I first noticed this phenomenon many decades ago when studying Plato's Republic. Plato holds that knowledge is the highest virtue. It followed therefore that society should reflect this fundamental truth. It followed from this that what was needed to assure that knowledge would remain society's defining virtue was a philosopher king. Hence a fundamental individual virtue, when applied to society, resulted in a dictatorship, albeit a dictatorship of wisdom. This is a case in which a private virtue, one properly ascribed to an individual, was made into a public virtue with, I suggest, the expected result. Indeed I. F. (Izzy) Stone the renowned investigative reporter, in his book, The Trial of Socrates, argues that Plato was part of a movement to overthrow the Athenian democracy.
For much of human history private virtues dominated the public arena. Government was viewed by the mass of people as good or bad on a personal scale, e.g. a good or bad monarch. The notion of the family was expanded to government as the monarch was viewed as the father of the country and the population as his children. Theoretically the state was his private domain. All others held their land in fief to him. Again this resulted in arbitrary rule as the father was viewed as the arbitrary ruler of this family.
Public virtues such as justice and equality came to the fore with the rise of democracy. Emanuel Kant saw this dichotomy and sought to reconcile these two kinds of virtue when he proposed that the private virtue of not lying was actually a public virtue because if everyone lied society could not function. While this effort to derive the private virtue of not lying from public necessity merits significant thought, it is interesting to note that not even the highest oath of office in our country, that of the President, makes no mention of not lying.
The problem is that private virtues are absolute for the individual who subscribes to them and thus become tyrannical when applied to public affairs. If honesty is a virtue for an individual then "more or less honest" will not do.
In our time this confusion of private and public virtue has become critical for the survival of our democracy. Conservatives, by passionately trumpeting individual virtues as replacements for public virtues such as equality and justice, have argued that charity should replace some major social services. You may remember President George H. W. Bush's call for a thousand points of light to solve glaring discrepancies in wealth. Thus the wealthy would decide when and if the poor were to receive the help they badly needed. This is not democracy! Again the current "debate" on health care pushes the conservative's private virtue of individual responsibility into the public arena where citizen rights and welfare should predominate and it does this with disastrous results for 46 million Americans, including 9 million children who have no health insurance.
One result of this relentless and deliberate insertion of private virtues into the public arena is that Americans have lost the sense of society and its importance. Democracy must accommodate a wide variety of private values of citizens; therefore its values, must in a sense, transcend those values in the interest of the society as a whole. This is not to say, for example, that we do not want personal honesty in government. It is to say that we do not require it as a condition of public office holding except in positions where it is critical, e.g. the town treasurer in the conduct of affairs related to that office. If honesty were rigorously required of politicians neither they nor this society could function for the simple reason politicians must say different things to different constituents if they are to be elected. We the citizens require this as we so frequently vote our private values rather than the public values of justice and equality.
There was a time when public virtues played a much stronger role in our public affairs. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration we actively sought and voted for the public good. We believed in the public good of public education as a right for children not a privilege of the wealthy. Public education was full of experimentation as we tried to understand what stimulated young people to learn. John Dewey fought to make the student the focus of education, not the institution. He understood Jefferson's view that education was the primary job of society and should focus on helping people realize their potential. Properly understood, society's goal was to produce an increasingly competent and curious citizenry. Conservatives have turned this on its head by declaring that they know the best things for students and education should be directed at instilling those values. Contemporary conservatism is at its heart dead. It is analogous to a hurricane or tornado; next to nothing at its center, but enormously destructive to everything around it. It does not want to inquire and base knowledge on the results of honest inquiry. Neither do corporations, and this is one of the roots of agreement between conservatives and the corporate world. It should never be forgotten that ignorance is deeply rooted in Christian culture. Knowledge of good and evil was a penalty God bestowed on Adam and Eve for their misbehavior. The Christian phrase " a little child shall lead them" implies that the ignorance of innocence is a virtue. These are the kinds of homilies out of which dictatorships are fashioned. Hitler's vision for the Nazi youth movement was purity of spirit. The image of Nietzsche's young eubemensch striding the Bavarian mountaintops captured the German imagination as "family values" and sexual purity threaten to distort our own public perceptions.
In short, be wary, very wary, of translating personal virtues into public virtues.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Limits
The other day the L. A. Times carried an article on the increasingly evident limits to Olympic athletic performance, unassisted by drugs or technology. To quote;
"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."
That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."
This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"
This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.
What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.
In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.
Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.
He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4
While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.
To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"
Bob Newhard
"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."
That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."
This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"
This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.
What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.
In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.
Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.
He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4
While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.
To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"
Bob Newhard
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The Contract-Based Society
To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, Between the real and the absurd falls the contract.
This was my thought as I pondered cause and effect in our recent plumbing fiasco. The builder, so called, did not build the house: they subcontracted to others. Some of the subcontractors did not build the house: they subcontracted. The builder was actually in the business of selling mortgages. This I discovered twelve years ago when we bought the house.
How much has the artifact called the contract pervaded our society and what are its consequences? I have yet to get anything close to a clear answer to that question, but it seems to me that the further a contract gets from the product or service it references, the more deleterious it becomes for society.
In terms of human history, contracts as we know them, are a rather recent innovation. The ancient Chinese people had no written contracts. When disputes arose over obligations they were adjudicated on the basis of fairness: a strange legal notion that. We long ago abandoned fairness as a contract criterion. Now it is caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.
One of the consequences of the increasing remoteness of the contract from the product or service it represents is that it becomes a commodity itself and is thus subject to speculation. For example the commodities market consists of nothing but contracts to buy real goods at a specified time for a specified price. These contracts become gambling entities as speculators buy and sell contracts based on variables such as weather forecasts, market timing, etc. Thus prices are driven higher than actual demand for the goods themselves. How much this increase is on average I have been unable to ascertain, but the massive amounts of money made on this market indicate it is not trivial.
A sense of the magnitude of this increased cost can be gained from Holly Jean's blog conjuring grace: field notes from the 21st century. (Her complete name is Holly Jean Buck.) She quotes Charles Derber in her blog, "Most of the financial activity going on in the world is in this kind of betting; nothing of value is created with these derivatives. For every $1 floating around the productive wold economy of real goods and services, there is an estimated $20 to $50 circulating in the world of pure finance, producing or creating nothing." Jean's bolg is well worth reading. It may be found at
http://www.createdestroyenjoy.net/grace/2008/06/adventures-in-global-finance-part-iii.html.
A study done by the University of Ohio for the state legislature found that although law professionals argued the value of the contract that in many rural communities contracts were much less formal, usually expressions of common law or simply verbal agreements. To quote,
Economists and business oriented social scientists and legal scholars generally believe that contracts that include all relevant verifiable terms to a transaction are preferable to "incomplete" contracts that omit many relevant terms thereby reducing the ability of a court or arbitrator to enforce the contract. However, canonical economic models that have supported this theory are largely based on one-shot transactions where two parties come together to execute a single transaction. The economic models and experiments developed in this project suggest that incomplete contracts may lead to higher productivity in repeat trading environments where people develop relationships by trading repeatedly over time with a small group of known trading partners. In these environments, complete contracts are not necessary because these relationships become self enforcing in the sense that the threat of relationship unraveling is sufficient to discipline the trading partners so that they honor their obligations. Moreover, their obligations are often implicitly understood rather than legally understood so that they need not be included in a contract. Finally, incomplete contracts provide trading partners with greater flexibility to respond and adapt to the actions of trading partners thereby reducing transactions costs increasing productivity.
In this connection David Korten, in his new book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, makes a distinction between the highly speculative economy of Wall Street and the more responsible economy of Main Street. The main difference is the proximity of the economic activity to the goods, services, and people involved. This is another way of saying that the chicaneries of Wall Street and, I would add the corruption of our society and politics is substantially a matter of our size.
At the far end of the distance between the product or service and its contract we have our recent mortgage debacle. Here contracts were not only commodities, they were sliced, diced and packaged into other commodities called securities. When contracts get this far removed from their source the contract has absolutely lost its anchor in reality and becomes a free-floating object for the fun and games of financial speculators. Greed rules. There is no social benefit. Disaster awaits.
A sign that the various costs of contracting are coming home to roost may be found in General Motors' decision to forgo its extensive contractual outsourcing of manufacture and make most of its new Volt electric car in house. Among the reasons given are; Achieving performance, quality and reliability by doing all design, manufacturing, materials selection and production procedures in house. Achieving exceptional power density, NVH, and high reliability and affordability only achievable by understanding and engaging the entire electric motor vaue chain.
It appears that globalization and the financial instruments it uses are not, because of the vast increases in cost and social disruption, the panacea its promoters have proclaimed. However, it is, to my mind, still an open question whether, given our overpopulated planet, any other kind of economy, especially one enjoying the benefits of localism, can persist.
Further there is a fundamental issue for human beings here. When humans first formed societies it was for security. Why, after so many millennia, do we put our basic necessities, e.g. food, at the mercy of a gambling den? Ought not humans and their welfare be the animating endeavor in basic needs distribution? Why should such a system be put at any greater peril than absolutely necessary? The results of the present system are mass starvation among the poor of this earth. Global Research in its 2008 report titled Global Famine declares, "Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation. They are largely attributable to speculative trade on the commodity markets." When we let financial speculation, i.e. gambling, come between humanity and its food we are looking moral corruption straight in the eye.
Bob Newhard
This was my thought as I pondered cause and effect in our recent plumbing fiasco. The builder, so called, did not build the house: they subcontracted to others. Some of the subcontractors did not build the house: they subcontracted. The builder was actually in the business of selling mortgages. This I discovered twelve years ago when we bought the house.
How much has the artifact called the contract pervaded our society and what are its consequences? I have yet to get anything close to a clear answer to that question, but it seems to me that the further a contract gets from the product or service it references, the more deleterious it becomes for society.
In terms of human history, contracts as we know them, are a rather recent innovation. The ancient Chinese people had no written contracts. When disputes arose over obligations they were adjudicated on the basis of fairness: a strange legal notion that. We long ago abandoned fairness as a contract criterion. Now it is caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.
One of the consequences of the increasing remoteness of the contract from the product or service it represents is that it becomes a commodity itself and is thus subject to speculation. For example the commodities market consists of nothing but contracts to buy real goods at a specified time for a specified price. These contracts become gambling entities as speculators buy and sell contracts based on variables such as weather forecasts, market timing, etc. Thus prices are driven higher than actual demand for the goods themselves. How much this increase is on average I have been unable to ascertain, but the massive amounts of money made on this market indicate it is not trivial.
A sense of the magnitude of this increased cost can be gained from Holly Jean's blog conjuring grace: field notes from the 21st century. (Her complete name is Holly Jean Buck.) She quotes Charles Derber in her blog, "Most of the financial activity going on in the world is in this kind of betting; nothing of value is created with these derivatives. For every $1 floating around the productive wold economy of real goods and services, there is an estimated $20 to $50 circulating in the world of pure finance, producing or creating nothing." Jean's bolg is well worth reading. It may be found at
http://www.createdestroyenjoy.net/grace/2008/06/adventures-in-global-finance-part-iii.html.
A study done by the University of Ohio for the state legislature found that although law professionals argued the value of the contract that in many rural communities contracts were much less formal, usually expressions of common law or simply verbal agreements. To quote,
Economists and business oriented social scientists and legal scholars generally believe that contracts that include all relevant verifiable terms to a transaction are preferable to "incomplete" contracts that omit many relevant terms thereby reducing the ability of a court or arbitrator to enforce the contract. However, canonical economic models that have supported this theory are largely based on one-shot transactions where two parties come together to execute a single transaction. The economic models and experiments developed in this project suggest that incomplete contracts may lead to higher productivity in repeat trading environments where people develop relationships by trading repeatedly over time with a small group of known trading partners. In these environments, complete contracts are not necessary because these relationships become self enforcing in the sense that the threat of relationship unraveling is sufficient to discipline the trading partners so that they honor their obligations. Moreover, their obligations are often implicitly understood rather than legally understood so that they need not be included in a contract. Finally, incomplete contracts provide trading partners with greater flexibility to respond and adapt to the actions of trading partners thereby reducing transactions costs increasing productivity.
