When an Open Society Closes Down

The process by which a capitalist society becomes a fascist dictatorship has been articulated by writers such as Umberto Eco, Lawrence Britt and Milton Mayer. Now comes Naomi Wolf with her book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot in which she describes the process in terms of our Constitutional democracy and the current state of the American psyche and historical consciousness or lack thereof.. I found her image of an open society progressively closing down very powerful. As she describes the process in Germany there are almost exact correlates for what has happened in the United States following 9/11. This is a process in the earlier stages of which people go on about their business and entertainment as usual as their democracy is being dismantled, usually by manipulating some catastrophic event attributed to persons or groups already demonized - Hitler’s Reichstag fire in the case of Nazi Germany. It is the acceptance of dramatic changes in the constitutional stricture of a democracy by an indifferent citizenry, in our case we were told to go shopping, that I find most chilling. It is far easier to lose our democratic guarantees of freedom and due process than to reclaim them.

I think we are at a point in the process where it is imperative that we vigorously appeal to that fragment of our Constitutional democracy that remains, namely the vote. We have this, perhaps last, chance to elect a president and congress that are pledged to undo the great harm that has been done and demonstrates the capacity to undertake the task of undoing what the Bush/Cheney cabal have created. Wolf doubts that the Homeland Security Department can be undone because of the vast amount of corporate wealth now derived from that source. It is so large that some experts now refer to it as the security-industrial complex rivaling the military- industrial complex.

Another feature of despotic development described by Wolf is the creation of an external and an internal enemy. This is necessary to achieve control over a society and use the same instruments internally and externally. As we watch the merging of the military and the police to control both external enemies and internal dissident citizens it becomes imperative that the political will be developed to do this. When the U.S. military shifts its strategic training from the open battlefield to the slums of the world you know city dwellers in this country are not immune to similar treatment. Some of you may remember Operation Urban Warrior, a mock invasion of Oakland California by the military in 1999.

At the expense of a long post, I think the best thing I can do is include an article by Naomi Wolf outlining her 10 steps to fascism. I cannot urge you too greatly to take this matter vary seriously. As Wolf points out in her book, the Founding Fathers were not at all sure that ordinary people could govern themselves and hence create a democracy. Ours is one of those times that put this democracy to the test. The list of steps below indicates why.

Bob Newhard

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1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

The Ultimate Contest for Planet Earth

Yesterday, December 10, 2007 Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, issued a call for Google, Goldman Sachs and Wal-mart and other corporations to get the UN commitment to the poor “back on track.” As the UK Guardian put it “Gordon Brown plans to harness at least 20 of the world's biggest multinational companies, including Google and Vodafone, to tackle a "development emergency" in the world's poorest countries and put the international community back on course to achieve seven UN development goals by 2015.” Short of global warming this request betrays one of the most ominous threats the world faces, namely the implied dependence of government on corporations to finance what governments can no longer do. This is privatization on a planetary scale. It acknowledges that corporations have corralled the wealth of the planet. In an earlier blog I mentioned another instance of this phenomenon in which Al Gore has joined a venture capitalist firm to fund profit making solutions to global warming instead of, for instance, working with the UN to create the coordinated governance this problem requires. What Gore is saying by such action is that this dire planetary situation is not going to be dealt with unless a profit is to be made and the corporations will determine how much they will do and how much it will cost. Democracy cannot flourish in such an environment of the rich and the dependent poor.

There is a way, however, to begin dealing with the problem of the world’s poor through the instrument of democratic government. It is called the Tobin Tax.

Instead of relying on the largesse of the corporations, we do what governments have always done; impose a tax to obtain the necessary revenue. But, it may be asked, how are you going to tax multinational corporations that simply move to another country to obtain lower taxes? First it is necessary to identify a global tax base. That is a global activity that will generate the necessary revenue to begin transferring the needed funds to the world’s poor. The Tobin tax would tax all global trades in currency between 0.1% and 2.5%. The daily volume of these global money transactions is between 1.2 and 2 trillion dollars a day. This tax would also discourage short-term speculation, a manifest source of recession and depression. Billions of dollars in currency trades cross the globe daily 24/7.

