps the most notable example is war. The G. W. Bush administration deliberately polluted society's communication complexity by lying about the motives of Saddam Hussein and by disguising their motive to control middle eastern oil and declaring that the enterprise would be a "cakewalk."

Another consequence of sociopolitical complexity and one that initially stimulated my interest in it, is complexity's effect on democracy. From what we have said above it is easy to see how rapidly the ordinary citizen of any sizable democracy can be and is aced out of the effective participation democracy presupposes. This is why I think it is extremely important for citizens to understand societal complexity, to demand the transparency necessary for that understanding, to receive training in how to deal with it, and to have the experience of evaluating with others a proposed course of social action. The latter is important because participation in such groups enhances the awareness of this complexity and can reveal methods for dealing with it. Not least of the benefits can be an improved understanding of when to trust complexity and to what degree and when not to trust it.

We have politicians promising "transparency" without, in my judgment, understanding the enormity of introducing transparency to any appreciable degree into the complexity of our enormous governmental environment. It is questionable whether in the long run this country, not to mention this state can maintain its current structure. Long ago the magazine The Futurist carried an article arguing that the North American continent would politically realign itself into economically similar "countries." The author suggested that economic identities would eventually outweigh the current political configurations. The common economic concerns of the Pacific Coast, Rocky Mountain, Great Plains and Eastern Seaboard would be the "countries" of the future. As he put it, the farmers of our Midwest have far more in common with the Canadian Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba than they do with either seaboard of the North American continent. Among other things, commonality of interest goes a long way toward reducing the burden of sociopolitical complexity.

The length of this post may prompt readers to consider it an example of its subject.

Bob Newhard

"Deficit" as a Code Word of the Wealthy

2010-07-11T15:08:00.000-07:00

According to reports, the primary concern of the G 20 conference in Toronto was the level of global debt. Most of the proposals were for a new round of austerity to reduce this deficit. Many counties, e.g. Germany wanted to attack this problem before it gets any worse. Obama wanted to go slower so that his stimulus program, (Another word for borrowing on the international financial market.) would have more time to take effect.

The thing that struck me was that the only solution considered was reducing cost, i.e. austerity, not increasing revenue. Reducing costs affects the mass of the world's population. Increasing revenue, if done fairly, would affect the much fewer rich. It should be remembered that the G 20 confab represents the interests of the global moneyed class, not the majority of citizens of the attending countries. In effect, the G-20, by its austerity pitch betrays its money, not people, roots. The popular press would have us believe that it is dealing with the world economy and its necessities.

I went to the World Social Forum's web site to see if this needed focus on the wealthy was in evidence. As far as I can see it was not. There was an abundance of sentiment about bettering the lives of the poor, about the evils of global capitalism, but I could find no specific proposals on redistribution of wealth and mechanisms for achieving this. I have visited various progressive web sites such as Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). I could find no proposals for redistribution of the world's wealth and mechanism's for achieving it and for maintaining an equitable distribution. Yet it is clear that the current mechanism for wealth generation and ownership are central to the world's economic problems.

It is not that the policy and mechanisms are unknown. For example James Tobin, a now deceased professor of economics, proposed what has been called the Tobin Tax. This is a very small, less than 1%, tax on global currency speculation transactions. This market processes over $1.8 trillion dollars daily. Tobin was concerned with transferring wealth from the rich portions of this planet to the poorest. He estimated a transaction tax, analogous to a sales tax, on this market, a market primarily of the rich, would generate about 300 billion a year, which was about what the United Nations said was necessary to achieve their goal of stamping out the abject poverty experienced by billions of people and providing a basic education for children.

It is high time progressives made the redistribution of wealth a prominent, well-articulated, political objective. Far from being the basis of unfairness that the political Right likes to paint such an effort, it is the prerequisite for creating a reasonably fair, healthy, democratic society. Excessively concentrated wealth must be seen as a fundamental enemy of democracy and human well being.

Bob Newhard

Maturity

2010-06-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

Recently my wife Eleanor and I attended the high school graduation celebration for one of our young relatives. This young lady graduated with honors. She wants to be a psychologist or a nurse and to my surprise, admires the young people of the 1960's, especially their protests against the Vietnam war and for civil rights. Dare one hope that hers is the generation that may bail this country out of its long nightmare of shallowness and militarism? But the most impressive thing about this youngster is that several years ago she lost her sister in an ATV crash with a train. She and her sister were very close. When offered rooms of their own they chose to continue sharing a room. For teenagers focused on establishing their individual identity this would seem to be a rarity. She came out of this traumatic loss with a concern not only to help others, but the understanding that society's welfare is central to this concern. To me this was a startling level of maturity in one so young. It would have been so easy, I am tempted to say natural, for her to have been embittered by a perceived unfairness in the traumatic loss she had experienced. I asked myself, in light of this display of maturity, how societies managed with their great traumas of which war is the preeminent one.

Until World War II the United States demonstrated a good deal of maturity in its response to war. While we were as guilty as most of using war, or threat of war, to get our way, nonetheless, after every war we demobilized and demilitarized. This demonstrated a degree of maturity as we repeatedly returned to a focus on civilian society at the end of each war.

