Obama and the Ramifications of Racism

In his speech of March 18th Barack Obama opened a gate through which Americans, if they are sufficiently mature, can enter the path to social cohesiveness. The significance of this opportunity can be understood by delineating the profound negative impacts of racism on our society.

When trying to identify and understand these ramifications a useful question is what would America look like if it were all white? Let us begin with social services. Using this test requires absolute honesty in assessing these consequences.

Health care: All modern affluent countries, except the United States, now have some form of national health care. Many have suggested that our lack is due to our rugged western idea of self sufficiency, Why then does Canada, with the same frontier experience, have national health care? I think a better case can be made that it is due to racism. There are too many racists that believe the primary beneficiaries of such a system would be not just the poor, which all countries have, but blacks and by implication any others of different skin hue. It was Ronald Reagan who made political hay by referring to “welfare queens” and thereby soliciting race to attack much needed social services. Would Bill Clinton have been able to convert welfare into workfare if the poor had been all white? Which is to say would compassion, not to mention the need for social stability, not have been extended further if welfare recipients were all white? We have 40 million uninsured children, would that be the case if they were all white? In brief we do not have national health insurance substantially because of racism.

Crime and imprisonment: The proportion of African Americans in our prisons far outnumbers their proportion of the population. Why? First I will suggest, is that it is easier to imprison a black person because of racism. Additionally the majority of those in prison these days are due to drug related incidents. Is it not clear that our drug laws have created a large, but illegal, economy by which the poor can get some of the benefits of a rich society? Is not a substantial portion of the poor black? One need only ask whether if these drug offenders were all white would we have such harsh sentences and such a minor emphasis on remedial treatment? Would we not be much more circumspect in defining drug crimes lest our children wind up in prison? Is there not a lesson to be learned from Great Britain, in which until the influx of dark skinned people from the erstwhile colonies after World War II, the police carried no guns? I think it is clear that crime has been defined and prosecuted by reference to race. We can attribute a substantial proportion of our crime as well as the enormous investment in our prison system to racism.

Education: If this society were all white would we, the wealthiest nation on earth, tolerate the run down schools still found in the separate-but-equal states in the South and dark skinned poor ghettoes of the North? Why the white flight that devastated so many urban schools? A society’s future hangs on the quality of its children’s education, yet we have left this increasingly to private wealth focused on the children of the affluent. What is the real reason for charter schools? Because of racism we are sacrificing the education of our young and the future of our society.

Foreign affairs: If this country can resolve, or at least substantially mitigate, its racism it will then be in a position to resume a leadership role in our planet’s development. We can once again make the Declaration of Independence available as a stimulus for human rights.

The military. After the Vietnam War the American military decided to never again deal with the popular uprising that put an end to their Vietnam enterprise. They persuaded the politicians to authorize an all volunteer military. Among the various nefarious outcomes of that decision, it placed the burden of staffing the military on the poor who, in search of sustenance and a future, saw the opportunity for improving their situation. That the military knew that the burden would fall disproportionately on people of color because of their high percentage of the poor, is evidenced by the vigorous effort they have made against discrimination. The military could not function with the level of divisiveness found in the population as a whole. However, the result is that the people we send to kill and be killed are disproportionately people of color.

Politics: As long as racism remains unaddressed the body politic will remain divided and the common people, lacking the power of cohesion, will remain the manipulated pawns of wealth and its multifarious minions.

This is, of course, just a sampling of the profound consequences of racism for Americans and their society. The price paid in alienation, personal ambivalences and distrust is even more extensively pervasive than the factors listed above. We in the United States constitute a critical experiment as a foretaste of what is going to be required to bring our planet’s population together to solve our mutual problems such as global warming and overpopulation. If mankind cannot make it in this wealthiest of countries, what hope is there for the rest of the world?

Sixty five years ago Gunnar Myral in his epic study for the Carnegie Foundation titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy pointed out that racism was central to America’s future. It found that the fundamental weakness in the American democracy was the deep conflict between the liberalism expressed in our founding documents and the pervasive role of slavery in the economic development of our society.

I think it is evident that Barack Obama is prepared to lead this nation toward a mitigation of this centuries-old, massively debilitating, affliction. It is possible, if those of good will and good sense are energetic enough, to turn the 2008 election into a process to begin healing this deep wound in our society, which in consequence, would do much to address these other issues that dominate this election.

