On becoming a nonagenarian

As of my 90^th birthday, a few observations on the intervening 90 years:

Population

World population in 1923 - 1,936,077,000!

World population 2011 = 7,021,836,029

U.S. population 1923 =111,947,000

U.S. population 2011 =311,600,000

This astounding rate of population increase is at the root of many of the most complex problems humanity faces. And this despite World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the current “war” on terror  that has killed millions.

How many of humanity’s problems can be traced to this fact alone. When will we hold religions that promote population growth to account?

In the face of this imminent threat we have the Pope expressing his deep concern for the poor, who are the major product of overpopulation, yet fighting the only effective means of reducing population--birth control and abortion. And this church is supposed to be a moral arbiter.  Put this together with Muslim and conservative protestant religions and you have identified a major threat to human survival.

Technology

My stepfather was born in a covered wagon going from Iowa to Alberta Canada. He lived to see humans on the moon. That is, of course, an immense change, probably greater than any since the discovery of the new world. Yet, Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock, argued that the rate of change humans experience is itself accelerating. I have asked myself what in my lifetime could possibly exceed what my stepfather witnessed. While the full impact has yet to be realized, molecular biologists have begun reconstructing life forms by manipulating DNA. As this expands, humanity will be taking its evolution into its own hands. For good and bad, assuming our species survives all that it faces, this capacity portends an immense change both in humans and in their society.

Cultural change

The comparatively simple American culture of my youth became a paragon of excess and waste as the world’s resources flowed to the United States following World War II. New clothing was deliberately shredded to produce blue jeans with holes in them as the witless fashions of excess took hold. The average house expanded from two bedrooms to as high as ten or eleven. William Whyte portrayed the sterility of corporate life in his 1950 book The Organization Man and Sloan Williams’ The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit dramatized this sterility.

In this period of exceptional affluence we found that affluence was, in the end, a kind of sickness and vacuity, which for want of purpose, has led to empire and continuous war.

Science

The one massive upbeat during the last 80 years has been science, as it has kept humanity in creative touch with the real world we inhabit. In it we have seen distant planets up close. It has unraveled our very being in the double helix. It is making clear how much a part of the natural world we humans are. We have yet to learn how to use the tools and methods of science to understand ourselves sufficiently to curtail the barbarities we unleash upon ourselves.

Our largest remaining enterprise is to understand deeply that we are our own worst enemy and that we have to correct that before we perish at our own hands. This is the extremely difficult task we have left to those who follow us and for which we can give them little guidance.

With this column I will begin writing on a less regular schedule than the biweekly pattern I have observed for the last seven-plus years. Some of the vicissitudes of old age, notably macular degeneration, have made reading and writing an increasingly difficult task. I hope to continue posting about as often as I have been, just not as regularly. Should this Center for Public Deliberation web site close, I will continue to publish my thoughts and observations on my Blogspot blog titled Temecula Valley Reflective Liberal.

Finally, I wish to thank Jerry and Maxine Ewig and Mark Brosius, who created this website years ago as part of Howard Dean’s Democracy for America effort in the Temecula Valley in California. Most especially I want to express my gratitude for the editorial work of my wife Eleanor, which has greatly increased as my eyesight has weakened. May humanity yet find a way to survive the conflicts that evolution has built into it and realize its enormous capacity to understand the near infinity of its universe and the complexity of itself.

Bob Newhard

Once More into the Future

I have frequently urged the creation of progressive perspective to provide progressivism  with a developmental coherency, which in my judgment, it currently lacks and that should also function as a motivational rallying point for progressives as does the concept of “freedom,” misused as it is, for conservatives.

The closest effort in this direction that I have seen so far is a multi-topic article in the American Prospect magazine titled A Strategic Plan for Liberals.”

