I have talked about the fundamental need for a progressive perspective in order to articulate a progressive understanding of out times and our future. Such a perspective will not only provide a clearer view of what needs to be done, it will allow us to establish priorities, discover relationships and conflicts among the various progressive causes, and more rationally settle disputes. It will also, most importantly, communicate a pattern of understanding to society as a whole allowing people to associate their own experiences with a larger grasp of reality.
The want of a comprehensive well thought out vision for progressives has amply evidenced itself in the debacle of the Massachusetts election to succeed Ted Kennedy. In a blue state, with a well developed Democratic Party, following one of the most popular Democrats in the senate, a far right Republican Birther was elected. What more does the Democratic party need as evidence of a massive misunderstanding (if not money-driven disregard of the people) and the need of a progressive vision to animate its own members as well as the public at large. A want of leadership is disastrously evident and leadership and vision go hand in hand. When running as a candidate Obama said his approach to governing would be a "pragmatic" one of seeing what works and what does not and changing course as circumstances required. This is not leadership. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Obama said the following in an ABC News interview on January 20, 2010 "If there's one thing I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," This is Obama's "pragmatism" in action. It amounts to a continuous practice of putting out fires. That the world's most powerful nation should be driven by the immediate chaos of the moment bespeaks a very dangerous bull in a global china shop. This is exactly why a well developed perspective is so important not only to provide direction and priorities, but to avoid the disasters that are consequent to their absence. In this Obama has failed miserably. We now have to hope he is capable of learning quickly. The crushing evidence for the need of a progressive perspective is what makes the following article so apposite to our situation. I hope you find it as relevant as I did.
The following article, while referencing the situation in Australia, is, in my judgment, an excellent presentation of the need for a progressive perspective.
The author is David McKnight, an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. His other writings can be found at beyondrightandleft.com.au. His book, ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War’ was published by Allen & Unwin.
I shall be back with my own thoughts in two weeks.
Bob Newhard
Thinking about a new progressive vision
I'd like to begin by recalling the words on the invitation to this seminar, in which we describe the aspirations of many people for a better society --- and also the way Australian society falls short of these aspirations. Then we added the following:
'...underlying these concerns is something else that is rarely discussed: it is the crisis of ideas and values which express alternatives. In spite of the current economic crisis, the rise of neo-liberalism reminded us that social change depends on political ideas embedded in an intellectual and moral framework. The motive for this seminar therefore arises from the need to find a space to discuss the development of intellectual and moral frameworks for progressive politics in Australia.'
By putting it in this way, we are talking about the connection between ideas and politics. Or what would once have been called the connection of theory to practice.
A crisis of vision
The lack of a broadly agreed set of ideas for the non-conservative side of politics is reflected in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious, at one end of the spectrum, is the decades-long crisis of vision within the Australian Labor Party. That party once had a vision which was based on using government to regulate and civilize capitalism. Yet it was a Labor federal government which ushered in privatization and deregulation in the national economy. In a different way, the radical left in Australia was, historically, a small but significant part of the Australian political scene. It had a highly developed analysis of society, centering on the social consequences of private ownership of property and the market. Most of the radical left has now disappeared altogether, including the Communist Party of Australia to which I once belonged. Some of the remaining parts of the radical left, as far as I can tell, seem to be groping towards a vision of ‘ecological socialism'. Others look determinedly backwards to past glories.
Yet while the anti-corporate left has largely disappeared, problems about the role of private corporations in democracies like ours have not disappeared.
The crisis of vision extends to other social movements, such as the women's movement. This movement achieved tremendous gains in social equality and opposition to discrimination. These changes, combined with the inflexibility in the economy and workforce, have lead to a situation where we now have what Barbara Pocock calls a ‘work-life collision'. In many families neither partner is able easily to fulfill the role of carer of small children. More broadly we have the continued devaluation of caring itself in a society focused on work, economic efficiency, consumerism, and individualization.
The crisis of vision also touches on matters of cultural diversity. Progressives have championed acceptance of cultural diversity against its detractors such as John Howard and Pauline Hanson. Progressives were also key supporters of acceptance of other forms of diversity around sexuality. Indeed, if you asked many younger people today the meaning of the political term ‘the left' many would respond in terms of its support for cultural and social diversity.
In celebrating diversity, it's worth recalling what has happened to an older progressive virtue -- that of the common good and the notion of a common interest. In a society in which the forces driving individualization are powerful, the notion of a common good has been a casualty. Even so, some thinkers dismiss such a notion at the level of theory. However, if one abandons a notion of the common good, one is reduced to promoting particular and small constituencies. Yet members of small constituencies also have communal identities -- as Australians, as users of a health care system or an education system.
Many of us want to retain support for acceptance of diversity, but we also believe that political action to address some of the major crises facing us is impossible without a notion of common humanity which shares a common fate and which needs to identify a common good. But how can a new balance be achieved?
Other problems exist between progressives based on the labour movement and the new and growing environmental movements. The need to address climate change will mean the dislocation of industries, and the need to end jobs in certain industries such as coal mining, and this is causing growing problems. My own view is that the need to address climate change will move to the centre of political ideas and practice. This situation will require the creative and bold application of progressive values.
A lesson from neoliberalism
In discussing the crisis of ideas for progressives, I think it is useful to look at a parallel and opposite case back in the 1970s. In those days it was the Right which had a dearth of credible and inspiring ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, the old conservative Right found its dominance under challenge by ideas of social change. Old notions of nationalism, of racism, of deference to authority and of the naturalness of privilege were being undermined.
But some individuals and forces within the Right sought an intellectual renewal, not by defending old shibboleths but by exploring old ideas which, in their view, suddenly had a new relevance. This was the beginning of the era of the ‘think-tanks' and the rise of economic liberalism or neo liberalism.
This ideological revolution of the Right had an instructive result. Over a period of time, it gave the Right the ascendancy in the battle of ideas and values in Australia and elsewhere. Even where the Right did not directly succeed in taking government, the ideas of the new Right dominated the political agenda and promoted its values and world view. It is only now, after decades of dominance, with the global financial crisis that this extraordinary movement has received its first effective opposition and undergone a significant challenge to its credibility.
In its days of success, neo liberalism had one advantage, and it contains a useful lesson on the reason for the rise and fall of ideas which aim to have social impact.
That advantage, and a key to the success of neo liberalism, was that it was in tune with deeper social changes. In my view the set of ideas known as neoliberalism evolved as one response to the age of affluence. Probably even its originators were not fully aware of this, but it suited the social changes which were sparked by material prosperity. Let me explain. The material prosperity of countries like ours is extraordinary and unprecedented in human history. This wealth gives most people a range of choices of which the most obvious are in supermarket shelves but which extends to a vast number of choices about where to live and how to live. It extends from choice about whether or not to have children -- to choices about which overseas destination to travel to. With choice comes a degree of personal freedom for ordinary people which, as I said, is unprecedented in history. It was not surprising that a set of ideas arose which celebrates choice and freedom and see these abstract notions as the basis for a good society. On this basis, neoliberal economic and social policies foster a strong individualism and self interest.
