On ‘Something Is Better Than Nothing’

I recently expressed my disappointment at her vote on Senate filibusters to Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren ran for the Senate and I supported her as a self-declared progressive. She voted for the anemic Reid proposal. In her response to my letter Warren expressed her deep disappointment with the result of the effort to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule, but she voted for Reid’s bill “because it is better to get something than nothing.”

This is, in effect, the mantra we have been getting from Democrats from Bill Clinton on. It reflects, in my judgment, a very narrow view of “something,” namely, what goes on in the legislature, not what goes on in the country.

Bernie Sanders, alone as usual, voted against Reid’s bill. That is because Bernie has a far larger view of progressive politics than most of the Progressives in Congress. Bernie understands the responsibility of progressive legislators to educate the public about the importance of issues facing the country’s legislature. His way of doing politics is to make his decisions in terms of the people, not his fellow legislators. He knows that Progressives will never effectively make their case unless they are known for their integrity and thoughtfulness. A pallid vote for Reid’s bill did little, if not nothing, to let the people know the extent of Progressive opposition to it and the reasons for that opposition.

Warren, along with some other of today’s Progressives, needs to take a serious look at what “Progressive” meant in the 1930’s. It might be helpful if these people read the article Eleanor: the Radical Roosevelt, which can be found on the Yes magazine web site at

http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/eleanor-the-radical-roosevelt.

The Progressive agenda of FDR’s Work Projects Administration (WPA) did not merely set out to put people to work, but also to put them to work for which they could make the greatest contribution. Thus the WPA not only had administrations for building dams, schools, roads and libraries, it also had the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writer’s Project. The latter produced a series of superb state histories that were noted for their thoroughness and readability. These became staples in public libraries. Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the Resettlement Administration became American icons and are still some of the best vehicles for understanding human despair and grief. The point is that government relief programs were aimed at keeping the society whole in its many dimensions. These survival programs made room for laborers and engineers, but also for artists and intellectuals. All this and much more was accomplished by government responsive to people’s needs.

This was progressivism in action. This is what was lost with the arrival of Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council and “Dynamic Middle” concept through which he continued Ronald Reagan’s practice of privatizing everything in sight. Today’s problems are different from those of the 1930s in that we have allowed the manufacturing base of that economy to be exported to other countries. Because of the continued replacement of human labor, mental as well as physical, by computers, jobs in the conventional sense can be expected to diminish and those that remain will become fewer and fewer. The threat from witless technological development to social development can have effects as disastrous as those of the Great Depression. Today’s Progressives should be devising and promoting the social programs to meet the needs of this anticipated future in order to mitigate adverse impacts, provide opportunities for human development and bring human population, consumption and industry into harmony with the capacities of our planet. To do this we must begin by reintroducing the fundamental role of government in achieving those goals. This cannot be left to the caprice of the profit-chasing private sector.

To do the above we also need to shift our primary focus from getting progressives elected, as exemplified by the Progressive Democrats of America and Democracy for America, to developing a progressive response to the issues of our future as well as the issues of our time.

I have looked rather assiduously for organizations or web sites that are focused on articulating a progressive futurism. I have not had much luck. In the course of this search I went to the Congressional Progressive Caucus web site at http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/. I found a lot of thinking and work going on, especially a 2012 ‘People’s Budget and the 2013 ‘Budget For All’ progressive budgets as rivals of Paul Ryan’s Republican budgets and President Obama’s Democratic Party budgets. These budgets evidence a high level of critical and comprehensive thinking. However, nowhere on the CPC site nor elsewhere, have I been able to find Progressives articulating a comprehensive and coherent progressive perspective to offer people and to compete with other perspectives for humanity’s future.