Now Gordon Brown is aware of the Tobin Tax. It has been introduced in various forms for consideration by various European Union countries. It has been introduced in the past into the United States Congress. Billionaire George Soros even supports a form of it even though, as he says, it would hurt his money trading profits. A successful resolution to support the Tobin Tax if other nations do was passed by Congress in 2000. It had, among its supporters, Dennis Kucinich. The resolution is languishing because it was contingent upon other nations adopting the tax. Why then did Brown call for the corporations to practice charity by providing funds for the relief of poverty in Africa instead of pursuing the Tobin Tax along with other wealthy countries? Perhaps you recall the first President Bush pushing his “thousand points of light” volunteer charity approach to solving the problems of the poor in this country. Charity, as a social remedy, must be rejected. It tacitly denies the right of every individual to the resources of our planet. We need to create a world where people have a right to a decent standard of living. This is what FDR stipulated in his four freedoms speech, one of which was the freedom from want.

For those of you interested in understanding the Tobin Tax there is an excellent article in Wikipedia with links to other sites. We must make people see that we are engaged in a fight with the corporations to preserve democracy for the people. Great wealth and great poverty are enemies of democracy as is unregulated capitalism.

Bob Newhard

Our Bifurcated Nature

The late Carl Sagan wrote his last book, Billions and Billions with the knowledge that he was dying. Presumably one wants to convey what is of utmost importance under these circumstances, yet in an early chapter he is concerned with Monday night football. He asks why this rabid concern for team sports among males. He notes that it gets so heated that murder and mayhem have been the consequence of some soccer games. Sagan gives an excellent account of how this penchant for team sports finds a significant, often defining, place in almost every culture and has been taken so seriously that the penalty for losing was sometimes, as in Mayan culture, death. Why? Sagan traces it back through millions of years of pre-human and human experience of hunting upon which human survival depended and which evolved into war using the same weapons and strategies. He is very good at conveying the importance of the hunt for survival, the risk and teamwork necessary. Additionally, status was conferred on the successful hunter because he provided for group survival. Think millions of years of this and we can begin to grasp the dimension of the problem that this ancient, highly rewarded and necessary skill, has produced for our technologically evolved and overpopulated world. The acclamation given to the hunter, both individual and group for their accomplishment and the required bravery were acknowledged by all repeatedly for thousands of generations. These male hunting groups, Sagan speculates, may be the first “brotherhoods,” The result is that quite possibly the disposition to the hunt, to war and to glory is hardwired into human males. In an age of nuclear weaponry and biological warfare this predisposition is not only irrelevant; it is dangerous to the human species. It is our monumental task to find a way to overcome this primordial male propensity before it does us in.

The only chance we have is to use our unique capacity to think. Can we sublimate this male instinct in sports? William James thought this could be done; Sagan seems to doubt it, witness the mayhem sports can turn loose in men. Can sex, at least an equally potent drive in men, offset this attachment to violence? There is a thread running from ancient Greece to the 1960’s that suggests some potential. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his play Lysistrata apparently thought so, (Lysistrata literally means “"she who disbands armies") as did the make-love-not-war anti-war slogan of the 1960s. Bonobos, the chimpanzee said to be our closest primate relative, use sex to repair the disharmony of community squabbles. How this could be implemented into our society is another matter. Another possibility is to seek societal change into a matriarchy, which has much lower rates of violence. An interesting study in this regard titled Indonesia's matriarchal Minangkabau offer an alternative social system may be found at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-05/uop-imm050902.php. As this study indicates, matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy in which females dominate instead of males. Rather it is a society that is a more co-equal arrangement than one of female domination.

These are but examples. What is imperative is that we understand ourselves much better, that we search our evolutionary past for possible offsets to mass violence, that we use this as evidence, not answers, because humans have never been in the situation that now faces them. Our past can provide evidence, perhaps ideas, but not answers because human beings have never before been faced with their ability to destroy our species. This is new and requires not only facts, but the understanding of the implications of those facts.

Sagan’s understanding of the roots of organized violence and their utter incompatibility with the technological world our intelligence has produced is an instance, I think, of the most profound and increasingly relevant question we can ask. Can the evolved human being, with all the instinctive, cultural and emotional baggage instilled over millions of years, deal with the consequences that evolution has produced. Put another way, can evolved human intelligence overcome human emotion as the primary determinant of human behavior. Our minds have produced a destructive capacity that can destroy the species. Our emotions and their ingrained cultural expressions, e.g. the violence of war and the wanton treatment of our planet now have at their disposal the nuclear and biological ability to destroy our species. While we can look to our past for suggestions of what might be possible, we cannot look to it for solutions. The failure to understand this is what constitutes both the gross error of the conservative traditionalists and their danger to continued human existence. Cases in point are religions bred in tribal cultures that are being promulgated, with increasing violence, as “solutions” to this modern dilemma or the notion of property that asserts that people can “own” portions of this planet and do what they will with it. This planet is briefly inhabited by each of us and is then left to future generations, far larger than ours in cumulative total, with little regard for their needs. We need to shape up. Terrorism is not the fundamental issue of our time – survival is. As a society we must start thinking instead of believing. There is no precedent for humans who are able to destroy their own species. This planet, not our nation, must be the focus of our concern. We must find our own way.