As I said, I believe that properly understood, this has lessons for us. Every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to identify problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to articulate a new social vision.
Why is that? Well, because certain forces have a logic of their own: they impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change, if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can do one very important thing. To put it bluntly you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don't want to recognize the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best. Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.
Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let's say in the next 12 months an unprecedented drought occurs. Let's say Melbourne and Sydney's water supply once again dips down below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This sort of frightening example of climate change would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.
Seeking a coherent new vision
A new vision needs to have a degree of coherence. That is, your economic policy has to be in alignment with your social policy. If you want to encourage, for example, home care for children , then you don't want economic conditions that force women back to work immediately after giving birth. Or, if you want to fight carbon pollution, this has big implications for your economic approach as well as your social policy.
In raising the need for a coherent social vision, some might see this as a return to an oppressive orthodox theory of society. And that is the tendency after the collapse of the grand narrative of socialism. Indeed in as far as I can understand postmodern ideas, they have a decided preference for localizing politics and rejecting anything resembling a synthesis. And this is understandable up to a point, since it's perfectly possible to argue that the trajectory of Marxism which began to liberate working class, ended by enslaving them. Whether you accept this rather simplistic argument or not, it seems to me that the age of theories which purport to explain everything from world history, to current politics to the future of humanity, is over. Like certain kinds of religions, such theories tend toward a fundamentalism.
But to reject so called ‘theories of everything' is not to reject sets of ideas which try to explain more than local events and issues. Diversity is good and I don't wish to impose an orthodoxy on progressive politics. But in complex societies such as ours, some sort of coherent vision seems almost unavoidable. To take an obvious example, if you want to say something about the environment, it's necessary to have a view on aspects of the economy. Indeed you could argue that the fundamental issues of the environment are now issues of political economy and vice versa.
My personal view about a new politics is that it means searching for a new ‘social philosophy' which deals with problems such as sustainability and the balance between the life-world and the market. Another view is that politics will increasingly be oriented around the need to reduce carbon emissions -- and that this will involve a clash with entrenched corporate power as well as a challenge to deeply ingrained ways of life shared by large numbers of people.
Developing a new vision will not be easy. It is not a simple arithmetical ‘adding up' of a list of progressive causes and demands. Rather it involves far more complex syntheses of ideas and policies. And the need to explore some of those processes is what brought this collection of thinkers and authors together.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The ACLU and Corporate Personhood
As a long time card carrying member of the ACLU I am chagrined, to put it mildly. The ACLU has refused to bring the corporate personhood issue before the Supreme Court.
The aspect of corporate personhood contested was its right to free speech. Understanding that all of our rights are not absolute, for example you are not free to cry fire in a crowded theatre if no fire exists, the question was whether in this case a corporation, like you and me, has its speech protected by the Constitution. The case concerned Nike Corporation's right to lie in its published denial of unfair labor practices. The clearest statement I have found is one in which the ACLU was asked why, despite the Nike corporation's lying in its response to criticisms of its labor practices, it was nonetheless supported by the ACLU in its contention that its right to free speech would be abrogated if it was prevented from lying in describing its labor practices. Keep in mind that lying, like other forms of speech is protected except in specific cases, otherwise we would all be in jail. The above referenced statement can be found at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=226x6379.
The full ACLU Supreme Court amicus brief can be downloaded at http://www.aclu.org/content/aclu-amicus-brief-nike-inc-v-kasky.
The ACLU's amicus brief argued that the law made a distinction between commercial speech e.g. false advertising is not protected speech, and non-commercial speech and that in this case Nike was defending itself against accusations by others and hence was not engaged in commercial speech. An argument that the ACLU was wrong in its amicus brief can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1374003. The gist of this argument is that the ACLU was mistaken on at least two counts. Number one was assuming that lying by a corporation defending itself against evidence of its poor labor practices was not commercial speech and hence was protected by the free speech clause of the Constitution. This could have gone to the heart of the corporate personhood issue. Corporations exist for one purpse only; to make profit. Hence they are amoral entities at best and pernicious at worst. The foundation of law, however, is morality. For instance motive is always a concern in establishing guilt. Number two was that in so doing the Court was continuing the practice of "First Amendment Formalism," which consists of using the narrowest interpretation of the law to decide cases rather than to consider the real world which the law is presumably intended to address. It is the latter issue that I want to consider.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Homes observed, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." At a time when this nation and the planet it inhabits are facing unprecedented problems, we have a Supreme Court dedicated to a formalist approach to law allowing it to disregard the plight our citizens face. The legal prospects for the changes our times demand and progressives seek are substantially less than promising. One glimmer of hope may be Justice Sotomayor who raised the corporate personhood issue in a recent case. It is interesting to note and disheartening to contemplate that in dealing with gross racial injustice it took almost exactly 100 years to break the hold of the South on this issue and that it was the Supreme Court that did it. As usual, rather than talk racial bigotry, the racists and their allies called the Court "activist." It is also interesting to note that the Supreme Court, frequently in the defense of property rights, was a major obstacle to President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to deal with mass unemployment and its consequences. The problem became so acute that Roosevelt sought to increase the size of the Court so more liberal justices could be appointed.
But why is the Supreme Court sometimes unwilling to address major needs of our society as it is currently and during Roosevelt's New Deal and so responsive to society's need as when it took on the civil rights issue? I think there is evidence for a correlation between maldistribted wealth and legal formalism. When the nation's wealth is predominantly in the hands of a few the legal system becomes more formalistic. When the wealth is more evenly distributed the courts are more inclined to address society's major issues whether economic racial or cultural. For example, when there was a gross maldistribution of wealth preceding the Great Depression, for example the muckrakers attacks on Standard Oil or Upton Sinclair's attack on the railroads in California, the courts were rigidly unresponsive to the needs of society at large. Conversely, wealth was much more evenly distributed when the Supreme Court took on the civil rights issue that politicians had failed to deal with for so long. This is, in my judgment, more than a mere correlation when the power of wealth is fully understood. If this analysis is correct the Supreme Court becomes one more instrument of the wealthy.
I do not think, as may be obvious from some of my previous comments, that we are yet willing to understand and acknowledge the depth and breadth of the pernicious influence of excessive wealth on a democracy. It is so dangerous that the amount, concentration and control of wealth should be regulated. You may be familiar with the writings of David Korten, e.g. When Corporations Rule the World. He has a new book out titled Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth in which wealth distribution is a fundamental issue. He, as I have previously argued, sees the problem of pernicious wealth as both its size and its unrelatedness to actual production of goods and services. By holding wealth close to production society as a whole gets the benefits and is in a better position to control excessive wealth by breaking up dominating corporations as was done with AT&T. His is a "Main Street" capitalism as opposed to a "Wall Street" capitalism. I am finding the book intriguing, although I have reservations as to whether the impact of technology is consistent with his call for smaller units of political and social organization.
