The Ultimate Cold War

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist

Humanity, since the rise of civilization, has been dominated primarily by political and religious institutions. Gradually a third major institution began to emerge, initially with vastly expanded trade resulting from Europe's Age of Exploration, then increasingly with the Industrial Revolution and now with highly integrated transnational global corporations. While, by the 18^th century it was common for European monarchs to turn to bankers such as the Rothschilds to finance their wars, the political power remained the province of the monarch.

In the early United States corporations were often viewed with suspicion because of their history in the establishment of a number of the colonies. The history of settling colonies with indentured servants, of misleading the poor of Europe to induce migration to the colonies and their remote control by English investors, all contributed to this distrust. As a result corporations were authorized for specific purposes, e.g. building roads or canals, and were sunsetted when the project was finished. The Civil War saw a vast expansion of the corporation to meet the demands of that war, especially in the building of railroads. After the war the building of the transcontinental railroad and a plethora of others, placed the corporation, as an institution, as a firm feature of the American economy. Indeed, it was a law suit between the Southern Pacific railroad company and Santa Clara County California, by way of a clerk of the court's titling of a case, that first introduced the notion that corporations were persons. Upton Sinclair's novel, The Octopus, dealt with the stranglehold the railroads had on California politics.

The Progressive movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was largely a political reaction to these new corporate kids on the power block. The revolt against the excessive freight rates these increasingly monopolistic railroads charged became a focus of the Grange and other progressive agricultural groups. Geographically, where we had progressivism then, the Midwest and the South, we now have conservatism. Could the vast increase in corporate farming have anything to do with this change?

The Muckrakers like Ida M. Tarbell whose detailing of the economic practices of John D. Rockefeller in her book History of the Standard Oil Company, revealed the corporate world of interlocking directorates. These directorates facilitated the corporate response to regulations and other common objectives.

All this economic activity engendered the rise of mammoth financial corporations such as that of J. P. Morgan who became so powerful that he, along with other financiers, hatched a foiled plot to overthrow the government of FDR by force shortly after he became president. In effect, the corporation had arrived as the third major force in humanity's organized life.

Following World War II the corporation became an increasingly global entity as a result of its fundamental requirement to grow. It is now beginning to challenge government, the last frontier for growth other than religion. Whether it seeks to privatize this institution for profit is yet to be seen, but it poses an interesting question.

In dealing with government or, as some prefer, the state, corporations have sought to control the state rather than directly administer it. Mussolini made clear that Italy under his governance operated in the interests of corporations. Recently the Chinese Ambassador asked a group of American economists to meet with him at his Embassy to discuss, as he put it, "Now that free market capitalism has failed what do you think of state capitalism?" In state capitalism the state sets the economic agenda by either owning major corporations (this happened briefly in this country when the U.S. government took over General Motors) or the state owns a controlling interest in the corporation. It will be interesting to see if, over time, the state succumbs to the corporation due in part to the fact that corporations are generally much more flexible the political units. Their governing boards may see opportunities for growth too tempting to neglect.

Corporations are single-mindedly focused on profit and it is imperative that they grow or they will perish. They, therefore, do not have to weigh as many factors in reaching their decisions as do governments, which is why China's government control of its capitalist economy is finding success while the Soviet Union's government controlled economy did not. As global capitalism seeks ever greater markets and merges into ever greater economic organizations with ever fewer people making the decisions, the corporation can outperform any government, which is why government is society's last defense against corporate takeover of the global economy. In my judgment, one need only ask why major transnational and global corporations meet annually in the Davos World Economic Forum or the G8 or G20 have their frequent summits. These are little more than meetings at which corporate interests are the focus.

The World Social Form, deliberately created as the people's offset to the corporate World Economic Forum, is attended by a relatively chaotic mass of multicultural humanity. The emphasis is on improving human life. This differs starkly from the relatively few, but powerful by invitation only, attendees at Davos. One need only compare these gatherings to see the dimensions of the struggle humanity is faced with as it seeks to deal with the enormous power that its collective brain has created, but which that collective brain has failed to control. We want to retain our humanity, but we continue to create a world hostile to that desire.