For instance, in these well-regarded Progressive budgets there is a massive effort to create jobs, but nowhere on this site or elsewhere have I found progressives trying to think out the consequences of a continuing job loss due to technology and increasing population. We will need an alternative to the job as we know it or we will have to create pointless surrogates though their only role is to distribute income, e.g. store greeters are common in Japan and becoming increasingly so in this country. As society’s productivity is increasingly turned over to machines, the results of that productivity will have to be turned over to human beings, either the wealthier few as in this country or the average many, as the preservation of democracy will require. Again, if our planet’s resources demand a sustainable future, where is the progressive planning for such a future? I ask myself why a society that had converted the working class into the middle class through an improved level of economic equality would buy Ronald Reagan’s  ‘Morning in America.’ Granted there had been a continuing period of “stagflation.” But if we could pull ourselves out of the worst depression we had ever seen, could we not deal with a period of little or no growth? What does this episode, with all of the continuing economic and social adversity it has created tell us about a society based on a sustainable economy? Where are progressives wrestling with this aspect of our future?

We must THINK deeply and hard in order to articulate the solutions to the complex problems that face us and the rest of mankind if we are to survive in any civilized fashion. That this call to thought is not too precipitous is indicated by observing that the progressive budgets would balance the budget by 2021 and a few decades after that humans will be living with the compound consequences of global warming. Let us work hard to bring reality into focus in the politics, economics and social consciousness of this country.

Bob Newhard

The Mind-Body Problem, Restated

Human beings have long been fascinated b the strange bifurcation that they find in themselves. Their bodies have immediate sensations, pleasures, pains, tfears, limitations of space and time. At the same time their minds may be re-experiencing memories of past place and events or imagining future places and events, or those that never existed. Philosophers have called this the mind-body problem and have compiled a large body of thought about it. In what follows I want to consider a societal expression of this bifurcation, especially with regard to one rapidly developing technology.

It has been a phenomenon of societal development since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. At that point the power of human thought began to be felt. What Francis Bacon observed in the 17^th century, namely, that “knowledge is power,” evidenced its transforming impact in the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th century. Ever since, mam’s mind has increasingly outpaced the rest of its organism. We have, unfortunately, behaved as though this increasing gap between what our minds created and what our bodies could deal with, did not matter. Of late, more and more people are pointing out that little matters more than this fault line in us and in out societies.

We now see that our minds have developed and implemented technologies that threaten our existence as a species. Using our technologies we have altered the planet’s climate system and we have unleashed the power of nuclear fission and we do not know how to put it back in the bottle.

The latest and perhaps the most threatening of these technologies is known as synthetic biology.

In his book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, George Church describes and discusses the relatively new and rapidly developing field of synthetic biology. Generally this refers to the process of removing parts of DNA and combining them with other DNA to produce a different form of life.

Church equates synthetic biology with other foundational shifts in human evolution such as the discovery of fire and the movement from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. If he is right, and he presents considerable evidence that he is, then humanity is faced with a monumental opportunity to improve itself and an equally monumental opportunity to destroy itself in a multidimensional chaos that boggles the mind because this technology will eventually offer human beings the ability to restructure themselves. We will increasingly become the subjects of technology, not just the applicators of technology.

A few examples that come to mind: What happens when the demand for designer children takes hold? We have already seen the phenomenon of selling the semen of very intelligent men to those seeking artificial insemination. Will an existing generation seek to fashion the subsequent generation to its desires?  Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New world describes a society that breeds its  citizens to meet the society’s requirements for the skills it needs thereby avoiding unsatisfied desires and the social disruptions and violence prevalent in today’s violence ridden societies. Conversely, will existing societies use this technology to breed future generations to pursue existing antagonisms or megalomania as currently powerful segments of the Christian and Muslim religions vie to outbreed each other and thereby make their religion dominant?

As Church points out in some detail, synthetic biology is spreading rapidly beyond the laboratories of government, academia, and corporations. It has entered a phase similar to that of the Home Brew Club and garages s of the early phases of the semiconductor-microcomputer revolution of Silicon Valley. In gatherings in Cambridge Massachusetts, students and others from Harvard and MIT are using startup labs that charge fees such as $200 a month to use the lab and its equipment and get a discount on the reagents used in DNA manipulation. The same thing is happening in Silicon Valley itself. This means the technology to manipulate life itself is spreading under all the motivations and interests of human beings with little or no oversight or control. We may be witnessing yet another wave of fundamental change and a problematic future.

The bottom line to all of this is that mankind will make itself the subject of the same experimental and technological development that it has made of the rest of the natural world. Do we have the faintest notion of what that mindset will mean for the future of our species?

