The bright side of life - revisited

“When you’re chewing on life’s gristle

Don’t grumble, give a whistle”

Eric Idle

I am in the process of reworking a lot of my material, looking to see if I could ever make a book out of it all, trying to see what, if any, threads of thought might hold it all together. This is a rough draft of some of the reworkings. Thank you for your patience. DS

David Seaton's News Links

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.  The bad news comes fast and furious. When I am subjected to an information overload, I occasionally experience some sort of intuitive flash connected to images, a sudden understanding/epiphany/gestalt.

The other day the Tea Party movement revealed itself to me in a poetic metaphor that put them into a different perspective. Something that although just as grotesque, is at the same time touchingly human in its vulnerability.

It came to me that the Tea Party movement with their confused and confusing agenda, the open carrying of fire arms in Starbucks, the birthers, the militias, the “Last Days” crowd, the Limbaughs, the Becks, and all the assorted, foxy, incoherent mishegoss that goes with them is one and the same thing as collagen lip injections, faces paralyzed with botox or toupees and comb overs: a self-deceiving escape from the inevitable. Fooling the mirror perhaps, but nobody else, certainly not Father Time or the Grim Reaper or the great undercurrents of events. This escapism from the simplest of realities is one of the hallmarks of our era.

The Tea Baggers, like the botox zombies, are just whistling past the graveyard.

Everything we are living right now, from global warming to the juking and jiving of the financial system, from exploding population in poor countries, to aging populations in the rich ones, is crying out for more regulation, more control, more transparency and more taxes to pay for it. This is either going to happen or our world is going to disintegrate into a devil’s stew of famine, pollution, explosively intolerable inequality and endless war… not necessarily in that order.

The world of the future will be a world of control or it wont be.

The world of the future will be a world of iron rules and regulations and with all the privacy of a nudist camp, or it will be a nightmare beyond our powers to imagine.

This process is as inevitable as aging leading to dying.

People do some some weird stuff when staring down the one that the Spanish call “the bald lady”… death.

Just as an aging woman who has had her lips blown up like Donald Duck fools herself into thinking she is still desirable, someone who walks into Starbucks with a pitiful little pistol on his hip fools himself into thinking he has power over his life and future. He sips his latte made from coffee grown in an impoverished third-world narco-state and sits there worrying about a dark skinned “socialist” coming and taking his little gun away.

The word “socialism” is thrown about with so much abandon. The word is used as an automatic disqualification, something both strange and sinister, touched with the “Mark of the Beast”.

However, the world we are fast approaching would be fortunate if it were somehow connected to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, somehow an expression of international solidarity. Because the alternative, at best, would be a global version of a huge Indian slum, a human ant’s nest crossed by open sewers, filled with hunger, anger and disease or living skeletons listlessly wasting away in starved apathy: the world’s misery huddled at the feet of a few gated communities, heavily guarded by… Predator drones.

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.

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, because of the need to husband fossil fuels and other natural resources, 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, with its frivolous burning of ever scarcer oil, 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.

Admittedly the human animal can continue to flourish in conditions where any other self-respecting mammal would stop breeding and go extinct, but even so, if you oppress them enough, they turn and bite.

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

Forever Young: The key to the Tea Party movement

Forever young

"We may be prisoners of deep and poorly understood changes to the world economic system." Robert J. Samuelson - Newsweek

"(M)any companies will do whatever necessary to squeeze out added profits. And that will spell disaster – giant oil spills, terrible coal-mine disasters, and Wall Street meltdowns – unless the nation has tough regulations backed up by significant penalties, including jail terms for executives found guilty of recklessness, and vigilant enforcement." Robert Reich

It is hardly a new insight that much of the environmental movement is a Trojan Horse for socialist assumptions and ambitions (the British like to call environmentalists “watermelons”—green on the outside, red on the inside). Jonah Goldberg - Commentary

"Since the beginning of the modern period, expanding markets and communications networks had an explosive force, with individualising and liberating impacts on individual citizens; but each such opening was followed by a reorganisation of the old relations of solidarity within an expanded institutional framework. Time and again, a sufficient equilibrium between the market and politics was achieved to ensure that the network of social relations between citizens of a political community was not damaged beyond repair. According to this rhythm, the current phase of financial-market-driven globalisation should also be followed by a strengthening not only of the European Union but of the international community. Today, we need institutions capable of acting on a global scale." Jürgen Habermas - Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links

When I am subjected to an information overload, I occasionally experience some sort of intuitive flash connected to images, a sudden understanding/epiphany/gestalt.

