Think tanks and progressivism

I have previously lamented the absence of an overarching progressive conceptualization. In an effort to understand this lack I have been doing a little research on progressive think tanks. It turns out that others have been puzzled by this relative absence. Progressives have an abundance of issues, initiatives and sponsoring organizations, see the list at http://www.movingideas.org/content/en/issues.htm, but, as one writer notes, these “(progressive) organizations have not provided a counterweight to right-wing ideas such as privatization, deregulation, and underinvestment in public purposes.” Let’s examine the political efficacy of the idea of privatization. Why has it been so effective among the masses that have been and will increasingly be adversely affected by its implementation? I suggest that its appeal is not just as Reagan declared, namely, that we needed to get government off our backs. Rather it was the belief by the many that in doing so we could have all the benefits provided by government for free – that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would literally provide all the benefits we were accustomed to and more at no cost. This profound release from responsibility is an instance of what I was referring to in my last column remarking seductions of the mind by the corporations versus the progressive’s call for an exercise of will and discipline by the citizenry.

Why is there this relative paucity of effective progressive think tanks? Some may say that the private funds for financing such undertakings is lacking. Given the amount of money beltway Democrats can draw from the wealthy, I doubt that this is the case. I suggest that the fundamental reason is that progressives have no universally robust perspective to offer the public as a viable and attractive alternative to the three isms of capitalism, socialism and communism. In subsequent columns I will consider at least one possible alternative perspective for progressivism.

Bob Newhard

The Brain as a Market

It is generally accepted as a truism that capitalism requires growth. No matter what the profit, capital investors require increased profit for the next term or they will place their money elsewhere. For a capitalist organization to increase its profits it must either reduce its costs, e.g. mass layoffs or it must increase its market share or find new markets.

Within this context I want to focus on what happens when a market becomes saturated with a given product. By one account I read, but can no longer find, an early president of General Motors, concerned that the auto market was becoming saturated decided to offer a colored automobile instead of the ubiquitous black. He chose this option to create a new market because painting a car body was much cheaper than changing functional specifications, e.g. motor, brakes. He began with the top of the line Cadillac and found the response so impressive that it was implemented in the rest of the GM line. Other automobile manufacturers soon followed suit. At this point the automobile was no longer focused on meeting a need, but became a fashion statement. It appealed to our brains, which I shall call desires, not to the relief of our muscular needs to move our bodies over distances.

Creating markets by appealing to our desires obviously preceded this particular illustrative event. However, as the world’s needs are progressively met, and by world’s needs I mean that portion of the world that can afford to meet its needs with money, the satisfaction of our desires will become an increasingly predominant market. What happens to humans and their societies when marketing is increasingly focused on their brains? I believe we get a foretaste of the consequences from our current American society.

Business enterprise is increasingly targeting our brains (including the emotions.) After World War II as the Japanese economy began to recover, the Japanese initially invested in American real estate. Then they focused on banking as they brought their banks to this country. In the last twenty years or so they have focused on entertainment, e.g. Sony bought MGM. In effect they passed from marketing things, to marketing the representation of things (money), to marketing images per se to the brain,

Our brains as a market offer in abundance what capitalist markets desire most, e.g. a very flexible market capable of absorbing a wide variety of products, difficult to saturate, minimal materials requirements and relatively inexpensive manufacturing costs. For these reasons we can expect massively increasing efforts to address this market.

Creating markets in our brains

At capitalism’s inception the objective was to find a market for one’s goods and, having found it, to try to control it. One of the earlier commodities for capitalism was salt. Wherever it was discovered there was an attempt to control it usually for purposes of taxing it. As late as the 20^th century the British prohibition against making salt by Indians in order to protect producers in England precipitated Gandhi’s famous salt march to the sea where Indians defiantly made salt by evaporating sea water.

The next step for capitalism was to create markets. This was initially done by colonialism. Today it is increasingly done by creating markets in our brains. The advertising industry is a prime example of this form of capitalism. An early example was Lifebuoy antiseptic soap introduced in 1895 by Lever Bothers. It was promoted as fighting Body Oder (B.O.). Dial soap carried this forward with the slogan “Don’t you wish everybody did?” use Dial soap. This body-oder marketing has now played out to racism. See the book Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. All this coming from an appeal to the brain albeit with the sale of a physical product as its objective.

