On Presidential Coins and the Imperial Presidency

This month saw the issuance of the first of the new Presidential dollar coins. A new one will be issued every three months until all the presidents have their coin issued, providing they are dead. I see in this one more effort to establish in the public mind the concept of the imperial president. Let me explain. Personages represented on our coins and currency have always been people deemed to have made an exceptional contribution to society. Not all presidents have been represented because they made no such contribution. We understood that the office does not make the office holder, but rather the office is made exceptional by the office holder. We long have made it an item of American democracy that the President is no more than any other citizen of the republic. He or she is not above the law and when they leave the office they return to being a citizen again. This is the way a democracy provides leadership. We have had exceptional individuals as presidents, e.g. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison, and Roosevelt. We have had some that were abysmally corrupt, bigoted and those that focused on the welfare of the rich at the expense of the rest of society, e.g. Taft, Pierce, Buchanan, Reagan, and both Bushes. When we start honoring a class of individuals who have held the power implicit in the American presidency for that reason alone, we have begun to make that office definitive of human worth. This is anti-democratic and is the thing Washington rejected when many sought to make him king. When the war mongering and naked aggression of a Polk or a G. W. Bush can find equal status with Washington’s admonition to avoid entangling agreements with other nations and Wilson’s attempt to establish the League of Nations, one knows that any meaningful commonality between these individuals is absent, that one is dealing with the office, not the occupant. This, in my judgment, has no place in a democratic government based upon the interests of the citizen not those of an officeholder.

In my judgment the Imperial Presidency is not just about G. W. Bush. It is about the corporate displacement of the state by its own governing structures. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. One of the most powerful political and military entities of the later Middle Ages in Europe was the Hanseatic League established by merchants in the interest of controlling trade in the Baltic and having self-contained “embassies” throughout Europe. It was eventually defeated by the nation states, principally England.

Why do I smell corporate interests behind the enabling legislation for these new coins? This is the third time that they have tried to sell the use of these coins to the public. Why do they keep at it? Is it because the U. S. Mint says it would save 500 million dollars a year? Savings alone have seldom generated such repeated efforts by a legislative body. John Sununu originated this bill in the Senate. Notably he was on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee receiving major campaign contributions from the likes of Citicorp. Both Representative Mike Castle and Representative Carolyn B Maloney, sponsors of the bill in the House, are on the House Committee on Financial Services. Both receive the majority of their campaign contributions from banking, financial and insurance companies. The coin vending machine manufacturing and coin-based businesses, e.g. food, car washes, are known to want coins to promote automatic vending, a less labor-intensive retailing mechanism, ergo, more people laid off and out of work. The printing industry wants the one dollar bill retained. The Mint says that it could save 500 million dollars a year by going to one dollar coins and is spending mightily promoting the coins. The Mint web site provides teacher lesson plans and totally bland comments on the presidents. These students will never see the motives and horrible mistakes some of our presidents have made. They will be given an adulatory account. There are even coin-related cartoons for children. The public is known to favor the dollar bill, so Congress has required the continued issuance of the one dollar bill so the overall cost of the one dollar denomination has skyrocketed. Additionally, embedding the concept of an Imperial Presidency is consonant with the corporations’ preference for an authoritarian government that they can directly make deals with rather than one that requires the checks and balances of the democratic process. This is evidenced by their support for Pinochet and Mussolini.

Finally, I believe the ubiquity of these coins and the daily contact people of all ages will have with them will lead to acceptance that all these people were really great individuals and benefactors of our democracy. Such a belief will become as axiomatic as the belief that “In God we trust” was on our coinage from the very beginning rather than added in 1865 at the behest of Christians believing that without acknowledging God on our coinage the outcome of the Civil War was in jeopardy.

Does this all add up to a conspiracy? No, it’s just business as usual, namely corporations seeking their own ends even if it means a further dumbing down of the electorate.

Bob Newhard

Global Warming and Progressivism

Progressivism has always been postulated on making the world better for the mass of people. That central icon of the 19th century, Progress, was built into the movement. America’s multicentury exploitation of a continent provided an abundance of resources thus facilitating our society’s predisposition to reify the concept of progress generation after generation. With global warming, and all that it entails, we know this is coming to an end. My mother’s child-raising maxim was to leave the world a better place than you found it. This will be increasingly impossible for future generations. How will we understand progressivism over centuries of declining resources? What now for progressivism?

