U.S. Capitalism Called into Question
September 22nd, 2008by Glynn Wilson
Editor’s Note: Why is it that in the United States of America, where free speech is part of our national psyche as well as the Constitution, and the most successful style of democracy in the history of the world was created, the debate on TV and in the nation’s news media seems so limited and fake about the current economic meltdown and President Bush’s bailout of Wall Street banks and insurance companies?
Noam Chomsky and other scholars have discussed this problem in the past in obscure academic texts most citizens have never heard about. But what if blogging software could provide a forum to bring this debate to the masses and go beyond the sound bites and actually foster a real debate on the past and future of American capitalism?
Are privatized free markets really better for people than government institutions?
As Chomsky once said, “In a totalitarian state, it doesn’t matter what people think, since the government can control people by force using a bludgeon. But when you can’t control people by force, you have to control what people think, and the standard way to do this is via propaganda (manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions), marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy of some fashion.”
He has also said, “It’s the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector.”
Of course he is right, and we could point to a number of national and local examples, including the coverage of the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in the Alabama press, or the coverage of the state of the economy by any number of U.S. news outlets.
But what I have found interesting over the past few days is the language creeping into mainstream news outlets questioning American-style capitalism. Here are a few examples.
“It’s a bitter pill for all those to claim that unfettered free markets were the best, that we don’t need regulation,” said Dan Seiver, finance professor at San Diego State University. “But perhaps this idea that unfettered capitalism is the way to go has finally been put to rest.”
“While Wall Street celebrates, the man in the street should be crying in his beer,” said Seiver. “It’s socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.”
Was that reported in some obscure leftist magazine? No, it was reported by Reuters, the conservative financial wire service started in Great Britain.
Bush Bailout A Bitter Pill for Free Market Capitalists
Yes, some alternative online news sites have found writers to take on this same theme. At AlterNet.org, here’s one recent headline.
“Free-market extremists brought us this needless economic collapse. Here’s a rundown of the mistakes we’ve made and the reforms we need now.”
The current carnage on Wall Street, with dire spillover effects on Main Street, is the result of a failed ideology — the idea that financial markets could regulate themselves. Serial deregulation fed on itself. Deliberate repeal of regulations became entangled with failure to carry out laws still on the books. Corruption mingled with simple incompetence. And though the ideology was largely Republican, it was abetted by Wall Street Democrats.
Only a Roosevelt-Scale Counterrevolution Can Prevent Another Depression
But even Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post company, published a special edition on this issue.
“Does the crisis on Wall Street mean that the American style of capitalism is no longer the model for the world?”
American Style Capitalism Called Into Question
The German magazine Der Spiegel, hardly a left-wing rag, reported this.
In fact, it really does look as if the foundations of US capitalism have shattered. Since 1864, American banking has been split into commercial banks and investment banks. But now that’s changing. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch — overnight, some of the biggest names on Wall Street have disappeared into thin air. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the only giants left standing. Despite tolerable quarterly results, even they have been hurt by mysterious slumps in prices and — at least in Morgan Stanley’s case — have prepared themselves for the end.
“Nothing will be like it was before,” said James Allroy, a broker who was brooding over his chailatte at a Starbucks on Wall Street. “The world as we know it is going down.”
Many are drawing comparisons with the Great Depression, the national trauma that has been the benchmark for everything since. “I think it has the chance to be the worst period of time since 1929,” financing legend Donald Trump told CNN.
The Political Economy of the Mass Media, a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, first published in 1988, presents an analysis its authors call the “propaganda model.”
The book argues that since mass media news outlets are now run by large corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other corporations.
The pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported.
This occurs not as a result of conscious design but simply as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized.
The book further points out issues with the dependency of mass media news outlets upon major sources of news, particularly the government. If a particular outlet is in disfavor with a government, it can be subtly “shut out” and other outlets given preferential treatment. (This has been particularly true in Bush’s two terms as president).
Since this results in a loss in news leadership, it can also result in a loss of readership/viewership. That can itself result in a loss of advertising revenue, which is the primary income for most of the mass media (newspapers, magazines, television).
To minimize the possibilities of lost revenue, therefore, outlets will tend to report news in a tone more favorable to government and business, and giving unfavorable news about government and business less emphasis.
So we have asked several scholars who know something about these issues to join us in a discussion here that we hope can go beyond the sound bites and start a more informed discussion around this country about how our economy should be structured in this democratic republic.
As I have reported before, the $700 billion Bush is about to spend on bailing out the Wall Street financial firms would be enough money to provide free health care and a free college education to every man, woman and child in this country. And we would be a smarter and more healthy country as a result.