Bob Newhard

The Unitary Presidency, its Source and its Attack on Democracy, the Constitution, the Public Treasury, and the Citizen’s Well-being

The concept of the unitary presidency, also known as the unitary executive, holds that the three branches of government have independent power to interpret the law. Hence, the President of the United States has power independent of Congress or the courts to interpret law and need not follow the will of either Congress or the Courts. Theoretically the Congress and the Courts have each the power to interpret the law as they see fit. They do not, however, have the power to enforce their interpretations. A glaring example of this doctrine has been Bush’s use of signing statements to exert his “law” over that of that of Congress, the only body authorized to create law by the Constitution. Signing statements were infrequently used prior to Bush, usually to protect the prerogatives of the executive branch against perceived overreaching by Congress. From President Monroe to Jimmy Carter signing statements had been used 75 times. G. W. Bush used this device at least 435 times in his first term alone. While Bush far surpasses other presidents in this practice, there was a notable increase during Reagan’s administration, during which Attorney General Ed Meese managed to get West Publishing to include presidential signings in its United States Code Annotated, perhaps the most prestigious and widely used record of United States law. Notice this is law not administrative directives, the latter of which is the province of the executive branch of government.

Bush has also used the “unitary executive” to abrogate treaties, to reject the Geneva Convention and to inflict imprisonment and torture contrary to American law and he has kept these secret imprisonments and tortures out of the courts by asserting his office’s supremacy. Never has fascism been so blatantly declared in this country.

As Jennifer Van Bergen describes it in her excellent Findlaw article http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20060109_bergen.html ,”The unitary executive doctrine arises out of a theory called "departmentalism," or "coordinate construction." According to legal scholars Christopher Yoo, Steven Calabresi, and Anthony Colangelo, the coordinate construction approach "holds that all three branches of the federal government have the power and duty to interpret the Constitution." According to this theory, the president may (and indeed, must) interpret laws, equally as much as the courts.”

Additionally, the unitary executive theory would reverses the definitive 1803 Marbury vs. Madison case in which Chief Justice Marshall’s Supreme Court ruled that in Constitutional issues the courts and ultimately the Supreme Court have the final say.

A major source for this so called theory, which obviously destroys the fundamental Constitutional premise of a balance of powers, has been the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. This is a Far Right group formed in 1982. It is promoting a Far Right attack on the Constitution’s balance of powers requirement as well as the placing of its members in influential positions in government. It has active chapters in about 180 law schools. Among its members are Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Alito and Roberts and Bush appointees Ashcroft and Chertoff, A long, but partial, list of this group’s members in government as well as additional information can be found at http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=3149. The group is funded by such neofascist sources as the Scarife Foundation. According to Supreme Court Justice Alito, a member of the Federalist Society, the organization came out of the Nixon and Reagan administration. The first campus chapters were established at the Yale and Harvard and the University of Chicago law schools. All of this was in place when G. W. Bush became president. His first Attorney General was John Ashcroft, a member of the Federalist Society, who asserted that protest against the president in time of war was treason.

This is a sketch of the legal source of the unitary executive. However, one need only ask why would so much effort go into radical revisionism after 200 years of settled law and precedent involving the relationships of the three branches of government and the role of the Constitution? There has been no massive civil emergency that might occasion such thought as it did when FDR sought to change the composition of the Supreme Court by adding new members. The Court kept siding with property against the mass of suffering citizenry by declaring as unconstitutional measures to alleviate the depression the propertied class had caused.