Bob Newhard

A Nation of War Lovers

While we are kept focused on terrorism both abroad and at home, there is I believe, a deeper reason why our country continues to engage in war. It goes beyond imperialism, beyond fighting terrorism, beyond even an uncontrollable thirst for oil. I suggest the United States and its citizens have become addicted to war. We have become economically, culturally, and psychologically addicted.

We may deny it. But let’s look at the evidence.

Economic addiction

Our economy, to a huge extent, depends upon military expenditures. Straight up, as expressed in the United States budget for 2007, the Department of Defense (A euphemism for what used to be called the War Department.) appropriation is $439.3 billion. However, this does not include that portion of the Department of Energy budget devoted to developing and maintaining our nuclear capability nor does it include the cost of caring for the veterans of our wars in the Veteran’s Administration budget, nor does it include the direct appropriations for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; this total is about 626.1 billion dollars. All this money, of course creates jobs as it did in Hitler’s Germany. All of these expenditures ripple through the economy providing jobs and income for all kinds of businesses from grocery stores to small tangential manufacturers. I have yet to find a study tracing all the economic implications of the military budget. I think it would show we are far more dependent upon the military than we think we are. To get a feel for the implications of this kind of influence it is useful to think of what our society would look and feel like if those expenditures were directed to the environmental, educational, and social necessities of the United States and the world. All people engaged in such efforts could believe they were contributing to a better world instead of hiding out from the terrorists we continue to produce. Considerations of this sort come closer to getting at the true cost of militarism.

Cultural addiction:

Sixty-six years (1941 to 2007) of a standing army have had deep cultural effects. One study has indicated that the military is the most trusted institution of our society. See a series of recent polls at http://www.pollingreport.com/institut.htm; this despite the distrust of many of the Founding Fathers. A fundamental concern of the Constitutional Convention was the existence of a standing army. The following is from the manual of the U. S. Army Officer Candidate School. “In the Constitutional Convention, there was still traditional fear of a standing army, which excited the opponents of a strong government. In truth, the military clauses of the Constitution follow a cautious compromise course between the hopes of those who favored greater military strength and the fears of those who anticipated a military despotism.”

Popular culture has, through advertising, become a significant influence on young people. In 2006 the military had an advertising and recruitment budget of 1.4 billion dollars. Thus you see frequent ads of tanks galloping over terrain and technological whiz-bang combat environments directed at young people. The Army even has an online videogame (http://www.americasarmy.com/) introducing young people to war and combat. The Marines have an auxiliary called the Young Marines who are clothed in combat fatigues and boots and carry simulated rifles all in the stated interest of developing their character. One can become a Young Marine at age eight. This, I suggest, is pernicious cultural penetration of the worst form, reminding one of the Hitler Youth.

Psychological addiction:

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a piece in 1983 titled The Worst Addiction of Them All. In it he compared the addiction of what he called “war preparers” to that of alcohol and gambling addicts. There is a psychological rush as a new war is prepared for. Barbara Tuchman, in her book on Europe preceding World War I noted that English and German university students in their get-togehers openly acknowledged that they would likely be going to war with each other and viewed it as a great adventure. This nation has been kept on the edge of war or at war for over sixty years. I suggest it has become addicted to the continuing excitement as demonstrated in the best selling videogames.

Some time ago I saw a documentary about a coffee farmer in Africa. He had hired a local tribe to harvest his coffee. However, the men of the tribe soon found cause to go to war with an adjacent tribe leaving the women to (disgustedly) pick the coffee. The documentary showed the men chasing each other with spears in the presence of the women picking coffee. There were deaths involved.

I mention these to illustrate the profound human compulsion for war. However, this inclination has been amplified by technology and in the United States, as earlier in various European countries, by a lust for empire. Initially it did not seem so. Our infant nation had suffered enough at the hands of the British Empire. Washington warned against foreign entanglements. But as population increased and greed found fertile ground in the wilderness to the west we manufactured the myth of Manifest Destiny and set about decimating the indigenous peoples. It did not look like imperialism because it was done within our own self-declared borders. However within thirty five years of the country’s founding we promulgated the Monroe Doctrine by which the countries of the world were notified that we would not tolerate their colonialism in the western hemisphere, in effect declaring the whole hemisphere our colony. We were off to the imperial races. In that short a time we had forgotten what the Founding Fathers understood so well.