Bob Newhard
The aspect of corporate personhood contested was its right to free speech. Understanding that all of our rights are not absolute, for example you are not free to cry fire in a crowded theatre if no fire exists, the question was whether in this case a corporation, like you and me, has its speech protected by the Constitution. The case concerned Nike Corporation's right to lie in its published denial of unfair labor practices. The clearest statement I have found is one in which the ACLU was asked why, despite the Nike corporation's lying in its response to criticisms of its labor practices, it was nonetheless supported by the ACLU in its contention that its right to free speech would be abrogated if it was prevented from lying in describing its labor practices. Keep in mind that lying, like other forms of speech is protected except in specific cases, otherwise we would all be in jail. The above referenced statement can be found at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=226x6379.
The full ACLU Supreme Court amicus brief can be downloaded at http://www.aclu.org/content/aclu-amicus-brief-nike-inc-v-kasky.
The ACLU's amicus brief argued that the law made a distinction between commercial speech e.g. false advertising is not protected speech, and non-commercial speech and that in this case Nike was defending itself against accusations by others and hence was not engaged in commercial speech. An argument that the ACLU was wrong in its amicus brief can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1374003. The gist of this argument is that the ACLU was mistaken on at least two counts. Number one was assuming that lying by a corporation defending itself against evidence of its poor labor practices was not commercial speech and hence was protected by the free speech clause of the Constitution. This could have gone to the heart of the corporate personhood issue. Corporations exist for one purpse only; to make profit. Hence they are amoral entities at best and pernicious at worst. The foundation of law, however, is morality. For instance motive is always a concern in establishing guilt. Number two was that in so doing the Court was continuing the practice of "First Amendment Formalism," which consists of using the narrowest interpretation of the law to decide cases rather than to consider the real world which the law is presumably intended to address. It is the latter issue that I want to consider.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Homes observed, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." At a time when this nation and the planet it inhabits are facing unprecedented problems, we have a Supreme Court dedicated to a formalist approach to law allowing it to disregard the plight our citizens face. The legal prospects for the changes our times demand and progressives seek are substantially less than promising. One glimmer of hope may be Justice Sotomayor who raised the corporate personhood issue in a recent case. It is interesting to note and disheartening to contemplate that in dealing with gross racial injustice it took almost exactly 100 years to break the hold of the South on this issue and that it was the Supreme Court that did it. As usual, rather than talk racial bigotry, the racists and their allies called the Court "activist." It is also interesting to note that the Supreme Court, frequently in the defense of property rights, was a major obstacle to President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to deal with mass unemployment and its consequences. The problem became so acute that Roosevelt sought to increase the size of the Court so more liberal justices could be appointed.
But why is the Supreme Court sometimes unwilling to address major needs of our society as it is currently and during Roosevelt's New Deal and so responsive to society's need as when it took on the civil rights issue? I think there is evidence for a correlation between maldistribted wealth and legal formalism. When the nation's wealth is predominantly in the hands of a few the legal system becomes more formalistic. When the wealth is more evenly distributed the courts are more inclined to address society's major issues whether economic racial or cultural. For example, when there was a gross maldistribution of wealth preceding the Great Depression, for example the muckrakers attacks on Standard Oil or Upton Sinclair's attack on the railroads in California, the courts were rigidly unresponsive to the needs of society at large. Conversely, wealth was much more evenly distributed when the Supreme Court took on the civil rights issue that politicians had failed to deal with for so long. This is, in my judgment, more than a mere correlation when the power of wealth is fully understood. If this analysis is correct the Supreme Court becomes one more instrument of the wealthy.
I do not think, as may be obvious from some of my previous comments, that we are yet willing to understand and acknowledge the depth and breadth of the pernicious influence of excessive wealth on a democracy. It is so dangerous that the amount, concentration and control of wealth should be regulated. You may be familiar with the writings of David Korten, e.g. When Corporations Rule the World. He has a new book out titled Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth in which wealth distribution is a fundamental issue. He, as I have previously argued, sees the problem of pernicious wealth as both its size and its unrelatedness to actual production of goods and services. By holding wealth close to production society as a whole gets the benefits and is in a better position to control excessive wealth by breaking up dominating corporations as was done with AT&T. His is a "Main Street" capitalism as opposed to a "Wall Street" capitalism. I am finding the book intriguing, although I have reservations as to whether the impact of technology is consistent with his call for smaller units of political and social organization.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Demicans and Republicats, the Lesson to be Learned from Barack Obama
Many have speculated on the diametric difference between Obama's campaign message of fundamental change and the fundamental lack of change in his actions and policies as President. Some say Obama did not bring change because the office of President changed him. Others, with whom I agree, say that Obama never intended to bring change, that he is the great deceiver. From his very first decision to name Rahm Immanuel as his Chief of Staff and his ouster of Howard Dean as head of the Democratic National Committee it was clear that nothing resembling the change he trumpeted during his campaign was going to take place. It has only gotten worse. There is a large and chilling lesson to be learned from this enormous deception. That lesson is crystal clear in telling us who is in charge of this country and what their intentions are for those of us who live here and those on this planet that may suffer from the use of America's power both economic and military.
From his 700 million dollar bailout of major US banks (talk about "trickle down"), to his pursuit of American oil hegemony on the shores of the Caspian Sea, otherwise known as the Afghanistan surge, Obama has demonstrated his allegiance to the wealthy of this nation and the continued political domination of corporations. It is, in my judgment, imperative that the people of this country become focused on corporate America as the single largest threat to their democracy and personal well being. Profit, not people, has been the articulating dominator of this country far too long. It is now a question of them or us. Obama, with a mandate no president has had since Ronald Reagan, refused to use it to redirect this country to the welfare of its citizens instead of the welfare of its wealthy.
The depth of Osama's commitment to the wealthy and their corporations is portrayed in an excellent, well documented report by David DeGraw titled Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down. The report can be found at http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war-racket-the-obama-illusion-comes-crashing-down. DeGraw describes how the Afghanistan surge is actually directed at denying Russia and China access to one of the world's largest oil reserves located on the Kazakhstan coast of the Caspian Sea. More accurately, it is aimed at providing that oil to United States oil corporations. Wall Street firms, especially Goldman-Sachs, are involved in this effort by way of setting up an oil commodities market outside the United States to handle the world-wide competition for this oil. Thus, to make the depth of the deception that is the Afghanistan War a little clearer, the United States military is waging war, killing and being killed, for the benefit of oil corporations who will not only make immense amounts of money from that oil, but will, in addition, manipulate the speculative market for this oil to further raise the oil's cost and their profits. This monstrous undertaking involving the killing and maiming of the innocent in the thousands for the benefit of egregiously wealthy corporations, their officers and investors, is but an instance of the capitalist greed we have unleashed upon the world. We progressives must make clear the depths of calumny that the people are being subject to. DeGraw's essay is a good place to start.
