From comments: "
neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce
wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana
Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through
cybernetic data aggregation."
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and
creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more
oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and
micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and
hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The
introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age
of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom
but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of
freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so
much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
"... The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood. ..."
Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation
of the NHS. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images M y life was saved last year by the
Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure
to remove a cancer from my body . Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from
the floor. I've just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On
the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff
had objected to a decision by the National Health Service
to privatise the hospital's cancer scanning . They complained that the scanners the private
company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital's own machines. Privatisation, they
said, would put patients at risk. In response,
as the Guardian revealed last week , NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel
if its staff continued to criticise the decision.
The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping
privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech,
promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism
was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a
semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend
on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down,
hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into
public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is
brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and
silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In
his book Bureaucracy , published in 1944, he
argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of
the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social
democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that
could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised –
confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be
reduced to cogs "in a vast bureaucratic machine", deprived of initiative and free will.
By contrast, those who labour within an "unhampered capitalist system" are "free men", whose
liberty is guaranteed by "an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote". He
forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And
those votes become a source of power.
His ideas, alongside the writings of
Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this
country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony
Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of
freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential
services to remain public, and they are right to do so.
If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly,
which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs
– or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised
by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We're not idiots, even if
we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.
So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services
outright, they would subject them to "market discipline". Von Mises repeatedly warned against
this approach. "No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise,"
he cautioned. The value of public administration "cannot be expressed in terms of money".
"Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things."
"Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices." "You cannot
'measure' a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case." They ignored his
warnings.
Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name
of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became
not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control.
Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself.
Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test , depriving
children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling
patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and
persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics . Universities urge their
researchers to
write quick and superficial papers , instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores
under the research excellence framework.
As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the
destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds
of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system
causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania
claims to address.
New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the
public sector. Amazon has patented
a wristband that can track workers' movements and detect the slightest deviation from
protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples' keystrokes, language, moods and tone of
voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the
micro-chipping of their staff . As the philosopher Byung-Chul
Han points out , neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that
reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. "Everyone is a
self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise."
The freedom we were promised turns out to be
freedom for capital , gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has
created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by
managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency
measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no
argument or complaint.
Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at
the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true
that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated
drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian
orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become
overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs
collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with
nationhood.
A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of democracy. The final
restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no separate market
and state, just a totalitarian market state.
This is the best piece of writing on neoliberalism I have ever seen. Look, 'what is in
general good and probably most importantly what is in the future good'. Why are we
collectively not viewing everything that way? Surely those thoughts should drive us all?
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Finally. A writer who can talk about neoliberalism as NOT being a retro version of classical
laissez faire liberalism. It is about imposing "The Market" as the sole arbiter of Truth on
us all.
Only the 'Market' knows what is true in life - no need for 'democracy' or 'education'.
Neoliberals believe - unlike classical liberals with their view of people as rational
individuals acting in their own self-interest - people are inherently 'unreliable', stupid.
Only entrepreneurs - those close to the market - can know 'the truth' about anything. To
succeed we all need to take our cues in life from what the market tells us. Neoliberalism is
not about a 'small state'. The state is repurposed to impose the 'all knowing' market on
everyone and everything. That is neoliberalism's political project. It is ultimately not
about 'economics'.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism. This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism. Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
Nationalised rail in the UK was under-funded and 'set up to fail' in its latter phase to make
privatisation seem like an attractive prospect. I have travelled by train under both
nationalisation and privatisation and the latter has been an unmitigated disaster in my
experience. Under privatisation, public services are run for the benefit of shareholders and
CEO's, rather than customers and citizens and under the opaque shroud of undemocratic
'commercial confidentiality'.
What has been very noticeable about the development of bureaucracy in the public and private
spheres over the last 40 years (since Thatcher govt of 79) has been the way systems are
designed now to place responsibility and culpability on the workers delivering the services -
Teachers, Nurses, social workers, etc. While those making the policies, passing the laws,
overseeing the regulations- viz. the people 'at the top', now no longer take the rap when
something goes wrong- they may be the Captain of their particular ship, but the
responsibility now rests with the man sweeping the decks. Instead they are covered by tying
up in knots those teachers etc. having to fill in endless check lists and reports, which have
as much use as clicking 'yes' one has understood those long legal terms provided by software
companies.... yet are legally binding. So how the hell do we get out of this mess? By us as
individuals uniting through unions or whatever and saying NO. No to your dumb educational
directives, No to your cruel welfare policies, No to your stupid NHS mismanagement.... there
would be a lot of No's but eventually we could say collectively 'Yes I did the right thing'.
'The left wing dialogue about neoliberalism used to be that it was the Wild West and that
anything goes. Now apparently it's a machine of mass control.'
It is the Wild West and anything goes for the corporate entities, and a machine of control
of the masses. Hence the wish of neoliberals to remove legislation that protects workers and
consumers.
"Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes
itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia
evokes powerful belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers
of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification
for existing from it.
For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or
political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual
profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks.
And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with
the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the
general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."
Trump clearly hates being regulated, as do most bus billionaire cronies. They want to drill
for oil on the White House lawn if there is potential. They would mine sulfur from Old Faithful
if it was profitable.
"... There's a curious alliance occurring between right-wing authoritarianism and neoliberalism, which is very very troubling. ..."
"... When the neoliberal ethic was first being proposed, it was very much being proposed to the generation of 68 and saying to that generation, 'Look, you want individual liberty and freedom. OK, we'll give it to you in this neoliberal form, which is a very political, economic form, and you have to forget other issues, like social justice and the like.' So, it seeped its way into the discourse of much of the Left and this creates a sort of tolerance for some neoliberal practices. ..."
"... The first revolt against the neoliberal order was Seattle, which was the anti-globalization movement and then all of the picketing of the IMF and G20's meetings. At that point, the ruling class has started to say 'well this could get out of hand, we need a government structure that's gonna sit on these people and do it really, really hard.' ..."
"... So, when Occupy Wall Street came along, which was a fairly small and fairly innocent kind of movement, Wall Street got paranoid. And basically summoned the New York mayor at the time - who was the Wall Street character Bloomberg - to say 'squash these people.' And so, at this point, the perpetuation of the neoliberal order starts to become more and more guaranteed by state authoritarianism and neoconservatism. Which now, has morphed a little bit into this kind of right-wing populism. ..."
"... Indeed, in the early 70s, right after the 1968 movement and when neoliberalism starts to become the dominant ideology, the Left retreated and retired from the idea of a collective struggle. ..."
David Harvey speaks with Greg Wilpert and describes how neoliberalism neutralized the Left
in the early 70s and why now there is a peculiar alliance between neoliberalism and right-wing
authoritarianism.
As Harvey points out:
There's a curious alliance occurring between right-wing authoritarianism and neoliberalism,
which is very very troubling.
When the neoliberal ethic was first being proposed, it was very much being proposed to the
generation of 68 and saying to that generation, 'Look, you want individual liberty and freedom.
OK, we'll give it to you in this neoliberal form, which is a very political, economic form, and
you have to forget other issues, like social justice and the like.' So, it seeped its way into
the discourse of much of the Left and this creates a sort of tolerance for some neoliberal
practices.
Neoliberalism has a very clever way of turning things around and blaming the victim. And we
saw that in the foreclosures of the housing and all this kind of stuff. Many people who were
foreclosed upon, didn't blame the system. What they blamed was themselves.
When Clinton came in promising all kinds of benefits and gave us all these neoliberal reforms,
at that point, people kind of said 'you know, this is not really working for me, and what's
more, there's something going on here which is not right.'
The first revolt against the neoliberal order was Seattle, which was the anti-globalization
movement and then all of the picketing of the IMF and G20's meetings. At that point, the ruling
class has started to say 'well this could get out of hand, we need a government structure
that's gonna sit on these people and do it really, really hard.'
So, when Occupy Wall Street came along, which was a fairly small and fairly innocent kind of
movement, Wall Street got paranoid. And basically summoned the New York mayor at the time - who
was the Wall Street character Bloomberg - to say 'squash these people.' And so, at this point,
the perpetuation of the neoliberal order starts to become more and more guaranteed by state
authoritarianism and neoconservatism. Which now, has morphed a little bit into this kind of
right-wing populism.
So, in a sense the neoliberal order is being perpetuated by this authoritarian shift. And that
should give the Left a good possibility to mount a counter-attack in certain parts of the
world.
Indeed, in the early 70s, right after the 1968 movement and when neoliberalism starts to
become the dominant ideology, the Left retreated and retired from the idea of a collective
struggle.
As Adam Curtis describes
in his film, HyperNormalisation :
The extraordinary thing was that no one opposed the bankers. The radicals and the Left
wingers who, ten years before, had dreamed of changing America through revolution, did nothing.
They had retreated and were living in abandoned buildings in Manhattan. The singer Patti Smith
later described the mood of disillusion that had come over them. "I could not identify with the
political movements any longer," she said. "All the manic activity in the streets. In trying to
join them, I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy." What she was describing was
a rise of a new, powerful individualism that could not fit with the idea of collective
political action. Instead, Patti Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical,
who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn't try to change it. They just
experienced it.
So, the critical question today is whether the time has come for the Left to revive and
exterminate the neoliberal/far-right authoritarian beast.
"... You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors , we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers ..."
"... this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential election. ..."
"... the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there ..."
"... We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests, the think tanks, the so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant stream of thinly disguised propaganda and misstatements of principle and history. We are comforted by their lies. ..."
"... We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil -- to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is that cliché. And it is so finely woven into the fabric of our day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us and around us. ..."
"... It has always been so, especially in times of such vanity and greed as are these. Then is now. There is nothing new under the sun. And certainly nothing exceptional about the likes of us in our indulgent self-destruction. ..."
"He drew near and saw the city, and he wept for it saying, 'If you had only recognized the things that make for peace.
But now you are blinded to them. Truly, the days will come when your enemies will set up barriers to surround you, and hem
you in on every side. Then they will crush you into the earth, you and your children. And they will not leave one stone
upon another, because you did not recognize the way to your salvation.'"
Luke 19:41-44
"You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If
we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers.'"
Matthew 23:29-30
...the results of the Senate GOP finding no evidence of 'collusion' with Russia by the Trump Administration to influence the
results of the presidential election..
This last item is not surprising, because this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction
to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential
election.
Too bad though, because the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind
of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there. And by there we mean on both sides of the fence -- which
is why it had to take a back seat to a manufactured boogeyman.
... ... ...
There is a long road ahead before we see anything like a resolution to this troubling period in American political history.
We look back at other troubled periods and places, and either see them as discrete and fictional, a very different world apart,
or through some rosy lenses of good old times which were largely benign and peaceful. We fail to see the continuity, the similarity,
and the commonality of a dangerous path with ourselves. As they did with their own times gone by. Madness blinds its acolytes, because
they wish it so. They embrace it to hide their shame.
We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests,
the think tanks, the so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant stream of thinly disguised
propaganda and misstatements of principle and history. We are comforted by their lies.
People want to hear these reassuring words of comfort and embrace it like a 'religion,' because they do not wish to draw the
conclusions that the genuine principles of faith suggest (dare we say command in this day and age) in their daily lives.
They blind themselves by adopting a kind of a schizoid approach to life, where 'religion' occupies a discrete, rarefied space, and
'political or economic philosophy' dictates another set of everyday 'practical' observances and behaviors which are more pliable,
and pleasing to our hardened and prideful hearts.
We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil -- to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is
that cliché. And it is so finely woven into the fabric of our day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us
and around us.
And so we trot on into the abyss, one exception and excuse and rationalization for ourselves at a time. And we blind ourselves
with false prophets and their profane theories and philosophies.
As for truth, the truth that brings life, we would interrupt the sermon on the mount itself, saying that this sentiment was all
very well and good, but what stocks should we buy for our portfolio, and what horse is going to win the fifth at Belmont? Tell us
something useful, practical! Oh, and can you please fix this twinge in my left shoulder? It is ruining my golf game.
"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves,
after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves
bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus's sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will
horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman's
beautiful throat."
Léon Bloy
No surprise in this. It has always been so, especially in times of such vanity and greed as are these. Then is now. There
is nothing new under the sun. And certainly nothing exceptional about the likes of us in our indulgent self-destruction.
"... The idea of the 'American dream' seems to have morphed into a nasty belief that if you're poor it's your own fault. You didn't 'want it enough'. You must be secretly lazy and undeserving, even if you're actually working three jobs to survive, or even if there are no jobs. ..."
"... It always seems very odd to me that so many people who think like that profess to be Christian. 'Poverty equals moral failure' is the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ got into so much trouble for saying. ..."
The idea of the 'American dream' seems to have morphed into a nasty belief that if
you're poor it's your own fault. You didn't 'want it enough'. You must be secretly lazy and
undeserving, even if you're actually working three jobs to survive, or even if there are no
jobs.
This view has taken hold in the UK too, where the tabloids peddle the view that anyone who
claims state benefits must be a fraud. But at least, people here and in mainland Europe have
the direct experience of war within living memory and we understand that you can lose
everything through no fault of your own. In the US, even when there's a natural disaster like
Katrina it seems to be the poor people's fault for not having their own transport and money
to go and stay somewhere else.
It always seems very odd to me that so many people who think like that profess to be
Christian. 'Poverty equals moral failure' is the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ got
into so much trouble for saying.
"... Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good. ..."
"... Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. ..."
"... At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes. ..."
"... The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords" have a harder time kicking them around. ..."
Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor:
They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and
financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the
benefits of the social contract and common good.
Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism
is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to
accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling
elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either
exploit or consider disposable.
At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have
taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology
which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes.
The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They
don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords"
have a harder time kicking them around.
Once you understand this about the cheap-labor
conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Remember,
cheap-labour conservatives believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity
they want is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits those who
work for an hourly wage.
You also need to remember that voting the coalition out, which you need to do, will not
necessarily give you a neoliberal free zone; Labor needs to shed some the dogma as well.
"... "We are being poisoned by weedkiller and other pesticides in our food and weedkiller sprayed indiscriminately on our communities. The media remain silent." ..."
"... Mason notes that the agency repeatedly failed to hold Monsanto accountable for its role in the pollution (a role that Monsanto denied from the outset) and consistently downplayed the dangers of the chemicals themselves. ..."
"... In a report prepared for the agency and the local authority in 2005 but never made public, the sites contain at least 67 toxic chemicals. Seven PCBs have been identified, along with vinyl chlorides and naphthalene. The unlined quarry is still leaking, the report says: ..."
"... Apart from these events in Wales, Mason outlines the overall toxic nature of Monsanto in the UK. For instance, she discusses the shockingly high levels of weedkiller in packaged cereals. Samples of four oat-based breakfast cereals marketed for children in the UK were recently sent to the Health Research Institute, Fairfield, Iowa, an accredited laboratory for glyphosate testing. Dr Fagan, the director of the centre, says of the results: ..."
"... "These results are consistently concerning. The levels consumed in a single daily helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is sufficient to put the person's glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver disease in rats (and likely in people). ..."
"... Another study notes neurotransmitter changes in rat brain regions following glyphosate exposure. The highlights from that study indicate that glyphosate oral exposure caused neurotoxicity in rats; that brain regions were susceptible to changes in CNS monoamine levels; that glyphosate reduced 5-HT, DA, NE levels in a brain regional- and dose-related manner; and that glyphosate altered the serotoninergic, dopaminergic and noradrenergic systems. ..."
"... "Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It's on their food and in their water, and it's even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people's fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world's most widely-used pesticide – was safe, the EU's food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto , the pesticie's manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking. ..."
"... At that stage, PCBs, DDT, chlordane, lindane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, toxaphene, heptachlor, dioxin, atrazine+ and dacthal were shown to be EDCs. Many of these residues are found in humans in the UK. ..."
"... Of course, the chickens are now coming home to roost for Bayer, which bought Monsanto. Mason refers to attorneys revealing Monsanto's criminal strategy for keeping Roundup on the market and the company being hit with $2 billion verdict in the third 'Roundup trial'. ..."
"... Attorney Brent Wisner has argued that Monsanto spent decades suppressing science linking its glyphosate-based weedkiller product to cancer by ghost-writing academic articles and feeding the EPA "bad science". He asked the jury to 'punish' Monsanto with a $1 billion punitive damages award. On Monday 13 May, the jury found Monsanto liable for failure to warn claims, design defect claims, negligence claims and negligent failure to warn claims. ..."
"... "Perhaps more ominously for Bayer, Monsanto also faces cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer's, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, kidney disease, and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts. Strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10. ..."
"... Rosemary Mason shows that the health of the UK populations already lags behind other countries in Western Europe. She links this to the increasing amounts of agrochemicals being applied to crops. If the UK does a post-Brexit deal with the US, we can only expect a gutting of environmental standards at the behest of the US and its corporations and much worse to follow for the environment and public health. ..."
A special report in the Observer newspaper in the UK on 23 June 2019 asked the question: Why
is life expectancy faltering? The piece noted that for the first time in 100 years, Britons are
dying earlier. The UK now has the worst health trends in Western Europe.
Aside from the figures for the elderly and the deprived, there has also been a worrying
change in infant mortality rates. Since 2014, the rate has increased every year: the figure for
2017 is significantly higher than the one in 2014. To explain this increase in infant
mortality, certain experts blame it on 'austerity', fewer midwives, an overstrained ambulance
service, general deterioration of hospitals, greater poverty among pregnant women and cuts that
mean there are fewer health visitors for patients in need.
While all these explanations may be valid, according to environmental campaigner Dr Rosemary
Mason, there is something the mainstream narrative is avoiding. She says:
"We are being poisoned by weedkiller and other pesticides in our food and weedkiller
sprayed indiscriminately on our communities. The media remain silent."
What follows are edited highlights of the text in which she cites many official sources and
reports as well as numerous peer-reviewed studies in support of her arguments. Readers can
access the report
here .
Toxic history of Monsanto in the UK
Mason begins by offering a brief history of Monsanto in the UK. In 1949, that company set up
a chemical factory in Newport, Wales, where it manufactured PCBs until 1977 and a number of
other dangerous chemicals. Monsanto was eventually found to be dumping toxic waste in the River
Severn, public waterways and sewerage. It then paid a contractor which illegally dumped
thousands of tons of cancer-causing chemicals, including PCBs, dioxins and Agent Orange
derivatives, at two quarries in Wales – Brofiscin (80,000 tonnes) and Maendy (42,000
tonnes) – between 1965 and 1972.
Monsanto stopped making PCBs in Anniston US in 1971 because of various scandals. However,
the British government agreed to ramp up production at the Monsanto plant in Newport. In 2003,
when toxic effluent from the quarry started leaking into people's streams in Grosfaen, just
outside Cardiff, the Environment Agency – a government agency concerned with flooding and
pollution – was hired to clean up the site in 2005.
Mason notes that the agency repeatedly failed to hold Monsanto accountable for its role
in the pollution (a role that Monsanto denied from the outset) and consistently downplayed the
dangers of the chemicals themselves.
In a report prepared for the agency and the local authority in 2005 but never made
public, the sites contain at least 67 toxic chemicals. Seven PCBs have been identified, along
with vinyl chlorides and naphthalene. The unlined quarry is still leaking, the report
says:
"Pollution of water has been occurring since the 1970s, the waste and groundwater has been
shown to contain significant quantities of poisonous, noxious and polluting material,
pollution of waters will continue to occur."
The duplicity continues
Apart from these events in Wales, Mason outlines the overall toxic nature of Monsanto in
the UK. For instance, she discusses the shockingly high levels of weedkiller in packaged
cereals. Samples of four oat-based breakfast cereals marketed for children in the UK were
recently sent to the Health Research Institute, Fairfield, Iowa, an accredited laboratory for
glyphosate testing. Dr Fagan, the director of the centre, says of the results:
"These results are consistently concerning. The levels consumed in a single daily
helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is
sufficient to put the person's glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver
disease in rats (and likely in people). "
According to Mason, the European Food Safety Authority and the European Commission colluded
with the European Glyphosate Task Force and allowed it to write the re-assessment of
glyphosate. She lists key peer-reviewed studies, which the Glyphosate Task Force conveniently
omitted from its review, from South America where GM crops are grown. In fact, many papers come
from Latin American countries where they grow almost exclusively GM Roundup Ready Crops.
Mason cites one study that references many papers from around the world that confirm
glyphosate-based herbicides like Monsanto's Roundup are damaging to the development of the
foetal brain and that repeated exposure is toxic to the adult human brain and may result in
alterations in locomotor activity, feelings of anxiety and memory impairment.
Another study notes neurotransmitter changes in rat brain regions following glyphosate
exposure. The highlights from that study indicate that glyphosate oral exposure caused
neurotoxicity in rats; that brain regions were susceptible to changes in CNS monoamine levels;
that glyphosate reduced 5-HT, DA, NE levels in a brain regional- and dose-related manner; and
that glyphosate altered the serotoninergic, dopaminergic and noradrenergic systems.
Little wonder, Mason concludes, that we see various degenerative conditions on the rise. She
turns her attention to children, the most vulnerable section of the population, and refers to
the UN expert on toxicity Baskut Tuncak. He wrote a scathing piece in the Guardian on
06/11/2017 on the effects of agrotoxins on children's health:
"Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides,
and fungicides. It's on their food and in their water, and it's even doused over their parks
and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these
pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals
and their potential impact on people's fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was
revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world's most widely-used pesticide
– was safe, the
EU's food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto ,
the pesticie's manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking.
" Exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer.
Because a child's developing body is more sensitive to exposure than adults and takes in more
of everything – relative to their size, children eat, breathe, and drink much more than
adults – they are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals. Increasing evidence
shows that even at "low" doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can
result.
" In light of revelations such as the copy-and-paste scandal, a careful re-examination of
the performance of states is required. The overwhelming reliance of regulators on
industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments, and the
confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change."
Warnings ignored
It is a travesty that Theo Colborn's crucial research in the early 1990s into the chemicals
that were changing humans and the environment was ignored. Mason discusses his work into
endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), man-made chemicals that became widespread in the
environment after WW II.
In a book published in 1996, 'The Pesticide Conspiracy', Colborn, Dumanoski and Peters
revealed the full horror of what was happening to the world as a result of contamination with
EDCs.
At the time, there was emerging scientific research about how a wide range of man-made
chemicals disrupt delicate hormone systems in humans. These systems play a critical role in
processes ranging from human sexual development to behaviour, intelligence, and the functioning
of the immune system.
At that stage, PCBs, DDT, chlordane, lindane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, toxaphene,
heptachlor, dioxin, atrazine+ and dacthal were shown to be EDCs. Many of these residues are
found in humans in the UK.
Colborn illustrated the problem by constructing a diagram of the journey of a PCB molecule
from a factory in Alabama into a polar bear in the Arctic. He stated:
"The concentration of persistent chemicals can be magnified millions of times as they
travel to the ends of the earth... Many chemicals that threaten the next generation have
found their way into our bodies. There is no safe, uncontaminated place. "
Mason describes how EDCs interfere with delicate hormone systems in sexual development.
Glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor and a nervous system disruptor. She ponders whether
Colborn foresaw the outcome whereby humans become confused about their gender or sex.
She then discusses the widespread contamination of people in the UK. One study conducted at
the start of this century concluded that every person tested was contaminated by a cocktail of
known highly toxic chemicals that were banned from use in the UK during the 1970s and which
continue to pose unknown health risks: the highest number of chemicals found in any one person
was 49 – nearly two thirds (63 per cent) of the chemicals looked for.
Corruption
exposed
Mason discusses corporate duplicity and the institutionalised corruption that allows
agrochemicals to get to the commercial market. She notes the catastrophic impacts of these
substances on health and the NHS and the environment.
Of course, the chickens are now coming home to roost for Bayer, which bought Monsanto.
Mason refers to attorneys revealing Monsanto's criminal strategy for keeping Roundup on the
market and the company being hit with $2 billion verdict in the third 'Roundup trial'.
Attorney Brent Wisner has argued that Monsanto spent decades suppressing science linking
its glyphosate-based weedkiller product to cancer by ghost-writing academic articles and
feeding the EPA "bad science". He asked the jury to 'punish' Monsanto with a $1 billion
punitive damages award. On Monday 13 May, the jury found Monsanto liable for failure to warn
claims, design defect claims, negligence claims and negligent failure to warn claims.
Robert F Kennedy Jr., another attorney fighting Bayer in the courts, says Roundup causes a
constellation of other injuries apart from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma:
"Perhaps more ominously for Bayer, Monsanto also faces cascading scientific evidence
linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its
introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer's, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis,
Parkinson's, kidney disease, and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate
cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts. Strong science suggests
glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten
sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is
attacking children as young as 10.
In finishing, Mason notes the disturbing willingness of the current UK government to usher
in GM Roundup Ready crops in the wake of Brexit. Where pesticides are concerned, the EU's
precautionary
principle could be ditched in favour of a US-style risk-based approach, allowing faster
authorisation.
Rosemary Mason shows that the health of the UK populations already lags behind other
countries in Western Europe. She links this to the increasing amounts of agrochemicals being
applied to crops. If the UK does a post-Brexit deal with the US, we can only expect a gutting
of environmental standards at the behest of the US and its corporations and much worse to
follow for the environment and public health.
Anyway, it ain't just glyphosates. We live in a toxic world today. They sicken us with
their chemicals and then reap profit from their pharmaceuticals used to treat our symptoms.
Never a cure. No profit in that. Keep us alive and sick and using their pharmaceuticals to
mask the symptoms. Die before you can collect SS. That's the plan.
Blaming glyphosate, which has been used for decades for a decline in life expectancy that
began only in 2014 doesn't make any sense. If glyphosate really was that cancer causing, it
would have led to a decline decades ago I would think. That being said, I have a bunch of
hard to kill weeds in my backyard (not in the lawn) that I want to get rid of. One in
particular is a real problem as it's not actually a weed but a plant that was put in before I
moved here. It can't easily be pulled or even touched by my weed eater as it has a poison
inside that burns the skin and lungs. I intend to use glyphosate if I have to, but I'm open
to other suggestions from people here that would also get the job done.
" If glyphosate really was that cancer causing, it would have led to a decline decades ago
I would think. "
Monasanto was just stupid to claim Glyphosate didn't have an pontential toxic properties.
It would have just been wise to put on the label: "Do not ingest or inhale, May contain toxic
and carcinogens. where protective gloves and clothing when handling. Do not apply near
streams, ponds or other sources of fresh water."
If someone gets sick, they are not liable or have limited liability.
" I intend to use glyphosate if I have to, but I'm open to other suggestions from people
here that would also get the job done. "
Just use protective clothing & gloves when handling what ever herbicide you use. Avoid
spraying in a way that you might inhale or get exposure. FWIW: I have a hogweed growing on my
property. Way too dangerous to touch of get near. I am going try using Glyphosate to kill it,
if that does do it, I try another herbicide.
Hogweed is very dangerous: Like poison ivy only about 1000 times worse. Even lightly
touching it can cause very nasty skin lesions. Herbicide is the only safe way to get rid of
it.
Weedkiller is killing people because ... we said so!
But what if it isn't weedkiller? What if it is plastic bottles or food preservative or over
the counter pain remedies? We would never know because ZH says it's weed killer. It could be
a combination of many things. Since this is affecting people in their late 80's, anything
that generation was exposed to in the past 80 years could be to blame including during World
War II. I realize that rational thought is frowned upon on ZH but have a little skepticism.
This is the Internet after all.
Roundup was sold to farmers for 30 years as a safe way to help harvest their crops and
reduce the growth of mold which can be much more toxic then many man made chemicals. I am
less worried about monsanto than I am drug overdoses that are killing over 70,000 people a
year. Instead of bombing Iran we need to bomb China and mexico for all of the death causing
drugs they have imported into our country. Over a quarter of a million people are dead from
drugs like heroin and fentanyl in the last 4 years.
" Roundup was sold to farmers for 30 years as a safe way to help harvest their crops and
reduce the growth of mold which can be much more toxic then many man made chemicals. "
Nope, its used as a herbicide to kill everything before they plant a crop so the weeds
don't compete with the crop.
" I am less worried about monsanto than I am drug overdoses that are killing over 70,000
people a year. "
ODs aren't as terrible as food\water contamination. Any sane person will not abuse
opioids. Look at this way: there are 70K less people living on welfare or some other gov't
subsidy. However Food\Water contamination is a big deal since its difficult for even the
sanest people to avoid it. OD is usually a life choice, Food\Water contamination is not.
"... More importantly, Ryan's campaign using the word "isolationism" to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn't accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good. ..."
"... Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option. ..."
"... A few months after Bush's address, Antiwar 's Rich Rubino wrote an article titled " Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism ", explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense. ..."
"... "Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world," Rubino explained. "In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent." ..."
"... "A non-interventionist supports commercial relations," Rubino contrasted. "In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations." ..."
"... "A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations," wrote Rubino. "In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences." ..."
"... Calling an aversion to endless military violence "isolationism" is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people "agoraphobia". ..."
"... Another dishonest label you'll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is "pacifism". "Some wars are bad, but I'm not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary," supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They'll say this while defending Trump's potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq. ..."
"... All Wars Are Evil. Period. "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." – Henry Kissinger ..."
"... Can you imagine Jesus firing a machine gun at a group of people? Can you picture Jesus in an F-16 lobbing missiles at innocents? ..."
"... instead of getting us out of Syria, Trump got us further in. Trump is driving us to ww3. ..."
"... funny how people, fresh from the broken promises "build that wall" etc, quickly forget all that and begin IMMEDIATELY projecting trustworthiness on yet ANOTHER candidate. I'Il vote for Tulsi when she says no more Israeli wars for America. ..."
"... if there's even a small chance Tulsi can get us out of the forever wars i will be compelled to vote for her, as Trump clearly has no intention on doing so. yes, it is that important ..."
"... As for this next election? Is Ron Paul running as an independent? No? Well then, 'fool me once...' Don't get me wrong: I hope Gabbard is genuine and she's absolutely right to push non-interventionism...but the rest of her platform sucks. There's also the fact that she's a CFR member ..."
"... Just as they did with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Pat Buchanan, the MSM and the swamp have already effectively buried Gabbard. It's unlikely that she'll make the next debate cut as the DNC and MSM will toss her out. ..."
"... All the MSM is talking about post-debates, even on Faux Noise, is Harris's race-baiting of old senile Biden. ..."
After getting curb stomped on the debate
stage by Tulsi Gabbard, the campaign for Tim "Who the fuck is Tim Ryan?" Ryan
posted a statement decrying the Hawaii congresswoman's
desire to end a pointless 18-year military occupation as "isolationism".
"While making a point as to why America can't cede its international leadership and retreat from around the world, Tim was
interrupted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard," the statement reads.
"When he tried to answer her, she contorted a factual point Tim was making -- about the Taliban being complicit in the 9/11
attacks by providing training, bases and refuge for Al Qaeda and its leaders. The characterization that Tim Ryan doesn't know
who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is simply unfair reporting. Further, we continue to reject Gabbard's isolationism and
her misguided beliefs on foreign policy . We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it's ok to dine with murderous dictators
like Syria's Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people."
Ryan's campaign is lying. During an exchange that was explicitly about the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ryan plainly said "When we
weren't in there, they started flying planes into our buildings." At best, Ryan can argue that when he said "they" he had suddenly
shifted from talking about the Taliban to talking about Al Qaeda without bothering to say so, in which case he obviously can't legitimately
claim that Gabbard "contorted" anything he had said. At worst, he was simply unaware at the time of the very clear distinction between
the Afghan military and political body called the Taliban and the multinational extremist organization called Al Qaeda.
More importantly, Ryan's campaign using the word "isolationism" to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a
costly, deadly military occupation which isn't accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything
other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good.
Under our current Orwellian doublespeak
paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable
opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option.
This is entirely by design. This bit of word magic has been employed for a long time to tar any idea which deviates from the neoconservative
agenda of total global unipolarity via violent imperialism as something freakish and dangerous. In
his farewell address to the nation , war criminal George W Bush said the following:
"In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism
and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity
at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."
A few months after Bush's address, Antiwar 's Rich Rubino wrote an article titled "
Non-Interventionism
is Not Isolationism ", explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which
simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense.
"Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world," Rubino explained. "In its purest
form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be
mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent."
"A non-interventionist supports commercial relations," Rubino contrasted. "In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists
share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with
all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing
nations."
"A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within
nations," wrote Rubino. "In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling
itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and
non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic
consequences."
Calling an aversion to endless military violence "isolationism" is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people "agoraphobia".
Yet you'll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination,
or even proper non-interventionists. Gabbard supports most US military alliances and continues to voice full support for the bogus
"war on terror" implemented by the Bush administration which serves no purpose other than to facilitate endless military expansionism;
Trump is openly pushing regime change interventionism in both Venezuela and Iran while declining to make good on his promises to
withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan.
Another dishonest label you'll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is "pacifism". "Some wars are bad, but I'm
not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary," supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They'll say this
while defending Trump's potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending
disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq.
This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, virtually no one is a pure pacifist who opposes war under any and all possible
circumstances; anyone who claims that they can't imagine any possible scenario in which they'd support using some kind of coordinated
violence either hasn't imagined very hard or is fooling themselves. If your loved ones were going to be raped, tortured and killed
by hostile forces unless an opposing group took up arms to defend them, for example, you would support that. Hell, you would probably
join in. Secondly, equating opposition to US-led regime change interventionism, which is literally always disastrous and literally
never helpful, is not even a tiny bit remotely like opposing all war under any possible circumstance.