Finally, the brain need not only constitute a market for things external to itself, but it can also be the consumer of its own content. As the need for and ability to produce physical objects decreases, again for the affluent portion of the global population, I suspect we will see increasing marketing of brain-satisfying items. Initially these may be called experiences. This, in my judgment is the ultimate market because the brain has an enormous capacity to abstract, fantasize, and emote, all of which are targets for marketing. We are beginning to see this market in video games, many of them played world-wide on the Internet. For millions, these games are highly addictive. They can create an economy of their own in which real money is paid to another player for a weapon the other player has acquired through successful play. South Korea has indicated that it intends to make the production of video gaming software a cornerstone of its economy.

What does such an intensely mental world mean for progressivism? What values should obtain? What are the politics? In brief, will progressive presuppositions such as the primacy of society, by extension the human species, still have a function? Will people turn progressively inward as they so often have with new technology, e.g. television brought the movie and its public theater into the privacy of the home. The automobile took people from the bustling city to the reclusive suburbs leaving the city with the poor and less affluent and without the tax base to provide for them. Will people continue to identify with larger groups, e.g. communities, states, nations and indeed the world at large? Will they be so lost in their virtual worlds, with all their possibilities to satisfy, that they will no longer be able to identify with their families or others? Note, for example, the migration from the family dinner table where the whole family gathered each evening to eat and converse to fast-food eating out or the catch-as-catch-can meals at home.

One response to the above dilemma has been a movement called Sustainable Capitalism, which for neoclassical economists would be an oxymoron. Capitalism, they hold, requires growth which is not a feature of sustainability. Sustainable Capitalism seems to be one more call to redress the environmental degradation that has been increasingly capitalism’s bequest to the future. One feature of it would require a constitutional amendment requiring all capitalist undertakings to be measured against the needs of future generations, which although unborn, would have the same rights as those currently alive. This to me opens a Pandora’s Box which, among other things, the Religious Right would love because the fetus and the fetus’ assumed fetus ad infinitem would be considered equals of those alive at the moment. This would make those alive prey to whatever fantasies were applied to an unknown future. One can imagine wars of the future fought over the presumed future of one class or another of a future population. As we now set about extending human conflict into the vastness of space we would be extending into the even lesser known future. This is the kind of predicament one can get into when trying to stop the juggernaut of environmental destruction.

However, my point lies elsewhere. Sustainable Capitalism, like all efforts to change society, relies on a continuous exercise of will from which the mass of people readily tire. The corporate world, with its short term profit horizon, can offer the mass of people the pleasures of brain stimulation thereby easily counteracting the force of will in most people. We see this playing out in TV channels like Fox where the pabulum of “reality” shows, sports and sex is used to seduce the populace into complacency. In brief, progressivism is a social movement relying on masses of self-motivated individuals. Corporations have, and will increasingly address individual psyches producing unwitting automatons as people pursue their own corporation-induced desires. In a contest between the effort of will and the seduction of satisfied appetites, which is a mass society likely to choose? The answer may be perceived in the rampant purchasing of gas guzzling, over-sized SUVs and trucks when the consequences for society and the environment are well known. The politics of the individual versus the politics of the group will continue to be played out, but in different terms. Jefferson’s solution to this dilemma was through education provided by society to assist each individual in realizing her/his full potential. How will progressivism address this world of induced and comfortable individualism that should instead be focused on the welfare of all? One suggestion I would offer is that progressives make the individual’s self-potential realization the clear and stated goal of their social programs.

Bob Newhard.

Public Schools, Religion and Deception

One of society’s most fundamental responsibilities is the education of the young. One of the primary goals of that education is to prepare the young to live effectively in the world in which they will have to function. There was a time when society changed very little from generation to generation. Education of the young could rely heavily on a tradition that had sufficed for previous generations. As the world changed for economics and politics with the rise of the industrial revolution and its introduction of an ever-increasing rate of change, so it did for education. Education today must prepare students to live in a world their parents can hardly glimpse. Ironically, this awareness is a powerful stimulant for parents to flee to the perceived verities of an earlier age and to impose an education, based on that earlier age, upon their children. Nothing could be of less value to their children or to the democratic society in which they, possibly, will live.

We see this scenario being played out in our local schools. Two Board members of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District (MVUSD) initially proposed teaching a course on the Bible in literature, art and history. The Board was split with a majority favoring a course on world religions. The result has been a staff proposal to teach a one year course on the Bible in literature and a one semester course on world religions. These options are to be considered by the Board as a whole and voted on at their April, 26, 2007 meeting.