As a result of Obama's abandonment of progressives it is, in my judgment, fruitless to continue the pursuit of some sort of accommodation with him. He patently is not interested. The problem is what is to be done to save our democracy in the absence of political clout. Some, such as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are focused on electing progressive candidates to national, state and local political offices. Commendable as this is, I do not think we have time for this approach. The Copenhagen climate conference, for example, has demonstrated that the wealthy portion of the planet is prepared to sacrifice the poorer southern nations of the world, especially Africa, by way of "cap and trade" the market for which strongly favors the wealth of the rich countries. The United States is a major player in this effort, which would lock in this market approach until at least 2020, which is way beyond the time we have to act on this most momentous of issues. As I say, we do not have time for an incremental approach to changing our government and our national priorities.
To my mind progressives have to organize to take the issues and the short term impacts that they will generate to the people. As an example, Sam Pizzigati has proposed that instead of just increasing the taxes on the rich, who, with their time and money, will energetically seek to reverse them, we need in addition to cap both the top and the bottom of the annual income scale. Sam's essay can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109pizzigati.html . Decades ago Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income for all citizens. He saw that, with the advancement of technology and the consequent elimination of jobs, the job could no longer be the sole vehicle for distributing the gross national product. A guaranteed annual income or some surrogate would "cap" the bottom of the economic scale. Capping the maximum income that a citizen could receive would not only create a more equitable society, it would, by linking the welfare of the rich and the poor with these "caps," provide a constant awareness among the citizenry of equity, especially when the wealthy begin their often devious efforts to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society. The importance of this latter point can be demonstrated by reflecting on how Reagan persuaded the average American that increasing the wealth of the already wealthy by tax breaks and other measures would stimulate the economy and thereby provide jobs for the rest of us. In this connection it should also be noticed that we have been indoctrinated to accept the "business cycle" as normal. What is seldom pointed out is that since the advent of modern technology, especially computers and robots, after every recession there have been fewer jobs available. In other words the "normal" business cycle is now in the business of eliminating jobs. As long as the job remains the basic means of distributing the gross national product this problem can only increase.
I think we can now see more clearly what Ralph Nader has been saying for years, namely, that in the area of corporate domination of American society there is no significant difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They are both wedded to corporate domination of our country and our world. As for the latter matter Arundhati Roy, in her book of essays titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers has described the corporate pillaging of India by the very same corporations that have been so detrimental to our own society. What David DeGraw has shown us about Obama and what Sam Pizzigati has proposed as a remedy for the dominating role of wealth in our society reflects both the cause of our terrible times and the kind of remedy progressives need to pursue. Lacking a political party progressives need to push both the underlying cause of our dysfunctional and increasingly dangerous societal behavior and the kind of remedies need. This is exactly what the progressives did at the turn of the 20th century with their push to base our currency on silver and gold rather than the much scarcer gold alone, which the wealthy could so easily control. This is the significance of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. Let us go forth and do likewise.
Bob Newhard
From his 700 million dollar bailout of major US banks (talk about "trickle down"), to his pursuit of American oil hegemony on the shores of the Caspian Sea, otherwise known as the Afghanistan surge, Obama has demonstrated his allegiance to the wealthy of this nation and the continued political domination of corporations. It is, in my judgment, imperative that the people of this country become focused on corporate America as the single largest threat to their democracy and personal well being. Profit, not people, has been the articulating dominator of this country far too long. It is now a question of them or us. Obama, with a mandate no president has had since Ronald Reagan, refused to use it to redirect this country to the welfare of its citizens instead of the welfare of its wealthy.
The depth of Osama's commitment to the wealthy and their corporations is portrayed in an excellent, well documented report by David DeGraw titled Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down. The report can be found at http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war-racket-the-obama-illusion-comes-crashing-down. DeGraw describes how the Afghanistan surge is actually directed at denying Russia and China access to one of the world's largest oil reserves located on the Kazakhstan coast of the Caspian Sea. More accurately, it is aimed at providing that oil to United States oil corporations. Wall Street firms, especially Goldman-Sachs, are involved in this effort by way of setting up an oil commodities market outside the United States to handle the world-wide competition for this oil. Thus, to make the depth of the deception that is the Afghanistan War a little clearer, the United States military is waging war, killing and being killed, for the benefit of oil corporations who will not only make immense amounts of money from that oil, but will, in addition, manipulate the speculative market for this oil to further raise the oil's cost and their profits. This monstrous undertaking involving the killing and maiming of the innocent in the thousands for the benefit of egregiously wealthy corporations, their officers and investors, is but an instance of the capitalist greed we have unleashed upon the world. We progressives must make clear the depths of calumny that the people are being subject to. DeGraw's essay is a good place to start.
As a result of Obama's abandonment of progressives it is, in my judgment, fruitless to continue the pursuit of some sort of accommodation with him. He patently is not interested. The problem is what is to be done to save our democracy in the absence of political clout. Some, such as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are focused on electing progressive candidates to national, state and local political offices. Commendable as this is, I do not think we have time for this approach. The Copenhagen climate conference, for example, has demonstrated that the wealthy portion of the planet is prepared to sacrifice the poorer southern nations of the world, especially Africa, by way of "cap and trade" the market for which strongly favors the wealth of the rich countries. The United States is a major player in this effort, which would lock in this market approach until at least 2020, which is way beyond the time we have to act on this most momentous of issues. As I say, we do not have time for an incremental approach to changing our government and our national priorities.
To my mind progressives have to organize to take the issues and the short term impacts that they will generate to the people. As an example, Sam Pizzigati has proposed that instead of just increasing the taxes on the rich, who, with their time and money, will energetically seek to reverse them, we need in addition to cap both the top and the bottom of the annual income scale. Sam's essay can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109pizzigati.html . Decades ago Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income for all citizens. He saw that, with the advancement of technology and the consequent elimination of jobs, the job could no longer be the sole vehicle for distributing the gross national product. A guaranteed annual income or some surrogate would "cap" the bottom of the economic scale. Capping the maximum income that a citizen could receive would not only create a more equitable society, it would, by linking the welfare of the rich and the poor with these "caps," provide a constant awareness among the citizenry of equity, especially when the wealthy begin their often devious efforts to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society. The importance of this latter point can be demonstrated by reflecting on how Reagan persuaded the average American that increasing the wealth of the already wealthy by tax breaks and other measures would stimulate the economy and thereby provide jobs for the rest of us. In this connection it should also be noticed that we have been indoctrinated to accept the "business cycle" as normal. What is seldom pointed out is that since the advent of modern technology, especially computers and robots, after every recession there have been fewer jobs available. In other words the "normal" business cycle is now in the business of eliminating jobs. As long as the job remains the basic means of distributing the gross national product this problem can only increase.
