When we humans "do" politics we focus on other humans rather than extra-human considerations. I suggest that we do so at our own peril. Politics as we now do it can be called inter-politics, that is between humans in the context of their societies. This leads us to suppose that the important issues lie between human beings rather than between human beings and the context in which their species exists.
Barack Obama, despite strong campaign appeals to progressives to accept his "vision", has created a cabinet composed mainly of Clintonite retreads. Despite all the hype, he has time and again rejected the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which was the wing that gave him so much support during the election. I ask why this profound shift after being elected?
In what follows I may be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt.
Let us assume that what we have witnessed, including giving the prominence of the inaugural prayer to Rick Warren, is Obama's effort to "bridge" the gap between left and right, that is between two human groups. Notably, Bill Clinton tried this with his Democratic Leadership Council, which pandered to the Religious Right and to corporate domination of the economy. It did this with what we now know as disastrous consequences. It is no consolation to see Obama go to the same people to facilitate his "bridging" act. In both these cases I suggest we are looking at people-driven politics rather than reality-driven. Clinton and Obama have looked to the political middle for what is needed.
Reality does not necessarily lie at the middle. The real world requires large scale addressing of issues mankind has never had to face before, e.g. global warming, massive over population and critical environmental degradation. It is, in my estimation, the primary job of the politician to bring these kinds of issues to center stage so that they can be addressed in the terms they require while there is still time to do so democratically. Continuing neglect will necessitate dictatorship as in China's mandated family size with its horrific impact on female babies. It should be noted that the Republicans have not sought to build bridges, rather they have reveled in playing hardball, including shutting down the federal government under Newt Gingrich and creating an imperial presidency under G. W. Bush. They have thereby moved the "center' further and further to the right to the point that we face incipient fascism. This method of doing politics references only the political power of groups of people and focuses on the ways to manipulate people rather than on the problems the people face. I suggest this is a fruitless way to go about politics in the desperate times we face. Among other things it is too easily controlled by ideologies and people's perfidies and bigotries.
The politics of reality, on the other hand, can bring people together based upon the common threats they face. This is most notable in wartime, when desperate circumstances override ideological differences.
The progressive mission should be a fundamentally reality-driven politics presenting the real world as humanity faces it and articulating clearly and forcefully the consequences for humanity if it disregards the necessary.
In a politics of reality human population would rise to a major focus of political concern. One may ask how this issue can be made politically viable when major religions oppose methods for dealing with it. The politics of this reality require an Al Gore of population growth to make clear what the consequences for humanity will inevitably be. For example, as Gore showed the before and after of glacier melt, we need to show the before and after of population growth, the massive suburban sprawl since the end of World War II , a major source of global warming, the food riots in India and Africa and the massive congestion of our cities. It must make clear that advocates of population growth are enemies of mankind.
Another reality that needs to be faced is the fact that the job will be decreasingly available as a means of distributing the gross annual product. As automation, computerization and robotization increasingly set in, jobs will increasingly disappear. We are seeing some of these consequences in a United Sates economy built on finance, not manufacturing and in social disruptions like the youth rioting in Athens specifically because there are no jobs. What, if anything, will replace the job as a means for distributing the wealth generated by society's productivity? This is not to mention the job's psychological and social function of establishing personal significance, an even more profound victim of automation. My father was proud of the fact that he never went on the "dole" during the Great Depression although he sometimes made less than WPA paid. Until society creates the moral equivalent of the job, increasing numbers of citizens will be psychologically and socially on the dole.
In brief, the issue of Right and Left should be replaced by the issue of Fantasy, either religious or economic, and the Real as our planet presents it to us.
Bob Newhard
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
An Age of Ideologues
When Allan Greenspan confessed to Congress that he knew that the mortgage crisis was immanent, but said nothing, he did so because he believed the market would correct itself without massive government interference. He said acting on this belief had worked for forty years and he was very surprised when it did not do so this time. I was dumbstruck by this admission. Capitalism has been subject to the boom and bust cycle since its inception. As long ago as the 1830s the economist Henry George was wrestling with the problem of how to mitigate this process to minimize the suffering that went with it. The Great Depression, a mere 70 plus years ago, is an obvious warning, especially when so much of the regulatory apparatus designed to protect society from a repeat had been dismantled by "free market" ideologues from Ronald Reagan on. All this was known to Greenspan, but he could not believe that the free market would not correct itself. This is the mark of an ideologue, in this case an Ayn Rand-believing, libertarian ideologue. The largest economy the world has ever seen was placed in the hands of an ideologue.
It is common to believe that the 19th or 20th centuries were the period that saw the rise of ideology to prominence. Socialism, communism and capitalism, each of whose adherents refuse to call it an ideology, a term of denigration reserved for the other two isms, were predominant. I want, however, to use a broader conception of ideology to include systems of belief devoid of evidence, in politics and religion as well. I believe we live in an age of ideology because of this age's extreme multidimensional complexity. In such an environment people seek simplicity in all-encompassing explanations. Living within the scope of knowledge is not enough to assuage the fear of the unknown, which is what extreme complexity amounts to.
As population increase and environmental degradation reduce mankind's survival options, it will become increasingly important that knowledge, with its concomitant tentativeness, increasingly replace ideology. The fundamental question here is whether human beings, who have for millennia relied upon one form or another of ideology to guide them through the unknown, can be brought to rely on knowledge as the guide into the unknown. Ideology's main attraction has been the emotional satisfaction it provides. Knowledge can offer no such all-encompassing assurance.
An alternative to ideology now in increasing vogue is "pragmatism." When Barack Obama began his campaign he focused on "change." He talked in terms of his "vision." Since winning the election he is talking increasingly of "pragmatism". He says we must see what works and if it doesn’t try something else. This is not knowledge at work: It is trial and error on a massive scale. What is needed is a broad assessment, based upon what we know, in order to give some cumulative and continuing benefit. We know from the history of the Great Depression that the way to get the economy going again is to feed money in from the bottom, i.e. through jobs. We know that the economy of a large society needs, to a certain extent, to be planned and we know that the capitalist market is exceptionally vulnerable to human greed, i.e. over-speculation. We also know that the world's population is going to have to do with less. This is the kind of knowledge that has to be brought to bear on our current fiscal crisis, not simply trial and error pragmatism or economic ideology.
Bob Newhard
It is common to believe that the 19th or 20th centuries were the period that saw the rise of ideology to prominence. Socialism, communism and capitalism, each of whose adherents refuse to call it an ideology, a term of denigration reserved for the other two isms, were predominant. I want, however, to use a broader conception of ideology to include systems of belief devoid of evidence, in politics and religion as well. I believe we live in an age of ideology because of this age's extreme multidimensional complexity. In such an environment people seek simplicity in all-encompassing explanations. Living within the scope of knowledge is not enough to assuage the fear of the unknown, which is what extreme complexity amounts to.
As population increase and environmental degradation reduce mankind's survival options, it will become increasingly important that knowledge, with its concomitant tentativeness, increasingly replace ideology. The fundamental question here is whether human beings, who have for millennia relied upon one form or another of ideology to guide them through the unknown, can be brought to rely on knowledge as the guide into the unknown. Ideology's main attraction has been the emotional satisfaction it provides. Knowledge can offer no such all-encompassing assurance.
An alternative to ideology now in increasing vogue is "pragmatism." When Barack Obama began his campaign he focused on "change." He talked in terms of his "vision." Since winning the election he is talking increasingly of "pragmatism". He says we must see what works and if it doesn’t try something else. This is not knowledge at work: It is trial and error on a massive scale. What is needed is a broad assessment, based upon what we know, in order to give some cumulative and continuing benefit. We know from the history of the Great Depression that the way to get the economy going again is to feed money in from the bottom, i.e. through jobs. We know that the economy of a large society needs, to a certain extent, to be planned and we know that the capitalist market is exceptionally vulnerable to human greed, i.e. over-speculation. We also know that the world's population is going to have to do with less. This is the kind of knowledge that has to be brought to bear on our current fiscal crisis, not simply trial and error pragmatism or economic ideology.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 30, 2008
A Passion for Ignorance
When the cultural history of the period following World War II is written, I suspect one of the most interesting (baffling) questions will be, "Why did our country, in the midst of the unprecedentedly successful application of science, e.g. man on the moon, discovery of DNA, etc. undertake such a massive, deliberate, dumbing down of its culture in which more people knew less than in the preceding generation?