The Greek crisis combined with the chaos of the volcanic ash episode and the hideous, Gulf of Mexico oil spill, followed close on by the mysterious Dow Jones electronic trading collapse the other day on Wall Street, set off such a eureka moment for me.

Suddenly the Tea Party movement revealed itself in a poetic metaphor to me in a way that put them into a different perspective. Something that although just as grotesque, is at the same time touchingly human in its vulnerability.

It came to me that the Tea Party movement with their confused and confusing agenda, the open carrying of fire arms in Starbucks, the birthers, the militias, the "Last Days" crowd, the Limbaughs, the Becks, and all the assorted, foxy, incoherent mishegoss that goes with them is one and the same thing as collagen lip injections, faces paralyzed with botox or toupees and comb overs: a self-deceiving escape from the inevitable. Fooling the mirror perhaps, but nobody else, certainly not Father Time or the Grim Reaper or the great undercurrents of events. This escapism from the simplest of realities is one of the hallmarks of our era.

The Tea Baggers, like the botox zombies, are just whistling past the graveyard.

Everything we are living right now, from global warming to the juking and jiving of the financial system, from exploding population in poor countries, to aging populations in the rich ones, is crying out for more regulation, more control, more transparency and more taxes to pay for it. This is either going to happen or our world is going to disintegrate into a devil's stew of famine, pollution, explosively intolerable inequality and endless war... not necessarily in that order.

The world of the future will be a world of control or it wont be.

The world of the future will be a world of iron rules and regulations and with all the privacy of a nudist camp, or it will be a nightmare beyond our powers to imagine.

This process is as inevitable as aging leading to dying.

People do some some weird stuff when staring down the one that the Spanish call "the bald lady"... death.

Just as an aging woman who has had her lips blown up like Donald Duck fools herself into thinking she is still desirable, someone who walks into Starbucks with a pitiful little pistol on his hip fools himself into thinking he has power over his life and future. He sips his latte made from coffee grown in an impoverished third-world narco-state and sits there worrying about a dark skinned "socialist" coming and taking his little gun away.

The word "socialism" is thrown about with so much abandon. The word is used as an automatic disqualification, something both strange and sinister, touched with the "Mark of the Beast".

However, the world we are fast approaching would be fortunate if it were somehow connected to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, somehow an expression of international solidarity. Because the alternative, at best, would be a global version of a huge Indian slum, a human ant's nest crossed by open sewers, filled with hunger, anger and disease or living skeletons listlessly wasting away in starved apathy: the world's misery huddled at the feet of a few gated communities, heavily guarded by... Predator drones. DS

Behold a dancing Russian bear

David Seaton's News Links
A long time reader of this blog, RC of Puerto Rico, kindly sent me a link to a blog I had never heard of: "ClubOrlov", which is the work of a Leningrad born, Russian-American Engineer named Dimitri Orlov.

Thank you RC, because Orlov is very, very good.

Some of what he writes is so good that I found myself muttering, "Gee I wish I'd said that", while the ghost of Oscar Wilde whispered softly in my ear, "You probably will, David".

Without further adoo I'll clip some juicy bits from a post called "That Bastion of American Socialism" which prints out at seven A4 pages of Times Roman 12point in MS Word. However quite a few authors (Zakaria, Friedman, for example) say much less in books that run to hundreds of pages

Over the past few months the American mainstream chatter has experienced a sudden spike in the gratuitous use of the term "Socialist." It was prompted by the attempts of the federal government to resuscitate insolvent financial institutions.(...) there is nothing remotely socialist to Henry Paulson's "no banker left behind" bail-out strategy, or to Ben Bernanke's "buy one – get one free" deal on the US Dollar (offered only to well-connected friends) or to any of the other measures, either attempted or considered, to slow the collapse of the US economy. A nationalization of the private sector can indeed be called socialist, but only when it is carried out by a socialist government. In absence of this key ingredient, a perfect melding of government and private business is, in fact, the gold standard of fascism. But nobody is crying "Fascism!" over what has been happening in the US. (...) As a practical matter, failing at capitalism does not automatically make you socialist, no more than failing at marriage automatically make you gay. Even if desperation makes you randy for anything that is warm-blooded and doesn't bite, the happily gay lifestyle is not automatically there for the taking. There are the matters of grooming, and manners, and interior decoration to consider, and these take work, just like anything else.

