Traditionally, we try to understand our situation by examining the past for cognates otherwise known as lessons of the past. However, as our future as a species becomes clearer, e.g. global warming, water and food shortage, etc. we may, I believe, profitably use the future that is increasingly being laid out before us, to understand the present. We can determine what our options are, what humans are likely to do if an option is exercised (history as well as our psychological and sociological knowledge can be helpful here) and therefore what we should do.
I ended my last column with the question " What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?" Both of these novels are depictions of how society may end up. 1984 describes a world in constant conflict and in particular a dictatorial society controlled by pervasive fear and lack of privacy.
Brave New World depicts a society in which citizens are biologically bred from selected embryos to optimally perform the tasks for which they are intended and therefore to be perfectly happy in carrying out their tasks. In the event they become overstressed and perhaps a source of societal discontent they may take a drug soma to induce pleasure and restore satisfaction.
In 1962 Huxley delivered an address titled The Ultimate Revolution at the University of California, Berkeley. A transcript of the talk may be found at http://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/huxley_ultimate_revolution_032062.htmh/ In this lecture Huxley argued that the ultimate fate of human social/political organization favors the Brave New World scenario. While he greatly admired Orwell's work, he nonetheless believed that the cost of continuous control by the threat, fear and violence of 1984, when comared with that of breeding compliant humans in the first place, will eventually be too high for continued social survival. In either case, as I see it, the result would be dehumanizing as we now consider that term.
Both these scenarios of the future may appear far-fetched, although Orwell's may be much less so. However,they may be instructive as we attempt to gage our future as a species, assuming following blind emotion does not end us first. We have a plethora of precursors of Orwell's 1984. Its basic mode of operation is control through fear of violence and the intense surveillance of individual lives. The Stasi in East Germany, prior to the fall of its master the Soviet Union, was notorious for the pervasive spying on citizens by citizens, indeed parent by child. The autocratic regimes of North Africa and the Middle East practice this kind of domestic control. However, as we now see in those countries, people eventually rebel against such anti-social practices and, at the risk of death, rise in protest. The lesson here, I believe, is that humans can endure the internal stress of fear only so long before they erupt. In his lecture Huxley, citing Pavlov's experiments, notes that periodic release of this stress sinks deep into the human psyche and that doing this is why some dictatorships can be made to last longer than others.
In support of his own thesis Huxley notes the advances that had been made at the time of his lecture over 45 years ago, in both biological and psychological understanding of human beings. Today, especially with the advent of DNA understanding, people now talk of designer children, that is human beings bred to the parent's specifications by manipulating human cells at the DNA level. The lesson here is that we are at the point in which we are about to take charge of our own biological destiny. This, given what we know of the human tendency to self-aggrandizement and our socio/economic tendency to let that self-aggrandizement rise to power through our free enterprise system, is scary indeed.
While there is currently substantial resistance to modifying the human genome, as population wars continue, (for example, Catholics and Muslims trying to dominate through population majorities) some form of genetic or psychological modification may be necessary to eliminate this ancient form of rivalry and keep human population within earth's carrying capacity. In any event, if humans can do it, history demonstrates they will do it.
My last column was concerned substantially with modifying the human mind through psychology. That process will, in my judgment, favor Huxley's scenario for the same reason that his biologically managed society will prevail in the long run, namely, it is more economical to target the human brain than the human body.
With all the evidence that the world prefigured by Huxley is well underway in fact and even more so in potential and taking note of the abundant occasions for conflict latent in major global trends, it becomes relatively clear that human social organization is in its most perilous state since the last ice age.
Having seen in these last two posts how unprepared human emotions are for dealing with the huge, unprecedented, problems we face, the importance of our thinking ability becomes clear. If we are to survive the future with any semblance of what we now regard as human, we must think our way through. We have several hundred years of applied reason in science. We know the power of the reasoning brain. The current tragedy, however, is that when we most need to apply our powers of thought and investigation, we are rejecting thinking for feeling. We willingly substitute the fantasy of creationism for evolution. Our energy corporations, their political henchmen, and media servants, convince millions of our citizens that multiple and well-documented evidence of global warming due to our continuing uses of fossil fuels is a fable concocted to scare people into doing with less. This rejection of the most reliable source of information mankind has ever devised in favor of feel-good fantasy is, to my mind, the ultimate tragedy of the scientific revolution.
In this dire situation all that our species has going for it is its intellect. Those who care for the continued existence of our species have to make science and critical thinking the focus of a vigorous political effort because, unfortunately, truth itself cam no longer prevail against the massive self-deception that pervades this society and the massive amounts of wealth and power determined to keep it that way.
At a personal level we can exercise this faculty with the discipline it requires to take evidence seriously and revise our beliefs and actions as intelligence and evidence requires.
In what I have written in this and my previous column I have been hard on the emotions. The emotions obviously play a large role in what it means to be human. They provide us with some of the most fulfilling experiences of our lives. They make society possible. But we must always remember a basic prerequisite for mankind's continuing survival, namely, that thought validates emotion, not the other way around.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Politics of the Emotions
One of the most inexplicable political events of recent history has been the ability of the Far Right to reverse its losses in two years despite the fact that their people caused the worst recession in the last 80 years and that recession was still in effect during the midterm elections which they handily won. Why did this happen and what have we to learn from it?
There are, no doubt, a number of things that played in to it, but the primary one in my judgment is the role that emotions and their manipulation now play in our elections. For example, we must have candidates with charisma, preferably celebrities. That is an emotional test for political viability. The issues chosen to create candidate electability must be "hot" issues or made to be hot. Making an issue hot is best done by those used to making any product hot, namely advertising professionals or, in short, Madison Avenue. The Republican power structure has, in itself, nothing to offer the ordinary citizen. Yet they succeeded in a context thought to assure their defeat. In this advertising saturated and driven economy the tools for emotional manipulation are well honed by Wall Street's well-paid colleagues on Madison Avenue.
Progressives, on the other hand have tried to persuade the electorate primarily with reason and evidence. For example, they cite the millions of children without health care; they cite the scientific evidence for global warming; they quantify the damage to and death of people due to pesticides, air and water pollution, etc. Progressives draw attention to the human suffering consequent on each of these issues hoping to arouse the voter's emotions enough to get the votes needed. It doesn't work.
The manipulation of the emotions on the other hand provides a rich field for fabrication, innuendo and half truths to cultivate and an abundance of votes to be harvested. A brief example of this type of politics can be seen in President Clinton's failed attempt to get a health-care bill through Congress. Even though it was heavily weighted with corporate rewards it failed to satisfy the pharmaceutical and health insurance greedheads. All they had to do to defeat the effort was place and repeat the "Harry and Louise" ad in which a husband and wife discussing the issue at home agreed that something should be done, but doubted this bill would do it. All Madison Avenue had to do was instill doubt, not disproof, to deprive the effort of the support it needed. In this case the emotion appealed to was that of domesticity and the trust that engendered. Nothing like the home fires to soften the harshness of facts.