But the key question is this: Is it even possible to discuss national health care or public college education in this country when any plan will just be dismissed as “socialism?”
According to my own training in political science, I learned that this country is in fact a socialist-democracy. We have Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and other safety-net programs that actually prop up the weak end of our society and allow the rest of the private economy to function.
And every time the banks get into trouble, the federal government bails them out anyway. That could hardly be called “free-market capitalism,” since in a true free market, a business that can’t make enough profit to survive is allowed to fail and go out of business. But that’s what we continue to call it anyway in what is obviously a serious distortion of the truth — for propaganda purposes.
Other relevant recent columns:
America Needs a New Pill, Not Corporate Welfare
Media Bashing 501
Workers of the World Unite!
This discussion will continue in the comments section. Please feel free to join us…
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
One example I would like to start with is my experience in Havana, Cuba, in 2000. I did not meet a single toothless dumbass there. Everyone seemed to have a college education. And there were no fat people either : )
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
This is a remarkable and dangerous moment in US history — the full seizure of the government by the classic bourgeoisie, bankers, merchants and industrialists.
It has been coming, of course, for a long time. When Truman consciously, using Dean Acheson as Secretary of State, rejected independence for small and new nations after WWII — Iraq, Vietnam, Iran, et al. He placed corporate America in the driver’s seat here and faced it off against the people of the world — rejecting our great WWII ally, the Soviet Union, setting up the CIA, and recolonizing the part of the world liberated during the war.
Then under Ike, John Foster Dulles, in whose office the CIA was formed, declared containment — encirclement of the Soviet Union.
But it goes back even further, to the invasion of the new-born Soviet Union by I think 17 nations, led by eh US, during the counter revolution shortly after the 1917 revolution and the end of WWI. That drew the line between the bourgeoisie and the working class in terms of nationalities.
The assassination of Lenin in 1923 brought the USSR Stalin in 1924 and the destruction of the revolution; he turned it into a kind of socialized Tsarism. That in the USSR and the bowing, continually, in the US to corporate capitalism (not to personal capitalists), began the arrow in history which has finally struck our own heart.
Our corporatist empire began in earnest with the aforementioned betrayals of emerging nations after WWII, and climaxed early with the Nixon, Kissinger, ITT overthrow of the Allende democratic government of Chile and establishment of the fascist Pinochet there, soon placing him under the tutelage of Milton Friedman, founder of “neo-liberalism,” the economic philosophy of the corporate state, now matured after its first experiment in Nazi Germany.
Since then, every step of our economy and international politics has been to turn decision-making power over to the corporate monopolies which determine now the economy of the world.
I studied with Friedman at the U of Chicago in 1965 and this was all planned economically.
Meanwhile, in the US, beginning in the Great Depression (the first, now), GW Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush, conspired with others massively wealthy men in 1933-4 to overthrow the US democracy and set up fascism like Hitler had set up in 1932, basing it, like Hitler, on the corporate state. They were “betrayed” by General Smedley Butler, whom they mistakingly approached to lead it, and it failed. But the dream of fascism remained in the Bush political genome.
To make this clear, Prescott Bush, a banker, funded Hitler heavily, and did so until 2 years into WWII when the US seized his bank! Standard Oil, now Exxon Mobil, did similarly and the government at the time of the seizure of Bush’s bank, forced Standard to quit fueling Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
This history set the scene for what we are now experiencing in the US and its dominated world.
During Nixon’s reign, David Rockefeller, President of Chase Manhattan Bank, disliked Nixon’s “liberal” foreign policy and organized a group of international bankers, merchants and industrialists to oppose it and to intensify the corporate domination of US policy. It was called the “TriLateral Commission”, headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and it later took over dominance of the Democratic Party with the Democratic Leadership Conference, led by neo-liberal politician Bill Clinton and others.
They replaced the Bush I Presidency with Clinton’s, caring not a whit about parties, but about dominance of economics and putting their policies in force. Sure enough, Clinton gave us NAFTA and the WTO, which Bush had failed to pass — with a Democratic President, Gephardt who as Speaker had opposed Bush, but bowed to Clinton’s leadership.
Then we got GWB, and we have Prescott Bush’s grandson, Prescott’s economic program, and Prescott’s dream corporate state!
That’s just background, but necessary. I’ll talk more about the present later.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Interesting that you bring up Brzezinski, who was of course President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser in the late 1970s.
The London economist revealed to its readers in a March 2007 article that Brzezinski is Obama’s brain in much the same way that Karl Rove or the neocons in general have been considered as Bush’s brain, according to Wikipedia.