I believe there were a number of causes, e.g. the substitution of the image for print as in television, affluence itself, but I want to dwell on a primary source: religion.
To begin, why is it that "people of faith" is an honorable, respect-laden, descriptor? Why do we not hear "people of reason" as such? Faith is a form of ignorance. The fundamental necessity of faith occurs when we must act, but we have less than adequate evidence to do so. It should be noted that even then we would prefer evidence or knowledge, but the exigencies of life require action in its absence. However, as is so often the case, we humans transform necessity into desire. Because faith has sometimes seen us through some of life's exigencies it must have some efficaciousness. As I mentioned in an earlier post we abstract from a specific event or events to a general proposition. In consequence believing has become, in our time, more important than thinking.
At a time when society must think its way out of a complex multifaceted threat of global disasters, violence and indeed the continued existence of our species, we have the most pronounced calls to religious faith. Indeed, knowledge itself is massively opposed by people and institutions of faith. Evolution is not only denied, but replaced by religious dogma. Population reduction is vigorously opposed despite the evidence that its growth is a major cause of violence. Faith has become a threat to our continued existence.
In our society it is considered bad form to criticize religion. Why? Let me suggest at least one reason: the Constitution. The Constitution's first amendment, in addressing the relationship between government and religion, elevated religion to the highest prominence. I sometimes wonder what religion's place in our culture would be if the first amendment had read, Congress shall make no law abridging the citizen's freedom of conscience, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. By using religion, an organized body of great power, it incorporated a force that could and does oppose or manipulate the state for its own benefit. Had this right been framed in terms of individual conscience it would not have such political power. In any event religion has become a prominent political player and yet would hold itself above criticism.
As a result religion now has corporate-like power to influence our government. It is as adept as corporations at getting public funds for its own purposes. It pressures our public institutions, e.g. schools, to become vehicles for its propaganda. In so doing it introduces a dumbing down process into public education. I have witnessed courses in religion being introduced into a public school district on the premise that students could not understand cultural clichés derived from religion unless the religion was taught. There would, of course, be no proselytizing.
Because religion does not have to take the real world seriously as does science, e.g. there are no empirical tests, it can make outlandish claims, do anything to appeal to human emotions and still be followed by the thoughtless. Hence we have the barbarities of Mumbai, the spraying of battery acid on Muslim girls who dare try to get an education or the promotion of maximum birth rates on a vastly over populated planet. Even the most benign of religions has an element of irrationality to it, which makes it difficult for its adherents to condemn the barbarities of fundamentalist adherents on doctrinal grounds.
Religion has the temerity in most cultures to define and become the guardian of morality. With the Age of Reason an effort to divorce religion and morality began. So far this effort has not been a stunning success. It is even a philosophical maxim of secular Western philosophy that you cannot derive a moral proposition from a factual one. This has led to an unnecessary cultural bifurcation in Western culture. Immanuel Kant, in my estimation, provided a clue to how we might reduce this cultural chasm. As an instance, he argued that lying was not wrong because some religion or its deity said it was. It was wrong because if everybody lied society could not function. This is a factual, empirical, justification for not lying. Suppose we tested every so-called moral proposition in this manner. Those that had a deleterious effect on the functioning of human societies would be regarded as immoral those that did not were matters of personal preference. While some problems would obviously remain, e.g. how does one separate morality from prudence (To which I would respond that cultural prudence may lie at the evolutionary root of morality.) These problems would have far less adverse impact on human beings and their societies.
Considerations of this sort may have to be pursued if we are to minimize the enormities that passionate ignorance has and will increasingly inflict on society. It must become a maxim of society that faith is not knowledge and belief is not reason if we are ever to live in concert with the planet, the two edged sword that science has given us and the common plight we all share.
Bob Newhard
I believe there were a number of causes, e.g. the substitution of the image for print as in television, affluence itself, but I want to dwell on a primary source: religion.
To begin, why is it that "people of faith" is an honorable, respect-laden, descriptor? Why do we not hear "people of reason" as such? Faith is a form of ignorance. The fundamental necessity of faith occurs when we must act, but we have less than adequate evidence to do so. It should be noted that even then we would prefer evidence or knowledge, but the exigencies of life require action in its absence. However, as is so often the case, we humans transform necessity into desire. Because faith has sometimes seen us through some of life's exigencies it must have some efficaciousness. As I mentioned in an earlier post we abstract from a specific event or events to a general proposition. In consequence believing has become, in our time, more important than thinking.
At a time when society must think its way out of a complex multifaceted threat of global disasters, violence and indeed the continued existence of our species, we have the most pronounced calls to religious faith. Indeed, knowledge itself is massively opposed by people and institutions of faith. Evolution is not only denied, but replaced by religious dogma. Population reduction is vigorously opposed despite the evidence that its growth is a major cause of violence. Faith has become a threat to our continued existence.
In our society it is considered bad form to criticize religion. Why? Let me suggest at least one reason: the Constitution. The Constitution's first amendment, in addressing the relationship between government and religion, elevated religion to the highest prominence. I sometimes wonder what religion's place in our culture would be if the first amendment had read, Congress shall make no law abridging the citizen's freedom of conscience, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. By using religion, an organized body of great power, it incorporated a force that could and does oppose or manipulate the state for its own benefit. Had this right been framed in terms of individual conscience it would not have such political power. In any event religion has become a prominent political player and yet would hold itself above criticism.
As a result religion now has corporate-like power to influence our government. It is as adept as corporations at getting public funds for its own purposes. It pressures our public institutions, e.g. schools, to become vehicles for its propaganda. In so doing it introduces a dumbing down process into public education. I have witnessed courses in religion being introduced into a public school district on the premise that students could not understand cultural clichés derived from religion unless the religion was taught. There would, of course, be no proselytizing.
Because religion does not have to take the real world seriously as does science, e.g. there are no empirical tests, it can make outlandish claims, do anything to appeal to human emotions and still be followed by the thoughtless. Hence we have the barbarities of Mumbai, the spraying of battery acid on Muslim girls who dare try to get an education or the promotion of maximum birth rates on a vastly over populated planet. Even the most benign of religions has an element of irrationality to it, which makes it difficult for its adherents to condemn the barbarities of fundamentalist adherents on doctrinal grounds.
Religion has the temerity in most cultures to define and become the guardian of morality. With the Age of Reason an effort to divorce religion and morality began. So far this effort has not been a stunning success. It is even a philosophical maxim of secular Western philosophy that you cannot derive a moral proposition from a factual one. This has led to an unnecessary cultural bifurcation in Western culture. Immanuel Kant, in my estimation, provided a clue to how we might reduce this cultural chasm. As an instance, he argued that lying was not wrong because some religion or its deity said it was. It was wrong because if everybody lied society could not function. This is a factual, empirical, justification for not lying. Suppose we tested every so-called moral proposition in this manner. Those that had a deleterious effect on the functioning of human societies would be regarded as immoral those that did not were matters of personal preference. While some problems would obviously remain, e.g. how does one separate morality from prudence (To which I would respond that cultural prudence may lie at the evolutionary root of morality.) These problems would have far less adverse impact on human beings and their societies.
Considerations of this sort may have to be pursued if we are to minimize the enormities that passionate ignorance has and will increasingly inflict on society. It must become a maxim of society that faith is not knowledge and belief is not reason if we are ever to live in concert with the planet, the two edged sword that science has given us and the common plight we all share.
