RFK Action Front

The Enlightenment as moral cover for unjust racial hierarchies

2011-05-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, this is it exactly. From The New Yorker, "Books: The Inner Voice: Gandhi's Real Legacy:"

Gandhi’s ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. Born in 1869 in a backwater Indian town, he came of age on a continent pathetically subject to the West, intellectually as well as materially. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats were free to transport millions of Asian laborers to far-off colonies (Indians to South Africa, Chinese to the Caribbean), to exact raw materials and commodities from Asian economies, and to flood local markets with their manufactured products. Europeans, convinced of their moral superiority, also sought to impose profound social and cultural reforms upon Asia. Even a liberal figure like John Stuart Mill assumed that Indians had to first grow up under British tutelage before they could absorb the good things—democracy, economic freedom, science—that the West had to offer. The result was widespread displacement: many Asians in their immemorial villages and market towns were forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family, and tradition amid rumors of powerful white men fervently reshaping the world, by means of compact and cohesive nation-states, the profit motive, and superior weaponry.
Dignity, even survival, for many uprooted Asians seemed to lie in careful imitation of their Western conquerors. Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English. He studied law in London and, on his return to India, in 1891, tried to set up first as a lawyer, then as a schoolteacher. But a series of racial humiliations during the following decade awakened him to his real position in the world. Moving to South Africa in 1893 to work for an Indian trading firm, he was exposed to the dramatic transformation wrought by the tools of Western modernity: printing presses, steamships, railways, and machine guns. In Africa and Asia, a large part of the world’s population was being incorporated into, and made subject to the demands of, the international capitalist economy. Gandhi keenly registered the moral and psychological effects of this worldwide destruction of old ways and life styles and the ascendancy of Western cultural, political, and economic norms.
He was not alone. By the early twentieth century, modern Chinese and Muslim intellectuals were also turning away from Europe’s universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, which they saw as a moral cover for unjust racial hierarchies..."
--Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker, May 2, 2011

Mishra is reviewing a new book on Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld, "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India." In the book Lelyveld contends that the real Gandhi was much different than the myth created in the Hollywood movie -- and that Gandhi's actual political program was much bigger and more radical than we usually understand.

Gandhi’s indictment of modern civilization went further. According to him, the industrial revolution, by turning human labor into a source of power, profit, and capital, had made economic prosperity the central goal of politics, enthroning machinery over men and relegating religion and ethics to irrelevance. As Gandhi saw it, Western political philosophy obediently validated the world of industrial capitalism. If liberalism vindicated the preoccupation with economic growth at home, liberal imperialism abroad made British rule over India appear beneficial for Indians—a view many Indians themselves subscribed to. Europeans who saw civilization as their unique possession denigrated the traditional virtues of Indians—simplicity, patience, frugality, otherworldliness—as backwardness.

Gandhi never ceased trying to overturn these prejudices of Western modernity. He dressed as an Indian peasant and rejected all outward signs of being a modern intellectual or politician. True civilization, he insisted, was about moral self-knowledge and spiritual strength rather than bodily well-being, material comforts, or great art and architecture. He upheld the self-sufficient rural community over the heavily armed and centralized nation-state, cottage industries over big factories, and manual labor over machines. He also encouraged satyagrahis to feel empathy for their political opponents and to abjure violence against the British. For, whatever their claims to civilization, the British, too, were victims of the immemorial forces of human greed and violence that had received an unprecedented moral sanction in the political, scientific, and economic systems of the modern world. Satyagraha might awaken in them an awareness of the profound evil of industrial civilization.

There are two points I want to make about this article and the above quotes:

1. This is the first time in my life that I've ever seen the Enlightenment challenged in print. And the critique feels exactly right. I feel like I've been circling around this idea for a year now and finally someone put their finger right on it -- which is this: many of the enlightenment philosophies that we celebrate in the West: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism; and classical liberalism -- are really just elaborate justifications for racial hierarchy, colonialism, neocolonialism, and hegemonic dominance of capital over people. (Neoliberal economic theory as practiced by Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago consists of taking the racist, colonial, hegemonic theories of Bentham (and Hayek) and expressing them through calculus and graphs.)

2. One of the things that people don't understand about Gandhi is that for him -- satyagraha was about liberating the British from the violence of CAPITALISM. For Gandhi, British rule, capitalism, and violence were all one in the same, and liberation, economic simplicity, and nonviolence were all one in the same. Modern progressive Americans want to hold up the nonviolence piece but they don't recognize that they are missing the larger context -- that violence is a symptom of capitalism and nonviolence necessarily also requires the rejection of capitalism. I think that's really quite profound.

What Barack Obama could learn from Lula da Silva

2011-01-01T13:07:00.000-08:00

For the last eight years, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has been an unapologetic champion for the poor and working class. The result?

By expanding cash-transfer programs for the poor, subsidizing housing loans and raising the minimum wage, his government pulled more than 20 million people out of poverty. The middle class has grown by 29 million people since 2002.

The country, which received a record $30 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund when it was close to economic collapse in 2002, now lends money to the I.M.F.

And what happens when you show leadership by consistently standing up for your base?

Mr. da Silva, the 65-year-old former metalworker with a fourth-grade education, leaves office with an approval rating of more than an 80 percent.

It's sort of obvious to the point of being ridiculous -- if you stand up and represent the interests of 80% of the public, then you'll have 80% approval ratings. In some ways it demonstrates the insanity of the U.S. political system. In DC, Democratic elected officials actually believe that they have to regularly piss on their base in order to be taken seriously (and it seems that President Obama has come to believe that he has to be Wall Street's bitch in order to get re-elected). And then they wonder why they have such low approval ratings.

Obama could have 80 percent approval ratings right now too if he would stand up for the people who voted for him by:

bailing out homeowners in the same way that he rescued the banks;
supporting Medicare for All instead of mandates to purchase private insurance; and
taxing the rich to pay for (human and physical) infrastructure to grow the economy for everyone.

It's simple, simple simple -- stand up for your base and they will stand up for you.

Note: quotes are from NY Times: "Brazil's New Leader Begins in the Shadow of Predecessor" by Alexei Barrionuevo, December 31, 2010.

Their canon, Our canon

2010-10-02T12:52:00.000-07:00

Completely brilliant article today in the NY Times on what radical conservatives are reading these days -- and how these writings are showing up in the speeches and plans of Republican candidates and office holders. I highly encourage you to read the whole article, Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts by Kate Zernike. So what are crazy Republicans reading these days?

"The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek (1944)
"The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat (1850)
"The 5000 Year Leap" by W. Cleon Skousen (1981)

Like the bible of modern conservatism, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, these books are basically conservative porn made up of fantasies about a return to the 19th century when white men still ruled the planet and everyone else took orders from them.

But the article got me thinking about what a progressive canon might be and what foundational texts should inform our movement. And it was harder to come up with a list of foundational books than I imagined. I've come up with a few (none by economists by the way) but I'd welcome any additional suggestions from you in the comments below.

I think every good progressive should read:

The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
No Logo by Naomi Klein
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

But what's interesting about each of these books (and this is a self criticism more than anything else) is that they are all long on what is wrong with conservatives but short on what we would do if we were actually in power. Derrick Jensen has the most brilliant analysis of modern culture that I've ever read but his remedy is for us to return to being hunter gatherers (which is a nonstarter for most people). Howard Zinn would have us kill fewer people in wars of aggression (always a good idea) but as far as I know, he doesn't necessarily provide a comprehensive political program for how one might achieve a world at peace. And Naomi Klein (in Shock Doctrine) provides a robust defense of Keynesianism, which is great, but I gotta figure that ultimately progressives should be fighting for more than just a return to Keynes. So anyway, if you have a chance please list what books you think should inform the progressive canon in the comments below (no sign in required -- but haters, as always will be deleted).

George Lakoff 2.0

2010-08-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

Okay so cognitive linguist George Lakoff has shown that there are two core frames when it comes to politics:

The nurturant parent model; and the
Strict father model.

Even though all people have both core frames in their heads, in progressives the nurturant parent model is active and in conservatives the strict father model is active.

It seems to me that Lakoff does perhaps the best job of any living person of explaining political worldviews and why progressives and conservatives think the way they do.

But here's the thing. Which model is factually correct? Both models make claims that are empirically provable. Does the nurturant parent model actually lead to healthier, more creative kids (and later society)? Does the strict father model lead to better behaved, more moral kids (and later society)?

In almost every case, the evidence from the social sciences shows that the nurturant parent model is more likely to lead to healthier creative people and societies.

Take for example the recent "multiyear study that shows that spanking kids makes them more aggressive later on." Progressive claim that spanking causes all sorts of psychological problems in kids that later leads to aggressive or criminal behavior. Conservative claim that spanking leads to more moral citizens. But it turns out that only progressives are factually correct.

Or take tax cuts. Progressives claim that government spending (on infrastructure) is the best way to stimulate the economy. Conservatives claim that tax cuts (for the rich) are the best way to stimulate the economy. But you can actually measure the multiplier effective of each approach -- and it turns out that the multiplier effect of government spending (1.59) is much greater than the multiplier effect of tax cuts (0.29).

But what's weird about Lakoff is that he seems to stop at merely pointing out the differences in worldview -- without going the next step and arguing that the correctness of each worldview can be measured through scientific evidence.

The Prop 8 trial illustrates the point that I'm trying to make. By going to trial, supporters of marriage equality were able to put all of the evidence on the table. And it turns out that it is empirically provable that marriages involving couples of the same sex lead to just as healthy and happy relationships, families, and societies as marriages involving opposite sex couples. By contrast, the opponents of gay marriage had their strict father model of morality but no scientific evidence to back up the validity of their claims.

See that's the thing. In almost every case, the conservative worldview is not only different, it is factually incorrect. So it seems to me that not only should we point out the differences in worldview between progressives and conservatives, but we should always go the next step and explain that usually only the progressive worldview is factually correct in the real world.

List of non-traditional conference methods (aka unconferences)

2010-07-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

I recently queried my Facebook friends to get their counsel on the following question:

Can anyone point me to examples of non-traditional conference methods? The old model of 'expert-in-the-front, everyone-else-just-listen-and-clap,' seems played out. Are there conferences that invert the pyramid to involve and engage everyone in participation, expertness, and action?

And the stuff they came back with is amazing. Check it out:

Appreciative Inquiry
Barcamp
Birds of a Feather
Dotmocracy
Fishbowl (conversation) -- love this idea!
Ignite
Infocamp
Knowledge Cafe
Lightning Talks
Nominal Group Technique
Open Space Technology
Pecha Kucha
Speed Geeking
TeachMeet
Unconference
World Café

So it turns out that there is a whole world of non-traditional conference possibilities. I'm surprised that many progressive groups continue stick with the old format -- because 'expert-up-front, everyone-else-listen-and-clap'' is not consistent with our democratic philosophy and worldview. If we believe that the people have the best answers (which I think we do), then I believe we need to find ways of tapping into that wisdom.

some reflections from Netroots Nation 2010 -- the progressive blogosphere is a living, growing, learning organism

2010-07-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

Here is what conservatives have going for them:

Hierarchy.

The entire conservative worldview and the structure of their political machine (messages, think tanks, and organizational structure) is built on hierarchy. The benefits that come from hierarchy are unity, message discipline, and focus.

Here is what progressive have going for us:

Diversity.

As James Surowiecki shows in The Wisdom of Crowds, the benefits of diversity are extraordinary. The more diverse, decentralized, and independent the group is, the more likely it is to come to the correct answer. Hierarchical groups all move in the same direction (which is nice) but they tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over. All of the diversity within the progressive movement leads to conflict within the group -- but over time, by engaging in the constant battle of ideas, progressives tend to arrive at the correct answer to the various challenges facing society. So for example, in the last two hundred years, progressives have figured out abolitionism, universal suffrage, and how to win two world wars, while conservatives have figured out some greeting card platitudes about personal responsibility.

The internet in general, and blogging is particular, is really built for a progressive way of thinking. It's diverse, decentralized, and wildly independent. Progressive blogs -- most notably sites like DailyKos, Pam's House Blend, Calitics -- have figured out how to create smart groups that harness the wisdom of the crowd. These sites solicit diversity by allowing diaries so that anyone can participate. But then these site harvest the wisdom of the crowd by moving the best diaries (based on the reaction of the crowd in the comments) up to the recommended list or onto the front page. As a result, the progressive blogosphere has become an ideas factory that is consistently spitting out the best answers on the major issues of the day. Through intense debate over the course of many months, the progressive blogosphere came up with the best answer for health care (Medicare for all), process (end the filibuster), and financial regulatory reform (consumer financial protection agency, regulate derivatives, relief for homeowners instead of Wall Street).

What really impressed me about Netroots Nation 2010 (that I just returned from) is that the progressive blogosphere continues to grow and learn and change in pretty profound ways. It seems to me that the progressive blogosphere is like a single living organism (with a million little individuals cells) that is developing increasing complexity and sophistication. So for example, lots of progressive bloggers are now making connections between race and class and economics and labor and the environment -- really starting to see their single issues within the large systemic frameworks that create oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr., late in his career, started making the connections between race and class and the Vietnam war. So too, progressive bloggers are starting to get that racism, laissez-faire capitalism, militarism, homophobia, and sexism, all stem from the same system of domination.

To see what I'm talking about, check out the following videos from the conference:

Van Jones' keynote

Tim Wise on the links between racism and economic crisis -- starts at the 26:30 mark (you can just move the video slider to cue it up to that spot)

Rev. Lennox Yearwood (starts at 36:50)

Majora Carter (starts at 41:45)

As people start to connect the dots, it also creates the possibilities for lasting systemic change. In spite of the daily challenges, it seems to me that this is a really exciting time to be a progressive.

Update #1: Ian Welsh has a great post up on his site about the tensions in the room at Netroots Nation 2010. I think this is the best summary I've seen of the mood of, and divisions in, the audience at the event. Where I differ with Welsh's analysis is that I think that the programming at NN was kinda genius. Van Jones, Tim Wise, Lennox Yearwood, and Majora Carter all connected the dots in really profound ways that I think set the stage for a much deeper systemic shift in the movement in the years to come. At least that's my hope.

Casinos make the case for high levels of taxation

2010-07-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

I spent the last four days in the air conditioned wonderland of a casino (the Rio) in Las Vegas at the annual Netroots Nation convention. Many people love casinos, myself included. But I never gamble (as they guy in the elevator said to me yesterday, "The only way to win is not to play.") I love casinos because they are freaking nice -- gorgeous innovative architecture, air conditioned, pretty lights, good music, and extra oxygen pumped in to make everyone feel better.

Washing my hands one afternoon in the casino's restroom -- complete with high ceilings, granite countertops and a dedicated employee to keep it clean, I got to thinking... it seems to me that casinos make the case for much higher levels of taxation in society.

Because the REASON that casinos are so nice is that they tax the hell out of people. Going to Vegas is like putting your money into a mutual fund that is guaranteed to lose at least .2% of your money (blackjack) and may cost you as much as 29% of your money (Keno). But people LOVE Las Vegas -- in part because all of our losing then leads to great works of architecture (replicas of Paris, New York, and Egypt for example) and cheap breakfast buffets (as one side note -- the Rio now offers an ALL YOU CAN EAT ALL DAY buffet at 7 different casinos for the one low price of $39.99).

In fact that's the reason that palaces in France are so nice and the reason why so many people want to visit France as a tourist destination -- because a former French government taxed its people at a high rate and built great public works that have lasted for centuries.

Interestingly, Vegas casinos also tax the rich at a very high rate. The whales (like Tiger Woods or Jerry Buss) with their private jets, limos, and secret entrances to the casinos end up leaving much more cash behind than the average gambler.

The strangest thing about Las Vegas is that people actually seem to enjoy losing. It's like the purifying ritual of risk and loss taps into some deep limbic desire of Thanatos, for loss and rebirth.

So I guess all the IRS needs to do in order to become more popular is to making paying taxes more fun and exciting! Perhaps they could add scantily clad go-go girls dancing on the customer service desks at the various IRS offices while pumping in extra oxygen and 1990s dance hits? Also, the IRS could merge with various state lotteries (which after all are just voluntary tax systems structured as games) -- such that once a year someone's name is pulled out of a hat and his/her entire tax bill is forgiven!

But all kidding aside, the fact is, casinos show that under some conditions, people voluntarily embrace high levels of taxation. Las Vegas involves something of a trade -- casinos give inexpensive food, inexpensive accommodations, and lovely public works in return for high levels of taxation (gambling). I think the same is true for the public sector in a way -- if people feel that they are getting a high level of service -- health care (not just health insurance), education, and well-designed public works projects, they will be much more willing to pay taxes at a higher rate.

Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality in 4 sentences or less

2010-07-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

For those put off by the prodigious length (851 pages) of Ken Wilber's seminal work, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, here's the whole book in 4 sentences:

Why is there something rather than nothing?
(Um, we really don't know.)
But there is something and that is pretty cool.
And evolution seems to involve increasing layers of complexity so maybe evolution points us toward God.

There, I just saved you $23 and 200 hours of reading time.

Ya gotta read this

2010-07-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

Errol Morris' recent 5-part series on the Anosognosic’s Dilemma (published in the NY Times) is one of the most mind-blowing things I've read in a long time. From the article:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

What Morris does so brilliantly in the series is to explore the ways in which we ALL engage in acts of self deception -- in effect convincing ourselves that we are 'wearing the juice' -- even when no one else is buying our acts of self deception. Turns out there is an entire name for this phenomenon: The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.[3]

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

I highly recommend reading the whole series. I think it has the potential to change how we look at the world, ourselves, and each other.

I'm calling BS on Tesla Motors

2010-06-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

For the last several years, Tesla Motors has been shaking down just about every public sector economic development agency they can find. They've solicited huge subsidies from the cities of San Jose, Los Angeles, and East Palo Alto. They received a massive loan from the (U.S.) federal government and investments from Daimler AG (maker of Mercedes), Toyota, and Aabar Investments (the global investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi). And today they raised another $226 million through a smashingly successful Initial Public Offering (IPO).

The only problem?

"The company hasn't had a profitable quarter since it was founded in 2003. It has sold only 1,000 of its high-end Roadster sports cars." --Dan Strumpf, Associated Press

So you've got an unprofitable company in an overcrowded marketplace making overpriced cars that aren't actually selling very well. What's not to like?

If it looks and smells like a Ponzi scheme, it probably it is.

In some ways Tesla Motors is a policy maker's dream. A new American car company, creating green cars, based in Palo Alto, the high tech capital of the universe. But in my experience, anytime a company starts walking around with its hand out asking for subsidies, something is amiss. That's because smart companies, profitable companies, don't want guvmint messing around with their business. They want to quietly and quickly go about making as much money as they possibly can with as little government interference as possible.

Economic development programs usually get embarrassed when they try to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. Generally speaking, the best economic development policy is to invest in great infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, and ports -- and human infrastructure -- health and education -- investments that benefit all companies in a region.

Look, lots and lots of people can make a great car. But building a great car COMPANY is extremely difficult. That's why only a tiny handful of the most successful industrialized economies in the world even have an automotive industry. In order to create a successful car COMPANY you have to get extremely good deals on steel, plastics, aluminum, energy, robots, semiconductors, etc. And that benefits those companies with enormous SCALE -- not small start ups. Thus only a few GIANT industrial companies, like Mitsubishi have even tried to enter the car marketplace in the last 50 years.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong about this. But Tesla motors feels like the DeLorean Motors of our day -- a flashy idea for a car that attracts lots of investment -- only to end up mired in legal battles once investors realize that there is an enormous difference between a great idea for a car and a profitable car company.

stuff they didn't teach you in school

2010-06-22T22:44:00.000-07:00

David Wong, the Senior Editor of Cracked.com has a new post titled: The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School. As you would expect, it's funny and racy and irreverent. But it's also surprisingly thoughtful. In fact, the #1 most important thing they didn't teach you in school is so good I want to quote it here:

#1. Social Studies: Life is Hard and You Will Die, Get Over It

We're not foolish enough to think one semester of this course can deprogram years of Hollywood bullshit. That's why we make this a daily class, that continues from K through 12.

Many of you will get very depressed in your 20s, and some of you will stay that way the rest of your lives. Over the years your garage band will break up, you career dream will fall through, a girl will break your heart, you'll be unhappy with your body, you'll lose your parents, your favorite pet will die, you will endure at least one very terrible injury that requires hospitalization and breaks new boundaries for what kind of pain you thought was possible.

And your childhood memories will be exploited to buy vast amounts of cocaine. Deal with it.

The reason why this will lead to depression, where it may not have done so for an equivalent person 200 years ago, is because you were raised on illogical stories where things always work out for the main character for utterly arbitrary reasons. Han Solo can shoot straight, but none of the bad guys can--even though they train more. John McClane beats the terrorists because he has toughness and perseverance--something the bad guys lack, even though they should be equally desperate. If a guy and a girl are right for each other, they always wind up together, careers and geography and personal hang-ups be damned.

Here's the problem: these fantasies were created by adults, as a means of escape from the real world. You, however, have been watching them since you were five--for most of us these were our first impressions of how the adult world works, even if on a subconscious level. You had no context to realize they were bullshit. It sounds frivolous, but that doesn't change the fact that some of you reading this will not survive the long process of learning how different the real world is.

If it helps, try to remember that you're still one of the one percent of humanity that was born in a time and place where there is such a thing as anesthesia.

Chapters Include:
I. You Can Die at Any Moment, Get Over It;
II. Required Reading: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
III. Roleplay Exercise: Various Scenes from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
IV. Yes, It Takes 10,000 Hours to Get Really Good at Something, But At Least You're Not Scavenging Through a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland.

Definitely check out the whole article for a few good laughs and few insights that will make you nod in appreciation.

the roots of power

2010-06-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

Three really insightful paragraphs from the classic 1977 book, Poor People's Movements:

Common sense and historical experience combine to suggest a simple but compelling view of the roots of power in any society. Crudely but clearly stated, those who control the means of physical coercion, and those who control the means of producing wealth, have power over those who do not. This much is true whether the means of coercion consists in the primitive force of a warrior caste or the technological force of a modern army. And it is true whether the control of production consists in control by priests of the mysteries of the calendar on which agriculture depends, or control by financiers of the large-scale capital on which industrial production depends. Since coercive force can be used to gain control of the means of producing wealth, and since control of wealth can be used to gain coercive force, those two sources of power tend over time to be drawn together within one ruling class.

Common sense and historical experience also combine to suggest that these sources of power are protected and enlarged by the use of that power not only to control the actions of men and women, but also to control their beliefs. What some call superstructure, and what others call culture, includes an elaborate system of beliefs and ritual behaviors which defines for people what is right and what is wrong and why; what is possible and what is impossible; and the behavioral imperatives that follow from these beliefs. Because this superstructure of beliefs and rituals is evolved in the context of unequal power, it is inevitable that beliefs and rituals reinforce inequality, by rendering the powerful divine and the challengers evil. Thus the class struggles that might otherwise be inevitable in sharply unequal societies ordinarily do not seem either possible or right from the perspective of those who live within the structure of belief and ritual fashioned by those societies. People whose only possible recourse in struggle is to defy the beliefs and rituals laid down by their rulers ordinarily do not.

What common sense and historical experience suggest has been true of many society is no less true of modern capitalist societies, the United States among them. Power is rooted in the control of coercive force and in the control of the means of production. However, in capitalist societies this reality is not legitimated by rendering the powerful divine, but by obscuring their existence....

--Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Success, How they Fail, p. 1-2.

For more on the way that culture normalizes and obscures the true workings of society, please see my earlier posts on Freire. For a very different look at the role of culture and what it can mean to suddenly see and understand the culture all around us, check out this brilliant speech by the late novelist David Foster Wallace titled, This is Water.

Are markets actually calling on governments to raise taxes?

2010-06-14T22:28:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that the markets are actually calling for higher taxes. Because look -- the markets seem to want deficit reduction. Got it. But if you do deficit reduction through spending cuts you kill the recovery and send the economy into a double dip recession. So the only way to get deficit reduction plus growth is through increasing taxes. For Greece, or the UK, or Germany, or the U.S. to cut deficits through cutting spending right now would be complete insanity.

This is the "NAFTA and WTO Recession" and it's not gonna end until trade policy changes

2010-06-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

If we had the NAFTA debate to do all over again, I think the soundbite that could have won it for us would have been this:

NAFTA would make it illegal to do any manufacturing in this country.

