The Best Reason for Supporting Bernie Sanders

MIT Technology Review

“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.”

 Martin Luther King 

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
 Warren Buffet

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

Martin Luther King:Speech to the Negro American Labor Council, 1961.

What is the best reason for supporting Bernie Sanders?

How about: "the future of humanity is at stake"?

Exaggeration? Not really.

To get right to the point: in at most a generation, or perhaps much sooner, science, in the form of robotics and Artificial Intelligence, will have led humanity to a fork in the road. A clear choice between a dream utopia and utter dystopia lies before us... it reads like science fiction, but it isn't.

One path we could take holds the possibility of leading us to an amazing and paradisaical utopia of infinite possibilities for a full and enriched quality of life, an end to poverty and even alienation... for everyone... everywhere.

And the other path - the one we are traveling today - would eventually lead the immense majority of humanity, including most of today's middle class Americans, to live in conditions that would make the legendary slums of present day Calcutta look like Disneyland by comparison.

Calcutta today.- Your town tomorrow?

How can we take the right path?

The question is: what ideas and what political mobilization will best make sure that humanity takes the path of the greatest good for the greatest number, instead of the path that will lead to unimaginable wealth and power for a tiny minority and utter misery and a "life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"  for 99% of humanity.

Here is how the situation stands now, with the present technology... in the opinion of none other than Martin Wolf, someone who nobody could consider "radical". Here the prestigious, chief economist of The Financial Times says.

(T)here is anxiety over rising inequality and economic insecurity. Perhaps the most fundamental cause is a growing sense that elites are corrupt, complacent and incompetent.  Martin Wolf - Financial Times

And remember, that is with present technology.

Now meet Hod Lipson:

Hod Lipson (born 1967 in Haifa, Israel) is an American robotics engineer. He is the director of Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab (CCML), formerly known as Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL), at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Lipson's work focuses on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creating machines that can demonstrate some aspects of human creativity. His publications have been cited close to 10,000 times, and he has an h-index of 50, as of November 8, 2015. Wikipedia

Professor Lipson is very worried.

Hod Lipson’s vision of the future is one in which machines and software possess abilities that were unthinkable until recently. But he has begun worrying about something else that would have been unimaginable to him a few years ago. Could the rapid advances in automation and digital technology provoke social upheaval by eliminating the livelihoods of many people, even as they produce great wealth for others? (...)  Are we at the beginning of an economic transformation that is unique in history, wonderful for what it could do in bringing us better medicine, services, and products, but devastating for those not in a position to reap the financial benefits? Will robots and software replace most human workers?(...) A prevailing view among economists is that many people simply don’t have the training and education required for the increasing number of well-paying jobs requiring sophisticated technology skills. At the same time, software and digital technologies have displaced many types of jobs involving routine tasks such as those in accounting, payroll, and clerical work, forcing many of those workers to take more poorly paid positions or simply abandon the workforce. Add to that the increasing automation of manufacturing, which has eliminated many middle-class jobs over the past decades, and you begin to see why much of the workforce is feeling squeezed.(...) Whoever owns the capital will benefit as robots and AI inevitably replace many jobs. If the rewards of new technologies go largely to the very richest, as has been the trend in recent decades, then dystopian visions could become reality. (emphasis mine) - Who will own the Robots - MIT Technology Review

Newslinks Thought for the Day: If the word "democracy" has its origins in the Greek words demos, meaning "people," and kratia, meaning "power"; then what happens to democracy, when the demos don't "add value"?... "Not adding value" being a bland technicism that means people are not needed for much of anything anymore. Therefore power-less?

Some people and organizations who are paid to think are busy thinking about all this. One of them is  the Brookings Institute.

This is how Wikipedia describes them:

The Brookings Institution is an American think tank based on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., USA. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and global economy and development. In the University of Pennsylvania's 2014 Global Go To Think Tanks Report, Brookings is ranked the most influential think tank in the world

This is how they see the problem and possible practical solutions to it.

While emerging technologies can improve the speed, quality, and cost of available goods and services, they may also displace large numbers of workers. This possibility challenges the traditional benefits model of tying health care and retirement savings to jobs. In an economy that employs dramatically fewer workers, we need to think about how to deliver benefits to displaced workers.

