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 United States has 5% of the world’s population, but consumes 25% of the world’s annual production. This is generally regarded as an unjust rate of consumption by the United States population. For purposes of understanding let us seek a just world by reducing our level of consumption to the 5% and redistributing the rest on the same principle of fairness, namely consumption in proportion to population, to the rest of the world’s population. To achieve that level of fairness we would have to get by on 20% of what we now consume. What would your life look like if you lived on 20% of your current income? Granted this is a very rough approximation with a lot of variables in need of consideration. However, I found it surprising how many of those variables were in fact “necessities” for my standard of living. As an example, with 20% of my current income I would not be able to afford a car in our context of responsible car ownership, e.g. insurance, regular maintenance and cost of fuel. Without a car I would be dependent upon public transportation; all but non-existent in the developer’s sprawl of Temecula Valley. (For one person’s experience see Living Without a Car at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/92528.) In short much of our infrastructure would collapse if we had to make do with 20% of our current income. At this point one begins to feel the impact of anything approaching an equitable distribution of the world’s production. Yet, if we are to avoid the chaos of a planet of the rich and the poor this is what we must do. Reaching a just and sustainable world will be the biggest challenge humans have ever faced. Obviously we in the wealthier countries of the world must radically trim our sails. We must find effective, i.e. non-corrupting, ways to transfer wealth and opportunity to the poor areas of the world. We will probably have to redefine “opportunity” in terms of some social rather than economic benefit. We must openly take on those forces that oppose population reduction as enemies of future generations and precipitators of massive human conflict and suffering. Religion must be no shelter for these forces.

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

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.

Obviously Obama played one tune during the primaries when he presented himself as the candidate of the progressives who had made all the difference in the 2006 election. However, once having secured the nomination he made a bee line for the Clintonian “dynamic middle”, which earlier Democrats would have called Republican. He rapidly eviscerated his slogan “Change you can believe in.” This kind of duplicity concerning our basic Constitutional rights is criminal and a transparent abrogation of his Oath of office to protect the Constitution. There was no political necessity for his vote. The veto of the worst president, with the lowest poll ratings, this country has ever seen would have had no significant adverse political consequences. There was, however, an economic reason. As Glen Greenwald has pointed out, there was an enormous amount of corporate money behind this bill. The corporations knew they had committed a crime and the only way out was congressional absolvency. Bush and the corporations knew that an investigation of their crimes would reveal their insidious effort to overthrow our democracy. There is but one explanation, corporate money bought Barack Obama.

It is becoming fashionable to defend Obama by referencing his oft repeated goal of bringing America together. To do this, it is said, he has to appeal to conservatives. My first response to that is that if shredding the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is required to get votes from the Republicans, we have thereby confirmed what the Republicans are really interested in. Secondly this form of bringing America together is simply Clintonism served up again. Finally, it is far more important to deal with the real world this nation faces than bringing it together under false pretenses. I am sure that the Obama rhetoric that won the support of many progressives during the Democratic primary did not suggest a radical turn to the Right in the general election. To now claim that this is what Obama meant all along raises the question of why did he not spell out what he meant in the primaries? He knew the reasons for his support from progressives. This is the kind of dishonesty only a lawyer can appreciate.

But now what? He is still better than McCain some say. Some say support him but keep his feet to the fire. Given the trap he has led progressives into we may have to vote for him, but that makes him even more offensive to those who seek progressive honest government. In the next election it will make Kucinich much more viable.

More importantly, this episode of deception impresses upon me Ralph Nader’s argument that both political parties are under the control of corporate America. Mike Byron sees Republicans and Democrats as “stooges” of the corporations that move their resources from one to the other party whenever the natives get restless with the party in “power.” This is the corporate choreographed kabuki dance in which most of our politicians are little more than stylized actors in a formulaic play.

The only way to get out of this corporate domination is through a movement outside of both parties that either becomes a competing party or obtains sufficient popular support to radically change the Democratic Party. I do not see this happening within the Democratic Party as the Progressive Democrats of American, DFA or MoveOn believe, because that party believes the money of corporate wealth can buy them the elective offices they seek. Neither party served the needs of ordinary citizens during the Gilded Age of great rich/poor disparity at the end of the 19^th century. As a result a progressive movement developed and came to such prominence and power by articulating the plight of ordinary citizens that they successfully ran candidates in many states. While ultimately they failed to change the political landscape of the two party system, they did succeed in greatly influencing the Democratic Party. Their programs and political power were essential to the election of FDR and to the articulation of much of FDR’s program of redirecting the government of the United Sates to the service of its citizens rather than its corporations.

Bob Newhard