There are some proposed alternatives to the above scenario.

David Korten in his book Agenda for a New Economy recognizes the fundamental inadequacy of our current free market model, especially the deleterious effect of what he calls phantom wealth, that is, wealth that is detached from real objects and services. This is the immense wealth of the major financial institutions and of the wealthiest among us. One of his remedies is to tax this kind of wealth until it does not exist or is reduced to ineffectiveness. He also makes a case for smaller regional economies rather than national or global ones. His remains a capitalist economy, but highly regulated to generate an economy measured by values such as health, degree of education, elimination of poverty, etc., not by money.

Joe Stiglitz, a former director of the World Bank, in his book Making Globalizaatio Work, while fully cognizant of the profound failures of free market globalization, believes globalization can and must be made to work for human benefit.

Chris Hedges, former head of the New York Times Middle East Bureau and now prolific author on the sad, self-destructive nature of much of modern culture, has declared that he is now a socialist. Some of the best writing on the current social catastrophes that our economic and social practices are generating is being done bye socialists, notably Mike Davis' Planet of the Slums and Eric Hobsbawn's Age of Extremes. If and as I feel I have these adequately in hand, I may be able to expand on the matters addressed in this post.

Bob Newhard

The Return of the Ideologues

If you search Google for "Age of Ideology" or some variant thereof you will find that the vast majority of results deal with the ideological struggles of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I would argue that with the election of Ronald Reagan this country entered a new Age of Ideology, at least in so far as the Republican Party is concerned. What follows are but two examples of this now 21^st century phenomenon.

Each year when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gets a new batch of court clerks, he invites them to his home for a showing of the movie The Fountainhead, a film rendition of Ayn Rand's novel of the same title. In the novel, Rand, the founder of Libertarianism, pits the architect Howard Roark against the elected officials, who find the building they commissioned too modern for their traditionalist tastes. The officials eventually succeed in subverting Roark's creation to a more traditional building, which Roark eventually blows up in esthetic revenge. This was Rand's first successful novel and reflected her repeated theme of the creative individual against the collective society. Rand, a native born Russian, had given a 20^th century voice to American individualism and it has come home to roost with a vengeance.

Notably, Rand chose an architect as her protagonist. An architect is said to be an artist whose art form is buildings. This being the case, the architect must inevitably use other people's money to create her/his art. The logic of Rand's novel is that society should be put at the disposal of its great creators. (In our money-dominated society the great creators inevitably became the corporate honchos.) Art, it must be observed, is arbitrary at its core. It is the vision of the artist and is not subject to any test other than that its creator imposes. This is one of the reasons that art is a lousy metaphor for societal leadership. It must eventuate in dictatorship if the artist as politician is to realize her/his vision. This is, in effect, what Plato argued for 2,500 years earlier when he proposed that the state be governed by a philosopher king. Will we never learn! The only significant difference is that Rand has the additional problem of what happens when talent and ability arise in more than one person, not to mention hundreds or thousands. Presumably you have the battle of the titans in which the mass of mankind suffer.

I first read The Fountainhead in my 20s and was suitably impressed with Roark's valiant efforts to realize his dream and the dead weight of those representing society who sought to suppress it. I eventually worked out the implied scenario, especially after reading Nietzsche. I find it appalling that a Supreme Court Justice should think that this piece of romanticism has anything to do with governance in one of the world's most powerful countries.

Alan Greenspan, our erstwhile Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is another Libertarian disciple of Ayn Rand. Reflecting the tutelage of Rand and the economist Milton Friedman, who taught that the market was always self-correcting if left to itself, Greenspan said he was "shocked" by the recession caused by the securitization of fragmented mortgages, which he admitted he did not understand. This is the expression of an ideologue or, as Eric Hoffer said for the Communist mentality, a "true believer." That ideologues can rise to such positions of power and influence in our erstwhile democracy betrays the political naiveté of its populace, especially its inability to deal with incessant propaganda.

