California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Don't say Gay, CRT or That Founding Fathers Were Less Than Perfect

by John Lawrence

As Ken Burns pointed out in his excellent documentary on Benjamin Franklin, not only was Franklin a slave owner, but also he fathered an illegitimate son, William. Geez, a slave owner and a philanderer! Do we want this taught to our kids in school? I say why not. It's better than filling their heads with nonsense, bullshit and fairy tales. The truth is that European settlers stole land from the Indians, and then brought in African slaves to work it while they sat on their asses and got rich. Benjamin Franklin is held up as a paragon of American achievement which he was in many ways. As a scientist he made a contribution to the theory of electricity and saved many church spires with his invention of the lightning rod. He also almost single-handedly saved the American revolution as a diplomat who got France to support it financially and militarily. Without France's support the fledgling United States of America would have assuredly remained British colonies. By the way Franklin's son William became the British Governor of the colony of New Jersey. Franklin himself was a loyal British subject until the Declaration of Independence at which time he decided to be an American.

So Republican reactionaries don't want unsavory facts about our Founding Fathers taught in school in addition to unsavory facts about sex. They don't want anything taught,especially the truth, if it makes their children feel uncomfortable. The fact is that not all people are heterosexuals, the Founding Fathers owned slaves, Indian's land was stolen from them and the Founding Fathers, some of them anyway, were philanderers who fathered illegitimate children. William, by the way, also fathered an illegitimate son, whom Franklin, to his credit, accepted into his household. After the Declaration, Franklin and his son William, who remained a loyal Brit, became estranged. William was captured and imprisoned by the American patriots.

Time reported:

"Opponents of CRT now invoke it as a catchall term for any discussion of systemic racism. All of a sudden, this once obscure bit of pedagogy is the hottest topic in conservative politics. In recent weeks, Republican governors in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas have signed bills designed to restrict the way history is taught or ban the use of CRT. In a legally binding opinion, Montana’s attorney general called critical race theory and antiracism training “discriminatory” and illegal “in many instances.” On June 10, the Florida board of education approved a rule that instruction “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” At least 25 states have proposed or taken actions designed to restrict how teachers discuss racism and sexism, according to Education Week. One group in Nevada is calling for teachers to wear body cameras; under a bill that was proposed in Arizona, teachers could have been fined $5,000 for teaching students to feel “guilt” over their race."

So American history can't be portrayed in school as anything "other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence." Glory, glory. What noble people these slave owners, Indian land stealers and philanderers were! Not to mention the Mexican American war.

History.com reported:

"The invasion of Mexico was one of the first U.S. conflicts to spawn a widespread anti-war movement. Political opponents labeled “Mr. Polk’s War” a shameless land grab, while abolitionists viewed it was a scheme to add more slave states to the Union. Among the more notable critics was freshman Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, who took to the House floor in 1847 and introduced a series of resolutions demanding to know the location of the “spot of soil” where the war’s first skirmish took place."

Well, in fact American history is full of lies and bullshit about war including the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Perhaps grade school children shouldn't have to be faced with the facts of life unsavory as they may be, but at some point, say high school, American citizens should be required to read "The Untold History of the United States," by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick or "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn or both.

Off the Top of My Head

The Code Breaker

by John Lawrence, March26, 2021

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson is an exciting new book which details the efforts and the knowledge to edit genes known as CRISPR. That means cutting into the DNA genome and removing "sick" genes and/or replacing them with the correct genes. The book details the quest to discover the mechanism by which this is possible. The book focuses on Jennifer Doudna but many researchers, many of them recent immigrants or workers at foreign universities, are involved. The fundamental insights can be explained in a few sentences. They noticed that bacteria have been fighting off viruses successfully for billions of years, and they were doing this by incorporating the virus DNA into the data base of their own genome. Upon encountering a new virus the bacteria knew how to encode that virus's DNA so that they could identify it in an attack in the future. Secondly, the bacteria knew how to dispatch a portion of RNA that would travel to the site of the virus and encode an enzyme that would then destroy the virus. The messenger RNA knew precisely where to point the enzyme which then cut the virus DNA thereby destroying it. So the e. coli bacterium has known how to edit genes for billions of years. The trick is to figure out exactly how the bacterium does this.

So Jennifer Doudna and cohorts did just that: They figured out how a bacterium cuts a virus's DNA precisely in a certain location. That's what the book is about. That's what gene editing is about. Gene editing is in its infancy, but it has already been used to correct the genetic mutation which causes sickle cell anemia which is caused by the mutation in one gene. Experimentally, it has been shown that if this gene can be cut out and replaced by one that contains the correct genetic information, the disease can be cured. If this can be done early in the development of an embryo, the correct gene can even be transmitted to succeeding generations. An estimated 8 million children are born each year with severe genetic disorders or birth defects. Gene editing can possibly correct some or all of these defects. In order to do this the enzyme which cuts the gene out of the DNA must be told precisely where to cut, and the correct gene must somehow be implanted precisely at this location and the DNA reconnected. In theory the whole idea is very simple. Figuring out how to do this either in the laboratory or in actual animals, much less in humans, is the hard part.

Whether or not this research will lead to an understanding of the origins of life is an open question. Perhaps there is a sub-atomic entity sort of like a neutrino which is massless and ubiquitous in the universe which is the progenitor of life wherever conditions are propitious. Perhaps it is able to generate an organism with the minimal genome, something which has never been discovered in nature. Even a virus which has the simplest known genomic structure has three thousand base pairs, compared to the three billion base pairs in human genomes. A base pair consists of the 4 nucleotides called A, C, G, T   which comprise one rung of the DNA ladder. So a successful gene edit would have to identify the precise rung of the DNA ladder where the mutation had occurred which means at least one of the 4 letters of the base pair was incorrect and correct it.

So I theorize that a life progenitor would have to be something that is ubiquitous in the universe and capable of starting life with a minimal genome which consists of only a few base pairs. This is a mystery but certainly not the only one. Gravity is an every day phenomenon but no one has detected a graviton which is thought to be the physical entity that distorts space time according to Einstein's theory of relativity. No one understands the "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. No one understands what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which has been demonstrated to be a reality in quantum theory. Just as the line is blurred between what is material and what is massless energy, the line is blurred between what is spiritual and what is material. Is the creation of life in the universe a physical, material phenomenon or a spiritual one?

Off the Top of My Head

The Republican Game Plan is No Mystery: Obstruct Democratic Attempts to Help the Poor and Middle Class

by John Lawrence, January 24, 2021

The Washington Post article said it best: Right on schedule, Republicans pretend to care about deficits again. When they are in power, they run up the deficit by giving tax breaks to the rich. When Democrats are in power, they use the filibuster if necessary to deny Democrats any success in helping the American people who need help the most. They are deficit hawks, supposedly, but only when Democrats are in power. Knowing how this game operates by now, Democrats are prepared to do whatever is necessary to thwart it. The main tool at their disposal to get the COVID relief package passed is budget reconciliation which escapes the filibuster and only requires a majority vote in the Senate, exactly what Republicans have used to get their tax cuts passed. It seems clear that what the Republican party really stands for is aiding and abetting the rich while denying financial help and opportunities to the poor.

Even conventional economists like Larry Summers advocate for more Federal spending since interest rates are low. "We note that in a world of unused capacity and very low interest rates and costs of capital, concerns about crowding out of desirable private investment that were warranted a generation ago have much less force today. We argue that debt-to-GDP ratios are a misleading metric of fiscal sustainability that do not reflect the fact that both the present value of GDP has risen and debt service costs have fallen as interest rates have fallen." His point is, since interest rates are near zero, the US debt is not going to increase much as a result of paying interest on Treasury bonds. Furthermore, pump priming to get the economy up to full capacity as quickly as possible results in more taxes being collected by the Federal government which lowers deficit spending. Also, since the Fed sets interest rates, it can keep them at zero.

Furthermore, the piece de resistance is that in the final analysis deficits don't matter. The US Federal government can never run out of money since the US dollar is a sovereign currency. It can just be created by a few keystrokes on a computer by the Federal Reserve as it was when trillions of dollars were created to bail out the big banks. It is the same process that is used when the Federal government needs money. Instead of the Fed creating the money and moving it into the accounts of the big banks at the Fed, the money is created and moved into the account of the US Treasury which also exists at the Fed. This is the process that takes place when the amount of Federal government spending exceeds the amount the Federal government takes in from taxes. Republicans know this because of the $2 trillion that was created this way due to the Trump tax cuts.

So Republicans basically are lying to the American people as they have done so many times before when they pretend that money is not available to accelerate the COVID response or to provide relief to the American people or to rebuild infrastructure or to combat climate change. They are deluding the public. Democrats need to reeducate the American people about how the economy really works. Government debt just ends up on the Fed's balance sheet the same way that the trillions to bail out the big banks ended up on the Fed's balance sheet. Since the US dollar is a sovereign currency, there is never a need to pay it off. The US can never be in a situation of dependency on China or Japan or be constrained to pay off the Treasury bonds that they own since they could be paid off tomorrow again by a few keystrokes if necessary by moving money to their accounts at the Federal Reserve. Modern Monetary Theory has unmasked the way that the US economy really works in terms of how the US currency is created or destroyed by the US central bank - the Federal Reserve. In her book The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton details this process.

So are there limitations on the creation of money by the Fed. Of course, but, as long as there is unused productive capacity in human or material terms, deficit spending can benefit not only the economy in general in terms of increasing GDP, but it can benefit the actual lives of people who are suffering because of food insecurity, rent and mortgage insecurity, health care insecurity, crumbling infrastructure and a desire to save the planet as a habitable place to live for their grandchildren. As the article points out, "the greater risk now, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and others have warned in recent months, is that policymakers will do too little, rather than too much, to prevent permanent damage to the country’s productive capacity."  Janet Yellen, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Treasury Department and former Fed Chairman, has also said that the government must “act big” with its next coronavirus relief package. So do Fed Chairmen and current and former Treasury Secretaries know more than Republican hacks who are spewing deficit hawk propaganda? You bet they do. They know how the relationship between the Fed and the US Treasury actually works. And it works how Stephanie Kelton outlines in her book.

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Sanders, Budget Reconciliation and Modern Monetary Theory

by John Lawrence, January 18, 2021

Joe Biden will have no trouble from Congress in passing his $1.9 trillion relief bill. That's because Democrats control all 3 branches, and the filibuster is neutered due to "budget reconciliation." This allows a spending bill to be fast tracked through Congress without the possibility of a filibuster. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "The Senate can consider and pass reconciliation bills relatively quickly and with only a simple majority, rather than the three-fifths majority often needed for controversial legislation. That’s because reconciliation legislation isn’t subject to filibuster. Under general Senate rules, legislation can be stalled by virtually unlimited debate and the offering of numerous amendments, with a three-fifths majority vote required to invoke “cloture,” thereby limiting debate and blocking non-germane amendments. For a reconciliation bill, however, the Congressional Budget Act limits Senate debate on the bill to 20 hours and limits debate on the subsequent compromise between the two houses to ten hours."

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown that deficits don't matter. At least George W Bush didn't think so when he used the budget reconciliation process to give huge tax breaks to the rich which significantly increased the deficit and reduced income to the Federal government from taxes. The use of budget reconciliation did an end run around PAYGO which requires the Federal government to balance its budget and the debt limit which also constrains Federal spending. Both conservatives and liberals will be enthused over the fact that MMT proclaims that either tax reduction or government spending is good for American society (up to a point) even though the debt limit or PAYGO may be violated. This is because government is effectively adding money to the private sector which drives economic activity.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are very familiar with not only budget reconciliation but also MMT because one of its chief adherents, Stephanie Kelton who wrote the book, The Deficit Myth, previously was a Senate advisor to Bernie on the Senate Budget Committee. On December 26, 2014, Kelton was designated as Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the Senate Budget Committee, a post that she held in 2015 and early 2016, when she left that position to become an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign. So the American economy is about to get a shot in the arm that will mostly benefit poor and middle class people (whereas the Bush tax cuts primarily benefited the rich) much to the chagrin of conservatives that hold to the idea that government deficit spending should only benefit the rich through tax cuts.

MMT contends that, since the Federal Reserve creates money by keystokes on a computer and the US dollar is a sovereign currency, the US government can never run out of money. Treasury bonds can always be sold to cover deficits, and, if they can't be sold to the general public, they will end up on the Fed's balance sheet where they may remain forever as an accounting entry. Even the interest paid on Treasury bonds, which is now approximately zero, is not a consideration. Interest on Treasuries owned by the Fed is remitted to the Federal government anyway. So now is the time for massive spending by the US Federal government to 1) expedite recovery from COVID; 2) jump start the economy; and 3) expedite a global response to global warming by converting to renewable energy on all levels including:

"replacing fossil-fuel engines with electric in all public and private transport, super-insulating buildings and replacing inefficient HVAC systems, establishing regional photo-voltaic micro-grid electric networks, replacing gas cooking ranges with electric induction units, buying regenerative-produced farm products and 'meatless meats', replacing all small engine appliances and tools with battery electric power"

And this is not to mention that solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy need to replace fossil fuel electric generating plants.

There is no time to lose. The incoming administration has a lot on its plate. In addition to that they have to run an impeachment trial in the Senate. Let's hope it doesn't slow down any of Joe Biden's initiatives. With Bernie as the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, armed with a knowledge of MMT, we can look forward to restoring the US' standing in the world community as well as restoring an economy that works for the poor and not just the well heeled, getting the pandemic under control and mitigating climate change. Thank you Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Off the Top of My Head

While Trump Was Colluding With Russia, Hillary Was Colluding With Wall Street

by John Lawrence

Hillary has a new book out: What Happened. Hillary is in denial about what really happened. She's mad at Bernie Sanders because he pointed out that she took huge sums of money (for speeches!) from Wall Street executives like Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Jamie Diamond, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. This was never supposed to have seen the light of day, much less become a campaign issue. This was just supposed to be par for the course, the normal way of doing business for someone in her position.

I liked Hillary. I voted for her. She had a nice smile. But taking money from Wall Street after they almost brought down the whole economy? They should have ended up in jail. Instead they were cut a break and never missed a beat with their enormous salaries and bonuses. They are doing the same things today they were doing then and instead of going to jail, their institutions, notably Wells Fargo, get a small slap on the wrist and a small fine, the cost of doing business.

In addition to her coziness with Wall Street, something that Hillary didn't want us to know about, Hillary was instrumental as Secretary of State in the debacles in Libya and Syria. While the American media and public were sidetracked with respect to Hillary's "fake" transgressions such as her emails, the real reasons why she should never have become President were her collusion with Wall Street and her failed foreign policy gambits. Hillary voted for the invasion of Iraq! As a woman she thought it necessary to establish her reputation as a hawk. She thought she had to gain a reputation for being tough. Instead of greasing the skids for her becoming the first woman President, this turned out to be her downfall.