In this connection David Korten, in his new book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, makes a distinction between the highly speculative economy of Wall Street and the more responsible economy of Main Street. The main difference is the proximity of the economic activity to the goods, services, and people involved. This is another way of saying that the chicaneries of Wall Street and, I would add the corruption of our society and politics is substantially a matter of our size.
At the far end of the distance between the product or service and its contract we have our recent mortgage debacle. Here contracts were not only commodities, they were sliced, diced and packaged into other commodities called securities. When contracts get this far removed from their source the contract has absolutely lost its anchor in reality and becomes a free-floating object for the fun and games of financial speculators. Greed rules. There is no social benefit. Disaster awaits.
A sign that the various costs of contracting are coming home to roost may be found in General Motors' decision to forgo its extensive contractual outsourcing of manufacture and make most of its new Volt electric car in house. Among the reasons given are; Achieving performance, quality and reliability by doing all design, manufacturing, materials selection and production procedures in house. Achieving exceptional power density, NVH, and high reliability and affordability only achievable by understanding and engaging the entire electric motor vaue chain.
It appears that globalization and the financial instruments it uses are not, because of the vast increases in cost and social disruption, the panacea its promoters have proclaimed. However, it is, to my mind, still an open question whether, given our overpopulated planet, any other kind of economy, especially one enjoying the benefits of localism, can persist.
Further there is a fundamental issue for human beings here. When humans first formed societies it was for security. Why, after so many millennia, do we put our basic necessities, e.g. food, at the mercy of a gambling den? Ought not humans and their welfare be the animating endeavor in basic needs distribution? Why should such a system be put at any greater peril than absolutely necessary? The results of the present system are mass starvation among the poor of this earth. Global Research in its 2008 report titled Global Famine declares, "Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation. They are largely attributable to speculative trade on the commodity markets." When we let financial speculation, i.e. gambling, come between humanity and its food we are looking moral corruption straight in the eye.
Bob Newhard
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The American Socio-political Stupor and Some Possible Remedies
It was my intention to return to blogging my own thinking for this post. However a rather dramatic plumbing failure has required replumbing our home with the attendant chaos. The following article addresses a concern that I have voiced previously, namely, why are Americans so passive in the face of such monstrous injustice. While I think there are issues and possible conflicts beyond those detailed here, I also think this is one of the best accounts I have read.
I am posting this early because I may not have access to my computer on my normal posting date.
Bob Newhard
Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
By Harriet Fraad, Tikkun
Posted on February 2, 2010, Printed on February 4, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145481/
This is the cover article for the January/February issue of Tikkunmagazine.
An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America. Five contributors, each interacting with and shaping the others, have devastated the American moral, economic, psychological, and social landscape. Each is fed by related streams, but each contributes its own force to the disaster. The American dream in which each generation surpassed the previous generation in real wages has all but disappeared, along with dreams of an intact family, a steady job, a home, and an honest supportive community.
This article looks at each of five collaborators in the crisis in order to answer the following questions:
How did this happen? What forces are responsible?
Why are Americans passive as millions lose their homes, their jobs, their families, their hopes of justice, and the American dream?
Why do Americans remain disorganized at home while their European and Asian counterparts flood into the streets and strike in militant, organized protest? Why do others believe in their potential to reclaim their lives while we do not?
What happened is a result of at least five major, interrelated forces. One is a transformation of American morality, and with it the loss of belief that the social and political realms could be shaped by morality, ethics, and secular spirituality. Another is an economic depression. A third is a transformation of the family, which has been the foundation of American emotional life. A fourth is the decimation of Americans' social participation in all areas, from bridge clubs and PTAs to political parties. A fifth is the tranquilizing and numbing of the American population with psychotropic medications.
1. The Crisis in Morality and Social Ethics
Let us begin with the first of our contributors: American ethics, morality, and spirituality. The same forces that decimated our economic, psychological, and social landscapes have transformed our sense of morality and social ethics. The shared dream of an ethical, moral society that dominated the United States until the 1970s has systematically eroded. In the 1960s it was common to believe that morality and spirituality include a concern for all human beings, rich and poor alike. The biggest push against those social ethics began with Reagan's presidency in 1981. It continued in Reagan's second term and was reinforced by each president until its (we hope) final act in the presidency of George W. Bush.
Reagan's basic ideology was that people are poor because they lack incentives. He claimed that poor people's noble drive to get rich is eroded by social programs that permit them to survive or, in his term, "freeload." In this framework, income tax cuts increase the incentive to work and get rich, so all are expected to benefit from them. In 1980 the highest incomes were taxed at 73 percent. In 2009 those same high incomes were taxed at half that rate, 35 percent. Of course the percentage of tax on the highest incomes is actually even lower, since the wealthiest Americans can hire tax accountants to help them evade taxes. Reagan used his famous veto power to cut a huge range of social programs from biomedical research, to social security for disabled Americans, to clean water, to expanded Head Start. At the same time, he increased the military budget while decrying big government.
That pattern has been repeated ever since, which is how, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States went from being the most egalitarian western industrialized society in 1970 to the least egalitarian in 2009.
In addition, the Soviet model of socialism failed. It did not provide the kind and ethical societies that are part of a socialist vision. The mass of people believed that the Soviet Union was communism. Left-wing class analyses of the failure of Soviet Communism, such as Bettelheim's in the late 1970s or Resnick and Wolff's in 2002, were not widely read or embraced. Both of those analyses demonstrate that the USSR and its satellites exemplified class societies in which a bureaucratic class appropriated wealth and made crucial decisions affecting the lives of the mass of people. They explain that the USSR failed because it was not a communist society. It was not a society in which the people in each workplace decided what to produce, and also collected their own profits and decided together how to distribute those profits. Because these left-wing class interpretations were few and largely unembraced, a socialist or communist dream seemed doomed to end in rigid, bureaucratic, and undemocratic societies that were rejected by their own people. People lost faith in a secular dream.
Slowly there has been a transformation of our morality and ethics. Where our morality once required the United States to embody our ethics in the world and empower all citizens, it has shifted so that our morality now consists of requiring conservative personal and sexual behavior. Within that morality Clinton committed an impeachable crime by lying about having sex with an intern, while Bush and Cheney did not commit impeachable crimes by lying about the threat from Iraq and thus causing the deaths of over four thousand U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, or by torturing prisoners. It is not considered immoral to spend between six billion and twelve billion dollars a week on the war in Iraq while cutting school and social programs for needy families because "there is not enough money." The secular morality that made America a proudly democratic and egalitarian nation has deteriorated. We are experiencing a national moral, ethical, and spiritual crisis.
2. The Dying of the Economic Dream
A second contributor to American passivity is the economic crisis from which we are suffering. Let us look at our history in order to understand what happened. From 1820-1970, the United States experienced a unique period of ever-increasing prosperity. For 150 years, U.S. salaries rose together with ever-increasing worker productivity. For 150 years, each generation was able to afford a better standard of living than the generation that preceded it. That was the American dream.
Unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not enjoy working-class solidarity with other workers whose families and social organizations, unions and political parties were inflected by a history of overt class struggle fought as proudly permanent members of the working class. Europeans organized their working unions along political lines. They fought for better conditions as part of the ideology of long-term communist and socialist struggles for ownership and control of their workplaces.
The U.S. labor movement is not informed by a struggle for worker ownership of the businesses that produce U.S. goods and services. Decisions about what to produce and the right to appropriate and distribute profits are left to corporate boards of directors. Americans accepted the capitalist system in which each generation had relatively prospered. American labor fought for an increasing amount of income that would permit workers to consume more goods and services, a system in which each generation could move to jobs considered more prestigious and lucrative within the capitalist hierarchy. Blue-collar workers' children could become white-collar, and white-collar children could become professionals in the next generation (particularly if they were not just white-collar but white, period). U.S. growth permitted ever-increasing real wages and possibilities for consumption. Even in the Great Depression from 1929-1939, real wages, the amount that one could buy with one's wages, were able to rise because prices fell even faster than wages.
That ever-increasing prosperity stopped in 1970. By 1970 the introduction of computers, better telecommunications, and more efficient transportation enabled jobs to be outsourced to lower-paid workers overseas. Competing factories in Europe and Japan, which had been decimated by World War II, were now vying for U.S. markets. Then China emerged as a manufacturing giant. Competition reduced the U.S. share of both domestic and global markets. The outsourcing of American jobs to cheaper labor markets was not stopped by militant unions, which were unable to achieve the powerful "runaway shop" laws that were won in other nations. Nor did militant unions force the creation of a tight safety net to catch workers in financial distress.
For a long time, there was a relative scarcity of white male workers available for the jobs reserved for white males in America's racially and sexually segregated job markets. White male workers, who were accustomed to receiving increasing real wages and living a lifestyle of ever-greater consumption, could no longer support their families on their frozen wages. Americans' sense of self worth was in large part dependent on their net worth. They became increasingly depressed. Their sense of personal value was cut with their salaries. This happened as the advertising industry burgeoned. Advertising continuously and relentlessly sells consumption as the path to happiness. Consumption was undermined and with it stability, prosperity, and a sense of personal success.
3. What Produced the Crisis in Personal and Family Life?
Economic desperation pushed many more women into the labor force to increase money for the household. Previous to the 1970s, most white, nonimmigrant American women entered the labor force only in times of particular and urgent family need: upon divorce, or if a husband died, was ill, unemployed, or deserted his family. Women's labor outside the home provided some safety in times of emergency. In 1970, 40 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, mostly part time. By the year 2008, 75 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, mostly full time. Many women enjoyed the greater autonomy, variation, and creativity that jobs could provide. Many others were forced by economic necessity to work outside of their homes in routinized dead-end jobs with scarce assistance from governmental supports for day care, after-school programs, or elder care.
Women's work outside of the home helped to improve the standard of living for most families, but it did not compensate families for lost white male wages. Women's wage work imposes not only the obvious expenses of additional clothing and transportation, but also the costs of purchasing some of the goods and services that women previously produced at home free of charge, such as cooking, mending, cleaning, shopping, and child care. Those goods and services are crucial. Once they become commodified in the marketplace, they become expensive. The latest figures from Salary.com indicate that if a stay-at-home mother in the United States were replaced by paid domestic products and services, the cost would be $122,732 a year. The domestic products produced and services rendered by a mom who works outside of the home would cost $76,184 per year.
Even with women flooding into the labor force, families were still financially hurting. Working women had no time to perform full-time household labor and child care, and there was still not enough money for consumption. More money was accumulating at the top while the mass of Americans suffered from frozen wages. The wealthy then promoted the credit card to lend to Americans the money that they formerly would have earned in growing wages. Families became dependent on credit card debt. Since the interest rate on credit cards ranges from 15 percent to 25 percent, Americans descended into debt at record-breaking levels.
The living standard of Americans deteriorated psychologically as well. In American culture, women provide most of the emotional labor to make home a warm and comfortable place for men and children. It is women who usually arrange children's social lives and activities, from play dates to dental appointments. Women are usually the directors of adult social life as well. Indeed, women are usually in charge of emotional life for the entire family. The more women work outside of the home without social support in the form of child care programs and domestic help, the more stressed, overworked, and emotionally unavailable they become. Overwhelmed women have less energy for the roles of social director and organizer, as well as emotional and physical caregiver. Households are hurting emotionally. When Bush took office in 2000, he cut many of the already hobbled social programs that allowed families to survive. Families are in trouble.
