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Rethinking The World

By Brian Filed in Links, Politics Tagged with 2009 Remarque Lecture, bad business, capitalism, corporatism, Jonathan Swift, Marshall Auerback, Noam Chomsky, social democracy, Tony Judt December 11th, 2009 @ 2:10 pm

Three seemingly unrelated articles for anyone interested in seeing the world from a perspective a little bit broader than the pushme-pullyou game of American politics:

British historian and NYU professor Tony Judt recently gave a lecture in his role as director of the Eric Maria Remarque Institute looking at the successes and failures of social democracy in Europe. The New York Review of Books has an edited transcript of the lecture, which also considers why America is ambivalent toward social democracy: he points to the heterogeneity of our society and to the human tendency to discount the dangers of anything sufficiently far away (physically or in time). Given the current fascination in this country with what is or is not “socialist”, it’s worth having the historical overview about the very nature of the ideas of social democracy. Here is link to a video of the lecture (QuickTime), if you’d rather listen to it than read it.

The political humor website Political Irony has this post today with a short excerpt from a recent interview with Noam Chomsky as a commentary on the ironic situation that Big Business finds itself in as it tries to simultaneously convince Americans to both love and hate our government. On their own, these couple of paragraphs are quite illuminating (as is most everything Chomsky has to say about politics), but the whole interview itself is even better. The interview is ostensibly about the past successes of labor political action and how it could/should be renewed in our present times, but the conversation does drift into this bigger context of how corporations and corporatist government has been able to successfully convince most Americans that big business is good for them. Seen in juxtaposition to the Judt lecture, both pieces take on added layers of meaning when considering the long, slow march away from the social reforms of the mid 20th Century.

So, thirdly, there’s this modern take on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” from the New Deal 2.0 blog at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. You may recall that Swift sarcastically suggested that the solution to systemic famine in Ireland was to start eating the Irish children. So, with tongue in cheek and eyes pointed quite firmly at conservative pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the author of the post suggests that the solution to our crumbling economy is to deport the poor until we reach 100% employment. Even though the author, Marshall Auerback, is being as sarcastic as Swift, it is not at all difficult to imagine some right-winger coming up with this idea and running with it sort of the way Lou Dobbs has done with the bugaboo of immigration. I think this post actually goes very nicely with the Chomsky interview as an example, if exaggerated for effect, of exactly how our power brokers work overtime to undermine notions of social justice and economic equality.

Bullet-Proofing

By Brian Filed in News, Politics Tagged with American fascism, corporatism, economic equality, education, fascism, ideology, rule of law November 2nd, 2009 @ 12:15 pm

At this juncture, it’s reasonably safe to say that the right-wingers have long since blown by “crazy” and have drifted pretty thoroughly into “Bizarro-world”, but the unfortunate reality is that they are dragging all of us along with them. The situation over the weekend with the “moderate” New York Republican congressional candidate dropping out of the race due to pressure from wackos supporting a Palin-endorsed candidate shows that these people have “real world” effects that we have to contend with. The concern that Obama has squandered much of his popularity early is not just fretting that the Democrats will lose ground in Congress, but that the people they lose the ground to are, quite frankly, dangerous in their willingness to pander to the Tea-bagging Set.

As we labored through the eight long years of the Bush Administration, the left spent a lot of time comparing Bush and his policies and initiatives to fascism — a tactic which has come back to us in spades, unfortunately. Separating out the personality issues from both the left and right, however, it’s not too hard to see that there are genuine roots of fascism building in the body politic of the United States. Neither George Bush nor Barack Obama are particularly intent on becoming an American Hitler, but our overall political sensibility has accepted hallmarks of fascism and incorporated them into the political structure almost without so much as a passing glance.

I came across this post at a political blog called Cognitive Policy Works that looks at some of the grass-roots ways that creeping fascism can be countered. The POV of the piece is decidedly anti-Republican and needs to open up to the idea that the Democrats are hand-in-hand with the GOP in terms of most of these situations, but the suggestions themselves are not too idealistic or partisan:

Passing health-care reform — probably the most partisan thing on the author’s list. She argues that this will “restore trust” in government, but given the crap and patently obvious politicking that has gone on since this article was originally posted, I can’t see anyone on the right or left looking at this as a “trust-builder”. On the other hand, it DOES demonstrate that the public is being screwed by both political parties as they cater to their corporate masters, so maybe it might help reunite the ends of the political spectrum against their comon foe: the corrupt political system.
Re-establishing the rule of law — she speaks here not about curtailing the power grabs of the Executive Branch during the Bush years and the naked efforts of the Obama Administration to hold on to those breaches of the Constitution. Instead, she’s talking about trying to re-assert the idea that all are equal under the eyes of the law. Fascism’s particular flavor in America isn’t the anti-Semitic authoritarian sort that Hitler imposed, it’s the corporatism of Mussolini’s Italy. The legal system we have today treats corporations like private individuals and heavily favors the interests of corporations and their wealthy minions. Our government was created with the specific notion that it was intended to defend the individual and labor mightily to treat all citizens even-handedly, and this particular twisting of our system is insidious and dangerous without being either “conservative” or “liberal”.
Investing in education — okay, this is the one she hits out of the park. We are in this mess because ignorance and anti-intellectualism have soundly defeated the efforts to educate the public. Americans are pathetically unaware of their own history, since they rarely learn more than the platitudes of 8th-grade history class, and thus unusually susceptible to demagoguery that plays to familiar, patriotic themes. As Sinclair Lewis purportedly said, “Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross”. And don’t even get me started on “creationism” and other junk science. We have become a nation of gullible morons, uncurious and sometimes deliberately antagonistic to anything that smacks of sophistication. Credulous people are easily manipulated by messages that play to their fears, even when it is trivial to expose the lies behind the message. Death panels? Socialsm? Really?
Reversing our economic inequality. I completely agree, but it’s never going to happen. There will be no Cultural Revolution in this country, even though I think we are sorely in need of one. Just as society has always had to suffer the poor, it has also always had to suffer the rich. Economic equality is also not necessarily a counter to the effects of fascism; fascism really doesn’t care about class struggle, because it loads the political deck in favor of corporations so thoroughly.
Restoring liberal institutions — the crux of this point is in her discussion of the role of religion. American religious institutions are, for the most part, more likely to embrace and disseminate conservative values, and thus ease the path for the acceptance of fascist ideas. The failure of progressive Christian institutions to counter the effects of the fundamentalist right is enormous and largely left unacknowledged by those institutions. Until there is some common context for political progressives and religious progressives, there can be no effective counterbalance to the spread of fascist ideas through the auspices of Christian churches.