As noted above, a more powerful demonstration of getting people to use their emotions to make societal decisions was the astonishing change in the electorate's views in the two years between the Democrat's sweeping election of 2008 and the 2010 midterm elections despite ongoing home and job loss and the glaring economic inequity made clearly evident by the disaster. Granted, it was the money of the Koch brothers, which bought the advertising skills of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks astroturf factory, that pulled it off, but why did so many change their point of view? There are certainly a number of reasons, but a very prominent one lay in the manipulations of human psychology.
Let me suggest the following scenario, which occurred to me as I pondered why was there such a pronounced effort to pin the label of "socialism", although honorable to me, on such an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama? How could it be made to stick on someone so obviously pro-business?
Given the deep hole the Far Right had dug for itself the political plotters began by assessing what they had to work with if the wealthy were not to lose their shirts. They knew the American public had been bombarded with anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades thereby creating an available mindset so pervasive and uncritical that people easily confused communism, socialism and even Nazism. The plotters also knew that the Obama administration might have to launch a massive public works program, a la FDR, to remedy the economic damage they had caused. Putting these two perceptions together would allow Democratic efforts to rebuild the economy through public works rather than private enterprise to be defeated by associating such efforts with labels Americans had been taught to hate. The tea party created for this purpose had no remedy for correcting the enormous damage done by conservatives. They did, however, bring forth an old bugaboo, that is an old cold war emotion, and they were able to elect Congresspeople and senators and return the party of disaster to a control of the lower house. Such is the power of the emotions when politically deployed.
But if that is all there is to it, this country and mankind are in the deepest of poo. The facts are out there and in the long run they will not be denied, whether it's global warming or effective health care for the increasing billions of this planet's population--each one of which can be a disease vector to cause the deaths of others. A major problem for progressives is how to make the facts more effective than the emotions in societal decision making.
To lend further dimension to the importance of this issue, I would draw your attention to the U.S. military Psychological Operations (PSYOP) command. This command was created in November, 1990. It says "The purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is to demoralize the enemy by causing dissension and unrest among his ranks, while at the same time convincing the local population to support American troops." Put this together with another of its objectives, to wit, "In addition to supporting commanders, psychological operations provide interagency support to other U.S. government agencies." and it becomes clear that there is nothing to prevent the use of this type of mind control on the American people. Indeed the military targeted Senators Carl Levin, Al Franken and others for this treatment in an effort to get their support for more funds and troops for the Afghan War. (Full story at http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/02/al_franken_targeted_by_us_army_psy-ops.php ) In many respects there is nothing new about the many means people have adopted to persuade others ranging from bribes to torture. Nor is there anything new about applying such measures against large numbers of people as is evidenced by the wide scale immersive application of advertising in this society. What is new is to see the military organized and funded to apply mental and emotional manipulation to those deemed to be the enemy and to understand the easy transfer of these techniques to the control of the domestic population via the Homeland Security Department. What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?
Bob Newhard
There are, no doubt, a number of things that played in to it, but the primary one in my judgment is the role that emotions and their manipulation now play in our elections. For example, we must have candidates with charisma, preferably celebrities. That is an emotional test for political viability. The issues chosen to create candidate electability must be "hot" issues or made to be hot. Making an issue hot is best done by those used to making any product hot, namely advertising professionals or, in short, Madison Avenue. The Republican power structure has, in itself, nothing to offer the ordinary citizen. Yet they succeeded in a context thought to assure their defeat. In this advertising saturated and driven economy the tools for emotional manipulation are well honed by Wall Street's well-paid colleagues on Madison Avenue.
Progressives, on the other hand have tried to persuade the electorate primarily with reason and evidence. For example, they cite the millions of children without health care; they cite the scientific evidence for global warming; they quantify the damage to and death of people due to pesticides, air and water pollution, etc. Progressives draw attention to the human suffering consequent on each of these issues hoping to arouse the voter's emotions enough to get the votes needed. It doesn't work.
The manipulation of the emotions on the other hand provides a rich field for fabrication, innuendo and half truths to cultivate and an abundance of votes to be harvested. A brief example of this type of politics can be seen in President Clinton's failed attempt to get a health-care bill through Congress. Even though it was heavily weighted with corporate rewards it failed to satisfy the pharmaceutical and health insurance greedheads. All they had to do to defeat the effort was place and repeat the "Harry and Louise" ad in which a husband and wife discussing the issue at home agreed that something should be done, but doubted this bill would do it. All Madison Avenue had to do was instill doubt, not disproof, to deprive the effort of the support it needed. In this case the emotion appealed to was that of domesticity and the trust that engendered. Nothing like the home fires to soften the harshness of facts.
As noted above, a more powerful demonstration of getting people to use their emotions to make societal decisions was the astonishing change in the electorate's views in the two years between the Democrat's sweeping election of 2008 and the 2010 midterm elections despite ongoing home and job loss and the glaring economic inequity made clearly evident by the disaster. Granted, it was the money of the Koch brothers, which bought the advertising skills of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks astroturf factory, that pulled it off, but why did so many change their point of view? There are certainly a number of reasons, but a very prominent one lay in the manipulations of human psychology.
Let me suggest the following scenario, which occurred to me as I pondered why was there such a pronounced effort to pin the label of "socialism", although honorable to me, on such an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama? How could it be made to stick on someone so obviously pro-business?
Given the deep hole the Far Right had dug for itself the political plotters began by assessing what they had to work with if the wealthy were not to lose their shirts. They knew the American public had been bombarded with anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades thereby creating an available mindset so pervasive and uncritical that people easily confused communism, socialism and even Nazism. The plotters also knew that the Obama administration might have to launch a massive public works program, a la FDR, to remedy the economic damage they had caused. Putting these two perceptions together would allow Democratic efforts to rebuild the economy through public works rather than private enterprise to be defeated by associating such efforts with labels Americans had been taught to hate. The tea party created for this purpose had no remedy for correcting the enormous damage done by conservatives. They did, however, bring forth an old bugaboo, that is an old cold war emotion, and they were able to elect Congresspeople and senators and return the party of disaster to a control of the lower house. Such is the power of the emotions when politically deployed.
But if that is all there is to it, this country and mankind are in the deepest of poo. The facts are out there and in the long run they will not be denied, whether it's global warming or effective health care for the increasing billions of this planet's population--each one of which can be a disease vector to cause the deaths of others. A major problem for progressives is how to make the facts more effective than the emotions in societal decision making.