Darrell M. West proposes striking economic changes in order to restructure how our society delivers on the social contract, such as:

• Separating the dispersion of health care, disability, and pension benefits outside of employment, offering workers with limited skills social benefits on a universal basis.

• Mandating a basic income guarantee for a reasonable standard of living to combat persistent unemployment or underemployment posed by the automation economy.

• Revamping the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to allow the benefit to support households in the grips of high unemployment.

• Providing activity accounts for lifetime learning and job retraining to motivate the workforce to keep pace with innovation.

• Offering incentives for volunteerism—beneficial for many people who in the future may not be able to provide for their families through regular employment but may still wish enrich their communities.

• Encouraging corporate profit sharing to spread the benefits of improved productivity to the broader workforce.

• Reforming the education curriculum to reflect the high premium STEM skills will offer employees in the future.

• Expanding arts and culture for leisure time, ensuring that reduction in work will not eliminate chances for cultural pursuits.

"There needs to be ways for people to live fulfilling lives even if society needs relatively few workers," West writes. Taking steps now in anticipation of the exciting new future that awaits will help people adapt to new economic realities.(emphasis mine) "What happens if robots take the jobs?" - Darrell M. West

If West's agenda could be realized, what might it look like?

 Going back to the piece from MIT:

Software and digital technologies have displaced many types of jobs involving routine tasks such as those in accounting, payroll, and clerical work, forcing many of those workers to take more poorly paid positions or simply abandon the workforce.

The disappearance of paper pushing jobs doesn't have to be a tragedy. Read this from the philosopher, Erich Fromm:

Marx did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people, especially of the ever increasing segment of the population which manipulate symbols and men, rather than machines. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter's functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his "personality," his smile, his opinions in the bargain; the symbol manipulators are hired not only for their skill, but for all those personality qualities which make them "attractive personality packages," easy to handle and to manipulate.  Erich Fromm

So if, thanks to AI and robots, it is no longer possible to "earn" a living, but the rights to "life itself, + liberty + the pursuit of happiness", are still maintained, then offering West's menu of "Incentives for volunteerism—beneficial for many people who in the future may not be able to provide for their families through regular employment but may still wish enrich their communities." or "Expanding arts and culture for leisure time, ensuring that reduction in work will not eliminate chances for cultural pursuits.", while making sure everyone, everywhere, has decent health care, education etc, would,  in short, mean a recipe for heaven on earth.

Of course the money for all of this would have to come from taxing the only ones who would still have any money... the one-percent.

Now stop for a moment and think a bit... Can you imagine the "one-percent" buying into any of Darell West's agenda? For example: the Koch brothers... or Sheldon Adelson or the right-wing think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation,  The American Enterprise Institute, Standford's Hoover Institution, etc, etc,etc, all the "greed is good" crowd, Ayn Rand's Objectivists, or any of their political errand boys: Cruz, Trump, Christie, Rubio, Bush... and the endless lobbyists and their hordes of parasitical congress-persons and assorted senators or governors. Can you imagine them swallowing West's program without the assistance of a nationwide, massive, political, "Great Awakening", to "help" them gag it down.

Facing such hard, ruthless, well-funded and organized opposition, those who call themselves "realists", those possibilists said to "living in the real-world"; in other words, those settling for small "realistic", incremental gains, would be putty in the hands, of such brutal opponents .

It will be a long hard fight and very different from the old-fashioned labor battles... because with robots doing everything and the one-percent owning the robots... who could go on strike? In the meantime, until all the robots arrive, the one-percent is moving more and more manufacturing to China: a one-party dictatorship where strikes are illegal.

The fight

Below I have included a classic political fight song, "Which Side Are You On?", sung by the iconic folk singer, Pete Seeger, in social-democratic Sweden, in the no less iconic year, 1968. It's about a coal miner's strike in Kentucky.... It is a wonderful song, wonderfully sung, but coal's going out these days and so are strikes... so only the title makes much sense today... and one single phrase in the song... which sums up why I believe that anyone who thinks that Darell M. West's agenda is worth fighting for, should support Bernie Sanders.