It's exactly the sort of cut-to-the-marrow soundbite that the right loves to use to polarize debate -- to say 'you're either with us or you are America-hating scum.' And unlike conservative talking points this soundbite has the added benefit of being true.

Here's why it's true:

For-profit corporations in this country are required by law to maximize profits for shareholders. That's what it means to be a for-profit company. So if a U.S. company can have its product manufactured here for $17 dollars an hour or manufactured in another country for $1 an hour -- the U.S. company is required, through its legal obligation to shareholders, to offshore the production to the lowest cost manufacturing center.

But here's the thing. We very well may get to have the NAFTA and WTO debates all over again -- because the recession we are going through right now is the direct result of NAFTA & WTO. And the recession is not going to end (in any meaningful lasting way) until trade policy changes.

Both of these trade agreements were based on absolute intellectual horseshit. The idea was that yes, the U.S. would end up sending a lot of manufacturing jobs to lower cost production countries. BUT! the argument went, everything would be okay because U.S. workers would still be the ones designing and managing and marketing those products -- and those management jobs would grow and would be far better jobs than the lousy manufacturing jobs they replaced.

Here's why that's complete nonsense:

Under currently international trade agreements, Hewlett Packard could offshore every single job in the company -- manufacturing, design, marketing, legal, etc. to India -- leaving one single job left in the U.S. for the CEO (if he chose to live in Malibu or something). And we can't all be the CEO of HP. The U.S. economy needs at least 150 million jobs in order for our people to survive. We need a natural diversity of different types of job to match the natural diversity in our population -- namely we need an economy such that anyone with a strong back and a good attitude can make a middle class standard of living in this country -- and that's what we had before NAFTA & the WTO.

So the prosperity that we saw over the last 20 years was an illusion. Suddenly, TVs and electronics and clothes got really really cheap. And we felt wealthy because we could buy more of them. But all the while, the core of our economy was being hollowed out as manufacturing jobs were being sent overseas. Specifically, that cheap big screen TV at Best Buy was only cheap because it came at the expense of a unionized manufacturing job in the U.S. The $500 you saved on the TV came out of the salary of an American worker. And now 20 years later, SURPRISE! all the manufacturing jobs are gone and they aren't coming back. An entire generation of American men with only a high school education has been sacrificed to the beautiful equations of Milton Friedman that turn out, in the real world, to only benefit his corporatist friends. And then endless cheap credit kept the illusion of prosperity going, even as we had run out of jobs and the salaries that went with them. But now that bubble has popped and all of the gauges are showing empty, empty, empty.

As the Obama administration strives to jump start the economy -- there is quite literally nowhere to pump the stimulus money. You can't pump it into traditional manufacturing -- because those jobs are gone. So they try to pump it into green manufacturing and energy efficiency -- which is great. Until you realize that U.S. corporations are still required by law to maximize profits for their shareholders and Chinese manufacturers can make anything we can make here -- and only pay their workers $1 an hour (sometimes less). So then you realize that the hundreds of billions of dollars we are pumping into green manufacturing -- is really just the U.S. government funding the R&D that is going to make Chinese manufacturers rich.

So Obama and his boys Tim Geithner & Larry Summers then try to reinflate the housing bubble through tax credits and guarantees for big banks to take big risks again -- because really, other than financial ponzi schemes, we don't really make anything in this country anymore. But how long is that papering over of the problem gonna last? Until the mid-terms in November? Until the 2012 presidential election at the latest. But then the clock runs out again.

So when the double dip recession comes and the economy completely flatlines because we don't have any manufacturing jobs in this country (and the white collar research and design jobs are not nearly enough to make up for the jobs that are lost) -- I propose that we start the debate about rebuilding our economy by canceling NAFTA and dismantling the WTO.

Quite literally the kids in black were correct and the white (University of Chicago) guys with Ph.D's were terribly, catastrophically wrong.

communist and corporatist kitsch

2010-05-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

The other day, I had a cup of "The People's Green Tea" made by the The Republic of Tea (those nice cylindrical tins with the paper wrappers you can get at Whole Foods). The branding of the tea seems intentionally to invoke the People's Republic of China and Maoist simplicity. And I got to thinking -- communism and communist kitsch is irresistible to corporate marketers because communism is fundamentally aspirational and communal. Marketers know that people want not just a product but an experience, a brand that appeals to their aspirations in life. Furthermore, people want connection with others. And communism supplies a readily recognizable utopian ideal and communal emphasis. Which is kinda fascinating when you think about it -- that both communism and corporatism are appeal to the same fundamental human desires for transcendence and connection.

the measure of a relationship

2010-05-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

For me, the measure of any relationship -- romantic, friendship, work, family -- is that when we have a disagreement, can we talk about it thoroughly and openly enough such that we are able to reach a higher synthesis? The ideal synthesis speaks to the relative truth of both of our positions while transcending our prior partial views on the matter. I think we've all had relationships where people come to loggerheads and have to "agree to disagree" (permanent stalemate) or find ways to water each other down through some sort of lowest common denominator compromise (where neither person gets what he or she wants). But those sorts of compromises, don't strike me as sustainable (I suppose they are sustainable in the very very short term but they fall apart in the short, medium, and long term).

For me some of the greatest joys in life come from talking through something in a way that leads to an "aha moment" -- the intimacy of discovering a new higher truth bigger than the one we held before. I've had jobs where my boss and I traded drafts (of grant proposals, press releases, speeches, etc.) back and forth -- and each person's ideas sparked a new burst of creativity and discovery in the other. And I've also had jobs where the boss just had not done his/her (personal psychological) work, wasn't a great writer, or was just a dick -- where each disagreement led to stalemate or a series of lowest common denominator compromises until the draft was incoherent. The same thing happens in friendships, intimate relationships, family relationships, etc. -- some are characterized by heart dialogue and higher synthesis and some are characterized by endless conflict and unresolved disagreement. The higher synthesis relationships make me feel happy to be alive while it seems to me that the endlessly conflicted ones are not really worth spending much effort on because that relationship is not gonna be sustainable for any length of time anyway.

Over time, you can tell pretty quickly who you can riff and improvise with and who you can't. And in the very best relationships, you are doing the dance of thesis, antithesis, synthesis all the time without a lot of conflict or disagreement because you've created enough space (trust + love + communication) for an ever-unfolding dialogue of exploration and discovery.

I guess this makes me a Hegelian (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). [And my boy Ken Wilber borrows this idea from Hegel and adopts it to Buddhism (even though I don't think it has anything to do with Buddhism -- the steps towards transcendence in Buddhism seem to go thesis, antithesis, nothingness, everythingness).] But really it's Marx too -- Marx borrowed from Hegel, believing that the march of history consisted of thesis, antithesis, (higher) synthesis.

For me, one of the best resources for learning how to have the sort of dialogue that can lead to a higher synthesis is the book: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.

What if one could look up the credit score of every company -- just like they are able to look up the credit scores of customers?

2010-05-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

All of us are walking around with a credit score hanging over our heads. If you go to make any major purchase on credit -- a car or house -- even renting an apartment or applying for a credit card -- the lender will want to know your credit score. A credit score is a measure of character -- it gives a numerical value for how trustworthy you are based solely on your past history. It gives the lender a reasonable understanding of his/her/its risk and the likelihood that you will repay the loan.

Which I guess is fine as far as that goes.

But when I'm looking to buy a mutual fund, where is the credit score that tells me how trustworthy the financial services company is? When I go to buy a car, where's the credit score that tells me how likely it is that company will follow through on its warranty? When I buy a house, where is the credit score that tells me how trustworthy the builder is?

See, the odd thing about our market economy is that it is completely asymmetrical. Consumers, regular human beings, are all walking around with a number over our heads (instantly available online) that tells lenders exactly how much we're good for. But there is no objective measure that tells us whether the company on the other side of the deal is trustworthy or not. In short, labor and consumers are graded, but in our capitalist system, capital itself never gets graded (which is how they are able to steal your 401(k), the U.S. Treasury, and the wealth of the entire planet...).

That's really the problem with Wall Street right now. There is no objective measure that tells us the credit score of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley etc. That's why Retail Investors are Fleeing the Stock Market and YTD Domestic Flows Into Stocks Are Negative. Indeed if these companies were given a credit score based on their past history -- no one would ever do business with them again because they are not creditworthy. That's the crazy thing about the present political moment -- the U.S. and the E.U. are throwing trillions of dollars at companies that, if they were a person, would not qualify for even the most basic entry-level credit card.

In some ways then, Yelp and Zagat's Guide and Consumer Reports and Edmunds Car Buyers Guides and even customer reviews on Amazon.com are an attempt by people to create a credit score for companies and products. But it still seems to me that there is an ENORMOUS UNMET DEMAND for a single trustworthy measure of the creditworthiness of major corporations themselves (not a particular product that the company sells -- but the company itself). And really, if we could build a system to score the trustworthiness of each corporation, it could become the basis for reregulation the economy -- requiring every company to live up to the highest standards of creditworthiness or lose their license to operate in our economy.

Update #1: Branding is an attempt, by corporations, to finesse the issue of creditworthiness -- to create the impression and emotional sensation of trust, without any bona fide data to back it up. In fact, branding is the opposite of creditworthiness in a way -- in human terms it's the equivalent of a person applying for a credit card saying, 'don't bother researching my credit history -- look at how pretty I am!' Branding intentionally lights up the emotional parts of the brain associated with desire so that we will turn off the rational parts of the brain used to assess risk -- in order to sell products at a higher profit margin. So at the core then of the capitalist system there is this disconnect (between the brand image and the actual product itself), this built in incentive to lie in order to generate ever higher profits. Thus one of the key functions of the public sector is to reign in this impulse to lie that always appears in the marketplace. That's the point of regulation, to correct for the defects that are an inherent part of a market economy.

going to church vs. seeing a psychologist

2010-05-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

Okay last post for the day...

A while back I spoke with a friend who used to be a church pastor but who now does one-on-one (psychological) counseling with people. I asked her which one she preferred. "Oh being a counselor is soooo much better than being a pastor!" she said. Surprised, I asked her why. She explained that when people come to church, they are looking to sit back and be entertained. When someone goes for counseling, they are looking to do work, they are looking to grow and change and become a better person.

That conversation has really stuck with me because it rings true from my experience.

And it got me wondering whether perhaps, the purpose of religion is NOT to help people become more ethical, but rather to make people feel righteous about stuff they are already doing (usually homophobia, male domination, reinforcing the status quo, etc.)

Because really when you think about it, religious people are some of the LEAST ethical people in society. Ask any waitress in America about the horrible tips from people who come to brunch straight from church and you'll see what I'm talking about. And people who really want to grow, who really want to challenge themselves, and who really want to change who they are to become better people -- almost always go see a counselor/therapist to help them get there. It's really quite fascinating.

Please boycott the American Cancer Society

2010-05-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

Talk about being a card carrying member of the veal pen, Holy shit!

This week, the White House released an advanced copy of a report from the President’s Cancer Panel. It's surprisingly good. Among the findings:

It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals. Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.

More importantly, the report suggests that the dangers of cancer from chemicals in the environment are a huge problem that deserves more attention.

“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

The President’s Cancer Panel report will give a boost to Senator Feinstein’s efforts. It may also help the prospects of the Safe Chemicals Act, backed by Senator Frank Lautenberg and several colleagues, to improve the safety of chemicals on the market.

Finally, finally(!) we have a rigorous scientific study that will get lots of attention and begin the process of regulating some of the 80,000 synthetic chemicals in our environment that are untested and unregulated -- and likely causing cancer in children and adults.

So what does the American Cancer Society do with this good news? In a statement this week they poured cold water all over it and said it went too far:

A dire government report on cancer risks from chemicals and other hazards in the environment has drawn criticism from the American Cancer Society, which says government experts are overstating their case.

WTF!? Complete and total insanity. Or rather, this is what your brain looks like on corporatism.

The American Cancer Society is one of the wealthiest non-profits in the world. For every $1 spent on direct service, approximately $6.40 is spent on compensation and overhead. Their board is chock full of wealthy corporatists and pharmaceutical executives who don't make money on prevention -- they only make money on new drugs to treat cancer. So faced with the opportunity to REDUCE cancer by regulating synthetic chemicals in the environment that may cause cancer, the American Cancer Society says "no thanks."

That's cool. Fuck 'em. If the American Cancer Society won't step up to prevent and reduce toxins in the environment (for fear it would hurt the interests of their corporate board members) then I say we boycott their ass.

So please don't give money to the American Cancer Society -- no matter how nice those return address labels they send you for free in the mail might be. Thanks!

Also if the American Cancer Society wants to be the PR firm for wealth industrialists (read: toxic polluters) and pharmaceutical companies, that's fine. But they should have their 501(c)(3) non-profit status revoked as a result.

Update #1: Yeah, yeah I know that the American Cancer Society statement was kinda nuanced and said a few nice things about regulation as well. But they also knew full well that they are an issue validator (meaning that people look to them to lead on the issue of cancer -- and if they don't choose to lead on a particular fight, no one else is going to get out further in front than they are. Issue validators, because they are closer to the issue than the general public, give the signal to the wider community when something is worth fighting and when it is not). And when Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist from the cancer society, posts a statement calling the report unbalanced -- they knew full well how it would be used in the debate to knock down attempts at regulation. It's really quite shameful.

If you want to reduce cancer causing toxic chemicals in the environment, please donate to the Environmental Working Group instead.

Update #2. Apparently, this is not the first time that the American Cancer Society has gone out of its way to oppose efforts to alert the public about environmental causes of cancer. From the May 10, 2010 edition of the New York Times:

New York unveiled what it billed as the nation’s first comprehensive statewide cancer map, which became available Monday on the Web site of the State Department of Health. The creation of the map was opposed by the American Cancer Society when it was proposed two years ago...

It's really hard to overstate how completely vile it is for a group called the American Cancer Society to go out of its way to shield industrial polluters from scrutiny, so that the the pharmaceutical companies on their board can make more money.

Charles Murray finally admits that school choice isn't about performance, it's about ideology

2010-05-08T17:53:00.000-07:00

For decades conservatives have been telling anyone who would listen that U.S. needed to destroy the entire public education system in this country and replace it with a system of vouchers whereby parents could send their kids to any school -- public or private. We were told that if schools were forced to compete with each other, the magic of the market would naturally lead to better schools and improved test scores. Never mind that this same market just pissed your 401(k) down the drain while enriching Goldman Sachs and destroying the global financial system almost overnight.

Progressives correctly recognized the wolf in sheep's clothing -- vouchers would be a subsidy to conservative families who already pull their kids out of public schools to send them to religious schools. And progressives knew that the vouchers would never be large enough to cover the full cost of education -- conservatives' goal of course was to punish poor people and brown people by giving tax breaks to the rich while destroying the educational system serving the rest of the country.

Then a funny thing happened. President Clinton called their bluff. He said 'you want to create your own schools -- fine. We'll call 'em charter schools -- they'll still exist within the public school system -- but you can run 'em and any kid who wants to can attend your charter school.'

So all sorts of philanthropists and entrepreneurs and ideologues of various stripes poured into the school system to create charter school -- all with the goal of showing the existing educational leaders that they (the newbies) knew better.

Now after a nearly 18 years of experimentation in creating and running charter schools a new study is out that looks at the effectiveness of charter schools. And results are not impressive:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Like always, exposed to the rigors of the real world, conservative ideology falls apart:

Perhaps the sharpest knock on charters — one that even some proponents acknowledge — is that mediocrity is widely tolerated. Authorities are reluctant to close poor schools. Some advocates concede that the intellectual premise behind school choice — that in a free market for education, parents will remove students from bad schools in favor of good ones — has not proved true.

“If you look at the hopes and dreams from 1992, it didn’t pan out that quality would rise because of marketplace accountability,” said James Merriman, chief executive of the New York City Charter School Center. “It turns out you need government accreditation to drive quality, and the human capital to make schools go. The hard lesson is, it is so dependent on human capital.”

You would think that conservatives would put their tail between their legs and crawl back under the rock they came from. But if there is one thing we know about conservatives, evidence to the contrary rarely derails their dystopian dreams.

So into the debate walks cracker ass cracker racist mutherfucker Charles Murray with an Op Ed in the New York Times this week. [For those who don't know Charles Murray, he's the author of the Mein Kampf of modern conservatism, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that argues that wealthy white people who have every advantage in the world are just better people than poor people of color and so they deserve all the advantages they get. Like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged it's an execrable piece of writing and thinking -- and like Atlas Shrugged it sold like crazy because it basically functions as conservative porn.] And in his Op Ed on May 4, Why Charter Schools Fail the Test, Murray finally admits what progressive have been pointing out for years -- school choice isn't about effectiveness, it isn't about test scores, it isn't about education, it is solely about ideology. Murray:

As an advocate of school choice, all I can say is thank heavens for the Milwaukee results [that showed the charter schools underperformed regular public schools]. Here’s why: If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea. Schools differ in what they teach and how they teach it, and parents care deeply about both, regardless of whether test scores rise.

...And yet, knowing that [that charter schools do not outperform regular public schools], I would still send my own children to that charter school in a heartbeat. They would be taught the content that I think they need to learn, in a manner that I consider appropriate.

Murray doesn't care if kids are learning. He doesn't care if the nation falls behind other nations in math and science and economic competitiveness. His ideology tells him that schools should teach in a certain way and the results be damned.

New Rule: No Civil Disobedience Until You've Made 1,000 Phone Calls

2010-05-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

White people love getting arrested for protesting things they claim to care about. In fact, I'm surprised that the blog Stuff White People Like hasn't already done a post on civil disobedience -- because if there is one thing white people love, it's getting arrested for a good cause.

I want to share my own experiences with civil disobedience briefly and then make the case that white people should do a whole lot more phone calling and a whole lot less getting arrested to show how much they care.

Nineteen years ago, the first Persian Gulf War was just starting to heat up. I was in college and I started participating in meetings on campus about how to stop the war. One of the first suggestions that came up was, 'let's commit civil disobedience.' Out of an anti-war group of roughly 200 people, about 30 of us split off to form an Affinity Group dedicated to pursuing civil disobedience. As I learned, ya gotta have an Affinity Group to do this kinda thing. Everyone in the Affinity Group plans an action and then some members volunteer to get arrested while the rest of the members witness (talk with press and police) and then post bail to get the arrested members our of jail.

Members of our Affinity Group tried to get arrested in a "Die In" at the White House prior to the start of the war. But the D.C. police have seen everything and they hate the additional paperwork from having to arrest people every weekend. So they just let us die in and lay on the cold hard pavement while they stood around chatting with each other. Their supply of donuts and coffee was greater than our supply of warm clothes and patience, so we returned home unarrested.

Undaunted we did a civil disobedience vigil at the Federal Building in Philadelphia a few days later. But again, we couldn't get arrested to save our lives. Black people get arrested for driving a car in the wrong neighborhood, brown people get arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts but white people can't get arrested even when they BEG the cops to arrest them.

And then, the 100-hour (1st) Persian Gulf War was over. The short duration of the war was actually a problem because many of our non-hierarchical Affinity Group meetings took 5 or 6 hours. By the end of the war our Affinity Group had probably spent more hours in planning meetings than the war itself took.

But we were determined to get arrested doing civil disobedience. The next event on the progressive protest calendar was Earth Day. So a subset of our Affinity Group -- the more environmentally minded members, split off to form a separate Affinity Group to do civil disobedience in connection with Earth Day.

So on April 22, we dutifully headed up to Manhattan for an Earth Day protest on Wall Street. While the D.C. police seem intent on ignoring you, the NYPD seemed more focused on humiliating protesters. They herded us into a little square "official protest zone" purposefully designed to make our numbers look small and pitiful against the backdrop of the NY Stock Exchange. Too cramped to march around, we were supposed to yell while standing in place behind a series of metal barricades across the street and down about a block from our intended target.

Our group quickly surmised that being crammed into the official protest zone was worse than useless. So we wandered around looking for ways to get our message across. And sure enough, a couple blocks away we discovered a local news crew doing a live broadcast about the protests. Sensing correctly that this was about the only chance we were going to have to get our message out -- one of the members of our group walked out into the middle of the street and just stood there. He was promptly joined by four or five other members of our group and they stood together holding hands in a line blocking traffic on a major Manhattan street (now that I think about it, I believe the street they were blocking was Broadway). The timing was impeccable. The news cameras had something to focus on, the reporter had something to talk about, and the riot police had someone to arrest.

I videotaped the whole encounter. The Rodney King beatings had just happened in LA, showing both the ruthlessness of the LAPD and the importance of videotape. We figured that if police could see that we had a camera recording our actions -- that our protesters would be less likely to be harmed.

Within about two minutes our group was rustled into the back of a waiting NYPD paddy wagon. Our members sang a little song as the doors closed and the paddy wagon drove off. And our Earth Day Protest had made the morning news in the largest media market in the U.S.

But here's the thing -- the protest made absolutely no difference. There was no policy that we were advocating, no specific law that we were trying to pass. It was pure white guilt kabuki theater. It made us feel better for a day -- that we were doing something -- when in fact, we weren't actually accomplishing anything.

So I just want to make 2 related points about civil disobedience:

1. We are doing it wrong. Almost all modern uses of civil disobedience bear NO resemblance to the civil disobedience committed by Martin Luther King, Jr. The situation facing the civil rights movement was completely different than the situation facing privileged white Americans today. In the deep south in the 1950s blacks couldn't vote so they had to resort to means outside of the electoral system. Moreover, MLK and the SCLC were breaking unjust laws. MLK wasn't blocking traffic just to get arrested. The laws that were broken -- sitting in at lunch counters, crossing a bridge to the other side of town (where blacks weren't allowed), sitting at the front of a public bus -- all of those were unjust laws. Through their actions the civil rights movement was saying, 'we are challenging your authority to rule because you are violating widely held moral principles of fairness and justice.' The thing I disliked about our Wall Street protest was that we had no problem with the traffic laws in Manhattan -- but that was the law that we were breaking. In most modern uses of civil disobedience, the law that is being broken is completely unrelated to the issue that is being protested. It's just protest as theater -- which is not the purpose of civil disobedience.

2. Civil disobedience should only be a last resort, not a first resort. Civil disobedience should only be used after ALL other avenues to reach a resolution have been exhausted. Look, if you care enough to get arrested, you should care enough to at least make a few phone calls first to ask for a redress of your grievances. But how many phone calls do most protesters make before getting arrested? Real phone calls -- to people who don't agree with you but who are in a position to do something to improve the situation? Prior to our protest on Wall Street NONE of our group had made ANY phone calls to any of these Wall Street firms to ask them to change their behavior.

Look, creating lasting change is about gaining power. And the way you build power is through building relationships. And the way you build relationships is through talking with lots and lots of people.

So I propose a new rule:

Thou Shalt Not Commit Civil Disobedience Until You've Made At Least 1,000 Phone Calls.

Calling the President, your two Senators, and your Representative in the House -- that takes 4 calls. So what are you going to do with your other 996 calls? Ah, that's where it gets interesting. Who has a vote or say in making the decision that you want to see enacted? Who are they connected with? What do they care about? How do they see the world? If you are unhappy with a company -- who are their largest shareholders? Largest customers? Points of vulnerability to public opinion? If you are upset with a politician -- how many calls can you make to voters in his/her district?

The fact is, if progressives (as a movement) required that no one could participate in a civil disobedience protest until he/she had made 1,000 targeted calls -- then we would never need to get arrested. If we each made 1,000 phone calls we would win on almost every issue that we care about because our members would be building the sorts of networks of relationships that lead to power.

The 1,000 phone call rule could be seen as a rite of passage -- like the100,000 prostrations, known as "chak-boom" in Tibetan, required of anyone who aspires to become a Buddhist monk.

