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September 25, 2012 | FPIF
The struggle over the Trans-Pacific Partnership reveals a disturbing trend in American politics. The much discussed Citizens United ruling granting corporations personhood has given way to a trade negotiation process in which corporations are granted more rights than American citizens, their elected representatives, or foreign governments impacted by the deal.
That trade negotiations with such an immense potential impact on numerous sectors of the American economy have been conducted in secret is troubling enough. To consider that those negotiating the treaty have willfully ignored experts and elected representatives in favor of corporate interests calls into question the sustainability of American democracy.
tom anocu
Patricia Gray is right. It's better if we stop using the much maligned term 'democracy' to a system that works against and NOT for the interests or ordinary people. Using it to justify the abuses government and corporations commit against citizens the world over is a travesty. You CAN'T have both, concentrations of power in the hands of the few and democracy. That is a contradiction not very well understood in the US. Journalists should recognize this and stop perpetuating the patent FARSE. The illusion of 'choice' in the Nov. elections reflects all this.
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November 1, 2013 | NYTimes.com
249 Comments
TORONTO - HERE'S the puzzle of America today: the plutocrats have never been richer, and their economic power continues to grow, but the populists, the wilder the better, are taking over. The rise of the political extremes is most evident, of course, in the domination of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and in the astonishing ability of this small group to shut down the American government. But the centrists are losing out in more genteel political battles on the left, too - that is the story of Bill de Blasio's dark-horse surge to the mayoralty in New York, and of the Democratic president's inability to push through his choice to run the Federal Reserve, Lawrence H. Summers.
All of these are triumphs of populists over plutocrats: Mr. de Blasio is winning because he is offering New Yorkers a chance to reject the plutocratic politics of Michael R. Bloomberg. The left wing of the Democratic Party opposed the appointment of Mr. Summers as part of a wider backlash against the so-called Rubin Democrats (as in Robert E. Rubin, who preceded Mr. Summers as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration) and their sympathy for Wall Street. Even the Tea Party, which in its initial phase was to some extent the creation of plutocrats like Charles and David Koch, has slipped the leash of its very conservative backers and alienated more centrist corporate bosses and organizations.
The limits of plutocratic politics, at both ends of the ideological spectrum, are being tested. That's a surprise. Political scientists like Larry M. Bartels and Martin Gilens have documented the frightening degree to which, in America, more money means a more effective political voice: Democratic and Republican politicians are more likely to agree with the views of their wealthier constituents and to listen to them than they are to those lower down the income scale. Money also drives political engagement: Citizens United, which removed some restrictions on political spending, strengthened these trends.
Why are the plutocrats, with their great wealth and a political system more likely to listen to them anyway, losing some control to the populists? The answer lies in the particular nature of plutocratic political power in the 21st century and its limitations in a wired mass democracy.
Consider the methods with which plutocrats actually exercise power in America's New Gilded Age. The Koch brothers, who have found a way to blend their business interests and personal ideological convictions with the sponsorship of a highly effective political network, are easy to latch on to partly because this self-dealing fits so perfectly with our imagined idea of a nefarious plutocracy and partly because they have had such an impact. But the Kochs are the exception rather than the rule, and even in their case the grass roots they nurtured now follow their script imperfectly.
MOST plutocrats are translating their vast economic power into political influence in two principle ways. The first is political lobbying strictly focused on the defense or expansion of their economic interests. This is very specific work, with each company or, at most, narrowly defined industry group advocating its self-interest: the hedge fund industry protecting the carried-interest tax loophole from which it benefits, or agribusiness pushing for continued subsidies. Often, these are fights for lower taxes and less regulation, but they are motivated by the bottom line, not by strictly political ideals, and they benefit very specific business people and companies, not the business community as a whole.
As Mark S. Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, documents in his recent book "The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite," this is not the business lobby that shaped America so powerfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Business leaders of the postwar era were individually weaker but collectively more effective; C.E.O. salaries were relatively lower, but the voice of business in the national conversation was much more potent, perhaps in part because it was less exclusively self-interested. The postwar era, not coincidentally a period when income inequality declined, was the time when business executives could say that what was good for G.M. was good for America and really believe it. It didn't hurt that they were sometimes willing to forgo short-term personal and corporate gain when they judged that the national interest required it.
The second way today's plutocrats flex their political muscle is more novel. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, a pair of business writers, have called this approach "philanthrocapitalism" - activist engagement with public policy and social problems. This isn't the traditional charity of supporting hospitals and museums, uncontroversial good causes in which sitting on the board can offer the additional perk of status in the social elite. Philanthrocapitalism is a more self-consciously innovative and entrepreneurial effort to tackle the world's most urgent social problems; philanthrocapitalists deploy not merely the fortunes they accumulated, but also the skills, energy and ambition they used to amass those fortunes in the first place.
Bill Gates is the leading philanthrocapitalist, and he has many emulators - nowadays, having your own policy-oriented think tank is a far more effective status symbol among the super-rich than the mere conspicuous consumption of yachts or private jets. Philanthrocapitalism can be partisan - George Soros, one of the pioneers of this new approach, backed a big effort to try to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush - but it is most often about finding technocratic, evidence-based solutions to social problems and then advocating their wider adoption.
Philanthrocapitalism, particularly when you agree with the basic values of r thing worth to consider is to study the pat tern of 'clotting' of those clan groups among other democracy and economy institutions. In this regards, one can remember Amartya Sen's hypothesis sometime ago that is: that democracy can affect distribution of wealth in a given nation, and that bad democracy ma y bring unequal distribution of products, which make many people in a nation suffer much more. If we extend this hypothesis a bit further, then one can hypothesize that (i) there is always tendency for clan groups to influence democracy system including news /media as the fourth pillar of democracy, in order to alter the course of distribu tion of resources for their advantage . To put this effect, see the diagram 2 below. r thing worth to consider is to study the pat tern of 'clotting' of those clan groups among other democracy and economy institutions. In this regards, one can remember Amartya Sen's hypothesis sometime ago that is: that democracy can affect distribution of wealth in a given nation, and that bad democracy ma y bring unequal distribution of products, which make many people in a nation suffer much more. If we extend this hypothesis a bit further, then one can hypothesize that (i) there is always tendency for clan groups to influence democracy system including news /media as the fourth pillar of democracy, in order to alter the course of distribu tion of resources for their advantage . To put this effect, see the diagram 2 below. apitalist in charge, can achieve remarkable things. Consider the work the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done on malaria, or the transformative impact of Mr. Soros's Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Bloomberg took philanthrocapitalism one step further - he used his résumé and his wealth to win elected political office. In City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg's greatest achievements were technocratic triumphs - restricting smoking in public places, posting calorie counts and championing biking. As he prepares for life after political office, he is already honing the more typical plutocratic skill of using his money to shape public policy by energetically engaging in national battles over issues like gun control and immigration reform.
At its best, this form of plutocratic political power offers the tantalizing possibility of policy practiced at the highest professional level with none of the messiness and deal making and venality of traditional politics. You might call it the Silicon Valley school of politics - a technocratic, data-based, objective search for solutions to our problems, uncorrupted by vested interests or, when it comes to issues like smoking or soft drinks, our own self-indulgence.
But the same economic forces that have made this technocratic version of plutocratic politics possible - particularly the winner-take-all spiral that has increased inequality - have also helped define its limits. Surging income inequality doesn't create just an economic divide. The gap is cultural and social, too. Plutocrats inhabit a different world from everyone else, with different schools, different means of travel, different food, even different life expectancies. The technocratic solutions to public-policy problems they deliver from those Olympian heights arrive in a wrapper of remote benevolence. Plutocrats are no more likely to send their own children to the charter schools they champion than they are to need the malaria cures they support.
People might not mind that if the political economy were delivering for society as a whole. But it is not: wages for 70 percent of the work force have stagnated, unemployment is high and many people with jobs feel insecure about them and about their retirement. Meanwhile, the plutocrats continue to prosper. And for more and more people, the plutocrats' technocratic paternalism seems at best weak broth and at worst an effort to preserve the rules of a game that is rigged in their favor. More radical ideas, particularly ones explicitly hostile to elites and technocratic intellectuals, gain traction. And that is true not just in the United States but across the Western developed world - for instance, the Italian prime minister Enrico Letta, recently warned that "the rise of populism is today the main European social and political issue."
AS this populist wave crashes in on both sides of the Atlantic, the plutocrats, for all their treasure and their intellect, are in a weak position to hold it back.
Part of the appeal of plutocratic politics is their power to liberate policy making from the messiness and the deal making of grass-roots and retail politics. In the postwar era, civic engagement was built through a network of community organizations with thousands of monthly-dues-paying members and through the often unseemly patronage networks of old-fashioned party machines, sometimes serving only particular ethnic communities or groups of workers.
The age of plutocracy made it possible to liberate public policy from all of that, and to professionalize it. Instead of going to work as community organizers, or simply taking part in the civic life of their own communities, smart, publicly minded technocrats go to work for plutocrats whose values they share. The technocrats get to focus full time on the policy issues they love, without the tedium of building, rallying - and serving - a permanent mass membership. They can be pretty well paid to boot.
The Democratic political advisers who went from working on behalf of the president or his party to advising the San Francisco billionaire Thomas F. Steyer on his campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline provide a telling example. Twenty years ago, they might have gone to work for the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy or run for public office themselves. Today, they are helping to build a pop-up political movement for a plutocrat.
Plutocratic politics have much to recommend them. They are pure, smart and focused. But at a time when society as a whole is riven by an ever widening economic chasm, policy delivered from on high can get you only so far. Voters on both the right and the left are suspicious of whether the plutocrats and the technocrats they employ understand their real needs, and whether they truly have their best interests at heart. That rift means we should all brace ourselves for more extremist politics and a more rancorous political debate.
Where does that leave smart centrists with their clever, fact-based policies designed to fine-tune 21st century capitalism and make it work better for everyone?
Part of the problem is that no one has yet come up with a fully convincing answer to the question of how you harness the power of the technology revolution and globalization without hollowing out middle-class jobs. Liberal nanny-state paternalism, as it has been brilliantly described and practiced by Cass R. Sunstein and like-minded thinkers, can help, as can shoring up the welfare state. But neither is enough, and voters are smart enough to appreciate that. Even multiple nudges won't make 21st-century capitalism work for everyone. Plutocrats, as well as the rest of us, need to rise to this larger challenge, to find solutions that work on the global scale at which business already operates.
The other task is to fully engage in retail, bottom-up politics - not just to sell those carefully thought-through, data-based technocratic solutions but to figure out what they should be in the first place. The Tea Party was able to steer the Republican Party away from its traditional country-club base because its anti-establishment rage resonated better with all of the grass-roots Republican voters who are part of the squeezed middle class. Mr. de Blasio will be the next mayor of New York because he built a constituency among those who are losing out and those who sympathize with them. Politics in the winner-take-all economy don't have to be extremist and nasty, but they have to grow out of, and speak for, the 99 percent. The pop-up political movements that come so naturally to the plutocrats won't be enough.
The author of "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else" and a Liberal Party candidate for the Canadian Parliament.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 3, 2013, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Plutocrats Vs. Populists.
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October 16, 2013 | Yahoo
Republican Party Senator John McCain's decades-old joke about the popularity of Republicans in Congress --"we're down to paid staffers and blood relatives"-- is approaching arithmetical accuracy.
All of which tell us...a lot less than it might about the electoral prospects of the GOP. The party had already begun an agonizing reappraisal of its condition after the 2012 presidential contest, where Republicans lost the popular vote for the fifth time in the last six presidential elections. It might seem as if the recent damage to the party's brand, combined with the demographic challenges of a younger, browner and blacker electorate, all but dooms the GOP to years in the wilderness, unless the centrists wrest control from the party's more militant (or zealous, or screw-loose) wing.
But maybe not. Why not? Consider, for openers, the Power of the Purse. Once upon a time, the big business/Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP held the key to its finances. It was a big reason why the Midwest/small town element of the party could never get its longtime hero, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, nominated for president. (When Taft lost for the third time, in 1952, he said, "every Republican nominee since 1936 has been picked by the Chase Manhattan Bank.")
In political terms, that hasn't been true since Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. The rise of the party in the South, and its rules that give extra convention delegates to states that vote Republican, have shifted the axis of power in a way that Republicans of earlier generations would have found inconceivable.
More recently, the financial power has shifted as well. With campaign-finance laws now essentially gutted, wealthy ideologues can provide more than enough cash to fuel a cause or a candidacy (as casino mogul Sheldon Adelson did for Newt Gingrich's presidential bid last year). If the pin-striped wing of the GOP thinks it can force Republicans to the center by threatening to cut off campaign contributions, it's an empty threat. In fact, the more likely threat is that conservative outside groups like Heritage Action and Club for Growth will fund the primary challenges to any Republican incumbent who looks to move to the center.
Bottom line: Between the Internet and the deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and company, a candidate of the party's most militant wing will not lack for resources.
But, doesn't this mean that the GOP is on its way to nominate a presidential candidate so far out of the mainstream that he or she will go down to a defeat that will make losers to Goldwater and George McGovern look like FDR and Reagan?
Maybe. But consider: the latest shutdown-default farce has had another consequence even more dramatic than the unpopularity of the Republicans; it has made the public even more cynical about the whole process of government. (For the first time, polls have found voters saying they'd like to throw out all the rascals, including their own elected representative).
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Amazon.com
Writing in the same iconoclastic spirit he brought to Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Canadian writer Saul offers a damning indictment of what he terms corporatism, today's dominant ideology. While the corporatist state maintains a veneer of democracy, it squelches opposition to dominant corporate interests by controlling elected officials through lobbying and by using propaganda and rhetoric to obscure facts and deter communication among citizens.
Corporatism, asserts Saul, creates conformists who behave like cogs in organizational hierarchies, not responsible citizens. Moreover, today's managerial-technocratic elite, while glorifying free markets, technology, computers and globalization, is, in Saul's opinion, narrowly self-serving and unable to cope with economic stagnation.
His prescriptions include eliminating private-sector financing from electoral politics, renewing citizen participation in public affairs, massive creation of public-service jobs and a humanist education to replace narrow specialization. His erudite, often profound analysis challenges conservatives and liberals alike with its sweeping critique of Western culture, society and economic organization.
LeeBoy (Pine Bluff, Arkansas)
A coup d'etat in slow motion?, August 12, 2005
A key premise of the book is that a life worth living, the so-called examined life, the fully aware life cannot take place without individuals in the society being fully conscious - or without seeking the kind of self-knowledge that readily can be translated into action.
Saul maintains that we have a "new religion," the blind pursuit of self-interest. It is led by an ideology of "corporatism," which has deformed the American ideal of a life worth living into one devoid of a concept of the common public good. Through it, one of America's most noble ideas, that of "rugged individualism" has been sullied, distorted and transformed into an ideology of selfishness; an ideology that has so manipulated our reality that our the language and knowledge, usually placed in the service of actions and designed to improve our way of life, has become useless.
The corporate compartmentalization of, and distortion of public knowledge, and the accompanying enforced conformity has so confused us and has so muted our voices that knowledge no longer has any effect on our consciousness nor on our actions. Individual selfishness as "modeled" by corporate self-interest has hi-jacked Western civilization as we have come to know it.
The book describes how corporatism has accomplished this feat: It has used its own ideology of self-interest (and the promise of certainty that all ideologies promote) to render us passive and conformist in areas that matter and non-conformist in those that do not. This new pseudo or false individualism has the effect of immobilizing and disarming our civilization intellectually and thus renders it unconscious.
The most important way it does this is by denying and undermining the legitimacy of the individual as the primary unit and defender of, as well as the center of gravity of the public good. The public good becomes deformed by, and subordinate to, and equated with the narrow pursuit of corporate self-interests, as most often defined by the pursuit of profits and associated corporate perks. The hedonistic model of the corporate life is projected on to society writ large as the only life worth living.
The impetus for placing corporate interests (and the corporate model of our humanity) at center stage in the drama of Western Civilization, seems to have come about through the misconception that rugged individualism, democracy and our current understanding of the public good were once defined by, depend on, and proceed directly from, the pursuit of economic interests. This is a misconception because in actual fact exactly the reverse is true: It was notions of the public good as defined by democracy and individualism that gave rise to economic interests, and not the other way around.
Moreover, economic models have been so spectacularly wrong and unsuccessful, that they could not have survived without an ideology that renders the public unconscious. Saul suggests that even the best economic models amount to little more than passive tinkering. The fact that we have come to rely on them -- even though we know they are seriously flawed and have little or no basis in reality -- is compelling evidence of our lack of memory and thus, of our lack of collective consciousness.
According to the author, it is the proper use of knowledge and memory that renders us conscious (and thus by extension, also renders us human). The misuse of knowledge and memory through corporate and technological, manipulation, specialization and compartmentalization is just a deeper form of collective denial.
Said differently, (corporate generated) specialization creates its own illusions. When knowledge actually becomes confused and is sufficiently narrowed, compartmentalization promotes the illusion that knowledge is multiplied when in fact it has shrunken. It leaves the impression that more rather than less knowledge is being created. It promotes the illusion that truth is only what the specialist can measure; that "managing is doing," (and more importantly that a managerial class is important and necessary). Finally, it creates the illusion that the ideology, which promotes corporatism, produces certainty (the main job of any ideology).
These illusions all have facilitated the corporate takeover of what would otherwise be seen as, the public interest. By doing so, the legitimacy of the individual as the center of gravity of the public good is crowded out, undermined and denied.
Thus the management elite, (with their suitcases full of money to buy off our elected representatives) like a cancer, is let loose on society. It lives within its own insulated cocoon creating an artificially interiorized sense of its own importance, wellbeing and its own distorted vision of civilization as a whole. Insulated from within, the management elite is free to grow without bounds, without accountability, and in complete disregard for the reality "out there," and always only to satisfy and service its own selfish needs. Truth is not in the world "out there" but is in what the professionals can measure and whatever is reported to these insulated elites. The deeper the insulated managerial class retreats into its own interiorized illusions of reality, the more confused language becomes and the less likely knowledge can be translated into actions that will effect the wider reality, and thus the public good.
In its pursuit to deny the legitimacy of the public good and to replace it with corporate econometric models of reality, Saul has traced the history of this process and gives many examples of how it works: through media propaganda, films, ads, music, sports and style-and always through insinuations of what is considered proper thought and ways of behaving.
One of the better examples he gives is how unemployment keeps getting redefined downward with no relation to the reality of the labor market but mostly to suit the needs of the neo-cons (the courtiers of the corporate elites). Or how, even as companies are losing money and are laying-off large numbers of ordinary workers, the salaries and incentive packages of the managerial elites continue to rise - often even until the very day the companies actually go bust.
Another example given is how through the process of globalization, that by the year 2020 the U.S. will be fully reduced to a Third World country. We are told that our future standard of living will depend entirely on globalization. Here globalization (like its companion concept, productivity) is a synonym for pegging workers' wage rates to the lowest wages available worldwide. It is never mentioned in such discussions that the salaries and incentive packages of the managerial elites will actually rise significantly as this "mother of all least common denominators economic formulas" is being applied to the lower end of the economic class scale. Taken to its logical conclusion, the salary of U.S. workers will equal those of Chinese peasants by 2020; and the corporate elites all will be filthy rich like Sam Walton. This "Wal-Martization" of America is already well in train.
Why are we so susceptible to being manipulated by corporate generated ideology and power? Saul gives an answer: We have an addictive weakness for large illusions that are tied to power and that can simplify our worldview by promising emotional certainty. The examples he gives are none other than the great religions themselves, and their spin-offs of Marxism, fascism and most of the autocratic governments of the past, including Hitler's Third Reich.
The roads to serfdom, or to fascism or communism (or pick your own ism) all intersect at the same ideology reference points: they begin as enforced social and political orthodoxy and conformity: first fashion and style; then the social enforcement of ways of thinking; and then patriotism is made into a religious-like requirement; after which rights and free speech are suppressed in the name of national security or loyalty to the state. One-by-one laws are suspended and then arbitrary arrests and disappearances begin; and finally the country is rendered completely passive and unconscious - compressed into a pseudo-patriotic religious trance.
In the modern era, this progression is by now all too familiar: It leads directly to the de-legitimatization of the citizen as the primary defender of the public good. This just as inevitably leads to handing over power to those whose self-interests are larger than their dedication to the preservation of the public good or even to the preservation and defense of the state itself.
The citizen then ceases to be able to determine what is, and is not real. He becomes immobilized like a child, unable to judge what is in his own best interests -- let alone what is in the best interest of the public good or the state. He is then forced to sing for his dinner and to dance to the corporate tune for any sense of wellbeing or self-worth. The "public good" becomes completely subordinate to the "corporate good."
What Saul admonishes us about is already imminently clear: that the kind of society we have is determined by where the true source of legitimacy lies. Today legitimacy in America -- that is its power, organization, and influence -- lies not in the vote and in stylized but impotent public citizen participation, but in the hands of the lobbyists, the technocrats, and the anti-democratic and anti-patriotic corporate vampires.
Saul did not need to tell us that all the serious decisions are now made in the back rooms without consulting the people. The best "the people" can hope for (and indeed what they yearn for) is that the decisions made over their heads will at least retain a semblance of emotional ideological purity.
While the corporate robber barons sneak out the back door to their off-shore tax havens (with the nations valuables in tow), the public good has been distorted and transformed into little more than "What I have" or into bumper sticker sized emotionalisms: the advancement of creative design and the right to post the Ten Commandments on the court house steps, abortion and gun rights, anti-Affirmative Action, states rights, etc. Because of its lack of consciousness, Americans have lost the ability to conceptualize a common good larger than their own immediate individual narrowly defined self-interests.
How do we get out of this coup d'etat in slow motion? Saul's answer is that we must change the dynamics of the process but he gives few specifics on how this can be done. This a great and very sobering read. Five stars.
Joyce (Bonham, Texas)
Makes the complex understandable, November 29, 2012
Saul has unusual skill in making complex entanglements understandable, colorful, and often humorous. His satire is biting. His irony is satisfying. His writing is dense with fresh insights about difficult subjects, so reading him is challenging at times but worth the effort. In this book, Saul explores how the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities (common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, memory) leads to the rational but antidemocratic structures of corporatism. He lays out the historical roots of corporatist doctrines (going back to Plato) and how they are so woven into our social fabric that they threaten the practice of democracy. He notes how our civilization is blinded to its true character by sentiment and ideology and argues that while Fascism was defeated in World War II, its corporatist doctrines are powerfully influencing our society today.
For Saul, one central aspect of the corporatist doctrine is its hijacking of the term "individualism," defining it as self-absorption or selfishness. Both Left and Right positions are based upon that definition. The Left agrees with the Right that individualism is selfishness, only it wants individual rights to be equally distributed and more fair. Whereas Saul talks about individualism thus:
"Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection. . . Real individualism then is the obligation to act as a citizen."
And further:
"The very essence of corporatism is minding your own business. And the very essence of individualism is the refusal to mind your own business. This is not a particularly pleasant or easy style of life. It is not profitable, efficient, competitive or rewarded. It often consists of being persistently annoying to others as well as being stubborn and repetitive."
And further still:
"Criticism is perhaps the citizen's primary weapon in the exercise of her legitimacy. That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism, loyalty, and silence are so admired and rewarded."
Saul discusses the role that four economic pillars play in either accentuating or reducing our unconscious state as citizens: (1) the marketplace, (2) technology, (3) globalization, and (4) money markets.
Here is my summary of his lessons on these four.