The single phrase?

You guessed it!

It's,  "Us workers haven't got a chance, unless we organize."

Recite that as a liberating mantra.

This brings us to Bernie

When Sanders says — as he does in every speech — that he’s seeking to build “a revolution,” that’s not just rhetoric. What Sanders understands in his bones is that every period of progressive reform in U.S. history has come as a result of massive street heat, of energized movements that push policymaking elites to the left. Abolitionists pressured the Lincoln Republicans toward a policy of emancipation. Militant workers and a socialist left, whose general strikes shut down several major cities in 1934, prompted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democrats to legalize collective bargaining and create Social Security in 1935. The civil rights movement enabled the Kennedy-Johnson Democrats to pass the landmark legislation of the ’60s. Progressive reform doesn’t happen absent a large and vibrant left. Harold Meyerson - Washington Post

Now Robert Reich, the brilliant Atom Ant of left-wing, economists and agitators, describes how it was done before and how it could be done again.

Teddy Roosevelt got a progressive income tax, limits on corporate campaign contributions, regulation of foods and drugs, and the dissolution of giant trusts – not because he was a great dealmaker but because he added fuel to growing public demands for such changes.(...) "The real world we’re living in” right now won’t allow fundamental change of the sort we need. It takes a movement. Such a movement is at the heart of the Sanders campaign. The passion that’s fueling it isn’t really about Bernie Sanders. Had Elizabeth Warren run, the same passion would be there for her. It’s about standing up to the moneyed interests and restoring our democracy. It Takes a Movement, Like the One at the Heart of Bernie Sanders’ Campaign, to Change the World -  Robert Reich 

Reich makes a very, very important point... This is not really about Bernie himself, it is about the people themselves, the Demos and their Kratia.  

Bernie Sanders is simply the only one who has had the guts to rise to the occasion. 

The only "mouse" brave enough to volunteer to "bell the cat"...

Bernie Sanders + enough voters = Mighty Mouse

And finally Bernie speaks for himself:

As he looked ahead to carrying on the fight in New Hampshire, he used many of his favorite lines. “It is just too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.” “We do not represent the interests of the billionaire class, Wall Street, or corporate America. We don’t want their money.” “The American people are saying no to a rigged economy.” “We are going to create an economy that works for working families, not just the billionaire class.” - Bernie Sanders Just Changed the Democratic Party - The New Yorker

You could say it louder, but it would be hard to say it more clearly. 

Moral of the story: It has happened before and it can happen again and God help us if it doesn't. DS

PS: Here is the Brookings document in full to download:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/10/26-robots-emerging-technologies-public-policy-west/robotwork.pdf 

21rst Century Populism: the New "Us" Against the Same Old "Them"

Mark Bittman published a very important article last week in the New York Times, entitled, "What is the Purpose of Society?".  Important, because in just a few words he gets to the very heart of political action.

He begins with the most basic problem imaginable: food:

The world of food and agriculture symbolizes most of what’s gone wrong in the United States. But because food is plentiful for most people, and the damage that conventional agriculture does isn’t readily evident to everyone, it’s important that we look deeper, beyond food, to the structure that underlies most decisions: the political economy.(...) Think about it this way: There are two kinds of operating systems, hard and soft. A clock is a hard system. We know what it’s for, we know when it isn’t working, and we know that 10 clock experts would agree on how to fix it — and could do so. Soft systems, like agriculture and economics, are more complex. We don’t all agree on goals, and we don’t agree on whether things are working or in need of repair. For example, is contemporary American agriculture a system for nourishing people and providing a livelihood for farmers? Or is it one for denuding the nation’s topsoil while poisoning land, water, workers and consumers and enriching corporations? Our collective actions would indicate that our principles favor the latter; that has to change. Mark Bittman - New York Times

Toward the end of his article comes a paragraph which, in my opinion  could be the political strategy that "connects the dots" between many heterogeneous groups and issues in a way that might finally articulate a serious progressive challenge to today's floundering "conservative revolution".