One of the most dangerous aspects of an ideology is its resistance to change. The real world is subject to continuous change and in these times of coalescing megatrends demanding concerted action from an extremely fractious global population, the last thing we need is rule by ideologues. This, however, is what we will have if humanity cannot get a grip on itself. Most modern tyrannies have arisen out of social chaos. Our future will be no different unless those concerned with society both for itself, and as a vehicle to enable humanity to deal effectively with its future, become vigorous, numerous and, dare I say it, creative enough to persuade humanity that it is one at root and that its only chance for survival is to respond to our immense challenges not as nations, not as races, not as religions, not as cultures, but as a species.

As I was writing this, President Obama announced his willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the bargaining table in an effort to get Republican support for raising the U. S. debt ceiling, something the Republicans did seven times During G. W. Bush's administration. That a Democratic president would offer up Social Security and Medicare for any kind of political deal would have been unthinkable before the Democrats began to cave after Reagan's election. What Obama is dealing with, and he surely knows it, is the politics of ideologues. Ideologues who care nothing for human welfare or any other societal requirement except their ideology, which in this case comes down to no government at all unless absolutely necessary. Grover Norquist, the Republican no-tax godfather, is now arguing that any increase in governmental revenue should be regarded as a tax and so is to be avoided. He infamously stated that he wished to see government small enough so he could drown it in a bathtub. When Obama first announced, after his election, that he intended to "reach out" to Republicans, he betrayed a naiveté belying his education, intelligence and political experience or, more likely, his intention to accommodate the wealthy, especially their corporations. These were the people who did not shy from bringing the Federal Government to its knees by denying it all funding, as Newt Gingrich did. These were the Republicans that did not hesitate to lie, big time, to the American people about the non-existent threat that Iraq posed to this country. The magnitude of the lie can be grasped when one recalls that G. W. Bush immediately declared "this is war" in response to the 9-11 Twin Towers attack. It was "war" because these ideologues, as exposed by a plan concocted by Cheney and others in the 1990's, were looking for a pretext to launch the New American Empire.

Obama could have dealt with these ideologues by proposing a Tobin tax on the securities transactions of the very wealthy, which the European Union is now considering and which it projects will raise 200 billion euros annually. This transaction tax is analogous to the sales tax we pay on our purchases, except it is applied to the buying and selling of investment transactions, e.g. the millions of daily currency differential trading transactions. Had this been done and the radical economic unfairness aggressively revealed to the public the Republicans and their constituency of wealth would have been the objects of popular scorn as they were during FDR's New Deal. To appreciate what Obama had to work with consider the People's Budget of the House Progressive Caucasus at http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/The%20CPC%20FY2012%20Budget.pdf In the end, as events of the Arab Spring again evidence, the only antidote to the arrogance of excessive wealth is popular resistance.

Bob Newhard

The Octopus

In 1901 Frank Norris wrote a famous novel with this title about the many ways the railroads inserted their tentacles to control California. Today we have the Koch brothers doing the same on a national scale. Let us look at a few of those tentacles.

Global warming tentacle: The April 4, 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times reports on a study funded by the Kochs to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The scheme was to throw doubt on the statistics that support global warming. This, because they knew they could not refute the evidence. A team of physicists, including one Nobel Laureate, engineers, one statistician, a graduate student, and one climatologist was assembled. Unfortunately for the Kochs, at the end of their analysis the team found themselves in substantial agreement with the work they had set out to debunk. It is evident that the report was not done in the interest of science, but rather in the interest of the Kochs, because, unlike a genuine scientific report, it did not undergo peer review prior to publication. In this regard, the Koch's team was like the Utah scientists who asserted they had created cold atomic fusion. This was shown to be false once it was subject to review by competent scientists.

Science and the integrity it has introduced into human affairs in its relatively short time is one of mankind's most precious possessions. Traducing it is a fundamentally heinous act. The Kochs sought to corrupt it for their venal purposes, much as Stalin corrupted the science of genetics by imposing Lysenko's anti-Mendelian theories on Soviet agriculture because it agreed with Soviet political views. The evidence on global warming is there. It continues to accumulate. We can no longer avoid many of its consequences. In the face of this dire threat to our species we have the Kochs trying to delay even further any attempts to deal with the consequences. The enormity of what the Kochs are doing can be grasped by reading Lester Brown's new book "World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse" or "The Great Disruption" by Paul Gilding. Both authors make it clear we have passed the tipping point. The question is not can we avoid the consequences, but how can we deal with the consequences if we are to survive.