What to do? Kurt Vonnegut states that we as a nation should do as alcoholics and gamblers do as the first stage of recovery. We need to admit that we have this addiction. As part of thi, I think the history books we require our children to read should demonstrate the honesty of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. We should insist on honesty in our media. We should begin to use our resources to improve the lot of mankind, which is the best defense any nation can deploy. Can this be done to any effective extent? After World War II the United States, understanding that World War II was a consequence of the deprivations that the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I imposed upon the German people, created the Marshall Plan. We saw the need for a world body representing all peoples of the world, hence the United Nations. In doing these things we were acknowledging the earlier mistakes. The time is long overdue when we should undertake the same reassessment regarding our propensity toward war.

Bob Newhard

On Having No Good Options in Iraq

It is becoming rather clear that the United Sates has no good option in Iraq. The future, if the United States stays there, will be continued violence. Our presence in any form will be resented. If we leave quite probably tribal and ethnic conflict will break out, perhaps spreading to adjacent countries. What to do? There is enormous gravity to this question. Large numbers of people are likely to be killed and maimed either way. This is a question we all need to explore. As citizens of this presumed democracy that is ours, not just that of the experts, if we are serious about taking our country back. As we consider the matter we should, in my judgment, seek guiding principles and the major steps they entail. Few of us know enough to be specific. The following are some of my thoughts.

First we have to show the world that Bush, by his lying to the American people, did not have their approval for this unprovoked war. Bush’s impeachment is necessary if there is to be any credibility to our intentions and, hence, any chance of mitigating continued violence in Iraq and the Mideast.

Second, having distanced ourselves from that calloused monster, we must use the moral space we create to bring in the United Nations, representing the world community not just the United States.

Third, we must provide funds to repair the damage we have caused. These funds should be administered by the United Nations not the United States to make it clear we are not once again manipulating Iraq’s destiny.

Fourth, we must use our influence in the United Nations to create a conference of Middle East countries, encouraged by the world’s major powers, to develop a plan for Middle East coexistence. This may include formation of a regional trading block using their oil to establish a unified presence in the concert of nations. This would do much, in my judgment, to assuage the harm western countries have done over the last hundred years in treating these people as adjuncts to western imperialism. Such a conference must include Israel, but without United States sponsorship. In this connection the liberal element of Israeli politics should be encouraged by the world community as a way of facilitating the unified presence mentioned above. Where that liberal presence is found in Muslim countries it should also be encouraged. For too long the United States, under the thrall of corporate imperatives for profit, has sided with the conservative elements in these countries. Indeed we overthrew Mossadegh , the popularly elected head of a Democratic Iran and installed the tyrannical Shah to prevent the nationalization of their oil by the Iranians. However, these countries cannot be brought into the world community while practicing the barbarities of Islamic fundamentalism. Similarly, to make ourselves credible in the world community we shall have to demonstrate that the United States is not run by Christian fundamentalists. We will never have the human consensus necessary for world peace from a bunch of religious fundamentalists, whether Christian, Islamic, Hindu, etc. Religious fundamentalism is an enemy of world peace. In brief, the United States, after its egregious attack on Iraq, its abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, its withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty, its withdrawal of family planning services in a planet being made uninhabitable by overpopulations, and many other violations of common decency, has incurred a great debt to humanity.

It will be said that we cannot do all of this. First of all we should have thought of that before we unleashed our killing machine. Second, it will be said that we don’t have the resources to do this. In that regard we had the resources to rejuvenate Europe after World War II. Third we need to learn to live with much less for environmental purposes. Let us use those savings to restore the basics we have destroyed. Fifth, it will be said that such an effort is far too complex to accomplish. Again, we should have thought of that before we unleashed the war mongers and greed heads on that small nation. This, in my judgment, is what we must undertake if we are ever to be a positive presence in the world.