Bob Newhard
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Financial Tsunamis
In the last few days I have read a few articles on the effect of the global financial crisis on Japan. The owners of much of the world’s liquid wealth, having withdrawn their funds from U. S. and European financial markets to cut their losses, have decided that the Japanese yen is the safest major currency in which to place their money. This has created a monumental problem for the Japanese because it has rapidly increased the value of the yen by about 12%. This has commensurately increased the price for Japanese products. For a nation as dependent upon exports as Japan, this is a real blow to their economy. Thus because of the crash of the American economy and in consequence a debased dollar the Japanese are faced with selling expensive products that the world cannot buy. What does this tell us about an economic tsunami that can slosh back and forth across the world’s societies with no control?
The first thing it says, I believe, is that the world needs some mechanism by which, for starters, the size of the tsunami can be reduced. Capitalism has always had the boom and bust cycle so we know that this will happen again and again and in the globally integrated economy we now have it will have repeated disastrous consequences. To reduce the magnitude of the tsunami waves we need to reduce the over speculation that produces them. This speculation goes on globally 24 hours a day every day in the foreign exchange market, i.e. making money by exploiting the constantly changing relative values of the different national currencies. To quote from the Global Policy Forum,
“The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with an estimated $1.9 trillion currency traded per day (2004). This means that in less than one year, currency worth 10 times the global GDP is traded. Of this massive amount, international trade in goods and services, which requires foreign exchange, accounts for only a small percentage ($9 trillion per year) of the total trading.”
That such a massive amount of money is in motion around the globe and not focused on any human need creates, in my view, a wild beast capable of great harm at any time and any place. It also indicates that the resources exist to deal with humanity’s oppressing needs. Controlling this beast that can devastate a nation’s or a region’s (Southeast Asia in 1997) or the global economy should be of the highest priority for the world’s leaders and especially that of the United States. A good device for doing this, as I have mentioned previously, is the Tobin Tax on global financial transactions.
James Tobin and others have proposed tax rates ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent that would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year for the benefit of the poor areas of the planet or addressing the social problems at the root of conflict. A UN study has estimated that about $150 billion per year is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, ensuring primary schooling for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.
To my mind, this tax verges on a no brainer. We negotiated the GATT, NAFTA, etc. for the benefit of the corporations. It is high time we did the same for the benefit of humanity. We ordinary people have long lived with transaction taxes such as the sales tax. It is also high time that the wealthy of this planet pay a transaction tax as they move their wealth around the world manipulating money to make even more money. We badly need to bring this money market into some conformity with the world’s real economy. The wealthy and the Far Right will and are fighting it, usually as that hated economic practice called socialism, which has been made a bogeyman in the campaign against Obama. Which brings me to my final point (at last?). Several countries, e.g. France and Belgium, have already adopted the Tobin Tax conditional upon other major economic powers adopting it also. If the G8 plus India, China and Brazil could be persuaded to use this tax to mitigate the massively destructive over speculation of the global capitalist system’s impact on their own economies, the benefits to world economic stability would be substantial. By using the tax proceeds to progressively enhance the lives of the world’s poor, humanity just might find its way through the chaos of global warming and overpopulation.
Bob Newhard
The first thing it says, I believe, is that the world needs some mechanism by which, for starters, the size of the tsunami can be reduced. Capitalism has always had the boom and bust cycle so we know that this will happen again and again and in the globally integrated economy we now have it will have repeated disastrous consequences. To reduce the magnitude of the tsunami waves we need to reduce the over speculation that produces them. This speculation goes on globally 24 hours a day every day in the foreign exchange market, i.e. making money by exploiting the constantly changing relative values of the different national currencies. To quote from the Global Policy Forum,
“The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with an estimated $1.9 trillion currency traded per day (2004). This means that in less than one year, currency worth 10 times the global GDP is traded. Of this massive amount, international trade in goods and services, which requires foreign exchange, accounts for only a small percentage ($9 trillion per year) of the total trading.”
That such a massive amount of money is in motion around the globe and not focused on any human need creates, in my view, a wild beast capable of great harm at any time and any place. It also indicates that the resources exist to deal with humanity’s oppressing needs. Controlling this beast that can devastate a nation’s or a region’s (Southeast Asia in 1997) or the global economy should be of the highest priority for the world’s leaders and especially that of the United States. A good device for doing this, as I have mentioned previously, is the Tobin Tax on global financial transactions.
James Tobin and others have proposed tax rates ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent that would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year for the benefit of the poor areas of the planet or addressing the social problems at the root of conflict. A UN study has estimated that about $150 billion per year is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, ensuring primary schooling for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.
To my mind, this tax verges on a no brainer. We negotiated the GATT, NAFTA, etc. for the benefit of the corporations. It is high time we did the same for the benefit of humanity. We ordinary people have long lived with transaction taxes such as the sales tax. It is also high time that the wealthy of this planet pay a transaction tax as they move their wealth around the world manipulating money to make even more money. We badly need to bring this money market into some conformity with the world’s real economy. The wealthy and the Far Right will and are fighting it, usually as that hated economic practice called socialism, which has been made a bogeyman in the campaign against Obama. Which brings me to my final point (at last?). Several countries, e.g. France and Belgium, have already adopted the Tobin Tax conditional upon other major economic powers adopting it also. If the G8 plus India, China and Brazil could be persuaded to use this tax to mitigate the massively destructive over speculation of the global capitalist system’s impact on their own economies, the benefits to world economic stability would be substantial. By using the tax proceeds to progressively enhance the lives of the world’s poor, humanity just might find its way through the chaos of global warming and overpopulation.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Trickle down crisis ‘solutions’
The other day I was talking with a local Democratic congressional candidate. I asked him for his views on the current economic situation. He said we have a liquidity problem and that we have to get money to the small business people so they can start borrowing again. While I agreed that small business needed help I thought that FDR’s approach of feeding the money in at the bottom rather than the top of economic food chain was preferable both because it would immediately help the people who needed it most and the money would immediately go into circulation because of those needs. He said that this situation was not like the one in the Great Depression. He said that this one was one of restoring liquidity to the economic system and that small business, which would hire more people as business improved if they could get bank loans, rather than public works was the quickest way to do this. He pointed out, as many people do, that the New Deal recovery was not fulfilled until the full employment of World War 2. I was struck by this comment from one who had earlier expressed admiration for Franklin Roosevelt. To me it was an indicator of just how far Reaganesque, profit-first, economics has permeated Democratic thinking. Let me explain.
First, the Great Depression was understood as a liquidity problem. I can remember my mother, who by instinct was a saver (She cut up and hemmed old towels to make washcloths.) say that people needed to spend more. There was a national campaign against hoarding. Second, the lesson to be learned by the fact that the New Deal was not completely accomplished until World War 2 is that government provision of jobs does work. It was war, that is government, production that spurred the economy along with the fact that there were fewer workers, which should tell us something about overpopulation. I have asked myself repeatedly why Democrats will do almost anything to preserve the dominance of the free enterprise system. As long ago as the 1870’s the economist Henry George was concerned about eliminating the boom and bust cycle of capitalism. Obviously this occurred because capitalism always overshot the mark due to the over speculation it generated. George saw taxation as the appropriate device for controlling this repeated over speculation. Indeed that was the basic mission of the Federal Reserve established after the great depression. It did not work this time because the people let themselves be gulled by Reagan’s irrelevance about ‘Welfare Queens” and the need to get “government off our (corporate) backs” by way of deregulation.
That this should happen well within the lifetime of many who suffered in the Great Depression, demonstrates the need for this lesson to become a part of the American way. Not free enterprise, but regulated enterprise in which the economy’s sole justification is the welfare of the people. Even Adam Smith recognized this when he expressed concern that corporations like the East India Company could dominate a country’s economy and politics.