Another common distortion you'll see is the specious argument that a given opponent of US interventionism "isn't anti-war" because
they don't oppose all war under any and all circumstances.
This tweet by The Intercept 's Mehdi Hasan
is a perfect example, claiming that Gabbard is not anti-war because she supports Syria's sovereign right to defend itself with the
help of its allies from the violent extremist factions which overran the country with western backing. Again, virtually no one is
opposed to all war under any and all circumstances; if a coalition of foreign governments had helped flood Hasan's own country of
Britain with extremist militias who'd been murdering their way across the UK with the ultimate goal of toppling London, both Tulsi
Gabbard and Hasan would support fighting back against those militias.
The label "anti-war" can for these reasons be a little misleading. The term anti-interventionist or non-interventionist comes
closest to describing the value system of most people who oppose the warmongering of the western empire, because they understand
that calls for military interventionism which go mainstream in today's environment are almost universally based on imperialist agendas
grabbing at power, profit, and global hegemony. The label "isolationist" comes nowhere close.
It all comes down to sovereignty. An anti-interventionist believes that a country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn't
have the right to conquer, capture, infiltrate or overthrow other nations whether covertly or overtly. At the "end" of colonialism
we all agreed we were done with that, except that the nationless manipulators have found far trickier ways to seize a country's will
and resources without actually planting a flag there. We need to get clearer on these distinctions and get louder about defending
them as the only sane, coherent way to run foreign policy.
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"If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."
Fascinating belief, has he been to Libya lately, perhaps attended an open air slave Market in a country that was very developed
before the US decided to 'free' it.
When we weren't there, they flew planes into our buildings?
Excuse me mutant, but I believe we paid Israel our jewtax that year like all the others and they still flew planes into our
buildings. And then danced in the streets about it. Sick people.
All Wars Are Evil. Period. "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." –
Henry Kissinger
Picture if you will Jesus. Seriously? Can you imagine Jesus firing a machine gun at a group of people? Can
you picture Jesus in an F-16 lobbing missiles at innocents?
Do you see Jesus piloting a drone and killing Muslims, other non-believers, or anyone for that matter? Can you picture Jesus
as a sniper?
Soooo,,, If my favorite evening activity, is to sit on the front porch steps, while the dog and the cats run around, with my
shotgun leaning up next to me,,, Is that Isolationist, or Protectionist,,,
instead of getting us out of Syria, Trump got us further in. Trump is driving us to ww3. we can't do **** if we're
glazed over in a nuclear holocaust. maybe Tulsi is lying through her teeth, but i am so pissed Trump went full neocon
funny how people, fresh from the broken promises "build that wall" etc, quickly forget all that and begin IMMEDIATELY
projecting trustworthiness on yet ANOTHER candidate. I'Il vote for Tulsi when she says no more Israeli wars for America.
If you read her positions on various issues, a quick survey shows that she supports the New Green Deal, more gun control (ban
on assault rifles, etc.), Medicare for all. Stopped reading at that point.
We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it's ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria's Bashar Al-Assad
who used chemical weapons on his own people.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only
for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus
becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the
lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. ~ Joseph Goebbels
The better educated among us know exactly as to who Goebblels was referring to. Even a dullard should be able to figure out
who benefits from all of our Middle East adventures.
"Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer
peace, but isolationism. "
Under military might WAS the old world order... Under the new world order the strength is in cyber warfare .
If under technology the profiteers can control the masses through crowd control ( which they can-" Department of Defense has
developed a non-lethal crowd control device called the
Active Denial System (ADS) . The ADS works by firing a high-powered beam of 95 GHz waves at a target that is, millimeter wavelengths.
Anyone caught in the beam will feel like their skin is burning.) your spending power ( they can through e- commetce and digital
banking) and isolation cells called homes ( they can through directed microwaves from GWEN stations).... We already are isolated
and exposed at the same time.
That war is an exceptable means of engagement as a solution to world power is a confirmation of the psychological warfare imposed
on us since the creation of our Nation.
Either we reel it in and back now or we destroy ourselves from within.
"
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
if there's even a small chance Tulsi can get us out of the forever wars i will be compelled to vote for her, as Trump clearly
has no intention on doing so. yes, it is that important
Idiot, Tulsi is a sovereign nationalist on the left. You have just never seen one before. If you were truly anti-globalist
you'd would realize left and right are invented to divide us. The politics are global and national, so wake the **** up
""War Is the U.S. Racket!"" They are not good at it, there "great at it". My entire life 63yrs,they been fighting someone or
something. When times where rough in the 1800s,Hell! they fought themselves(Civil War. As I said b4 No one seems to ask, Where
does the gold go of the vanquished foe? Truly Is A Well Practiced Racket.
Good article with several salient points, thought I would ask "what's wrong with a little isolationism?" Peace through internal
strength is desirable, but good fences make good neighbors and charity begins at home!
The gradual twisting of language really is one of most insidious tactics employed by the NWO Luciferians. I think we'd all
like to see the traitorous Neocons gone for good. Better yet, strip them of their American citizenship and ill-gotten wealth and
banish them to Israel. Let them earn their citizenship serving in a front-line IDF rifle company.
As for this next election? Is Ron Paul running as an independent? No? Well then, 'fool me once...' Don't get me wrong:
I hope Gabbard is genuine and she's absolutely right to push non-interventionism...but the rest of her platform sucks. There's
also the fact that she's a CFR member and avowed gun-grabber, to boot. Two HUGE red flags!
She almost strikes me as a half-assed 'Manchurian Candidate.' So, if she's elected (a big 'if' at this point) I ask
myself 'what happens after the next (probably nuclear) false flag?' How quickly will she disavow her present stance on non-interventionism?
How quickly and viciously will the 2nd Amendment be raped? Besides, I'm not foolish enough to believe that one person can turn
the SS Deep State away from it's final disastrous course.
These word games were already in use looong ago. Tulsi Gabbard is using Obama's line about fighting the wrong war. She
would have taken out Al Qaeda, captured Bin Laden, and put a dog leash on him. So that she could make a green economy, a
new century of virtue signalling tyranny. No thanks.
Just as they did with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Pat Buchanan, the MSM and the swamp have already effectively buried
Gabbard. It's unlikely that she'll make the next debate cut as the DNC and MSM will toss her out.
All the MSM is talking about post-debates, even on Faux Noise, is Harris's race-baiting of old senile Biden.
I went to some of the so-called liberal websites and blogs and the only mention of Gabbard is in the context of her being a
Putin stooge. This combined with the fact that virtually all establishment Republicans are eager to fight any war for Israel clearly
shows that it will take something other than the ballot box to end Uncle Scam's endless wars.
"... The result has been a disaster for consumers, the environment and the condition of the infrastructure which was sold off as a result of the privatization. Wikipedia provides a helpful list of the past history of awful, depressing headlines the company has generated: ..."
Of all the inhabitants of the Little Shop of Horrors that is neoliberalism, surely the most
gruesome cohort must be privatization of monopoly public services. And then within this
best-worst category, privatization of potable water and wastewater treatment utilities can't be
anything other than an outright winner of this ugly competition.
Where I live in southern England, the Thatcher administration – who else? –
privatized the previously state-owned company which has a monopoly, as all water supply and
sewage treatment inevitably requires, on providing potable water and treating wastewater which
flows into the sewer system and eventually, via treatment plants, back into the
watercourses.
The result has been a disaster for consumers, the environment and the condition of the
infrastructure which was sold off as a result of the privatization. Wikipedia provides a helpful
list of the past history of awful, depressing headlines the company has generated:
In 2007 Southern Water was fined £20.3 million for 'deliberate misreporting' and
failing to meet guaranteed standards of service to customers. Southern Water Chief Executive
Les Dawson said: "Today's announcement draws a line under a shameful period in the company's
history".
In 2011 Southern Water Ltd was fined £25,000 when sewage flooded into Southampton
water.
The company was ordered to pay £10,000 in fines and costs after sewage seeped into a
stream at Beltinge in Kent.
A leak of sewage from Southern Water's plant at Hurstpierpoint pumping station, West
Sussex, lead to fines and costs of £7,200 in 2011.
Southern Water was fined £50,000 in April 2011 for two offences relating to
unscreened discharges into Langstone Harbour, Hampshire, between November 2009 and April
2010.
In June 2010 Southern Water was fined £3,000 after it admitted polluting 2 km of a
Sussex stream with raw sewage, killing up to a hundred brown trout and devastating the fish
population for the second time in five years. Crawley Magistrates' Court heard that the
Environment Agency received calls from members of the public after dead fish were seen in the
Sunnyside Stream in East Grinstead on 30 August 2009.
In November 2014 Southern Water were fined £500,000 and agreed to pay costs of
£19,224 at Canterbury Crown Court after an Environment Agency investigation found that
untreated sewage was discharged into the Swalecliffe Brook, polluting a 1.2 kilometre stretch
of the watercourse and killing local wildlife. (www.gov.uk/government/news)
In December 2016 Southern Water was fined a record £2,000,000 for flooding beaches
in Kent with raw sewage, leaving them closed to the public for nine days. The Environment
Agency called the event "catastrophic", while the judge at Maidstone crown court said that
Southern Water's repeat offending was "wholly unacceptable " . The company apologised
unreservedly, as it did when fined £200,000 in 2013 for similar offences. Due to health
concerns, Thanet district council was forced to close beaches for nine consecutive days,
including the Queen's diamond jubilee bank holiday weekend. (The Guardian, 19 December
2016)
You would have thought, perhaps in hope rather than realism, that after this deluge of crap
(literally), Southern Water (and their investors) might have, if you'll forgive the pun,
wondered if it wasn't time to clean up their act. If so, you'd be, uncharacteristically for
Naked Capitalism readers, rather naive. Southern Water has made their previous civil
violations look like a spot of mustard on a necktie.
Southern Water was fined by the regulators here £126M on June 25th, which sounds a lot
but is in reality in slap on the wrists territory in view of their latest misconduct.
Before delving into the details of that, to provide some context, the utility is the usual
PE-orchestrated financial-engineering asset-sweating systematical reduction of a former public
service to a hollowed out husk.
Southern Water is owned by a consortium, which came together
Clive again, momentarily interrupting the flow, like a blocked sewer. The use of language
there is almost an art form. "came together". Did they all hook up on Tinder or something? Not
a bit of it. The "consortium" was a Private Equity instigated lash up of yield-hungry investors
chasing, like everyone else these days, above-average rates of return. Why didn't they simply
buy chunks of the publicly-traded equity tranches of the company to give themselves exposure to
this particular asset class (public utilities)? Because this wouldn't have given them
sufficient leverage and control over the institution to do their financial raping and
pillaging. Back, reluctantly, to Southern Water
in 2007 solely for this purpose.
The consortium members are shareholders in Greensands Holdings Limited, the top holding
company. [ ]
The Greensands consortium members comprise a mixture of infrastructure investment
funds, pension funds and private equity. The infrastructure funds are managed by JP Morgan
Asset Management, UBS Asset Management and Hermes Investment Management.
The pension funds are represented by JP Morgan Asset Management, UBS Asset Management,
Hermes Investment Management and Whitehelm Capital or are self-managed. Cheung Kong
Infrastructure and The Li Ka Shing Foundation are direct investors.
What have these fine upstanding custodians of our water supply been up to, then? Lying,
cheating, bullying and polluting. Ofwat, the UK water industry regulator, started peering more
closely at Southern Water in 2018. They
didn't like the look of what they saw .
A board which was asleep at the wheel:
Water resources management plan and market information
What we found
Overall, we had serious concerns in key areas of this assessment such as options
costing, Board involvement, assurance and leakage reduction presentation. The draft water
resources management plan option costs were not presented clearly and a limited description
of assurance was provided for both the plan and market information table. The late provision
of the market information and the time taken to update option cost information did not
provide confidence in the company's management of this data. The leakage reduction target, a
key plan metric, was not consistently presented in the plan and there was no evidence of
Board involvement or sign off.
Our assessment: serious concerns
A company that deliberately obfuscated the regulators:
What we found
[ ] We currently have four open cases – an enforcement case, a sewer requisition
case and two requests to appoint an arbitrator.
[ ]
In terms of the enforcement case, we do not consider that the company has met our
expectations and we have serious concerns. This is based on Southern Water not responding
fully to our requests for information (for example, by providing documents with missing pages
and/or text), not responding in a timely manner and providing relevant information that was
unclear. This has affected our ability to rely on the information provided and has required
us to take steps to seek further clarifications and grant extensions to previous deadlines
for responses, impacting our ability to progress the investigation as quickly and efficiently
as we would have liked.
Our assessment: serious concerns
These failings led the regulator to conduct a much wider-reaching inquiry. The full
regulatory report has to be read in its entirety to convey the awfulness that went on. But
edited highlights, or maybe that should be low-lights, were:
・Falsification of regulatory reporting for effluent discharge quality to avoid
fines:
In summary, as a consequence of now restating past WwTW performance data, we have
calculated that Southern Water has avoided price review penalties in past years amounting to
a total of £75 million (in 2017-18 prices). This has arisen as a direct consequence of
the practices in place within the company to implement ANFs at its WwTW (Clive:
Waste-water Treatment Works) over 2010 to 2017. The total amount of avoided price review
penalties reflects the restated figures that Southern Water has now provided about the
numbers of WwTW that were potentially non-compliant with permit conditions relating to final
effluent quality.
・Deliberate attempts at evasion -- government agencies monitor water treatment plants
but the operator predicted when the inspections and sampling was due and intentionally halted
to flow from treatment plants ("Artificial No Flow or ANF" events) so there was no output to
sample:
The Sampling Compliance Report provides evidence (mostly in the form of email extracts
between employees of Southern Water between 2010 and 2017), of staff anticipating the timing
of planned OSM (Clive: On Site Monitoring) samples across numerous WwTW, in order to ensure
that no effluent was available for sampling purposes. This deliberate practice (which took
place through a number of different methods) of creating an artificial "no flow" event
(described as an "Artificial No Flow or ANF") meant that a sample under the OSM regime could
not be taken thus ensuring that the sample (and as a consequence the relevant WwTW) would be
deemed as being compliant with permit conditions. As a result of this manipulation, a false
picture of Southern Water's WwTW performance (and how this was being achieved) was provided
internally within the company, to the Environment Agency (Clive: the UK's equivalent of
the EPA, similarly gutted, but that's another story for another time ) and to
Ofwat
・They even took waste water discharges away by tanker so nothing could be measured at
the outfall pipes.
Staff then used the knowledge about sample dates to put in place ANFs. This included,
for example, through the improper use of tankering (i.e. by tankering wastewater from one
WwTW to another to cause an ANF). Another method included 'recirculating' effluent within a
WwTW again to ensure there was no final effluent available for sampling.
・Senior management hassled and pressured employees to obfuscate performance
measures.
The report also highlighted occasions where employees felt pressured by senior managers
to create ANFs.
・The whistleblowing policy for employees actually started with a big red frightener
threatening dismissal for using the wrongdoing reporting mechanisms:
Southern Water has acknowledged in its Action Plan that there were deficiencies in its
organisational culture which prevented employees from being comfortable with speaking out
about inappropriate or non-compliant behaviours. This included having in place ineffective
whistleblowing processes which resulted in no staff coming forward to report their concerns
despite certain staff being obviously uncomfortable about the implementation of ANFs and
feeling pressured to act in an improper manner (as evidenced by emails we have seen that are
referenced in the Sampling Compliance Report).
The whistleblower policy Southern Water had in place at the time included on its first
page and highlighted in bold the following text: "Should any investigation conclude that the
disclosure was designed to discredit another individual or group, prove to be malicious or
misleading then that worker concerned would become the subject of the Disciplinary Procedure
or even action from the aggrieved individual."
By pretending that waste water being discharged into watercourses was of a higher quality
than it was, the investors pocketed profits that should have gone on infrastructure
improvements and staffing to enable treatment plants to be safely operated and checked
effectively.
Criminal investigations are pending .
But we've seen this movie many times before. Protected by the best corporate lawyers money
(public consumers' money, that is) can buy, a defence shield of auditors, layers of management
on whom the blame can be pinned and a complex legal argument which has to be constructed to a
high evidence threshold allowing jurors to be thrown off the scent to a degree that a
reasonable doubt emerges, we shouldn't hold our breaths.
So we're left with the penalties imposed. Unfortunately there's less here than meets the eye
initially from the headline figure. From the regulatory report:
This is a notice of Ofwat's intention to issue Southern Water with a financial penalty
amounting to £37.7 million reduced exceptionally to £3 million for significant
breaches of its licence conditions and its statutory duties. This is on the basis that
Southern Water has undertaken to pay customers about £123 million over the next five
years, some of which is a payment of price review underperformance penalties the company
avoided paying in the period 2010 to 2017 and some of which is a payment to customers for the
failures set out in this notice, paid in lieu of a penalty.
This means the regulator reduced the up-front cost (which would have come out of the profits
for fiscal 2019-20 in one hit) for an arrangement which allows Southern Water eee-zee payment
terms and to spread the cost over five years through a customer rebate initiative. And some of
the rebate is itself merely penalties which would have been levied if the wrongdoing --
environmental pollution and missed targets for waste processing quality -- had been identified
at the time. They are trying to bribe me with my own money.
The whole sorry saga shows how the entire publicly-overseen but privately-owned regulated
utility model is completely broken. The system is a sitting-duck for gaming and, at best, the
issues are uncovered well after the fact. If ever.
There is, however, a final failsafe currently still in place. Water quality standards in the
EU are mandated by EU Directive with redress available through the Court of Justice of the
European Union (CJEU). A Member State government can be fined and ordered to implement better
oversight and governance of the utilities. Thus, any temptation which the U.K. government might
succumb to, to "fix" problems like those entrenched in Southern Water by slackening off the
potable and wastewater standards, are prohibited by the threat of EU / CJEU referral.
The U.K. government has promised that, post-Brexit, environmental protections will be
"equivalent or better than" those specified in the EU Directive. I -- and similarly cynical
readers -- might well harbour a few doubts about that.
Mmm. I can't help but think that non-government ownership is not (necessariliy) the
problem, but PE (an industry that has made a lot of people rich in the last 20y by pricing
the same asset off ever-lower discount rates) certainly is.
Government ownership often results in unaccountable, faceless monopolies (I'm old enough to
remember British Rail, which felt that it was an entirely acceptable plan to raise fares to
push travellers off rail and onto the roads when the trains got too full) and the "taking
private" of steady-state utility businesses, with cashflows that were "ripe" for
securitisation and other smoke and mirrors moves, pushed accountability back into the dark
ages.
There have been a number of cases of assets like this bought by JVs of PE and public pension
plans. I wonder, were the latter just solicited to make the actions of the former look more
respectable ?
The government certainly doesn't always do a bang up job with everything it controls, but
when the government runs things, citizens at least theoretically have some recourse.
When a private corporation runs it, citizens can, literally in the case above, eat
s**t.
There is, however, a final failsafe currently still in place. Water quality standards in
the EU are mandated by EU Directive with redress available through the Court of Justice of
the European Union (CJEU). A Member State government can be fined and ordered to implement
better oversight and governance of the utilities. Thus, any temptation which the U.K.
government might succumb to, to "fix" problems like those entrenched in Southern Water by
slackening off the potable and wastewater standards, are prohibited by the threat of EU /
CJEU referral.
I do believe that the combination of Water Quality Framework
Directives , along with the Habitats
and Birds
Directives , are a major 'hidden' driver behind the people behind Brexit. These
Directives are written in such a way as to provide almost no wiggle room for national
regulators to escape hitting hard quantitative targets for water and habitat improvements.
The Fracking industry is a very significant example – the Water Frame Work Directive
also sets standards for groundwater, and its exceptionally difficult for the industry to meet
the standards of proof that they will not degrade the quality of these water bodies. The ECJ
is dominated by judges from northern European jurisdictions, which tend to take a far more
'literal' approach to Directives and their associated national laws and regulations. They
provide zero room to massage failures to hit targets.
Escaping those Directives will be worth billions to those two industries at the very
least. Well worth shoving a bit of money to the various campaigns. There are plenty of other
industries that likewise feel they will benefit from what will be an upcoming bonfire of the
Regulations.
I think too that the wriggle-room on water quality -- wastewater especially, potable is
generally not something that anyone would risk meddling with; well, unless you live in Flint,
Michigan, anyway -- has not escaped the notice of or despicable elites here.
The temptation by government to play along, grant "temporary" "exemptions" in response to
industry whining, sorry, lobbying, will prove difficult to resist, more than ever when the
U.K. government will be in a position to know that its word is final (it can simply make new
laws if it decides it doesn't like the old ones).
Will the U.K. as a society end up doing the right thing, or simply backsliding and
acquiescence because it's just easier? At least in the short term. I wish I had a definitive
answer to that one. Ask me again when we know for sure, although I suspect you'll have to dig
me up and open the coffin first.
International racketeering. First they hide the real "persons of interest" within a
consortium of consortiums of funds of funds – much like some special purpose "vehicle"
for wealthy investors – and then they lobby governments bye gaslighting them, saying
'We can do this economically and efficiently' and you are clearly running our of money, so
sell this water district to us and we'll get it back on track.' Right. Makes me wonder if
Bojo and his cronies are heavy into waste management. Pun intended.
I can only see a change when laws are adjusted so that executives can face actual jail
time. Spending a few months, if not a few years, in HMP Berwyn or HMP Bronzefield would
definitely not look good on either a resume or on LinkedIn so would concentrate their minds
wonderfully about the hazards of breaking laws. Till then, any penalties are merely
costs-of-doing -business and so are not a great risk.
Prison time for top executives and board members. Real cash on the nail fines, to be paid
in lump sums. Right to recover bonuses and distributions made to shareholders. Forfeiture of
company ownership to the Crown. For starters.
Limited liability is a privilege not a right and if the terms for limited liability isn't
fulfilled then the limited liability can, in some countries under certain conditions, become
unlimited liability. An example, trading while insolvent in Sweden (in Swedish, as the laws
are in Swedish and only concerns Sweden then it is unlikely to be found in many other
languages):
How do you put people who sat around a conference table in a corporation committee meeting
in jail? The entire process is designed and perfected to evade responsibility. Anytime I see something like this I class it as a complete fluke:
While I was reading this I was feeling increasingly obfuscated by the similarities I find
in the publicly-owned privately-managed sewage and waste plants in Madrid. I can easily
understand the frustration of the regulator with managers opacity. Imagine how bored must I
be sometimes, that I annually take a look at the reports that the managers of those plants
produce. These are rubbish reports. You have to spend a lot of time, first trying to
understand the real meaning of some concepts, second to gather the truly relevant variables
in order to assess the real performance of the plants.
I have to say that the situation in Spain must be worse than in the UK because regulators,
if they exist, never come up with auditing results, not to mention noticing misconducts. We
are miles away from being able to even fine those misconducts of which only a few have been
brougth to the public by NGOs.
Interestingly the former progressive Major of Madrid Carmena, now replaced with
conservatives in alliance with xenophobe populists, ordered the first audit (i believe it is
the first) of the waste treatment plant, a huge facility called Valdemingómez. I guess
that the current Major, whose name I don't want to recall, will hide audit results to the
public given that his party set years ago the current model for waste management.
Good waste management/recycling is going to be the industry of the future. Instead of
being publicly contrite about their excessive wealth, the Billionaires should all focus their
resources on fixing what will otherwise be an overwhelming mess. We will all be, as the
military says, "Overtaken by events" someday soon unless we get on top of this. Pollution,
garbage and sewage are the byproducts of our irresponsibility. Coupled with overpopulation.
Not good. Andrew Carnegie donated his money away on good things. Every little town in America
was a beneficiary, with a "Carnegie Library" among other things. But it made us all laugh out
loud when San Francisco named its new water treatment facility the "George W. Bush Sewage and
Water Treatment Facility" (or stg. like that). Unfortunately, the joke is really on us unless
we start demanding improvements and responsibility. The problem is already almost too big to
fix, Houston.
I knew an English guy circa 1999 who was then 35 years old and a hard Thatcherite in his
opinions (didn't do any actual political activism, of course) because the previous Labour
governments had ruined everything to the point that the country had to go to the IMF. He was
no fan of the NHS, either. NHS-reimbursed dentists had done a ton of unnecessary fillings on
him and his young friends as children. Worse, NHS doctors had misdiagnosed a life-threatening
illness for years until American emergency room doctors did a bunch of expensive tests and
cured him.
I wonder what he would have to say 20 years later now that the faults of privatization on
both sides of the Atlantic have been laid bare?
I don't think there is any alternative to constant watchdogging and activism by the
general public.
Sewage treatment is part of health care. Places without adequate sewage treatment suffer rampant diseases in potable water, fish,
animals and people exposed to it. Sewage treatment facilities are the only example of publicly run health care in the
U.S.
Each homeowner, and renter, pays a certain amount for it and it is handled to scientific
standards without a profit motive.
Late last
year, I
linked to a review of John Patrick Leary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism
(Haymarket Books), and put it on my list of "one more book to read." And now I've finally
gotten around to it! Which is no reflection on the book, or its cover; merely on my own
scattered-brained schedule.
Leary describes (page 180) the genesis of Keywords as follows:
The project began when I was walking through a downtown Chicago food court with Lara Cohen
and Christine Evans, complaining at length about how the word "innovation" seemed to be
everywhere.
Who among us! More:
Christine suggested that instead of just getting mad, I make some small effort at getting
even by writing up my criticisms this turned into a blog chronicling the other terms that
celebrated profit and the rule of the market with guileless enthusiasm. This book is the
product of her suggestion. Lara has been the first reader of virtually everything in book and
its most important critic.
"Getting even" is certainly a strange motivation for starting a blog! MR SUBLIMINAL
[snort!] And, after the usual list of thank-yous that befit an Acknowledgements section,
this:
Thank you to my Wayne State students for your hopeful example of a generation unimpressed
by the promises of an innovation economy.
Let us, indeed, hope! Here is the list of terms that Leary, er, curated; I am sure, readers,
that many will provoke a thrill -- or shudder -- of recognition in you all:
Table 1: Leary's Word List
Accountability
Grit
Artisanal
Hack
Best practices
Human capital
Brand
Innovation
Choice
Leadership
Coach
Lean
Collaboration
Maker
Competency
Market
Conversation
Meritocracy
Content
Nimble
Creative
Outcome
Curator
Passion
Data
Pivot
Design
Resilience
Disruption
Robust
DIY
Share
Ecosystem
Smart
Empowerment
Solution
Engagement
Stakeholder
Entrepreneur
Sustainable
Excellence
Synergy
Fail
Thought leader
Flexible
Wellness
Free
Continuing along with those who have not run screaming from the room: From Leary's list, I
have picked three words: Our favorite, innovation , and then market , and
smart . I'll provide an extract of the definition of each term, followed by a brief
comment. I'll conclude with some remarks on the book as a whole.
Innovation
From page 114 et seq.:
For most of its early life, "innovation" was a pejorative, used to denounce false prophets
and political dissidents. Thomas Hobbes used innovator in the seventeenth century as a
synonym for a vain conspirator [Joseph Schumpeter], in his 1911 book The Theory of
Economic Development used "innovation" to describe capitalism's tendnecy toward tumult
and and transformation. He understood innovation historically, as a process of economic
transformation, but for him this historical process relied upon a creative, private agent to
carry it out [T]he entrepreneur. s
Other than mystifying creativity [another term] itself -- which now looks like an
intuitive blast of inspiration, like a epiphany, and less like work -- "innovation" gives
creativity a specific professional, class dimension. It almost always applies to white-collar
and profit-seeking activities Rarely do we hear of the innovative carpenter, plumber, or
homemaker .
The innovator is a model capitalist citizen for our times. But the object of most
innovations today is more elusive [than in the days of Bell and Edison]: you can touch a
telephone or a phonograh, but who can lay hands on an Amazon algorithm, a credit default
swap, a piece of proprietary Uber code, or an international free trade agreement? As an
intangible, individualistic, yet strictly white-collar trait, innovation reframes the cruel
fortunes of an unequal global economy as the logical products of a creative, visionary
brilliance. In this new guise, the innovator retains both a touch of the prophet and the hint
of the confidence man.
That's the stuff to give the troops! I especially like the part about innovative plumbing;
after all, potable water and indoor plumbing have probably saved more lives than all the Lords
of Silicon Valley combined! However, I could wish for the class analysis to be sharpened with
respect to finance: For credit default swaps, to the executives (not just "white collar"
workers) who committed accounting control fraud; for Uber, the executive crooks and liars who
run the never-to-be profitable business. The intangibles are listed without being categorized
in terms of political economy.
Market
From page 132 et seq.:
The market is both a widely dispersed metaphor of exchange and an economic term often used
a a shorthand for capitalist forms of exchange, especially when modified by the word free
[another term].
The word's oldest meaning is its simplest: "A place where trade is conducted," a meaning
that appears in Old English as far back as the twelfth century. This spatial menaing of the
market place obviously persists in farmer's markets, stock markets, and supermarkets,
but today the market is something more abstract. The most recent definition given by the OED
is "the competive free market; the operation of supply and demand." Its first example of this
usage comes from 1970, at the rough beginning of the neoliberal era .
When politicians speak of "market forces" they presume their autonomy; we are creatures of
the market rather than the other way around. [But] in key moments of recent economic history
-- the United States Troubled Asset Relief Program, the European austerity measures to
enforce "market discipline" on Greece -- market autonomy is nowhere to be seen
A synonym for exchange, whether intellectual or economic, an ontological feature of human
social, an implacable natural force, or a cybernetic network reliant on a strong state: The
market can be whatever you need it to be.
Once again, I would quarrel with the financial detail of the glossary item; the Treasury's
TARP, at $700 billion, was
dwarfed
by the real bailout outlay from the Fed , which has been estimated at $7.7
(Bloomberg) to $29 trillion (Levy Institute). Further, European austerity measures damaged not
only Greece, but the EU's entire southern tier, most definitely including Italy and Spain.
Finally -- although this may seem like a debater's point -- if "market" can be "whatever you
need it to be," then why can't the left repurpose it? Leary himself instances the Communist
Party of the USA's ludicrous coinage of "the marketplace of ideas"; on the editorial pages of
the New York Times, no less!) So "market" may be malleable, but it's not that malleable.
Why?
Smart
Finally, from page 158 et seq.:
Smart, used as an adjective modifying a technology, connotes an efficeint, clean, orderly
pragmatism . Smartness just works . Smart technologies, from munitions to ID cards to
refrigerators to mattresses, usually do one of three related things, and often all three:
they allow (or require) a user to remotely access a computer-linked network, they generate
data [a term] about that user, and they act autonomously, or seem to do so . In addition,
smart means moderr. The six thousand dollar smart refrigerator that tells you when you're out
of milk shows that the key to a smart technology isn't whether it is, in fact, a wise idea.
To be smart is simply to belong ti the new age, . Smart therefore presumes the political
neutrality of the technologies we use.
I think Leary could have leaned a little harder on how crapified most "smart" technology is;
readers will be familiar with the material we periodically post on the Internet of Sh*t. More
centrally, I'm a bit stunned that Leary has limited smart to technology, foregoing the
opportunity to perform a class analysis, as Thomas Frank did in Listen, Liberal! . From
page 22:
Professionals are a high-status group, but what gives them their lofty position is
learning, not income. They rule because they are talented, because they are smart
. A good sociological definition of professionalism is "a second hierarchy" -- second to the
main hierarchy of money, that is -- "based on credentialed expertise
presumed to be politically neutral, exactly as smart technology is. I think expanding the
glossary to "smart" in Frank's sense would have enriched the book. (Frank goes on to use
"smart" throughout the book, with varying degrees of scorn and derision; used without irony,
it's a veritable tocsin of bad faith.)
Conclusion
Leary's Keywords is definitely stimulating and well worth a read (and at $16.00,
within reach for most). At the very least, you should run a mile from any public figure --
whether executive or politician -- who takes the words listed in Leary's keywords (see Table 1)
seriously.
My criticism takes the form of Table 2, which is the list of terms from the great Raymond
Williams, whose book, also entitled Keywords ( PDF ),
was published in 1977, in the Eoneoliberal Period, and which Leary describes as a "classic".
Here are the terms defined by Williams:
Table 2: Williams' Word List
Aesthetic
Exploitation
Originality
Alienation
Family
Peasant
Anarchism
Fiction
Personality
Anthropology
Folk
Philosophy
Art
Formalist
Popular
Behaviour
Generation
Positivist
Bibliography
Genetic
Pragmatic
Bourgeois
Genius
Private
Bureaucracy
Hegemony
Progressive
Capitalism
History
Psychologica
Career
Humanity
Racial
Charity
Idealism
Radical
City
Ideology
Rational
Civilization
Image
Reactionary
Class
Imperialism
Reader's
Collective
Improve
Realism
Commercialism
Individual
References
Common
Industry
Reform
Communication
Institution
Regional
Communism
Intellectual
Representative
Community
Interest
Revolution
Consensus
Isms
Romantic
Consumer
Jargon
Science
Conventional
Labour
Select
Country
Liberal
Sensibility
Creative
Liberation
Sex
Criticism
Literaturw
Socialist
Culture
Man
Society
Democracy
Management
Sociology
Determine
Masses
Standards
Development
Materialism
Status
Dialect
Mechanical
Structural
Dialectic
Media
Subjective
Doctrinaire
Mediation
Taste
Dramatic
Medieval
Technology
Ecology
Modern
Theory
Educated
Monopoly
Tradition
Elite
Myth
Unconscious
Empirical
Nationalist
Underprivileged
Equality
Native
Unemployment
Ethnic
Naturalism
Utilitarian
Evolution
Nature
Violence
Existential
Notes
Wealth
Experience
Ordinary
Welfare
Expert
Organic
Western
Work
If you compare the tables, you will see that Williams' list of keywords is both more
abstract and more powerful, although some that we would expect to see today ("identity,"
"rentier") are missing. Of course, it's extremely unfair of me to make compare Leary's and
Williams' lists in this way; in fact, I admonish others not to complain that the author did not
write a book about penguins, when the author plainly intended to write a book about crows.
