On Presidential Coins and the Imperial Presidency

This month saw the issuance of the first of the new Presidential dollar coins. A new one will be issued every three months until all the presidents have their coin issued, providing they are dead. I see in this one more effort to establish in the public mind the concept of the imperial president. Let me explain. Personages represented on our coins and currency have always been people deemed to have made an exceptional contribution to society. Not all presidents have been represented because they made no such contribution. We understood that the office does not make the office holder, but rather the office is made exceptional by the office holder. We long have made it an item of American democracy that the President is no more than any other citizen of the republic. He or she is not above the law and when they leave the office they return to being a citizen again. This is the way a democracy provides leadership. We have had exceptional individuals as presidents, e.g. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison, and Roosevelt. We have had some that were abysmally corrupt, bigoted and those that focused on the welfare of the rich at the expense of the rest of society, e.g. Taft, Pierce, Buchanan, Reagan, and both Bushes. When we start honoring a class of individuals who have held the power implicit in the American presidency for that reason alone, we have begun to make that office definitive of human worth. This is anti-democratic and is the thing Washington rejected when many sought to make him king. When the war mongering and naked aggression of a Polk or a G. W. Bush can find equal status with Washington’s admonition to avoid entangling agreements with other nations and Wilson’s attempt to establish the League of Nations, one knows that any meaningful commonality between these individuals is absent, that one is dealing with the office, not the occupant. This, in my judgment, has no place in a democratic government based upon the interests of the citizen not those of an officeholder.

In my judgment the Imperial Presidency is not just about G. W. Bush. It is about the corporate displacement of the state by its own governing structures. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. One of the most powerful political and military entities of the later Middle Ages in Europe was the Hanseatic League established by merchants in the interest of controlling trade in the Baltic and having self-contained “embassies” throughout Europe. It was eventually defeated by the nation states, principally England.

Why do I smell corporate interests behind the enabling legislation for these new coins? This is the third time that they have tried to sell the use of these coins to the public. Why do they keep at it? Is it because the U. S. Mint says it would save 500 million dollars a year? Savings alone have seldom generated such repeated efforts by a legislative body. John Sununu originated this bill in the Senate. Notably he was on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee receiving major campaign contributions from the likes of Citicorp. Both Representative Mike Castle and Representative Carolyn B Maloney, sponsors of the bill in the House, are on the House Committee on Financial Services. Both receive the majority of their campaign contributions from banking, financial and insurance companies. The coin vending machine manufacturing and coin-based businesses, e.g. food, car washes, are known to want coins to promote automatic vending, a less labor-intensive retailing mechanism, ergo, more people laid off and out of work. The printing industry wants the one dollar bill retained. The Mint says that it could save 500 million dollars a year by going to one dollar coins and is spending mightily promoting the coins. The Mint web site provides teacher lesson plans and totally bland comments on the presidents. These students will never see the motives and horrible mistakes some of our presidents have made. They will be given an adulatory account. There are even coin-related cartoons for children. The public is known to favor the dollar bill, so Congress has required the continued issuance of the one dollar bill so the overall cost of the one dollar denomination has skyrocketed. Additionally, embedding the concept of an Imperial Presidency is consonant with the corporations’ preference for an authoritarian government that they can directly make deals with rather than one that requires the checks and balances of the democratic process. This is evidenced by their support for Pinochet and Mussolini.

Finally, I believe the ubiquity of these coins and the daily contact people of all ages will have with them will lead to acceptance that all these people were really great individuals and benefactors of our democracy. Such a belief will become as axiomatic as the belief that “In God we trust” was on our coinage from the very beginning rather than added in 1865 at the behest of Christians believing that without acknowledging God on our coinage the outcome of the Civil War was in jeopardy.

Does this all add up to a conspiracy? No, it’s just business as usual, namely corporations seeking their own ends even if it means a further dumbing down of the electorate.

Bob Newhard

Global Warming and Progressivism

Progressivism has always been postulated on making the world better for the mass of people. That central icon of the 19th century, Progress, was built into the movement. America’s multicentury exploitation of a continent provided an abundance of resources thus facilitating our society’s predisposition to reify the concept of progress generation after generation. With global warming, and all that it entails, we know this is coming to an end. My mother’s child-raising maxim was to leave the world a better place than you found it. This will be increasingly impossible for future generations. How will we understand progressivism over centuries of declining resources? What now for progressivism?