Immediately after World War II we again demonstrated maturity when we established the Marshall Plan to help our erstwhile enemies recover after the war. Being as we had the only viable economy after the war this "generosity" also created jobs for returning soldiers, which helped avoid the bonus-march unrest following World War I. The Marshall Plan not only demonstrated maturity, but also that we were able to become a learning society as we recognized one of the sources of World War II in the depression-exacerbating reparations following World War I. However, all of this was lost as we failed to find some life-saving détente with the Russians. Both sides had humanity as a stated concern, for America it was liberty, for Russia the welfare of the proletariat. Had we fought as manfully for peace as we did for war we may have avoided the loss of millions of lives and massive human displacement and suffering that the so-called Cold War brought upon mankind. The bellicose Winston Churchill put an end to all hopes with his Iron Curtain speech.

Now we are again faced with a test of national maturity. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were uncalled for. After 9-11 we were not faced with a "war" as G. W. Bush and his ruling neocons declared. We had the opportunity to use the overwhelming sympathy and willingness to cooperate of most of the world. We could have created a cooperative police action to track down the perpetrators and subject them to a world tribunal as was done with other criminals such as Milosevic. This, however, did not suit the plans of the neocons to create a defacto empire out of the "sole remaining superpower." The smallness of mind, the gross failure to understand human resistance to occupation by foreigners, especially as it developed after World War II, completely escaped them as they converted foreign policy into military policy.

What would national maturity now require of us? Many urged, and many thought, Obama would pursue getting us out of the aggressive wars initiated by G. W. Bush. This time the maturity required some of the courage displayed by Roosevelt in opposing Wall Street (the financiers tried to organize a coup) or by Truman, who fired General MacArthur at the height of his poularity for insubordination. In Barak Obama it was not forthcoming and hence we have not displayed the maturity to remove our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

This time it is up to we the people to create a movement for national maturity. We have no Roosevelt or Truman or Marshall. Maybe we shall find one in a Congressman Grayson or Congressman Sestak. For now it is totally up to us. Nine years after a hubris-driven and murderous mistake was made, it is time for an exercise of the national maturity we have demonstrated before.

Bob Newhard

The Politics of Values

2010-06-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

Since the advent of Reaganism we have been subjected to the politics of values. But what are values and how do they play out in politics?

Let us consider values as distinct from facts. Facts require evidence, values do not. Facts have a greater or lesser amount of evidence to support them. The more evidence the greater the facticity. Values are human creations, they are not found in nature. They have a substantial degree of emotional content. Being a human creation, having no necessary connection to the natural world, and being emotionally charged makes them an ideal vehicle for controlling society.

This being the case values should always be examined, especially when being employed to persuade people. Questions that need to be honestly explored are: Who is pushing the particular values? Do they have any non-value interest in the effort being made? If so what are those interests and who else will benefit by society's pursuit of them?

Another downside of values is, that being detached from the real world, they can be treated as absolutes because there can be no fact contradicting them. This makes values immune to any imperative derived from the natural world, e.g. global warming or overpopulation. This detachment from reality also means that belief in values can lead to a kind of insanity. Human beings can invest any amount of passion, good or bad, they choose in support of them. This is compounded by their apparently absolute nature, another "benefit" of being detached form the real, testable, world of fact. As a result, there is nothing to cast doubt on a value and the human passion for certainty finds a safe home. Thus people are free to believe any fantasy by calling it a value, which, being absolute, cannot be challenged. As a result "belief" is elevated to the highest levels of certainty and is so psychologically powerful that many people cannot distinguish between belief and fact.

Some examples may clarify the relevance of this argument against the innocence of values. We have, for example, placed a high value on human life. Left unexamined, this value has been and is being used to thwart human birth reduction. Millions of people, e.g. Christian, Muslim, believe preventing the birth of human beings and aborting the human fetus is morally wrong. Yet the evidence is that this planet cannot handle unlimited human births. This obviously insane behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged because values that once had relevance when humans were few and weak, have gone unexamined, and are even frequently reinvigorated despite the obvious consequences. Obviously we are at a stage where the quality of human life, not, the quantity, is of primary importance. It is also obvious that the facts have trumped values in importance.

Finally, as alluded to above, values are used by the powerful to control those less powerful. An interesting study would be to delineate the primary values of a society and then analyze the use made of those values by the controlling elite to control the rest of the society. In my last column I attempted to do that with the American value of freedom. As I tried to show, this value, left unexamined, has permitted corporations to defend their constant immersive propaganda as their right to exercise free speech. They, of course, have a huge megaphone, that will easily drown out the free speech of others. Because of the high value we place on free speech, we, including the Supreme Court, have allowed the free speech of some to kill the free speech of others. Obviously the facts surrounding this issue would call for a greater opportunity to be heard for those with a weaker voice, but the value of free speech cloaked in its robe of absoluteness, is not allowed to be challenged by the facts,

Socrates declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. One might add that the unexamined value can be a source of great harm to the living.

Bob Newhard

Freedom versus power

2010-05-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Rand Paul, the GOP candidate for Kentucky's U.S. senate seat and son of Libertarian leader Ron Paul, recently stated that he believed the Civil Rights law of 1964 should have applied to public venues only, not private establishments. He argues that the Federal Government has no right to tell private business, organizations, etc. whom they can serve or admit as members with respect to race or sexual orientation. For him, when it comes to freedom of the individual versus other rights, there is no higher value than freedom. Many people view this argument as fundamental to the "American way." Others simply declare he is a racist and would be done with it. I think there is a more fundamental issue here and it is one that infects a good deal of American politics.

The argument from democracy as individual freedom goes back to the nation's founders. Jefferson believed freedom was fundamental to a democracy, however, he recognized that freedom had to have an economic base configured to democracy's needs. For this reason he argued for a nation of small farmers, each having the land and associated resources to maintain his economic independence of other citizens. In contrast Hamilton, among others, saw no threat to democracy when employees were dependent upon a factory owner for their jobs.