In September 2007, Brzezinski, who is Barack Obama’s chief foreign policy adviser and will most likely occupy a high-profile post in the administration if he is elected, endorsed Obama, saying, “What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and peoples.”
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
But in addition to the history, do you think the current crisis may allow us to finally talk about some sensible public policies such as national health care and put a stop to some of the most damaging deregulation and privatization policies?
For example, why are we running hospitals for profit, where the financial incentive is to under-staff, which we know results in high infant mortality rates? If you don’t have a doctor or an anesthesiologist on duty when a pregnant mother comes in in a rural hospital, dead babies are the result.
But the so-called “pro-life” community doesn’t seem to care about that issue. They just don’t want women to have the right to choose an abortion, and McCain’s choice for Veep would push for a roll-back of Roe v. Wade.
Obama said in his acceptance speech in Denver: “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.”
But the Republicans now just look at Planned Parenthood as a “liberal” organization like the ACLU or something.
I think we need country bands and rap groups to make public service ads making condoms cool, myself, but no one else has picked up on that idea.
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:53 am
Perhaps a review of the writings of Joseph Schumpeter and
Thorstein Veblen might provide additional insights.
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Care to summarize? Provide a link?
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
The current economic crisis provides a moment for reflection concerning the real meaning of words like “capitalism” and “socialism.” The dictionary tells us that the distinction lies in whether capital and the means of production are owned by private individuals or held in common by the state.
But it is not really so simple. Every economic system has a cultural, social and political context that is arguably just as important(if not more so), although true believers on either side don’t like to admit that. Besides, most economic systems in the world today enjoy a mix of public and private ownership.
I would like to put in a plug for a systems approach to socio-political-economic organization that is not so one- sided. Things like capital, capitalism, culture, technology, money, banking, governance, socialism, politics, power, religion, education, globalization, nationalization, nationalism, apple pie, and (dare I add) motherhood, are not necessarily good or bad in and of themselves, but depend on the principles that guide them, in the systems in which they are embedded.
A free market is not a good thing unless it is also fair. Capital is not a good thing unless it is widely available in small amounts to low income people at reasonable rates. Democracy is not real if it is “controlled” by anybody, and politics is not good if it is controlled by corporations. Socialism is not good if it is controlled by oligarchies.
Let’s get real, folks. The labels don’t mean much unless we understand the systems in which they are embedded. It’s the systems we have to focus on, and change for the better.
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Of course, but first we have to change the public dialogue. The question is, can we change it now, to deal with this crisis. I’m not seeing it on TV, but showed how it crept into the press.
Don’t be shy about writing a long essay in this space with links to more research.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Regarding Brzezinski: The TLC, Tri-Lateral Commission,in its first statement, said it wanted to elect from its ranks a President of the US. Wlll, Brzenski was trying to flesh out the TLC and there was no one on it from the American South. He noticed this young ex-Governor of Georgia, ambitious, whom he sought out and recruited. Then they convinced Carter to run for President and Brzezinski provided the foreign policy experience Carter knew he lacked. So it was Brzezinski who picked Carter to run for President. (Ironically, I had earlier been part of a delegation led by Dr. Martin Luther King which met with Governor Carter to ask him to come out in opposition to the war on Vietnam. Carter had responded that he know so little about foreign relations that he felt inadequate to do so.)
It was Brzezinsky who first, convinced Carter to refuse to talk to the PLO, then set up UN Ambassador Andrew Young to be caught doing so and having him fired. So Brzezinski cleared the field of opposition and peacemakers and was ready to go to work.
In Afghanistan, the Communist novelist Nur Mohammad Taraki led a bloodless coup against the ruling Shah and set up an electoral democracy, liberated women to go to school nad dorp the veil, and put the children in school who had been chained to the looms, making rugs. A horrified Brzezinski flew to Pakistan and pointed a gun at Afghanistan, indicating that this was war!
Taraki did not know that his top military guy, Hafazullah Amin, a Maoist, was a CIA agent, trained by the Asia Foundation, which only trained its agents, as it later testified in the CIA hearings in Congress. After a bit over a year, Amin violently overthrew his champion, Taraki, and set out to destroy whole villages loyal to Taraki. There seemed to be nothing the Afghan democrats could do.
Members of Taraki’s party gathered in exile in Moscow, and elected a new President, Babrak Karmal. But they had no way to seat hem, since the usurper had the military. The Soviet Union agreed to support them, and they invaded the country with Soviet military assistance, seizing the government.
As we know, the Soviets never left and Brzezinski used this to first organize the “mujahaddin,” guerrillas attacking Afghanistan, made up of heroin growers and sellers. A lovely bunch. He then brought Osama bin Laden in to the mujahiddin to fund it and to bring his extremist ideology. There among the mujahaddin, Osama created the Talliban. OUR Talliban.