In broad outline, will progressivism have to redefine itself as making the world less worse as distinct from making it better? If so, what is the vision for “less worse?” I suggest it may be preserving the best in humans as we struggle to survive. If we do not emphasize both we may well return to the barbaric dog-eat-dog days of prehistory. We must preserve civilizations as we seek to preserve ourselves. And this has to be done on a planetary scale.
One way of addressing this problem has already been offered. With the objective of progressively lowering human-produced greenhouse gasses, it has been proposed that the wealthy most- polluting nations transfer wealth to the poorer less-polluting nations in exchange for the right to keep polluting at an ever diminishing scale as they seek to adjust their societies to the altered living conditions. This transfer of wealth has long been viewed as necessary to global democracy, but now the poorer nations of the world have something to offer that is of fundamental value to the wealthier nations. That there are significant problems with this is evident, e.g. what happens as the poorer societies increase their standard of living? How does a wealthy society react when it sees its living standards declining while those of poor societies are increasing, albeit still much below that of the wealthy? Any such agreement would require that whatever poor societies do with this influx of wealth it would not contribute to global warming. This is just one meager example of the complexity that will be involved in the many well-motivated proposals that will be forthcoming. . Let us not be too sanguine about these efforts to move wealth to the poor in exchange for reducing the pollution of the wealthy at a slower rate. We must keep in mind how resistant the wealthy nations have been to adequately assist the poor. An occasional disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami can elicit an immediate outpouring of aid as the media plays it up, but we have not been in it for the long haul – and it is the long haul that matters with global warming
In addition to the well-motivated we have the devious who will udoubtedly be even more prevalent. Bush’s energy proposal contained in his State of the Union address focuses on biofuels, especially corn.
President Bush asked Congress to help solve "one of the great challenges facing our generation" by approving proposals he says will cut U.S. gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent over 10 years.
"Every member of Congress who cares about strengthening our economy, protecting our national security and confronting climate change should support the energy initiatives I have set out," the president said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "We can leave behind a cleaner and better world for our children and grandchildren."
Bush's energy proposals, made in his State of the Union address last month, include ramping up the production of alternative fuels such as ethanol made from new, non-corn feedstocks. The president wants to require the use of 35 billion gallons a year of ethanol and other alternative fuels, such as soybean-based biodiesel, by 2017, a fivefold increase over current requirements. The ethanol would be in gasoline blends of 10 percent to 85 percent.
The call for sharp increases in ethanol use will get bipartisan support in Congress. But production of ethanol from corn is expected to fall far short of meeting such an increase. So Bush envisions a major speedup of research into production of "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips, switchgrass and other feedstocks. (AP report) The major producer of ethanol in the United States, Archer Daniels Midland, is a major player in political influence and is a major polluter, including pollution associated with producing ethanol. This piece of corporate greed has other dimensions. For a fuller account see http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646&printsafe=1.

Additionally, the skyrocketing price of corn because of its use to produce ethanol is already causing food shortages. The poor in Mexico have been rioting because the price of tortillas, a Mexican staple, has gone beyond their reach. We must keep in mind that the United States produces food for much of the rest of the world.

Violence, of course, will always be there to play a major role as resources diminish. Bush’s Middle East adventures to control oil are a prime example. What happens when two major nuclear powers instead of a small and large state face off for this diminishing resource?
This is a dead serious complex business. We must do everything we can to keep the various efforts transparent, to point out the greed and self-interest that will permeate these efforts and above all exert ourselves to understand as much of this hideously complicated problem as we can.

Bob Newhard

The All Volunteer Army and Some of Its Implications

One of the concepts that is of interest in various industries, notably, the consumer electronics industry, is “convergence.” This is an effort to understand where various technologies may converge in order to create new products by merging the functions of the converging technologies. An example is the cell phone which is being viewed as a phone, camera and computer. Whether and how these can be productively integrated is a matter of considerable study.
I want to consider a more ominous case of convergence, namely that of military technology and the loss of human freedom and of democracy.