However, freedom and society can be in conflict because in addition to freedom all societies generate power. Under conditions of absolute freedom that power will gravitate to the strongest individuals or groups who, in their own interests will destroy the freedom of others. This is the law of the jungle. A democracy is intended to distribute the power a society generates to all its members thus assuring that freedom is not lost to those who agglomerate power. This simple lesson, I believe is at the root of much of what is wrong, dysfunctional, and potentially destructive of our society.

In Rand Paul's case if people and institutions, except those of government, were free to discriminate the power available to discriminate would be at least equal to that of government. The majority of employees work in the private sector. Think about the implications of that one fact. Michael Lind has an excellent article on this matter at http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/05/25/rand_paul_black_like_him. Lind recalls the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin that relates how Griffin, who had had his white skin darkened by a dermatologist, experienced the hostile racism that permeated the southern states. Griffin's experiences alone are enough to indicate the consequences of Paul's distinction between public and private sector racism.

This advocacy of radical individualism by Libertarians plays out in our own area also. The Murrieta Public Library as well as some others, offers as reading rewards at their summer reading programs for children, coupons from In 'N Out Burger for a free burger. The coupons are emblazoned with a burger, fries and a soda. I have repeatedly expressed my concern, in view of our rampant and increasingly dangerous childhood obesity epidemic. Every major political office from the President, to the Surgeon General, to the California Governor, and the Riverside County Health Officer has expressed their profound concern over what we are doing to children. In most of these cases they have launched programs to fight this trend. This generation of children is projected to be the first in 200 years to have a shorter average life span than the preceding generation. Adult onset diabetes usually first seen at age 45 to 55 is now being seen in children 14 to 16. Over the last 20 years childhood diabetes has increased 10 fold. I have presented this information to the city's Library Commission, to the Library Director and to the City Council. I have been told that it is not the Library's role to determine what the child eats; it is the child's parent. Put another way, the Library can offer coupons for food that is bad for the children, thereby becoming a shill for corporate marketing to the young, and it is up to the parent to stop them. That this is the environment in which this epidemic has occurred and has demonstrably failed escapes them. When children are threatened by commercial products, as in cases from defective cribs to cigarettes, we do not trust parents to protect their children; we pass laws enforced by government. This is exactly the same argument the Libertarians have used repeatedly and is, at root, the same as Rand Paul's racism, i.e. government has no right to tell free individuals in a democratic society what to do. Of course government does, of necessity, tell citizens what to do and often penalizes them if they don’t, e.g. our traffic laws. That an argument this transparently ludicrous should have power in this democracy bespeaks the low level of citizen education, awareness, concern, and, I believe, the power of the media. Why is it that people cannot see that a democratic society requires a strong government to keep the strong (think corporations), from preying on the rest of the citizenry. Is there a risk in a strong government? Of course there is if it is not held accountable by the people. But the people have to be adequately informed, willing to make government part of their lives and pass on a culture of responsible citizenship to their offspring. Without this they shall never be free. Without this they will be deceived pawns of the wealthy and the corporations they control. The pernicious practice of divorcing freedom from power so that power can prevail will inevitably destroy our democracy.

In the mouths of Libertarians "freedom" means power for the few. As recently made evident by the Tea Party rallies saturated with Libertarians, the Party has been a cover for racists, white militia, etc., all of whom prefer power to democracy. Unless capitalism is controlled by a responsible democratic government, it is nothing but a method for transferring power to the wealthy few. These people will trade this delusory notion of freedom for power any time for they know that power allows them great latitude to manipulate the ill defined , easily manipulated, and generally emotion-driven concept of freedom. Until the American public gets this through their heads we shall never have an effective democratic government. Until Progressives make this use of "freedom" clear to the public, they have failed in their presumed purpose.

Bob Newhard

Drowning in Denial

2010-05-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

"Denial" is often offered as an account of why someone refuses to acknowledge the obvious. This has become a cultural phenomenon in the United States. But what are we really saying when we say a person or collection of persons denies that something obvious or exceedingly well founded either does not exist or is not true?

Two psychologists, Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, in their book Politics of Denial offer an explanation of the denial phenomenon. They say that this kind of adamant denial has its origin in the denier's childhood. Children unable to face a situation restore their sense of equilibrium by denying whatever they cannot face. We have often seen children put their hands over their eyes or pull the covers over their head when faced with an unplessantness. Supposedly, if it is not seen it does not exist. The human psyche requires this kind of protection. Having found the techniques useful in childhood, many people continue to use it throughout their lives. Indeed as they become adults they become belligerent in its defense. And when a large number of people find their society facing a catastrophe this kind of denial can become national policy. Denial in this sense thus becomes a very dangerous "madness of crowds" reaction to reality. Milburn and Conrad argue that this delusive mentality now dominates the Republican Party.

Bill Moyers in a talk titled Penguins and the Politics of Denial suggested that the way to deal with this phenomenon in the radical religious right is to translate an issue, in this case global warming, into the language and thought patterns of the religious right. He suggests, for instance, using the story of Noah, whom God had warned of an imminent flood, to build an ark. Noah's fellow citizens jeered him and denied the reality he declared. This, according to Moyers, rather then the language of science used by global warming environmentalists, could convince these deniers of the reality of global warming. This is seen by one writer as an advance in the effort to convince a large segment of the American population that something needs to be done. But is it the right thing? I think not. It is, in effect, to sacrifice science and the exactitude and discipline of its language to the vagaries of religious usage in which it enters into a welter of irresolvable "interpretations". There is nothing for it but that those who think in terms of stories need to realize that language matters. In my university days I had an Ethiopian friend working on his degree in pharmacology who assured me that one could not "do" science in Amharic, the major language of Ethiopia.