If you are not making phone calls, knocking on doors, and talking with people who can impact the outcome of a decision -- then you are not actually serious about your issue. You are just engaging in kabuki -- narcissistic performance art to assuage your white guilt to make yourself feel better.

heckuva paragraph

2010-04-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

In the midst of an otherwise unremarkable Modern Love column in today's NY Times comes this absolute gem of a paragraph:

It’s hard to say when our differences began to eclipse what we had in common. I kept thinking things would right themselves, but our marriage had become like a radio that played only static; we couldn’t find a clear frequency no matter how much we fiddled with the dial.
--Katie Brandi, Anchors Don't Come in Pretty Boxes

link of the week

2010-04-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

This is a topic I've touched on before. But Ezra Klein really hits it out of the park with his interview of an anonymous Harvard graduate who went to work for Goldman Sachs in an article titled, "Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?" Because really, at the end of the day it's kinda bizarre that many of Americas best and brightest go to work for these Wall Street firms that are basically mobsters with better clothes. Money quote:

Investment banking was never something I thought I wanted to do. But the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful. In the midst of anxiety and trying to find a job at the end of college, the recruiters are really in your face, and they make it very easy. One thing is the internship program. It's your junior year, it's January or February, and you interview for internships. If all goes well, it's sort of a summer-long interview. And if that goes well, you have an offer by September of your senior year, and that's very appealing. It makes your senior year more relaxed, you can focus on your thesis, you can drink more. You just don't have to worry about getting a job.

Oh so THAT'S why Colgate Total Toothpaste causes my tongue to go numb!

2010-04-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I bought a tube of Colgate Total Toothpaste at my local Target. It made my teeth look shiny but it also caused my tongue to go numb. Not a good side effect for a toothpaste. So I called Colgate and told them about the problem. The customer service rep read a script that said, "We're sorry that you had that experience. It is not a problem that we expect. But there are many ingredients in toothpaste and everyone reacts differently. We'll send you a coupon for a free tube of toothpaste." So I got a coupon worth $1.81 and felt pleased with myself for taking some sort of action. And just as the lawyers (who drew up the script read by the customer service agent) hoped, that seemed like the end of the story.

But today, buried deep within the LA Times health section was an article titled, "FDA is reviewing the use of antibacterial products containing triclosan." It turns out that triclosan is an antibacterial chemical that is used in hand soaps and yes, Colgate Total Toothpaste. Turns out triclosan is also an endocrine disruptor that interferes with "thyroid hormones, thereby impairing growth and brain development." It also interferes with the reproductive hormones estrogen and testosterone, leading to infertility. Money quotes from the article:

"There's no question that exposure to triclosan is widespread in the U.S. A national health survey found triclosan in the urine of 75% of the 2,517 people who gave samples. The chemical can enter the body via absorption through the skin or the lining of the mouth.

Mae Wu, a program attorney at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group in Washington, D.C., says that even people who deliberately try to avoid antimicrobial products still end up getting exposed because the soaps are in public restrooms, offices and restaurants.

What triclosan does once it enters the body is not clear. Research in animals has found hormonal effects of triclosan, including upsetting the normal balance of thyroid hormones, thereby impairing growth and brain development, and of the reproductive hormones estrogen and testosterone, leading to infertility. These effects are similar to other so-called endocrine disruptors, such as bisphenol A, dioxins and pesticides such as DDT. The FDA says it intends to evaluate this new research."
-- Jill U Adams, LA Times, April 19, 2010.

I thought it was a little creepy that they claimed that their toothpaste continued working for 12 hours! But seriously, to put a fucking endocrine disruptor in my toothpaste!!! WTF!?

A few years ago I took a homeopathic treatment for a chronic ailment and it worked better than any prescription medicine I had tried. Interestingly, the homeopath said that in order for this treatment to work I could never ever drink coffee, smoke, or use mint. "It turns the remedy off," she said. I don't think for a moment that the magic sugar pills actually produced the helpful result. Rather, by religiously observing the rules about avoiding coffee I was finally able to sleep again and I believe that helped my body to repair itself. I imagine those who cut out smoking (not a problem for me since I already didn't smoke) also saw similar benefits from the subtraction of the toxic particle pollution rather than the addition of the sugar pills. But I could never figure out why mint was also prohibited. The only real consequence of that prohibition was that I changed toothpaste -- from Colgate to Tom's of Maine (Anise flavor). But it now it makes sense -- by banning mint, homeopaths also get people to stop using traditional toothpaste -- and it turns out that traditional toothpastes are loaded with all sorts of nasty chemicals like saccharine, titanium dioxide, and triclosan. And because the gums are a mucous membrane, brushing your teeth with traditional toothpaste then allows these chemicals to enter your bloodstream.

Elizabeth Gilbert on same-sex marriage

2010-04-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert. I really enjoy her voice on the page and I benefit from watching how she works through problems -- depression in Eat, Pray, Love and her doubts about marriage in Committed. Look, I get the criticisms of her writing (that it can be self indulgent, self absorbed, unaware of the vast privileges she enjoys). But really that criticism can be leveled against the entire memoir genre for the most part.

I actually think Gilbert is a much better writer than most folks (even her fans) give her credit for. Gilbert's ability to synthesize and summarize massive amounts of research into just a paragraph or two to set up a scene or a chapter is really quite amazing. In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert gives the entire history of a town or a particular Buddhist meditation practice in just a few paragraphs to set up the narrative about her experience. Some of those paragraphs must have taken months of research just to get those 10 sentences right -- but she makes it look effortless. Her research into the history of marriage in Committed is equally skillful.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage is a different book than Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert is older, a better writer, and wrestling with a different set of issues this time. But the book stands on its own quite well and provides an insightful history of marriage and a compelling memoir of a woman wrestling with her doubts about getting married for the second time.

But today I want to quote from a section in chapter 3 of Committed to share her thoughts on same-sex marriage. I think she makes a compelling, conservative case for gay marriage:

     Anyhow, to be perfectly honest, I find it a bit crazy that social conservatives are fighting so hard against this at all, considering that it's quite a positive thing for society in general when as many intact families as possible live under the estate of matrimony. And I say this as someone who is -- I think we can all agree by now -- admittedly suspicious of marriage. Yet it's true. Legal marriage, because it restrains sexual promiscuity and yokes people to their social obligations, is an essential building block of any orderly community. I'm not convinced that marriage is always so terrific for every individual within the relationship but that's another question altogether. There is no doubt -- not even within my rebellious mind -- that in general, matrimony stabilizes the larger social order and is often exceedingly good for children.
     If I were a social conservative then -- that is to say, if I were somebody who cared deeply about social stability, economic prosperity, and sexual monogamy -- I would want as many gay couples as possible to get married. I would want as many of every kind of couple as possible to get married. I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage, but perhaps they should consider the distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to save marriage. Think of it! Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the Western world. People are getting married later in life, if they're getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility. We don't trust marriage anymore, many of us straight folk. We don't get it. We're not at all convinced that we need it. We feel as though we can take it or leave it behind forever. All of which leaves poor old matrimony twisting in the winds of cold modernity.
     But just when it seems like maybe all is lost for marriage, just when matrimony is about to become as evolutionarily expendable as pinkie toes and appendixes, just when it appears that the institutions will wither slowly into obscurity due to a general lack of social interest, in come the gay couples, asking to be included! Indeed, pleading to be included! Indeed, fighting with all their might to be included in a custom which may be terrifically beneficial for society as a whole but which many -- like me -- find only suffocating and old-fashioned and irrelevant.
     It might seem ironic that homosexuals -- who have, other the centuries, made an art form out of leading bohemian lives on the outer fringes of society -- want so desperately now to be part of such a mainstream tradition. Certainly not everyone understands this urge to assimilate, not even within the gay community. The filmmaker John Waters, for one, says that he always thought the only advantages of being gay were that he didn't have to join the military and he didn't have to get married. Still, it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as full integrated, socially responsible, family-centered, taxpaying, Little League-coaching, nation-serving, respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in? Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic, ne'er-do-well, heterosexual deadbeats like me? --Elizabeth Gilbert, pages 74 to 76, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.

a theory on relationships

2010-04-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

Okay I've got a new theory on relationships:

The key to any relationship -- romantic, workplace, relationships between citizens, etc. -- is that both parties share the same platonic ideal of what that relationship should look like.

If you think the platonic ideal of a romantic relationship is a white picket fence with two kids and a dog -- and your partner thinks the platonic ideal of a romantic relationship is a life of vagabond travel with occassional bursts of polyamory -- that relationship just ain't ever gonna work.

By the same token, if your platonic ideal workplace is a vision of collaboration, communication, and democratic decision making -- and your boss's platonic ideal is a workplace where employees know their place and speak when spoken to -- it ain't gonna work.

And nationally, when one political party's vision of the platonic ideal of the nation-state is a European-style multicultural democracy with a vibrant public sector and a sturdy safety net, and the other party dreams of a Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand inspired White Somalia with no regulations governed by theocratic misogynistic Old Testament (Christian Sharia) law -- well, needless to say, the political debates are gonna be difficult.

This post is really just the flip side of the coin to the argument I made in my earlier post on mutuality. It just seems to me that before any two parties (in ANY relationship -- romantic, workplace, citizen to citizen, etc.) get into a conversation about any specific area of disagreement, we should first have a conversation about what our platonic ideal is of how we think things ought to look (and why). And furthermore, only through a continual dialogue regarding the platonic ideal (the form, process, and goal -- the telos of the relationship) can we ever hope to see any sort of shift in our platonic ideals so that we might eventually come to some sort of consensus about how things ought to be.

abaissement du niveau mental

2010-04-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

Heckuva paragraph today by Olga Tokarczuk in an Op Ed in the NY Times about the plane crash that claimed the lives of the Polish President and many of the members of the Polish elite. She writes:

I am reminded that when a major trauma occurs, the kind that is both individual and collective, something happens that Jungian psychology calls an “abaissement du niveau mental” — a lowering of the level of consciousness. Intellect gives way to the gloom of the collective psyche. The horrified mind tries to find meaning, but lets itself be seduced by old myths. -- Olga Tokarczuk, April 15, 2010

Yep, that is EXACTLY what happened in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. regressed in its collective consciousness back to a prior stage of development. That's the reason that Dennis Miller and Victoria Jackson went from being smart edgy comedians to becoming paranoid delusional spokespeople for radical conservatism. That's the reason that we were able to ~~elect~~ appoint Bush, a guy with the intelligence of an average high school kid who likes to party, to two terms. That's the reason that otherwise decent people quickly embraced violations of international law including torture and pre-emptive war.

I'm just happy to have a term for it now.

corporatist domination exists because it's an immortality project

2010-04-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

As frequent readers of this blog will know, I'm keen to better understand the ways that domination shows up in the economy. It's my contention that domination and its twin, violence, play a large role in our economy (even in "white collar" jobs); that domination/violence has been at the core of wealth creation for thousands of years; and that the goal of any sort of progressive movement is to move society away from systems of domination and towards systems based on love. With that in mind...

I stumbled across this quote in Erich Fromm's, "On Disobedience and Other Essays" and thought it relevant to this discussion:

"Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted. Another possibility of overcoming separatness lies in the opposite direction: man can try to unite himself with the world by having power over it, by making others a part of himself, and thus transcending his individual existence by domination." Erich Fromm, On Disobedience, page 2.

I think Fromm is really on to something quite profound.

I would argue that no one is a corporatist by nature. No one comes out of the womb desiring to serve the interests of capital. Babies want to be in union with others (primarily the mom, but also with dad, brothers, sisters, grandparents, the dog, other kids). Thus, by definition, all babies are communists. If you want to base your politics on natural law, the only choice is communism because in nature, capital doesn't exist.

But later, as a child hits 7 or 8 years old, and becomes conscious of him/herself and becomes aware of the fact that he/she is finite, perishable, vulnerable, and mortal, he/she begins to search around for immortality projects. And capital, or rather, the pursuit of capital through the control and domination of others (either through slavery or wage slavery or off-shoring of production) becomes a popular immortality project. Which explains then why corporatists fight against any attempts to regulate or restrict their actions -- as if their lives depended on it. If they ever stopped to think about it, common sense would tell them that their actions are immoral, that paying someone 80 cents an hour violates basic norms of human decency. But corporatists can't stop -- because the domination of others -- whether it is people within their own household or factory workers 5,000 miles away is their immortality project, the means by which they transcend their individual existence and their fear of death.

Update #1: Honestly, the more I think about the quote above, the more it seems to me the perfect description for the dynamics within the Republican party. Namely, the Republican party consists of two blocks -- a handful of overclass corporatists who thrive on domination + large numbers of undereducated white males who submit to the corporatists -- and feel united with them through their acts of submission. It's a perfect closed loop, an immortality project for both the dominators and the dominated.

Link of the week, April 11

2010-04-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

Ian Welsh is one of the finest progressive thinkers in the world. Largely self taught, his writing breaks through the myths and distortions that too often clutter our political debate. So when Welsh writes a post called, "Books which influenced me the most" it's definitely worth a look. As for me, I'm going to click over to Amazon.com to buy Jane Jacobs', “The Economy of Cities”, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

Link of the week

2010-03-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

For anyone who read my post on fractional reserve banking, I think you'll be interested in this guest post by George Washington over at Naked Capitalism titled: "Fraction...Er...Fictional Reserve Banking."

Money quote:

But whatever you think about fractional reserve banking, whether or not you agree with its critics, the truth is that we no longer have it.

The whole post is completely fascinating.

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? The ways that neoclassical economics obscures common sense

2010-03-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

True story: I went to one of the most progressive colleges in the U.S. Friends who knew of my intense interest in politics thought that I would not enjoy microeconomics but that I would love macroeconomics. As it turns out I had a brilliant microeconomics professor and it was one of the best classes I ever took. But my experience of macroeconomics was another matter entirely.

Midway through the semester, after explaining the money supply, fractional reserve banking, and the role of the Fed, the professor spent most of one class on the "Chilean Economic Miracle." He talked about deregulation and privatization and 8% growth rates in the GDP. As he concluded his lecture I realized, with astonishment, that he was not ever going to mention the military brutality that went along with the Chicago School Economic Program. Look, if this was the University of Chicago Economics Department, I might have understood, embarrassed as they might be at the number of people murdered in the name of their theories. But this was one of the most liberal colleges in the country and yet, the thousands of people murdered under Pinochet in Chile were going to get no mention in this class.

I was alarmed and looked around the classroom to see if anyone else was similarly distressed by the sleight of hand that had just happened in front of us. But all of the other students were dutifully taking notes. So I slowly raised my hand, interrupting the professor as he blissfully moved on to another topic.

I don't remember exactly what I said but it was something along the lines of:

"Um, aren't you missing something? The economic growth that you are talking about happened under a military dictatorship. Pinochet murdered thousands of union members, rounded up people and tortured them in soccer stadiums, threw nuns out of helicopters, operated death squads throughout the regime. Don't you think it's a problem that the Chilean Economic Miracle that you are talking about was implemented by a fascist government? Doesn't that invalidate the economic growth that happened, if it had to happen under a military dictatorship?"

At the time, I was taking a class in modern Chilean literature, reading first-hand accounts of what it was like to live under the Pinochet government. Clearly my economics professor was not reading the same books.

The professor, clearly taken aback by my rather sharp criticism of his lecture proceeded to talk about the Pinochet government and the Pinochet/University of Chicago economic program as if they were two separate, unrelated things. He acknowledged that the Pinochet government was brutal, but said the military repression was not the cause of the economic growth. Rather, Chile, in spite of the military government, had implemented an economic program that would work regardless of who was in power.

His argument seemed disingenuous at best. A year before, I had traveled in Central America and seen what U.S. economic and military power did to people on the ground in these countries. And the U.S. had just concluded the first Persian Gulf, an unbelievably cynical corporatist war straight out of 3 Days of the Condor.

So, at the risk to my grade and to the horror of the econ majors in the room, I took another pass at explaining the problem with his argument. "If the Nazi's had had 8% economic growth, would you give an entire lecture on the economic growth in Germany without mentioning the rest of the Nazi program?" (lol. *sigh* I was much more brazen in those days).

The Professor, now clearly unhappy with me, explained that while the Pinochet government was surely brutal, they did not rise to the same level (of horror) as the Nazis; and that Chile under Pinochet and Nazi Germany were different examples. It is true that I probably erred in including the Nazi example (people get all woozily the moment anyone mentions Nazis -- any hope of reaching a new understanding pretty much goes out the window after that). But the point remains that if a nation has to use death squads and military dictatorship to implement their economic program -- it invalidates everything that happens afterward. You can't claim credit for increasing GDP if said increase in GDP required the murder of thousands of your fellow citizens in order to achieve that growth.

My point is this: I'm sure the economics professor was a great guy. In fact one of my friends thought this professor was the best in the whole college. I'm sure at a summertime bbq this professor would tend the grill and greet the guests and tell great stories. But his academic training had made him LESS smart than he would have been through common sense and living in the world.

That's always my question with various disciplines -- do they make people smarter, more able to see and understand the world around them? Because sadly, it seems to me that a lot of disciplines make people less smart -- dogma has a way of making things perfect on paper and yet, over time, rather unhelpful in the world.

Take the Buddhist story of the faithful monk who meditated so long that he developed gangrene in his legs but kept meditating to show his faithfulness to a discipline that devalues the physical world in favor of the spiritual world. (Now maybe the story is apocryphal, but it certainly illustrates a certain mindset of those who keep pressing on even when evidence suggests one should stop.) I'm sure the monk was a great guy, but his dogma had made him less smart than he would have been through just common sense and living in the world.

It seems to me that religion, neoclassical economics, and scientific disciplines that downplay the importance of emotions and human experience all make their practitioners less smart than they would have been on their own, left to their own devices.

Which brings me to my next example. The March 1, 2010 edition of The New Yorker has a long profile on Paul Krugman (again it appears free right now but if you want to read it, do it soon before they move it behind their subscription pay wall). It's definitely worth a read. Paul Krugman is brilliant. He's one of the smartest economists in the world and a winner of the Noble Prize in economics. He's also a progressive and one of the most important public voices in the country challenging neoclassical orthodoxy and conservative policies that don't make sense. But what really jumped out at me about the article, were Paul Krugman's blind-spots -- the areas in which economics as a discipline had made him less smart than he might have been through just common sense and experience in the world. I want to quote several sections at length:

Krugman’s tribe was academic economists, and insofar as he paid any attention to people outside that tribe, his enemy was stupid pseudo-economists who didn't understand what they were talking about but who, with attention-grabbing titles and simplistic ideas, persuaded lots of powerful people to listen to them. He called these types “policy entrepreneurs”—a term that, by differentiating them from the academic economists he respected, was meant to be horribly biting. He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations. While another country’s success might injure our pride, it would not likely injure our wallets. Quite the opposite: it would be more likely to provide us with a bigger market for our products and send our consumers cheaper, better-made goods to buy. A trade surplus might be a sign of weakness, a trade deficit a sign of strength. And, anyway, a nation’s standard of living was determined almost entirely by its productivity—trade was just not that important.
When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren't earning American wages and didn't have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren't the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation . . . suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990 . . . have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn't anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right. --The New Yorker

Take any fifth grader in the U.S. and explain the situation to him or her as follows: there is a factory that makes running shoes that pays their workers $18 an hour. Now another factory opens up and instead of paying their workers $18 an hour -- they pay their workers less than $1 an hour -- and the shoes are about the same quality. What will happen to the workers at the first factory?

I would wager that the average fifth grader will be able to figure out that all of the workers at the first factory will lose their jobs. Furthermore, if one continues the example and says that "the worker from the first factory is now looking for work, what are his/her wages likely to be at the next job?" the average fifth grader will be able to figure out that the wages for the worker are likely to be significantly less at the next job than in his/her former job.

But if you put that average fifth grader through a Ph.D. program in economics that only looks at neoclassical economics models, voila, that person might now conclude that "A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990 have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%." Neoclassical economic dogma actually made a really smart guy less smart than an average fifth grader.

An entire generation of American workers (those with only a high school diploma who worked in manufacturing) has had their economic aspirations crushed by U.S. free trade policies based on these incorrect models of how the global economy works. And yet, because these workers didn't neatly fit into the economists' models, they weren't factored into policy.

The extent of the corruption in corporate America, was also missed by Krugman until recently:

Certainly until the Enron scandal, Krugman had no sense that there was any kind of problem in American corporate governance. (He consulted briefly for Enron before he went to the Times.) Occasionally, he received letters from people claiming that corporations were cooking the books, but he thought this sounded so implausible that he dismissed them. “I believed that the market was enforcing,” he says. “I believed in the S.E.C. I just never really thought about it. It seemed like a pretty sunny world in 1999, and, for all of my cynicism, I shared a lot of that. The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn't see.” --The New Yorker

Look, I don't want to cap on Paul Krugman. He's one of the finest thinkers in our country. And unlike many neoclassical economists, he's willing to admit when he is wrong and shine a light on the limitations of the thinking that characterized his earlier career. But it is a striking illustration of just how primitive economics remains as a field at this point that such glaring errors show up in the writings of one of our finest economists.

And the reason these errors show up is that economics as a discipline has placed priority on mathematical models over experience.

Again, as in his trade theory, it was not so much his idea that was significant as the translation of the idea into mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea”—of economic geography—“to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn't that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn't know what to do with it. --The New Yorker

Krugman makes this point eloquently in an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine titled, "How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?" His short answer: economists mistook (mathematical) beauty for truth.

This is not a small matter. Economists have enormous influence over policy. Quite literally, life and death policy matters are being decided based not on the facts but on how pretty the economic model looks.

I will have much more discussion on this topic in a future post when I review Yves Smith's extraordinary book, "Econned: How unenlightened self interest undermined democracy and corrupted capitalism." I'm just two chapters in but it is amazing -- the best book I've read since Shock Doctrine.

Antidepressants are no more effective than a placebo and why that's great news

2010-03-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

(updated seven times, please see below)

I finally read the Newsweek cover story, "The Depressing News about Antidepressants" by Sharon Begley. It's shocking. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing. Shortly thereafter, The New Yorker came out with a similar article entitled, "Head Case: Can Psychiatry be a Science" by Louis Menand that reports on a similar set of data (the article appears to be free right now but The New Yorker sometimes put things behind their subscription pay wall so check it out while you can). As is my style, I want to quote from both articles and then riff a bit at the end on what all of this may mean:

The number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005. [Basically 1 in 10 Americans.] -- Newsweek, January 29, 2010

In 1998, researchers examined 38 manufacturer-sponsored studies involving just over 3,000 depressed patients. The authors, psychology researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein of the University of Connecticut, saw—as everyone else had—that patients did improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that dates from the 1950s. This improvement, demonstrated in scores of clinical trials, is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work. But when Kirsch compared the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills—clinical trials typically compare an experimental drug with a placebo—he saw that the difference was minuscule. Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs. Put another way, three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect....

Out of the blue, Kirsch received a letter from Thomas Moore, who was then a health-policy analyst at George Washington University. You could expand your data set, Moore wrote, by including everything drug companies sent to the FDA—published studies, like those analyzed in "Hearing Placebo," but also unpublished studies. In 1998 Moore used the Freedom of Information Act to pry such data from the FDA. The total came to 47 company-sponsored studies—on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexa—that Kirsch and colleagues then pored over. (As an aside, it turned out that about 40 percent of the clinical trials had never been published. That is significantly higher than for other classes of drugs, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco; overall, 22 percent of clinical trials of drugs are not published. "By and large," says Kirsch, "the unpublished studies were those that had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug.") In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, he and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants—not the 75 percent he had calculated from examining only published studies—had also been achieved by a dummy pill.
The extra effect of real drugs wasn't much to celebrate, either. It amounted to 1.8 points on the 54-point scale doctors use to gauge the severity of depression, through questions about mood, sleep habits, and the like. Sleeping better counts as six points. Being less fidgety during the assessment is worth two points. In other words, the clinical significance of the 1.8 extra points from real drugs was underwhelming. Now Kirsch was certain. "The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong," he told me in January on the eve of the publication of his book The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-depressant Myth.

Even Kirsch's analysis, however, found that antidepressants are a little more effective than dummy pills—those 1.8 points on the depression scale. Maybe Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and their cousins do have some non-placebo, chemical benefit. But the small edge of real drugs compared with placebos might not mean what it seems, Kirsch explained to me one evening from his home in Hull. Consider how research on drugs works. Patient volunteers are told they will receive either the drug or a placebo, and that neither they nor the scientists will know who is getting what. Most volunteers hope they get the drug, not the dummy pill. After taking the unknown meds for a while, some volunteers experience side effects. Bingo: a clue they're on the real drug. About 80 percent guess right, and studies show that the worse side effects a patient experiences, the more effective the drug. Patients apparently think, this drug is so strong it's making me vomit and hate sex, so it must be strong enough to lift my depression. In clinical-trial patients who figure out they're receiving the drug and not the inert pill, expectations soar. That matters because belief in the power of a medical treatment can be self-fulfilling (that's the basis of the placebo effect). The patients who correctly guess that they're getting the real drug therefore experience a stronger placebo effect than those who get the dummy pill, experience no side effects, and are therefore disappointed. That might account for antidepressants' slight edge in effectiveness compared with a placebo, an edge that derives not from the drugs' molecules but from the hopes and expectations that patients in studies feel when they figure out they're receiving the real drug.