Women are no longer willing to work outside of the home, do the lion's share of the domestic work, and simultaneously take care of their children's and husbands' physical and emotional needs largely unaided either by their husbands or by social programs. For the first time in American history, the majority of women are abandoning marriage. Women now initiate two-thirds of divorces. Half of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in legal separation or divorce. These impressive figures do not include the many people who end their marriages outside of the legal system.
When men's emotional relationships with women break down, they have little intimate emotional support. Women usually count on other women to emotionally sustain them. Women still manage to befriend and support each other on a personal level in a way that few men can. These changes in households and family life are a third tributary to America's deluge of disaster. Americans have lost both the financial dream of ever-increasing prosperity and consumption, and also the emotional family dream of a stable family connected by a present wife creating emotional connection and domestic order. In short, Americans have lost what was the comfort of home.
4. Americans' Increasing Isolation from One Another
A fourth disaster is closely related. The freeze in U.S. real wages coincided with the beginning of Americans' increasing isolation from one another. Beginning once again in the 1970s, nearly all social connections between Americans declined. The decay in U.S. social life was an almost total phenomenon. It extended from inviting friends to dinner, to joining bridge clubs or bowling leagues, to volunteering for noncontroversial activities such as the PTA or Red Cross blood drives, to participating in more controversial activities such as working for a cause or a political candidate.
There was growth in social participation in evangelical religious groups; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) groups; internet groups; and self-help groups. However, membership in self-help groups, America's greatest social participation growth area, was outnumbered two to one by drop-outs from bowling leagues alone, according to Robert Putnam's 2000 book, Bowling Alone, which I have drawn on for statistics throughout this section.
Several inconclusive theories have emerged as to why Americans have dropped out of U.S. social life and civic life.
Women dropping out of social activities because of working full time outside of the home accounts for only 10 percent of the overall dropout rate.
One might attribute U.S. social desertion to the phenomenon of busyness, but that too is an insufficient explanation. The average American watches four hours of television a day, which would be difficult to manage with an intensely busy schedule. The Internet may seem like a replacement for social interaction, but the Internet isolates people as well as connects them.
Extensive television viewing may be a culprit since more people relate to their television sets than to each other, and the heaviest viewing correlates to the least social participation. But surely this is a symptom as much as a cause of the problems that isolate Americans. I say this because extensive television viewing is reported by the viewers themselves as so unsatisfying that it leaves them "not feeling so good." Their descriptions portray it as an addiction that compels without satisfying. An overwhelming number of viewers watch for the purpose of distraction or entertainment. Television functions as an escape from loneliness, changed gender expectations, and looming economic disaster.
Perhaps the greatest reason is that Americans are psychologically and also physically exhausted. They have fewer vacations and longer workweeks than any of their Western European counterparts. Activity in society, including activity in politics, has become a luxury good for those fortunate few who have extra time and energy. The Left's natural constituency, the mass of Americans, is exhausted, disillusioned, and in despair. To add to their despair, the tremendous wealth at the top of society has been used to fund right-wing media outlets like Fox News, to name just one example. Right-wing media promote the idea that there is no alternative to the status quo. At the same time, the skewed distribution of wealth allows vast sums to be given to politicians who advance the fortunes of those who pay their way. Immense wealth is invested in weakening the regulations against enormous giving at the top. These developments increase the conviction that ordinary people make no difference in politics. They have no voice. The force of the Left is further weakened.
5. The Drugging of America
The fifth tributary that helped to create our deluge of disaster is both a cause and an effect of America's social breakdown. This is the numbing of Americans with psychotropic drugs. In 2006, Americans, who make up approximately 6 percent of the world's population, consumed 66 percent of the world's supply of antidepressants. In 2002, more than 13 percent of Americans were taking Prozac alone. Prozac is one of thirty available antidepressants. Anti-anxiety drugs, such as Zoloft, are so widely prescribed that in the year 2005, the $3.1 billion sales of Zoloft exceeded the sales for Tide detergent.
Many of these drugs, which are also called "cosmetic drugs" or "life-enhancing drugs," are diagnosed for loneliness, sadness, life transitions, or concentration on task performance. They have been "normalized" through extensive direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing to doctors who are financially rewarded for recommending them to colleagues. Regulations that once restrained the widespread promotion and sales of these powerful drugs have been relaxed to the point of near nonexistence. The United States is the only Western nation that permits direct-to-consumer drug advertising. We are also the only nation without price controls on drugs. Psychiatric drugs are so ubiquitous that the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in America, and antidepressants are their most profitable products.
What Can We Do?
The current disaster did not just happen with the recent burst of the stock market and housing bubbles. Americans somewhere knew for a long time that we could not pay our credit card bills or our mortgages. Somewhere, unconsciously, we had to know that disaster was approaching. We responded with denial, withdrawal, depression, and dissociation accomplished with the aid of extensive television viewing and preoccupation with scandals and celebrities.
Each of the five tributaries flowed together to drown the mass of Americans in debt, family dissolution, isolation, and drug-induced apathy. In response to the original questions that inspired this article, we now need to ask another question: what can we do about it? Americans may now be looking for change. They elected a president who promised change. That change has not happened. Where else can we look?
Capitalism needs and breeds consumerism. We are surrounded by advertisements for products. Ubiquitous advertising has a blighting side effect. The presentation of all human connection now carries a price tag for a branded product. Scenes of connection with a group of friends include, for example, Budweiser beer. The devoted mother is washing your clothes with Tide. The sexy woman, whom men want and women want to be, seems to come with the sleek Toyota. Ads appear whenever we turn on our computers or read newspapers or magazines. Product placement is present in almost every film. Television, America's mass entertainment, embraces product placement and explicit advertising directed to all ages. Capitalist consumerism coveys the message that relationships happen with and through products. There are too few scenes of people trying honestly to connect and surmount their real economic, social, and emotional problems through honest discussion and negotiation. We need more images of people who enjoy their connection and work through the difficult times involved in creating close, mutual, nurturing relationships. How do we manage to effect change within this environment? Where are the contradictions that create openings?
A Time When Noncommercial Values Are Attractive
One opportunity for change has emerged due to the recent capitalist collapse, which has intensified American suffering. People can no longer afford the brand-name products seen on TV. Their economic woes reveal the relentless hustling of now unaffordable consumer products. They try generics, unknown brands, and less consumption, and often find them just as good. This presents us with an opening to question. New, noncommercial values can form.
Since Americans are hooked on the mass media, and the media loves anything new, the Left can create media-attracting new actions. The anarchist group that formed around a book calledThe Coming Insurrection got full media attention when a well-publicized group jumped on stage at Barnes & Noble in New York for a spontaneous reading that began, "Everyone agrees it's about to explode." The action was widely covered for its novelty.
We can look to the four areas that have grown in the current social drought. They are, in order of their growth, self-help groups, internet groups, evangelical church groups, and GLBT groups.
Self-Help Groups
The largest self-help groups are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Alcohol and drugs have proved to be a personal and social disaster for millions of Americans, who cannot function on the job and suffer havoc in their personal lives due to these substances. Huge alcohol and pharmaceutical lobbies push these substances on individuals desperate for relief from their problems. The individual solution of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol-promoted so efficiently by capitalism-failed terribly. In the face of that failure, millions join together in small groups where they share their pain and suffering within a supportive, nonjudgmental collective that operates without salaries, advertisements, or financial charges. These twelve-step groups give the Left a window of possibility. We can add a thirteenth step to their twelve-step programs. We can add a step to organize against big pharmaceutical and liquor advertising, which profits on false promises. The Left desperately needs to address people's despair and give them support. We can learn to incorporate nonjudgmental personal and political support, as well as psychological and political dimensions, to Left groups where both nonjudgmental attitudes and psychological support have been sadly lacking. The Left has tried too hard to focus on being correct and not enough effort on reaching people where they are hurting. We need to listen to people without judgment as they do in twelve-step programs.
The GLBT Movement
We can also study the contradictions that helped to produce GLBT organizations. Advertising creates omnipresent images of happiness accessed though products that relate to sexual attractiveness. The sexy woman rides in the man's sleek new car. The virile man drives a big truck and smokes Marlboros. Multibillion-dollar industries such as the diet, cosmetic, and fashion industries promote products to enhance sexual attractiveness. Popular culture celebrates heterosexual coupling and family as ultimate happiness while avoiding mention of collective joys or homosexuality.
The GLBT movement works to include those in their identity group who are excluded from the grand celebration of personal couple happiness built around sexual pairing. The very pressure to channel complex desires into heterosexual coupling helped lead GLBT people to, as a group, articulate collective visions of resistance and envision new possibilities.
Since most families and relationships are breaking down, American people desperately need connection. Organizing creates connection. Collective dreams have a chance to replace the individualistic desires cultivated in capitalist America.
What We Can Learn From Evangelicals' Failures ... and Successes
Conservative evangelical groups create a collective vision and connection while celebrating capitalist success as God's blessing. They provide some of what people desperately need and the Left ignores, such as strong verbal support for important work in the home and a focus on the hard work of child rearing. Conservative evangelicals manage to accomplish this while sex role stereotyping that labor, as well as opposing every form of non-church-based material support that actually allows families to stay afloat. They typically oppose single-payer health plans, Head Start for all, sex education (unless abstinence-based), family planning, maternity and paternity benefits, minimum wage hikes, etc. In the end they cannot deliver the support that families need. The savior they pray to has not saved them from financial and personal desperation and divorce.
Evangelicalism's reduction of morality to personal morality and particularly sexual morality has an embarrassing side effect. Googling "evangelical scandals" results in 3,729,000 hits in five seconds. Evangelical scandals have resulted in reduced credibility. There is now an opportunity for the wider ethical spiritual morality of the community associated with Tikkun and left-leaning evangelicals connected to Sojourners who develop their social, economic, personal, and political morality, and who see political activity as an expression of morality taken into the world. We on the Left have an opportunity to champion our own moral, ethical, and spiritual vision to Americans who desperately need both morality and hope for a better world. Evangelical promotion of the centrality of personal connection and family gives the Left an opening to advocate material and psychological support for all kinds of families. The Left urgently needs a family program to address the mass breakdown of U.S. homes and families.
The evangelical groups can, ironically show us what we are missing. The failure of evangelical morality, which excludes social, economic, and political morality, may create an opening for a much-needed left-wing program of social, political, economic, and personal ethics and morality for which many hunger.
Internet Organizing
There are explicitly political possibilities afforded by the net. MoveOn.org and other political groups organize and mobilize through the Web. In Iran, members of the opposition evaded censors, communicated with each other, and aroused national and international support through Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook account of Neda Soltani's murder focused Iran and the world on the violent repression of Mousavi's supporters. That possibility exists here.
The four social growth groups springing up in America's desert of political opposition point out possible avenues for a Left that desperately needs direction. Let us return to our original questions:
Why are Americans passive as millions lose their homes, their jobs, their families, and the American dream?
Why do Americans remain at home, disorganized, while their European counterparts flood into the streets in militant, organized protests? How did this happen? What forces are responsible? We can see that the cycles of capitalism with its relentless need for consumer spending and capital accumulation at the top have devastated America. We can also see that unbridled capitalism has created mass suffering and then turned the rage of those who suffer against all who need governmental assistance and against additional scapegoats such as homosexuals, feminists, liberals, socialists, and immigrants. We can create new roads to reclaim this nation by organizing and activating the mass of Americans who know that the ostensible "recovery" will never return what they have lost. We dared to elect a president who championed change verbally, who campaigned on unity and respect for all, and who preserves the structures that destroyed our lives. En masse, we have turned to self-help groups, evangelists, psycho-pharmaceutical drugs, and sexual identity politics, which do not solve the multifaceted crisis in which we are drowning. America needs another way. Perhaps we can provide it?