This document was published in the Nov./Dec. issue of the American Prospect magazine and is intended to be a “the road map for a progressive future.” It is meant to do for progressives what the Lewis Memo, written in August 1971, did for American business. Corporate attorney Lewis Powell wrote this memo to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce a few months before his appointment to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. In the memo Powell lamented the loss of influence American business had suffered under the New Deal and argued that to regain its influence (by which it is clear he meant dominance) it must become far more political. He laid out a number of things that business had to do, among them use the media much more effectively to influence public policy. To this end he suggested the creation of think tanks to create reports promoting business interests, hence, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute. The Chamber adopted Powell’s suggestions enthusiastically and has been putting large amounts of money into the effort ever since. The project has been a huge success, eventuating in making government an enemy of the people, to be curtailed as severely as possible by transferring its functions to the for-profit private sector. It has also used and subverted government to capture resources and create markets to further its insatiable lust for profit.  It has, by the resultant propaganda and corporate control of the media, convinced many Americans that business is more efficient than government, despite a Social Security department that puts the private sector to shame. It even portrays government as the enemy of freedom. For those, like me, who are unfamiliar with this episode in American history, I strongly recommend reading the above cited article in the American Prospect.

The Strategic Plan For Liberals is intended to do for progressivism what the Lewis Memo has done for conservatives. It consists of a collection of articles written by various authors addressing various issues often by way of specific proposals such as creating a million federal jobs to deal with unemployment.

Despite many important suggestions, the              strategic Plan is, in my judgment, mainly a hodgepodge of suggestions that have merit on their own, but offer little as a progressive perspective on the major dilemmas people face in this age of monumental economic, cultural, ethnic, and other conflicts. We need a view on how to maximize human potential and create a  world in which the human beings and their  society are the fundamental concern.

A few points in what I would call a Progressive Perspective follow.

·      Do not let wealth accumulate to any individual or organization beyond identified need. Wealth is power and great wealth is great power and, as such, is a major threat to democracy. Speculative wealth is the worst because it is tied to no need and is, hence, a major source of mischief running from depression to war. Controlling wealth by taxation will divert it to societal improvement for all. The argument that great wealth is needed to stimulate creativity and innovation is falsified daily by the creativity of scientists in the employ of universities and government. The single most influential innovation of the late part of the 20^th century is the Internet, a product of government.

·      Identify and make viable a defined and motivating criterion for the progressive movement. I suggest survival of our species. This will entail making clear the degree that said survival is now at risk and how the threat to our survival is likely to develop. We must make repeated demonstrations about the consequences of resource depletion, pointing out how the latest war or famine is an expression of this depletion. Resource depletion is at the root of much of current conflict, especially oil. Many of the issues in the world today, from drone attacks to bloated military budgets to ecological disasters, are products of oil depletion alone. Let us put it all together as a consummate threat to human survival.

·      Finally, for this short list, our value systems must move substantially from the individual to the societal. As E. O. Wilson, the famed social biologist has pointed out in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, the most successful and enduring species in the history of evolution have been socially based. Put another way, we sink or survive as a species. Let us use our natural assets   of reason and empathy to create our path to survival.

Bob Newhard

narbonne42

Nader's Hope for 2016: An "Enlightened" Billionaire with Progressive Vision Article  headline from Common Dreams for June 23, 2013

It is doubtful that our country has seen any more dedicated, effective, intelligent, and knowledgeable  progressive than Ralph Nader. Nader has bucked corporate America, been threatened by them, and has seen federal laws written as a result of his efforts over the last nearly 50 years. Long ago Nader began pointing out that there was no substantial difference between the two major political parties. They both got money, which some have called the life blood of politics, from the same corporations. Nader now rests his hope for Progressivism in an enlightened billionaire. This kind of change in some one as thoughtful and knowledgeable as Nader must provoke the most serious self-reflection among progressives that they have yet had to face.

Nader, in effect, is saying that the people can no longer successfully challenge money. He is saying, in effect, democracy is dead. If he is right, what then?

I surmise that Nader sees the power of global wealth and the system of global capitalism and sees no way that ordinary people can prevail against the monster that our country is largely responsible for creating. Around the world from Europe to the Middle East to Southeast Asia  and South America we see massive resistance by millions of ordinary citizens against the economic  and social environment that global capitalism has produced. We also see the masters of that system ignore or seek to destroy that resistance.

Progressives must now ask themselves whether global capitalism has in fact defeated democracy. If we say no, we must say, with the same candor as Nader, why not. If we say yes, we must begin to articulate how, if at all, Progressive values can be restored and maintained in the political, economic, social and  cultural milieu that now define the world we live in.

For my part, I still have some confidence that mass resistance can still overcome centralized power, even in this technologically advanced global environment.