In the final analysis, she would have made a much better President than Donald Trump. It's a tragedy that she wasn't elected, but it's a bigger tragedy for the Democratic party that they didn't select Bernie Sanders as their candidate. She criticized Bernie for making unrealistic promises. Isn't that what Trump did and look at the results. Trump is all over the board while Republicans in his administration and Congress slowly grind away at every program that would benefit the poor or the earth. Hillary would have been the President of the Democratic party status quo going back to her husband's "triangulation" and deregulation of Wall Street. We need something better than that, but we got something worse.

Who Weeps Not, Sees Not: Celebrating Victor Hugo's Les Misérables

From Common Dreams, Friday, June 30, 2017

 

by Abby Zimet, staff writer

 

 

Illustration of the dramatic journey carrying Marius through the sewers.

For a break from the current squalor, we pay tribute to Victor Hugo (1802-1885), who on this date in 1862 published the last chapter of Les Misérables, his extraordinary, riveting, timeless, 1,500 page paean to the wretched of the earth that gave voice to the long-suffering voiceless. The well-known, bare-bones plot of Hugo's masterwork tells the story of Jean Valjean, a peasant and tree pruner who steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children, is imprisoned for 19 years, and goes on to transform his life and many others' through the political upheaval of revolutionary France even as he is pursued by the vengeful Inspector Javert.

As much activist and legislator as artist, Hugo's own politics evolved over the 20 years he spent writing his masterwork - years spanning the 1848 French Revolution. What began as a furious cry against poverty, brutal police, economic injustice and an inhumane prison system came to explore revolution, class struggle, spiritual and moral growth, and the redeeming power of love. Hugo writes about life and death and everything between: He calls for compassion, equality, solidarity, dignity for women, free education - "the right to the alphabet" - while embarking on long, dense, oddly fascinating digressions about Waterloo - okay we skipped it - and the Paris sewer system, which is pretty cool. He is funny, moving, full of rage and grace, deeply human, always.

At his funeral in 1885 - he asked to be buried in a pauper's casket - over two million people, more than the population of Paris, came to celebrate Hugo's enduring legacy in "a festival of the oppressed." Their fervor affirmed Hugo's longtime claim to the universality of his themes: In a letter to his Italian publishers, he insisted, "Misery concerns us all...In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: 'Open to me, I come for you.'"

Alas, many of the millions who know Les Misérables as a movie/musical/Disney cartoon have failed to read the book; we just got around to it last year. A word from the newly wise: Read it. It's astonishing, and will enrich your life. It's also stunningly, sorrowfully relevant, now more than ever. So is the final missive Hugo reportedly wrote, days before his death: "To love is to act."

Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson

by John Lawrence

Streve Jobs, the book by Walter Isaacson, is of course about Steve Jobs, the person, who died last year at age 56 after a long bout with pancreatic cancer. He was the founder, along with his partner Steve Wozniak, of Apple Computer which is today the largest corporation on the planet in terms of market capitalization. Jobs and Wozniak were both college dropouts who had a passion for technology. After having developed and sold a "blue box" which allowed people to make phone calls anywhere in the world at no charge, they were among the first to develop personal computers after the Altair came out in 1976. Wozniak was the technical genius who developed the circuit boards and Jobs was the visionary who thought of himself as being at the "intersection of technology and the humanities."

Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs shortly after his birth in 1955. Later in life he found his birth mother, and found out the fact that he had a full sister, Mona Simpson, with whom he developed a relationship. Although he had information about his birth father, Jobs decided that he never wanted to meet him, but had actually unknowingly shaken hands with him at a restaurant in Cupertino that his father had managed.

Apple Computer was started officially in 1977 based on the Apple II designed by Wozniak. Three years later they went public and Jobs went from having a net worth of zero to having a net worth of $256 million overnight. After touring the Xerox PARC plant, Jobs got the idea for the graphical user interface and the mouse which were embodied in the first Macintosh and constituted a truly revolutionary development. Even though the Mac never garnered the market share of the IBM compatible PCs, it was a product which expressed Jobs passion for great design principles that extended to not only the case of the computer and the angles of its bevels but also to the packaging. Bill Gates's criticism of Jobs was that he couldn't code, and Jobs criticised Gates as having ripped off the Windows interface from the Macintosh for Microsoft. Despite the rivalry, Gates continued to provide application software for the Macintosh.

Jobs was probably one of the few CEOs of a major corporation that maintained throughout his life that one of his three or four greatest experiences was dropping LSD. Jobs didn't suffer fools gladly and didn't mind calling them bozos and assholes to their faces. His "reality distortion field" was responsible for his being able to convince anybody of anything and winning in most negotiations including getting the music industry to disaggregate record albums and sell individual songs for 99 cents which were to be purchased by consumers from Apple's iTunes store. He didn't endear himself to people by calling their ideas the "biggest piece of shit I've ever seen", but could turn around and be irresistably charming when it suited his purposes. Having started with nothing his passion was primarily to create excellent products rather than to make huge profits. This caused both successes and failures. His behavior at times was so erratic that Apple hired John Sculley, the CEO of Pepsi-Cola, to be CEO at Apple in 1983 just prior to the introduction of the Macintosh which revolutionized personal computing. His main purpose was to rein in Jobs and to impart some sense of order at Apple. It wasn't long before they were at odds with each other, and Jobs ended up being forced to leave Apple, the company he founded, in 1985. Wozniak had long since gone his separate way.

After Jobs left Apple he started NeXT Computer with his own money, a venture that never really got off the ground thanks in part to Jobs perfectionism. Apple did not prosper either under Sculley continually losing market share to Microsoft. Jobs wanted complete control over every aspect of his products from the ground up including both hardware and software, and he wouldn't license the software to clone makers as Microsoft did. The Microsoft strategy was the more successful as it turned out that the market would rather have cheaper, clunky computers than more elegantly designed expensive ones.

While at NeXT, Jobs had the opporetunity to buy Pixar, a small struggling digital animation firm. He was able to cut a deal with Disney to produce Toy Story and took Pixar public right after Toy Story became a huge commercial success. All of a sudden Jobs was back in action. Both NeXT and Pixar might have been failures, but Jobs passion for excellent products resulted in Pixar's huge success. After Apple's slide into decreasing market share for the Macintosh, Sculley was eventually replaced as CEO in 1993. In 1996 Jobs came back to Apple at the Board's request initially as an unpaid consultant. Eventually, he again took full control as CEO. He was able to turn the company around with the iMac whose case he and his design team spent an enormous amount of time on getting just right. Design considerations were primary and the hardware guys had to cram their electronics into the unorthodox case in the best way they could.

Jobs managed to get Apple to buy NeXT thus ending that dead end. Meanwhile, he was CEO at both Apple and Pixar, a fact that he felt contributed to his health problems. Eventually, Pixar was sold to Disney, and a lot of Jobs' weallth came from Pixar rather than Apple. In fact when Apple gave him stock options, they ended up being worthless due to the depreciation of the stock value. During this time Jobs was working as CEO of Apple for $1 a year, something that appealed to his countercultural identity and his professed lack of concern about money.

Jobs' greatest success came in the 2000s, after he was diagnosed with cancer, with the introduction of the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone and the iPad. He took Apple from a computer manufacturer to a company that revolutionized the distribution of music, created the smartphone and brought other greatly popular consumer devices to market. Finally, Jobs passion for design and total control over product development paid huge dividends in ways that other companies couldn't match.

Jobs lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011; Tim Cook took over the CEO position at Apple. This article in the New York Times about Apple tells the sad tale about how most of Apple's production is now done overseas. At one time Jobs built factories in the US which he designed himself right down to the color of white paint on the walls and the $20,000. office chairs. Those factories have long since gone to China. As the article points out, it is not only more profitable for Apple to contract out its production to Foxconn in China but it is also more expedient as Foxconn can provide workers who can be rousted out of their dormitory beds in the middle of the night to make last minute changes in products and work incredible numbers of hours to meet product launch dates.

Foxconn's penchant for working its workers to their limits has drawn unfavorable publicity like the following:

In 2010, there were 14 suicides and 18 attempts at Foxconn’s complex. In response, Foxconn raised salaries by one-third, from 900 yuan a month to 1,200 yuan, and set up an in-house counseling service -- complete with music therapy rooms. Buddhist monks were brought in to cleanse the factory of evil spirits. Most famously the company put up nets around workers’ dormitories, and created a somewhat dubious “no suicide” contract all employees were required to sign...

While Apple CEO Tim Cook will make $378 million this year, Foxconn workers are forced to live in squalid dormitories as reported by ThinkProgress:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will receive a $378 million pay package this year, consisting of a $900,000 base salary and $376.2 million in stock options. This is a six-fold increase over his compensation last year, and could very well make Cook 2011′s highest paid CEO.  At the same time that the company is handing such a huge package to its chief executive, though, the workers in China who make Apple’s most well-known products continue to toil in tough conditions. Last year, a report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group found that the Chinese workers at the Taiwanese-based company FoxConn — who assemble the iPad, as well as other high tech gadgets for Apple, HP, Microsoft and others — were forced to work loads of overtime, stand on their feet 14 hours a day, and live packed together in squalid dormitories.

Such is the result of globalization. Consumers in the US and other advanced countries snatch up fancy tech gadgets which are produced by exploited workers in China while the richest 1% continue to receive huge paychecks. American workers are left out of the loop entirely. Jobs and his original Macintosh development team were willing to work 90 hour weeks to produce "insanely great" products. But now this work ethic or rather overwork ethic is being forced on Chinese workers who won't reap the financial rewards that Jobs and his original team reaped for their overwork efforts. Is this the real legacy of Steve Jobs and American entrepreneurialism?

 

Hungary, the Latest European Domino to Come Under Sway of IMF

by John Lawrence

In a pattern that has been repeated all over the world, most notably in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, a country gets itself into huge debt and then comes to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for a bailout. The IMF is nothing more than an arm of right wing ideologues of the Chicago School whose prescriptions and demands for the possibility of help turn out to be the ususal right wing nostrums: privatization, free trade and AUSTERITY. Naomi Klein nailed the IMF in her book Shock Doctrine:

 

Like the UN, the World Bank and the IMF were created in direct response to the horror of the Second World War. With the goal of never again repeating the mistakes that had allowed fascism to rise in the heart of Europe, the world powers came together in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to create a new economic architecture. ... The World Bank would make long-term investments in development to pull countries out of poverty, while the IMF would act as a kind of a global shock absorber, promoting economic policies that reduced financial speculation and market volatility. When a country looked as though it was falling into crisis, the IMF would leap in with stabilizing grants and loans, thereby preventing crises before they occurred. The two institutions, located across the street from each other in Washington, would coordinate their responses.

Although the IMF originally was supposed to promote "economic policies that reduced financial speculation and market volatility," that hasn't turned out to be the case. In fact just the opposite has occurred. Klein continues:

John Maynard Keynes, who headed the UK delegation, was convinced that the world had finally recognized the political perils of leaving the market to regulate itself. "Few believed it possible," Keynes said at the conference's end. But if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhoof of man will have become more than a phrase". The IMF and the World Bank did not live up to that universal vision; from the start they allocated power not on the basis of "one country, one vote," like the UN General Assembly, but rather on the size of each country's economy - an arrangement that gives the United States an effective veto over all major decisions, with Europe and Japan controlling most of the rest. This meant, when Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the eighties, their highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade. The colonization of the World Bank and the IMF by the Chicago School [a school founded by right wing economist Milton Friedman that advocated laissez-faire capitalist economic principles] was a largely unspoken process, but it became official in 1989 when John Williamson unveiled what he called the "Washington consensus." It was a list of economic policies that he said both institutions now considered the bare minimum for economic health - "the common core of wisdom embraced by all serious economists." These policies, masquerading as technical and uncontentious, included such bald ideological claims as all "state enterprises should be privatized" and "barriers impeding the entry of foreign firms should be abolished." When the list was complete, it made up nothing less than Friedman's neoliberal triumvirate of privatization, deregulation/free trade and drastic cuts to government spending [i.e. austerity!]. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the last holdouts against the new orthodoxy, wrote that Keynes "would be rolling over in his grave were he to see what has happened to his child."

So what is happening in Hungary today and througout the EU is nothing more nor less than that the IMF is demanding structural change according to its radical right wing ideology in return for an economic bailout. American rating agencies such as Fitch have downgraded Hungary's credit rating to junk status making it difficult for Hungary to borrow in the bond market to refinance its debt - the same old story as in Greece, Italy, Spain etc. etc. If Hungary then wants the IMF to help, it must accede to IMF demands which is to say it must give up some of its autonomy as a country.

From the Washington Post:

Fitch kept a negative outlook on Hungary, indicating a more than 50 percent chance for another downgrade on the Central European nation of 10 million people within the next two years. The move followed similar action from Moody’s and Standards & Poor’s [also American agencies!]. Hungary’s shaky finances have been battered this entire week. Its currency, the forint, fell to all-time lows during two consecutive days and the government suffered through a rough bond auction Thursday in which the interest rates it had to pay to borrow jumped more than 2 percentage points in just a few weeks.

So let's be clear about the dynamic of what's going on here. An American rating agency downgrades Hungary's credit rating which causes the Hungarian currency to drop in value and causes investors, which are mainly large international banking institutions, to demand a higher interest rate just to roll over existing debt, not to borrow more money. It is widely known that speculators are involved in driving down the value of a nation's currency, and investors (who may be one and the same as speculators) control the interest rate that a country must pay. And now for the denouement, enter the IMF, helpfully offering to bail Hungary out in return for Hungary giving up its autonomy to the IMF and imposing austerity on its countrymen and women. And this all because Hungary is in debt to private banking institutions not to the publicly owned European Central Bank (ECB).

Fitch Ratings’ decision to cut Hungary’s credit rating one notch, to BB+ from BBB-, was triggered partly “by further unorthodox economic policies which are undermining investor confidence and complicating the agreement of a new IMF-EU deal,” said Matteo Napolitano, Director in Fitch’s Sovereign Group.

In other words you (Hungary) will do what bond market investors, the IMF and EU demand ... or else. This begs the question, why does the EU put its member countries in the position of being at the whims of international investors, ^i.e. the bond market, namely big banks such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank? Why doesn't the ECB (European Central Bank) bail out Hungary itself at least to the extent of stabilizing the interest paid on its preexisting bonds? The average Hungarian worker is not reponsible for this predicament. Why should he or she be expected to pay for it? It's the rising interest rates brought on by the rating agency's downgrades that are causing the financial crisis in the first place. Yet the price to be paid is the same old right wing price of demanding austerity and letting the IMF order them around. The EU seems to be complicit in this whole process.