I think we can now see more clearly what Ralph Nader has been saying for years, namely, that in the area of corporate domination of American society there is no significant difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They are both wedded to corporate domination of our country and our world. As for the latter matter Arundhati Roy, in her book of essays titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers has described the corporate pillaging of India by the very same corporations that have been so detrimental to our own society. What David DeGraw has shown us about Obama and what Sam Pizzigati has proposed as a remedy for the dominating role of wealth in our society reflects both the cause of our terrible times and the kind of remedy progressives need to pursue. Lacking a political party progressives need to push both the underlying cause of our dysfunctional and increasingly dangerous societal behavior and the kind of remedies need. This is exactly what the progressives did at the turn of the 20th century with their push to base our currency on silver and gold rather than the much scarcer gold alone, which the wealthy could so easily control. This is the significance of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. Let us go forth and do likewise.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Progressivism Reborn or A New Progressive Paradigm
One of the salient failures of contemporary progressivism is the absence of a basic progressive paradigm. The conservatives under Ronald Reagan used the paradigm of an inept malmotivated government as the enemy to overcome. Government was portrayed as the enemy of freedom. The "positive" side of this paradigm was "freedom" from government, indeed as we have seen, from democracy itself. That is because the freedom of the wealthy is at war with the democracy that secures freedom for the rest of us. The genius in this "freedom" paradigm is that it appeals to a basic human desire. The range of political games that can be played between the paradigms of big brother and the self identity that is the basic motivator of freedom, is enormous and the conservatives have played them to the point of the ME generation," Greed is Good", and the moose-skinning individualism of Sarah Palin. However, the real name of the game was not big brother and freedom, but corporate capitalism's takeover of an otherwise distracted country. By the rigging of this country for maximum corporate profit conservatism is and has been a profound enemy of democracy. Our voting has been about as effective as that of Soviet Russians voting for members of the Duma. We no longer have a democracy, but a plutocracy.
It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.
The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.
This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.
Bob Newhard
It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.
The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.
This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Malicious Doubt
Doubt has had a checkered history in Western Civilization. For long periods during the Dark and much of the Middle Ages it was dangerous to express doubt on religious matters. However, with the rise of science doubt found a definite role in human inquiry. Doubt is essential to science. It is what allows science to avoid dogmatism and encourage inquiry and not infrequently controversy. With science doubt became essential to the establishment of fact. Doubt is also an acknowledgement of human noetic finitude. However, doubt is also an emotional response to the world about us and to other humans.
With the advent of advertising, and its applied psychology, doubt as an emotional response became a fundamental tool for promoting corporate agendas. David Michaels in his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health begins his account with the tobacco industry's campaign against the mounting evidence that tobacco smoking caused cancer. This has been a 50 year battle against mounting scientific evidence including the Surgeon General's declaration of the danger of tobacco smoking and eventually fighting the accusation that tobacco advertising was targeting children. To this day we permit the sale of a known addictive carcinogen. The primary ingredient in the tobacco industry's defense was doubt. The evidence against tobacco smoking was statistical. The tobacco company argued that until a laboratory test could demonstrate the connection between smoking and cancer in human beings, forget mice, regulation of their product was unwarranted. Thus the companies were able to raise doubt (the emotional variety) in the public's mind by opposing the "hard" sciences of physiology and chemistry to the supposed "soft" science of statistics, i.e. the public belief that if you can lie with statistics all statistics are suspect. The tobacco companies would have you forget the fact that all epidemiology is founded on statistics. Thus doubt so used in advertising was as good as disproof, without disproof's risk of being exposed. One can't be sued for doubting something. Doubt is not false advertising.
This Madison Avenue technique of using unjustified doubt to defeat truth moved with alacrity to politics. A most notable case was the defeat of the Clinton health care plan. The Harry and Louise television ad promoted by the pharmaceutical corporations did much to defeat this effort to get a national health plan. The ad did not say that a national health plan was dangerous, unethical, destructive of free enterprise, un-American, etc. It even granted that some improvement was necessary. It merely had Harry and Louise, in conversation at home, express reservations as to whether this plan was the right one. In other words it instilled doubt in the viewer's mind. That was as good as proving the health plan was wrong with no risk of contradiction and much less controversy.
Another, and for the purposes of this column final, example of the use of doubt not only to dissuade masses of people, but to replace knowledge with myth, is the modern rise of creationism. This is not merely a subversion of knowledge, but a direct attack upon it. The proponents of creationism begin by casting doubt on evolution, by calling it "merely" a theory thereby leaving it open to doubt and justifying the teaching of competing theories in public schools. They did this by equating the scientific meaning of theory and the common notion that a theory is nothing but an opinion. In science a theory is, first of all, capable of acquiring evidence and thereby increasingly verifiable. Theories may thus have more or less evidence for them and to that extent constitute knowledge. Because the popular mind equates knowledge with certainty, theories are always less noetically reliable than knowledge. It should be pointed out that the only area in which we actually have certainty is when conclusions are logically drawn from premises that have the conclusion imbedded in them. We call this discipline mathematics. Discoveries can be made here because we may be unclear about the premises we use. For example, for centuries Euclid's geometry was believed to be the only possible geometry and as such described the real world. However, in the 19th century two perfectly consistent non-Euclidian geometries were developed, one by Riemann, the other by Lobachevsky. Among other things two parallel lines could intersect in these geometries. Further when Einstein was looking for a geometry to describe the universe of relativity, which Euclid's did not, he found that Riemann's system worked perfectly. Thus pure mathematical innovation became a function of an empirical science. This, in very rough outline, exemplifies how scientific theories are developed. They are not insubstantial speculations.
Another approach to trying to get the public to understand the nature of scientific knowledge is undertaken by Richard Dawkins in a Free Inquiry article titled The Fact of Evolution adapted from his new book The Greatest Show On Earth:The Evidence for Evolution. In this article Dawkins seeks to articulate the nature of evidence. In it Dawkins describes some of the consequences of denying evolution's facticity. He points out that the evidence for evolution is far more substantial than, for example, that of the Jewish holocaust, yet even though there are holocaust deniers there is no mass belief that the holocaust did not happen. More important to my mind, is pointing out the scientific consequences of denying evolution. Evolution is necessary to the study of genetics and to the understanding of the relatedness of all life forms. To quote Dawkins, "Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond, sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Yet people will doubt it, which is what I mean by the psychological response we call doubt and it is this "doubt" that is fed, manipulated and promoted by those having powerful interests other than truth. The searchers after profit and power are not to be trusted as searchers for truth.
What are the perils that confront a society that has been conditioned to emotional responses to its problems, in this case the emotional correlate of doubt, in place of the factual, evidentiary use of the term? First there are no built in limits to the emotional use of language. The only test is whether it solicits the emotional response of the user. The truth or falsity of language, its facticity, is not only independent of its emotional use, it is often deliberately contravened by the emotional use. Thus a society that cannot distinguish between fact and emotion is doomed to be a continuing victim of deception, untested decision making and the cruelest of social consequences. The whole catastrophe of our Middle East involvement, the horrendous death rates, the societal destruction and the massive waste of money drastically needed for humane purposes can be laid at the feet of a massive substitution of the emotional connotations of language for its cognitive uses. Language matters!