To lend further dimension to the importance of this issue, I would draw your attention to the U.S. military Psychological Operations (PSYOP) command. This command was created in November, 1990. It says "The purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is to demoralize the enemy by causing dissension and unrest among his ranks, while at the same time convincing the local population to support American troops." Put this together with another of its objectives, to wit, "In addition to supporting commanders, psychological operations provide interagency support to other U.S. government agencies." and it becomes clear that there is nothing to prevent the use of this type of mind control on the American people. Indeed the military targeted Senators Carl Levin, Al Franken and others for this treatment in an effort to get their support for more funds and troops for the Afghan War. (Full story at http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/02/al_franken_targeted_by_us_army_psy-ops.php ) In many respects there is nothing new about the many means people have adopted to persuade others ranging from bribes to torture. Nor is there anything new about applying such measures against large numbers of people as is evidenced by the wide scale immersive application of advertising in this society. What is new is to see the military organized and funded to apply mental and emotional manipulation to those deemed to be the enemy and to understand the easy transfer of these techniques to the control of the domestic population via the Homeland Security Department. What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Freedom and Society, the Libertarian Example
In my last post I argued that absolute freedom was the freedom of the jungle, in which the top predators deprived the rest of the jungle's inhabitants, including humans, of their freedom through fear and death and that humans banded together to create their freedom. However, some may say that we humans are now the dominant predator and therefore we no longer need to band together. In this simple observation a good deal of our social and economic behavior is encapsulated. Our technology has increasingly allowed us to be independent of each other or seemingly so. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, has pointed out some of the social consequences of this phenomenon.
However, we still have the dominant predator to fear, it is us or at least some of us. As an example let us consider libertarianism as a philosophy of predation.
Libertarians would have us believe that freedom is an individual right and, ironically, that society should guarantee it, which is obviously another way of saying society bestows freedom upon us. This appeals to the American mindset which tends to be simplistic and given, more than some other societies, to ideological solutions to complex problems. However, as in the jungle, the freedom of the powerful is obtained at the expense of the freedom of the less powerful. A recent and glaring example is the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are humans and can use their massive wealth to pursue their political objectives.
The Internet is replete with articles associating Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas as well as Alito with libertarianism. I found the following quote in an article on theses allocations titled The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court. The quote gives some historical and philosophical scope to the libertarian misrepresentation of freedom: "There are two dimensions to the gun lobby's individual right to gun ownership. One is the libertarian fantasy that we reverse the process described by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government, declare individual sovereignty, dissolve political community, and return to the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The libertarian fantasy mixes with other political ideologies, across the political spectrum, and expresses a defeatist retreat from political life." The complete article can be found at http://www.potowmack.org/997cthom.html. One consequence of libertarian influence is thus the legal baptism of corporate personhood and the unleashing of corporate wealth to subvert the democratic process.
Libertarian influence on our economic policy has been profound. Milton Friedman was the father of trickledown economics in which the rich get the economic benefits first and the rest of society get whatever trickles down after their orgy of greed. Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago (think Obama?), was an economic advisor to Peruvian dictator August Pinochet, and a mentor of Alan Greenspan, a fellow libertarian.
Greenspan expressed "shock" when our Great Recession occurred because he expected the market to correct itself as Friedman had taught him. This is what happens when ideologues address the real world with all its variables. The "law" of the self-correcting market is analogous to Marx's necessity of history in its blind adherence to doctrine. If there is one pronounced tendency in human affairs it is applying certainty, whether of the arbitrariness of morality (think the politics of values) or the arbitrariness of ideology to the vicissitudes of reality. It is a recipe for disaster, human suffering and death. This is the ultimate folly of libertarianism as it was for Soviet communism.
Bob Newhard
However, we still have the dominant predator to fear, it is us or at least some of us. As an example let us consider libertarianism as a philosophy of predation.
Libertarians would have us believe that freedom is an individual right and, ironically, that society should guarantee it, which is obviously another way of saying society bestows freedom upon us. This appeals to the American mindset which tends to be simplistic and given, more than some other societies, to ideological solutions to complex problems. However, as in the jungle, the freedom of the powerful is obtained at the expense of the freedom of the less powerful. A recent and glaring example is the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are humans and can use their massive wealth to pursue their political objectives.
The Internet is replete with articles associating Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas as well as Alito with libertarianism. I found the following quote in an article on theses allocations titled The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court. The quote gives some historical and philosophical scope to the libertarian misrepresentation of freedom: "There are two dimensions to the gun lobby's individual right to gun ownership. One is the libertarian fantasy that we reverse the process described by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government, declare individual sovereignty, dissolve political community, and return to the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The libertarian fantasy mixes with other political ideologies, across the political spectrum, and expresses a defeatist retreat from political life." The complete article can be found at http://www.potowmack.org/997cthom.html. One consequence of libertarian influence is thus the legal baptism of corporate personhood and the unleashing of corporate wealth to subvert the democratic process.
Libertarian influence on our economic policy has been profound. Milton Friedman was the father of trickledown economics in which the rich get the economic benefits first and the rest of society get whatever trickles down after their orgy of greed. Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago (think Obama?), was an economic advisor to Peruvian dictator August Pinochet, and a mentor of Alan Greenspan, a fellow libertarian.
Greenspan expressed "shock" when our Great Recession occurred because he expected the market to correct itself as Friedman had taught him. This is what happens when ideologues address the real world with all its variables. The "law" of the self-correcting market is analogous to Marx's necessity of history in its blind adherence to doctrine. If there is one pronounced tendency in human affairs it is applying certainty, whether of the arbitrariness of morality (think the politics of values) or the arbitrariness of ideology to the vicissitudes of reality. It is a recipe for disaster, human suffering and death. This is the ultimate folly of libertarianism as it was for Soviet communism.
Bob Newhard
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Freedom's just another word for everything to lose
When one becomes of an age, one can no longer be sure that common knowledge of his earlier years is still common knowledge. Some forty or fifty years ago Kris Kristofferson wrote a poignant song about loss and the meaninglessness of life titled Me and Bobby McGee. One line in that song that resonated heavily in those days was "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose;" hence, the title of this post.
"Freedom" has been the watchword of the political right in this country designed to carry a massive burden of deception and destruction. It is high time Progressives start dealing with this term instead of shying away from criticizing such a foundation term for Americans.
Freedom has many meanings and those meanings are derived from the context in which the term is used. Absolute freedom in the real world verges on being a contradiction in terms. Absolute freedom would be the freedom of the jungle because this is the world of predator and prey in which only the predator is free. Only the tiger is free, every other creature's freedom is conditional upon not meeting up with the tiger. Does this remind anybody of corporate capitalism? It was this fear of more powerful animals that first encouraged humans to band together for mutual protection. Society was born of the effort to avoid absolute freedom; however, humans living in groups soon found that they needed rules, frequently in the form of taboos or religions. These rules, given the perversity of human nature, had to be enforced, hence the beginning of government. Thus human freedom has meaning only in the context of a society held together by some degree of force. With this understanding of the necessity of government, the next question is how much government. Mankind has fought violently over this issue. I think a useful way to address this issue is to go back to freedom's evolutionary roots, namely, mutual protection.