Leary promised a "field guide to the capitalist present, and he has delivered. Nevertheless, it
would be nice to have a second edition of Keywords , written with Leary's clarity,
knowledgeability, and verve, and containing more powerful terms[1], most of which have been
erased. Starting, perhaps, with "class."
NOTES
[1] To be fair, Leary writes (page 5): "The words in my collection are generally more
specific to the contemporary moment. They can also be understood as blockages -- that is, they
are the words we use when we aren't calling things by their proper name. William's collection
has "management" and "labor"; this one has "leadership" and "human capital." Tacklage is, I
suppose, what happens, in addition to blockage, if some prole of an analyst uses the wrong
(that is, the right) words. That said, can the truth be reverse engineered out of bullshit? One
for the judges.
What, no "muscular"? Hillary probably like muscular because it made her sound more
threatening. Nikki Haley took up the same gig with her stilletto heels.
Thanks for this post. Leary's list looks like TED talk word cloud, imo. Ad speak. ha.
I don't know if Williams' word list was based on ad speak of the 1970s. Maybe not.
Many of Williams' words place people in relation to each other or to the society, within
society. Not getting that same larger society idea from the words in Leary's ad speak list;
it's more 'rational man' alone against the world. Maybe that's the essence of ad speak. "Army
of one." "Be all YOU can be." etc.
Or now: Be all the smart, innovative, creative, nimble, passionate leader YOU can be."
;)
I am not 100% certain of this; everybody should read Tufte's ESSAY:
THE COGNITIVE STYLE OF POWERPOINT: PITCHING OUT CORRUPTS WITHIN , but the exact quote
does not appear in there. The quote does occur in Tufte's 2003 Wired essay , but as a deck beneath
the headline, and not in the body of the article. Therefore, I am not sure whether Tufte
coined the phrase, or some anonymous editor. Can any readers clarify?
"And that's how it is
That's what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you're listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why"
Thank you Lambert. You manage to keep me sane. This exposure to and of nonsense is very
timely now. In the end all we have is a set of words which allow us to trust each other. We
need to find them.
Most of Leary's list is familiar from events I occasionally attended as a government IT
specialist. "Wellness" overlaps with what I call the language of therapy (don't know the
"correct" term) e.g. "conversation", "healing" which if anything is even more grating
Never thought about it before but in the use of the word 'market' today, it is like it is
trying to replace the word 'society' and how it was used before. Is that what Thatcher meant?
That there was no society but a 'market' instead?
I was just thinking that maybe we need rehabilitate the phrase (which appears in some
famous document which we in theory revere) 'promote the general welfare'. This connotes of
course citizenship, commons, community. Everything that we desperately need.
Nowadays, "community" really means something that you pay for. Or, if you're not paying
for it, well, you're the product.
Take, for example, online groups. They're often called communities. You may have to pay to
belong, but if you don't, the data that you and your fellow "members" produce is being sold
and resold.
In the offline world, there are businesses that refer to their customers as members. And
what are they members of? Well, my dear, that is a community.
So, add these two words to the list of words that need to be taken outside and shot:
Sounds like a great book; anyhow a superb post. I'd have liked to see what Mr Leary has to
say about 'associate' (noun; see also employee [archaic]) and service (noun; as in "software
as a service"). Perhaps also "industry" (as in "the payday loans industry") – which now
I think has senses that Williams could not have imagined. Oh, and why not "Crapification?" On
a more serious note, there is "Inequality." (Hat tip to Tom, above, for the peerless
"Vibrant.")
Perhaps worth adding: "gig economy," "[education/health care, etc.] reform."
Yesterday I read a story in the NYT ["Love" section, formerly "Weddings"] about an
Instagram "Influencer couple."
Some terms are euphemisms; others are buzzwords for the increasing privatization /
shrinking of public space/services/goods (what was once known in some circles as the "theft
of the commons," but hey, I'm old).
Such terms deserve to be called out repeatedly, with their actual meaning helpfully
provided in (). Thus "ed reformers" (i.e. privatizers through various means such as ESAs,
ETCs, vouchers) or "right to work," which I finally decided to define as "right to fire at
will." Far-right think tanks are great sources of such terms; the bills ALEC writes for state
legislatures are, too.
My own special bugbear is "grit" (someone who still demonstrates faith in the system which
has betrayed them).
OTOH, such words are helpful in identifying the ideological perspective an author is
coming from.
I was wondering where the use of the phrase, "We need to have a conversation about " In
place of " we should discuss" or "let's talk about" came from. I find it " to be a given"
that anything that Kamala Harris says is meaningless noise these days. She seems to have
acquired this mea!y mouth way of avoiding taking a position after only a short time in the
Senate. She's well on her way to being permanently inconsequential.
"We need to" or "you need to" is one of my pet peeves, because of the power-tripping
assumption that my interlocutor gets to determine my needs (all for the greater good ,
of course! Always for the good!)
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard was both pilloried and held in uncertain awe
for his contribution to the English lexicon of 'incentivising', as in 'incentivising and
rewarding hard work'.
Etymology shows that word meanings can change and even invert over time. Floyd Merrell
looked at the poetics of ambiguity, where 1:1 is unambiguous, 1:2 can have two meanings (a
dog growling may be warning or playing), to n:n where meaning is entirely contextual.
There are people, and places, and objects which have changed in affect for me, usually
through an aversive experience. We see this with words; for example, 'socialist' will always
carry resonances of fascism since Adolph called his thing 'National Socialism'. As useful as
'class' is it, carries Marxist overtones, which causes reflexive affect for some. 'Well'
carries positive connotation in some evangelical circles.
Words can get stink on them from dogwhistles. Will you argue about old words, or avoid
quagmires with Smart Innovative people by creating clever and fresh new words with less
historical accretion? That's what Shakespeare did and we're still looking at him four hundred
years later. As a friend said to me in a conversation about demented mothers, "You've got to
let'em go." You can still love them, but if they control the conversation, there madness
lies.
I'm guessing: aside from acceptance, involvement & touch from loving, comforting,
equanamous parents (community integration amongst disparate peers), the sociopathic/ somatic
neuroses evinced in this addiction to euphamism, platitude and obfuscatory pleonasm as glib,
off-handed, day-to-day BS subterfuge, reflects cytokine imbalances, resulting from unresolved
childhood trauma and fast-food diets, deficient in pre-biotics? Not enough roughage, huh?
The ones that turn my stomach the most are "influencer," "maker," and "ask" as a noun (as
in, "Hey, I know it's a big ask, but I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday "). Oh! And
also "content" used to mean information. A friend who is a university professor said the
administration are now referring to faculty as "content distributors." Barf.
Ever had a conversation with a Teacher? Oh excuse me; an "educator" LOL. They use so many
sucky phrases and words that you can't even remember what the discussions were about in the
first place. It's bad enough in secondary schools but now in pre-school (early learning
centres) you need an interpretation booklet to make any sense of what your child is up to in
the damn place. I must confess that my MBA taught me a whole bunch of weasel words and
obscure terminology so that my management reports were rarely tested for veracity. And
therein lies the issue. Words were once used to impart knowledge, whereas now, as the article
alludes to, words and phrases are redesigned and reoriented to avoid, obfuscate, marginalise,
confuse etc you get the picture.. Look no further than your local politician for tricky word
speak – it makes Trump's burbling seem almost sensible by contrast. At least we know
what a pussy is now!
I took a trip last weekend to Palm Springs, CA. and Laughlin, NV. and everywhere I went I
was inundated with offers for "handcrafted" margaritas and coffees and various food
stuffs.
"Men make their own history vocabulary, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
"... Friedrich von Hayek, one of the creed's most revered economic gurus, spent his productive years railing against government old age pension and medical insurance schemes. When he became old and infirm, he signed on for both social security and medicare. ..."
Friedrich von Hayek, one of the creed's most revered economic gurus, spent his productive
years railing against government old age pension and medical insurance schemes. When he
became old and infirm, he signed on for both social security and medicare.
Love it. When push comes to shove all those ideologies and beliefs crumble into the dust of
practical needs. Another individual who cloaked the self-interest of the rich and
powerful into some kind of spurious ideology.
George wrote a rather good article about Von
Hayek a few years ago I seem to remember.
"... Republicanism and true Christianity are mutually exclusive. There is nothing for them to quote. Sharing your wealth? Giving to the poor? Egalitarianism? Loving your neighbour? The Good Samaritan? ..."
"... Best to pretend that Christianity is about extreme right wing economic policy (and fascist social mores), even though it is the opposite. ..."
"... And Tea Partiers like Ayn Rand? The most anti-Christian and anti-American lunatic you can find? The corporate agenda and Wall Street interests trump everything else. No news there. ..."
"... A lot of these people describe themselves as Christian, makes you wonder which part of Jesus' message they loved more, the part that said the poor should rot without help, or the part where he said violence was justified and the chasing of wealth is to be lauded. ..."
It never stops to amaze me how the American Republican Right claims to be Christian. Have you
noticed that they NEVER quote the words of Jesus Christ? I don't blame them,
Republicanism and true Christianity are mutually exclusive. There is nothing for them to
quote. Sharing your wealth? Giving to the poor? Egalitarianism? Loving your neighbour? The
Good Samaritan?
Dirty words all. Best to pretend that Christianity is about extreme right wing
economic policy (and fascist social mores), even though it is the opposite.
If Jesus came to the US today, he would not like Republicans and they would not like him.
Santorum, Palin, Limbaugh etc. would strap him to the electric chair and pull the lever if
they could, no doubt.
And Tea Partiers like Ayn Rand? The most anti-Christian and anti-American lunatic you
can find? The corporate agenda and Wall Street interests trump everything else. No news
there.
The most bizarre aspect of the rights infatuation with Ayn Rand is that she was an
ardent Atheist who's beliefs are diametrically opposite to those of Jesus & the
Bible.
A lot of these people describe themselves as Christian, makes you wonder which part of
Jesus' message they loved more, the part that said the poor should rot without help, or the
part where he said violence was justified and the chasing of wealth is to be lauded.
"the only way you're gonna be able to sleep at night (and go to heaven in the afterlife) is
to believe that the system has some moral justification based on the laws of nature"
I think this is one of the drivers in the shift from Catholicism to Protestanism,
especially in Northern Europe.
For Medieval Catholics everyone was where God had put them, so the rich were rich and the
poor poor as part of Gods plan, and anyone trying to change it was going against God.
Which is handy if you are a Baron or Bishop living the high life surrounded my thousands of
starving peasants (having armed retainers also helped).
Come the industrial revolution and the rise of the business and trade classes that's not so
appealing, so now God rewards the virtuous and hard working, who naturally rise to the
top.
Another very informative article from one of the few writers with any sense of having a
'finger on the pulse.'
It's sad that it's taken over 30 years for the real shaping influences behind the current
system to be identified and discussed outside the boundaries of a few university
conferences.
The Right have been absolutely brilliant at media control and obfuscation. Their gurus
have been camouflaged and the whole process of influencing Reagan and Thatcher's governments
from the late 1970's has escaped exactly the kind of scrutiny that George gives Rand.
We might also investigate the influence of John Nash's (A Beautiful Mind) 'Gameplay'
experiments in a similar fashion along with the economic gurus who followed Hayek so
slavishly.
It has been known for years that the neo liberal project was designed not just to under
mine democracy and convert people into passive cloned market junkies, but to put an end to
the whole of the Enlightenment Project, which perhaps naively saw human development,. growth
and other human qualities totally savaged and defeated by this poisonous evil, which emulates
all the worst aspects of Fascism without the flags and theatre.
Sadly, this is not a 'this is happening' phenomenon; it's a 'this has happened
phenomenon.' The taint and viral effect of its impact on uk and usa political structures has
already caused major damage. All three major political parties in the uk have for 30 years
subscribed to its tenets though they were no doubt not presented in such a flagrant form as
Rand's writing.
How problematic is it to now look at the polity and rescue it from such a major
ideological shift? Certainly, the major parties cannot shuck off the cape of their key
beliefs after promoting Right wing ideologies for so long, and the traditional Left is no
more.
However, it is good to see some pithy journalism that goes to the heart of the matter -
those of us who have been pleading for less x factor celebrity worshipping of politicians can
at least feel as though this shifts the spectrum to real and significant issues that have
affected the lives of everyone for so long.
I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that
towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security.
In case nobody mentioned this book before, which is relevant to the theme:
These submerged policies, Mettler shows, obscure the role of government and
exaggerate that of the market. As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits
they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance
companies and the financial industry. Neither do they realize that the policies of the
submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating
inequality.
"... If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to legitimise itself. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. ..."
"... Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. ..."
"... Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices, they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know there would be socialism. ..."
"... This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is, neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t totalitarianism. ..."
"... It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal. ..."
"... However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes that Hayek railed against. ..."
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism.
In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath
discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue.
Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become
synonymous with nationhood. A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of
democracy.
The final restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no
separate market and state, just a totalitarian market state.
Yes, the EU is an ordoliberal institution - the state imposing rules on the market from
without. Thus, it is not the chief danger. The takeover of 5G, and therefore our entire
economy and industry, by Huawei - now that would be a loss of state sovereignty. But because
Huawei is nominally a corporation, people do not think about is a form of governmental
bureaucracy, but if powerful enough that is exactly what it is.
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Neoliberalism allows with impunity pesticide businesses to apply high risk toxic pesticides
everywhere seriously affecting the health of children, everyone as well as poisoning the
biosphere and all its biodiversity. This freedom has gone far too far and is totally
unacceptable and these chemicals should be banished immediately.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives.
Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'.
Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism.
This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism.
Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
1. Hayek's book 'The Road to Serfdom' uses an erroneous metaphor. He argues that if we allow gov regulation, services and spending
to continue then we will end up serfs. However, serfs are basically the indentured or slave labourers of private citizens and
landowners not of the state. Only in a system of private capital can there be serfs. Neo liberalism creates serfs not a public
system.
2. According to Hayek all regulation on business should be eliminated and only labour should be regulated to make it cheap
and contain it so that private investors can have their returns guaranteed. Hence the purpose of the state is to pass laws to
suppress workers.
These two things illustrate neo-liberalism. Deception and repression of labour.
"... A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes . What's more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides , even though the murder rate gets so much more attention. ..."
"... In some states the upsurge was far higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%). ..."
"... Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between 35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Globally , it ranks 27th. ..."
"... The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half of all such acts in this country. ..."
"... Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower among people in higher-income brackets. ..."
"... Evidence from the United States , Brazil , Japan , and Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases, so does the suicide rate. ..."
"... One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways) than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly higher . ..."
"... The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have labeled " deaths of despair " -- those caused by suicides plus opioid overdoses and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and its ripple effects do appear to matter. ..."
"... Trump has neglected his base on pretty much every issue; this one's no exception. ..."
Yves here. This post describes how the forces driving the US suicide surge started well before the Trump era, but explains how
Trump has not only refused to acknowledge the problem, but has made matters worse.
However, it's not as if the Democrats are embracing this issue either.
BY Rajan Menon, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New
York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention
Originally published at
TomDispatch .
We hear a lot about suicide when celebrities like
Anthony Bourdain and
Kate Spade die by their own hand.
Otherwise, it seldom makes the headlines. That's odd given the magnitude of the problem.
In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves.
In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly
seven times greater than the number
of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.
A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every
12 minutes . What's more, after decades
of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since
the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do
homicides , even
though the murder rate gets so much more attention.
In other words, we're talking about a national
epidemic of self-inflicted
deaths.
Worrisome Numbers
Anyone who has lost a close relative or friend to suicide or has worked on a suicide hotline (as I have) knows that statistics
transform the individual, the personal, and indeed the mysterious aspects of that violent act -- Why this person? Why now? Why in
this manner? -- into depersonalized abstractions. Still, to grasp how serious the suicide epidemic has become, numbers are a necessity.
According to a 2018 Centers for Disease Control study , between
1999 and 2016, the suicide rate increased in every state in the union except Nevada, which already had a remarkably high rate. In
30 states, it jumped by 25% or more; in 17, by at least a third. Nationally, it increased
33% . In some states the upsurge was far
higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%).
Alas, the news only gets grimmer.
Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th
among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between
35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest
rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Globally , it ranks 27th.
More importantly, the trend in the United States doesn't align with what's happening elsewhere in the developed world. The World
Health Organization, for instance, reports
that Great Britain, Canada, and China all have notably lower suicide rates than the U.S.,
as do all but
six countries in the European Union. (Japan's is only slightly lower.)
World Bank statistics show that, worldwide,
the suicide rate fell from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2000 to 10.6 in 2016. It's been falling in
China ,
Japan
(where it has declined steadily for nearly a
decade and is at its lowest point in 37 years), most of Europe, and even countries like
South Korea and
Russia that
have a significantly higher suicide rate than the United States. In Russia, for instance, it has dropped by nearly 26% from a
high point of 42 per 100,000 in
1994 to 31 in 2019.
We know a fair amount about the patterns
of suicide in the United States. In 2017, the rate was highest for men between the ages of 45 and 64 (30 per 100,000) and those 75
and older (39.7 per 100,000).
The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New
Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own
guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a
higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half
of all such acts in this country.
There are gender-based differences as well.
From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost four-and-a-half times higher in the first of
those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last.
Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is
lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill
themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower
among people in higher-income brackets.
The Economics of Stress
This surge in the suicide rate has taken place in years during which the working class has experienced greater economic hardship
and psychological stress. Increased competition from abroad and outsourcing, the results of globalization, have contributed to job
loss, particularly in economic sectors like manufacturing, steel, and mining that had long been mainstays of employment for such
workers. The jobs still available often paid less and provided fewer benefits.
Technological change, including computerization, robotics, and the coming of artificial intelligence, has similarly begun to displace
labor in significant ways, leaving Americans without college degrees, especially those 50 and older, in
far more difficult straits when it comes to
finding new jobs that pay
well. The lack of anything resembling an
industrial policy of a sort that exists in Europe
has made these dislocations even more painful for American workers, while a sharp decline in private-sector union membership
-- down
from nearly 17% in 1983 to 6.4% today -- has reduced their ability to press for higher wages through collective bargaining.
Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted median wage has barely budged
over the last four decades (even as
CEO salaries have soared). And a decline in worker productivity doesn't explain it: between 1973 and 2017 productivity
increased by 77%, while a worker's average hourly wage only
rose by 12.4%. Wage stagnation has made it
harder for working-class
Americans to get by, let alone have a lifestyle comparable to that of their parents or grandparents.
The gap in earnings between those at the top and bottom of American society has also increased -- a lot. Since 1979, the
wages of Americans in the 10th percentile increased by a pitiful
1.2%. Those in the 50th percentile did a bit better, making a gain of 6%. By contrast, those in the 90th percentile increased by
34.3% and those near the peak of the wage pyramid -- the top 1% and especially the rarefied 0.1% -- made far more
substantial
gains.
And mind you, we're just talking about wages, not other forms of income like large stock dividends, expensive homes, or eyepopping
inheritances. The share of net national wealth held by the richest 0.1%
increased from 10% in the 1980s to 20% in 2016.
By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% shrank in those same decades from about 35% to 20%. As for the top 1%, by 2016 its share
had increased to almost 39% .
The precise relationship between economic inequality and suicide rates remains unclear, and suicide certainly can't simply be
reduced to wealth disparities or financial stress. Still, strikingly, in contrast to the United States, suicide rates are noticeably
lower and have been declining in
Western
European countries where income inequalities are far less pronounced, publicly funded healthcare is regarded as a right (not
demonized as a pathway to serfdom), social safety nets far more extensive, and
apprenticeships and worker
retraining programs more widespread.
Evidence from the United States
, Brazil ,
Japan , and
Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases,
so does the suicide rate. If so, the good news is that progressive economic policies -- should Democrats ever retake the White
House and the Senate -- could make a positive difference. A study
based on state-by-state variations in the U.S. found that simply boosting the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit by 10%
appreciably reduces the suicide rate among people without college degrees.
The Race Enigma
One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways)
than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly
higher . It increased from 11.3 per 100,000
in 2000 to 15.85 per 100,000 in 2017; for African Americans in those years the rates were 5.52 per 100,000 and 6.61 per 100,000.
Black men are
10 times more likely to be homicide victims than white men, but the latter are two-and-half times more likely to kill themselves.
The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate
effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne
Case and Angus Deaton have labeled "
deaths of despair
" -- those caused by suicides plus
opioid overdoses
and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and
its ripple effects do appear to matter.
According to a study by the
St. Louis Federal Reserve , the white working class accounted for 45% of all income earned in the United States in 1990, but
only 27% in 2016. In those same years, its share of national wealth plummeted, from 45% to 22%. And as inflation-adjusted wages have
decreased for
men without college degrees, many white workers seem to have
lost hope of success of
any sort. Paradoxically, the sense of failure and the accompanying stress may be greater for white workers precisely because they
traditionally were much
better off economically than their African American and Hispanic counterparts.
In addition, the fraying of communities knit together by employment in once-robust factories and mines has increased
social isolation
among them, and the evidence that it -- along with
opioid addiction and
alcohol abuse -- increases the risk of suicide
is strong . On top of that,
a significantly higher proportion of
whites than blacks and Hispanics own firearms, and suicide rates are markedly higher in states where gun
ownership is more widespread.
Trump's Faux Populism
The large increase in suicide within the white working class began a couple of decades before Donald Trump's election. Still,
it's reasonable to ask what he's tried to do about it, particularly since votes from these Americans helped propel him to the White
House. In 2016, he received
64% of the votes of whites without college degrees; Hillary Clinton, only 28%. Nationwide, he beat Clinton in
counties where deaths of despair rose significantly between 2000 and 2015.
White workers will remain crucial to Trump's chances of winning in 2020. Yet while he has spoken about, and initiated steps aimed
at reducing, the high suicide rate among
veterans , his speeches and tweets have never highlighted the national suicide epidemic or its inordinate impact on white workers.
More importantly, to the extent that economic despair contributes to their high suicide rate, his policies will only make matters
worse.
The real benefits from the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by the president and congressional Republicans flowed
to those on the top steps of the economic ladder. By 2027, when the Act's provisions will run out, the wealthiest Americans are expected
to have captured
81.8% of the gains. And that's not counting the windfall they received from recent changes in taxes on inheritances. Trump and
the GOP
doubled the annual amount exempt from estate taxes -- wealth bequeathed to heirs -- through 2025 from $5.6 million per individual
to $11.2 million (or $22.4 million per couple). And who benefits most from this act of generosity? Not workers, that's for sure,
but every household with an estate worth $22 million or more will.
As for job retraining provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the president
proposed
cutting that program by 40% in his 2019 budget, later settling for keeping it at 2017 levels. Future cuts seem in the cards as
long as Trump is in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office
projects that his tax cuts alone will produce even bigger budget
deficits in the years to come. (The shortfall last year was
$779 billion and it is expected to
reach $1 trillion by 2020.) Inevitably, the president and congressional Republicans will then demand additional reductions in spending
for social programs.
This is all the more likely because Trump and those Republicans also
slashed corporate taxes
from 35% to 21% -- an estimated
$1.4
trillion in savings for corporations over the next decade. And unlike the income tax cut, the corporate tax has
no end
date . The president assured his base that the big bucks those companies had stashed abroad would start flowing home and produce
a wave of job creation -- all without adding to the deficit. As it happens, however, most of that repatriated cash has been used
for corporate stock buy-backs, which totaled more than
$800 billion last year. That, in turn, boosted share prices, but didn't exactly rain money down on workers. No surprise, of course,
since the wealthiest 10% of Americans own at least
84% of all stocks and the bottom
60% have less than
2% of them.
And the president's corporate tax cut hasn't produced the tsunami of job-generating investments he predicted either. Indeed, in
its aftermath, more than 80% of American
companies stated that their plans for investment and hiring hadn't changed. As a result, the monthly increase in jobs has proven
unremarkable compared to President Obama's
second term, when the economic recovery that Trump largely inherited began. Yes, the economy did grow
2.3%
in 2017 and
2.9% in 2018 (though not
3.1% as the president claimed). There wasn't, however, any "unprecedented economic boom -- a boom that has rarely been seen before"
as he insisted in this year's State of the Union
Address .
Anyway, what matters for workers struggling to get by is growth in real wages, and there's nothing to celebrate on that front:
between 2017 and mid-2018 they actually
declined by 1.63% for white workers and 2.5% for African Americans, while they rose for Hispanics by a measly 0.37%. And though
Trump insists that his beloved tariff hikes are going to help workers, they will actually raise the prices of goods, hurting the
working class and other low-income Americans
the most .
Then there are the obstacles those susceptible to suicide face in receiving insurance-provided mental-health care. If you're a
white worker without medical coverage or have a policy with a deductible and co-payments that are high and your income, while low,
is too high to qualify for Medicaid, Trump and the GOP haven't done anything for you. Never mind the president's
tweet proclaiming that "the Republican Party Will Become 'The Party of Healthcare!'"
Let me amend that: actually, they have done something. It's just not what you'd call helpful. The
percentage of uninsured
adults, which fell from 18% in 2013 to 10.9% at the end of 2016, thanks in no small measure to
Obamacare , had risen to 13.7% by the end of last year.
The bottom line? On a problem that literally has life-and-death significance for a pivotal portion of his base, Trump has been
AWOL. In fact, to the extent that economic strain contributes to the alarming suicide rate among white workers, his policies are
only likely to exacerbate what is already a national crisis of epidemic proportions.
Trump is running on the claim that he's turned the economy around; addressing suicide undermines this (false) claim. To state
the obvious, NC readers know that Trump is incapable of caring about anyone or anything beyond his in-the-moment interpretation
of his self-interest.
Not just Trump. Most of the Republican Party and much too many Democrats have also abandoned this base, otherwise known as
working class Americans.
The economic facts are near staggering and this article has done a nice job of summarizing these numbers that are spread out
across a lot of different sites.
I've experienced this rise within my own family and probably because of that fact I'm well aware that Trump is only a symptom
of an entire political system that has all but abandoned it's core constituency, the American Working Class.
Yep It's not just Trump. The author mentions this, but still focuses on him for some reason. Maybe accurately attributing the
problems to a failed system makes people feel more hopeless. Current nihilists in Congress make it their duty to destroy once
helpful institutions in the name of "fiscal responsibility," i.e., tax cuts for corporate elites.
I'd assumed, the "working class" had dissappeared, back during Reagan's Miracle? We'd still see each other, sitting dazed on
porches & stoops of rented old places they'd previously; trying to garden, fix their car while smoking, drinking or dazed on something?
Those able to morph into "middle class" lives, might've earned substantially less, especially benefits and retirement package
wise. But, a couple decades later, it was their turn, as machines and foreigners improved productivity. You could lease a truck
to haul imported stuff your kids could sell to each other, or help robots in some warehouse, but those 80s burger flipping, rent-a-cop
& repo-man gigs dried up. Your middle class pals unemployable, everybody in PayDay Loan debt (without any pay day in sight?) SHTF
Bug-out bags® & EZ Credit Bushmasters began showing up at yard sales, even up North. Opioids became the religion of the proletariat
Whites simply had much farther to fall, more equity for our betters to steal. And it was damned near impossible to get the cops
to shoot you?
Man, this just ain't turning out as I'd hoped. Need coffee!
We especially love the euphemism "Deaths O' Despair." since it works so well on a Chyron, especially supered over obese crackers
waddling in crusty MossyOak™ Snuggies®
This is a very good article, but I have a comment about the section titled, "The Race Enigma." I think the key to understanding
why African Americans have a lower suicide rate lies in understanding the sociological notion of community, and the related concept
Emil Durkheim called social solidarity. This sense of solidarity and community among African Americans stands in contrast to the
"There is no such thing as society" neoliberal zeitgeist that in fact produces feelings of extreme isolation, failure, and self-recriminations.
An aside: as a white boy growing up in 1950s-60s Detroit I learned that if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had
to do was to hang out with black people.
" if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had to do was to hang out with black people."
amen, to that. in my case rural black people.
and I'll add Hispanics to that.
My wife's extended Familia is so very different from mine.
Solidarity/Belonging is cool.
I recommend it.
on the article we keep the scanner on("local news").we had a 3-4 year rash of suicides and attempted suicides(determined by chisme,
or deduction) out here.
all of them were despair related more than half correlated with meth addiction itself a despair related thing.
ours were equally male/female, and across both our color spectrum.
that leaves economics/opportunity/just being able to get by as the likely cause.
Actually, in the article it states:
"There are gender-based differences as well. From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost
four-and-a-half times higher in the first of those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last."
which in some sense makes despair the wrong word, as females are actually quite a bit more likely to be depressed for instance,
but much less likely to "do the deed". Despair if we mean a certain social context maybe, but not just a psychological state.
Suicide deaths are a function of the suicide attempt rate and the efficacy of the method used. A unique aspect of the US is
the prevalence of guns in the society and therefore the greatly increased usage of them in suicide attempts compared to other
countries. Guns are a very efficient way of committing suicide with a very high "success" rate. As of 2010, half of US suicides
were using a gun as opposed to other countries with much lower percentages. So if the US comes even close to other countries in
suicide rates then the US will surpass them in deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Firearms
Now we can add in opiates, especially fentanyl, that can be quite effective as well.
The economic crisis hitting middle America over the past 30 years has been quite focused on the states and populations that
also tend to have high gun ownership rates. So suicide attempts in those populations have a high probability of "success".
I would just take this opportunity to add that the police end up getting called in to prevent on lot of suicide attempts, and
just about every successful one.
In the face of so much blanket demonization of the police, along with justified criticism, it's important to remember that.
As someone who works in the mental health treatment system, acute inpatient psychiatry to be specific, I can say that of the
25 inpatients currently here, 11 have been here before, multiple times. And this is because of several issues, in my experience:
inadequate inpatient resources, staff burnout, inadequate support once they leave the hospital, and the nature of their illnesses.
It's a grim picture here and it's been this way for YEARS. Until MAJOR money is spent on this issue it's not going to get better.
This includes opening more facilities for people to live in long term, instead of closing them, which has been the trend I've
seen.
One last thing the CEO wants "asses in beds", aka census, which is the money maker. There's less profit if people get better
and don't return. And I guess I wouldn't have a job either. Hmmmm: sickness generates wealth.
Once declared by The New York Times to be,
"the most important intellectual alive," a quote it surely regrets, prolific gadfly Noam
Chomsky has said that, "Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S.
media." How true. However, the same dictator might find the sloppy, often incoherent work of
that uniform press to be a problem in need of a solution, especially at a time when it finds
itself assaulted on all sides by alternative media. The mainstream finds itself desperately
waging rearguard actions as it stumbles beyond the shadow of respectability. As it retreats
into a shell of reactionary conformity, the mainstream has become a parody of itself. Once, its
propaganda was well-crafted and replete with nuance and high-quality dissimulation, such that
the average American reader could be duped regardless of his or her preconceived notions.
That is no longer the case. The demise of authority in the mainstream is thanks largely to
the relentless round-the-clock news cycle and a deep bias in favor of sound bytes and
sensationalism. How ironic that the collapse of faith in western media is caused by its own
relentless fealty to profitability. The corporate press has now become, for vast segments of
the population, a transparently deceitful congeries of second-rate pseudo-journalists who
traffic in base fictions at the behest of elite capital. Meanwhile, ranks of first-rate
independent journalists now dot the coarse hide of the staggering beast of the mainstream, more
woodpeckers than parasites, slowly penetrating the dense carapace of falsehood that coarsens
the consciousness of western citizenry. Only relentless infusions of capital are keeping the
beast alive. Quantitative easing for the propaganda class.
If you want a nice index of the abysmal depths to which modern political discourse has sunk,
there are dozens of pristine examples on YouTube. In fact, the site is in some sense a
junk-strewn wasteland of western cultural debris, each piece of trash boasting thousands of
views. I recently watched an episode of the BBC's, "The Daily Politics",
now mercifully discontinued after 15 years of spreading disinformation disguised as "in depth"
coverage of political events. Last July, just before being shuttered for good,, the show hosted
the communist Aaron Bastani. (Perhaps this was another effort to align Labour's Jeremy Corbyn
with the fraudulent effigies of Stalin and Mao.)
This show is a particularly good example of what happens when a freethinker is for some
reason permitted time on a mainstream network and utters viewpoints that are well outside the
Overton Window of acceptable opinion. The airing of such thinkers is not, as most suspect, an
example of an open press, but rather a calculated effort to censor unacceptable ideas. On a
psychological level, it serves the same purpose of unifying the herd as burning witches did in
the medieval epoch. There is some sort of malign catharsis in communal attacks on ideological
enemies. Just look at the vicious historical Hindu violence against minority Muslims in India.
Communalism, they call it. In any event, this collection of pseudo-journalists, arrayed around
a table in comfortable chairs, was an especially nice representation of the idiocy of our
current political dialogue. Four neoliberals had to be brought on to collectively mock,
browbeat, and quiz the good-natured YouTube host
of "The Bastani Factor" on his bizarre communist politics.
