Looking on the bright side of life

"When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle"
Eric Idle

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Things are looking pretty dismal at the moment. The economic situation is the worst in my lifetime, and I was born at the end of WWII.

Even before our Friedmanite economy showed us its athlete's feet of clay, we could see that fossil fuels were a finite source and that their continued use might make it difficult for our species to survive. The nightmare oil spill in the Gulf reminds us of that inconvenient truth, while we watch the gyrations of the world economy.

And if the economy does pick up again, the Chinese and the Indians imitating the American Way of Life with its phenomenal waste of fossil fuel energy could lead to God knows what kind of terminal ecological collapse.

Of course the problem is that to sustain itself our economy must grow constantly, like a bicycle that will fall over if it ever stops. The fact is that we may "running out of road", reaching some sort of limit, a sort of musical chairs, where the few chairs left have already been taken by the rich while the great mass of the world's population mills around with nowhere to sit and little to eat after the music stops.

It would seem obvious to me that if we are not going to see the world entirely degenerated into some Hobbesian dystopia, we are going to have to create and run a very tightly organized, strictly regulated and equitable order of society. If the trends we see today continue, I believe that will be inevitable, so fast becoming inevitable, that even a person like me, in their mid 60s, might live to see it.

The question, will be how to preserve the republican trinity, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" in such a tightly ordered society.

These three things often don't go together or are mixed in very weighted proportions.

Lets look at Germany before the collapse of Communism:

In East Germany, for example, you had a very sinister secret police and steady repression of all dissent. You had very few consumer goods and no freedom to travel. However, you also had total job security, a good free school system (Angela Merkel is a product of that system) and subsidized housing and free health care.

That system was defeated because Western Germany had strong labor unions, good free schools and health and subsidies... and also freedom of speech, assembly, travel and abundant consumer goods... No contest. Obviously West Germany's "Social Market Society" came closer to "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" than "Real Existing Socialism" did.

However in the future we will probably find ourselves stripping out the abundant consumer goods from the mix and certainly mass tourism to the four corners of the earth will be a fairy tale that today's children will tell their grandchildren about.

If we are going to be moving toward a world of limited energy use, zero growth sustainability, less possibility to travel and fewer consumer goods and so forth, about the best we could hope for would be East Germany without the Stasi and with free speech, assembly and habeas corpus.

Right now the dynamic of our system seems to be to "Friedmanize" the world and break down social democracy wherever it is found, impoverish people and make their lives precarious.

This sort of society where the majority is impoverished, while a minority becomes amazingly rich, has been proven to only work with a military dictatorship and police state repression... and even then hunger and precariousness cannot go on beyond a certain point without engendering revolutionary movements.

Certainly if you increase the percentage of the poor and precarious beyond a certain level the word "freedom" begins to take on different nuances: freedom from what? freedom to do what? That is when some version of Equality, Fraternity, without Liberty, a version of East Germany "uncut" might seem very attractive to many desperately poor and insecure people.

If any young person is looking for something useful to do with their lives, helping to organize and build a world where free people live in brotherhood, sharing out the world's limited resources equitably, would certainly fill the bill. DS

Stuff happens

Mark Zuber, a parent of a child at Big Sky High School in Missoula, had a stronger reaction when a teacher showed the video to his daughter last year. “There was not one positive thing about capitalism in the whole thing,” Mr. Zuber said. New York Times

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I stumbled onto this film in yesterday's New York Times and was amazed by it's incredible coherence and power of synthesis. Here, take a look at it.

Annie Leonard presents "The Story of Stuff"

Now, what amazes me and, as a child of 1950s America, pleases me even more, is that this film is a viral hit all over the USA... because the parent in Montana that complained that the message of the film is anticapitalist is absolutely right... it certainly is anticapitalist.

In fact this video is one of the shortest, clearest, encapsulated and most brutally lucid devastations of capitalism since Marx and Engels whipped out the "Communist Manifesto" way back in 1848.

Again, let me emphasize that more than its exceptional brilliance of exposition, I am impressed by its wide success and acceptance.

So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web. New York Times

You can see why the right wing is constantly making fun of ecology, global warming and the plight of baby seals and polar bears etc. They can see the writing on the wall. Environmentalism is the wedge that is opening people's consciousness and creating a mass movement of a new and oppressed social class, which I would call "the breathing class". Because, yes, breathing has finally come into contradiction with our economic system.