Making denial the threat to our society that it is is the work of those who manipulate this human failing. A prime example is the oil companies. Exxon Mobil, for example has given millions to the American Enterprise Institute to produce reports denying global warming or at least questioning its validity, which for political purposes amounts to the same thing. As a result the Institute advertised grants of $10,000 to any scientist who would produce a paper at least questioning the validity of global warming. Then there are those who use the ignorance of the deniers for political purposes. You may remember the scene from the 2008 Republican Convention when Sara Palin supporters, old and young, energetically chanted "Drill, baby drill." These people in their enthusiastic ignorance were pursuing continuing and increasing harm, both global warming and oil-spill, to the only planet they or their children have. Talk about immaturity!

There is another aspect to this gross denial which is that it is another instance of what I have called the downside of abstraction. Humans, when they were still living close to the real world as hunter-gathers and even as farmers had to take account of reality moment by moment, and could not indulge denial without great peril to themselves. They could indulge myth because it was generally used to emphasize reality. Thus the various rain and corn dances were performed to insure that the real world would remain true to them. Similarly, humans in their hubris prayed for the sun to return at the winter solstice. They were not creating a different world as today's deniers do. Once again it is the remoteness of people's mental state from the demands of the real world that allows this type of insanity to not only flourish, but to influence policies of the world's largest military power. That is frightening in its implications. I think this kind of mass craziness, undisciplined by reality is, to a considerable extent, the product of societal affluence. We need to be vigorous in our pursuit of understanding the downside of affluence before we do consummate damage to this planet and thus to ourselves and our posterity.

Bob Newhard

The Future of Property

2010-05-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

Given the imminent convergence of major impacts on humanity, e.g. global warming, global food shortage, global water shortage and all that these imply for human society, one of the more useful forms of inquiry is to ask what our situation implies for fundamental societal institutions, e.g. governance, marriage and family, social structure itself. In this column I will take a look at the future of property in an era of increasingly reduced resources and increasing population.

Property has had a varying history. Hunter gatherer societies had little property except their weapons and tools. To what extent these may have been held in common for everybody's use I am uncertain. While land was not owned, tribes might by force or tradition lay claim to hunting grounds. In the 21st century the "hunting ground right" is still an issue as the fish population declines. More on this later.

As humans moved to agriculture after the last ice age specific land allocation became more important for survival. Not only did the rise of agriculture result in more stable societies providing the basis for the rise of civilization, it also placed land ownership at the center of the human economy.

In terms of human history it wasn’t that long ago that medieval societies regarded all property as ultimately the monarch's, but in practice much of it belonged to the monarch's aristocracy. In the typical feudal arrangement the lord owned all significant property especially land. Even the so-called commons were owned by the lord and his serfs paid him a portion of the benefit they accrued from its use. At this time the economy was land based and wealth measured primarily in land holdings.

Gradually, with increased commerce, including the discovery of the new world, the European economy began to expand and land was no longer the only measure of wealth. The Industrial Revolution greatly enlarged the European economy, but also provided a new basis for wealth, i.e. manufacturing. Interestingly, at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution the land-based economy was facing a dilemma of its own creation. As families grew larger land holdings were being fragmented by multi-child inheritance, Thus came the practice of primogeniture in which the eldest son inherited all the land. A significant portion of the initial Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs and workers were the children of land holders ineligible to inherit the land.

Writing in the earlier phase of this economic transformation, Thomas Hobbes based freedom itself on property ownership. We find this notion in Jefferson when he envisioned a nation of small farmers as the economic foundation of democracy because their property and the living it provided would make them independent of overlords. I think that one reason for this close association of property ownership and freedom lay in the fact that the property of the monarch and aristocracy had given them power over the populace and that therefore property was necessary to assure freedom of the ordinary citizen. There is, to this day, a strong feeling among some citizens that property is the root of freedom.

However, as the impact of diminishing resources and increasing population make property increasingly scarce, ownership of property will become more problematical. One can easily see this as a source of ongoing violence.

With this brief history in mind what are the prospects for property or for that matter ownership in general? To assess the distance this society has to travel in this matter we need only recall G. W. Bush's 2004 campaign that flaunted the banner of the "Ownership Society." Such a society thoroughly based on ownership would require little government (except for military) and society's major domestic transactions, e.g. health care, education, retirement, employee benefits would be negotiated between "independent" entities. This would promote values such as personal responsibility, economic liberty and owning of property. Interestingly this view, but not Bush's reasons for it, is not too far removed from Jefferson's belief. Jefferson feared that Hamilton's economic view, focused on a manufacturing-based economy, would make employees vulnerable to political manipulation.

But back to Bush and the Republicans. The Ownership Society was little more than an attempt to preserve the wealth of the rich. It was offered as a defense for his wealth-favoring tax cut. It uncritically assumed that property would remain the basis of the U.S. economy, even if the rest of the world moved on.

This conservative effort to impose the wealthy on the rest of us by way of a 400 year old view of property and with mankind's survival in mind, indicates how massive a cultural shift will be required to allow our species to survive. In short, is there a surrogate for property?

One answer to that question is that we should substitute access for ownership.