Theater of the Absurd
The stage is set by show producers when they cast a giant image of a yellow hammer and
sickle against a vast background of red (gulag blood, no doubt). This farcical backdrop covers
half the set. The "guest" Bastani is first mocked for handing out a t-shirt that says, "I'm
literally a communist." Then he is asked by moderator Jo Coburn, a haughty establishment tool
with a penchant for constant interruptions, whether or not Bastani is simply whitewashing "a
murderous ideology."
After Bastani finishes describing communism for the panel, Laura Hughes of the highly
esteemed Financial Times declares that she felt like she'd just sat through her high
school history class all over again, and that what was really needed was, "a new word" other
than communism, since the latter was obviously so freighted with capitalist propaganda (she
didn't exactly say that). Political pundit and Tory Matthew Parris then jumps in to say he's
perfectly comfortable with the current word, and that Marx was perfectly clear about what he
meant by it. Hughes gazes at Parris, nodding with a condescending smile, before Coburn leaps in
to ask again about the supposedly nine million slaughtered at the hands of Stalin's purges,
gulags, and induced famines. Parris laughs uncomfortably and defensively remarks, "Well, I'm
not a communist!" But the bloodthirsty Coburn isn't satisfied. Is understanding communism
not, in effect, trivializing its crimes? Parris then confirms for all and sundry that the
practice of communism will most certainly require mass slaughter.
Coburn jumps back to Bastani, asking whether it requires violence. Rather than say it
requires the seizure of property from the ruling class, and that this act might inspire violent
resistance, as it did from the kulaks following the Bolshevik revolution, Bastani attempts to
smooth it all over with an anecdote from the 14th century, which appeases no one and distracts
everyone. Here another conservative journalist, Suzanne Evans, declares, in reference to the
disturbing t-shirt, to say, "I'm literally a communist" is tantamount to saying, "I'm literally
a fascist." Hughes bounces up and down in her chair and reminds the panel that communism
"didn't work!" She then reiterates her call for "a new word." Someone then asks whether Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn would wear Bastani's communist t-shirt, prompting Bastani to point out
that Corbyn isn't actually a communist. Evans smugly replies, "He's 90 percent a communist" (to
guffaws in the gallery).
Parris has by this point recovered from the dreadful insinuation that he was a tankie. He
then announces that one of the main problems with communism, aside from the mass slaughter, is
that it still has a "student Che Guevara mystique about it." This insight is met with knowing
nods and throaty growls from the panel. He then bafflingly adds that free marketers (like
himself) "haven't been robust enough in defending what we believe in." Bastani might have noted
that a century of nonstop laissez faire propaganda from the business press should surely
have squelched a few noisy gangs of undergrads in Che t-shirts. Alas, the show then dribbled to
a close, everyone declining the offer of the t-shirt as though it were smallpox-infested
blanket from colonial times.
The comments section beneath the YouTube video was largely sympathetic to Bastani, but in
places typically descended into an intra-communist debate about what communism actually is,
with one ideologue insisting that, "The USSR was not remotely Marxist!" Several naysayers
chimed in with the usual boilerplate about how everything we enjoy today is a product of
capitalism and how capitalism is "by far" the best system ever conceived for human prosperity,
etc. As usual, the capitalists take credit for everything except the death toll.
Punching Back
Unfortunately, this is garden variety stuff on mainstream television. One hardly utters a
non-mainstream perspective before opposition pundits have their hackles up and are firing off
stock phrases about the glories of the free market. There are numberless responses to this kind
of commercial pablum, of which a handful come to mind.
First, no one is saying capitalism isn't a great engine of material production. Even Marx
praised it on that count. But we should never tire of pointing out that capitalism isn't about
markets; it's the division of resources between capital and labor, the latter of which get
brutally exploited by the former. As for markets, there were plenty of slave markets in the
ancient world, and plenty of markets under feudalism, and there have been plenty of markets in
socialist economies. Second, the numerous social advances made in the US were made in
spite of capitalism, not because of it. It's not as though the franchise, the eight-hour work
day, or the social safety net were commodities distributed by profit-seeking capitalists in
some magically humane laissez faire agora.
Third, the Soviet Union was a demonstrable success, achieving some remarkable industrial
gains during just the Thirties alone, before western jackals watched while the Nazi
Wehrmacht rolled into Russia, and was finally unraveled by pro-western factions within
the Soviet state. The German Democratic Republic is another example of a profoundly different,
and generally more humane, kind of social organization, that is continuously given the short
shrift by ideologues hurling their "Stasi state" jibes into the bristling ether of social
media. Fourth, we'd have never even begun to exit the Great Recession of 2008 without China's
command economy, with its various socialist aims and government controlled production.
Fifth, no one bothers to investigate the propaganda surrounding communism, referred to in
this awful BBC show
as a "murderous ideology". The purge and gulag and famine death figures were popularly
disseminated largely by Robert Conquest, a British propagandist, and are suspect at best, and
at worst fraudulent. The majority of the left won't even go there for fear of crossing the
threshold into pariah status, and being thrust into that burgeoning cultural pen of actual
socialists and communists. Sixth, there are thought to be
some 20 million people since the end of WWII who have died at the hands of imperial
capitalism, and its unquenchable thirst for new markets. Those figures are not likely to be
falsified, at least partially because they are not the product of a ferociously anti-Communist
propaganda system, but rather independent alternative journalists without a bourgeois mandate
to romanticize neoliberalism and demonize communism. Nor are those numbers likely to stall; the
implacable drive for hegemony promises much more slaughter, with many more million brown men,
women, and children adding to the figures, plenty of them doubtless LGBTQ+ and trans. Seventh,
India, for instance, is hardly better off than it was before the capitalist invasion by
Britain. Same goes for the Congo or anyplace else capital has reached for market access. Life
in the metropole is considerably different than life in the ransacked provinces.
Eighth, when you argue for the current system, you're arguing for a capitalist oligarchy in
which 1 percent of humanity controls more than half the world's wealth, and 30 percent control
95 percent of the wealth, leaving 70 percent of the world's population to support itself on 5
percent of the world's resources, access to which are nevertheless being hotly contested by
capital. Ninth, recent studies have shown marked rises in suicides as neoliberal austerity
takes hold in the metropole itself, while hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have taken
their own lives thanks to neoliberal structural reforms in a story that provoked meager
interest in western capitals. Tenth, it's been conclusively shown that we are heading into the
sixth mass extinction event in history, produced by capitalist industrialization. Yet almost
all of us are in denial, either as Republicans hastily summoning their liberal conspiracy
talking points, or as neoliberal Democrats who still cling to the meager thread of the Obama
era and the Paris Accords, as if Obama and Paris were really going to address climate change
the way it needs to be addressed.
Alas, these responses might have short-circuited the hive mind of the BBC panel. Facts,
hurled into a pandemonium of deceits, can have that effect. Of course, Bastani was shuttled
away before any of these considerations were tabled, the benighted doxies of imperialism happy
to have had another go at the far left before decamping for their next bourgeois dinner party,
anxious to don their own 'most important intellectual' attire and regale placid peers of the
intelligentsia with tales of ideology run amuck.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, political commentator, and veteran of the communications
industry. He has written for many political communities. He is the recent author of Imperial Fictions, a collection of essays from between 2015-2017. He lives in
New York City and can be reached at[email protected] . Read other articles by Jason .
The author is a very fuzzy way comes to the idea that neoliberalism is in essence a Trotskyism for the rich and that
neoliberals want to use strong state to enforce the type of markets they want from above. That included free movement of
capital goods and people across national borders. All this talk about "small government" is just a smoke screen for naive fools.
"... The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state. ..."
"... Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology, contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy. ..."
"... One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among many rather than the big Other of regulation as such. ..."
"... I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople. ..."
"... They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw in the aspirations of the decolonizing world. ..."
"... The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people, whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place. ..."
"... The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. ..."
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674979524
ISBN-13: 978-0674979529
From introduction
...The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of
those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying
congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after
the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state.
There is truth to both of these explanations. Both presuppose a kind of materialist explanation of history with which I have no
problem. In my book, though, I take another approach. What I found is that we could not understand the inner logic of something like
the WTO without considering the whole history of the twentieth century. What I also discovered is that some of the members of the
neoliberal movement from the 1930s onward, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, did not use either of the explanations
I just mentioned. They actually didn't say that economic growth excuses everything. One of the peculiar things about Hayek, in particular,
is that he didn't believe in using aggregates like GDP -- the very measurements that we need to even say what growth is.
What I found is that neoliberalism as a philosophy is less a doctrine of economics than a doctrine of ordering -- of creating
the institutions that provide for the reproduction of the totality [of financial elite control of the state]. At the core of the strain I describe is not the idea that we
can quantify, count, price, buy and sell every last aspect of human existence. Actually, here it gets quite mystical. The Austrian
and German School of neoliberals in particular believe in a kind of invisible world economy that cannot be captured in numbers
and figures but always escapes human comprehension.
After all, if you can see something, you can plan it. Because of the very limits to our knowledge, we have to default to ironclad
rules and not try to pursue something as radical as social justice, redistribution, or collective transformation. In a globalized
world, we must give ourselves over to the forces of the market, or the whole thing will stop working.
So this is quite a different version of neoliberal thought than the one we usually have, premised on the abstract of individual
liberty or the freedom to choose. Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to
the global forces of the market.
One of the core arguments of my book is that we can only understand the internal coherence of neoliberalism if we see it as a
doctrine as concerned with the whole as the individual. Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology,
contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft
institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy.
To me, the metaphor of encasement makes much more sense than the usual idea of markets set free, liberated or unfettered. How
can it be that in an era of proliferating third party arbitration courts, international investment law, trade treaties and regulation
that we talk about "unfettered markets"? One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among
many rather than the big Other of regulation as such.
What I explore in Globalists is how we can think of the WTO as the latest in a long series of institutional fixes proposed
for the problem of emergent nationalism and what neoliberals see as the confusion between sovereignty -- ruling a country -- and
ownership -- owning the property within it.
I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations
by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to
nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople.
They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic
actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I
show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw
in the aspirations of the decolonizing world.
Perhaps the lasting image of globalization that the book leaves is that world capitalism has produced a doubled world -- a world
of imperium (the world of states) and a world of dominium (the world of property). The best way to understand neoliberal globalism
as a project is that it sees its task as the never-ending maintenance of this division. The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that
the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people,
whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place.
The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like
a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. The book acts
as a kind of field guide to these institutions and, in the process, hopefully recasts the 20th century that produced them.
3.0 out of 5 stars
One half of a decent book May 14, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase This is a rather
interesting look at the political and economic ideas of a circle of important economists, including Hayek and von Mises, over
the course of the last century. He shows rather convincingly that conventional narratives concerning their idea are wrong. That
they didn't believe in a weak state, didn't believe in the laissez-faire capitalism or believe in the power of the market. That
they saw mass democracy as a threat to vested economic interests.
The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow across borders without any limit.
Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs, immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the
democracy-based nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International organizations which were by
their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy. That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected
was national government power. They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic international organizations
which would gain the powers taken from the state.
The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of economics. While some of them are
(at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them,
was a mystical thing beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real belief was in "bigness".
The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market
with specialization across borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system.
The author shows how, over a period extending from the 1920s to the 1990s, these ideas evolved from marginal academic ideas
to being dominant ideas internationally. Ideas that are reflected today in the structure of the European Union, the WTO (World
Trade Organization) and the policies of most national governments. These ideas, which the author calls "neoliberalism", have today
become almost assumptions beyond challenge. And even more strangely, the dominating ideas of the political left in most of the
west.
The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw themselves as "restoring" a lost
golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And
to the extent that they have been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all the political
and economic questions of that era as well.
In reading it, I started to wonder about the differences between modern neoliberalism and the liberal political movement during
the industrial revolution. I really began to wonder about the actual motives of "reform" liberals in that era. Were they genuinely
interested in reforms during that era or were all the reforms just cynical politics designed to enhance business power at the
expense of other vested interests. Was, in particular, the liberal interest in political reform and franchise expansion a genuine
move toward political democracy or simply a temporary ploy to increase their political power. If one assumes that the true principles
of classic liberalism were always free trade, free migration of labor and removing the power to governments to impact business,
perhaps its collapse around the time of the first world war is easier to understand.
He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU. Those organizations were as much about
protecting trade between Europe and former European colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe.
To me at least, the analysis of the author was rather original. In particular, he did an excellent job of showing how the ideas
of Hayek and von Mises have been distorted and misunderstood in the mainstream. He was able to show what their ideas were and
how they relate to contemporary problems of government and democracy.
But there are some strong negatives in the book. The author offers up a complete virtue signaling chapter to prove how the
neoliberals are racists. He brings up things, like the John Birch Society, that have nothing to do with the book. He unleashes
a whole lot of venom directed at American conservatives and republicans mostly set against a 1960s backdrop. He does all this
in a bad purpose: to claim that the Kennedy Administration was somehow a continuation of the new deal rather than a step toward
neoliberalism. His blindness and modern political partisanship extended backward into history does substantial damage to his argument
in the book. He also spends an inordinate amount of time on the political issues of South Africa which also adds nothing to the
argument of the book. His whole chapter on racism is an elaborate strawman all held together by Ropke. He also spends a large
amount of time grinding some sort of Ax with regard to the National Review and William F. Buckley.
He keeps resorting to the simple formula of finding something racist said or written by Ropke....and then inferring that anyone
who quoted or had anything to do with Ropke shared his ideas and was also a racist. The whole point of the exercise seems to be
to avoid any analysis of how the democratic party (and the political left) drifted over the decades from the politics of the New
Deal to neoliberal Clintonism.
Then after that, he diverts further off the path by spending many pages on the greatness of the "global south", the G77 and
the New International Economic Order (NIEO) promoted by the UN in the 1970s. And whatever many faults of neoliberalism, Quinn
Slobodian ends up standing for a worse set of ideas: International Price controls, economic "reparations", nationalization, international
trade subsidies and a five-year plan for the world (socialist style economic planning at a global level). In attaching himself
to these particular ideas, he kills his own book. The premise of the book and his argument was very strong at first. But by around
p. 220, its become a throwback political tract in favor of the garbage economic and political ideas of the so-called third world
circa 1974 complete with 70's style extensive quotations from "Senegalese jurists"
Once the political agenda comes out, he just can't help himself. He opens the conclusion to the book taking another cheap shot
for no clear reason at William F. Buckley. He spends alot of time on the Seattle anti-WTO protests from the 1990s. But he has
NOTHING to say about BIll Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that matter. Inexplicably
for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the year 2000.
I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half rates zero stars. Though it could
have been far better if he had written his history of neoliberalism in the context of the counter-narrative of Keynesian economics
and its decline. It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation of the parties of
the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or
worse telling you what he is going to say next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press.
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The book follow the Austrians from the beginning in the Habsburgischer empire to the beginning rebellion against the WTO. However,
most importantly it follows the thinking and the thoughts behind the building of a global empire of capitalism with free trade,
capital and rights. All the way to the new "human right" to trade. It narrows down what neoliberal thought really consist of and
indirectly make a differentiation to the neoclassical economic tradition.
What I found most interesting is the turn from economics to law - and the conceptual distinctions between the genes, tradition,
reason, which are translated into a quest for a rational and reason based protection of dominium (the rule of property) against
the overreach of imperium (the rule of states/people). This distinction speaks directly to the issues that EU is currently facing.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A historian with an agenda October 22, 2018 Format: Hardcover Author is covering Mises, Hayek, Machlup in Vienna. How to produce
order once the Habsburg empire had been broken after 1918? They pioneered data gathering about the economy. However, such data
came to be used by the left as well. This forced the people mentioned to become intellectual thinkers as opposed to something
else(??). I like how the author is situating the people in a specific era, but he is reading history backwards. The book moves
on, but stays in Central Europe. Ordocapitalism followed after Hitler. It was a German attempt to have a both strong state and
strong by market, which given Europe's fragmentation required international treaties. This was seen as a way to avoid another
Hitler. Later, international organisations like IMF and TWO became the new institutions that embedded the global markets. The
book ends in the 90s. So in reading history backwards, the author finds quotations of Mises and Hayek that "prove" that they were
aiming to create intellectual cover for the global financial elite of the 2010s.
Nevertheless, the book is interesting if you like the history of ideas. He frames the questions intelligently in the historical
context at the time. However a huge question-mark for objectivity. The book is full of lefty dog whistles: the war making state,
regulation of capitalism, reproducing the power of elites, the problem [singular] of capitalism. In a podcast the author states
point blank "I wanted the left to see what the enemy was up too". I find it pathetic that authors are so blatantly partisan. How
can we know whether he is objective when he doesn't even try? He dismissively claims that the neoliberal thinkers gave cover to
what has become the globalist world order. So why should we not consider the current book as intellectual cover for some "new
left" that is about to materialise? Maybe the book is just intellectual cover for the globalist elite being educated in left-wing
private colleges.
Taking a long view it was very astute and cleverly conceived plan to to present
counter-revolution as revolution; progress as regress; the new order 1980- (i.e.,
neoliberalism) was cool, and the old order 1945-1975 (welfare-capitalism) was fuddy-duddy.
Thus:
Capital controls = fuddy duddy Capital Account liberalisation = cool Worker's
Rights = fuddy duddy Flexible Labour markets = cool World Peace -- fuddy duddy War = Cool
National Sovereignty = fuddy duddy Globalization = Cool Social Mobility = fuddy duddy
Inequality = cool Respect for elections/referenda = fuddy-duddy Flexible referenda/elections
= cool Social solidarity = fuddy-duddy Rampant nihilistic invidualism = cool Respect for
human rights and the UN International Law = fuddy-duddy Blatant Imperialism = cool
And so the agenda goes on. Counter-revolution qua revolution
This week, the Trump administration's Department of Transportation (DOT) withdrew another
rail
safety recommendation originally proposed during the Obama administration. In the process,
the agency made quite clear that it has no plans to further regulate the rail industry,
especially the dangerous and continued transportation of oil and ethanol in unsafe tank
cars.
The latest proposed rule to be withdrawn would have required two-person crews on trains.
Supporters of this rule argue that two-person crews are safer because the job of operating a
train is too demanding for one person, new technologies are making the job more complex, and
fatigue becomes a more serious issue with only one crew member. Since 2017, the Trump
administration has already repealed a regulation
requiring modern brakes for oil trains and canceled a plan requiring train operators to be
tested for sleep apnea.
In announcing this decision, the DOT's Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) stated it was
"providing notice of its affirmative decision that no regulation of train crew staffing is
necessary or appropriate for railroad operations to be conducted safely at this time."
Buried on page 21 of the 25 page document explaining the decision, the FRA spells out the
broader department attitude toward rail safety:
"DOT's approach to achieving safety improvements begins with a focus on removing
unnecessary barriers and issuing voluntary guidance, rather than regulations that could
stifle innovation."
As we've documented on DeSmog
before , that translates to removing existing safety requirements and allowing the rail
industry to volunteer when and how to improve safety. When the head of the FRA is a
former rail company CEO , corporate capture of the U.S.regulatory system should come as no
surprise. The rail industry's main opposition to this rule is that it will increase costs while
claiming it will not improve safety. This is the same basic argument used to support the
industry's opposition to other safety regulations.
FRA Overriding States' Rights to Regulate Rail Safety
In addition, this FRA memo contained several statements clarifying that not only will the
agency back off of regulating rail safety, it also will use the power of "pre-emption" to make
sure states can't fill the resulting regulatory gaps either.
As we have
explained before , rail companies are essentially only accountable to federal regulators
(should they choose to regulate) due to a legal doctrine known as "pre-emption," which exempts
interstate rail companies from observing local or state laws where they operate.
This is important in this instance because several states have passed laws regarding train
crew staffing, and other states are considering such regulation. The FRA notes in detail these
state efforts and then says that its decision not to regulate crew size preempts any such rules
at the state level:
"FRA intends this notice of withdrawal to cover the same subject matter as the state laws
regulating crew size and therefore expects it will have preemptive effect."
The document goes on to cite Supreme Court case law in an attempt to justify this approach
and then reiterates the point in its final line, saying that "no regulation of train crew
staffing is appropriate and that FRA intends to negatively preempt any state laws concerning
that subject matter."
On December 31, 2013, part of the tank car pileup and residual fire resulting from the
train collision near Casselton, North Dakota. Credit: National Transportation
Safety Board , public domain
With this document, the FRA likely is setting up a precedent to follow for regulating the
volatility and vapor pressure of crude oil transported by rail. DeSmog has covered in detail
the issue of oil
volatility , which appears to be the key for turning oil trains into "bomb trains," as rail
operators have dubbed them.
The last remaining rail safety proposal on the books from the Obama administration concerns
the vapor pressure of oil in rail tank cars, but that was
proposed in 2017 and the DOT website lists the status of this proposed rule as
"undetermined."
Meanwhile, the state of Washington has passed a law
regulating the vapor pressure of oil for rail transport. This law is being
challenged by North Dakota -- the source of many of the bomb trains involved in fiery
accidents, including the
Lac-Mégantic, Canada, disaster that killed 47 people in 2013 and helped inspire the
proposed rule requiring two-person crews that the Trump adminstration just withdrew this
week.
Based on the FRA's strategy with the rail staffing rule, expect to see the Trump
administration withdraw the proposed regulation on oil vapor pressure and say this move
preempts Washington state's law.
A Case Study in the Corporate Capture of American Regulation
The FRA's decision to withdraw the train crew rule is a great case study of a failed
regulatory system in America.
The public is supposed to have a say in the regulatory process via the public comment
process. In this case, approximately 1,500 comments supported the regulation -- including
comments from members of Congress -- and 39 opposed it. The opposition highlighted by the DOT
was from rail lobbying groups the Association of American Railroads and the American Short Line
and Regional Railroad Association. While the public can have its say, it may not have any
impact in the current regulatory process.
The FRAdocument also notes that the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC reviewed the
issue but "was unable to reach consensus on any recommendation." RSAC was established by the FRA but is dominated
by industry members, including the Association of American Railroads and the American Petroleum Institute
, the latter of which is the nation's largest oil lobby and has repeatedly misrepresented basic
facts about crude oil volatility and rail transport.
This advisory committee doesn't have the membership to make an independent recommendation
that goes against its members' interests.
Screen shot of RSAC members from the Federal Railroad Administration website.
Another key point in the FRA's withdrawal decision is that it claims there is no evidence
that two-person crews are safer than single-person crews on trains. The agency cites
industry-funded studies, which make this claim and say the regulation would "greatly reduce
U.S.railroads' ability to control operating costs." Because the FRAitself does not collect data
on the use and safety of single-person crews versus two-person crews, it can't provide any
information one way or the other.
The one clear scenario where two-person crews increase safety is in accident situations, a
point made by many commenters and acknowledged by the FRA. In the 2013 BNSF oil train derailment and
explosion in Casselton, North Dakota , crew members were able to separate many of the oil
tank cars from the rest of the train, likely preventing a much larger oil spill and fire (which
were still large). The FRA argues that while this is true, the same role can be played by first
responders:
"While FRA acknowledges the BNSF key train crew performed well, potentially saving each
other's lives, it is possible that one properly trained crewmember, technology, and/or
additional railroad emergency planning could have achieved similar mitigating actions."
Despite making this assertion, the agency provided no evidence of how these alternatives are
possible. In the case of oil train accidents, there are no examples of first responders
arriving in time to do anything other than back away from the often-explosive trains and let
them burn.
In the case of Casselton, the city fire chief Tim McLean said, "I'm glad the crew made it out of the
engine because I don't know if we would have been able to get in there and get them."
Casselton's first responders were working to evacuate the city, not deal with the exploding
train cars.
With rail companies now comfortably positioned to self-regulate under the Trump
administration, the industry can continue its long (and, at times,
bloody ) history of putting profits over safety. The Department of Transportation's latest
move makes this approach official government policy.
Mile long trains manned by one crew member are accidents waiting to happen. This will kill
and maim people. Commercial airliners have a two-person cockpit crews for a good reason. An
improperly tied down train by the sole engineer killed 43 in Canada. A conductor not calling
out signals and signs contributed to killing three in Amtrak's 2017 Talgo crash onto I-5 in
Washington State. A single engineer is subject to fatigue and distraction with no one to snap
them out of it. A second crew member can check for problems, set brakes, and switch tracks
while the engineer stays on board the running locomotive. This is solely a safety issue.
Each new death will be on the corporations and regulators pushing this to increase their
profits. If promulgated, they deserve jail time for manslaughter with the next inevitable
death.
If the two-driver rule is being withdrawn, then I see one major reason for this. Those
companies must be planning on using autonomous trains down the track, so to say. The driver
would then become more a monitor than a driver and perhaps be done away with altogether due
to the fact that the job would be too fatiguing for a single driver. This is happening
elsewhere. Here in Oz, the Rio Tito Group has been using autonomous trains since last July to
transport iron ore using its "AutoHaul" system. Last I heard, they were running about three
dozen of these robot trains a day. Here is a short clip showing the initial run-
Of course there are two major differences between Oz and the US with the use of these
trains if the US brings them in. The ones in Oz go through the Pilbara and from that film
clip, you can see that it is pretty barren country people-wise. An autonomous train in the US
would run through a lot of small towns and perhaps cities. The ones in the US would also be
transporting oil and that film clip from Casselton, North Dakota shows what happens when they
go bump. The ones in Oz are use for transporting iron ore and after intense internet
research, I have found that there is no situation in which they will ever explode in a train
crash/derailment.
I think you're right about the a plan to replace human drivers with autonomous trains
monitored by a human. I didn't realize human train drivers [R.R. engineers?] were so very
expensive that using one instead of two and eventually one 'monitor' instead of one driver
were such a great savings. Are the railroad companies going to be indemnified against
accident risks in some other pending deregulations? Maybe they could contract out for the
train-monitors and hang any accident risk on fly-by-night contracting firms and any
train-monitor who is so lucky as to survive an accident. What of the rails? I road trains
cross-country last year and a lot of the ride was wavy and bumpy. How smart are the
autonomous trains?
"Because the FRAitself does not collect data on the use and safety of single-person crews
versus two-person crews, it can't provide any information one way or the other."
Other countries might have studied this question.
This sounds like what happened with Boeing and the FAA. Now all we need is for the
railroad CEO's to have backgrounds in the military-industrial complex.
I'm waiting for 15-20 cars full of dilute bitumen to derail & explode directly across
from Manhattan. There're ALWAYS bomb trains shunted alongside AMTRAK's NE Corridor where
130mph Acela are passing 80-90mph trains on decrepit infrastructure. Just waiting to happen,
like any shithole kleptocracy.
"I'm waiting for 15-20 cars full of dilute bitumen to derail & explode directly across
from Manhattan."
Hopefully next to a Trump property. Is this rule actually going to save the train
companies money? How expensive are these accidents? Perhaps the real question is how many CEO
bonuses can be milked from this rule.
Well, we've been TOLD, there'll be another (fracked PA CNG fired?) power plant going into
North Bergen, we hear trains across the Hudson all night. Heavy cars, here, usually means
tankers, heading to NJ refineries? I was in Huston with Texas Eastern's GREAT old inspection
boss when they blew up part of Edison, NJ. A failed tie-in weld, cracked by a backhoe or
something, in cold weather. They had windows breaking up here, in the UWS? A 36″ line,
rolled at Bethlehem/ Steelton, or some damn thing? Shit happens? Don't live in a valley!
One of the more irritating indirect developments from this is that people can now say that
1) we are still reliant on oil 2) that oil needs to be transported 3) trains clearly aren't
safe as a means of transportation 4) therefore pipelines are a better idea. It's gussied-up
NIMBYism because pipelines usually don't travel through highly populated areas and only
destroy the local environment for decades/centuries upon leaking rather than killing people
directly. Obviously I'm all for tanker cars not exploding in the middle of communities, but
I'm also not a great fan of the long-term loss of fresh water and the exporting of negative
consequences to poor/rural/indigenous people.
This is similar to this morning's glyphosate issue. Once again, where is Congress? The
administration enforces the laws but Congress is supposed to oversee. To busy fretting over
Mueller?
Where is Congress? Gathering campaign contributions everyone and assuring a lucrative job
for later. The administration enforces the laws and Congress oversees that process with the
same careful attention to the public good we enjoy from the administration's efforts. Mueller
is purely for entertainment.
It isn't bad enough that we face multiple threats to our future, endless wars, nuclear
war, Climate Chaos, resource depletion, crumbling infrastructure Neoliberalism seems intent
on constructing as much fragility as possible into our already fragile Society.
The Legislature, (especiallyTHIS Executive), Judiciary & Media are at work, as most of
us knew by draft age. Trump is the Boogieman this time, like Obama & Shrub before him.
He's distracting the 10% Pussyhat hordes as Barack did with CNBC/ FOX's totally spontaneous
baggers. Poisoned air, water, food: RussiaRussiaRussia; National Healthcare including
longterm homecare & price/quality control on meds: RussiaRussiaRussia; Run-away global
warming, worse than anticipated: RussiaRussiaRussia; Police shooting down folks in their
motor vehicles or home, at WILL, without repercussions You guessed it: RussiaRussiaRussia!
Thi IS their job!
"... put some trigger words than inhibit zombies brains: racist, antisemite, populist, fascist, white, sexist, ..."
"... There can be no debates without first pointing out objective reality (factual observations). Long logical expositions often turn out to be dissimulation.. ..."
"... Objective reality, based on history, suggests that human beings are irrational at best, and depraved at worst. The issue is not one of swaying folks, it's one of asking them to place themselves in the shoes of their opponents. ..."
To deny debate.. they simply engineer language.. and put some trigger words than inhibit
zombies brains: racist, antisemite, populist, fascist, white, sexist, ...
There can be no debates without first pointing out objective reality (factual
observations). Long logical expositions often turn out to be dissimulation..
Objective reality, based on history, suggests that human beings are irrational at best,
and depraved at worst. The issue is not one of swaying folks, it's one of asking them to
place themselves in the shoes of their opponents.
It's not about religion either, but about what's been proven to work, and what's not
worked. Neither is it about winning arguments, that's just ego stroking.
What it's about, is how to get along even when there's disagreement on issues, and that
requires the maturity to first, acknowledge when one may be wrong, questioning one's
assumptions, and allowing others their beliefs provided it reduces or prevents harm to
others.
Concisely, the core issue is about the minimization of harm to others, especially
conscious harm. Everything else is just details. Expositions that rely extensively on theory
are dissimulations, stories, short stories, are way more effective especially when they're
relatable.
Technical expositions are for professional debaters (academics), stories are for people,
those who truly wish to get along..
"... You point out that our entertainment industry focuses its plots on strong leaders, and Good Guys vs Bad Guys, and we definitely internalize that, especially when our overlords want to demonize another country, and use our entertainment-induced perspective as a shortcut. ..."
"... But, at the same time, on another level, Americans understand that the president is a puppet and must obey orders, or have his brains blown out in bright daylight, in the town square. ..."
"... We hold both these views simultaneously, hence, as Orwell called it, Doublethink. ..."
You point out that our entertainment industry focuses its plots on strong leaders, and
Good Guys vs Bad Guys, and we definitely internalize that, especially when our overlords want
to demonize another country, and use our entertainment-induced perspective as a shortcut.
They tell us that the leader of the targeted country is a Bad Guy and we must kill the
people in order to save them. And Americans nod and comply. Except for the 5% that prefers
peace, and they argue that the leader is not a Bad Guy, so we shouldn't kill the people to
save them.
No American ever thinks to argue international law or basic morality, we just argue about the
plot lines.
But, at the same time, on another level, Americans understand that the president is a
puppet and must obey orders, or have his brains blown out in bright daylight, in the town
square.
We hold both these views simultaneously, hence, as Orwell called it,
Doublethink.
"... Like many of its Wall Street counterparts, Boeing also used complexity as a mechanism to obfuscate and conceal activity that is incompetent, nefarious and/or harmful to not only the corporation itself but to society as a whole (instead of complexity being a benign byproduct of a move up the technology curve). ..."
"... The economists who built on Friedman's work, along with increasingly aggressive institutional investors, devised solutions to ensure the primacy of enhancing shareholder value, via the advocacy of hostile takeovers, the promotion of massive stock buybacks or repurchases (which increased the stock value), higher dividend payouts and, most importantly, the introduction of stock-based pay for top executives in order to align their interests to those of the shareholders. These ideas were influenced by the idea that corporate efficiency and profitability were impinged upon by archaic regulation and unionization, which, according to the theory, precluded the ability to compete globally. ..."
"... "Return on Net Assets" (RONA) forms a key part of the shareholder capitalism doctrine. ..."
"... If the choice is between putting a million bucks into new factory machinery or returning it to shareholders, say, via dividend payments, the latter is the optimal way to go because in theory it means higher net returns accruing to the shareholders (as the "owners" of the company), implicitly assuming that they can make better use of that money than the company itself can. ..."
"... It is an absurd conceit to believe that a dilettante portfolio manager is in a better position than an aviation engineer to gauge whether corporate investment in fixed assets will generate productivity gains well north of the expected return for the cash distributed to the shareholders. But such is the perverse fantasy embedded in the myth of shareholder capitalism ..."
"... When real engineering clashes with financial engineering, the damage takes the form of a geographically disparate and demoralized workforce: The factory-floor denominator goes down. Workers' wages are depressed, testing and quality assurance are curtailed. ..."
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the corresponding end of the Soviet Empire gave the fullest impetus imaginable to the forces of
globalized capitalism, and correspondingly unfettered access to the world's cheapest labor. What was not to like about that? It afforded
multinational corporations vastly expanded opportunities to fatten their profit margins and increase the bottom line with seemingly
no risk posed to their business model.