Now, I have no doubt that there are many among the good and the great that manage our affairs and guide our destinies who would rather make money than breathe and I wonder and shudder to think what mischief they are going to come up with to put a stop to all this nonsense. DS

Global Warming: new game, new rules

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We are looking at the beginning of a new era, which we could call "post-everything". We have found our limits... beyond this point we cannot go.

If humanity, and a few other species, are to survive, there are going to have to be some very strict rules and they are going to have to be very strictly enforced. The question is how that is going to be done democratically... because it is going to be done one way or another. DS

Warming and Global Security - Editorial - New York Times
Abstract: On Monday, 11 retired admirals and generals released a detailed 68-page report arguing that climate change could be a “threat multiplier” in already fragile parts of the world. Rising sea levels could threaten the livelihoods of more than one billion people living within 45 miles of Asia’s coastlines. In Africa, recurring heat waves could cause widespread shortages of food and water, leading to large-scale migrations and escalating tensions. Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine general, made the point elegantly when he said that “we will pay for this one way or the other” — either now, to control the emission of greenhouse gases, or later, in military engagements and “human lives.” READ IT ALL

Rebuilding the left - 3 - back to basics

When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism. When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything, we call it liberty. Benjamin R. Barber - Los Angeles Times

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One of the most interesting things that Howard Dean has been pushing of late is the idea of the Democrats campaigning on "values": Not abandoning that field to the Republicans without a fight. That there could be some common ground between conservatives and liberals on what constitutes an optimum, human experience: A 'decent' life. I think that this is a powerful idea whose time has come.

In a previous post I had a clipping about a grade school in Louisiana where the dear little 5th graders fornicate on the classroom floor when teacher is absent. Here, for example is something people of both conservative and liberal views might find equally troubling and have a common, human, "catcher in the rye" impulse to do something to change. The welfare of children is a theme that unites and where there isn't a huge amount of daylight between parents of the entire political spectrum. Let's develop that theme in more detail:

Here is an interesting "values-driven" piece by Benjamin R. Barber from the Los Angeles Times, which gives a concentrated critique of today's capitalism.

The crises in subprime mortgages betrays a deeper predicament facing consumer capitalism triumphant: The "Protestant ethos" of hard work and deferred gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of easy credit and impulsive consumption that puts democracy and the market system at risk.(...) Capitalism's success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are now chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to "need" all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth. Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster. We still work hard, but only so that we can pay and play. In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied core needs into permanent shoppers, producers must dumb down consumers, shape their wants, take over their life worlds, encourage impulse buying, cultivate shopoholism and invent new needs. At the same time, they empower kids as shoppers by legitimizing their unformed tastes and mercurial wants and detaching them from their gatekeeper mothers and fathers and teachers and pastors. The kids include toddlers who recognize brand logos before they can talk and commodity-minded baby Einsteins who learn to shop before they can walk. Consumerism needs this infantilist ethos because it favors laxity and leisure over discipline and denial, values childish impetuosity and juvenile narcissism over adult order and enlightened self-interest, and prefers consumption-directed play to spontaneous recreation. The ethos feeds a private-market logic ("What I want is what society needs!") and combats the public logic fashioned by democracy ("What society needs is what I want to want!").(...) Compare any traditional town square with a modern suburban mall. In the square, you'll find a school, town hall, library, general store, park, movie house, church, art gallery and homes — a true neighborhood exhibiting our human diversity as beings who do more than simply consume. But our new town malls are all shopping, all the time. When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism. When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything, we call it liberty. Can we redirect capitalism to its proper end: the satisfaction of real human needs? Well, why not? The world teems with elemental wants and is peopled by billions who are needy. They do not need iPods, but they do need potable water, not colas but inexpensive medicines, not MTV but their ABCs. They need mortgages they can afford, not funny-money easy credit. READ IT ALL

Barbour is basically saying that "all that is solid melts into air". The latest build of our economic system is destroying individuals, families, cultures, the environment and communities. We are living in a self-inflicted hell. In Barbour's article we can see that the issue of child welfare is linked to issues as diverse as public space and the Protestant ethos. He also points out the Achilles heel of our economic system, perhaps its principal contradiction: its over-productivity. The system just produces too much stuff and if it can't sell it all we suffer and if it does manage to sell it all we suffer even more. In producing so much useless stuff it destroys the environment too.

Howard Meyerson in the Washington Post writes about the great American multinational corporation's campaign to prevent the creation of labor unions in their Chinese workplaces. It is obvious that capitalism and political freedom are in no way connected and may well be arch antagonists.