- The danger of using the marketplace as our guide is that we are limiting ourselves to the narrow and short-term interests of exclusion. If we wish to lead society we must calculate inclusive costs.
- Business schools (following the "scientific management" Frederick Taylor brought to Harvard) treat men and women as mechanisms to be managed along with machines. And we are lining up students behind machines, educating them in isolation when what is really needed is to show them how they can function together in society.
- Trade cannot in and of itself solve societal problems. The main effect of globalization has been to shift the tax burden from large corporations onto the middle class. Adam Smith's repeated admonition has been ignored. It is: high wages are essential to growth and prosperity.
- Money is not a value in itself. Money in money markets is not available for taxation, and it doesn't really exist. It is pure speculation. We must see what is truly of value to society and reward those things.
This is only a bit of the clarity Saul's book gives us as citizens about what we are dealing with, empowering us with weaponry to overcome the Fascistic creation of corporatism.
Christopher (Seattle, Washington, USA)
A roundhouse shot at corporatist, group-think American life, March 19, 2002 "Are we truly living in a corporatist society that uses democracy as little more than a pressure release valve?"
Not satisfied with hurtling the literary hand-grenade of the 1990's, "Voltaire's Bastards", into the midst of our oblivious Western society, John Ralston Saul has now equipped his metaphorical sniper rifle, and in his crosshairs is the 'deviant class' which has destabilized our American dream. In "The Unconscious Civilization", Saul targets `corporatist' groups, the special interests (both economic and social) which have lulled citizens into replacing their own thoughts with those of factions who magically (and absurdly) claim to represent their beliefs and dreams.
"One of the difficulties faced by citizens today is making sense of what is presented as material for public debate, but is actually no more than the formalized propaganda of interest groups. It is very rare now in public debate to hear from someone who is not the official voice of an organization."
Characteristic of Saul's previous work, "The Unconscious Civilization" is a firm, wind-knocking shot to the gut. But luckily for you, your opponent is also teaching you how to fight. Hear him shout: `Stand up, slothful citizen. Your constitution is failing.'
"The statistics of our crisis are clear and unforgiving. Yet they pass us by--in newspapers, on television, in conversations--as if they were not reality. Or rather, as if we were unable to convert knowledge into action."
Do you feel protected by the Internet, by the millions of voices which you feel will conglomerate to represent you? So how's it working for you so far? Sure we have information, but what the hell good is it doing for the spirit of our nation?
"Knowledge is more effectively used today to justify wrong being done than to prevent it. This raises an important question about the role of freedom of speech. We have a great deal of it. But if it has little practical effect on reality, then it is not really freedom of speech. Without utility, speech is just decorative."
In this work, Saul scopes out the corporatist mindset, the coalescence of many minds into one body with only one voice (corpus from Latin, meaning body), which has invaded business, politics, and civil society alike. The result is chilling, for when we rise to speak, we find our individual words have different meanings to each of these bodies. As a consequence, we are learning to speak less.
"In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning, although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality."
We may be blind to the corporatist processes, but we should be able to fairly see their results. In politics: 38% voter turnout rates, lowest political convention viewership, the quashing of third-party voices; in business: the plastering of disclaimers, sloganeering, and that opaque wall of business-speak between every salesman and their customer; in civil society: the inability to progress in conversation without soundbites, and the number of people who flat-out don't want to talk to you.
This partition of words has not obstructed John Ralston Saul, though. An advocate of "aggressive common sense", Saul portrays himself correctly as a classic liberal, defender and klaxon for the citizen, neither champion nor foe of the marketplace.
"The market does not lead, balance, or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business."
"Every important characteristic of both individualism and democracy has preceded the key economic events of our millennium. What's more, it was these characteristics that made most of the economic events possible, not vice-versa."
John Ralston Saul's work consists of five chapters loosely based off a series of 1995 lectures at the University of Toronto. Like "Voltaire's Bastards", Saul here is discursive and entertaining; each chapter is a new dive into an invigorating Arctic lake of realization. Chapter One, "The Great Leap Backwards" launches the assault. The remaining chapters focus on reconstruction... their titles: "From Propaganda to Language", "From Corporatism to Democracy", "From Managers and Speculators to Growth", "From Ideology Towards Equilibrium".
Moderately mistitled (resulting in a one-point demerit in the overall review score), a more appropriate title for this book would have been "The Corporatist Civilization". A true attack on the `unconscious' among us would have been welcome, though Saul does meander briefly into this realm, with a few sections that fit cozily into the overall thesis:
"Perhaps the difficulty with the psychoanalytic movement is that from the beginning it has sent out a contradictory message: Learn to know yourself--your unconscious, the greater unconscious. This will help you to deal with reality. On the other hand, you are in the grip of great primeval forces--unknown and unseen--and even if you do know and see them, it is they who must dominate."
One-quarter the size of "Voltaire's Bastards", Saul this time out initiates a concise attack: on utopias, ideology, technocracy, demagoguery, and group mentality... all of which direct the individual to replace their view of the world with that of an `official spokesman', eerily reversing the vector of our society towards a fascist state. An insightful read; terse, but somewhat condensed and abstract at places. The trade-offs are more than acceptable, though. Steel yourself for a barrage of Truth.
seydlitz89
Lacks The Big Picture, July 3, 2000
John Ralston Saul is considered one of the great humanist essayists of this time. That is true but he is also very much a man of our times, with both the advantages and disadvantages of the current Weltanschauung. I bought this book after having read some rather rave reviews and had high expectations. I can't say that I have got anything from this book that I didn't already have or suspect. He's reinforced some of my opinions without adding to my empherical knowledge to back them. The concept of the individual, individualism if you will, is dominant today, representing a narrow and superficial deformation of the Western idea. Market Capitalism does not guarantee democracy; you can have poor democracies and prosperous dictatorships. Today we are in an unconscious process of masochistic suicide destroying the very substance of our public institutions, institutions which were the products of decades of thought and democratic debate, all in the pursuit of making things more `effective', more `business-like'. . . So according to Saul, and on target IMHO, but what does this all mean? What can we draw from these intermediate conclusions?
He then goes on to describe the crisis that grips the West, which he dates from 1973. Bureaucratic thinking and rationalization continue to manipulate our perceptions, dominate and drive our existence, controlled by what he describes as `Corporatism'. He states,
"the corporatist movement was born in the nineteenth century as an alternative to democracy. It proposed the legitimacy of groups over that of the individual citizen." Pp16-17
Napoleon, Hegel and Bismarck helped the process along by emphasizing rule by elites and adherence to the state. This was all only a lead up to the great
"new all-powerful clockmaker god - the marketplace - and his archangel, technology. Trade is the marketplace's miraculous cure for all that ails us. . . I would suggest that Marxism, fascism and the marketplace strongly resemble each other. They are all corporatist, managerial and hooked on technology as their own particular golden calf." Pp19-20
...Weber warned of the dangers of bureaucracy, of how capitalism mated with ever increasing rationalization and technological innovation would become a very difficult beast to control. He also warned against the subversion of democratic institutions by powerful non-democratic groups with oligarchic tendencies. Saul's view on the triumph of rationalism is also, by the way, influenced by Weber. So instead of damning Weber he should be thanking him. Here we see the tendency so common among US (and Canadian) intellectuals today of putting the blame for their perceived crisis on foreign thinkers (usually German or French) who have some how lead the well-intentioned, but all too trusting North Americans astray. Alan Bloom, on the right, was guilty of the same thing in his The Closing of the American Mind. In all, this tendency represents a mixing up of cause and effect. If you want to look for a foreign culpret, how about the English Utilitarians who put morally accepted self-interest and quest for profit in the service of individual gain above anything else? An attitude that has since then been enthusisatically and uncritically accepted by the mass of American intellectuals.
What is Saul's solution? Persistent public commitment by the citizenry can turn the tables on corporatism. But how, given the power that Saul says the elites have to manipulate and control all the spheres of our existence? What of their ability to define "freedom" in wholly consumerist terms, making it a mere matter of material choice? As long as the US Constitution allows for majority rule, the public will have the last say, but how to mobilize the public, how to educate them as to defending their best interests when the reigns of mass communication are in the hands of the corporatists? How do we make the interests of society take priority over the interests of profit? The moral dilemma in all this is ignored by Saul who distrusts anyone who even mentions it. Unable to follow Nietzsche's lead he stumbles. Nietzsche, alas a foreigner, was also primarily a moralist. Morals are important since they shape the way that we adjust to the struggle for our very existence in an ever more competitive world. While a sense of the spiritual is necessary, the vast bulk of our actions, the reality we must deal with in our every day lives, is economic due to the pervasive market system which is the very air we breathe. It is therefore very much man-made, synthetic, something that has been grafted onto society, not a component of it. Morals are as necessary now as when we lived in small farming communities, since it is by working together, by accepting each others' strengths and weaknesses, by learning to control our own impulses and irrational drives and by accepting the inate worth of each person that we insure not only our own but the survival of our species in the coming hard winter. A, "myth-building" exercise you say, but is it any more a myth than that of "the Market corrects itself and all we need do is trust in it"?
Since the end of the 18th Century we in the West have lost almost every remnant of our pre-Capitalist past. We have forgotten our entire community or social or human-to-human history, we are unable to recall when an action did not infer some sort of self-benefit. We fail to see that the so-called Third World is as we were two hundred years ago. It is not a question of scientific or technological or commercial progress, in the most human sense, but of the maturing and decay of an ideological-based social system.
Saul's main drawback is that he lacks the indepth knowledge of the numerous disciplines necessary for this very complex subject. That and `distance' since he approaches the problem with far too many preconceptions. A much better book in a related subject is Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. His history of the market economy provides much of the background necessary to illuminate our current situation. Few if any thinkers today have the breadth of knowledge to provide the big picture of our current post-modern situation. Men like Max Weber, who had a encyclopedic knowledge of several wide fields of study no longer walk the earth. Still a much more refined, yet wide view which would include a fuller understanding of social economics, history, political science, sociology, theology and philosophy is necessary in order to get a grip on the tendencies which are slowly eating away our society and threaten to turn us all into what Max Weber described as "a culture of specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart".
Herbert L Calhoun
Wake up and Smell the Oil Wal-Mart Shoppers, August 10, 2005
If the doubling, in less than a year, of the price of oil for no discernable reason (with no end in sight), and with absolutely no reaction from us or our government is not evidence that something is terribly wrong with our collective mind. Then surely an order of magnitude increase in the cost of medical care and prescription drugs, and the quintupling of our health insurance (for those of us who have any), should be.
Or, one might have imagined that the juxtaposition of soaring corporate profits (in these very same areas) with an effective reduction in "actual wages" everywhere else, would also have shaken us from our deep collective slumber?
Or maybe the fact that we have been led into yet another war for no defensible reasons and without either an exit strategy or a fighting plan -- a war whose justifications and rationale keeps changing with each increased attack from the terrorists as our national debt continues to soar -- would have shaken us out of our passivity.
While our government's response to the needs of the "rank-and-file" is increasingly non-existent, or completely ineffectual, and the "managerial class" continues to rob us blind as they laugh all the way to the bank; we are obsessed with the risk of breast implants, abortion rights, hanging the Ten Commandments in the public square, reality shows (that are anything but real), Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, and how to continue to win at the game of "Democrats and Republicans (or liberals and conservatives, or Blacks versus Whites, or males versus females, or pick your own senseless emotional dichotomy)."
But the very best evidence yet of our lack of consciousness and proof that our society is being thrown under the bus while we watch in horror with our eyes wide open, is when the most devastating critique of our own slothfulness is also the sanest, most compassionate and most eloquent.
Saul in this trenchant sanity check of the society that leads the Western World realizes that the time for vitriol and shouting has long since passed. That is why with eloquence, understated passion and with measured but devastating logic and reason (that quality he so distrusts), he has issued a broadside at the foundation stone of what ails our society most: Rampant and immoral Corporatism.
And even though in the end, his prescription for how we are to extricate ourselves from this dilemma is unconvincing, he has laid the necessary groundwork for serious thinking to begin. If "the people" in Western Democracies are ever to regain control of their minds, and then eventually their societies; Saul's ideas in this small volume must inevitably be contended with.
A Customer
Saul is a modern secular prophet!, March 28, 1999
You can add the name John Ralston Saul to those of Noam Chomsky, Ivan Illich, Franz Fanon (and who else?) on your list of the key late 20th century 'global conspiracy theorists' - people who are visionary seers/prophets who have unorthodox views and make outrageous pronouncements on this and that, but with whom you have to broadly agree. Because they operate outside the conventions of fixed ideologies, they're able to see the broader picture, and see more deeply into the nature of things.
The Unconscious Civilization - the 1995 Massey Lectures - was written in an oral style by Canadian freelance intellectual, essayist and novelist John Ralston Saul.
His thesis is disarmingly simple: in the long line of history's totalitarianisms, we can now add undemocratic 'corporatism'.
Our society, he argues, is only superficially based on the individual and democracy.
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rayme4raw
Holy Crap, and why am I the first commentor. He just said what I've been thinking about the elite. They don't have a way out, they don't want to be leaders, they want to get as much stuff as they can until it all comes crashing down. DHS may have bought 1 billion hollow point bullets for us, trust me, the American people have enough bullets for the elite.
lynnybee888:
excellent video. withdraw your support from this system; purchase as little as possible, do NOT take out loans, withdraw your money from banks & do NOT used their credit cards. give Ben Shalome Bernanke back his worthless fiat money & save yourselves by purchasing metal. we don't need no stinking big government; the whole system is a scam, a wealth transferance mechanism & it started in 1913 in earnest we don't need no stinking government debt borrowed from private banks @ interest.
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April 21, 2013 | naked capitalism
Transcript
Robert Johnson: I think the, call it the oligarchy now is audacious. They don't really care if they're legitimate. There was a time – you know, I always hear Jurgen Habermas was paraphrased by saying,
"Legitimate if you can, coerce if you have to, and accommodate if you must."
And I think we've gone past – I almost started, this was really eerie because we didn't compare notes – I almost started my discussion about John Ralston Saul's book, The Unconscious Civilization, and I think we've gone beyond – I'm grateful we have gone beyond the unconscious civilization. A lot of people don't buy the package anymore that's emanating from those corporations you talked about.
But there is a sort of, "Okay guys, you're mad, how are you going to stop me?" mentality at the top. Now I'm going to say that that fight has to happen, but there's also, you know, they always talk about Marx and capitalism, capitalists versus labor. A lot of the interesting fissures in a system are intra-capitalist conflict, and right now, I guess the way I'd put it in a metaphor is it feels like there are an awful lot of the elite that know this system is not wholesome, and they're all standing on the deck of the Titanic looking in each other's eyes, and they're asking a question with their eyes, "Are we going to help this navigator? Are we going to help this captain get off the ice? Or are we going to get the food and the jewels from the safe and put them in our lifeboat?" And my sense is that most of them are trying to get stuff into their lifeboat, and that system isn't going to cohere. And in that dysfunction there is opportunity.
Lambert here: I'm not a worse is better kind of guy. However, as far as "How are you going to stop me?" I'd say we've been in that power relationship before, if not this exact situation, and we've come out on the other side, and better. There's always no alternative. Until there is. I've run this Thomas Nast cartoon once, but here it is again:
Maju:
There are two issues here: on one side what the Johnson says is very much true: the "leaders" (greedy parasitic vampires) have no plan worth that name nor care much about it other than keeping their mercenary forces ready to defend their ill-gotten gains. On the other, the peoples around the World, with very limited exceptions, seem to lack the class consciousness needed to get organized and initiate the otherwise urgent revolutionary process that puts these oligarchs in their place (jail or execution), what feeds the feeling of impunity among the bosses.
So it looks, at least right now, as a very slowly evolving final act. We know it's final, we know that this situation is totally untenable but it is a time, to use a famous Gramscian quote, "in which the past isn't yet fully dead, and the future isn't yet fully born".
And this situation is, for me at least, a huge emotional drain: knowing that we are at the very end of an era, much like the late 18th century, but not seeing yet almost anywhere the breach through which we are going to transit to the new one.
MaroonBulldog:
Why do you think there's a new era coming after this? If, as you suggest, the masses lack the consciousness to organize simple revolutionary activity, where are they going to get the consciousness to organize and coordinate the feeding of 7,000,000,000 people?
To me, the new era looks a lot like post-modern Malthusian Hell.
Lambert Strether:
I reject "the masses" as an analytical category.
Murky:
Yea! Ranting out some spoon-fed ideology of evil rich capitalists verses good but poor masses does not foster any quality of discussion.
The world almost never divides up so conveniently into good and evil, black and white.
There just might be a good capitalist out there somewhere; such things have been known to happen. Take the example of Soros; he has given many millions to socially progressive foundations, most recently the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Or take Carnegie who established the public library system in the USA, a clear example of good. And there will be dregs and horrors of humanity among the so-called masses too, because no single group is all good, pure and holy. Racing to judgement about 'capitalists' or 'masses' or any other slice of humanity without a full context of fact and history just leads to shallow and mob style thinking.
Cassiodorus:
The concern with the elites has nothing to do with good or evil. It's about confronting the unsustainable nature of capital accumulation. Being an elite is being a beneficiary of capital accumulation - you can experience all sorts of gross comforts, but they're only manifested as privileges, and you have to maintain them through a narcissistic hogging of the world.
If we of the 99% had our collective act together, we could bring paradise to Earth. The process of bringing paradise to Earth would, however, involve (among many other things) the end of elite privilege.
Maju:
Don't forget Engels, mecenas of Communism.
It's not about the good or evil nature of individuals, although of course power corrupts (a lot, and also attracts those already corrupt) and capitalist property and wealth is just a form of power. It's about objective class interests: overall people who benefit from this predatory system have a vested interest in it and people who are being obviously exploited and/or marginalized in it (the vast and growing majority) have a vested interest in radical change into some other more democratic form of society and economy, i.e. socialism in its various forms.
Said that, individuals may choose a camp which is not their natural one because of free conscious (ethical or corrupt) choice, or also because of ideological brainwashing (TV, religion, school and all that). But nobody has any interest in being exploited like a slave, dumped like trash to a slow death in the streets or having their environment destroyed. Only those who get exclusive profits from such activities, i.e. the capitalists (and secondarily their mercenary minions in the armed forces, media, political arena, etc.) have interest in this system as it is.
fouad sayegh:
Mob thinking at the top is okay but at the bottom it is not. What you are missing is that the former begets the latter.
Murky:
Please, don't hold up Marx or Engels as the men with answers for suffering humanity. Look how the ideology of Marxism played out in communist Russia. Millions murdered in gulag prison camps. Likewise with Chinese communism. Marxism promised a utopian worker's paradise, but instead turned into human disaster on a colossal scale.
Marxism has already has already been historically tested on human populations with dire consequences, and historians now regard the entire Marxist edifice as a failed ideology. But there are still many, like you, who still think it has answers for all of us.
It would serve humanity very well to distrust any and all ideologies wholesale. Ideology finds itself rooted in a variety of domains, including economics, religion, and politics. The damage that ideology does, is that it coerces thought into a preset mold, thereby killing free thought and empowering a straightjacket of group-think. Listening to how Republicans and Democrats squabble is a perfect example of how North Americans have been divided and disempowered by ideology. Ideology is, in my opinion, EVIL.
We do agree on the problem, that the Global Financial Crisis resulted in grotesque economic inequality and extreme social injustice. We just disagree on the tools needed for solutions.
Massinissa:
"Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country".
- George Orwell
gepay:
efschumacherI believe this: "If only there were evil people somewhere Insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us
and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every living soul And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I also believe that there are elites who are rich beyond greed who mostly run the world. ("This is a system?" Mr. Natural). However they are made up of layers of new and old money sources starting with what's left of the Royal Families of Europe.
Yes, mostly they are families like the Rockefellers and the Agnellis and the Krupp/Thyseens etc. Talented individuals like Kissinger are the last public link between us and them. Layers and layers. Occasionally they fight among themselves. Whatever faction Lehman Bros was closest to has been thrown off the bus. While a person like Bill Gates has been welcomed in. Someone like Pablo Escobar became rich enough but wasn't invited. Other gangsters are though as I believe in Peter Scotts paradigm of the Deep State – . Demaris 'Captive City'
From the moment of its incorporation as a city in 1837, Chicago has been systematically seduced, looted, and pilloried by an aeonian horde of venal politicians, mercenary businessmen, and sadistic gangsters. Nothing has changed in more than a century and a half. The same illustrious triumvirate performs the same heinous disservices and the same dedicated newspapers bleat the same inanities. If there has been any change at all, it has been within the triumvirate itself. In the beginning, the dominant member was the business tycoon, whether it be in land speculation, railroads, hotels, meat packing, or public utilities, Pirates like Potter Palmer, Phillip Armour, George Pullman, Charles T. Yerkes, and Samuel Insull fed the city with one hand and bled it dry with the other. Around the turn of the century, with the population explosion out of control, the politician gained the upper hand over his partners in the coalition. It remained for the gangster to complete the circle in 1933 following the murder of Mayor Cermak. Today it is nearly impossible to differentiate among the partners – the businessman is a politician – the politician is a gangster – the gangster is a businessman. I think the present President of the US comes from Chicago. Wall Street is now run by criminals who money launder drug money when not busy defrauding us. The Jewish billionaire oligarchs are now in as are many other billionaires from around the world.
Lenin wrote "What to do? What to do? but we now know how that turned out. Armed revolution does not seem feasible at this time but it surely does seem that world situation is devolving into another World War or anarchy. So many guns and violent people in the US. And no alternative appearing yet.
Jessica>I reject "the masses" as an analytical category.
You could think of it as the rentier, the (sub)urban bourgeosie and the proletariat. We've seen the income growth figures that equates these: enormous growth for the 0.1% rentier, losing ground for the bottom 80% proletariat, and just better than breaking even for the 19.9% bourgeosie.
The proletariat will not be inspired to lead anything, but may be driven herd-wise by elements of the other two factions. For the most part, they won't thank anybody, whatever the outcome.
The (sub)urban bourgeosie includes the educated and professional classes (if you're reading this: you're in it), is the class that does all the creating, runs the show and generally does the bidding of the rentier. The single most important element in the control strategy is to keep the bourgeoisie riven, fissured and divided. This, the 19.9%, is the class that must cohere if any meaningful change is to happen. It's a not so trivial task because these people stand on opposite sides of all sorts of pungent issues like regulation, gun control, abortion, 'socialism' versus 'capitalism', climate change, whether the people who created every productivity revolution should be 'entitled' in retirement to any of the very gains that they made happen, and whether the Dodgers were better than the Capitals last weekend.
I think I've seen a similar (more detailed) analysis to this somewhere else, but the original author seemed to think the (sub)urban bourgeosie were the problem, whereas in fact they are the diverse instrument set for maintaining the conduit for rentier enrichment and control.
So, tools, lay aside your differences, cohere, and rise up, you have nothing to lose but your 5 percent gains aggregated over the last 40 years.
ArkansasAngieThe way you describe the 19.9% is analogous to the bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the landed aristocracy in Europe in the 1800s. Even after they had taken over in France, it was amazing how long that new leading class remained willing to cede political power to the obsolete aristocracy in the rest of Europe. In some analyses, it was only WW1 that finally finished off the landed aristocracy. Because the new bourgeois was both internally divided and scared of the working class. One thing that is unique about the new knowledge worker class ("creative" class) is that they can only reach their full potential as a class by creating a much more inclusive system. If they try to just replace the 0.1% and make themselves into a new elite, they will continue to be throttled as a group. Because knowledge production is inherently different from thing production. Any system that holds knowledge back in order to collect rents must hold back the development of knowledge and of those who would otherwise do it. That does not mean that the knowledge worker class couldn't try. In fact, given how subservient to the rentiers the knowledge worker class has been, it is hard to imagine them not first trying to find a way to create "rational 0.1%-ism" or "0.1%-ism without the 0.1%".