Or so it appeared. In 2000, aerospace engineer L.J. Hart-Smith's remarkable paper, sardonically titled
"Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting," laid
out the case against several business practices of Hart-Smith's previous employer, McDonnell Douglas, which had incautiously ridden
the wave of outsourcing when it merged with the author's new employer, Boeing. Hart-Smith's intention in telling his story was a
cautionary one for the newly combined Boeing, lest it follow its then recent acquisition down the same disastrous path.
Of the manifold points and issues identified by Hart-Smith, there is one that stands out as the most compelling in terms of understanding
the current crisis enveloping Boeing: The embrace of the metric "Return on Net Assets" (RONA). When combined with the relentless
pursuit of cost reduction (via offshoring), RONA taken to the extreme can undermine overall safety standards.
Related to this problem is the intentional and unnecessary use of complexity as an instrument of propaganda. Like many of its
Wall Street counterparts, Boeing also used complexity as a mechanism to obfuscate and conceal activity that is incompetent, nefarious
and/or harmful to not only the corporation itself but to society as a whole (instead of complexity being a benign byproduct of a
move up the technology curve).
All of these pernicious concepts are branches of the same poisoned tree: "
shareholder capitalism ":
[A] notion best epitomized by Milton Friedman that the only social
responsibility of a corporation is to increase its profits, laying the groundwork for the idea that shareholders, being the owners
and the main risk-bearing participants, ought therefore to receive the biggest rewards. Profits therefore should be generated
first and foremost with a view toward maximizing the interests of shareholders, not the executives or managers who (according
to the theory) were spending too much of their time, and the shareholders' money, worrying about employees, customers, and the
community at large. The economists who built on Friedman's work, along with increasingly aggressive institutional investors, devised
solutions to ensure the primacy of enhancing shareholder value, via the advocacy of hostile takeovers, the promotion of massive
stock buybacks or repurchases (which increased the stock value), higher dividend payouts and, most importantly, the introduction
of stock-based pay for top executives in order to align their interests to those of the shareholders. These ideas were influenced
by the idea that corporate efficiency and profitability were impinged upon by archaic regulation and unionization, which, according
to the theory, precluded the ability to compete globally.
"Return on Net Assets" (RONA) forms a key part of the shareholder capitalism doctrine. In essence, it means maximizing the returns
of those dollars deployed in the operation of the business. Applied to a corporation, it comes down to this: If the choice is between
putting a million bucks into new factory machinery or returning it to shareholders, say, via dividend payments, the latter is the
optimal way to go because in theory it means higher net returns accruing to the shareholders (as the "owners" of the company), implicitly
assuming that they can make better use of that money than the company itself can.
It is an absurd conceit to believe that a dilettante
portfolio manager is in a better position than an aviation engineer to gauge whether corporate investment in fixed assets will generate
productivity gains well north of the expected return for the cash distributed to the shareholders. But such is the perverse fantasy
embedded in the myth of shareholder capitalism.
Engineering reality, however, is far more complicated than what is outlined in university MBA textbooks. For corporations like
McDonnell Douglas, for example, RONA was used not as a way to prioritize new investment in the corporation but rather to justify
disinvestment in the corporation. This disinvestment ultimately degraded the company's underlying profitability and the quality
of its planes (which is one of the reasons the Pentagon helped to broker the merger with Boeing; in another perverse echo of the
2008 financial disaster, it was a politically engineered bailout).
RONA in Practice
When real engineering clashes with financial engineering, the damage takes the form of a geographically disparate and demoralized
workforce: The factory-floor denominator goes down. Workers' wages are depressed, testing and quality assurance are curtailed. Productivity
is diminished, even as labor-saving technologies are introduced. Precision machinery is sold off and replaced by inferior, but cheaper,
machines. Engineering quality deteriorates. And the upshot is that a reliable plane like Boeing's 737, which had been a tried and
true money-spinner with an impressive safety record since 1967, becomes a high-tech death trap.
The drive toward efficiency is translated into a drive to do more with less. Get more out of workers while paying them less. Make
more parts with fewer machines. Outsourcing is viewed as a way to release capital by transferring investment from skilled domestic
human capital to offshore entities not imbued with the same talents, corporate culture and dedication to quality. The benefits to
the bottom line are temporary; the long-term pathologies become embedded as the company's market share begins to shrink, as the airlines
search for less shoddy alternatives.
You must do one more thing if you are a Boeing director: you must erect barriers to bad news, because there is nothing that bursts
a magic bubble faster than reality, particularly if it's bad reality.
The illusion that Boeing sought to perpetuate was that it continued to produce the same thing it had produced for decades: namely,
a safe, reliable, quality airplane. But it was doing so with a production apparatus that was stripped, for cost reasons, of many
of the means necessary to make good aircraft. So while the wine still came in a bottle signifying Premier Cru quality, and still
carried the same price, someone had poured out the contents and replaced them with cheap plonk.
And that has become remarkably easy to do in aviation. Because Boeing is no longer subject to proper independent regulatory scrutiny.
This is what happens when you're allowed to "
self-certify" your own airplane , as the Washington Post described: "One Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular
system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer would act as the FAA's representative, signing on behalf of the U.S. government
that the technology complied with federal safety regulations."
This is a recipe for disaster. Boeing relentlessly cut costs, it outsourced across the globe to workforces that knew nothing about
aviation or aviation's safety culture. It sent things everywhere on one criteria and one criteria only: lower the denominator. Make
it the same, but cheaper. And then self-certify the plane, so that nobody, including the FAA, was ever the wiser.
Boeing also greased the wheels in Washington to ensure the continuation of this convenient state of regulatory affairs for the
company. According to OpenSecrets.org ,
Boeing and its affiliates spent $15,120,000 in lobbying expenses in 2018, after spending, $16,740,000 in 2017 (along with a further
$4,551,078 in 2018 political contributions, which placed the company 82nd out of a total of 19,087 contributors). Looking back at
these figures over the past four elections (congressional and presidential) since 2012, these numbers represent fairly typical spending
sums for the company.
But clever financial engineering, extensive political lobbying and self-certification can't perpetually hold back the effects
of shoddy engineering. One of the sad byproducts of the FAA's acquiescence to "self-certification" is how many things fall through
the cracks so easily.
[Nader's] niece, 24-year-old Samya Stumo, was among the 157 victims of an Ethiopian
Airlines flight crash last month, less than six months after a flight on the same aircraft,
the Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed in Indonesia.
"She was compassionate from the get-go. She'd be 8 years old and she'd get a pail of hot
water and go to her great-grandmother and soak her feet and rub her feet and dry them. She
was always that way."
Clifford Law has brought suit on behalf of the Stumo family in the United States District
Court for the Northern District of Illinois. From the
complaint :
Blinded by its greed, BOEING haphazardly rushed the 737 MAX 8 to market, with the
knowledge and tacit approval of the United States Federal Aviation Administration ("FAA"),
while BOEING actively concealed the nature of the automated system defects. Numerous
decisions by BOEING's leadership substantially contributed to the subject crash and
demonstrate BOEING's conscious disregard for the lives of others, including but not limited
to BOEING's role in: designing an aircraft with a powerful automated flight control system
[the MCAS] susceptible to catastrophic failure in the event a single defective sensor;
failing to properly inform pilots of the existence of the new flight control system and
educate and train them in all aspects of its operation; failing to properly address the new
system in the aircraft's flight manual; refusing to include key safety features as standard
in the aircraft rather than optional upgrades; delivering 737 MAX aircraft with a version of
the flight control system that was materially different from the version presented to the FAA
during certification; and failing to take appropriate action after BOEING learned that the
737 MAX aircraft was not performing as intended or safety, as was made tragically clear with
the crash of Lion Air Flight JT 610.
BOEING's decision to put profits over safety is further evident in BOEING's repeated
claims that the 737 MAX 8 is so similar to its earlier models that it does not require
significant retraining for those pilots familiar with the older generation of 737s.
All pretty much conventional wisdom at this point! The suit also calls for exemplary (punitive)
damages ; I've embedded the complaint at the end of the post, in case any readers care to
dig into it. I'm not going to examine the case in this post; rather, I'm going to focus on
three items from Naders letter that I think advance the story: His framing for 737 MAX
airworthiness; his highlighting of Boeing's stock buybacks; and his call for Boeing CEO
Muilenburg's defenestration.
(Stalling, in Nader's telling, being the condition the defective MCAS system was meant to
correct.) Because aircraft that are aerodynamicallly unstable, llke fighter jets, have ejection
seats! Now, a pedant would point out that Nader means commercial aircraft , but as
readers know, I eschew pedantry in all contexts. That said, Nader manages to encapsulate the
problem in a single sentence (using antithesis , isocolon , andanaphora ). Now, we have pilots in
the commentariat who will surely say whether Nader's formulation is correct, but to this
layperson it seems to be. From 737 MAX, a fan/geek site, on the business and technical logic of the MCAS system :
The LEAP engine nacelles are larger and had to be mounted slightly higher and further
forward from the previous NG CFM56-7 engines to give the necessary ground clearance. This new
location and larger size of nacelle cause the vortex flow off the nacelle body to produce
lift at high AoA [Angle of Attack]. As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a
slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which could lead the pilot to
inadvertently pull the yoke further aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards
the stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable under 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall
characteristics". Several aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the leading
edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge vortilons but they were insufficient to pass
regulation. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input
during elevated AoA when flaps are up.
Nader on Stock Buybacks
From Nader's
letter , where he is addressing Muilenberg ("you") directly:
Boeing management's behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing's use of its earned
capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to 2017 to reinvest in
R&D, in new narrow-body passenger aircraft? Or did you, instead, essentially burn this
surplus with self-serving stock buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the
companies that MarketWatch labelled as "Five companies that spent lavishly on stock buybacks
while pension funding lagged."
Incredibly, your buybacks of $9.24 billion in 2017 comprised 109% of annual
earnings . As you well know, stock buybacks do not create any jobs. They improve the
metrics for the executive compensation packages of top Boeing bosses [ka-ching]. Undeterred,
in 2018, buybacks of $9 billion constituted 86% of annual earnings .
To make your management recklessly worse, in December 2018, you arranged for your
rubberstamp Board of Directors to approve $20 billion more in buybacks. Apparently, you
had amortized the cost of the Indonesian Lion Air crash victims as not providing any
significant impact on your future guidance to the investor world.
Holy moley, that's real money! Nader's detail on the stock buybacks (see NC here
,
here , and here )
interested me, because it bears on Boeing's 2011 decision not to build a new narrow-body
aircraft in 2011. I
summarized the decision-making back in March:
(2) Choice of Airframe : The
Air Current describes the competitive environment that led Boeing to upgrade the 737 to
the 737 MAX, instead of building a new plane:
Boeing wanted to replace the 737. The plan had even earned the endorsement of its
now-retired chief executive. "We're gonna do a new airplane," Jim McNerney
said in February of that same year. "We're not done evaluating this whole situation
yet, but our current bias is to not re-engine, is to move to an all-new airplane at the end
of the decade." History went in a different direction. Airbus, riding its
same decades-long incremental strategy and chipping away at Boeing's market supremacy,
had made no secret of its plans to put new engines on the A320. But its own re-engined jet
somehow managed to take Boeing by surprise. Airbus and American forced Boeing's hand.
It had to put new engines on the 737 to stay even with its rival .
Why? The earlier butchered launch of the 787:
Boeing justified the decision thusly: There were huge and excruciatingly painful
near-term obstacles on its way to a new single-aisle airplane. In the summer of 2011, the
787 Dreamliner wasn't yet done after billions invested and years of delays. More than 800
airplanes later here in 2019, each 787 costs less to build than sell, but it's still
running a $23 billion production cost deficit. . The 737 Max was Boeing's ticket to
holding the line on its position -- both market and financial -- in the near term.
Abandoning the 737 would've meant walking away from its golden goose that helped finance
the astronomical costs of the 787 and the development of the 777X.
So, we might think of Boeing as a runner who's tripped and fallen: The initial stumble,
followed by loss of balance, was the 787; with the 737 MAX, Boeing hit the surface of the
track.
So, Dennis. How's that workin' out for ya? How does the decision not to build a new
plane look in retrospect? Ygeslias writes in
Vox, in April:
Looking back, Boeing probably wishes it had just stuck with the "build a new plane" plan
and toughed out a few years of rough sales, rather than ending up in the current situation.
Right now the company is, in effect, trying to patch things up piecemeal -- a software update
here, a new warning light there, etc. -- in hopes of persuading global regulatory agencies to
let its planes fly again.
What Nader's focus on stock buybacks shows, is that Boeing had the capital to invest in
developing a new plane .
From Bloomberg in 2019 :
For Boeing and Airbus, committing to an all-new aircraft is a once-in-a-decade event.
Costs are prohibitive, delays are the norm and payoff can take years to materialize. Boeing
could easily spend more than $15 billion on the NMA, according to Ken Herbert,
analyst with Canaccord Genuity, and Airbus may be forced into a clean-sheet design if sales
take off.
The sales force has been fine-tuning the design with airlines for at least five years,
creating a "will it or won't it?" drama around the decision on whether to make the plane,
known internally at Boeing as the NMA, for new, middle-of-market airplane.
Now, it is true that the "huge and excruciatingly painful near-term obstacles" referred to
by the Air Current are sales losses that Boeing would incur from putting a bullet into it's
cash cow, the 737, before it turned into a dog (like now?). Nevertheless, Beoing was clearly
capable, as Yglesias points put, of "tough[ing]out a few years of rough sales." So what
else was "excruciatingly painful"? Losing the stock buybacks (and that sweet, sweet
executive compensation). Readers, I wasn't cynical enough. I should have given consideration to
the possibility that Muilenburg and his merry men were looting the company!
Consider, in addition, the statement of two Harvard scholars -- Leonard J. Marcus and Eric
J. McNulty, authors of the forthcoming book, You're It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When
it Matters Most. These gentlemen did not achieve their positions by using strong language.
That is why, the concluding statement in their CNN article on March 27, 2019, merits your
closer attention:
"Of course, if Boeing did not act in good faith in deploying the 737 Max and the Justice
Department's investigation discovers Boeing cut corners or attempted to avoid proper
regulatory reviews of the modifications to the aircraft, Muilenburg and any other executives
involved should resign immediately. Too many families, indeed communities, depend on the
continued viability of Boeing."
These preconditions have already been disclosed and are evidentially based. Your
mismanagement is replete with documentation, including your obsession with shareholder value
and executive compensation. There is no need to wait for some long-drawn out, redundant
inquiry. Management was criminally negligent, 346 lives of passengers and crew were lost. You
and your team should forfeit your compensation and should resign forthwith.
All concerned with aviation safety should have your public response.
I can't find anything to disagree with here. However, I'll quote from commenter Guido at
Leeham News,
March 29, 2019 :
What I don't understand: Muilenburg was the CEO when the MCAS code was implemented.
Muilenburg was the CEO when Boeing "tweaked" the certification of the B737Max. It was the
Boeing management that decided, that the B737Max must under no circumstances trigger
simulator training for pilots.
Muilenburg has for sure not written the code for MCAS by himself, but as the CEO he is
responsible for the mess. He is responsible, that the first version of MCAS was cheap and
fast to implement, but not safe. It was basically Muilenburg, who allowed a strategy, that
was basically: Profits and Quickness before safety. Muilenburg has the responsibility for 346
dead people. You can't kill 346 people with your new product and still be the highly paid CEO
of the company. There have to be consequences.
Why are there no calls, that Muilenburg must step down?
However, a search of court documents and news reports shows the company is facing at least
34 claims from victims' families and one claim seeking class certification on behalf of
shareholders. The claims allege Boeing is responsible for losses after installing an unsafe
anti-stall system, called "MCAS" (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), on its
737 Max 8 planes, suspected to have played a role in both crashes. Boeing CEO Dennis
Muilenburg said it was "apparent" the system had been activated in both crashes.
Added to the uncertainty of potential expenses for Boeing are pending regulator
probes. The U.S. Justice Department initiated a criminal investigation into Boeing's Federal
Aviation Administration certification, as well as how it marketed its 737 Max 8 planes. The
U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General is also conducting an
inquiry.
On April 9, the lawsuit seeking class certification was brought on behalf of shareholders who purchased Boeing stock
between January 8, 2019 and March 21, 2019. The proposed class period covers a time frame
beginning after the Lion Air crash, and extending beyond the Ethiopian Airlines crash, when
Boeing's stock experienced a steep decline.
But then again, Muilenberg may know -- or think -- that Boeing, as a national champion, is
too big to fail. So, if Boeing gracefully exits from the commercial aviation business, it may
find the warm embrace of government contracting more comfortable. Perhaps that's why propaganda
like this suddenly started showing up in my Twitter feed:
I suppose it's too much to ask that the CEO of a too-big-to-fail company be asked to resign,
even if he did kill a lot of people. But if Nader can do with the 737 MAX, at the end of his
career, what he did with
the Corvair ("a one-car accident") , when he was coming up, everybody except for a cabal of
looters and liars in Boeing's Chicago C-suite will be a lot better off. So we can hope.
I keep going back to the DC-10 fiasco in the 1970s.
In 1974, in one of the most horrific air disasters of all time, a THY (Turkish Airlines)
DC-10 crashed after takeoff from Orly Airport outside Paris, killing 346 people. The accident
was traced to a faulty cargo door design. (The same door had nearly caused the crash of an
American Airlines DC-10 two years earlier.) McDonnell Douglas had hurriedly designed a plane
with a door that it knew was defective, then, in the aftermath of Paris, tried to cover the
whole thing up. It was reckless, even criminal. Then, in 1979, American flight 191, also a
DC-10, went down at Chicago-O'Hare, killing 273 -- to this day the deadliest air crash ever
on U.S. soil -- after an engine detached on takeoff. Investigators blamed improper
maintenance procedures (including use of a forklift to raise the engine and its pylon), and
then found pylon cracks in at least six other DC-10s, causing the entire fleet to be grounded
for 37 days. The NTSB cited "deficiencies in the surveillance and reporting procedures of the
FAA," as well as production and quality control problems at McDonnell Douglas.
That's two of history's ten deadliest air crashes, complete with design defects, a
cover-up, and 619 dead people. And don't forget the 737 itself has a checkered past, going
back to the rudder problems that caused the crash of USAir flight 427 in 1994 (and likely the
crash of United flight 585 in 1991). Yet the DC-10, the 737, and America's aviation prestige
along with them, have persevered. If we survived the those scandals we can probably manage
this. I have a feeling that a year from now this saga will be mostly forgotten. Boeing and
its stock price will recover, the MAX will be up and flying again, and on and on we go.
This is how it happens.
Maybe. But in 1974, the United States was commercial aviation. Airbus had launched
its first plane, the A300 , only in 1972. We were also an
imperial hegemon in a way we are not now. For myself, I can't help noticing that it was
Boeing's takeover of a wretched, corrupt McDonnell Douglas -- the
famous reverse takeover -- that ultimately turned Boeing from an engineering company into a
company driven by finance. With resulits that we see.
The fact that the CEO and the Board have not resigned just shows everyone that they lack
all the essential characteristics of human beings.
Stock buybacks should be illegal. Profits should only be distributed via dividends or
reinvested. The fact that companies can do this shows how corrupted our governments are.
The rest of the world may forget this one. I won't and there are millions like me who will
never step aboard a boeing plane again.
The only thing that will save this company now is the US govt, which is likely.
Boeing's management is not going to jail and likely will keep their jobs. The deaths of
over three hundred people means nothing. They are not even American and probably only middle
class so they don't have connections to use. The "American" company Boeing has both money and
connections.
Money gives you rights and if you don't have it, you are not even a human being.
Just look at 2008. The Vampiric Octopus called Wall Street was saved by the Feds with
almost no one going to jail, or even criminally prosecuted. The exceptions of an innocent
small community bank in NYC and some low level employees of a very few loan companies. The
entire planetary economy came to with in hours of freezing and then collapsing. Millions of
Americans lost homes, often through questionably legal foreclosures, with many millions more
losing their jobs.
Nothing going to change and I wish I could believe otherwise.
So I should just fire up my own money press then as should everyone else Money was
invented as a limiter by the ancient church then adopted by governments.. Money isnt
necessary to live and it will b thrown overboard soon enough.
I think money as a concept arose in Sumer about 6-7 thousand years ago with the clay
receipts given by the temple of the local city's patron god for livestock and grain stored
there.
But my knowledge of money's history is limited. If anyone wants to correct or clarify,
please do.
Might be wrong but think (if my memory of Gerber serves) you refer to credit/debt. Actual
money (coin) I think arose along side the use of large scale Armies (armies are both highly
mobile & inherently amorphous -- ie people come & go, die, are wounded, loot must be
traded etc, all of which is difficult in the absence of currency)
Stock buybacks were once illegal because they are a type of stock market manipulation. But
then Reagan got in and wanted to do his banker buddies a favour-
To think that Boeing has Ralph Nader of all people on their case. With apologies to Liam
Neeson, Nader might be saying to Muilenberg right now: "If you are looking for (forgiveness),
I can tell you I don't have (forgiveness). But what I do have are a very particular set of
skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for
people like you. If you go now, that'll be the end of it."
That sounds like good advice that.
Re-outlawing the "Stock Buyback" would be one useful reNew The Deal reform. Outlawing
compensation in stocks, options, or etc. of any kind except money would be another useful
Newer Deal reform. Both together would force-multiply each other's effect.
I hope the four Old Real Democrats have people reading these threads and taking any
possibly-good ideas back to headquarters. I hope the New Catfood Democrats and their people
aren't spying or eavesdropping on these threads.
I love how Nader brings stock buy-backs into his letter and basically connects the dots
from a recklessly designed aircraft system full circle to an indictment of our current
shareholder value system of capitalism and its perverse incentive structure which includes
safety shortcuts and runaway executive compensation. Such a perfect case study for this
site!
I think Nader really should beat the drum heavily on the perverse incentive structure at
Boeing and how executives shortchanged safety to grab more money for themselves because
that's an easy story for a jury to understand. I see where Nader is going with the inherently
"stall prone" aerodynamic design stuff, and he's not wrong, but I think he may be treading on
dangerous ground. Automatic stabilizer trimming systems designed to overcome the negative
aerodynamic attributes of the new 737 Max wing/engine design is a confusing rabbit hole for
the lay person. Boeing attorneys and expert witnesses may be able to twist the jury's head
into a pretzel on this issue. The debate and discussion here concerning process, decision
making, design philosophy etc at Boeing has generally been of very high quality, but has a
tendency to go off the rails when the discussion dives too deeply into the subject matter of
aerodynamics and aircraft systems. I could see the same dynamic playing out in the courtroom.
Nader is the master class-action consumer advocacy attorney not me, but I think he should go
heavy buybacks and whistle blower warnings while avoiding unforced errors arguing over the
not-so-important point of whether or not the 737 Max crashed because it was stall prone or
because it was too stall adverse. Two brand new Boeings crashed, people died, Boeing was
greedy, Boeing was hasty, the MCAS trim system was garbage and probably criminal. He's got a
slam dunk case arguing the MCAS trim system with a single point of failure was poorly
designed and recklessly conceived, I think he should just stick to that and the greed angle
and avoid the stall prone vs. stall adverse debate. I wish him luck.
They screwed up the plane design then thought an extra layer of software would ameliorate
the problem enough. It sucks but it's probably just good enough. Seems pretty simple.
As JerryDenim touched on, a good defense lawyer would probably be able to defeat this
argument in front of a jury. There are too many examples of successful and safe commercial
aircraft with aerodynamic compromises (the hardware, as you call it) that use software fixes
to overcome these limitations. The focus in this case would need to be on the implementation
of that software and how criminal neglect occurred there.
Boeing's attorneys are going to try and make any lawsuits a question of why the airplanes
ultimately crashed. I hate to spoil it for anyone, but I can tell you Boeing's attorneys are
going to blame it all on the pilots. Airlines and airplane manufactures always do. Nothing
new. Dead pilots can't defend themselves, their families don't have millions in the bank and
they aren't going to be placing any billion dollar aircraft orders in the future. If anyone
has read my frequently maligned comments, you already know the line of attack. Not following
the runaway trim procedures and overspeeding the aircraft with takeoff thrust set. That's why
Nader or anyone else pursuing Boeing would do well to sidestep the "why did two Boeing 737
Max Jets crash" question and stick to the details surrounding the horribly flawed MCAS trim
system and the Boeing corporate greed story. Steer clear of the pilots' actions and the
potentially confusing aerodynamics of modern jetliners, keep the focus squarely on the MCAS
trim system design process and executive greed.
Anyone prosecuting Boeing will have to deal with Boeing's defence, which as noted, will
play up the commoness of such technical compromises. I do wonder whether Boeing will go after
the pilots, though.
Any pilots argument naturally raises Boeing's negligence re : training, flight manuals &
communication. The prosecution case will naturally play up the greed aspect as
cause/motivation/
context for the crashes & Boeing's direct responsibility /negligence.
The defense would likely also pull in the airlines and FAA as targets for liability, as
both have some responsibility for these matters. Attacking the FAA would be fodder for the
de-regulators (Privatize it! Government is incompetent!). The airlines would complain that
competition forces them to cut costs, and that they meet all of the (gutted) legal
requirements.
I agree with focusing on the greed aspect. Nader's letter has some technical errors such
as stating the engines were tilted (they were moved horizontally and vertically, not rotated)
that show he hasn't fully understood the details. It doesn't help that many of the changes
made to the 737 MAX from previous generations are actually quite subtle, and can't really be
discussed individually for this context. It is the sum of these changes that made it an
extremely deadly aircraft.
The other failure/business feature is the concept of modularity. The software designed to
fix the aerodynamic complexities is broken down into modular components, and then sold off as
"options". Once again greed sabotages the system. Modularity is a great way to gouge
customers and lock in higher profits. The level of technical competence needed to properly
evaluate what modules are essential complicates the outcome. But then again, this can be
rationalized as a feature not a bug. Blame for failure can be passed around- the customer
should have purchased the entire package.
The runaway externalities emanating from the current form of capitalism as practiced in
the US must be reigned in. Voluntary compliance to some sort of moral code is useless- worse
than useless in that corrupt operators can hide behind lame excuses for failure.
The bigger problem is that Government regulations could solve these problems quickly, as
in throwing people in jail and confiscating their property. A strong argument can be made for
ill-gotten gains. I surely would vote for that if given the chance. Deal drugs and you can
loose your home. What about conscious business decisions
leading to harm?
You need a strong force external to these business concerns for this to happen. The
separation of government and business. Business should operate at the will of the government.
When the government is run with the wellbeing of the people foremost, then issues like
crashing planes can be rectified.
When the interests of business and government merge, then what you have is fascism.
American fascism will have a happy face. These unfortunate problems of crashing planes and
polluted environments will trundle along into the future. Billionaires will continue to
accumulate their billions while the rest of us will trundle along.
But one day, trundling along won't be an option. Maybe only outsiders to the US system can
see this clearly.
You ask: "So when the original 737 was designed, did the engineers have the option of
using these larger engines? Did they decline to do so because it was a flawed design?"
The larger engines currently in use on the 737 Max 8 were not designed until recently.
They did not decline because the current engine wasn't even invented.
I guess what I am wondering is if the original designers of the 737 had the option of
designing a more powerful engine similar to that used in the 737 MAX but declined to do so.
No doubt engine technology has advanced during the 50 years since the first 737's were built.
Could the engineers 50 years ago have designed engines like those on the 737 MAX? If so, what
were there reasons for not doing so?
I also have a second question. I have been told that stalling can be prevented by placing
small wings at the front of an airplane. Would such a design have resolved the problems with
the 737 MAX?
Fifty years of technological improvement, yes. The new engines aren't more powerful,
they're more fuel efficient. Airbus had put more fuel efficient engines on its planes, so
Boeing rushed new engines of its own into service to compete.
But they're really too large to
be mounted on the 737; they mess up the center of gravity. MCAS was a janky software fix to
solve a fundamental hardware problem, because Boeing didn't want to design a new plane.
And
it didn't want to lose money by requiring airlines to retrain pilots, it sold the plane with
the new engines as being exactly the same as the old, a painless upgrade.
Canards, as the small wings at the front of aircraft are sometimes called, would likely
not have been a fix in this case. There are some light aircraft that use these for stall
prevention by utilizing the aerodynamic properties of the wing. Since a stall (absence of
lift) is often caused by the nose of aircraft being too high, you can design the canard so
that it stalls before the main wing. Thus it's difficult for the whole plane to stall, since
the nose will sink when the canard loses lift first and returns the plane to a more
appropriate attitude. An example here:
In high performance aircraft canards are used to increase maneuverability by providing
another control surface.
We generally don't see them in commercial aircraft for a few reasons:
-Aircraft layout would not be conducive to carrying passengers – jetways would be
awkward, doors would be less accessible, visibility out of the cockpit might be
compromised.
-Control surfaces at the tail of the aircraft are more effective, as the lever distance
they act over is often longer. Tail surfaces are easier to place out of the airflow of the
main wing than to place main wing out of the airflow of canards.
-Added complexity for not much added benefit (if we were to add canards to a plane with
tail surfaces as well).
These are of course all very coarse generalizations – engineering is all about
making technical and economic trade-offs.
A radical example of what can be accomplished by a combination of aerodynamics and
software is the B-2 bomber – only one main wing, no tail or canards. I know, it has
ejection seats but I sincerely doubt any aeronautical engineer has ever sat down and thought,
"Hm, well, that's a sketchy design, but screw it, they can just eject if I messed up".
So would Boeing have to design a new plane to use canards? It would probably require the
737 MAX pilots to have new training. Boeing also seemed to want to hide the instability
problem and the canards would be visual evidence for the problem.
The 737 Was designed in the '60. High bypass turbo fan engines had yet to be developed
then. Upgrading the 737 is like adding a plug in hybrid engine to a Ford F100.
The original 737 was designed to be quite low to the ground, to allow for easier boarding
in an era before widespread jetway use (models have even been offered with integrated pull
out boarding stairs), and to allow for more accessible servicing.
This worked well with the
engines of the time, which were often low bypass turbofans, and thus smaller in diameter.
This combination of height and engines made sense for the market it was designed.
Most modern commercial engines are high bypass turbofans, and therefore larger in
diameter. The move to larger fan diameters has been enabled by advances in materials,
manufacturing technology, and simulation software, with the goal of increasing engine power
and efficiency.
Another factor influencing the engine size that can be used without extensive redesign is
the landing gear operation. Because it folds towards the centerline of the plane, and into
pockets in the bottom of the fuselage, there is a limit on how long it can be before it
becomes too long and each side would collide with the other. And one would need to redesign
the wing box structure to accommodate the moved wheels.
Exactly. This is a textbook case of the looting of America.
The $30 billion dollars made
by cutting costs including quality inspection, using an existing airframe, tax cuts and
ignoring safety went directly to stock buybacks that benefited stockholders and C-suite
compensation.
Just like 2008 Boeing is "too big to fail and jailing the executives would
cause it to collapse". Unless Americans demand an end to the corruption and the restoration
of the rule of law; the plundering will continue until there is nothing left to live on.
Boeing could have designed two brand new safe airliners with that cash that would have
provided jobs and efficient transportation into the future but instead the money went into
the pockets of the connected rich and killed 346 people.
What really gets me is that ultimately that would have given the fools more money because
the orders would have kept on coming and probably increase, which would mean more profit and
more compensation for everyone. Of course that would have taken a few years instead of
immediately. So now the compensation is going to crash. Oh wait! They will just sell again to
themselves, strip the company, and sell the nameplate still affixed to some ruin.
I am starting to understand why the Goths had no resistance when in Italy and during the
sack the city of Rome. Centuries earlier the Republic and then the Empire routinely raised
multiple armies and dealt with catastrophes both natural and man made. At the end, not only
could they not readily create an another army, they could not repair the aqueducts. Like we
are becoming, Rome became a hollow shell.
And probably the only stockholders who even benefited would be the individual or
family-dynasty rich stockholders who own many thousands to millions of shares of a particular
stock at a time. It takes ownership of that many shares for a tiny benefit-per-share to add
up to thousands or millions of tiny little benefits-per-share.
People with pensions or 401ks or whatever may well involuntarily "own" 2 or 3 or maybe 10
shares "apiece" of Boeing. But they derived no benefit from the tiny little benefit per share
this maneuver gained for the shares.
Re: appendix 3, over-steer is counter-intuitive as hell. Once it's underway you have to
steer left during a right turn and vice versa. I have watched race drivers do it (very
skillfully) at the track, but there is no way I would want to be in a car that did that in a
pressure or potential accident situation without a lot of training beforehand.
"your obsession with shareholder value": shareholder value is not being attended to if the
company is driven into the ground by virtue of its planes being driven into the ground.
Clearly the definition of "shareholder value" that these bozos use is as defective as
their engineering decision-making.
Hang a few of them pour encourager les autres . And hang a few of the regulators
who thought it would be a dandy idea to let the firm regulate itself.
And hang a few of the lawmakers and lawbuyers who legislatively de-budgeted and
money-starved FAA into this " turn it over to the plane-makers" corner as well.