Mutual protection places a primacy on the group. A fundamental fallacy of the regressives is that one can have freedom without the group. This view, I believe, is considerably a consequence of technology's beneficent impact. In an earlier age, when the frontier was vast and wild, a few people ventured forth, but they formed communities as soon as they could and most people remained in cities and small towns. Go back three or four hundred years and most people in Europe were living in villages and towns. Go back to the Crusades, when most people lived in villages, these societies were so small and compact and fear of wandering too far from the village and its protection was so pronounced that many crusaders never found their way home. The point is that technology has permitted humans to live in such large groups and with a seeming independence of other humans that people now believe that the group is no longer necessary for their protection. In place of the mutually obligated group they now hire the police or arm themselves for individual protection to the detriment of the group. This is one of the ironies arising when humans become their own worst enemy.
One needs, however, to expand the awareness of threats to humankind to see the continuing need of group primacy. We have a planet of increasingly limited resources with a population of seven billion and counting and in which mankind has become its own worst enemy. The threat is enormous, so enormous that we must now consider all humans on this planet as part of a single group, sometimes called a global village. Freedom needs to be defined in the context of this group just as the first humans defined it within the context of the clan. We need the rules which will allow this global village to protect itself from itself. This, needless to say, is a new experience for mankind. It is why some people have argued that to avoid killing ourselves as a species we need an external enemy because that is what societal protection has always meant. There is no external enemy. The enemy is us as Pogo so observantly said.
The regressives have tried to divorce freedom from society and society's necessary governance. The logic is not there so they have used the emotional connotations of freedom to motivate people against their own government. A modicum of thought would quickly reveal that it is not the government that is the problem, despite Reagan's declaration to the contrary, it is who is controlling the government. Our War for Independence was not fought to turn people loose in the jungle as prey, but as the Constitution declares, to form a more perfect union. We wanted a society in which the people had a say in how they are to be governed, but governed they would be.
What does all this mean for Progressives? We must, I think, clearly and repeatedly demonstrate that there is no human freedom without government. We must measure a society by how much freedom is available to every citizen in the society, not just the affluent. We must understand freedom in much clearer terms than is currently the case. Freedom from fear is as essential now as when humans first formed their mutual defense against predators. Freedom from want is as necessary as freedom from assault, because severe want generates violence, not to mention the adverse impact on human development. In short, FDR's Four Freedoms should be added to our Constitution as rights of this country's citizens. There is, of course, no freedom if a single person, i.e. the tiger, is capable of destroying any and all others. Fear is a fundamental enemy of freedom, eclipsed only by the destruction itself. People feared Hitler and his Gestapo and military machine. What they feared was what millions experienced--death. This is why a dictatorship cannot have free citizens. We must make this clear to people
As noted above, we no longer have to fear predation by lions and tigers. We face corporate predators. The casualties of their predation are, in the popular mind, mainly "losers" not casualties. It is doubtful that early humans considered a clan member devoured by a lion a "loser." This is an indication of how grossly we have let corporate and wealthy America distort the popular perception. The corporation, now deemed a person, is the primary predator loose in our society. We must use our society to protect us from this predator as did our ancestors to protect themselves from their predators.
Bob Newhard
"Freedom" has been the watchword of the political right in this country designed to carry a massive burden of deception and destruction. It is high time Progressives start dealing with this term instead of shying away from criticizing such a foundation term for Americans.
Freedom has many meanings and those meanings are derived from the context in which the term is used. Absolute freedom in the real world verges on being a contradiction in terms. Absolute freedom would be the freedom of the jungle because this is the world of predator and prey in which only the predator is free. Only the tiger is free, every other creature's freedom is conditional upon not meeting up with the tiger. Does this remind anybody of corporate capitalism? It was this fear of more powerful animals that first encouraged humans to band together for mutual protection. Society was born of the effort to avoid absolute freedom; however, humans living in groups soon found that they needed rules, frequently in the form of taboos or religions. These rules, given the perversity of human nature, had to be enforced, hence the beginning of government. Thus human freedom has meaning only in the context of a society held together by some degree of force. With this understanding of the necessity of government, the next question is how much government. Mankind has fought violently over this issue. I think a useful way to address this issue is to go back to freedom's evolutionary roots, namely, mutual protection.
Mutual protection places a primacy on the group. A fundamental fallacy of the regressives is that one can have freedom without the group. This view, I believe, is considerably a consequence of technology's beneficent impact. In an earlier age, when the frontier was vast and wild, a few people ventured forth, but they formed communities as soon as they could and most people remained in cities and small towns. Go back three or four hundred years and most people in Europe were living in villages and towns. Go back to the Crusades, when most people lived in villages, these societies were so small and compact and fear of wandering too far from the village and its protection was so pronounced that many crusaders never found their way home. The point is that technology has permitted humans to live in such large groups and with a seeming independence of other humans that people now believe that the group is no longer necessary for their protection. In place of the mutually obligated group they now hire the police or arm themselves for individual protection to the detriment of the group. This is one of the ironies arising when humans become their own worst enemy.
One needs, however, to expand the awareness of threats to humankind to see the continuing need of group primacy. We have a planet of increasingly limited resources with a population of seven billion and counting and in which mankind has become its own worst enemy. The threat is enormous, so enormous that we must now consider all humans on this planet as part of a single group, sometimes called a global village. Freedom needs to be defined in the context of this group just as the first humans defined it within the context of the clan. We need the rules which will allow this global village to protect itself from itself. This, needless to say, is a new experience for mankind. It is why some people have argued that to avoid killing ourselves as a species we need an external enemy because that is what societal protection has always meant. There is no external enemy. The enemy is us as Pogo so observantly said.
The regressives have tried to divorce freedom from society and society's necessary governance. The logic is not there so they have used the emotional connotations of freedom to motivate people against their own government. A modicum of thought would quickly reveal that it is not the government that is the problem, despite Reagan's declaration to the contrary, it is who is controlling the government. Our War for Independence was not fought to turn people loose in the jungle as prey, but as the Constitution declares, to form a more perfect union. We wanted a society in which the people had a say in how they are to be governed, but governed they would be.