Listen to the apostles of free trade, and you'll learn that once consumer choice comes to authoritarian regimes, democracy is sure to follow. Call it the Starbucks rule: Situate enough Starbucks around Shanghai, and the Communist Party's control will crumble like dunked biscotti. As a theory of revolution, the Starbucks rule leaves a lot to be desired. Shanghai is swimming in Starbucks, yet, as James Mann notes in "The China Fantasy," his new book on the non-democratization of China, the regime soldiers on. Conversely, the American farmers who made our revolution didn't have much in the way of consumer choice, yet they managed to free themselves from the British. In New England, however, they did have town meetings, which may be a surer guide to the coming of democratic change. It's a growing civil society -- a sphere where people can deliberate and decide on more than their coffee -- that more characteristically sounds the death knell of dictatorships. Which is why the conduct of America's corporate titans in China is so disquieting. There, since March of last year, the government has been considering a labor law that promises a smidgen of increase in workers' rights. And since March of last year, the American businesses so mightily invested in China have mightily fought it.(...) It's not as if Chinese unions would use these laws to run roughshod over employers. Chinese unions are not, strictly speaking, unions at all. They remain controlled by the Communist Party. Their locals can be and frequently are headed by plant managers, whether the workers want them or not. And yet, these changes proved too radical for America's leading corporations.(...) Andreas Lauff, a Hong Kong-based corporate attorney, wrote in the Jan. 30 Financial Times, "comments from the business community appear to have had an impact." The new draft "scaled back protections for employees and sharply curtailed the role of unions."(...) Admittedly, a few nettlesome issues remain. First, about one-fourth of the global labor force is in China. Opposing steps toward the formation of unions there suppresses the wages of so many workers that its effect is felt worldwide. Second, since authoritarian China remains an adversary of the United States and a backer of some genuinely dangerous authoritarian regimes, blocking even the most modest steps toward the development of a civil society and democratic rights there poses a threat to U.S. security interests. READ IT ALL

Some hoary old Marxist lounging on the ash heap of history might raise himself up on an elbow and be heard to croak something to the effect that the system had "entered into contradiction". Community, civil society, the family, the air and the water... and even or especially, independent thought are enemies of this version of "prosperity". Margaret Thatcher maintained that "society" doesn't "exist". Perhaps she was a prophetess. Certainly that is the direction we are taking.

Returning to the opening idea of common ground between progressives and the devout Christians. Certainly both have more in common with each other than with the economic system that we have been discussing.

The left as it was explained to me by word and example (unfortunately more of the former than the latter) is about, equality, austerity and the value of work and most of all about the brotherhood of those who work. The Catholic, "Blessed" (official title) Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke of "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God" and so, using the exact same words, do the thoroughly un-Catholic Freemasons. Even Confucius say, "The man of human-heartedness is one who desiring to sustain himself, sustains others, and desiring to develop himself, develops others; that may be called the way to practice human-heartedness."

So we might begin by dividing up people between the "human-hearted" and those who, while belonging to the species and living from it, are unconcerned for its welfare. The Spanish writer Ramón María del Valle Inclán, had a character named the "Marqués de Bradomin", who divided everything and everyone in the universe into two major categories: the Marqués de Bradomin and everything else. How does this sort of personality develop? Richard Conniff writing in the New York Times has this to offer on the subject:

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.” Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table. It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.(...) The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them. Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow researchers describe it as an instance of “approach/inhibition theory” in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.(...) The bottom line: Without power, people tend to play it safe. Given power, even you and I would soon end up living large and acting like idiots. READ IT ALL

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity are the basic values.

Christians are given to asking themselves, "what would Jesus do?" and not even a hardened atheist would ever suggest that Jesus would act like any of the jerks described in Conniff's column. So it shouldn't be that difficult to get from "Am I my brother's keeper?", The Beatitudes, the parable of the Good Samaritan etc, etc to universal public health care plus decent public education.

So I think Howard Dean is really onto something of genuinely revolutionary potential. Something, that combined with political micro-financing and participatory democratic activism could reshape and humanize the face of America and American politics. DS

Al Gore: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

"There is a wild card. On Feb. 25, America will watch the Academy Awards, where the Oscar for best documentary will likely go to "An Inconvenient Truth." If Al Gore wins the Oscar, addresses the nation for two minutes on global warming and the war, then appears on Oprah, Leno, Letterman, Stewart and Colbert, a subsequent declaration of candidacy would put him in the top tier. " Pat Buchanan

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The news about candidates now is mostly about how much money they are raising and how eager they are find correct positions and how much they want the job. It all has the flavor of a reality show, a talent contest, or something with Donald Trump; a slight flavor of Paris Hilton or "Little Miss Sunshine". This does not fit the political mood of the times. This is a very grave and deadly moment, colored by cynicism and war crimes, of doubt, failure and defeat... of betrayal of trust. Of regret.