The New York Times reported:

Since sweeping to power in 2010, [Hungarian] Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has tightened its grip on the media and the top constitutional court, taken over private pension funds and slapped Europe’s biggest tax on banks — prompting a series of international protests and unnerving markets.

The plot thickens! Orban had the temerity to socialize the pension funds. That's a no-no as far as the IMF is concerned. The IMF demands privatization of public assets, not socialization of private assets. And Orban slapped a big tax on banks - another no-no. The IMF wants the people to pay the price of Hungarian economic woes - austerity - not the banks. The Occupy movement's slogan, "The banks got bailed out, we got sold out," turns out to be true! This is just another mechanism to foist debt on the people and liberate the banks from taxes and regulation, just what Milton Friedman and the Chicago School wanted!

What is happening in Europe now is nothing new. The US backed IMF and World Bank has been carrying on the same road show for decades - first in Pinochet's Chile, later in Argentina and Bolivia. The neoliberal agenda was also prescribed for Iraq. Regarding Iraq Paul Krugman wrote:

... Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything."

Just another example of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Now Hungary is undergoing the Shock Doctrine and the IMF in collaboration with the EU is following in the tradition of Reagan and Thatcher and demanding higher tribute in taxes (on the poor, not on the banks!) and elimination of government jobs and programs in return for a handout. Oh, excuse me, a bailout. Please, Mr. IMF, could you spare a forint? And where is the ECB? MIA!

Greenspan's Fraud: Overtaxing the Poor; Reducing Taxes on the Rich

by John Lawrence

Greenspan's Fraud is the title of a book by Dr. Ravi Batra. In light of what's currently happening in Washington regarding the extension of the payroll tax cut, it is prescient. Greenspan engineered an increase in the payroll or FICA or Social Security tax in the 1980s at the behest of then President Ronald Reagan which effectively raised taxes on the poor while Reagan cut the income tax and effectively lowered taxes on the wealthy. The ostensible reason for this increase in payroll tax was a crisis in funding Social Security 35 years out (sound familiar). Republicans worked themselves and the American public up into a lather over a non-existent Social Security crisis. The real purpose of this supposed crisis was to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor just as it is with Republicans today who don't really want to extend the payroll tax cut engineered by President Obama. Instead, they have pledged Grover Norquist not to raise taxes except ... they might make an exception for the payroll tax. In other words their pledge is to not raise taxes on the rich while they have no problem with raising them on the poor. They are showing their true colors ... again: protect the finances of the rich while exploiting those of the poor and middle class. Such was the brilliance of Greenspan's plan in the early eighties that hardly any Americans knew or realized what he was actually up to including the Democrats who went along with it. Personally, I've been self-employed since 1976, and I never realized that Greenspan had doubled my FICA taxes in 1983 so that I ended up paying higher payroll taxes than rich people paid in capital gains tax. Such is the reality of Republican subterfuge.

From Greenspan's Fraud, the book:

Greenspan's economics has extracted trillions of dollars in taxes from the American middle class and sharply enriched the rich, who are essentially people like himself and his friends - multimillionaires, politicians, and businessmen. ... His policies have led to the pooring of America as well as the world, while a tiny minority has raked in millions, even billions, in profit. He may be a legendary figure in the eyes of many, but when you carefully explore what he has wrought, the aura of public reverence around him can evaporate quickly. This book will show that because of Greenspan's beliefs or support for certain policies, family income and real wages have declined for a broad swath of Americans, while CEOs have earned millions in stock options and capital gains; US manufacturing has been decimated and the country is saddled with more than half a trillion dollars of trade deficit per year; nearly two million lucrative jobs have vanished since 2000, and millions of people have been downsized.

In December 1981 President Reagan selected Greenspan to chair a blue ribbon commission to "save" social security. When it became obvious that the Federal budget deficit was ballooning due to Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, Greenspan ginned up the Social Security crisis which allowed the payroll tax to be increased, and, since Social Security and the general fund had been part of the unified budget since 1969, the increase in revenues from the increased payroll taxes masked the Federal budget deficits due to Reagan's tax cuts. In simple terms the excess revenues from social security taxes offset the deficit in the general fund due to Reagan's tax cuts. But rather than raise the income tax, which would have increased taxes disproportionally on the wealthy, Greenspan's plan was to raise the payroll tax which is a tax primarily on the poor and middle class. In addition Greenspan also later proposed cutting benefits for social security beneficiaries.

The Reagan-Greenspan theology required that the income [taxes] remain small even if it became necessary to coax money out of the destitute because this is essentially what the commission proposed in 1983. Instead of the general budget that actually faced a massive deficit, the commission insisted that the Social Security Trust Fund faced a giant shortfall, some 30 to 75 years in the future, when baby boomers would retire in large numbers. Never mind that in 1983 itself, the Trust Fund's receipts began to rise because of increasing employment, while the general budget suffered an even larger deficit of $208 billion. In fact, by the end of the year, the Fund earned a small surplus. But the Greenspan commission relied on "forecasts" that showed a gargantuan deficit looming in the Fund, not five to ten years hence, but more than half a century later. It proposed eliminating the Social Security deficit expected from 1983 all the way to 2056 by overtaxing workers in advance, and generating an adequate surplus in the process.

So the money taken in in payroll taxes which was not used to actually make payments to social security recipients was transferred to the general fund and used to defray the budget deficits brought about by Reagan's tax cuts on the wealthy. In place of the money so used non-marketable Treasury bonds of an equivalent amount were placed in the Social Security Trust Fund (SSTF). Today they amount to $2.5 trillion. This is the amount owed to the SSTF by the general fund. Every year the surplus payroll tax revenues were spent in the general fund and IOUs of a similar amount were placed in the SSTF. The surplus dwindled over the years until today more money is actually being paid out to Social Security recipients than is being taken in in payroll taxes. That means that those non-marketable Treasury bonds in the SSTF must be cashed in and money taken from the general fund to make up the difference. Hence the general fund must accumulate an even larger deficit or it must raise taxes to make up the difference. This is why Republicans are again insisting that Social Security is in crisis. Pay-go demands that the amount paid out from the general fund to make up the difference between what is received in payroll taxes and what is paid out be paid for. Republicans want to make up the difference, as Greenspan wanted to do years ago, by cutting benefits. What they don't want to do is to raise income taxes on the wealthy to do so. Instead of honoring the special non-marketable Treasury bonds in the SSTF which would require either higher deficits or raising the income tax, Republicans want to cut benefits either by raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living allowance. More extreme right wing Republicans, such as Paul Ryan, want to privatize social security so that the IOUs in the SSTF never will have to be honored. Both Paul Ryan and Alan Greenspan are devotees of Ayn Rand whose philosophy consisted mainly of unadulterated greed and to hell with the poor and middle class.

But Greenspan reserved his most draconian tax increase for the self-employed.

The Greenspan proposal would prove to be a crippling burden for the poor and the self-employed, because it sought to lift rates over and above those provided by a 1977 law. Today, [2005] a full-time minimum-wage earner, working for 2000 hours annually at a wage of $5.15 per hour, earns about $10,000 annually On that she has to pay a Social Security and Medicare tax of 7.65 per cent, or $765. which leaves her with $9,235. Add to this a state and local sales tax averaging 8% in big cities, and she forks over another $739 to meet her minimum consumption. This sum of over $1500 in taxes can make a difference between homelessness and living in an apartment, between three meals a day and malnourishment, between a doctor visit and living with illness.This is why the commission's tax propopsals amounted to coaxing money out of the destitute, i.e., the millions who subsist on the minimum wage. A worse outcome awaited for those working for themselves. Today [2005], a self-employed individual earning $30,000 a year, has to pay nearly 15% in Social Security taxes. Once $4500 is deducted in self-employment contributions, an individual is left with little to support a family, especially when his income is subject to the sales and income tax as well.

The Social Security or FICA tax is regressive; there are no deductions or exemptions. It's a flat tax that everyone, rich or poor, pays at the same rate. And it is only paid on the first $106,000. of income. All income over that amount is tax free as far as FICA taxes are concerned. This is why it's essentially a tax on the poor and middle class while the income tax which has higher tax rates for higher income earners is progressive and hits the rich more than the poor although today the highest tax bracket is 35% for income over about $380,000. That means that millionaires and billionaires pay income tax at the same rate as someone earning $380,000. There are no higher tax brackets for the truly rich.

Greenspan convinced his fellow commissioners and Congress to go along with his scheme and his proposals were enacted as Social Security Amendments in 1983. Greenspan's proposals also guaranteed that the maximum taxable wage base (which today is $106,000) would increase year after year so that Social Security taxes would increase on an annual basis. The reality of the situation is that the payroll tax increases of 1983 have been used primarily to fund the tax cuts of wealthy individuals and corporations. They don't want to give up the financial benefits they gained by having payroll taxes reduce their income taxes for 38 years. So they are in the process of reducing social security benefits by a combination of raising the retirement age, scaling back cost of living adjustments or possibly raising the payroll tax rates. The point is that there is no Social Security crisis if the non-marketable Treasury bonds in the SSTF are honored which is essentially the social contract entered into in 1983 by Greenspan and Reagan. If in fact these Treasuries were marketable instead of unmarketable bonds, they could be redeemed on the open market by the SSTF. In that case they would simply be rolled over by the Treasury Department and effectively become part of the ever increasing deficit and national debt. Alternatively, revenues could be sought from other sources most likely the income tax which has been kept low for decades due to the pilfering of the SSTF by the general fund.

Since Congress controls the rules regarding Social Security, they can change them at any time without any recourse by the American people. This means that they can bypass the implied contract to reimburse the IOUs in the SSTF with impunity effectively finessing the whole situation. A better way to place more money in the SSTF would be to lift the $106,000 cap on income subject to the Social Security tax meaning effectively that the rich would pay Social Security tax on all of their income, the same way the poor do.

Other posts on Social Security are the following:

1. You'll Never Hear a Republican Mention the $2.5 Trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund

2. Is Social Security Broke Or Solvent?

3. A Way to Make Social Security Solvent for the Next 75 Years

4. New Study Identifies Revenues for Doubling of Social Security Payout

5. The Only Social Security Reform Worth Considering: Raising the Ceiling on Income Subject to It

6. Schakowsky's Plan to Save Social Security, Reduce Debt, Grow the Economy

7. Remove the Cap On Social Security and Means Test It

8. Social Security Taxes Fall Unfairly on the Poor Self-Employed

9. Is Social Security a Government Sponsored Ponzi Scheme?

10. More on Social Security

 

Wendell Potter: Health Insurance Industry Spinmeister Turned Whistleblower

by John Lawrence

In his book, "Deadly Spin," Wendell Potter lays bare the inner workings of the health insurance industry. It's another reason for Occupy Wall Street to exist because the private health insurance industry is dicated to by Wall Street which demands an ever increasing bottom line. The infamous Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is a figure which Wall Street is determined to lower. It indicates how much premium money is spent on medical services versus how much is spent on overhead including advertising, CEO salaries, shareholders etc. At a MLR of 97%, Medicare spends 97% of its premiums on medical services and only 3% on overhead. The private health insurance industry under pressure from Wall Street has pushed the MLR down to around 80%. That means that 20% of premiums go to CEO salaries, advertising, and to investors. How the private health care industry manages to drive the MLR downwards is by denying health care to those it insures who develop sicknesses that are too expensive to treat.

After being enlisted by CIGNA to discredit Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, Potter found himself assigned to the spinning of the case of a California girl who needed a liver transplant in order to live. Nataline Sarkisyan was denied a liver transplant by CIGNA. Her family enlisted the media in its attempts to get CIGNA to cover the girl's plight. The situation became a cause celebre with CIGNA being the villain. Potter's job was to protect CIGNA's image, and quite frequently, when a "horror story" became known to the public, he would recommend that CIGNA reverse its decision and go ahead and cover the cost of the procedure in question. Such was the case in Nataline's situation. At the last minute, at Potter's request, CIGNA reversed itself and okayed the liver transplant. However, before the procedure could take place, Nataline died.

That was the last straw for Potter who had had moral qualms concerning his job for some time that required him to sedate himself nightly with a six pack of beer. He went to a free health clinic near his home in Tennesee at which he found scores of people who might have been his neighbors, some even with health insurance, being treated for free in animal stalls at the county fairgrounds. His moral anguish reached the point where he knew he had to resign his job. There is such a thing as "right livelihood" and some people just can't go on day after day in a job that they know is immoral even though it's perfectly legal. Other people have no such moral qualms. They are the ones including the CEOs of these health insurance companies who will do anything for money.

Potter said: "Not only was I no longer "engaged" in my responsibilities as chief flack for the company, but I also didn't see eye to eye [with his bosses], and I had simply had it with trying to "protect, defend and enhance" the  company's reputation. I didn't have it in me to handle any more horror stories. Nataline Sarkisyan's life and death had affected me profoundly.

"My last day as a CIGNA employee was May 2, 2008, the day after we anonounced that we had earned $265 million, or ninety-four cents a share, on revenues of $4.6 billion during the first three months of the year. The stock price closed that afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange at $42.26, up 3.5 percent from the day before.

"CIGNA had had a very good day on Wall Street. Investors were happy because CIGNA had exceeded their expectations. CIGNA executives on the lead team, all of whom had stock options - me included - were richer financially.

"But I was richer in every way thinkable."

Potter points out how health insurance CEOs and other executives use stock options to enrich themselves. Their gains are tied to how well the stock does on Wall Street so they have every incentive to drive up the stock price in every way imaginable. The ways they do this are to deny health care to consumers and to drive down the amount they pay to providers. While the highest paid administrator in the Medicare program earns less than $200,000 a year, most health insurance CEOs take home on the order of $10 million annually. "In 2007, the CEOs at the ten largest publicly traded health insurance companies collected a combined total compensation of $118.6 million - an average of $11.9 million each."

So it's Wall Street again that is at the heart of the health care crisis in the US just as it's at the heart of the foreclosure crisis, the student debt crisis and just about every other crisis including the US national debt crisis because they were bailed out by the taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Wendell Potter has gone on to become the health insurance industry's chief critic appearing on countless TV and radio shows and writing columns for magazines and newspapers. Fortunately, one man's moral qualms overpowered his greed. He is an exception, however. For most people avarice and the need to support their families overpower their moral qualms and so the system marches on deedicated to increasing shareholder value at the expense of human value.