Then there is a delicious paragraph where Orlov talks about Socialism in education:

Let us start with the observation that intelligence, and the ability to benefit from higher education, occur more or less randomly within a human population. The genetic and environmental variation is such that it is not even conceivable to breed people for high intellectual abilities, although, as a look at any number of aristocratic lineages will tell you, it is most certainly possible to breed blue-blooded imbeciles. Thus, offering higher education to those whose parents can afford it is a way to squander resources on a great lot of pampered nincompoops while denying education to working class minds that might actually soak it up and benefit from it. A case in point: why exactly was it a good idea to send George W. Bush to Yale, and then to Harvard Business School? A wanton misallocation of resources, wouldn't you agree? At this point, I doubt that I would get an argument even from his own parents. Perhaps in retrospect they would have been happier to let someone more qualified decide whether young George should have grown up to incompetently send men into battle or to competently polish hub caps down on the corner.

That is about the best short description of the failure of the US educational system that I have ever seen.

Then in one paragraph of blazing economy he positively eviscerates and disposes of every conservative argument that has been around for the last thirty years.

You might also think that it is unfettered free enterprise that has made mainstream American society the economically stratified, downwardly mobile and economically insecure place that it is, which is just as it should be. Alas, that argument is no longer plausible: the flip side of a socialist defeat is a capitalist defeat. No matter what your political persuasion might be, there is simply no way that an economically insecure, badly educated, badly treated population can be made to thrive, and this sets the stage for some very bad economic performance. As the economy collapses and economic losses mount, social and political instability become inevitable.

Then he lets some air out of the Obama balloon:

Currently, a great many people are filled with hope that the incoming Obama administration will bring much-needed change. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama inherits an office much tainted by his predecessor, whose attempt at securing his legacy included a clandestine trip to Baghdad where, when he attempted to speak of victory, someone threw shoes at him and called him a filthy dog, all on international television. The US presidency is now a carnival side show(...) Due to a certain quirk of the national character, most Americans have trouble understanding that honor is something you lose exactly once.(...) There are countries, in the Muslim part of the world especially, where honor is of paramount importance, and having the highest office in the land turned into a laughing-stock is not conducive to securing their support.

After that Orlov dispatches Obama's stimulus plans and then, in a grand finale worthy of Jonathan Swift he makes a "Modest Proposal" on how to bring socialism to America.

But that you are going to have to go and read for yourselves.

Have fun! DS

Comrade Bush's "Five Year Plan"

Igor Igorevich

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism. Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government. The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system. Washington Post

The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. (...) In the rescue law passed a week ago, Congress stipulated that the Treasury must strictly limit the pay of executives in banks to which it adds capital — including provisions that ban golden parachutes and that direct the government to recover bonuses based on stated earnings that prove inaccurate. Britain’s plan also hinged on the willingness of several of the largest banks — Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC Holdings, among them — to sell preferred shares to the government. It is not clear, administration officials said, that the largest American banks would agree to this, particularly given the restrictions on executive pay. New York Times

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world's financial markets while they ``rewrite the rules of international finance.'' ``The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,'' Berlusconi said (...). A solution to the financial crisis ``can't just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.'' Bloomberg

The big lesson is that the west can no longer assume the global order will be remade in its own image. For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is ending. Philip Stephens - Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links
Well, it appears that George W. Bush is going to nationalize American banks...

Holy Moly!

My inner Lenin is having the shivering fits.

My inner Ilyich is in stitches.

I sure never thought that it would be Dubya that would end up building Socialism.

Damn!

Isn't the world a wonderful place?

Isn't life fun?

What other planet can offer such horse shit? DS

Michael Moore: the Picasso of agit-prop

David Seaton's News Links
Michael Moore is a genius at agitation-propaganda.