The Kochs need to be continuously vilified for what they are attempting to do. They are neither just mistaken business men nor are they ordinary crooks; they are political con men using the billions our laws allowed them to accumulate to the great harm of this nation and this world.

The attack on human well-being tentacle: The Kochs want no employer except the private sector and they want that sector unhindered by any laws stipulating how the workers should be treated or compensated. They are now bent on denying pensions to public employees. They want rampant insecurity to guarantee them the cheapest labor pool possible. This is evident from their funding of Wisconsin's Governor Walker and his immediate post-election attack on public unions even though this was not a feature of his campaign.

The war against the working class tentacle: Rick Santelli, a prominent commentator on CNBC, has a regular financial broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange. On one occasion he launched into a rant against President Obama's effort to provide some assistance to people at risk of losing their home through mortgage default. Santelli's rant about the unfairness of such use of taxpayer funds brought the trading to a halt as the assembled stock brokers took up the demand that there be no assistance for people they considered too dumb or negligent to have incurred mortgages they could not afford and that others, especially including themselves, should not be expected to bail them out through federal assistance. With the massive bailouts of the bankers who caused the recession in full view, Santelli and these stock brokers had the colossal gall to seek denial of any assistance to the victims. From this rant and this response of the financial community, the Tea Party was born with the quick fiscal support of the Kochs. One of the sickest signs of cultural corruption in this country is a populist political party born on the floor of a stock exchange able to elect senators and representatives on its first try.

The Supreme Court tentacle: With disastrous effect on our democracy the Supreme Court recently declared corporations to be persons with the right to directly fund political candidates without any acknowledgement of their doing so. Two of the Justices, Scalia and Thomas, have been regular attendees at the Koch's twice yearly conferences focused on furthering the Far Right agenda. This transparent effort to not just weaken government, but to make it an agent of the wealthy now has Grover Norquist, the anti-tax, anti-government lobbying powerhouse of the Far Right now declaring that any increase in government revenue should be considered a tax.

As Norris' novel led to the breakup of the railroad holding company and its monopoly, so we need to seek and vigorously promote suitable taxing of the obscene wealth that the Kochs represent so that it can no longer pose the threat to our democracy and to its people that it does.

A special note: Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the Koch brothers. It may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/kochmansions/ Interestingly, it uses the octopus as the video's logo.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the continuing efforts of the Koch brothers to destroy Social Security. The video may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/socialsecurity/

Bob Newhard

Beyond Good and Evil, With Apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche

The language of good and evil stops short of considering the facts. Long before the appearance of good and evil, mankind had to deal with survival. Because mankind has been successful in meeting the challenges of survival, at least for many people, we, using our brains and captive to our emotions, created cultural artifacts such as the morality of good and evil. However, with the prospect of irreversible damage to our species and much other life on this planet, we must again make survival a priority.

One need only contemplate the amount of human energy and natural resources consumed in our conflicts over cultural, religious and other value issues or the sheer will to dominate, to see the dissonance between values and the facts of survival. This is especially glaring when one compares them to the energy and resources expended on threats to our survival, e.g. global warming, massive food and water shortages and pandemics.

A paradigm for much of what is going on in this world because of the failure to look beyond values to reality may be found in the small country of Yemen. What began as a protest by the people for greater representation and a government focused on their needs has now been hijacked by the rivalry between two tribes that has now killed hundreds and continues to do so. This is happening in a country that UNESCO says is one of the poorest on the planet, with 40% living below the poverty line and suffering from severe water shortages, fuel shortages to deliver water by tanker trucks and by rapidly rising food prices.