The underlying motivation of this legal undertaking was to transfer government power and public wealth and resources to the private sector. As Grover Norquist has said, he wants”To drown the beast (government) in a bathtub.” I might add that it has not been Republicans alone that have adopted this posture. Bill Clinton with Al Gore’s assistance auctioned off major portions of the communications spectrum, a public property, to the corporations. Al Gore has now signed on to a major venture capitalist corporation asserting that this is a great opportunity for the private sector to profit from global warming. Gore asserted on the occasion that "What we (his corporation) are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally." As Andrew Leopold in Salon observes, all three of those projects were initiated and successfully completed by government, not corporations. As Naomi Klein says in her seminal new book Shock Doctrine, corporate globalization’s treatment of countries around the world has been brought home with a vengeance by G. W. Bush’s administration. What was done to Argentina, Russia, China, etc has now been done to the United States. The dismantling of government by way of privatization, the resultant massive transfer of public wealth to the private sector, and the oppression of the citizenry have been hallmarks of American globalization.

With the vast harm that Bush’s unprecedented attack on the Constitution and our democracy has done and the resultant chaos that he has inflicted as a unitary executive and the threat his actions pose for the future, it is imperative that current presidential candidates make very clear their views on the matter. Will they thoroughly reverse Bush’s illegal practices and refuse to accept any of the precedents s he has set? Will they refuse to use any of the power that Bush arrogated to the office and, in addition, propose and support laws to make this kind of behavior illegal in the future? Current candidates for president are, in the main, not making this issue anywhere near central to their campaigns. We must insist that they do. I suggest a thorough examination of each candidate’s web site to see if and to what extent this is a central issue for them. It is, in my judgment, not enough to make a few peripheral statements. What is needed is a firm, developed, commitment to reverse this dictatorial policy and replace it with laws or if feasible, a Constitutional amendment to prevent it from cropping up again.

Bob Newhard

Morality as a Source of Dictatorship

Moral values are by their nature absolute. In and of themselves they do not countenance a more-or-less response. When we modify our allegiance to them it is usually because they conflict with each other or that the real world we face is inconsistent with them. When we do breach a moral value in these cases we often say we are being “practical.” In contrast, the real world we live in is a mater of more-or-less, a matter of probability. Nature knows no certainty. Thus we humans are faced with a world of moral values and a natural world that couldn’t care less about those values.

There is yet another world we face, the world of society consisting of other human beings. This world, from the perspective of the individual, has elements of both the real world and the world of moral values. This societal world can respond to the demands of morality, which is one major source of social change. It can also behave like a natural force by, for example, putting people to death for violation of its laws. Because of its dual nature society is vulnerable to major shifts in how its members are treated.

One of the main devices for manipulating this societal world is to define its moral component in terms of religion or custom. In so doing we impose what would otherwise be personal values on the society as a whole. This leaves no room for individual dissent. In his essay On Liberty John Stuart Mill saw this distinction between personal moral values and society’s moral values as clearly as anyone when he asked “What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society? His answer, broadly put, was that when one’s act had a significant affect on others it was society’s concern; when it did not it was the individual’s domain. Thus, for example, consensual homosexual activity would be none of society’s business.

We can now see why moral values, being absolute and therefore arbitrary, requiring no additional proof or reason, when transferred from the individual to society, members of which may not choose to accept them, become the instruments of dictatorship. This is why societies that place a high emphasis on moral values are so often dictatorial in nature. John Calvin’s Geneva is an excellent example. This is also why so much of the world’s history has been shot through with conflict and bloodshed, namely, because some people sought to impose their beliefs and values on others.

This tendency in humans to transfer personal values to the social realm is exceptionally pernicious for a democratic society in which the right of the individual not to be subordinated to the dominance of others is crucial to democracy’s existence.

In our own time the attempt to impose religious values, often veiled with the phrase “family values,” by Christian fundamentalists, should not be viewed as a religious issue only. It is by its nature the leading edge of dictatorship, which G. W. Bush is facilitating with every arbitrary action of his imperial presidency. The Religious Right is an enemy of democracy as surely as are fundamentalist Muslims and must be shown as such to a citizenry that is obviously baffled and bamboozled by confusions that our nation’s founders saw through clearly.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and its economy

Democracy implies and requires a supporting economy lest it segue into an oligarchy or tyranny. That economy must insure that a society’s productivity is distributed in a reasonably equitable manner otherwise that productivity, usually expressed as wealth, will gravitate to those who are more successful at acquiring it. The process of acquiring wealth increasingly favors those who have wealth until the society devolves into one of the rich and the poor. Because wealth breeds power this means the wealthy will control the society and democracy will no longer exists. Thus a democratic society requires a reasonably equitable distribution of its productivity. Even at the beginning of our country Thomas Jefferson understood the threat a maldistibution of wealth posed to democracy. It was for this reason that he, in contrast to Hamilton, proposed a nation of independent farmers each with his own plot of land. Such a citizen would be more independent than one who worked for another in an industrial or commercial firm. We no longer have such a society. Agriculture itself has been industrialized and controlled by corporations that employ others to work the farms.