Dilemmas of this kind and this magnitude, i.e.  multidimensional in extremis, effecting every life form including its present and its future generations, should give humanity great pause.

We badly need an early warning system for technological development and it’s potential. The United Nations has produced a document titled Early Warning Systems: A State of the Art Analysis and Future Directions aimed at identifying existing advance warning systems and identifying areas of need for such systems. This document can be found at http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/siouxfalls/publications/Early_Warning.pdf. The document deals with shorter term disasters such as oil spills and earthquakes and long-term “creeping” disasters such as global warming, soil erosion and other forms of environmental degradation. Imperative though development of technological early warning systems are, I was unable to find any reference to this need in the platforms of the National Democratic Party, Green Party or the Socialist Party USA.  This want of concern speaks volumes about the mind set of American politics, especially its unwillingness to take the lead in using government and law to make the human predicament clear enough to permit society to deal with faster rates of change than mankind has previously had to deal with.

Technology as the product of the human brain is, if left to the capacious greed and lust for power all too common to mankind, the societal mind-body problem that must be solved or at least greatly ameliorated if our species is to survive.

Bob Newhard

Privatization: Implications That Are Less Often Considered

In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander comments on the problems facing prison reform. Among them is the well-financed resistance of private prison corporations. She quotes from the 2005 annual report for the Corrections Corporation of America, which explained the vested interests of private prisons matter-of-factly in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

“Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. This possible growth depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including crime rates and sentencing patterns in various jurisdictions and acceptance of privatization. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our

criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

This list of prospective growth areas presents a number of them that are in flat opposition to public objectives, e.g. public policy seeks to reduce recidivism as opposed to the corporate concern to increase it. It takes little imagination to see the politics of private prison corporations, e.g. criminalizing every human activity they can, lengthening sentences, etc. The sources of increased profit could play out in political payola and/or well-funded referenda.

Let me pause here and discuss capitalism’s demand for growth.  One can imagine company content with making a certain level of profit. It does not need to seek funds beyond those supplied by its revenue. However, should such a company meet circumstances requiring additional funds or merely indulge in the lust to be bigger, it must borrow that money. Typically this is done by a public stock offering of shares in the company. The stock holders become part owners of the company and are entitled to their share of the profits. Even this level of complexity is understandable. In the early phases of capitalism people would often invest in a ship going to pick up spice, silks and other valuables from the Far East. If the enterprise was a success each investor shared the profits to the extent of their investment. Today, however, once the modern day corporation issues stock that stock becomes a commodity to be sold. It takes on a life of its own; a life of speculation and of whatever processes the financial markets can dream up. It is primarily this phase of capitalism that drives modern day capitalism. This type of capitalism may have only modest concern for corporate earnings. It is interested in the trading value of the stock, which may vary with anything from speculation about the company’s possible future development to the hiring of a new CEO. To meet the demands of many of today’s investors it is necessary to show a profit, often over only the last quarter, above the profit of the previous quarter, no matter how profitable the previous quarter may have been. Thus a demand for growth can and often is, unrelated to the production of the company. It has become a financial figment in a casino of speculation, concerned with value as established on the trading floor.

Public services have no inherent need for growth. The demand for growth distorts public services grotesquely. Any effort to privatize a public service should be evaluated from the growth perspective.  Public officials must require a “growth report,” not unlike an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), that would detail the corporation’s opportunities and requirement for growth from the privatized public service. The rather candid statement quoted above might be a good place to start.

Bob Newhard

Newtown and Cultural Insanity

The Los Angeles Times carried an article in which the reporter queried people in and about Newtown regarding the mass killing of school children and adults at the Newtown public school. He found a community long given to guns with a plethora of gun shops, gun repair shops and shooting ranges. Indeed, the small state of Connecticut is the birthplace of the iconic Colt and Winchester guns, the Colt being established in 1830 and still manufactured in Hartford. Newtown citizenry is split between multigenerational families and, beginning about 15 years ago, wealthy newcomers from New York who found a quiet haven 70 miles from New York City from which they commute for work. Last fall Newtown’s police commission put an item on the ballot proposing limited hours for firing ranges and police permission to fire guns on private property. This was done primarily in response to complaints of noise from firing ranges. The proposed ordinance was defeated by local gun shops and their trade association supporters.