Book Review: After Capitalism

by Linda Greene, from The Bloomington Alternative

October 1, 2011

It’s easy to talk about socialism in the abstract, but hardly anyone tries to imagine and codify exactly what socialism in the United States could be like.

David Schweikart has a vision of what our society could be like after socialism replaces capitalism:

"[T]he Marxian vision of a new world is one in which the work I do — the work we all do — is both challenging and satisfying. Through work I develop my skills and talents, and have the pleasure of contributing to the well-being of others. The work I do involves my body as well as my mind, physical dexterity as well as intelligence — capacities that have been nurtured through education."

Schweikart’s book After Capitalism is an imaginative handbook for creating a socialist American society that succeeds capitalism. It describes in down-to-earth detail a replacement for capitalism that he calls "economic democracy” and how we can bring it about. The book is an entertaining and informative tour de force, with a lot of careful thought behind it. Only reading it can do justice to its complexity.

Schweikart lists four "fundamental problems” with capitalism: "staggering inequality, widespread unemployment, the intensification of work for those who remain employed, and intractable poverty, both domestic and global.”

Besides "its savage inequality,” capitalism is an irrational system: "How can it be,” Schweikart asks, "that the amazing technologies we keep developing tend to intensify, not lessen, the pace of work and make our jobs and lives less, not more, secure?”

***

Schweikart doesn’t envision the total overthrow of capitalism; he thinks it’s wise to incorporate the best qualities of capitalism into economic democracy. "A mass movement dedicated to establishing real as opposed to pseudo democracy is not going to trample on the genuine advances the previous order has achieved,” he says.

---

David Schweikart, After Capitalism, 2nd ed. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2011

---

"Economic democracy abolishes private ownership of the means of production and wage labor, but retains the market,” Schweikark says. In other words, economic democracy is a socialist system with a competitive market economy.

Economic democracy, according to Schweikart, has "three basic features, the second of which it shares with capitalism:”

Worker self-management: Each productive enterprise is controlled democratically by its workers.

The market: These enterprises interact with one another and with consumers in an environment largely free of government price controls. Raw materials, instruments of production, and consumer goods all are bought and sold at prices largely determined by the forces of supply and demand.

Social control of investment: Funds for new investment are generated by a capital assets tax and are returned to the economy through a network of public investment banks.”

In economic democracy the means of production belong to the whole society collectively, and workers lease them from the society. "A flat rate tax is the source of revenue and is distributed to regions on a per capita basis,” Schweikart says. The workers receive a "nationally specified minimum per capita income” and the profits of the firms they work in. That income is economic democracy’s "equivalent to the minimum wage.” The government is the "employer of last resort.”

Whereas capitalist companies strive to maximize total profits, in economic democracy the idea is to maximize profits per worker, according to Schweikart. "Economic democracy abolishes private ownership of the means of production and wage labor, but retains the market." Schweikart defines a capitalist as someone "who owns enough productive assets that he can live comfortably on the income from those assets.” Economic democracy makes capitalists obsolete.

Economic democracy is a "genuinely democratic, fully employed, stable, ecologically sustainable society without overwork or poverty,” Schweikart says. As he points out, a healthy capitalism requires unemployment to keep wages down. Further, the threat of job loss is the "basic disciplinary mechanism of the system.”

In economic democracy, as in capitalism, Schweikart says, "stimulating consumer demand is in the immediate interest of every enterprise.” Unlike capitalism, however, economic democacy is not "under competitive pressure to produce, make a profit, reinvest and grow.”

"The transformation from capitalism to economic democracy is nonviolent and comes about as a result of a social movement inspired by deep humanistic ideals (which is the only way it will ever come about),” Schweikart asserts. "One of the ‘conditions,’ if there is to be a relatively peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, is the coming to power of a Left political party with a radical agenda,” he says.

The labor movement, of course, plays a critical role in changing the economic system, but that’s not to say that other struggles aren’t important and interrelated. As to issues of race, sex, ecology, peace, gay and lesbian liberation, prisons and so forth, "[N]one of these issues in fact can be treated in isolation from the others, although various movements will doubtless have distinctive emphases.”

***

Schweikart doesn’t merely elaborate on the characteristics of economic democracy but offers a blueprint for getting there. "Economic democracy abolishes private ownership of the means of production and wage labor, but retains the market." "Unlike capitalism, however, economic democacy is not 'under competitive pressure to produce, make a profit, reinvest and grow.'"

He suggests ways to move toward economic democracy by creating a more "benign form” of capitalism. Schweikart offers three scenarios for moving peacefully from capitalism to economic democracy, depending in part on the status of the economic system at the time.

After Capitalism leaves questions about specifics: What would happen to the military-industrial system under economic democracy? What would happen to Big Pharma? The health insurance industry? It’s a mark of a good book, however, that it leaves the reader eager to delve further into issues the book focuses on.

Democracy, Schweikart says, "is a system in which a universal electorate is reasonably well informed, active, and unobstructed by a privileged minority class.”

After Capitalism is a stimulating guidebook for those who want to work toward a genuine democracy in the United States.

Linda Greene can be reached at [email protected]

 

"Pornography Is a Vast Graveyard Where the Left Has Gone to Die"

by John Lawrence

In his book, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," Chris Hedges has a whole chapter on pornography, "The Illusion of Love". The title of this blog is taken from a quote from Andrea Dworkin which Hedges uses as a lead-in to the chapter. Recently, Michelle Bachmann has garnered some media notice for signing a pledge put out by the FAMiLY LEADER, an Iowa conservative group, to rid the country of pornography among other things. The pledge has gained notoriety for a phrase suggesting that African-American families were better off during slavery than they are today. But there is little discussion of the substance of the pledge including its stance on pornography (as usual the media is only interested in the most sensationalized aspects of reality). Bachmann, whom many have characterized as a right wing nut case, has championed Christian conservative family values including the definition of marriage as being "between a man and a woman." Irregardless, the Left has been mute regarding pornography which suggests that it adopts the "live and let live" attitude it has about homosexuality and marriage and the family in general which is really a libertarian attitude. After reading Chris Hedges' chapter on pornography, the Left might reconsider this stance at least with regard to pornography. What Hedges has to say is truly shocking and the faint of heart might consider discontinuing reading this blog right here.

Suffice it to say that pornography has gone mainstream. According to Hedges:

There are some 13,000 porn films made every year in the United States, most in the San Fernando Valley in California. According to the Internet Filter Review, worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the ever-expanding e-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That is more than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink combined. Annual sales in the United States are estimated at $10 billion or higher. There is no precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is very lucrative to some of the nation's largest corporations. General Motors owns DIRECTV, which distributes more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are currently the biggest American companies accommodating porn users with the Hot Network, Adult Pay Per View, and similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by consumers.

And Obama thought he was saving the American auto industry! Instead he saved one of America's largest porn purveyors! The mainstreaming of porn has openly flouted obscenity laws which like other regulatory laws have been largely missing in action. According to the website HULIQ, "According to Miller v. California (1973), the "Miller Test" became a Supreme Court-sanctioned ruling that set up a three-part array in which "community standards" could be used to determine whether or not an item was pornographic, obscene, and of no redeeming value. This allowed communities and regions to set their own obscenity standards, which is in keeping with Tea Party standards (as a federal law banning pornography would not)." So where are the community standards especially in the red Tea Party states that would ban pornography? Or is it OK because there's a lot of money in it? So what's the problem with the mainstreaming of pornography? It's innocuous adult entertainment, isn't it? Hardly. According to Hedges, "The largest users of Internet porn are between the ages of twelve and seventeen. And porn producers increasingly target adolescents." I've even heard this demographic referred to as "children"! "The age demographic has moved downwards, especially in the UK and Europe," explained Steve Honest, the European director of production for Bluebird Films. "Porn is the new rock and roll. Young people and women are embracing porn and making purchases. Porn targets the mid-teens to the mid-twenties and up."

Hedges interviewed porn star Patrice Roldan who has starred in nearly two hundred films including Lord of Asses, Anal Girls Next Door, Monster Cock Fuckfest 9, Deep Throat Anal, Trophy Whores, and  Young Dumb & Covered in Cum.  Roldan made good money in the porn industry so to say that these girls who entered the industry voluntarily were exploited is not wholly accurate. In addition to the money they made filming, they could go on "dates" with their fans who they met at the annual Las Vegas porn convention at $3000 -$5000 a pop and up. Some made great money as hotel-bound prostitutes. Just imagine if you could have met Marilyn Monroe or Lana Turner or Sophia Loren at an annual convention and "dated" them! But in those days movie stars couldn't even sleep together onscreen in the same bed much less "date" their adoring fans. But that's de rigeur in the porn film world. Tres ordinaire et normale. After Roldan's first film, she was handed $600. and contracted gonnorhea. Hedges again: "She began, once she had treated her gonnorhea, to do films three or four times a month. She would have several more bouts with gonnorhea and other sexually transmitted diseases during her career. She got pregnant and had an abortion. The demands on her began to escalate. She was filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became 'extremely rough.' They would pull my hair, slap me around like a rag doll."

"The next day my whole body would ache," she recalls. "It happened a lot, the aching. It used to be that only a few stars, people like Linda Lovelace, would once do things like anal. Now it is expected." And this is how our teen-agers are learning about love, sex and relationships?! This is how they are developing their concept of how to treat a woman!

The physical pain and numerous surgeries to repair torn vaginas and anal tissues lead most porn stars to use excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol to deal with the pain and the emptiness of their emotional lives. Most end up being junkies and alcoholics. Hedges again: "Roldan would endure numerous anal penetrations by various men in a shoot, most of them 'super-rough.' She would have one man in her anus and one in her vagina while she gave a blow job to a third man. The men would ejaculate on her face. She was repeatedly "face-fucked,' with men forcing their cocks violently in and out of her mouth. She did what in industry shorthand is called 'ATM,' ass-to-mouth, where a man pulls his penis from her anus and puts it directly in her mouth." She explained that she washed herself good so this didn't bother her too much except when the man pulled his penis from another girl's ass and put it in her mouth because she didn't know about the other girl's standards of cleanliness!

"What does it say about our culture that cruelty is so easy to market?," Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity asks. "What is the difference between glorifying violence in war and glorifying the violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason that porn is so difficult to discuss is not that it is about sex - our culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is difficult is that porn exposes something very uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with women who are sexual commodities. Increasingly, women in pornography are not people having sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing cruelty are played out. And men - maybe a majority of men - like it."

Finally Hedges sums up why pornography represents the "illusion of love":

As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.

Why would the Left cede this family values issue to the likes of Michelle Bachmann? Surely a libertarian attitude towards pornography acquiesces in the mainstreaming of pornography and the profits accumulated by large "respectable" US corporations like GM and AT&T. It also acquiesces in the purveying of pornography to young adolescent males who make up a large share of the audience and the attitudes that are being formed by exposure to such trash. American culture has gone in a few short years from one that was overly puritanical to one that is awash in degradation, obscenity and debauchery by anyone's definition. The sexual liberation of the 1960s, initially a salubrious renunciation of repression, has been thoroughly exploited and degraded by the commercialized pornography industry of the 2000s. It is the culture of the Roman Empire before its fall, of Caligua and Nero, a culture of debasement and depravity. Surely, it should not be left to the likes of Michelle Bachmann to point this out. While I don't agree with her on her stance against homosexuality or the definition of marriage, I do heartily endorse the fact that she purportedly is taking a stand against pornography. The American culture is so hypocritical that it outlaws legalized prostitution but mainlines pornography. I think legalized prostitution might serve an actual purpose for those who cannot find satisfaction in a normal relationship with a woman, but pornography is not helpful in formulating salubrious attitudes between the sexes nor is it protective of women who enter the industry despite the fact that they are paid well and do so voluntarily. When a "live and let live" libertarian attitude results in the degradation of a class of women and results in unhealthy attitudes towards sex, it should be prohibited while encouraging healthful relationships, not necessarily, but including, marriage.

Thomas Paine, American Revolutionary and Founding Father

by John Lawrence

Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, was the guy who put into words, so that the average person could understand it, the whys and wherefores of the American revolutionary cause. He was one of the founding fathers in the truest sense although he was later discredited by the Federalists and by conservatives ever since. He is the one who wrote the immortal words: "These are the times that try men's souls." His books and pamphlets sold in unheard of quantities for the 1770s. At the end of the revolutionary war, Paine was a popular hero.

But he went on from there to be involved in the French revolution and to try to foment revolution in Britain. In France he narrowly escaped the guillotine when the Jacobins instituted The Terror. Arriving back in America, a journey expedited by then President Thomas Jefferson, he continued to write such tracts as "The Rights of Man", "The Age of Reason" and "Agrarian Justice" in which he proposed a democratic system of addressing poverty by taxing the rich to provide grants for young people and pensions for the elderly.

Paine, a Deist as were many of the Founding Fathers, was excoriated by 18th century churchmen because, unlike the others, he made very public pronouncements about it especially in "The Age of Reason". Emigrating from England, Paine in his writings encouraged the nascent American polity to make a true revolution, to become truly independent, and not just merely call for a redress of grievances from England. An ablolitionist, he failed, however, to address those views in "Common Sense". "Common Sense" gave dramatic new meaning and momentum to the American cause and called for a true democracy.

However, not everyone was thrilled with Paines's egalitarianism and democratic spirit. John Adams and other conservatives distrusted "the people", and since Paine's appeal was to workingmen and farmers, they distrusted handing over the reins of government to a democratic rabble. Paine never claimed any royalties for his writings which at first were published anonymously. Paine eventually petitioned Congress for some redress for his efforts and was awarded a farm in New York State. He continued to write and be involved in politics.

The following is from Thomas Paines and the Promise of America by Harvey J Kaye:

"Paine did more than censure Britain's political order. Reviving the plan he had begun to formulate years earlier but had set aside in his encounter with America, he extended his radical-democratic thinking by outlining a series of welfare programs that a revolutionary change in government would afford. Along with suggesting a progressive estate tax to limit accumulation of property, he recommended raising the incomes of the poor by remitting their taxes and augmenting the sums, distributing special relief for families with children, creating a system of social security for the elderly, instituting public funding of education through a voucher system, providing financial support for newly married couples and new mothers, and establishing employment centers for the jobless."

He also rendered a most appealing image of the good society:

"When it shall be said in any country of the world, "My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government."

Even as Paine pushed radicalism in a social-democratic direction, he proclaimed, "I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend to its effects." It may seem odd to many of us today, but like many eighteenth-century radicals confronting the legacy of absolutism, Paine comprehended "political liberty and economic liberty" as mutually interdependent and imagined that economic freedom served to assure equality of opportunity and results. Witnessing monarchical regimes taxing the productive classes, transferring wealth to parasitic royals and aristocrats, and punishing working people and the poor, he personally had come to view nondemocratic governments, not markets, as the fundamental cause of social inequality and oppression. Consequently, he proposed the liberation of the market and expansion of commercial activity.