There is another case of air disaster often referred to in what is known as *Human
Factors* training a L-1011 which *descended* into the glades; while the crew tried to sort
out a problem with a light bulb. I suggest familiarizing with it for perspective. (not to
exonerate Boeing; just to encourage keeping an open mind)
Ahhh, the infamous Captain Buddy. Immortal tyrant of early CRM training fame
Lambert's mention of the DC-10 and it's fatally flawed, explosive decompressing cargo door
sent me down a hole of DC-10 disasters and accident reports. Some of those DC-10 incidents
like America Airlines flight 96 could have been major tragedies but were saved by level heads
and airmanship that by today's standards would be considered exceptional. The AA 96 crew
landed safely with no fatalities after an explosive decompression, a partially collapsed
floor and severely compromised flight controls. The crew had to work together and use
non-standard asymmetrical thrust and control inputs to overcome the effects of a stuck, fully
deflected rudder and a crippled elevator. The pilots of the ill fated United flight 232,
another DC-10, are celebrated exemplars of the early CRM case studies, both crew members and
a United DC-10 instructor pilot who happened to be occupying the jumpseat all worked together
to heroically crash land their horribly stricken craft in Sioux City Iowa with only partial
aileron control and assymetrical thrust to control the airplane. No elevator, no rudder
control. A good number of passengers perished but most lived. Those pilots in the two
instances I mentioned were exceptional, and they had to resort to exceptional means to
control their aircraft, but in light of airmanship of that caliber from just a few decades
ago, it blows my mind that in 2019 the mere suggestion that professional airline pilots
should probably still be capable of moving the thrust levers during a trim emergency is
somehow controversial enough to expose oneself to charges of racism and bias?! Different
times indeed.
Boeing 737 Max aside, airplanes seem to be a lot safer these days than they were in the
1970's and 80's. Widespread acceptance and adoption of CRM/TEM has made personalities like
Captain Buddy and many bad cockpit automation practices relics from the past, but automation
itself still looks to be increasingly guilty of deskilling professional pilot ranks. In light
of that trend, it's a really good thing passenger jets in 2019 are more reliable than the
DC-10 and easier to land than the MD-11.
Deteriorating pilot skills. Yep. Now you're getting it. Problem is, more automation equals
more pilot skill degradation. Everything is just peachy with highly automated "idiot proof"
airplanes until something breaks, then who is supposed to fly the plane if the pilots can't?
The flight attendants? Whoever is sitting in 1A? Airbus airplanes malfunction too, as
documented in a number of well publicized disasters and not-so-well publicized near
disasters, so while this may be an effective marketing pitch to an airline executive not able
or not willing to pay for highly skilled, experienced pilots, it's not a solution to a pilot
skill crisis. Long term, it makes the situation worse.
Personally I believe in training the hell out of pilots because if I get into a plane, I
want a pilot at the controls and not an airplane-driver. I would bet that even I could be
trained to fly an aircraft where most of the functions are automated but when things go
south, that is when you want a pilot in control. Training is expensive but having an
ill-trained pilot in the cockpit is even more expensive.
A thought . A completely fresh plane design is not necessarily safer. There is aways a
trade off between innovation and proven reliability. It is surprisingly rare for an entirely
new aircraft family to be introduced without at least one problem that threatens (but does
not always take) lives.
787 and 737 MAX are not the only problems Boeing have had.
The 737 NG (Next Generation) airplane using composite materials for the aircraft body, was
also outsourced, The idea was that the Body parts would be built to exacting specifications,
so they could be connected at the stage of final assembly. However, the sub-contractor
couldn't live up to the specifications, so Boeing had to manually re-drill holes to connect
the fuselage parts.
Not long after we had a series of crashes, where the fuselage broke up into its parts,
something almost never seen before in airplanes.
There are other Human Factors at play; regarding pilot ability Measuring ability by simply
looking at *hours flown* (often referred to as *experience*) is misleading. Relevant details
might include just what types of experience. It is possible to get airline positions *ab
initio*, or in-house, if you will (with 500 hours, (IIRC) OR:
Prospective pilots from private sector, or military, may be more likely to have diverse
backgrounds; including Flight Instructor background, Upset Recovery training; Aerobatic
flying; and Glider or sailplane background. These are not necessarily prerequisites for
airline hires. Do they make a difference? in emergencies???
The change in Part 135 minimums for non ab-initio applicants has done little or nothing to
improve safety. It did financially squeeze some very competent and capable career minded
pilots out of the pipeline to the left front seat. (thanks chuck.)(f.u.) His feel-good
legislation:*We're doing something about it!*
It isn't just Boeing that is using share buybacks to goose CEO pay. Shareholders of
American Express have an opportunity to vote to Deduct Impact of BuyBacks on Pay. See
American
Express 2019 Proxy Vote Recommendations
But, but Nader made Al Gore lose in 2000. Good to see him out of the shadows (he has a
podcst BTW).
While Boeing deserves every form of condemnation and Muilenberg should resign I do think
the facts that were all laid out in that should-be-Pulitzer-winning Seattle Times series are
being stretched a bit. The problem seems to be, not that the plane is prone to fall out of
the sky, but that its handling characteristics differ from the earlier, ubiquitous, 737
models. MCAS is the defective part, and Boeing will pay plenty
Florida's presidential election in 2000 was expected to be close and likely to be decisive
in the electoral college vote. Nader was a fairly popular third-party candidate for president
in that election. Many supporters of Gore over Bush pleaded for Nader to exit that race and
ask his supporters to vote for Gore. He did neither. In the end the margin of Bush's win in
Florida was tiny, if it existed at all, so there was reason to be angry at Nader, as I was at
the time, since if he had quit the race in that state, Gore would very likely have become
president instead of Bush.
If you're into counterfactual teleology then you might say Nader's stubborn vanity
therefore led to the Iraq and Afghan wars. I don't but it's worth being aware that some
people do.
I can't find the link right now; but, it stated that after close study, most of the voters
who voted for Nadar would not have voted for Gore and would have just sat out the election
resulting in an even more pronounced victory for Bush. Gore's defeat came from his inability
to win his home state of TN.
The claim ignores other factors. Gore's lackadaisical campaign, for one, and its poor
response to the BushCheney campaign's misuse of the legal system to stop the Florida
recount.
It's not Gore's fault the Supreme Court's conservative majority chose to not let the FL
supreme court determine what FL law means, and chose to decide the election itself. But his
response to the Florida debacle was weak, like his campaign. That might be one reason so many
people voted for Nader. That's on Al and on BushCheney.
Some additional information and clarification about the Corvair.
The Corvair had a rear mounted engine and rear wheel drive. This is a poor design from a
handling perspective as the rear weight bias produces a pendulum effect making the Corvair
prone to oversteer. This tendency was exacerbated by the Corvair's swing axle independent
rear suspension with its inherent camber changes as the wheel moved up and down. These
characteristics of the Corvair were deadly in that while cornering if you let off the
accelerator, the engine brakes the rear wheels creating a condition called "throttle lift
oversteer". Under this situation the counterintutive reaction should be to put your foot on
the accelerator and not the brakes. Some of you may recall that comedian Ernie Kovacs was
killed when his Corvair spun off the road in wet weather and hit a utility pole.
A paradox here is that the Porsche 911 has a design very similar to the Corvair, rear
wheel drive, rear mounted engine and rear weight bias and is praised for its handling. The
Corvair was sometimes referred to as a poor man's 911. It too was prone to severe and violent
oversteer if the throttle was lifted while cornering but in the case of the 911 it was
expected that the driver know that while cornering your foot stayed on the accelerator. As
the horsepower of 911s increased over the years the tendency to oversteer was tamed by
fitting larger tires on the rear wheels. With the advent of technologies like antilock
braking systems ,traction control and advanced computers employing torque vectoring to
control vehicle stablity, cars today do have their versions of MCAS and the Porsche can be
referred to as a triumph of engineering over design.
The 911 had pivots at both ends of the stub axles. It would lift throttle oversteer (boy
would it lift throttle oversteer -lots of fun if you knew what you were doing), but it would
not do the jacking rear-end lift that the corvair (pivots only at the differential end of the
half shaft) would do.
Oddly, the VW bug had the exact same layout but Ralph never went after it.
Nader is right to point out the design flaws, which seem to have the potential to cascade
into failure.
The new engine nacelles create unusual lift. Being placed forward of the center of lift,
that causes the nose of the aircraft to rotate vertically upward. If uncorrected, that would
cause the aircraft inappropriately to rise in altitude and/or to approach a stall.
The nacelle-induced lift increases with an increase in engine thrust. That increases speed
and/or reduces the time the pilot has to react and to correct an inappropriate nose-up
attitude.
Boeing seemed unable to correct that design problem through changes in the aircraft's
shape or control surfaces. It corrected it, instead, by having the computer step in to fly
the aircraft back into the appropriate attitude. Works when it works.
But Boeing seems to have forgotten a CompSci 101 problem: shit in, shit out. If the
sensors feeding the computer report bad data, the computer will generate a bad solution.
Boeing also seems to have designed the s/w to reset after manual attitude correction by the
pilot, forcing a correction loop the pilots would not always win.
Boeing elected not to inform aircraft purchasers or their flight crews of their automated
fix to their new aircraft's inherent instability problem. Murphy's Law being what it is
– if something can go wrong, it will – the pilots should have been made aware of
the recommended fix so that when something went wrong it, they would have a chance of fixing
it with a routine response.
Boeing elected not to do that. In the short run, it avoided the need for expensive
additional pilot training. In the long run, Boeing would have hoped to increase sales. When
hoping for the best, it is normal practice to plan for the worst. Boeing seems not to have
done that either.
All this talk of CEO and top managment resignation . honestly they probably don't care.
They have made millions, if not tens of millions of dollars on bonuses; they can retire once
they walk out the door. To change the behaviour of the C-suite you must affect the C-suite
directly, charge convict them with at least criminal negligence or worse.. A drunk driver who
causes the accident will most likley go to jail if someone dies in the accident, how come a
CEO and his mgmt team, can wilfully go against decades of engineering and aviation best
practices that are codified, and still only have to resign??
"... The article also discusses how some frontline FAA safety inspectors wanted to ground the MAXes until the "AoA Disagree" indicators were re-enabled, but were overridden by higher-ups who insisted that it was not a primary safety feature. ..."
Yes, the very last country to pull the 737-MAX out of use is going to be the first to
put it back. There is some serious money being lost by Boeing and the Airlines, and they
want to put a stop to it. This is all about millions and millions of Benjamins, for "they"
are taking a shortct to save even more money.
Simulators are EXPENSIVE, so the plan is to give the pilots a joystick and a computer,
and maybe throw in some lectures and videos of other pilots using a real flight simulator.
Are you ready to rush to reserve a flight?
This isn't a bad deal just for the flight crews and passengers, but the pure stench of
it is contaminating other arenas. A Denier site I'm not going to link has managed to
leverage the lack of regulator oversight by the FAA to lots of other places.
Planes, Automobiles, Bicycles, Homes, Hospitals, Schools, and Sidewalks Can All Be Made
Unsafe by Mad Science, Rush to Market, and Corrupt Regulators
They don't include "vaccines" in that list because their readers understand perfectly
well that if the FAA is a crap agency, why not the FDA as well? Much as I hate to admit it,
the Deniers didn't have to break a sweat to score these perfectly valid points.
Does anyone imagine Volkswagen could have gotten away with all those years of cheating
on their emissions if the regulators had been doing their jobs?
How did China get away with shipping that cancer-causing blood pressure medicine to the
US for so many years? It's safe to assume some bored "regulator" was just waving the stuff
on past without doing a single test.
This is going to cost us. I'm out of links, but here is a headline to consider.
Russia's Irkut aircraft manufacturer has posted the first video of a direct flight by
its MS-21-300 airliner from Irkutsk to Ulyanovsk-Vostochny Airfield.
The brand-new Russian passenger craft is designed to transport up to 211 people over
a distance of 6,400 kilometres.
There are competitors out there, and they can't be fended off by "sanctions" forever.
Allowing unwatched & unregulated companies to run amok is going to hurt us all in the
long term.
Boeing management's behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing's use of its earned
capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to 2017 to reinvest in R&D, in
new narrow-body passenger aircraft? Or did you, instead, essentially burn this surplus
with self-serving stock buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the
companies that MarketWatch labelled as "Five companies that spent lavishly on stock
buybacks while pension funding lagged. "
Feathering the Corporate Nest while stiffing the workers. Just what Wall Street loves.
"Ugly" at Boeing isn't a 'skin deep' issue - it's that way clear to the bone!
The article also discusses how some frontline FAA safety inspectors wanted to ground the
MAXes until the "AoA Disagree" indicators were re-enabled, but were overridden by
higher-ups who insisted that it was not a primary safety feature.
The concept of hate speech is a form of censorship, but censorship is not 'one size fit all" phenomenon. Something
is is justified and even necessary. Sometimes it is just a demonstration of raw political power ("Might makes right") and
suppressing of the dissent.
In any case the neoliberal interpretation of "hurt feelings" as justification for censorship is open to review.
Notable quotes:
"... It’s the greatest power of an ideology that it can seep into the worldview of those who claim to oppose it. ..."
I’m reading
another article about debates over free speech on campus, this time at Williams College, an elite school in the northwestern
corner of Massachusetts. A faculty petition asks to formalize and tighten the college’s policy on free speech by adopting the
Chicago Principles, which state that “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for
closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.” Over
three hundred students, however, have signed a counterpetition arguing that speech which harms minorities should not be
allowed.
... ... ...
Peter Dorman
I fear my post was overly subtle. Let me be more explicit and see if that helps. My
argument was not about “free speech versus social justice warriors” or anything
of the sort. It was about a relatively new response to politics I saw first hand at Evergreen
and have read about at other institutions.
I lived through the experience of hearing activists protesting against emails and
statements at public meetings on the grounds they (the activists) were being subjected to
emotional distress. Even more remarkably, no one else openly questioned the basis on which
this argument rested. The whole tenor of discussion had shifted, and the line between public
and private had apparently been redrawn such that the private criterion of “how does
this make me feel” could be employed as a reason to suppress, or at least discourage,
political action.
It struck me that this was the characteristic shift of neoliberalism, reinterpreting the
public sphere as simply another venue for applying the hedonic calculus of individual
pleasure/pain. (Virginia-style public choice theory does something similar but in a very
different way.) I grant that much more was entailed at Evergreen, just as neoliberalism
entails far more than this one characteristic; nevertheless, the it-makes-me-feel-bad
argument for narrowing the public sphere is historically new—yes?—and coincides
with the more general neoliberal view that “the political is personal”.
Our feelings of personal well-being become political criteria of what is right and wrong
for the community, just as our political agency is reduced to personal choice. (What am I not
supposed to buy? What is the right language for me to use when talking to someone of identity
X?)
I don’t want to add more to the stew, but one further point is relevant. The
stories, all of them, that have been disseminated about what happened at Evergreen during
2017 and the runup to those events are incomplete if not simply false. This includes the
testimony of Bret Weinstein, who is factually correct about the direct experiences he
underwent but has no clue about the forces and interests that instigated them. Suffice it to
say that the faculty and perhaps students of the political left were mostly bystanders in
this imbroglio. (Anecdotal evidence: my radical students were not involved, and my students
who were involved were not the radicals.)
They may have taken sides after the event, but the
conflict was not about leftism, Marxism, radicalism or even social justice in any substantive
sense. That’s worth pointing out because it provides a further dimension to the
argument I made in my post. No significant political change was either proposed during or
eventuated from the 2017 protests, except the ongoing dismantling of some of the
college’s more experimental features in the face of a devastating budget crisis.
I am trying to understand how an ostensibly political event could be so deeply
anti-political. There are structural aspects I haven’t brought up and don’t have
time or space for: who did what and through what institutional mechanisms, etc. In this post
I am simply trying to identify some of the underlying assumptions behind the rhetoric.
This post makes an interesting encapsulation of Neoliberalism: “life is an
accumulation of moments of utility and disutility”. I am not convinced this formulation
is sufficient to characterize Neoliberalism. How well would this formulation distinguish
between Neoliberals and Epicures?
“Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism insofar as it declares pleasure to be its
sole intrinsic goal, the concept that the absence of pain and fear constitutes the greatest
pleasure, and its advocacy of a simple life, make it very different from
“hedonism” as colloquially understood.”
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism]
Is ‘utility’ greatly different than ‘pleasure’ as Epicures frame that
word?
I do like the last sentence of the post: “It’s the greatest power of an
ideology that it can seep into the worldview of those who claim to oppose it.”...
The topic of free speech per se free speech was excellently covered by Howard Zinn in his
talk “Second Thoughts on the First Amendment”. [I received a copy of the mp3 of
this speech as a premium from my contribution to Pacifica Radio WBAI. The lowest price mp3 or
written transcript for the speech was at https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/zinh006/
transcript for $3 or mp3 download for $5.]
Zinn’s speech made it clear that free speech was no simple matter contained within
the meaning of the words ‘free speech’. There are questions of the intent of
speech — the effects of a speech … bad feelings? … inciting a riot
— capacity for speech that spreads fear … spreading unwarranted panic the
classic yelling “Fire” in a crowded building — questions of the forum?
There is free speech on a street corner and free speech on television, and they differ
greatly in kind, and there is defamatory and slanderous speech.
...The equation between speech and money
our ‘Supremes’ made is little short of the complete debasement of the Supreme
Court as a forum of jurisprudence. The ‘prudence’ must be expunges from any
characterizations of their judgements FAVORABLE or otherwise. The Supreme Court does not
interpret the laws of the land. Like our Legislatures they are ‘bought’ and
‘bot’ to the whims of money.
Adam Eran April 26, 2019 at 7:06 pm
I’d suggest the dispute is theological. Everyone wants a “higher power” to bless their particular approach. The neoliberal
preference for comparing measurable effects, scoring them as costs or benefits, is the standard MBA religion. Why if you
can’t measure it, it mustn’t exist!
The whole approach doesn’t require too much thinking, and has the imprimatur of “science” and “reason” both… Excellent gods,
all. Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years makes a good case for the way our confusion of monetary with ethical comparisons
has managed to bamboozle humanity for literally thousands of years. You see rich people deserve their wealth. They are good,
and you can tell by the amount of money they have. See!
Code Name D, April 26, 2019 at 7:14 pm
Some speech has as its primary purpose making others suffer, through insult or instigating fear, and has little or no
persuasive intent. That’s hate speech, and I don’t see a problem with curtailing it.
The problem is just about anything “becomes” “hate speach” as a means of censorship. Calling out Isrial’s influence on US
politics becomes antisimitism. Being critical of Hillary is misogany. Hell, not liking Campain Marvel is an example of hate
speach. Recently negative reviews of the movie were removed from Rotten Tomatos as an example.
You might imagin that a line could be drawn some where. But when ever you draw that line, it always migrates over time.
Neoliberalism destroys itself, don't panic. A ridiculous economic model was rolled out globally that had no long term future. The standard debt fuelled growth model of neoliberalism. The UK:
China has seen their Minsky Moment coming and the debt fuelled growth model can no longer
be used. Adair Turner took over at the FSA when Lehman Brothers collapsed and this gave him the
incentive to find out what was going on.
Adair Turner has looked at the situation prior to the crisis where advanced economies were
growing by 4 – 5%, but the debt was rising at 10 – 15%. This always was an unsustainable growth model; it had no long term future.
After 2008, the emerging markets adopted the unsustainable growth model and they too have
now reached the end of the line. We are trying to maintain an economic model that never had a long term future as it only
worked by adding more and more debt in an unsustainable way. The debt didn't grow with
GDP. How can banks grow GDP with bank credit?
I have a problem with any argument based upon hurt feelings. Just what the heck are "hurt
feelings?" How do we tell when someone is sincere or faking said? How do we tell when someone
is emotionally fragile? How do we tell when someone has distorted values (But Hitler is my
hero!)? How do we shock college students out of their complacency? How do we challenge them
with new ideas? Are we to stop talking about the theory of evolution because someone's
religious sensibilities are offended?
Having said that it is my generation that jettisoned good manners and we are now suffering
the affects of that. The foundation of communication is knowing your audience and how much
information that can receive at a time and some forgoe any consideration of that effect to
make a controversy where there is none. And political free speech is absolutely necessary if
we are to be a country that governs ourselves.
The free exchange of ideas, and the evolution of ideas via exposure of new facts and
interpretations and disagreements is vitally important; all progress comes from this. However
fake news, bullshit arguments, and its long lasting effects cannot be underestimated. An easy
example of is the 'the measles vaccine causes autism' bullshit debacle, which both caused
numerous children and adults to now needlessly contract measles and more importantly, caused
ordinary people to doubt the integrity of the medical professionals, and even science in
general.. the discussion needs to expand from between speaker and the hurt listener, to third
parties who are listening, who may or may not have their agendas, but whose opinion can be
shifted based on the debate.
Btw, tobacco industry bullshit, climate change denial bullshit, are other huge sources of
untruth which has polluted the discussions of today
We need to have a discussion/teaching on how we can again have truthful debate, however
painful, and be able to distinguish from bald lies , false narratives or bullshit which
unfortunately clouds many debates.
We need to accept that the truth exists and that we must seek to discern it. We need a
deep discussion on what is truth and how to search for it and understand it, realizing that
although the truth exists, that one person's perception and experience of it may differ from
that of Another persons. And we need this discussion and skill set to be widely distributed,
in a sense like a mental vaccine to help combat against the Bullshit virus that pervades the
discussion today.
I too have noticed a shift in rhetoric. A recent incident at my own institution comes to
mind. A letter appeared in the student newspaper complaining about an awards ceremony for
university athletes. Apparently, a male tennis player of color had given a speech in which he
thanked the university for having provided him with the opportunity to sleep with lots of
white women. The author of the letter of complaint, a female student-athlete of color who'd
attended the ceremony, claimed that this made her feel "unsafe," and wondered why the
university president, who was in attendance, had not put a stop to the offending speech. In
the course of the discussion which followed publication of the letter, no university official
publicly questioned whether the complaining student should have felt afraid in that setting
(an awards ceremony on a university campus with hundreds of people, including the university
president, in attendance). No university official publicly questioned whether feelings of
fear, reasonable or not, are grounds for stopping a speech. Some faculty members did however
create a circular letter supporting the complaining student and at least strongly suggesting
official punitive actions against the offending student and his coaches. Debate then focused
on whether his coaches should be fired.
Note that in this case the feelings in question are not just any unpleasant feelings. The
problem with the offending speech was not that it provoked anger or sorrow. The problem was
that it made her afraid. So, I'm skeptical of the explanation for the shift in rhetoric
offered above, the one having to do with neoliberal habits of thought. Its not specific
enough.
Thanks for giving me a chance to take up a tangent I left out of the post in the interest
of curtailing sprawl. The safety version of the I-feel-bad argument is interesting.
Here is one interpretation, very provisional. Despite its increasing popularity, the
general claim that certain types of political debate or social expression should be off
limits because it makes me feel uncomfortable has an uncertain status. Institutions don't
have an explicit obligation to promote the moment-to-moment subjective well-being of
participants. (Even neoliberal approaches to governance, like cost-benefit analysis, avoid
this by basing their justification on postulates that identify current and prospective
"utility", however dicey they may be in practice.)
Into the breach jumps the safety trope. Institutions do have an obligation to protect the
safety of those they include and touch. Movements against rape and domestic violence as well
as pathological police violence have invoked this responsibility, and rightly so. And student
movements, in an apparent effort to establish a parallel, have expressed the feeling-bad
argument as feeling-unsafe.
The problem, as you point out, is the difference between feeling and being unsafe. I'm not
in a position to question whether you feel bad (I'm sure I would have felt furious if I had
been in the awards ceremony you describe and heard a predatory remark like the athlete's),
but I can question whether you really are as unsafe as you claim. (I agree with your point
about the objective safety of being in the awards audience.) The catch, however, is that
there is another cultural trope at work, the conflation of belief and knowledge. This is now
firmly ensconced in the worldview of much of the left, or "left" as I would put it. It
underlies the doctrine of positionality, transforming it from a version of ideology theory
(which I respect) to an epistemology (which is preposterous). Come to think of it, its
failure to admit the enormous sphere of intersubjectivity, the portion of reality we share
and is subject to the rules of evidence, has a sort of neoliberal (specifically Hayekian)
tinge to it.
So no, you don't get to say, "Actually, you are quite safe here." There is no shared
reality to examine that could possibly overrule someone's feeling that they are unsafe. I
have had this exact conversation with several students, but I also see versions of it in the
popular media and even in a lot of "scholarly" work. The mantra of those faculty and
administrators supporting (or in some cases collaborating with) protesters at Evergreen was
"listen to the students", as if what we hear -- and yes, of course we should listen to them
-- was thereby the factual state of the college we had to respond to. It's also a reason why
about a tenth of the student body, which excluded many or most of the radicals (see above),
had to be referred to as "the students". The "subjective perception = reality" formulation is
incoherent in the face of competing, incompatible subjective perceptions.
My reading is that the core psychological principle of neoliberalism, that life is an accumulation of moments of utility
and disutility, is alive and well within certain sectors of the "left". A speech (or email or comment at a meeting) should be
evaluated by how it makes us feel, and no one should have the right to make us feel bad.
Not sure about this "utility/disutility" dichotomy (probably you mean market fundamentalism -- belief that market ( and market
mechanisms) is a self regulating, supernaturally predictive force that will guide human beings to the neoliberal Heavens), but, yes,
neoliberalism infected the "left" and, especially, Democratic Party which was converted by Clinton into greedy and corrupt "DemoRats'
subservient to Wall Street and antagonistic to the trade unions. And into the second War Party, which in certain areas is even more
jingoistic and aggressive then Republicans (Obama color revolution in Ukraine is one example; Hillary Libya destruction is another;
both were instrumental in unleashing the civil war on Syria and importing and arming Muslim fundamentalists to fight it).
It might make sense to view neoliberalism as a new secular religion which displaced Marxism on the world arena (and collapse of
the USSR was in part the result of the collapse of Marxism as an ideology under onslaught of neoliberalism; although bribes of USSR
functionaries and mismanagement of the economy due to over centralization -- country as a single gigantic corporation -- also greatly
helped) .
Neoliberalism demonstrates the same level of intolerance (and actually series of wars somewhat similar to Crusades) as any monotheistic
religion in early stages of its development. Because at this stage any adept knows the truth and to believe in this truth is to be
saved; everything else is eternal damnation (aka living under "authoritarian regime" ;-) .
And so far there is nothing that will force the neoliberal/neocon Torquemadas to abandon their loaded with bombs jets as the tool
of enlightenment of pagan states ;-)
Simplifying, neoliberalism can be viewed an a masterfully crafted, internally consistent amalgam of myths and pseudo theories
(partially borrowed from Trotskyism) that justifies the rule of financial oligarchy and high level inequality in the society (redistribution
of the wealth up). Kind of Trotskyism for the rich with the same idea of Permanent Revolution until global victory of neoliberalism.
That's why neoliberals charlatans like Hayek and Friedman were dusted off, given Nobel Prizes and promoted to the top in economics:
they were very helpful and pretty skillful in forging neoliberal myths. Especially Hayek. A second rate economist who proved to be
the first class theologian .
Promoting "neoliberal salvation" was critical for the achieving the political victory of neoliberalism in late 1979th and discrediting
and destroying the remnants of the New Deal capitalism (already undermined at this time by the oil crisis)
Neoliberalism has led to the rise of corporate (especially financial oligarchy) power and an open war on labor. New Deal policies
aimed at full employment and job security have been replaced with ones that aim at flexibility in the form of unstable employment,
job loss and rising inequality.
This hypotheses helps to explain why neoliberalism as a social system survived after its ideology collapsed in 2008 -- it just
entered zombie stage like Bolshevism after WWII when it became clear that it can't achieve higher standard of living for the population
then capitalism.
Latest mutation of classic neoliberalism into "national neoliberalism" under Trump shows that it has great ability to adapt to
the changing conditions. And neoliberalism survived in Russia under Putin and Medvedev as well, despite economic rape that Western
neoliberals performed on Russia under Yeltsin with the help of Harvard mafia.
That's why despite widespread criticism, neoliberalism remains the dominant politico-economic theory amongst policy-makers both
in the USA and internationally. All key global neoliberal global institutions, such as the G20, European Union, IMF, World bank,
and WTO still survived intact and subscribe to neoliberalism. .
Neoliberalism has led to the rise of corporate (especially financial oligarchy) power and an open war on labor. New Deal policies
aimed at full employment and job security have been replaced with ones that aim at flexibility in the form of unstable employment,
job loss and rising inequality.
This hypotheses helps to explain why neoliberalism as a social system survived after its ideology collapsed in 2008 -- it just
entered zombie stage like Bolshevism after WWII when it became clear that it can't achieve higher standard of living for the population
then capitalism.
Latest mutation of classic neoliberalism into "national neoliberalism" under Trump shows that it has great ability to adapt to
the changing conditions.
that's why despite widespread criticism, neoliberalism remains the dominant politico-economic theory amongst policy-makers both
in the USA and internationally. All key global neoliberal global institutions, such as the G20, European Union, IMF, World bank,
and WTO still survived intact and subscribe to neoliberalism. .
A pilot with 30 years of flying
experience and 40 years of design experience rips decisions made by Boeing and the FAA.
Gregory Travis, a software developer and pilot for 30 years wrote a scathing report on the
limitations of the 737, and the arrogance of software developers unfit to write airplane code.
Travis provides easy to understand explanations including a test you can do by sticking your
hand out the window of a car to demonstrate stall speed.
Design shortcuts meant to make a new plane seem like an old, familiar one are to blame.
This was all about saving money. Boeing and the FAA pretend the 737-Max is the same aircraft as
the original 737 that flew in 1967, over 50 years ago.
Travis was 3 years old at the time. Back then, the 737 was a smallish aircraft with smallish
engines and relatively simple systems. The new 737 is large and complicated.
Boeing cut corners to save money. Cutting corners works until it fails spectacularly.
The original 737 had (by today's standards) tiny little engines, which easily cleared the
ground beneath the wings. As the 737 grew and was fitted with bigger engines, the clearance
between the engines and the ground started to get a little um, tight.
With the 737 Max, the situation became critical. The engines on the original 737 had a fan
diameter (that of the intake blades on the engine) of just 100 centimeters (40 inches); those
planned for the 737 Max have 176 cm. That's a centerline difference of well over 30 cm (a foot),
and you couldn't "ovalize" the intake enough to hang the new engines beneath the wing without
scraping the ground.
The solution was to extend the engine up and well in front of the wing. However, doing so
also meant that the centerline of the engine's thrust changed. Now, when the pilots applied
power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to "pitch up," or raise
its nose. This propensity to pitch up with power application thereby increased the risk that the
airplane could stall when the pilots "punched it"
Worse still, because the engine nacelles were so far in front of the wing and so large, a
power increase will cause them to actually produce lift, particularly at high angles of attack.
So the nacelles make a bad problem worse.
I'll say it again: In the 737 Max, the engine nacelles themselves can, at high angles of
attack, work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing's
center of lift, meaning the nacelles will cause the 737 Max at a high angle of attack to go to a
higher angle of attack. This is
aerodynamic malpractice
of the worst kind.
It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification
criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But instead of going back to the drawing
board and getting the airframe hardware right, Boeing relied on something called the
"Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System," or MCAS.
It all comes down to money
, and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and
its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the
737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737
was the key to the 737 Max's fleet fungibility. That's probably also the reason why the
documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.
Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft's operating
handbook or to pilot training, and someone -- probably a pilot -- would have piped up and said, "Hey.
This doesn't look like a 737 anymore." And then the money would flow the wrong way.
When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it's
about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns forward. It turns out
that
the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column -- indeed, so much
force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to
tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening
.
MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is
turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. I
n a fight between the flight
management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until
they give up and (literally) die
. Finally, there's the need to keep the very existence of
the MCAS system on the hush-hush lest someone say, "Hey, this isn't your father's 737," and bank
accounts start to suffer.
Those lines of code were no doubt created by people at the direction of managers.
In a pinch, a human pilot could just look out the windshield to confirm visually and directly
that, no, the aircraft is not pitched up dangerously. That's the ultimate check and should go
directly to the pilot's ultimate sovereignty. Unfortunately, the current implementation of MCAS
denies that sovereignty. It denies the pilots the ability to respond to what's before their own
eyes.
In the MCAS system, the flight management computer is blind to any other evidence that it is
wrong, including what the pilot sees with his own eyes and what he does when he desperately
tries to pull back on the robotic control columns that are biting him, and his passengers, to
death.
The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far
out of their league and did not know it. How can they can implement a software fix, much less
give us any comfort that the rest of the flight management software is reliable?
So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No.
1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737's dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike
No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity to fail
(angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to
cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other
angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.
None of the above should have passed muster. It is likely that MCAS, originally added in
the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It
doesn't need to be "fixed" with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed
altogether
.
Numerous Bad Decisions at Every Stage
Ultimately 346 people are dead because of really bad decisions, software engineer arrogance, and
Boeing's pretense that the 737 Max is the same aircraft as 50 years ago.
It is incredible that the plane has two sensors but the system only uses one. A look out the
window was enough to confirm the sensor was wrong.
Boeing also offered "cheap" versions of the aircraft without some controls. The two crashed
flights were with the cheaper aircraft.
An experienced pilot with adequate training could have disengaged MACS but in one of the crashed
flights, the pilot was desperately reading a manual trying to figure out how to do that.
Flight Stall Test
If you stick you hand out the window of a car and your hand is level to the ground. You have a
low angle of attack. There is no lift. Tilt your hand a bit and you have lift. Your arm will rise.
When the angle of attack on the wing of an aircraft is too great the aircraft enters aerodynamic
stall. The same thing happens with your hand out a car window.
At a steep enough angle your arm wants to flop down on the car door.