In my judgment a course focused on one religious book does little to prepare students for the world in which they will live and is in fact damaging to that goal. The text for this course is An Illustrated Guide to the Bible by J. A. Porter. Conversely a course presenting the world’s religions objectively would obviously be a benefit. The texts for these two courses are available for inspection through April 25^th at the school distinct administrative offices. There are two books used for this course, namely, Scriptures of the World’s Religions by James Fraser and Experiencing the World’s Religions by Michael Molloy. I have examined the books and the text on the Bible is, in my judgment, substantially a gloss using art and literature as a way to talk about one religious book. The texts on world religions are not the worst. However there is negligible attention paid to the large variety of religious wars and the consequences of religious prejudices. This lack of objectivity is a violation of the fundamental value of education, i.e. to learn how things really are and how things really work. There is a subtle assumption that religion is basically good even though particular religions differ radically in the way they regard human beings and in their belief systems and behavioral injunctions.

A similar lack of objectivity is the absence of the voluminous literature of religious skepticism. There are five pages concerned with secularism in one of the books, but even here it is in a very muted form of secularism, e.g. suggesting that their might be an accommodation between religion and science, indeed, that environmentalism may become a religion. Students need to know the long history of religious skepticism if they are to understand the history of religion. They should know that Socrates was forced to commit suicide for "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state" and "of corrupting the youth.” They should know of Lucretius’ atomistic account of the natural world. They should know that the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life for declaring that Copernicus was right. They should know that the Church burned Bruno at the stake for his support of science. They should know of the religious skepticism of David Hume, and the Deism of Tom Paine, Washington, Jefferson and Madison. They should know of a similar skepticism among American personages of literature, e.g. Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and our own recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut.

Students should know of the horrors of religious conflict and prejudice and why religion is so often a basis for prejudice, namely, its absolutism permits no way to negotiate differences. They should know of the deadliness of religious warfare from the Crusades and the sacking of Constantinople, and the disasters of the Children’s Crusade to the religious wars of Europe, including the slaughter of the Huguenots, which so profoundly affected the thinking of the founders in formulating the Establishment clause of the Constitution prohibiting a state religion. They should be aware of the Inquisition and the torture and barbarity visited on those who did not confess their Christianity.

Additionally, in my judgment, there should be extensive material on the nature of belief and the difference between belief and evidence.

Finally, it is important to know that of the two Board members initially proposing the Bible course, one is a pro bono lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a fundamentalist Christian group of lawyers seeking to establish a Christian theocracy in place of our non-theistic democracy, notice I did not say anti-theistic. The segue from non-theistic to anti-theistic has been a favorite method of the Religious Right in attacking secularism. They demonize agnostics, atheists and secularism in general as being opposed to religious freedom. That freedom is the freedom to express not to dominate. Prominent among ADF’s specters are gays. Ken Dickson, an ADF lawyer on the MVUSD Board, has defended a Poway student who wore a T-shirt to school emblazoned with anti-gay statements. The student was sent home for an acceptable shirt. Dickson argues that the boy’s freedom of speech was denied. Hate as free speech in an environment which children are required to be in? On that basis, as my wife Eleanor notes, students should be allowed to bring guns to school by way of the right to bear arms clause as interpreted by the National Rifle Association. Among the funders of the ADF is Eric Prince of the Amway-Prince automotive empire and founder of the private army Blackwater USA. The ADF legally fights against gays, atheists, secularism and for the legal imposition of Christian values, often called family values. They would prefer no public schools, but failing that seek to make public schools Christian in their orientation.

Bob Newhard

G. W. Bush and the Banality of Evil

George W. Bush has made much of “evil” including it as a cause justifying war. Having been assigned such an important role, it merits examination.

Hannah Arendt, whose main concern after World War II was to understand totalitarianism, was sent by the New York Times to report on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She discovered in Eichmann a well-educated person demonstrating no hatred for the Jews, in fact working with Zionists to find a place for them to migrate to. However, when the Nazis decided that the final solution was to be extermination Eichmann found no trouble in carrying out his assignment to round up and send to concentration camps some 400,000 Jews. Puzzled by Eichmann’s ordinariness in light of the horrors he had committed, Arendt reflected on evil as she had totalitarianism in her earlier books. She offered her thoughts in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the Eichmann trial. In this study she coined her now famous phrase the “banality of evil.” That which is banal lacks originality, it is ordinary, routine and, I suggest, intellectually dull. As one commentator put it, there is no interior dialogue, no asking and answering questions, just the focus on doing the routine well. This notion of evil contrasts with that of many people, including G. W. Bush, that evil is focused on creating as much pain, suffering and death as it can.

But if evil can flow from the banality of Eichmann’s sense of duty might it not flow from other states of mind focused on the banal for different reasons?