Commerce was, for Paine, "a pacific system, operating to unite mankind by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other ... If commerce was permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of government." As much as he appreciated the manifold potential of free markets, however, he did not hold that equality AND democracy must necessarily defer to the imperatives of commerce and trade. And as his revolutionary proposal for welfare-state policies attests, he increasingly realized that the democratic governments for which he fought would have to politically address inequality and poverty.

Paine came to see later that exploitation was not necessarily always at the hands of aristocratic governments, but was also carried out by the affluent to the detriment of the poor. He proposed a redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxes. He realized that the exploitation of labor led to the wealthy class on the one hand and the poor on the other. This is much the same pass as the US is coming to in the present age except for the fact that to a greater extent it is not the exploitation of labor so much as it is joblessness that is leading to the creation of an extended poverty class. Either wealth is redistributed from rich to poor or the economy comes to a grinding halt as jobs for the poor and middle class are being eliminated right and left and government cannot continue to borrow money to give to the jobless in order to prevent them from becoming destitute. Therefore, in order that the poor don't all become homeless serfs digging through garbage pails for their food, government has to play the role of distributing relief as well as paying for it and this is only possible by taxing those that have more money than any human could conceivably need in order not only to provide welfare but also to invest in infrastructure in order to create jobs.

Quoting from Kaye again:

"Back on his feet, Paine immediately set himself to writing a series of new pieces, including a highly original Agrarian Justice. He had come to see all the more clearly that inequality and poverty were the consequences not simply of exploitive systems of taxation and government expenditure but also of economic power and the payment of inadequate wages. 'Civilization,' he wrote, 'has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in the natural state ... [T]he accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence."

Paine refused to blame the poor for the economic circumstances to which they were reduced, for "poverty is a thing created by ... civilized life," which, he believed, did not exist "in the natural state." In the face of increasing disparities, he grew increasingly impatient: "The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and ... a revolution should be made in it." And even more strenulously than he had in Rights of Man, Paine propounded that society had an obligation to address material inequality and poverty through a system of public welfare. This "ought to be considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation," he insisted, and its aim should be to "preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced."

Paine had been led to write Agrarian Justice by Bishop Richard Watsin's sermon "The Wisdom and Goodness of God, in having made both rich and poor," which Watson had included in his reply to The Age of Reason. "It is wrong to say God made both rich and poor," Paine responded. "He made only male and female; and He gave them the earth for their inheritance." Paine then held that since God had provided the land as a collective endowment for humanity, those who had come to possess the land as private property owed those who had been dispossessed of it - "on every principal of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization" - an annual ground rent. Specifically, he delineated a limited redistribution of income by way of a tax on landed wealth and property:

"To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age."

Because of Paine's radical views regarding welfare and especially his radical Deist views regarding religion, he was discredited and reviled and demonized by the conservatives of his day. When he died the Quaker cemetery would not accept his body for burial so he was laid to rest on his New York State farm with only a couple people in attendance. There were no public dignitaries.

The French woman Madame Marguerite de Bonneville, who had accompanied him back to America with her sons and tended him through his illnesses and final days, would recall:

"Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help feeling most acutely. Before the earth was thrown down upon the coffin, I, placing myself at the east of the grave, said to my son, Benjamin, 'stand you there, at the other end, as a witness for grateful America.' Looking around me, and beholding the small group of spectators. I exclaimed as the earth was tumbled into the grave, 'Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!' This was the funeral ceremony of this great politicain and philosopher!"

Thomas Paine had been expunged from the pantheon of the Founding Fathers because of his radical economic views and because of his publicly stated Deism. In later years his memory would be revived but he would never regain the status that he had during the Revolutionary War which was on a par with Washington, Jefferson anfd Franklin.

Book Review: “Obama’s Wars” by Bob Woodward – the Capitulation of Civilian Control Over American Military

by Frank Gormlie on November 14, 2010, published by the OB Rag

in Civil Rights & Liberties, Culture, Election, History, Media, Opinion, War, Peace & Empire

President Obama and General Petraeus.

Most reviews of Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, focus on the perceived failures and incompetency of Barack Obama, or on the in-fighting between the generals or within the White House staff, or intellectualize on the over-all abilities and shortcomings of Woodward as a chronicler of modern American history. And in doing so, they miss the point.

The point is, Woodward has opened a window for us – the readers, the nation, the world – into how foreign policy decisions are being made in the Obama administration, and how the President reached his decision of sending another 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan almost one year ago exactly.

And through this window, we are witnesses to a horrifying reality.  A horrifying reality that unfolds from chapter to chapter, from agonizing moment to agonizing moment where you want to throw the book across the room and to shout out, “Those fuckers!”

But you keep the book in hand, and burn through it.  As the reader, you have a front row seat as Woodward takes you painstakingly from meeting to meeting and from memo to memo during the six month period of “strategic review” of the situation in Afghanistan that Obama ordered soon after he was elected.

This is not a history book, already dusty. This is all very current right now, this is America now, this is how the White House operates, how the Pentagon operates, this is how a war in Afghanistan – seven years in the making when Obama was elected – has been allowed to spin on its own dangling noose by Bush & Co – and how the new president was left with no strategy when he entered the White House. The characters in the book are alive and … still kicking, although some have just departed the White House or are about to.

Today’s news was already described in this book. You knew Secretary of Defense Gates was going to leave the administration, as you already knew that General Jones was leaving.  You already knew about the 3,000-man CIA hit teams going into Pakistan.

You can see how the “hawks” lined up in the debates within the Situation Room – and how Secretary of State Clinton joined them. You can see how the “non-hawks” assembled, led by Vice President Biden, tried to halt the slide into sending more and more troops, but who were decidely outweighed by the hawks. You can watch how Obama’s thoughts on what should be done in Afghanistan traverse a trajectory continually boxed in by his Pentagon advisers.

And ultimately, the book is a sad commentary on where American has come, and what America has become.

Without too much commentary, Woodward draws us a sketch, not too detailed, but a picture that we can view nevertheless. It’s a sketch of how the Pentagon usurped a sitting democratically-elected president in the 21st century.

Woodward shows us how the generals and admirals lied to, misrepresented, threatened, cajoled, blocked, delayed, manipulated – and ultimately “rolled” the President of the United States into authorizing what they – the Pentagon – wanted to do in Afghanistan all along.  This is the terrifying reality that Woodward portrays.

It is terrifying because we are supposed to live in a country ruled by a Constitution that places civilians over the military. Civilians – in the form of the president and administration advisers and secretaries – are supposed to be in control of how and why the military executes its goals and carries how foreign policy dictates. Not the other way around. But this is what Woodward has given us in his portrayal – the lack of ultimate civilian control of the American military.

This book and its story – despite its shortcomings and Woodward’s biases – are necessary reading for anyone who wishes to understand why we are still in Afghanistan and how we’re dealing with Pakistan.  Read and understand it – and you are an “expert” on US involvement in those countries.

Read it at your own risk, for once completed, you’ll find yourself gnashing your teeth, clenching your fists, and shouting out, “You ………!!!”

Yet, once read, you may also find yourself armed with a new knowledge of just what is happening in your name, in our name. This knowledge will give you an appreciation of how little our former law professor from Chicago was prepared to fend off the onslaught of Pentagon hard heads, and insight into just how little he actually decided in sending more of our sons and daughters off to more war.

And finally, this knowledge will allow you to strap on the appropriate armor that will be needed in re-asserting civilian control over the military and in bringing this country back from its empire-bound journey, and in – truthfully – re-establishing what’s left of our democracy. You’ve got to read “Obama’s Wars.” Now.

The Rapacious Prescription Drug Industry

There are two recent books that expose the unsalutary practices of the drug industry. One is "Our Daily Meds," by Melody Peterson  (left) and the other is "The Truth About the Drug Companies," by Marcia Angell (below). A recent study found that half the Americans that have health insurance are on some kind of prescription drug! Ever since drug advertising became legal in the US in 1997 (one of two nations in the world that allow it), the drug industry has beaten a drum to the tune that there is a prescription drug for every malady perceived or otherwise that will take care of the problem. They have even created diseases for which there was no prior awareness.

USA Today on Tuesday examined the "political clout of the pharmaceutical industry," which since 1998 has spent $758 million on lobbying efforts -- more than any other industry, according to the... Center for Public Integrity. The pharmaceutical industry in 2003 spent $143 million on lobbying activities. At that time, there were 1,274 registered pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington, D.C. -- more than two for every member of Congress, USA Today reports. Of those, 476 were former federal officials, including 40 former members of Congress. Former Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) earlier this year was named CEO and president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. According to USA Today, Tauzin's move to the private sector is "testament to the industry's power." Prior to taking his position with PhRMA, Tauzin helped pass the Medicare prescription drug benefit as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Currently, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) -- the "gatekeeper for legislation that comes to the Senate floor" -- is a "key lobbying target" for the industry, USA Today reports. During the 2004 election cycle, the drug industry contributed at least $17 million to federal candidates, including $1 million to President Bush and $500,000 to former Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass).

The pharmaceutical industry would have you believe that they need to charge such high prices for their wares so that they can do research to come up with more and better drugs. In point of fact their research budgets are meager compared to their outlays for advertising, lobbying and executive compensation packages. They've found that a "me too" drug can make them more money than a drug that they've developed from scratch. A "me too" drug is one that they've copied from a success by another drug company, but offers nothing new or original. As for research, they won't hesitate to put a drug on the market whose negative side effects almost outweigh the positive effects of the drug, and those positive effects may be little more than a placebo. As a result, US citizens are loading up on drugs in their systems which may be doing them more harm than good.

Doctors are totally in bed with the drug industry which offers them all kinds of money and perks to go along with the program. The drug industry will even ghostwrite the research papers for them (as well as the congressional legislation) and see that they are published in what used to be independent, unbiased journals. All the doctor need do is put his name on it. (All Congress need do is pass the legislation.)

The newer and scarier material in “Our Daily Meds” concerns the increasingly serious consequences of Americans’ dependency on prescription drugs. Disagreeing with Iowa’s nosologist, Ms. Petersen says the lethal consequences of overprescribed or misprescribed drugs are too readily accepted as “natural” death. She cites the unwillingness of pathologists to question the wisdom with which doctors dispense medications. The reluctance of hospitals to perform autopsies, she says, has impeded medical research into what these interactions can do.

So the accumulation of drugs is a person's system and the encouragement by the drug companies to increasingly rely on pills to cure every perceived pain or ailment goes hand in hand with the public's laziness and unwillingness to take responsibility for their own lives and to seek a panacea by altering their lifestyles - in particular diet and exercise. Dieting and excercise require work and a willingness to undergo pain and discomfort. Instead why not avoid the pain and discomfort by taking a pill? And if a particular drug does not solve the problem ... ? Not to worry, the doctor will simply prescribe another drug. If that one doesn't work, then another and another... In this way the profits are multiplied. So a failure is actually a success ... in terms of profits.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D. Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first.

Not only that but when a study shows that a drug such as Vioxx causes more harm than good or has disastrous side effects, the FDA allows them to keep it on the market, to keep selling it and to keep endangering peoples' lives. A conclusive study found that Vioxx was causing heart attacks and strokes, but it's still being sold as well as other drugs which have been found to be harmful.

The moral is profits first, human lives second and our government is in the pockets of the drug lobby.

Book Review: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins sets out in this book to prove that there is no God. In his initial chapters he goes over the "proofs" of the existence of God, as well as other reasons for believing in God such as Pascal's wager. Pascal said that one is better off to believe in God for the following reasons. Suppose there is a God and you believe in him. Then surely you will go to heaven. If there really isn't a God and you believe in him, you've lost nothing. But, if there is a God and you don't believe in him, you'll surely go to hell, whereas, if there really isn't a God and you don't believe in him, you've gained nothing so you're better off to believe in God. But hold on for a second. This is assuming that all God cares about is whether you believe in him or not. What if God doesn't really care whether or not you believe in Him but cares about how you've lived your life? Then all bets are off. And what if your believing in God causes you to carry an unnecessary and inhibiting baggage of false beliefs around your whole life, causes you to live in a mental straitjacket? Then surely, you've lost something by believing in God!

Dawkins separates the human race into a number of religious classifications from Theists (true believers) to Deists such as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein, who believe God created the universe but doesn't micro-manage it by listening to and responding or not responding to prayers and supplications to agnostics who are unsure whether there is or isn't a God to atheists, like Dawkins, who believe there almost certainly is no God. We have to wait till the 4th chapter for Dawkins' proof that there almost certainly is no God and it is a big disappointment or maybe it's a huge relief depending on your point of view. His proof is essentially that, if there were a God, then who created Him and so on in an infinite regression? Well, it doesn't take too much imagination to imagine a God who is timeless, who exists outside of time and, therefore, always existed. Time is a function of the physical universe as Einstein demonstrated. Time started with the Big Bang and will end if the universe ends in a Big Crunch. If the universe continues to expand it may never end, but, at any rate, it is a function of our physical universe and doesn't apply to any entity that transcends our universe. Well, God, if He exists, and is the Creator of our universe would "almost certainly" transcend the time constraints of the universe He created. Timelessness is not hard to imagine, and I'm surprised that Dawkins, who prides himself on being able to imagine things beyond our normal 3 (or 4) dimensional world, doesn't seem capable of imagining it.

I agree with Dawkins that the great preponderance of war in human history has been justified by religion or has had religious overtones. Many ancient warlords and conquistadors were only interested in religion to the extent that any particular religion's God would help them to vanquish their enemies and win wars. The Roman emperor, Constantine, made Christianity the state religion of Rome only because he thought the Christian God would help him win battles. Otherwise, Christians would have probably continued being persecuted and tortured and thrown to the lions in the Roman Colosseum. But the existence or non-existence of God really has nothing to do with religion as it has played out in human history. I agree with Dawkins that religion really isn't about whether or not God exists so much as it is about filling a psychological void in the human experience. We probably need God more than God needs us.