Taxation as a control mechanism is better suited to ameliorating the boom and bust cycle than the usual practice of trying to deal with depressions by wasteful corruption-prone tactics of money infusion on those occasions. Taxation has the advantage of being continuously available as problems arise. It can be increased to reduce the excesses of wealth underlying speculation as well as being reduced to stimulate an economy. Further it can be targeted on specific parts of an economy if they are seen to be the problem. An example of this latter is the proposed Tobin tax, named after James Tobin the economics professor who first proposed it, which would place a small tax on the billions of dollars of investment transactions that fly around the world electronically 24/7 in order to transfer some of the wealth of the northern hemisphere to the poverty-ridden southern hemisphere.
Underlying this view is the need for the American people to abandon their insane belief in the sanctity of the free enterprise system. It is a controlling mechanism used by the wealthy. The profit-driven free enterprise system has, and can have, no regard for human beings other than as cogs in an economic machine that regards them as either assets (customers) or liabilities (seniors, the ill, children etc.). Citizens have to be disabused of the manipulative Horatio Alger myth that because some people can “make it” all can and if they don’t it is their fault not the system’s, no matter how prone the system is to the influence of wealth. This myth has caused great unnecessary suffering. The people should understand that the “taxes are bad” mantra of conservatives is designed by the wealthy to control the welfare of those less fortunate. Joe the Plumber’s complaint about taxes being too high and robbing him of what he earned despite the fact he would benefit from Obama’s tax plan serves to underscore American’s ignorance of their current tax “system” and the extent of the indoctrination they have been subjected to. What do we expect when so many of television’s news readers (I refuse to call them reporters.) are millionaires themselves.
Finally, it should be a matter of common sense and taught as a part of the American ethos, that redistributive taxation is necessary to preserve democracy. Without it the wealthy will be in a much better position to accumulate additional wealth than will those who lack wealth. This will eventually produce a society of the rich and the poor, which is and always has been inimical to democracy. We have glossed this fact by saying democracy requires a large middle class. This is simply a sociological way of stating the same economic fact, which in taxation terms, we call the graduated income tax. Wealth must be controlled in the interest of preserving democracy. This, to my mind, should be an essential feature of the economic education of the citizenry.
As a footnote and perhaps a future column I would point out that, unlike the Great Depression, we no longer have a manufacturing-based economy. We have so dramatically outsourced and robotized manufacturing that finance has now replaced manufacturing as the largest segment of our economy. How this nation will recover using our current ‘service’ economy is far from clear.
Also, how much will the rest of the world let us increase our enormous global debt in order to finance rebuilding our infrastructure and the alternative energy resources we need, e.g. wind farms from Texas to North Dakota.
Another, deeper issue, is whether a manufacturing economy can be grown without disastrous effect on our environment. Our productivity of the last 200 or so years has decimated the natural environment and has allowed human population to become unsustainable. These highly relevant issues seldom come up in the contemporary discussion of what is now the world’s economic crisis.
Bob Newhard
First, the Great Depression was understood as a liquidity problem. I can remember my mother, who by instinct was a saver (She cut up and hemmed old towels to make washcloths.) say that people needed to spend more. There was a national campaign against hoarding. Second, the lesson to be learned by the fact that the New Deal was not completely accomplished until World War 2 is that government provision of jobs does work. It was war, that is government, production that spurred the economy along with the fact that there were fewer workers, which should tell us something about overpopulation. I have asked myself repeatedly why Democrats will do almost anything to preserve the dominance of the free enterprise system. As long ago as the 1870’s the economist Henry George was concerned about eliminating the boom and bust cycle of capitalism. Obviously this occurred because capitalism always overshot the mark due to the over speculation it generated. George saw taxation as the appropriate device for controlling this repeated over speculation. Indeed that was the basic mission of the Federal Reserve established after the great depression. It did not work this time because the people let themselves be gulled by Reagan’s irrelevance about ‘Welfare Queens” and the need to get “government off our (corporate) backs” by way of deregulation.
That this should happen well within the lifetime of many who suffered in the Great Depression, demonstrates the need for this lesson to become a part of the American way. Not free enterprise, but regulated enterprise in which the economy’s sole justification is the welfare of the people. Even Adam Smith recognized this when he expressed concern that corporations like the East India Company could dominate a country’s economy and politics.
Taxation as a control mechanism is better suited to ameliorating the boom and bust cycle than the usual practice of trying to deal with depressions by wasteful corruption-prone tactics of money infusion on those occasions. Taxation has the advantage of being continuously available as problems arise. It can be increased to reduce the excesses of wealth underlying speculation as well as being reduced to stimulate an economy. Further it can be targeted on specific parts of an economy if they are seen to be the problem. An example of this latter is the proposed Tobin tax, named after James Tobin the economics professor who first proposed it, which would place a small tax on the billions of dollars of investment transactions that fly around the world electronically 24/7 in order to transfer some of the wealth of the northern hemisphere to the poverty-ridden southern hemisphere.
Underlying this view is the need for the American people to abandon their insane belief in the sanctity of the free enterprise system. It is a controlling mechanism used by the wealthy. The profit-driven free enterprise system has, and can have, no regard for human beings other than as cogs in an economic machine that regards them as either assets (customers) or liabilities (seniors, the ill, children etc.). Citizens have to be disabused of the manipulative Horatio Alger myth that because some people can “make it” all can and if they don’t it is their fault not the system’s, no matter how prone the system is to the influence of wealth. This myth has caused great unnecessary suffering. The people should understand that the “taxes are bad” mantra of conservatives is designed by the wealthy to control the welfare of those less fortunate. Joe the Plumber’s complaint about taxes being too high and robbing him of what he earned despite the fact he would benefit from Obama’s tax plan serves to underscore American’s ignorance of their current tax “system” and the extent of the indoctrination they have been subjected to. What do we expect when so many of television’s news readers (I refuse to call them reporters.) are millionaires themselves.
Finally, it should be a matter of common sense and taught as a part of the American ethos, that redistributive taxation is necessary to preserve democracy. Without it the wealthy will be in a much better position to accumulate additional wealth than will those who lack wealth. This will eventually produce a society of the rich and the poor, which is and always has been inimical to democracy. We have glossed this fact by saying democracy requires a large middle class. This is simply a sociological way of stating the same economic fact, which in taxation terms, we call the graduated income tax. Wealth must be controlled in the interest of preserving democracy. This, to my mind, should be an essential feature of the economic education of the citizenry.
As a footnote and perhaps a future column I would point out that, unlike the Great Depression, we no longer have a manufacturing-based economy. We have so dramatically outsourced and robotized manufacturing that finance has now replaced manufacturing as the largest segment of our economy. How this nation will recover using our current ‘service’ economy is far from clear.
Also, how much will the rest of the world let us increase our enormous global debt in order to finance rebuilding our infrastructure and the alternative energy resources we need, e.g. wind farms from Texas to North Dakota.
Another, deeper issue, is whether a manufacturing economy can be grown without disastrous effect on our environment. Our productivity of the last 200 or so years has decimated the natural environment and has allowed human population to become unsustainable. These highly relevant issues seldom come up in the contemporary discussion of what is now the world’s economic crisis.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 5, 2008
On Religion, Morals and the Public Weal
The current bellicose, undemocratic, and corrupt presidential administration was put in power by the most religious movement in this country since the last fit of religiosity in the series of Great Awakenings to which this country has been subject. What are we to make of this?
These are the people who claim they are the moral majority. The discrepancy between this claim and the president and administration they put in power are in glaring contrast. Why so?
I believe that there is more to such a contrast than mere hypocrisy. What we are looking at is, I suggest, a reflection of the American’s self absorption. By self absorption I mean that the American value system is far more focused on the individual than on the society.
Notice that the so-called moral majority is concerned mainly with personal behaviors, although they do oppose some societal practices, e.g. teaching evolution. Their heavy emphasis and activism has been focused on abortion, same-sex marriage and other “misbehaviors” of private life. These are said to be personal sins and society must suppress them.