One of the things that has puzzled me about G. W. Bush is how an individual can look at all the death and destruction he has caused and is causing and yet persist in the effort and all this in the face of no threat. What level of callousness does this take? Bush gives no evidence of creative thinking. No evidence of any significant educational impact. No appreciation for the complexity of human existence. In brief there is every evidence that Bush’s interior life is awash in banality. Some have seen in him the Dry Drunk phenomenon in which the reformed alcoholic must so continually focus on avoiding a relapse that no questioning or entertaining doubt can be permitted lest he loose his grip. This too is a form of the banal.

The point of the banality of evil is that otherwise ordinary people can create the most horrible of crimes because of the intensity of their focus on a single justifying principle. Perhaps the terrorist and religious fanatic can be understood as extreme cases of banality. If so, the importance of thinking takes on a new dimension.

Bob Newhard

Religion, Dictatorship and American Ambivalence

Americans have, in my judgment, a somewhat unique, naïve and increasingly dangerous view of religion. It is founded on the distinction between church and state as reflected in our Constitution. Because that distinction is so imbedded in our consciousness we assume that religion is politically innocent. Unlike our European forbears, we have little experience with religion as a major property owner, of prelates as major business operators and masters of serfs or religion as highly integrated into the politics and law of our country. As a result we are at best ambivalent about any attack on religion viewing religion as a private matter. Get over it. Religious fundamentalism has been a profound enemy of democracy and in this country has become the single largest threat to our democracy; larger in point of power than any terrorist group. One of the functions of the “war on terror” has been to distract Americans from the insidious efforts of fundamentalist Christian religions to carry out this destructive enterprise.

Chris Hedges is a war reporter, one time head of the New York Times’ Middle East bureau and author of a seminal book on the attractiveness of war for humans titled War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He has a new book out titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Hedges, a divinity student at Yale, where he had a professor who observed the rise of Nazism in the German church, documents a similar rise in political power of the Religious Right. He details with direct quotes their ongoing strategy to use our Constitutional freedom of religion to establish an American theocracy not unlike John Calvin’s rule of Geneva. Democracy will be destroyed in the interest of Christian dogma and the military and economic power of the United States will be used to make Christianity the dominant religion world wide. As Hedges documents, the Nazi attack on the Weimar Republic was “values” based. Their initial scapegoats included homosexuals as does the Religious Right in this country. If this were a political movement a majority of Americans would be in vigorous opposition to the Religious Right, but this movement, using the gloss of religion, confuses people as to how to deal with it. This, as in Germany, is the purpose of using religion to gain political ends.

In the matter of tolerance, which religious differences raise in a democracy, Hedges quotes the philosopher Karl Popper “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

We are, in my judgment, faced with a serious threat of fascism in this country. We see it in the usurpation of authority by the Bush administration. We see it in the USA Patriot Act. We see it in the loss of habeus corpus. We see it in the way that an act of terrorism was converted into an act of war so that our democratic freedoms could be more easily abridged. We see it in the unconstitutional gifts of millions of dollars to religious groups in the name of service to the needy. We see it when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest military officer, publicly expresses his disdain for gays in the military. We see it in the incorporation of private armies into the American military. This was done by edict of Donald Rumsfeld thus making armies such as Blackwater and its Right Wing Christian owner immune from civilian courts for their crimes and yet as private companies they are not subject to military law. An armed camp of government subsidized freebooters was thus created. We see it locally when a religious group takes over the flagpole at our local high schools for daily prayer meetings thereby declaring ownership of that national symbol. We see it when the family is made the center of political and cultural concern, not the individual as the Constitution declares. We see it in the gross distortions of American history promulgated by the religious Right. We see it in their gross distortions of ordinary language in which, for example, the word freedom means freedom in Christ and from secular humanism. We see it in their exceptionally egregious claim to be a moral majority. In short we see it in every dimension of our cultural and political life. It is high time we recognize it for what it is and, lest this country follow the path exemplified by Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile and Spain’s Francisco Franco, we need to energetically defend our democracy against it. A fascist military superpower on this planet would be disastrous for humanity.

Bob Newhard

Reality as a Moral Arbiter

As of February 2, 2007 we have been informed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we have passed the tipping point in global warming. The planet will continue to get warmer for centuries and at an accelerating pace. This means rising sea level, massive desertification, water shortage, more frequent violent storms, etc. For western man, especially Americans, who have predicated the meaning of their lives on the prospect of the world getting better, especially for their children, we now have to face the prospect of an increasingly hostile environment. This will, I believe, give occasion for more people than usual to query what it means to be human in a world without hope.