Harriet Fraad is a psychotherapist-hypnotherapist in practice in New York City. She is a founding member of the feminist movement and the journal Rethinking Marxism. For forty years, she has been a radical committed to transforming U.S. personal and political life.
© 2010 Tikkun All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145481/
I am posting this early because I may not have access to my computer on my normal posting date.
Bob Newhard
Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
By Harriet Fraad, Tikkun
Posted on February 2, 2010, Printed on February 4, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145481/
This is the cover article for the January/February issue of Tikkunmagazine.
An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America. Five contributors, each interacting with and shaping the others, have devastated the American moral, economic, psychological, and social landscape. Each is fed by related streams, but each contributes its own force to the disaster. The American dream in which each generation surpassed the previous generation in real wages has all but disappeared, along with dreams of an intact family, a steady job, a home, and an honest supportive community.
This article looks at each of five collaborators in the crisis in order to answer the following questions:
How did this happen? What forces are responsible?
Why are Americans passive as millions lose their homes, their jobs, their families, their hopes of justice, and the American dream?
Why do Americans remain disorganized at home while their European and Asian counterparts flood into the streets and strike in militant, organized protest? Why do others believe in their potential to reclaim their lives while we do not?
What happened is a result of at least five major, interrelated forces. One is a transformation of American morality, and with it the loss of belief that the social and political realms could be shaped by morality, ethics, and secular spirituality. Another is an economic depression. A third is a transformation of the family, which has been the foundation of American emotional life. A fourth is the decimation of Americans' social participation in all areas, from bridge clubs and PTAs to political parties. A fifth is the tranquilizing and numbing of the American population with psychotropic medications.
1. The Crisis in Morality and Social Ethics
Let us begin with the first of our contributors: American ethics, morality, and spirituality. The same forces that decimated our economic, psychological, and social landscapes have transformed our sense of morality and social ethics. The shared dream of an ethical, moral society that dominated the United States until the 1970s has systematically eroded. In the 1960s it was common to believe that morality and spirituality include a concern for all human beings, rich and poor alike. The biggest push against those social ethics began with Reagan's presidency in 1981. It continued in Reagan's second term and was reinforced by each president until its (we hope) final act in the presidency of George W. Bush.
Reagan's basic ideology was that people are poor because they lack incentives. He claimed that poor people's noble drive to get rich is eroded by social programs that permit them to survive or, in his term, "freeload." In this framework, income tax cuts increase the incentive to work and get rich, so all are expected to benefit from them. In 1980 the highest incomes were taxed at 73 percent. In 2009 those same high incomes were taxed at half that rate, 35 percent. Of course the percentage of tax on the highest incomes is actually even lower, since the wealthiest Americans can hire tax accountants to help them evade taxes. Reagan used his famous veto power to cut a huge range of social programs from biomedical research, to social security for disabled Americans, to clean water, to expanded Head Start. At the same time, he increased the military budget while decrying big government.
That pattern has been repeated ever since, which is how, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States went from being the most egalitarian western industrialized society in 1970 to the least egalitarian in 2009.
In addition, the Soviet model of socialism failed. It did not provide the kind and ethical societies that are part of a socialist vision. The mass of people believed that the Soviet Union was communism. Left-wing class analyses of the failure of Soviet Communism, such as Bettelheim's in the late 1970s or Resnick and Wolff's in 2002, were not widely read or embraced. Both of those analyses demonstrate that the USSR and its satellites exemplified class societies in which a bureaucratic class appropriated wealth and made crucial decisions affecting the lives of the mass of people. They explain that the USSR failed because it was not a communist society. It was not a society in which the people in each workplace decided what to produce, and also collected their own profits and decided together how to distribute those profits. Because these left-wing class interpretations were few and largely unembraced, a socialist or communist dream seemed doomed to end in rigid, bureaucratic, and undemocratic societies that were rejected by their own people. People lost faith in a secular dream.
Slowly there has been a transformation of our morality and ethics. Where our morality once required the United States to embody our ethics in the world and empower all citizens, it has shifted so that our morality now consists of requiring conservative personal and sexual behavior. Within that morality Clinton committed an impeachable crime by lying about having sex with an intern, while Bush and Cheney did not commit impeachable crimes by lying about the threat from Iraq and thus causing the deaths of over four thousand U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, or by torturing prisoners. It is not considered immoral to spend between six billion and twelve billion dollars a week on the war in Iraq while cutting school and social programs for needy families because "there is not enough money." The secular morality that made America a proudly democratic and egalitarian nation has deteriorated. We are experiencing a national moral, ethical, and spiritual crisis.
2. The Dying of the Economic Dream
A second contributor to American passivity is the economic crisis from which we are suffering. Let us look at our history in order to understand what happened. From 1820-1970, the United States experienced a unique period of ever-increasing prosperity. For 150 years, U.S. salaries rose together with ever-increasing worker productivity. For 150 years, each generation was able to afford a better standard of living than the generation that preceded it. That was the American dream.
Unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not enjoy working-class solidarity with other workers whose families and social organizations, unions and political parties were inflected by a history of overt class struggle fought as proudly permanent members of the working class. Europeans organized their working unions along political lines. They fought for better conditions as part of the ideology of long-term communist and socialist struggles for ownership and control of their workplaces.
The U.S. labor movement is not informed by a struggle for worker ownership of the businesses that produce U.S. goods and services. Decisions about what to produce and the right to appropriate and distribute profits are left to corporate boards of directors. Americans accepted the capitalist system in which each generation had relatively prospered. American labor fought for an increasing amount of income that would permit workers to consume more goods and services, a system in which each generation could move to jobs considered more prestigious and lucrative within the capitalist hierarchy. Blue-collar workers' children could become white-collar, and white-collar children could become professionals in the next generation (particularly if they were not just white-collar but white, period). U.S. growth permitted ever-increasing real wages and possibilities for consumption. Even in the Great Depression from 1929-1939, real wages, the amount that one could buy with one's wages, were able to rise because prices fell even faster than wages.
That ever-increasing prosperity stopped in 1970. By 1970 the introduction of computers, better telecommunications, and more efficient transportation enabled jobs to be outsourced to lower-paid workers overseas. Competing factories in Europe and Japan, which had been decimated by World War II, were now vying for U.S. markets. Then China emerged as a manufacturing giant. Competition reduced the U.S. share of both domestic and global markets. The outsourcing of American jobs to cheaper labor markets was not stopped by militant unions, which were unable to achieve the powerful "runaway shop" laws that were won in other nations. Nor did militant unions force the creation of a tight safety net to catch workers in financial distress.
For a long time, there was a relative scarcity of white male workers available for the jobs reserved for white males in America's racially and sexually segregated job markets. White male workers, who were accustomed to receiving increasing real wages and living a lifestyle of ever-greater consumption, could no longer support their families on their frozen wages. Americans' sense of self worth was in large part dependent on their net worth. They became increasingly depressed. Their sense of personal value was cut with their salaries. This happened as the advertising industry burgeoned. Advertising continuously and relentlessly sells consumption as the path to happiness. Consumption was undermined and with it stability, prosperity, and a sense of personal success.
3. What Produced the Crisis in Personal and Family Life?
Economic desperation pushed many more women into the labor force to increase money for the household. Previous to the 1970s, most white, nonimmigrant American women entered the labor force only in times of particular and urgent family need: upon divorce, or if a husband died, was ill, unemployed, or deserted his family. Women's labor outside the home provided some safety in times of emergency. In 1970, 40 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, mostly part time. By the year 2008, 75 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, mostly full time. Many women enjoyed the greater autonomy, variation, and creativity that jobs could provide. Many others were forced by economic necessity to work outside of their homes in routinized dead-end jobs with scarce assistance from governmental supports for day care, after-school programs, or elder care.
Women's work outside of the home helped to improve the standard of living for most families, but it did not compensate families for lost white male wages. Women's wage work imposes not only the obvious expenses of additional clothing and transportation, but also the costs of purchasing some of the goods and services that women previously produced at home free of charge, such as cooking, mending, cleaning, shopping, and child care. Those goods and services are crucial. Once they become commodified in the marketplace, they become expensive. The latest figures from Salary.com indicate that if a stay-at-home mother in the United States were replaced by paid domestic products and services, the cost would be $122,732 a year. The domestic products produced and services rendered by a mom who works outside of the home would cost $76,184 per year.
Even with women flooding into the labor force, families were still financially hurting. Working women had no time to perform full-time household labor and child care, and there was still not enough money for consumption. More money was accumulating at the top while the mass of Americans suffered from frozen wages. The wealthy then promoted the credit card to lend to Americans the money that they formerly would have earned in growing wages. Families became dependent on credit card debt. Since the interest rate on credit cards ranges from 15 percent to 25 percent, Americans descended into debt at record-breaking levels.
The living standard of Americans deteriorated psychologically as well. In American culture, women provide most of the emotional labor to make home a warm and comfortable place for men and children. It is women who usually arrange children's social lives and activities, from play dates to dental appointments. Women are usually the directors of adult social life as well. Indeed, women are usually in charge of emotional life for the entire family. The more women work outside of the home without social support in the form of child care programs and domestic help, the more stressed, overworked, and emotionally unavailable they become. Overwhelmed women have less energy for the roles of social director and organizer, as well as emotional and physical caregiver. Households are hurting emotionally. When Bush took office in 2000, he cut many of the already hobbled social programs that allowed families to survive. Families are in trouble.
Women are no longer willing to work outside of the home, do the lion's share of the domestic work, and simultaneously take care of their children's and husbands' physical and emotional needs largely unaided either by their husbands or by social programs. For the first time in American history, the majority of women are abandoning marriage. Women now initiate two-thirds of divorces. Half of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in legal separation or divorce. These impressive figures do not include the many people who end their marriages outside of the legal system.
When men's emotional relationships with women break down, they have little intimate emotional support. Women usually count on other women to emotionally sustain them. Women still manage to befriend and support each other on a personal level in a way that few men can. These changes in households and family life are a third tributary to America's deluge of disaster. Americans have lost both the financial dream of ever-increasing prosperity and consumption, and also the emotional family dream of a stable family connected by a present wife creating emotional connection and domestic order. In short, Americans have lost what was the comfort of home.
4. Americans' Increasing Isolation from One Another
A fourth disaster is closely related. The freeze in U.S. real wages coincided with the beginning of Americans' increasing isolation from one another. Beginning once again in the 1970s, nearly all social connections between Americans declined. The decay in U.S. social life was an almost total phenomenon. It extended from inviting friends to dinner, to joining bridge clubs or bowling leagues, to volunteering for noncontroversial activities such as the PTA or Red Cross blood drives, to participating in more controversial activities such as working for a cause or a political candidate.
There was growth in social participation in evangelical religious groups; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) groups; internet groups; and self-help groups. However, membership in self-help groups, America's greatest social participation growth area, was outnumbered two to one by drop-outs from bowling leagues alone, according to Robert Putnam's 2000 book, Bowling Alone, which I have drawn on for statistics throughout this section.
Several inconclusive theories have emerged as to why Americans have dropped out of U.S. social life and civic life.
Women dropping out of social activities because of working full time outside of the home accounts for only 10 percent of the overall dropout rate.
One might attribute U.S. social desertion to the phenomenon of busyness, but that too is an insufficient explanation. The average American watches four hours of television a day, which would be difficult to manage with an intensely busy schedule. The Internet may seem like a replacement for social interaction, but the Internet isolates people as well as connects them.