It will be said that this whole enterprise goes against human nature as we know it Human beings may, on occasion, be moral, but nations never. This level of humility and concern for others cannot be expected of any nation. I suggest that those of this persuasion look honestly at the alternative, keeping in mind what we have done. Obviously the above proposal is imperfect as is and lacks anything approaching adequte detail, but its underlying premise that the United States owes this world’s peoples, especially those of the Middle East an enormous debt is, I think, beyond doubt.

Bob Newhard

Taxing in Defense of Democracy

I take it as an axiom that capitalism and democracy are fundamentally antagonistic. Democracy is a method for dealing with power, which is the substance of government. The primary method for distinguishing one government from another is how the government’s power is allocated. In monarchies and tyrannies the power resides in one person. In oligarchies it resides in a few people. In democracies it is distributed to all the citizens of the society being governed. Capitalism, on the other hand, is based on wealth. Left untrammeled, the wealthy are in a stronger position to acquire more wealth than is the rest of society. Thus the economic processes of capitalism inevitably lead to concentrations of wealth and hence power. Regulation is therefore necessary to insure that capitalism does not destroy democracy.

We are living through an excellent example of this process. Ronald Reagan began his presidency in 1981 with a promise to revitalize the economy by “getting government off our backs”, his slogan for massive deregulation of business. Most economists agree that productivity did increase very substantially and prices dropped. In brief the capitalist economy was substantially set free to operate in its own terms. However, the fiscal value of the increased productivity was very unevenly distributed. Increasingly the wealth generated went to the wealthy and eventually to what some economists now call the super rich. This process has gone on until we now have the largest gap between the rich and the poor since the end of the 19^th century. This mass movement of wealth to the very few resulted in huge investments in the political process by the wealthy. A massive industry of corporate lobbyists developed to target the wealth of the few on the representatives of the many. As a result the government increasingly reflected the desires of the wealthy. Today the process has gone so far that our legislatures increasingly disregard citizens’ expressed desires to pander to the interests of the wealthy. We have just experienced an election in which the electorate strongly expressed its desire to end the war in Iraq, but those elected on this platform have failed to carry out as clear a mandate as is politically possible. Likewise, the demand for impeachment of Bush and Cheney elicited statements from Democratic leaders that they would pursue this objective. Having won election they promptly declared that impeachment was off the table. Finally, after 35 years of largely unregulated capitalism and the creation of an extremely wealthy miniscule minority we have a regime that has and is attacking our democracy as vigorously as Reagan earlier attacked economic regulation. Up to this point we, as a nation, have tolerated the destruction of our liberties and rights at a pace and to an extent not seen before in this society. We can be imprisoned on the say so of one person. We have no assurance of habeas corpus. Citizens are being encouraged to distrust each other as they are told that Al Queada is training Americans for terrorist attacks. We have even reached the point where one Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, has called another Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama “too liberal.” Bush senior demonized “L” word when campaigning against Michael Dukakis . Now we have it being used by Democrats to attack each other. The sum total of this process is that in thirty years we have gone from a functioning democracy to an incipient fascism and the instrument has been wealth. Well over two millennia ago Aristotle argued that the well lived life requires an adherence to “balance.” We do not seem to understand that democracy is in constant tension between the productivity of capitalism and anti-democratic results it will produce if left unchecked. We need in this country to explicitly acknowledge and teach in our schools that a primary function of government in a democracy is to insure that wealth does not become overwhelming and therefore a fundamental responsability of government is to redistribute a democracy-saving portion of the wealth annually generated to the society. This is what European courtiers have done. This is what we need to do.

This is where the issue of taxes, otherwise not that high on the progressive flagpole, becomes very interesting. In brief, how shall we tax to protect and optimize democracy?

Taxation like economics is regarded as a dismal subject. As such it seldom reaches the rear burner, much less the front burner of progressive thinking. This I believe is a fundamental mistake. Conservatives have made taxes a political mantra. Progressives need not only to show the democratic necessity of taxes but their use to improve life and its opportunities for all citizens. We often see taxes as a source of revenue, but seldom as a means for insuring the continuance of democracy.