The result of this moral predisposition is to analyze and account for social issues in terms of individual responsibilities or individual failures. This approach fails to consider the complex relationships that a modern mass society generates and the consequences that flow from this fact. It also inhibits the ability to treat social and political arrangements as systems and therefore to look for systemic problems. Thus we know that there is a high correlation between crime and poverty and yet we address crime solely as an individual responsibility not as a consequence of a misdistribution of societal wealth.
For example, this intense focus on individual “responsibility” assumes that in a society of 300 million we can know of the personal failings of those in power as one might have in an early Puritan village. Additionally, when we try to compensate for this lack of knowledge of individuals by passing laws against proscribed behaviors we create far worse problems. Examples are the ten-year crime wave prohibition unleashed and the disastrous cost in lives and wealth of our ongoing war on drugs. These are direct consequences of the American proclivity to “personalize” social problems. That this is an old mistake is evidenced by Plato’s Republic in which knowledge is the primary human virtue. To make knowledge effective in society Plato advocates rule by a philosopher king, in other words a dictatorship of the wise. This proposal was made in the context of the world’s first constitutional democracy. What Americans have done is to substantially amplify this by applying it to a complex society of 300 million and substituting the values of an essentially tribal religion, Christianity, for Plato’s knowledge.
This failure to distinguish between social problems and moral issues is routinely employed by dictators and would be dictators. Note G. W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s reference to nations as evil. The leaders of a nation may in some sense be evil, although it is interesting that increasing amounts of “evil” are being reduced to psychological and genetic factors by science, but it is ludicrous to call a nation evil.
One of the most egregious manifestations of this disposition is found in the continuing refusal by Americans to see America as part of the world. We are a nation apart. For such a nation there is only one role in this highly integrated planet and that is to dominate the rest of the world. Until Americans firmly reject this posture they will have no peace and the level of human suffering and death will continue to escalate. The neocon criminals who sought to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world must be publicly and vigorously rejected to begin compensating for the harm we have done.
Bob Newhard
These are the people who claim they are the moral majority. The discrepancy between this claim and the president and administration they put in power are in glaring contrast. Why so?
I believe that there is more to such a contrast than mere hypocrisy. What we are looking at is, I suggest, a reflection of the American’s self absorption. By self absorption I mean that the American value system is far more focused on the individual than on the society.
Notice that the so-called moral majority is concerned mainly with personal behaviors, although they do oppose some societal practices, e.g. teaching evolution. Their heavy emphasis and activism has been focused on abortion, same-sex marriage and other “misbehaviors” of private life. These are said to be personal sins and society must suppress them.
The result of this moral predisposition is to analyze and account for social issues in terms of individual responsibilities or individual failures. This approach fails to consider the complex relationships that a modern mass society generates and the consequences that flow from this fact. It also inhibits the ability to treat social and political arrangements as systems and therefore to look for systemic problems. Thus we know that there is a high correlation between crime and poverty and yet we address crime solely as an individual responsibility not as a consequence of a misdistribution of societal wealth.
For example, this intense focus on individual “responsibility” assumes that in a society of 300 million we can know of the personal failings of those in power as one might have in an early Puritan village. Additionally, when we try to compensate for this lack of knowledge of individuals by passing laws against proscribed behaviors we create far worse problems. Examples are the ten-year crime wave prohibition unleashed and the disastrous cost in lives and wealth of our ongoing war on drugs. These are direct consequences of the American proclivity to “personalize” social problems. That this is an old mistake is evidenced by Plato’s Republic in which knowledge is the primary human virtue. To make knowledge effective in society Plato advocates rule by a philosopher king, in other words a dictatorship of the wise. This proposal was made in the context of the world’s first constitutional democracy. What Americans have done is to substantially amplify this by applying it to a complex society of 300 million and substituting the values of an essentially tribal religion, Christianity, for Plato’s knowledge.
This failure to distinguish between social problems and moral issues is routinely employed by dictators and would be dictators. Note G. W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s reference to nations as evil. The leaders of a nation may in some sense be evil, although it is interesting that increasing amounts of “evil” are being reduced to psychological and genetic factors by science, but it is ludicrous to call a nation evil.
One of the most egregious manifestations of this disposition is found in the continuing refusal by Americans to see America as part of the world. We are a nation apart. For such a nation there is only one role in this highly integrated planet and that is to dominate the rest of the world. Until Americans firmly reject this posture they will have no peace and the level of human suffering and death will continue to escalate. The neocon criminals who sought to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world must be publicly and vigorously rejected to begin compensating for the harm we have done.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Real Surrealism
You may have read an August 7, 2008 report in the Californian (Remote-control warriors suffer war stress, too) regarding Predator drone operators at March Field. In case you did not, the article describes the daily life of these operators. They remotely fly Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Their daily mission is to pilot their drones and fire the Predator’s weaponry to kill people that have been assigned them as targets. The Predator’s cameras are so accurate that they can distinguish between a man and a woman and image a person sitting on a bench. At the end of their shift they go home to their families, take the kids to a soccer game and carry on as a normal family. Or do they? Some of these soldiers say they can handle the daily job to kill and their family relations by keeping them separate. At what price? Others seek the help of psychiatrists caringly provided by the military.
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
Friday, September 5, 2008
Intellectual Honesty in Desperate Times
It is said the truth is the first casualty of war. I believe honesty precedes it.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The fault, dear Brutus...
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.
Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.
• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.
Robert Newhard
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.
Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.
• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.
Robert Newhard
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Accountability, Postmodernism and Barack Obama
For starters, let me ask you to read this recent exchange between Glen Greenwald and Cass Sunstein on Democracy Now. The exchange has to do with Obama’s support of the FISA bill despite his assertion that he would not support it. Sunstein is a Professor of Law at Harvard and a legal advisor to Obama. Greenwald is a well known writer on political issues and versed in Constitutional law.
AMY GOODMAN: I recently spoke to Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who’s been a leading congressional voice against the Bush spy program. This is some of what he had to say.
SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: The President takes the position that under Article II of the Constitution he can ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We believe that that’s absolutely wrong. I have pointed out that I think it is not only against the law, but I think it’s a pretty plain impeachable offense that the President created this program, and yet this immunity provision may have the effect not only of giving immunity to the telephone companies, but it may also allow the administration to block legal accountability for this crime, which I believe it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Cass Sunstein?
CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President’s adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President’s position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush’s view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong—let’s be very clear on that—but the notion that it’s an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That’s high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.
And now you have an administration that—we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, “Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that.” Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, “Well, we can’t criminalize policy disputes.”
And what this has really done is it’s created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they’ll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, “Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it’s really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison.” And so, we’ve incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it’s criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he—there’s no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.
I want to draw your attention to Sunstein’s statement “the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching.” and Greenwald’s excellent and perceptive reply beginning with “You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless…." In response to Sunstein would it not be appropriate to point out that any president might construe his actions as interpretive and thereby render the accountability the Constitution requires of the president ineffective? The president, according to Sunstein, can act like a dictator (unitary president) so long as that is his interpretation of the Constitution without thereby committing a crime. However, the branch of government responsible for interpreting the constitution is the Supreme Court not the Executive.
But the reason I find this exchange significant is that the passage from the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” to Sunstein;s “presidential interpretations” is that it is, in my judgment, a typical postmodernist reduction of clear statements to interpretations. Postmodernism holds that values, including the values upon which law is presumably based, are culturally defined and that therefore there can be no universal values which transcend cultures as such. This, of course, presents a problem when two cultures clash with deadly results, e.g.9/11. Is mankind incapable of reasonably calling this or the 800,000 Tutsi’s killed by Hutus in Rwanda a crime against humanity as such? If there are no human values transcending particular cultures world government becomes impossible.