Bob Newhard
With the advent of advertising, and its applied psychology, doubt as an emotional response became a fundamental tool for promoting corporate agendas. David Michaels in his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health begins his account with the tobacco industry's campaign against the mounting evidence that tobacco smoking caused cancer. This has been a 50 year battle against mounting scientific evidence including the Surgeon General's declaration of the danger of tobacco smoking and eventually fighting the accusation that tobacco advertising was targeting children. To this day we permit the sale of a known addictive carcinogen. The primary ingredient in the tobacco industry's defense was doubt. The evidence against tobacco smoking was statistical. The tobacco company argued that until a laboratory test could demonstrate the connection between smoking and cancer in human beings, forget mice, regulation of their product was unwarranted. Thus the companies were able to raise doubt (the emotional variety) in the public's mind by opposing the "hard" sciences of physiology and chemistry to the supposed "soft" science of statistics, i.e. the public belief that if you can lie with statistics all statistics are suspect. The tobacco companies would have you forget the fact that all epidemiology is founded on statistics. Thus doubt so used in advertising was as good as disproof, without disproof's risk of being exposed. One can't be sued for doubting something. Doubt is not false advertising.
This Madison Avenue technique of using unjustified doubt to defeat truth moved with alacrity to politics. A most notable case was the defeat of the Clinton health care plan. The Harry and Louise television ad promoted by the pharmaceutical corporations did much to defeat this effort to get a national health plan. The ad did not say that a national health plan was dangerous, unethical, destructive of free enterprise, un-American, etc. It even granted that some improvement was necessary. It merely had Harry and Louise, in conversation at home, express reservations as to whether this plan was the right one. In other words it instilled doubt in the viewer's mind. That was as good as proving the health plan was wrong with no risk of contradiction and much less controversy.
Another, and for the purposes of this column final, example of the use of doubt not only to dissuade masses of people, but to replace knowledge with myth, is the modern rise of creationism. This is not merely a subversion of knowledge, but a direct attack upon it. The proponents of creationism begin by casting doubt on evolution, by calling it "merely" a theory thereby leaving it open to doubt and justifying the teaching of competing theories in public schools. They did this by equating the scientific meaning of theory and the common notion that a theory is nothing but an opinion. In science a theory is, first of all, capable of acquiring evidence and thereby increasingly verifiable. Theories may thus have more or less evidence for them and to that extent constitute knowledge. Because the popular mind equates knowledge with certainty, theories are always less noetically reliable than knowledge. It should be pointed out that the only area in which we actually have certainty is when conclusions are logically drawn from premises that have the conclusion imbedded in them. We call this discipline mathematics. Discoveries can be made here because we may be unclear about the premises we use. For example, for centuries Euclid's geometry was believed to be the only possible geometry and as such described the real world. However, in the 19th century two perfectly consistent non-Euclidian geometries were developed, one by Riemann, the other by Lobachevsky. Among other things two parallel lines could intersect in these geometries. Further when Einstein was looking for a geometry to describe the universe of relativity, which Euclid's did not, he found that Riemann's system worked perfectly. Thus pure mathematical innovation became a function of an empirical science. This, in very rough outline, exemplifies how scientific theories are developed. They are not insubstantial speculations.
Another approach to trying to get the public to understand the nature of scientific knowledge is undertaken by Richard Dawkins in a Free Inquiry article titled The Fact of Evolution adapted from his new book The Greatest Show On Earth:The Evidence for Evolution. In this article Dawkins seeks to articulate the nature of evidence. In it Dawkins describes some of the consequences of denying evolution's facticity. He points out that the evidence for evolution is far more substantial than, for example, that of the Jewish holocaust, yet even though there are holocaust deniers there is no mass belief that the holocaust did not happen. More important to my mind, is pointing out the scientific consequences of denying evolution. Evolution is necessary to the study of genetics and to the understanding of the relatedness of all life forms. To quote Dawkins, "Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond, sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Yet people will doubt it, which is what I mean by the psychological response we call doubt and it is this "doubt" that is fed, manipulated and promoted by those having powerful interests other than truth. The searchers after profit and power are not to be trusted as searchers for truth.
What are the perils that confront a society that has been conditioned to emotional responses to its problems, in this case the emotional correlate of doubt, in place of the factual, evidentiary use of the term? First there are no built in limits to the emotional use of language. The only test is whether it solicits the emotional response of the user. The truth or falsity of language, its facticity, is not only independent of its emotional use, it is often deliberately contravened by the emotional use. Thus a society that cannot distinguish between fact and emotion is doomed to be a continuing victim of deception, untested decision making and the cruelest of social consequences. The whole catastrophe of our Middle East involvement, the horrendous death rates, the societal destruction and the massive waste of money drastically needed for humane purposes can be laid at the feet of a massive substitution of the emotional connotations of language for its cognitive uses. Language matters!
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Context of Freedom
Democracy has been defined in our founding documents and in our beliefs about society as equality on the one hand and as merit-based on the other. We have "All men are created equal" in our Declaration of Independence on the one hand and the Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man on the other. Both of these archetypes are rooted in the European rebellion against monarchy and inherited wealth and status. The conflict between these two democratic values has been glossed by asserting that equality means equality of opportunity not equal access to society's resources. Jefferson sought to bridge this gap by using education as a device for creating upward mobility based on accomplishment. This is the duality that underlay Ronald Reagan's attack on the Rooseveltian consensus - the rights of merit versus the rights conferred on humans as such. We are now living with the results of this unresolved duality.
Politically, in England the conflict between egalitarianism and meritocracy played out this way. Prior to the Thatcher government the Labour Party supported programs closely analogous to those promulgated by Franklin Roosevelt in this country. The major domestic thrust was to promote the well being of the population at large. Thatcher, like Reagan, who was in many respects her protégé, set out to destroy the world labour had built since the end of World War II. You may recall her attacks on the unionized coal miners and the privatizing of the British railway system. She did this on the premise that Britain had to free its best talent (the corporations) to energize a new economics driven by profit. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party, seeking to compete with the Tories, substituted upward mobility for equality as did Bill Clinton's substitution of workfare for welfare, which gave us the working poor - exactly the kind of labor that corporations desire. Notice the high incidence of Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps, which means the American taxpayer is subsidizing this commercial behemoth.