Extensive television viewing may be a culprit since more people relate to their television sets than to each other, and the heaviest viewing correlates to the least social participation. But surely this is a symptom as much as a cause of the problems that isolate Americans. I say this because extensive television viewing is reported by the viewers themselves as so unsatisfying that it leaves them "not feeling so good." Their descriptions portray it as an addiction that compels without satisfying. An overwhelming number of viewers watch for the purpose of distraction or entertainment. Television functions as an escape from loneliness, changed gender expectations, and looming economic disaster.
Perhaps the greatest reason is that Americans are psychologically and also physically exhausted. They have fewer vacations and longer workweeks than any of their Western European counterparts. Activity in society, including activity in politics, has become a luxury good for those fortunate few who have extra time and energy. The Left's natural constituency, the mass of Americans, is exhausted, disillusioned, and in despair. To add to their despair, the tremendous wealth at the top of society has been used to fund right-wing media outlets like Fox News, to name just one example. Right-wing media promote the idea that there is no alternative to the status quo. At the same time, the skewed distribution of wealth allows vast sums to be given to politicians who advance the fortunes of those who pay their way. Immense wealth is invested in weakening the regulations against enormous giving at the top. These developments increase the conviction that ordinary people make no difference in politics. They have no voice. The force of the Left is further weakened.
5. The Drugging of America
The fifth tributary that helped to create our deluge of disaster is both a cause and an effect of America's social breakdown. This is the numbing of Americans with psychotropic drugs. In 2006, Americans, who make up approximately 6 percent of the world's population, consumed 66 percent of the world's supply of antidepressants. In 2002, more than 13 percent of Americans were taking Prozac alone. Prozac is one of thirty available antidepressants. Anti-anxiety drugs, such as Zoloft, are so widely prescribed that in the year 2005, the $3.1 billion sales of Zoloft exceeded the sales for Tide detergent.
Many of these drugs, which are also called "cosmetic drugs" or "life-enhancing drugs," are diagnosed for loneliness, sadness, life transitions, or concentration on task performance. They have been "normalized" through extensive direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing to doctors who are financially rewarded for recommending them to colleagues. Regulations that once restrained the widespread promotion and sales of these powerful drugs have been relaxed to the point of near nonexistence. The United States is the only Western nation that permits direct-to-consumer drug advertising. We are also the only nation without price controls on drugs. Psychiatric drugs are so ubiquitous that the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in America, and antidepressants are their most profitable products.
What Can We Do?
The current disaster did not just happen with the recent burst of the stock market and housing bubbles. Americans somewhere knew for a long time that we could not pay our credit card bills or our mortgages. Somewhere, unconsciously, we had to know that disaster was approaching. We responded with denial, withdrawal, depression, and dissociation accomplished with the aid of extensive television viewing and preoccupation with scandals and celebrities.
Each of the five tributaries flowed together to drown the mass of Americans in debt, family dissolution, isolation, and drug-induced apathy. In response to the original questions that inspired this article, we now need to ask another question: what can we do about it? Americans may now be looking for change. They elected a president who promised change. That change has not happened. Where else can we look?
Capitalism needs and breeds consumerism. We are surrounded by advertisements for products. Ubiquitous advertising has a blighting side effect. The presentation of all human connection now carries a price tag for a branded product. Scenes of connection with a group of friends include, for example, Budweiser beer. The devoted mother is washing your clothes with Tide. The sexy woman, whom men want and women want to be, seems to come with the sleek Toyota. Ads appear whenever we turn on our computers or read newspapers or magazines. Product placement is present in almost every film. Television, America's mass entertainment, embraces product placement and explicit advertising directed to all ages. Capitalist consumerism coveys the message that relationships happen with and through products. There are too few scenes of people trying honestly to connect and surmount their real economic, social, and emotional problems through honest discussion and negotiation. We need more images of people who enjoy their connection and work through the difficult times involved in creating close, mutual, nurturing relationships. How do we manage to effect change within this environment? Where are the contradictions that create openings?
A Time When Noncommercial Values Are Attractive
One opportunity for change has emerged due to the recent capitalist collapse, which has intensified American suffering. People can no longer afford the brand-name products seen on TV. Their economic woes reveal the relentless hustling of now unaffordable consumer products. They try generics, unknown brands, and less consumption, and often find them just as good. This presents us with an opening to question. New, noncommercial values can form.
Since Americans are hooked on the mass media, and the media loves anything new, the Left can create media-attracting new actions. The anarchist group that formed around a book calledThe Coming Insurrection got full media attention when a well-publicized group jumped on stage at Barnes & Noble in New York for a spontaneous reading that began, "Everyone agrees it's about to explode." The action was widely covered for its novelty.
We can look to the four areas that have grown in the current social drought. They are, in order of their growth, self-help groups, internet groups, evangelical church groups, and GLBT groups.
Self-Help Groups
The largest self-help groups are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Alcohol and drugs have proved to be a personal and social disaster for millions of Americans, who cannot function on the job and suffer havoc in their personal lives due to these substances. Huge alcohol and pharmaceutical lobbies push these substances on individuals desperate for relief from their problems. The individual solution of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol-promoted so efficiently by capitalism-failed terribly. In the face of that failure, millions join together in small groups where they share their pain and suffering within a supportive, nonjudgmental collective that operates without salaries, advertisements, or financial charges. These twelve-step groups give the Left a window of possibility. We can add a thirteenth step to their twelve-step programs. We can add a step to organize against big pharmaceutical and liquor advertising, which profits on false promises. The Left desperately needs to address people's despair and give them support. We can learn to incorporate nonjudgmental personal and political support, as well as psychological and political dimensions, to Left groups where both nonjudgmental attitudes and psychological support have been sadly lacking. The Left has tried too hard to focus on being correct and not enough effort on reaching people where they are hurting. We need to listen to people without judgment as they do in twelve-step programs.
The GLBT Movement
We can also study the contradictions that helped to produce GLBT organizations. Advertising creates omnipresent images of happiness accessed though products that relate to sexual attractiveness. The sexy woman rides in the man's sleek new car. The virile man drives a big truck and smokes Marlboros. Multibillion-dollar industries such as the diet, cosmetic, and fashion industries promote products to enhance sexual attractiveness. Popular culture celebrates heterosexual coupling and family as ultimate happiness while avoiding mention of collective joys or homosexuality.
The GLBT movement works to include those in their identity group who are excluded from the grand celebration of personal couple happiness built around sexual pairing. The very pressure to channel complex desires into heterosexual coupling helped lead GLBT people to, as a group, articulate collective visions of resistance and envision new possibilities.
Since most families and relationships are breaking down, American people desperately need connection. Organizing creates connection. Collective dreams have a chance to replace the individualistic desires cultivated in capitalist America.
What We Can Learn From Evangelicals' Failures ... and Successes
Conservative evangelical groups create a collective vision and connection while celebrating capitalist success as God's blessing. They provide some of what people desperately need and the Left ignores, such as strong verbal support for important work in the home and a focus on the hard work of child rearing. Conservative evangelicals manage to accomplish this while sex role stereotyping that labor, as well as opposing every form of non-church-based material support that actually allows families to stay afloat. They typically oppose single-payer health plans, Head Start for all, sex education (unless abstinence-based), family planning, maternity and paternity benefits, minimum wage hikes, etc. In the end they cannot deliver the support that families need. The savior they pray to has not saved them from financial and personal desperation and divorce.
Evangelicalism's reduction of morality to personal morality and particularly sexual morality has an embarrassing side effect. Googling "evangelical scandals" results in 3,729,000 hits in five seconds. Evangelical scandals have resulted in reduced credibility. There is now an opportunity for the wider ethical spiritual morality of the community associated with Tikkun and left-leaning evangelicals connected to Sojourners who develop their social, economic, personal, and political morality, and who see political activity as an expression of morality taken into the world. We on the Left have an opportunity to champion our own moral, ethical, and spiritual vision to Americans who desperately need both morality and hope for a better world. Evangelical promotion of the centrality of personal connection and family gives the Left an opening to advocate material and psychological support for all kinds of families. The Left urgently needs a family program to address the mass breakdown of U.S. homes and families.
The evangelical groups can, ironically show us what we are missing. The failure of evangelical morality, which excludes social, economic, and political morality, may create an opening for a much-needed left-wing program of social, political, economic, and personal ethics and morality for which many hunger.
Internet Organizing
There are explicitly political possibilities afforded by the net. MoveOn.org and other political groups organize and mobilize through the Web. In Iran, members of the opposition evaded censors, communicated with each other, and aroused national and international support through Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook account of Neda Soltani's murder focused Iran and the world on the violent repression of Mousavi's supporters. That possibility exists here.
The four social growth groups springing up in America's desert of political opposition point out possible avenues for a Left that desperately needs direction. Let us return to our original questions:
Why are Americans passive as millions lose their homes, their jobs, their families, and the American dream?
Why do Americans remain at home, disorganized, while their European counterparts flood into the streets in militant, organized protests? How did this happen? What forces are responsible? We can see that the cycles of capitalism with its relentless need for consumer spending and capital accumulation at the top have devastated America. We can also see that unbridled capitalism has created mass suffering and then turned the rage of those who suffer against all who need governmental assistance and against additional scapegoats such as homosexuals, feminists, liberals, socialists, and immigrants. We can create new roads to reclaim this nation by organizing and activating the mass of Americans who know that the ostensible "recovery" will never return what they have lost. We dared to elect a president who championed change verbally, who campaigned on unity and respect for all, and who preserves the structures that destroyed our lives. En masse, we have turned to self-help groups, evangelists, psycho-pharmaceutical drugs, and sexual identity politics, which do not solve the multifaceted crisis in which we are drowning. America needs another way. Perhaps we can provide it?
Harriet Fraad is a psychotherapist-hypnotherapist in practice in New York City. She is a founding member of the feminist movement and the journal Rethinking Marxism. For forty years, she has been a radical committed to transforming U.S. personal and political life.
© 2010 Tikkun All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145481/
Sunday, January 24, 2010
A Progressive Perspective, a Compelling Need of Our Time
I have talked about the fundamental need for a progressive perspective in order to articulate a progressive understanding of out times and our future. Such a perspective will not only provide a clearer view of what needs to be done, it will allow us to establish priorities, discover relationships and conflicts among the various progressive causes, and more rationally settle disputes. It will also, most importantly, communicate a pattern of understanding to society as a whole allowing people to associate their own experiences with a larger grasp of reality.
The want of a comprehensive well thought out vision for progressives has amply evidenced itself in the debacle of the Massachusetts election to succeed Ted Kennedy. In a blue state, with a well developed Democratic Party, following one of the most popular Democrats in the senate, a far right Republican Birther was elected. What more does the Democratic party need as evidence of a massive misunderstanding (if not money-driven disregard of the people) and the need of a progressive vision to animate its own members as well as the public at large. A want of leadership is disastrously evident and leadership and vision go hand in hand. When running as a candidate Obama said his approach to governing would be a "pragmatic" one of seeing what works and what does not and changing course as circumstances required. This is not leadership. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Obama said the following in an ABC News interview on January 20, 2010 "If there's one thing I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," This is Obama's "pragmatism" in action. It amounts to a continuous practice of putting out fires. That the world's most powerful nation should be driven by the immediate chaos of the moment bespeaks a very dangerous bull in a global china shop. This is exactly why a well developed perspective is so important not only to provide direction and priorities, but to avoid the disasters that are consequent to their absence. In this Obama has failed miserably. We now have to hope he is capable of learning quickly. The crushing evidence for the need of a progressive perspective is what makes the following article so apposite to our situation. I hope you find it as relevant as I did.
The following article, while referencing the situation in Australia, is, in my judgment, an excellent presentation of the need for a progressive perspective.
The author is David McKnight, an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. His other writings can be found at beyondrightandleft.com.au. His book, ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War’ was published by Allen & Unwin.