If one is not a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a member of any other religion, one can still believe in the existence of God. Anyone can completely reject organizational religion and can still have a personal one. The fact that religion has been used to justify war does not mean that there is no God or that there is one. One of the positive things Dawkins is for is to conduct objective experiments which can reflect on certain religious beliefs. He discusses an experiment in which a group of cancer patients was prayed for by another group of people while a control group of cancer patients was not prayed for. It was double blind in the sense that no one knew which group was being prayed for or by whom. Then the two groups were statistically evaluated to see if one group had less deaths than the other. In this particular experiment, prayer was not found to have a benefical effect. There are other experiments that could be conducted. One I dreamt up is to have a carefully monitored light bulb hooked up to a switch that was switched off, but very easy to turn on. Then the object would be to have a group of people who would be willing to try to turn on the light after they had died. This experiment could be conducted over a long time span - many, many years. It would be hoped that a large group of people would agree to be participants. This would tend to prove or disprove that there are ghosts or that people who have recently died could affect reality among the living by interacting with them as ghosts and, at least, some of the dearly departed are reported to do. It is claimed that ghosts can open and close doors. Then they should be able to turn a light off and on. This would be a controlled experiment as opposed to the anecdotal stories that are heard which could be entirely apocryphal. The number of times the light turned on spontaneously could be compared to the number of people in the control group who had died.The only problem with experiments such as these is that true believers are not interested in conducting them, and scientists are for the most part not interested either.

Dawkins explores to a great extent the dichotomy between Darwin's theory of evolution and the religious fundamentalist theory of Creationism. Of course, he comes down on the side of Darwin and his arguments are most convincing. This is really child's play for an intellect like Dawkins. It's a no-brainer that the theory of evolution is viable. The only question is do we know all that there is to know about how evolution works? I don't think so. I think there is more to be discovered. It would be arrogant to assume that the last word has been written about any scientific theory. Will Darwin's theory ever be invalidated? I don't think so. Will it ever be added to or subsumed? Undoubtedly. While random genetic changes over a long period of time and natural selection can account for the evolution of complex species from simple ones, is randomness the only mechanism that's involved? I don't think science can maintain that with 100% certainty. I think there may be other mechanisms like even maybe the subconscious mind that might affect mutations thus making them somewhat less than totally random. I also happen to think that Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) is a reality. There was a book "Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain" that reported scientific experiments on ESP and, to my mind at least, strongly suggests the reality of such phenomena. J.B. Rhine founded a Department of Parapsychology at Duke University and conducted statistical experiments in card guessing and dice tossing. I think this is a fruitful area of research although there doesn't seem to be any money to fund it in a theocratic, militaristic culture such as the US.

Dawkins pays tribute to the psychological roots of religion. As human beings, we are all in need of solace, peace of mind, consolation and love. When I was a boy, my parents led me to believe in Santa Clause. Now there was somebody who loved me and rewarded me every Christmas by delivering a great assortment of presents. It was my favorite time of year, and Santa Claus was my best (imaginary) friend. Of course, it was my parents who loved me and delivered the presents. My Mom taught me that, although she didn't put it in exactly these terms, God was essentially Santa Claus writ large. God was all loving. God loved me unconditionally. That was the God they taught me to believe in. This was very comforting. Although I'm ambivalent about a personal God at this point, it is still comforting to believe that the universe has a purpose and God, while I don't believe He micro-manages life on earth, ultimately wants good to win out over evil. The purpose of the universe may be nothing more than the unfolding drama, the spectacle of it all, from beautiful sunsets to the ecstasy of sex. I tend to think prayer may have some validity, even though God doen't necessarily hear and answer prayers, in terms of sending out good thoughts and wishes via ESP to other human beings. So prayer may have validity even though the mechanism by which it works may not be the same mechanism that most people who pray believe in. In fact God may have set up the universe to work perfectly and automatically (including evolution), physically and spiritually, without his having to do anything.

This gets to the heart of the problem. Suppose that all religion is subjective and has nothing to do with objective reality. Dawkins decries wishful thinking, self-delusion and anthropomorphism where anthropomorphism is defined as ascribing human attributes to inanimate objects, natural phenomena or in this case God. As Dawkins points out, human beings' minds can play tricks on them when dealing with objective reality and most humans don't have the aptitude, inclination or robust intellect to be absolutely objective. It is too cold and forbidding. So we need things like God if only in the mythological sense. Dawkins and other scientists, and, in particular, atheists tend to take things absolutely literally. They are literalists for whom something is either true or false. What does it hurt to believe in a God of our own devising if we can believe in art, history, mythology, even Santa Claus, for Christ's sake, even though we know he doesn't really exist, and find some consolation there. Dawkins rightfully points out the importance of the Bible as part of our literary, cultural and historical heritage. Maybe we should consider God a part of our mythological heritage too and yet still draw comfort from Him as we would from art, music or literature - in other words not take God too literally or too objectively. How could you tell a child who has lost her mother anything other than "Mommy is in heaven with God"? Dawkins mentions religion as consolation and this is probably the bottom line of why religion is necessary even if you don't believe in it with your rational mind. You couldn't tell a child that her mother's death was just a random perturbation of atoms and molecules that came together in an unfortunate circumstance.

The trouble with atheists, especially atheist scientists, is that they don't even believe they they themselves exist as anything other than a machine, let alone whether God exists. Turing invented the Turing machine and the Turing Test. He said imagine that you ask questions through a slot in the wall. On the other side of the wall is either a computer or a human who supplies the answers through the same slot. If the computer is sufficiently complex, you could not tell the difference between a human and a computer based on the answers you get. Some scientists even believe that advanced computers or robots even have conscious feelings. So in a spiritual sense, some scientists, at least, believe that machines are "alive" and that they themselves are nothing more than "dead" machines. If you can't believe in yourself as a spiritual being, a self who is real to you anyway, how could you ever believe in the existence of something beyond yourself whom you've never seen or experienced in any direct way?

So let's postulate for a minute that God exists. Then the real question is: "What is the nature of God?" Is he all powerful and all loving? No, he can't be both because, if he was, he would step in and prevent the slaughter of innocents. He could have prevented 9/11 just by having better communications between the FBI and the CIA, not to mention having the President willing to read the PDB which was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack within the US.". He could have prevented the Nazi genocide of the Jews. He could have prevented genocide in Darfur. So it's obvious to me that God is not micromanaging affairs on earth. I think of myself as a Deist plus. I think God could have set up the universe just by defining six numbers, and set it up so that God is involved on an ongoing basis in terms of psychic and spiritual phenomena. In fact God, instead of being a well-defined entity outside the universe, could have immersed himself and dispersed himself within the universe and life itself could be God manifested in multitudinous forms combining both spiritual and physical attributes.

So the atheist position that there is no God is sort of a conversation ender. It's much more interesting to wonder, if there is a God, what is his nature, and what am I doing here and how does that all relate to the purpose, if there is one, of the universe?

Choice

A recent book, The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, argues that, as choices proliferate, people are less satisfied overall. He says that we would be better off and more satisfied if we had fewer choices. I think his analysis is fairly shallow and he misses the mark. A lot of the book is "filler" which one has come to expect from a best seller. This book claims to have been a "Business Week Top Ten Book of the Year." His book is long on pseudo-psychological psycho-babble and short on the analysis of social conditions such as advertising which distort the whole process of choosing and turn many choices into phony or false choices which benefit only the seller, not really the consumer.

A social system such as preferensism which is an outgrowth of social choice is predicated on the assumption that increased freedom is associated with increased choices, and, I would argue, that increased choices are increasingly satisfying provided that the choices are real and not distorted by advertising. In addition, there are methods and techniques (hardly mentioned by Barry Schwartz) for dealing with what might seem like a bewidering array of choices. For example, before I purchase a CD, I read reviews (hopefully more than one) to see what the critics have to say about the music. I know from experience that I'm particularly interested in only one genre of music so that eliminates a large number of choices that I don't even have to consider right there. Consumer Reports as well as a number of online services such as epinions rate and rank different products, and there are price comparison wesites such as shopping.com that do price comparisons.

Therefore, I feel there are intelligent ways of making a decision as to which product or service one wishes to consume which make the process rewarding if not enjoyable. The only depressing thing to me is having my programming interrupted by TV and radio advertising. That, not the number of choices available, is what is truly depressing. Schwartz walks into a store and notes that there are "285 varieties of cookies," "40 options for toothpaste" etc. Unfortunately, he never gets beyond a rather psychological analysis as to why there are such a bewildering number of options and are any of the options any good? I have been on a quest to find plain white toothpaste like used to be on store shelves when each manufacturer was represented by only one variety of toothpaste. Although there are 40 varieties of toothpaste, I have not been able to locate on the store shelves just plain white toothpaste. The question is why? I think the answer has to do with (of all things) the marketing clout of the large toothpaste producing corporations. Crest and Colgate are the two largest and they have the most varieties of toothpaste taking up the most shelf space real estate in the supermarket. Inside the boxes, which tout the different varieties, the toothpaste is remarkably similar. For the most part it is all an aqua color which leads me to believe that the only significant difference among the different varieties is the packaging.

Now the supermarket will not devote a large amount of shelf space to just one variety of toothpaste. For a company to dominate the supermarket shelves, they have to produce what seemingly is a large number of different kinds of toothpaste. The only problem is they're not really all that different. So these choices are false choices. They're not really giving consumers a large number of choices at all, just attempting to dominate supermarket real estate, and evidently, the supermarkets are happy to go along with this deception.

Another problem in the "bewildering array of choices" that Schawarz notices is that in many cases hardly any of them are of high quality. I've noticed time and again a product, that I had been a regular purchaser of because I really liked the product, disappearing from store shelves only to be replaced by a similar but less desirable product. Why do you suppose this is and how does this affect Schwartz' rather depressing analysis that more choices produce less satisfaction? My analysis is that the store manager only wants to devote shelf space to products for which there are the highest profit margins. Therefore, a lower quality product which costs less to produce may have a higher profit margin than a high quality product whose ingredients cost more. Such a product may have a lower profit margin. And through advertising, corporations can increase demand for low quality products which have high profit margins. This is why independent testing and rating agencies are so important. Expert opinion and criticism can defeat the purpose of advertising which is to increase corporate profit margins, not to educate or inform the consumer, let alone provide him or her with a quality product.

Companies which put out a high quality product can take market share from companies who have established a "brand" but continue to market the lowest quality the consumer will buy. Take coffee, for instance. The coffee industry has known for years that there are two kinds of coffee beans: the low quality and cheaper Robustico and the higher quality and more expensive Arabica. Naturally they sold the lower quality coffee and made hefty profits for years. Then along came Starbucks and their goal was to deliver a superior product. They, therefore, used the higher quality and more expensive ingredients. Their profit margin per cup might have been lower, but they gained enormous market share because consumers, once they had been exposed to a superior product, came to be willing to spend more to get an excellent cup of coffee rather than the swill they had been used to. The same thing could be said for bread. People who were fortunate enough to travel to Europe where the quality of bread and coffee was superior saw the opportunity for emulating those operations and establishing high quality niche markets.

So I think Mr. Schwarz totally misses the mark. Instead of an analysis of the false choices that are so depressing, he tells us that more choice in general is depressing. His agent must have told him to include the psycho-babble in order to sell books. But it's basically bullshit. Most people that are at all sophisticated or experienced make choices based on their experience and rely on expert opinions from knowledgable sources. Smart people today can avail themselves of resources widely available on the web to make choices. There are quality comparison sites and price comparison sites. Instead of giving an intelligent method for culling the bad choices and narrrowing down to the good quality choices, Mr. Schwarz just says that we should have fewer choices in general and then we would be better off. I disagree. I think we are better off when we have an increasing number of high quality choices.

In a society based on preferensism, choice is fundamental. A citizen has to make choices which are both political and economic in nature. The educational system in any society needs to teach people how to make intelligent choices. For instance, in a political system in which all candidates for the Senate are voted on by all voters instead of just voting on a district by district basis, obviously there would be many more choices to consider than if one were just voting for one senator from one district. Such a system could still make sense and increase the freedom of each citizen if citizens allowed themselves to be guided in making choices the way they are guided by critics and experts in making consumer choices. A party or publication might make recommendations based on their way of thinking and each voter might take the recommendations of the party or publication they felt an affinity with.

There are other ways to make choice manageable in a preferensist society or one based on individual and social choice. A good review of some of these ideas can be found here.

Book Review: "Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast

Greg Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse," is an eye opener since, although I was thoroughly convinced that the Bush Administration had plans for the ultimate disposition of Iraq's oil, I hardly suspected that there were two plans: Plan A and Plan B. Within a month of Bush's inauguration, the State Department and the National Security Council met in Walnut Creek, CA to plan the invasion of Iraq. The 323 page plan they came up with was like a coup: decapitate the Iraqi head of government, namely Sadam, and replace him with someone more suitable leaving everything else the same including the state owned oil ministry. This plan would only shut down Iraq for a few days, and then Iraq would open again for business. There would be no long, drawn-out occupation. Why did they want to get rid of Sadam? Sadam was jerking around the oil markets thereby interfering with OPEC and its self-designated control over world oil pricing. The troops would be in and out in 3 days. This plan was Colin Powell's baby. It's also what the Saudis and Big Oil, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and ChevronTexaco, wanted.

Shortly after 9/11, the neocons, based in the Defense Department with roots in Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which included Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Dick Cheney, got into the act. They drafted Plan B which called for total war and a complete rewrite of Iraq's laws, regulations and policies affecting everthing especially the oil. This would not be a 3 day wham bam thank you maam but a lengthy occupation. Their 101-page confidential document spells out a complete make-over of Iraq's economy in accordance with the Chicago School's free market philosophy: tax breaks for the rich, putting all state owned assets, including banks, up for grabs to foreign investors, even new copyright laws protecting software and music!

Essentially the War in Iraq involved a shadow war between the Defense Department and the neocons on the one hand and the State Department, Big Oil, the Saudis and OPEC on the other. The neocons wanted to bust the Saudi-controlled OPEC cartel with their ability to control the worldwide price of oil thus making oil prices a function of the free market. The Saudis set quotas for each oil producing member country including Iraq and Iran thus controlling the price of oil worldwide. Since oil prices were set in dollars (oil had to be bought and sold in dollars), the US and Saudi Arabia were essentially in bed together. This was especially true of the Saudi royal family and the Bush family which have ties going way back. This makes it curious as to why Rumsfeld and the neocons prevailed at first in the invasion and the post-invasion occupation in which Jerry Bremer was installed as the "Emperor of Iraq." (By the way, Bremer was a friend of mine at Andover which also produced George W Bush.) Bremer, having worked for Kissinger & Associates, represented the neocons and started the process of auctioning off Iraqi assets to the highest bidders and tinkering with the Iraqi Constitution.