Still Believable

By Brian Filed in Rants Tagged with corporatism, economy, government, regulation, unemployment March 5th, 2009 @ 1:43 pm

On Tuesday, I posted a link to a blog post from Rex Hammock wherein he listed some things that he had lost belief in due to the economic crisis we’re in, and then I added a few others that I felt were similarly discredited. In the comments, my friend Karan asked what I did still believe in and/or hope for (since Hammock had, at the end of his post, added a few on that score). Since I felt it would take up too much space to explain in a comment, I said I would write a second post along those lines, and so here we are. Given that the crisis itself stems from a lack of confidence in financial institutions (a well-deserved lack, I think), it’s much easier to point to things to be critical about, but I’ve come up with several things that I think would be worthwhile, not just in easing the strain on the economy, but in fashioning the paradigm that will replace the one presently burning itself into ashes.

Restoring the government’s role as the natural enemy of corporatism — In my view, the best role government has is maintaining an adversarial relationship to big business. Our government, by its very definition, is meant to protect the interests of individuals over the potential abuses of other institutions that can amass power: churches, military leaders, even the individual branches of the government as established in the Constitution. The founders also clearly wanted to circumscribe the power of corporations by limiting their charters and enacting other restrictions that held corporations in check for decades. By the latter half of the 19th century, the increasing economic power of some began to erode this adversarial position through the traditional route of corruption, but even the financial shenanigans of the late 1800s eventually overstepped a threshold and a new wave of governmental reform and regulation swept through Washington in the first quarter of the 20th century. The reforms in labor, in the social safety net, in the manifestation of “public interest” as a valid entity in regulation, and ultimately the sweeping financial reforms of the early part of FDR’s administration all served to rein in the monster of capitalism that came to life after the Civil War. In the years since World War II, however, and especially in the forty years since the election of Richard Nixon, government has been completely co-opted by business and now only works for the benefit of corporations. My personal belief is that it remains possible to resurrect the government’s identity as the antagonist of unbridled capitalism, though I also think it will take a few more years of drama and devastation to get there.

The adaptability of the human species — I am, quite honestly, utterly fed up with the popular fascination for Doomsday-ism, and have been for some time. Anyone who reads this blog for any length of time knows that I have zero patience or tolerance for people who are constantly looking for some catastrophe that will destroy life as we know it. While the failures of the global economy surely should not be waved away dismissively, the Doomsdayers were all too quick to latch on to this crisis and whip themselves up into a frenzy speculating over the degree of chaos it would cause, mainly because the economic crisis is a lot more real than waiting around for tsunamis, bird flu, killer volcanoes, asteroids, or glacier melting. Humans are nothing if not resourceful and adaptable, and I believe that it’s far more likely that people all over the world will develop adaptive responses to the situation rather than self-destruct. That’s not to say that there will not be unrest; indeed, there is a strong need for unrest in troubled times, as it is often the only way to shake the powerful out of their complacency and reorganize power structures to meet the needs of the many. However, to imply that all of human civilization stands on the brink of annihilation within the context of a financial collapse is simply deluded.

Money is bullshit — Money is probably the only mass delusion on Earth bigger, more powerful and more destructive than religion. What we’ve seen is that it’s possible for clever and unscrupulous financiers and businesspeople to simply invent wealth out of whole cloth in the form of credit swaps, derivatives, bogus consumer credit, and good old fashioned fraud. And then to have it all evaporate in the space of a few weeks, even though there was never any tangible wealth behind all that paper. And what is “tangible” about wealth? I hear and read a lot of people hollering about gold, but even our insistence on the value of gold is illusory. You can’t eat it or wear it; it has practical uses, but they’re limited and certainly do not justify the overall value we assign to it. The more money that appears to be lost, the more money that appears to be given away in “bailouts” and “stimulus packages”, the more it looks like the great big lie that it is in the first place. There must be other ways to effectively exchange goods and services that can be shielded from the effects of greed and fraudulence to such an extent that allows the basic material needs of all people to be met to a level that our civilized advancements can sustain for the very long term. And it’s not the All-Mighty Dollar, the Euro, or the yuan.

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Bullet-Proofing

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