From one direction there is our volunteer army. It came into existence after the Vietnam conflict because the military did not want to deal again with all the resistance a conscripted army generated. This is the first step in removing the military from citizen influence. It has become an army for hire, i.e. paid in the form of an education, new citizenship, etc. With the volunteer army serving under contract, not unlike the French Foreign Legion, the military has gained a level of independence from public concern and scrutiny. The result has created a military primarily of the poor. As it is relatively easy for an older generation to send a younger generation into battle so it is even easier to send the poor into battle. There is ample evidence that the Vietnam level of resistance has not been forthcoming because the relatively affluent have not been required to serve.

.The military’s next level of independence is gaining momentum, namely, the roboticization and other technological innovations applied to the military. Examples are: DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released research grants for drugs that will permit soldiers to fight up to three days in combat without debilitating fatigue; A recently released military vehicle carries a ray gun that makes humans feel as though they are on fire thereby debilitating them. The stated aim is to develop technology that debilitates rather than kills, i.e. non-lethal weapons. The products of DARPA’s immense technological budget are not subject to any civilian agency, e.g. FDA, EPA, etc. review. There is an enormous level of human-control technology development taking place with no civilian oversight. With respect to the “supersoldier” a recent report states

“…the Pentagon seems intent on giving its troops every tactical advantage while they are in combat, even if those advantages are distinctly disadvantageous to the long-term health of American servicemen. However, whatever FDA regulators privately think about the ‘supersoldier’ of the future, any attempt to materially change military policy would likely result in the Pentagon simply flouting FDA regulatory control.” (Better Fighting Through Chemistry? The Role of FDA Regulation in Crafting the Warrior of the Future, March 8, 2004)

This developing technology is not significantly subject to control by the citizen’s representatives, which further distances the military from the citizen and increases the danger to democracy by a very powerful agency focused on controlling humans and on destruction.

Another trend is the increasing involvement of the military in domestic issues. Notoriously the military under Rumsfeld found no problem developing and promoting the Total Information Awareness program for spying on citizen telephone calls. The F.B.I was created specifically to keep the military out of domestic affairs.

So now we have the substitution of a volunteer, i.e. paid, army to minimize citizen influence, a robotized, supersoldier, army much more attached to the military that to our civilian institutions and a simultaneous incursion into domestic affairs by the military, which is exactly what the nation’s founders feared.

One further consideration: The military is designed to cope with masses of people, e.g. armies, navies and air forces. The domestic equivalent to an army is the protesting crowd. One way of looking at DARPA creations is their potential for crowd control and dispersal. The description of the device that makes people feel as though they are on fire specifically mentions crowd control. It does not take much of an imagination to see military technology turned on citizens by malmotivated individuals such as G. W. Bush. One can recall Attorney General John Ashcort equating protest with treason because it aided the enemy. To my mind, progressives need to promote not only reducing the size and influence of the military, but also placing their technological developments under civilian review.

Bob Newhard

On Anecdotes, Images and Rationality

I want to pursue the subject of my last column, i.e. an image-oriented versus a print-oriented culture. Among the pervasive influences of our increasingly image oriented society is the ascendancy of the anecdotal at the expense of the rational account of things.

There was a pre-scientific time in which the explanation of events was basically anecdotal, that is, a story or anecdote concerning the actions of individuals, either imaginary or actual that was the reason things happened as they did. Thus things happened because one god was angry with another or angry with the behavior of humans, act. With the development of science it became apparent that things happened basically because of properties inherent in the material that was interacting. This led to a broader and testable conception of things in which classes of things had the same properties and members of the class all behaved the same. Thus our explanations of things were no longer in terms of anecdotes of human behavior or of the gods.