Global corporations have a significant advantage over other forms of human organization including political institutions such as nations. Large multinational corporations have faster means for decision making. They have the ability to deploy resources very quickly and to subordinate individuals, nations and organizations to their objectives. Political decision making is frequently slow, especially in a democracy, which, I suspect, is one reason the Obama administration has become increasingly authoritarian and secretive.

To successfully oppose such a controlling entity people must use their numbers to, in effect, render themselves useless to this human-based corporate monster whose only source of income is, ultimately, other humans. Without a market, capitalism goes nowhere. Historically masses of humanity have overcome wealthier, better organized and technologically advanced opponents. For example, the Soviet Union, barely out of feudalism, was able to defeat the Nazi military by throwing huge numbers of human beings against them and suffering huge losses in the process, but the human mass prevailed. Organized labor was able by its sheer numbers to shut down General Motors by sit-ins, now called occupying, in the 1930s. John L. Lewis and his coal miners defeated the power of the coal companies in the 1930s. Nader, obviously, believes this can no longer be done. I suspect the power of global capitalism is, in his mind, too great to defeat by mass resistance.  (He may also think that such a solution, given the military technology of the corporate state, would lead to massive, perhaps societal-destroying, violence.) I think, however, that the fact that people are toppling powerful regimes in the Middle East and South America, regimes which have frequently deployed advanced military technology against them, evidences that a determined people in their large mass can bring organized, advanced power to its knees. The people of Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc. are forcing European states to reconsider their cozy relationship to big banks and wealthy investors. The European Union is considering a transaction tax on the trillion-dollar-a-day trading in currency and other financial instruments. This has been the fiscal home of the very rich. Similarly, the tax havens of the wealthy are undergoing tighter controls to insure that the wealthy pay their taxes on this sequestered wealth. Much of this is happening because people in their numbers are in the streets energetically demonstrating that they know why they are suffering economic deprivation. People may yet prevail over the instruments of their oppression.

What I have written above is premised on non-violent protesting. If this, in the context of a winner-take-all global economy, is not possible then the horrors of carnage to exhaustion will descend upon us. This is the consequence that, in my opinion, prompted Nader to opt for salvation through well-motivated wealth.

 There is a natural progression in human consumption-based economies from need to want to greed. This progression is not only out of control in capitalism, it is enshrined. In a time of decreasing resources and increasing population we must obviously find a better economic system.

Protests are highly emotional things in which reason gives way to categorical thinking and ideological irrelevance. The massive protests in Brazil are already confronting the all too pervasive divide between middle-class and working/poor class groups. An account of the efforts to bridge this gap, titled Brazil’s Left Is Eager to Lead the “Swarm”, may be found at http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/06-0

All I value has been created by human beings.  That their marvelous capabilities should be crushed in a multi-dimensional excess that they are incapable of controlling, challenges the depths of sorrow and despair we humans can feel. But, as Pete Seeger says in his song My Rainbow Race, I will give it one more try.

Bob Newhard

Prisoners of PRISM

A majority of Americans – 56% -- say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism.  (Source: Pew Research Center poll dated June 17, 2013.)

To my mind, the above finding reveals a level of ignorance, amnesia, and naiveté that a democracy cannot long withstand.  The Pentagon has told the Congress that they anticipate 15 to 20 years of continuous warfare. That alone is more than a viable democracy can maintain. Now we discover that all Americans may expect to see their personal behavior monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA).

This immense and growing database will be housed in an equally immense facility being built in Utah. The data mining activities to be applied to it can be expected to be very sophisticated. If, as it is said, they can identify individuals from it as well as the relationships with other individuals, one can expect every branch of government and every corporation with its Congressional henchpersons to be mining for its own purposes. It may be said that access to the database will be strictly controlled, but over the life time of such a data resource, justifications and pressures may be expected to prevail.

Consider, as an example, the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover used the resources of the FBI as he chose without any real Congressional oversight.  In fact, some legislators were fearful of him for what he might reveal about them. He persecuted Martin Luther King Jr., bugging his home, his office and the various hotels he stayed in. The latter activity turned up the fact that MLK was having affairs with women not his wife. The FBI employee even suggested that King might prefer to commit suicide rather than have these liaisons revealed. This 56% majority should ask themselves what might happen if another Hoover got hold of this database.