There is some modest potential in some current arrangements. The fishing industry provides some perspective. While nations have long laid claim to areas of the ocean for fishing purposes they could, of course, not lay claim to the fish themselves, which may or may not enter a given national boundary. It is useful to keep in mind that fishing is the one holdover from the hunter gatherer societies.

Another step in this direction is car sharing instead of car ownership. Two companies, Zipcar and Flexcar, using a combination of wireless, GPS and other computer technologies allow customers to reserve cars online, walk a few blocks to where it is parked in their neighborhood, use it and return it to the parking spot. This form of car use not only avoids the ownership costs of maintenance, insurance, etc., it means fewer cars can provide the transportation needs of metropolitan areas.

Bicycle sharing, especially in Europe, is a going and growing public/private enterprise. Mexico City is trying to clean up its immense smog problem using bicycle sharing in the city's core areas.

Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, has a long and interesting article on access versus ownership in which he sees technology driving a passage from ownership to access. He notes the digitized book as an example. It is interesting to note that Kelley, an avowed libertarian, sees tax-based public enterprise as a vehicle for this change as well as private enterprise. The article may be found at http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all.

But what of land itself, which remains the most basic measure of wealth for much of the planet's population? In this regard it is instructive to note that China, Saudi Arabia, etc. are buying up large tracts of land in Africa to grow food for their own populations. The only large effort at abandoning land ownership was the Soviet Union in which society, through the state, owned the land and farmers were in essence state employees. To many people in the West this was an instance of dictatorship. Farmers, like employees of a corporation, were told what and how much to grow based on the needs of their society. The farm was made to emulate the factory. This feature is currently duplicated, in spades, by American corporate farms, in which animals are raised in very confined space, fed large amounts of medication to avoid easily transmitted disease and hormones to increase the rate of growth and hence saleability. It is not clear whether this form of agriculture is necessary to support the population that the human species has produced and continues to produce.

Finally, ownership may be finding its comeuppance in the developing politics of Latin America, especially Bolivia. Evo Morales has been returning major extraction industries such as oil and minerals to the people by way of nationalization of corporations. Morales, of indigenous extraction himself, is basing this process on what the dominant economies owe Bolivia's indigenous people in recompense for all that has been taken from them. It will not do for a corporation to declare they have a contract with a preceding government that ruled by the power of elitism, not by the consent of the people. Morales in a recent conference in Cochabamba seemed to be calling upon all indigenous people to rise up and demand compensation from those who have plundered their lands and resources. In this connection more than one African government that agreed to sell millions of acres for growing food to China and others has been forced by outraged citizens to withdraw these agreements. China and others are now calling for such countries to supply troops to protect "their interest." If Morales and others focused on the welfare of the population find a significant and determined constituency among the economic victims of this planet, we may have found something of an answer to the future of property. At least in certain areas it will be possessed by society not by individuals. It will, however, place a greater burden on the citizen to insure that government itself is not co-opted by the wealthy and thereby become tyrannical. It may be that humans are condemned by their very nature to repeat Plato's cycle of aristocracy, timocracy (government by those possessed of great honor, usually military), oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny endlessly until the technology of violence overwhelms our species.

Bob Newhard

Idiocy and its manipulation

2010-04-18T18:59:00.000-07:00

As have many others, I have tried to understand the phenomenon of political rage demonstrated by Republicans. We apparently have millions of presumably mature adults very distressed about issues that have no substance. There are many answers and that is part of the problem. Are they no longer capable of recognizing reality? Do they really believe Obama is a socialist? Do they really believe Sara Palin is presidential material? In that event do they really care what happens to this country? These people appear to be very angry. About what? Loss of jobs or homes? That is due to corporate greed unleashed by the Republicans. They must know this.

I think people are angry because of what has happened to them and the rather bleak prospects for much improvement in the near term. But then why vilify Obama? He did not cause the pain they feel. There was outrage at Clinton presumably for his sexual behavior, but nothing comparable to the noisy, often vicious, protests against Obama. Representatives who voted for Obama's health care bill have had their homes vandalized. Tea Partiers have spat upon and subjected black congress people to racial slurs.

I think there is a two-part answer. Being black and president, Obama is an easy target for predominantly white outrage. While there has been notable improvement in the racial structure of this society the felt racism is still very much alive and available for political manipulation, which brings me to the second part of the answer.

If you trace the origin of the "Tea Party" phenomenon you will find it is a creation of Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks operation. FreedomWorks is funded by corporations such as General Electric, General Motors and AT&T. What, one might ask, do the unhinged thousands that participate in Tea Party events, spit on and utter racist slurs to black congressmen who voted for the health care bill, vandalize the homes of representatives who voted for the bill, and believe that Sara Palin is presidential material, have in common with the heads of major U.S. corporations? From the corporate point of view, these people, frightened by fear and loss, vessels of sublimated racism and members of a middle class that has been shrinking for decades at the hands of corporate outsourcing, being highly emotional, easily manipulated by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck are ideal foils for distracting public antipathy from themselves and focusing it on the government they use for the fall guy. The danger is that this kind of purposeless stress, especially in a society as vacuous as ours, will produce insane responses divorced from any humane workable solution. In Nazi Germany the jobs that we now cry for were provided by a war machine that killed millions. Our current situation fits, with a good deal of accuracy, the early 20th century rise of fascism.