I believe that television has done much to revive the anecdotal approach to our problems. It does this by visually dramatizing events; the extent of the dramatization is unlimited. Abstract understanding, e.g. global warming and the globalization of the world’s economies, are not amenable to anecdotal explanation. Issues of this sort require sustained thinking and concepts not images or stories. Thus these fundamentally important human problems are not being understood in their actual dimensions. If they were, public policy would be very different. When we speak truth to power it has little effect if the truth is too abstract for people raised on television to understand. This is why we are driven to the effects of complex processes rather than the processes themselves when we attempt to bring people to their senses in a democratic society. Examples are the images of melting glaciers or poverty stricken African children in the presence of American oil rigs. But the effects are not an explanation, which is why malmotivated individuals and institutions can get away with half truths, e.g. global warming is a natural process, not man induced, because it happened before humans inhabited the earth. There is a basic need for the populace to understand the increasingly complex world they inhabit if we are to rely upon them as the source of power in a democratic society.

Bob Newhard

Print, Image and Public Educaton

Progressives place a high priority on public education, but is that priority extended to the content of public education? Notoriously the Far Right has paid close and demanding attention to the content of public education because it sees it as an ideal venue for foisting its agenda upon the young. I suggest progressives, perhaps out of a desire to distance themselves from the tactics of the Far Right, express little concern for the content of public education. I think this is a fundamental and grievous mistake.

These thoughts occurred to me as I was recently reading a textbook on English literature my mother used when, I believe, she was about 12 years old. It was written in 1897 and is worn and frayed and has penciled comments by her. It is, of course, all in black and white. The illustrations are small black and white etchings or photos. The authors treated range from Cotton Mather to Tom Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, William Dean Howells and Samuel Clemens. I noticed a list of words, apparently to be understood, such as hyperbole, which my mother had written on a blank page.
It seemed to me that the use of language was of a more disciplined, indeed appreciative, vein than one would now find being offered to children of a similar age.

I was reminded of a study done in 1990 by a writing professor at the University of Delaware, Marcia Peoples Halio, comparing the quality of student writing produced on a Macintosh to that written using a PC. As you may recall the Macintosh was the first popular computer to use the graphical user interface (GUI). The professor found that the papers written on a PC were uniformly superior to those written on the Macintosh. Aside from the observing that the language was less precise, often verging on slang and the sentences were shorter and lass descriptive, she also noticed that the Macintosh users placed a good deal of emphasis on the appearance of their papers, using a variety of fonts and illustrations. She surmised that the Macintosh users became so involved in the formatting and appearance of their papers that they did less thinking about the subject of the paper than they did about its appearance.

The above instances, I believe, are indicative of a passage from a print-oriented to an image-oriented society. So far as I have been able to observe, progressives have not asked what happens to their values as this shift takes place. In particular, is the public education they so avidly support producing the kinds of citizens that can or will continue to vigorously support the values of free speech, social equality and intellectual honesty? What does free speech mean in a world of images? The last time Western civilization, or a part thereof, was so concerned with the appearance of its writing was in the illustrated manuscripts produced by monks concerned with praising their deity or impressing the aristocracy, but certainly not to express the values of a democratic society. What can intellectual honesty mean in such an environment? If, as Marshall McLuhan proclaimed, the medium is the message, we appear to be tending to the trivial and the irrelevant.

Robert Newhard

On Technology and a Progressive Vision

For the modern world there was no more seminal event than the Italian Renaissance. With the recovery of Greek and Roman thought, humans in their natural world became the focus of thought. Perhaps the most important element in the spread of the Renaissance was the invention and implementation of printing. Had the Renaissance occurred in an era of manuscripts its spread, if any, would have been most probably limited to the scholars of the period. With printing the discoveries of antiquity, the latest thoughts concerning those discoveries and their application to existing institutions and practices were accomplished much faster than ever before and for a much wider audience. While Charlemagne, living in a feudal world, could not read. The princes and public of the Renaissance read a continual and voluminous flow of thought and discovery. I suggest that one reason for the cultural explosion of the Renaissance was that printing released a thousand years of pent up human thirst for understanding in a very brief period of time. Additionally, it was found that this knowledge could be built upon thus eventuating in science thereby enabling the volume of learning and discovery to continue increasing.

