It’s been a great run and I have enjoyed every minute of it.  On June 22 I got married and will be involved with a variety of activities that preclude taking the time required to do a proper job of editing and publishing a progressive political magazine.

To our readers I recommend the online magazine LA Progressive for your enjoyment and edification.  Dick and Sharon, the editors there, helped give We! its standards and its contacts.  Their advice and encouragement was more than appreciated and I will always be grateful.  To our writers, I advise them to submit their work to LA Progressive as well.  It has an excellent audience and the best editors outside of We! that I have encountered.

Thanks to all of you, readers and writers alike.  I have enjoyed it all tremendously and consider it a privilege to have served as We!’s only editor.

To my silent and much appreciated partner, I offer my heart felt thanks.  You helped me find my freedom and relocate my self-respect and find my way free of what amounted to an insideous and destructivce cult.  I would have managed to escape eventually but due to your help and encouragement, I did it with my head held high and my mind and self-respect intact.  I don’t have your current emai address but I know you have mine so get in touch if you like.

If anyone has business with me as editor of We!, you can continue to reach me via this magazine’s contact function for about one year.

We! is no longer an active magazine.  It’s archives can be made available by request and author contacts can be arranged with the writers’ permissions.

“leave no mark upon the earth but the footprints of your compassion and the cechoes of your laughter.” nm antinoro, 2002

“Is there anything in all of that to suggest a way forward?” We! contributor Jerry Lobdill posed this question to me in his comment #20 of 25 pursuant to the conversation following my “infrastructure” essay. I had just mentioned Mancur Olson’s “logic of collective action”. This essay responds to Jerry’s questions by interpreting two anecdotes through Olson’s logic: both anecdotes involve short-sightedness, and in very different ways the US Postal Service. One anecdote involves my own personal short-sightedness, dating back to the mid-1980s when I applied “technology assessment” consulting job with the then US Post Office,. The other dates back to early February 2009 and involves the Postmaster General’s proposed remedy $3-4 billion operating loss incurred this year for the now US Postal Service’s.

Back in the mid-1980s, I applied for a job that would have involved me in helping the US Post Office prepare itself for the digital age. Importantly, although I didn’t realize it at the time, “prepare” was to be understood in a very broad sense. As I thought of myself as being a broad thinker, I thought I was a shoe-in for the job—but I was wrong! I let my own preferences constrain my imagination. For example, I loved to handwrite letters with my fountain pen. My aesthetics blocked my view of the future of e-mail, and that limited my preparation for the interview – and I didn’t get the job. As I’ve since allowed myself to learn, “digital” has expanded far beyond e-mail in its implications for me and for the Postal Service.

Keep my story in mind, and flash forward to early February 2009. The Postmaster General testified to a Congressional oversight committee that the Postal Service had incurred an operating loss of a few billion dollars over the past year. Then he suggested – whether as an honest effort to reduce operating expenses or as a bureaucratic ploy to seduce the Congress to increase funding remains unclear to me – that mail delivery be cut back by one day per week, from six days a week to five.

It’s not my purpose in writing this essay is to assess the likelihood that such a cutback would accomplish whatever the goals the Postmaster had in mind. Rather, I want to take a more expansive view of his technology options, the kind of view I wish I would have pursued twenty-five years ago – the kind of view that Olson’s logic might suggest adopting.

So, I conjecture about some premises that the Postmaster General’s suggestion itself suggests he may have left unstated, and so, unexamined. Let me begin at the USPO’s beginning; according to Wikipedia:

“The United States Post Office (U.S.P.O.) was created in Philadelphia under Benjamin Franklin on July 26, 1775 by decree of the Second Continental Congress. Based on the Postal Clause in Article One of the United States Constitution, empowering Congress “To establish post offices and post roads,” it became the Post Office Department (U.S.P.O.D.) in 1792… In 1971, the department was reorganized as a quasi-independent agency of the federal government and acquired its present name…” [02/09/2008; 10:34 EST]

The Framers must have viewed a postal system as pretty important, considering not only THAT they put it in the Constitution, but also where they put it: in the same Article as freedom of speech and separation of Church and State; AND, ahead of the Article about the right of militias to bear arms. But, let me add some context: posting a letter was the only way citizens of the new nation could maintain personal contact, share private ideas, and develop community unmediated by newspaper owners.

It was also a time when many Americans were too busy farming to shop, too self-sufficient to need to shop, and too exhausted from working to make “shop ‘til you drop” anything but a bad joke. It was also a time before Sears came up with the mail order catalogue. And, it was a time before telegraphs, telephones, e-mail, and cell phones; not to mention radio, television, and other more one-way communication media.

In short, the Framers must have seen the post as essential for reasons more critical than merely people “staying in touch”, buying things, getting junk mail; they must have seen the post as a way for people to connect as citizens building a democracy. It seems highly unlikely to me that any of them would have gone to the trouble of providing for post offices and post roads anywhere at all in the Constitution for any other reason, even if some of them had somehow anticipated the arrival of Sears’ catalogue in their “postbox”.

The point of this extended digression is to develop a basis for arguing (even though I am not a lawyer) that the current Postmaster General may be following the letter of Article One, but not the spirit – and that his reason for doing so is, whether intentional or inadvertent, primarily bureaucratic, and as such, hardly worthy of Franklin and his Fellows.

One of my bosses in the government described the job of a bureaucrat as follows: imagine yourself in a room full of balloons (note: air-filled, not helium-filled); a bureaucrat’s job, my boss told me, was to keep as many of the balloons as possible from hitting the floor. Well, I would like to think that his description was overly cynical, but that does seem to fit the Postmaster’s proposal for cutting back on delivery days.

That’s because the first rule of bureaucracy is to survive—so, he hit that balloon back up. The way to do that is to maintain as much scope of work as possible—so, he hit five of his six “delivery day” balloons, (on the surface) giving up some budget and some staff, rather than risking losing the whole bureaucracy – and his job along with it.

But, lost in all the commotion around keeping as many balloons as he can from hitting the floor, is the question, what is the Postal Service for? If its purpose is limited to delivering bills, books, junk mail, and anything anyone might think of, then the Postmaster may be pursuing a sensible strategy of salvaging as much of his budget and people as he can, by sacrificing some of them.

However, if the raison d’etre of the Postal Service is to help connect citizens so they can build democracy, that changes everything – largely because technology of “being connected” has changed so much since Franklin’s time. And it seems that technology changes faster every day. It’s so hard to keep up with.

So, bureaucrats of the “keep the balloons from hitting the floor” school tend to tacitly agree to ignore the “keep up with new technology” balloon – politically, it doesn’t count, anyway. Of course, that’s only a tendency, as my own experience with the US Post Office trying to get out in front of all this illustrated.