After about a year of this, President Cheney had a change of heart. He was split in his allegiance to the neocons and his allegiance to Big Oil. After all, Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and George W had all been oil executives. You might wonder why Big Oil would not want Iraqi oil assets auctioned off to them so that they could bust OPEC's stranglehold on oil pricing and so that they could make big bucks owning and controlling Iraqi oil and pumping and selling it at as great a rate as they could. The answer is that the price of oil is completely controlled by the Law of Supply and Demand. Pumping more oil does not result in greater profits. Pumping less oil and then jacking up the price of oil due to oil shortages results in greater profits. The same ruse was perpetrated by Enron in its quest to "screw little old ladies in California." Therefore, Big Oil is completely happy to have OPEC and the Saudis essentially keep the supply down and prices up. If everyone was free to pump as much oil as they wanted, there would be a resultant glut, prices would fall and profits would diminish. We've seen how limited supplies of oil and recent record high prices have resulted in insanely high oil company profits. So effectively, Big Oil's interests are the same as OPEC's interests. While a cartel among oil companies is illegal, a cartel among nations such as OPEC is not. They act as the world governing body for setting production quotas and hence oil prices and profits.

Dick Cheney, with his allegiance split between the neocons and Big Oil, finally woke up one day and decided Bremer and the neocons had to go. At that point the neocon plan to turn Iraq into a "coaling station" was out and the State Department's Plan A, which kept the state owned oil company (with heavy participation by Big Oil) intact, went into effect. The only problem was that the US was starting to lose control of the entire situation in Iraq so it didn't make much difference whose plan for control of Iraqi oil assets was operative. However, the battle between the State Department and Big Oil and the Saudis on the one hand and the Defense Department and the neocons on the other rages on even as the war in Iraq rages on. It's anyone's guess as to what the final outcome will be. But it seems clear that it's in the interests of the Iraqis to be a docile and compliant member of OPEC, and, if and when they regain control of their economy, to kick Big Oil out of Iraq altogether.  Meanwhile, there are other forces at play in the world such as oil producers Venezuela's and Iran's antipathy to the US and China's increased demand for oil which could throw OPEC out of kilter and undermine Saudi control of world oil pricing. If and when oil can be bought and sold in euros or some other major currency, the US will not be able to count on an unlimited credit card limit with which to run interminable budget deficits and fight interminable wars without raising taxes.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Disposable Workers and Salesmanship

In her new book, "Bait and Switch", Barbara Ehrenreich puts forth the theory that, since there are more female college graduates these days and since they are scoring higher on tests and grades, they should be in the higher positions in US corporate life. To her consternation, however, the male college goof-offs are still populating the higher reaches of corporate life. Why? Is this fair?

Ehrenreich likes to accept certain parts of American mythology and then cry foul when this contradicts another tenet of American mythology forgetting that it's all only mythology anyway and maybe her time could be better spent debunking the myths and giving people sound career advice instead of complaining about how irrational it is that the myths aren't consistent. Myth #1: The more highly performing a person is in college, the better in terms of position and earnings that person will do in real life. This is a bunch of BS put forth by the educational system to insure that they have a steady flow of customers lusting after college degrees. The educational system myth would have you believe that the key to success is success in learning a bunch of technical crap that's in high demand by corporate employers. The reality is that people who are just good technically are at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. What they would not have you believe and what the truth is is that a good salesman in whatever field is worth ten times what a good technical person is any day because they are the people who actually bring home the corporate bacon and these skills you don't learn in school unless you learn them by goofing off and developing social as opposed to intellectual skills.

I worked in the military-industrial complex for 15 years so my experience is limited to that area but the same principal applied. At the Navy research lab where I worked, I noticed that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the projects, the departments, how they were organized or anything else. That's because the single most important organizing principle was that a department was only as successful as the department head's ability to pry money loose from Congress or the Pentagon. That is to say each department head was essentially a lobbyist who spent most of his time in Washington, DC tapping Congressional pots and selling them a bill of goods about whatever they could in order to bring money into their department and hence into the lab.

This would explain why the Antenna Department, whose technology was well established 50 years ago, had more workers and a larger departmental budget than the Microelectronics Department, a department whose field of endeavor was a current hotbed. The simple explanation is that the Antenna Department head was a better salesman than the Microelectronics Department head was. That was all there was to it. That was simply the main organizing principle. It had nothing to do with the needs of the Navy, the needs of defending America or anything else. It had simply to do with who could successfully sell Congressmen and other Pentagon types who were sitting on pots of money to part with that money. That's the way the system worked. The Department head didn't need a PhD from Cal Tech or MIT. He needed salesman skills which he would more probably have learned at the  local bar rather than in calculus class.

The MIT and Cal Tech types would be just the worker bees at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. Of course, in Barbara Ehrenreich's world she thinks that just because men are at the top of the corporate totem pole and not nerdy women this proves prejudice and discrimination toward women. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that women who have barely the least in educational credentials but who do have great faces, bodies and/or personalities will have a far better chance of ascending to the higher, more rarified spheres of corporate life. So you see, Barbara, it's not quite as unfair as you try to lead people to believe. It's just that the mythology is false.

In the military-industrial complex, the lowest level is occupied by those who only do technical work. Then you have many levels of middle management all progressively at higher GS levels (in civil service) until you get to the department head who is at the highest GS level because he brings in the most money. The dirty little secret is that all the engineering, math and other hard technical subjects you studied in college only position you to be the lowest paid workers in the complex who are doing essentially the crap work, most of it make work with hardly any real life consequences other than to produce some bogus report that some Congressman's intern might look at approvingly so the next round of funding can continue. As far as making the US a safer place, you've got to be kidding. As far as those who do well in college being in the upper echelons, that's a joke.

When I was in college studying to be an Electrical Engineer at Georgia Tech, in one of the advanced electronics courses I had a professor who proclaimed, "Every Electrical Engineer should know how to work a Thyratron problem!" You knew there would be one on the final which I worked correctly. They only cared if you put the right number in the box. It didn't matter if you had the right approach but made a little mistake. No credit for that! This was hardball, baby. The real world. No hand holding! If you had the right number, you got full credit. If you were off by one decimal, you got zilch. Needless to say, I went forward with full confidence that I could tackle any Thyratron problem in the real world that I was asked to do. I was ready to apply my engineering skills that I had worked so hard to acquire. Only problem was, not only was I never asked to do a Thyratron problem in the corporate world, I was never even asked to do a circuit design problem of any sort.

The truth is that most engineers in the military-industrial complex are nothing more than contract monitors or liasons who travel a lot. Any serious work that needs to be done is sub-contracted out to Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) which is an adjunct to Cal Tech or Lincoln Labs which is an adjunct to MIT where they have a lot of really top notch PhDs who are ready and able to do the highest level technical work. The BSs and MSs who populate the military-industrial complex, whether in the civil service or in the corporations (I have worked for both), will seldom get a chance to do anything of any meaningful technical value for which they were trained, but will instead continue to receive what amounts to middle class social welfare for the rest of their life. Their life consists of a mixture of meaningless work combined with boredom. Those who want to climb the corporate ladder go into management and get out of technical work at the earliest opportunity. Those with budding salesmanship skills (for which they've had no training except at the local bar) can move on up the ladder.

This makes Myth #1 - that you will do better in life if you did better in school - a total farce, one for which Barbara Ehrenreich totally falls. Myth #2: If there weren't a "glass ceiling," women who did well in college would do better in corporate life than men who didn't do well in college. The reality: Nerdy women won't get any farther in corporate life than nerdy men. Women with social skills who are good looking but with a bare minimum of credentials will ascend to the top echelons of corporate life just as men with similar attributes do. The key thing is salesmanship or saleswomanship skills. Physical appearance and personality combined with an ability to be persuasive and convincing are key elements for both men and women.

Consider another field. Who do you think makes more money: a good car mechanic or a good car salesman? The answer should be obvious. But do they teach you to be a salesman in school. I don't think so. Instead they teach you mechanistic, technical skills because those skills are easier to measure. Imagine a final exam in which the highest score is obtained by the student who manages to sell the professor a bill of goods?

Take another field: the law. The most money is made by defense lawyers who manage to get guilty, wealthy clients off. What are his or her skills? The ability to "sell" the jury on his client's innocence even if he knows his own client is guilty. These are literally salesmanship skills - the ability to be persuasive, the ability to be convincing. The same could be said for prosecutors who manage to convince a jury that an innocent person is guilty. It works both ways and has nothing to do with establishing the truth of the matter. It has everything to do with the relatve salesmanship skills of the attorneys involved. Those who have a better track record can command a higher price. Those who can't manage to get their clients off become public defenders.

Barbara is right that there are many "throw-away" workers who have gone to college and done everything right only to find themselves in the position of not being able to get a job in their chosen fields. If there was truthiness-in-advertising, colleges and universities and, to say the least, high school guidance counsellors should flat out tell people that educational degrees in themselves are no guarantee of a job and you might want to think twice about investing all the time, money and effort into something that will only put you in a position of being able to compete for a job. You will have to pursuade some interviewer to hire you and not the next guy. Corporations love nothing more than to pick and choose among a number of qualified applicants. It's the law of supply and demand. Not only does having far more qualified applicants than jobs keep their salaries low, it also puts the employers in the position of cherry-picking the best (in their terms) applicants. The best just might be those who have superior salesmanship skills or those with better personalities or those who are better looking.

Barbara makes a good living writing about those who have been disposed of in this disposable society - books such as "Nickel and Dimed," about America's low wage workers, that somehow made the New York Times best seller list. It is somewhat ironic, I think, that Barbara, who has managed to carve out her own self-employed niche, is obsessesd about telling others not how to carve out their own niche but why they should feel resentful because America hasn't lived up to its own mythology. And basically the whole reason for the mythology in the first place has to do with selling. People in the education field are selling the mythology that education is so important to success in life because, if they didn't, their customer base (namely, students) would dry up. They're not likely to tell you the truth just as any other salesman is not likely to tell you the truth. He's only trying to make a sale so he will tell you that his product (education) is the greatest thing in the world, the sine qua non of a successful life.

I knew someone once (who will remain nameless) who barely made it through high school.  The prognostication by my parents (who were educators) was that this poor fellow would be a dismal failure in life. However, he had a winning personality, and, after leaving school, in short order became a top salesman for a company selling industrial machinery. He was making $200,000. a year at a time when the average PhD in a highly technical field was making maybe $60,000. This guy was a total non sequitur. It does not follow, according to American mythology, that someone who does not do well in school should do well in life. However, like the hummingbird, who by the laws of aerodynamics shouldn't be able to fly, this guy defied all predictions. And there are many more like him. The fact of the matter is that good salesmen do well, selling is an essential part of any field and that it is something you don't learn in school.

The problem is that rather than turning out employees, the colleges should be turning out entrepreneurs, persons in any field capable of making a living irregardless of whether or not they happen to be able to be employees of corporations. Interestingly enough, some colleges are changing their orientation in that regard. The Jacobs Schoool of Engineering at UCSD advertises its "entrepreneurial atmosphere." I can't vouch for this school's change of approach from the time I went there, but, I think, it's a step in the right direction. Ehrenreich's approach might have been to recommend that a person's education should be aimed at self-sufficiency rather than a place "in the system." This self-sufficiency should include self-employment as one alternative if one finds that he or she has been "disposed of" for whatever reason by the system.

The 60s, the New Left and Revolution

In the 60s we used to make a distinction between the New Left and the old left. The old left was still around. They were old men who had admired Marxist-Leninism in the 20s or who had considered themselves communists and admired the Societ Union before it was obvious what "Uncle Joe" Stalin was up to. They continued to hold the values of universal brotherhood, considered the working class to be mainly saints, and were antagonistic to the capitalist class. Their political aspirations were mainly the pipedreams that old men dream or regrets for what might have been.

The New Left was different. We were going to make it happen - revolution that is. Thousands of college kids were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. A cultural and sexual revolution was under way. Someone told me, "Bellbottoms are revolutionary," and I better get rid of my straight-legged jeans. On the left everyone was a brother or sister even if you hadn't met them before. The Black Panthers were our heroes. Che Guevara was a hero. Country Joe and the Fish sang "And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam." Mario Savio instigated the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley by using the F word liberally.

The father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, was teaching at the University of California San Diego where I was a graduate student. (By the way, Herbert and I share the same birthday.) Marcuse was a German Jew who had escaped Hitler, come to America, worked for the CIA and finally wound up in Academia. He was a philosopher who had written several up to then not very widely read books. Marcuse was a Freudian-Marxist, someone who combined the revolutionary ideas of Marx with the revolutionary ideas of Freud. In appearance he seemed rather grandfatherly, certainly professorial and a kindly old man. He was in his seventies when he lectured in German philosophy at UCSD. Hegel's dialectic was on the menu. I enjoyed every minute of his lectures so much I didn't want to miss anything so I never took notes. I wasn't taking the course for credit anyway.

I was a graduate student in the Applied Physics and Computer Science Department and wanted to do my thesis on voting systems and social choice theory as I thought, if you were going to replace all the institutions of society in one fell swoop by having a revolution, you should at least have some idea, some theoretical underpinning, of the kind of society you wanted to replace it with. As such I was an ambivalent revolutionary. The Applied Physics and Computer Science Department was eager to get rid of me as I was the only student in engineering that had radical views and thought that, instead of proceeding with business as usual, we all should be doing everything we could to bring the war to an end. Toward that end a meeting had been arranged between Marcuse and me to see if it might be a good idea for me to switch departments and become his student. When I told him about my interest in applying information theory to voting systems and conflict resolution, he said, "Don't give them a blueprint." Well, I thought the most I could do was to provide a road map, not a blueprint, but I did want to proceed with my technical aspirations for societal architecture rather than writing diatribes about the labor theory of value which I had done more or less as a hobby but which I didn't consider to have any lasting value.

Marcuse had written a book, "Eros and Civilization," which was my Bible along with Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death," and Wilhelm Reich's "Mass Psychology of Fascism." Reich's book was actually banned in the US at that time so we considered it a revolutionary act to steal a copy out of a Canadian library and reprint a hundred copies which we gave away for free, of course, to anybody that was interested. Marcuse's basic oeuvre as a Freudian-Marxist was that repression of the instincts (primarily the sexual instinct) led to all sorts of right-wing impulses such as hate, greed and war. This was also the basic belief of Brown and Reich. Marcuse advocated in circumlocutory English (it was obvious he thought in German) the "liberation of the instincts." The general idea was that, if people were unrepressed and sexually fulfilled, this would lead to a world of brotherly love which would be filled with non-greedy people willing to share what they had with others. From this a society based on the principal "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" would actually be possible and could actually be built.