Another seminal invention that represents as paradigmatic a breakthrough as printing has been the use of the computer and the voluminous capacity to communicate it has provided. However, when we look at the impact of this technology we do not see a burst of culture and understanding. To the contrary almost every one of these associated inventions has eventuated in the trivial, the mundane and the entertaining. In short, cultural banality. Nor is this outcome trivial in itself. Hannah Arendt famously declared the “banality of evil” in her report on the Eichmann trial. I suggest that this is a two way street, i.e. the evil of banality. Banality is evidence that the human mind has not come to grips with the complexity of the real world and, in consequence, we get the results that the religious right, corporate greed and G. W. Bush are having on the people of this planet. “Blinded by banality” might function as a description of our time.

I suggest that this failure to realize the potential of computer-based technology is due in part to there being no long term socially repressed knowledge to be released. Print had done its job well. Thus while we can communicate at lightening speed and while we can elaborately simulate human activities we have, in effect, nothing to say of culture-shaking importance. Progressives, if they would meaningfully lead in the future, must find, if it exists, what it is in human nature that will foster growth in human potential and seek ways to release it. In this regard I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that education is the foundation of democracy and that those who refused to avail themselves of a free education should be disenfranchised. The question is, of course, whether every human being wants to expend the effort to realize her/his potential. Human history would indicate they do not. Do we have the genius to find ways to make this self realization a social function of fundamental importance to people, and to their democracy, which can be no better than they are?

Bob Newhard

Democracy, Truth and Reality

Sometimes progressives and other well-motivated people would have us think that democracy is the end-all and be-all of human organization. At root democracy is an agreement arrived at by the majority with due concern not to infringe the rights of the minority. There is however, a third element in this decision-making process, and one becoming of profound importance. It is reality. No matter what a group of humans agree upon, it is of no consequence for reality. For instance the Kyoto Protocol agreed to by the majority of the planet’s nations, is not a solution to global warming. It is, as the saying goes, a first step, but unless the remaining steps are taken within the time that reality requires, global warming, regardless of any human agreement, will produce the terrible consequences scientists have predicted.

In every group decision we reach there are at least two opposing sides plus reality. Notoriously, humans can reach agreements totally disregardful of reality. The agreement achieved may simply reflect an emotion-driven compromise in which cultural or other concerns are the focus of negotiations not reality. This is why democracy, while probably better than an ego-driven dictatorship, cannot be trusted to arrive at truth. With the power of humans to destroy themselves and much of the planet’s other life forms as great as it is and growing rapidly, the damage we can inflict requires an increasing focus on and concern for reality. Mistakes, often caused by focusing on the other party rather than reality can have momentous consequences. Every negotiation should begin with and retain reality as its focus.

But, it is said, reality is in the eye of the beholder. This is much less so than the cliché would have us believe. Depending upon the degree of precision required, testable or rigorously confirmed evidence is frequently available that constitute good indicators of reality. Even in the gross, complex, and deception-ridden world of foreign policy the experience of the Vietnam war was very telling evidence that the invasion of Iraq was not only immoral, but doomed to failure. The leadership of this country and the majority of Americans chose to disregard it. Reality was replaced by hubris in reaching the decision to invade Iraq. In any negotiation what reality may be replaced by, e.g. religious, moral or cultural beliefs, varies greatly depending upon the concerns of the negotiators.

At bottom reality cannot be negotiated. This is why scientific endeavors cannot be democratic. Those endeavors are focused on reality and must accept the evidence adduced. This is why we must be ever vigilant that our democracy does not pretend to deal with reality. The failure to do so lets groups like Christian conservatives promote creationism and indeed get laws passed requiring its teaching in public schools. They convince legislators that more people believe in creationism or intelligent design than believe in evolution and thereby these spurious beliefs, not only lacking, but incapable of any evidence, are permitted to be taught.

Progressivism, if it is to be effective in the 21st century, must have a fundamental motivating concern to discover the truth and to do that well before it begins developing proposals and pushing agendas. The truth is not to be found in one’s opponents nor in oneself nor in an amalgam of the two. It is to be found in a rigorous examination of facts and the evidence that intellectual honesty can adduce from them.

A note to readers:
I am simultaneously posting my blogs to the following address - http://thetemeculavalleyreflectiveliberal.blogspot.com/
I am in the process of copying all my posts to this blog to the new blog address. They are readable, but contain some formatting from the DFA web site. I hope you will visit the new blog and I look forward to your comments.

Bob Newhard