Again, Senator Joseph McCarthy wielded the power of his office to hound people and destroy careers and livelihoods by innuendo and fabrication.  McCarthy had no qualms about modifying a photo to show that two people were together at a certain time and place when they were not. Could another such powerful senator, riding the wave of popular hysteria or a congressional committee such as HUAC, do the same with PRISM? All it would take would be to show that a person or group placed phone calls to others who had placed call to yet others some of whom were known terrorists.  Guilt by association would do the rest.

We know other countries have fallen prey to the domination of secrecy. East Germany under Soviet control had its Stasi, many members of which were ordinary citizens reporting on the behavior of other ordinary citizens. Angela Merkel expressed to President Obama Germany’s concern about PRISM, especially the Boundless Information program within it that focused heavily on German citizens, by comparing PRISM to the infamous Stasi. As a result of their experience with the Stasi, Germany has one of the strictest privacy laws in the world. That we have secretly and massively violated it does not sit well with one of the United States’ most important allies. The level of fear in such a society is very high, which may have been the primary function of the Stasi.

This database is being developed and controlled under contract by a major corporation—Booz Allen Hamilton. This means that access to information from the database is in the hands of the private sector, where money rules supreme. One should not think for a moment that Booz Allen Hamilton is above all temptations.

With these few observations of the risk in which our democracy has been placed by the Obama Administration in mind, let us consider the context in which this database will exist.

The Pentagon has told the Congress that it expects our wars to continue for another 15 to 20 years. Reflect on what has happened to our democracy in the decade of war we have just gone through. At the end of another 15 to 20 years of war, we will have a garrison state under the military control of the Homeland Security Department. By then the citizen will have become a subject living in an environment of suspicion, control, and fear. Whatever it becomes, it will kill our democracy and democratic freedoms. It is up to citizens of today to stop this horrendous project before it accomplishes exactly what Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have in mind. There is an implicit conflict in any democracy between freedom and security. To preserve a democratic state its citizens must, by the very conditions this bifurcation creates, take some degree of risk to preserve their democracy. This is a lesson the American citizenry have yet to grasp and has led them to be easily manipulated by fear, as G.W. Bush knew when he created colored levels of imminent Al-Qaeda terrorist attack. Our citizenry needs to grow up, calm down, and carefully develop a democracy-protecting strategy for our country. Obviously our military and our current administration cannot do it.

Admittedly, this is a big order for an American populace that seems to have forgotten the risks and efforts of the nation’s founders to create our democracy and the civic courage of those who undertook its preservation in precarious times. As the fights for a just economy and civil rights called upon the citizenry of those times, so the current destruction of our Constitutional liberties call upon us to marshal a vigorous opposition capable of stopping the erosion of our democracy. They did it in their time, we must in our time.

All futures lie in time and circumstance. Let us look at both and do our part in creating a viable and promising future for this nation and this world.

Bob Newhard  

On Humanity Overcoming its Technology

“For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.” So says Noam Chomsky in an essay titled “Humanity Imperiled
The Path to Disaster.”

Finally, the human species and its survival are becoming the focus of at least some human attention. This concern should be the bedrock of all efforts to create a better world. Every effort in that direction should be able to show its significance for human species preservation and enhancement.

With this in mind it is useful to see how it plays out in the views of those who think about it as a profession. Oxford University is the home of the multidisciplinary Future of Humanity Institute. The Institute has a major commitment to the evaluation of various threats to the survival of the human species.

The BBC report on the work of the Institute explores the thinking of its members in a document  that can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530k. Everything from pandemics to war as a cause of human species extinction is evaluated in terms of what our species has survived up to this point in the context of an evolution that has seen far more species go extinct than survive. In the end, they come up with the human species’ greatest threat to its survival. This threat resides in our brain and increasing technological accomplishments. Currently biological engineering, artificial intelligence and machine self-replicative production rank high in their species lethality. What is of primary concern with these threats is the inability of humans to control them; their broad potential for unintended consequences. When a life form is modified or created using genetic engineering have all the potential effects, physical, mental and social been taken into account? Put another way; the gap between discovery and implementation is getting wider as the potential of the technology is increasing, some would say exponentially. For example, in today’s news we are told that Uruguayan scientists have transferred a gene that produces fluorescence in jellyfish to sheep that now glow in the dark. One researcher gave as a reason for doing this, beyond diabetes and hemophilia, that their success may attract outside corporate research and production to their small country. In other words, we have modified a long-established life form in order to attract investment. As to the need for greater control over technology and its development need one say more?