To my mind what is needed is some reasonably common measure for equitably determining taxable wealth. From this point of view it would be useful to get beyond possessed assets as a focus for taxing wealth. The consequences for the environmental and social costs of wealth need to be factored in. For example, a recent study published in Science News for January 24, 2007 examined the ecological “footprint” of the wealthy nations of the world compared to that of the poor countries and found that the cost to poor countries substantially exceeded their debt to the rich countries. Interestingly, to obtain an equitable basis for making their comparisons, the researchers used a conceptual device known as the international dollar, which adjusts for purchasing power around the world. As an aside Lester Brown has proposed shifting taxes from labor’s income tax to environmental impact which would both slow down that impact and produce funds to begin repairing the damage we have caused.

After World War II many European countries implemented tax programs that insure a reasonable check on excessive growth in wealth. While the effort was to insure that a significant portion of their gross national product went to social programs, including health, education and quality of life programs, it had the effect of insuring continued democracy as well. Taxes were high, but social benefits were extensive. Take home lesson: it was this demand for social services that was resisted by and led to the ouster of Winston Churchill the enormously popular Conservative wartime leader.

An example of how things go awry when tax laws are not adequately focused on preventing excessive wealth accumulation is the tax exemption for mortgage interest. Decades ago this exemption was provided so that poorer people could more easily afford to become home owners. However, because the tax was proportional to the cost of the home and hence the amount of the mortgage, it was used by the wealthy to buy ever more expensive housing, thereby increasing the cost of housing and thus increasingly depriving the less wealthy from access to housing, the exact opposite of the intended outcome. The law, keeping in mind the need to preserve democracy, should have had a declining deductible as cost increased.

Taxing fiscal activities is also necessary to protect democracy because activities, notably investing, can move money and hence power around the globe at the speed of electrons. Keeping wealth in this fluid environment means that the wealthy can suck wealth from a country before its citizens know what is happening. Read the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins to get a feel for how this is done. This has been a prime feature of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. By requiring poor countries to accommodate the desires of wealthy corporations in order to get the money they need, they are forced to privatize and thus lose control of major social assets such as wage support, guaranteed retirement benefits, etc. By depriving the poor of their share of the gross national product the wealthy of this world have not only rearranged national economies to benefit themselves, they have also weakened the citizenry’s ability to protect or promote democracy.

It is high time that progressives think out a tax system focused on human welfare. The conservatives continue their anti-tax mantra. Progressives need to demonstrate that the Reaganesque approach caries the seeds of democratic destruction.

Bob Newhard

The “Two Sides” Argument

On January 19, 2008 the New York Times reported the Choteau School District No. 1 (Montana) cancelled a talk to students about global warming by the lead author of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The reason given was that some parents objected that both sides of the issue were not presented.

One of the most insidious arguments used by the Far Right, especially when they have no evidence for an assertion, is that there are to sides to every story. This is such a strong cliché in our society that it is deemed transparently true. Thus the Far Right needs only to invent another side to stymie any well-founded proposal. For our culture, steeped in democratic egalitarianism as it is, this is a profoundly enervating cliché. We cannot get a toe hold for dealing with reality. We do not, as is so often observed, become outraged at the transgressions against out Constitution, at the arrogant abrogation of the Geneva Conventions and our agreement to abide by United Nations protocol, at the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistani civilians and their children and the violation of our sense of decency occasioned by mass torture and unjustified incarceration. These are consequences of the “two sides to every issue” mantra. Thus does acceptance of this argument not only stymie truth, it trivializes the agony and destruction of all the above afflictions to nothing more than discourse.

As I have said before, there is a way out of this enervating morass. It is to recognize, focus on, and promote reality and its servants reason and evidence as arbiters of disagreement. Humans can differ over any phantasm that may occupy their minds, but reality, the third and critical element in any disagreement, is independent, indeed disregardful, of the fantasies of humans.

As an example, Americans often indulge the fantasy that they are an exceptional people. Truth, in allegiance to reality, notes that the Europeans who came to these shores had a continent full of resources to exploit while much of the rest of the world had to make do with resources exploited by centuries of dense population. Such a windfall explains far more than do hard work and enterprise. At the ideological level the nation began as an exceptional country based on the concept of the people as sovereign, but we let a passion for wealth divert us from the path of improving mankind’s opportunities for social and self improvement.