Still, consider what the Postmaster did not say. He did not point out that Franklin et al had chosen what could be considered the hi-tech communication system of their day: post carriers, post offices, and post roads. Nor did he suggest that they would have chosen a higher tech system, were one available. Had he chosen this approach, the Postmaster might have cast his proposed his one-day cutback as the first step of several in getting the Post Office out of the 18th century.

He might have done the “communication for democracy” equivalent of the national telecommunication law, which mandates a transition to digital television, going so far as to specify a date by which the transition must be effected. (The fact that the date was recently slipped serves to strengthen my argument here: that bureaucracies slow down technological innovation—just as Olson’s logic would have us expect.)

He might have announced that the US Postal Service would begin transitioning away from delivering physical items to delivering only digital communication; that henceforth the Postal Service would dedicate itself to building infrastructure to support such communication—and, very importantly, undertake a literacy campaign to help everyone learn not only how to use the technology, but also how to feel comfortable doing so. Remember: back when the original Post Office was founded, there were a lot of people who signed their name with an “X” because they couldn’t write—so that illiteracy — albeit of a different sort — was an obstacle for the early Post Office too.

[I’m hoping that the “fit” with Obama’s forward-looking, infrastructure building program is evident.]

What about the physical stuff that the Postal Service now delivers? Leave it for private firms. Why should the proud citizens of a democracy get involved in delivering junk mail?

Well, there is a reason, and Olson’s “logic” helps us here too. Olson argues that interest groups tend to slow adoption of new technology. Consider the groups which have contributed to shaping how the Postal Service operates: bureaucrats and their supervisors, people who actually “carry the mail” (from pick up to delivery) and their representatives and people who support their work, mailbox makers, uniform suppliers, and others. It would hardly be surprising if every one of these groups were to resist the change to a digital Post Office. So strong might the resistance be that the idea for trying it might not occur to the Postmaster, much as it didn’t occur to me, lo! these many years earlier.

There are other aspects to consider: digital mail is “green” only after a lot of not-so-green etching fluids and other materials are left behind; privacy, security, stability-resiliency-robustness—to name a few challenges that a forward-looking Postmaster would probably have to work through. Still, in answer to Jerry’s questions: yes, there is a chance, though not a good one. And there is hope, but only if people keep open minds; there is hope, but realizing it practically will likely take more time and more effort than we might anticipate.

by George Thomas

Let the politics scream on.  The Bush Cartel may earn some comeuppance, or may not. A careful reading and listening to all the political talk either demanding accountability under law, or soft-pedaling the whole thing while urging that we “turn the page,” reveals little but shouting.  Finally, Obama appeared to invoke “the rule of law” in his May 21st security speech in one sentence, while in another describe the continued program of preventive long-term incarceration of ‘terrorists’.

What gives?

Dick Cheney did not disappoint. Within minutes he provided his usual mix of self-promotion in de-facto response to Obama. His speech was content-free, and we can ignore it as some more standard Bush administration dogma. Someone, somewhere, pule-e-ease find a way to shut Dick Cheney up before he convinces millions of our unread, unsophisticated citizens to swing US politics back to sheer madness.  It could happen.  I was alive way back during the second Dubya selection, and I know.  But the depressing thought occurs to me: What would it matter?

Nancy Pelosi surely didn’t help with her news conference last week.  She plunged into the question of whether the CIA had briefed her on interrogation procedures, and whether they had made specific mention of current use of certain “enhanced” techniques prohibited under international law, not to mention laws of the United States.  She plunged on mindless of the obvious intentions of Republican mouthpieces to comb through all she said in search of tentative statements and uncertainties to distort.

The CIA lies to Congress “all the time” – an assertion which was found to be enough to damn Pelosi but not several others, Republican and Democratic congressmen and even CIA spokesmen alike. Sen. Graham even referred to his meticulous notes and found only one briefing, where the CIA stated there had been four, and found no mention of the use of waterboarding.  The CIA then backed down, casting doubt on their own records-keeping accuracy, for which taxpayers pay big bux.  Speaker Pelosi will probably survive as the political posturing has died down, yet the ideological bloviati have not backed down.  The downside to the currently popular regime of surgical political posturing, however, may have doomed her political capital.  Who knows?

Waterboarding!  It sounds like a fun ocean sport, or something one does by a river rapids while picnicking on the bank with burgers, clams, dogs of all types, fizzy drinks and beer.  But alas, no.  It’s torture.  Some news descriptions describe it as akin to the classic Chinese water torture, but I don’t know.  Something about months of slow drip-drip-drip driving the prisoner mad diverges from descriptions of “waterboarding,” which inflicts the sensation of drowning.  But never mind that.  It’s prohibited specifically by law.  And so what?

In essence, the most depressing scenario from the worst of my political nightmares goes like this: Obama tried to achieve the impossible in his major speech on security, and of course our political hack agencies (tax-supported) commenced immediate screaming.  I believe the President miscalculated in this effort.  That’s because the intelligence and interrogation functions of a modern sovereign state mired in the chaos of irreconcilable international disagreements, institutionalized saber rattling and the need to keep some of the nastiest measures secret, do not fit logically with US Renaissance-born values, even when the country’s constitutional makeup remains arguably impossible of improvement.

In other words, critics on the Left noted Obama’s outline of prolonged incarceration without known charge, and his very Bush-like statement of the reasons for it — in a word, “terrorism.”  They then noted Obama’s repeated insistence that the US must proceed according to “the rule of law.”  Ignore the strategy of “turning the page” on Bush administration lawbreaking, and ignore the possibly upcoming modern “Spanish Inquisition.”  In Obama’s speech two monumental and irreconcilable ideas stood back-to-back.

In that one speech, possibly without fully realizing the implications, Obama expressed one of the most damning conundrums of our time, and one of the reasons why the USA will continue to baffle and outrage certain people and confound certain traditions. One could not help hearing an imagined Jack Nicholson voice shouting from way back in the convoluted long-term memory banks of the brain: “You can’t HANDLE the truth!”

Either it’s a sign that people with some expertise in irreconcilable cross cultural phenomena will enjoy future job security, OR……

The political screamers and morons will rise to the top.  There’s more of them.  I guess chaos, insecurity, unending war, rancor and insanity are more equitable in the employment opportunities department. Come on, Lefties! Show some “empathy!”

Er……. sorry.

]]> http://www.wemagazine.org/obamas-a-genius-he-shows-why-unending-madness-is-inevitable/feed/ http://www.wemagazine.org/general-dave%e2%80%99s-map-shows-human-terrain-really-continues-east-into-afghanistan-and-pakistan/ http://www.wemagazine.org/general-dave%e2%80%99s-map-shows-human-terrain-really-continues-east-into-afghanistan-and-pakistan/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 02:09:36 +0000 George Thomas http://www.wemagazine.org/?p=1299 by George Thomas

Bi-products of unwise foreign policy have afflicted us before, and they will probably afflict us again.  Such is the stability of cultural values and, generally speaking, today’s Neoconservatives have never accepted that fact.  So many believe we can construct Disneyland in far-off lands for our entertainment.