NellNo more wedgies.
So long as they have us wedged against each other over social issues they keep us from forming coalitions that can break their hold.
I seriously do not care about abortion, immigration, NRA, gay marriage, et al.
We all know that the financial crisis was caused by criminal activity. That is the issue to focus on and rally around.
Lexington"The single most important element in the control strategy is to keep the bourgeoisie riven, fissured and divided. This, the 19.9%, is the class that must cohere if any meaningful change is to happen. It's a not so trivial task because these people stand on opposite sides of all sorts of pungent issues"
Excellent point. I have just this weekend begun to see signs of some coherence around a specific issue, the land value tax. I have read support for this from the right and from the left. Possibly because it is viewed as an anti tax haven measure.
Susan the otherIt says something about the success American popular culture has had in enforcing ideological homogenity that even Americans who perceive that there is something seriously wrong with country's economic and political composition find any analysis that includes a discussion of class deeply distateful.
Things change. The agony may possibly be extended for a long period (what can we know about the future?) but something is clear: catastrophic social collapse as happened to the USSR in the 1980s or is happening to us now in the 2010s can't and won't persist forever: eventually revolutionary changes will take place.
Anyhow the only alternative under Capitalist predatory conditions is total ecological collapse of the planet, a process already way too advanced: nuclear and "conventional" pollution all around, depleted oceans, destruction of the natural refuges everywhere, accelerated extinction of one species after another and of course global warming. Space travel and colonization are just science fiction for many centuries to come: we only have this planet and Capitalism is definitely destroying it at accelerated pace.
So, if not revolution, pathetic extinction. But there's no other foreseable future, really.
efschumacherI agree with you Maju that this chaos is stressful. We all look to the things that have given us hope in the past and those things aren't working very well. Like the Boston Marathon. Who will ever think of marathons the same way again?
But Robert Johnson's observation that opportunities come in a crisis is a little encouraging. I really take issue with some of the comments here that the 1% is in control (not so, it's their system that is in fact out of control); that the 19% in the "middle" is the creative class (but look at the mess they have created!); and that the bottom 80%, the proles, are braindead. Please. I'm pretty sure it is the 1% who have gone braindead. They "really haven't had a good new idea in 2000 years." (from "Catch 22″ – such a good quote).
efschumacherMmmm, I'm not saying the "proles are braindead". I'm saying they are distracted, whether through fatalism, laziness, hopelessness, misdirection or some combination of the above.
Used to be that in England they had the Grammar School system, that creamed off the (academically) top 20%, gave them better educational opportunities than the rest, and loosed them to run the country, indeed, to run the world. That system was meritocratic in that it didn't matter that you had a working class background if you could make the grade academically. It allowed a constant flow upwards from the proletarian class. But it was never going to be more than 20%, although it didn't exclude some of the rest from getting on financially. So no, the proles aren't brain-dead, there is plenty of intellectual vigor there. But the vast bulk of them will still retain the chains.
The story I hear is that those kinds of educational opportunities are coming to be increasingly unavailable in this country – which has long been trumpeted by the foghorn of propaganda as the place where even Joe Q. Public can 'make it'. Maybe he can, but not in any significant proportions.
Lambert StretherMoreover, even Jane Austen dramatizes the brain-dead vapidity of the 1% back in the 1800′s.
Whereas Julian Fellowes seems to want us to be sympathetic to their shared struggle with the rest of us in the birth of modernity.
ambritAdding the kicker: "In the interim, a variety of morbid symptoms appear" (from memory, too lazy to Google now).
bangerDear skippy; Too true that. Ecology should give us our frame of reference here. When a biosphere loses too many so called "peripheral" species, the whole thing grinds to a halt and re sets. Diversity is an essential feature of any healthy system. The other thing about flamethrowers is that they will occasionally blow up on the back of the wielder, leaving crispy critters everywhere.
My impression is that the oligarchs don't really have that much power. The world is ruled not by a few families but by an emergent network – a kind of entity with its own agenda. It is well known, for example, that many CEOs are sympathetic to things like the environment and the plight of the world – but they cannot act in any other way – the system won't allow it. It is the system itself that is the problem not the oligarchs themselves though many of them, it is true, are truly misanthropes.
masaccio
Can you point to something that has happened in the last 10 years or so that runs contrary to the desires of the oligarchy? Maybe the network operates to carry out the will of the oligarchs.
banger
Stan MusicalThat's the point I'm trying to make. The system itself, without necessarily being controlled by anyone has a life of its own and distributes power towards the class that created it.
MurkyIf Gramsci said that, he was cribbing from Mathew Arnold's:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born,
I agree we're still in some sort of limbo, but while we turn in circles the planet's other denizens are slowly (or quickly) dying off. They're an "other" 99%.
And regardless of how well off, Americans, especially, are a 10%, if not 1%, at the top.
Returning to the US after time spent in the "third" world, which is in fact much more real, much less infused with the Spectacle, (I'm pleased DeBord's insight is getting polularized), produces culture shock, just at the amount and variety of material goods on offer. It verges on the hallucinatory if you're not used to it.
Energy use by us "first-worlders" is wasteful to an extreme degree and polluting, and indulgence of our many "needs" we could go without – driving everywhere, creating garbage made of non-biodegradable material (often encasing processed food), drinking industrial chemical concoctions we call "soft drinks"–and so on and so forth, puts us squarely on the side of the big capitalists whether we are aware of, or can accept it.
Solidarity against the oppressors can begin with bourgeoied-up Americans consuming less and educating themselves about how the oligarchs are really–I mean really–screwing over the "other" 6 billion people on the planet.
Lambert StretherThanks for the video clip; it's a good though very brief introduction to Robert Johnson. Wikipedia has a brief article about Johnson, mostly noting that he is Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The best content I found on Johnson was a Youtube clip in which he verbally demolishes the economics profession. He says economists have become lackeys to Wall Street, and then he makes specific suggestions of how to get the profession back on track. Here is the clip:
just meApril 21, 2013 at 5:49 am
Yes, it is brief. But I thought it made the exact one point that needed to be made.
jake chaseFrom the youtube info:
Interview with Robert Johnson Economist and Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), New York
"I think the economics profession was making tremendous money in consulting for the financial sector. Many of the theories were not investigational illumination how financial markets worked. They were portraits painted like a marketing document. They did a great disservice to mankind and we're cleaning up after that right now."
"When the people become anxious they want the expert to tell them what's going to happen. And they feel good when their anxiety is relieved because they think they understand the future. But if the expert instead of telling the truth is telling snake oil, a false story, when that is unmasked the expert becomes the scapegoat."
"Economists are very much accused of "only seeing the economy through the eyes of the model" as opposed to seeing the economy and building a model as a map of what reality is. Formalism is very different to science."
"There are several modifications to economics teaching that need to take place. The first is rather than teaching introductory economics as an indoctrination in method they should teach it as a course in the philosophy of science where the subject is economics and its assumptions and the trade-offs and the flaws as well as the strings are explored sceptically on behalf of the student."
looks interesting - reminds me of Yves' post on Professor Outis Philalithopoulos…
madronaYou might as well teach Creation Science as Economics. Perhaps they already do; it's been a while since I hung around a university.
Among other things that are broken is our university system. Most students learn more about football and sexual technique than anything else. Of course, both are great fun, but do we really need three hundred thousand business students and God knows how many in ethnic studies, art history, geography, literature, etc. All a person needs to know is how to read and how to count. It shouldn't take thirty years, but these days it not only does but most degree recipients haven't mastered either skill and don't seem to care about using them.
Fifty years ago, everyone I knew at college understood the routine was bullshit and the only sensible objective was to land some kind of job with a future. I never found one and was not surprised since there really weren't very many back then.
Think it's tough being poor in bad times? Some of you should try it on during good times. That is when it really gets personal.
Oh well, what's the point? Soft headed social critics are really just as delusional as poor saps who swallow advertising slogans. But nothing can convince them of the futility of their nostrums. Writing in to these blogs is just impersonating Syssyfus. I know I've spelled it wrong. So what?
mmckinl"Think it's tough being poor in bad times? Some of you should try it on during good times. That is when it really gets personal."
Preach on, brother Jake! (virtual high-five) Been there, felt that.
CassiodorusThe oligarchs game plan is quite obvious … Just look at the fire power they put on the streets of Boston … Just look at the legislation that allows information gathering that would make the former East Germany blush …
Just look at how our rights to assemble, habeus corpus and local determination are being legislated away by Congress and through trade agreements that are little more than trump cards for corporate hegemony.
A totalitarian state is just around the corner … the elites are going nowhere. With half the population a month or two away from being homeless and hungry the violence that follows will be used to crack down even harder.
Just look around … at Greece, Spain, Cypress. The protests have done little to stop the fascism. The elites will use the ring wingers to suppress everyone else. How long was Franco in power?
All the institutions are already coopted. Universities, Unions, Religion and Governance are cowed or cooperating. Local police are militarized and Federally deputized. The National Guard Federalized. And there are plenty of folks ready to lend these people a hand for their own gain.
Just look at what is directly in front of you … The elites don't need lifeboats. They already own anything of value and now they intend to use all the weight of the government against us. Look at our justice system, look at our state and federal governments … They own them lock, stock and barrel.
mmckinlThe unsustainability of the existing system is not changed by the fact that nearly all of it is under some form of neoliberal elite control.
fouad sayegh"Unsustainability" for Who? You must be talking about the lower 99%. It is quite sustainable for the elites. When the system goes bankrupt they will establish a new currency and loan themselves the money to keep everything they have …
Just look at the banksters. JP Morgan, Wells, Bof A, Citi and of course Goldman Sachs. They were all bailed out, they will be bailed out again. The Chairmen of the Bank Of England and the ECB are Goldman alumni … The Fed is next.
You are correct, there is not enough to go around, the current situation is unsustainable. And that is why the next political and social model will be fascism and a police state. Given from what I have seen of Americans they will embrace order over freedom … nothing but sheep.
How do they maintain this order? Food and fear. It is no accident that Monsanto has carte blanche and OBTW they have just purchased Blackwater now known as XE. They will control the food supply.
Social order and the economy? Through their massive data bases with which they can issue no fly orders that will be expanded to train and ship with all travel and lodging managed through credit cards that they own.
Jobs, education? With the info they store they can blacklist anyone for good jobs, schools. You will never hear that you have been black listed. It will be a series of failed applications,interviews and credit downgrades.
mmckinlThe Americans, the Greeks, the Spaniards and even the Italians seem to have caved in. I am still hopeful watching the French for an encore.
MassinissaIndeed … And Greece and Spain had, "Socialist Goverments", and bailed their banks without question …
I don't hold out much hope for Francois Holland. His ratings are already in the tank and falling. He will bail the banks.
The next President of France will most likely be that Bilderberg favorite, the IMF sweetheart, Christine Lagarde.
Having the tag "socialist" in your logo does not make you socialist. The Socialist International today is analogous to the US Democratic Party with a single and rather anachronic exception: the Sandinista Front (which got in it in the 1980s in a rather different pre-Blairite context). Today European and other "socialist" or "labour" parties are just, like the Democratic Party in the USA, managers of hardcore Neoliberalism with just the occasional populist penchant for this or that mostly pointless reform.
A different but highly comparable situation is the "communist" regimes of East Asia (China, Vietnam, etc.), which are today hyper-capitalist with just some state planning more in the fascist sense than with any kind of socialist meaning. Today the only examples of socialism available are Cuba, Venezuela and a handful of other American states, where the welfare of the people and social cohesiveness is still the first priority.
You should not look merely at labels but contents.
just meI dont know Mckine, Im kind of expecting the next French president to be Marine Le Pen. She did incredible in the last presidential election, and wouldnt it be fitting for the next president to be an almost literal fascist?
Then again, being protectionist and eurosceptic, im not sure the elites that be would really approve of the Front National having power, fascistic or not. Dont forget that the French system has constantly denied the party seats in parliament due to the way its denied, despite its very large support among the electorate.
SóloSéQueNoSéNadaYou are correct, there is not enough to go around, the current situation is unsustainable. And that is why the next political and social model will be fascism and a police state. Given from what I have seen of Americans they will embrace order over freedom … nothing but sheep."
Want to shake you! (nicely, of course)
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/america-is-not-broke
March 5th, 2011 9:03 PM VIDEO: America Is NOT Broke
By Michael Moore
…WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone who tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!
So how do we make this happen? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.
To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, democracy is in our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp.
I mean, it could be fun and lively, not horrible and deadly. Like breathing again. Being us again. I myself would like to pursue happiness. With everybody. My American Dream, tyvm.
mmckinlOnce the the Dollar falters as the Reserve Currency, it is game over (inflationary depression) for the United States. Americans will wake up to their poverty.
However, a police state is certainly not in the cards. In general, Americans are so ignorant, cowardly, and overweight that a Revolution is simply inconceivable. I fully expect them to starve in front of their flatsceen TVs, wimpering into oblivion while watching some spinoff of Real Beverly Hills Housewives.
Don LevitThe dollar will be the last currency to fail. Although the petro-dollar hegemony is being tested there is no alternative.
Only the US has the military might to back a world reserve currency … Of all the giant industrial countries (Germany, Japan, China) only the US produces 50% of its own oil.
This is a contradiction: "However, a police state is certainly not in the cards. In general, Americans are so ignorant, cowardly, and overweight that a Revolution is simply inconceivable."
Once Americans lose their flat screens, along with their houses and jobs there will be trouble. Over 50% of American families are within a couple of months of being homeless and hungry.
Unlike European countries where most have extended family that is much less the case in the US. These people will be immediately desperate for the basics … Already the "Sequester" is reducing help.
A "police state" is definetly on the cards … whether we will have velvet glove fascism or iron fist fascism is the only question left to answer if revolution is not on the list.
What you fail to appreciate is that when the US goes down most other countries will already be on their knees. When the US goes down the entire world economy is going down with it …
mmckinlMilitary might backs a world currency, huh? For how long? For how long are the masses going to be ruled by the military? For how long will the military back the elites? The only force in backing the U.S. dollar is the force of taxation. Unfortunately, taxes are so low in relation to our total debt, I am not sure even taxation has that much influence anymore. Don Levit
SóloSéQuéNoSéNadaDon Levit ~ "The only force in backing the U.S. dollar is the force of taxation."
Only partially true … The value of the dollar is based on demand for the dollar and the ability to pay. Dollars are in demand for taxes, legal tender, loans in dollars, foreign reserves and trade such as the petrodollar.
For any currency to be viable there must be enforcement of contract. Legal tender is the start but the courts, sanctions and ultimately use of force are the pillars of strength.
bangerCountries can simply use local currencies in bilateral trade settlement. No military strength is necessary: just stop doing business with anyone who rips you off.
MassinissaExactly right–moreover there is no real political opposition. The "left" such as it was has entirely disappeared as a force. The system is very robust. The main reason is that the current oligarchy is not like other oligarchies in history – this one is an emergent network where the power is diffused across the network and no one node is all that powerful – in fact as an emergent system it is, in itself, the actual Emperor of the Empire, i.e., the system itself is the power and the individual oligarchs are not necessarily in charge.
JessicaIm aware that the question about Franco was rhetorical, but Franco was in power from 1936-75. Thats 39 years.
Goddamn, I honestly didnt realise it was that long until I looked it up. Thats almost half a damn century.
Schofield"Lambert here: I'm not a worse is better kind of guy." I read this more as saying that the elite will not act together in a coherent way, but fragments of the elite will do things that make sense for the fragment but are harmful for the elite as a whole. That can be to our benefit. I would say that the Republican refusal to help Obama cut social security is an example of that.
casino implosionNope it's about confronting our necessary human nature which by default struggles to balance power and always will do. It's about refusing simple minded utopianism, like Communism, Neo-Liberalism or state imposed religions, which appears to provide balance but in reality concentrates far too much power in the hands of the few.
It's about how we can best diffuse power but still effectively meet our needs both individual and collective. Galileo and the Catholic Church (as welfare state) perfectly illustrates this. It is the end always a work in progress!
Lambert StretherThis guy is coming out of the Soros nexus, where the motives are ambiguous at best.
Ms Gone might argue that's an example of elite fracture
Lambert StretherI agree entirely. To me a tell is the pervasive vagueness, metaphors and lack subject-verb-object sentences dealing with the who, what, when and why of our kleptocracy and its actors. In other words, Johnson's speech describes a world with no agency, no history and lots of vague, pseudo-poetically expressed, notions.
Compare to, and contrast with, Jeffrey Sachs's rather more incisive and direct words on, apparently, a similar subject.
Ms GHmm. As it happens, the transcriber has been good enough to transcribe both speeches! I think you're right. And Johnson's speech was in 2012, whereas Sachs was just last week.
So it looks like, for some fractions of the elite, the language has moved from lack of agency to agency in a year. That's an interesting result.
JesseIn the same vein, one could ask of Soros what exactly he means by an "Open Society" - fully open to looting operations by speculators or something else? I know (in my completely subjective state of being and thinking) the answer.
Dennis RedmondBrilliant, Lambert.
Thank you.
bangerOne point worth emphasizing: the plutocrats have one critical weakness, and that is the fact that their domination of the political system, as well as their suicidal economic policies, are very much limited to the US and EU. Powerful anti-neoliberal social movements, political uprisings, and developmental states are on the march all across Latin America, northern Africa, Eurasia, East Asia and Southeast Asia. That's a sea change from the early 1990s, when neoliberalism was dominant pretty much everywhere.
from MexicoGood point–there is some limited hope in that direction–but it is in no position to actively oppose the Empire.
banger@Dennis Redmond
This is what I see going on. I perceive neoliberalism as a system in structural crisis. The use of the state's instruments of violence in the United States, deployed against its own people, comes into play as power is being lost, not as a manifestation or demonstration of omnipotent power. Many places in Latin America have already gone through this stage.
The crisis of neoliberalism is far more advanced in Latin America than it is in the United States or Europe. But the people of the US and Europe will eventually learn. It´s just that they are not very far along on the learning curve.
South America is split. Yesterday I was in La Paz, Bolivia. Bolivia, together with Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Uruguay, Ecuador and Brazil, are in open revolt against neoliberalism and the United States. I understand that Peru is now switching from a pro-neoliberalism to an anti-neoliberalism stance. Today I am in Bogota, Columbia. Columbia, along with Chile and Mexico, are still very much in the US/neoliberal camp.
So Latin America, which is the place where neoliberalism was first imposed, is now in the process or rejecting neoliberalism. I see the European periphery being the next place to begin rejecting neoliberalism. This is not an overnight process, however. These things take time.
Church ain't over till the fat lady sings, and in the US and Europe the fat lady isn't even near singing. The transition did not happen anywhere in Latin America without the neoliberal state, always with the backing of the United States, trying to maintain control by violent means. Economic liberalism and state violence go together like Thelma and Louise. Those who think the oligarchy has triumphed and is all-powerful with its instruments of state violence have it all wrong, in my opinion. Again, these things take time and the people must experience neoliberal victimization personally, but change is in the air.
bangerAs I've commented before, the "oligarchs" are really an emergent and networked intelligent system. This system is very complex and much more robust than most critics understand. Our world is radically different than the one we saw develop during the immediate post-WWII era. The intellectual class as a whole has largely failed to understand the new political arragements that have developed. We exist in a world of new entities. Major corporations that are more complex than any Empire that ever existed and grow increasingly complex each year. The web of power now contains its own intelligence – still somewhat vague and tending to resemble the "intelligence" of social insects but infinitely more creative and adaptive.
Part of the problem is that political science has not fully grasped the developments of Systems, Chaos, and Complexity Theory. In part because we still live under the illusion that "individuals" or groups of individual are the main actors in modern life–they're not.
The only novelty about that is it's global dimension, Banger: oligarchs always had their networks, their shadow party behind the formally ruling (managing) ones. And even that is not really that new.
Much more interesting in my understanding is the development in the last decades of parallel network of intelligence (communication among intelligent beings at least) that is not dependent (or almost not) on the oligarchs and their vertical adoctrination systems. Thisphenomenon of the Internet, which is here to stay, can only be paralleled to that of print. Print caused radical changes in our world, and was almost without doubt the seed of the bourgeois revolution, not just political but also intellectual and technological.
This is similar but much bigger and faster and the primary benefitted class is not anymore the bourgeoisie but the social worker. That is the real change that we are experiencing in our lives and whose overall effects only future historians will be able to discern properly.
The other change is negative: it is the "bouncing" at the limits of Planet Earth: the absolute limit of predatory expansion – or "growth", as economists like to call it.
Seen it objectively this means the collapse of the capitalist system because if something we know from Chaos Theory is that total control is impossible. So corporations are not, like any power, so all-powerful, much less too intelligent: they have to obey the laws of physics, biology and Chaos itself. They ride the wave and try to keep their position but every wave ends with a collapse – and that is not something they can impede at all. In the end they are just as exposed to the elements like everyone else.
As the article suggests with a different metaphor: they are reaching the end of the wave and they do not know what to do next. Mostly they do not even want to think at all about it: just keep surfing as they have done all this time and pretend that the wave will last forever.
When a society collapses, revolutions tend to happen, precisely to purge the vices changing the rules and try to prevent a further collapse that way.
Adam NoelReally, what I'm saying is that the oligarchy is becoming a virtual entity. This is a new thing because the world system is so much more complex that at any time in history. This is a single system that encompasses the entire world with a huge population.
What you says, of course makes sense – as individuals they don't want to think about it but they also believe that they, even the most powerful among them has little control over anything – I want to say "it's the system, stupid." Remember, never before has there been a society that even comes close to what we are facing this period of history is unique. We not only have a global economy incredibly interlinked but we have machine intelligence coordinating much of this and it will only increase.
bhikshuniAlthough I generally agree with what you are saying I do not think the oligarchy has become a virtual entity as much as the oligarchy is of sufficient size to ensure crowd dynamics begin to take place (I believe this phenomena could still emerge sans computers, for example). Up until this point in history the oligarchy was not large enough, did not wield enough power and was constrained by geography. The problem now is that a critical threshold has been reached causing a group dynamic to begin to take place.
The anonymity of the oligarchic elite (Due to the sheer size of it) allows the group to function independent of the desires of the group itself. I think crowd psychology has finally reached the level of the elites when before it was only controlling the crowds. The result is a sort of dilemma where even if the elites want to act in the interest of the people they will likely just lose their power if they acted. The only way to dissolve the system would be for all of them to act in unison but the chance of them all acting is practically zero.
bangerThat explains Soros's so-called (conveniently self-serving) reluctance to donate to non-profits he thinks won't use the donation to his satisfaction.
Chris EngelExactly, whether you call it "crowd dynamics" or a virtual entity it has, in some sense, a life of its own. I suggest that it is and will move beyond that into the realm of artificial life. Hopefully this life form will be less craven than it members–I think this is a possibility.
impermanenceStunning words.
I think the news from Sachs and the continued noise from Buffett and Soros are evidence of his point.
Exciting times to live in, I just hope my at-will contract doesn't get cancelled abruptly in the mess :>
DolleyMadisonAs long as people want something for nothing, the Elite are more than happy to throw a low-cost crumb our way every now and again [and make us pay for it!].