In an analysis of six large experiments [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2010] in which, as usual, depressed patients received either a placebo or an active drug, the true drug effect—that is, in addition to the placebo effect—was "nonexistent to negligible" in patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression. Only in patients with very severe symptoms (scoring 23 or above on the standard scale) was there a statistically significant drug benefit. Such patients account for about 13 percent of people with depression. "Most people don't need an active drug," says Vanderbilt's Hollon, a coauthor of the study. "For a lot of folks, you're going to do as well on a sugar pill or on conversations with your physicians as you will on medication. It doesn't matter what you do; it's just the fact that you're doing something."

Right about here, people scowl and ask how anti-depressants—especially those that raise the brain's levels of serotonin—can possibly have no direct chemical effect on the brain. Surely raising serotonin levels should right the synapses' "chemical imbalance" and lift depression. Unfortunately, the serotonin-deficit theory of depression is built on a foundation of tissue paper. How that came to be is a story in itself, but the basics are that in the 1950s scientists discovered, serendipitously, that a drug called iproniazid seemed to help some people with depression. Iproniazid increases brain levels of serotonin and norepinephrine. Ergo, low levels of those neurotransmitters must cause depression. More than 50 years on, the presumed effectiveness of antidepressants that act this way remains the chief support for the chemical-imbalance theory of depression. Absent that effectiveness, the theory hasn't a leg to stand on. Direct evidence doesn't exist. Lowering people's serotonin levels does not change their mood. And a new drug, tianeptine, which is sold in France and some other countries (but not the U.S.), turns out to be as effective as Prozac-like antidepressants that keep the synapses well supplied with serotonin. The mechanism of the new drug? It lowers brain levels of serotonin. "If depression can be equally affected by drugs that increase serotonin and by drugs that decrease it," says Kirsch, "it's hard to imagine how the benefits can be due to their chemical activity."

Antidepressants had sales of $9.6 billion in the U.S. in 2008.

The New Yorker article also cites the studies on the placebo effect by Kirsch and then for good measure questions the scientific basis for the entire field of psychiatry. About midway through a long article he drops this bombshell of a paragraph:

Later studies have shown that patients suffering from depression and anxiety do equally well when treated by psychoanalysts and by behavioral therapists; that there is no difference in effectiveness between C.B.T., which focuses on the way patients reason, and interpersonal therapy, which focuses on their relations with other people; and that patients who are treated by psychotherapists do no better than patients who meet with sympathetic professors with no psychiatric training. Depressed patients in psychotherapy do no better or worse than depressed patients on medication. There is little evidence to support the assumption that supplementing antidepressant medication with talk therapy improves outcomes. What a load of evidence does seem to suggest is that care works for some of the people some of the time, and it doesn't much matter what sort of care it is. Patients believe that they are being cared for by someone who will make them feel better; therefore, they feel better. It makes no difference whether they’re lying on a couch interpreting dreams or sitting in a Starbucks discussing the concept of “flow.” --The New Yorker, March 1, 2010

Okay so here's what we know:

* Most people do recover from depression.

* The effect of anti-depressants is almost entirely due to the placebo effect -- which is substantial.

* The 13% of depressed patients who are severely depressed, do seem to benefit from antidepressants for reasons that aren't clear.

* For everyone else, just sitting down and talking with someone who cares about you is as effective as any clinical treatment.

* The serotonin theory of depression is bunk and always has been (in spite of being repeated hundreds of millions of times a year by doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals around the world.)

Wow.

So let me just take a moment to explain why I think this is good news, fantastic news even.

Basically, the effectiveness of psychopharmaceuticals was a bubble -- just like the dot.com bubble at the end of the 1990s and just like the housing and financial services bubbles that popped in 2008. Big Pharma is basically in the branding business -- no different than Nike, Starbucks, or Tommy Hilfiger. Big Pharma was selling a lifestyle brand -- PERMANENTLY HAPPY -- but in order to keep their huge profits going, they had to keep hyping the value of their product and pushing it on more and more people. And now that bubble has popped. It's not that there was never any value there. It's just that the value was not as great as advertised.

I was always deeply skeptical of the claims made by Big Pharma. It seemed to me that life is just a series of peaks and valleys. But Big Pharma pathologized the human condition to boost their profits (which is all kinds of messed up when you think about it). Furthermore, it seemed to me that the massive proliferation of antidepressants in the culture was too often just a (happy!) mask to hide the corporate power that has been strip mining our society for the last 40 years. Wages have been stagnant for 40 years, living standards are declining, and huge monopolies control an ever greater share of our lives (between Big Insurance, Big Energy, and Big Finance people have fewer discretionary dollars to spend each month -- most dollars are already allocated for survival before the paycheck ever arrives). PEOPLE HAVE REASON TO BE DEPRESSED BECAUSE THINGS ARE REALLY MESSED UP IN OUR SOCIETY. But Big Pharma came along and patted us all on the heads and said, no, no, it's just YOU who's messed up, society is JUST FINE!

But that quote from The New Yorker is really the big one:

patients who are treated by psychotherapists do no better than patients who meet with sympathetic professors with no psychiatric training.... it doesn't much matter what sort of care it is. Patients believe that they are being cared for by someone who will make them feel better; therefore, they feel better. It makes no difference whether they’re lying on a couch interpreting dreams or sitting in a Starbucks discussing the concept of “flow.”

Here's what that means -- if another human being cares about you and shows that he/she cares, you are likely to get better.

So much of our current moment -- the collapse of the global financial system, the decline in trust in corporations, elected official, and elites -- is pointing us to a return to modesty. To a return to what we know in our gut is true. To a return to living within our means. Furthermore, the evidence that human interaction plays such a large role in healing also points us to something much more important -- the return to community; the return to actually giving a shit about each other instead of trampling over each other in search of ever greater paper wealth. Which is really great news when you think about it.

Look, nature's antidepressants are sleep, exercise, natural food, community, and touch. All of those are almost free (natural food costs money -- but the profit margins on real food are substantially lower than on processed foods). But corporations sell us on the virtues of coffee, cubicles, fast food, and individuality -- because all of those are extremely profitable. And then corporations sell us the "solutions" to the problems they created. I think the way forward then, is for us to step away from the corporatist distortions that have come to permeate society over the last 40 years and to return to what we know to be true -- getting plenty of rest, moving our bodies, eating right, and most importantly, being really good to each other in community.

Update #1: This post is slightly modified from an earlier version. In a post I wrote earlier this week, I accused Niall Ferguson of letting his politics preceed his facts and yet I see that I did some of that in this post too so I went back and rewrote several sentences. Also, I should be clear to point out that all of the discussion above is in reference to depression and antidepressants. This research, by Kirsch and others, is only talking about the placebo effect in connection with antidepressants. Their research says nothing about other classes of psychopharmaceuticals including mood stabilizers, anti-convulsants, or anti-psychotics. Likewise, their research says nothing about the placebo effect in connection with other mental health issues like bipolar disorder, ocd, schizophrenia, etc.

Update #2: For folks interested in learning more about these issues, check out the Carlat Psychiatry Blog.

Update #3: Absolute genius: "how to be happy, a flow chart"

Update #4: Talk Deeply, Be Happy? from the NY Times. (hat tip AR for the link.)

Update #5: It seems to me that based on the data above, we don't actually know whether the thing that is working is the 1. placebo, 2. the antidepressant drug, or 3. neither -- whether depression just remits on its own with time. Because even the placebo group in the control is still getting something -- no one in these studies is getting no treatment are they? So isn't there still a third possibility out there -- that depression sometimes goes into remission on its own?

Update #6: A friend (who also happens to be a pharmacist) pointed out that antidepressants are both underprescribed and overprescribed at the same time. Many of those with severe depression (the population actually helped by these drugs) are not on antidepressants whereas millions of middle class and wealthy people with good health insurance and milder symptoms are overprescribed these drugs.

Update #7: Louis Bayard writing in Salon.com reflects on this new data in a compelling and deeply personal post entitled, "My antidepressant gets harder to swallow: As studies shed doubt on certain psychiatric drugs, I wonder: Do I really need my little white pill?" It's very very well done (and many of the comments are fascinating too). Money quote:

It's bracing to see how depression is treated in other countries, where the relationship between drug manufacturers and physicians isn't quite so hand-in-glove. Great Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, for example, recommends that, before taking antidepressants, people with mild or moderate depression should undergo nine to 12 weeks of guided self-help, nine to 12 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, and 10 to 14 weeks of exercise classes.

There's this "thing" and it's the only thing that we've got

2010-03-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

I've touched on this topic before, and I even used a concert video to illustrate my point in that post too, but I want to return to this concept because I think it's really important and doesn't get talked about nearly enough. It goes like this:

In the summer of 2008, I went to a concert on the Santa Monica Pier featuring Arrested Development. It was warm, a nice breeze was blowing, and there were thousands of people out on the pier and down on the beach below. The group had been huge back in 1992 but eventually was drown out in the marketplace by the very gangsta rap they had sought to replace through their message of positive Afrocentric hip hop. Their first album, 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of... remains one of the greatest music recordings of all time and it seems that most everyone in the audience knew all the lyrics to those songs.

Even though Arrested Development hadn't been on top in a while, the lead singer (Speech?) still had it as a performer and began to lead the audience in a call and response. He'd sing out, "Lemme here you say, whoaaaa," and we'd sing back "whoaaaa" and he'd say "yeaaaah" and we'd sing back "yeaaah." Or he'd sing a line from the verse and then point the microphone out to the audience for us to sing the next line. By the time we got to "Everyday People" the band and the crowd were one -- one huge single organism, singing, smiling, together.

The moment Speech started involving the crowd, chills of inspiration went up my spine. It was the middle of the Presidential election, long before Obama wowed the world at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and it was the first time in forever that I had actually seen someone lead anything. It was the first time in years that I had actually felt the collective energy of the group again. The crazy things is, I don't think we even have a vocabulary to describe what this thing is -- the collective sphere in the U.S. having been attacked, hacked, dismantled, thwarted, and quite literally murdered for decades. But here I was on the Santa Monica pier, feeling connected again, feeling like a part of a group, feeling the sensation that there was something here that was more than the sum of its parts.

For another example, check out this video for the song Resistance by Muse (seriously check out the video, it's amazing). The crowd shots are incredible -- this is a group of young people in black clothing who are so often portrayed as disaffected, unmotivated, unconnected to the world. But maybe the real issue is that they just don't give a fuck about what the corporatists want them to pretend to care about -- and THAT's why they appear checked out. But when their energy is gathered and focused -- you could power a city with it. Watching the crowd you get the sense that there is nothing this group, together, could not do. But then when they return out into the night again, the energy fades and scatters.

My point is this: as progressives, the collective is all that we have! Yes our policies are better, yes our governing philosophy is better, yes our policies actually work and improve peoples lives. But we are always going to get massively outspent by corporate forces and that money also buys more sophisticated messaging too -- especially in corporate media. ALL THAT WE HAVE is our ability to be popular, our ability to tap into the truth that always resides outside corporate control, our ability to tap into the collective energy that is more than the sum of our individual parts. All that we have is the ability to awaken and harness that thing that we all experience in working as a group, that sensation that anything is possible together. The collective spirit is the one thing the corporatists will never have because the true collective spirit is based on love -- love for each other, love for life, love for the planet. And love can never be bought or sold, it just is, the eternal river of life that flows around us.

During the campaign, Obama figured out how to harness this collective energy and he used it quite effectively. Since being sworn in, he has completely abandoned collective approaches, and mass politics in favor of Rahm-Emanuel-inspired inside baseball. But progressives never win based on triangulation and cynically playing an inside game. The only way we win is through tapping into the energy of the crowd that is based on the truth of love. And until Obama gets back to that, he won't be effective.

I also touch on this concept in a slightly different way in an earlier post called The River.

The Ascent of Money, part 3, a closer look at the relationship between violence and wealth

2010-03-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

This is the last post in my three part series on The Ascent of Money (you can read parts 1 and 2 here).

In this post, I want to return to the question, 'What is the relationship between violence and wealth?' One of the reasons I'm so intrigued by this question is that the relationship between the two seems obvious and yet it is never talked about openly in popular culture, and certainly never talked about in an economics classroom. Indeed it seems to me that the only time we every acknowledge the relationship between violence and wealth is in TV shows like The Sopranos or perhaps a movie featuring the character Jason Bourne. I think it is vital to study this dynamic because as we come to understand the relationship between violence and wealth we can presumably take steps to have less violence in our economy and in our society, correct?

With that in mind, as I read through Niall Ferguson's financial history of the world, I started to write the word "violence" into the margin anytime he mentioned the relationship between violence and wealth. I just want to draw your attention to some of those passages so that we can begin to move to the foreground, some of the underlying dynamics of our economy that deserve closer scrutiny:

"Behind every loan shark, there lurks an implicit threat." --The Ascent of Money, p. 40

It's obvious, but worth noting that the informal banker to most of the world's poor, relies on violence as a business model.

"Prior to the 1390s, it might legitimately be suggested, the Medici were more gangsters than bankers: a small-time clan, notable more for low violence than high finance. Between 1343 and 1360 no fewer than five Medici were sentenced to death for capital crimes." p. 42

Quite literally, modern banking began with mafia families in Italy. Interesting too that Ferguson sees capital crimes as "low violence."

"There were no debtors' prisons in the United State in the early 1800s, at a time when English debtors could end up languishing in jail for years." p. 60

I had forgotten about debtors prisons, but up until fairly recently (1869) the country that gave us the Magna Carta also loved putting poor people in jail.

But here's where things get really interesting:

"'War', declared the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, 'is the father of all things.' It was certainly the father of the bond market. In Pieter van der Heyden's extraordinary engraving, The Battle about Money, piggy banks, money bags, barrels of coins, and treasure chests -- most of them heavily armed with swords, knives and lances -- attack each other in a chaotic free-for-all. The Dutch verses below the engraving say: 'It's all for money and goods, this fighting and quarreling.' But what the inscriptions could equally well have said is: 'This fighting is possible only if you can raise the money to pay for it.' The ability to finance war through a market for government debt was, like so much else in financial history, an invention of the Italian Renaissance." p. 69

"The Battle of Waterloo was the culmination of more than two decades of intermittent conflict between Britain and France. But it was more than a battle between two armies. It was also a contest between rival financial systems: one, the French, which under Napoleon had come to be based on plunder (the taxation of the conquered); the other, the British, based on debt." p. 80

"In many ways, it was true that the bond market was powerful. By the later nineteenth century, countries that defaulted on their debts risked economic sanctions, the imposition of foreign control over their finances and even, in at least five cases, military intervention. It is hard to believe that Gladstone would have ordered the invasion of Egypt in 1882 if the Egyptian government had not threatened to renege on its obligations to European bondholders, himself among them. Bringing an 'emerging market' under the aegis of the British Empire was the surest way to remove political risk from investors' concerns. Even those outside the Empire risked a visit from a gunboat if they defaulted, as Venezuela discovered in 1902, when a joint naval expedition by Britain, Germany and Italy temporarily blockaded the country's ports. The United States was especially energetic (and effective) in protecting bondholders' interests in Central America and the Caribbean." p. 98 [By the way, don't you just love how Ferguson describes international war crimes as "energetic (and effective!) ways of protecting bondholder's interests!"]

So the micro is the macro -- just as the loan shark will kneecap a debtor who is late on a payment, creditor nations will invade and overthrow governments, even democratically elected governments, in order to increase profits.

"As [Jan Pieterszoon] Coen [officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century] himself put it: 'We cannot make war without trade, nor trade without war. he was ruthless in his treatment of competitors, executing British East India Company officials at Amboyna and effectively wiping out the indigenous Bandanese." p. 134

Far from being an aberration, that theology of domination continues on to this day in U.S. foreign policy. It is also interesting to think about the ways in which creditor nations kneecap debtor nations to get their money back given that China is now the de facto banker to the U.S. -- holding nearly a trillion dollars of our debt.

"Besides cheaper calories, cheaper wood and cheaper wool and cotton, imperial expansion brought other unintended economic benefits, too. It encouraged the development of militarily useful technologies -- clocks, guns, lenses and navigational instruments -- that turned out to have big spin-offs for the development of industrial machinery." p. 285-286.

"The key problem with overseas investment, then as now, is that it is hard for investors in London or New York to see what a foreign government or an overseas manager is up to when they are an ocean or more away. Moreover, most non-Western countries had, until quite recently, highly unreliable legal systems and differing accounting rules. If a foreign trading partner decided to default on its debts, there was little that an investor situated on the other side of the world could do. In the first era of globalization, the solution to this problem was brutally simple but effective: to impose European rule." p. 289

You get the point. Even in a book written by a conservative Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (the Hoover institution -- intentionally named after the worst president in U.S. history), a guy who has a vested interest in obscuring the relationship between wealth and violence, the relationship shows up again and again. You can't talk about the history of money, or the history of finance, or economic history, without also talking about the history of violence and the ways in which violence has been used to enforce contracts and increase profits.

More on that topic in future posts.

The role of fractional reserve banking in propelling the growth of capitalism in Protestant countries

2010-03-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

Friends who know me know that I'm a huge fan of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I discuss this book so often in person that I was surprised the other day when I did a search of my blog and discovered that I've never gone into much depth about the book here on the site. So today I want to rap down the basic thesis of The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism and then expand upon Weber's theory using data from Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. (There is an excellent Wikipedia article on The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism for anyone who is looking for a more complete overview of the book.)

First published as a two-part article in 1904-5, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is one of the cornerstones of the field of sociology. In the book, Weber is trying to figure out why it is that capitalism developed faster in countries that adopted Protestantism while the development of capitalism in Catholic and other non-Protestant countries lagged behind. And what he finds is this:

The central question for a Christian is whether he/she is going to heaven. In Catholicism, for hundreds of years, the path to heaven was very clear -- pay "indulgences" to the church, and your sins are forgiven and when you die, you go to heaven. Indulgences were basically a way for the Catholic Church to tax all of Europe for hundreds of years. But Martin Luther and John Calvin hated the practice of indulgences (and many feudal princes in Germany and other provinces hated them too). Luther and then Calvin argued that God is so great, no human works could possibly be enough to earn his (sic) favor. Rather, everything is predestined, determined ahead of time by God. They argued that those who go to heaven are saved through God's grace alone, not human works (read: indulgences).

Which is fine as far as that goes, but people naturally want to know if they are one of the chosen, one of the elect who will be going to heaven. Weber writes:

"The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background." --The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism, p. 110.

This was no small matter either. Luther argued that only 144,000 people were going to heaven, so there were a limited number of seats on the bus, so to speak. So people started to look around for signs that one is "chosen." And what are the signs? Well according to Luther and Calvin, the chosen are those who dedicate their lives to creating God's will on earth. So the signs are that one works without ceasing -- and here's the kicker -- and one never spends much on the sins of the flesh. Luther and Calvin hated the sensuality of Catholicism, that peasants could get drunk, dance, and have sex with each other on Saturday and then pay their indulgences on Sunday and be forgiven. The mark of Protestantism became those who so ordered their lives so that they NEVER gave in to the sins of the flesh and never spent their earnings on bodily desires. Hence the Protestant Ethic was born.

"On the one hand it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace... On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means." --The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 111 and 112

"The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system. There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin.... [Protestantism] had developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturae, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature." p. 117 - 118

"Sebastian Franck struck the central characteristic of this type of religion when he saw the significance of the Reformation in the fact that now every Christian had to be a monk all his life.... By founding its ethic in the doctrine of predestination, Protestantism substituted for the spiritual aristocracy of monks outside of and above the world the spiritual aristocracy of the predestined saints of God within the world." p. 121

Just to be clear, the relentless work ethic of Protestants was not a means to attain salvation but rather a system of self assurance (a method of existential anxiety control if you will) that simply affirmed one had already attained salvation through grace.

But something curious happens when people work extremely hard and rarely spend money. For the first time in human history you have large accumulations of capital. And large accumulation of capital naturally lead to banks (places to store that capital), which then provides the catalyst (and the capital) for the emergence of capitalism in all of the Protestant nations.

The explanatory powers of the theory are so strong that indeed, a whole academic discipline, sociology, emerged in its wake. And the writing in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is both so direct and searing that it has endured as one of the great academic treatises of all time.

And yet, as great as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is, I wonder if there are some additional factors that also help to explain the rise of capitalism in Protestant countries.

In an earlier post, I asked whether in fact, slavery, not Protestantism, was the catalyst for the emergence of capitalism? Indeed Eric Williams makes that point in his book Capitalism & Slavery and Eduardo Galeano builds upon that idea in, Open Veins of Latin America.

But I don't think it's an either/or situation. I think it's a both/and. Protestantism led to the accumulation of capital that developed the bourgeois class that accumulated even more capital that paid for the ships that participated in and profited from the African slave trade that further fueled the growth of capitalism.

After reading The Ascent of Money, I think I may have stumbled upon another important facet of the story: fractional reserve banking. I'll explain:

The early Christian Church and Islam too forbade the lending of money and charging interest. It was called usury and was considered one of the worst possible sins.

"For Christians, lending money at interest was a sin. Usurers, people who lent money at interest, had been excommunicated by the Third Lateran Council in 1179. Even arguing that usury was not a sin had been condemned as heresy by the Council of Vienna in 1311-12. Christian usurers had to make restitution to the Church before they could be buried on hallowed ground." --The Ascent of Money, p. 35

The earliest forms of modern banking began in Italy with the emergence of the powerful Medici family serving as an intermediary between various businesses.

"Of particular importance in the Medici's early business were the bills of exchange (cambium per literas) that had developed in the course of the Middle Ages as a way of financing trade. If one merchant owned another sum that could not be paid in cash until the conclusion of a transaction some months hence, the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and use the bill as a means of payment in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as broker. Whereas the charging of interest was condemned as usury by the Church, there was nothing to prevent a shrewd trader making profits on such transactions. That was the essence of the Medici business. There were no checks; instructions were given orally and written in the bank's books. There was no interest; depositors were given discrezione (in proportion to the annual profits of the firm) to compensate them for risking their money. " --The Ascent of Money, p. 43-44

But it wasn't until the Reformation that modern banking and the modern capitalist system really took off. And Martin Luther and John Calvin were key in revising church teachings on lending with interest.

"From 1515 until early 1524, Luther's works indicate that he was completely opposed to lending money at interest. In the second time period, from late 1524 until his death in 1546, while still principally against usury -- especially among Christians -- Luther's writings indicate that he allowed for the practice of lending money at interest, albeit with certain restrictions." --Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences that Separated the Protestant Reformers, David Jones p. 52

In 1524, just 4 years after surviving the Diet of Worms and excommunication (but not execution) by the Catholic Church, Luther displayed a notable shift in his writing on usury:

"Luther's writings reveal that he tolerated and even suggested guidelines whereby usury may be practiced in the kingdom of this world. These guidelines include a call for itemized collateral, shared risk, and governmental oversight of usurious transactions." -- Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences that Separated the Protestant Reformers, p. 61

So too, Calvin's views on usury also represented a break from earlier church teachings. In Calvin's letter on usury in 1545 he makes a biblical case that usury might be permitted under certain circumstances:

"Calvin knew there were two Hebrew words translated as “usury.” One, neshek, meant “to bite”; the other, tarbit, meant “to take legitimate increase.” Based on these distinctions, Calvin argued that only “biting” loans were forbidden. Thus, one could lend at interest to business people who would make a profit using the money." -- Norman Jones, Utah State University

As a result of these theological shifts, the modern banking system began to emerge in Protestant countries in Europe.

"It was in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm [all cities that broke from Catholicism during the Reformation] that the next decisive wave of financial innovation occurred, as the forerunners of modern central banks made their first appearance. The seventeenth century saw the foundation of three distinctly novel institutions that, in their different ways, were intended to serve a public as well as a private financial function. The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins. By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of checks and direct debits or transfer that we take for granted today. This allowed more and more commercial transactions to take place without the need for the sums involved to materialize in actual coins. One merchant could make a payment to another simply by arranging for his account at the bank to be debited and the counterparty's account to be credited. The limitation on this system was simply that the Exchange Bank maintained something close to a 100 percent ratio between its deposits and its reserves of precious metal and coin....