Sometimes we make blanket condemnation of everyone involved, one way or other, in the Iraq-Afghanistan-BushWar mess.  This is not particularly helpful.  It’s even wrong, so wrong.  Take for example the normal-guy and gal ignoramuses caught up and eventually charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.  They reaped the most damaging negative sanctions, even though they held relatively little responsibility.  Policy makers, as we speak, remain on the lam so far.

I can’t say enough about the callow, naive folks in charge of much leadership and responsibility within many military organizations.  Sometimes training and education include the mistakes made early in a career.  But when these mistakes become really, really public and visible, and become the main point of contention in international brouhaha, it can scar a young, naive – let’s face it, stupid, callow mind well into adulthood, regardless of whether that mind ran like a well-oiled engine of genius proportions.

Then there are the real culprits — leaders who rode a string of contrived moral “outrage” campaigns to power because they were frankly tired, tired of waiting for real solutions to work.  Real solutions take patience and nuanced expertise.  People like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist and a whole host of neoliberals had become impatient.  They wanted the world to morph into Disneyland during their lifetimes.

You see, these guys were so solidly utopian in their neoliberal ideology that they inspired the coinage of the new, meaningless label, “neoconservative.” We had met the dreaded “Neocons.”

Gen. David Petraeus was somewhat different.  Relatively speaking, it’s a good thing Petraeus was tapped for leadership as the BushWar fiasco began to crumble, and the “blowback” predicted as early as Oct. 2001 – while dust from the collapsed WTC towers still hung in portions of the New York City downtown air – became more than a disgruntled, leftie, academic Chicken Little whine.  Never mind that the mention of “blowback” issued from the CIA.

Petraeus came from educated, elite, Ph.D.-valuing, academic-mongering stock, and had the ability to sell relative sanity to the rest of the military establishment.  Up ‘til then, military leadership had habitually balked at the notion that, say, anthropologists could inform foreign policy and military doctrine.  In a turnabout, and a rather breathtaking one at that, under Petraeus military strategists and theorists brainstormed the oddly cloak-and-dagger concept of “Human Terrain Systems.”

Terrain is a special term in mil-speak.  It isn’t limited only to the lay of the land, hills, streams, valleys, lakes, vegetation and lack thereof.  It also encompasses “lines of communication” (roads, phone lines, utilities, buildings, nuclear plants, factories, etc.).  It also encompasses cultural geography, or living, breathing people and their societies.

Hence the sudden attraction for Margaret Mead clones to be directed away from treating Major Hoople as a gorilla for study, or Colonel Klink as an informant from a Samoan village, and toward “understanding the people living within the ‘theater’ of military concern.”  Welcome back to the conventional military intelligence concept of “know-thy-enemy.”  The concept is an ideal that has rarely if ever been achieved.

So while remnant Bush-inspired military policy error continues in consequence like a runaway train months after Bush has left office, and while “collateral damage” continues as one of many bi-products of “kinetic action,” little armies of geeks in glasses carry clipboards and gain local trust (and yes, hearts and minds while they’re at it), even though clothed in military uniforms.

The new strategy was a good idea, relatively speaking.  Reasonable people can disagree now over whether it allowed the collection of too little information too late.  Debates continue over whether the US military should depart the Iraq-Afghanistan “theater” sooner or later.  Less debate circulates over whether the US broke it, and now it’s up to them to fix it.  That explains some remaining European reluctance to send thousands of heavily-armed, substantially-backed, uniformed, semi-educated agents with glasses and clipboards to Uncle Sam’s aid.

Margaret Mead would be intrigued, and might see parallels from her days working for military intel during WWII.  General Petraeus recently warned of hard times ahead for the US military operations in Afghanistan.  Of course there are dangers “looming.”  It’ll require years of “area experts”, swarming through villages, cities and backcountry of Afghanistan, communicating, asking questions about things that matter to the locals, and trying to regain some basis for trust.

Trouble is, many will be armed and in uniform, and someday the major policy makers in huge, distant centers of industrial power will convert back to arrogant, unsustainable policies about which Europe’s old colonial powers rightfully warn us. Local Pashtun chieftains can be excused for wondering at the inconsistencies.  Legions of Afghani and Pakistani people can be excused for joining quasi-traditional, non-rational, reactionary movements.

Yes, it really is all deja-vu.  Wakan tonka help us all…….

Now that Obama has gone all namby-pamby on torture accountability, and it’s beginning to look like some leading Congressional Democrats knew and even approved of torture, I’m covering my bets and coming out in favor of torture. Bring it on, I say! The more, the merrier! Torture all around!

Damn, I feel manly when I talk that way.

I mean, look, it’s not as if I’M the one getting tortured. The government promises to only torture people they don’t like, and darn it, I’m a likeable guy. They won’t come after me.

But you know, if we’re going to have torture, we have to make it as efficient as possible, and one of the main problems good freedom-loving Christian nations have when they decide to make torture a function of state policy is that of getting the right people for the job of torturing.

Given how many New York Yankee fans are there are, you would think that it would be easy to find people who are smug, or even delight in the suffering of others. And there are quite a few of those. But when it comes to doing so in the name of the United States of America, some do better than others.

It’s a generally well-known observation in the literature that children who gain pleasure from the sadistic torture of animals are predisposed to grow up to become psychopaths; if not serial killers then at least severe social misfits, with no real empathy for anyone.

This leads to this question: if children who torture animals are likely to be socially maladjusted and even dangerous, what are adults who torture other adults?

Psychopathy lends itself nicely to torture. Psychopaths have a lack of empathy, are incapable of forming deep bonds or caring about others. They are oblivious to the pain of others. The act of torturing someone doesn’t bend them because they were already bent.

They don’t necessarily enjoy inflicting torture, and for outfits like the US military, that makes them ideal for the positions of official state torturers. If it’s just a living to them, they aren’t going to get overexcited and kill the American state victims before any information can be extracted from them.

Psychopaths make darned good torturers, and America should start a breeding program to make sure the country always has enough torturers to beat the Russians or somebody.

There’s another personality type that is good at torture (psychopaths aren’t usually predisposed to such behavior) and that would be those who have Sadistic Personality Disorder. They didn’t set fire to kittens when they were children because they were bored; they did it because they enjoyed the pain the kitten experienced.

When people think of psychopaths, they tend to think of Thomas Harris’ brilliantly spooky character, Hannibal Lector, “Hannibal the Cannibal.” But Lector enjoyed hurting people, and this made him nearly an archetypal Sadistic personality. That he had psychopathic elements to his personality is an accurate portrayal on Harris’ part; the two disorders are not mutually exclusive, and often have what is called “comorbidity”, which means (loosely) that the two often show up in the same personality.