This issue is addressed in a recent study "In Pursuit of
Egalitarianism - And why social mobility cannot get us there" by Rebecca Hickman that raises the question whether the value of freedom is better served by a culture based on merit-driven upward mobility, or by a society based on equality. This document may be downloaded at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/ . In this paper Hickman argues that freedom is better served by egalitarianism than by meritocracy. The reason is that freedom is a product of society, which meritocracy by rewarding those having "merit" more than others debilitates. Merit is, by definition, scarcer than the average. Hence a society's wealth will inevitably migrate to those having merit thereby creating a bifurcated society in which not only wealth and power, but freedom itself are agglomerated to those having merit. Hence a meritocracy cannot distribute freedom any more than it can wealth and power. This is why Republicans were so freaked out when Obama said wealth should be spread around a little. They know that wealth is power and spreading wealth around means spreading power around, which is democracy. A meritocracy thus is, in fact, an enemy of democracy. Meritocracy is a version of an old story, going back at least to Plato, in which personal values such as merit, when applied to society as a whole, result in gross unfairness and despotism. With Plato the primacy of knowledge led to the philosopher king, a dictatorship. Perhaps the most revealing statement of the American meritocracy was George W. Bush's message to a banquet of wealthy supporters. He told them "You are my base." This is about as anti-democratic as a politician can get. Yet, tellingly, I have been unable to find any such characterization of that utterance; so deep has become the American acceptance of inequality.
Egalitarianism, contrary to what conservatives would have people believe, makes every citizen a stakeholder and not only distributes wealth, power and freedom more evenly, but it greatly diminishes a society's internal friction and promotes cooperation thereby mitigating such disasters as as the governmental abandonment of Katrina victims. Egalitarianism is an old bugaboo of conservatives that is said to lead to domination by the majority and the stifling of personal merit. This is the burden of Ayn Rand's writing, the ideological roots of libertarianism. And as George Orwell observed in his allegory Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. However, this is merely to observe that any virtue can be subverted. Obviously in a meritocracy some people are, of necessity, more equal than others. Because Communism used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" it does not mean it makes sense. The dictator of the Soviet Union was, for example, Joseph Stalin who was not above murdering dissenting proletarians just as capitalist dictators such as Mussolini, Pinochet and China's leadership have done. Dictatorships can arise in any society, but in a society where fairness and concern for all is the operative narrative it is much less likely to do so.
The failure to grasp the significance of the distinction between meritocracy and egalitarianism in practice has led to Ronald Reagan's war on the poor, the beginning of a massive shift of national wealth to the rich and the debasement of the Democratic party as it fell prey to the wealthy and tried to emulate the Republicans' pernicious use of merit to deprive our society of the resources it needs to assure something of a level playing field to all of its citizens.
Bob Newhard
Politically, in England the conflict between egalitarianism and meritocracy played out this way. Prior to the Thatcher government the Labour Party supported programs closely analogous to those promulgated by Franklin Roosevelt in this country. The major domestic thrust was to promote the well being of the population at large. Thatcher, like Reagan, who was in many respects her protégé, set out to destroy the world labour had built since the end of World War II. You may recall her attacks on the unionized coal miners and the privatizing of the British railway system. She did this on the premise that Britain had to free its best talent (the corporations) to energize a new economics driven by profit. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party, seeking to compete with the Tories, substituted upward mobility for equality as did Bill Clinton's substitution of workfare for welfare, which gave us the working poor - exactly the kind of labor that corporations desire. Notice the high incidence of Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps, which means the American taxpayer is subsidizing this commercial behemoth.
This issue is addressed in a recent study "In Pursuit of
Egalitarianism - And why social mobility cannot get us there" by Rebecca Hickman that raises the question whether the value of freedom is better served by a culture based on merit-driven upward mobility, or by a society based on equality. This document may be downloaded at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/ . In this paper Hickman argues that freedom is better served by egalitarianism than by meritocracy. The reason is that freedom is a product of society, which meritocracy by rewarding those having "merit" more than others debilitates. Merit is, by definition, scarcer than the average. Hence a society's wealth will inevitably migrate to those having merit thereby creating a bifurcated society in which not only wealth and power, but freedom itself are agglomerated to those having merit. Hence a meritocracy cannot distribute freedom any more than it can wealth and power. This is why Republicans were so freaked out when Obama said wealth should be spread around a little. They know that wealth is power and spreading wealth around means spreading power around, which is democracy. A meritocracy thus is, in fact, an enemy of democracy. Meritocracy is a version of an old story, going back at least to Plato, in which personal values such as merit, when applied to society as a whole, result in gross unfairness and despotism. With Plato the primacy of knowledge led to the philosopher king, a dictatorship. Perhaps the most revealing statement of the American meritocracy was George W. Bush's message to a banquet of wealthy supporters. He told them "You are my base." This is about as anti-democratic as a politician can get. Yet, tellingly, I have been unable to find any such characterization of that utterance; so deep has become the American acceptance of inequality.
Egalitarianism, contrary to what conservatives would have people believe, makes every citizen a stakeholder and not only distributes wealth, power and freedom more evenly, but it greatly diminishes a society's internal friction and promotes cooperation thereby mitigating such disasters as as the governmental abandonment of Katrina victims. Egalitarianism is an old bugaboo of conservatives that is said to lead to domination by the majority and the stifling of personal merit. This is the burden of Ayn Rand's writing, the ideological roots of libertarianism. And as George Orwell observed in his allegory Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. However, this is merely to observe that any virtue can be subverted. Obviously in a meritocracy some people are, of necessity, more equal than others. Because Communism used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" it does not mean it makes sense. The dictator of the Soviet Union was, for example, Joseph Stalin who was not above murdering dissenting proletarians just as capitalist dictators such as Mussolini, Pinochet and China's leadership have done. Dictatorships can arise in any society, but in a society where fairness and concern for all is the operative narrative it is much less likely to do so.
The failure to grasp the significance of the distinction between meritocracy and egalitarianism in practice has led to Ronald Reagan's war on the poor, the beginning of a massive shift of national wealth to the rich and the debasement of the Democratic party as it fell prey to the wealthy and tried to emulate the Republicans' pernicious use of merit to deprive our society of the resources it needs to assure something of a level playing field to all of its citizens.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 1, 2009
On Reading Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-rich Can Save Us"
I am reading Ralph Nader's new book, a novel, titled "Only the Super-rich Can Save Us." I have not yet finished it, but I believe I am far enough along to discuss Nader's view of the state of the union and its desperate need for radical change, albeit within the constraints of capitalism. Nader's shift to dependence upon the super rich may well reflect his sense of the depth of trouble, both current and immanent, this nation faces. It may even be his non-violent antidote to a plight for which the violence of revolution has so frequently been the result.
Reviewers have drawn attention to the disparity between Nader's decades-long opposition to the role of wealth, especially corporate wealth, in our society and a book with the title Only the Super-rich Can Save Us. What happened? My thought is that Nader has determined that there can be no successful social or political movement in this country without sufficient access to the media. Our society is too big, too complex, and too disparate to do it the way it was done in the 1930s. Then, thousands of people worked in the same plant, where communication and organization were facilitated by that simple fact. Today, technology has scattered workers for the same corporation all over the planet. Because we never required a substantial support for public discourse when we licensed the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum, todays privately controlled media can trump any public policy it dislikes with a media barrage. For purposes of national discourse we have thus made ourselves hostage to wealth and privilege and the power that goes with it. Nader has fought long and hard for forty years. It is a dire warning for progressives when a person of his dedication, intelligence and knowledge finds no other way to initiate the changes we need without the cooperation of the wealthy. This is an indicator of how bad it really is.