It was in Stockholm nearly half a century later, with the foundation of the Swedish Riksbank in 1656, that the barrier was broken through. Although it performed the same functions as the Dutch Wisselbank, the Riksbank was also designed to be a Lanebank, meaning that it engaged in lending as well as facilitating commercial payments. By lending amounts in excess of its metallic reserve, it may be said to have pioneered the practice of what would later be known as fractional reserve banking, exploiting the fact that money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. Since depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money, only a fraction of their money need to be kept in the Riksbank's reserves at any given time." --The Ascent of Money, p. 48-49

Think about how important fractional reserve banking is to the history of the world. I deposit $100 in a bank that is required to hold 10% reserves. The bank then lends out $90 to a business that spends that $90 on equipment to run their business and make a profit. The seller of that equipment deposits that $90 in a bank that then lends out $81 and so on. In just 3 transactions, the original $100 has been turned into $271 of economic activity.

Basically, while the Catholic countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy) were still thinking that money was metal and building far flung empires to dig the metal ore out of the ground, the Protestant countries of Europe figured out how to make money out of nothing more than trust. And in the end, money based on credit (trust in business relationships) proved to be more resilient than money based on metal. How crazy is that!?

The important point to note here is that, it was not just the Protestant ethic that led to (capital formation which caused) the emergence of modern capitalism. It was also the theological openings by Luther and Calvin to allow usury, to allow lending with interest that sparked the emergence of capitalism in Reformed countries as well. Free from the dictates of the Vatican, the Protestant countries quickly liberalized lending rules in ways that reshaped the balance of power in the world and gave birth to our modern capitalist economy.

Final thought: it's interesting to reflect on how different church doctrines lead to different lending patterns in the economy. Basically, the Catholic ban on usury led to the rise of mafia-style families like the Medici -- informal financial intermediaries who don't charge interest but take a cut of each transaction. By contract, Protestant support for usury can be said to lead to the development of the multinational banks. They both have their problems of course, but it's fascinating to reflect on the role of theology in dictating the direction of the economy.

Update #1: A number of researchers have noted that the ban on charging interest in Islam has impeded the economic growth of the Middle East, leading in part to the millions of young men with limited financial futures (who are then a target for recruitment by radical Islamic organizations). Also I think it's interesting to note that religions that tend to de-emphasize the importance of the physical world and give priority to the spiritual or invisible world, for example Buddhism and Hinduism, both lead to economic structures that are a complete disaster -- basically leaving the society stuck with a stone age economy. Western liberal support for Tibet is always something of a mystery to me given that Tibet was a theocracy with a population left destitute by a theology that paid little attention to the need to improve living standards. The Indian economy has shown remarkable growth in recent years but I would argue that Hinduism is not driving that growth -- rather as the country has become more secular, it has devoted more resources towards economic development (investing heavily in education and infrastructure).

What is money?

2010-03-10T17:15:00.000-08:00

[Editors note: Today I am starting what I hope will turn into a series of posts on what exactly it means to "wake up." I hear the words "awake and alive" a lot these days, particularly in Buddhist circles. When Buddhists talk about waking up they are usually referring to a state of non-dualism, everlasting consciousness, free from the ever-changing nature of our physical world. I've never really been able to discover the "awake" state that Buddhists refer to -- and I suspect most Buddhists, even those who claim enlightenment haven't experienced it either (in my experience, most people who claim to be enlightened in this world are not).

Instead, I'm talking about waking up in the political sense -- breaking through the assumptions and noise around us and seeing things as they really are. That's really the purpose of this blog in general but just in the last few weeks I feel like I've been seeing the outlines of what an awake political consciousness might really look like so I hope to begin sketching it here. I'm going to be coming at this question from a bunch of different angles so at first it will seem like my posts are all over the place. But I think over time, these various sketches will come together to paint a clearer picture of things as they are.]

As frequent readers of this blog will know, one of the questions I keep coming back to is, "What is the relationship between violence and wealth?" But I realized recently, that perhaps I have the question phrased incorrectly. Maybe the question is, "What is the relationship between violence and money?" And in order to answer that question, we need to ask, 'well, what exactly is this thing we call money?'

The answer is not as obvious as it may appear. Is money the rectangular piece of paper in my pocket printed by the government? Paper money used to be tied to gold but the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971 and now the value of paper money is not tied to anything tangible. Furthermore, why did we ever treat hunks of metal as money in the first place? Is the demand for jewelry really that high? What about the number staring back at me on the computer screen showing my checking account balance? Are electronic ones and zeros stored in some remote server that most people never see really "money" in the same way that paper or metal is considered money?

To better understand money I read, Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World." Ferguson is a conservative (he's a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) and he has a bad habit of dropping gratuitous neocon soundbites into the text that have nothing to do with his point. For example he argues that unions suck (page 116 in the hardcover edition); that the fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet was really a great guy (pages 213-215); and that George Soros is evil (pgs 314-319). I guess that's just how conservatives roll -- they have to throw in their nonsensical applause lines every 50 pages in or so in order to keep their membership card active and get invited to the next conference.

Ferguson's knee jerk attacks on working people are all the more incongruous because he wrote this book during the middle of one of the greatest financial collapses in human history. As he narrates the economic history of the world, a picture emerges of an endless cycle of booms and busts and our era in no different. The long term data presented in The Ascent of Money serves as a pretty profound indictment of the capitalist system and the greed and avarice of bankers and businessmen (occasionally a few women too, but mostly men). But I guess that's why he had to throw in the red meat applause lines for conservatives -- he didn't want his neocon funders and friends to think he had 'gone all Naomi Klein on them' (even though the data in The Ascent of Money really supports Klein's politics more than Ferguson's.)

I would be remiss at this point if I failed to point out just how odious it is to have to read nonsense like this is a book by a major publisher:

To work the mines, the Spaniards at first relied on paying wages to the inhabitants of nearby villages. But conditions were so hard that from the late sixteenth century a system of forced labor (la mita) had to be introduced, whereby men aged between 18 and 50 from the sixteen highland provinces were conscripted for seventeen weeks a year. Mortality among the miners was horrendous, not least because of constant exposure to the mercury fumes generated by the patio process of refinement, whereby ground-up silver ore was trampled into an amalgam with mercury, washed and then heated to burn off the mercury. The air down the mine shafts was (and remains) noxious and miners had to descend seven-hundred-foot shafts on the most primitive of steps, clambering back up after long hours of digging with sacks or ore tied to their backs. (p. 21)

Did you catch that? Ferguson writes that 'The Spanish at first relied on paying wages. But the conditions were so bad (namely most of the miners died) so a system of forced labor HAD TO BE INTRODUCED.' The Spanish enslaved the population and worked them to death in the mines -- but Ferguson writes about it as an economic necessity as if the Spanish HAD NO OTHER CHOICE but to enslave and kill the local population.

Think of all the other ways that a more conscientious person might have written that passage: "But the conditions in the mines were so horrendous that the indigenous population refused to work at any price. Rather than improve conditions in the mine or simply walk away, the Spanish, driven by their lust for wealth and a theology of domination, decided to enslave the local population instead. The resulting forced labor and early death for the indigenous population were acts of genocide that enriched the Spanish crown." It's amazing to me that none of the editors at The Penguin Press bothered to cut out the sentences that make Ferguson look like a corporatist monster. But maybe they just didn't see it because they come from a similar worldview. It really shows the sorry state of conservative thinking that Ferguson is treated as a "serious academic" even though he reflexively sides with capital and against people every single time.

The numerous instances of sloppy, ideologically driven prose are really too bad because the information contained in The Ascent of Money is really quite excellent. Case in point, Ferguson's explanation of "what is money" is very insightful -- perhaps the strongest section in the book:

"What the Spaniards had failed to understand is that the value of precious metal is not absolute. Money is worth only what someone else is willing to give you for it. An increase in its supply will not make a society richer, thought it may enrich the government that monopolizes the production of money. Other things being equal, monetary expansion will merely make prices higher. There was in fact no reason other than historical happenstance that money was for so long equated in the Western mind with metal. In ancient Mesopotamia, beginning around five thousand years ago, people used clay tokens to record transaction involving agricultural produce like barley or wool, or metals such as silver. Rings, blocks or sheets made of silver certainly served as ready money (as did grain), but the clay tablets were just as important, and probably more so. A great many have survived, reminders that when human beings first began to produce written records of their activities they did so not to write history, poetry or philosophy, but to do business." (The Ascent of Money, p. 26 - 27.)

"What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief, event faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honors his checks or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display. Anything can serve as money, from the cowrie shells of the Maldives to the huge stone discs used on the pacific islands of Yap. And now, it seems, in this electronic age nothing can serve as money too." (p. 29 - 30.)

"It is no coincidence that in English the root of 'credit' is credo, the Latin for 'I believe.'" (p. 30)

"Cursed with an abundance of precious metal, mighty Spain failed to develop a sophisticated banking system relying instead of the merchants of Antwerp for short-term cash advances against future silver deliveries. The idea that money was really about credit, not metal, never quite caught on in Madrid. Indeed, the Spanish crown ended up defaulting on all or part of its debt no fewer than fourteen times between 1557 and 1696. With a track record like that, all the silver in Potosi could not make Spain a secure credit risk. In the modern world, power would go to the bankers, not the bankrupts." (p. 52)

In my next post I'll explore the ways in which fractional reserve banking explains The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism.

I shouldn't have watched Religulous again, but...

2010-02-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

Okay this is not gonna go over well, but, that's never really stopped me before. [Actually, social disapproval is one of the ways that our minds become colonized, circumscribed, and constrained. And it is only through risking social disapproval that we break through those chains to see the world as it really is.] So here goes:

By any standard modern definition of mental health, the founders of most of the major world religions were mentally ill. Matching our modern understanding of mental health up against the written accounts of the actions of these religious figures, one would observe that:

Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, appears to have suffered from anti-social personality disorder. He abandoned his family and avoided most personal relationships with other people, preferring instead to live under a tree with his eyes closed for most of his life.

Abraham, the patriarch of the Israelites and the Jewish faith, appears to have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia: he heard voices, thought God was talking to him, and tried to murder his own son because of the voices in his head.

Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of the Christian faith, appears to have suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. He thought he was the son of God, told people to abandon their families, give everything away, and follow him.

I know less about the life and works of Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh, the founder of Islam. But he too, claimed that angels sent by God spoke directly to him and is said to have transcribed an entire book, the Qur'an, based on these messages from God. Today we would call that sort of thinking schizophrenic.

More recently:

Martin Luther (who started the Protestant Reformation), St. Ignacius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuits), and John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim's Progress which formed the cornerstone of Puritanism) all suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder.

Joseph Smith Jr., founder of Mormonism, was a well known con man. [Read Jon Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven to learn more.] I don't know where being a con man fits in the DSM-IV but needless to say, it suggests that Smith's mental health was not 100%.

What this suggests is that 1) our tradition of holding the medical practice of psychiatry in high esteem; and 2) our tradition of respecting various religious traditions -- are fundamentally incompatible with each other. To the extent that we hold that the DSM-IV is the best approximation we have for what constitutes mental health and mental illness -- then we necessarily conclude that the followers of the various major religions traditions are following the teachings of people who were likely suffering from mental illness. And to the extent that we conclude that religion is a good and true depiction of life on earth (and beyond) -- then we necessarily conclude that the DSM-IV is invalid. And yet, most respectable, modern people in Western society hold these two fundamentally incompatible sets of views ('religious tolerance is good and modern psychology is good') without noting the severe dissonance between these two sets of views.

Said simply -- it seems that we either we need to respect crazy people more, or respect religious traditions less.

some thoughts on economic growth

2010-02-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

In order for the economy to grow, you have to make things that improve people's quality of life.

You have to grow things that people can eat (real food that nourishes bodies not the frankenfood that ConAgra creates).

You have to make manufactured goods that save people time or money, or that increase comfort or well being.

You have to make technological innovations that cure diseases or solve problems or connect people in meaningful ways.

You have to provide services that increase stability, that increase happiness, or that help people live fulfilling lives.

You have to build the infrastructure (physical and social) upon which all of the rest of this economic activity can transpire.

That is the foundation of economic growth in any country.

But since 1993 and the passage of NAFTA, the U.S. doesn't really make things anymore. We've shipped a large portion of our manufacturing to Mexico and China and the third world.

A number of companies -- like the private health insurance industry -- create the illusion of making something. Judging from their ads, private health insurance companies claims to be an accounting service to improve health care access, quality, and affordability. But in reality, they are just rackets to pump money from people to corporations.

Since the repeal of Glass-Steagal in 1999, the only thing that has propelled U.S. economic growth is "financial services." But it turns out that the U.S.led "innovation in financial services" was really just a scam, an elaborate mathematical Ponzi scheme executed by the best and brightest firms on Wall Street.

So when President Obama tries to stimulate a depressed economy now, the problem is, the only thing that the U.S. really makes anymore, the only thing we really excel at, is rackets, scams, and financial Ponzi schemes. Left with little choice, the Obama financial team led by Geithner & Summers has tried to re-inflate the financial services bubble and the housing bubble. Because really, that's all we got.

The problem is that this strategy is not going to work. The fundamentals just aren't there. The idea that we can run a successful economy without making things that actually improve people's lives is just silly. The idea that we can just muddle through this mess and everything will be okay is about to crash headfirst into the brick wall of reality.

So, my guess is that the re-inflated housing and financial services bubble will pop. I imagine traders will take profits in the early summer, sticking small scale investors with huge losses, and we'll head into the second dip of the great recession by fall. Because the Wall Street crowd doesn't really don't care if the bubble pops again-- they know they'll get a better deal from a Republican Congress and that a Republican electoral sweep is more likely if the economy is in tatters next November.

The alternative of course would be for Obama to acknowledge the depth of the economic and political problems facing the country and begin to address them. It would likely need to include restoring Glass-Steagal, canceling NAFTA, nationalizing the health insurance and oil industries, cutting the defense budget in half, bringing our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, restoring FDR-era levels of taxation on the rich, and creating a national university system dedicated to science and engineering. Ian Welsh has a great list of things that are needed "To Fix America." But again it does not seem that Obama is interested in having that sort of conversation with America or pushing that sort of legislative agenda through Congress. It is exactly the sort of sober, adult conversation that Obama potentially could be really great at. But instead we get nonsense about bipartisan budget commissions and the 'need to reform entitlement programs' including Medicare and Social Security. Quite literally, facing an economy that is hitting on no cylinders -- our political class proposes slashing the most effective anti-poverty programs in the history of the world rather than addressing the sources of the problem.

a couple of great links

2010-01-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

I know I'm posting a lot of links these days (as opposed to my original essays). But some folks out there are completely rocking it right now so I want to be sure to highlight some of the great thinking and writing happening in the progressive blogosphere. (I actually think we're witnesses the maturation of the progressive blogosphere -- it is getting smarter and faster before our eyes, but that's another post.)

Devilstower over at DailyKos hits it out of the park with his(?her?) post, "Remember the Naughts." Money quote (hat tip to Digby for highlighting it!):

Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. Think we should privatize war by handing unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Kiddo, we passed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.
They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

Then Ian Welsh answers a question that I have been pondering myself for the last few weeks, "Why Democrats Are Trying to Commit Electoral Suicide." Really the whole piece should be required reading for any poli sci 101 class, but I'll just quote one paragraph and urge you to click over to read the whole thing:

The elites are convinced they know what has to be done. Not necessarily what’s “best”, but what is possible given the constraints they believe America operates under and the pressures which elected officials work with. So Obama can say, and mean, that if he were creating a medical system from scratch, he’d go with single payer. But he “knows” that’s impossible, not just for political reasons, but because there are huge monied interests who would be horribly damaged or even destroyed by moving to single payer. On top of that, he looks at the amount of actual change required to shift all that money away from insurance companies and to reduce pharma profits, and to change which providers get paid what, and he sees it as immensely disruptive to the economy. In theory, it might lead to a better place, but to Obama, the disruption on the way there is unthinkable.

Ian Welsh continues to be one of the few voices of reason as the Democratic Party (and its apologists) shows that almost none of its leaders has the sort of transformative consciousness necessary for real change [just so people don't get the wrong idea, fuck Ralph Nader too, self described green party people in the U.S. appear to have even less transformative consciousness than Democrats]. Also the comments over at IanWelsh.net are often surprisingly good -- definitely worth a look.

the Obama disconnect: why progressives ain't happy with Obama's first year in office

2010-01-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that progressives are not happy with President Obama's performance over the past year. Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, and Digby are in open revolt over the Senate health care reform bill. John Aravosis over at Americablog has been railing against President Obama for his failure to deliver on promises regarding LGBT equality. The peace movement, including MoveOn & Brave New Films, has been completely undermined by President Obama's decision to double down in Afghanistan. And don't even get the Canadians started -- Naomi Klein and Ian Welsh could melt the paint off a barn with their withering criticism of President Obama's failures on climate change (Klein) and his corporatist approach to the financial crisis (Welsh).

With that in mind, the conversation in the progressive blogosphere over the last month has been truly bizarre. Progressives have measured Obama's actions and concluded that he has failed to deliver on core promises and principles. Meanwhile, Obama loyalists like Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, and Josh Marshall have all jumped into the fray to say, 'Whoa! Whoa! That's CRAZY TALK to say that Obama is not a progressive or to say that he has failed to deliver on key promises.' Then they'll trot out a soundbite from the campaign and say, 'See! See! Obama always was a moderate (Republican) and never claimed otherwise.' Strangely they also trot out other soundbites to say 'See! See! Obama really is a true progressive (even though he is acting like a moderate Republican from the Northeast).' (And yes, I know that E. Klein, Silver, and Marshall do not think of themselves as "Obama loyalists" more like just good "mainstream" Newsweek Democrats. But the fact remains that they are doing the heavy lifting for Obama in the progressive blogosphere right now).

And into this scrum walks Micah L. Sifry over at TechPresident with a pitch-perfect analysis of what happened this past year -- how "Yes We Can" became Summers, Geithner, & Emanuel running the country. I'm just going to quote from one paragraph, but I really want to encourage you to read the whole piece, it's really well thought out and well argued:

The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn't happen, in the first year of Obama's administration. The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests--banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex--sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

Digby has some great reflections on Sifry's piece too, (here). She writes:

And even someone as cynical as I was about the race was a little bit surprised at how clumsily the White House has handled the politics. It's felt gratuitous, as if the plan was to repeatedly disappoint the base in order to prove their centrist bonafides. That sort of triangulation may have been necessary at another time, but right now it foolishly has moved the debate to the right when the right was badly discredited. It seems to be a matter of policy preference. And there is probably a price to pay for that.

I think some of the feelings of betrayal among progressives stem from the fact that the fundamental equation appears to have has changed. During the campaign, the equation that guided everything was, 'This is about you. We live and die based on our popular grassroots base.' But President Obama's governing philosophy (as implemented by Rahm Emanuel) has been guided by, 'This is about corporation campaign contributions. We will do our best to make things better for everyone with the caveat that we will NOT take any actions that upset our largest donors.' It's hard to have two more radically different guiding philosophies in the space of 12 months. Obama's message to his progressive base has gone from empowering ("Yes, we can!") to condescending ('trust me, it'll all work out') in the space of less than a year.

Maybe it's all just a sad commentary on the progressive movement. A candidate came along who said, "We're the ones we've been waiting for!" and we all swooned with adoration. We heard, "Yes we can" and filled in our own wish list. But I think there was also a wink and a nod orchestrated by the Obama campaign. The heavy emphasis on Obama's background as a community organizer created the impression that MLK himself was resurrected and running for President. Regardless of who led the other person on, after the first year of the Obama administration, it's clear that progressives need to tighten our belts, step back into the trenches, and fight for every single scrap that we can, because ain't no one gonna deliver it for us on a silver platter. And that's probably for the best, progressivism is never about one person, it's a vision of policy based on the idea that collective approaches are almost always better than individual ones. President Obama is gonna make progressives prove our mettle on every single issue for the next eight years. I hope we rise to the challenge.

Update #1. bmaz has an extensive post on this topic over at Firedoglake. Interestingly, in many ways, Firedoglake is building the sort of loud, messy, smart, participatory, nimble, truly progressive political organization that we had hoped would emerge from OFA.

Constitutional questions regarding the Senate health care reform bill

2010-01-01T15:09:00.000-08:00

Look, I'm as progressive as they come. I want national health insurance as much as anyone. But it seems to me that the Senate health care reform bill, as it currently stands, may be unconstitutional.

As I understand it:

The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to provide services with said tax money.

But the Constitution does NOT give Congress the power to require that I purchase a product or service from a private corporation as a condition of citizenship.

Let me give an example that might illustrate what I'm talking about:

Suppose that the best scientific research had shown that running makes people healthier (it does).

And suppose that New Balance Shoes was the last American shoemaker remaining and that it had fallen on hard times (it is and it has).

Now suppose that in order to save New Balance Shoe Corporation, Congress passed a law saying that all American citizens must purchase a pair of New Balance Shoes every year or face a penalty. That would clearly be unconstitutional, correct?

Isn't that what the Senate health care reform bill actually does? Absent a public option or Medicare for All, the Senate health care bill doesn't provide services. Rather it mandates that every American must buy a service from a private corporation as a condition of citizenship. I don't see how that passes Constitutional muster.

Now of course the obvious reply is to point to car insurance. Every state requires that those who own a car have valid car insurance from a private corporation. And it seems to work out fine for everyone (with some grumbling and subsequent reforms in the system from time to time). But the important difference between health insurance and car insurance is that car insurance is a condition of owning a car -- not citizenship. I can always opt out of car insurance by taking the bus or walking or riding my bike or staying home.

I imagine the other potential variation of disagreement might be to argue that Congress subcontracts with private corporations to provide services all the time -- so what's so different about providing health insurance through a private subcontractor? The difference as I see it is that in the case of using a private corporation to build a road for example -- the private corporation is always the SUBcontractor. Even in that case, the ultimate responsibility for the work still resides with the government who is paying for the product or service. But that's not how the Senate health care bill works, does it? The Senate health care bill says I must purchase a service from a private corporation (which is then free to pocket 30% of that money as profit). Government may provide a subsidy to me to help me to buy that private service, but the contractual relationship is between me and the private insurer, not me and the government.

The rules for citizenship are pretty clearly laid out in the Constitution. And if Congress wants to amend the rules for citizenship to require private health insurance as a condition of citizenship, that's fine, but they would have to amend the Constitution in order to do it.

If Congress provided a universal public option or Medicare for All, then all of these Constitutional questions go away. But in the absence of a universal public option or Medicare for All, I don't see how the Senate health care bill is Constitutional.

(Hat tip to emptywheel at FDL for providing the inspiration for this post.)

Update #1: Well knock me over with a feather! Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that argues that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Of course Senator Hatch is making the argument in the attempt to block any expansion of coverage. By contrast, I'm saying that the individual (private health insurance) mandate is unconstitutional and THEREFORE the only way to constitutionally expand coverage is through a universal government run plan like Medicare for All (see the comment below from "Bob the Health and Health Care Advocate" along these lines). I gotta admit, I'm extremely uncomfortable making a argument that is similar to the one made by Orrin Hatch -- because that dude is wrong about almost everything.

mcjoan over at DailyKos cites Jack Balkin who slaps down the unconstitutionality argument. He writes:

The individual mandate is structured as a tax. And the tax is perfectly constitutional under Congress's powers to tax and spend for the general welfare.

That doesn't seem very reassuring to me. If indeed the individual mandate is structured as a tax then it would seem that Congress is authorizing the IRS to collect taxes from citizens on behalf of a private corporation -- which raises even more constitutional questions. On the other hand, it really is the perfect metaphor for the sorry state of the U.S. Congress at this point -- a public body working on behalf of the interests of its corporate bosses.

Said differently, Congress could create a mandate whereby all citizens are required to buy Miley Cyrus CDs. And presumably Congress could "structure that as a tax." But I don't see how that would be constitutional. Same problem with private health insurance. Congress doesn't decide what is or is not constitutional, the courts decide that.

Update #2: Many commentators have credited President Obama with practicing "the art of the possible." The notion is that President Obama figures out the limits of what Congress can hope to pass and never asks for anything beyond those limits. Never mind that "the art of the possible" is the exact opposite of what candidate Obama ran on. What "the art of the possible" argument overlooks is that what is possible to get through Congress may not be possible on the ground as policy.