The trouble, though, is that they tend to go through victims at a pretty fast clip, and will cheerfully lie about information obtained just to make their bosses suffer, too. This is Not Good.

There are other personality types who are at least capable of torture. Fundamentalists can be persuaded to torture in the name of a Cause, usually a religious one. Torquemada is the classic example, from the Spanish Inquisition. The trouble is they tend to see their victims as transgressors rather than suspects, and, being emotionally bonded to whatever McGuffin it is that motivates them (god, the state, their race), take perceived defiance of their McGuffins rather personally. In their eyes, you don’t violate the law, or merely oppose the state. You transgress. And that is evil, very evil. A conscientious officer will want to keep an eye on those types, since they prefer to punish, rather than extract data. This tends to use up a lot of Canadians of Lebanese extraction who had the misfortune to be in Yemen in 2001. Since you can’t justify your torture department to the Senate Military Appropriations Committee if all your detainees are dead, fundamentalists tend to be a rather iffy choice for the role of Extractor for the United States.

Narcissists are another poor bet to be official state torturers, even though they, too, will often have an affinity for the role. They like dominating and subjugating others for their own self-aggrandizement. However, as you may have guessed from the name of their condition, people with Narcissistic personality disorder tend to be somewhat self-absorbed. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s all about them.

A narcissistic torturer might have a delightful day rubbing his testicles on the faces of bound captives or making them watch in horror as others rape their children, but at the end of the day, the narcissistic torturer is going to have an empty feeling. It was fun, sure, but at the back of his mind, he knows that he was just doing it as an agent of the United States of America, and sure, he loves his country and all that, but it isn’t just the SAME. When he forces a Iranian woman to teabag him, it isn’t his balls being washed—it’s Uncle Sam’s, metaphorically speaking. America has the power, and he’s just the agent for that power, and that’s a position that doesn’t sit well with narcissists. He’ll want to go home and assert his own authority in his own name.

So he’ll torture the neighbors’ dog to death, or maybe a few random kids a few blocks away, just so he can say that he is THE torturer, he’s the one who’s running the show, dammit, and what he does down at CIA headquarters is just the day job. It’s not even that important to someone like him. He’ll show them. He’ll show them ALL.

The astute reader can see where this would lead to problems for the administration. Therefore, they should avoid narcissists as state torturers.

Because the psychological profile of those willing to engage in torture is so very similar to those who engage in child rape – two very similar activities, when you think about it – there is the added plus that quite a few child molesters will be on the taxpayer payrolls and off the public streets, and working their singular talents at the direction of the administration, rather than just randomly. Any American will feel a thrill of pride knowing they we’ve taken such people and made them happy and productive citizens.

The very worst type to hire as torturer is the person who doesn’t have any significant personality or affective disorders. There are a few of those left, but they tend to be in prison, or some other country. We have a rough time of it, you know.

Normal people don’t really have any affinity for torture at all, even though after watching a few episodes of “24”, or even “American Idol”, they claim to be for it. It’s the ticking bomb thing. Anyone hauled in for parking tickets secretly knows the location of a nuclear weapon that’s going to go off in downtown Bakersfield in about two hours.

Which is what gives the government a training program for torturers. First, give them a rationale. The “ticking bomb” rationale is absurd, but an amazing number of people – over half, according to polls, consider that an acceptable excuse for torture.

Next, convince them that it’s an “us versus them” situation. Along with indoctrination about how all Moslems (or whatever bogeymen it is this week) hate America, put them in controlled experiments where they can get rewards if they administer mild electric shocks to people sitting in a face-to-face situation. While obviously a more confrontational situation than what you get with someone strapped to a waterboard, it does excite the “flight or fight” response, and a surprisingly high percentage of people will press the button and administer the shock.

The best possible training ground for turning ordinary and reasonably emotionally healthy people into torturers is the role of prison guard. There’s a superb German movie, “The Experiment,” that shows how this works. You take two sets of people, arbitrarily divided out of one amorphous group, and put them in a 24-hour-a-day, cut-off-from-the-outside-world setting for a month. One group are prisoners, the other group are prison guards. At first, it’s all in fun, and the subjects joke with one another and it’s all very relaxed and happy. But then, one of the “prisoners” pushes back a little too hard against the unconsciously-assumed authority of one of the prison guards, and the two groups separate, mutually disliking, distrusting, and disrespecting. Because they wield the power, the guards can make the prisoners suffer, and in order to show that they have the power, they do. That is why so many prison guards are such scumbags, little better than their charges and often worse. It’s a great way to cultivate torturers from a population that wasn’t mental to begin with.

America has always prided itself on its morals and resourcefulness, and we owe it to the world to have the very best torturers we can find, people willing to torment without (too much) joy and able to extract answers, even when they know there are none to extract.

Good torture is a delight in the eyes of God. Bad torture is just tacky.

“The long memory is the most radical idea in America.”
Utah Phillips, as recalled by Amy Goodman

I was reminded of Utah Phillips’ observation as I sat down to write this essay on how we approach public policy for dealing with unemployment during a time of mass unemployment. I intended to start off the essay by recalling the title of a book I read in around 1990. But, when I went to Amazon.com to look for the book, I found it wasn’t listed. I figured that it had gone out of print.

Fortunately, my memory – or at least a radical part of it, as I can barely remember my own name when I wake up in the morning – had something of a radical idea: the book I had in mind was And the Wolf Finally Came, by Thomas P. Hoerr (circa 1990). It’s a book about several decades of ups and downs of steel making in Pittsburgh. The author recounts how Pittsburghers had grown accustomed to those ups and downs, and how as one source told the author, “the wolf finally came”; that is, those troublesome ups and downs got replaced by much more troublesome down, period.

Hoerr’s recounting provides a pointed reminder of how unprepared public policy makers can be for—to borrow a word from Jarrod Diamond—Collapse!; and so, how unprepared they can be for Transformation! and for Learning!  I should add that Mancur Olson’s “logic of collective action” predicts foot-dragging by groups who disproportionately benefit from “keepin’ on keepin’ on” with established technology instead of adopting—and adapting—to new technology, the adoption of which would usually entail rearranging relations of power; see Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action; or chapters 2 and 3 of his The Rise and Decline of Nations, which summarize the first book.

The question that links all these points is, what if the current economic “downturn” is really Hoerr’s wolf finally coming… for the whole US economy?  If that’s the case, then unemployment compensation, the primary public policy tool, becomes obsolete, immediately.  That’s because unemployment compensation was conceived as a temporary solution to a temporary problem, getting people through the down part of one cycle to the up part of the next cycle; and not coincidentally, in that very way to facilitate the capitalist practice of accounting for labor as a variable cost, always to be minimized, rather than as a fixed or resource cost, to be sustained.  But Hoerr’s wolf leaves permanent, structural problems in its tracks.