The mother of the 20 year old shooter was a wealthy divorcee living in a colonial style home. She liked guns, beer and volunteering at the local public school. She had an arsenal of five weapons, including an assault semi-automatic rifle, which the Times reporter found not to be all that unusual in Newtown and environs. The shooter’s mother had said she needed this arsenal for protection, a reason others gave for their own arsenal.

With funeral services still being held for those killed in the shooting, the Times reporter queried gun retailers and members of gun clubs and failed to get any rethinking of guns and mass slaughter, other than that schools needed to hire police personnel or arm teachers and principals. The remedy was more guns. The good people had to arm themselves against the bad people. This is the position the National Rifle Association has taken. Their leader publicly declared that the only remedy for a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. This profoundly simple-minded response to the mass killing of young children with a high capacity automatic weapon betrays either a high level of cultural callousness or a society that has lost its connection to reality. In either case this response from a multibillion dollar organization that expects it to fly raises so many questions as to the state of American society and American culture that the depth and complexity of our social sickness and its causes await an urgent analysis and the beginning of an era of remaking America as a society focused on human well-being.

I am personally of the opinion that there are many contributing causes to tragedies such as Newtown.  Among them are gross overpopulation, which cheapens human life; massive movement of wealth to a very few and the consequent decrease in the wealth distributed among the rest of American society; a narrow-minded moral meanness that has spread in our society with the political rise of the South; the loss of a sense of reality occasioned in no small part by 24/7 advertising, which replaces truth and fact with emotional fantasy; the effects of a communications and an entertainment technology that increasingly isolates Americans from the human presence of each other. So called social networking is often little more than self-advertisement by the millions seeking to be somebody in a very homogenized society. This litany of contributing causes is neither complete nor may not even mention those most important, but it does provide a sense of the complexity of the problems we face as our world begins to unravel around us. We are at the point where Americans will reject the path of self- indulgence, cultural arrogance and global imperialism and begin to seek remedies for our many shortcomings, including seeking them from other developed societies or we will continue down the path of self-delusion, decline and demise. I am not that hopeful, given what history tells me about human behavior, but if we have the capacity to put exploratory hardware on Mars and understand our evolutionary roots, we may find a way to avoid the extinction that most certainly awaits us if we do not. It would be a startling and valuable precedent to see a society as large and complex as ours recover its sanity.

Bob Newhard

The Rich Are Always With Us or How Wealth Distorts Society

I believe it is time that we stop moralizing about the unfairness of wealth and the opportunities it affords that are not available to those lacking wealth. Wealth has social consequences inimical to society and the stability it requires.

In his book The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future Joe Stiglitz remarks the role of inequality in the major social revolutions of 1848 and 1958 and speculates that 2011 may turn out to be another such seminal period because of the pervasive inequality.

But how does wealth distort society? Let me count the ways.

Wealth is power and as it is much more likely to attract additional wealth than is non-wealth (the poor are a notoriously lousy investment for the money-focused wealthy), it increasingly concentrates wealth and the power it generates into fewer and fewer hands. To paraphrase Lord Acton Power corrupts and increasing power increasingly corrupts. This power has distorted our political process so thoroughly that our democracy is now a hollow version of its former self. This power now permeates every aspect of our society including economics, law, media, war, education both general and academic, etc.

Wealth as a goal badly distorts our ability to deal with the major threats our species faces. It replaces a concern for our planet and our species with a concern for money and profit. Neither of these meets any fundamental human need.

Wealth replaces human value with monetary value and makes of human beings factotums in the market place with money equivalents not unlike the machines used to produce our goods. Indeed, we are often more concerned for the machine than the human. We allow businesses to amortize the value of a machine over time thereby reducing taxes on it, but do not allow the worker to amortize her/his body as it wears out. They are just fired.

Even if wealth did not result in excessive power it would still be distorting to society. If it could only be used to denote status as Thorstein Veblen describes in his Theory of the Leisure Class or as in Samuel Butler’s Erewon in which the Musical Bank issued non-negotiable money that represented prestige only, wealth would still have the pernicious influence of dividing society along artificial lines that would take its focus off valuing human wellbeing.