This is not so different from Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent trip around the world visiting many American military installations and foreign countries declaring that America must and will remain strong in Asia and elsewhere to protect its access to global resources and markets. Our well-being requires control of a substantial portion of the planet? Why? Sweden and other small Scandinavian countries have a higher standard of living than we do and have no such pretensions. Do I smell the odious stench of corporate profit demands in the pronouncements of Gates? His comments were intended to reassure America's allies and especially to warn China, which is now the focus of Pentagon war planning. Shall we now return to the "evil yellow peril" of the 19^th century? Will we again talk about evil empires while our planetary home suffers the ravages of our over population and over consumption? Will we now engage in an extremely wasteful global competition and perhaps a global conflict? Will we demand of our government a halt to this idiocy? Or once again will we be led down the path of good and evil, killing wantonly and understanding nothing?

If we are to think productively and act appropriately we will have to continually focus on human survival and what it requires of us, not on others and what they have done and are doing wrong. The language of good and evil is a linguistic trap that goes nowhere except to a polarized world. It cannot lead to insights or deal with the complexity of human nature. Additionally, it is easily manipulated because the terms are so emotionally loaded. Witness how Ronald Reagan used it to describe the Soviet State as an evil empire, despite the fact that it had transformed a quasi-feudal society into a major technical power, and was the major reason the Nazis were defeated and put the first satellite into orbit in a little over seventy years. Did not we try to kill it in its cradle with our invasion of 1918-1919? Was it a tyranny? Was it brutal in perusing its ends? Did its citizens, in the main, have a high regard for it? Yes, it was all of these and more, but Reagan, the ideologue, would sum it all up with the word "Evil." In this he differed not a bit from the Ayatollah Khomeini who called the United States "the Great Satan."

In all of this I am aware that, if carried too far, humans can peruse the facts at great harm to others as the Nazi human experimentation projects and the science practiced by Doctor Mengele demonstrate. Nothing was done here that humans have not done to other animals, which is why Sam Harris insists that the so-called value of human life, so easily dismissed in war and ideological differences, be extended to all sentient life. This observation points to the fact that while values are necessary to some extent they are usually prejudiced in the interest of those promoting them, e.g. the value of human life. This alone should be enough to keep us on our guard when we hear of the politics of values.

In any event, we live in a time when the values entertained by humans and their institutions pose a far greater threat to our continued existence than does a robust pursuit of the facts. T. S. Eliot supposed we would end with a whimper not a bang. I suggest we may end a badly confused species, never having understood itself sufficiently to distinguish between its own creations and those of thee plant it inhabits, unless by something unforeseen allows us to get a grip on our collective selves.

Bob Newhard

Meritocracy

Meritocracy, a society ruled by those possessing merit, is founded on the belief that merit is or should be the only measure of personal and social value. Meritocracy is a foundation belief of libertarians. The term first appeared in 1958, but the same notion was prevalent in the 19^th century when it was called social Darwinism. In the 21^st century it has again become a virulent doctrine heavily influencing every thing from economic policy to education.

There is much in our cultural history to suggest that merit has merit. If you look at the advances that human beings have made, especially in the last 400 years, they were discovered or initiated by a miniscule portion of the human beings that existed over that period. We, as a culture, express our belief that a person has a right to everything he or she creates or legally acquires, that is, he or she merits whatever they legally acquire. However, let us ask how merit functions as a social philosophy, which is what libertarians and their founder Ayn Rand intend.

Merit is one among a number of human virtues. One of the problems of any social philosophy founded on a human virtue is that the resulting society almost inevitably winds up as an authoritarian one, usually a dictatorship. Plato, for example, argued that knowledge was the primary human virtue. His proposed state, elucidated in his work entitled The Republic, eventuated in a monarchy ruled by a philosopher king. Merit, however, is but one among a number of human virtues such as empathy, generosity, etc. Additionally it can be found in some human beings combined with selfishness, a lust for power or incompetence in areas in which the meritorious person has no competence. In short merit, like many other human virtues, is a lousy criterion by which to allocate wealth and power. Yet merit along with a notion of unmitigated freedom is the rubric under which much of this nation's business and allocation of its resources are conducted. In these and other areas merit has replaced need and equality.