One can surmise that Postmodernism arose out of reflections on World War II and the horrors that the reality of atomic warfare presented. There was a concern to provide a way to mitigate or avoid the cultural conflicts of a shrinking human world. If values could be reduced to cultural concerns then presumably we could avoid some of the worst conflicts by admitting the viability of all cultures within their own sphere of influence, But, as so often, the best laid plans of mice and men “gang oft agay.” Postmodernists have gone so far in this quest as to deny that science is anything more than Western folklore and no more valid outside the context of Western culture than that of Hindu cosmology outside of India. Thus while the initial motives may have been honorable the damage to human integrity has, in my opinion, been disastrous.
The reason that I bring Obama into this is that his legal training and academic career took place in universities in which postmodernism has had a significant impact. Harvard Law School, where Obama took his doctorate, and the University of Chicago Law School where he taught for twelve years both featured a form of postmodernism called Critical Theory or more specifically in Obama’s case Critical Race Theory. I realize that the political right has made much of these facts (See the article in USA Today by Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online), but I want to consider this in a broader context. Will a postmodernist approach to foreign affairs for instance, allow Obama to be more understanding of the situation of those who oppose United States policies under his administration? I suggest that it may well do so for postmodernism paces a heavy emphasis on culture as definitive of human issues. Will, however, postmodernism lead Obama to temporize on accountability? Much has been made of the consequences of failing to hold G. W. Bush et. al. accountable. Should we not now be exploring Obama’s views on this matter? It has been said that Barack Obama has the ability to let people of very different persuasions project their views on him. Why does he yet remain an enigma to so many? He has contradicted himself repeatedly as most politicians must if they are to garner votes from a polyglot populace, but less has been made of this fact than with other politicians. It suggests Ronald Reagan’s Teflon presidency.An interesting experiment is to ask yourself “What would Obama do” in a number of different significant scenarios. I suspect you will find puzzlement, but be uncertain whether the puzzlement stems for uncertainty about Obama or uncertainty about the scenario. What, for instance, will Obama do about global warming? Will he take the large risks associated with telling the American people and the corporations that an economy based on growth is at odds with human survival or will he try to finesse the issue by a patchwork of corporation-inspired profit-driven proposals? In my judgement, progressives have to push Obama hard on fundamental issues until he makes his positions clear. Too much is at stake not to do this.
Bob Newhard
AMY GOODMAN: I recently spoke to Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who’s been a leading congressional voice against the Bush spy program. This is some of what he had to say.
SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: The President takes the position that under Article II of the Constitution he can ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We believe that that’s absolutely wrong. I have pointed out that I think it is not only against the law, but I think it’s a pretty plain impeachable offense that the President created this program, and yet this immunity provision may have the effect not only of giving immunity to the telephone companies, but it may also allow the administration to block legal accountability for this crime, which I believe it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Cass Sunstein?
CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President’s adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President’s position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush’s view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong—let’s be very clear on that—but the notion that it’s an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That’s high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.
And now you have an administration that—we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, “Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that.” Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, “Well, we can’t criminalize policy disputes.”
And what this has really done is it’s created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they’ll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, “Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it’s really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison.” And so, we’ve incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it’s criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he—there’s no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.
I want to draw your attention to Sunstein’s statement “the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching.” and Greenwald’s excellent and perceptive reply beginning with “You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless…." In response to Sunstein would it not be appropriate to point out that any president might construe his actions as interpretive and thereby render the accountability the Constitution requires of the president ineffective? The president, according to Sunstein, can act like a dictator (unitary president) so long as that is his interpretation of the Constitution without thereby committing a crime. However, the branch of government responsible for interpreting the constitution is the Supreme Court not the Executive.
But the reason I find this exchange significant is that the passage from the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” to Sunstein;s “presidential interpretations” is that it is, in my judgment, a typical postmodernist reduction of clear statements to interpretations. Postmodernism holds that values, including the values upon which law is presumably based, are culturally defined and that therefore there can be no universal values which transcend cultures as such. This, of course, presents a problem when two cultures clash with deadly results, e.g.9/11. Is mankind incapable of reasonably calling this or the 800,000 Tutsi’s killed by Hutus in Rwanda a crime against humanity as such? If there are no human values transcending particular cultures world government becomes impossible.
One can surmise that Postmodernism arose out of reflections on World War II and the horrors that the reality of atomic warfare presented. There was a concern to provide a way to mitigate or avoid the cultural conflicts of a shrinking human world. If values could be reduced to cultural concerns then presumably we could avoid some of the worst conflicts by admitting the viability of all cultures within their own sphere of influence, But, as so often, the best laid plans of mice and men “gang oft agay.” Postmodernists have gone so far in this quest as to deny that science is anything more than Western folklore and no more valid outside the context of Western culture than that of Hindu cosmology outside of India. Thus while the initial motives may have been honorable the damage to human integrity has, in my opinion, been disastrous.
The reason that I bring Obama into this is that his legal training and academic career took place in universities in which postmodernism has had a significant impact. Harvard Law School, where Obama took his doctorate, and the University of Chicago Law School where he taught for twelve years both featured a form of postmodernism called Critical Theory or more specifically in Obama’s case Critical Race Theory. I realize that the political right has made much of these facts (See the article in USA Today by Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online), but I want to consider this in a broader context. Will a postmodernist approach to foreign affairs for instance, allow Obama to be more understanding of the situation of those who oppose United States policies under his administration? I suggest that it may well do so for postmodernism paces a heavy emphasis on culture as definitive of human issues. Will, however, postmodernism lead Obama to temporize on accountability? Much has been made of the consequences of failing to hold G. W. Bush et. al. accountable. Should we not now be exploring Obama’s views on this matter? It has been said that Barack Obama has the ability to let people of very different persuasions project their views on him. Why does he yet remain an enigma to so many? He has contradicted himself repeatedly as most politicians must if they are to garner votes from a polyglot populace, but less has been made of this fact than with other politicians. It suggests Ronald Reagan’s Teflon presidency.An interesting experiment is to ask yourself “What would Obama do” in a number of different significant scenarios. I suspect you will find puzzlement, but be uncertain whether the puzzlement stems for uncertainty about Obama or uncertainty about the scenario. What, for instance, will Obama do about global warming? Will he take the large risks associated with telling the American people and the corporations that an economy based on growth is at odds with human survival or will he try to finesse the issue by a patchwork of corporation-inspired profit-driven proposals? In my judgement, progressives have to push Obama hard on fundamental issues until he makes his positions clear. Too much is at stake not to do this.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The Rich, the Poor and Justice
Try an experiment with me, a gedanken experimentelle or thought experiment as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza called it. It is commonly noted that the
This sort of thought experiment prompts us, by the enormity of necessary change it impresses upon us, to ask what conceivably can be done? We must find a way to transfer global wealth to the poor areas of our planet in a manner that causes minimal disruption of the complex systems of the developed countries. I suggest, as I have in the past, that the best way to do this is by taxing the major sources of excessive wealth and this on a global basis so that the wealthy cannot use the idiosyncrasies of national governments to escape this taxation. The device for doing this, as I have previously argued, is the Tobin Tax. This is a tax on the billions of daily financial transactions that fly around this world 24/7. The value of the Tobin Tax as a means of avoiding massive conflict and violence has not received the attention it deserves. For those of you who wish to learn more about the Tobin Tax and to think about its many ramifications please see the article on the Tobin tax in Wikipedia.
Bob Newhard
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Kabuki Dance
I was writing on a different topic, but the news that Barack Obama had voted for the FISA bill was so stunning in its implications that I felt it necessary to deal with those implications.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, June 29, 2008
On Abstraction
The human ability to abstract is a two edged sword. It has been the source of major human accomplishments and major human deception and unnecessary misery.
What do the Mars Rover and the murderous
I think one lesson to be learned from our power to abstract is that it is very productive when applied to the natural world, but problematic and even deadly when we apply it to human beings. When applied to human beings abstractions can easily result in bigotry, violence and mass slaughter. In bigotry we usually abstract one or a few characteristic of the members of a group and disregard all individuality within the group and any other group characteristics. Thus derogatory terms such as japs, gooks and now ragheads are used to describe opponents in combat.