Meanwhile in Iran, students were rising up in opposition to the butchery of the US Puppet Shah Reza Palavi. the US had put the Shah on the throne by overthrowing Muhammed Massedegh, the democratic socialist Prime Minister who came in after WWII. Finally, in frustration, the student movement seized the US Embassy and famously held he staff as hostages.
Brzezinski, wanting to replace the temporary Carter with David Rockefeller’s real choice, Ronald Reagan, kept Carter from tryingto end the stand-off, and then engineered just before the election the famous helicopter crash in the desert of the rescue mission.
The Brzezinski/Reagan alliance then kept hte hostages in captivity through the election, insuring Carter’s defeat by Reagan, The hostages were released on the day Reagan was inaugurated as President.
This is the man who Obama has advising him on foreign affairs for the campaign. I find that truly frightening, but not so frightening as a McCain Presidency!
This doesn’t reflect so much on the individual Obama as on the Democratic Party, taken over by the DLC.
The DLC came from the TLC, organized by Brzezinski as the corporate branch of the Democratic Party, effectively taking over the Democratic Party. That produced Bill Clinton! The rest is current events.
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I guess, as they say, you have to know some history before you can change it : )
I know there are other lurkers just dying to get in here. There are some things that perhaps cannot be said about certain people we know, but I hope at least to show people that we can talk about policies that include something other than run-amok free-market capitalism. It leads to unbridled greed, wealth and power in too few hands, and the great unwashed masses in this land better start realizing this.
Now that the big dogs have made their big money after eight years of rape under Bush, they are ready to sit down in front of Congress and talk about new “regulations” of the banking and insurance industries. I think we’ve heard that before, when they bailed out the federal savings and loans in the 1980s.
Check out this video to be shocked at news about those days you never saw in the mainstream news media.
The Mafia, the CIA and Bush Sr.: Roots of the Savings & Loan Scandal
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/411.html
September 24th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I liked this post, but the purpose of journalism today is to be the cronies for the wealthy owners of the paper you work for. This socialism talk would get you fired from any mainstream media places. I went to some interesting classes at the RCPUSA, Freedom Social Party and the ISO. I think the whole abortion issue is a cannard in the class warfare that the two headed serpent of the American political parties represent. I am glad to see someone speaking truth to power.
Of course now that we are entering late capitalism and converting to state capitalism, we are more closely resembling the Soviets we thought were such a threat.
The whole idea that 4 billion to provide health insurance to 4 million children was too much, but 700 billion risk insurance for Wall Street CEOs is a necessity is ridiculous.
Sincerely,
MTT
September 26th, 2008 at 10:55 am
John McCain and I share at least one attribute, if one can call it that, a weakness in economics. I, however, spend a substantial portion of my life writing, reading and editing, so I do have a pretty good idea of what words mean. And, as editor-in-chief of the Guild Practitioner, the theoretical journal of the National Lawyers Guild, I am particularly versed in the intersection of law and politics. It is from that perspective that I am compelled to comment on the “rescue” scheme concocted by Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke. I therefore think it important that others understand what we mean when we use words.
The essence of capitalism, as I understand it, is that individuals own businesses, manufacturing plants, etc., employ others to work for them with the aim of turning a profit. In theory, as a business grows prosperous, both the owner and the employees make more money. The theory of socialism, on the other hand, is that the businesses and plants owned by individual capitalists are owned by society as a whole for the collective benefit of the body politic.
Most of us, when we think of fascism, think of oppression, concentration camps, invasions of other countries and war. But those are simply manifestations of fascism, not a few of which we have seen in our country in the last several years – for example, the invasion of Iraq, unauthorized military incursions into Pakistan, extraordinary renditions and secret prisons, the redefinition of torture, detentions without charges. But the real essence of fascism is the integration of the largest monopolies with the state.
So, with these definitions, let us turn to the proposed “rescue.” The legislation, as originally proposed, arrogated to Treasury Secretary Paulson, late of the investment firm Goldman Sachs, the unrestricted authority to spend $700 billion in public money at one time (more than a trillion over a couple of years) without any review or oversight, to buy so-called “mortgage-backed securities” from banks. What, then, are mortgage-backed securities? They are bundles of mortgages, generally sub-prime and with variable interest rates, that the banks bought.
Recently, interest rates on the mortgages have risen precipitously so more and more people are unable to make their payments at the same time that home prices have been falling. The result is that the banks are left holding mortgages that are not being repaid and are owed more than the property that was meant to secure them. Thus, “mortgage-backed securities” are anything but secure.