To preserve our democracy, if for no other reason, we must insure distribution of wealth sufficient to prevent domination by the wealthy. Being as our economy is a capitalistic one, we must determine whether it can be made into a democracy-supporting economy or not. Under FDR we had reasonable success in controlling wealth distribution by taxation and public works. Today Europeans are doing the same basically through taxation. If we look at wealth accumulation as a threat to democracy, perhaps we can finally get past the plethora of myths running from Horatio Alger to personal wealth as a measure of success. It is useful to note that even at the planetary level James Tobin has proposed, and stimulated a movement, to impose a tax on the immense amount and size of the daily transactions of the global stock and monetary markets. (See http://www.ceedweb.org/iirp/.) This money would be used to redress the radical monetary imbalance on this planet by relieving the abject poverty rampant in so much of the world and providing a stable base for societal development.

I suggest that the preservation and enhancement of democracy can be a unifying focus and rallying point for progressivism, which currently does not seem to have such a unifying concern. The call of democracy broke the power of kings; perhaps it is still powerful enough to break the power of corporations.

Bob Newhard

Clarifying Clinton

The lead article in the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic magazine is devoted to Bill Clinton and his post-presidential carrier of inducing corporations to fund needed social solutions, e.g. AIDS, energy conservation, etc. (The article plus a slide show and interview can be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200710/clinton-foundation.) Reading the article and watching a video presentation by Clinton did much to clarify for me what has happened to the Democratic Party I once knew as a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. As with many Democrats, I have long known that Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council had abandoned the people and their needs as the prerequisite and defining purpose of a democracy. Roosevelt was under no illusions about the need to protect citizens from the aggrandizing power of the corporations. It was one of the functions of government to redistribute a portion of the gross national product to the people in the interests of preserving a democracy, which cannot exist in a nation of the rich and the poor. I asked myself how a Democrat could auction off large segments of the publicly owned communication spectrum with no public benefit required. We should have required ample prime time for public affaires such as elections. We should have created an independent network such as the BBC. Everybody knew the media was the problem, but these “Democrats” sold it to the very corporations that were polluting our airwaves with trivia and worse and with no public interest strings attached. This scenario has been repeated time and again by these people, whether it was a health plan that bent over backwards to accommodate the corporations, but still could not satisfy corporate greed, or a welfare program that forced people on welfare to find a job in an obviously declining job market and when those jobs often did not pay a living wage. This is democratic concern for the people?

The article is appropriately headlined “Let’s Make a Deal” on the cover of the magazine. In the article it becomes clear that Clinton views corporations as fundamental and government’s role is to facilitate them as much as possible while extracting whatever quid pro quo it can from them. In 2005 Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation (URL http://www.clintonfoundation.org/index.htm) to carry out his vision called the Clinton Global Initiative. As the author of the Atlantic article notes, “Clinton can and certainly does raise money, but he didn’t have enough to endow a major grant-making foundation. What he did have was an ex- presidential bully pulpit, a deep Rolodex, the power to attract attention and talent, and an inkling that those assets might be used to do for public goods something like what entrepreneurs and investment bankers do in the corporate world: midwife new markets or scale up underdeveloped ones.” The author describes the annual, somewhat frenetic, gathering of corporate executives and their flunkies to negotiate what “commitments’ they will make toward improving the world. There is no question that the Foundation does a type of good. Apparently its AIDS initiative was quite successful, but the instrument for doing this good is corporate charity, not government. This is analogous to the Clinton administration’s doing enormous good for the corporations in the hope that the corporations would, in some measure, reciprocate. Robert Reich, Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor, recounts the cold shoulder he got from multinational corporations when he asked for their support in improving labor laws in return for the enormous benefits that the administration had bestowed on them. I believe this charitable approach to dealing with social issues, which Democrats of the FDR period thought the business of government, was endemic to the Clinton administration. That Clinton’s foundation continues in the same vein accounts, I believe, for the friendship between him and the first Prescient Bush who appealed to a thousand lights of charity to solve social problems. This approach implies that the citizens have no right to a decent standard of living, which FDR declared they did.