It’s clear to most everyone, regardless of politics, that the big issues — labor, race, food, immigration, education and so on — must be “fixed,” and that fixing any one of these will help with the others. But this kind of change must begin with an agreement about principles, specifically principles of human rights and well-being rather than principles of making a favorable business climate.

I find this striking because it connects with what Podemos, the wildly successful, out of the blue, political movement that is shaking the foundations of Spain's establishment is saying these days.

Podemos originated in the aftermath of the 2011–12 Spanish protests against inequality and corruption. It is a left-wing populist party that seeks to address the problems of inequality, unemployment and economic malaise that followed in the wake of the European debt crisis. (...) Podemos is currently the 2nd largest Spanish party by number of members; it became the 3rd largest party within the first 20 days it allowed membership, with 100,000 signing up in that period, and currently has more than 344,000 members. Wikipedia 

Basically their message is that today's problems are not so much a question of "left versus right", but more a question of "up versus down"; "down" being defined as "la gente", a less political buzzword for the people than "el pueblo". This is a demographic smorgasbord that ranges all over the political system but who are united, perhaps unknowingly, in their mutual suffering, the common adversary of all of them being "La casta" (the "caste"), defined as a tiny minority of amazingly wealthy and powerful corporations and individuals who control and manipulate the financial, political and mainstream information systems to their benefit and to the detriment of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

Finally we are talking about finding a common denominator shared throughout most of the population. Those suffering could include anyone from a civil servant trying to fix the climate or guarantee the purity of what Americans eat or a small, "main street" businessman smothered by the "big boxes", all the way to someone flipping burgers in McDonald's, and every imaginable minority: all could feel oppressed by the system as it stands.

The "casta", then, is the common adversary of all "la gente", the people, that is to say, everybody that is not super-rich and powerful.

In American terms it would sound something like "everybody against the one percent".

What sort of mentality are "we the people" facing? Let's ask Bloomberg:

It's not necessarily natural to act selfishly. Decades of research suggest that humans are hard-wired to reciprocate kind deeds because doing so offers an evolutionary advantage. Yet being at work seems to strip people of a desire to help people. "Organizations are more future-oriented," Pfeffer says. "They emphasize calculation, rather than morality and duty." He and Belmi cite prior research showing how companies have increasingly walked back promised pension benefits, cut retirees' medical insurance benefits, and laid off staff in the absence of financial strains. Even though research suggests the obvious—that being stingy about reciprocation can make employees less productive and more likely to quit—companies still seem to have no qualms about screwing over workers. Bloomberg Business

Clearly then, contrary to much that "they" would like "us" to believe, (understatement warning) the corporate model cannot serve the well being of the community as a whole.

As Mark Bittman says,

Shouldn’t adequate shelter, clothing, food and health care be universal? Isn’t everyone owed a society that works toward guaranteeing the well-being of its citizens? Shouldn’t we prioritize avoiding self-destruction?

You could say it louder perhaps, but I doubt if you could say it more clearly. DS

Lady Thatcher's Koan

Dirty Dancing

In almost any question, no matter how complex, there is an axis, hinge, fulcrum, upon and around which the entire question revolves. Discovering that point is often produced after concentrated immersion in the problem in all its facets, but the discovery itself is experienced as an intuitive flash.... what Zen Buddhists call "satori". In their discipline they make use of riddles called "Koans" to trigger such insights.

Koan:  a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment. Merriam-Webster

Here is a sample koan:

A monk asked Zhàozhōu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Zhaozhou said, "Wú".

Margaret Thatcher, of all people, once delivered herself of a koan, which, in my opinion,  if meditated upon sufficiently, explains much of what we are living through today with the triumphant "Conservative Revolution" that she and Reagan led and also gives valuable insights in how to resist and perhaps even reverse that revolution.

Here is Maggie's koan

"Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families." Margaret Thatcher - 1987

In my view, this "koan" encloses all the contradictions and even the agenda of the Thatcher/Reagan,  Conservative Revolution, the political, social and economic wasteland that we inhabit today.

Let's get into our lotus position and have a closer look at this thing, let us in the words of the immortal Spike Milligan, "scrutinize it with an intense scrute".