Additionally, people will do ALMOST anything to get out of having to take responsibility for their own lives.
Add these two factors and you have a history of modern first-world human civilisation.
MurkyWith intellectuals on both sides of the aisle sounding the alarm, yet NO ONE is stepping up to stop the carnage, you gotta wonder what its gonna take. On HuffPo, David Stockman offers a sweeping, revisionist account of US economic history, refuting myths about the Reagan years and the demise of the Soviet Union, the growth of the warfare state, and how the Fed enriches the powerful and shelters them from free markets. Above all, he shows that blaming our economic problems on "capitalism" is preposterous, and lacks an understanding of how the economy has been deformed and destroyed by crony capitalism. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-stockman/days-of-crony-capitalist-_b_3039943.html?goback=.gde_2654557_member_234160783
craazymanStockman has recently published a book titled, The Great Deformation: the Corruption of Capitalism in America. Runs 700 pages, but the pages turn fast as it's packed with characterizations of Wall Street CEOs, US government cronies, and juicy stories of how Wall Street turned the American economy into a casino. I'm only into it 100 pages, but already Stockman has completely demolished the myth that the TARP bailout had to be done. Remember the stories of how the banking system would shut down, ATMs would go dark, medicine and food wouldn't be delivered to cities, and that and social catastrophe of a Great Depression would hit in full force? Complete nonsense. The carnage would have been confined to the canyons of Wall Street, the big investment banks would have all gone bust, and the rot of the American banking system would have been cleaned out in one fell swoop. It's a good read! For anybody interested in Stockman's views that doesn't' have time for a thick book, there is a recently posted video on Youtube, only 53 short minutes, in which Stockman makes most of his points quite clearly.
Lambert Strether#Who's the elite anyway?
Are these just people with lots of money? What about Brittany Spears and Lady Gaga? Are they elite? What about Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens? or Bruce Springsteen? or even Rachel Ray the TV cooking queen?
Ever notice there's no protest music these days? What? Did they forget how to play a guitar?
What about the baseball players? Are they elite? And what about some dude from the projects that gets a job in the mailroom on Wall Street and now makes 100 million a year? Are they elite? You can't do that anymore because the elite run things now and they'd never let a mailroom guy do anything. Yes, they probably are elite.
What about a congressperson or senator? Are they elite? Maybe not yet, while they're bending over taking elite sausage in the mouth. Maybe they'll never be elite or maybe they will be.
What about the president? He doesn't seem very elite to me. He seems like . . . I don't know what he seems like. A bad dream maybe. Or something that you'd make up if you were living on another planet writing science fiction about strange worlds in the sky where life is confused. At any rate, he doesn't seem elite to me.
The people who seem like they could be part of the elite are mostly hungry animals bent on stuffing themselves so full of money they expand like a corpse in the sun. They're bruised red and purple with money and their eyes are vacant sockets picked clean and dry and their mouth is a rubber hole locked in an "Oh" expression.
That's what they seem like to me. A color photograph from a war zone. Something that a German expressionist painter would draw with a black background and lots of dark reds and blues and purples. Although I admit that's kind of a cartoon. It's hard to see somebody like that as "elite". but I suppose they are.
I live in a cheap rental apartment but next to me are townhouses worth millions. I wonder if the folks who live there are elite. It's hard to say. I walk by them to the bus and they come and go with their kids. I don't notice them at all. I couldn't care less. Maybe they're elite. But they don't seem like it. They just seem like folks going to work and kids running out the door screaming. maybe at night they turn into reptilians. anything is possible.
I frankly don't think there are any elite except a few money bag CEOs, a few dozen lobbyists and a few lawyers. It's amazing how few of them there are, and how much trouble they cause. They only cause so much trouble 'cause people follow them around and do what they say. That's the problem. Everything else is just people's imaginations but it's a big "just".
PAUL TIOXONI believe that wealth distribution follows a power law (and not a bell curve). So, yes, a very very few at the tip top of the power curve, a steep decline, and then a huge honking long tail.
"It's amazing how few of them there are, and how much trouble they cause." Exactly. Ursula LeGuin: "There are not very many of the Shing."
Lambert Stretherhttp://www.sussex.ac.uk/ir/research/gpe/gpesurvey/
Chapter 9: Page 22 Interlocking directorships circa 2009.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535108/
I think you are going to see a lot more than protest songs. It's all cracking up and everyone knows it.
Financialization is the liquidation of the social order in order to transfer power to what ever comes next.
Paul TioxonPaul T: That's more or less what Arrighi says.
Ms GI Wallerstein, Giovanni's good friend and associate, is seen in the following 2 vids at the March 20 2013 Moscow Economic Forum.
The first talk is a very brief overview with the headline, World in Great Depression, unemployment all over the world bad and getting worse. If that isn't bad enough, he speaks in roomful of people who seem there for him. Capitalist want their money back in 3 years and if they can't they don't invest. Hence, liquidation and hold.
The USA is done as hegemon and no one is ready to fill the breach, including the competing currencies. Hence, the uncertainty in investment decisions leads to liquidity preference. What happens when every one is liquid but some decide that only one currency will be recognized? The anxiety spills out to society at large while the Titanic passengers stair at one another admiringly as the their piles of cash in ill fated currency go down to DAvey Jones' locker.
Then, May 1st can be talk like a pirate day for everyone looting in the streets!
JEHR"I live in a cheap rental apartment [in New York City]."
It is much easier not to be bothered by the wealthy when one has secure and affordable shelter in one's root (physical) community. Which is another way of saying I'm jealous :)
Andrew WattsFor me, the elite have a combination of money and power that they use for increasing their money and power in an ever-expanding cycle. Those are the elite and anyone can join that wants both money and power.
Andrew WattsI believe there is a faction of the upper class (as they like to style themselves) who looked at Occupy Wall Street and other activists groups with the attitude "So, how do we get out of this?". Far from being openly hostile to these groups they viewed them as a source of direction or vision.
The World War(s) and the Great Depression shattered the confidence in the leadership skills of the old Anglo-Saxon Establishment. This led to the rise of the technocratic class. In the present I have no doubt that faith in the technocrats has already begun to wane. The only question that remains is who is going to provide the necessary leadership and subsequent policies that will guide the country.
Timothy Gawne(Continued, partly in response to banger)
Our corporations are modeled after and still resemble a military organization. In terms of it's hierarchy and corporate organization there is no fundamental difference. The military discipline in which corporate goals have been pursued over the years partly explains the success it's achieved. The lack of organized opposition explains the rest.
The success of Ralph Nader, and his Nader's raiders should demonstrate what even a small group of organized activists can do to undermine Corporate America.
The American oligarchy is just as decentralized as most believe it to be. However there is no dominating intelligence guiding it. Considering that not all of the oligarchs share similar goals or even moral values. It would be a grave mistake in judgment to equate the likes of the Koch brothers with George Soros. The important thing to remember about the organization of the American oligarchs is that they exercise their power through connections. The base relationship is family. This power-relationship extends to business associates and from the personal level to the institutional level.
The oligarchy isn't like the Matrix. It is neither as complex or omnipotent as people might think.
steelhead23Ahh,
Such a pleasure after the pablum of the New York Times or CNN.
You know, the rich really aren't that smart. What they are is totally shameless and oblivious.
The rich of the classical Roman empire drove their society into the ground. Some perished (Emperor Valens, anyone?) But most did great, they stole everything not nailed own and shifted it to the gated community of Constantiople, where they lived in luxury for over 1000 years. I wonder if the American rich are going to find a new Constantinople in time?
TG
nobodyWhat are we going to do about it, indeed. There is much to this question that deserves analysis. WE have institutions that are supposed to prevent or ameliorate the economic damage being foisted on us by the antics of the rentiers. Yet, as clearly presented on these pages, the rentiers have corrupted the institutions we counted on to keep them in check. If institutional control has faiied, delegitimating the government, what exactly are WE to do?
A Real Black PersonWe should stop thinking about the problem at the level of the "institutions that are supposed to prevent or ameliorate the economic damage," and instead realize that nearly *all* of the institutions are in states of crisis, failure, or major malfunction.
We need to transform all of the institutions that are vital or salvageable from within, and create new institutions to replace those that have become irredeemably pathological or predatory.
And there need to be some fundamental shifts of ethos, attitude, and consciousness: from hyper-efficiency and over-optimization to resilience, from competition to cooperation, from ego-supremacism to relative interpersonal egalitarianism, from status-seeking to mutually respectful, from burning the seed corn to storing up for seven years of lean.
nobodyCentralization and concentration of resources are features of highly complex societies. Does it really matter as to whether it is a self-appointed elite or an elite that arises from free market competition that hold an increasing share of power? Would left-leaning academic elites do a better job of running societies than right-leaning capitalists?
Is anyone familiar with the book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph Tainter?
A Real Black PersonYes, Tainter has been mentioned here and it would seem that at least several of the regular commenters are familiar.
No, left-leaning academic elites are probably not likelier to do a better job of running societies than right-leaning capitalists, or at least not sufficiently better.
But most people are of neither the 0.01% power elite, nor the 0.01% academic elite.
Societies would be better run if the people who do the real work and the people who are deprived of the opportunity of meaningful work (or any work at all) had a meaningful say in the running of them.
The issue of power is central, regardless of the right/left sometimes blurry division. As the bureaucratic elites of the USSR demonstrated (among other many possible examples), ideology alone guarantees nothing.
Power resides on the ability to organize, which can be under formal public control (left or socialism) or under that of private actors (right or capitalism). In any case it always need additional elements like bureaucracy and armed forces of some sort, be them public, private or mixed.
Putting the economy formally in the hands of the public is an element of democratization but alone is clearly not enough, same for political structures, etc. All must be ideally in the hands of the public, what implies a radical democratization at all levels, with full guarantees for the people to exert control on managers, be them political, economical or of whatever kind: inept, corrupt or simply liar managers must be revocable with immediate effect, power in general must be decentralized, so people can exert a more direct influence on it at their local level and, through that local level, as well as directly through the global intercommunication networks, on other higher levels of power.
This is extremely challenging, of course, but what else can we do that works in a planet pushed to the limits?
Democracy at all levels, also economic, mediatic (social property) and certainly much more radical in the political aspect than what formal delegation systems allow for, is necessary not just for ethical or ideological reason (that also) but because of feedback and realism reasons. Only those on the ground, locally, at a productive task, etc. can inform the system of what works and what does not. Bureucratization (~corporatization) of some level may be unavoidable but this must be controlled from the grassroots in almost real time, what modern technologies do allow for.
This issue of power, of democracy, is central to our civilizational challenge.
A Real Black PersonApril 24, 2013 at 12:36 pm
No, it's not. Let me tell you why. In urbanized societies with large populations, what if too many people want to enjoy a certain amount of something and there isn't enough of it to go around? Democracy has not really solved this problem…because different groups fight for asymmetric power and control. This is why you don't see democracies in very poor countries. People vote based on religious affinity, ethnicity, and social class and they frequently vote to diminish the rights of other people, especially if they believe if they are right. For example, Sunnis will vote for more water to go to more Sunnis, a disproportionate amount of that water will go to a small elite of wealthy and politically connected Sunnis, while the rest will go the other Sunnis. Poor Sunnis will get the least. Social hierarchy and a pecking orders have been recurring solutions to distribute resources and among large groups of people that humans living in civilizations have come up with. Equitable distribution of resources are in only possible and sustainable in rural populations of closely-knit homogeneous people. It's technically possible at large scale, possible but the whole aversion to helping those who people perceive as too different from them, kicks in.
In large urban areas where people frequently interact with strangers, who may look different and have different values, equitable distribution of resources has no appeal.
I understand that your criticism is to this formality of pseudo-democracy in which the bourgeois class always keep power because they control the economy (in the past they were also the only ones allowed to vote but they had to make concesions). A real democracy cannot allow the economy to be out from the control of the people as collective entity as it is now.
Another element you mention and that seems central to your reasoning is communitarianism, which is a complex matter of course. However I see absolutely no reason why sunnis and shias, blacks and whites, men and women, gay and straight, religious and atheists, or whatever other differential identies, cannot freely discuss their differences as individuals who live in the same neighborhood or work in the same factory (and therefore have shared interests). Unless power structures coerce them to behave differently, in which case the problem are those power structures, for example religious sects with economic and other power interests in which people (shia, sunni and whatever else alike) are just brainwashed pawns for their power games.
Naturally the solution goes through dilution of such differences (and it may require direct confrontation of the communist-democratic camp with the religious hierarchies or whatever other bloodsucking structure like banks or whatever). Nobody said that freedom and dignity was easy to achieve. But it is necessary.
A Real Black PersonApril 24, 2013 at 6:07 pm
What you fail to understand is that you want to continue fighting an uphill battle against human behavior. We are NOT capable of putting our differences aside in any meaningful capacity. As long as there is social hierarchy, it will be impossible for everyone to have freedom and dignity. As long as there are people who pine for a homogeneous tribal existence, where everyone who participates in a society adheres to the same set of core beliefs, there will be tendency to treat people who refuse to or can't fit into this ideal homogeneous society like @#$#@$. Ask teenage kid. There's no better feeling in the world than the feeling of fitting in. There's no worse feeling in the world then not fitting in. To drive home my point, I'm going to quote a recent post on NC.
From : Michael T. Klare: Entering a Resource-Shock World: How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion;
Thorstein says: April 22, 2013 at 8:08 am
"…You see, when I was a child, back in the 50s, I could vote twenty times and more: my parents voted for me, both my maternal and paternal grandparents voted for me, as did my maternal and paternal aunts and uncles. We all lived in the same Congressional District.
That's no longer true in the U.S. and it's increasingly not true of other "first world" countries. My children's aunts and uncles all live in other jurisdictions, where they resent paying taxes for other people's children's schooling. The servers who wait on them in restaurants are not their second cousins. They leave small tips.
Since the 60′s, we've been trying to build communities of strangers, and it's not been working very well. Boomers aren't directly to blame, but we were present at the scene of the crime."
It won't be possible and people in general are very reasonable. Rationing works well as long as it is fair.
April 24, 2013 at 12:07 pm
What you are actually suggesting, is suggesting less complexity. If you are suggesting less complexity, you are suggesting for less civilization. It's the layers of middle men and rent-seekers that deprive the common person of their own personal agency. The layers of middle men and rent seekers are also key features of civilization, of complex societies increased divisions of labor, means that large groups of people become dependent on other large groups of people to do more of what they used to do by themselves. As a group of people become wealthier they outsource as much work as possible to other people or machines. When an affluent married couple with children can outsource all the cultivation of food, clothing, housework and child-rearing to nannies and maids, they can focus on philanthropy, the arts and science.
Work was never about meaning, it was about subsistence. Historically, the idea of work having meaning was only for a small number of people who were able to do intellectually stimulating work for the rulers.
What people are actually complaining on across the political spectrum , without them realizing it, are the fruits of civilization.
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June 09, 2013 | Slashdot
tmosley
Re: NSA spied more than China ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct. Obama is merely continuing and expanding on Bush's policies (while simultaneously blaming him for the resulting effects). McCain would have done the same, perhaps more, perhaps less. This is a farce unlike any seen on this planet for more than a thousand years.
Spoiler alert: It ends badly.
The only way to end without losing everything to hyperinflation and confiscation by the police state is to vote third party. ANY third party. Honestly, even the Socialist Party would be better than this. At least they wouldn't cloak their socialism or national socialism in the guise of capitalism.
bill_mcgonigle
Re: NSA spied more than China ? (Score:5, Informative)
The only way to end without losing everything to hyperinflation and confiscation by the police state is to vote third party
And because of Duverger's Law [wikipedia.org] the only way for that to happen is to get Approval Voting [indiegogo.com]* implemented.
But the odds of that happening in time, against the hegemony, are asymptotic to zero. Since the last time it happened the two big parties have spent more than a century and a half ensconcing their rule in law.
* or more other more-difficult-to-understand-and-implement Condorcet method
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June 06, 2013 | Economist's View
The end of an era?:
Persuasion, Great and Intimate, by David Warsh: ...The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression by Angus Burgin, of Johns Hopkins University ... is the latest of a lengthening shelf of books by intellectual historians that seek to explain the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 in terms of the influence of ideas or money or both.To most of those writing the narrative of American politics in the 1970s, the enthusiasm for markets and reduced government that accompanied "the Reagan revolution" (or, earlier, the deregulation of transportation, under Jimmy Carter, or finance, under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford), seemed to come out of nowhere. They were expecting, per Keynes and Schumpeter, "the end of laissez-faire."
The Blorch said in reply to Lafayette...
I think that in a Democracy politicians compete with other politicians for office. Obvious enough but now consider that holding office allows the politician to do favors for the groups of lobbyists who contributed to the campaign. So, really politicians compete to do favors for the donors.
At the same time a politician helps the donors, the favors he dispenses may come at the expense of the general welfare of the people. For example, allowing monopolies and price gauging in household internet delivery by the cable companies. Or, say, allowing the insurance industry to write a health care bill.
So a politician in a democracy must juggle keeping two balls in the air. He/she must administer to a declining general welfare while continuing to please their donors.
Moving on from the juggling metaphor, it is efficient for the politician to kill two birds with one stone: a twofor, if you will. In this scenario, the clever politician promotes a policy that is pleasing to many but really, only benefits the few donors that fund the campaigns.
Take the housing debacle, for example. Many were pleased to get a mortgages and refies. A few benefited in the end and these few were naturally amply represented by lobbyists.
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naked capitalism
I keep going back to Jeffrey Sachs, with whom Flassbeck and Jay (and Soros) seem to agree:
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, thank you very much for saying it and practicing it. I do believe – by the way, I'm just going to end here because I've been told I have to run to the U.N. in fact right now – I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structures need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I'm going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I'm talking about the human interactions that I have. I've not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can't find its voice. It's terrified of these companies.
If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I'm afraid to say, and no party is – I mean there's – if not both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn't have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it's led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now, and it's very, very unhealthy.
I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language, and I've not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won't, I've waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn't happened. And by the way it's not going to happen anytime soon it seems.
mansoor h khan:
Skippy,
Throughout history elites in all societies have always worked to preserve and maintain social stability. They know war and chaos is very risky and will probably end their good life eventually.
Are our elites that stupid? Why would they not have some balance in society to avert war and chaos?
more at:
http://aquinums-razor.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-banking-system-and-economic-growth.html
mansoor h. khan
JGordon:
May 19, 2013 at 10:30 am
We have elites which support Monstanto and nuclear power, things that have the potential of wiping out all life on earth, including that of the elites?
The obvious answer of course is that they are not stupid, but psychotic. If you look at it from that perspective, then everything the elites do makes perfect sense.
Nathanael:
May 20, 2013 at 12:59 am
Psychopathic, techincally.
They are incapable of being afraid of long-term consequences, due to a mental defect.
Susan the other:
I've been reading American History and last nite I read about the infamous Haymarket Riot in Chicago in the 1880s. And the tragedy that ensued and the indelible mark it left on our social conscience. I firmly believe that sort of resentment lives in our collective social conscience for literally hundreds of years. And then I realized I didn't understand the nexus between unions and socialism.
The trajectory from serfs to guilds to "combinations" to associations to syndicates to parties to unions. I do not understand why that last step to socialism and guaranteed labor similar to the European experiment didn't occur here. And now we are bent on destroying the unions once and for all and the new scheme of the corporations is to import labor for specific jobs regardless of how desperate our own population, especially our college grads, are for work. I agree with the point where this interview left off – it is a question of functional government. But when corporations control government, as they have here for over 100 years with increasing power, the government itself doesn't know what else to do. Look how Obama pandered to the unions just to win reelection and then unceremoniously dumped them.
Julian Dennis:
No they have not. Certainly they have always had unfair advantage, but during the Jackson administration there was pushback. More recently after the crash of the thirties regulations and social spending led to a less unequal division, not perfect but better.
The difference however in both of those cases was a President was behind the pushback. Ah wouldn't be nice to have one who at least a little bit on our side.
nonclassical:
"But in the end, they cannot succeed with that. They can only succeed with a flourishing economy, and you can make money in the long term only if the economy is growing sufficiently quick." ……………
..obviously unaware of "Shock Doctrine-Rise of Disaster Capitalism", performed upon South-Central American nations, 70′s, 80′s…(and related war crimes, by Friedmanite-"Chicago Boys" war criminals)…
..have we already forgotten HW telling "W" he didn't take out Saddam, as it would DESTABILIZE the entire Middle-East?? Does anyone believe DEstabilization was not the Cheney-"W"-bushit GOAL??
"Civilization" be damned…mother earth takes no prisoners…historical documentation (Kevin Phillips-"American Dynasty"-"American Theocracy") shows what happens when manufacturing based economies DEvolve into "financial services"=paper debt economies…and Phillips was Nixon acolyte..
Timothy Y. Fong
May 19, 2013
"But the political economy is as much like a family as government is like a household. Is there a way forward here? Readers?" The problem is pretty simple. American elites seem to believe that the US is immune to the cycle of nations. They simply cannot grasp the potential negative outcomes. That is, if things go really wrong, some oligarchs and their retainers (both public and private) will find themselves torn apart by angry crowds, or pursued to the ends of the earth by a new revolutionary government.
The denial falls into two categories. The first, and most common, is a belief that "democracy" and the Constitution mean that things can never fall apart. This is a common belief amongst attorneys and other working professionals.
I find this view to be especially ironic when expressed by relatively conservative Christians, since one of the basic tenants of Christianity is that human beings are fundamentally fallen and imperfect. Apparently, however, that doesn't apply to Americans, which again, makes no sense, seeing as the Bible does not mention the United States anywhere. Then again, it does make sense, as a friend of mine in the clergy has observed that some of his most rabidly conservative congregants have never actually read the Bible.
Professionals of course, generally have to make it through the filtering system of higher education in the United States, which means buying into the reigning political orthodoxy. Incidentally, that recent survey about American attitudes toward armed rebellion seemed to show that the more education someone had, the less likely they were to believe that armed rebellion would be necessary in the coming years.
The second view, which I suspect is in play amongst the pathological elite mentioned by Sachs, is the belief that they can buy protection. Call it the "high walls and trustworthy details" philosophy. I can see how a person could believe that if they live in a walled community (or co-op with a doorman), and have a trustworthy security detail, they can avoid any consequences for their actions. Security details can be either wholly private, or simply off duty police officers. Indeed, in a place like NYC, the police can be ordered (paid) to bust the heads of any pesky protesters.
In that light, Mayor Bloomberg's campaign to more strictly control firearms makes perfect sense. The truly worthy….err…wealthy, will always be able to hire off duty armed police officers (pistols politely concealed) as bodyguards. Removing firearms from the hands of everyone else is a nice insurance policy. I understand that the dogma around here is that firearms and violence are ineffective nowadays in political struggles, but, I'm sorry, the fundamental drives of humans don't change, no matter how much we'd like to think otherwise. Bloomberg won't get his way outside of the Northeast. There are simply too many firearms in circulation, and any effective action to seize them would probably precipitate a civil war– at least secession, if not a split amongst security service personnel.
Ian Welsh had a very good interview the other day where he mentioned that if things go wrong, it will be very ugly, and a lot of innocent people will get hurt. That is true, and it is a measure of how depraved and foolish our elites are that they are risking that turn of events.