To me, one of the most threatening cases of unintended consequences was the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein proposed it because he was concerned that the Germans were developing it. It was used, it was said, to save American lives that would be lost in an invasion of Japan. The fact that Japan had indicated its willingness to concede defeat in discussions with the Russians if they could retain the Emperor in power was known. However, that was not enough to save the lives of Japanese civilians, including children, because the real objective was to demonstrate our new technology to the Russians. On the occasion of the bomb’s first test explosion Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan project that developed the bomb, made clear the terrible consequences that would flow from this technology. Today some of the smallest countries on the planet have deployed this technology. All this to impress the Russians. It simply stimulated rapid development of the technology of mass human annihilation in yet another country.

But the beat goes on. We have allowed corporations to drive the process of technology development and deployment with little concern, other than for profit. Does Monsanto know or care whether its genetically modified corn may greatly reduce corn diversity and thereby the grain’s resistance to some newly mutated corn disease? Has the importance of biodiversity been adequately brought to bear on a technology driven by relatively short term profit? We are allowing the worst institutions, as far as accountability is concerned, to decide these matters. That a halt must be called to this process is more than evident, it is imperative. Can it be made a cause célèbre, in a world of hype, where fact loses out regularly to fiction?

As I have noted previously, in the human bifurcation of body and brain, the brain, unfortunately so often driven by the appetites of the body, is taking humanity into the territory of unimaginable consequences. Clearly, we must take technological development out of the hands of profit-driven corporations. Our concern is not to find or create the next market; it is to create a viable future for the human species.

Bob Newhard

Overcoming Our Values

“Humanity today is like a walking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.”

“We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

E O. Wilson – The Social Conquest of Earth

History has seen science destroy the mythic cosmology of the Catholic Church. Science still finds heavy resistance as its biological evidence destroys a mythic story of divine creation of humanity. Currently there is increasing evidence that the free will that we base our legal and moral systems on is also an illusion. Neuroscientists are pursuing the likelihood that all values are illusory in that they cannot be found in nor reliably represent the world of fact.

Neuroscientists investigating the “living brain” with new technology have discovered that the brain executes a decision and then informs the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of consciousness. Our consciousness labors under the illusion that it is making the decision. We literally do not know we have made a decision until after it has been made. While the time gap between the two events is miniscule, this fact raises fundamental issues for morality and law, both based on the assumption that people know what they are doing.

One of the consequences of values gradually submitting to the rule of fact is that values, which have been a major source of human mayhem (think the Middle East), can be measured against human well-being as it is defined by the real world. A major problem with values is that they can be completely arbitrary and attached to anything, including human fantasies, and for any purpose. Values are beyond any testing or evidence, yet they are capable of marshaling immense force from the people who believe them. They are controlled by nothing and applied to everything. As neuroscience and other sciences reveal more about how they function in the human brain, values will be brought to the bar of fact, hopefully before they destroy us all in some conflagration of ideologues.

But, it may be asked, how would society function without moral values? One suggestion was made by Samuel Butler in his satire of values-ridden Victorian society titled Erewhon published in 1872. Human behaviors in Erewhon  are not morally good or bad, they are healthy or sick. Thus when there was a transgression of Erewhon’s laws the malefactor was sent to the “Straightener” to be healed. It is relevant to note that the law now accepts the condition of the accused’s body and brain as relevant to determining moral responsibility. It was not that many centuries ago that  moral values were so detached from reality that courts were trying animals for transgressing the law, frequently as possessors of evil spirits.

An important thing to notice about Butler’s Erewhon is that it is concerned with reforming society, not the individual. It uses a fictional society to criticize Victorian society and describes what happens to individuals when that change is made. Conservatives generally argue that the individual has to be reformed as a condition for societal reformation. I think this is frequently a cop-out because they know full well that such a prescription will lead to continuing inaction as individuals face the daunting task before them. In a world of 8 billion people social change is the only vehicle for accomplishing the needed changes in mankind if humanity is to survive.