I shall be back with my own thoughts in two weeks.
Bob Newhard
Thinking about a new progressive vision
I'd like to begin by recalling the words on the invitation to this seminar, in which we describe the aspirations of many people for a better society --- and also the way Australian society falls short of these aspirations. Then we added the following:
'...underlying these concerns is something else that is rarely discussed: it is the crisis of ideas and values which express alternatives. In spite of the current economic crisis, the rise of neo-liberalism reminded us that social change depends on political ideas embedded in an intellectual and moral framework. The motive for this seminar therefore arises from the need to find a space to discuss the development of intellectual and moral frameworks for progressive politics in Australia.'
By putting it in this way, we are talking about the connection between ideas and politics. Or what would once have been called the connection of theory to practice.
A crisis of vision
The lack of a broadly agreed set of ideas for the non-conservative side of politics is reflected in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious, at one end of the spectrum, is the decades-long crisis of vision within the Australian Labor Party. That party once had a vision which was based on using government to regulate and civilize capitalism. Yet it was a Labor federal government which ushered in privatization and deregulation in the national economy. In a different way, the radical left in Australia was, historically, a small but significant part of the Australian political scene. It had a highly developed analysis of society, centering on the social consequences of private ownership of property and the market. Most of the radical left has now disappeared altogether, including the Communist Party of Australia to which I once belonged. Some of the remaining parts of the radical left, as far as I can tell, seem to be groping towards a vision of ‘ecological socialism'. Others look determinedly backwards to past glories.
Yet while the anti-corporate left has largely disappeared, problems about the role of private corporations in democracies like ours have not disappeared.
The crisis of vision extends to other social movements, such as the women's movement. This movement achieved tremendous gains in social equality and opposition to discrimination. These changes, combined with the inflexibility in the economy and workforce, have lead to a situation where we now have what Barbara Pocock calls a ‘work-life collision'. In many families neither partner is able easily to fulfill the role of carer of small children. More broadly we have the continued devaluation of caring itself in a society focused on work, economic efficiency, consumerism, and individualization.
The crisis of vision also touches on matters of cultural diversity. Progressives have championed acceptance of cultural diversity against its detractors such as John Howard and Pauline Hanson. Progressives were also key supporters of acceptance of other forms of diversity around sexuality. Indeed, if you asked many younger people today the meaning of the political term ‘the left' many would respond in terms of its support for cultural and social diversity.
In celebrating diversity, it's worth recalling what has happened to an older progressive virtue -- that of the common good and the notion of a common interest. In a society in which the forces driving individualization are powerful, the notion of a common good has been a casualty. Even so, some thinkers dismiss such a notion at the level of theory. However, if one abandons a notion of the common good, one is reduced to promoting particular and small constituencies. Yet members of small constituencies also have communal identities -- as Australians, as users of a health care system or an education system.
Many of us want to retain support for acceptance of diversity, but we also believe that political action to address some of the major crises facing us is impossible without a notion of common humanity which shares a common fate and which needs to identify a common good. But how can a new balance be achieved?
Other problems exist between progressives based on the labour movement and the new and growing environmental movements. The need to address climate change will mean the dislocation of industries, and the need to end jobs in certain industries such as coal mining, and this is causing growing problems. My own view is that the need to address climate change will move to the centre of political ideas and practice. This situation will require the creative and bold application of progressive values.
A lesson from neoliberalism
In discussing the crisis of ideas for progressives, I think it is useful to look at a parallel and opposite case back in the 1970s. In those days it was the Right which had a dearth of credible and inspiring ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, the old conservative Right found its dominance under challenge by ideas of social change. Old notions of nationalism, of racism, of deference to authority and of the naturalness of privilege were being undermined.
But some individuals and forces within the Right sought an intellectual renewal, not by defending old shibboleths but by exploring old ideas which, in their view, suddenly had a new relevance. This was the beginning of the era of the ‘think-tanks' and the rise of economic liberalism or neo liberalism.
This ideological revolution of the Right had an instructive result. Over a period of time, it gave the Right the ascendancy in the battle of ideas and values in Australia and elsewhere. Even where the Right did not directly succeed in taking government, the ideas of the new Right dominated the political agenda and promoted its values and world view. It is only now, after decades of dominance, with the global financial crisis that this extraordinary movement has received its first effective opposition and undergone a significant challenge to its credibility.
In its days of success, neo liberalism had one advantage, and it contains a useful lesson on the reason for the rise and fall of ideas which aim to have social impact.
That advantage, and a key to the success of neo liberalism, was that it was in tune with deeper social changes. In my view the set of ideas known as neoliberalism evolved as one response to the age of affluence. Probably even its originators were not fully aware of this, but it suited the social changes which were sparked by material prosperity. Let me explain. The material prosperity of countries like ours is extraordinary and unprecedented in human history. This wealth gives most people a range of choices of which the most obvious are in supermarket shelves but which extends to a vast number of choices about where to live and how to live. It extends from choice about whether or not to have children -- to choices about which overseas destination to travel to. With choice comes a degree of personal freedom for ordinary people which, as I said, is unprecedented in history. It was not surprising that a set of ideas arose which celebrates choice and freedom and see these abstract notions as the basis for a good society. On this basis, neoliberal economic and social policies foster a strong individualism and self interest.
As I said, I believe that properly understood, this has lessons for us. Every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to identify problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to articulate a new social vision.
Why is that? Well, because certain forces have a logic of their own: they impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change, if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can do one very important thing. To put it bluntly you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don't want to recognize the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best. Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.
Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let's say in the next 12 months an unprecedented drought occurs. Let's say Melbourne and Sydney's water supply once again dips down below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This sort of frightening example of climate change would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.
Seeking a coherent new vision
A new vision needs to have a degree of coherence. That is, your economic policy has to be in alignment with your social policy. If you want to encourage, for example, home care for children , then you don't want economic conditions that force women back to work immediately after giving birth. Or, if you want to fight carbon pollution, this has big implications for your economic approach as well as your social policy.
In raising the need for a coherent social vision, some might see this as a return to an oppressive orthodox theory of society. And that is the tendency after the collapse of the grand narrative of socialism. Indeed in as far as I can understand postmodern ideas, they have a decided preference for localizing politics and rejecting anything resembling a synthesis. And this is understandable up to a point, since it's perfectly possible to argue that the trajectory of Marxism which began to liberate working class, ended by enslaving them. Whether you accept this rather simplistic argument or not, it seems to me that the age of theories which purport to explain everything from world history, to current politics to the future of humanity, is over. Like certain kinds of religions, such theories tend toward a fundamentalism.
But to reject so called ‘theories of everything' is not to reject sets of ideas which try to explain more than local events and issues. Diversity is good and I don't wish to impose an orthodoxy on progressive politics. But in complex societies such as ours, some sort of coherent vision seems almost unavoidable. To take an obvious example, if you want to say something about the environment, it's necessary to have a view on aspects of the economy. Indeed you could argue that the fundamental issues of the environment are now issues of political economy and vice versa.
My personal view about a new politics is that it means searching for a new ‘social philosophy' which deals with problems such as sustainability and the balance between the life-world and the market. Another view is that politics will increasingly be oriented around the need to reduce carbon emissions -- and that this will involve a clash with entrenched corporate power as well as a challenge to deeply ingrained ways of life shared by large numbers of people.
Developing a new vision will not be easy. It is not a simple arithmetical ‘adding up' of a list of progressive causes and demands. Rather it involves far more complex syntheses of ideas and policies. And the need to explore some of those processes is what brought this collection of thinkers and authors together.
The want of a comprehensive well thought out vision for progressives has amply evidenced itself in the debacle of the Massachusetts election to succeed Ted Kennedy. In a blue state, with a well developed Democratic Party, following one of the most popular Democrats in the senate, a far right Republican Birther was elected. What more does the Democratic party need as evidence of a massive misunderstanding (if not money-driven disregard of the people) and the need of a progressive vision to animate its own members as well as the public at large. A want of leadership is disastrously evident and leadership and vision go hand in hand. When running as a candidate Obama said his approach to governing would be a "pragmatic" one of seeing what works and what does not and changing course as circumstances required. This is not leadership. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Obama said the following in an ABC News interview on January 20, 2010 "If there's one thing I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," This is Obama's "pragmatism" in action. It amounts to a continuous practice of putting out fires. That the world's most powerful nation should be driven by the immediate chaos of the moment bespeaks a very dangerous bull in a global china shop. This is exactly why a well developed perspective is so important not only to provide direction and priorities, but to avoid the disasters that are consequent to their absence. In this Obama has failed miserably. We now have to hope he is capable of learning quickly. The crushing evidence for the need of a progressive perspective is what makes the following article so apposite to our situation. I hope you find it as relevant as I did.
The following article, while referencing the situation in Australia, is, in my judgment, an excellent presentation of the need for a progressive perspective.
The author is David McKnight, an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. His other writings can be found at beyondrightandleft.com.au. His book, ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War’ was published by Allen & Unwin.
I shall be back with my own thoughts in two weeks.
Bob Newhard
Thinking about a new progressive vision
I'd like to begin by recalling the words on the invitation to this seminar, in which we describe the aspirations of many people for a better society --- and also the way Australian society falls short of these aspirations. Then we added the following:
'...underlying these concerns is something else that is rarely discussed: it is the crisis of ideas and values which express alternatives. In spite of the current economic crisis, the rise of neo-liberalism reminded us that social change depends on political ideas embedded in an intellectual and moral framework. The motive for this seminar therefore arises from the need to find a space to discuss the development of intellectual and moral frameworks for progressive politics in Australia.'
By putting it in this way, we are talking about the connection between ideas and politics. Or what would once have been called the connection of theory to practice.
A crisis of vision
The lack of a broadly agreed set of ideas for the non-conservative side of politics is reflected in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious, at one end of the spectrum, is the decades-long crisis of vision within the Australian Labor Party. That party once had a vision which was based on using government to regulate and civilize capitalism. Yet it was a Labor federal government which ushered in privatization and deregulation in the national economy. In a different way, the radical left in Australia was, historically, a small but significant part of the Australian political scene. It had a highly developed analysis of society, centering on the social consequences of private ownership of property and the market. Most of the radical left has now disappeared altogether, including the Communist Party of Australia to which I once belonged. Some of the remaining parts of the radical left, as far as I can tell, seem to be groping towards a vision of ‘ecological socialism'. Others look determinedly backwards to past glories.
Yet while the anti-corporate left has largely disappeared, problems about the role of private corporations in democracies like ours have not disappeared.
The crisis of vision extends to other social movements, such as the women's movement. This movement achieved tremendous gains in social equality and opposition to discrimination. These changes, combined with the inflexibility in the economy and workforce, have lead to a situation where we now have what Barbara Pocock calls a ‘work-life collision'. In many families neither partner is able easily to fulfill the role of carer of small children. More broadly we have the continued devaluation of caring itself in a society focused on work, economic efficiency, consumerism, and individualization.
The crisis of vision also touches on matters of cultural diversity. Progressives have championed acceptance of cultural diversity against its detractors such as John Howard and Pauline Hanson. Progressives were also key supporters of acceptance of other forms of diversity around sexuality. Indeed, if you asked many younger people today the meaning of the political term ‘the left' many would respond in terms of its support for cultural and social diversity.
In celebrating diversity, it's worth recalling what has happened to an older progressive virtue -- that of the common good and the notion of a common interest. In a society in which the forces driving individualization are powerful, the notion of a common good has been a casualty. Even so, some thinkers dismiss such a notion at the level of theory. However, if one abandons a notion of the common good, one is reduced to promoting particular and small constituencies. Yet members of small constituencies also have communal identities -- as Australians, as users of a health care system or an education system.