What is the solution? After decades of both major political parties worshiping at the altar of Milton Friedman, free markets and the end of government involvement in, or regulation of, business, business and government leaders have had an epiphany. Apparently, there is a role for government other than to keep out of the way of business and unrestricted markets. It is to “rescue” major financial institutions from their own profit-seeking recklessness at the risk of taxpayer money. Of course, once it is determined that the securities are secure enough, they will be sold back to those institutions so they can make a profit. Meanwhile, the banks keep their secure securities, selling only the risky ones to the government.
The plan is the dream of any capitalist. Risk is socialized – the province of government – and gain is privatized. At the same time, those on the other end, the people who are struggling to keep the homes they are buying, are left out of the equation. They, after all, are not “too big to fail.” Nor do they, like Goldman Sachs, have one of their own running the Treasury.
How much more can we integrate monopoly enterprises with the government? More and more, traditional governmental functions are outsourced to private firms. Even military functions are now contracted to Blackwater, Halliburton and others. The proposed “rescue” is one more step down this very slippery and very chilling slope, integrating major financial institutions with the government for the benefit of the former and at the risk of the latter.
It is not enough, as it appears the two parties are doing, to tinker with and fine tune the Bernanke-Paulson scheme. The crisis we are facing did not begin with the risk to financial institutions that took on bad debt and it will not end with their (temporary) salvation. When we begin to insist that our government is of, by and for the people, not monopoly corporations, and that it has an obligation to protect the people from the predations of those same corporations which have been running roughshod and unregulated over the people for too long.
September 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Thanks for the contribution David. Interesting analysis.
The problem is, as I outlined at the outset, words have been distorted in the public discussion in the media and so no real, analytical, intellectual or philosophical debate can take place. Without that, no meaningful solution can be reached.
In his dear-in-the-headlights moment on national TV the other night, our idiot king president used the words democracy and capitalism and repeated the petard about the U.S. system being the best ever created. Maybe it was until he got his greedy little hands on it : )
Congress and the president are now engaged in a narrow debate about how much to put up to stop the Wall Street banks from failing, which should be done according to economic theory. The most important time for the government to involve itself in the economy is during such a crisis.
The Democrats are trying to also talk about protecting home owners and to include a provision to help them refinance and not lose their homes. That’s what Obama is focused on. Others want some guarantee that executive Golden Parachutes will be slashed so that there is an appearance that they are not just getting rich at our expense.
But no one is talking about real systemic change and how we need to openly consider the extent to which it takes some socialist policies to make capitalism work in a democracy. It would be helpful if the masses could at least get a sense of that from the media, but as you know, we can’t get a word in the mainstream, establishment-protecting press about this.
So for Joe Sixpack — who may in fact oppose the bailout, (see the stories on the news page about Senator Shelby of Alabama’s opposition) — never comes out of a story like this with a real sense of the academic theories behind it and why that matters.
I honestly think Bush is afraid his so-called “legacy” could very well be the end of American capitalism, or at least the crash of it like Herbert Hoover faced in 1929.
But as long as the news media is all about making money, they will side with capitalism over democracy any day. That’s why we need more people reading non-profit media and the blogs : )
I suspect in the next few years, more news organizations are going to have to abandon the 20 percent profit motive to survive. Even the Anniston Star will become a not for profit foundation tied to the University of Alabama when the publisher dies, much like the St. Petersburg Times in Florida with the Poynter Institute.
Harper’s magazine has been non-profit since the early 1980s, and we have seen the kind of journalism produced there over the past year on the Siegelman case vs. what we get in the Birmingham News.
I hope the News publishes your column, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. They are strictly Republican, capitalist, and written on a ninth grade level. I doubt if many of the listeners of the Finebaum show would understand it if they read it anyway : )
September 26th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
This is worth publishing in its entirety. Perhaps the mainstream media should turn to academic guest columns at a time of crisis such as this, since they have not hired people with experertise to cover these things themselves.
From Newsweek, September 29, 2008
When Atheists Attack
by Sam Harris
Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin‘s performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin’s speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones “God and country.” If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
Then came Palin’s first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin’s luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady’s misfortune—and, above all, upon the “liberal elites” with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth’s surface (she didn’t have a passport until last year), or that she’s never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska’s geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.
The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin’s lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter’s microphone, saying things like, “I’m voting for Sarah because she’s a mom. She knows what it’s like to be a mom.” Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin’s most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn’t much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase “Bush doctrine.” And I am quite sure that her supporters didn’t care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain’s advisers. What doesn’t she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin’s ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn’t: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn’t be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn’t ready for? He wouldn’t. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.