In this connection, E.O. Wilson in his above cited book, points out that social animals and insects have a far greater record of survivability as a species than nonsocial species. In a world where socialization, especially when expressed as a pronounced division of labor, is the best guarantee of species survival, we have a culture focused on the individual, especially, the pronounced individualism of Ayn Rand and the Libertarians.  Legislators in Oklahoma have rejected federal tornado disaster aid on the basis that Oklahoma is a go-it-alone state. We thus have major political movements rejecting, and denying others, the very basis for long-term species survival. Talk about detached values!

In any event, the real world must become the bedrock of our values. We have had enough of competing value systems detached from reality. Free floating fantasies sparking mass slaughter and indifference to the real plight of humanity compounded by the rapidly increasing lethality of our weaponry and the increasing competition for resources insure the end of civilization if not our species. 

This is not to rule out the possibility of converting values to the facts of the real world as distinct from merely basing our values on facts. The feasibility of this can be seen in Carl Sagan’s use of the  “billions and billions” of galaxies in the universe, so immense that human imagination cannot grasp it; we must have mathematical formulae to deal with its immensity. It has many of the properties attributed to god and can by its sheer immensity and complexity engender the awe many people reserve for their deity. It supplies an inexhaustible resource for the human search for meaning and, most importantly, it is rationally addressable.

Humanity’s survival presents a task of unprecedented, multidimensional complexity, fraught with murderously fanciful beliefs and traditions. Our species has much to learn about itself and its environment and very little time to do so. We progressives must be a vehicle for bringing science, its methods and its demand for convincing evidence to the arenas of societal decision making.

Bob Newhard

Quo Vadis Progressivism

Recently the Common Dreams website hosted a conversation with some of their more prominent writers titled A Conversation with Common Dreams: 'Given the Status Quo, What's Needed?' Many of the writers were adamant that what was needed to break the current impasse was a movement. Neither the existing political parties nor the current batch of politicians is up to the task. We could not rely on politicians to lead this society forward until they could be assured that it was politically safe to do so. Regarding the necessity for a movement, John Nichols, a progressive writer for whom I have great respect, pointed out that from Jefferson’s time, through the progressive movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to FDR’s New Deal, we have seen progressive movements rise and make a difference for human well-being. He was of the opinion that we were on the verge of another such an event.

 

As I listened to John I asked myself why these periods of great benefit to the ordinary citizen did not last, being as (supposedly) politics in a democracy express the will of the people?

 

 

Take the end of the New Deal under Ronald Reagan. Granted there was an existing stagflation. Why would people, many of them Democrats,, support Reagan who had made it clear that it was his intention to break the unions and take the American economy back to the unregulated capitalism of the 19^th century. Was an “aw shucks” friendly persona enough to do this? Was a cheery “New morning in America” enough to do it? Was a temporary stall in the capitalist economy enough to do it? The social safety net was in place. There was no depression. Why were masses of people willing to transfer their well-supported trust in government for the self-centeredness and human disregard of a corporatist America?

 

This, I believe, is the kind of question progressives have to answer if they are to create the permanent economic equality that must prevail if this country and this world are to be able to deal effectively with the massive changes society increasingly faces as humans seek to survive the ecological conditions and the untoward social structures they have created.

 

Does this fact mean that progressivism cannot go beyond periods of power and that, like capitalism, it has cycles? Our last progressive era was that of the New Deal. It was brought to an end during a period of economic stagflation by Ronald Reagan who persuaded Americans that the stagflation could be brought to an end only by turning the economy and people’s well-being over to the private sector, aka the corporations.  To show the way he broke the airline controller’s strike by bringing in military air traffic controllers. What we and the world have gone through in the Great Recession is a direct consequence of the American citizenry’s willingness to give up all that had been achieved by the New Deal in order to solve a much more transitory problem.

 

In contrast to much of what was said during the Common Dreams “conversation,” I believe progressives must find a way to make progressivism much less transitory, especially with the need for economic sustainability so imperative. It is wise to remember that, with the rapidly increasing ubiquity and lethality of modern weaponry, economic stability is becoming an imperative for human survival.

 

Progressives need to develop, offer, and push a program for sustained progressivism.

 

For example, when I think of how the catastrophe that was Ronald Reagan’s election and deleterious regime could have been avoided, I think of the preemptive measures that should have been in place when stagflation hits a capitalist economy. As we have reserve funds and pre-developed plans for dealing with natural disasters, so we should have for economic disasters. These should be triggered by stipulated situations and conditions. If society is to retain its multiplicity of interests and energy, this kind of support for economic downturns should be broad and continuously in place.