What to do?  No country can keep paying people to not work for what could easily become an oxymoronic “permanent interim” period: no one could.  Think of buggy-whip makers, after the (“horseless carriage”) wolf finally came to places where horse-drawn carriages and related products had been made.

The only viable public policy option is Change!  And the only potentially workable approach to such policy is Transformation-through-Learning!  One workable approach to that would entail changing over to the sort of future-responsive social learning program envisioned by Donald N. Michael in his seminal book, On Learning to Plan—and Planning to Learn (JosseyBass, 1973); later reissued as a second edition, with the leading “On” omitted (Miles River Press, 1997).

But learning is never easy; even acknowledging that learning “just might possibly maybe, sort of, somewhat… well… necessary” can seem to be, and can in fact be, frightening—personally, professionally, financially, and other ways as well.  Dreams dissolve, along with institutional premises upon which they had been premised.  Some people get blamed, and no one knows when more constructive activities have finally supplanted the so-called—and in my view, inappropriately dismissive—“blame game” (it’s unfortunate that the two words rhyme).

Those sufficiently courageous to acknowledge that learning is needed must then deal with the even greater difficulty entailed in actually doing the learning.  And that includes exposing oneself to not-yet familiar evaluation criteria applied by not-yet familiar people in not-yet familiar institutional settings, with outcomes extending from something seen as “success” to something seen as “failure”, and including unsettling outcomes that a person had previously felt insulated from—all demanding even more courage.

But, we must find the courage to learn if we are to fend off Hoerr’s wolf, even if we must risk failing to do so.  That’s because we certainly can’t do any better in our Transformation-through-Learning! than we do in our learning itself.  Hoerr’s wolf sees right through grade inflation, ego inflation, expensive marketing campaigns, and other forms of individual and institutional self-validation.

How can we attempt to do this? By way of example, let me suggest a way that the US government could leverage General Motors—long perceived as unwilling and/or unable to learn—into learning.  (I mean, GM can’t expect the government to give it all the billions it has requested, with no strings attached—can it?)  The government could hold hearings that would focus less on how GM’s new plan “restructures” and “cuts costs”; and instead focus on whether, how, and how well GM’s new plan incorporates learning from their most recent, wretchedly mistaken plans.  Somehow, some of GM’s top managers came up with those wretchedly mistaken plans, and some other group signed-off on adopting them.  GM officials must somehow persuade representatives of taxpayers that they have searched out and identified that “somehow” and learned how to avoid it (and how to recognize and avoid situations like it) in developing their current plan for which they would like to borrow a few billion bucks.

Here are some of the questions I’d ask them to discuss.

1.    Starting two plans ago, with the plan on which the most recent, failed plan was based, how was the set of candidate goals developed?  How were goals selected from those candidate goals?  How were goals prioritized?  What variables were used?  How was disagreement regarding goals selected and/or how those selected goals were prioritized handled?  How often did the CEO end up on the losing side, and what portion of total dollars decided about did those “losses” represent?
2.    How were outcomes projected and evaluated? ?  How were contingencies handled, and how were unanticipatable contingencies distinguished from anticipatable contingencies incompetently handled?
3.    How does each executive interact with his or her subordinates, and how would each executive characterize his or her subordinates’ interactions with their subordinates – down to and including the people who actually make automobiles for GM? How were the implementation and operation of these plans considered in development of these people, and so, in output projections and evaluations? Are employees still wearing “Golden Handcuffs” to reduce risk of losing their jobs?  What provision, if any, did the executives make for feedback – whether favorable or unfavorable – and for incorporating learning based upon it into the plan?
4.    How did GM decide that this plan was “done”?
5.    [Responses to questions 1-4 would provide a benchmark for GM’s approach to learning to change.]
6.    Regarding the current failed plan, how did the process through which the current plan was generated differ from what was just reported about the immediately previous plan?  Which elements changed; which did not? How were such distinctions reached?
7.    How is the change from the most recent past plan to the one now being submitted today different from the change from the first of the plans discussed above to the most recent past plan?
8.    Finally, to lend some solidity to all these more obscure procedural matters, approximately how would GM spend each marginal $1/2 billion?  What specfic substantive and financial benefits would each marginal $1/2 billion expenditure contribute to the success of your plan.

This approach would afford at least a glimpse into GM’s decision-making process, including how and even whether GM is able, willing and inclined to learn as well as how well GM actually goes about learning and building what it does learn into decisions it takes and actions it undertakes. Hopefully, but far from certainly, such a glimpse would help to inform taxpayers’ representatives of GM’s prospects—which is to say, whether loaning GM the money would turn the company around, or merely give Hoerr’s wolf a really big meal.

______________________________

*Dr. Letcher earned the Doctorate from Cornell, studying what he terms “practical political economy”.  He also earned two Masters from Michigan, one in public policy and the other in engineering mechanics—and did his undergrad work at the old Case Institute of Technology.  He always says, “I had great teachers.”  He worked in, studied, and taught about matters of public policy for over thirty years.  He has been writing for We! since March 2008.

One of my best friends and favorite writers, Robert Letcher, has accused those Republicans who oppose President Obama’s stimulus program of “treason by a thousand cuts” (Republicans Giving Civic Lessons?!!!??, We! Magazine, February 14, 2009).  I strongly disagree.

Even more important than the formal definition that Bob cites,  I believe treason has a clear and powerful “public meaning” of disloyalty to one’s country.  Accordingly, unlike words that lack such a universal public meaning, I believe words like treason should only be used when we really (really!) mean it.  Otherwise, they lose their powerful public meaning.  I personally believe that the stimulus program was a very good idea, to try to jump-start our economy and help millions of families survive.  But, I don’t think opposition to the stimulus program in general, or to the process that was used by the Administration and Congress to pass it quickly, comes even close to justifying the use of the word treason, whether by one or a thousand or a million cuts.

I think treason should be reserved for those issues with immediate consequences related to fundamental constitutional principles and which do not involve a “thousand degrees of grayness.”   And nothing involves so many degrees of grayness than a giant stimulus bill put together in a few weeks.  Would a stimulus bill 10 percent smaller or a debate a week or two longer so more members (and the public) could read and digest it, really be the difference between treason and non-treason?  Or, was Obama’s willingness to compromise to get three Republican Senate votes equal to one-thousandth of treason?  Or, was his unwillingness to support a bill 10 percent larger (or much larger as economists like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have advocated?) treason-like?  I think these questions point out the folly of bringing treason into the debate over an economic stimulus program.