Many of us want to retain support for acceptance of diversity, but we also believe that political action to address some of the major crises facing us is impossible without a notion of common humanity which shares a common fate and which needs to identify a common good. But how can a new balance be achieved?
Other problems exist between progressives based on the labour movement and the new and growing environmental movements. The need to address climate change will mean the dislocation of industries, and the need to end jobs in certain industries such as coal mining, and this is causing growing problems. My own view is that the need to address climate change will move to the centre of political ideas and practice. This situation will require the creative and bold application of progressive values.
A lesson from neoliberalism
In discussing the crisis of ideas for progressives, I think it is useful to look at a parallel and opposite case back in the 1970s. In those days it was the Right which had a dearth of credible and inspiring ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, the old conservative Right found its dominance under challenge by ideas of social change. Old notions of nationalism, of racism, of deference to authority and of the naturalness of privilege were being undermined.
But some individuals and forces within the Right sought an intellectual renewal, not by defending old shibboleths but by exploring old ideas which, in their view, suddenly had a new relevance. This was the beginning of the era of the ‘think-tanks' and the rise of economic liberalism or neo liberalism.
This ideological revolution of the Right had an instructive result. Over a period of time, it gave the Right the ascendancy in the battle of ideas and values in Australia and elsewhere. Even where the Right did not directly succeed in taking government, the ideas of the new Right dominated the political agenda and promoted its values and world view. It is only now, after decades of dominance, with the global financial crisis that this extraordinary movement has received its first effective opposition and undergone a significant challenge to its credibility.
In its days of success, neo liberalism had one advantage, and it contains a useful lesson on the reason for the rise and fall of ideas which aim to have social impact.
That advantage, and a key to the success of neo liberalism, was that it was in tune with deeper social changes. In my view the set of ideas known as neoliberalism evolved as one response to the age of affluence. Probably even its originators were not fully aware of this, but it suited the social changes which were sparked by material prosperity. Let me explain. The material prosperity of countries like ours is extraordinary and unprecedented in human history. This wealth gives most people a range of choices of which the most obvious are in supermarket shelves but which extends to a vast number of choices about where to live and how to live. It extends from choice about whether or not to have children -- to choices about which overseas destination to travel to. With choice comes a degree of personal freedom for ordinary people which, as I said, is unprecedented in history. It was not surprising that a set of ideas arose which celebrates choice and freedom and see these abstract notions as the basis for a good society. On this basis, neoliberal economic and social policies foster a strong individualism and self interest.
As I said, I believe that properly understood, this has lessons for us. Every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to identify problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to articulate a new social vision.
Why is that? Well, because certain forces have a logic of their own: they impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change, if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can do one very important thing. To put it bluntly you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don't want to recognize the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best. Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.
Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let's say in the next 12 months an unprecedented drought occurs. Let's say Melbourne and Sydney's water supply once again dips down below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This sort of frightening example of climate change would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.
Seeking a coherent new vision
A new vision needs to have a degree of coherence. That is, your economic policy has to be in alignment with your social policy. If you want to encourage, for example, home care for children , then you don't want economic conditions that force women back to work immediately after giving birth. Or, if you want to fight carbon pollution, this has big implications for your economic approach as well as your social policy.
In raising the need for a coherent social vision, some might see this as a return to an oppressive orthodox theory of society. And that is the tendency after the collapse of the grand narrative of socialism. Indeed in as far as I can understand postmodern ideas, they have a decided preference for localizing politics and rejecting anything resembling a synthesis. And this is understandable up to a point, since it's perfectly possible to argue that the trajectory of Marxism which began to liberate working class, ended by enslaving them. Whether you accept this rather simplistic argument or not, it seems to me that the age of theories which purport to explain everything from world history, to current politics to the future of humanity, is over. Like certain kinds of religions, such theories tend toward a fundamentalism.
But to reject so called ‘theories of everything' is not to reject sets of ideas which try to explain more than local events and issues. Diversity is good and I don't wish to impose an orthodoxy on progressive politics. But in complex societies such as ours, some sort of coherent vision seems almost unavoidable. To take an obvious example, if you want to say something about the environment, it's necessary to have a view on aspects of the economy. Indeed you could argue that the fundamental issues of the environment are now issues of political economy and vice versa.
My personal view about a new politics is that it means searching for a new ‘social philosophy' which deals with problems such as sustainability and the balance between the life-world and the market. Another view is that politics will increasingly be oriented around the need to reduce carbon emissions -- and that this will involve a clash with entrenched corporate power as well as a challenge to deeply ingrained ways of life shared by large numbers of people.
Developing a new vision will not be easy. It is not a simple arithmetical ‘adding up' of a list of progressive causes and demands. Rather it involves far more complex syntheses of ideas and policies. And the need to explore some of those processes is what brought this collection of thinkers and authors together.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The ACLU and Corporate Personhood
As a long time card carrying member of the ACLU I am chagrined, to put it mildly. The ACLU has refused to bring the corporate personhood issue before the Supreme Court.
The aspect of corporate personhood contested was its right to free speech. Understanding that all of our rights are not absolute, for example you are not free to cry fire in a crowded theatre if no fire exists, the question was whether in this case a corporation, like you and me, has its speech protected by the Constitution. The case concerned Nike Corporation's right to lie in its published denial of unfair labor practices. The clearest statement I have found is one in which the ACLU was asked why, despite the Nike corporation's lying in its response to criticisms of its labor practices, it was nonetheless supported by the ACLU in its contention that its right to free speech would be abrogated if it was prevented from lying in describing its labor practices. Keep in mind that lying, like other forms of speech is protected except in specific cases, otherwise we would all be in jail. The above referenced statement can be found at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=226x6379.
The full ACLU Supreme Court amicus brief can be downloaded at http://www.aclu.org/content/aclu-amicus-brief-nike-inc-v-kasky.
The ACLU's amicus brief argued that the law made a distinction between commercial speech e.g. false advertising is not protected speech, and non-commercial speech and that in this case Nike was defending itself against accusations by others and hence was not engaged in commercial speech. An argument that the ACLU was wrong in its amicus brief can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1374003. The gist of this argument is that the ACLU was mistaken on at least two counts. Number one was assuming that lying by a corporation defending itself against evidence of its poor labor practices was not commercial speech and hence was protected by the free speech clause of the Constitution. This could have gone to the heart of the corporate personhood issue. Corporations exist for one purpse only; to make profit. Hence they are amoral entities at best and pernicious at worst. The foundation of law, however, is morality. For instance motive is always a concern in establishing guilt. Number two was that in so doing the Court was continuing the practice of "First Amendment Formalism," which consists of using the narrowest interpretation of the law to decide cases rather than to consider the real world which the law is presumably intended to address. It is the latter issue that I want to consider.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Homes observed, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." At a time when this nation and the planet it inhabits are facing unprecedented problems, we have a Supreme Court dedicated to a formalist approach to law allowing it to disregard the plight our citizens face. The legal prospects for the changes our times demand and progressives seek are substantially less than promising. One glimmer of hope may be Justice Sotomayor who raised the corporate personhood issue in a recent case. It is interesting to note and disheartening to contemplate that in dealing with gross racial injustice it took almost exactly 100 years to break the hold of the South on this issue and that it was the Supreme Court that did it. As usual, rather than talk racial bigotry, the racists and their allies called the Court "activist." It is also interesting to note that the Supreme Court, frequently in the defense of property rights, was a major obstacle to President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to deal with mass unemployment and its consequences. The problem became so acute that Roosevelt sought to increase the size of the Court so more liberal justices could be appointed.
But why is the Supreme Court sometimes unwilling to address major needs of our society as it is currently and during Roosevelt's New Deal and so responsive to society's need as when it took on the civil rights issue? I think there is evidence for a correlation between maldistribted wealth and legal formalism. When the nation's wealth is predominantly in the hands of a few the legal system becomes more formalistic. When the wealth is more evenly distributed the courts are more inclined to address society's major issues whether economic racial or cultural. For example, when there was a gross maldistribution of wealth preceding the Great Depression, for example the muckrakers attacks on Standard Oil or Upton Sinclair's attack on the railroads in California, the courts were rigidly unresponsive to the needs of society at large. Conversely, wealth was much more evenly distributed when the Supreme Court took on the civil rights issue that politicians had failed to deal with for so long. This is, in my judgment, more than a mere correlation when the power of wealth is fully understood. If this analysis is correct the Supreme Court becomes one more instrument of the wealthy.
I do not think, as may be obvious from some of my previous comments, that we are yet willing to understand and acknowledge the depth and breadth of the pernicious influence of excessive wealth on a democracy. It is so dangerous that the amount, concentration and control of wealth should be regulated. You may be familiar with the writings of David Korten, e.g. When Corporations Rule the World. He has a new book out titled Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth in which wealth distribution is a fundamental issue. He, as I have previously argued, sees the problem of pernicious wealth as both its size and its unrelatedness to actual production of goods and services. By holding wealth close to production society as a whole gets the benefits and is in a better position to control excessive wealth by breaking up dominating corporations as was done with AT&T. His is a "Main Street" capitalism as opposed to a "Wall Street" capitalism. I am finding the book intriguing, although I have reservations as to whether the impact of technology is consistent with his call for smaller units of political and social organization.
Bob Newhard
The aspect of corporate personhood contested was its right to free speech. Understanding that all of our rights are not absolute, for example you are not free to cry fire in a crowded theatre if no fire exists, the question was whether in this case a corporation, like you and me, has its speech protected by the Constitution. The case concerned Nike Corporation's right to lie in its published denial of unfair labor practices. The clearest statement I have found is one in which the ACLU was asked why, despite the Nike corporation's lying in its response to criticisms of its labor practices, it was nonetheless supported by the ACLU in its contention that its right to free speech would be abrogated if it was prevented from lying in describing its labor practices. Keep in mind that lying, like other forms of speech is protected except in specific cases, otherwise we would all be in jail. The above referenced statement can be found at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=226x6379.
The full ACLU Supreme Court amicus brief can be downloaded at http://www.aclu.org/content/aclu-amicus-brief-nike-inc-v-kasky.
The ACLU's amicus brief argued that the law made a distinction between commercial speech e.g. false advertising is not protected speech, and non-commercial speech and that in this case Nike was defending itself against accusations by others and hence was not engaged in commercial speech. An argument that the ACLU was wrong in its amicus brief can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1374003. The gist of this argument is that the ACLU was mistaken on at least two counts. Number one was assuming that lying by a corporation defending itself against evidence of its poor labor practices was not commercial speech and hence was protected by the free speech clause of the Constitution. This could have gone to the heart of the corporate personhood issue. Corporations exist for one purpse only; to make profit. Hence they are amoral entities at best and pernicious at worst. The foundation of law, however, is morality. For instance motive is always a concern in establishing guilt. Number two was that in so doing the Court was continuing the practice of "First Amendment Formalism," which consists of using the narrowest interpretation of the law to decide cases rather than to consider the real world which the law is presumably intended to address. It is the latter issue that I want to consider.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Homes observed, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." At a time when this nation and the planet it inhabits are facing unprecedented problems, we have a Supreme Court dedicated to a formalist approach to law allowing it to disregard the plight our citizens face. The legal prospects for the changes our times demand and progressives seek are substantially less than promising. One glimmer of hope may be Justice Sotomayor who raised the corporate personhood issue in a recent case. It is interesting to note and disheartening to contemplate that in dealing with gross racial injustice it took almost exactly 100 years to break the hold of the South on this issue and that it was the Supreme Court that did it. As usual, rather than talk racial bigotry, the racists and their allies called the Court "activist." It is also interesting to note that the Supreme Court, frequently in the defense of property rights, was a major obstacle to President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to deal with mass unemployment and its consequences. The problem became so acute that Roosevelt sought to increase the size of the Court so more liberal justices could be appointed.