What does all this mean for Progressives? We must, I think, clearly and repeatedly demonstrate that there is no human freedom without government. We must measure a society by how much freedom is available to every citizen in the society, not just the affluent. We must understand freedom in much clearer terms than is currently the case. Freedom from fear is as essential now as when humans first formed their mutual defense against predators. Freedom from want is as necessary as freedom from assault, because severe want generates violence, not to mention the adverse impact on human development. In short, FDR's Four Freedoms should be added to our Constitution as rights of this country's citizens. There is, of course, no freedom if a single person, i.e. the tiger, is capable of destroying any and all others. Fear is a fundamental enemy of freedom, eclipsed only by the destruction itself. People feared Hitler and his Gestapo and military machine. What they feared was what millions experienced--death. This is why a dictatorship cannot have free citizens. We must make this clear to people
As noted above, we no longer have to fear predation by lions and tigers. We face corporate predators. The casualties of their predation are, in the popular mind, mainly "losers" not casualties. It is doubtful that early humans considered a clan member devoured by a lion a "loser." This is an indication of how grossly we have let corporate and wealthy America distort the popular perception. The corporation, now deemed a person, is the primary predator loose in our society. We must use our society to protect us from this predator as did our ancestors to protect themselves from their predators.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Sea Anchors
As you may know, a sea anchor is a device for stabilizing a ship in the grip of a storm. In the age of sail it was frequently a large sail thrown overboard with a rope attached to the ship. The sail's drag against the water provided sufficient resistance to wave and wind to create a modicum of stability.
As I read of the effort to crush the rising resistance in the Middle East, as I heard President Obama's State of the Union speech, which was so full of platitudes and irrelevancies, and as I read of the eighth secretive meeting of the Koch Brothers and their billionaire/millionaire allies in Rancho Mirage and the fact that two Supreme Court Justices (Scalia and Thomas) have been regular attendees of these political plotting soirées, I was, to put it mildly, at sea. An engulfing chaos seemed to be the reality of the day.
But then I heard Governor Jerry Brown's short, no nonsense, and very knowledgeable speech and read of the Common Cause-led, almost 1000 person protest at the Koch Brothers' event and asked myself "Is the left finally starting to find itself?"
The political left has been abandoned by mainstream politics in this country. The Democratic Party, the Lefts' traditional home, has, sometimes angrily, rejected it despite the critical role it played in getting Obama elected. Obama, like Clinton, is taking the Party to the center as fast as he can. There is nothing in the middle of the road, as Jim Hightower so uniquely said, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. However, I believe that in the protest against the Koch Brothers' billionaires political plotting and in Jerry Brown's State of the State address the Left may yet mount a major resurgence.
Why so? Let me take the protest at Rancho Mirage first. The protest was reported to have had about 1,000 demonstrators. It was organized by Common Cause. They bussed demonstrators from all over Southern California. It was a well organized effort, but the thing that struck me most forcefully is that unions of low wage earners, e.g. janitors and domestic workers, were providing much of the transportation. The people, in a very basic sense, were involved. This indicated a major shift in union emphasis. In my youth unions were focused on manufacturing workers and as such they were organized in and through the plants where people worked. The corporate business community exported most of those jobs, so the unions began organizing the next lower tier of employee. These people did not work in one place. They worked in a variety of buildings and homes. Yet union membership and organization still worked. I found that fact very heartening. The poor of this country are finding institutions of an earlier age are still viable and they are willing to use them. However, there is a lesson for Progressives here. As with factory workers, until we have government focused on the people's and society's well being, technology will continue to be directed at eliminating jobs and eventually today's union members will face the same fate as yesterday's factory workers. This is why we need a developed, informed and articulated Progressive perspective. We have to stop reacting and anticipate the future. As Dennis Kucinich repeatedly pleaded in the 2008 Presidential election, "Wake up America, wake up" so we should be urging "Wake up Progressives."
Jerry Brown's State of the State address struck me as the first honest, developed, well communicated speech I have heard from a politician in many a decade. Gone were the shibboleths, the euphemisms, the deceptive use of language so common to current political speech. His strategy is solid for these times; take the budget issue to the people. He has made his recommendations and encourages others, so far with no success, to make theirs. As a case in point, he noted the massive resistance by local governments to his proposed elimination of redevelopment agencies. However, in an excellent display of honest politics, he pointed out that these agencies use this tax-payer-supplied money, which could be better used for schools and safety services. Academic research has shown repeatedly what most of us know, that municipal politics and decision making are far more controlled by the local business community than by any other segment. This pot of money, in effect, allowed the business community to spend tax dollars on whatever projects appealed to them. Is it little wonder that the Republicans don't want Brown's proposals, hard as they must be for all of us, taken to the voters?
As we float and bob in this sea of political and social chaos, caused mainly by the manipulations of excessive wealth that now engulfs us, it is both consoling and energizing to see a plank or two that we can grab onto. I think Common Cause and the unions involved in the protest of the Koch brothers' billionaires plot against democracy and the efforts of Jerry Brown to bring sanity and responsibility to California's government should receive strong Progressive support. The image of janitors and domestic servants opposing the third wealthiest people in the country after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a people's organization like Common Cause seeking a law suit to have Scalia and Thomas removed from the Supreme Court for unconscionable bias should be energizing to all of us. Let us turn these sea anchors into visionary Progressive foundations.
Bob Newhard
As I read of the effort to crush the rising resistance in the Middle East, as I heard President Obama's State of the Union speech, which was so full of platitudes and irrelevancies, and as I read of the eighth secretive meeting of the Koch Brothers and their billionaire/millionaire allies in Rancho Mirage and the fact that two Supreme Court Justices (Scalia and Thomas) have been regular attendees of these political plotting soirées, I was, to put it mildly, at sea. An engulfing chaos seemed to be the reality of the day.
But then I heard Governor Jerry Brown's short, no nonsense, and very knowledgeable speech and read of the Common Cause-led, almost 1000 person protest at the Koch Brothers' event and asked myself "Is the left finally starting to find itself?"
The political left has been abandoned by mainstream politics in this country. The Democratic Party, the Lefts' traditional home, has, sometimes angrily, rejected it despite the critical role it played in getting Obama elected. Obama, like Clinton, is taking the Party to the center as fast as he can. There is nothing in the middle of the road, as Jim Hightower so uniquely said, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. However, I believe that in the protest against the Koch Brothers' billionaires political plotting and in Jerry Brown's State of the State address the Left may yet mount a major resurgence.