The charitable approach to dealing with major social issues is, in my judgment, very dangerous. If and as it becomes the norm we lay the groundwork for fascism, which, as Mussolini pointed out, is a fusion of corporations and government. Presidential candidates in the 2008 election should be scrupulously examined for this same approach to government, most notably, Hillary Clinton who is taking large amounts from media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Robert Newhard

Asymmetrical Warfare Can Easily Segue Into an Asymmetrical Society

It began as an intriguing question. Why, on three occasions, have the world’s superpowers been defeated by small, largely undeveloped, countries? The United States was defeated in Vietnam and has been in its effort to control Iraq. The Russians were defeated in their effort to subdue and control Afghanistan.

I discovered that the United States military has been asking this question ever since the Vietnam defeat. The issue has been studied under the rubric of “asymmetrical warfare.” From what I have been able to discover in an admittedly cursory inquiry the military is relying primarily on technology to address their problems with the kind of guerrilla resistance they have met in Vietnam and Iraq. The consequences of introducing the military and its ever-advancing technology into the environment of the civilian, which is where the terrorist operates, bode ill for mankind. Once the military is introduced into civilian affaires its power can be as easily directed against our own citizens as against any enemy. Unless we are very careful we will wind up letting the military kill democracy under the guise of defending it.

One of the more significant consultants in this area is John Robb who was a mission commander for a counterterrorism unit that worked with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 before becoming the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism. The following are selections from an article he published in the magazine Fast Company titled “Security: Power to the People.” The full article may be found at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/103/essay-security.html

· The end result of this struggle will be a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies.

· The terrorists have developed the ability to fight nation-states strategically--without weapons of mass destruction. This new method is called "systems disruption," a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens.

· Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life.

· As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge.

These conflicts could be looked at as technology versus people encounters. As such, why have technologically deficient people been able to defeat the most technologically advanced militaries on the planet? There are those who still argue that the United States lost in Vietnam because it did not bring all its technological capability to that war, meaning nuclear weaponry. The same could be said of Russia. Understanding that nations have always expected their militaries to use all available resources to win a war, it is impressive that in both Vietnam and Afghanistan both the United States and Russia chose defeat rather than employ nuclear weaponry. It raises the question of whether mankind is finally learning, in a very brutal fashion, that wars are no longer winnable. It also indicates the fudamentally evil decision of the Bush administration to bridge this gap between the acceptable and the unacceptable by undertaking the development of battlefield nuclear devices known as bunker busters to, in effect, “domesticate” the use of nuclear energy as just one more battlefield weapon of modern warfare.

There is, however, another aspect of the world as Robb and the military see it. It is a world disintegrating under the pressure of terrorism, to be followed, as that deterioration progresses, by gangs and other smaller groups. I suggest this process would virtually duplicate that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire under pressure from the barbarian invasions. As the security provided by the Roman Empire declined people fled to the estates of local nobility for protection and from this arose the feudal system that dominated Europe for a thousand years. This current scenario by Robb differs in one major regard because of the vastly increased level of technology brought to this disintegrative process. This raises the issue, indeed the specter, of mankind being unable to create an ethos based on its commonality and being backed into a world in which conflict, violence and fear, complemented by nuclear and biological weaponry, dominates. As society fragments under the impact of terrorism, as the powers that be increasingly construe protest as terrorism, as the military increasingly intervenes in domestic protest and as technology is increasingly pitted against individual citizens, it will become progressively clear that those who would build fences dividing humanity invite a world of conflict.

Bob Newhard

When Better is Not Good Enough

Bill Clinton and the DLC democrats have made a mantra of making things “better”, which has allowed them great latitude for obfuscation. The question is not whether things can be made better. The issue is can they be made good enough. Reality determines whether policy and action are good enough, not slight improvements that fail to deal with the necessities.

This thought came to mind as I read of Hillary Clinton urging the removal of the puppet president of Iraq who was supposed to bail this country out of the transparently stupid attack on Iraq and now that the situation has devolved into the chaos knowledgeable people predicted, she and other Democrats who voted for this immoral insanity are trying to pin the blame on their chosen Iraqi instead of themselves. Why?: To maintain their electability. This is absolutely disgusting, when the carnage they did not have the courage to resist in the first place is now to be blamed on the Iraqis themselves. If this timid, weasel, mentality is to reside in the White House as of 2009, the great and tough decisions that are needed to direct this country away from the narcissistic self interest that has characterized it over the last forty years, including the whole notion of being a superpower, will not be made. We badly need an administration that can create a new vision for this country and this planet in which we use our resources to solve the massive problems humanity faces instead of exacerbating them. We must think real world when we consider these candidates. Forget accepting electability as the fundamental criterion in evaluating candidates. That criterion leads all too easily to shallowness, irrelevance and the disasters they create in the real world. Create electability by demanding an end to hype and deception. Demand that the real world be the focus of politics, not winning an election when there is no evidence the winner has any grasp of mankind’s dire needs and even less a grasp on what needs to be done to address those needs. We must hold our elected officials accountable, but we must also hold ourselves accountable first by insuring the fundamental importance of our demands. To do this we need to think rigorously and thoroughly about what this world and this nation need most.