The MACS software overrides what a pilot can see by looking out the window.
Useless Manuals
If you need a manual to stop a plane from crashing mid-flight, the manual is useless.
It's already too late.
The pilot had seconds in which to react. Yet, instead of requiring
additional training, and alerting pilots of the dangers, Boeing put this stuff in a manual.
This was necessary as part of the pretense that a 737 is a 737 is a 737.
In my day Pilot's were repeatedly cautioned not to fly the
aircraft to the scene of an accident since nobody survives a high
speed crash or a stall. Non-pilots can vote me down but the
proper action at the second the pilot lost control of his aircraft
that close to the ground should have been to pull power, drop
flaps, and make a soft field landing that some passengers would
have survived.
Sure it's a flying turd, but it will be back in the air soon. The
CEO can spew buzzwords at the speed of sound. The FAA will approve
any fix Boeing pukes forth cause nobody has the moral courage to
stand in the way of making the big money.
I saw that article in Spectrum and while it makes some points
about software development he mixes it up with generic claims way
beyond his expertise. Editors at Spectrum should be fired.
Cirrus Jet got grounded due to this MACS problem.. This CODE is
all over the place and probably in AIRBUS also [(.. I'm
betting that it was stolen from AIRBUS] Computer controlled fly
by wire is death-in-a-box as it can always be hacked.
Boeing thinks it will fix the problem with its "MCAS" software.
While it may do so on paper, there remains the problem of the
weight distribution of engines, cargo and fuel which is placing
the center of gravity behind the center of pressure for this
modified aircraft during flight near the stall point. That problem
is faulty aerodynamics. Any aircraft that is inherently
aerodynamically unstable should never be flown in a commercial
setting. Ground them all. Fire the stupid fools who allowed this
beast to fly, including those at the FAA. And finally, sell your
Boeing stock.
"... "One of the problems we have with the system is, why put a system like that on an airplane in the first place?" said Slack, who doesn't represent any survivors of either the Lion Air or Ethiopia Airlines crashes. "I think what we're going to find is that because of changes from the (Boeing 737) 800 series to the MAX series, there are dramatic changes in which they put in controls without native pitch stability. It goes to the basic DNA of the airplane. It may not be fixable." ..."
"... But it's also important that the pilots get physical feedback about what is going on. In the old days, when cables connected the pilot's controls to the flying surfaces, you had to pull up, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to descend. You had to push, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to ascend. With computer oversight there is a loss of natural sense in the controls. There is only an artificial feel, a feeling that the computer wants the pilots to feel. And sometimes, it doesn't feel so great. ..."
"... An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have a tendency to go further into the stall. This is called "dynamic instability," and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic -- fighter jets -- are also fitted with ejection seats. ..."
"... The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably. This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. ..."
"... When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns forward. It turns out that the flight management computer can put a lot of force into that column -- indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening. ..."
"... MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. In a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die ..."
"... Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. "Raise the nose, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." ..."
"... Travis also describes the bad business incentives that led Boeing to conceptualize and present the 737 Max as just a tweak of an existing design, as opposed to being so areodynamically different as to be a new plane .and require time-consuming and costly recertification. To succeed in that obfuscation, Boeing had to underplay the existence and role of the MCAS system: ..."
"... Travis also explains why the FAA allows for what amounts to self-certification. This practice didn't result from the usual deregulation pressures, but from the FAA being unable to keep technical experts from being bid away by private sector players. Moreover, the industry has such a strong safety culture (airplanes falling out of the sky are bad for business) that the accommodation didn't seem risky. ..."
"... The 737 Max saga teaches us not only about the limits of technology and the risks of complexity, it teaches us about our real priorities. Today, safety doesn't come first -- money comes first, and safety's only utility in that regard is in helping to keep the money coming. The problem is getting worse because our devices are increasingly dominated by something that's all too easy to manipulate: software ..."
Even though Boeing is scrambling to fix the software meant to counter the 737 Max's increased propensity to stall as a result
of the placement of larger, more fuel=efficient engines in a way that reduced the stability of the plane in flight, it's not clear
that this will be adequate in terms of flight safety or the public perception of the plane. And even though the FAA is almost certain
to sign off on Boeing's patch, foreign regulators may not be so forgiving. The divergence we've seen between the FAA and other national
authorities is likely to intensify. Recall that China grounded the 737 Max before the FAA. In another vote of no confidence, even
as Boeing was touting that its changes to its now infamous MCAS software, designed to compensate for safety risks introduced by the
placement of the engines on the 737 Max, the Canadian air regulator said he wanted 737 Max pilots to have flight simulator training,
contrary to the manufacturer's assertion that it isn't necessary. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that
American Airlines is developing 737 Max flight simulator training .
But a fundamental question remains: can improved software compensate for hardware shortcomings? Some experts harbor doubts. For
instance, from the Spokane
Spokesman-Review
:
"One of the problems we have with the system is, why put a system like that on an airplane in the first place?" said Slack,
who doesn't represent any survivors of either the Lion Air or Ethiopia Airlines crashes. "I think what we're going to find is
that because of changes from the (Boeing 737) 800 series to the MAX series, there are dramatic changes in which they put in controls
without native pitch stability. It goes to the basic DNA of the airplane. It may not be fixable."
"It is within the realm of possibility that, if much of the basic pitch stability performance of the plane cannot be addressed
by a software fix, a redesign may be required and the MAX might not ever fly," [aviation attorney and former NASA aerospace engineer
Mike] Slack said.
An even more damming take comes in
How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer in IEEE Spectrum (hat tip Marshall Auerback). Author Greg Travis
has been a software developer for 40 years and a pilot. He does a terrific job of explaining the engineering and business considerations
that drove the 737 Max design. He describes why the plane's design is unsound and why the software patch in the form of MCAS was
inadequate, and an improved version is unlikely to be able to compensate for the plane's deficiencies.
Even for those who have been following the 737 Max story, this article has background that is likely to be new. For instance,
to a large degree, pilots do not fly commercial aircraft. Pilots send instructions to computer systems that fly these planes. Travis
explains early on that the As Travis explains:
In the 737 Max, like most modern airliners and most modern cars, everything is monitored by computer, if not directly controlled
by computer. In many cases, there are no actual mechanical connections (cables, push tubes, hydraulic lines) between the pilot's
controls and the things on the wings, rudder, and so forth that actually make the plane move ..
But it's also important that the pilots get physical feedback about what is going on. In the old days, when cables connected
the pilot's controls to the flying surfaces, you had to pull up, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to descend. You had to push,
hard, if the airplane was trimmed to ascend. With computer oversight there is a loss of natural sense in the controls. There is
only an artificial feel, a feeling that the computer wants the pilots to feel. And sometimes, it doesn't feel so great.
Travis also explains why the 737 Max's engine location made the plane dangerously unstable:
Pitch changes with power changes are common in aircraft. Even my little Cessna pitches up a bit when power is applied. Pilots
train for this problem and are used to it. Nevertheless, there are limits to what safety regulators will allow and to what pilots
will put up with.
Pitch changes with increasing angle of attack, however, are quite another thing. An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall
cannot, under any circumstances, have a tendency to go further into the stall. This is called "dynamic instability," and the only
airplanes that exhibit that characteristic -- fighter jets -- are also fitted with ejection seats.
Everyone in the aviation community wants an airplane that flies as simply and as naturally as possible. That means that conditions
should not change markedly, there should be no significant roll, no significant pitch change, no nothing when the pilot is adding
power, lowering the flaps, or extending the landing gear.
The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably.
This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.
Travis explains in detail why the MCAS approach to monitoring the angle of attack was greatly inferior to older methods .including
having the pilots look out the window. And here's what happens when MCAS goes wrong:
When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set of motors
and jacks push the pilot's control columns forward. It turns out that the flight management computer can put a lot of force into
that column -- indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to
tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.
Indeed, not letting the pilot regain control by pulling back on the column was an explicit design decision. Because if the
pilots could pull up the nose when MCAS said it should go down, why have MCAS at all?
MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think
they are flying the plane. In a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer
will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die
Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. "Raise
the nose, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Travis also describes the bad business incentives that led Boeing to conceptualize and present the 737 Max as just a tweak of
an existing design, as opposed to being so areodynamically different as to be a new plane .and require time-consuming and costly
recertification. To succeed in that obfuscation, Boeing had to underplay the existence and role of the MCAS system:
The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other
737 was the key to the 737 Max's fleet fungibility. That's probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system
was kept on the down-low.
Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft's operating handbook or to pilot training,
and someone -- probably a pilot -- would have piped up and said, "Hey. This doesn't look like a 737 anymore."
To drive the point home, Travis contrasts the documentation related to MCAS with documentation Cessna provided with an upgrade
to its digital autopilot, particularly warnings. The difference is dramatic and it shouldn't be. He concludes:
In my Cessna, humans still win a battle of the wills every time. That used to be a design philosophy of every Boeing aircraft,
as well, and one they used against their archrival Airbus, which had a different philosophy. But it seems that with the 737 Max,
Boeing has changed philosophies about human/machine interaction as quietly as they've changed their aircraft operating manuals.
Travis also explains why the FAA allows for what amounts to self-certification. This practice didn't result from the usual deregulation
pressures, but from the FAA being unable to keep technical experts from being bid away by private sector players. Moreover, the industry
has such a strong safety culture (airplanes falling out of the sky are bad for business) that the accommodation didn't seem risky.
But it is now:
So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No. 1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737's
dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity
to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the
angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.
None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the "OK" pencil of the most junior engineering
staff, much less a DER [FAA Designated Engineering Representative].
That's not a big strike. That's a political, social, economic, and technical sin .
The 737 Max saga teaches us not only about the limits of technology and the risks of complexity, it teaches us about our real
priorities. Today, safety doesn't come first -- money comes first, and safety's only utility in that regard is in helping to keep
the money coming. The problem is getting worse because our devices are increasingly dominated by something that's all too easy
to manipulate: software
I believe the relative ease -- not to mention the lack of tangible cost -- of software updates has created a cultural laziness
within the software engineering community. Moreover, because more and more of the hardware that we create is monitored and controlled
by software, that cultural laziness is now creeping into hardware engineering -- like building airliners. Less thought is now
given to getting a design correct and simple up front because it's so easy to fix what you didn't get right later .
It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have
ever saved. It doesn't need to be "fixed" with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether.
There's a lot more in
this meaty piece . Be sure to read it in full.
And if crapification by software has undermined the once-vanuted airline safety culture, why should we hold out hope for any better
with self-driving cars?
Automation is not the issue. Boeing cutting corners and putting only one or two angle of attack sensors is. Just like a man
with two clocks can't tell the time, if one of the sensors malfunctions, the computer has no way of knowing which one is wrong.
That's why Airbus puts three sensors in its aircraft, and why Boeing's Dreamliner has three computers with CPUs from three different
manufacturers to get the necessary triple redundancy.
Thus this is really about Boeing's shocking negligence in putting profits above safety, and the FAA's total capture to the
point Boeing employees did most of the certification work. I would add the corrosion of Boeing's ethical standards was completely
predictable once it acquired McDonnell-Douglas and became a major defense contractor.
I beg to differ since it looks like you didn't read the article in full, as a strongly recommended. The article has a section on the cost of fixing hardware problems versus software problems. Hardware problems are enormously
costly to fix.
The plane has a hardware problem resulting from Boeing not being willing to risk having to recertify a fuel efficient 737.
So rather than making the plane higher off the ground (new landing gear, which other articles indicate was a non-starter since
it would lead to enough other changes so as to necessitate recertification) and trying to fix a hardware problem with software.
That has two knock-on problems: it's not clear this will ever be adequate (not just Travis' opinion) and second, it's risky given
the software industry's propensity to ship and patch later. Boeing created an additional problem, as Travis stresses, by greatly
underplaying the existence of MCAS (it was mentioned after page 700 in the documentation!) and maintaining the fiction that pilots
didn't need simulator training, which some regulators expect will be the case even after the patch.
You also miss the point the article makes: the author argues (unlike in banking), the FAA coming to rely on the airlines for
certification wasn't a decision they made, but an adaptation to the fact that they could no longer hire and retain the engineers
they needed to do the work at the FAA on government pay scales. By contrast, at (say) the SEC, you see a revolving door of lawyers
from plenty fancy firms. You have plenty of "talent" willing to work at the SEC, but with bad incentives.
Thank you for reviewing this. 700+ pages! I thought it was paywalled bec. so slow to download. The resistance to achieving
fuel efficiency is front and center these days. One thing I relate it to is the Macron attitude of punishing the fuel consumer
to change the market. Cart before horse. When the FAA sent down fuel efficiency requirements it might have been similarly preemptive,
now in hindsight. There should have been legislation and regulation which adjusted the profitability of the airline industry via
better tax breaks or regulations against aggressive competition. The safety of airlines would have been upheld if the viability
of the company were protected. So even domestic protectionism when it comes to safety. And in so doing, the FAA/congress could
also have controlled and limited airline use which tries to make up in volume for all the new costs it incurs. It's a serious
problem when you are so carefree as a legislator that you let the free market do it. What a mess. Quality is the first thing to
go.
reminds me of what was said about risk departments inside banks -- deliberately lowly paid, so that anyone with skills would
move on or easily be hired away. Was it you? Bill Black? Luyendijk? I don't remember. Either way..
I did read the article completely and I was an aircraft commander of a C-141A during the Viet Nam war and I am a degreed electrical
engineer.
Having flown the C-141A for several thousand hours I am very familiar with the aircraft pitching up almost uncontrollably.
A favorite trick that C -141 flight instructors pulled on pilots new to aircraft was to tell the student pilot to "go around"
(for the first time during his training) on an approach. The student pilot followed the flight manual procedure and started to
raise the nose while advancing the throttles to full power. However, what wasn't covered in the flight manual was the fact that
a HUGE trim change occurred when the engines went from near idle to full power. To regain control, it took both hands (arms) to
move the yoke away from your chest while running nose down trim. While you were doing this the airplane was trying to stand on
its tail. On the other hand none of us ever forgot the lesson.
The C-141 was not fly by wire; however all control surfaces were equipped with hydraulic assist and "feel springs" to mimic
control feel without the hydraulics. The feel springs for the elevators must have been selected using a human subject like Arnold
Schwarzenegger because (in my opinion) they were much stronger than necessary. The intent was to prevent the pilots from getting
into excessive angles of pitch, which absolutely would occur if you weren't prepared for it on a "go around".
What Fazal & V have said is basically correct. The max has four angle of attack vanes. The MAIN problem was that Boeing decided
to go cheap and only connect one of the vanes to the MCAS. If they had connected two, the MCAS would be able to determine that
one of them was wrong and disconnect itself. That would have eliminated the pitch down problem that caused the two crashes.
Connecting that second AOA vane would not have created any certification issues and would have made Boeing's claim about the
"Max" being the "same" as previous versions much closer to the truth. Had they done that we wouldn't be talking about this.
Another solution would have been to disable the MCAS if there was significant counter force on the yoke applied by the pilot.
This has been used on autopilot systems since the 1960's. But not consistently. The proper programming protocol for the MCAS exists
and should have been used.
I agree that using only one AOA vane and the programming weren't the only really stupid things that Boeing did in this matter.
Insufficient information and training given to the pilots was another.
Yes. second, it's risky given the software industry's propensity to ship and patch later.
-this is one of the main themes in the Dilbert cartoon strip.
the author argues (unlike in banking), the FAA coming to rely on the airlines for certification wasn't a decision they made,
but an adaptation to the fact that they could no longer hire and retain the engineers they needed to do the work at the FAA on
government pay scales.
-That's what happens when you make 'government small enough to drown in a bathtub' , i.e. starve of the funds necessary to
do a good job.
My 2¢ . Boeing's decision to cut manufacturing corners AND give the autopilot MCAS system absolute control might have been
done (just a guess here, based on the all current the 'self-driving' fantasies in technology ) to push more AI 'self-drivingness'
into the airplane. (The 'We don't need expensive pilots, we can use inexpensive pilots, and one day we won't need pilots at all'
fantasy.) Imo, this makes the MCAS system, along with the auto AI self-driving systems now on the road no better than beta
test platforms And early beta test platforms, at that.
It's one thing when MS or Apple push out a not quite ready for prime time OS "upgrade", then wait for all the user feedback
to know where it the OS needs more patches. No one dies in those situations (hopefully). But putting not-ready for prime time
airplanes and cars on the road in beta test condition to get feedback? yikes . my opinion.
It is interesting that a software bug that appears in the field costs very roughly ten times as much as one caught in QA before
being released, yet most managements continue to slight QA in favor of glitzy features. I suppose that preference follows supposed
customer demand.
Boeing, the FAA, and the airlines seriously screwed up the introduction of this aircraft so badly it cost lives. The article
by Travis is however written by someone out of his depth, even though he has more familiarity with aircraft and software than
the average person. There are numerous factual errors and misrepresentations, which many commenters (with more detailed knowledge
of the subjects) on the article point out. One of the principles of aviation safety is to identify and fix failures without finger
pointing, in order to encourage a culture of openness and cooperation. The tone of the article takes the opposite approach while
trying to argue from (undeserved) authority. I agree with his critique that these incidents are a result capitalism run amok –
that should, in my opinion, be separate from a discussion of the technical problems and how to fix them.
If Boeing had adhered to that cardinal principle of openness, there might be no failure to fix via "a culture of openness and
cooperation". These catastrophic failures were a result of Boeing not being open with its customers about the safety implications
of its redesign of the 737 Max and instead choosing the path of obfuscation to sell the idea of seamless fleet fungibility to
airlines.
Looking through the comments the complaints about the article seemed to be in one of three areas-
– Questioning the author's credentials (you're just a Cessna pilot!)
– Parroting the Boeing line that this was all really pilot error
– Focusing on some narrow technical element to discredit the article
The majority of comments were in agreement with the general tenor of the piece, and the author engaged politely and constructively
with some of the points that were brought up. I thought the article was very insightful, and sometimes it does take an outsider
to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
I'd like to see a reference for your assertion that the "principles of aviation safety" preclude finger pointing. Unless I'm
very much mistaken the whole purpose of an FAA accident investigation is to determine the root cause, identify the responsible
party, and, yes, point fingers if necessary.
The general point I was trying to make, perhaps poorly worded, is that the only goal is to identify the problem and fix it,
and not to focus primarily on assigning blame as vigorously as possible. Mistakes occur for many reasons – some of them nefarious,
some not. Excessive finger pointing, especially before a full picture of what went wrong has been developed, fosters a tendency
to coverups and fear, in my opinion.
Regarding your other points, the technical details are vital to understand clearly in almost any aviation incident, as there
is never one cause, and the chain of events is always incredibly complex. Travis' analysis makes the answers too easy.
From what I understand the light touch approach was more about getting people to honestly divulge information during the investigation
period, of which, assisted in determining cause.
This "light touch" approach is used throughout the aviation industry, all the way from initial design to aircraft maintenance,
as the purpose is to make sure that anyone, no matter the rank or experience, can bring up safety concerns before incidents occur
without fear of repercussions for challenging authority. It's likely that this cornerstone of aviation culture was ignored at
too many points along the way here.
I am not defending Boeing, the FAA, or the airlines. Serious, likely criminal, mistakes were made by all.
I however take issue with Travis' approach of assigning blame this early and vigorously while making errors in explaining what
happened. He especially attacks the the development process at Boeing, since software is his speciality, although he makes no
claims as to having worked with real time or avionics software, aside from using products incorporating it. These are quite different
types of software from normal code running a website or a bank. He does not, and can not, know what occurred when the code was
written, yet makes significant declarations as to the incompetence of the engineers and coders involved.
If he were leading the investigation, I believe the most likely outcome would be pushback and coverup by those involved.
It's likely that this cornerstone of aviation culture was ignored at too many points along the way here.
I am not defending Boeing, the FAA, or the airlines. Serious, likely criminal, mistakes were made by all.
I however take issue with Travis' approach of assigning blame this early
I don't disagree with your description of how it used to be. However, since the FAA has reduced its regulatory role, and by
extension given aircraft manufactures more leash to run with ideas that shouldn't be followed, we're left with the situation that
large, potentially crippling tort lawsuits are one of the only checks left on manufacturer stupidity or malfeasance. Think of
the Ford Pinto bolt-too-long-causing-gas-tank-explosions case. If the FCC won't make manufacturers think twice when internal engineers
say 'this isn't a good idea, isn't a good design', maybe the potential of a massive lawsuit will make them think twice.
And this is where we get into pointing the finger, assigning blame, etc. I'm assuming there are good engineers at Boeing who
warned against these multiple design failure and were ignored, the FCC was see-no-evil here-no-evil, and the MCAS went forward.
Now come the law suits. It's the only thing left to 'get Boeing's attention'. I don't know if Travis' is too early. It's likely
there's been plenty of chatter among the Boeing and industry engineers already. imo.
Training a pilot is building a very complicated automation system : what kind of thought process do you expect within the short
timeframe (few minutes) of a crisis in a cockpit ? Kant's critique of pure reason ?Somehow people seem more comfortable from death
coming from human error (I.e. a bad human automation system) that death coming from a design fault, but a death is a death
The problem is not automation vs no automation, it is bad corner-cutting automation vs good systematic and expensive automation.
It is also bad integration between pilot brain based automation and system automation, which also boils out to corner cutting,
because sharing too much information about the real behaviour of the system (if only it is known accurately ) increases the complexity
and the cost of pilot training.
Real safety comes from proven design (as in mathematical proof). It is only achievable on simple systems because proofing is
conceptually very hard. A human is inevitably a very complex system that is impossible to proof, therefore, beyond a certain standard
of reliability, getting the human factor out of the equation is the only way to improve things further. we are probably close
to that threshold with civil aviation.
Similarly, regarding cars, the considerable improvement in death per km travelled in the last 30 years cannot be attributed
only to better drivers, a large part comes from ESP and ABS becoming standard (see
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811182
). If this is not automation, what is ?
It looks as if you didn't read the piece. The problem, which the author makes explicit, is the "ship now, patch later" philosophy
that is endemic in software design.
And it would be better to look at flight safety stats within markets. You have great swathes of the emerging world starting
to fly on airplanes during this period. I'm not saying the general trend isn't correct, but I would anticipate it's to a significant
degree attributable to the maturation of emerging economy air systems. For instance, I flew on Indonesia's Garuda in the early
1990s and was told I was taking a safety risk; I'm now informed that it's a good airline. Similarly, in the early 1980s I was
doing business in Mexico, and the McKinsey partner I was traveling with (who as a hobby read black box transcripts from plane
crashes) was very edgy on the legs of our travels when we had to use AeroMexico (as in he'd natter on in a way that was very out
of character for a typical older WASP-y guy, he was close to white knuckle nervous).
Garuda's transition from "safety risk" to "good airline" was an actual occurrence. At one point Garuda and all other Indonesian
air lines were prohibited from flying in the EU because of numerous crashes that were the result of management issues, that forced
the airline(s) to change their ways.
ABS is an enhancement. MCAS is a kludge to patch up massive weaknesses introduced into the hardware by a chain of bad decisions
going back almost 20 years.
Boeing should have started designing a new narrow-body when they cancelled the 757 in 2004. Instead, they chose to keep relying
on the 737. The end result is MCAS and 300+ deaths.
"There are numerous factual errors and misrepresentations, which many commenters (with more detailed knowledge of the subjects)
on the article point out."
Not sure why anyone would mis-characterise comments. The first comment points out a deficiency, and explains it. There was only
one other commenter, who alleged errors – but without explaining what those could be. He was later identified by another person
as a troll. Almost all other comments were complimentary of the article. So why make the above assertion?
We have a noteworthy number of newbie comments making poorly-substantiated digs at the Spectrum IEEE piece. We've also seen
this sort of non-organic-looking response when we've put up pro-union pieces when political fights were in play, like Wisconsin's
Scott Walker going after unions.
Travis does indeed play fast and loose with a number of things. For example, his 0-360 engine does *not* have pistons the size
of dinner plates (at a 130mm bore it isn't even the diameter of a particularly large saucer). MCAS is a stability augmentation
system not stall prevention system and the 737 MAX wasn't "unstable" it was insufficiently stable. The 737 trim system acts on
the stabilizer not the elevator (which is a completely different control surface). etc.
For the most part, it doesn't affect the thrust of his arguments which are at a higher level. However it does get distracting.
Thank you – I was beginning to wonder what the difference was between unstable and insufficiently stable. Not that this is
a subject to make jokes about.
Yeah, but sometimes the choice is to laugh or cry, and after constantly going WTF!?! every time I read about this horror, even
mordantly grim humor is nice.
Investigators pipe up, but my understanding of a proper investigation is: a. find out what happened; b. find out why the incident
occurred; c. what can be done to prevent.
The public opinion has already sailed I think, against the company. If negligent, adverse-safety decisions were made, the head
people should be prosecuted accordingly.
Yet, I feel this isn't going to happen despite the reality that billions of humans never want to fly a boeing jet again. Why
would you risk it? Toast and deservedly imho
"Agile" "use-case driven" software development: very dangerous, takes the disruptive, crappification approach (under some hands)
of trying to identify the minimum investment to hit the minimal requirements, particularly focusing on an 80/20 Pareto rule distribution
of efforts.
Which may be good enough for video delivery or cell-phone function, but not for life-critical or scientifically-critical equipment
Many people here are assuming Boeing uses modern software-development methodology in spite of flaws that make such an approach
iffy in this field. Why assume that?
When I worked, many years ago now, as a Boeing software engineer, their software-development practices were 15 years behind
the rest of the world. Part of that was sheer caution and conservatism re new things, precisely because of the safety culture,
and part of it was because they did not have many of the best software people. They could rarely hire the best in part because
cautious, super-conservative code is boring. Their management approach was optimized to get solid systems out of ordinary engineers
with a near incomprehensible number of review and testing steps.
Anyone in this audience worked there in software recently? If not, fewer words about how they develop code might be called
for. Yes, the MCAS system was seriously flawed. But we do not have the information to actually know why.
> Anyone in this audience worked there in software recently? If not, fewer words about how they develop code might be called
for.
4/16 Links included a lengthy spiel from Reddit via Hacker News by a
software engineer who worked at Boeing 10 years ago (far more recently than you) which detailed the horrors of Boeing's dysfunctional
corporate culture at length. This is in addition to many other posts covering the story from multiple angles.
NC has covered this topic extensively. Maybe try familiarizing yourself with their content before telling others to shut up.
Excuse me? Are ad hominem attacks fine now? I didn't tell anyone to "shut up" or contradict the great amount of good reporting
on Boeing's management dysfunction.
I just pointed out that at one time, yes way back there, there was a logic to it and that the current criticism here of its
software-development culture in particular seems founded on a combination of speculation and general disgust with the software
industry.
Whatever else I am or however wrong I may sometimes be, I am an engineer, and real engineers look for evidence.
Moving the engines in itself didn't introduce safety risks, this tendency to nose up was always there. The primary problem
is Boeing wanted to pretend MAX is the same plane as NG (the previous version) for certification and pilot training purposes.
Which is why the MCAS is black box deeply hardwired into the control systems and they didn't tell pilots about it. It was supposed
to be invisible, just sort of translating layer between the new airframe and pilots commanding it as the old one.
And this yearning for pre-automation age, for directly controlling the surfaces by cables and all, is misguided. People didn't
evolve for flying, it's all learned the hard way, there is no natural way to feel the plane. In fact in school they will drill
into you to trust the instruments and not your pedestrian instincts. Instruments and computers may fail, but your instincts will
fail far more often.
After all 737 actually is old design, not fly by wire. And one theory of what happened in the Ethiopian case is that when they
disengaged the automatic thing, they were not able to physically overcome the aerodynamic forces pushing on the plane. So there
you have your cables & strings operated machine.
I don't see basis for your assertion about safety risks given the counter-evidence in the form of the very existence of the
MCAS software. Every article written on it points out it was to prevent the possibility of the plane stalling out when "punching
up". And as the article describes, there were two design factors, the placement of the engines and the nacelles, which led to
it generating too much lift in certain scenarios.
And your argument regarding what happened when the pilot turned off the autopilot is yet another indictment of Boeing's design.
This is not "Oh bad pilots," this is "OMG, evidence of another Boeing fuckup." This is what occurred when the pilots disabled
MCAS per instructions.
Have you not heard of purely mechanical systems that allow for the multiplication of force? It's another Boeing design defect
that the pilots couldn't operate the flight stabilizer when the plane was under takeoff stresses. That's a typical use case!
And it was what Boeing told pilots to do and it didn't work!
From Reuters (apparently
written before the black box detail revealed that the pilots could not control the stabilizers):
Boeing pointed to long-established procedures that pilots could have used to handle a malfunction of the anti-stall system,
regardless of whether the pilots knew MCAS existed.
That checklist tells pilots to switch off the two stabilizer trim cutout switches on the central console, and then to adjust
the aircraft's stabilizers manually using trim wheels.
And that's one of they should worry about most, since that's one of highest risk times for flight, and the plane should have
been engineered with that scenario in mind. This raises the possibility that the inability of the pilots to handle the plane manually
in takeoff also somehow resulted from the changes to the aerodynamics resulting from the placement of the bigger engines.
This is his argument about how the reliance on software has led to undue relaxation of good hardware design principles:
The original FAA Eisenhower-era certification requirement was a testament to simplicity: Planes should not exhibit significant
pitch changes with changes in engine power. That requirement was written when there was a direct connection between the controls
in the pilot's hands and the flying surfaces on the airplane. Because of that, the requirement -- when written -- rightly imposed
a discipline of simplicity on the design of the airframe itself. Now software stands between man and machine, and no one seems
to know exactly what is going on. Things have become too complex to understand.
Pitch changes with power changes are common in aircraft. Even my little Cessna pitches up a bit when power is applied. Pilots
train for this problem and are used to it.
Again, the plane already had the habit of picthing up and the changes didn't add that. The question isn't if, but how much
and what to do about it. Nowhere did I read MAX exceeds some safety limits in this regard. If Boeing made the plane to physically
break regulations and tried to fix it with software then indeed that would be bad. However, I'm not aware of that.
As for the Ethiopian scenario, I was talking about
this article . It says when they tried manual, it very well could be beyond their physical ability to turn the wheels and
so they were forced to switch electrical motors back on, but that also turned up MCAS again. In fact it also says this seizing
up thing was present in the old 737 design and pilots were trained to deal with it, but somehow the plane become more reliable
and training for this failure mode was dropped. This to me doesn't look like good old days of aviation design ruined by computers.
You should read the Ethiopian Government's crash preliminary crash report. Very short and easy to read. Contains a wealth of
information. Regarding the pilot's attempt to use the manual trim wheel, according to the crash report, the aircraft was already
traveling at 340 knots indicated airspeed, well past Vmo or the aircraft's certified airspeed when they first attempted to manually
trim the nose up. It didn't work because of the excessive control forces generated by high airspeeds well beyond the aircraft's
certification. I'm not excusing Boeing, the automated MCAS nose down trim system was an engineering abomination, but the pilots
could have made their lives much easier by setting a more normal thrust setting for straight and level flight, slowing their aircraft
to a speed within the normal operating envelope, then working their runaway nose-down pitch emergency.
I didn't like the IEEE Spectrum piece very much since the author seemed to miss or exaggerate some issues, and also seemed
to confuse flying a Cessna with being expert about large airliners or aerospace engineering. The title says "software engineer"
but at the end he says "software executive". Executive doesn't always mean non-engineer but it does mean someone who is full of
themselves, and that shows through the whole article. The stuff I'm seeing from actual engineers (mostly on Hacker News) is a
little more careful. I'm still getting the sense that the 737 MAX is fundamentally a reasonable plane though Boeing fucked up
badly presenting it as a no-retraining-needed tweak to the older 737's.
There's some conventional wisdom that Boeing's crapification stems from the McDonnell merger in 1997. Boeing, then successful,
took over the failing and badly managed McDonnell. The crappy McDonnell managers then spent the next years pushing out the Boeing
managers, and subsequently have been running Boeing into the ground. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's a narrative that
rings true.
You are misrepresenting the Hacker News criticisms, and IMHO they misrepresent the piece. They don't question his software
chops. And if you really knew the software biz, "software executive" often = developer who built a company (and that includes
smallish ones). The guy OWNS a Cessna, which means he's spent as much on a plane as a lot of people spend on a house. If he was
a senior manager as you posit, that means at large company, and no large company would let an employee write something like this.
He's either between gigs or one of the top guys in a smallish private company where mouthing off like this won't hurt the business.
Notice also his contempt for managers in the article).
He's also done flight simulator time on a 757, and one commentor pointed out that depending on the simulator, it could be tantamount
to serious training, as in count towards qualifying hours to be certified to fly a 757.
They do argue, straw manning his piece, that he claims the big failure is with the software. That in fact is not what the article
says. It says that the design changes in the 737 Max made it dynamically unstable, which is an unacceptable characteristic in
any plane, no matter what size. He also describes at length the problem of relying on only one sensor as an input to the MCAS
and how that undermined having the pilots be able to act as a backup .by looking at each other's instrumentation results.
The idea that he's generalizing from a Cessna is absurd. He describes how Cessnas have the pilot having greater mechanical
control than jets like the 737. He describes how the pilots read the instrument results from each side of the plane, something
which cannot occur in a Cessna, a single pilot plane. He refers to the Cessna documentation to make the point that the norm is
to over-inform pilots as to how changes in the software affect how they operate the plane, not radically under-inform them as
Boeing did with the 737 Max.