The military is notorious for its efforts to “objectify”, that is making objects out of the enemy by abstracting some presumed characteristic and applying it to all members of the defined enemy class. This allows soldiers to be more efficient in killing enemy humans because they do not have to treat them as humans. Currently we are seeing the results of this form of abstraction play out in the “prosecutions” of the soldiers that slaughtered a family, including children, in Hidatha
Lt. Col. David Grossman has written a book titled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Grossman describes how the U. S. Army, in comparing the combat kill rate for American troops to the ammunition they fired in the Civil War and World Wars 1 and 2, determined that the kill rate was far below what they expected. Upon further investigation they found that the majority of troops in combat were avoiding killing the enemy soldiers by firing over their heads. These citizen soldiers could not bring themselves to kill another human being even when being fired upon. As a result the U. S. Army began a vigorous desensitization effort in training its soldiers. In my judgment, this may be a reason why the military is trying to place increasing amounts of technology between its soldiers and the enemy. When one fires a missile from a destroyer at sea one does not have to see the consequences in an Iraqi village over the horizon and hence one performs more reliably. The only casualty is our humanity, which happens to bind our species together, and hence is fundamental to civilized society. One additional question is, of course, what happens when these desensitized people return to civilian life?
One more example of abstraction gone grievously awry can be found in economics. The problem began with an abstraction we call money. Prior to money as a medium of exchange, economic transactions were basically barter. In my own lifetime my maternal grandmother would take the eggs and garden produce of their
Finally, there is that most dangerous threat to our species the abstraction called religion. As a recent article in the Providence Journal (April 28, 2008) asks, why in the repeated crises mankind is now experiencing, for example the current global food crisis, do we call in such experts as the economists, the agronomists and the political scientists to analyze the problem and offer possible solutions, but we never call in the demographers who analyze population explosions. Why indeed! Could it be the fear of backlash from the religions that promote higher birth rates? After all, the Vatican tried to kill the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo , Egypt
We know as certainly as we know the contribution made by fossil fuels to climate change, indeed more so, that the human population explosion is the fundamental cause of the damage we are doing to our planet and to ourselves. Yet we have major religions such as Catholicism and Islam promoting maximum population growth. If, in ordinary life, we saw a person pouring gasoline on a house fire we would act immediately to stop the crime. In the case of a similar threat to our species we give tax breaks to the criminals.
One aspect of abstraction-based structures is that, because they can be independent of all constraint either of fact or reason, they are ideal hosts to the play of human emotions. This often gives those abstractions applied to humans their power to affect humans.
Given our mass societies and their complex interrelationships, social abstractions in the form of law are necessary. However that necessity may reflect the problems of massive groupings of human beings more than anything intrinsic to human nature. In brief the lesson to be learned here is that our ability to abstract has very powerful consequences and that we should examine any abstraction-based proposal or practice for all its consequences before allowing its implementation. However, to require this kind of precaution, in the face of massive religious, cultural and advertising hype focused only on the so-called benefits of their abstractions saturated with emotionalism, will take a much higher level of sophistication and self control than now exists in our society. This change can either be accomplished through education, hopefully undertaken by progressives, or the realities of environmental and social collapse will induce humanity to learn the hard way – if it survives the learning process.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Taxation and Democracy -- the Deviousness of George Skelton
George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times political columnist in Sacramento, has raised the question of whether, especially in these hard times, public employees get too much in the way of salary and benefits. (June3,2008 issue.) In so doing he subtly suggests they do. Skelton also wrote a column (May 5, 2008) on taxes as a solution to the State budget crisis in which he says “Least stable is an income tax system that depends too heavily on the wealthy. Their incomes rise and fall steeply with the economy -- and therefore so do state budget deficits. In 2005, million-dollar earners comprised only one-third of 1% of all taxpayers but paid 36.5% of the income tax.” Putting these two statements together we get the hackneyed pit-classes-of-working-people-against-each-other conservative approach to fiscal problems. This time it goes to the ludicrous extreme of saying the rich should not be fairly taxed because their radically varying income is not a stable base for taxation. Presumably the middle and poorer classes of citizens whose income consists mainly of regularly taxed and reported salaries should bear the brunt of taxation. Furthermore, he offers the typically deceptive statement that “…million-dollar earners comprised only one-third of 1% of all taxpayers but paid 36.5% of the income tax.” without indicating what proportion they had of the total income. This is the point of the well known story about Bill Gates greatly increasing the average wealth of customers at a bar the moment he walked in. This kind of dishonesty permeates our consideration of one of the most important democratic issues, namely, a basic society-wide economic equity.
Every once in a while citizens get fed up with this gross and continuing inequity and force legislators to do something. Usually the response is to fix a particularly glaring tax loophole. This band aid approach to tax fairness has contributed to a massive wealth and income disparity between the rich and the poor not seen since the end of the 19th century. In what follows I want to offer a few suggestions on what should be done to correct this staggering imbalance.
First, there is a profound need to establish the basis for a tax system. I suggest that in a democracy that basis is the welfare of society as a whole. That welfare should define all other tax values such as fairness. That welfare requires that the distribution of wealth not be so disparate that democracy cannot function. Conventionally the tax basis has been some form of fairness, violated though it may be. This is, for example, the basis for our income tax system or our sales tax in which the monetary value of an item stipulates the amount of tax paid, unless the tax is being used for some other purpose, e.g. to reduce tobacco use. I think the tax system must be more firmly rooted than this because “fairness” can be variously defined, e.g. “It is fair that a person keep all the wealth he/she has managed to acquire,” or “It is fair that parents pass on all their wealth to their progeny.” This sense of fairness is deadly to a democracy. Taxes are essential to our democracy; without them we would have a society of the rich and the poor in which a democracy cannot exist. In the capitalist system wealth is better positioned to acquire more wealth than is the absence of wealth. Wealth thus inevitably becomes concentrated in the hands of a few and wealth is power. This being the case it is necessary to redistribute a portion of the gross national product to those with less income to insure the continuance of democracy. Our method for doing this is taxation. The wealthy, because of their economic and hence political power are continually contriving ways to avoid paying taxes. What is needed is an ongoing strategy for capturing taxes with the assurance and regularity that we exercise with worker salaries.
The tax system is already rigged in favor of the rich. My wife and I recently got a taste of this when we sold some property we had held for twenty years. Our profit was taxed at only 15% instead of the 28% we were accustomed to pay on our salaried earnings. Additionally the wealthy have a variety of ways of earning income, stock options, government subsidies, depletion allowances for extracting oil and minerals from public land (Notice, the worker can not depreciate his body, his only asset, as he ages.) and hiding income in the Cayman Islands.
I want now to suggest a way a vast amount of wealth, which is not now taxed, can be. It is called the Tobin Tax in recognition of James Tobin, an economist, who first proposed it. It is, like the sales tax and the value added tax, a transaction tax. Tobin was concerned with ameliorating the gross imbalance of wealth between the northern and southern halves of our planet. He was impressed with the billions of dollars that flow 24/7 around the globe. This is an enormous quantity of fiscal transactions. If these transactions could be taxed a small amount billions of dollars could be transferred to the poorest areas of our planet. The wealthy may hide their money in the Cayman Islands or disguise it in other forms of transactions, but increasing their wealth requires fiscal transactions. These are almost always electronic and the transactions themselves must be noted. Even money laundering requires a transaction. The importance of this source of revenue is further evidenced by the fact that the financial segment of our annual gross domestic product has replaced manufacturing as the predominant segment. Finance is now our major “industry.” A Tobin tax in California
While taxation may seem a dull subject, its crucial role in protecting our democracy should be a focus of progressive thinking and action.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Democracy and Courage
As of this writing Hillary Clinton in, justifying her continuing campaign, pointed out that other presidential Democratic candidates ran their campaigns into June including, gratuitously, Bobby Kennedy whose campaign was cut short by assassination. She knew that possible assassination was being used to argue that Obama was “unelectable.” Though she later apologized for the remark, the intentional damage was done. She was playing on the continuing argument against Obama that if he is elected he, as a black man, would be exceptionally liable to be assassinated. I have heard this argument from otherwise well meaning people. The logic of the argument is, of course, that those who may threaten a candidate in this manner control our elections. This raises an issue I see all too seldom discussed, namely, the courage it takes to live and participate in a democracy. Being that democracy ultimately rests upon human reason, not humankind’s strongest characteristic, it is therefore exceptionally vulnerable to attacks that are emotionally driven, e.g. fear.