Part of this pathetic outcome I attribute to those who subverted the goals of FDR. When Winston Churchill expressed his intention to reconstitute the British colonial system once World War II had ended, FDR rejected the notion. He argued that one of the benefits of a war that cost so much in human bloodshed should and would be the recognition of people’s right to self determination. Hence, the British Empire was not reconstituted after the war. However, after Truman became president, when Ho Chi Minh sought United States aid in resisting the French effort to forcibly reconstitute its South East Asia empire, United States leaders sided with the French and took over that conflict when France failed. This despite the fact that the Vietnamese 1945 Declaration of Independence begins with the lines taken from our own Declaration of Independence namely, “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” We rejected these long-suffering people struggling against colonial domination. How had our values become so twisted? I suggest, in part, that the distortion began with our domination and manipulation of South and Central American countries under the Monroe Doctrine. With that declaration we became imperialists. Of course, we got in the habit of taking what we wanted in our dealings with America’s indigenous peoples. All this flowed, in part, from a fantastical interpretation of our own history, to wit, that we had an exceptional devotion to liberty, never questioning whether our liberty was bought at the expense of other’s loss of liberty. Fantasy is very dangerous if used as a basis for understanding and decision making. Reality is the only check on it. Anything that purports to take its place such as there being two sides to every issue is therefore equally dangerous.

Imagine, in FDR we had a president who understood our industrial society, who understood corporations and who declared in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech to Congress,

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.”

Can you but wonder how different the world would be if the United States had used its wealth and power for these purposes? With these guidelines we, unlike the USSR, could have gone to the oppressed people of the world with a message not only of anti-colonialism, but of individual freedom and economic justice. This is why Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro believed they had a friend in the United States until they were so brutally disabused. This is why I have such great disgust with the mini-minded Democratic Leadership Council and the Clintons for whom the corporations come before the people of this country. There are very substantive issues on this planet and the grotesque charade of the current presidential campaign is profoundly sickening, especially when we know what could have been.

It should be clear from this that the democratic virtue of hearing all sides of an issue is no substitute for the search for truth. Reality has its own demands beyond human consensus. This is why science is different from politics. The Far Right has deliberately sought to substitute the democratic virtue of hearing all sides for the evidentiary virtue of truth. There is an ongoing, pernicious effort to subvert human understanding and “The two sides to every issue.” is a primary form of it.

Bob Newhard

The Dangers of Shallowness

The evidences for cultural shallowness in the United States are abundant. By “shallowness” I mean a disinterest in truth, reality and understanding in preference for whatever immediately attracts the senses. It was not always so. My parents were Iowa farm children. As such they had their chores to perform, which were necessary to the farm’s function. They did what needed to be done for their survival, which being a “dry” non-irrigated farm, meant that their life was contingent upon the weather. What needed to be done were “chores”. Each child had her/his own.

When I was a child my sister and I had “chores” to do from dishes to weeding the lawn of dandelions. Of course these chores were not necessary to our family’s survival, but during the depression I carried papers to pay for some of my clothing. While my sister and I were not nearly as essential to family survival as our parents, we did, in the depression, develop a decent sense of necessity and reality.

The generation following ours was raised in the affluence of the post World War II booming economy in which the United States had the only major undestroyed economy after that war and dominated the world market. This created an environment in which children were increasingly separated from the real world, the world of necessity. Society turned to other modes of presumed importance. Television compounded this turn to fantasy. There was less and less reference to reality. Today children do not know the difference between heroes and celebrities. Our major industries are focused on entertainment. Our technology almost inevitably ends up as an instrument of entertainment. The computer becomes a gaming device and the telephone becomes a camera. Our economy is more focused on making money off of money than on making money by making things. When I was young the daily measure of the economy as broadcast on the radio was the price of steel; now it is the stock market. Our public elections are defined as horse races rather than occasions for articulating the profound issues facing us and the rest of the world. All of these and many more are measures of our increasing disconnect from reality.

I have wondered for some time why, with all the massive layoffs we have had in recent years, we have not seen the level of protest one would expect. Apparently this job loss has been compensated for by borrowing against home equity and credit cards. With the sub-prime loan scandal home values have plunged, the value of equity has plummeted and homeowners not only cannot pay off mortgages, they can no longer borrow against equity. In other words it appears that a large number of people were continuing their life style on debt, not unlike the nation’s debt. The Federal Reserve Board reported on January 9, 2008 that credit card debt rose at an 11.3 percent annual rate in November 2007. They said this jump was largely due to millions of homeowners, having lost the ability to borrow against their homes, turning to credit cards. Borrowing at sub-prime rates, using one’s home as an investment and expanding one’s life style as the value of the home increased, turning to credit card debt when that gambit failed are all indicators of a society deep into fantasy.. This is but one, now very serious consequence, of our culture’s detachment from reality, so serious it may portend a depression. In 1929 there were no credit cards to delay the onset of the depression, it came quickly.