All of this criticism is based on the social evil of creating distinctions that generate asocial grouping based on the assumption of some groups that they are superior to other groups and that superiority per se is of fundamental importance.

Aldous Huxley was sensitive to the human proclivity to place undue value on difference in his novel Brave New World in which human beings were bred from the embryo on up to do certain jobs so that there would be no social crises due to unrealized expectations or sense of inferiority or superiority. In the rare event this discontent did arise a soma pill would alleviate any undue stress.

We must begin to view wealth as at least a threat, if not an enemy of, a stable democratic society and mitigate its accumulation out of that concern. Children should not be encouraged to go forth and seek their fortune as has been a centuries-long mantra in American society, now commonly called “success.”

But, it is said by the wealth-instilled conventional wisdom that without great wealth as a stimulant we will not get the innovation that a vibrant economy requires. In this regard a recently read article comes to mind.

The federal government has a new program to make the country a leader in battery technology. The plan calls for the  Argonne National Laboratory, which has considerable experience developing the lithium-ion battery that now powers everything from cell phones to the Tesla all-electric very fast luxury automobile, to lead this project. A number of university laboratories will work in cooperation with Argonne and the results of their development will be turned over to corporations to develop and market  products. The major innovation here is to be found in the government and other non-profit institutions. The private sector contributes a secondary level of innovation in developing products for the market and in the process these for-profit companies create excessive wealth that plays havoc with everything from financial stability to environmental destruction to social stability. Obviously highly qualified people work for the Argonne Laboratory, as they do in university research laboratories. They are well paid, but rather than being motivated by aspirations to become billionaires they find satisfaction in the knowledge they create. Another example is the Internet developed totally at government expense to mitigate damage to the nation’s communications system in the event of a nuclear attack. The private sector was allowed to use this system thereby generating behemoths of the Google and Amazon size, which avoided paying sales taxes for years until states began forcing them to do so. Again, this was billions in revenues that could have been used for society’s betterment.  My point here is that contrary to the constantly-pushed claptrap from the business community, we do not need free market capitalism to generate innovation. Additionally, we can no longer afford the liabilities free market capitalism introduces into a democratic society.

So, what should replace it? If you talk to people in the professions and sciences you will find that interest in the subject was and continues to be a prime motivator. Of course they want a reasonable income, but dreams of great wealth are seldom what inspire them.

What if the corrupting wealth that now flows to the ever fewer was taxed at 90% as it was under Franklin Roosevelt and what if those moneys were invested in creating clean energy solutions, massive rebuilding and improving of the nation’s infrastructure and to help people through adequate funding of public education and affordable academic education? These societal needs and desires are, after all, the price we pay for tolerating excessive wealth.

Finally, as technology continues to erode the role of the job as a means of distributing society’s wealth-generating productivity, it will be necessary to create a job-sharing labor market if we are to continue to use the job as the means of maintaining a fair distribution of wealth.  

 The standard argument from the likes of the National Chamber of Commerce that increasing the cost of products by using more people to produce them would price American products out of the market, would be dealt the death blow it so richly deserves because the excess wealth now going to those who have no need for it would be used to keep the price of American products reasonable. It is high time we added up the cost of excessive wealth and used the power of taxation to mitigate its adverse impacts and redirect the flow of wealth to society as a whole. We have done it before. It is high time we did it again.

Bob Newhard

On Dryland farming, Free Market Capitalism and the Threat of the Short-term Thinking they Exemplify

I was watching Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl about the extended Midwestern drought of the 1930s. At the time, these were dryland farms meaning no irrigation and absolute dependence upon the weather. In 1938, at age 15, I spent the summer on my grandparents farm is central Iowa. This was a dryland farm and the risks a farmer took every year would have a Wall Street financier shaking in his Guccis. The corn crop could be wiped out by a hailstorm, which often accompanied thunderstorms. So every time the summer air got thick and the flies gathered in layers on the screen door we knew a thunderstorm was on the way and a possible deluge of crop-destroying hail. Additionally if the rains did not come at the right time and the crop could be damaged by too little or too much rain for a given stage of crop growth. These were small farmers who, unlike today’s Wall Street capitalists did not have hedge investments in other assets that could offset much of the damage of a failed investment. These farmers were capitalists par excellence.