The working people who cleaned up the mess after the 9-11 attack are sick because of inhaling toxic dust. They do not receive adequate medical care, except as charity cases. Michael Moore takes them to Communist Cuba where first class medical care is available free and there they receive the "Elvis treatment". I can't imagine a more powerful metaphor. What a lovely kick in the gonads for the flag waving "patriots" of the American right. A real work of art. ¡Olé! DS

Michael Moore takes 9-11 Victims to Cuba for treatment - New York Post
Abstract: Filmmaker Michael Moore's production company took ailing Ground Zero responders to Cuba in a stunt aimed at showing that the U.S. health-care system is inferior to Fidel Castro's socialized medicine, according to several sources with knowledge of the trip. The trip was to be filmed as part of the controversial director's latest documentary, "Sicko," an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month.(...) Responders were told Cuban doctors had developed new techniques for treating lung cancer and other respiratory illness, and that health care in the communist country was free, according to those offered the two-week February trip. Cuba has made recent advancements in biotechnology and exports its cancer treatments to 40 countries around the world, raking in an estimated $100 million a year, according to The Associated Press. In 2004 the U.S. government granted an exception to its economic embargo against Cuba and allowed a California drug company to test three cancer vaccines developed in Havana, according to the AP.(...) Some called the trip a success, at least logistics-wise. "From what I heard through the grapevine, those people that went are utterly happy," said John Feal, who runs the Fealgood Foundation to help raise money for responders and was approached by Moore to find responders willing to take the trip. "They got the Elvis treatment." Although he has been a critic of Cuba, Moore grew popular there after a pirated version of his movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," was played on state-owned TV. 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

David Seaton's News Links

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

Rebuilding the left

Read the article from the Financial Times below.

David Seaton's News Links

Today I'd like to be upbeat on the future of the left. Many say that the left is finished, "on the ash heap of history" Ronnie said, quoting Trotsky, of all people. Reagan, the first neocon?

Many commentators maintain that the fall of the USSR was the end of socialism as a movement and even as an idea. And the truth is that even the moderate left has been reeling since the Berlin Wall came down. The end?

I am slowly coming to quite the opposite conclusion. The consciousness of suffering created the "class struggle". Marx didn't invent it out thin air in a laboratory, he simply attempted to make a scientific analysis of what any contemporary reader of Charles Dickens was aware of, all around him every day, everywhere. With all of Dickens's genius he couldn't hope to spread the reality of poverty and injustice as today's media can. Inequality, poverty and exclusion certainly haven't gone away and Globalization, which is unchained capitalism is aggravating them. We have the evidence around us daily. There is no substitute for the left. Necessity creates the organ.

Instead of its destruction, the fall of the USSR and "really existing socialism" means the liberation of the left, rather like the death of an evil, neurotic, absorbent parent or the break up of a hate-filled, destructive marriage or even the loss of faith in a "jealous" god... it means liberation.

The path that Soviet, Marxist-Leninism took was that of the Party as the "vanguard of the proletariat", a select, elitist group called on by history to lead the "masses" toward socialism. Inevitably that led to an inbred, selfish, corrupt coterie of self righteous bureaucrats, a carnival mirror image of their capitalist opposite numbers. The Oscar winning film, "The Lives of Others" gives a clear portrait of what this "vanguard" wrought. If the left is to be "reborn" it must be democratic in the fullest sense. The first battle to be fought is to make societies that call themselves "democracies" into truly participatory democracies. The tools to do so are all around us. We are entering the era of the flowering of micro-financed, activist enriched, "mini-mass movements". The YouTube phenomenon, means we return to village democracy where rotten tomatoes can be thrown at frauds and phonies. No "vanguard" could lead this and if any rises to do so it should be "youtubed" to extinction.

The greatest enemy of this reborn, participatory, democratic left is "permanent war", martial law, the "permanent state of exception" and the "national security state" with its suspension of human or constitutional rights.