In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that’s what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response “absurd.” It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin’s life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the “end times.” Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that “God’s going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you”?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” “miraculous healings” and “the gift of tongues.” Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin’s spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of “the final generation,” engaged in “spiritual warfare” to purge the earth of “demonic strongholds.” Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: “All options remain on the table”?
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin’s impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin’s daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who “intends” to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of “the dysfunction in the black community”?
Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins’ case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a “parental consent law” in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush’s claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a “higher Father” before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush’s religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to “talk the talk” between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to “walk the walk” until the Day of Judgment.
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world’s only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
“Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child’s brain?”
“Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I’m an avid hunter.”
“But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind.”
“That’s just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink.”
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.
I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. “You can’t blink,” she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.
Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.
September 26th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Fractal Organization of Socio-Political-Economic Systems for Societal Change
Essay for Locust Fork News-Journal, by Robert G. Dyck, Ph.D.
bobdyck@vt.edu
September 26, 2008
1. Systems Science
First comes the good news about systems science, adding to what I said about the crucial importance of the socio-political-cultural context of capitalism and socialism in these pages, on 09-23-08. Luckily for us, there is quite a lot of “new science” that helps us understand what goes on in evolving complex systems like ecosystems, including social systems with economic components. This new science goes way beyond the limitations of Newtonian, mechanistic science (the “clockwork universe”), because it is not based on simple cause-and-effect relationships, but on whole system effects that emerge, sometimes in unexpected “chaotic” ways, as a consequence of flows of energy (including information and money) through a system. We also know that systems evolve in order to accommodate and maximize their energy flows (including information and money): they have to become ever-more complex to facilitate those flows. Human systems adapt and become more complex through a process of evolutionary adaptive learning, which is, ultimately, the key to our survival on the planet. We also know, from evolutionary systems findings, that the collaborative sub-systems are a lot more important than competitive sub-systems to the overall evolutionary process.
We now also know that one of the best ways to facilitate the flow of energy (including information and money) through a system is to utilize fractal geometries. Nature uses fractals all the time to facilitate the flow of energy between different parts of a system, especially when those parts have different scale (size) relationships. In the human body, for example, we have both arterials and capillaries. Both are necessary to distribute energy to both the big muscles and organs, and also to the smaller ones. The system as a whole cannot work properly unless big and small are coordinated, systemically, in accordance with applicable power laws. We won’t go into the mathematics of power laws here; suffice it to say that the fractal principle of self-similarity, in both small and large structures, is essential for the energy transfer process.
Fractally organized structures necessarily do have both large, medium, and small components, in numbers proportionate to the power laws that generate them. In urban terms, we have to have traffic arterials, but if there are too many of them, the possibility of intimate pedestrian-scale social interaction will be destroyed. In economic terms, very large arterial money flows controlled by just a few people on Wall Street will destroy the adequacy of money flow through the hands of people on thousands of Main Streets. For this reason, we should (but generally don’t) organize money flows in accordance with fractal principles to assure the viability and long-term sustainability of all parts of the system. If the smaller parts of the system do not get their share, the whole system will collapse.
Notice that we have just been talking about hierarchies and oligarchies. Some hierarchical organization is necessary for the survival of a social system. But if hierarchy becomes oligarchy, the system as a whole is imperiled by the inadequacy of money (and power) that flows through the parts of the system controlled by, but not really supported by the oligarchy, rather than by the people who should be controlling their own destinies, but are not able to do so, because of subversion of their support system by the oligarchy.
A final paragraph is needed to explain the so-called “S” curve, which describes the rise and fall of all types of systems, over time. Usually there is an initial slow “take-off” period, followed by a period in which energy flow through the system is maximal and the system grows much faster. In turn, this is typically followed by a “leveling-off” period in which the system achieves very little growth, followed finally by its decline or even collapse. But sometimes there is a revival of system innovation at the point of decline, and a new “S” curve can begin. Note that the periods of systemic growth are always accompanied by increasing levels of systemic complexity. In the case of human socioeconomic systems, this corresponds to an increase in the level of innovative productivity, based on adaptive learning, demonstrating that more and more citizens are contributing to support of the system’s continuing viability (sustainability).
Note: The source reference for this summary discussion is Goerner, Dyck, and Lagerroos, The New Science of Sustainability: Building a Foundation for Great Change (2008). The book is distributed by New Society Publishers (based in British Columbia, Canada), and is available for purchase at Little Professor Books & Café, 2717 South Main, Homewood, AL 35209, phone 205-870-7461. Dr. Dyck will be present at the Little Professor for conversation and to autograph book copies purchased, on Friday, Oct. 24, 2008, from noon until 1 pm.