Further, I believe flippant charges of treason undermine the democratic project.  In this regard, as much as I disagree with it, I see the Republican opposition to the stimulus as a healthy part of our democratic dialog and debate.  Since polls have shown strong public support for Obama’s economic program in general, and for the stimulus bill in particular, most Republicans were not motivated by near-term political gain.  Sure, some Republican clowns like Limbaugh will portray any stimulus, other than full repeal of all income taxes, as socialism, but many Republicans had more principled reasons for their opposition to the specific stimulus program:  passed too quickly, too much debt, too few tax cuts, inclusion of programs that were not near-term stimulus and should have been debated separately.  But, principled opposition is the lifeblood of a vibrant democracy, and isn’t this exactly what anti-war progressives wanted from the Democratic leadership in the run-up to the war?  Moreover, from a partisan perspective, since “our side” won this time, I even see the opposition as helpful as it gives the public a better understanding of what the Republican Party really stands for and, if the stimulus is successful, could lead the way toward a more fundamental and permanent political transformation.

Finally, remember that    I remember all too well, a few days after my young daughter and I marched in downtown Ann Arbor against the war in the winter of 2003, reading a letter to the editor in the local paper, calling us “traitors” for not falling in line behind President Bush.  I then responded with my own letter, also published, that mirrored Twain’s philosophy of “loving one’s country, not one’s government” and citing Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote supporting one’s right to criticize the President.  I then used the two letters as a history and civics lesson for my daughter about the responsibility of citizens to dissent in a democracy.  I feel just as passionately about the anti-democratic nature of using the “treason card” now that my side is winning.  Democracy demands dissent and dialog, not conformity and bullying-by-words like treason.

Casual use of those few words, like treason, that still have a powerful public meaning only weakens our public discourse and democracy.  Both are on shaky ground as it is.

————————————————————-
Jeff Alson is an engineer and environmentalist who lives with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Research 2000 had a poll the other day that claimed that 32% of Republicans in Georgia would support leaving the United States. This compared to 5% among Democrats, and 14% among independents. As Daily Kos correspondent Arjun Jaikumar remarked, “Apparently, the most conservative of Republicans only love their country when they’re in power. Charming.”

It’s scary only until you realize that there’s not much left of the GOP these days, and the extremist nuts make up a disproportionate number of that GOP “base.” In Georgia, for instance, 25% of voters identify themselves as Republicans (which is higher than the country at large, which is now only 22% Republican. Incredibly, there were more Republicans in Georgia in the 1960s, when the party was seen as northern, anti-Jim-Crow, and liberal). Thirty-two percent of a quarter of the population is 8% of the total population. The eighth percentile will put you right out near the lip of any bell-shaped curve. Welcome to Wingnut World. The land of guns, gawd, and meth. Or “The Knights,” which is the new, done-over PR group fronting for the KKK. And while most mainstream Christians have deserted the GOP in droves, the not-inconsiderable apocalyptic snake-handlers who believe “The Omega Factor” is a gonna-be-true story, are still a fundamental part of that base. The four jackasses of the apocalypse and all that.

I actually drew criticism from one wingnut who chided me, telling me that by questioning the patriotism of people who wanted to secede from the United States, I was doing the Democrats no favors. With most people, I would have assumed sarcasm was being employed, but I’ve dealt with this particular nut before. He really thinks that comparing people who want to grab their guns and open fire on the US Army because America elected a Negro as President to the slaver rebels of 1861 wouldn’t be politically astute. Therefore, the American people would rise up in righteous wrath and demand that I apologize for questioning the patriotism of insurrectionists.

I guess I just wasn’t in a very apologetic mood, despite being raised in Ottawa. I didn’t oblige him.

Of course, Georgia isn’t the worst. Texas is. A majority of Republicans think Texas would be better off without the United States. It would be interesting to see how many Americans think the US might be better off without Texas. Even among state Democrats, who understand that patriotism isn’t just a ploy meant to silence people who disagree with them, support for the idea ran at about 16%, with 80% disapproving. (As always, I wonder about the Olive Oyls, the 4% who can’t decide if they like the idea or not. Heinlein was wrong: some people can’t even muster an opinion on cats).

Georgia actually had a resolution in the Senate, 632, titled “Affirming states’ rights based on Jeffersonian principles; and for other purposes.” The resolution (not binding and not taken up by the state assembly) was based on a resolution Jefferson wrote for the state assembly in Kentucky in 1798. The resolution had a truncated list of things Congress was empowered to do (curiously truncated, since Jefferson had to know what the first Article of the Constitution had to say on the matter) and a stern reminder that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved to the people, or the states.

The resolution, a pointless exercise in batshittery for modern Republicans to be foisting, was silly enough. The reference to Jefferson, with the assumption that it reflected his views on secession, was absurd.

Jefferson had no use for it. In a letter he wrote to John Taylor (a libertarian who approved of slavery), also in 1798, he noted the issues that gave rise to confederalist sentiment, saying, “It is true that we are compleatly under the saddle of Massachusets & Connecticut, and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings as well as exhausting our strength and substance.” But he went on to write, “But who can say what would be the evils of a scission, [separation] and when & where they would end? Better keep together as we are, hawl off from Europe as soon as we can, & from all attachments to any portions of it. And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist.”

He noted that if two states were to secede, such as North Carolina and Virginia, they would take to feuding between themselves in short order, and that only single units of states could hope to succeed.

Even in that, he was wrong. At that time, there was a strong secessionist movement within the state of Massachusetts to break away from what was seen as too much power and control by Boston. The movement achieved its goals, and became the state of Maine. Jefferson would have been flabbergasted to know that in 35 years, his own state of Virginia would secede from America, and immediately thereafter, the northern third of the state would secede from Virginia and rejoin the Union. That’s the chunk known, somewhat illogically, as “West Virginia” today. I live in the state of Jefferson, a region that in a non-binding plebiscite some 16 years ago, voted 91-9% to secede from Sacramento.

Slight difference between the nutballs who want to secede in Georgia, and the Jeffersonians here: if you accuse one of the locals of being disloyal to Sacramento, he won’t get offended. He’ll probably give you a disbelieving guffaw and say, “You THINK?”

Secessionism isn’t unusual by any means. Canada has Quebec, Mexico has Chiapas, and England had…well, everybody.

But usually, a certain amount of thought goes into such a stance. Locals are upset over water rights and general lack of influence in Sacramento. The Quebec separatistes have cultural and language issues.

With the fruitloops in Georgia and Texas, it’s just an inchoate rage. We saw that with the Tea Baggers, who raged over the fact that Obama was lowering their taxes, had no interest in taking their guns, wasn’t a socialist, and could be trusted around white women. At least, that’s the reality. The view they have of Obama is some cracked mirror inversion, and nothing can dissuade them from the endless howling.

Even as they destroy the GOP and decrease their own influence, they simply get nastier and alienate more people from the party. Erik Erickson, who runs the influential Red State blog that considers itself the future of the GOP, snarled that departing Supreme Court Justice David Souter was “a goat-fucking child molester.” Given that the GOP has a candidate named Horsely running for governor in the Georgia state primary who claims to have once had sex with a mule, Erickson might want to go a bit easier on the allegations of animal abuse.