Let us now contrast what I shall call social virtues with these personal virtues. Among social virtues are equality, fairness and empathy. The libertarian and the massive political right wing condemn these virtues, often as socialism, as governing principles because, they say, they can lead to dictatorship. While this is true, it is also true of their free market capitalism, as witness Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet even had Milton Friedman, the father of free market capitalism, as an advisor. The point here is that any political economy can lead to dictatorship; hence, this criticism is irrelevant. The only way a democracy can avoid becoming a dictatorship is by constant citizen vigilance.

Among the insufficiencies of the libertarian view are the internal conflicts of an ethos predicated on notions as vague as "merit." Presumably, in the current libertarian view, the "merit" of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, George Soros and take your pick of Wall Street financiers, say Timothy Geither, is that they all made a bundle of money far in excess of what they could personally need. I included George Soros , even though he supports liberal causes, because he made his millions gambling on the continuously changing values of the world's different currencies. On the basis of human need and well being this is one of the most deleterious uses of money, differing little from the Wall Street casino mentality that produced our current finance-generated recession. In 1921 Thorstein Veblen, one of the more gifted thinkers this country has produced, wrote a book titled The Engineers and the Price System. In this book Veblen explored the conflicts between what he called "business" and "industry." Business was solely interested in making money. Industry, in which he included workers, was interested in making things. Veblen pointed out that industry was often hampered in its efforts to make things, especially new things, by the profit concerns of business. A current example would be the Koch brothers fighting clean energy technology in order to protect their fossil fuel business. Libertarians have no way to choose between the merit of money making and the merit of production without going outside their sacred merit-based ethos to social values such as human welfare. Of course, what Veblen called industry in his day has been largely taken over by what he called the price system. Major industries became more interested in making money than making things. Hence through exporting our "making" capability to the cheap labor of China et. al., the major segment of our economy moved from manufacturing to finance.

Perhaps more basic to the failings of libertarianism is its destructiveness. Libertarianism, like ideologies in general, suffers from focusing on one human virtue to the exclusion of any others thereby creating the basis of an authoritarianism, which now characterizes our society, although it is generally disguised as the rule of money. When the Supreme Court deemed corporations to be persons with all the rights of a person, including supporting the political candidates of their choice, it was clear that we no longer had a democracy, we now have a plutocracy, which is the arbitrary rule of the many by the wealthy few. At a deeper level we are witnessing what happens, as it so often does, when personal virtues (the merit of making one's fortune) are made public virtues (this is the way society should be run.)

The bottom line in all this is that converting private virtues into public virtues leads almost inevitably to arbitrary government and is a dangerous and often unrecognized enemy of democracy. The individual values of freedom and merit are the two most prominent examples of what happens when individual values are made into public values. We need to understand what is happening when Murdoch and the Koch brothers and their Cato think tank push merit and freedom. In view of the propaganda we daily and voluminously face it is imperative that people understand that there is no virtue in wealth otherwise Donald Trump would be a paragon of virtue. It must be equally realized that excessive wealth is destructive of democracy and is a constant threat to the social fabric. We need to ask whose merit and whose freedom. We need, in short, to return to our social values and find expression for our private values within that social context lest our species perish from this earth.

Bob Newhard

Reflections on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

As I thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden I wondered what has happened to this society in the last 60 years. At the end of World War II we sought to reestablish the rule of law on a war-shattered planet. We brought to justice the malefactors in a war that had killed millions, wounded many more, and massively displaced populations. As heinous as the crimes were we did not summarily kill these practitioners of terror. With bin Laden we made no attempt to capture him and bring him to a trial in which the world could hear the evidence and judge the verdict. Instead we summarily killed him, even though others in the building were handcuffed. He was unarmed. We dumped his body into the ocean, an act that Muslim clerics condemn as against their religion and which, they fear, will incite further violence against the United States. In short, we had become our enemy. This was an act of barbarity that the America of 1946 did not tolerate, although we did tolerate incinerating thousands of innocents with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When World War II was over President Roosevelt sought to eliminate colonialism by establishing the United Nations in which all nations would have a voice. He tried to create a mechanism for peace. This time, Bush, one of the worst presidents we have ever had and his imperialist buddies sought to dominate the rest of the world. How could we be so retrograde?