These farmer capitalists knew their business and had little use for government, especially government “interference” in their business of farming. Initially they rejected the advice of government agricultural experts who said the dust bowl was largely a creation of their straight line plowing method, indeed plowing straight furrows was regarded as a hallmark of farming competence. It was suggested that they adopt contour plowing which followed the undulations of the land and which would retain much more of what rain fell. It took a year or more of demonstration to convince farmers to change. Other measures such as leaving stubble in the field until the next planting season and planting rows of wind-breaking trees and letting land lay fallow for a year came from the government and were eventually adopted by farmers. The process of restoring the land had begun and when another drought set in and dust began to blow the farmers themselves went after the miscreants who had not maintained their soil.

The lesson here is that free market farmer capitalists thought they knew it all and distrusted a government that told them they were the primary cause of the event that overtook them. The deeper lesson, omitted from the segment of the documentary I watched, is that short term thinking, i.e. the annual crop production can lead to long term disaster i.e. the dust bowl.

All of this struck me as almost exact paradigm for Wall Street free market capitalism.

Here we have the experts who want the government kept out of “their” business as well as out of affairs  they want to control for profit. Their practices have caused global recession instead of regional disaster. They too disregarded, indeed saw to the overthrow of government regulations created to avoid disasters such as the Great Depression and the Great Recession. However, unlike the farmers, they never learned to accept the regulations their business requires. Under the leadership of Milton Friedman they even developed an economic theory that said it was wrong for the government to be involved in its practices and made that absurd claim public policy in the oft-repeated sole remaining super power.

However, decision making practices of those running this largest casino on the planet leave a bit to be desired.

As with the short-term thinking of farmers that resulted in the Dust Bowl, the short- term thinking elicited by free market capitalism also generates disastrous consequences.

In an article titled The Blindness of Short-Term Thinking ‘Quarterly Capitalism’ Desperately Needs Tempering With Long-Term Guidance, that can be found by goggling the title, the short-term thinking of financial executives is explored.

A group of top asset managers attending a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley (MS) were asked about their investment time horizon. Fifty-five percent said a quarter or less; only 20% said more than a year. Another survey revealed that 78% of managers would reject a net-present-value-positive project if it would lower quarterly earnings below consensus expectations, and 80% would focus on this short-term metric at the expense of building long-term shareholder value.

This should send shivers down the spine of every investor looking for long-term value creation, because climate risks alone could cost investment funds $8 trillion by 2030, according to Mercer.

The point here is that capitalism has, as perhaps its worst trait, short-term thinking built into it. Despite hopes to lengthen corporate reporting cycles this will remain true because one of capitalism’s primary money making strategies is rapid reinvestment turnover in order to optimize profit. In some types of currency differential investing in the Foreign Exchange Market the profit per transaction is often a fraction of 1%. However, because these transactions take place at computer-driven speed 24/7, worldwide, an average of 1.9 trillion dollars a day is invested. Rapid turnover has become a leitmotif of capital investment. The long-term perspective upon which the future of our species depends is absent in the major arenas of global resource allocation under the sway of capitalism.

Heidi Cullen, in her book The Weather of the Future, deals at length with the failure of the mass of mankind to grasp the gravity of what our species faces. Cullen, a climatologist, consulted psychologists who described two systems inherent in human beings for dealing with risk. One is analytic, carefully considering all aspects of risk. She offers stock market investing as an example of this. The other risk-evaluating system is emotional and stems from very early human evolution. The fight or flight syndrome of threatened animals is an early version of the system in human beings. Cullen’s psychologists told her that this type of decision making has regard only for the immediate, prioritizes in terms of the individual’s experience and assumes that every problem has one cause and, hence, does very poorly in cases where many factors function to cause a threat. Her psychologists told her that, in case of conflict between these two systems, the emotion-driven system will trump the analytic system every time.

Cullen suggests bridging this gap between the analytic and emotional risk assessment systems by including climate forecasts with the regular weather forecast. This, presumably, would give climate forecasts credibility in the public mind. Whether this would work or not, it may not be necessary. Hurricane Sandy’s massive destruction could go a significant way in associating the process of climate change with the immediacy of weather.

