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

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

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

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 U. S. soldiers in Hidatha have in common? They are both the results of the human ability to abstract. Somewhere in our evolutionary history we humans developed the ability to abstract from our observations. An abstraction may begin with generalizations about the common elements in the phenomena we observe, but in rather short order they take on a life of their own as an abstraction. Humans became so fascinated with their abstractions that we began drawing relationships among them, using these to build abstract structures, which they endowed with meaning superior to that found in our ordinary experiences. An example of this process is found in plane geometry. The Egyptians had learned to triangulate the Nile flood plain using knotted ropes so that after the annual flooring they could reallocate the land to the owners. Eventually the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras derived the properties of the right triangle independent of any application. Pythagoras and his followers were so impressed with the symmetry and power of their geometry that they built a religion around it. Plato held that everything we witnessed was a pale reflection of its perfect form, called a universal. These universals were where reality resided.

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 Iraq. Although many participated in this slaughter, only one has been convicted and he will serve several years in prison whereas if he had done this to an American family he would have been sentenced to die. Even in the administration of “justice” these Iraqis remain objectified.

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 Iowa farm to town and trade them for salt and other necessities. When money was introduced as a medium of exchange, goods could be much more broadly distributed. All sorts of erstwhile local human products and services could find their monetary equivalencies and be interchangeably sold and purchased. However, money soon created a world of its own in which people began to make money off of money itself. Even Jesus saw there was something wrong with this (competing abstractions?) when he threw the money changers out of the temple. Thus began a world of business detached from human need. An enormous space was created for speculative deviousness, fraud and manipulation of a society’s economy. Of late, the inequalities and environmental disasters caused by money-based abstraction has led to an economic reaction called “true cost accounting” which aims at restoring the environmental and social damage caused by our money-based capitalism. It requires that all effects, e.g. pollution, social degradation, environmental destruction, waste etc. be built into the cost of products and services so that our economic activities do not lead to disastrous consequences for the human species.

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 in 1999.

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

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 19^th 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 would do much to level out the tax contribution of the wealthy that Skelton is concerned about.

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

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