The GOP greeted the news of Souter’s departure with a chorus of petulant whines, which, while not as vile as Erickson’s, were certainly the sort of stuff that will rile up the nutballs and further alienate moderates. One party leader demanded that Obama pick a conservative for the SC because George HW Bush accidentally named a “liberal” – Souter – to the SC so the Dems owed them one.

My friend Jim Kennemur at Lonesome Mongoose passed along the gem about Erickson, but he shared an even better idea that he passed along from Nell Scovell, of Vanity Fair. Scovell knows of a young, bright, gifted law professor at Brandeis University with a strong background in Constitutional law, having clerked for a Supreme Court Justice in the past. Further, she is black, and would share substantially Barack Obama’s own philosophy on the Constitution. Her qualifications would be as good as those of most of the sitting justices, and better than some.

Her name is Anita Hill. Yes, that Anita Hill.

Look, the right wing are going to scream and cry and kick their heels and threaten to leave the country no matter who Obama names to fill Souter’s spot on the bench. Unless Obama were to cave and name David Limbaugh or Jim Bybee to the court, and with an effectively filibuster proof majority in the Senate, that’s not going to happen.

And the beauty of it is that Hill IS very well qualified, and would probably be a damned good judge.

And if the Republicans don’t like it, they can threaten to secede. With any luck, they’ll wave big American flags as they do so, just to remind everyone of just how absurd they’ve become.

Arlen Spector?!?!?! The first time I blurted that out was during an industry screening of Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, in which his name came up in connection with the rogue “magic bullet” issue. I just had another Arlen Spector blurt a few minutes ago (as of this writing, anyway).

He’s switching? Defecting? “Coming home,” as some people on the other side of the aisle (oops, I mean, his side of the aisle now, don’t I?) have noted with the added word “welcome”? The newest Senate Democrat, the Man of the Hour, has even moved the Swine Flu and his former GOP sister Susan “we don’t need no stinking epidemic funding!” Collins off the top of the breaking news watch.

Well, okay, I’m celebrating. I guess.

My instinct is not to trust this too much. I can’t help looking this gift horse directly in the mouth, through the teeth, and down the hatch. At least he seems to be somewhat honest, openly admitting how he recognized painfully well that he’d be eaten for breakfast by a primary challenge from a more rigidly conservative challenger, which would likely move his seat into the Democratic column in the 2010 election anyway.

Spector also seems honest enough to tip his hand on the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to the Office of Legal Counsel. Good to know, and not particularly surprising. I remember what a rough time he gave Anita Hill when she tried to warn us about the questionable judgment and character of then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas. I remember him posturing on any number of issues through the years and SOUNDING as though he was going to be as reasonable as can be to the Democratic or liberal point of view, only to wind up back in Republicans’ arms again when it counted.

Look, when I’m out there blogging or in some political chat room or even occasionally just on Facebook, I’m the first to say I’m as Machiavellian as the next guy. I’m glad he’s one of us. Kinda. Because I’m not sure I’ll ever be completely certain about him, and I won’t be counting on him too much. He’s been a Republican, or at least, been in bed with them, for far too long to convince me completely. He’s admitted that he, too, is pretty Machiavellian – this latest maneuver being the most glaring example. He’s not the only one worth watching closely, though. Looks like we’re going to see some mighty elaborate political chess-playing in the weeks and months ahead. This changes the game board, and there’ll be a ripple effect that will be gobsmackingly fascinating.

Despite Mitch McConnell’s insistence that this is strictly a Pennsylvania story, it’s anything but. The Minnesota Senate stand-off starring the hapless Norm Coleman now becomes ever more glaring. Pass the popcorn and watch the ramifications start to roll out. It’s probably gonna get GOOO-OOOOD.

This may wind up moving Governor Tim Pawlenty up in the GOP food chain as their great white hope for the future. I strongly suspect he secretly believes that if he’d been John McCain’s choice of running mate instead of Sarah Palin, he’d be vice president now. How long will he play politics with that seat and obstruct Al Franken’s increasingly justifiable claim to the job, now that the Dems will technically have 59 votes? Perhaps we’ll see Pawlenty staking out a claim as party savior as their last fire door as the flames roar down the hallway toward it? Pawlenty certainly has no motivation to hand the 60th vote to Senate Democrats anytime soon. And the longer he holds out (and the hell with what his own state might need, with only 50% Senate representation in these tough times), the bigger a hero he’s likely to be to his party’s hardcores.

And there’s the hardcore thing, too. The more moderates – either civilian or office-holder – will continue to defect from the Republican Party as we now know it. Spector’s move has made that all the more acceptable and will give them cover if they were previously hesitant to stick their necks out this far. The 13th-century minds currently in control of the GOP, who are hellbent on pushing it as far to the right as they can, will continue to alienate reasonable minds of every persuasion. I’ve tried to have conversations with them myself, and they seem determined to avoid getting the message. Whether it’s some congressional staffer in a hardline GOP representative’s office or my pleasant but misguided neighbor down the street, there’s a surprisingly prevailing feeling that they lost in November either because they didn’t package their positions effectively, or they weren’t conservative enough.

These poor souls have spent a couple of decades by now trying to move the country to the right, and then prematurely proclaiming that America is a center-right country philosophically. Well, they’re wrong. Arlen Spector’s decision just puts a period on the end of one of the sentences here.

Liberal principles have been under assault since the dawn of the Reagan era, but majorities in America STILL support a woman’s right to choose. The last eight years of horror – on the GOP’s watch – have been enough to convince solid majorities of voters to give Barack Obama an absolute mandate – not the house-of-cards pretend version Republicans boasted nonstop that George W. Bush had earned. Overwhelming adversities, especially those that cross state lines, ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the foreclosure crisis and Wall Street mess and now the spreading Swine Flu, are waking people up to the value and need of a strong and able federal government – and the fact that these kinds of necessities cost tax money. Look at Texas Governor Rick “maybe we just oughta seceed” Perry desperately scrambling for help from the CDC only days after excoriating federal spending and priorities, with the Swine Flu now infecting his state. Yes, it’s true, freedom isn’t free, but neither are all those government services and programs you don’t want to admit you really do want and can’t live without. Much of what’s left of the GOP just doesn’t get that. And they won’t. It’s simply not in them.

The Specter Switch will mean that BOTH parties have to look at themselves and at their future. Personally, I’d dearly love to see the dreams of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist turned upside down and inside out – and forever if possible! The carefully-engineered “great political realignment” of Rove’s design appears ready to morph into perhaps a generation of Democratic control. Norquist’s long-cherished goal of shrinking the federal government so small that it could be drowned in a bathtub shrivels by the day into near-nothingness itself. I know all about the arguments in favor of a two-party system and checks and balances and all that. But the one-party rule that we just barely survived as a nation during most of this decade inflicted so much damage, some of it of the gravest kind on our poor country domestically and in all corners overseas, that we’re in desperate need of strong and decisive reversal and a whole lot of it. The Republicans and their increasingly radical political philosophy have hurt and divided this country so profoundly that they deserve to wither on the vine – while the rest of us clean up their many messes.