One answer is that we are now dealing with terrorism, not states with defined borders and their armies. While this is true it is, in my view, insufficient as an explanation. We knew we were dealing with terrorism from the beginning, yet we said we were going to war with them. The fact that terrorism made all the difference between our behavior at the end of World War II and our behavior in killing bin Laden should have called forth a different approach. The fact that it did not betrays the worst sort of societal manipulation to lead us into the bloody morass we have created. The fact that 80 well trained men carried out the mission makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starkly irrelevant in necessity and tragically calamitous in their results. Prior to the attacks on the Taliban and the uncalled for invasion of Iraq many people drew attention to the fact that the responsible reaction to the 9-11 attack was a global police action, which would have resulted in an operation much like the one that located him and could easily have captured him had not the Bush and now Obama administrations had other goals in mind. The Obama administration has said that they did not want a trial during which bin Laden could stir up additional enmity. The same could have been said of the Nazi criminals, but we deemed preserving the rule of law was more important than not stimulating continuing Nazi propaganda. Nazism did not die and still has many adherents in Germany,France and the United States. Similarly the summary killing of bin Laden will not staunch the animosity of many of those of his persuasion toward this country. Keeping Chalmers Johnson's articulation of blowback in mind, we have done nothing to reduce terrorism, much less understand it and seek a way to defuse it. For those of good will, stopping this misuse of terrorism to justify our own terrorism, e.g. drone attacks, must be an ongoing and accelerated process.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Human Well Being

At a recent group discussion of public employee pensions I noticed that the issues revolved around who deserves what and who pays for it, not what is good for society. This, in my judgment, is another manifestation of the "me generation," still hanging on. While I understand the above concerns, they are misconstrued. Had the focus been on society rather then the differing individual claims, it could have been seen that the real problem is a gross maldistribution of wealth that is a social cancer that will kill our democracy if it is not redressed. As I have noted before, wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. In democracy, which is based on distributed power, i.e. the citizens, such accumulations of wealth are deadly. A democracy demands a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth to insure the independence of the citizen. Jefferson understood this when he argued for a nation of small farmers whose farms would provide them with a measure of independence that the factory worker did not have in the industrial society preferred by Hamilton. As our nation became a manufacturing-dependent one, we had to find a surrogate for the family farm to control wealth concentration to a degree that it would not threaten democracy. We did this with a graduated income tax. We have, however, largely destroyed the effectiveness of the graduated income tax by capping that tax at a ridiculously low level, i.e. a million dollars in an era of multibillionaires and by granting massive tax breaks to the wealthy. We have also allowed tax havens for the wealthy in which massive amounts of profit provide no tax revenue at all.

This effort to persevere democracy by preventing excessive wealth accumulation has the added economic benefit of making the society's wealth more productive by insuring that said wealth will be spent on actual human needs and not on the disruptive, often disastrous, speculations of the very rich. Again, this becomes axiomatic without any concern for equity between individuals. The motive is the preservation of democracy.

As evidence that the pursuit of democracy, requiring an equitable distribution of wealth, leads directly to a public ethos of citizen well being we need only look at the state of our democracy and citizen well being under FDR's New Deal. Income taxes on the wealthiest among us were high, reaching slightly over 90% for a time after World War II. It was 70% as late as the 1970s. As a result we were able to afford the GI Bill allowing millions to get a college degree and subsidize loans so that returning veterans could afford their own home. This era also saw an unprecedented rate of building public schools and libraries and a high level of job security. When Ronald Reagan came to power, and since, we have seen the reverse. Money locked up in the coffers of the rich and their corporations does not go to improve the society as evidenced by a level of college tuition that ordinary people cannot afford, the closing and privatizing of public schools and homes being torn from people because of the shenanigans of an unregulated financial market, to mention just a few.

It is, to me, politically axiomatic that a democracy will far more likely target its resources on the well being of its citizens than will any other form of government. It is also axiomatic that the increasing destruction of democracy that we have seen since Ronald Reagan will move increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer people, thereby weakening our society as a whole to the point of a dictatorship, known under George W. Bush as a unitary presidency. Having observed that wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power, I will add Lord Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Bob Newhard