2. The Current Economic Crisis
The current national financial services and economic crisis was entirely predictable, based on the theory of complex systems presented above, because of the interlocking oligarchical control of the financial market by Wall Street, the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Bank. As pointed out by Kevin Phillips in his recent book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism (New York: The Penguin Group, 2008), the financial services sector now controls 20 percent of US GDP, principally because of de-regulation and favor-seeking support (for campaign financing) by the executive and legislative branches of the US government, while the manufacturing sector has dropped by half in the last 30 years to only to 12 or 13 percent of GDP. These proportions are just the reverse of what they should be in a healthy, productive, sustainable economy.
Further, as argued in William Greider’s Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), the Fed has always been a force counter to truly democratic financial policy, equitable distribution of capital earnings, and equitable access to capital, since its establishment in 1913. As a quasi-public institution, owned and operated in reality by the private banking sector, it has never supported the interests of the citizenry at large. Its overriding focus, control of growth and inflation by curtailing the money supply and maintaining high interest rates, has worked against any significant rise in real wages during the last 30 years, with the result that US income and wealth distribution has become radically skewed to the wealthiest population percentiles, while the middle class population has gone into steep decline, and the poverty percentile has steadily increased.
The prevailing pattern of “trickle-down economics, ”controlled by oligarchies, obviously is not working for the majority of Americans. In the run-up to the current depression, millions of working people have been stripped of their jobs and the ownership of their homes and other economic resources, while the financial services sector has reaped enormous profits and huge increases in salaries and wealth for its CEOs and its financial management class. Small wonder that there is enormous, widespread bi-partisan unhappiness with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan for a $700 billion to $1 trillion bailout of the big financial corporations, at the expense of the same American taxpayers who have already borne the burden of past financial policies that did not work for them.
3. The Need for Fractal Socio-Political-Economic Organization
The key challenge before us is to try to engage our society in the process of building a new “S” curve of sustainable socio-political-economic development, in which the culture and the politics are more democratic and the economic outcomes more equitable. This process would reduce socio-economic injustices to an absolute minimum, while supporting possibilities for personal realization, contributions to community and the society at large, universal economic security, universal educational opportunity, and universal health maintenance, to the maximum sustainable extent. The notion, developed below, that we have to change the prevailing cultural “stories” that inform our societal processes, comes from David Korten’s The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, and San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006), but I have altered the content of his stories to support my fractal-based scenarios for change.
Our society has to be rebuilt from the bottom-up, rather than from the top down, in order to facilitate a more mutually beneficial, fractally organized societal culture, with substantially increased levels of collaborative participation by citizens of all levels of society. This will not be an easy or quick process. The old story that oligarchical culture is not only the best, but the only way to organize society, has to be exposed for the myth that it is. However , it is the only story that most citizens have ever heard. Thus, the new story has to be understood and internalized, through a process of community-based discussion, consciousness raising, and experimentation. The long, difficult, sometimes tedious, sometimes exciting and rewarding process of community organization has to be its fundamental basis. The goal is the development of a society with minimal need for hierarchical direction, but with maximal opportunities for individual self-realization, community-based ownership and support, and self-management.
This community development process will, in turn, lead to consideration of, and experimentation with, the political options available. Again, the old story that politics is mostly about personal ambition and self-aggrandizement has to be exposed for the myth that it is. Most of us have become so jaded and cynical about the “political process” that we do not recognize that there is another version of the story that we need to hear and internalize: that social organization through politics is necessary to achieve a more collaborative, mutually supportive, environmentally conservative, personally productive, and secure economy, based in the local community but interlinked with other communities and other levels of organization, for mutual benefit and support.
Finally, although this reverses the usual order of things, the notions that economics comes before culture and politics, and that our economic future depends on centralized oligarchical control of wealth and national security, have to be exposed as the twin myths that they are. Social and political organization are the only ways to lay the groundwork for the necessary paradigm shift away from the military-industrial empire that currently threatens all of our social, economic, and political institutions, including the US constitution and all three branches of the US government. Putting this another way, the economy needs to spring from its cultural and political context which, based on the insights of the ancient Greeks, is really the only basis for the good and productive life, rather than vice-versa. Only with this sea change of perspective can any economy become fully productive, socially and morally just, mutually supportive, and sustainable in the long term. Note that this means that all constituent components of the system will have to be sustainable, including its communities and cities, lest the whole system fail. Note also that sustainability puts a premium on collaboration, and that the pseudo-science of social Darwinism (“survival of the fittest”) is not supported either by the theory or the practice of new science.