One of America's biggest regrets must be that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election from Al Gore. If Gore had been sworn in instead of Bush, we know now that we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. Hillary, like Gore's running mate, Joe Lieberman, was all for the invasion of Iraq and would probably support military action against Iran. As for Barack Obama, he was an Illinois state senator at the time... he says he was against the war, but did he inhale?

Having something you want with all your heart, which you have won fairly, literally stolen from you is about as bitter an experience as any man or woman can face in life. I'll freely admit that I never really had any clear impression of Al Gore at all until I observed how he carried himself in "defeat". Gore's reaction showed no bitterness, anger or pettiness. America, with its horror of losing, has not learned what a wise and demanding master the pain of defeat is. Spaniards, who have long experience of both triumph and defeat, say that the bravery of a man is like the taste of a melon, until they are cut open, you don't know what is inside. So now we know two important things for sure about Al Gore: he wouldn't have started the war and that he has a strong heart. Do we really know much of anything of comparable value about any other candidate for the Democratic nomination?

In global warming Gore has found an issue of universal concern and has carved himself a universally recognized position as an authority on it. He did this quietly, patiently and methodically. Even if adopting global warming were only a strategy to recreate his political career, it is such a long headed strategy and so subtly executed that it would prove a capacity of analysis, judgment, self control and execution that have long been (longer than six years) missing from the White House. One thing for sure, Al Gore shouldn't have to beg for the presidency. We cannot turn back the clock or undo the harm undone, but there can be second acts in American life. DS

Global Warming... "conservatives" up against the wall

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Scientists are overwhelmingly in agreement: global warming is happening and the results are already catastrophic. By the time today's small children are adults, the nightmare will be consummated... The end of the world? No, global warming is not the end of the world, just as tetraplegia is not the end of life. Global warming only means the end of life as we know it.... or perhaps as we would want to know it. Politically the question is, can our free-market economy, which is based on consumption, respond to the challenge? Can a fox guard chickens? As there seems to be a direct link between our consumption habits and climate change, it would appear not. Clearly, "conservatives" (ironic term) don't want to admit global warming or talk about it because they are looking at a collapse of their system that would dwarf the Soviet Union's. As the disaster progresses there seem two broad alternatives for humanity: selfishness or solidarity. First case: a tiny minority, armed to the teeth, maintains something like the old life style surrounded by a hostile, suffering majority... think Israeli settler enclaves on the occupied West Bank... on a planetary scale... or. Second case: a highly controlled, planned economy on a global scale where scarce resources are husbanded and shared equitably. The second alternative by any other name is "Socialism". The question would be, totalitarian, terror-based socialism or participatory, democratic socialism? Totalitarian, terror-based socialism, as we saw in the Soviet Union's, "Real, Existing Socialism", would mean a a tiny minority (party apparatchiks), armed to the teeth, that maintain something like the old life style surrounded by a hostile, suffering majority... while talking solidarity. It would seem that the only humanly tolerable alternative to a parched and flooded, homo homini lupus, dystopia, would be democratic, participatory socialism... Which hasn't been invented or tried yet. So anybody who would like to do some serious, useful thinking, should get busy preparing it, designing it and agitating for it. Meanwhile read Anatol Lieven's, wonderful, "writing on the wall" piece below. DS

Anatol Lieven: The end of the West as we know it? - IHT

Abstract: For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming.(...) As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen." The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations. If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.(...) If the conservative estimates of the Stern report are correct, then already by 2050 the effects of climate change may be such as to wreck the societies of Pakistan and Bangladesh; and if these states collapse, how can India and other countries possibly insulate themselves? At that point, not only will today's obsessive concern with terrorism appear insignificant, but all the democratizing efforts of Western states, and of private individuals and bodies like George Soros and his Open Society Institute, will be rendered completely meaningless. So, of course, will every effort directed today toward the reduction of poverty and disease.(...) If this comes to pass, what will our descendants make of a political and media culture that devotes little attention to this threat when compared with sports, consumer goods, leisure and a threat from terrorism that is puny by comparison? Will they remember us as great paragons of human progress and freedom? They are more likely to spit on our graves.
READ IT ALL