When people express their concern that Obama could be assassinated they often express it as a concern for Obama’s welfare. The fact that Obama, an obviously intelligent person, decided to run means that, at best people do not want to experience one more presidential assassination, at worst they see this argument as a way to keep a black man out of the presidency. Either way it is racist at its core because it assumes that being black is a cause for assassination. For a society to rise above its past it must have the courage to accept and challenge its imperfections. We have a candidate who is willing to do that. We should support him in his efforts to remedy this cultural blight. Martin Luther King accepted that he would possibly be assassinated. Should all of his accomplishments be diminished because he was assasinated? The same holds for Gandhi and the massive changes he wrought. There are violent elements in any society. Should society make no progress because of this?
As I have noted previously, progressives should look at Obama’s candidacy and presidency as a unique opportunity to take a major step in rectifying racism in this country. This is a disease that will eventually consume our society. Obama is offering us an opportunity to take this major step. We must take it.
As long as societies are the instruments for human improvement we must have the courage to use them for that purpose.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The ‘Underthrow’ of Democracy
We are all familiar with the processes of the overthrow of a democracy by force, but can a democracy be destroyed by the consent of the governed – the ‘underthrow’ of democracy? During the McCarthy period I used to ask myself this question and, more particularly, if it could, would I as the citizen of a democratic society, be thereby required to accept this decision by the majority of the people? In brief, can a democratic society democratically choose another form of government, say a dictatorship? In what follows I want to suggest that this is possible and, what I did not consider at that time, it is being done at this moment.
Some time ago John Dean wrote an article for Fndlaw in which he argued that it was possible to convert our democracy to a dictatorship within the constraints of the Constitution. I want to discuss the possibility that this could be, and possibly is, being done without the mass of the population knowing it or, in a sense, caring.
The first requirement is that the population is basically satisfied with its society. There is a pervasive sense of well being. Most people have adequate food and shelter and people’s minds are kept distracted by entertainment, a constant stream of innovation, and the general feeling that tomorrow will be better than today. This is the root theme of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which citizens are bred to their occupations and provided with soma drug-induced vacations whenever they showed signs of unrest. I think the evidence is that we have, in the main, such a population. For example, it puzzles me that, in view of the economic, foreign policy, and military debacles and the dismal prospects for the future, there has been no significant public unrest. Knowledgeable young people undertook the “Battle of Seattle’ and large numbers demonstrated against invading
Assuming this to be the case, a second factor is that the citizenry has, through technology, size of population and the intrusion of wealth, been substantially divorced from the major decision making process. This has occurred to such an extent that even their legislative representatives have been removed from the process by an arbitrary executive – at least those who were not sheep to begin with. Again, no substantial protest.
This absence of protest has been in my judgement a significant factor in the rise of the notion of a unitary presidency in time of war. This situation is a clear indication that there is a movement in this country to create a dictatorship out of this democracy and that that movement has reached the highest levels of government including the true believers on the Supreme Court. While the movement is couched in terms of this presidential power only in times of war, it is obvious that we have an administration and a Republican candidate prepared for continuous war - McCain asserts 100 years. One hundred years of conditioning is more than enough to produce a generation accepting of dictatorship as a proper form of government. It took only forty years of a standing army to produce acceptance of perpetual militarism in this country. The fact that McCain made this statement makes it clear he has no concept of war’s destructive impact on a democratic society – or he is aware of it and, like Bush, intends to exercise his dictatorial powers.
Perhaps our democratic values became so commonplace, so seldom made the focus of thought, and their necessity disguised by affluence, that in our large and complex society power was moved from the people to a few who conduct a puppet show we call voting. Voting is the only democratic function most people are aware of. Yet how many of us have analyzed this process in terms of democratic practice? The candidates are largely chosen for us. Those that oppose the accepted doctrine are weeded out by denying them exposure in a large society dependent upon mass communications. Kucinich was an obvious victim of this process. Even the remaining “elect able” candidates are become the focus of trivia administered by the media. Serious consideration of major issues is not allowed to get through to the public. The people, therefore, make their selection on the basis of distracting trivia such as gay rights and abortion. The focus on small things when faced with large issues is a feature of childishness. Thus voting itself has been trivialized although its shell remains and democracy is thereby defeated or underthrown.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 4, 2008
An Untold Story
In his new book, Bad Money, Kevin Phillips says that the staggering transformation of our financial institutions between 1987 and 2007 is one of the “greatest stories never told.” Among other things that period saw the financial sector of the economy replace manufacturing as the largest segment of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This was due in part to the increasing deregulation of the financial sector allowing the major financial institutions to invent new “products” with no regulatory oversight and evaluation. Among these products was the bundling of mortgages, which were then sold to investors as securities. The debts of millions of homeowners were thus commodified and placed on a speculative market. Speculation is the preeminent source for disassociating finance from reality. My question is, “Was this an unforeseen accident?”
In an article in the April 28, 2008 Dissent Mag blog by Michael Hudson (Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor) quotes the Wall Street Journal as follows, “Even the Wall Street Journal expressed surprise. Jon Hilsenrath noted the seeming irony: “In August 1999, as the tech-stock bubble was worsening, Alan Greenspan stood before central-banking colleagues in
I am also reading Broken Government, a book by John Dean. Dean describes in considerable detail how the Republicans have systematically and in defiance of Constitutionally mandated separation of the powers of government acted with an arbitrariness not seen before. The nexus of Dean’s concern is the disregard for “process” in the conduct of our governing bodies and that a proper concern for process is essential to a democratic government. He argues that the current belief in
My fundamental question is whether there is a connection between the refusal by Alan Greenspan to deal with the mortgage crisis and let the financial corporations reap as much profit as possible on the one hand and on the other the rampant arbitrariness of Republican governance. Could both of these phenomena constitute an effort to create a radically unregulated environment for corporate enterprise. This raises the fundamental question of whether there is a corporate interest in the destruction of our government and its ability to serve the people. This would be more than fascism. This would be the substitution of the top down dictatorial structure of corporations for the bottom up consent of the governed structure of democratic government. With this privatization of government functions everything would be done for profit, which is to say for those with the money to generate that profit. I used to think that corporations wanted to use our government, especially the military, for their own purposes. It now seems to me that they want to replace government by privatizing its functions for profit, including the military.
Grover Norquist, a power in the neocon movement, has openly declared he wants to destroy our government and turn its operations over to the private sector. Given the Republican’s pronounced antipathy to government, what better way to do it then by overburdening it with debt and excessive tax breaks for the wealthy? One of the favorite mantras of the business sector has been the notion of “creative destruction,” which is deemed to be a good thing. Hence we have seen over the last thirty five years or so the repeated arbitraging of viable businesses simply because the purchasing arbitrager saw a way to make money by breaking up a business, i.e. destroying it, and selling its parts. It would not surprise me that the corporate world sees government in much the same light. In this case they would break up government and privatize the pieces all of which would operate for profit. I do not think, in view of all the evidence, ranging from corporate attacks on social security to their domination of foreign governments for resources form oil to bananas, that such an enterprise is beyond multinational corporate consideration and possibly within their current practice.
As an indication of how dangerous this situation can be, not only to our civil liberties and Constitutional rights, but to human lives and the welfare of the planet, it is useful to take into consideration an observation by Kevin Phillips. He notes that
Bob Newhard
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