Whether or not the intensity of that hurricane was associated with climate change, its track almost certainly was. The normal track for hurricanes going up the Atlantic coast of the United States is to head out into the ocean somewhere between Virginia and Rhode Island. My surmise is that it is following the warmer water of the Gulf Stream. Instead of turning east however, Sandy turned west and tore into some of the most populous areas of the United States. My hypothesis is that the heavy Arctic ice melt this summer poured an immense amount of cold water into the Northern Atlantic, which disrupted the flow of the Gulf Stream, which is also responsible for mild winters in England and other parts of Western Europe. This is a scenario climate scientists have feared for some time. It is known that a high pressure area over Greenland probably blocked what would have been Sandy’s normal path East. Whether that high pressure ridge was caused by exceptionally cold water in the Northern Atlantic I do not know. Scientists are working intensively to understand the dynamics surrounding hurricane Sandy. And as the evidence accumulates the relationship between global warming and this kind of extreme weather will become clearer.

Hurricane Sandy may be a significant event in creating an effective link between climate change and weather. Even more importantly it advances the process of establishing science in the popular mind as the institution of trust when dealing with the real world. The turning from the emotion-driven to the analytic account may get a significant boost in the popular mind if we can get past the corporate control of the mass media with its vested interest in pursuing fossil fuel as the primary energy source. Science may need the public protest of knowledgeable citizens to get past the corporate control of our mass media.

If we are to preserve a democratic society we must, when considering such unprecedented threats as climate change, global food and water shortages and overpopulation, change the mode of risk decision making from short term emotional to long term analytical quickly and pretty thoroughly. If we don’t the decisions will be made by arbitrary authority and probably be made too late. It is time to let that which made us unique as a species rise to the top of the decision making process as we have done in science. It is time to understand that believing something does not make it a fact. In short, it is time for mankind to grow up.

Bob Newhard

Facing Up to Our Times

In a lecture that may be found on YouTube under the title Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges details the massive corruption and social dysfunction that corporations have introduced into human society at the end of which he expresses no hope that mankind will avoid the abyss that it has created for itself.

There is, in Chris' judgment, a possible way to deal with our situation and that is to incorporate the poor of the planet into the wealth of the planet. This would avoid a class of millions of desperately poor people whose implacable resentment is the seed bed for the totalitarianism that will overtake us otherwise. Lest it be thought that Hedges is placing too much importance on the significance of the poor I suggest reading Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which can provide some insight into the dimensions of massive poverty in a world of ostentatious wealth. Also, as Mike Davis in his Planet of the Slums notes, the U.S. Military is refocusing its combat training on the slums, the environment from which it expects the major conflicts of the future to emerge.

However, Chris says, this necessary redistribution of wealth will never happen in a world dominated by coporate capitalism. In consequence of this corporate power and intransigence Chris, being the tenaciously honest person he is, faces up to the despair his conclusion leaves him with. His recourse is to individual acts of resistance, justice and compassion that, while not changing the course of the vicious folly we face, will confirm the best that is in us. He closed the lecture with the last lines of W. H. Auden's poem September 1, 1939, written as Auden saw with despair the horrible implications of the German invasion of Poland, which touched off World War II.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Obviously Chris has asked himself and us, how will we live our lives in these times of crushing irrelevance and denial. It is a question that, in my judgment, every morally engaged person must ask themselves. 

Nevil Shute ends his novel On the Beach, which depicts the end of humanity as the radioactive fallout from a massive nuclear exchange in Europe circles the world by the prevailing winds, by portraying the mass of mankind either turning to religion or to a final great party as they anticipate their end.

In contrast, Chris Hedges writes for those relatively few who face the moral consequences of the demise of our species.

I dealt with this issue some time ago when I could see no way out for our species that has given me everything I value. Unfortunately,­ mankind's intelligence has been dominated by its primordial emotions throughout evolution. What is most unique to our species has been held hostage to its much earlier biological self. When faced with despair as to the fate of our species I find that “affirming flame” in mankind's unique ability to think and thereby understand. In that quest to understand, and perhaps help avoid the pitfalls of fear-driven passion, may there be those found in that pursuit should our species fail.

Bob Newhard