Noam Chomsky recently gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in which he sees the storm clouds of fascism forming in this country. I have appended a report on the speech below. These are very dangerous times beyond the ken of the majority of Americans who believe their justified anger will lead them to an acceptable solution. They are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. One important task at hand is how to penetrate that anger and direct it to its cause. The corporations are the primary villains and are the proper and productive target for their rage. We must ask ourselves, for example, why we have not long since pilloried Rupert Murdoch for his calloused efforts to create a massively destructive earthquake along the racial and class fault lines of our society. There is no need in reality for the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Their only function is to further Murdoch's greed for both money and power at the expense of our society's sanity, the destruction of our democracy and an increasing risk of fascism. This man is a calloused culprit and should be so branded by all who are concerned to create a workable society in these increasingly strange times in human history.

Bob Newhard
*************************
As have many others, I have tried to understand the phenomenon of political rage demonstrated by Republicans. We apparently have millions of presumably mature adults very distressed about issues that have no substance. There are many answers and that is part of the problem. Are they no longer capable of recognizing reality? Do they really believe Obama is a socialist? Do they really believe Sara Palin is presidential material? In that event do they really care what happens to this country? These people appear to be very angry. About what? Loss of jobs or homes? That is due to corporate greed unleashed by the Republicans. They must know this.

I think people are angry because of what has happened to them and the rather bleak prospects for much improvement in the near term. But then why vilify Obama? He did not cause the pain they feel. There was outrage at Clinton presumably for his sexual behavior, but nothing comparable to the noisy, often vicious, protests against Obama. Representatives who voted for Obama's health care bill have had their homes vandalized. Tea Partiers have spat upon and subjected black congress people to racial slurs.

I think there is a two-part answer. Being black and president, Obama is an easy target for predominantly white outrage. While there has been notable improvement in the racial structure of this society the felt racism is still very much alive and available for political manipulation, which brings me to the second part of the answer.

If you trace the origin of the "Tea Party" phenomenon you will find it is a creation of Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks operation. FreedomWorks is funded by corporations such as General Electric, General Motors and AT&T. What, one might ask, do the unhinged thousands that participate in Tea Party events, spit on and utter racist slurs to black congressmen who voted for the health care bill, vandalize the homes of representatives who voted for the bill, and believe that Sara Palin is presidential material, have in common with the heads of major U.S. corporations? From the corporate point of view, these people, frightened by fear and loss, vessels of sublimated racism and members of a middle class that has been shrinking for decades at the hands of corporate outsourcing, being highly emotional, easily manipulated by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck are ideal foils for distracting public antipathy from themselves and focusing it on the government they use for the fall guy. The danger is that this kind of purposeless stress, especially in a society as vacuous as ours, will produce insane responses divorced from any humane workable solution. In Nazi Germany the jobs that we now cry for were provided by a war machine that killed millions. Our current situation fits, with a good deal of accuracy, the early 20th century rise of fascism.

Noam Chomsky recently gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in which he sees the storm clouds of fascism forming in this country. I have appended a report on the speech below. These are very dangerous times beyond the ken of the majority of Americans who believe their justified anger will lead them to an acceptable solution. They are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. One important task at hand is how to penetrate that anger and direct it to its cause. The corporations are the primary villains and are the proper and productive target for their rage. We must ask ourselves, for example, why we have not long since pilloried Rupert Murdoch for his calloused efforts to create a massively destructive earthquake along the racial and class fault lines of our society. There is no need in reality for the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Their only function is to further Murdoch's greed for both money and power at the expense of our society's sanity, the destruction of our democracy and an increasing risk of fascism. This man is a calloused culprit and should be so branded by all who are concerned to create a workable society in these increasingly strange times in human history.

Bob Newhard
*************************
Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America

By Matthew Rothschild, April 12, 2010

Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.

“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.
“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.
Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”

There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.

And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
“The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’
People see that and are not happy about it.
”
He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”
“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.

And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”

He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.” When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.

No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said. “These are lessons to keep in mind.”

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
.

The Insidiousness of Privatising Public Services.

2010-04-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, March 31 2010, the Californian carried an editorial arguing that Saturday mail delivery should be abolished in the interest of saving money. The editorial, dripping with anti-government sentiment, stated that "The U.S. Postal Service is gushing red ink like, well, the rest of the federal government …" To help stop this "gushing" the Californian argues that Saturday mail delivery should be abandoned. In effect the argument is that because the Postal Service is not making money, actually loosing it,, its service should be truncated. This is a free market argument and should have nothing to do with government services, which are not intended tg make a profit. While cost controls are necessary, they are not to be determined by the private sector. Until 1970 the Postal Service was known as the Post Office Department, one of two departments specifically required by the Constitution and whose head was a member of the President's cabinet. As a result of the Postal workers strike, because of abysmally low pay and poor working conditions, President Nixon in 1970 pushed through the act creating the United States Postal Service, a private entity. From that point on what was a tax-supported public service became a for profit operation and thereby a suitable target for conservative maligning. The Post Office was set up as a government service in the Constitution, not unlike the military or the court system. Conservatives have repeatedly pulled this game of privatizing a public service and then criticizing it on private sector criteria. They are trying the same thing with a national health care plan, but are having a hard time because the exorbitant costs of private sector health care have been long established and glaring.

Under Ronald Reagan this was no longer a game. It became policy to appoint government agency heads with the specific intent of weakening or abolishing those agencies. It is interesting that people can be sent to jail for plotting to overthrow the government, but when Newt Gingrich's Republicans refused to fund the federal government or Ronald Reagan set about systematically destroying it or when Grover Norquist says it must be drowned in a bathtub not a peep was or is heard.