Progressivism is especially vulnerable in such a world. It has had a “better future” at its core. Will it be able to translate its values into a world of less-and-less? If so, what will it look like at that point? There are already progressive strategies being offered to reduce the impact of global warming on the poor of the planet. Could for example, the poor areas of the world, which pollute less than the developed areas be paid for a “right to pollute” by the developed countries with a diminishing cap on total planetary pollution? This could see a long sought significant transfer of wealth to the poor of the planet. However, this whole process is shot through with profound uncertainty.

Hope is sometimes contrasted with despair. I think this is a mistake. Meaning remains.

It is rather commonly agreed that the most significant difference between humans and the other animals that have evolved on this planet is the human ability to reason. By reason I mean the ability to abstract and draw relationships between those abstractions and to apply these logically related abstractions to the real world in order to produce understanding. This process obviously involves more than reason, notably honesty about the facts, but at root it is reason that is unique to the human species.

We will in the coming centuries, for that is how long global warming will last, have ample opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human as mankind experiences century after century of increasing global warming. There will also be ample opportunity for mankind’s other response mechanisms to calamity, e.g. increasing social fragmentation and the accompanying hostility and violence, superstition raised to a high level of mass delusion, etc. Much of human experience suggests that consequences such as these will be predominant, despite being destructive of the best in humans. In all this there will be those who persist in the exercise of hope, no matter how fantastic it has to get, as the enormity of man’s predicament becomes more evident.

I suggest for those who wish to live responsibly that this is a unique period in human experience in which our intelligence is telling us what our future is and that knowing this we can use it to vastly improve our ability to optimize the best in human nature. This is not unlike a person knowing he has a limited time to live seeking to optimize that time. This will require as much honesty as we can muster in facing the future and based on the facts that honesty uncovers seek to deepen our understanding of the real world and how humans relate to it.

Some people, especially those of an entrepreneurial bent, are already getting hyped by the potential for bringing technology to bear on these problems. Many will find refuge in these undertakings and insist that we can technologize our way out of this. The response I am suggesting would vigorously question such assumptions in the interest of honesty and the continuing preservation of what is best in humanity, namely, understanding. This is a time that will require an uncommon level of earnestness of those who seek to retain their judgment and exercise their thought. This is not to say that this is a period to look forward to, it will be fraught with calamity and violence, but as long as we have our ephemeral lives we can exercise our understanding and learn who we are as humans. Unfortunately humans have the additional problem of institutionalizing their emotions. Religion is the institutionalized form of hope and we see what its disregard for reality can lead to. Let us not trade on the vagaries and distractions of hope in which the mind is directed to, and obfuscated by, our desires rather than our understanding. Let us substitute purpose for hope as we seek to exemplify what is most uniquely human.

For those who are interested, Barbara Ehrenreich has an article, The Pathologies of Hope, in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine. While she is dealing with her bout with breast cancer rather than mankind’s future under global warming, she finds that hope has perversely invaded even academia in the form of Positive Psychology. She ends her article with reference to Albert Camus and the need for honesty in living our lives.

Finally, I would point out that hope rather than understanding is already being made a political issue. Barak Obama is obviously going to make hope a centerpiece of his presidential campaign as is evidenced by the 3-20-07 publication of his book The Audacity of Hope. Here is a senator with at best modest achievements as a senator. He evidences less than a comprehensive appreciation for the global issues that reality presents to mankind. Hence, he will appeal not to understanding and thought but to mankind’s emotions and the delusion that accompanies them. To do this knowingly is, in my judgment, despicable. The spin doctors of the left and undoubtedly the media will turn the 2008 election into a contest of which will be the first minority president a black or a woman. As important as racial accommodation and women’s equality are, they do not compare with global warming and the immediate strategies and negotiations that this world-wide phenomenon demands of us. We should find our racial and gender commonalities in our common and dire predicament, not in personal charisma or an appeal to the “American Way.” The question is not do “We worship an ‘awesome God’ in the Blue States” or whether the “audacity of hope ...is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.” as Barak Obama would have it. This is rhetoric directed at people’s feelings which are highly manipulable. The question is do we humans have the intelligence, will and ability to rearrange our social priorities to address the future that faces our species or will we play the same old “values” game that has glossed the existential issues we have faced for the last thirty or forty years. Al Gore talks reality with respect to global warming. Barak Obama gives us yet more sentimental pabulum, which makes me very suspicious of his motives and his new found corporate moneybags. As the Daily Kos (2-26-07) says in its plea for progressives to come to Al Gore’s defense, “Note to Senator Obama: spare us the hope and bi-partisanship talk and help us fight back.”

Bob Newhard

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