This is going to sound somewhat harsh, but perhaps what our society really needs is an extremely ugly lesson in the unintended consequences that can happen when a few people decide to take all the wealth and oppress the shit out of everyone else. That would be a decisive end to the ridiculous nonsense about how "it can't happen here because we have democracy." If that happens, and we survive, somehow, we should take a cue from the Japanese and their tsunami markers. After a tsunami, people mark the safe areas, and the areas where the water came up to. In some cases the markers are centuries old, a warning for the future. We should put up markers to remind everyone of the consequences of acting like short sighted sociopaths. Sociopaths may not feel empathy, but they certainly have an instinct for self preservation– and future sociopathic elites (let's not kid ourselves– they'll be back) should have a dire reminder of the lethal consequences of overreach.
jake chase:
I am afraid you are being romantic and melodramatic in your expectations. What is more likely is that the middle class will move seamlessly into customer service at Walmart and other oases of putrid consumerism.
Americans to the end will be passive consumers of vapid entertainment and disgusting fast food and carbonated sugar water. Look at the amazing number who still smoke cigarettes and gamble at casinos and horsetracks, not to mention bookmakers.
Our individualism may be carcinogenic and idiotic but it is deeply inbred.
Generalfeldmarschall Von Hindenbur:
I wish I could say jake is wrong. Things here will have to devolve to the level of the Latin American latifundia with the descendants of today's "middle class" (working class is a forbidden term) living in favelas and being hunted for sport by the children of the elites before they pull their head out and disabuse themselves of this Horatio Alger/Ayn Rand mythology that anyone can be rich through prayer and hard work.
banger:
Nations don't matter–we live in an emergent international Empire with an emergent imperial court and a virtual Emperor.
I don' believe this country is a Constitutional democracy on the federal level. The two Party system doesn't work anymore because the power-elite has gamed the system.
The genius act the oligarchs used was to create an Orwellian state of permanent war which actually suspends the Constitution which is in place only at the pleasure of the power-elite. Boston showed what can happen should anything that looks like "terrorism" occur.
Washington is the main global imperial court and all who work there are all part of it. There is no difference between government officials, politicians and journalists other than the fact they represent somewhat different interests.
Great comment on education and how it vets the elite–that's why universities turn out little scared clones today.
I think armed rebellion is unlikey but I'm thankful to be living in the South nonetheless
Julian Dennis:
Yes let's go for it! Would anybody like to join my new religious movement 'Hang a Banker for Christ.' If you won't do it for yourself, if you won't do it for your loved ones, if you won't do it for that stranger in need, then do it for the Lord!
Virmont:
To paraphrase George Carlin: Where do you think these "pathological elites" come from? Mars?
Parasites as "pathological" as the American ones could only survive on a certain type of host: a people of proud ignorance and infinite obedience.
What you call an infection (a Lenin o a Mao Tse-Tung) would actually require a population with many redeeming qualities. America, on the other hand, is the same old opportunist genocider it started out as, it just goes into hibernation for awhile, dormant like a retrovirus.
Americans would sooner idolize the pus-filled sac while calling to lay waste to the nearest defenseless minority.
sd:
I have the unfortunate history of having had too much experience with sociopaths, starting first and foremost with a parent who with the exception of murder (at least that I know of) meets all but one of the criteria of a textbook sociopath.
The sociopaths have gained control of the world. They care only of themselves. They are sadistic. They enjoy and receive pleasure from the suffering of others. So far, the only way I have found to counter such behavior is through the acts of creation and generosity. Art, music, dance, smithing, carving, cooking, sewing, knitting, weaving, gardening, any activity that leads to creation is the antithesis of the destruction. The act of giving freely is the antidote to greed.
So look around and say, what can I do myself? The very act of making your own bread and sharing it with others is the anarchy we so desperately need today.
jake chase:
Lambert, on this one I agree with you. I have been saying this for five years and wrote a novel about it in 2008 in which I more or less anticipated everything which has since happened despite having no expert knowledge of CDOs or CDSs either.
It is perfectly obvious that our elite and its toadying supporting class of professionals, academics and journalists care about nothing except their own profligate engorgement. Consequences to others be damned. It is worse now in America than it was in France before the Revolution. These MFs know they are personally invulnerable because they control all political decisions. The difference between fifteen million unemployed and fifty million unemployed is at worst inconsequential and at best positive for them. They view the destruction of the middle class as a plus. They have seen Mexico (on vacation, of course) and they prefer that kind of wealth distribution. Inasmuch as they live only in the air (airplanes and tall buildings) and on the coastal beaches, their physical concerns are accordingly limited and biased.
What continually amazes me is why anybody in the country listens to anything they ever say?
Jim Haygood:
'Inasmuch as they live only in the air (airplanes and tall buildings) …'
… a lifestyle melding captured by the buzzphrase 'helicopter views' which graces this weekend's Times-Titanic property advertorial:
High-end projects in Manhattan … are proving so profitable that they are warping the local real-estate market, making it more difficult to put up more-affordable housing.
The luxury building trend is driving up the overall cost of land in the city. Several developers maintained that they could build moderately priced housing only if they could get significant tax breaks.
"There are only two markets, ultraluxury and subsidized housing," said Rafael Vińoly, the architect who designed the [84-story residential] tower on Park Avenue at 56th Street, which is called 432 Park.
Presumably 'subsidized housing' includes prisons, where more than a couple of million americanos live.
Hope them luxury towers have they own generators. Eighty-four floors is a long way to climb in a blackout.
Serfs up, comrades!
Susan the other :
Reading Aesop's Fables is always encouraging because all those tales try to caution against greed by using an interesting truth. Which is as Lincoln told us "…. but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And once trust is lost it is never recovered. It is always changed. Trust is a good example of evolution. It isn't a static thing. Just remember your parents, if you are old enough, who lived through the 30s and never trusted the banks or the stock market again and were extremely skeptical of real estate. That distrust ran so deep and was partially passed on to our generation that it created a condition whereby the Finance Industry had to think up all sorts of tricks to lure us back in. Which they did. But they regret it as much as we do. All this mess because corporations are trying hard not to pay livable wages. Sad and foolish.
Another Gordon:
Very like the French Revolution.
About a year ago I saw a BBC program about Versailles and the decades running up to the French Revolution and it was spookily like the situation in the US today. The government was perenially short of revenues – partly because of wars, but mainly because of a system which taxed only the poor (who, naturally couldn't pay much) while exempting the aristocracy who repeatedly used their political power to block any move to tax their vast wealth. In the end they paid with their heads while Britain won the struggle for colonial supremacy.
Those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.
Cletus:
jake chase:
"What continually amazes me is why anybody in the country listens to anything they ever say?"
It seems that you have nailed the crux of the problem.
On one hand, we have the relatively small group of sociopaths who control the entire system - practicing their brand of sadism. On the other hand, we have the teeming middle class made up of both sycophant/inept sociopaths and willfully ignorant, self-hating masochists.
I'm actually beginning to believe there's something in our water supply that causes the majority of people to be docile. Any other generation of people at any other time in history would have seen this for what it is, by now, and would have put an end to it, one way or the other.
Then again, maybe not. Rome went on for a long time as a war-mongering kleptocracy governed by sociopaths
AbyNormal:
12 Million Americans Are Sociopaths
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/08/as-many-as-12-million-americans-are-sociopaths.html
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. d.h.lawrence
Hugh:
It's interesting to see how people dance around the concepts of kleptocracy, class war, and wealth inequality. Apply these to the interview above and all the surprise and incomprehension melt away.
Flassbeck says "What we have is the systemic malfunctioning of the system, system malfunctioning of the labor market, systemic malfunctioning of the financial markets." This seems to me like a half statement. The system is indeed malfunctioning, as in not serving the interests of the 99%, but as an engine of looting and suppression of the 99% by the 1%, it is working just fine. The rich and elites may be evil and/or stupid but mostly they are criminal.
They are not irrational. They will loot to a crash and then loot the crash. They will keep doing this until there is nothing left or they are overthrown. This is the essence of kleptocracy. It is the real system we have, and it is functioning exactly as intended.
Brooklin Bridge:
... ... ...
Moreover, much of the discussion in the comments is more interesting than in the post in that commenters question the why of the middle class and others as well as of the 1%. Why indeed do we – or so many of us – go along with this broken, or criminal, system? I'm not sure Lambert means it that way (applying to both the 1% AND the 99%) when he calls it, "the eternal question", but since both sides of a pathological relationship (the abusors and the abusees) are important if there is to be such a relationship at all, it IS pertinent. Finally, I assume like objects, a system taken alone can't be criminal or evil. Those qualities are imbued by the people who inhabit and use or are used by the system.
I'm not arguing your points, except perhaps the implication that, it's simple, (or easily understandable) "[if one applies the] concepts of kleptocracy, class war, and wealth inequality." Those may indeed be useful concepts with which to look at it, but even then IT is still not simple or easily cleared up to understanding regardless of the tools you bring to bear or of which side of the abuse one examines or both.
Moneta:
We go to university to be part of the elite. And many who don't go still think they can realize the American dream if they work a little harder. People want to believe they will be part of the winners.
As long is this hope stays alive, nothing will change.
Eureka Springs:
When our nation is led not by bleeding heart liberals but led by humanitarian bombing, eating heart liberals… the system is indeed entirely corrupt. It's way past time to demand self-examination of each and every one in society as much as playing the blame game.
We need very simple bullet point lists which describe the problems rather than posts like this which would bore the hell out of at least 85 percent of those who need to be included in revolt.
We need rule of law at the top. FIRE and war crimes being at the top of the list, followed closely by the abuse of the secret and police apparatus. We need the ability to publicly assemble without threat of arrest, tear gassing, usurpation of assemblies by the police state etc. We need to end the bribe based political and electoral system. No negotiation, no half measures such as what move to amend suggested. We need more direct democracy such as the ability to amend by referendum rather than relying on the corrupt system to represent. We need SOLIDARITY, general strikes. Until public assembly can be conducted safely. solidarity strikes can and should be conducted in other ways… such as millions of people shutting off their breaker switch at the pole for a day at a time. We need to understand and admit how the 99 percent are culpable/enable the systemic corruption mentioned in the post and how to stop it or at least minimize – delegitimate.
banger:
I don't think there's any simple way to deal with our situation. We are dealing here with issues that go beyond anything human beings have ever faced.
At the deepest level we each face a choice between moving towards connection or towards radical alienation. We have to choose between fear or love and most, today, chose fear. Out of that choice our toxic elites rise and no amount of laws will change anything. Solidarity, which you rightly post about here, is essential but it can only occur out of love and connection with others that's why, despite the obvious evil of our elites we do nothing–because we are separated and alone–we believe human beings are first "individuals" who are "independent" that's total fiction–we are individual and important but within the context of larger wholes whether it's nature or our neighborhood.
I mean we have our work cut out for us but it is, believe it or not, an "inner" work that consists of dropping the fear, the anxiety, the alienation (that is programmed into us by the evil elites for their benefit) and opening our hearts fearlessly even if they are broken every day. If we can each do that it will create huge winds that will blow the whole house of cards down–because the system exists only because we allow it exist as reflecting our inner states.
anon y'mouse:
average American doesn't need bullet point lists. he's already been influenced by the think tanks and propaganda-meisters against such things, and has made up his mind. besides, if -I- can read and understand this post, then so can (s)he.
the truth is, as long as the play well tomorrow and give good water-cooler chitchat, they don't care.
i'm all for a good general strike. hard to ask people who NEED a paycheck because they are one away from homelessness to participate, though. I honestly believe most are in Diffusion of Responsibility and Pluralistic Ignorance mode, and simply hope that they can afford to fix the broken water heater and replace the roof next before next year's rainy season. those are large enough problems without solving the government, climate change or world overpopulation.
keep 'em scrambling for scraps (and crawling over each other for them) and they'll never have time to challenge the powers-that-be.
MaroonBulldog:
See "Republic, Lost" by Lawrence Lessig. Compare "A Capitalism for the People" by Luigi Zingales. Leftish Lessig and Libertarian Zingales have basically the same criticism of the current lobby-election finance-regulatory capture crony corruption system, which stifles the goals of the left and the right at once. That's why left and right both dislike President Obama. The right sees him as a bolshevik, the left sees him as a menshevik. He's neither a bolshevik nor a menshevik really. He's just the current leader of the corruption system.
Bruce Wilder:
We are doomed.
If the closest thing you can realistically come to hope, is hope for a system collapse - that's pretty hopeless. But, I think that's what realism gets you.
The big mistake of 2008 was letting people like Bernanke define policy in terms of preserving a dysfunctional system. Everywhere, and all the way down to the suburbs and exurbs, our collective "vision" is preserving a system that no longer works, that hasn't worked well in a long time.
The pathology of the elite at the tippy top is matched by detachment and denial at the bottom. "You can't cheat an honest man," my father advised. The conman depends on both the trust and the greedy dishonesty of the mark, especially the greedy dishonesty. Our desire for hope, our insistence on hope, is being used to get support for preservation-ism. Because the alternative - the realistic alternative - is "hope" for system collapse.
The outsized share of income going to the top 1% can only be generated by disinvestment. You can see it in the numerous nonprofits being driven into the ground, trying to pay big bucks to their executives; this is the end-game. The political economy is being consumed from the bottom-up, to maintain "prosperity" at the very top.
It cannot go on indefinitely. Eventually, the stock of capital runs out. The infrastructure ages into obsolescence. The social insurance is gone. The electricity fails more and more frequently. There are more and more people, who can find no jobs because there are no jobs; the capital stock for those jobs has been liquidated to fund the fortunes of the 1%.
We are descending an uneven stairs. In 2008, we stepped down quite far. About 5% of jobs disappeared completely in the U.S., leaving that much of the labor force unemployable. Oddly, the crises in Europe and China are putting off the day of reckoning in the U.S. Financialization in the U.S. depends on Europe and China not having fully functional currencies and financial systems. So, the U.S. will be able to paper over its unsolved problems, while they continue to get worse, and the economy is eaten away from the bottom-up.
When Europe and China begin to recover, or stabilize, the U.S. will face another step-down - a big one, a drop off the cliff. But, that's a year or three or five away.
scraping_by:
[The eternal question: Are the elites stupid and/or evil? --lambert]
The eternal answer – those aren't mutually exclusive.
Indeed, the more mathematically inclined among us could work up Venn diagrams with two variables, a function between stupid and evil. Very few 100% stupid. Very few 100% evil.
Or perhaps they're additive. Stupid people with evil motives, and/or evil people who do stupid things. You'd need an objective scale that measures both stupid and evil on an equivalent basis so you could total the stupid/evil content.
Or, if your taste is higher math, you'd derive the change in stupidity as evil consequences took over, leading to stupid arguments to justify evil actions. The total stupid/evil could be integrated in two variables.
Given the mainstream economics custom of trying to reduce reality to higher math, I'm surprised there isn't much more work done in this fertile field.
Nathanael:
Don: because, usually, only the government can successfully print large amounts of money and get people to take it.
If you find someone else who can print money - and get it accepted by nearly everyone - that person can provide stimulus.
It's the money-printing power which is necessary to create stimulus.
Yes, there are lots of conditions under which other people can print money. If they can get people to take it, they can provide stimulus.
*This is what created the bubble economy of the Clinton/Bush years*. Phony "AAA money-market" stuff was treated… as money. This money juiced the economy.
The *DEMONETIZATION* of these "AAA money-market securities" is what caused the economic crash.
Calgacus
Why must the government provide the fiscal stimulus? Why can't it be provided by the net savers – the corporate sector and the household sector?
To add to banger's & Nathanael's excellent answers, because "stimulus-providing" = deficit-spending = spending more money than is taken in. And this is logically contradictory to "net saving" = taking in more money than is spent. Flassbeck understands that what you ask for is logically impossible.
When the government invests its surplus – I take that back, there is no governmental surplus to invest.
The government cannot "have" a surplus or a deficit of its own money to "invest". The government doesn't have or not have its own money. The meaningful notion of a government surplus is an increased real wealth and product of the country. If you want to pick nits, minus the change in foreign debt, and to pick nits of nits, minus the distorting or inflationary effect of enlarging the stock of domestically held debt when the growth is brought about by new spending.
What governments are doing right now is destroying their surplus, their productive capacity, their real wealth, by refusing to engage in the spending, the direction, that the economy, that real people are crying out for. The way to tell this is happening is when ONE person is involuntarily unemployed.
Right now, due to the triumph of academic morons in the 60s-70s (following, returning to misguided thought even earlier) and the elite segment they mouthpiece, the foolish humans of Earth are destroying colossal planetary resources for no reason whatsoever, except for the amusement of these most depraved elites.
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03/24/2013 | Zero Hedge
Submitted by 'Jim in MN',
The hallmark of human nature is adaptability. Faced with a changing environment, the human spirit and its social manifestations change in response. But once the human endeavor itself creates the environment, how can such adaptation be a simple exercise in instinct? Simply put, it cannot. For better or for worse, the subjective element must dictate the outcome. This subjective element is often called judgment. But under today's circumstances, a better term might be 'taste'. The question then becomes: do the powerful have good taste? The fate of the rest of us hangs on the answer, as the fate of the slave rests upon the master's whim.
Consider the global financial crisis. The unfettered power and unrestrained corruption that is the hallmark of today's society has been allowed to play out with predictable results. There is no need to document the disaster that has befallen the people around the world, saddled with debt, stuck with stagnant wages if they can find work at all, and subject to worsening standards of living, with civil liberties eroding so quickly that only the authorities seem to know what is left on any given day (and they're not telling).
Throughout all of this, the global elites have displayed consistently worsening signs of decadence, psychopathic tendencies, and overall detachment from reality. And who can blame them? There has been no tap on the shoulder, no knock on the door, no raid on the office to indicate that anything is seriously wrong. The destruction of a generation's potential, the removal of trillions from the rest of the population has not been punished. It has been handsomely, indeed shamelessly, rewarded.
Chrystia Freeland, writing in The Atlantic in early 2011, noted this increasing abstraction from reality, based on her experience trailing and interviewing the global elite:
This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can't exist without the wider community. Even setting aside the financial bailouts recently supplied by the governments of the world, the rich need the rest of us as workers, clients, and consumers. Yet, as a metaphor, Galt's Gulch has an ominous ring at a time when the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting "their" taxes to paying down "our" budget deficit. They may not be isolating themselves geographically, as Rand fantasized. But they appear to be isolating themselves ideologically, which in the end may be of greater consequence.
Taste, in the end, may dictate destiny. If this seems as alarming as it is trite, rest assured that it is. Just as one's taste in food can run to fish or fowl, so the taste of the elite can run a different, more critical gamut-from risk aversion to risk seeking. In a terminally decadent, corrupt society, fantasy runs rampant. Reality has little consequence, and therefore plays an increasingly removed, abstracted role in setting limits on behavior. While we gape at the grotesque excesses of a Caligula, our global elites run financial schemes that are no less shocking.
The filigreed madness and the outright lies embedded in today's routine financial scams, carefully evaluated for their nearness to the legal line in slide shows crafted from the finest, most velvety color palettes, would put Roman or Babylonian deviants to shame. The number of lives sacrificed to maintain these delicate minarets of risk would make Genghis Khan blush.
It would be far more honest, and possibly more aesthetic, for the elite to wear the bones of their victims as trophies stuck through their noses. But that would require truly colossal noses.
We have arrived at the end of the line, like Micheal Moorcock's poignant, omniscient partygoers in 'The Hollow Lands', who have endless reserves of power, but little left to do with it (a typical sentiment being something like: "'I enjoyed Flags,' he said. 'Particularly when My Lady Charlotina made that delicious one which covered the whole of the western hemisphere.'").
The more the tastes of the elite run to risky business, the more fragile the complex edifice of global finance becomes. Spectacular failures, mind-boggling crashes, and mighty people instantly reduced to public mockeries through their own perversion or crimes become the norm. In this madhouse of absolute power, would it be so strange to hear of another Incitatus? The original, of course, being the favorite horse of the Emperor Caligula:
To prevent Incitatus, his favourite horse, from growing restive he always picketed the neighbour-hood with troops on the day before the races, ordering them to enforce absolute silence. Incitatus owned a marble stable, an ivory stall, and a jewelled collar; also a house, furniture, and slaves - to provide suitable entertainment for guests whom Caligula invited in its name. It is said that he even planned to award Incitatus a consulship.
Suetonius: Caligula 55
Such is the contemporary reality we live in. People try to live their lives, to avert their eyes, to hide their children from the sight and effect of the monstrous cavorting of the elites. But they loom above all others on the horizon, intent on their self-aggrandizing excesses, like a constant, living, writhing surrealist mountain range. And the uncaring fragments of the elites' collapsing 'entertainments' rain down like meteors upon the rest of the population.
Perhaps a crazed fad for frugality will break out and suppress the urges of the elites. In the meantime, hide your valuables as well as you can, and treat your children with the sympathy they deserve. They are among the chief victims of our era's unholy orgies of risk and corruption. Frugality or fragility? The choice is yours, as well as theirs.
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Feb 26, 2013 | Jesse's Café Américain
I wish that C-Span would permit their videos to be 'embeddable.'"I'm a very firm believer that a liar is a cheat and a thief and a crook. I don't like liars. I never lie. I always told my own child, "If you murder somebody, tell me. I'll help you hide the body. But don't you lie to me."
"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."
"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success."
Lord Acton
Greg's talk is excellent, and thanks to C-Span the video quality is good.
Speaking of excellent essays on corruption, Yves Smith has written a wonderful piece titled, Jack Lew's Grotesque Citi Employment Deal and the Institutionalization of Corruption.
Corruption, facilitated by the credibility trap, is the biggest problem facing the West today. That is the real subsidy, the most debilitating entitlement.
It is the belief of the elite that the power of their office is an achievement that rewards them with the right to lie, cheat and steal, both for themselves and their friends.
Although it is most important to understand that they would be shocked and insulted if one uses those words, lie, cheat and steal, to describe what they are doing. They view themselves as exceptionally hard working, as obligated by their natural gifts and superiority.
Through a long indoctrination that starts sometimes in their families, but is most often affirmed in their elite schools and with their circle of privileged friends, they learn to rationalize selective moral behaviour not as immoral but as 'the entitlement of success.' And they are supported by a horde of morally ambivalent enablers who will tell them whatever they wish to hear.
There are one set of rules for themselves and their friends, and another set of rules for the rest.
Few who actually do evil consciously choose to be evil. They rationalize what they do in any number of ways, but the deceit often hinges on their own natural superiority, and the objectification and denigration of the other. We are makers, and they are takers. Although many may work hard, they see their own work as having special value and merit, while the actions of the others are inconsequential and unworthy.
Given enough time, their rationalizations become an ideology, desensitized to the meaning and significance of others outside their own select group. This supremacy of ideology empties their souls, and opens the door to mass privation and even murder, although rarely done by their own hands.
This is what Glenn Greenwald calls 'justice for some.' Or even earlier what George Orwell captured in the slogan, 'Some animals are more equal than others.'
And just to be clear on this, with regard to the Anglo-American political situation, the tragedy is not that just some are corrupted, which is always the case. The tragedy is that the Democrats and the Labor Party learned that they could become as servilely corrupted by Big Money as the Republicans and the Conservative Party, while maintaining the illusion of serving their traditional political base.
And it has rewarded them very well in terms of extraordinarily well-funded political power, and almost unbelievable personal enrichment afterwards.
In such a climate of corruption, political discourse loses the vitality of ideas and compromise for the general good, and take on the character of competing gangs and crime families, engaged in aggressive schemes and protracted turf wars, tottering from one pitched battle and crisis to another.
"A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.And you know how I feel about this.The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.
And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.