 

This kind of solution requires planning, as does any complex situation, but we have been fed the myth that planning is anti-democratic; that it does not permit the freedom that innovation requires. The political Right puts planning down as dictatorial control ala Russia’s planned economy. The pejorative distinction used to be their command economy versus our demand economy.

 

The capitalist countries never did acknowledge the accomplishments of the Soviet Union. In less than 70 years they moved from a largely feudal society to putting the first satellite into orbit. Along the way they moved their entire manufacturing establishment east of the Ural Mountains to avoid losing it to the Nazis in World War II and then defeated the Germans. The Soviet Union’s passage from feudalism to an industrial economy can be compared with the nearly 200 years it took the capitalist countries of Europe and America. Of course, it can be said that they had the accomplishments of capitalist industrialization to point the way. While there is obvious truth to that, it should be remembered that the capitalist countries did everything they could to impede Russia’s economic development, including military invasion.

 

The lesson to be learned here is that both Russia and now China have demonstrated effectiveness at dictatorial economic development. Unless the democracies of this planet demonstrate far more responsiveness to marshaling the effort to meet the massive challenges of global warming, impending food and water shortages, and excessive population, mankind may turn to the demonstrated ability of dictatorships to secure its continued survival. Certainly planned economies will become increasingly necessary as the above-noted impending catastrophes unfold.

 

 

But planning requires a perspective; some idea of what the goal is. The political Right has a fairly simple task in this matter, as traditionalists usually do. Pick a traditional belief, make it the goal and do what you have always done. Progressives have a much more difficult task because, in aiming to improve society, we have to be sensitive to the implications of the conditions that confront humanity and figure out ways in which humanity can endure and perhaps flourish in the changed conditions and then figure out how best to bring those changes about. An example of this difference can be found in Hoover’s approach to the Great Depression, namely, let capitalism take its course and Roosevelt’s approach of creating new public programs to deal with the effects of the Depression at all its various levels. These ranged from the Civilian Conservation Corps for unskilled  young men, to reforming agricultural practices, to writer’s projects, to major infrastructure construction. This difference in the complexity of the tasks of the political Right and Left has always pervaded American politics and may account, in part, for more frequent Republican than Democratic governance.

 

As to the nature of a Progressive, some Progressives, people like Cornel West, believe it is necessary to articulate a Progressive value system analogous to the Right’s use of “values” as a political tool. While at some point this may be desirable, I think we should begin elsewhere. Any value system, if we are to avoid the horrific consequence of value systems based on human fantasy and the religious conflict they so frequently spawn, must be based on reality. I suggest this process should begin with the necessity that humans must live in harmony with the planet they inhabit. This is the only home we have ever had and long before we seek habitat elsewhere in the universe we shall have perished if we continue to devastate our home. This planet is the root of whatever commonality we have as a species, a commonality that is essential to our survival. We must keep constantly in mind that we humans are our own worst enemy, accounting for more death and destruction than nature has ever imposed on us. The solutions to the massive problems that confront us are to be found within us, if they are found at all.

 

As an example of developing a Progressive perspective, we might use the work of Lester Brown dealing with the impact of humanity’s suicidal use of the earth. We humans now know enough to undertake this project of environmental harmony. We also know enough about the demands such an adjustment would make on long-standing human beliefs regarding such matters as the right to have as many children as one wants, the right to possess whatever one can legally acquire and the right to enjoy whatever possessions we manage to garner. Our species living in harmony with earth will demand material and psychological adjustments bigger and deeper than mankind has ever experienced, and this in the context of the deadliest weaponry we have ever developed. Deep and persistent thinking will be required for such a foundational effort of Progressivism. Matters such as global warming must be made the concerns of daily living and social planning and inform the founding documents of our changed public institutions.

 

There is an old gospel song containing the line “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” This is the mentality that must be vigorously challenged along with the commandment to go forth and multiply. Such cultural sentiments must not be seen as innocent sentiments, but as dangerous misconceptions. That this world is our only home should be one of the major mantras of Progressivism.

 

It seems to me our task, while overwhelming, is clear and only humans can carry it out.

 

Bob Newhard