In broad outline, will progressivism have to redefine itself as making the world less worse as distinct from making it better? If so, what is the vision for “less worse?” I suggest it may be preserving the best in humans as we struggle to survive. If we do not emphasize both we may well return to the barbaric dog-eat-dog days of prehistory. We must preserve civilizations as we seek to preserve ourselves. And this has to be done on a planetary scale.
One way of addressing this problem has already been offered. With the objective of progressively lowering human-produced greenhouse gasses, it has been proposed that the wealthy most- polluting nations transfer wealth to the poorer less-polluting nations in exchange for the right to keep polluting at an ever diminishing scale as they seek to adjust their societies to the altered living conditions. This transfer of wealth has long been viewed as necessary to global democracy, but now the poorer nations of the world have something to offer that is of fundamental value to the wealthier nations. That there are significant problems with this is evident, e.g. what happens as the poorer societies increase their standard of living? How does a wealthy society react when it sees its living standards declining while those of poor societies are increasing, albeit still much below that of the wealthy? Any such agreement would require that whatever poor societies do with this influx of wealth it would not contribute to global warming. This is just one meager example of the complexity that will be involved in the many well-motivated proposals that will be forthcoming. . Let us not be too sanguine about these efforts to move wealth to the poor in exchange for reducing the pollution of the wealthy at a slower rate. We must keep in mind how resistant the wealthy nations have been to adequately assist the poor. An occasional disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami can elicit an immediate outpouring of aid as the media plays it up, but we have not been in it for the long haul – and it is the long haul that matters with global warming
In addition to the well-motivated we have the devious who will udoubtedly be even more prevalent. Bush’s energy proposal contained in his State of the Union address focuses on biofuels, especially corn.
President Bush asked Congress to help solve "one of the great challenges facing our generation" by approving proposals he says will cut U.S. gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent over 10 years.
"Every member of Congress who cares about strengthening our economy, protecting our national security and confronting climate change should support the energy initiatives I have set out," the president said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "We can leave behind a cleaner and better world for our children and grandchildren."
Bush's energy proposals, made in his State of the Union address last month, include ramping up the production of alternative fuels such as ethanol made from new, non-corn feedstocks. The president wants to require the use of 35 billion gallons a year of ethanol and other alternative fuels, such as soybean-based biodiesel, by 2017, a fivefold increase over current requirements. The ethanol would be in gasoline blends of 10 percent to 85 percent.
The call for sharp increases in ethanol use will get bipartisan support in Congress. But production of ethanol from corn is expected to fall far short of meeting such an increase. So Bush envisions a major speedup of research into production of "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips, switchgrass and other feedstocks. (AP report) The major producer of ethanol in the United States, Archer Daniels Midland, is a major player in political influence and is a major polluter, including pollution associated with producing ethanol. This piece of corporate greed has other dimensions. For a fuller account see http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646&printsafe=1.

Additionally, the skyrocketing price of corn because of its use to produce ethanol is already causing food shortages. The poor in Mexico have been rioting because the price of tortillas, a Mexican staple, has gone beyond their reach. We must keep in mind that the United States produces food for much of the rest of the world.

Violence, of course, will always be there to play a major role as resources diminish. Bush’s Middle East adventures to control oil are a prime example. What happens when two major nuclear powers instead of a small and large state face off for this diminishing resource?
This is a dead serious complex business. We must do everything we can to keep the various efforts transparent, to point out the greed and self-interest that will permeate these efforts and above all exert ourselves to understand as much of this hideously complicated problem as we can.

Bob Newhard

The All Volunteer Army and Some of Its Implications

One of the concepts that is of interest in various industries, notably, the consumer electronics industry, is “convergence.” This is an effort to understand where various technologies may converge in order to create new products by merging the functions of the converging technologies. An example is the cell phone which is being viewed as a phone, camera and computer. Whether and how these can be productively integrated is a matter of considerable study.
I want to consider a more ominous case of convergence, namely that of military technology and the loss of human freedom and of democracy.

From one direction there is our volunteer army. It came into existence after the Vietnam conflict because the military did not want to deal again with all the resistance a conscripted army generated. This is the first step in removing the military from citizen influence. It has become an army for hire, i.e. paid in the form of an education, new citizenship, etc. With the volunteer army serving under contract, not unlike the French Foreign Legion, the military has gained a level of independence from public concern and scrutiny. The result has created a military primarily of the poor. As it is relatively easy for an older generation to send a younger generation into battle so it is even easier to send the poor into battle. There is ample evidence that the Vietnam level of resistance has not been forthcoming because the relatively affluent have not been required to serve.

.The military’s next level of independence is gaining momentum, namely, the roboticization and other technological innovations applied to the military. Examples are: DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released research grants for drugs that will permit soldiers to fight up to three days in combat without debilitating fatigue; A recently released military vehicle carries a ray gun that makes humans feel as though they are on fire thereby debilitating them. The stated aim is to develop technology that debilitates rather than kills, i.e. non-lethal weapons. The products of DARPA’s immense technological budget are not subject to any civilian agency, e.g. FDA, EPA, etc. review. There is an enormous level of human-control technology development taking place with no civilian oversight. With respect to the “supersoldier” a recent report states

“…the Pentagon seems intent on giving its troops every tactical advantage while they are in combat, even if those advantages are distinctly disadvantageous to the long-term health of American servicemen. However, whatever FDA regulators privately think about the ‘supersoldier’ of the future, any attempt to materially change military policy would likely result in the Pentagon simply flouting FDA regulatory control.” (Better Fighting Through Chemistry? The Role of FDA Regulation in Crafting the Warrior of the Future, March 8, 2004)

This developing technology is not significantly subject to control by the citizen’s representatives, which further distances the military from the citizen and increases the danger to democracy by a very powerful agency focused on controlling humans and on destruction.

Another trend is the increasing involvement of the military in domestic issues. Notoriously the military under Rumsfeld found no problem developing and promoting the Total Information Awareness program for spying on citizen telephone calls. The F.B.I was created specifically to keep the military out of domestic affairs.

So now we have the substitution of a volunteer, i.e. paid, army to minimize citizen influence, a robotized, supersoldier, army much more attached to the military that to our civilian institutions and a simultaneous incursion into domestic affairs by the military, which is exactly what the nation’s founders feared.

One further consideration: The military is designed to cope with masses of people, e.g. armies, navies and air forces. The domestic equivalent to an army is the protesting crowd. One way of looking at DARPA creations is their potential for crowd control and dispersal. The description of the device that makes people feel as though they are on fire specifically mentions crowd control. It does not take much of an imagination to see military technology turned on citizens by malmotivated individuals such as G. W. Bush. One can recall Attorney General John Ashcort equating protest with treason because it aided the enemy. To my mind, progressives need to promote not only reducing the size and influence of the military, but also placing their technological developments under civilian review.

Bob Newhard