Wresting democratic control of corporate culture from entrenched oligarchies will be difficult, but not impossible, with the right cultural and political support, according to William Greider. His book, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), frankly acknowledges that capitalism has no “soul,” consistent with the notion that “economic justice” is an oxymoron, according to the prevailing practice of neo-liberal economics. But Greider believes that it is both necessary and feasible to accomplish radical, systematic reform of capitalism, based on positive initiatives being taken by conservative business managers, small-town civic leaders, social agitators, ecologists, labor leaders, farmers, pension fund managers, and socially concerned stock holders. Many workers are becoming owners. Pension funds are withdrawing their capital from polluters. Small companies are learning to be profitable while caring for their employees and the environment. Governments are reforming their public works programs. Greider believes that the remedy for capitalistic/corporate malfeasance will come not from government, or the politics of the past, but from a new realignment of power that is already underway on many fronts.
Joel Kovel’s impassioned polemic, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London, New York: Zed Books, 2002, 2007), is designed to save the planet from ecological catastrophe by subverting the “sinister” intentions and impacts of capital. This approach broadens the scope of traditional socialism, but its implementation leaves many unanswered questions. Capital, in and of itself, must be considered a “neutral” tool for production and development, and a force for good or evil depending upon the intentions and impacts promulgated by those who control its use. Not incidentally, it is important to point out that there are billions of people in small land-holding and tenant farming households around the world, many of them women, who desperately need small amounts of capital at reasonable rates. In the past, the capitalistic banking system has generally preferred not to make small loans to low income borrowers, but the experience of the Grameen Bank (pioneered by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh), is that such loans are perfectly feasible, with as good or better rates of payback compared to other loans. Most importantly, they have been extremely productive for the circles of borrowers who are jointly responsible for the loan repayments.
4. Afterword
The key to building a new society lies in generating a much more inclusive and widespread culture of democracy. For new inspiration, we may turn to the idealism embodied in powerful pamphlets written by Thomas Paine more than two hundred years ago. Paine, more than anyone else, turned Americans in revolutionary times into democratic radicals, articulating a unique American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. His salient contribution is delineated by Harvey Kaye in Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill & Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
The most recent manifestation of Paine’s ideals occurred during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, constituting a second American revolution. Martin Luther King pushed Lyndon B. Johnson into securing passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Many other reforms and new programs also came during this period: LBJ’s programs included the War on Poverty, the Great Society, Medicare, Medicaid, Headstart, federal aid to education, job training, consumer and environmental protection, cabinet level departments for housing and transportation, national endowment for arts and humanities, freedom of information laws, and the Immigration Act of 1965. But the years 1964-65 were the high point. LBJ then committed the nation to imperial war in Vietnam (money that could otherwise have been invested in his War on Poverty), racial injustice and riots proliferated, and movements arose for other minority rights and hedonistic counter-culture objectives. The Left splintered along lines of class, race, and gender, and Paine’s motivating ideals were lost in the process.
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” When MLK was assassinated in Memphis, in 1968, he was fighting for the right of Memphis sanitation workers to organize unions, for economic equality. He recognized that unions had paved the way for the Civil Rights movement and said that unions were the best anti-poverty program available to low-income people. He wanted his Poor People’s Campaign to go to Washington to demand that money allocated for the Vietnam War be allocated instead to abolish poverty. He saw labor rights, civil rights, and human rights as indivisible. Today, King’s call “to planetize our movement for social justice” remains a crucial priority.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:59 am
[...] and less curious and qualified, as we are pointing out in some detail in this continuing discussion calling into question U.S. capitalism. It’s not too late to add your [...]
September 28th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Amen…
September 28th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Part of this discussion is now taking place here:
Palin Bump Shrinks, Obama Back Out Front
September 30th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Letter to the editor…
For my two-cents worth, the Dems should drop this one (the Wall Street bailout bill) — or better, load it up with progressive, main street provisions (like taxpayers taking capital stock and warrants in these companies) that may never pass but make sense. Then take the bill to the floor.
It’s very unpopular among the average guy on the street, whether Dem, GOP or independent.
It’s a Bush/Gramm/Reagan deregulation problem. Let the so-called “free marketers” solve it. That $700 Billion could provide health insurance for the uninsured for four years according to one source.
I believe the Paulson “push” on this is a ruse. The Dems should show Bush some backbone. He won’t even comply with constitutional requests for testimony from Rove and others. Why in the world would we go over backward to help bail out him and his cronies?
The market will ebb and flow but these guys are exaggerating the pain the average guy will feel. We have all seen our meager 401K’s go up and down before.
Sincerely,
Edward S. Savela
Vestavia Hills, Alabama