Bob Newhard

A Conundrum?

Why is it that at one and the same time our society has had the largest religious revival in over two hundred years and has at the same time the most bellicose, corrupt and ideologically rigid government in its history? It is generally assumed that religion and morality are intimately connected such that, for example, any group given the task of investigating social morality almost always includes a member of the clergy. I suggest this congruity is not coincidental.

The extent of religious enthusiasm is not only greater than the Great Awakening of the 1730’s it is, especially considering the vastly extended range of human knowledge and awareness of other societies, more deliberately ant-intellectual as evidenced by creationism and its efforts to suborn science with politics amply illustrate. It is, like its 18^th century predecessor essentially a fundamentalist movement. As such it:

· is suing the University of California to require that institution to give credit for its courses. The new 25 million dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky recently opened to overflowing crowds.

· is more bellicose in its willingness to unleash the world’s largest military establishment on the citizens of small nations. One of its favorite hymns, Onward Christian Soldiers, expresses the latent militarism in Christianity. It has not shied form the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians and their children.

· has, through its political leaders, for the first time in American history, formally espoused and practiced heinous forms of torture.

· has instigated and tolerated the destruction of our fundamental liberties and rights.

· has engendered the largest per capita prison population of any developed country in the world, largely due to its paranoia about and punishment response to drug use. One wonders per Karl Marx, if religion sees competition from drugs.

· has used millions of taxpayer funds to enrich itself.

· has corrupted the language that our society depends upon for communication with the intent to delude our citizens. Notice how they have conflated the common meaning of the word theory with the rigorous use of that term in science.

· would demolish abortion and birth control in spite of a human population growth that now threatens human survival, not to mention a decent quality of life.

In short they care nothing for mankind, except to dominate it. Note the Christian Dominionism movement, that volatile mix of religion and politics, which can so easily end in Fascism.

To the above charges, and there are many more, some may say that I am myself conflating fundamentalism with other kinds of religion. My reply is that when an institution puts reason first, rather than faith, belief or spiritualism, I shall cease calling it a religion. Faith has no inherent test for relevance and hence can be attached to anything – and that is where the trouble begins.

One of the fundamental reasons religion can have such deleterious consequences is that it deals in certainties when regarding the natural world and absolutes when dealing with morality. Because the natural world is highly variable and less than adequately known, reality defeats religion’s certainty repeatedly, often with disastrous results as exemplified by the refusal to treat AIDS as a disease rather than God’s punishment of evil doers. Similarly, because humans are very complex entities dealing with a complex reality and other complex humans, the rigidity that religion’s absolutes introduce into human value systems not infrequently leads to catastrophic results. People are currently being slaughtered by the thousands because of the inability of Islam’s various factions to accept each other’s humanity, not to mention G. W. Bush’s declared guidance from his god and the slaughter that has entailed.

Thus it is that when mankind feels most certain of its moral bearings it commits its most horrendous crimes. When will we demand of religion that, like science, it realize its own limitations and allow mankind to approach the natural world and each other with the same tentative, evidence searching, posture?

Bob Newhard

Impending American fascism

While I have written on this subject before, the recent purchase of the Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdoch and his intention to establish a new business TV channel in October 2007 lend additional urgency to this issue.

A brief review of the salient facts about the Bush presidency:

Project for a New American Century written by Dick Cheney et alia in 1992 outlines the purpose and road to American empire.

Bush rushes to declare a war in response to a terrorist attack. Terrorism cannot be fought as a war because there is no defined enemy or geographic area of encounter between the supposed forces. The point in declaring a war was to institutionalize this amorphous and endless conflict so that it could be made a military undertaking and so that an indefinite state of emergency could be created. Such a state, as George Orwell so aptly described is necessary to the continuous control of a society by the few “protectors.”