This kind of argument is endemic to the conservative mind set, namely, that the profit-driven sector should be the measure of public services. It is erroneous, if not malicious, in its assumption not only in measuring services by profit measurement alone, but even in assuming that profit-driven services can out perform the public sector even on a cost basis. Health care cost in this country compared to that of other industrialized countries is a glaring example.

I first noticed the technique now being employed to attack the Postal Service when, in the early 1960s, I was a librarian at the Los Angels Public Library. I had responsibility for the printing collection. The trade magazines were running articles on California's decision to transfer the printing of the election ballots from the state printer to a commercial firm that said they could do it cheaper. The name of that game was to continuously deny the state printer funds to upgrade its equipment until it was made sufficiently inefficient to warrant transferring its business to the private sector. Similarly, by refusing to make e-mail a public service under the Postal Service even though e-mail Internet service providers (ISPs) were using the government-built Internet, conservatives now use the adverse impact of e-mail as another reason to cut back on Postal Service funding. E-mail, as part of the Postal Service, could have been much more productively integrated with regular mail service.

Over all this privatization gambit is but one conservative strategy as it has laid siege to our government. Government can become inefficient, but the remedy is not to turn its functions over to the for-profit sector, which has no fundamental concern, not can it have, for citizen well being. Nor is it a shining example of efficiency as is amply demonstrated by the automobile industry. Progressives need to dispel this Regan-generated myth, which has of late generated the practice of depriving employees of legally required benefits and the government of taxes by declaring employees as contractors. And these people are the shining examples of how our society should be run?

Bob Newhard

The Case of the Misplaced Virtue

2010-03-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

I first noticed this phenomenon many decades ago when studying Plato's Republic. Plato holds that knowledge is the highest virtue. It followed therefore that society should reflect this fundamental truth. It followed from this that what was needed to assure that knowledge would remain society's defining virtue was a philosopher king. Hence a fundamental individual virtue, when applied to society, resulted in a dictatorship, albeit a dictatorship of wisdom. This is a case in which a private virtue, one properly ascribed to an individual, was made into a public virtue with, I suggest, the expected result. Indeed I. F. (Izzy) Stone the renowned investigative reporter, in his book, The Trial of Socrates, argues that Plato was part of a movement to overthrow the Athenian democracy.

For much of human history private virtues dominated the public arena. Government was viewed by the mass of people as good or bad on a personal scale, e.g. a good or bad monarch. The notion of the family was expanded to government as the monarch was viewed as the father of the country and the population as his children. Theoretically the state was his private domain. All others held their land in fief to him. Again this resulted in arbitrary rule as the father was viewed as the arbitrary ruler of this family.

Public virtues such as justice and equality came to the fore with the rise of democracy. Emanuel Kant saw this dichotomy and sought to reconcile these two kinds of virtue when he proposed that the private virtue of not lying was actually a public virtue because if everyone lied society could not function. While this effort to derive the private virtue of not lying from public necessity merits significant thought, it is interesting to note that not even the highest oath of office in our country, that of the President, makes no mention of not lying.

The problem is that private virtues are absolute for the individual who subscribes to them and thus become tyrannical when applied to public affairs. If honesty is a virtue for an individual then "more or less honest" will not do.

In our time this confusion of private and public virtue has become critical for the survival of our democracy. Conservatives, by passionately trumpeting individual virtues as replacements for public virtues such as equality and justice, have argued that charity should replace some major social services. You may remember President George H. W. Bush's call for a thousand points of light to solve glaring discrepancies in wealth. Thus the wealthy would decide when and if the poor were to receive the help they badly needed. This is not democracy! Again the current "debate" on health care pushes the conservative's private virtue of individual responsibility into the public arena where citizen rights and welfare should predominate and it does this with disastrous results for 46 million Americans, including 9 million children who have no health insurance.

One result of this relentless and deliberate insertion of private virtues into the public arena is that Americans have lost the sense of society and its importance. Democracy must accommodate a wide variety of private values of citizens; therefore its values, must in a sense, transcend those values in the interest of the society as a whole. This is not to say, for example, that we do not want personal honesty in government. It is to say that we do not require it as a condition of public office holding except in positions where it is critical, e.g. the town treasurer in the conduct of affairs related to that office. If honesty were rigorously required of politicians neither they nor this society could function for the simple reason politicians must say different things to different constituents if they are to be elected. We the citizens require this as we so frequently vote our private values rather than the public values of justice and equality.

There was a time when public virtues played a much stronger role in our public affairs. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration we actively sought and voted for the public good. We believed in the public good of public education as a right for children not a privilege of the wealthy. Public education was full of experimentation as we tried to understand what stimulated young people to learn. John Dewey fought to make the student the focus of education, not the institution. He understood Jefferson's view that education was the primary job of society and should focus on helping people realize their potential. Properly understood, society's goal was to produce an increasingly competent and curious citizenry. Conservatives have turned this on its head by declaring that they know the best things for students and education should be directed at instilling those values. Contemporary conservatism is at its heart dead. It is analogous to a hurricane or tornado; next to nothing at its center, but enormously destructive to everything around it. It does not want to inquire and base knowledge on the results of honest inquiry. Neither do corporations, and this is one of the roots of agreement between conservatives and the corporate world. It should never be forgotten that ignorance is deeply rooted in Christian culture. Knowledge of good and evil was a penalty God bestowed on Adam and Eve for their misbehavior. The Christian phrase " a little child shall lead them" implies that the ignorance of innocence is a virtue. These are the kinds of homilies out of which dictatorships are fashioned. Hitler's vision for the Nazi youth movement was purity of spirit. The image of Nietzsche's young eubemensch striding the Bavarian mountaintops captured the German imagination as "family values" and sexual purity threaten to distort our own public perceptions.