Here's the thing:

Lots of people hate the U.S. Postal Service -- and yet the U.S. Postal Service is amazing! The U.S. Postal Service will deliver a letter door-to-door anywhere in the U.S. in about three days for less than the cost of a tip at Starbucks or chump change thrown in the case of a street musician. And yet many people rail against the USPS, incensed by the high cost of a 43 cent stamp!!!

Now imagine if instead of a 43 CENT stamp and wonderful service, if the Congress sends the IRS to collect THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS from citizens on behalf of Aetna -- even though Aetna is still allowed to deny claims and cap lifetime payments.

Good luck with that.

Many commentators (and policymakers too) have been so busy trying to read the mind of Joe Lieberman to figure out what he would tolerate, that it seems that they never bothered to ask what the average citizen would be willing to tolerate.

why "free trade" sucks

2009-12-26T12:17:00.000-08:00

If you read only read one article this year on the problems of "free trade," read this one: "How the status quo can kill: the example of free trade" by Tony Wikrent over at Corrente. (Hat tip to Ian Welsh for the link). The post is brilliant.

Money quote (on the problems of outsourcing aircraft repair to India):

“Oh, I used to make almost $30 an hour. Same job. But they figured they could do it cheaper overseas. They were sending the airplanes to India for a couple of years. But they were fucking the job up so bad over there, it was taking them a week or more to get it done. We can get ‘em in and get ‘em out in a day and a half. Over there, lots of times, the plane couldn’t even take off. They had to take the whole wing apart again, to find out what was wrong. Just stupid shit. Motors weren’t connected. Positive wires were crossed with negatives. Brackets were missing. We found a wrench in one wing, which had gotten banged around, and kinked a hydraulic line pretty bad. I remember one plane came in, we got the skin off, and there were two bolts left holding the outer flap on.”

Of course I asked. There’s supposed to be eight.

Back in 1992, when the debate over NAFTA was heating up, I found the academic arguments in favor of "free trade" to be compelling. Now 16 years later, it's clear that NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements are a complete disaster that have destroyed our manufacturing base and thrown an entire generation of men-with-only-a-high-school-diploma (and their families) into poverty.

2 radical questions

2009-12-19T20:25:00.000-08:00

Following up on my last post... two of the most radical questions that one can ask another person are:

How are you? (pause)
What do you think? (pause)

When I say, "how are you?" I don't mean the casual NY, "howyadoin'?" Nor do I mean the casual Californian, "Hey, how's is going!?" Those are both rhetorical questions that are not soliciting answers.

The radical act in conversation is to ask "How are you?" and really mean it -- closing one's lips after the question, sitting in silence listening for the reply, signaling clearly that the other person can fill that space however they want. It takes some getting used to. At first, people will brush it off with, 'fine, fine,' and try to move on. But if you persist, "no really, how are you?" radically transformative things can happen.

"What do you think? (pause)" is similar. It acknowledges the other person's agency and subjectivity in the world. It instantly confirms that there are an infinite number of ways of seeing things. It begins a conversation of two people coming to understand each other's worldviews. Some people, particularly poor people or people in oppressive situations can sometime go their entire lifetimes without ever being asked, "What do you think?" Asking, "What do you think?" and pausing for as long as it takes for the other person to realize that the floor really is theirs to do with as they please, is a radical and transforming act.

I traveled in Central America during college on a trip led by a couple of sociology professors. "How are you? (pause)" and "What do you think? (pause)" were two of the tools they relied on in their research and in their teaching. At first I was disappointed that these two professors did not already have all the answers. But as I watched students and indigenous people bloom and come alive when asked these two questions (always with the complete pause at the end) I came to see what a radical act it was. I started using it everywhere -- with taxi cab drivers, hotel housekeepers, host mothers, children, and soldiers. And the world opened in ways I've never experienced before. The crazy thing is, there is always an answer after the question that is more remarkable than anything we could ever guess.

mutuality

2009-12-16T20:47:00.000-08:00

This is less of a post and more of a plea. And it goes something like this:

How do relationships end? I'm talking about all relationships -- romantic relationships, work relationships, friendships, family relationships -- heck even international relationships between countries. How do they end? It seems to me that most of the time they end when one or both people conclude that the other person has so clearly violated the common sense norms by which we all operate, that he/she must be exiled. And apparently, the best means of exile in our current culture is to stop communicating and walk away.*

But here's the thing, as I touched on in an earlier post, there is no such thing as the one common sense set of rules for anything. We are all walking around with really complex sets of rules in our heads about how things obviously should be -- and no one else is walking around with that same set of rules.

So then the only way that we can ever come to any sort of lasting relationship with another is through extensive on-going dialogue about our respective sets of rules. What are my rules? What are your rules? Where did they come from? What end do they serve?

That conversation is so much harder than it appears for a lot of reasons.

For that conversation to work, each person has to realize that his/her ironclad rules are just as arbitrary as the next person's.
Because our own internal sets of rules are so hard won over a lifetime of experience, it's difficult to even acknowledge that they exist, let alone hold them loosely or even (gasp!) consider letting them go.
Furthermore, to even open up that conversation is to engage not just in a process of sharing, but also in a process of negotiation as to what the new rules will be between two people. Because anytime we start sharing we will see that the two sets of rules don't match and will eventually be in conflict. So most people in a dominant position won't even want to start the conversation for fear of losing power through renegotiation of the rules.

My thinking on this matter has been sparked by starting to read bell hooks' book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. I don't hear about bell hooks as much as I used to, perhaps because I'm running in the wrong circles, perhaps because I'm not in school anymore, perhaps because black feminism has been co-opted by Oprah Winfrey's emphasis on the power of positive thinking (which apparently helps sell lots of consumer products too).

What I take away from reading bell hooks is that only through a continual dialogue about: who makes the rules? what are the rules? why are the rules that way? to what end do these rules serve? what shall the new rules be? says who? based on what values? to what new end? -- can we ever hope to come to any sort of deeper truths as individuals and as a society. It's exhausting, I know. But it is also the path of freedom and liberation I believe. Because really, only through such a dialogue can we ever hope to truly see another, honor another, and find mutuality with another -- which is the basis for love.

[*I should add: sometimes another person really does operate in bad faith, and then ending the relationship and walking away is the best strategy. I just don't think other people operate in bad faith nearly as much as we think.]

Things that seem normal but aren't, part 5

2009-12-16T17:23:00.000-08:00

Continuing my occasional series, "Things that seem normal but aren't"...

9. Our cultural fascinating with the concept of "The One." The concept of The One permeates so many areas of culture. Most major religions -- Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all fixated on the concept of The (Chosen) One. Sports commentators call Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or Tiger Woods, The One. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Oprah Winfrey anointed Obama as The One. It seems like any movie which costs over $100 million to make must be focused on The One -- Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Terminator, and Star Wars are all about the search for The One. Furthermore, beauty pageants and reality TV shows like Survivor are designed to identify and crown The One.

But here's what makes all of that so weird -- anything worth doing, anything of lasting value, any truly great accomplishment, is almost ALWAYS a collective effort. Furthermore, it seems bizarre that the search for The One shows up in religious contexts because it invalidates the concept that we are ALL made in God's image and that the divine resides in ALL of us (in which case, we wouldn't really need to wait around for The One in the first place would we?) My hunch is that the reason our culture is so fascinated with the concept of The One is because secretly we all think we are the one, it's an affirmation and reflection of our own narcissism.

At the end of the day, The One, as a concept is the foundation of theocracy, fascism, monarchism, and hyper-individualism. But as animals, what makes us truly happy is connection with others, interrelationship, and collective experience. Therefore it seems to me that the sooner we abandon the concept of The One and acknowledge our interconnection instead, the happier we will be. Furthermore, it seems that shifting our focus to "the all" and collective approaches to problem solving will better enable us to build things of lasting value -- families, buildings, companies, cities, societies.

As one example, imagine if instead of spending billions of dollars every Saturday on college football (the search for The One national champion and The One Heisman trophy winner) what if every Saturday the people of every major city poured out to build (and improve) houses in the area. I know, it's very Amish, but when you realize that we spend billions of dollars on football while literally walking by people who are homeless, that's the definition of insanity.

10. The fact that apocalyptic thinking shows up in almost every generation. It seems that every time I turn around, there's another blockbuster movie about the end of the world (2012, 28 Days Later, Blindness, anything with Keanu Reeves, etc.). It makes sense to me that any generation growing up since World War I would be infused with a certain level of apocalyptic thinking -- because since then, humans have actually had the capacity to end the world with our own means.

But apocalyptic thinking goes back as far back as recorded history. The people who wrote Revelations weren't predicting the end of the world thousands of years later, they thought it was imminent. Jesus and Paul were certain that the world was about to end. Every generation has its religious gurus who predict the end of the world and it seems that they are usually able to attract a decent-sized following. The persistence of apocalyptic thinking throughout human history seems disproportionate to the size of the threat. So what explains that?

Like the point above, in some ways it seems that perhaps apocalyptic thinking is a reflection of our own narcissism. Apocalyptic thinking gives us a narrative for exploring the fact that, as time-limited mortal creatures, every generation really does experience itself as the last. It's a way to make each generation feel important, chosen if you will, the pinnacle and ultimate expression of humanity. It's a way of overcoming our own insignificance in the face of the relentless march of time.

So just to be clear, to me, the 2012 stuff seems really silly. But as I said above, since WWI we really have had the capacity for our own self-annihilation and global warming seems a credible threat to the future of the planet that merits immediate and comprehensive action.

Finally, a little antidote to the heaviness of this post. In looking for a picture to accompany this post I stumbled upon a blog post titled, "Signs of the Impending Apocalypse." It's pretty funny. [Hint, Heidi and Spencer are sign #4!]

Update #1: Another sign of the impending Apocalypse? The Booty Pop Panties commercials running on MTV right now.

Massively collaborative mathematics: using blog comments to prove math's toughest theorems

2009-12-14T22:38:00.000-08:00

As frequent readers of this blog will know, I'm a huge fan of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. So I was delighted this weekend when I stumbled upon an article titled, Massively Collaborative Mathematics in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Ironically, for an issue devoted to the "The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas", the online version does not provide easy permalinks or ways to forward to social networks -- so I'll just excerpt the article here:

Massively Collaborative Mathematics
In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math's highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove a theorem he could not.

In two blog posts — one titled "Is Massively Collaborative Mathematics Possible?" — he proposed an attack on a stubborn math problem called the Density Hales-Jewett Theorem. He encouraged the thousands of readers of his blog to jump in and start proving. Mathematics is a process of generating vast quantities of ideas and rejecting the majority that don't work; maybe, Gowers reasoned, the participation of so many people would speed the sifting.

The resulting comment thread spanned hundreds of thousands of words and drew in dozens of contributors, including Terry Tao, a fellow Fields Medalist, and Jason Dyer, a high-school teacher.

It makes fascinating, if forbiddingly technical, reading. Gowers's goals for the so-called Polymath Project were modest. "I will regard the experiment as a success," he wrote, "if it leads to anything that could count as genuine progress toward an understanding of the problem." Six weeks later, the theorem was proved. The plan is to submit the resulting paper to a top journal, attributed to one D.H.J. Polymath.

By now we're used to the idea that gigantic aggregates of human brains — especially when allowed to communicate nearly instantaneously via the Internet — can carry out fantastically difficult cognitive tasks, like writing an encyclopedia or mapping a social network. But some problems we still jealously guard as the province of individual beautiful minds: writing a novel, choosing a spouse, creating a new mathematical theorem. The Polymath experiment suggests this prejudice may need to be rethought. In the near future, we might talk not only about the wisdom of crowds but also of their genius.
~Jordan Ellenberg, Sunday, Dec. 13, NY Times Sunday Magazine

Massively collaborative mathematics proves Surowiecki's point that:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group's decisions will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual, no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

~James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

Increasingly, I think the biggest innovations in ALL fields will come from massively collaborative projects -- massively collaborative psychology, massively collaborative economics, massively collaborative astrophysics, etc.

Book review: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

2009-12-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

George Monbiot's recent blog post about Ernest Becker, which I wrote about (here), caused me to go back to my book shelf and pull out Ernest Becker's book, The Denial of Death. I bought it a couple years ago after seeing it mentioned on Sam Harris' recommended reading list. But I had only made it half way through before getting sidetracked.

Now, having finished it, I've gotta say it's one of the most extraordinary books ever written (some other folks thought so too -- it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974). We live in an age of so much noise including:

extreme sports and extreme cars and extreme soft drinks;
lotions and pills and doctors claiming to make us more beautiful;
hyper aggression as the model for how we are to behave in the workplace;
shelf after shelf of self-help advice;
various gurus clamoring for our attention on magazine racks and on TV;
competing schools of psychology battling it out to capture one-on-one time with us; and
religions and infinite numbers of spin offs of religions all trying to claim they have found the way.

And we're as miserable as ever.

Ernest Becker cuts through all that noise and says, 'look, the reason human beings are such a mess is that we are all freaked out about dying and we all create these ridiculous immortality projects to try to repress our fear of dying. No amount of therapy or advice or repression or distraction is actually going to be able to take that fear away completely. So ultimately, true heroism comes from accepting our ongoing fears of our own mortality and proceeding with our various projects anyway, even in the face of the knowledge that we are all gonna die.'

Of course this will be an alarming thesis to many -- particularly those heavily invested in the repression of their own immortality project. I have experienced an amazing groundedness after reading The Denial of Death. The book enables us to just drop all of the noise. It enables us to see the world as it is -- a place that is terrifying and yet beautiful too. It enables us to drop the false heroism of our shinny immortality projects and embrace the true heroism of proceeding even in the midst of doubt and fear.

Interestingly, Sam Keen does such a great job of summarizing Becker in the foreword to The Denial of Death that I want to quote from Keen first:

Becker's philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands.

1. The world is terrifying. ...

2. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. ...

3. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. ...
Society provides a line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

4. Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles --my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.

--Sam Keen, foreword, The Denial of Death, p. xii - xiii

In the book itself, Becker masterfully updates psychoanalysis by showing that denial of death, not sexuality per se (as Freud argued), is the prime motivating force behind the repressions that create our culture.

Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality. As Rank unfolded in book after book, and as Brown has recently again argued, the new perspective on psychoanalysis is that its crucial concept is the repression of death. This is what is creaturely about humanity, this is the repression on which culture is built, a repression unique to the self-conscious animal. Freud saw the curse and dedicated his life to revealing it with all the power at his command. But he ironically missed the precise scientific reasons for the curse. ...

The psychoanalytic literature remained almost silent on the fear of death until the late 1930's and World War II. And the reason was as Rank revealed: how could psychoanalytic therapy scientifically cure the terror of life and death? But it could cure the problems of sex, which it itself posited. (p. 100)

Becker's thesis is summed up clearly and humbly at the conclusion of his book:

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever humanity does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. ...

The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something -- an object or ourselves -- and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force. (p. 284 - 285)

Interestingly, after reading The Denial of Death, I can see where the Landmark Forum sprang from. [Just to be clear, I am NOT recommending that anyone go down that path -- only pointing out what some of the intellectual antecedents to that movement may have been.] The Landmark Forum's message, that life is empty and meaningless -- and that it is empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless, so we may as well go on and create something beautiful in this world -- is congruent with Becker's philosophy. Where they differ is that Becker sees a role for God, a Creator, even Christianity, while the Landmark Forum leans in a more atheistic direction. I leave you with this hilarious video (below), Landmark Forum for Cats.

Update #1. Buddhism, monasticism, Stoicism, abstinence, and the Protestant work ethic all make better sense when seen through the writings of Ernest Becker. Each of these paths provides a theology and a set of practices for repressing the body which is a really just an attempt to deny our humanity in service of repressing our fear of death (no body, no humanity=voilà, nothing to take away, nothing to die). It's fascinating then to see attempts to repress the body in religious settings (repression of sex through Catholicism or repression of the body through work in Protestantism for example). Repression of the body in a religion setting seems like a hedge of sorts, a poker tell that the leaders of said religious order may not be so sure about the existence of god themselves (because it would seem that the primary motivation for wanting to repress the fear of death is that one is not 100% sure god has it covered). And it actually suggests that the true function of religion may not be to introduce us to God at all (a short hike in nature does a better job of that anyway). Rather the true function of religion may simply be to provide tools for repressing our fear of death -- and the handiest tool laying around, apparently, is repressing the body. That would make sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology -- those who best utilize religious practices for blocking out the fear of death probably invest the most energy in immortality projects (homes, careers, winning wars, building families, etc.).

Dear President Obama, The beer summit was nice, but how about an autism summit?

2009-12-13T18:10:00.000-08:00

Look, I appreciate that President Obama had the July Beer Summit at the White House. A white cop (who may or may not have been a model of cultural diversity and understanding) from Cambridge got to drink a Blue Moon, a distinguished African American Harvard Professor got to drink a Sam Adams Light, someone let Joe Biden in, and President Obama modeled for the whole country how to have an adult conversation about race.

But what President Obama really needs to do is to have a White House summit on autism. Autism is an absolute public health catastrophe right now and it appears to be growing. 1 in 91 children now has autism -- up from just 1 in 10,000 in 1970, and autism is estimated to cost the nation $90 billion per year. President Obama needs to bang some heads together (EPA, CDC, NIH, DOD) and ask the really hard questions and demand answers -- What is causing it? What are ALL the steps we can take immediately to respond? If that means closing every coal-fired power plant in the country tomorrow -- great, let's do it. If it means radically revising our vaccine protocols and instituting a global ban on mercury? Fine, done and done.

President Obama needs to marshal the full force of the federal government to respond to this crisis as if it were Hurricane Katrina itself -- because really at the end of the day it's actually a much much bigger disaster than Katrina (over 1 million Americans have been diagnosed with autism). Said differently, President Obama has shown that he can keep his cool and that he's incredibly skilled at measured, deliberative responses to long-term problems. We love that about him and it is a great skill for foreign policy and diplomacy (and even economic strategy too). But it would also be nice to see President Obama respond to an urgent crisis in an urgent manner and to show, perhaps for the first time, that he understands that the size of the federal response needs to match the size of the problem because thus far, the federal government's response to autism has been slow and insufficient.

To learn more, check out these helpful links from Talk About Curing Autism.

Update #1: "U.S. autism cases show 59% increase" Dec. 18, 2009, from the Palm Beach Post, Health Section. Fascinating note by James Lind in the comments portion after the article:

We have seen a 1500% increase in autism since 1990, the year the CDC ramped up its Hepatitis B antigen vaccination campaign, injecting 1 day old infants with this wicked concoction which (if it did work) only fights a disease caused by multiple sex partners, intravenous drug users and those receiving blood transfusions.

some thoughts on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, part 2

2009-12-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

So I want to take one more pass through the political theorem that I laid out in my last post on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This is a slight modification on what I posted earlier, but I think this is where I really wanted to go with it. I think both posts have something valuable to say, but this one also benefits from being more compact and builds nicely upon an earlier post I wrote on trauma. Okay here goes:

1. Oppressed people are not oppressed by accident or oppressed in some abstract sense. They are oppressed through actual violence in the first instance (the Conquest, Colonization, or Middle Passage) and later through a combination of physical and symbolic violence that becomes internalized. [Examples of on-going physical violence -- lynchings, police brutality, structural unemployment, punitive welfare "reform," NAFTA, crumbling schools, and high incarceration rates for minor drug offenses; Examples of on-going symbolic violence -- racist cultural media products including anything from Charles Murray, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, etc.; Examples of internalized violence -- depression, addiction, gangs, domestic violence, despair, inaction, cynicism, passivity.]

2. The initial violence causes PTSD in both conqueror and conquered. So of course oppressed people are messed up. And the dysfunction of the initial PTSD is then passed on down to subsequent generations of both oppressed and oppressors (because up until recently, there was no effective treatment for PTSD).

[This is where traditional Marxist analysis totally misses the boat. Marxists analysis too often portrays oppressed people in a retro-romantic way -- as perfect, innocent, well-intentioned folks who could lead the world to peace and prosperity if only the oppressors would stop oppressing them. What that analysis misses is the tremendous dysfunction that is built into every oppressed community as a result of the trauma of the initial oppression (and just built into the fact that human beings are flawed, fallible creatures).

This is not a small point either. Oppressors know about the dysfunction and pathologies in oppressed communities (often because they caused them and continue to benefit from them). And oppressors go to great lengths to point out this dysfunction as justification for why poor people cannot be permitted to gain power. I think we dismantle these critiques by saying that PTSD-like symptoms appear in both oppressor and oppressed communities because the initial violence was an attempt to destroy the humanity of oppressed people -- and ended up dehumanizing both oppressor and oppressed alike.]

3. In order to liberate themselves from oppression, oppressed people need to heal from the initial PTSD and its subsequent impact on individuals, families, and communities of oppressed people across the generations.

4. The way any oppressed people begin to heal from PTSD is through movement, through conversation, through shaking, through roaring, through completing the act of escape, through coming back into their bodies and realizing they are not just object but Subject. And that's really where Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed comes in. It is not only a tool for liberation, unwittingly it is also a tool for healing collective historical PTSD.

5. And that is precisely why white America (and really all oppressors) try to prevent step #4 from happening. Through an elaborate system of cultural messages about what is "proper" and ongoing institutional violence to reinforce that message ('don't talk back, know your place, don't show emotion, for gawd sake don't show anger ever, always show deference -- or you will be unemployed, broke, tazed, jailed, homeless, or killed'), white America tries to suppress any signs, signals, or steps that might lead to a collective shaking off of the trauma of the past. They try to short-circuit this last healing step in oppressed communities because as long as they can prevent it from being completed, they stay in power.

Cell phone radiation look up tool

2009-12-13T15:38:00.000-08:00

Another amazing, easy to use tool from the Environmental Working Group is their cell phone radiation look-up tool. Currently, the U.S. government does not require cell phone companies to label their products’ radiation output -- even though recent studies find significantly higher risks for brain and salivary gland tumors among people using cell phones for 10 years or longer. So the EWG created an easy to use online guide to cell phone emissions, covering over 1,000 phones currently on the market.

You type in your cell phone make, model, and wireless provider -- and their widget instantly looks up how much radiation your phone emits. They also then provide a link that lists every phone that emits LESS radiation than your own. Plus they show the 10 best cell phones (lowest radiation) and ten worst cell phones (those that emit the most radiation). It's definitely a helpful resource for making informed decisions about cell phone risks.

The EWG has also conducted a comprehensive, 10-month scientific evaluation of the hazards of cell phone radiation that includes data from more than 200 peer-reviewed studies, government advisories, and industry documents. You can download the full report for free (here).

Finally, check out their 8 Steps to Reduce Cell Phone Radiation Exposure. Some really great safety tips in there.

Easy to use tool to find drinking water test results for your city

2009-12-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

The Environmental Working Group has developed an extraordinary, easy to use, nationwide database of drinking water test results. You go to their website, type in your zip code and your water company, and it instantly gives you the water quality test results for your area. And the results will blow your mind. I innocently typed in my zip code and discovered that the tap water I drink every day exceeds the legal limit for Tetrachloroethylene and exceeds the health limit for Trichloroethylene and six other toxic chemicals.

But the EWG doesn't just leave you hanging with bad news, they also provide background information on the chemicals and links to filtration systems you can use to improve water quality in your home. It's a really impressive and helpful tool that I believe, over the long term, will also put a great deal of additional pressure on municipalities to clean up their water supplies. Check it out for yourself.

Some thoughts on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, part 1

2009-12-12T18:25:00.000-08:00

I just reread Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was impressed by how relevant it remains now -- nearly 40 years after it was first published. I was reading the 30th Anniversary Edition and it is actually better than the original because it has now been revised to reflect inclusive language (the tiresome term "man" as a reference to all of humankind has mercifully been replaced by "humanity" or "men and women").

I confess when I first read the book as a 19 year old, much of it was over my head. Even though Freire's genius stems from his insistence on starting with the concrete before moving to the abstract (traditional education usually gets this backwards much to the detriment of students) this is a book of pure pedagogical theory. But now that I've worked in various movements for social change for many years, the words and ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed leap off the page and ring true like never before.

One of the things that blew me away about the book is that Freire spends the entire first chapter discussing the phenomenon in which oppressed people often resist their own liberation. This is one of the hardest things and yet also one of the most important things to understand about liberation movements. When the movement begins, the very people who stand the most to gain from the movement will often oppose their own liberation.