Hence, the motto "Make Love, Not War" was seen as an admirable weltanschauung. The problem, which can now be seen with 20-20 hindsight, is that the Freudian-Marxist central tenet did not turn out to be correct. Liberation of the instincts (which was probably more due to Hugh Hefner than Herbert Marcuse since I'll wager more people read Playboy than "Eros and Civilization") certainly did take place. But it didn't reduce the amount of hate and greed in the world. In fact just the opposite. Hate and greed were liberated as well. This was borne out as the criminal population soon took advantage of all the free love and brotherly and sisterly trust. College girls hitchhiking down the coast to UCSD pretty soon started to be assaulted by those taking advantage of the love fest.

Charles Manson, more than anyone, put an end to the era of love and trust by killing a pregnant Sharon Tate. People started to get more conservative in their values. It was "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" all over again. The commercializers and predators moved in on the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Haight-Ashbury hippies started turning into street people still believing "Love is all you need" and that their brothers and sisters would be happy to share their spare change with them. In a massive counter-revolution, mainstrean America elected Nixon President in 1968. In the eighties Reagan led us all to believe that "greed is good." We needn't repress our urges to be greedy and selfish. Private property was good. Communal living was unAmerican. Sharing was bad.

In the final analysis liberation of the instincts did nothing to bring about a more just, equitable or loving society. People are certainly less repressed than they were, say, in the fifties - less repressed sexually and less repressed psychologically with respect to all the emotions especially anger, egotism and greed. So whether society is better or worse off, it is certainly a mixed bag. In some ways society is better off; in some ways, worse. However, liberation of the instincts did not lead to a change in the structure of society as envisioned by Marcuse et al. But Marcuse had an out, theoretically at least, something he called "repressive desublimation" which explained why liberation of the instincts might not lead to an ideal society. Irregardless of the theoretical fig leaf, I think that whatever changes there have been in societal structure or in the realm of politics have generally been in the opposite direction from the one Marcuse and the other Freudian- Marxists envisioned.

Book Review: American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

The sub-title of American Theocracy is "The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century," and it is more or less equally divide among these three somewhat disparate topics although they're all linked in some ways. Kevin Phillips runs down the whole history of religion in the US, and it is a fascinating account. It seems like the more radical religions have always displaced the more mainline, conservative and thoughtful religions. The Southern Baptist Convention, in particular, has taken over not only the whole south but bordering regions as well. These religions are characterized by blind faith and emotional appeal rather than thoughtful analysis. Therefore, the world's problems can be addressed not be intellectual analyses, but by gut feeling and the knowledge that God (not mere humans) always has the situation well in hand and that everything happens for the reason that God intends it to happen as prophesied in the Bible.

This particular kind of religion goes back to the post-civil war era when the notion that "the south will rise again" was kept alive in the churches. Now that the south has risen again as evidenced by the Red State take-over of the political process, southern and, therefore, American hubris exerts itself in the world as if we were God's chosen people. Taking the Bible literally, having dominion over the earth instead of husbanding the earth's resources, looking forward to Armageddon and the Rapture in which all the "true believers" will be taken up to heaven while the rest of us will be left behind to face a sorry mess, these are the articles of faith that America's dominant religion has foisted on America's dominant political party.

George W Bush, as a born-again Christian, is happy to pander to the religious right whether it is promoting a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (which he knows at the outset won't pass) or ignoring environmentalist warnings about global warming. Since God's divine hand is guiding history, America's leaders need do nothing more than emphasize absolutes, authority and tradition. The fact that most of the rank and file of the religious right are disadvantaged by Republican economic policies does not seem to deter them from voting against their own economic interests as long as they have elected officials that mouth the jargon of Christian conservatism. Since most of them are not sophisticated in the economic sense but are more concerned with Nascar, professional football and shopping at Wal-Mart, they can rest assured in the knowledge that a God fearing Christian in the White House is carrying out policies that represent God's will. Certainly the repeal of Roe vs Wade is one of them.

Regarding oil policy, American reserves are on the decline while Saudi Arabia and Iraq have the world's largest and second largest proven reserves, respectively. While the US is the world's largest consumer of oil, it is becoming increasingly dependent on the middle east for its supply. In a sense OPEC has the US where it wants it: in a stranglehold. It can increase the supply. It can decrease the supply. It can make the price go up. It can make the price go down. That's what makes the invasion of Iraq so critical for US neocon and oil company interests. Iraqi oil freed from the grips of either a Saddam, who wouldn't deal with the US after the 1991 Gulf War, or an OPEC would, hopefully, represent  a free market controlled by western oil companies. Well, it hasn't worked out that way so far, but that's still the ultimate goal.

The other factor driving up the price of oil is that China, developing at a rapid pace, is trading its bicycles for automobiles. China is developing a voracious apppetite for oil and other natural resources and is competing with the US for the limited supplies available. Meanwhile, such countries as Iran and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil assets joining Saudi Arabia, Mexico and others and leaving the major western oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British Petroleum in the lurch. The net result is that the US is increasingly dependent on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other OPEC countries. The one ace in the hole that the US currently possesses is that, by virtue of a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, oil must be purchased in dollars which at the present date, at least, is the world's reserve currrency. What this means is that other countries wishing to purchase oil from OPEC must keep a reserve of dollars with which to buy it. It also means that OPEC countries accumulate dollars from their sales to the US and other nations which must then be funneled back to the US by buying up US debt such as Treasury bonds or US assets such as port management companies that were to be sold to Dubai Ports until there was a huge outcry against it.

So we are dependent on the very countries where terrorism is spawned (Saudi Arabia is officially a Wahhabist Muslim country) both for our oil supply and for buying up our debt. Is it any wonder then that President Bush threatened to veto any legislation that would nix the Dubai Ports deal? As late as the 1980s, the US was a creditor nation. Since then it has run up debts to international creditors of over $4 trillion making the US the world's largest debtor nation. As long as oil continues to be priced in dollars this is not that great a concern. But, if OPEC should decide to price oil in euros as well as dollars, then nations need not keep a large dollar reserve and might increasingly make their purchases in euros or other currencies if OPEC should decide to sell oil in a number of different currencies. The petro-dollars - the accumulation of dollars by oil producing nations - would diminish and the US would have to raise interest rates, devalue the dollar or give in to inflationary pressures or all three in order to finagle its way out of a fiscal donnybrook. The spectre of such possibilities make controlling Iraqi oil as a conterweight to OPEC and China, which is cutting deals all over the world with countries basically hostile to the US, seem like a rational alternative to giving up the American way of life and debt.

Phillips' third major point is about the financialization of the US. As he says: "...Moving money around has surpassed making things as a share of the US gross domestic product." Financial services are on the rise; manufacturing is on the decline. The stock market bubble of 2000 has been replaced, by means of reducing interest rates to borrowers and "creative" financial instruments such as Adjustable Rate Loans (ARMs) and interest only mortgages, by a real estate bubble which is already on the verge of breaking. What bubble will be next to rescue the US economy? All kinds of fancy stock market derivatives and hedge funds have made the stock market subject to a bubble burst at any time, and guess who will be hurt? The 401k'ers who are hoping for a pension some day. The hedge fund guys can shift their money very quickly, and the derivatives accelerate the rises and falls much faster than an unsophisticated investor can react.

The US savings rate is now negative with consumers carrying a huge load of credit card and mortgage debt. Americans are encouraged to overconsume. Something like half of Americans are overweight and a third are obese. If Paul Volcker said it was his job as Fed chairman to "take the punch bowl away just as the party got started," now the policy seems to be to add more punch to the bowl and bring out the pork rinds and buffalo wings! Consequently, in addition to stock market and real estate bubbles, there is a credit bubble which could burst at any time. America has become a rentier culture. That is it makes more money from unearned income - capital gains on stocks, real estate, dividends and rents - than it does from manufacturing. Deindustrialization and postindustrialism have replaced manufacturing and hard work as the engine that drives the economy. The hard work, "the jobs Americans don't want to do," is done by illegal immigrants. The US trade deficit, because of imports of cheap manufactured goods from China and oil from the middle east, is in the neighborhood of $600. billion annually. Germany, Japan and Switzerland, by contrast, enjoyed huge surpluses in trade in manufactured goods and large ones in their current accounts in 2003 and 2004 all the while maintaining high workforce wages and benefits.

The Republican policy of profligate spending while lowering taxes, which started with Ronald Reagan who quintupled the National Debt and continues to the present day with George W Bush, is hastening the day when the US, already the world's largest debtor nation, will no longer be able to borrow and spend on such favorable terms as it currently enjoys. When the chickens come home to roost, and the world decides the euro or an Asian currency is a more favorable reserve than the dollar, the US will not only be the world's greatest debtor but the world's largest indentured servant.

Book Review: The World is Flat by Thomas L Friedman

This book is worth reading because it is an exhaustive account about what's happening in the world due to globalization. Thomas L. Friedman identifies the main forces and technological innovations that made globalization possible, chief among them being the thousands of miles of fiber optic cable that were laid down before the dot com bust of 2000 that make a telephone call to India easier, faster and better than a call across town. This makes it possible to outsource back office and call center work, help desks, credit card inquiries etc to Bangalore where there is a large well-educated work force eager to handle this kind of work for about one sixth the cost of an American worker.

He goes into great detail about how Wal-Mart, Dell and others make use of cheap foreign labor and modern computers and communications including the internet, a process called supply-chaining, so that new customer orders or replacement inventory can be automatically generated at the cheapest source in the world and then transported by means of a global parcel distribution system pioneered by UPS and FedEx. This makes every business, large or small, a global business from its inception. Storefronts started by housewives on Ebay are global by default. The world is flat because labor can be accessed anywhere in the world, but especially in India, China and Russia where there are large, well-educated populations. By the same token, markets can be accessed anywhere in the world. Routine tasks and even such tasks as accounting can be done anywhere there is a computer terminal hooked up to the internet. Globalization has done a lot for countries like India and China where fairly large segments of the population are moving into the middle class thanks to outsourcing and offshoring. However, as Friedman points out, this is still a drop in the bucket compared to the large overall populations in these countries. So even though a middle class is developing, the bulk of the populations are still poor.

Since manufacturing facilities and labor can be located anywhere in the world, it makes sense to seek these items out where they can be provided for the least cost. Then the products must either be  transported to markets in other parts of the world or sold in the countries of origin. As middle classes develop in other parts of the world, consumers there have purchasing power which creates markets for consumer goods in the developing world as well as the more established consumer markets in America, Europe and other developed nations.

What do these developments portend for America? Friedman makes no bones about the fact that American jobs are being lost to other countries where the work can be done more cheaply. If transportation costs are cheap (in the case of call center work there are no transportation costs), work will be done elsewhere. Friedman's solution for American workers is the same old starry-eyed fol de rol that we've heard before. American workers have to work harder, be better educated, more clever, more creative, work harder etc. This is the mentality of the rat race. Instead of calling his different phases Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0, he might just as well have called them Rat Race 1.0 and Rat Race 2.0. Rat Race 1.0 is when Americans just had to compete with other Americans for jobs. They had to study hard, get into the best colleges, work hard and compete to get ahead working long hours to impress the boss.

Corporations wanted workers who were docile and compliant and spent their leisure hours consuming and buying stuff - cars, houses, fast food, beer and prescription drugs especially. Now Rat Race 2.0 is when a door opens and about a billion other rats enter the arena. Now you have to race faster, run harder, study more, work harder, be more docile and compliant to get ahead in the competitive struggle. More and more jobs that aren't worthy of American citizens or are jobs Americans aren't willing to do, according to this scenario, are being farmed out, while we Americans will do the real creative, value added work. Guess what? It's bullshit. Other countries are increasingly taking over the creative work as well. Top level research is being done decreasingly by Americans and increasingly by Chinese and East Indians. Friedman's solution for the American worker, to constantly retrain, change jobs, get more education, work harder, work longer, is in the end a prescription for a heart attack and a nervous breakdown, much to the drug companies' delight.

Instead here's an alternative scenario for the American worker. Start your own business. Then your job cannot be outsourced. Why leave your fate up to corporations who have no loyalty to workers but will seek the cheapest labor wherever they can find it in the world? Become a capitalist yourself! Train yourself for a line of work over which you have complete control, and a line of work that can't be outsourced. Examples: medicine, law, plumbing, electrician, handyman, barber and beauty shops, franchises such as Starbucks, real estate. Whatever you do, don't go into high tech, cutting edge fields. These are the primary candidates for outsourcing. Take the money you would have spent on college and instead invest it in real estate. Your goal should be not to just be a worker living from paycheck to paycheck with the American dream of a mortgage and a couple of cars. Your goal should be to increase your net assets, your net worth, to the point that you can live off of a return from capital and not just the sweat of your brow. This is what they don't teach you in school where they teach the new American Dream which Friedman totally endorses which is to get better educated, work harder and run faster in the rat race. A moderately successful business man (and I include handymen, gardeners and plumbers in this category) doesn't have to do this. More importantly, a moderately successful businessman does not have to beg a corporation for a job.

If you're in business for yourself, whether you're a big time or small time operator, you have control over what you do, how you do it and when you do it. You don't have to enculturate yourself in some corporate culture. You can be your own person. You can speak your own mind. You might, by so doing, lose a customer here and there, but you won't lose your job as you would if you got into an argument with your boss. You can set your own working conditions, workweek (quantity and quality of hours), holiday and vacation schedule and benefits. You're not in the position of being a beggar or having to ingratiate yourself to your boss. In other words you're free, something which all Americans supposedly cherish, but in reality most of them only think they're free because they're basically just free to consume and vote for the party which has the most money for smear ads.

To be fair to Friedman, he doesn't think the whole globalization scenario is completely rosy for everyone. He acknowledges that there are many parts of the world which are not flat, where there is misery, disease, unemployment, disempowerment. He rightfully understands the role that humiliation plays in the gestation of anger and resentment among the classes and societies that are left out of the increasing prosperity for the lucky ones. In India, for example, the outcasts are the lowest of the low, live in squalor and aren't even seen as fit to associate with non-outcasts who consider them dirty. So you have the two extremes in one country. The outcasts of the world need something to hope for or they will turn to anger, resentment and destruction, in a word - terrorism. Globalization is not the solution for everyone although it's Friedman's solution - more globalization to include the disenfranchised, that is.

But there's a disconnect here. Corporations who are in the business of cherry picking the best and cheapest labor in the world in order to maximize profits for their shareholders (and for management too, incidentally) have no interest in being social workers. In fact their interests are diametrically opposed. Their interests are in paying out the least amount of money for labor and taking in the greatest amount of money in sales, that is for their shareholders, not for humanity in general.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Friedman's view of the world. His book, however, will be much discussed and chewed over. Nevertheless, this is a good book for those not familiar with how the process of globalization has changed and is changing the world bringing at least some prosperity to some who haven't had it before.