The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious hypocrisy.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.The problem which the modern world has not yet grappled is how to react to the rise of a global elite, which considers itself the children of a power which is above national restraints, and a law unto themselves.
Their success has been propelled by the dominance of Anglo-American financialization, and the rise of oligarchies in Russia, China, Latin America, and India. Countervailing power has been co-opted and subsumed. Any opposition has become marginalized and isolated.
The new oligarchs are supported by their fiat currencies, which together the increase of insubstantial 'cashlessness' in wealth, provides the ability to define and allocate value at will.
They have a penchant towards globalization and deregulation to support selective justice, to the extreme detriment of local rule, and individual choice and freedom. Above all, they are a law unto themselves, above what they consider subhuman restraint. Übermenschen.
"Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition-and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn't succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today's super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves...Of course this tendency is not new in history, as it is a facet of the human heart, and the empires of the past. But the scope of it is something rarely seen before this. And it is supported by technologies for mass action and control that seem terrifyingly powerful and new.A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street's swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider-and not unreasonable-fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble."
Chrystia Freeland, The Rise of the New Global Elite
And as hard as it may be to believe, this too shall pass. But as always, we have some work to do in our own time.
"The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness He grinds all."Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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... the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition-and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn't succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today's super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.
The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. [...]
As with the aristocracies of bygone days, such vast wealth has created a gulf between the plutocrats and other people, one reinforced by their withdrawal into gated estates, exclusive academies, and private planes. We are mesmerized by such extravagances as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's 414-foot yacht, the Octopus, which is home to two helicopters, a submarine, and a swimming pool.
[...] another defining characteristic of today's plutocrats: they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to hoi polloi back home. As Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of the private-equity firm Silver Lake, puts it, "A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors." The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by "interests" and "activities" rather than "geography": "Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be."
[This...] helps explain why many of America's other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global "nation" in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine-indeed, it's thriving.
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ROBERT HUNZIKER - The New Transnational Elite August 8, 2012 | Filed under: Economics and tagged with: America, American society, banking, banks, Bees, Bilderberg, Bush, candidate, capitalism, change, community, constitution, corporation, corporations, defense, Democrats, derivatives, dimension, enlightenment, individual rights, lifestyle, logic, middle class, military, money, New York, Patriot Act, petition, population, Poverty, Power, president, profit, protest, recession, Republicans, restaurants, revolution, ruling class, U.S., U.S. Congress, United States, World Bank, world economy
DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 24JAN04 - Dick Cheney, Vice...
The world's epicenter of capitalism is the United States, and its reach/power/influence circumnavigates the globe. The elites of the capitalist class are no longer tied to territoriality or driven by national competition. "U.S. capitalism has expanded its reach by morphing into a Transnational Capitalist Class." according to William Robinson (Univ. of Calif.) Global Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism, Aljazeera, May 2011.
The driving force that binds together this elite cadre is free market capitalism; it is the heartbeat of a worldwide network of capitalists that thrive off profits and wealth creation. Their nonpareil world order is driven by money which equates to success, power, collegiality, and increasingly, as this new world order coalesces into the most formidable political entity in the history of humankind, democratic nation-states lose the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment, which played such a major role in the French Revolution (1789-99) and the American Revolution (1775-83), contributing to the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791)… stripping away national identities.
The notion that a company or corporate executive or wealthy entrepreneur is bound by an allegiance to their country of origin is passé. The elite capitalists of today are bound to one another, not to countries. They meet at the same conferences, like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the The Bilderberg Group annual geopolitic forum, or in Asia it is the Boao Forum on China's Hainan Island each spring, or the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival, or Herb Allen's Sun Valley gathering for media moguls, or the Google Zeitgeist conference, all defining the characteristics of today's plutocrats; they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to the multitudes back home.
They attend the same operas and polo matches, stay at the same 5-star hotels, lease the same private jets, dine at the same 5-star restaurants, meet Bono, and ceaselessly travel the globe together, with homes on every continent, residing wherever the weather is seasonally most favourable. Their allegiances extend well beyond the borders of their nation-states of origin, and they could care less about the various underling classes of society in any particular country where they do business.
This new global elite, according to Chrystia Freeland (Global Editor at Large, Reuters, who traveled with, and mingles with, the elites), The Rise of the New Global Elite, Atlantic Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2011: "Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today's super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves."
This federation of convenience by the global elite is a lingering problem for the lower classes in America. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world's largest hedge funds told Chrystia Freeland that his firm's investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today's economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn't really matter. "His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that's not such a bad trade." Notice the CEO's reference to "not such a bad trade" as representative of free market lingo, i.e., "trade." Everything is measured in trade terms, like statistics… if you look in the mirror, you'll see the reflection of a commodity.
This viewpoint is typical of how the global ruling class thinks, and proof positive of it is reflected in today's politics in America. The right wing embodies this same viewpoint by striving to strip the federal government of public welfare services, privatizing governmental assets, and undercutting benefits to society at large, especially via manipulation of the federal tax code. This same occurrence is happening in real time right now in Greece, Spain, and Portugal as the cadre of elite technocrats out of Brussels, de facto capital of the EU, dictate nation-state policies to those three forlorn countries. The world's elites love hard times/recessions because of the set up. It makes it easier for them to strip away government largess via austerity programs that they force upon governments, and it allows for undercutting the wages of average citizens as well as dismantling of governmental regulations. This, in turn, prompts protestors to congregate in the streets of capital cities, but over time, the capitalist class waits them out, temporarily residing in one of their homes elsewhere, away from danger, and with time on their side, the capitalists win.
Upon reading Chrystia Freeland's article in Atlantic Magazine, one comes away with the impression the elite capitalists look down with disdain upon the masses of people, expressing a contempt for those in society who do not have the personal merit to rise to the occasion of wealth and power. Meritocracy is their biblical source, not equality and fraternity. These are hackneyed terms from 'America of old' and no longer applicable in the new technologically enhanced world, which itself is the major source of many of the new self-made wealthy.
This global ruling class controls the levers of an emergent trans-national state apparatus of global decision-making and orders emanate from the IMF, World Bank, the EU, and the WTO. The ruling bloc of this world order consists of chieftains of global corporations and financial conglomerates, major players in the dominant political parties of the world, media conglomerates, and technocratic elites.
Several thousand people, who all play in the same sandbox, control the world of finance and politics, similar to the faceless/nameless/shameless fictional elites in the TV series The X-Files. In that series, the 'Smoking Man' is the only personality from amongst the elite cadre that is recognized on an on-going basis; he is C.G.B.Spender, the public face of the "Syndicate," which is a shadow government and highly secretive organization. As the Smoking Man says, "If people were to know of the things that I know… it would all fall apart." Similarly, one wonders what those 'things' are in today's world, and there are definitely cracks in the veneer of this new capitalistic world order.
For example, "Market capitalism has proven to be a remarkable engine of wealth creation, but if it continues to function in the next 25 years as it has in the past 25, we are in for a violent ride or, worse, a serious breakdown in the system itself. That sounds dire, and it is," Global Capitalism at Risk. What are you Doing About it? by Joseph L. Bower, Herman B. Leonard, and Lynn S. Paine, Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2011. This article co-written by three professors at Harvard University pinpoints a festering problem that may be impossible to address because, as the article goes on to relate: "The leaders we talked to identified various forces that could severely disrupt the global market system in the decades ahead… these forces arise from multiple sources. Some are fueled by negative consequences of the market system and feedback into it in disruptive ways. Others arise from sources external to the system. Still others relate to…." Frankly, the multiplicity of the financial problem is the problem! The world of finance is a mind-boggling complexity of derivatives overlying derivatives superimposed upon CMOs interlocking with CDSs and residing within the depths of major brokerages and banks, deep in their vaults for nobody to see in full living color. The legendary investor Sir John Templeton summed up the financial monster in two words, writing a memorandum to close friends and family before his death, as he anticipated the future, "Financial Chaos." World banking/finance is a multi-headed hydra monster of global proportions that may bring the world of capitalism down to its knees, prompting police state intervention to maintain social order. The early stages of this phenomenon have already appeared, and historians may one day earmark the summer of 2007 as the start of the Age of Financial Calamity!
According to William Robinson: Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world. One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is a dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population or that portion marginalized and locked out of productive participation … constituting some one-third of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control, otherwise known as police states. Over time, this system becomes ever more violent and the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes opens the door for 21st century fascism to emerge without a rupture in electoral cycles and/or a constitutional change.
The door for 21st century fascism has more than opened. It has been blown off the hinges starting with the U.S. Patriot Act, which act violates the U.S. Constitution and which act was rammed down the throats of the U.S. Congress, whose members did not even read the document, by the Bush Administration, implying that any members who voted against the hurried-bill would be blamed for any further attacks at a time when the nation was braced for a second attack.
Another example of impending fascism occurred when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which act negates the writ of habeas corpus, the most powerful cornerstone of civil rights since the Magna Carta. Subsequently, May 2012, U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest overruled the domestic military detention provisions of the act, an act that was roundly supported by Democrats and Republicans.
This is a clear, and extremely troubling, clarion call for how far legislators will go to strip U.S. citizens of their rights. According to Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, "American individual liberties are being stripped away." The elites contend the negation of individual rights is foisted upon the government in order to maintain civil order, and their lackeys in Congress take bait with open-arms.
As transnational capitalism gains momentum, the chieftains of major U.S. international corporations feel less, and less, empathy towards their homeland and more akin to a world-state wherein the entire planet is their haunt. Their quest for profits dictates a worldly view that brushes aside nation-state regulations that interfere with profits, and their disdain for the peoples of any given nation-state leads to statist political leanings, meaning a concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a centralized government for control of individual nation-states whilst worldwide trade is subjected to free market capitalism. This course of action is already evident in Europe where nation-states like Portugal are being dictated to by a centralized body of technocrats, the EU. Likewise, this is happening in America where the Central Bank has become dictator of the markets whilst the global corporations on the Dow Jones Industrial Average carry on in their own markets around the world, splashing strong profits, in part, because of neoliberal tendencies that discriminate between which nation-states offer the cheapest labor and the weakest regulations. The common denominator of global corporations is cheap labor; they hover like bees around the queen wherever cheap labor is to be found.
As a result of an assortment of extremely powerful economic and political forces intertwined within transnational capitalism, it is reasonable to assume the various classes in American society will continue to experience a significant downgrade of lifestyle as the transnational capitalists comb the world for the cheapest labor and the loosest regulations.
In time, America itself will become a target for transnational capitalists' manufacturing plants & facilities as American wages and benefits continue to stagnate and as right-wingers attack governmental regulations and privatize government assets.
Read more: http://prn.fm/2012/08/08/robert-hunziker-transnational-elite/#ixzz2MKrzC3Ia Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
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Feb 21, 2010 | ParaPundit
Writing in the New York Times former neocon David Brooks points out that the replacement of the WASP establishment with a much more meritocratic and smarter elite doesn't appear to have made American society run better.
Yet here's the funny thing. As we've made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We've increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.
It's not even clear that society is better led. Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?
Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?
Among the reasons he cites for the poor performance of our meritocracy: It is less inbred. There are fewer loyalties among the elites. This reminds me of Robert Putnam's research on diversity leading to lower social capital and lower trust. We are well on our way toward a lower trust society with an elite that has fewer connections and loyalties to the rest of the population.
Steve Johnson
MercerElites are for their ability to score highly on standardized tests plus some bias towards having correct social attitudes (see the "extra curricular" section of a college application). Elites used to be picked by being the children of the current elites.
The children of past elites were likely to be about as qualified as the previous elites.
The children of "meritocratic" elites are likely to regress towards the mean.
Past elites had to increase the value of their country because it was their children's patrimony. They were husbandsmen of people; they harvested what they could and left behind a larger, richer herd. They didn't maximize their take because they cared what their children had to live off.
The current elites are likely to get one harvest out of our society so why not slaughter and sell all you can and not bother to feed or protect the herd?
What could ever have made anyone think meritocracy was a good idea?
" Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?"
The bankers are making more money for themselves. They would probably say that is the goal of being a banker. The question is why the rest of the country tolerates bankers having huge incomes based on activities that harm the rest of the economy.
from the Brooks column:
"the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it."
I think this is probably true. People also idealize the past. Iraq is not dumber then the Vietnam or Philippines wars. Brooks has no hard data that things are worse today.
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Mellow Monk (Livermore, CA USA) - See all my reviews
THIS is what American politics is all about. Everything else is divide-and-conquer distraction, December 6, 2009This book has its faults -- repetition, extraneous detail -- but the basic message is the most important one in American politics today: among America's elites, there is no "culture war," no "conservative versus liberal." They have a concrete agenda, and it's all about money.
Everything else is political theater. That this message is so seldom communicated makes this book all the more important. Bottom line: The rich are united around a purely economic agenda, and so those of us who have to work for a living should be, too. That's the author's message.
Read this book and stop thinking in terms of red versus blue. Because the real political situation is the haves against the have-nots. And compared to what the super-rich haves have, what you and I have is diddly.
Duane E. Campbell (Sacramento, California)
Valuable information, May 13, 2009
This is an excellent analysis of class and how it functions on a global scale. The information on the organizing and selling of NAFTA was superb. I have long worked on the NAFTA issues, but this book provided a deeper , broader view. My own work has been on labor and immigration issues. Jeff Faux covers how NAFTA led to U.S. banks purchasing most of the Mexican banks, and how during the Peso crisis of 1994, the U.S. bailed out the (U.S. owned) Mexican banks.
As he notes, globalization is at its most advanced stages in finance capital. We have certainly learned this again in the current banking crisis. The robber barons of finance capital have stolen the money, they have looted the treasury and our pensions and now they want to return to business as usual without any significant reform of the economic system. Just give them more tax payer money to bail out the banks.
William Grieder, in Come Home America; the Rise and Fall ( and redeeming promise) of our Country, notes:
The U.S. has two parallel political systems. The official one, expertly equipped and in charge, produces and distributes political opinions and ideologies from the political class.
The "other America", weak, dispersed, largely non organized, scattered and passive, is broad landscape onored and/or easily manipulated.
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It will Take to Win it Back, provides extensive information and analysis needed for those of us in the "other America".
Duane Campbell, author. Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. 4th. edit. 2010. Allyn and Bacon.
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Amazon.com
Enigma:...Over time, that sense of entitlement insensibly changed Democrats into what we in the Pentagon would call ENABLERS of Republicans. The Democratic enablers unwittingly played a crucial role in the demolition of the American dream, not unlike that played by infiltration troops in blitzkrieg. Infiltration troops soften up the front by slipping through defenses to find or create holes and weak areas for the tanks to roar thru to reap chaos and destruction deep in the enemy's rear area. Only in this case, the rear area being ruined is the American middle class, and the flood of tanks is taken up by the flood money supplied by the oligarchs who feather their nests by buying Democrats as well as Republicans in one seamless auction.
Put bluntly, to protect a sense of hereditary entitlement to the power that accompanied the coattails of FDR and the New Deal, Democrats abandoned their heritage and moved to Wall Street, Big Pharma, Defense, etc., and in so doing, insensibly mutated into faux Republicans. If you doubt this, look at the enervating, quasi-neoliberal bloviating by the self-inflating Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) or the cynical triangulations and warmongerings of Messrs. Clinton and Obama. The abdication of traditional Democratic principles gave Republican crazies more room to get even crazier, and together the faux Republicans and the real crazy Republicans reinforced each other to create a rightward shift in the American political dynamic that unleashed the emergence of a new gilded age, together with the emergence of a legalized plutocracy that criminal Russian oligarchs would envy. And this mutation came about in a remarkably short time of 30 to 40 years.
In so doing, the Democrats sold out their most important constituency, i.e., John Q. Average American, and colluded in the historic swindle that brought the great American middle class to the brink of impoverishment and debt peonage, a condition some times referred to chillingly in the tone-deaf salons of Versailles on the Potomac as the "new normal."
If you think collusion is too strong a term, I would urge you to think about Bill Clinton's (the DLC's choice for president in the 1992 election) collusion with Republicans in 1999 to nullify of the Depression era Glass-Steagle Act -- one of monuments of reform in the New Deal. This nullification was one of the main deregulatory "initiatives" that unleashed the greedy excesses that led to the 2007-8 financial meltdown. When he left office, Bill Clinton, by the way, did not pick up his grips and retire to a modest house in Independence Missouri like Harry Truman; he chose instead to join the plutocratic elite, where he is now well on his way to becoming a card-carrying member of the one-tenth of one-percent club of the mega rich. The bottom line: the Democrats' sense of entitlement and the consequent corruption of their principles have been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition in the emergence of the current political-economy that is destroying what is left of the middle class in our good ole USA. The reader would make a great mistake if he or she allowed the hilariously disgusting Republican hijinks described by Lofgren to brand his book as an anti-Republican polemic written by a convert, and miss his main message.
Mike, of course, states clearly in his title that his subject is how the madness of the Republicans and the uselessness of the Democrats reinforced each other over the last 30 to 40 years to hose the American People. It is the degenerate nature of their symbiotic relationship that is his thesis and should be the Left's call to arms.
I do not count on this happening, however. The faux Republicans are far more likely to try to exploit the embarrassment of riches in Mike's book for their narrow short-term political advantage, in yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy and opportunism that are central pillars propping up their losing mentality.
>>>Put bluntly, to protect a sense of hereditary entitlement to the power that accompanied the coattails of FDR and the New Deal, Democrats abandoned their heritage and moved to Wall Street, Big Pharma, Defense, etc., and in so doing, insensibly mutated into faux Republicans.I'm not quite sure if the this claim is accurate - when looking at the history of special interest giving and who paid off whom it appears that the Democrats have won that game for decades, it wasn't until just a few decades ago that the Republicans began closing and taking special interest money. To me that seems more like the Republicans mutated into faux Democrats.
>>>If you doubt this, look at the enervating, quasi-neoliberal bloviating by the self-inflating Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) or the cynical triangulations and warmongerings of Messrs. Clinton and Obama.
But historically speaking it has been the Democrats that have actually been the war mongers (WW I, WW II, Vietnam, Korea, etc, etc.)
>>>The abdication of traditional Democratic principles gave Republican crazies more room to get even crazier, and together the faux Republicans and the real crazy Republicans reinforced each other to create a rightward shift in the American political dynamic
WHAT????? Rightward shift you could have fooled me?
Lower taxes on the Wealthy Increased Defense Spending Pro-Life Pro-Abstinence Lower corporate income tax Increase Spending on hi-tech weaponry Partial Privatization of Social Security Decrease Capital Gains
Sounds pretty right-wing doesn't it - the funny thing is that was the Democratic Platform in 1960 when JFK ran for president. The Democrats haven't been pulled to the right they swung to the left and pulled the Republicans and the country that way. What was considered a normal Democratic position 50 years ago is considered by you a ultra far right position today.
>>>In so doing, the Democrats sold out their most important constituency, i.e., John Q. Average American, and colluded in the historic swindle that brought the great American middle class to the brink of impoverishment and debt peonage,
You do understand that the new deal brought about a switch in the normal power structure of the country. The uber rich realized that the Republicans had lost power and switched over to the democratic Party. By the late 1940's nearly 90% of the top 1% were registered Democrats and they controlled the Democratic Party. Currently 73% of all billionaires are registered Democrats, special interest money flows into the Democratic coffers are alarming rates.
"Do you know where the top 15 Mega-Donors money goes????
Here is the breakdown about giving: Democrats $426,334,807.28 Republican $71,028,473.98
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?
order=A 81.09% goes to Democrats 13.51%goes to Republicans
>>>If you think collusion is too strong a term, I would urge you to think about Bill Clinton's (the DLC's choice for president in the 1992 election) collusion with Republicans in 1999 to nullify of the Depression era Glass-Steagle Act -- one of monuments of reform in the New Deal. This nullification was one of the main deregulatory "initiatives" that unleashed the greedy excesses that led to the 2007-8 financial meltdown.
This is a false talking designed to mislead and misinform people. Virtually every country put forth a glass-Steagle Act after the great depression and virtually every country removed that in the 1970's-1980's with no problems. It was outdated and needed to be revamped but that is beside the point. The FACT is that GS was not the problem since it didn't address what the problem was - CDS's. CDS's were in fact allowed by FIRREA which the brainchild of the Democrats. CDS's were in fact never regulated, so you can't deregulate something that purposefully didn't have regulations in the first place.
>>>Mike, of course, states clearly in his title that his subject is how the madness of the Republicans and the uselessness of the Democrats reinforced each other over the last 30 to 40 years to hose the American People.
I kind of agree but I think the title has it backwards, this seems to be a better explanation: Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve
You could say that I am the opposite of your friend, I used to work for the Democratic Party and saw the inside dealings of it. The pandering to big money, the selling out to special interests, the disdain that they spoke of the middle class that they felt abandoned them was nauseating. And back in the early 2000's when the Republicans tried to reign in the Democratic Casino known as Wall Street and how the Democrats refused any sort of reform or regulation of their boys, sickened me. They allowed the whole country and the world to falter because of their greed for money. Yes the Republicans knew we were in trouble and wimped out because of the charges of racism and not wanting to help the lower class while the crazy democrats drove the wagon over the cliff yelling giddy up.
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I never thought I'd ever hear the United States of America called an "oligarchy". But now I have.
My dictionary says an oligarchy is a form of government where most or all political power effectively rests with a small segment of the society. As Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, puts it,
"Oligarchies are often controlled by a few powerful families whose children are raised and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy, often at some sort of expense to those governed."
Does that sound like the administration of George W. Bush?
For all my life, ever since grade school, I've been taught that the United States of American is a paragon of democracy. We have popular elections on every level-local, state and Federal. We have two houses of Congress, a President and a Supreme Court, a system of checks and balances, a Constitution second to none, and a Bill of Rights, the pride of our forefathers. Most Americans see our country as Ronald Reagan did -- the shining city on the hill-beacon to the world.
But here we are, today, when, according to the most recent CNN/USA Today poll, six of ten Americans see the Iraq war as a huge mistake and want our troops out of there, yet they are incapable of making that happen. Why? It's simple. It's the oligarchy that's keeping them there-that tight little group around Bush in the White House and Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, who run things for corporate feeders. You know who they are, Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, to name a few of the no-bid war profiteers. They can make 18 billion dollars, allocated for the reconstruction of Iraq, disappear in the blink of an eye. That is really slight of hand.
The war in Iraq is the best example of an oligarchy at work -- produced and managed to make money and to secure the remaining reserves of oil in the world. As they say, the world's oil has "peaked". It's all down hill from here, so we better grab it before somebody else does. To do this, we're got to keep a perpetual war spinning in the best oil-producing areas, the Middle East and the Caspian region. (We'd do it in Venezuela if we could.) With Iraq as a pivotal base, the oligarchy is planning to stay there into the foreseeable future. Any talk about drawing down troops is just that, talk-a tease offered for the 2006 mid-term elections. Using Iraq as a military base also explains the moves on former Soviet states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and others in the Russian orbit-targets of the giant oil conglomerates.
Oligarchies operate in secret. They spawn conspiracy theories. The 9/11 World Trade Towers collapse, for example. That garnered more than a million references in Google. Enough conspiracy theories for everyone. But the event caused a number of reputable construction engineers to raise their eyebrows. They saw it as a controlled demolition, as did Dr. Steven E. Jones, Physicist and Archaeometrist of Brigham Young University, who has done a major investigation on his own. He asks, why was this possibility not investigated by the 9/11 Commission and other governmental investigating agencies at the time? Not much help from the mainstream media, either. They accepted the Commission finding that it was an al-Qaeda attack. That's been the conventional wisdom ever since.