Bush demands and gets the USA Patriot Act giving the presidency many earmarks of fascism, including the ability to declare protest an act of terrorism. John Ashcroft declared that protest against the President in time of “war” is tantamount to treason.

Loss of habeus corpus.

Appointment of a Right Wing Supreme Court majority.

The use of “signings” to countermand legislation he does not like, without the transparency that a veto would provide.

I see Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and his imminent creation of a business TV channel as the latest steps in the corporate takeover of the United Sates and the institution of fascism. If one applies what Murdoch has done to the news, i.e. turn it into blatant propaganda, to what he will do with the Wall Street Journal and especially his business channel, this nation will be subjected to a continuous barrage of propaganda extolling the virtues of corporate capitalism and denouncing liberals, progressives and anybody arguing for social responsibility in our government and economy. They have already demonized the word liberal such that democrats like Hillary Clinton refuse to be identified as such. Remember Murdoch has held a fund raiser for Hillary. When resistance to this process becomes significant, which will probably occur, if not sooner, when the United States experiences the imminent depression, then the full impact of the USA Patriot Act will become evident. The intimate relationship between corporations and fascism was made explicit in Mussolini’s description of fascism as a corporate state. The potential for fascism in the United States is further shown by a relatively little known attempt to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration by force in the 1930’s by major bankers, financiers and industrialists concerned that he was taking the country to socialism. (A prominent view is that he actually saved the country for capitalism. My view is that he probably saved it from fascism.) Much of this effort was centered in the American Liberty League to which many of these men belonged and which had close connections to the American Legion. See the following web site on the League and the plot http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/all-both.html.

In general the plot was to raise a private army of 500,000 men from the disgruntled veterans of World War I and take over the government by force. They made the mistake of choosing Marine General Smedly Butler to raise this army. Butler is the most decorated Marine General ever. He was popular with the troops because he openly identified with them in preference to the Washington brass. He was believed to be pro-corporation because he fought battles for corporate benefit in China, the Philippines and South and Central America. What they were unaware of was that Butler despised the corporations that generated the wars that killed his men. After his retirement he wrote War is a Racket, a book describing the corporate interests for whose benefit U. S. troops fought. Butler went along with the plot until he was able to identify those involved. He then informed Congress, which held hearings on the matter and condemned the plot, but suppressed the evidence they had gathered. There is still speculation as to why this evidence was suppressed. I have been unable to ascertain whether any of these financial bigwigs ever went to jail.

To sum up: The Bush administration by fiat of an imperial presidency and a Far Right Republican congress has taken this country far down the road toward complete corporate dominance of our society, it has implemented the legal mechanisms for suppressing dissent, it controls the major media, has established surveillance of the citizenry, has, with terrorism, established an interminable enemy and has implemented ingredient after ingredient of the corporate state. This country has seen the corporate elite attempt to stage a fascist coup before. At the beginning of his book When Corporations Rule the World David Korten has a quotation from George Soros as follows; “Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today comes from the formation of unholy alliances between government and business. This is not a new phenomenon. it used to be called fascism….The outward appearances of the democratic process are observed, but the powers of the state are diverted to the benefit of private interests.”

I do not see progressives addressing this imminent threat of fascism at all. While we get all excited about health care, education, etc., which are important, they and our civil liberties and rights are in grave jeopardy from incipient fascism. Are we afraid to call corporate control of our country by its proper name? Are we unable to see or unwilling to articulate how corporations have taken over this country and are in the process of doing so to the planet? Are we willing to see all human values reduced to monetary values? There was a time when progressives clearly and forcefully pointed out the threat to democracy that the corporations posed. The Progressive Party ran on an anti-corporate platform. William Cullen Bryant, their presidential candidate, portrayed corporations as crucifying the people on a cross of gold. The muckrakers were not afraid to lay out the greed of John D. Rockefeller. Upton Sinclair took the meat packing industry to task in The Jungle and Sinclair Lewis portrayed the insidious influence of the local Chamber of Commerce in his novel Babbit. Even the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was outraged by corporate greed. To someone of my age it appears that the American populace and its culture have been seduced by the corporate media into believing that owning and enjoying more and more things is a civic virtue. Progressives need to get a grip before it is too late. To do that takes courage and the longer we wait the more courage it will take.

Additional reading on fascism in America, past and present may be found in:

It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis, copyright 1935

This novel can be read today as prescient in its depiction of the rise of fascism from business interests.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross, copyright 1980

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
by Chris Hedges, copyright 2006

Bob Newhard