As a historical side note, we are the inheritors of the 19^th century’s passionate belief in progress as the means to free mankind from drudgery and open the gate to the cultivation of the human intellect. Having gained that freedom, we have squandered it on our sensations and escapism. We have, in short, become the 19^th century progressive’s worst nightmare.

So much for the shallowness of our culture and MUCH more could be said. I want to consider another, less obvious consequence of this cultural shallowness. Once a culture departs from reality into fantasy it loses its single most important pole star. Fantasies such as cultural myths, values, etc. take precedence over reality. It should be kept in mind that values are found nowhere in the natural world. We humans create them and as such they can be as disregardful of the real world as any other fantasy. They should be periodically reviewed for their relevance to reality. Fantasies have nothing to reference or react to except other fantasies. Their competition, not mediated by reality, can rise to great heights of intensity and are subject to a multitude of manipulations. Thus we have gay rights or abortion competing with and often taking precedence over global warming or lack of arms control, which can destroy our species. It is in this kind of world, divorced from reality and its sobering influence that people can be panicked way beyond reason and evidence into surrendering their rights, supporting torture, and abandoning their concern for the innocent. If we are to preserve our freedoms and deal effectively with the world’s pressing problems we will have to get a much firmer grasp on reality. We must demand of our leaders that they articulate in terms of reality their views on how to mitigate or solve our unprecedented problems. Let them know that we are no longer satisfied with happy talk or cultural surrogates for the real world.

Bob Newhard

When an Open Society Closes Down

The process by which a capitalist society becomes a fascist dictatorship has been articulated by writers such as Umberto Eco, Lawrence Britt and Milton Mayer. Now comes Naomi Wolf with her book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot in which she describes the process in terms of our Constitutional democracy and the current state of the American psyche and historical consciousness or lack thereof.. I found her image of an open society progressively closing down very powerful. As she describes the process in Germany there are almost exact correlates for what has happened in the United States following 9/11. This is a process in the earlier stages of which people go on about their business and entertainment as usual as their democracy is being dismantled, usually by manipulating some catastrophic event attributed to persons or groups already demonized - Hitler’s Reichstag fire in the case of Nazi Germany. It is the acceptance of dramatic changes in the constitutional stricture of a democracy by an indifferent citizenry, in our case we were told to go shopping, that I find most chilling. It is far easier to lose our democratic guarantees of freedom and due process than to reclaim them.

I think we are at a point in the process where it is imperative that we vigorously appeal to that fragment of our Constitutional democracy that remains, namely the vote. We have this, perhaps last, chance to elect a president and congress that are pledged to undo the great harm that has been done and demonstrates the capacity to undertake the task of undoing what the Bush/Cheney cabal have created. Wolf doubts that the Homeland Security Department can be undone because of the vast amount of corporate wealth now derived from that source. It is so large that some experts now refer to it as the security-industrial complex rivaling the military- industrial complex.

Another feature of despotic development described by Wolf is the creation of an external and an internal enemy. This is necessary to achieve control over a society and use the same instruments internally and externally. As we watch the merging of the military and the police to control both external enemies and internal dissident citizens it becomes imperative that the political will be developed to do this. When the U.S. military shifts its strategic training from the open battlefield to the slums of the world you know city dwellers in this country are not immune to similar treatment. Some of you may remember Operation Urban Warrior, a mock invasion of Oakland California by the military in 1999.

At the expense of a long post, I think the best thing I can do is include an article by Naomi Wolf outlining her 10 steps to fascism. I cannot urge you too greatly to take this matter vary seriously. As Wolf points out in her book, the Founding Fathers were not at all sure that ordinary people could govern themselves and hence create a democracy. Ours is one of those times that put this democracy to the test. The list of steps below indicates why.

Bob Newhard

************************

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.