Why so? Let me take the protest at Rancho Mirage first. The protest was reported to have had about 1,000 demonstrators. It was organized by Common Cause. They bussed demonstrators from all over Southern California. It was a well organized effort, but the thing that struck me most forcefully is that unions of low wage earners, e.g. janitors and domestic workers, were providing much of the transportation. The people, in a very basic sense, were involved. This indicated a major shift in union emphasis. In my youth unions were focused on manufacturing workers and as such they were organized in and through the plants where people worked. The corporate business community exported most of those jobs, so the unions began organizing the next lower tier of employee. These people did not work in one place. They worked in a variety of buildings and homes. Yet union membership and organization still worked. I found that fact very heartening. The poor of this country are finding institutions of an earlier age are still viable and they are willing to use them. However, there is a lesson for Progressives here. As with factory workers, until we have government focused on the people's and society's well being, technology will continue to be directed at eliminating jobs and eventually today's union members will face the same fate as yesterday's factory workers. This is why we need a developed, informed and articulated Progressive perspective. We have to stop reacting and anticipate the future. As Dennis Kucinich repeatedly pleaded in the 2008 Presidential election, "Wake up America, wake up" so we should be urging "Wake up Progressives."
Jerry Brown's State of the State address struck me as the first honest, developed, well communicated speech I have heard from a politician in many a decade. Gone were the shibboleths, the euphemisms, the deceptive use of language so common to current political speech. His strategy is solid for these times; take the budget issue to the people. He has made his recommendations and encourages others, so far with no success, to make theirs. As a case in point, he noted the massive resistance by local governments to his proposed elimination of redevelopment agencies. However, in an excellent display of honest politics, he pointed out that these agencies use this tax-payer-supplied money, which could be better used for schools and safety services. Academic research has shown repeatedly what most of us know, that municipal politics and decision making are far more controlled by the local business community than by any other segment. This pot of money, in effect, allowed the business community to spend tax dollars on whatever projects appealed to them. Is it little wonder that the Republicans don't want Brown's proposals, hard as they must be for all of us, taken to the voters?
As we float and bob in this sea of political and social chaos, caused mainly by the manipulations of excessive wealth that now engulfs us, it is both consoling and energizing to see a plank or two that we can grab onto. I think Common Cause and the unions involved in the protest of the Koch brothers' billionaires plot against democracy and the efforts of Jerry Brown to bring sanity and responsibility to California's government should receive strong Progressive support. The image of janitors and domestic servants opposing the third wealthiest people in the country after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a people's organization like Common Cause seeking a law suit to have Scalia and Thomas removed from the Supreme Court for unconscionable bias should be energizing to all of us. Let us turn these sea anchors into visionary Progressive foundations.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, January 23, 2011
How Did We Get Here?
An observation: consider a recent string of murders--the abortion doctor George Tiller, the guard at the Holocaust museum, the intended slaughter at the progressive Tides Foundation in San Francisco thwarted by Oakland police, the 1998 bombing of the Olympics in Atlanta, and now the slaughter in Tucson. These and more were all committed by white men. Can you imagine the difference in response by this nation if they had all been committed by black men? There would have been an immediate and prolonged search for conspiracy, perhaps even the invention of a conspiracy a la WMDs in Iraq. However, does that mean that there is no conspiracy?
In what follows I will argue that there is a conspiracy of sorts involved in all of these events, although not an obvious one.
The "conspiracy" was called "the Southern Strategy." It was a Republican response to the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. Let me explain. In 1968 Richard Nixon implemented the Republicans' Southern Strategy. This strategy consisted basically of replacing the century-long Democratic "solid South" with a Republican solid South. I should point out that FDR had constant problems with these Dixiecrats and on at least one occasion had to ask Eleanor to cease going to the Southern states and advocating for the civil rights of blacks because he needed their votes in Congress. Southerners were infuriated with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision requiring integration of public schools. They were even more so with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pushed by Lyndon Johnson. This disaffection, indeed violent opposition, of white Southerners to such Democrat-supported legislation led Nixon and other Republican leaders to strike while the iron was hot. They succeeded. The Republican Party deliberately introduced racism, the single most heinous feature of American culture, into mainstream politics to gain votes. It was almost as if the Civil War had never been fought. For this they should never be forgiven. This is the "conspiracy" that I speak of. The South became Republican in very short order and the Republican Party became dominated by Southerners and the Southern ethos. Interestingly in 2005 Ken Mehlman the then RNC chairman confessed this motive and apologized to the NAACP for doing this.
While racism remained the foundation of the Southern political and social ethos, it was not totally foreign to other parts of the country, indeed to the nation as a whole. In World War II blacks and whites were segregated into separate military units. I found it interesting that the Army's white and black units that built the Alcan Highway competed with each other even though the black units labored with debilitated equipment. However, more than racism was involved. Along with racism Southerners brought a host of long-standing grudges against the North, which was epitomized by the federal government. The federal government was the agent that sent many of the carpet baggers south and they installed blacks in positions of power over whites. While white Southerners eventually got the power back through Jim Crow laws, the resentment remained. There was the oft repeated assertion that the South would rise again and the Confederate flag remained the flag of choice. In this connection, while I have a high regard for Howard Dean, I was appalled when he suggested going south for bubba's gun tooting, rebel flag flying pickup vote. The last thing the Democratic Party needs is an infusion of Southern sentiments.
However the story, as I see it, does not end there. When the Republican Party invited Southern white racists into their party they brought more than a hatred of blacks. They brought a century old hatred of the federal government and they brought their inherent belief that some people are, by nature, better than other people. They brought an ethos of confrontation, which was endemic to their opposition to the federal government. They brought their gun culture reflected in their gun rack pickups. The gun and the rope were their symbols of superiority as practiced by decades of KKK popularity, which spread to the Middle West before retreating again to the south. While these are things found in many parts of our country, they were profoundly developed artifacts of Southern culture. I was stationed for several months in Florida during World War II. I still remember the shock this California boy experienced when he saw separate drinking fountains and public toilet facilities for "negroes" and whites. On one occasion, on a crowded bus, I offered my seat to a black woman overburdened with packages. I was promptly reprimanded by the bus driver. A long history of slavery and a hundred years of Jim Crow become deeply imbedded in a culture, which means they find a wide range of cultural expression. This political use of racism by the GOP is aptly demonstrated by a quote from Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan's campaign manager. "Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[6]
What perhaps Nixon and other Republican leaders did not anticipate was that these newly minted Republicans would take over their party."
But to continue. These newly minted Southern Republicans quickly took over the Republican Paty, which rapidly moved from negotiation in legislation to confrontation. This is, in my opinion, the source of the political antagonism that so pervasively characterizes today's politics and is decried by so many. An example of the depth of the Republican policy of confrontation can be found in Newt Gingrich's shutdown of federal government non-essential services by withholding funds in a budget dispute with the Clinton administration.
But how, you may ask, could an old line political party of the wealthy find common cause with Bible Belt, poorly educated proletariat of the South? I believe the link can be found in the corporation. Let me cite some congruences between the Southern sentiment and corporate desires.
First, and perhaps most fundamental, the Southern hatred for the federal government and the corporate desire to keep government as small and weak as possible, except for the military, bred instant soul mates. When Ronald Reagan said that government was not the solution, but was the problem, he was inciting the energetic support of both groups.