First question, "who is society"? 

a. The totality of social relationships among humans.

b. A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.

c. The institutions and culture of a distinct self-perpetuating group. The Free Dictionary

In other words: anyone who actively participates in the affairs of a community within the larger community, be it a church, mosque or temple, or someone who canvases for a political party or a charity... or simply anyone who takes the trouble to pick up a piece of litter, that he/she didn't drop on the sidewalk and walks over to a public wastebasket and throws it away. That is society... Maggie said it doesn't exist... If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Who are the "individual men and women" that Lady Thatcher mentions?

Knowing her a little, I would think that she was referring to what I would now call "Piketty individuals", one-percenters like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or the Koch brothers, people whose activities are constrained by little more than the laws of physics... I think Lady Thatcher would prefer that other, lesser, "individuals" be of  the "Bowling Alone" variety; sitting by themselves on their soft sofas in a dark living room watching endless TV series, while eating popcorn and guzzling super-size, sugary drinks.

And the families?

Again, knowing her, I imagine that she was thinking of "Piketty" families:

The book argues that the world today is returning towards "patrimonial capitalism", in which much of the economy is dominated by inherited wealth: Their power is increasing, creating an oligarchy. Piketty cites novels by Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen and Henry James to describe the rigid class structure based on accumulated capital that existed in England and France in the early 1800s. Wikipedia

I certainly don't imagine she was thinking about couples with a high school education both working 60 hour weeks, weekends included, at minimum wages, whose children are being raised by a TV set, going to sub-standard, tax-starved public schools and without medical care.

And strangely enough, this is where the sado-libertarian ideology that Thatcher-Reagan represent has exposed a vulnerable flank in its defenses... religious conservatives... yes the, "every sperm is sacred", crowd. The new Pope has said that our economic system is "inhuman", more anti-Thatcher than that is hard to imagine. 

Respect for the person means not only guaranteeing their political and civil rights, the pope said, but also "offering each person the possibility of having effective access to the essential means of sustenance: food, water, shelter, health care, education and the possibility of forming and supporting a family."(...) "There cannot be true peace and harmony if we do not work for a society that is more just and marked by solidarity, if we don't overcome selfishness, individualism and special interests at every level," he said. Catholic News Service

Maggie would turn in her grave reading the above.

With that in mind, the Christian pro-life movement should be pressed to define what sort of society would be "human" enough to allow families to bring endless children into it and more importantly, how such a society could be achieved. 

Progressives should hold Christian's feet to the fire on this question. "OK, agreed, so no more abortion, so no more contraceptives, then where is the tax money coming from to pay for the nurseries, the schools, the universities, the hospitals, etc for all these humans?" "Can a system organized like ours do all this and if not, how could it be organized to be 'human' or are you OK with a system that the Pope defines as inhuman?" The Ayn Rand crowd couldn't care less about this, but certainly any person raised in the Abrahamic traditions would be discomfited by these questions.

In my opinion this is the "sound of one hand clapping" moment for progressives. DS

Once I built a tower, now it's done...

"We are so made that we can sustain our existence only in group life. Love is the essence of humanity, love needs something to bestow itself upon; human beings must live together in order to live a life of mutual love." D. T. Suzuki

"I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!" George Carlin

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Between the two quotes above there is certainly some space and variance of tone, but they are by no means contradictory and Suzuki would have been the last person to deny George Carlin's Zen.

Carlin was certainly right when he saw "no solution" and "no hope". However, it is useful before even thinking about solutions, to identify the "problem".

In my opinion, the distance between the reality we experience in our daily lives and Suzuki's deceptively simple analysis of our species, (which could, in great part, apply to the troop of baboons in the picture), is humanity's "problem".

In fact the distance is so great that many might dismiss Suzuki's analysis as treacly and sentimental when he says, "we are so made that we can sustain our existence only in group life (...) human beings must live together in order to live a life of mutual love", which, in fact, applies as accurately to any isolated human being as it would to any isolated baboon. A social animal being a social animal.

Over millions of years, our species evolved, like our cousins the baboons, to roam the savannas of Africa in extended families, sharing whatever food we found and curling up together at night to keep warm. Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. That wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Perhaps, it will be global warming that finally returns our remaining descendents to paradise. DS