This is counter-intuitive to the extreme. If someone has a boot on his/her neck you would think that removing that boot would bring relief and that those who fight to remove the boot would be greeted as heroes. But that is not the case because the oppressed person, in order to feel some sort of control over his/her own life has usually internalized the oppression initially directed from the outside, and because the oppressed person also knows that any oppressor who is willing to use the boot is also willing to extinguish the oppressed person as well -- so the boot then comes to be seen as the better alternative. Frantz Fanon discovered this by studying the anti-colonial movement in Algeria in the 1950s and wrote a whole book about the phenomenon called, The Wretched of the Earth. In many ways then Pedagogy of the Oppressed functions as a sequel to Wretched of the Earth posing the same problem, but answering the question, "so what do we do about it?"

I want to quote extensively from the first chapter of the book and urge you to run out and buy the book or re-read the old tattered copy you have up on your shelf somewhere. It really is as relevant today as ever.

In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. (p. 44)

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or "sub-oppressors." ... This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor.
(p. 45)

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. (p. 47)

However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression. (p. 47)

They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produce by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom. (p. 48)

In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their own liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. (p. 49)

If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these "beings for another." (p. 49)

Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.
(p. 56)

Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence--initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. (p. 58)

The more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate "things." This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to "in-animate" everything and everyone it encounters, in it eagerness to possess, unquestionable corresponds with a tendency to sadism. (p. 59)

Under the sway of magic and myth, the oppressed (especially the peasants, who are almost submerged in nature) see their suffering, the fruit of exploitation, as the will of God--as if God were the creator of this "organized disorder." (p. 61-62)

As a certain point in their existential experience the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressors and their way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors, to imitate them, to follow them. (p. 62)

The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity they must cease to be things and fight as men and women. This is a radical requirement. They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings. (p. 68)

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. (p. 69)

So all of this got me thinking about how how language and culture work in American society to perpetuate oppression today. Without realizing it, our minds have been colonized by the ideology of oppression, and as Freire points out, it is extremely difficult to break out of it. So here is how I think it works in the U.S. (and even around the world) now:

1. Oppressed people are not oppressed by accident or oppressed in some abstract sense. They are oppressed through actual violence in the first instance (the Conquest, Colonization, or Middle Passage) and later through a combination of physical and symbolic violence that becomes internalized.

2. In order to break out of oppression, oppressed people have to realize that they are oppressed and begin to dismantle the oppressive structures in their own minds as a first step toward making the commitment to transforming the reality around them.

3. [This is where it gets fascinating:] The first signs of the transformation of consciousness, I believe consist of 1.) anger upon recognizing the system of oppression; and 2.) any display that the oppressor no longer gets to make the rules.

Which is why American culture tries to squash any sign of anger, independence, or collective consciousness in oppressed peoples (African Americans mainly but also any person of color, women, and youth).

The Republican Party spent most of their advertising dollars in 2008 trying to convince America that Michelle Obama was an "angry black woman" and then, when that didn't work, they doubled down and tried to argue that Barack Obama was "an angry black man." That's what the whole Rev. Wright thing was about and why that 2 second "god damn America" clip got played several thousand times during the campaign. Every single commentator on Fox News has called Barack Obama an "angry black man." Those code words are intentional. "Angry black man" is a dog whistle to tell white America to go get their pitch forks to suppress the attempt by African Americans to achieve any sort of liberation consciousness. Historically, if Africans Americans in the United States displayed any sign of anger or unwillingness to express deference to white people, they were lynched. White America has always used violence to reinforce the cultural conditioning that keeps them in a position of privilege.

Why the hell do you think we invaded Grenada? Because the Reagan administration could not permit a black former slave colony from becoming a socialist paradise. The Reagan Administration knew that if African Americans in U.S. cities could look to the south and see a successful black socialist nation that it would radically change the political dynamics here in the U.S. The pictures of rich white American medical school students kissing the tarmac upon returning home was symbolic in more ways than one. They had been rescued from their overpriced med school in Grenada and their white privilege was still there waiting for them when they returning home.

Why does white America freak the fuck out anytime an African American player in the NBA or NFL wants to wear a dew rag or corn rows? Allen Iverson is about 3 feet tall and over the last decade has been one of the most successful players in the history of the NBA. But he's never gotten the endorsement deals like Jordan or Tiger. Why? Because he wears corn rows and hip hop fashion -- and that shows that he does not accept the conditions and rules set down by the oppressor culture. White sponsors simply will not permit that "bad attitude" (code words to tell people to ostracize those oppressed people who fail to display deference). God forbid Iverson ever gets angry about playing time -- even after making the All Star team ten times, every sports commentator on TV instantly rushes to the mic to tusk tusk and explain in various coded phrases that Iverson needs to learn his place. Iverson makes his own rules because he is confident in his own proven abilities. White America cringes and tries to force him to STFU because his independence shows that he is breaking free from the cultural mindset imposed by the oppressor.

What is more, there are a whole series of words that no one is permitted to say in polite society in the U.S. without risking instantly ending the debate and being excluded from further conversations. Those words include:

nationalize
class
reparations
redistribution
Marx
any mention of any strategy other than MLK-style nonviolence by progressive.

The common thread among all those words is that they each reveal a burgeoning consciousness and a crumbling of the oppressor mindset that tells us that all policy must be devoted to protecting the rights of capital.

So anyway, if you've read this far, thank you. And please go out read or re-read Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. The life you liberate may be your own.

Update #1. Freire, near the end of the preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed writes:

From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love. (p. 40)

It's a fascinating thing to write. His book is about educational theory. But at the end of the day, for Freire, education, revolution, and liberation are really in service of creating a world in which it will be easier to love. I think he has summed it up perfectly. That is the revolutionary project. A society built on systems of domination, distorts and impedes love. As we dismantle systems of domination, we create space for a world in which it will be easier to love.

Update #2: There is so much to say about Pedagogy of the Oppressed that I wrote a part 2 to this post which you can read (here).

a quick thought on culture

2009-12-12T16:10:00.000-08:00

I was watching VH1 today and someone said that The Who was the first rock band to smash their equipment on stage -- and that at the time, that was a huge deal.

I took note of that and then remembered seeing Nirvana at the Cow Palace back in 1993. At the end of an extraordinary set, they not only smashed all of their own equipment, but Kurt Cobain climbed up on top of a giant wall of speakers and launched himself through the air into Dave Grohl's massive drum set.

Thus The Who was the first rock band to smash their own equipment on stage and Nirvana was the first rock band to smash their own bodies on stage.

I wonder if this then captures some of the differences between Baby Boomers and Generation X. Baby Boomers directed their rage outwards for the first time, and Generation X directs their rage inward and turns it up to 12.

How Wall Street killed Adam Smith and Milton Friedman

2009-12-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

I was a political science major in college when the Berlin Wall fell. It was sort of hilarious because the political science professors, particularly foreign policy experts, just walked around in a daze. As they admitted in class, the standard textbooks on cold war foreign policy were now completely irrelevant. Everything we thought we knew about how the world worked changed in the space of about 6 months. Karl Marx who was already on life support before then, was now widely acknowledged to be officially dead.

But what I hadn't realized until just this morning, is that the collapse of the financial sector in 2008 killed Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. Their ideas should have been dead long ago but they kept hanging around because they provided the cover by which the powerful could continue to enrich themselves (at the expense of everybody else). But the collapse of the entire global financial system in 2008 and the fact that federal governments around the world had to come in and rescue the titans of finance with trillions of taxpayer dollars (and pounds and Euros and Deutsche Marks), definitively shows that Adam Smith and Milton Friedman were just shakedown artists. Rather than being an elegantly self regulating machine in tune with the deepest truths of the universe it turns out that our financial system in criminally corrupt and hopelessly unable to survive without massive government assistance.

And here's the craziest thing in all of this. The financial collapse of 2008, not only killed Smith and Friedman, but it also brought Marxist critiques of capitalism back to life. Well technically speaking, Marx was wrong and Nikolai Kondratiev was correct -- but the fundamental point of both men remains and has now been confirmed: an endless cycles of booms and busts are intrinsic to capitalism and capitalism is an inherently unsustainable system. Furthermore, it is only through a strong state regulatory system that the vicissitudes of capitalism can hope to be controlled.

Furthermore, as Ian Welsh has been pointing out for months, all that Geithner and Summers (and the entire Obama economic team) are doing is trying to re-inflate the housing and finance bubbles. Geithner and Summers thus pose a potentially catastrophic risk to the Democratic Party -- because if the re-inflated bubble bursts right before the 2010 midterm elections or the 2012 Presidential election, it opens up enormous space for a conservative populist candidate like Sarah Palin to run against the Obama economic record. As the one progressive on Obama's economic team, it sure would be nice if Jared Bernstein would start making a lot of noise right now. Furthermore, Obama needs to start listening more to Krugman and Reich and less to Geithner and Summers. Because at the end of the day, Geithner and Summers have a view of markets that is fundamentally incorrect, and basing policy on false assumptions about the way markets really work is a recipe for disaster.

In some ways then we live in a remarkable time with enormous political, economic, and even philosophical instability. Adam Smith and Milton Friedman are dead. And Marx and Kondratiev had prescient critiques of the problems of capitalism, but no solution for an alternative approach that is more sustainable. So for the time being the regulated capitalism of Keynes becomes the big winner. And maybe that's the best that we can do. But it seems to me that there is also a higher synthesis waiting to emerge from this whole crisis -- if we can just figure it out before the gaping abyss of uncertainty causes people to completely freak out.

Is violence intrinsic to money?

2009-12-11T16:49:00.000-08:00

Recently I stumbled upon a completely fascinating interview with University of Sydney Political Economy Professor Dick Bryan titled "The underlying contradiction of capitalist finance." I want to walk through some of the highlights of the interview and then share some reflections. First, the money quotes (definitely check out the whole article too):

What exactly is "money"?

[I]n most conventional analysis, there is an association of money with the state: indeed, in the tradition of Keynes, there is an understanding that money is ‘state money’, as opposed to ‘commodity money’ such as gold. State money is bits of paper, or entries in a balance sheet that are themselves valueless, but trust in state guarantees gives them effective value; commodity money is valued in itself.
But there are not just two absolute forms of money: there is a spectrum of moneys. There is (generally) safe, low-return money, which is state money in the form of cash or money in the bank. There are also highly liquid assets which are serving money functions, but they are not state money. They are derivative forms of money.

The financial crisis explained:

It seems to me very significant that the first intervention of the governments and central banks was not about shoring up financial institutions directly, it was to say to financiers: bring in your mortgage-backed securities and we will convert them into state money.
It's a signal to me that these securities were indeed being treated like money, in the sense that when their moneyness suddenly disappeared, the state sought to convert them into another money form. The initial response to the crisis of governments and central banks was not to say, as the stock markets fell, 'bring in your shares and we'll convert them to cash.' Nor did they say to banks 'bring in the titles to your properties and we’ll lend to you against your physical assets.' They said 'bring in your securities, and we'll convert them to cash.' It is, to repeat, a signal that the initial liquidity crisis, when securities markets crashed, was about a crisis of money.

Mortgage backed securities and the collapse of the housing bubble:

With mortgage-backed securities, what got sold into the market is not the mortgages, but claims on the income stream from the mortgages. And what is critical about derivatives is that they are financial exposures to an asset without ownership of the underlying asset.
With an oil future, you own exposure to the price of oil, but without owning any oil itself. So it is with mortgage-backed securities: you own exposure to the performance of a bundle of mortgages, but without owning the mortgages themselves.
And that separation is critical, for the mortgages themselves are illiquid – they last for 20 or 30 years, but the securities on the mortgages were highly liquid – they could be repackaged with other sorts of securities, turned into fancy products, and on-sold and re-sold. Further, the derivative dimension – the difference between ownership of the asset and ownership of an exposure to the performance of the asset was precisely what made sub-prime lending so profitable – as long as it lasted. The financial markets could separate out the performance of mortgages from the performance of house prices. They could sell the former, but retain the latter.
That is the reason that mortgage originators could keep lending to people who would buy houses that were expected to increase in value, even though they would almost certainly not repay loans: it was possible to hold the exposure to the prices of houses and sell off the exposure to the repayment of mortgages. It was a smart strategy for capital as long as house prices didn’t fall!

The nature of money (this is the home run in the interview in my opinion):

What's gone wrong in the markets is partly about regulation, a loss of order and morality in markets. Those things are now being widely criticized.
But there is another element here, about the nature of money. What concerns me in left and liberal debate is the strand that says that if we can make markets more efficient, more transparent, more ethical, then markets will not be volatile. That seems to be a basic premise, and it's basically wrong.
Money is itself the expression of a social relation. The concept of value is contested. The concept of equivalence is contested. We see that most starkly in exchange rates. What is one currency is worth in terms of another? There is no real answer. The neo-classical economists want to talk about fundamental value, but we know that doesn't work.
And it's not just at the level of exchange rates. Within a currency, equivalence is a contested concept. As Marxists, we should be pointing that out -- that there is social conflict expressed in the money form.
Any suggestion that once we have better regulation, money will become harmonious as a social unit, and then we can enter into debates about good or bad monetary policy, misses the point that money is always contestable. It has never been objective.
We have played out little social myths to construct money as objective. We had gold. We had Bretton Woods. We have "fundamental value" provided by neo-classical economists. They were all trying to tell us that money is an objective measure, and what we have to learn is that money is not an objective measure. Money is capitalist money, and it is money within capitalism.

Where do we go from here:

And central to that politics is new ways of resistance to the way in which the finance system, for all its fancy trading of risks, has systematically shifted risks onto labor -- until, that is, labor (in the form of house buyers) itself financially imploded, and the risks were suddenly thrown back onto capital. But, of course, it was then passed on to the state, which in turn will pass it back labor, but at a slower pace than was done by financial risk shifting, and in ways where labor’s implosion will not be at the cost of capital.
The point here is to analyze what’s happened so as to clearly identify the risk-shifting process and the best points of resistance to it; not to join the search for a clever set of state regulations which will somehow tame finance and place it at the service of production. ...
The state has always fudged on the issue of "moral hazard" -- of the extent to which the state should intervene to mop up for capital when capital stuffs up, and whether such mopping-up puts bad incentives into the market.
In all the financial sector reforms, and not just in the financial sector, there has always been a fudge about the question of whether there will be bail-outs. We've found something out. We've found that the state will always bail out big capital, in particular big banks. ...

What becomes most interesting in this is, how much of a watershed is this in the concept of markets, and how the states regulate markets? The moral hazard issue, historically framed as a dilemma, is now solved. What does that say about the virtue of profitability and entrepreneurship -- those moral virtues of the market, let people enjoy success because they also face the threat of failure? If that threat of failure is now going to be qualified, what is the constraint of the upside? If we are to have the carrot of profit, but not the stick of loss, how is that going to play out in wider social circles?

Okay so a few thoughts from all of this:

First, a bit of a tangent: It's interesting to watch (and participate in) the political debate in the U.S. since the invention of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Now it is so much easier for new ideas from any part of the world to enter the debate. And what's really striking to me is that Naomi Klein and Ian Welsh are almost always correct and both usually about 2 to 3 years ahead of the curve. They are like goddamn Nostradamus in predicting how political decisions will play out and in understanding exactly where the economy is going (and who the likely economic winners and losers will be).

It's like Klein and Welsh are looking into a crystal ball that none of the rest of us have. And in fact they are. What I realized is that they are both Canadian and they both still read marxist economic analysis. Thus the reason Klein and Welsh are so consistently correct is that they both have access to a set of analytical tools that most Americans have lost the ability to use. The range of the political debate in the U.S. is so insanely small -- we argue over corporatism (Obama) vs. more corporatism (the Republican Party) as if that were any choice at all. Even on a good day, the most informed Americans are only exposed to half of the debate -- completely ignoring labor, class, poverty, race, gender, sex, ecology, and any discussion of power. So then when someone like Naomi Klein, Ian Welsh, or Dick Bryan comes along it completely blows our minds because we have been conditioned and mentally colonized to ignore those facets of the debate.

Okay but here's the larger idea I want to rap down:

It seems to me that the analysis put forward above by Bryan actually points us to a startling political theorem that goes something like this:

IF:

1. The state issues money;
2. Trust in state guarantees gives money its effective value;
3. Trust in state guarantees is only as strong as our trust in the state's ability to remain solvent;
4. In order to remain solvent, the state must be able to withstand threats from within and without -- usually through military power;
5. In order to remain solvent, the state also must balance its books (or come close);
6. Low prices of foreign inputs and high prices of domestic outputs help to balance the state's books;
THEN
7. It appears that violence is INTRINSIC to money.

Said differently: if money is always the expression of a social relation and the concept of value is always contested; then, it seems from the evidence of history that the way that that (hierarchical) social order is maintained and the way that contested values (particularly currencies) are negotiated and resolved is through military force.

Now at first glance that theorem seems absurd. But play out the argument for a minute and I think you'll find it's not as absurd as it seems at first blush:

[Just to be clear, I would be HAPPY to be wrong about this. Furthermore, I am NOT saying this is a good thing -- but rather that this is a realpolitik look at the way things are.]

Imagine if you will that worldwide, workers in all coffee plantations suddenly joined the United Farmer Workers Union and went on strike for better wages. Overnight coffee prices double, Starbucks franchises go out of business, stocks of coffee and restaurant companies plummet and drag the wider stock market index down with them. But in the U.S. this would not play out as a debate about workers rights in the third world. In the U.S. we would never even see a single coffee picker on TV or hear any of their legitimate requests for fair compensation -- but we would see endless interviews with hot baristas who had just lost their jobs. The Wall Street Journal would editorialize on the "Specter of Inflation." Political pundits on cable T.V. would cluck cluck on how "the President looks weak and ineffective." Republicans would rush to the floor of Congress to make speeches about how the President "has lost control of the economy." Debates about inflation in particular but also debates about masculinity and the "health" of the economy (read the health of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) are all smoke screens to put pressure on elected officials to use violence to maintain our wealth.

So the U.S. (over the last 200 years) [and European countries over the last 500 years] have maintained a policy of proactive violence to maintain the value of their money.

Banana workers want a raise in Guatemala? We overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. (1954)

Chile wants to nationalize copper mines that the U.S. relies on for cheap bullets to fight the Vietnam War and cheap phone cables to fund ITT's global expansion? We overthrown the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. (1973)

Coffee workers and manufacturing workers in Colombia want a raise, the U.S. (and Dole Fruit) fund death squads that have killed 2,500 union leaders in that country since 1986.

In every case, the violence committed by the U.S. (and U.S. taxpayer-funded mercenaries) has helped to keep U.S. inflation down and the value of the U.S. dollar up. And the craziest fucking part of all this is that we are all complicit in this without realizing it, just by virtue of the fact that we will throw out our own government the moment our purchasing power or our living standards decline.

It's always been a little strange to me that so-called "rich" nations -- the U.S., and Europe also have a long history of violence and genocide. Indeed as Eduardo Galeano shows in Open Veins of Latin America (and as Eric Williams shows in Capitalism & Slavery) it is precisely the violence of Europe and the U.S. that produced the enormous capital accumulation that fueled the industrial revolution and further enriched those nations. And it is precisely the permanent state of preemptive violence, that we are loath to acknowledge, that reinforces our trust in the state guarantees of U.S. paper money and gives our currency continued value over time.

Update #1: I just want to add a quick note about the mechanics by which the U.S. makes the decision to overthrow a democratically elected government (or any other government for that matter). I don't necessary think anyone in the Nixon White House for example, necessarily made it their mission to figure out how to hold down wages in other countries per se (although there may have been some who thought like that). For the most part, I think the decision-making process is so much more subtle than that. It's more likely that the head of ITT or the global conglomerate that owned the copper mines in Chile went to college with Kissinger or other senior administration officials. They were roommates, buddies, they had dinner in the dining hall together and now they vacation together and their kids are growing up together.

When Allende announces he's going to nationalize the phone company, the head of ITT feels like something important is being stolen from him personally. So he gets on the phone with the highest ranking buddy he can find in the administration and says, 'Hey, you've really got to help me out, the crazy President of Chile is trying to steal my company from me.' And so the senior administration official makes some calls to help out his friend and they find some military planners who never did like the democratically elected government down there in the first place and they call the political folks who know for sure that they don't want Nixon 'to look soft on communism' (because that never plays well with the base) and it all just snowballs from there. Politics isn't rational, it's tribal -- it's about groups of friends looking out for each other. But the net effect of elites looking out for each other (and using military force to do it) is the perpetuation of a system of injustice that has existed for over 500 years.

the river

2009-12-10T18:23:00.000-08:00

Now for something a little different...

I once read somewhere that that if it were ever possible to be inside another person's head, we would instantly think we had gone insane because the other person's way of thinking would be so different than our own. [Imagine the movie Being John Malkovich and not just seeing what he sees but also being able to witness every thought that he thinks too.]

With that in mind... I'm continually amazed, even though I should not be, that most people have no idea what "the river" is and live, instead, entirely in the conventional world. I'm surprised because basically every decision I make -- about careers, relationships, what to write, what to read, my measure of all religious practice, my experience of nature, everything that I do that I consider important -- is made in reference to my experience of "the river." The river contains all the good stuff in the universe, all the stuff really worth doing, and you know you are in the river when you feel it. The physical experience of the river is the closest thing I have to any sort of spiritual/religious experience.

I'll explain.

Basically I'm a Platonist. But I don't believe in Plato's forms [Plato's argument is that the reason we are able to recognize a beautiful rose is because there exists a divine perfect "form" of the rose and we all carry that universal form around in our heads.] Instead of "forms" my experience of consciousness is that there is this river that we all have access to. (I know I should have written "a river we all have access to" but it isn't just any old river, it's the river, this river, there is only one in my experience, in the same way that there is onelove that people talk about.) When our actions are in tune with the universe, we know it because we can feel the sensation of getting closer to the river, or even being part of the river. The river does not produce the sensation of cold or wetness like a usual river. Rather, the river produces a sensation of harmony and attunement with one's deeper purpose and the deeper purpose of the universe (and it does have a sense of movement -- so in that way I guess it's like an earthly river). I definitely know when I've moved closer to the river because I can feel it -- it's an actual bodily sensation.

In some ways, my concept of the river is similar to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of "flow." But it's really more than that, because it's not just about being immersed in a task -- it's about being immersed in a task that is in harmony with the deeper purpose of the universe. So I can be in flow playing a video game, but never experience the river. But if I'm at a protest march and the protest march is making a difference and reducing suffering in the world, then I'm more likely to experience the river.

I should add that the river flows according to its own purposes. It shows up when it wants to show up, we can't call it to us. The best that we can hope to do is to work consistently day in and day out to do the right thing and, if we are lucky, occasionally the river will show up of its own accord. (As my favorite soccer coach used to say, "luck is the residue of careful planning" so doing the right thing helps but there is no direct cause and effect that one can count on). So in that way, sadly it creates an ethic somewhat akin to the protestant work ethic. But at the same time, it's not just a restatement of Protestantism because it also has lots of space for passion and desire and love. Furthermore, the hallmark of the river is an actual physical experience -- to which Calvinists are usually immune.

The concept of the river is so core to how I think and how I experience the world that for the longest time (most of my life) I just assumed that everyone else must know about the river too. But then when I actually describe the river to friends or lovers, it usually turns out that they have a completely different framework through which they make sense of the world and make decisions. So I guess this is just a helpful reminder that there is an extraordinary diversity of worldviews and interior experiences out there and that it's really helpful to inquire further about another person's interiors without making the assumption that we are all operating in the same way (which should go without saying but sometimes is worth repeating I suppose).

the menace of mercury

2009-12-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

I was doing some research yesterday on the dangers of mercury and I stumbled upon a few resources I want to pass along.

The first is an amazing video from the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine. Using actual brain neurons from snails, they show exactly how mercury damages brain neurons. It's extraordinary:

The U.S. coal industry emits 96,000 pounds of mercury into the air each year. Watching the video it's easy to understand why those emissions are so catastrophic for human health. What is more, the fact that drug companies continue to use mercury as a preservative in vaccines (including the flu vaccine) is absolutely fucking insane.

Next, I stumbled upon a fascinating article in the Times Online (UK): 'Green' lightbulbs poison workers: Hundreds of factory staff are being made ill by mercury used in bulbs destined for the West. Money quote:

Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs. A surge in foreign demand, set off by a European Union directive making these bulbs compulsory within three years, has also led to the reopening of mercury mines that have ruined the environment.