In short, be wary, very wary, of translating personal virtues into public virtues.

Bob Newhard

Limits

2010-03-07T22:04:00.000-08:00

The other day the L. A. Times carried an article on the increasingly evident limits to Olympic athletic performance, unassisted by drugs or technology. To quote;

"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."

That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."

This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"

This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.

What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.

In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.

Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.

He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4

While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.

To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"

Bob Newhard

The Contract-Based Society

2010-02-20T15:30:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, Between the real and the absurd falls the contract.

This was my thought as I pondered cause and effect in our recent plumbing fiasco. The builder, so called, did not build the house: they subcontracted to others. Some of the subcontractors did not build the house: they subcontracted. The builder was actually in the business of selling mortgages. This I discovered twelve years ago when we bought the house.

How much has the artifact called the contract pervaded our society and what are its consequences? I have yet to get anything close to a clear answer to that question, but it seems to me that the further a contract gets from the product or service it references, the more deleterious it becomes for society.

In terms of human history, contracts as we know them, are a rather recent innovation. The ancient Chinese people had no written contracts. When disputes arose over obligations they were adjudicated on the basis of fairness: a strange legal notion that. We long ago abandoned fairness as a contract criterion. Now it is caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.

One of the consequences of the increasing remoteness of the contract from the product or service it represents is that it becomes a commodity itself and is thus subject to speculation. For example the commodities market consists of nothing but contracts to buy real goods at a specified time for a specified price. These contracts become gambling entities as speculators buy and sell contracts based on variables such as weather forecasts, market timing, etc. Thus prices are driven higher than actual demand for the goods themselves. How much this increase is on average I have been unable to ascertain, but the massive amounts of money made on this market indicate it is not trivial.

A sense of the magnitude of this increased cost can be gained from Holly Jean's blog conjuring grace: field notes from the 21st century. (Her complete name is Holly Jean Buck.) She quotes Charles Derber in her blog, "Most of the financial activity going on in the world is in this kind of betting; nothing of value is created with these derivatives. For every $1 floating around the productive wold economy of real goods and services, there is an estimated $20 to $50 circulating in the world of pure finance, producing or creating nothing." Jean's bolg is well worth reading. It may be found at
http://www.createdestroyenjoy.net/grace/2008/06/adventures-in-global-finance-part-iii.html.

A study done by the University of Ohio for the state legislature found that although law professionals argued the value of the contract that in many rural communities contracts were much less formal, usually expressions of common law or simply verbal agreements. To quote,

Economists and business oriented social scientists and legal scholars generally believe that contracts that include all relevant verifiable terms to a transaction are preferable to "incomplete" contracts that omit many relevant terms thereby reducing the ability of a court or arbitrator to enforce the contract. However, canonical economic models that have supported this theory are largely based on one-shot transactions where two parties come together to execute a single transaction. The economic models and experiments developed in this project suggest that incomplete contracts may lead to higher productivity in repeat trading environments where people develop relationships by trading repeatedly over time with a small group of known trading partners. In these environments, complete contracts are not necessary because these relationships become self enforcing in the sense that the threat of relationship unraveling is sufficient to discipline the trading partners so that they honor their obligations. Moreover, their obligations are often implicitly understood rather than legally understood so that they need not be included in a contract. Finally, incomplete contracts provide trading partners with greater flexibility to respond and adapt to the actions of trading partners thereby reducing transactions costs increasing productivity.

In this connection David Korten, in his new book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, makes a distinction between the highly speculative economy of Wall Street and the more responsible economy of Main Street. The main difference is the proximity of the economic activity to the goods, services, and people involved. This is another way of saying that the chicaneries of Wall Street and, I would add the corruption of our society and politics is substantially a matter of our size.

At the far end of the distance between the product or service and its contract we have our recent mortgage debacle. Here contracts were not only commodities, they were sliced, diced and packaged into other commodities called securities. When contracts get this far removed from their source the contract has absolutely lost its anchor in reality and becomes a free-floating object for the fun and games of financial speculators. Greed rules. There is no social benefit. Disaster awaits.

A sign that the various costs of contracting are coming home to roost may be found in General Motors' decision to forgo its extensive contractual outsourcing of manufacture and make most of its new Volt electric car in house. Among the reasons given are; Achieving performance, quality and reliability by doing all design, manufacturing, materials selection and production procedures in house. Achieving exceptional power density, NVH, and high reliability and affordability only achievable by understanding and engaging the entire electric motor vaue chain.

It appears that globalization and the financial instruments it uses are not, because of the vast increases in cost and social disruption, the panacea its promoters have proclaimed. However, it is, to my mind, still an open question whether, given our overpopulated planet, any other kind of economy, especially one enjoying the benefits of localism, can persist.

Further there is a fundamental issue for human beings here. When humans first formed societies it was for security. Why, after so many millennia, do we put our basic necessities, e.g. food, at the mercy of a gambling den? Ought not humans and their welfare be the animating endeavor in basic needs distribution? Why should such a system be put at any greater peril than absolutely necessary? The results of the present system are mass starvation among the poor of this earth. Global Research in its 2008 report titled Global Famine declares, "Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation. They are largely attributable to speculative trade on the commodity markets." When we let financial speculation, i.e. gambling, come between humanity and its food we are looking moral corruption straight in the eye.

Bob Newhard