Second, the Southern love of the military coincided with the corporate desire to use the military to gain its global objectives, particularly oil and the military as a source of major profit.
The religious charismatic fundamentalism of the South would seem in irreconcilable opposition to the more modernist churches of the North. I suspect the militarism intimately associated with Southern protestant religion helped as corporations saw an excellent recruitment motivator for its military. There are few greater military motivators than religion. Recruitment went center stage when the military went all volunteer after the Vietnam war.
I also think that as the textile industries of the North moved south for cheaper labor that many in the South viewed the corporation as a means of economic advancement.
These are some of the congruences. I am sure there are many more, possibly more significant than those I have mentioned.
The penetration of Southern culture into national politics by way of its takeover of the Republican Party has been so thorough that I think we are able to say that the South has indeed risen again. In a world of increasing violence-oriented technology I think this cultural, socio/political development poses a significant threat to this nation and the world it still hopes to dominate.
A caveat: When I use the term Southern culture I of course do not mean every white Southerner. Bill Moyers, Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins are all Southerners. However, they all are or were at odds with the culture they were raised in. Molly did, however, write an article in defense of "bubba", whom she felt was misguided, but of good heart.
Cultures generally have three major groups; the fanatic at one end and the skeptic at the other. Most people however are somewhere in the middle, primarily focused on their own lives, taking the culture for granted. However, when cultural values seem threatened they can easily become energized, even to the point of fanaticism. The salient point is that criticism of a culture does not necessarily imply criticism of a particular member of the culture.
In 1944 Gunnar Myrdahl published his 1,500 page landmark study of racism in the United States and its threat to democracy titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In the last two years we have seen the rapid rise of the corporation-created, racist Tea Party. Will we never learn?
Bob Newhard
In what follows I will argue that there is a conspiracy of sorts involved in all of these events, although not an obvious one.
The "conspiracy" was called "the Southern Strategy." It was a Republican response to the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. Let me explain. In 1968 Richard Nixon implemented the Republicans' Southern Strategy. This strategy consisted basically of replacing the century-long Democratic "solid South" with a Republican solid South. I should point out that FDR had constant problems with these Dixiecrats and on at least one occasion had to ask Eleanor to cease going to the Southern states and advocating for the civil rights of blacks because he needed their votes in Congress. Southerners were infuriated with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision requiring integration of public schools. They were even more so with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pushed by Lyndon Johnson. This disaffection, indeed violent opposition, of white Southerners to such Democrat-supported legislation led Nixon and other Republican leaders to strike while the iron was hot. They succeeded. The Republican Party deliberately introduced racism, the single most heinous feature of American culture, into mainstream politics to gain votes. It was almost as if the Civil War had never been fought. For this they should never be forgiven. This is the "conspiracy" that I speak of. The South became Republican in very short order and the Republican Party became dominated by Southerners and the Southern ethos. Interestingly in 2005 Ken Mehlman the then RNC chairman confessed this motive and apologized to the NAACP for doing this.
While racism remained the foundation of the Southern political and social ethos, it was not totally foreign to other parts of the country, indeed to the nation as a whole. In World War II blacks and whites were segregated into separate military units. I found it interesting that the Army's white and black units that built the Alcan Highway competed with each other even though the black units labored with debilitated equipment. However, more than racism was involved. Along with racism Southerners brought a host of long-standing grudges against the North, which was epitomized by the federal government. The federal government was the agent that sent many of the carpet baggers south and they installed blacks in positions of power over whites. While white Southerners eventually got the power back through Jim Crow laws, the resentment remained. There was the oft repeated assertion that the South would rise again and the Confederate flag remained the flag of choice. In this connection, while I have a high regard for Howard Dean, I was appalled when he suggested going south for bubba's gun tooting, rebel flag flying pickup vote. The last thing the Democratic Party needs is an infusion of Southern sentiments.
However the story, as I see it, does not end there. When the Republican Party invited Southern white racists into their party they brought more than a hatred of blacks. They brought a century old hatred of the federal government and they brought their inherent belief that some people are, by nature, better than other people. They brought an ethos of confrontation, which was endemic to their opposition to the federal government. They brought their gun culture reflected in their gun rack pickups. The gun and the rope were their symbols of superiority as practiced by decades of KKK popularity, which spread to the Middle West before retreating again to the south. While these are things found in many parts of our country, they were profoundly developed artifacts of Southern culture. I was stationed for several months in Florida during World War II. I still remember the shock this California boy experienced when he saw separate drinking fountains and public toilet facilities for "negroes" and whites. On one occasion, on a crowded bus, I offered my seat to a black woman overburdened with packages. I was promptly reprimanded by the bus driver. A long history of slavery and a hundred years of Jim Crow become deeply imbedded in a culture, which means they find a wide range of cultural expression. This political use of racism by the GOP is aptly demonstrated by a quote from Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan's campaign manager. "Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[6]
What perhaps Nixon and other Republican leaders did not anticipate was that these newly minted Republicans would take over their party."
But to continue. These newly minted Southern Republicans quickly took over the Republican Paty, which rapidly moved from negotiation in legislation to confrontation. This is, in my opinion, the source of the political antagonism that so pervasively characterizes today's politics and is decried by so many. An example of the depth of the Republican policy of confrontation can be found in Newt Gingrich's shutdown of federal government non-essential services by withholding funds in a budget dispute with the Clinton administration.
But how, you may ask, could an old line political party of the wealthy find common cause with Bible Belt, poorly educated proletariat of the South? I believe the link can be found in the corporation. Let me cite some congruences between the Southern sentiment and corporate desires.
First, and perhaps most fundamental, the Southern hatred for the federal government and the corporate desire to keep government as small and weak as possible, except for the military, bred instant soul mates. When Ronald Reagan said that government was not the solution, but was the problem, he was inciting the energetic support of both groups.
Second, the Southern love of the military coincided with the corporate desire to use the military to gain its global objectives, particularly oil and the military as a source of major profit.
The religious charismatic fundamentalism of the South would seem in irreconcilable opposition to the more modernist churches of the North. I suspect the militarism intimately associated with Southern protestant religion helped as corporations saw an excellent recruitment motivator for its military. There are few greater military motivators than religion. Recruitment went center stage when the military went all volunteer after the Vietnam war.
I also think that as the textile industries of the North moved south for cheaper labor that many in the South viewed the corporation as a means of economic advancement.
These are some of the congruences. I am sure there are many more, possibly more significant than those I have mentioned.
The penetration of Southern culture into national politics by way of its takeover of the Republican Party has been so thorough that I think we are able to say that the South has indeed risen again. In a world of increasing violence-oriented technology I think this cultural, socio/political development poses a significant threat to this nation and the world it still hopes to dominate.