Over a year ago I wrote a post arguing that the environmental movement was being played when it came to compact fluorescent light bulbs and increasingly it appears that I was correct. It is not a complicated argument to say that using nuclear power or mercury in lightbulbs in order to reduce CO2 emissions is a bad trade off. I'm hoping that within a year a two that organic light-emitting diode lightbulbs (OLED) will come down sufficiently in price so as to make CFL's obsolete. Related to the issue of CFLs, check out this brilliant article by Derrick Jensen on the limits of consumer choice as a tool for environmental protection.

Finally, I just ordered the book, Diagnosis Mercury: Money, Politics & Poison by Dr. Jane Hightower and hope to have a review of it soon.

Tea parties show that Lyndon LaRouche has taken over GOP

2009-12-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

For me the most fascinating aspect of the tea party phenomenon that we have witnessed in 2009 is the degree to which it shows that Lyndon LaRouche has taken over the modern Republican Party.

The Republican party is an extremely hierarchical organization -- a pyramid with one leader at the top who cannot be questioned or challenged. And after eight years of being led by a shell of a man, the GOP was simply a shell of a party. No leadership had been developed within the party in over eight years so they were forced to nominate a septuagenarian and a glorified cocktail waitress for president. Furthermore not since Reagan has the party had any idea of how to mobilize people -- contracting that out to the NRA, talk radio, and the Christian Coalition.

By 2009, with the complete absence of any leadership at the head of the party, Lyndon LaRouche was able to walk right in and take over the Republican party without firing a shot. Because, as crazy as he is, LaRouche still knows how to mobilize a few (whacked out, paranoid) people. Make no mistake about it, the tea parties that we witnessed this year are pure Lyndon LaRouche and his gang of crazies. The photos of bodies piled at Dachau, the chaotic rallies with an infinite number of conflicting complaints all presented at the same time, the complete lack of any cohesive rational narrative, the obsessive focus on demonstrating just pure crazy paranoid anger -- that's all signature Lyndon LaRouche mobilization.

So when Michele Bachmann invites the LaRouche crowd to descend on DC -- and the rest of the Republican political establishment gets pulled into doing their bidding, it's really a remarkable statement about the complete collapse of a once proud American political party. The fact that traditional beltway media (and the RNC itself) doesn't realize it's been played by LaRouche shows what a disaster our political pundit class has become as well.

Photo of LaRouche supporters from back in 2007 -- before they took over the Republican Party. The telltale sign of a LaRouche protest is that they always make sure to coat everything they say or do with just a little extra dose of crazy.

Did Marya Hornbacher kill the "pain-and-suffering-memoir" genre and if so, is that a bad thing?

2009-12-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

The pain-and-suffering-memoir genre has been hot in publishing for much of the last 15 years.

Susanna Kaysen seemed to jump start the modern pain-and-suffering-memoir craze in 1993 with her brilliant account of her experience in a mental institution, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, in Girl, Interrupted. (BTW if you have the chance, read the book, but don't watch the movie -- they are very very different.)

In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel came out Prozac Nation, an astonishingly beautiful memoir of living with depression which became a national bestseller.

Then in 1998, Marya Hornbacher came out with Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Wasted is a masterpiece, a work of literature so poignant and searing that I imagine people will be reading it 50 or 100 years from now in the same way that we now read Sylvia Plath.

So last year (2008) I was surprised to see that Marya Hornbacher had a new memoir out called Madness: a Bipolar Life. My head tilted like Scooby Doo realizing, ruh roh, something was not right here. There were no loose ends at the conclusion of Wasted -- Hornbacher had triumphed over the most severe case of anorexia imaginable and fallen in love and married a wonderful guy. There was no need for a sequel. In fact, putting out a second pain-and-suffering memoir seemed to violate the #1 rule of the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre which is: You only get to write one! And yet here, in my hand, at the local bookstore was Marya Hornbacher's new pain-and-suffering-memoir, Madness, exactly 10 years after Wasted had been published.

Naturally I bought it took it home and read it in one sitting. Now Hornbacher writes that she had likely been suffering from bipolar disorder all along and anorexia was merely a symptom of this larger disorder (which makes sense of course). In the course of Madness she bounces from one disaster to another -- severe cutting, alcoholism, sabotaging relationships with friends and family, multiple trips in and out of mental institutions -- with such frequency that she starts to appear self indulgent. The writing in Madness lacks the insight and power of Wasted -- perhaps the result of memory loss from multiple electro-convulsive ("shock") therapy treatments (which she recounts in Madness). In Wasted, Hornbacher, for all of her setbacks, was still always the subject of her own destiny. In Madness, Hornbacher has become pure object buffeted by the relentless waves of misery.

Wasted was perhaps the singular achievement in the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre. And Madness feels like the work of an aging championship boxer coming back into the ring long after he should have retired. After 15 years of one-upsmanship in the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre, with one extremely talented author after another showing that she (usually it's a she) could survive (and even thrive! amidst) the most severe hardships imaginable, it is as if Marya Hornbacher turned in the ultimate piece of performance art, going all in against all comers in the game of misery poker to show that no matter what, she will always have the winning hand. Madness feels like the end of an era in publishing, the curtain coming down on an era of self disclosure as a form of self help.

But I wonder if, in the process, Marya Hornbacher also gave us a great gift and opened up space for new forms of storytelling to emerge. Because there was always something disingenuous about the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre. The stories were always told as a "Hero's Journey" and seemed to follow the same script -- an earnest well-intentioned young woman (or man) is beset by some evil affliction (disease, abuse, injury, or accident) that is not understood by western medicine and perhaps is caused by our modern era itself. Through trials and tribulations the author figures out how to smote the evil affliction and lives happily ever after and then sends us all a note about how she did it so that we might be aided in our own journeys. (Of course that is putting too fine a point on it, one could also make a compelling case that these authors were merely trying to narrate their own experience and illuminate the human condition and had no intention of telling a Hero's Journey sort of tale.)

The only problem with the hero's journey structure is that, particularly with mental health challenges, it rarely works out as neat and tidy as all that in real life (and memoirs after all are supposed to be an account of real life). For example, Elizabeth Wurtzel went on from the success of Prozac Nation to write a self help advice book for women, The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman. But in order to complete that advice book she started taking speed and in the process became a meth addict -- which then led to her next memoir More Now Again: a Memoir of Addiction. [Kaysen, to her credit, ends Girl, Interrupted decidedly unsure -- unsure whether she was ever sick, unsure of whether she will ever be considered what society calls "well." The movie of Girl, Interrupted on the other hand presents a Hero's Journey that runs counter to the ambivalence portrayed so effectively in the book.]

In some ways then, Madness: a Bipolar Life functions like Richard Wright's masterpiece Native Son (although obviously the pathologies in Madness are much much less severe than those depicted in Native Son). Do you remember reading Native Son in high school? In the book, Wright creates a sort of anti-hero in his character Bigger Thomas. An Amazon.com review states:

Other books had focused on the experience of growing up black in America -- including Wright's own highly successful Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of five stories that focused on the victimization of blacks who transgressed the code of racial segregation. But they suffered from what he saw as a kind of lyrical idealism, setting up sympathetic black characters in oppressive situations and evoking the reader's pity. In Native Son, Wright was aiming at something more. In Bigger, he created a character so damaged by racism and poverty, with dreams so perverted, and with human sensibilities so eroded, that he has no claim on the reader's compassion. ... Wright's genius was that, in preventing us from feeling pity for Bigger, he forced us to confront the hopelessness, misery, and injustice of the society that gave birth to him. --Andrew Himes

I think finally that's what Hornbacher does with Madness. She smashes the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre and in the process smashes the Hero's Journey form of story telling. She creates in herself a character whose extremes of self destructive behavior are so far beyond the norm that she no longer makes a claim on the reader's sympathies. She seems to be saying 'here I am, fucked up, beyond repair, beyond happily ever after, that is my experience of life, can you bear to look at it? can you stand it if life does not come wrapped in a bow?' In the process, I think she opens up space for us to once again see the world as it is with all of its light and darkness. Madness thus opens up space for stories that go beyond the Hero's Journey, into the depth of the human experience.

Update #1: this post is slightly modified from an earlier version.

I suppose it was only a matter of time...

2009-12-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

I was at the local wine shop the other night and the guy behind me in line was buying a beverage called Neuro Sleep -- it's literally a soft drink to help you sleep -- an anti-energy drink. I went home and googled it and it turns out that the Neuro Drink company makes beverages to tweek performance and mood in ALL areas of your life -- Neuro Gasm to improve sexual performance, Neuro Sonic for work, Neuro Trim to lose weight, Neuro Sport for exercise, and Neuro Bliss to manage depression I guess.

In fact, we've been using beverages to tweak mood for a long time -- various forms of alcohol to (poorly) manage depression, increase desire, or facilitate sleep; various forms of sugary beverages to manage mood and provide fuel during exercise; and coffee or strong tea to boost alertness at work. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that they could add the latest over-the-counter herbal supplements to beverages and then market them as tonics to manage specific neurological functions. But at the same time it all feels so "Brave New World" meets "Children of Men." Oh yeah, the guy behind me in line said Neuro Sleep works great and I should try it -- and the clerk and everyone else in line agreed.

Things that seem normal but aren't, part 4

2009-12-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

Continuing my occasional series on things that seem normal but aren't...

8. How totally fucking unhappy most of us are at work. We spend 8, 10, 12 hours a day at work. Most of us are there for a reason -- a common purpose shared with others or just a common goal of wanting to earn a living to provide for the essentials of life -- shelter, food, and medical care for ourselves and those we love. And most of us are totally fucking miserable in our jobs. Employees hate their bosses and see them as selfish, willfully ignorant,and intentionally counterproductive to the mutual aims of all involved. Bosses see their employees as lazy, unproductive, unenlightened impediments to traversing the obvious path laid out in front of them. In spite of seemingly mutual aims between all involved, most workplaces are a total fucking mess.

In a four year undergraduate college degree, most students will take zero classes in management (and no, an undergraduate class in psychology is not very helpful preparation for human relations in the workplace). In an MBA program there are lots of classes on economics, risk management, and decision making but most students will take one class in the art of management at most. In teacher education programs there are lots of classes on pedagogy and curriculum, but very few classes on how we get along with others and successfully negotiate the academic politics around us. In seminaries, where our religious leaders receive their professional training, there are lots of classes in theology but few classes in management. It's really quite extraordinary that the one thing essential to our mutual happiness -- the art of people relating to people -- is almost entirely unstudied in most all of our professional training. There is a sense that most people, in their heart-of-hearts must regard the art of how we are to get along with one another as simply unknowable. But the fact is, there are techniques for how we can and should get along with each other. Some methods are better than others and all of these propositions are knowable, testable, and replicable. The fact that all managers and most employees don't spend lots and lots of time learning, developing, and perfecting these skills is really dumbfounding.

If you are looking for a place to start, I highly recommend, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone (and three other co-authors at the Program on Negotiations at Harvard). Hands down this is the most informative self help book I've ever read.

I also highly recommend Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande Even though the book is focused on how to improve workplace practices in a medical setting, I think his insights about checklists and processes could help improve both performance and satisfaction in lots of different workplace settings.

If you have other ideas for tools, techniques, and processes that you find helpful, I'd be eager to learn about them in the comments.

intimacy defined

2009-12-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

In the midst of an otherwise thoroughly depressing article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about the limits of marriage counseling, is this gem of a sentence that I will now carry with me (slightly modified so that it will make sense out of context):

Intimacy begins when one person expresses revealing feelings;
intimacy builds when the listener responds with support and empathy; and
intimacy is achieved when the (initial) discloser hears this support and empathy and feels understood, validated and cared for.

I think that is very well stated.

Things that seem normal but aren't, part 3

2009-12-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

Continuing my occasional series, Things That Seem Normal But Aren't, I've got two more for you today.

6. The sheer volume of vampire stories in film, TV, and books. Look, I could understand if a new vampire movie came out every 15 to 20 years. But it seems that a new vampire-themed media product comes out every other week these days. Conservatives love vampires (ahem, Ayn Rand), progressives love vampires, men love vampires, women TOTALLY love vampires, old people like vampires, young people like vampires, Americans like vampires, people around the world like vampires. As a media brand, vampire rule. Which is all very odd when you think about it. What makes a sickly pale white guy who sucks people's blood compelling let alone sexy?

I gotta figure that the enduring power of vampires in our collective consciousness stems from the fact that vampires are really serving as a sort of metaphor for something else. My hunch is that vampires serve as a metaphor for the ways that men mess up women's lives and the ways in which women sacrifice their own lives for desire. As Carol Gilligan points out, for much of human history (really up until about the late 1960s) desire (eros) and death (thanatos) often went hand in hand (desire led to sexual union which led to childbirth where a high percentage of women lost their lives). Even since the advent of the pill and even with improved maternal and infant mortality in childbirth, men still seem to find ways to make women's lives messy (as Rene Russo's character Catherine said so well in The Thomas Crown Affair).

7. Car chases in movies. Even though we've mercifully escaped the era of the Cannonball Run series there are still an awful lot of car chases in movies. Which is surprising given that there really aren't that many car chases in real life. Of course there is the occasional O.J. Slow Speed Chase or various police pursuits on the freeway covered by local news traffic helicopters. But those are usually covered on the local evening news. It's unclear why someone would also pay money to see such things in a theater. But I think the role of the car chase in modern movies is not to simulate reality. Rather, the movie car chase recreates the primitive animal sensation of pursuit -- both predator and prey -- that is hardwired into our limbic system through millions of years of evolution. I think the movie car chase, even though unrealistic and foreign to our daily lives, gives us the dopamine rush and subsequent sense of relief when the danger passes that makes us feel satisfied -- like we went on an intense journey -- as we leave the theater (or as is usually the case these days -- as we hit the "open" button on the DVD remote and walk to the fridge).

Immortality projects

2009-12-04T22:58:00.000-08:00

A friend recently introduced me to George Monbiot's blog and it's excellent. Monbiot writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper in the UK and has written extensively on global climate change, corporate power, and environmental protection. He also has one of the finest posts you'll ever read on career advice for aspiring journalists.

In a recent post, Monbiot gave a great short summary of Ernest Becker's writing and I want to quote from it briefly and then riff on the ideas that came up in connection with this idea:

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with "vital lies" or "the armour of character"(10). We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker's thesis(11). When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it and increasing their striving for self-esteem(12).

I think Ernest Becker is correct -- immortality projects drive so much of what we do on this planet. Capitalism and the pursuit of wealth are immortality projects, religion is an immortality project, family can be an immortality project, writing, careers, even really intense hobbies can become immortality projects. So much of what we do is an attempt to build a name or thing or idea that lives on long after we do.

It makes sense then that our fights over jobs or politics or religion are so fierce -- the other person who disagrees with me or who is blocking me from accomplishing what I want to accomplish -- is getting in the way of my immortality project and that cannot stand!

And then one day you realize that it is all so silly. In all likelihood there is no immortality to be gained anyway, so what exactly are we fighting for? Time swallows everything and appears to be merciless. One of my all time favorite passages in any book is this from Milan Kundera in the Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Tereza's dream reveals the true function of kitsch: Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

With even just a little honest examination, all of these immortality projects all become just kitsch. Capitalism is just a folding screen set up to curtain off death. Religion is just a folding screen set up to curtain off death. World's records, tall buildings, that cherished book project, is just a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

The path of the Buddhist monk then makes sense. To their credit, Buddhists are willing to take a long gaze at things as they truly are. Looking into the abyss, they come to realize there is really nothing to push back against and they slow down, stop, and sit still in silence for the rest of their lives. But then of course Buddhism can easily devolve into its own immortality project too so it shows just how difficult it is to escape from the clutches of kitsch.

Lincoln was really on to something when he said, "The world will little note nor longer remember what we say here..." In fact I wonder if the reason the Gettysburg address has become so famous is because of Lincoln's existential rambling at the beginning of the speech that really captured the frailty of the human condition.

But here's the thing, I think we need immortality projects in order to keep our sanity. Even if we know they are silly, even if we know they are untrue, I think we should do them anyway. I think immortality projects are the motorboat that keeps us one step ahead of the sharks of depression. When I'm actively, passionately pursuing my own personal immortality project, I'm really quite happy. Immortality projects are often the thing that gives life meaning and brings us into connection with others. And even if, as the Landmark Forum folks point out, life is actually empty and meaningless, so what? We should still pursue that thing that we think is important just because we think it is important. I think recognizing that our immortality projects are silly enables us to hold them more loosely, to back off when they start making us miserable. But at the same time, I think they should be pursued because they make us happy. And if we can do it lightly, then perhaps it can bring us into greater communion with our fellow travelers on this rock.

----

Footnotes from the first blockquote above:

10. Ernest Becker, 1973. The Denial of Death, pp47-66. Republished 1997. Free Press Paperbacks, New York.

11. Tom Pyszczynski et al, 2006. On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations. Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4, 328–356.

12. Jeff Greenberg et al, 1992. Terror Management and Tolerance: does mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who threaten one’s worldview? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 63, No 2 212-220.

Capitalism is a wave form not a straight line

2009-12-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

Continuing a theme today...

Interesting article a few months back in The New Yorker (subscription required) called, "The Secret Cycle: Is the financier Martin Armstrong a con man, a crank, or a genius?" by Nick Paumgarten (October 12, 2009). The paragraph that really stayed with me (and prompted me to write a blog post about it almost 3 months later) is this one:

"In the nineteen-twenties, Nikolai Kondratiev, a Soviet economist, concluded that capitalism was inclined to half-century cycles of boom and bust and boom again, rather than, as Marx believe, a single, inexorable march toward collapse. Wrong answer. Stalin had him imprisoned and executed. It was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, he of "creative destruction," who called these cycles Kondratiev waves and popularized them in the West. "

I think that is it exactly. Capitalism is a wave form -- innovation followed by greed followed by collapse over and over again in 5 to 50 year cycles of boom and bust. [I could add: Capitalism is a wave form of innovation followed by greed followed by collapse -- followed by rebirth IF progressives are elected to clean up the problem, i.e. Franklin Roosevelt; OR fascism if conservatives are elected/seize power in response to the problem, i.e. Augusto Pinochet.]

I think the Wall Street guys know this too. They study the financial data more than anyone, they know that markets move up and down in waves. But the Wall Street guys never tell the general public that information. Rather, when they are selling stocks, 401(k) plans, and IRAs to the rest of us they always portray the market as a straight line of 8% returns year in and year out. ("Don't think about it," they say, "just give us your retirement savings and everything will work out fine. Trust us." Hard to imagine that not working out.) And it is precisely in the difference between the wave forms that Wall Street is riding and the straight line that they are selling to the rest of us that Wall Street makes all of its billions -- betting against the down times and riding the wave of succeeding bubbles.

Furthermore, the capitalist enablers in politics, Republicans, also sell capitalism to the public as an inexorable march of steady progress (profit), a rocket ship streaking ever onwards and upwards. And it is precisely this public lie of the straight line of capitalism by Republican politicians (and way too many Democratic politicians) that gives the Wall Street guys the cover they need to make money off of the actual peaks and valleys of capitalism.

How much wiser then it would to have a public policy that understood capitalism as a wave form subject to inevitable booms and busts, than as a straight line around which we try to build rational incremental linear policies. Indeed the challenge of progressive politics is to take the wave form of capitalism and straighten it out through massive regulation, enforcement of white collar criminal statutes, and a social safety net that protects the most vulnerable in society from the vicissitudes of the market.

I think it is wonderfully liberating to see that the both the straight line down of Marx and the straight line up of capitalist apologists are incorrect. It liberates us to focus on the challenge of how to design public policy based on curves -- calculus rather than arithmetic.

Update #1: I probably should have spaced out my earlier post, "Men's desire is a straight line, women's desire is a wave form" with this one because even though they both talk about straight lines and wave forms, I don't think the two topics (the booms and busts of capitalism and the peaks and valleys of women's desire) have anything to do with each other.

Men's desire is a straight line, women's desire is a wave form

2009-12-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

Sally Law in the latest issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating interview with Cindy Meston and David Buss, psychology professors at the University of Texas at Austin, about their book, "Why Women Have Sex." Here's the paragraph that jumped out at me:

[W]hereas men’s sexual orgasm tends to be fairly predictable and reliable in the sense of its occurrence, women’s sexual orgasm is highly variable. It's variable from woman to woman, and variable within the same woman from partner to partner, circumstance to circumstance, etc. Sexual attraction provides another example. Men’s sexual attraction tends to be based heavily on visual cues. Women’s sexual attraction tends to be far more nuanced. It’s affected by olfactory cues (how a man smells), personality of the partner (such as sense of humor and confidence), social status (how he is regarded in the eyes of his peers), other women's judgments of how attractive he is, and many other factors, in addition to the visual cues. The qualities women find to be sexually attractive in a man also vary across the ovulatory cycle, such as a shift toward finding more masculine features (faces, bodies, and voices) attractive at ovulation.

To put this simply, men's desire appears to be a straight line -- fixed, constant, predictable, cliched even (and often involves light blue eye shadow). But women's desire seems more like a wave form -- nuanced, varied, shifting over time. So why are men and women so rarely on the same page? Because the straight line of men's desire and the wave form of women's desire only intersect occasionally.

Now that may be putting too fine a point on it. But I think it is helpful to understand that men and women are not mirror images of each other, but rather seem to think about and experience desire in very different ways.

And of course Dr.'s Meston and Buss focused their research on heterosexual desire. It would be fascinating to replicate their research but focus it instead on homosexual relationships and those in which gender is more variable.

[Note: it's tough to write about this topic without slipping into using sex and gender synonymously. But as I pointed out in a previous post, sex is not the same thing as gender.

Also because I occasionally write on sex and gender (and use explicit language), it's interesting to see the keywords in the google searches that sometimes bring people to my site. Many many people who end up at my post, bleeding heart liberal, were not exactly looking for an exegesis on subconscious framing in political speech. But for the few dudes out there who were looking to get off, ended up here by accident, and maybe learned a little something new in the process, I guess that's to the good too.]

The global quest for an everything-is-gonna-be-all-right pill

2009-11-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

You know what people would be willing to spend a bajillion dollars on? An everything-is-gonna-be-all-right pill.

Isn't that exactly what heroin is? And cocaine? And alcohol. And nicotine. Often people who use these drugs are portrayed as irresponsible hedonistic "pleasure seekers." And while that may be true in some cases, for the vast majority of people I don't think that's exactly what's going on. It seems to me that the reason that most people try these drugs in the first place, (in spite of the known dangers) and then go back again and again, is to try to feel the sensation that "everything is gonna be all right."

In fact, the reason that drugs lords control entire countries (Myanmar, Afghanistan) and huge swaths of many other countries (Mexico, Colombia, the United States) is because they control the supply of everything-is-gonna-be-all-right sensation-producing plants. Global illicit drugs sales are estimated at $320 billion a year. [$300 billion is a fascinating number too because it is roughly equal to the estimated cost to end world hunger and equal to about half the amount of the U.S. annual military budget].

Interested to horn in on a portion of this huge market, global pharmaceutical sales of antidepressants reached $11 billion in 2008. But it seems to me that Eli Lily and Pfizer are just selling an everything-is-gonna-be-all-right pill too, no more no less.

Furthermore, isn't that what every major religion, new age guru, self help book, and revolutionary movement is selling -- an everything-is-gonna-be-all-right pill or process or methodology? [I remember being in Nicaragua around the time of the 1990 elections and the Sandinista campaign slogan was, "Todo será mejor" everything will be better. On the one hand, anyone who came up with that slogan should be fired for political malpractice. But on the other hand, it is understandable why someone would be drawn to saying something like that in a political campaign in the midst of a war.]

People seem to like pleasure, but they would be willing to give anything for the feeling that everything-is-gonna-be-all right. In fact, isn't that how American Beauty ends, the main character is murdered but he dies happy because he has realized that everything-is-gonna-be-all-right. Isn't that the Christ story: one who loses his life but this ultimate loss has no sting because he is firm in the knowledge that everything-is-gonna-be-all-right?

I guess the reason I'm so interested to riff on this topic is that all of the above suggests that many many people, much of the time, apparently do NOT feel that everything is going to be all right. Which if true, would be a fascinating statement on the human condition. Great literature and film sometimes portrays this feeling, this absence of everything-is-gonna-be-all-right. But it seems to me that the news media usually stays away from talking about this, even though the attempt to escape this feeling appears to be the motivating factor behind many of our daily decisions, and many, perhaps most, of our problems as a society (and internationally).