Not only has Nader decided access to wealth is absolutely necessary to a progressive overhaul of government, he has also apparently decided that that Tom DeLay's FreedomWorks approach to generating political clout is desirable. In this book his billionaires group repeatedly undertakes "stunts" ala FreedomWork's Tea Party program to stimulate public involvement on the group's progressive goals. Whereas FredomWorks is funded by the likes of the Mellon fortune's Richard Scaife, Nader's group is dependent upon billionaires and multimillionaires of a progressive persuasion, e.g. Warren Buffet and Ted Turner. In these money terms alone it would seem progressives are bound to lose because most of these kinds of people are very conservative. However, it appears that Nader believes that once the gross injustices and wealth disparity of our society are laid bare and made manifest to the public the desired changes will take place.
One of the questionable premises of the book is that government needs to be brought much more proximate to people's daily lives. While I agree, I have yet to find a way, given our large population, the impact of modern technology and what history and the social sciences tell us about human behavior, that government can be downsized to the community level Nader supposes. One of Nader's fictional groups, which sets itself this downsizing goal, winds up admitting that such functions as national security and dealing with major disasters will require a sufficiently strong national government. My question of this supposed arrangement is what makes Nader think that, over time, wealth and hence power will not gravitate to a national government that controls the military?
All in all, this book, by a very intelligent, beltway knowledgeable and profoundly concerned progressive is well worth reading. Of the 40,000 first edition print run, thirty five thousand sold in the first week. If, after finishing the book, changes in the above perceptions or significant other approaches to creating a just democracy become apparent, I will update this assessment.
Lest I appear too dour and serious about the book I should say it is something of a rollicking romp as the billionaires plot their strategies to initially disrupt the corporate world while employing strategies and tactics to replace it with a citizen-driven economy and politics. It is anything but a boring read and it is focused on initiating and installing a progressive agenda.
One final observation: We now have two giants of the progressive movement Nader and Michael Moore in his "Capitalism: a Love Story"; pleading with progressives to deal with the horrors that corporate capitalism has produced. One of the great civic questions of our time is why so little outrage has been demonstrated. Nader, I believe, thinks it is due to a want of effective communication. Moore has communicated his heart out in his films to the point that if his latest film does not generate something of an uprising, he may give up the effort. What has been done to the American people that when they know they were lied into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, seen a major city destroyed by hurricane and left destitute and seen how the wealthy and their greed have pillaged their economy to the point of a major depression, remain either cowed or indifferent except for a lunatic fringe that attributes all these calamities to God's will and man's sin. Are we looking at the psychological consequences of almost sixty years of unmitigated prosperity that through technologies such as television have produced a citizenry so given to delusion that they no longer believe there is a reality for which political leaders can be held accountable? If so, the rich have found a way to demoralize a society without the exhaustion of war.
Bob Newhard
Reviewers have drawn attention to the disparity between Nader's decades-long opposition to the role of wealth, especially corporate wealth, in our society and a book with the title Only the Super-rich Can Save Us. What happened? My thought is that Nader has determined that there can be no successful social or political movement in this country without sufficient access to the media. Our society is too big, too complex, and too disparate to do it the way it was done in the 1930s. Then, thousands of people worked in the same plant, where communication and organization were facilitated by that simple fact. Today, technology has scattered workers for the same corporation all over the planet. Because we never required a substantial support for public discourse when we licensed the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum, todays privately controlled media can trump any public policy it dislikes with a media barrage. For purposes of national discourse we have thus made ourselves hostage to wealth and privilege and the power that goes with it. Nader has fought long and hard for forty years. It is a dire warning for progressives when a person of his dedication, intelligence and knowledge finds no other way to initiate the changes we need without the cooperation of the wealthy. This is an indicator of how bad it really is.
Not only has Nader decided access to wealth is absolutely necessary to a progressive overhaul of government, he has also apparently decided that that Tom DeLay's FreedomWorks approach to generating political clout is desirable. In this book his billionaires group repeatedly undertakes "stunts" ala FreedomWork's Tea Party program to stimulate public involvement on the group's progressive goals. Whereas FredomWorks is funded by the likes of the Mellon fortune's Richard Scaife, Nader's group is dependent upon billionaires and multimillionaires of a progressive persuasion, e.g. Warren Buffet and Ted Turner. In these money terms alone it would seem progressives are bound to lose because most of these kinds of people are very conservative. However, it appears that Nader believes that once the gross injustices and wealth disparity of our society are laid bare and made manifest to the public the desired changes will take place.
One of the questionable premises of the book is that government needs to be brought much more proximate to people's daily lives. While I agree, I have yet to find a way, given our large population, the impact of modern technology and what history and the social sciences tell us about human behavior, that government can be downsized to the community level Nader supposes. One of Nader's fictional groups, which sets itself this downsizing goal, winds up admitting that such functions as national security and dealing with major disasters will require a sufficiently strong national government. My question of this supposed arrangement is what makes Nader think that, over time, wealth and hence power will not gravitate to a national government that controls the military?
All in all, this book, by a very intelligent, beltway knowledgeable and profoundly concerned progressive is well worth reading. Of the 40,000 first edition print run, thirty five thousand sold in the first week. If, after finishing the book, changes in the above perceptions or significant other approaches to creating a just democracy become apparent, I will update this assessment.
Lest I appear too dour and serious about the book I should say it is something of a rollicking romp as the billionaires plot their strategies to initially disrupt the corporate world while employing strategies and tactics to replace it with a citizen-driven economy and politics. It is anything but a boring read and it is focused on initiating and installing a progressive agenda.
One final observation: We now have two giants of the progressive movement Nader and Michael Moore in his "Capitalism: a Love Story"; pleading with progressives to deal with the horrors that corporate capitalism has produced. One of the great civic questions of our time is why so little outrage has been demonstrated. Nader, I believe, thinks it is due to a want of effective communication. Moore has communicated his heart out in his films to the point that if his latest film does not generate something of an uprising, he may give up the effort. What has been done to the American people that when they know they were lied into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, seen a major city destroyed by hurricane and left destitute and seen how the wealthy and their greed have pillaged their economy to the point of a major depression, remain either cowed or indifferent except for a lunatic fringe that attributes all these calamities to God's will and man's sin. Are we looking at the psychological consequences of almost sixty years of unmitigated prosperity that through technologies such as television have produced a citizenry so given to delusion that they no longer believe there is a reality for which political leaders can be held accountable? If so, the rich have found a way to demoralize a society without the exhaustion of war.
Bob Newhard
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