As the shape and power of this movement becomes clearer so will the use of this tactic of fear and suspension of liberty. There are some paranoiacs (and remember, even they have enemies) who think that the entire Al Qaeda phenomenon was allowed to flower as an answer to the panic that the anti-Globalization riots of Seattle in 1999 caused in our own "vanguard". DS

Mica Panic: Child poverty exposes the Anglo-American model - Financial Times Abstract: For more than 30 years neoliberals have held up the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK as examples that other countries must follow to achieve economic success and high levels of social well-being. Yet, according to a recent Unicef report on child welfare, these are the worst two industrial countries in which to grow up. Is the Anglo-American model really as successful as neoliberals claim? Two years ago another United Nations agency, the UN Development Programme, singled out the plight of many children in the US and the UK. Child poverty had doubled in the UK between 1979 and 1998, which it called "a legacy of the 1980s - a decade characterised by a distinctly pro-rich growth pattern that left poor people behind". A major cause was "the impact of [Thatcher] government policies that cut taxes for higher earners and lowered benefits for the poor.(...) In the US the consequences of similar policies and the lack of universal health care (unique among advanced countries) have been even more serious. According to the UNDP report: "A baby boy from a family in the top5 per cent of US income distribution will enjoy a lifespan 25 per cent longer than a baby boy from the bottom 5 per cent." Not surprisingly, when you consider the whole population, not just children, the two countries, especially the US, lag behind the nations of "old Europe", whatever indicators of well-being are used.(..) The importance of these comparisons is that they consistently show that countries with social democratic or corporatist models of capitalism have markedly higher levels of social well-being than those, such as the US and UK, with a liberal free-market model. Equally important, the reason for this is not that they have higher gross domestic product per head but that their social attitudes, objectives and policies are very different. Unlike the US and, since 1979, the UK, these countries attach great importance to social cohesion and, therefore, to equality of opportunity. As they believe that there is "such a thing as society" rather than "only" isolated, alienated individuals in ruthless pursuit of self-interest, the aim of their institutions and policies is to improve both social and individual welfare. In other words, the goal is to promote a harmony of national interests - not social Darwinism - by ensuring that the whole society shares the benefits of economic growth as well as the costs of the adjustment process that makes it possible. Consequently, social democracies in particular are committed to those institutions and policies that neoliberals want to change. Employers, employees and government co-operate to solve national problems. Taxes and social expenditure are comparatively high, making generous unemployment and other benefits possible. They spend much more than the US and the UK on retraining those who become unemployed. Inequalities of income are much lower; and so also poverty, economic insecurity, lack of trust in other people and levels of stress and crime. If these achievements are, as neo-liberals believe, a sign of failure, what constitutes success? Franklin Roosevelt's definition of socio-political success is as relevant now as in 1937 when he said: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." And what happens if we fail? Freedom and democracy were "not possible" in a country, he warned the US Congress, "if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living". Neither, as Europe was soon to show, was peace. READ IT ALL

Notes on socialized medicine

David Seaton's News Links
As an American expatriate long living in Europe, the one thing I think most separates my experience here with that of living in the states is socialized medicine.

I have been spending most of the day the last few days in a large hospital here in Madrid, where my wife has had her second hip replacement operation in the space of a year. Each artificial joint is made of titanium and costs €6000. Add to that the surgeon's fees (she was operated on by the head of the hospital's orthopedic surgery department, one of the top specialists in all of Spain), then there's the anesthesiologist's fee, a week in hospital, nursing, transfusions, etc, etc and the total cost to me is.... nothing... zilch... nada de nada.

I worry about my wife, I worry about the operation, I worry about all kinds of stuff, but I don't worry at all about how I'm going to pay for her operation.... I don't have the fear constantly hanging over my head that our savings will be wiped out or that some private plan will nickel and dime us literally to death and not give us the care we need when we really need it.

I know so many cases from home of friends of the family and relatives of mine who have worked hard all their lives, been successful in their professions, played by the rules, bought insurance and then have been humiliated by illness and left high and dry by the insurers. I am so grateful not to have worry about that, not even for a moment.

I think that experiencing socialized medicine is what changed me from being a "parlor pink" into really being a person of the left. For me a state that doesn't give its citizens health, education and culture is a fraud and to cut back on those things to spend the money thus "saved" on more and more weapon systems is simply (evil?). DS

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

David Seaton's News Links

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.
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