Everything is up for questioning. Does the media have the Chutpah to investigate any of them? No way. The Israel Lobby? No way. Untouchable. Look what happened when somebody tried to touch it. Two esteemed academicians, Professor John J.Mearsheimer of the Political Science Department of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt, Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard did a study and wrote a report on the Israel Lobby for the London Review of Books giving their views on the influence of Israel and the Israel Lobby in Washington on US foreign policy. Of course, the establishment, media and otherwise, came down on them like a ton of bricks. Alan Dershowitz, Professor at Harvard Law School and proponent of torture, reflects the kind of hysteria that was generated
"it is fair to ask why these distinguished academics chose to publish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especially given the obvious risk that it would be featured, as it has been, on neo-Nazi and extremist websites, and even those of terrorist organisations, and that it would be used by overt anti-semites to 'validate' their claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy"
All Mearsheimer and Walt were trying to do was bring a few facts to public attention and open the subject for discussion.
The oligarchy knows how to lock down.
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naked capitalism
Jersey Machievelli, December 7, 2010 at 7:28 pmPaul Tioxon, December 7, 2010 at 8:57 pmThe present political duopoly is under a generational spell of an ideology as dangerous as communism.
The generational part are the boomers – as Victor Hugo said "adversity makes men & prosperity makes monsters – well our little monsters, our little locust plagues are the boomers, those that oppose war when their behind was in danger, made everyone else cannon fodder when there were safely away from draft age, as well as many of today's social ills.
The ideology is a dark cloud that has been around humanity for millenniums and when it takes hold, an economic, personal liberty and knowledge dark age usually follows. Its presently fashionable to call it neo-feudalism and includes its neo-liberal economic arm and its neo-conservative foreign policy arm.
In the West – the neo-feudalism has taken the wrapping of a Corporate State with its hope of selected Global Corporation supplanting the former roles of higher nobility and the State taking the role of the lower nobility with its direct control of serfs. In the East – the wrapping are those of a State Corporation. Both abhors transparencies and nourish cronyism and are likely to battle it out eventually for total control.
All of the above helps explains the present republican's goal & democratic party with Obama's total failure from the first month of its presidency when he decline to hold Wall Street accountable, a moment when he should have been channeling his inner Robert DeNiro doing Al Capone giving his team dinner speech accompanied by his Louisville Slugger in "The Untouchables", making it clear that at its heart he was what a "country club republican" was in the 60's. This is why, many of Obama's supporters turned on him, if they wanted a country club republican they would have voted for a Clinton.
The American citizen can not fathom the treasonable ideas and action that have taken place against them by people that drank the laced kool-aid and are true believers in their psychedelic view of the nebulous dark cloud.
Just ask yourself what would a J.J. Angleton who was the CIA's counterintelligence chief during most of the cold war have thought and done if he received a report that by 2010 most of the manufacturing ability and know how of the country had been transferred to other countries and primarily a communist one-party state while running high debts to the same. Angleton would have thought either we fell under the biggest espionage trap ever devised or we became the biggest dunces in the world by ignoring critical thinking and drinking someones ideological laced kool-aid.
So yes, the average American is angry and is realizing that the country is no longer what they though it was and are searching and want someone to blame. Our future is grim if we don't stop drinking the ideologically laced kool-aid. Just look south for its results and I don't mean south of the Mexican border only, I mean the Dixieland border - just look at the results of anything to do with Mississippi.
The solution is quite simple, but farther away because of the Supreme Court's recent decision, and that is public funding of campaigns as the kool-aid drinking political duopoly racketering machines depends on its corporate masters for funding.
I don't foresee any changes but I foresee a lot of reactions. Citizens reacting at best the equivalent of tarring and feathering at worst political assassinations. Government reacting to its true masters and becoming more jack booted. Further civil disorder reaction from citizens ensuring a stronger police state reaction.
Going down this slippery road to an eventual dystopia. I hope I'm wrong, but the future looks more like the movies – something like 40%"Brazil" 40% Idiocracy" with a touch of "Soylent Green" and "Logan's Run" especially in the matters of handling the boomer generation problems.
By the way – the goal might be breaking the unions, but more importantly is to allow privatization and donations from those pay-to-play contract winners. Something like Jeb Bush did in Florida. County & State social services were privatize. Some contract went to reliable entities with history of social services, but a lot more went to newly created non-profit agencies that had for profit management structures. This for profits were the real winners as well as donations to the GOP racketeering machine. Ask any social worker in Florida or look up any major paper for results.
Jake, December 7, 2010 at 9:11 pmThe rich, the ruling class and their elite agents have long been at war with the people of this country. Of course, the tide of history has been one long push to disestablish the white male protestant oligarchy. It is difficult for me to have to listen to educated people actually ask the president of the US, the galactically stupid questions that he was presented with today. My favorite was from AP Ben Feller, the school boy wonder in the front row who asks how can the American people believe in you, when you say you want to not give the wealthy a tax break, and then boo fucking hoo, you flip flop Mr President! How can you pass legislation when the politics of the moment demands that you do what you promised not to?
I normally do not believe in arguing by name calling, like the anonymous republican eunuch, tee hee, his name says it all, a joke disguised as a trenchant appearance here on NC. But really, the politics of the situation demands, just what Ben? Here is politics, 60 votes in the Senate, 218 in Lower House, then, and only then will you get what you want.
There is a disturbing dumbing down of understanding what power is in this country. President Obama's arrival into DC, along with majorities in both houses of Congress was not a personal achievement. 67 million people voted him into office. They did it so he would fill an office where he would not be taking minute by minute orders for legislative action by the citizenry. He may choose to run, but we vote him in. If he lost, would he have failed to fight hard enough? It was not up to him to decide. It was us to us. He is not failing to fight it out, not failing to use his smarts and his political capital along with those whiz kids he has with him. He was only elected into the office. Once there, he is battling day in and day out to operate the Federal bureaucratic organizational structure. He is not shopping for options in the mall of life. He has people who want to destroy him in every way possible, to prevent him from doing anything at all. Anything at all. It has been like this in Washington, almost exactly, for over 100 years.
The middle class overachievers, who have grown up accomplishing so much, success in careers, in money made, in status, acclaim, legends in their own mind, now, see a president who is like them, polished, smart, an achiever, but he can not get what he wants. Like Tony Soprano crying out for help from his therapist, How do I make people do what I want them to do? He sees the problems of life as obstacles to his accomplishments, black marks of failures, instead of achievement, humiliation. Why can't Obama be more like FDR, now he was such an ICON! Poor Feller and all of the whiners and who can't believe that Obama is not as great a democrat as Buba. That Democrat did the best imitation of a republican I've ever seen. Tip O Neil went to his grave having stopped NAFTA, WELFARE REFORM, BANKING DEREGULATION, Bill Clinton accomplished more than Reagan and Bush together with those ACCOMPLISHMENTS.
But Obama, he can't do what I want him to do, and it would be so easy, but for the people with the necessary and sufficient votes in Congress who absolutely will not vote for what I want Obama to do. How can Obama get those people to do what he wants, when he wants it? Poor poor yuppies, poor poor outraged frustrated voters for Obama. Boo Hoo, it's not the republicans who have been fighting every quanta of government movement outside of military spending since the beginning of the 20th century, it is the unwillingness of Obama to win fights and thereby being a flip flopper.
Yves, you are uncovering tactical moves to strangle the baby in the bath water. It won't be the first or 21st such attack. Just continue in your work to expose these tactics and to blunt them. Fighting tooth and nail. Obama is not the great man we need, we need to be the great people, organized to turn back wave after wave of attacks that will surely come, again and again. Your financial analysis is critical in this undertaking, I am more than hopeful that full blown banana republic status is not our fate.
Jake, December 7, 2010 at 9:11 pmOh please. No states will go bankrupt. You can't break the state employees' unions without breaking the states. This is a silly worry and an empty threat by the Republicans. They may hate organized labor, but they certainly want collar county and downstate Illinois votes and Orange County money.
And labor productivity gains in capitalism should be expected to benefit the owners of capital, not the workers. I think I read that somewhere (and you should have). Unskilled laborers get paid enough to keep themselves alive, nothing more; surplus goes to the owners of capital. You must know this. The only reason workers ever benefited from productivity gains was because we used to have a labor movement in this country. It's largely dead now. The same people who bitch about the death of the "middle class" also frequently bitch about labor unions without seeing how the two are related. If you own no capital and want more money, you have to take it from the people who own capital. How is that so hard to understand?
Oh how I love the petty bourgeoisie! So entertaining. They try so hard not to get shot in the foot, but they vote for people who shoot them in the face.
Oh please. No states will go bankrupt. You can't break the state employees' unions without breaking the states. This is a silly worry and an empty threat by the Republicans. They may hate organized labor, but they certainly want collar county and downstate Illinois votes and Orange County money.
And labor productivity gains in capitalism should be expected to benefit the owners of capital, not the workers. I think I read that somewhere (and you should have). Unskilled laborers get paid enough to keep themselves alive, nothing more; surplus goes to the owners of capital. You must know this. The only reason workers ever benefited from productivity gains was because we used to have a labor movement in this country.
It's largely dead now. The same people who bitch about the death of the "middle class" also frequently bitch about labor unions without seeing how the two are related.
If you own no capital and want more money, you have to take it from the people who own capital. How is that so hard to understand?
Oh how I love the petty bourgeoisie! So entertaining. They try so hard not to get shot in the foot, but they vote for people who shoot them in the face.
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November 04, 2004 | tompaine.com
A clean electoral defeat and four more years of Bush will force the Democratic Party to change. Launching his new bimonthly column, Quo Vadis , TomPaine.com Associate Editor Patrick Doherty looks at the big picture and sees both great threats and great opportunities.Patrick C. Doherty is associate editor at TomPaine.com. Previously, he spent a decade working on conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and the Caucasus and holds a master's degree in security studies from the Fletcher School, Tufts University.
Now that Bush has been re-elected, the Democratic Party is faced with a major strategic challenge-perhaps the greatest challenge since the Great Depression inspired the New Deal.
Meeting that challenge is what this new column is about. Starting today, Quo Vadis -Latin for "where do we go from here?"-will advance the quest for a new progressive agenda. Every other week, I will ask the big questions of leaders, policymakers, executives and academics in an effort to focus Democratic attention on the larger picture.
Election 2004...
Let's cut to the chase. The Democratic Party is in the doghouse for at least two years, perhaps four. That will leave Bush plenty of time to continue his radical march backwards while the major problems facing the nation fester and, in many cases, bleed. Certainly, congressional Democrats will be able to blunt the worst assaults, but if the last two years is any measure, without a central, shared agenda, Democrats can be picked off one by one.
It is now time to ask the ancient political question "quo vadis "-where do we go from here? That requires that Democrats- indeed, all Americans-understand where we are now, where we want to go and then wrestle with how to get there.
Unfortunately, this presidential election did more to obscure than illuminate these questions. It reinforced terrorism as equivalent to a world war. It is not. Both candidates claimed their plans will fix the deficit. They cannot. And neither campaign ever bothered to ask where we are going. Instead, Bush described a future measured in battles won and taxes cut. Kerry measured it in alliances forged and jobs created. If America is to remain secure and prosperous, we need to be guided by a strategy built on vision. Neither candidate came close.
America can and must do better. The opportunity was there. Democrats in this election had the chance to combine Howard Dean's populism with Gary Hart's strategic vision, but instead got the opposite. John Kerry somehow managed to marry Gary Hart's populism and Howard Dean's strategic vision. Combined with Bob Shrum's sleazy preference for tactical messaging, this election was always going to be a referendum on Bush, never about where John Kerry wanted to take the nation.
…Or 1964?
To understand part of the problem, we have to recognize that this election cycle was the tenth consecutive contest in which we fought the battle of 1964. The underlying message of that storied election, between Johnson and Goldwater, was the nearly identical in its major themes: the American economic engine is sound and simply needs better economic management; the common enemy is "out there" so we simply need a better commander in chief. For the past 40 years, you're either for the "great society" where the wealthiest nation builds the middle class and accepts responsibility for social injustice, or you're looking for that "rendezvous with destiny" where free men and free markets come together to form a limited government.
The problem is that America today no longer resembles 1964. This is true at the micro level, where most families are two income, loaded with debt and only barely able to preserve the same standard of living as their parents. Social injustice is now tied to income, not race, and income inequality is increasing. Jobs are scarce, education is expensive and commutes are getting longer and longer. For the majority of Americans, the American Dream is not within reach.
But the larger issues are the reason I believe this will be the last election fought in the narrative of 1964. We can no longer focus on a single problem, like education or terrorism, and find a discrete solution. The source of our insecurity is no longer "out there." The Congressional Budget Office admits that there is no way to balance the Federal budget. Higher walls, smarter bombs, bigger safety nets or deeper tax cuts will not fix the problem, for the problem lies deeper.
It is time to recognize that the problems are more profound for the challenges are structural. Unlike before, the major threats to the American Experiment are based here at home, not in Moscow, Beijing or Pakistan. And those threats are flaws in our own political economy-not superpowers, rogue states or terrorist networks. And the longer we continue to ignore them, the more Americans will pay the price in both treasure and blood.
The Four Horsemen
There are four clear challenges threatening the American Experiment. Oil dependence tops the list. America consumes 25 percent of the world's oil but has only 3 percent of the reserves. Our addiction to oil has driven us, since 1980, to pursue a strategic doctrine of securing foreign oil supplies with our military. That policy, along with the nature of the global oil market, has sustained corrupt, illegitimate regimes in oil producing regions. That corruption, combined with the long festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has bred Islamic terror networks. As Chinese energy consumption expands, oil prices will continue to rise, putting more money and more military pressure into the mix. Indeed, China just signed a giant, $70 billion gas deal with Iran yesterday. The result is threefold: strategic competition with other consumers, like China, India, Europe and Japan; terrorism born of the oppression and humiliation suffered by local populations caught in the strategic crossfire; and rising energy prices at home.
Likewise, our fiscal situation is dire. Eminent bankers from both parties, like Pete Peterson and Robert Rubin, are warning that the nation's fiscal imbalance is about to ruin what remains of our economy. If we continue along the current path-the path accepted by both parties-the nation's debts will drive interest rates through the roof and crowd out domestic discretionary spending. That will devastate workers, homeowners, retirees, investors and small businesses alike. Healthcare, education, infrastructure will all atrophy. The Congressional Budget Office concurs; without a major structural change, the deficit will overwhelm the economy.
And there's more. The multiple failings of suburban sprawl are converging with dire consequences. The housing market is arguably the foundation of the American economy; indeed, suburban sprawl anchors spending in cars, energy, consumer products and durables. Today that foundation is crumbling. Federally-subsidized sprawl has segregated America by income and, as a result, public education is failing and politicians are able to gerrymander undemocratic districts. Continued expansion has meant overstretched but essential public services have broken down while more than $1 trillion of much-needed infrastructure investment has been ignored. As baby boomers discover that suburbs are unfriendly to the elderly, they are moving back into higher-density cities, displacing poverty into the first-ring suburbs. These migrating seniors are not interested in paying taxes for inner-city schools. That pushes young middle-class families ever farther out, increasing commuting time and decreasing good parenting. It's downward spiral.
And then there is climate change. Florida got socked with four major hurricanes this year. Japan was hit by a record-setting eight-story high wave caused by a typhoon. Our polar ice caps are melting at increasing rates, raising sea levels, flooding low-lying cities and threatening the Gulf Stream. In a few decades, global warming will dry out California's central valley and bake its cities. Already, reports are coming in of Bangladeshis fleeing starvation into India. France alone suffered 15,000 extra deaths in the summer of 2003 due to heat. We have a scientific consensus that the cause of all this is from burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Yet America is building more SUVs, OPEC and Russia are promising more oil, China is burning more coal and Brazil is cutting down more of the Amazon.
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April 5, 2002
By Bill Christison
Back in March CounterPunch published Christison's devastating critique of the strategies and conduct of the US war of terrorism. (See our archive by scrolling down to "Search CounterPunch.)) These new remarks, which he has made available to CounterPunch were delivered to various peace groups in Santa Fe, New Mexico on early April.Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979.Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
I've been asked to talk today about the topic, "U.S. Oil Policy as a Juggernaut in U.S. Foreign Policy." That's a great title. When you hear the word "juggernaut," what you think of--at least what I think of--is a monster machine of some sort, maybe the heaviest heavy tank you can imagine, rumbling down a city street, unstoppable, crushing everything in its way, and even destroying the paving of the street as it goes. Well, that comes pretty close to describing what I believe about the long-term effects of our oil, and other, foreign policies in the Middle East. But if we look ahead, rather than at the past or the present, my hope is that, by changing some of our own foreign policies, U.S. oil policy will in the future no longer be a destructive juggernaut.
It's worth spending a minute to talk about why oil is so important to the United States. The world's total use of energy from all sources--from petroleum, natural gas, coal, wood, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, solar, and wind power--has increased in recent years roughly as the global population has also increased. Petroleum contributes the greatest single amount--about two-fifths of the world's total energy output, and natural gas (which is in some ways related to oil) more than another one-fifth. The United States alone uses about one-quarter of the world's total energy output, but has less than five percent of the world's population. The U.S. itself does not produce anywhere near the amount of energy that it consumes. According to statistics of the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States used in the year 2000 almost 100 quadrillion Btu's--or British Thermal Units--of energy. But of those 100 quadrillion Btu's, the U.S. had to import close to 30 percent. The United States is, hands down, the most profligate user of energy, by far, on this whole globe.
With respect to oil alone, the U.S. imported in the year 2000 almost two-thirds of the oil that it used. The importance of Saudi Arabia as a supplier of the U.S., needs to be emphasized, but not just because the Saudis hold the largest known but still untapped oil reserves in the world. What is even more important to the U.S. at the moment is that Saudi Arabia has the largest installed but unused rapid production capacity--that is, oil wells, pumping equipment and so forth already there but not used to meet current, or "normal," production needs. In any emergency that cut off oil supplies from anywhere else in the world, Saudi Arabia would one of very few, and maybe the only, nation that could easily and quickly increase its oil production without a waiting period measured in months rather than a few days. This obviously adds to what any general or admiral would call the strategic value of Saudi Arabia to the United States.
There is another characteristic of the global oil industry that we should all understand. It is an industry dominated by a half-dozen extremely large, global corporations--including ExxonMobil (these two firms merged in 1999), British Petroleum, Shell, Texaco, Gulf and Socal. Fifty to 75 years ago these companies might have been swashbuckling, unregulated corporations seeking to maximize profits and avoid the controls of any governments by all means fair or foul. Today, however, these companies by no means have the same personalities that they had years ago. In the Middle East, at least, the governments of the area have nationalized practically all oil production, and the companies or their subsidiaries have gradually worked out mutually supportive relationships with the local governments, under which the companies continue to manage most of the oil production and global oil trade, while the governments, and OPEC, make the basic decisions on how much oil to produce. The companies continue to make large profits, which keep them happy enough.
In their relations with the U.S. and other advanced nations, the companies no longer shun government regulation, because most of the regulations imposed on them are supportive of, and increase the profits of, the companies themselves. The regulations fall more into the area of corporate welfare than into the area of inducing the corporations to become better citizens. In the U.S., the ties of the oil companies with both of the major political parties are close and mutually profitable. Up to a few months ago, these same comments would have applied to Enron, which was clearly one of the world's largest energy companies, even though it was not one of the largest global oil companies.
I started out by comparing the long-term effects of U.S. oil policies to a juggernaut. To show you why, I want to go back almost 60 years, to February 1945. In that month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, while returning from the Yalta Conference, met with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia on a U.S. warship in the middle of the Suez Canal. Two months later, Roosevelt was dead, but this meeting was probably one of his most important acts as a world leader The actual records of the conversations between these two men have never been released by either of their governments, but it is quite clear that an agreement was reached under which the United States guaranteed for the indefinite future the security and stability of the Saudi monarchy. In return, the Saudi King guaranteed U.S. access to, and joint development of, the massive Saudi oil reserves, also for the indefinite future. These mutual guarantees were later, implicitly at least, extended to apply to the other, and smaller, Gulf state monarchies, from the Arab Emirates to Bahrain and Kuwait. All of these guarantees were reinforced by the U.S. war against Iraq in 1990-1991, and these guarantees still today form the basis of U.S. oil policies in the Middle East.
So for close to 60 years now, the U.S. has continued to prop up and support these authoritarian governments. I'd like to give you an example of how this has worked in the case of Saudi Arabia. This is from an article that appeared in The Nation magazine last November, written by a British expert on world security affairs. Here are a few lines from this article. "To protect the Saudi regime against its external enemies, the United States has steadily expanded its military presence in the region. [T]o protect the royal family against its internal enemies, US personnel have become deeply involved in the regime's internal security apparatus. At the same time, the vast and highly conspicuous accumulation of wealth by the royal family has alienated it from the larger Saudi population and led to charges of systemic corruption. In response, the regime has outlawed all forms of political debate in the kingdom (there is no parliament, no free speech, no political party, no right of assembly) and used its US-trained security forces to quash overt expressions of dissent. All these effects have generated covert opposition to the regime and occasional acts of violence"
The United States pursued policies like these not only in Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States, but elsewhere in the Middle East as well. When the U.S. overthrew Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and reinstalled the Shah in power, Washington began carrying out precisely the same policies in Iran as it employed in Saudi Arabia. The Shah's secret police, known as SAVAK, and the Iranian military forces both grew markedly stronger. For 26 years the Shah's repressive regime succeeded in smothering internal dissent. In 1979, however, major internal dissent did erupt, supported by radical Islamic clerics who wanted all U.S. influence out of their land. The Shah was quickly overthrown. U.S. experiences in Iran since that date should have suggested to people in Washington that just perhaps the strong U.S. support for repressive regimes in the Middle East was not the ideal long-term policy for us to pursue. No reexamination of U.S. foreign policy ever got started, however, because the United States was immediately consumed by the horrible insult Iranians imposed on us when they held over 50 Americans from the U.S. Embassy hostage for more than a year.
Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. spent the decade quietly cozying up to Saddam Hussein, the dictatorial ruler of Iraq, which was and is another big oil producer of the Middle East. Since Iran was now a U.S. enemy, the U.S. supported Iraq in its war against Iran. The U.S. did not criticize Saddam Hussein even when he employed chemical warfare to gas sizable numbers of Kurdish people in his own country. The United States only abandoned him in 1990, when he crossed the U.S. over Kuwait. Even here, the diplomatic signals Saddam received from the U.S. until shortly before he invaded Kuwait were very unclear. Once again, when the break finally came, the U.S. administration gave no thought to reappraising its own policies throughout the region. A decision was made in favor of going to war to end this threat to U.S. hegemony and U.S. access to oil, and that was that.
Now, in the year 2002, this almost-60-year-old Middle East oil policy of the United States is showing signs of even more fraying at the edges. Beyond any question in my opinion, one of the root causes behind the terrorism of September 11 was this very U.S. policy of supporting for the past half-century and more these authoritarian and often corrupt Arab and Muslim governments. There exists a high degree of anger among many Muslims with their own governments, which have for so long been supported by the U.S.