But why is the Supreme Court sometimes unwilling to address major needs of our society as it is currently and during Roosevelt's New Deal and so responsive to society's need as when it took on the civil rights issue? I think there is evidence for a correlation between maldistribted wealth and legal formalism. When the nation's wealth is predominantly in the hands of a few the legal system becomes more formalistic. When the wealth is more evenly distributed the courts are more inclined to address society's major issues whether economic racial or cultural. For example, when there was a gross maldistribution of wealth preceding the Great Depression, for example the muckrakers attacks on Standard Oil or Upton Sinclair's attack on the railroads in California, the courts were rigidly unresponsive to the needs of society at large. Conversely, wealth was much more evenly distributed when the Supreme Court took on the civil rights issue that politicians had failed to deal with for so long. This is, in my judgment, more than a mere correlation when the power of wealth is fully understood. If this analysis is correct the Supreme Court becomes one more instrument of the wealthy.
I do not think, as may be obvious from some of my previous comments, that we are yet willing to understand and acknowledge the depth and breadth of the pernicious influence of excessive wealth on a democracy. It is so dangerous that the amount, concentration and control of wealth should be regulated. You may be familiar with the writings of David Korten, e.g. When Corporations Rule the World. He has a new book out titled Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth in which wealth distribution is a fundamental issue. He, as I have previously argued, sees the problem of pernicious wealth as both its size and its unrelatedness to actual production of goods and services. By holding wealth close to production society as a whole gets the benefits and is in a better position to control excessive wealth by breaking up dominating corporations as was done with AT&T. His is a "Main Street" capitalism as opposed to a "Wall Street" capitalism. I am finding the book intriguing, although I have reservations as to whether the impact of technology is consistent with his call for smaller units of political and social organization.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Demicans and Republicats, the Lesson to be Learned from Barack Obama
Many have speculated on the diametric difference between Obama's campaign message of fundamental change and the fundamental lack of change in his actions and policies as President. Some say Obama did not bring change because the office of President changed him. Others, with whom I agree, say that Obama never intended to bring change, that he is the great deceiver. From his very first decision to name Rahm Immanuel as his Chief of Staff and his ouster of Howard Dean as head of the Democratic National Committee it was clear that nothing resembling the change he trumpeted during his campaign was going to take place. It has only gotten worse. There is a large and chilling lesson to be learned from this enormous deception. That lesson is crystal clear in telling us who is in charge of this country and what their intentions are for those of us who live here and those on this planet that may suffer from the use of America's power both economic and military.
From his 700 million dollar bailout of major US banks (talk about "trickle down"), to his pursuit of American oil hegemony on the shores of the Caspian Sea, otherwise known as the Afghanistan surge, Obama has demonstrated his allegiance to the wealthy of this nation and the continued political domination of corporations. It is, in my judgment, imperative that the people of this country become focused on corporate America as the single largest threat to their democracy and personal well being. Profit, not people, has been the articulating dominator of this country far too long. It is now a question of them or us. Obama, with a mandate no president has had since Ronald Reagan, refused to use it to redirect this country to the welfare of its citizens instead of the welfare of its wealthy.
The depth of Osama's commitment to the wealthy and their corporations is portrayed in an excellent, well documented report by David DeGraw titled Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down. The report can be found at http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war-racket-the-obama-illusion-comes-crashing-down. DeGraw describes how the Afghanistan surge is actually directed at denying Russia and China access to one of the world's largest oil reserves located on the Kazakhstan coast of the Caspian Sea. More accurately, it is aimed at providing that oil to United States oil corporations. Wall Street firms, especially Goldman-Sachs, are involved in this effort by way of setting up an oil commodities market outside the United States to handle the world-wide competition for this oil. Thus, to make the depth of the deception that is the Afghanistan War a little clearer, the United States military is waging war, killing and being killed, for the benefit of oil corporations who will not only make immense amounts of money from that oil, but will, in addition, manipulate the speculative market for this oil to further raise the oil's cost and their profits. This monstrous undertaking involving the killing and maiming of the innocent in the thousands for the benefit of egregiously wealthy corporations, their officers and investors, is but an instance of the capitalist greed we have unleashed upon the world. We progressives must make clear the depths of calumny that the people are being subject to. DeGraw's essay is a good place to start.
As a result of Obama's abandonment of progressives it is, in my judgment, fruitless to continue the pursuit of some sort of accommodation with him. He patently is not interested. The problem is what is to be done to save our democracy in the absence of political clout. Some, such as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are focused on electing progressive candidates to national, state and local political offices. Commendable as this is, I do not think we have time for this approach. The Copenhagen climate conference, for example, has demonstrated that the wealthy portion of the planet is prepared to sacrifice the poorer southern nations of the world, especially Africa, by way of "cap and trade" the market for which strongly favors the wealth of the rich countries. The United States is a major player in this effort, which would lock in this market approach until at least 2020, which is way beyond the time we have to act on this most momentous of issues. As I say, we do not have time for an incremental approach to changing our government and our national priorities.
To my mind progressives have to organize to take the issues and the short term impacts that they will generate to the people. As an example, Sam Pizzigati has proposed that instead of just increasing the taxes on the rich, who, with their time and money, will energetically seek to reverse them, we need in addition to cap both the top and the bottom of the annual income scale. Sam's essay can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109pizzigati.html . Decades ago Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income for all citizens. He saw that, with the advancement of technology and the consequent elimination of jobs, the job could no longer be the sole vehicle for distributing the gross national product. A guaranteed annual income or some surrogate would "cap" the bottom of the economic scale. Capping the maximum income that a citizen could receive would not only create a more equitable society, it would, by linking the welfare of the rich and the poor with these "caps," provide a constant awareness among the citizenry of equity, especially when the wealthy begin their often devious efforts to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society. The importance of this latter point can be demonstrated by reflecting on how Reagan persuaded the average American that increasing the wealth of the already wealthy by tax breaks and other measures would stimulate the economy and thereby provide jobs for the rest of us. In this connection it should also be noticed that we have been indoctrinated to accept the "business cycle" as normal. What is seldom pointed out is that since the advent of modern technology, especially computers and robots, after every recession there have been fewer jobs available. In other words the "normal" business cycle is now in the business of eliminating jobs. As long as the job remains the basic means of distributing the gross national product this problem can only increase.
I think we can now see more clearly what Ralph Nader has been saying for years, namely, that in the area of corporate domination of American society there is no significant difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They are both wedded to corporate domination of our country and our world. As for the latter matter Arundhati Roy, in her book of essays titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers has described the corporate pillaging of India by the very same corporations that have been so detrimental to our own society. What David DeGraw has shown us about Obama and what Sam Pizzigati has proposed as a remedy for the dominating role of wealth in our society reflects both the cause of our terrible times and the kind of remedy progressives need to pursue. Lacking a political party progressives need to push both the underlying cause of our dysfunctional and increasingly dangerous societal behavior and the kind of remedies need. This is exactly what the progressives did at the turn of the 20th century with their push to base our currency on silver and gold rather than the much scarcer gold alone, which the wealthy could so easily control. This is the significance of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. Let us go forth and do likewise.
Bob Newhard
From his 700 million dollar bailout of major US banks (talk about "trickle down"), to his pursuit of American oil hegemony on the shores of the Caspian Sea, otherwise known as the Afghanistan surge, Obama has demonstrated his allegiance to the wealthy of this nation and the continued political domination of corporations. It is, in my judgment, imperative that the people of this country become focused on corporate America as the single largest threat to their democracy and personal well being. Profit, not people, has been the articulating dominator of this country far too long. It is now a question of them or us. Obama, with a mandate no president has had since Ronald Reagan, refused to use it to redirect this country to the welfare of its citizens instead of the welfare of its wealthy.
The depth of Osama's commitment to the wealthy and their corporations is portrayed in an excellent, well documented report by David DeGraw titled Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down. The report can be found at http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war-racket-the-obama-illusion-comes-crashing-down. DeGraw describes how the Afghanistan surge is actually directed at denying Russia and China access to one of the world's largest oil reserves located on the Kazakhstan coast of the Caspian Sea. More accurately, it is aimed at providing that oil to United States oil corporations. Wall Street firms, especially Goldman-Sachs, are involved in this effort by way of setting up an oil commodities market outside the United States to handle the world-wide competition for this oil. Thus, to make the depth of the deception that is the Afghanistan War a little clearer, the United States military is waging war, killing and being killed, for the benefit of oil corporations who will not only make immense amounts of money from that oil, but will, in addition, manipulate the speculative market for this oil to further raise the oil's cost and their profits. This monstrous undertaking involving the killing and maiming of the innocent in the thousands for the benefit of egregiously wealthy corporations, their officers and investors, is but an instance of the capitalist greed we have unleashed upon the world. We progressives must make clear the depths of calumny that the people are being subject to. DeGraw's essay is a good place to start.
As a result of Obama's abandonment of progressives it is, in my judgment, fruitless to continue the pursuit of some sort of accommodation with him. He patently is not interested. The problem is what is to be done to save our democracy in the absence of political clout. Some, such as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are focused on electing progressive candidates to national, state and local political offices. Commendable as this is, I do not think we have time for this approach. The Copenhagen climate conference, for example, has demonstrated that the wealthy portion of the planet is prepared to sacrifice the poorer southern nations of the world, especially Africa, by way of "cap and trade" the market for which strongly favors the wealth of the rich countries. The United States is a major player in this effort, which would lock in this market approach until at least 2020, which is way beyond the time we have to act on this most momentous of issues. As I say, we do not have time for an incremental approach to changing our government and our national priorities.
To my mind progressives have to organize to take the issues and the short term impacts that they will generate to the people. As an example, Sam Pizzigati has proposed that instead of just increasing the taxes on the rich, who, with their time and money, will energetically seek to reverse them, we need in addition to cap both the top and the bottom of the annual income scale. Sam's essay can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109pizzigati.html . Decades ago Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income for all citizens. He saw that, with the advancement of technology and the consequent elimination of jobs, the job could no longer be the sole vehicle for distributing the gross national product. A guaranteed annual income or some surrogate would "cap" the bottom of the economic scale. Capping the maximum income that a citizen could receive would not only create a more equitable society, it would, by linking the welfare of the rich and the poor with these "caps," provide a constant awareness among the citizenry of equity, especially when the wealthy begin their often devious efforts to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society. The importance of this latter point can be demonstrated by reflecting on how Reagan persuaded the average American that increasing the wealth of the already wealthy by tax breaks and other measures would stimulate the economy and thereby provide jobs for the rest of us. In this connection it should also be noticed that we have been indoctrinated to accept the "business cycle" as normal. What is seldom pointed out is that since the advent of modern technology, especially computers and robots, after every recession there have been fewer jobs available. In other words the "normal" business cycle is now in the business of eliminating jobs. As long as the job remains the basic means of distributing the gross national product this problem can only increase.
I think we can now see more clearly what Ralph Nader has been saying for years, namely, that in the area of corporate domination of American society there is no significant difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They are both wedded to corporate domination of our country and our world. As for the latter matter Arundhati Roy, in her book of essays titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers has described the corporate pillaging of India by the very same corporations that have been so detrimental to our own society. What David DeGraw has shown us about Obama and what Sam Pizzigati has proposed as a remedy for the dominating role of wealth in our society reflects both the cause of our terrible times and the kind of remedy progressives need to pursue. Lacking a political party progressives need to push both the underlying cause of our dysfunctional and increasingly dangerous societal behavior and the kind of remedies need. This is exactly what the progressives did at the turn of the 20th century with their push to base our currency on silver and gold rather than the much scarcer gold alone, which the wealthy could so easily control. This is the significance of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. Let us go forth and do likewise.
Bob Newhard
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