A caveat: When I use the term Southern culture I of course do not mean every white Southerner. Bill Moyers, Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins are all Southerners. However, they all are or were at odds with the culture they were raised in. Molly did, however, write an article in defense of "bubba", whom she felt was misguided, but of good heart.
Cultures generally have three major groups; the fanatic at one end and the skeptic at the other. Most people however are somewhere in the middle, primarily focused on their own lives, taking the culture for granted. However, when cultural values seem threatened they can easily become energized, even to the point of fanaticism. The salient point is that criticism of a culture does not necessarily imply criticism of a particular member of the culture.
In 1944 Gunnar Myrdahl published his 1,500 page landmark study of racism in the United States and its threat to democracy titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In the last two years we have seen the rapid rise of the corporation-created, racist Tea Party. Will we never learn?
Bob Newhard
Sunday, January 9, 2011
On a Remedy for the Grossly Lopsided Economy of this Nation and the World
Given that human beings are the most powerful animals on this planet and given that economic inequality has historically been a primary cause of the destructive unleashing of that power, it is imperative that we find a means to eliminate gross disparities of wealth and income. In this connection and others I wish to once again discuss the Tobin Tax, or as it is now frequently called, the transaction tax.
James Tobin was an American Nobel Laureate in economics. He was concerned with the plight of the billions of profoundly and perennially poor humans on earth. He saw this poverty as a function of gross economic inequality, especially between the African continent and the affluent nations of the northern hemisphere. To transfer more of the world's wealth to these impoverished nations and to accomplish several other objectives he proposed a small 0.5 percent tax on one of the least productive of economic activities, the "spot" market portion of the global currency market. In this market national currencies are bought and sold, using immediate transactions, as their relative values constantly change. While it has a non-unique function of providing currency equivalencies for purposes of trade, it is a highly speculative market with no overall regulation. The total global currency market had, as of April 20, 2010, an average daily turnover of an estimated $3.98 trillion dollars. This represents a market growth rate of approximately 20% since 2007. The spot market portion of the total global foreign exchange market, as of April 2010, had an average daily turnover of 1.450 trillion. It operates world wide 24 hours a day every day except weekends. The volume and immediacy of spot market transactions means that computers do a good deal of the investing based on formulas. As such it is a financial playground of the very rich.
As one can see, if this amount of money with this amount of transactions had a transaction tax, not unlike the sales tax you and I pay, a very substantial resource for alleviating the world's suffering and advancing the worldwide quality of life is within our grasp. In fact, Tobin argued that the 0.5 percent tax on spot market transactions would raise the $300 billion dollars a year that the United Nations says is required to eliminate the worst poverty and provide a basic education to all children world wide.
But this is not all that Tobin saw in his proposed tax. By taxing the highly volatile transactions of the spot market the wildest forms of speculation would be suppressed because in the small margins (but immense quantities) of currency trading a small tax would be enough.
Additionally, Tobin saw this process as the beginning of the establishment of a world currency, e.g. a Euro type currency applied world wide. This would not only eliminate speculation in money differentials, it would provide a strong impetus to world peace. National currencies, like national flags, are symbols of national significance. Every nation strenuously defends its currency. One tactic in international conflict is to try to destroy the value of the enemy's currency. A single global currency would also provide an icon around which people would increasingly find their common identity as citizens of one world.
Of course a transaction tax could be applied to any exchange of money. With the sales tax, we decided to tax the monetary value of the goods when they are sold. We, however, refused to tax food because it is too essential to human survival. This suggests a rule for applying transaction taxes, namely, the less important to human well being the higher the transaction tax.
My thoughts on the Tobin Tax, now generally called a transaction tax, were reignited by recent developments, especially in Europe. The transaction tax has become such a hot issue in Europe that the Austrian government says it will go ahead with this tax even if the other countries in the EU do not. The EU is, in effect, demanding more time so a Union-wide Tobin tax can be implemented. The European Union is creating an economic paradigm for a process by which humanity may yet find a way to coexist without a species-destroying conflict.
Bob Newhard
James Tobin was an American Nobel Laureate in economics. He was concerned with the plight of the billions of profoundly and perennially poor humans on earth. He saw this poverty as a function of gross economic inequality, especially between the African continent and the affluent nations of the northern hemisphere. To transfer more of the world's wealth to these impoverished nations and to accomplish several other objectives he proposed a small 0.5 percent tax on one of the least productive of economic activities, the "spot" market portion of the global currency market. In this market national currencies are bought and sold, using immediate transactions, as their relative values constantly change. While it has a non-unique function of providing currency equivalencies for purposes of trade, it is a highly speculative market with no overall regulation. The total global currency market had, as of April 20, 2010, an average daily turnover of an estimated $3.98 trillion dollars. This represents a market growth rate of approximately 20% since 2007. The spot market portion of the total global foreign exchange market, as of April 2010, had an average daily turnover of 1.450 trillion. It operates world wide 24 hours a day every day except weekends. The volume and immediacy of spot market transactions means that computers do a good deal of the investing based on formulas. As such it is a financial playground of the very rich.
As one can see, if this amount of money with this amount of transactions had a transaction tax, not unlike the sales tax you and I pay, a very substantial resource for alleviating the world's suffering and advancing the worldwide quality of life is within our grasp. In fact, Tobin argued that the 0.5 percent tax on spot market transactions would raise the $300 billion dollars a year that the United Nations says is required to eliminate the worst poverty and provide a basic education to all children world wide.
But this is not all that Tobin saw in his proposed tax. By taxing the highly volatile transactions of the spot market the wildest forms of speculation would be suppressed because in the small margins (but immense quantities) of currency trading a small tax would be enough.
Additionally, Tobin saw this process as the beginning of the establishment of a world currency, e.g. a Euro type currency applied world wide. This would not only eliminate speculation in money differentials, it would provide a strong impetus to world peace. National currencies, like national flags, are symbols of national significance. Every nation strenuously defends its currency. One tactic in international conflict is to try to destroy the value of the enemy's currency. A single global currency would also provide an icon around which people would increasingly find their common identity as citizens of one world.
Of course a transaction tax could be applied to any exchange of money. With the sales tax, we decided to tax the monetary value of the goods when they are sold. We, however, refused to tax food because it is too essential to human survival. This suggests a rule for applying transaction taxes, namely, the less important to human well being the higher the transaction tax.
My thoughts on the Tobin Tax, now generally called a transaction tax, were reignited by recent developments, especially in Europe. The transaction tax has become such a hot issue in Europe that the Austrian government says it will go ahead with this tax even if the other countries in the EU do not. The EU is, in effect, demanding more time so a Union-wide Tobin tax can be implemented. The European Union is creating an economic paradigm for a process by which humanity may yet find a way to coexist without a species-destroying conflict.
Bob Newhard
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