Osama bin Laden is a good example of this particular root cause behind the September 11 terrorism. His wrath was directed as much against the Saudi government, for example, as it was against the United States. His opposition to what used to be his own government was probably the main reason why he had the support of a majority of the young men under 25 in Saudi Arabia. He received similar support from many young men in other Arab and Muslim states as well. Right now these groups of angry young men obviously no longer have a viable leader in Osama bin Laden, but other extremist leaders are almost sure to arise. In addition, the next generation of leaders in at least some of these states may well emerge from among these young men. If any of them do come into power, their future governments will likely be more anti-American than the present governments, which Washington likes to call "moderate," but which are really nothing of the sort. If we have not reduced our energy dependence on oil in the meantime, we may face serious trouble.
The U.S. should therefore adopt quite draconian measures immediately to reduce its overall energy usage, including its dependence on Mideast oil. It is unlikely, for the near future at least, that the U.S. will solve a future energy crunch through alternative power sources or by "clean" coal, nuclear power, or Alaskan oil usage. The U.S. also should not count on oil supplies from Central Asia as a way to ignore the need for conservation.
The U.S. should also, over time and gradually, reduce its ties with the present governments in many Muslim states, and try to develop improved relations with opposition elements there, actively seeking out democratically inclined groups. Such steps will be necessary if there is to be any hope of reducing support for future Osama bin Ladens that arises from the anger of Arabs and Muslims with their own governments.
I want to turn now to another foreign policy problem that the U.S. faces in the Middle East, one that has become more tightly intertwined with U.S. oil policies since September 11. Ever since shortly after World War II, the U.S. has had not one but two fundamental foreign policies in the Middle East. The first policy, which I've already talked about, has been to support authoritarian and undemocratic governments in the oil nations in an effort to guarantee the long-term easy access to Middle East oil at "reasonable" prices. The other policy, equally important, has been to provide strong support to Israel and to guarantee the security of Israel as a Jewish state, also for the long term.
Over the last fifty-plus years, there has been a fair amount of tension and conflict between these two policies. The United States under President Harry Truman was, as I'm sure you all know, instrumental in helping to establish the state of Israel in 1948. But even then, one of the reasons for the opposition to Truman's desires by many other U.S. officials, including the Secretary of State, General George Marshall, was that it might endanger the west's access to oil from the Arab nations.
As it has turned out, for most of the period since World War II, the U.S. has managed to keep its two basic policies in the Middle East pretty much apart from each other--in separate boxes so to speak--and to keep the tensions between them in check. The very existence of the Cold War, which provided the bogey-man of a common enemy, helped in this regard. The one obvious time when the U.S. proved unable to keep the tensions between its two policies under control was the OPEC oil embargo against the west in late 1973 and early 1974. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973, and specifically the U.S. response of resupplying Israel with large amounts of new military equipment, precipitated the embargo, and many of us here can remember the gas lines that resulted in this country. But the gas lines only lasted a few months, and then we all went back to normal. But we should remember those months as a perfect example of the fact that there are indeed real conflicting interests involved in the two basic U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East.
Overall, though, because the United States has been able to hold these conflicting interests in check for most of the past half century, I think that Washington has allowed the tensions to grow, more or less ignored by U.S. policymakers, to a point where they are going to be exceedingly difficult to deal with in the future. Since September 11, a number of things have happened that make it more impossible than ever to separate the effects of the Israel-Palestine problem from the effects of the continuing U.S. support for most authoritarian governments of the oil nations in the area.
In Saudi Arabia and most of the small Gulf States, the position of the monarchies has become more precarious, as these monarchies have been subjected to more criticism since September 11 from public opinion in the United States than has been the case for years. In normal circumstances, when these monarchies are confident that the U.S. guarantee of their security is strong and unbreakable, most of them will not worry too much about other issues that might further weaken their domestic position. The George W. Bush administration is undoubtedly reassuring them that the U.S. security guarantee is still in effect, but they cannot help but be worried about its permanence when they see public opinion in this country changing. This puts pressure on the monarchies to pay more attention to the opinion of their own Arab "street." And the opinion of this Arab "street" is today more intensely critical than ever of Israel's policies on Palestine and the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The U.S. government, from September 11 right up to the present, has made it clearer than ever to the world at large that it will unilaterally decide what actions around the world constitute "terrorism," and what actions do not. Specifically, in the minds of Arabs and Muslims everywhere, the U.S. seems to have accepted all actions by Palestinians against Israelis, including acts against Israeli soldiers as well as those against innocent civilians, as being terrorism. At the same time, however, the U.S. appears to believe that no acts by Israelis against Palestinians constitute terrorism. Arabs see this as a double standard. When, also at the same time, Arabs see their own rulers expressing support for the "war on terrorism" as it is defined by the U.S., their antagonism toward their own rulers intensifies. And the rulers themselves, recognizing this antagonism, feel greater concern for their own positions.
I'd like to express a note of caution here. I certainly do not know for sure whether any, or some, or all of the governments in Arab oil nations--the dictatorial governments whose stability and security the U.S. has guaranteed for almost 60 years--will collapse in the near future. Of course change can happen rapidly and without warning. The best minds in the U.S. government had no inkling that the Shah of Iran was going to be ousted a week before it happened in 1979. But even governments that seem to be falling apart can sometimes last for years, until some totally unforeseen shove comes along that pushes them over the edge.
What I am more sure of is that these Arab oil governments are now under greater pressure to change than they have been for years, because of developments since September 11. Therefore the U.S. should be actively encouraging--though never using military force to do so--a gradual movement toward greater political democracy in these nations. And in order to reduce the importance of one major factor leading to greater instability in the region, the U.S. should immediately begin to play a far more active role than it has recently in pressing for a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem based on two truly sovereign nations, with strong treaty guarantees from the United States of the future security of both of these nations.
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By Bill Christison
Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.. These remarks, which he has made available to CounterPunch, have been recently delivered to various peace groups in New Mexico. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979.Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
On January 15 the Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, held a press conference in order to describe the initial criminal charges that the government would make against John Walker, the 20-year-old American citizen who had joined the Taliban military forces. In his talk, Ashcroft said this, and I quote: "The United States does not casually or capriciously charge one of its own citizens with providing support to terrorists. We are impelled to do so today by the inescapable fact of September the 11th, a day that reminded us in no uncertain terms that we have enemies in the world and that these enemies seek to destroy us. We peared in the New York Review of Books and I quote again "is to create one Islamic world. .This is a call to purify the Islamic world of the idolatrous West, exemplified by America. The aim is to strike at American heathen shrines, and show, in the most spectacular fashion, that the U.S. is vulnerable, a paper tiger" Unquote.
These Islamic extremists are not nice people. Those still alive, and other future adherents to their cause, will continue to try to kill innocent people in the U.S. and elsewhere. But what the extremists see themselves as trying to do is to stop the United States from continuing its drive for global hegemony, including hegemony over the Islamic world. I think it's important to understand this, because if people in the United States believe that some enemy is trying to "destroy" the U.S. and actually has some possibility of doing so then waging an all-out war against that enemy can be more easily justified. But what if the U.S. is not trying to prevent its own destruction, but instead is trying to preserve and extend its global hegemony? In that case, I think we should all step back and start demanding of our government a serious public debate over future U.S. foreign policies. We should be strenuously debating the degree to which the people in this country, given all of our own domestic problems, want the U.S. government to continue foreign policies intended to strengthen U.S. hegemony over and domination of the rest of the world in the political, economic, and militarily areas.
In short, Ashcroft's claim that enemies are seeking to destroy the United States makes it easier for the U.S. government to avoid any limits that might otherwise be imposed on its "war against terrorism" by an informed public opinion. President George W. Bush's references in his own speeches to America's enemies as "the evil ones" tend in the same direction. Although acts of terrorism which I'm defining here as killings of, or other violence against, innocent noncombatants are always inexcusable, simply labeling perpetrators as "the evil ones" makes it easier for the U.S. government to avoid any inconvenient discussion of ways in which the U.S. might modify its foreign policies to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist acts. But are all Afghans "evil ones?" Or all members of the Taliban? Or did only a few Taliban leaders know about the planned terrorist attacks before September 11? In any case, is it clear that all Taliban members were accomplices of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? And if they were accomplices, is it not true that the better legal systems of the world do not punish accomplices to a crime as severely as the criminals themselves? Is it right that in this war the U.S. is punishing the accomplices just as much the criminals themselves? It seems to me that the use of the term "evil ones" is intended to avoid discussion of a lot of nuances.
My own view is that the United States is now, almost five months after September 11, heading into an extraordinarily difficult time, when substantial changes in our foreign policies will be required. Yet all the polls seem to show that up to 90 percent of the people in this country still don't even want to listen to anyone who proposes alternatives to our present foreign policies. So I guess that shows that only ten percent of Americans care much about our policies toward the rest of the world. But I'll bet that in this room right now, a much higher proportion of you do care about the rest of the world and do want to see changes in our foreign policies
The first and most basic belief I have about the current situation is that military action will never be effective in solving the problem of terrorism against the United States. At best it will only prevent terrorism temporarily. As I've already mentioned, there's little doubt that the U.S. will somehow kill or capture or otherwise neutralize Osama bin Laden and most of his lieutenants. The U.S. has already pretty much pulverized Afghanistan by bombing, and has incidentally killed an unknown number of innocent noncombatants in the process. The U.S. government, by the way, seems uninterested in even estimating how many innocent noncombatants have in fact been killed, but it is possible that the number is as large as or larger than the 3,000 killed in the U.S. on September 11.
Whatever the military success of the U.S., however, a couple of years hence new extremists just as clever as bin Laden, and hating the U.S. even more, will almost certainly arise somewhere else in the world. That's why we need to understand the root causes behind the terrorism. If I am right that military action will not prevent future terrorism, but only delay it, we should start working on these root causes right away. We should not wait until the military actions are finished before looking at root causes, as some people would urge us to do.
So let's go. I'm going to list six major root causes of the terrorism that I think are important. Either Kathy of I will make some comments on each one and then propose how we should change our foreign policy on each. The critical thing you should keep in mind on all of these six issues is that there is a great deal of disagreement in Washington and elsewhere over the relative importance of one compared to another. With that caveat, here are the six root causes of terrorism against the U.S. that we've chosen to talk about. I've arranged them in a rough order that starts with those I think are most difficult to deal with, but the order does not necessarily reflect their relative importance. My personal feeling is that all six are of equal importance.
ONE: My number one root cause is the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
My first comment on this issue is that it is a more controversial root cause than any of the others on our list. The government of Israel, and many supporters of Israel in the United States, really did not want to talk about any root causes immediately after September 11. Top leaders in the United States, most of whom strongly support Israel, preferred to talk only in general terms about how the terrorists were mad and irrational, and how they had attacked "freedom itself," out of mindless hatred. More recently, when pressured to talk about root causes at all, the Israelis and their supporters have gone to great lengths to reject arguments that Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians, or U.S. support for Israel, are in any way even a partial cause of the terrorism. When forced to say something positive about root causes, they tend to allege a broader Islamic religious hatred of the West and its modern technology than I think exists. They also emphasize the internal tensions within the Arab world, the lack of democracy and the dictatorial rulers of Arab nations, who are depicted as trying to distract their people from their own internal grievances by whipping up hatred of Israel.
I need to digress for a moment. In a situation where there are clearly multiple root causes of terrorism, it's in the interest of any person or nation that might be blamed for one of the root causes to emphasize instead the other root causes. In the last couple of months, a sizable propaganda campaign has been launched suggesting that Saudi Arabia is the most important root cause of the September 11 terrorism. I certainly agree that the dictatorial and decrepit Saudi government and its support throughout the Muslim world for a harsh and immoderate version of Islam can be seen as one but only one of the root causes behind the recent terrorism. I'll have more to say about this later. What I want to point out here is that I suspect supporters of Israel are aggressively pressing this campaign against Saudi Arabia, in the hope of persuading other world leaders that the issue of Palestine is NOT a significant root cause. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is a leading practitioner of this pro-Israel campaign. Both Kathy and I believe, however, that the United States' strong support for Israel and for its occupation and colonization of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is indeed is a major root cause of the terrorism against the U.S.
After I go through the rest of the root causes, Kathy is going to talk in much more detail about the Israel-Palestine issue and its tragic consequences. Kathy will also give you her thoughts on changes in U.S. foreign policy that might be necessary if the U.S. does in fact desire a peaceful resolution of this issue a resolution that would also help to reduce the likelihood of future terrorism against the U.S.
TWO: My number two root cause is the present drive of the United States to spread its hegemony and its version of big-corporation, free enterprise globalization around the world. At the same time, the massive poverty of average people, not only in Arab and Muslim nations but also in the whole third world, has become more important as a global political issue. The gap between rich and poor nations, and rich and poor people within most of the nations, has grown wider during the last 20 years of globalization or, more precisely, the U.S. version of globalization. Animosities against the United States have grown among the poor of the world, who have watched as the U.S. has expanded both its hegemony and a type of globalization based on its own economic system, while they themselves have seen no or very little benefit from these changes.
This problem of poverty around the world is so immense that it's almost impossible to grasp. Global statistics are far from perfect, buy they show that the world's population hit 6 billion last year. 2.8 billion people, almost half of the world's total, have incomes of less than two dollars a day. Here's another statistic: the richest one percent of the world's people receive as much income as the poorest 57 percent. And here's a final statistic: The richest 25 million people in the United States receive more income than the 2 billion poorest people of the world one third of the world's total population. Can we here, sitting in this room, even comprehend the magnitude of the injustice that these figures represent? And have no doubt we in the United States are, rightly or wrongly, blamed for these figures.
The catalog of reasons for animosity toward the U.S. throughout the world includes a number of things in addition to our overbearing assertion of both economic and political hegemony: our arrogance in insisting that whatever we say goes, our penchant for abrogating or ignoring international treaties that we don't happen to like, as well as the influence of U.S. corporations that exploit cheap labor in third world countries to make consumer goods for Americans, Take all these things together and you have a wide sense among the poor people of the world of being oppressed by the United States. This in turn made it possible for Osama bin Laden and the fundamentalists around him to instill and spread intense hatred of us, just as a sense of being oppressed by the Allies after World War I made it possible for Hitler to arouse the kind of fear and hatred among Germans that led both to the slaughter of Jews and to World War II.
The pressures arising from the complex and related problems of U.S. hegemony, globalization and the immense gap in wealth will grow steadily more explosive. My proposal is that the U.S. should immediately develop and implement, with active participation of the U.N. and the European Union (E.U.), a new, very large, and long-term "Marshall Plan" type of aid program for all of the poor nations of the world. This plan should specifically be aimed at reducing the size of the income gap between the poorest and richest nations, and at reducing the income gap between the rich and poor within nations. This type of plan could contribute significantly to reducing the likelihood of future terrorism against the United States. It would also show a far more generous side of the United States to people who at present see only a U.S. version of globalization that seems to them highly selfish and beneficial largely to big corporations and the rich of the world.
I've been talking about a massive aid program for the world's poor since last October, when I spoke to a number of peace groups in Santa Fe. More recently, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has proposed a similar plan, in the amount of $100 billion for each of the next four years. My own suggestion as to the amount is $350 billion spread over three years. $350 billion is, after all, just about what the U.S. military budget will probably amount to in the next ONE fiscal year. One would think that we could find an equal amount to spend over a three-year period for what I would regard as a better purpose.
About now some of you are probably thinking, how unrealistic can this guy get! He of all people meaning me should be aware of how corrupt the governments of most third-world nations are, and you can just see all this money simply going down the drain. My answer is that solving the problem of massive income inequalities around the world is absolutely critical to the future stability of the world, and so far the U.S. version of globalization has not improved the situation at all. I think there are enough intelligent people in the U.N., U.S., Europe, and the underdeveloped countries themselves that we could set up a planning and monitoring group to oversee the wise use of such large funds and to hold the level of corruption to a minimum. The United States should not run such a program unilaterally, and the institutions set up to manage it should not be used to perpetuate and strengthen U.S. global hegemony, as the case now with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. When you hear charges of unrealism before some new program is even in the detailed planning stages, I think you're entitled to ask if those making the charges aren't really opposing the new program for some other reason. My own feeling is that the world is in such a mess, and the inequality problem is so severe, that maybe we should worry less about alleged "unrealism" and more about getting on with the business of planning, followed by real action, to do something about the problem.
THREE: The number three root cause I want to discuss is the continuing sanctions and lack of food and medicines for the people of Iraq, deaths of Iraqi children, and the almost daily bombing of Iraq by the U.S. and Great Britain. Right or wrong, the Arab and Muslim "street" blames this on the U.S., not on Saddam Hussein.
I don't have much to comment about on this one. The sanctions and the bombings have been in effect for ten years, and have neither brought about the ouster of Saddam Hussein nor significantly weakened him. And they have caused the deaths of children variously estimated at up to or over a million. The U.S. government's position is that Saddam himself is to blame for the troubles of the Iraqi people, but the fact remains that after all these years, the Iraqi people are the ones hurt by U.S. actions, not Saddam.
My view is that simple justice argues for an end to both the sanctions and the bombings. My proposal is that we do precisely that.
FOUR: My number four root cause is the continued presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
Ten years ago this was the principal cause of Osama bin Laden's hostility toward the United States. (His hostility on account of U.S. actions against Iraq and then the massive U.S. support for Israel came later and in both cases may be tactical an effort to broaden his own popularity in the Arab world.) Today the thousands of U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia are a constant irritant in Saudi-U.S. relations. The Saudi people clearly do not want them there. Unless we plan to invade Iraq again, I doubt there is any longer a vital reason to keep men and U.S. ground-based military facilities there.
My proposal? The obvious one that we remove the troops. I understand, of course you'd have to be blind and deaf not to know this that some people at high levels in the U.S. government do want to invade Iraq again. All I can say is, I hope such people do not carry the day. I can't think of a thing that would do more to broaden this "war on terrorism" into a Judeo-Christian war against Islam despite any U.S. governmental protestations to the contrary.
FIVE: The fifth root cause on my list is the dissatisfaction and anger of many average and even elite Arabs and Muslims over their own authoritarian, undemocratic, and often corrupt governments, which are supported by the United States.
My first comment here is that Osama bin Laden is a good example of this particular root cause. His extremist wrath was directed as much against the Saudi government, for example, as it was against the United States. His opposition to what used to be his own government was probably the main reason why he had the support of a majority of the young men under 25 in Saudi Arabia. He received similar support from many young men in other Arab and Muslim states as well. Right now these groups of angry young men obviously no longer have a viable leader in Osama bin Laden, but other extremist leaders are almost sure to arise. In addition, the next generation of leaders in at least some of these states may well emerge from among these young men. If any of them do come into power, their future governments will likely be more anti-American than the present governments, which Washington likes to call "moderate," but which are really nothing of the sort. If we have not reduced our energy dependence on oil in the meantime, we may face serious trouble.
In my view, this IS a truly difficult problem. My proposal is that we should adopt draconian measures immediately to reduce our overall energy usage, including but not limited to cutting our dependence on Mideast oil. We should, for example, change our tax structure to make energy as expensive to consumers in the United States as it is in Europe and Japan. This will require significant life-style changes in the U.S. I think we kid ourselves if we believe that we can solve any coming energy crunch by expanding alternative power sources or by increasing "clean coal" usage, nuclear power usage, and Alaskan oil usage. The shortages will be too great; so will the long-term environmental costs; and so will the political costs in our relationships with other nations that have already accepted higher energy prices for consumers as a necessary burden of 21st Century life.
We also should not count on new oil supplies from Central Asia allowing us to forget about the need for conservation and to stop being concerned about the stability of Saudi Arabia or other areas of the Middle East. Even assuming that massive supplies of oil from Central Asia become available quickly, all we'll be doing is transferring our support from the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to the dictatorships of Central Asia. That is not a prospect that we should blithely accept. In my view, conservation is the route we must follow.
I think we should, at the same time, gradually reduce the closeness of our ties with the present authoritarian governments in Arab and Muslim states, and try to develop a better understanding of and improved relations with groups in these states that oppose their own present governments. We should seek out groups that appear to be democratically inclined and "moderate" in the true meaning of the word. Difficult? Of course it will be. But it is the best shot we've got, in my opinion, to have a decent relationship with many Muslim states in the future. It's also the best shot we've got if we wish to diminish, over time, the support for future Osama bin Ladens that arises from the anger of Arabs and Muslims with their own governments.
SIX. The sixth and last root cause on my list arises directly from the U.S. "war on terrorism." It has to do with the kind of war the U.S. is now able to fight. On three recent occasions the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the Kosovo war of 1999 against Yugoslavia, and the current war against Afghanistan the United States has easily achieved victories by relying almost exclusively on air power, on missiles launched from a great distance, and now even on drone aircraft with no humans on board. The U.S. has won these wars with practically no casualties among its own forces. But while few Americans get killed, sizable numbers of other nationalities do.
Most people in the United States are proud both of these victories and of the low U.S. casualties in these three wars. From the viewpoint of anyone who supports the wars, this prowess of U.S. armed forces deserves to be honored. But elsewhere in much of the world, especially the underdeveloped world, this overwhelming invincibility of the U.S. military intensifies the frustrations about and hatred of the United States. This in turn makes future terrorist acts against the U.S. or what is now called by U.S. strategic thinkers asymmetrical warfare even more likely. Those in underdeveloped lands who oppose the U.S. drive for worldwide hegemony are increasingly coming to see no means other than terrorism as an effective method of opposing the United States.
This is an issue that demands a lot more discussion than it's been getting, and it goes to the heart of our future foreign policies. For the immediate future, perhaps the next five or ten years, it's going to be tempting for any government of the United States to implement and enforce whatever foreign policies it chooses by going to war, because it will be confident - even overconfident - that it won't lose a military confrontation and won't suffer many casualties. The U.S. government in fact has already started moving in this direction, by threatening to launch preemptive wars against nations that are trying to develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. Another thing the U.S. is already doing is to militarize the United States to an unprecedented, and wholly unnecessary, degree in comparison with other nations. An editorial in the March 3 New York Times puts it bluntly. "If Congress cranks up the Pentagon's budget as much as President Bush would like, the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined." To me, this is absurd - but there you are. These military expenditures will clearly lead to cuts in spending on domestic U.S. problems such as poverty and healthcare, and make it harder to do anything about solving the problems of global poverty and income inequality that I've already discussed. In this same five to ten year period, the readily available military option will also encourage the U.S. to avoid facing up to the hard decisions necessary for a peaceful resolution of our more intractable foreign policy problems.
This leads me to a very important conclusion. Since the greater willingness to initiate and fight wars intensifies hatred of the U.S., it is in the U.S. interest to show restraint and voluntarily stop employing warfare based on bombing in order to combat future acts of terrorism. The fact that U.S. bombs and missiles have already killed innocent civilians is tragic and puts us on a par with the extremists who committed the September 11 acts. The U.S. should stop, right now, all further military action that risks killing more civilians.
At the same time, I want to emphasize that I am quite sure there is enough evidence of Osama bin Laden's complicity in the September 11 terrorist actions to arrest and indict him. Assuming he is still alive, I would therefore support covert or Green-Beret-type operations to capture, but not assassinate, him. Maximum precautions should be taken, however, to prevent such operations from killing or injuring any more innocent civilians. Once captured, bin Laden should be prosecuted and tried in an international court.
I fully understand that compared to most views you hear concerning the U.S. "war on terrorism," my views are RADICAL. But I believe that unless the U.S. moves in the directions I've been suggesting throughout this talk, in five or ten years the terrorism against the United States will become so intense that our global relationships with other nations will be in shambles. On the other hand, if the U.S. government voluntarily moves toward the kind of foreign policy changes I've been talking about, I think that its actions might start a trend toward a considerably more peaceful, and stable, 21st Century than now seems likely.
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