Democrats now have to make sure their own burgeoning majority is protected and nurtured, and keeps its integrity so it survives for many years. There should be more of us on the Democratic/liberal/progressive end of the spectrum, anyway. After all, the multiple disasters that Republicans and extremist conservatives left behind, everywhere you look, will require an increasingly large clean-up crew anyway. And, Senator Spector, since it’s your now-former crowd that screwed everything up and left us in all this wreckage, it’s only fair that you be one of the first to grab a broom and some scrub-brushes.

Todd may or may not have felt that major investment houses and banks and insurance companies had made terrible sacrifices, but he clearly wanted to know why middle-class people weren’t making more of a sacrifice.

This came on a day when newspapers were reporting on the “tent cities” springing up across America, the 21st century equivalent of “Hoovertowns” during the Great Depression, shanty towns of planks and boards where the desperate homeless struggled to live. Sacramento opened up the state fair grounds for homeless families to pitch their tents where they might be a bit safer from the inevitable predators who have appeared to prey on such desperate families, and take what little they have left.

The same White House press corps who obsessed over a tax increase that would only have a minor effect on people making over $250,000 while ignoring vast tax relief for the 99% of Americans who are less affluent didn’t bat an eye at the shameless question. They’re WEALTHY! Aren’t they ENTITLED? Of course regular people should sacrifice more! These corporate “journalists” are concerned, because less and less working people seem to be reading or watching them, and that could threaten their bonuses at the end of the year.

During the Great Depression, wealthy Americans complained about how working people had stopped buying food and paying rent because they were ungrateful, or part of a socialist revolution, or just to cause headaches for the wealthy. They were quite put out by it, really. Then FDR started stripping the plutocracy of the power to which it have become accustomed, and resentment turned to panic and anger. Some of America’s wealthiest families aligned themselves with the Fascists, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, and the Bushes even had peripheral involvment in an effort to stage a coup against FDR in 1935.

Jared Diamond, the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” interviewed with PBS and said: “It seems to me that one of the predictors of a happy versus an unhappy outcome, has to do with the role of the elite or the decision makers or the politicians, or the rich people within the society. If the society is structured so that the decision makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they are motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole of society. If the decision makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society then they are likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.”

Plutocrats aren’t in the same life boat as the rest of us, and indeed, many of them feel they should even have to share the same ocean unless they need someone to do their fishing for them. It isn’t even that they are malevolent—many of them aren’t. They’re just disengaged. Our problems are not their problems, and they see dislocations such as Depressions as being, not a threat to country or society, but an inconvenience to their class.

Historically, they have bought up much of the press in order to propagandize, and the latest rise of plutocracy in America has been no exception. They bought propaganda clowns first, and, as conditions for them improved, both in terms of capital and in terms of what they were legally permitted to do, they bought up much of the formerly independent media.

Rush Limbaugh is the best known of the propaganda clowns. Recently, grousing about how GM paid an average of $70 a worker while Toyota paid $26, Limbaugh, without actually using the word “pension”, said, “[T]he Big Three are going down the tubes in part because of both the insane benefits for current workers, and the crazy compensation for retirees [...] You can’t pay people who produce nothing for you. And you can’t pay a whole bunch of them over and over again who don’t do anything, even if they have in the past.”

Limbaugh’s listeners aren’t the brightest people around, but surely some of them must have realized that Limbaugh was suggesting that GM just scrap the pension fund and leave all those workers who put in a life’s work for GM to live off Social Security. Of course, Limbaugh doesn’t like Social Security, either. Thinks it’s “socialist”. So basically, he’s saying, “The retirees serve no useful function. Let ‘em forage in the dump or starve.” Pensions are “crazy compensation for retirees”. Something to keep in mind if any Republican is still trying to argue that the private sector should take over Social Security.

It also explain’s Chuck Todd’s question. Doubtlessly paid well enough to be in the top 2% of income earners in the country, he sees no reason why he should pay an extra three cents on every dollar he makes above a quarter million, and wants to know why people making $12,000 a year aren’t getting the same hit to their income.

When the upper class is powerful enough to buy up the media like that, then you have a plutocracy.

They bought up the government, too, making politicians endebted to them through the system of legalized bribes known as the campaign contribution system. Look at the large collection of vapid millionaires, not just in the Senate which has always been infested with such, but the House, which was once thought of as “the people’s House” — what the British call “the House of Commons”. Commoners. Us.

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” - Supreme Court Justice Louis B. Brandeis

Throughout history, American’s have been vigilant to prevent the encroachment against their freedoms. There were three likely sources for such encroachments: the government, the churches, and the aristocracy. The founders recognized that a government that was accountable to the people was “a necessary evil” and that its chief role was to curtail the power of the church and the aristocracy. If government was “a good servant” in the control of the people, it became “a terrible master” in the hands of the priests or the plutocracy. Jefferson proposed limiting the rise of a landed gentry by applying a 100% tax to landed estates upon the death of the land holder, returning the land to the government for resale.

“Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty.” - Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes understood that a plutocracy was destructive, not just because of its insularity, arrogance and wretched excess, but because it simply sucked the money out of an economy. It happened in 1837, in 1873, in 1896, in 1929, and it’s happening now.

They disavow any role in the collapse, and blame workers, government, unions, anyone they can think of. It was that way in the wild swings of the economy in the 19th century, and again in the Great Depression, and so it is now. That’s why Todd snivels that the poor aren’t carrying the same burden as the rich, and why Limbaugh inveighs against pensioners as a waste of a company’s valuable resources.

They pretend that the loss of consumers in a consumer-based economy came as a total surprise, and they claim that nobody could have seen trouble brewing in 1999 when Glass-Steagell, the law that prevented banks from making wild investments in the market, was repealed. Senator Durban did, predicting that in 10 years time (about, oh, now) we would see massive bailouts have have a great deal of reason to regret letting the banks run wild like that. Nor was he the only one.

In 2004, James K. Galbraith said, “The cozy plutocracy of McKinley and his successors–Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover–could not stand before the needs of the modern world. It can’t be brought back now. Bush’s effort to do so will bring misery for many, perhaps for many years. But the final outcome is not in doubt. Bush’s second term, if it comes, will fail, and America will thereafter change course; democracy and common sense will assert themselves in the end.”

Let’s hope he’s right.

In the Great Depression, things got bad enough that the power of the Plutocrats was broken, and they were beaten back for two generations. America went on to become the richest and most powerful country in history. Without those parasites, it can recover a thrive once again.

With any luck at all, we’re about to watch history repeat itself.