As to the reasonableness of Travis' concerns, did you miss that a former NASA engineer has the same reservations? Are you trying
to say he doesn't understand how aircraft hardware works?
He owns a 1978 Cessna 172 , goes for about $70K,
so not quite house prices, more like a nice Tesla, whose drive by wire systems he seems to trust far more for some reason.
In regard to "dynamic instability" being unacceptable, this is a red herring. Most modern airliners rely on flight characteristic
augmentation systems in normal operation, trim systems being the most common. Additionally, there are aircraft designed
to be unstable (fighters) but rely on computers to fly them stably, to greatly increase manoeuvrability.
In regard to Cessnas being single pilot planes, the presence of flight controls on both sides of the cockpit would somewhat
bring into question this assertion .? Most 172s do however have only one set of instrumentation. When operating with two pilots
(as with let's say a student pilot and instructor) you would still have the issue of two pilots trying to agree on possibly faulty
readings from one set of non-redundant instruments.
No, it's a 1979 Cessna, and you don't know when he bought it and how much use it had, since price is significantly dependent
on flight hours. The listings I show it costs over $100K. A quick Google search says a plane with a new feel is closer to $300K.
Even $100K in equity is more than most people put down when buying a house
He also glides, and gliders often own or co-own their gliders.
The author acknowledges your point re fighters. Did you miss that he also says they are the only planes where pilots can eject
themselves from the aircraft? Arguing from what is acceptable for a fighter, where you compromise a lot on other factors to get
maneuverability, to a commercial jet is dodgy.
Regarding fighters and instability, I'm not the one that stated it's "an unacceptable characteristic in any plane, no matter
the size".
I am completely on Travis' side when it comes to the issues with culture and business that brought on these incidents. Seeing
however that these affected and overrode good engineering, I believe it's vitally important that the engineering is discussed
as accurately as possible. Hence my criticism of the piece.
Had you looked at prices as you claimed to, Cessnsa 172s specify the year in the headline description. 1977 v. 1978 v 1979
on a page I got Googling for 1979.
You are now well into the terrain of continuing to argue for argument sake.
I agree with you that the article is good and the criticisms I've read seem largely unmerited (quite a few of those btl on
that article are clearly bad faith arguments), but just to clarify:
That in fact is not what the article says. It says that the design changes in the 737 Max made it dynamically unstable,
which is an unacceptable characteristic in any plane, no matter what size.
My understanding (non-engineer, but long time aviation nerd) is that many aircraft, including all Airbus's are dynamically
unstable and use software to maintain stability. The key point I think that the article makes is that there is a fundamental difference
between designing hardware and software in synchronicity to make a safe aircraft (i.e Airbus), and using software as a fudge to
avoid making hard decisions when the hardware engineers find they can't overcome a problem without spending a fortune in redesigns.
Hard engineering 'fudges' are actually really common in aircraft design – little bumps or features added to address stability
problems encountered during testing – an example being the little fore planes on the
Tupolev 144 supersonic airliner. But it seems Boeing
took a short cut with its approach and a lot of people paid for this with their lives. Only time will tell if it was a deep institutional
failure within Boeing or just a flaw caused by a rushed roll-out.
I've personal experience of a catastrophic design flaw (not one that could kill people, just one that could cost hundreds of
millions to fix) which was entirely down to the personal hang-ups of one particular project manager who was in a position to silence
internal misgivings. Of course, in aircraft design this is not supposed to happen.
I'm reminded of the famous "software is eating the world" quote by uber VC Marc Andreessen. He posits that in an era where
Silicon valley style, software led disruption stalks every established industry, even companies that "make things" (hardware)
need a radical rethink in terms of how they see themselves. A company like Boeing, under this worldview, needs to think of itself
as a software company with a hardware arm attached, otherwise it might have its lunch eaten by a plucky upstart (to say nothing
of Apple or Google) punching above its weight.
It's not farfetched to imagine an army of consultants selling this "inoculate yourself from disruption" thinking to companies
like Boeing and being taken seriously. With Silicon valley's obsession with taking humans out of the loop (think driverless cars/trucks,
operator-less forklifts etc) one wonders whether these accidents will highlight the limitations of technology and halt the seemingly
inexorable march towards complex automation reducing pilots to cockpit observers coming along for the ride.
Ad homimem and therefore logically invalid. Plus reading comprehension problem. The "native pitch stability" comment was from
Mike Slack, a former NASA engineer, and not Travis, the Cessna owner.
I think that the point is that there are aircraft that don't take over the controls and dive into the ground. It's possible
to have these kinds of aircraft. These kinds of aircraft are good to have. It's like an existence proof.
No, not dangerously pro-automation. More like dangerously stuck in the past, putting bandaids on a dinosaur to keep false profits
rolling in. AF447 could be argued against excessive automation, but not the Max.
i think they are real profits. And the automation that crashed two planes over a short time span and it wasn't excessive? Band
aids on what was one of the safest planes ever made (how many 737's crashed pre 737 max? the hardware problem was higher landing
gear along with engines that were larger and added lift to the plane. MCAS was intended to fix that. It made it worse. I won't
be flying on a MAX.
Thanks for the article but re the above comments–perhaps that 737 pilot commenter should weigh in because some expert commentary
on this article is badly needed. My impression from the Seattle Times coverage is that the MCAS was not implemented to keep the
plane from falling out of the sky but rather to finesse the retraining issue. In other words a competent pilot could handle the
pitch up tendency with no MCAS assist at all if trained or even informed that such a tendency existed. And if that's the case
then the notion that the plane will be grounded forever is dubious indeed.
This isn't quite correct, and I suggest you read the article in full.
The issue isn't MCAS. It is that MCAS was to compensate for changes in the planes aerodynamics that were so significant that
it should arguably have been recerttified as being a different plane. That was what Boeing was trying to avoid above all Former
NASA engineer Mike Slack makes that point as well. Travis argues that burying the existence of MCAS in the documentation was to
keep pilots from questioning whether this was a different plane:
It all comes down to money, and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing
in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in
systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max's fleet fungibility. That's probably also the reason why the documentation
about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.
Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft's operating handbook or to pilot training,
and someone -- probably a pilot -- would have piped up and said, "Hey. This doesn't look like a 737 anymore." And then the
money would flow the wrong way.
I think you just said what I said. My contention is that the only reason the plane could ever be withdrawn is that the design
is so inherently unstable that this extra gizmo–the MCAS–was necessary for it to fly. Whereas it appears the MCAS was for marketing
purposes and if it had never been added to the plane the two accidents quite likely may never have happened–even if Boeing didn't
tell pilots about the pitch up tendency.
But I'm no expert obviously. This is just my understanding of the issue.
From what I've read at related links in the last week, a significant element is common type rating. Manufacturers don't have
to go through expensive recertification if their modifications are minor enough, earning a common type rating. Thus, the successive
incarnations of the 737 over the decades.
I'm only a layman, but a citizen who tries to stay informed and devours material on this topic. The common type rating merry
go round needs to stop. It seems at least that a new engine with a different position that alters the basic physics of the plane
shouldn't qualify for common type rating, which should be reserved only for the most minor of modifications.
As one who has followed the entirety of the MAX stories as detailed by the Seattle Times aviation reporters, it all comes back
to "first principles": a substantive change in aerodynamics by introduction of an entirely new pair of engines should have required
complete re-engineering of the airframe. We know that Boeing eschewed that approach, largely for competitive and cost considerations,
and subsequently tried to mate the LEAP engines to the existing 737 airframe by installing the MCAS, amongst other design "tweaks",
i.e., "kludging" a fix. Boeing management recognized that this wouldn't be the "perfect" aircraft, but with the help of a compliant
FAA and a huge amount of "self-assessment", got the beast certified and airborne -- -- until the two crashes, that is. Whether
the airlines and/or the flying public will ever accept the redo of MCAS and other ancillary fixes is highly problematic, as the
entire concept was flawed from the kick-off.
Also, it should be mentioned in passing that even the LEAP engines are having some material-wear issues:
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/cfm-reviews-fleet-after-finding-leap-1a-durability-i-442669/
Th IEEE Spectrum piece is somewhat reasonable but the author obvious lacks technical knowledge of the 737. He also does not
understand why MCAS was installed in the first place.
For example:
– "However, doing so also meant that the centerline of the engine's thrust changed. Now, when the pilots applied power to the
engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to "pitch up," or raise its nose.
– The MAX nose up tendency is a purely aerodynamic effect. The centerline of the thrust did not change much.
– "MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, "
– No. It is implemented in the Flight Control Computer of which there are two. (There is only on FMC unit.)
-" It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column -- "
– The Elevator Feel unit is not a computer but a deterministic hydraulic-mechanical system.
– "Neither such [software] coders nor their managers are as in touch with the particular culture and mores of the aviation
world as much as the people who are down on the factory floor, "
– The coders who make the Boeing and Airbus systems work are specialized in such coding. Software development for aircrafts It
is a rigid formularized process which requires a deep understanding of the aviation world. The coders appropriately implement
what the design engineers require after the design review confirmed it. Nothing less, nothing more.
and more than a dozen other technical misunderstandings and mistakes.
If the author would have read some of the PPRUNE threads on the issue or asked an 737 pilot he would have known all this.
Given what has happened with Boeing manufacture (787s being delivered with tools and bottles rattling around in them), you
have no basis for asserting how Boeing does software in practice these days.
And you have incontrovertible evidence of a coding fail: relying on only one sensor input when the plane had more than one
sensor. I'm sorry, I don't see how you can blather on about safety and coders supposedly understanding airplanes with that coded
in.
JeffC who actually worked at Boeing years ago and said the coding was conservative (lots of people checked it) because they
were safety oriented but also didn't get very good software engineers, since writing software at Boeing was boring.
I still have some trouble blaming the 737 losses, ipso facto, on using automation to extend an old design. There are
considerably more complex aircraft systems than MCAS that have been reliably automated, and building on a thoroughly proven framework
usually causes less trouble than suffering the teething problems of an all new design.
At the risk of repeating the obvious, a basic principle of critical systems, systems which must be reliable, is that they can
not suffer from single point failures. You want to require at least two independent failures to disturb a system, whose combined
probability is so low that other, unavoidable failure sources predominate, for example, weather or overwhelming, human error.
This principle extends to the system's development. The design and programming of a (reliable) critical system can not suffer
from single point failures. This requires a good many, skilled people, paying careful attention to different, specific stages
of the process. Consider a little thing I once worked on: the indicator that confirms a cargo door is closed, or arguably, that
is neither open nor unlatched. I count at least five levels of engineers and programmers, between Boeing and the FAA, that used
to validate, implement and verify the work of their colleagues, one or more levels above and/or below: to insure the result was
safe.
I bet what will ultimately come out is that multiple levels of the validation and verification chain have been grievously degraded
("crapified") to cut costs and increase profits. The first and last levels for a start. I am curious and will ask around.
The MAX isn't a proven framework. Boeing fundamentally altered the 737 design by shifting the position of the engines. The
MCAS fudge doesn't fix that.
My own impression is that there seems to be a clash between three separate philosophies at work here. The first is the business
culture of Boeing which had supplanted Boeing's historical aviation-centric ways of doing things in aircraft design. The bean-counters
& marketing droids took over, outsourced aircraft construction to such places as non-union workshops & other countries, and thought
that cutting corners in aircraft manufacture would have no long-term ill effects. The second philosophy is that of software design
that failed to understand that the software had to be good to go as it was shipped and had little understanding of what happens
when you ship beta-standard software to an operational aircraft in service. This was to have fatal consequences. The third culture
is that of the pilots themselves which seek to keep their skills going in an aviation world that wants to turn them into airplane-drivers.
If there is any move afoot to have self flying aircraft introduced down the track, I hope that this helps kill it.
Boeing is going to take a massive financial hit and so it should. Heads should literally roll over this debacle and it did not
help their case when they went to Trump to keep this plane flying in the US without thought as to what could have happened if
a US or Canadian 737 MAX had augured in. The biggest loser I believe is going to be the US's reputation with aviation. The rest
of the aviation world will no longer trust what the FAA says or advise without checking it themselves. The trust of decades of
work has just been thrown out the door needlessly. Even in the critical field of aircraft crash investigation, the US took a hit
as Ethiopia refused the demands that the black boxes be sent to the US but sent them instead to France. That is something that
has flown under the radar. This is going to have knock-on effects for decades to come.
Beginning to look like a trade war with the EU. airbus, boeing, vw, US cars; but haven't seen Japan drawn into this yet. Mercedes
Benz is saying EV cars are nonsense, they actually create more pollution than diesel engines and they are recommending methane
gasoline (that sounds totally suicidal), and hydrogen power. Hydrogen has always sounded like a good choice, so why no acclaim?
It can only be the resistance of vested interests. The auto industry, like the airline industry, is frantically trying to externalize
its costs. Maybe we should all just settle down and do a big financial mutual insurance company that covers catastrophic loss
by paying the cost of switching over to responsible manufacturing and fuel efficiency. Those corporations cooperate with shared
subsidiaries that manufacture software to patch their bad engineering – why not a truce while they look for solutions?
The whole 737 development reminds me of a story a GM engineer told me. Similarly to the aviation industry, when GM makes modifications
to an existing part on a vehicle, if the change is small enough the part does not need to be recertified for mechanical strength,
etc. One of the vehicles he was working on had a part failure in testing, so they looked at the design history of the part. It
turns out that, similarly to 737, this was a legacy part carried over numerous generations of the vehicle.
Each redesign of the vehicle introduced some changes, they needed to reroute some cabling, so they would punch a new hole through
the part. But because the change was small enough the engineering team had the option of just signing off on the change without
additional testing. So this went on for years, where additional holes or slits were made in the original part and each change
was deemed to be small enough that no recertification was necessary. The cumulative change from the original certification was
that this was now a completely different part and, not surprisingly, eventually it failed.
The interesting part of the story was the institutional inertia. As all these incremental changes were applied to the part,
nobody bothered to check when was the last time part was actually tested and what was the part design as that time. Every step
of the way everybody assumed their change is small enough not to cause any issue and did not do any diligence until a failure
occured.
Which brings me back to the 737, if I am not mistaken, 737 MAX is, for certification purposes, considered an iteration of the
original 737. The aircraft though is very different than the original, increased wingspan (117′ vs 93′), length (140′ vs. 100′).
737 NG is similarly different.
So for me the big issue with the MAX is the institutional question that allowed a plane so different from the original 737
certification to be allowed as a variant of the original, without additional pilot training or plane certification. Upcoming 777X
has the same issue, it's a materially different aircraft (larger wingspan, etc.) that has a kludge (folding wingtips) to allow
it to pass as a variant of the original 777. It will be interesting to see, in the wake of the MAX fiasco, what treatment does
the 777X get when it comes to certification.
The FAA needs to be able to follow these tweaks. Maybe we citizens need a literal social contract that itemizes what we expect
our government to actually do.
BTW, I do not believe that the problems are insoluble, or as a result of a design philosophy, but rather it is a result of
placing sales over engineering.
There are a number of aerodynamic tweaks that could have dealt with this issue (larger horizontal tail comes to mind, but my
background is manufacturing not aerodynamics), but this would require that pilots requalify for a transition between the NG and
the MAX, which would likely mean that many airlines would take a second look at Airbus.
We should avoid blaming "software" or "automation" for this accident. The B737 MAX seems to be a case of "Money first, safety
second" culture, combined with insufficent regulatory control.
The root of the B737 MAX accidents was an erroneous safety hazard assessment: The safety asessment (and the FAA) believed the
MCAS had a 0.6 authority limit. This 0.6 limit meant that an erroneous MCAS function would only have limited consequences. In
the safety jargon, its severity was classifed as "Major", instead of "Catastrophic".
After the "Major" classification was assigned, the subsequente design decions (like using a single sensor, or perhaps insufficient
testing) are acceptable and in line with the civil aviation standards.
The problem is that the safety engineer(s) failed to understand that the 0.6 limit was self-imposed by the MCAS software, not
enforced by any external aircraft element. Therefore, the MCAS software could fail in such a way that it ignored the limit. In
consequence, MCAS should have been classifed "Catastrophic".
Everybody can make mistakes. We know this. That is why these safety assessments should be reviewed and challenged inside the
company and by the FAA. The need to launch the MAX fast and the lack of FAA oversight resources surely played a greater role than
the usage of software and automation.
Yves: Thanks for this post; it has (IMO) a level-headed perspective. It is not about assigning *blame*, it is about *What,
Why, and How to Prevent* what happened from re-occurring. Blame is for courts and juries. Good luck finding jurors who are not
predisposed; due to relentless bombardment with parroted misinformation and factoids.
I wonder how often MCAS kicked in on a typical 737MAX flight, in situation where the weather vane advising of angle attack
was working as per normal. Since we are excluding the time when auto-pilot is working and also the time when the flaps are down,
there is only a very small time window immediately after take off. I would venture to guess that the MCAS would almost always
adjust the plane at least once. This is once too many, if one is to believe that the notion of design improvement includes improvement
in aerodynamic behavior. The fact that MCAS could only be overridden by disabling the entire motor control of the trim suggests
that the MCAS feature is absolutely necessary for the thing to fly without surprise stalls. There is no excuse in a series of
a product for handling associated with basic safety becoming worse with a new model. Fuel efficiency is laudable and a marketable
thing, but not when packaged together with the bad compromise of bad flight behavior. If the fix is only by lines of code, they
really have not fixed it completely. We know they are not going to be able to move the engines or the thrust line or increase
the ground clearance of the plane so the software fix will be sold as the solution. While it probably does not mean that there
will be more planes being trimmed to crash into the ground, it does make for some anxiety for future passengers. Loss of sales
would not be a surprise but more of a surprise will be the deliveries that will be completed regardless.
MCAS was intended to rarely if ever activate. It is supposed to nudge the aircraft to a lower angle of attack if AoA is getting
high to cause instability in certain parts of the flight envelope. An overly aggressive takeoff climb would be an example. Part
of the problem is that a faulty AoA sensor resulted in the system thinking it was at this extreme case, repeatedly, and in a way
that was difficult for the pilots to identify since they had not been properly trained and the UX was badly implemented.
Yes I've heard that. But do not believe it, given how it is implemented. So I really would like to know how it behaves in non-catastrophic
situations. If so benign, why not allow it to turn off without turning off trim controls? Did not the earlier 737's not need this
feature?
In a non-catastrophic situation, and if functioning correctly, it's my understanding it would felt by the flight crew as mild
lowering of the nose by the system. This is is to keep the plane from increasing angle of attack, which could lead to a stall
or other instability.
It's my understanding MCAS should be treated as a separate system from the trim controls, although they both control the pitch
of the stabilator. Trim controls are generally not "highly dynamic", in that the system (or pilot) sets the trim value only occasionally
based primarily on things like the aircraft weight distribution (this could however change during a flight as fuel is burned,
for example). MCAS on the other hand, while monitoring AoA continuously in flight modes where it is activated only kicks in to
correct excessive inputs from the pilots, or as a result of atmospheric disturbances (wind shear would be one possible cause of
excessive AoA readings).
Neither trim nor MCAS are required to manually fly the plane safely if under direct pilot control and the the pilot is fully
situationally aware.
Earlier 737s did not need this feature due to different aerodynamic properties of the plane. They however still have assistive
features such as stick shakers to help prevent leaving the normal flight envelope.
I've read a bit more in regard to allowing MCAS to turn off without turning off trim, I have no idea why it was implemented
as it was, since previous 737s allow separate control of trim and MCAS. More here:
This however still doesn't change the fact that neither is required to fly the plane, given proper training and communication,
both of which were criminally lacking.
IBG, YBG corporate decisions by people who will probably never fly in these planes, complete regulatory capture and distract
with the little people squabbling over technical details. In China there would probably already have been a short trial, a trip
to the river bank, a bullet through the head, organ harvesting for the corporate jocks responsible. Team Amrika on the way down.
On the subject of software, the underlying issue of ship and patch later is because the process of software is full of bad
practice.
Two examples, "if" and "new".
If is a poor use of a stronger mechanism, FSMs, or Finite State Machines.
'new' is a mechanism that leads to memory leaks, and crashes.
I developed some middleware to bridge data between maineframs and Unix systems that ran 7×24 for 7 years continuously without
a failure, because of FSMs and static memory use.
In an email to me (and presumably to all AAdvantage program members) transmitted at 03:00 April 17 UTC ( i.e. , 11 PM
April 16 US EDT), American Airlines states that it is canceling 737 MAX flights through August 19 (instead of June 5 as stated
by the earlier newspaper story cited in this post).
Eliminating introductory and concluding paragraphs that are marketing eyewash (re. passenger safety and convenience), the two
payload paragraphs state in their entirety:
To avoid last-minute changes and to accommodate customers on other flights with as much notice as possible before their
travel date, we have made the decision to extend our cancellations for the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft through August 19, 2019,
while we await recertification of the MAX.
While these changes impact only a small portion of our more than 7,000 departures each day this summer, we can plan more
reliably for the peak travel season by adjusting our schedule now. Customers whose upcoming travel has been impacted as a result
of the schedule change are being contacted by our teams.
I'm surprised this has not already appeared in earlier comments. Anybody else get this?
Now do Tesla & their bs Tesla Autonomy Investor Day please.
It appears to have it all from beta testing several ton vehicles on public roads, (like BA's beta testing of the MAX) to regulatory
capture( of NTSB, & NTHSA as examples) and a currently powerful PR team.
Apparently they're going to show off their "plan" how one will be able to use their Tesla in full autonomous mode while every
other OEM sez it can't be done by the end of this year let alone within a couple decades as the average person perceives autonomous
driving.
First of all, I didn't read the article, so I'm not going to critique it. There were some comments in the excerpt that Yves
provided that I think require some clarification and/or correction.
The 737 is not a fly-by-wire (FBW) aircraft. There are multiple twisted steel control cables that connect the flight control
in the cockpit to the various control surfaces. The flight controls are hydraulically assisted, but in case of hydraulic (or electric)
failure, the cable system is sufficient to control the aircraft.
In both the 737NG and the MAX, there are automation functions that can put in control inputs under various conditions. Every
one of these inputs can be overridden by the pilot.
In the case of the recent MAX accidents, the MCAS system put in an unexpected and large input by moving the stabilizer. The
crews attempted to oppose this input, but they did so mostly by using elevator input (pulling back on the control column). This
required a great deal of arm strength which they eventually could not overcome. However, if either pilot had merely used the strength
of their thumb to depress the stabilizer trim switch on the yoke, they could have easily opposed and cancelled out whatever input
MCAS was trying to put in. Why neither pilot took this fairly basic measure should be one of the key areas of investigation.
These comments are not intended in any way to exonerate Boeing, the FAA, and the compromises that went into the MAX design.
There is a lot there to be concerned about. However, we are not dealing with a case of an automation system that was so powerful
and autonomous that pilots could not override what it was trying to do.
Bjorn over at Leeham had this analysis:
"the Flight Crew followed the procedures prescribed by FAA and Boeing in AD 2018-23-51. And as predicted the Flight Crew could
not trim manually, the trim wheel can't be moved at the speeds ET302 flew."
In other words, the pilots followed the Boeing recommended procedure to turn off the automatic trim, but at the speeds they
were flying and the large angle that MCAS has moved the stabilizer to, the trim wheels were bound up and could not be moved by
human effort.
They then turned electric trim on to try to help their effort, and MCAS put the nose down again.
Also: Did no one ever test the humans factors of this in a simulator? At HP, when we put out a new printer, we had human factors
bring in average users to see if using our documentation, they could install the printer.
It is mind-blowing to me that Boeing and the FAA can release an Air Worthiness Directive (The fix after the Lion crash) that
was apparently never simulator tested to see if actual humans could do it.
None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the "OK" pencil of the most junior engineering
staff, much less a DER [FAA Designated Engineering Representative].
That's not a big strike. That's a political, social, economic, and technical sin .
This is the thing that has been nagging me all along about this story. The "most junior engineering staff" thing is not an
exaggeration – engineers get this drilled into them until it's part of their DNA. I read this and immediately thought that it
points to a problem of culture and values (a point I was pleased to see the author make in the next paragraph). Bluntly, it tells
us that the engineers are not the ones running the show at Boeing, and that extends even to safety critical situations where their
assessment should trump everything.
One of two things needs to happen as a result of this. Either Boeing needs to return to the old safety first culture, or it
needs to go out of business. If neither happens, we are going to see a lot more planes falling out of the sky.
I want to reemphasize that all airplane crashes are a chain of events; if one event does not occur there are no causalities.
Lion Air flight should never have flow with a faulty sensor. But afterwards when the elevator jackscrew was found in the full
nose down position that forced the plane to dive into the Java Sea, Boeing and FAA should have grounded the fleet until a fix
was found. The deaths in Ethiopia are on them. The November 2018 737-8 and -9 Airworthiness Directive was criminally negligent.
Without adequate training the Ethiopian Airline pilots were overwhelmed and not could trim the elevator after turning off the
jackscrew electric motor with the manual trim control due to going too fast with takeoff thrust from start to finish. With deregulation
and the end of government oversight, the terrible design of the 737 Max is solely on Boeing and politicians who deregulated certification.
Profit clearly drove corporate decisions with no consideration of the consequences. This is popping up consistently now from VW
to Quantitative Easing, or the restart of the Cold War. Unless the FAA requires pilot and copilot simulator training on how to
manually trim the 737 Max with all hell breaking loose in the cockpit, the only recourse for customers is to boycott flying Boeing.
Ultimately the current economic system that puts profit above all else must end if humans are to survive.
Before last month's crash of a flight that began in Ethiopia, Boeing Co. said in a legal
document that large, upgraded 737s "cannot be used at what are referred to as 'high/hot'
airports."
At an elevation of 7,657 feet -- or more than a mile high -- Addis Ababa's Bole
International Airport falls into that category. High elevations require longer runways and
faster speeds for takeoff.
remove Share link Copy Trump would have been better off Tweeting something like...
"The safety of the flying public worldwide is of the utmost importance to all of us. I have
been in constant contact with Boeings CEO and have complete confidence that the improvements
they are making will make the 737MAX one of the safest planes ever built. No 737 MAX will take
to the skies that I would not put my own family member on".
See the problem with the max is it will never be safe. What boeing did was try and put a
square peg in a round hole. To save costs both in certification and pilot training boeing
decided to just take the 737 airframe and put bigger more fuel efficient engines on it so
they wouldn't loose market share to airbus. That was a stupid mistake. The bigger engines
hung so low they had to mount them higher and more forward thus creating aerodynamic issues.
The new engine mounting causes air flow disruption over the inner wing during climb out. That
is why they messed with the mcas. You cannot break the laws of physics and then fix them with
software. Sorry that will never work.
Boeing is still delivering the 73NG and should make an offer to the airlines to replace
each MAX order 1 for 1 with a 737-800 or -900 at cost. The traveling public will have
immediate confidence, the airlines can fill schedules, and Boeing can clean house on the MAX
"leadership" team.
"... Boeing "effectively put profitability and growth ahead of airplane safety and honesty" by rushing the 737 MAX to market without "extra" or "optional" safety features - a practice that has outraged the company's critics - as it feared ceding market share to Airbus SE. Moreover, Boeing failed to disclose a conflict of interest surrounding its 'regulatory capture' of the FAA, which was revealed to have outsourced much of the approval process for the 737 MAX to Boeing itself. ..."
"... Of course, this shareholder lawsuit is only the tip of the legal iceberg for Boeing. The company will likely face a blizzard of lawsuits filed by family members of those killed during the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, the first of which has already been filed. ..."
Boeing shareholders who lost money selling their stock after the Ethiopian Airlines crash are suing
the company
for concealing unflattering material information from the public, defrauding
shareholders in the process,
Reuters
reports.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in Chicago, is seeking damages after the
March 10 crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 wiped $34 billion off Boeing's market cap within
two weeks. But if true, the crux of the lawsuit might have broader repercussions for the company as
it tries to convince regulators to lift a grounding order that has kept the Boeing 737 MAX 8
grounded since mid-March.
In essence, the suit alleges that
the company concealed safety concerns about the 737
MAX and its anti-stall software
following the Lion Air crash in October that killed 189
people,
but did nothing to alert the public or correct the issue.
Boeing "effectively put profitability and growth ahead of airplane safety and honesty" by
rushing the 737 MAX to market without "extra" or "optional" safety features - a practice that
has outraged the company's critics - as it feared ceding market share to Airbus SE. Moreover,
Boeing failed to disclose a conflict of interest surrounding its 'regulatory capture' of the
FAA, which was revealed to have outsourced much of the approval process for the 737 MAX to
Boeing itself.
Lead plaintiff Richard Seeks bought 300 Boeing shares in early March and sold them at a loss
after the shares dumped more than 12% in the weeks after the second crash, which would have left
him with a loss between $15,000 and $20,000. The lawsuit seeks damages for Boeing investors who
bought the company's shares from Jan. 8 to March 21. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and CFO Gregory
Smith have also been named as defendants.
Of course, this shareholder lawsuit is only the tip of the legal iceberg for Boeing. The company
will likely face a blizzard of lawsuits filed by family members of those killed during the Lion
Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, the
first of which
has already been filed.
Though its shares have recovered from their post-grounding lows, they have hit another bout of
turbulence this week after the company announced that it would slash production of the 737 MAX by
20%, before announcing that its aircraft orders in Q1 fell to 95 from 180 a year earlier.
Having grown up in Seattle within 15 miles of Plant 2 on Boeing
Field, I know a lot about The Boeing Company. I went to private
high school with Bill Boeing III and during college had a great
summer job at Troy Laundry delivering shop towels and uniforms to
all of the Boeing plants in the region.
I used to laugh because,
when I drove the laundries 20ft UPS style box van through those
enormous sliding doors into Everett's 747 Plant to deliver fresh
laundry and pickup soiled's, I would spend the next 4-hours
driving around 'inside' the building. I got to know dozens of
workers by name, who 'worked the line'.
After college, more than 20% of my graduating class went to
work at 'the lazy B' as it was commonly known. Not me. I went into
sales and started selling computers.....to Boeing and the FAA.
As the size my computer sales territory was increased to
include the entire West Coast I began to fly Boeing aircraft
almost everyday for 10-years. and on-board those aircraft I met
and flew with many Boeing executives.
One day I happened to sit next the 'current' Boeing HR
director, and after getting to know him confided that I
frequently smoked marijuana after work. To which he replied, "I
would gladly have the 15% of our work force that are alcoholics,
or into hard drugs smoke pot because it's effects are short-term
but when people come to work 'hung-over or jacked-up' that is when
bad **** happens and mistakes are made".
Even though, I had been 'on the line' and met many Boeing
employees I had not realized until that moment the seriousness of
what he was saying. The HR guy went on to say, that they 'had to
have redundancy at every step in the construction process to
ensure bad workmanship didn't make it into the final product'.
Fast forward 20-years; and Boeing airplanes are falling from
the sky......and it's not a surprise to me.
The legacy 737 "NG" is a solid aircraft, and its still being
produced down the same build lines as the MAX. Just the
previous generation. That plane drove the vast majority of
Boeings sales. It woulndt be hard to scale down MAX production
and just go back to producing the NG, but they wont do that.
They'll fix the MAX and move on, and as long as no more crashes
occur, eventually the public will forget.
The FED can't let the stock price fall on a company of that
size, so the FED trading desk will lend assistance. There is a
certain evil in this, because the stock
deserves
to
fall, and when it doesn't, it has the effect of vindicating the
company for the events that occurred. This is why free markets
should never be meddled with. It's actually immoral.
This is utterly predictable and something I've already said
repeatedly: Boeing did not tell pilots or its customers about the
mechanism. Boeing is criminally liable for the MURDER of 300+
people. Families will sue and cancellations will follow.
Then
this:
"In essence, the suit alleges that
the company concealed
safety concerns about the 737 MAX and its anti-stall software
following
the Lion Air crash in October that killed 189 people,
but did
nothing to alert the public or correct the issue.
Boeing
"effectively put profitability and growth ahead of
airplane safety and honesty"
Pilots complained about the problem and were IGNORED.
This is good to see. Boeing needs to be held accountable for
MURDER. But instead Trump slaps tariffs on the competitor, AIRBUS,
to pay for Boeing's criminality.
This will not stop companies choosing AIRBUS and its good
safety record over a bunch of psychopathic murderers. If Boeing
had put safety first, it's competitor would not be picking up
business..ironic...
I still don't understand the point of the MCAS. Clearly it causes
the plane to do a face plant into the ground. However, like in
that one situation where the jump seat pilot knew to turn it off,
the plane flew fine. Boeing says the MCAS is to prevent the plane
from stalling at steep angles of attack, but the plane seems to
stay in the air better without it. So which is it? The fact is the
Boeing neglected to put it in the manual suggests it was done on
purpose. The fact that they sold a version with no redundancy to
the AOC sensor seems to be have done on purpose. Since Boeing is
basically an arm of the DOD, the question should be who was on the
flights that crashed? That's the missing link in this debacle.
Check out "
moonofalabama.org
",
very good explanation, plus some further links to pilot forums.
From what I understand, the pilots get into some sort of "catch
22"....even if they switch of the MACS, they are doomed.
I'm not I anyway in the flying biz, but work in power
generating control systems, and funny enough, use quite a lot
of Rosemount sensors in ex areas. They are good sensors, but
always use two in mission critical operations.
Why Boeing opted for just one, really blows my mind.
What would an extra sensor cost, 10.000USD?, altogether with
new software..bla-bla.
Now look what this is costing them.
Well, this is what happens when MBA bean counters take over
a former proud engineering company.
From what I understand, the pilots get into some sort
of "catch 22"....even if they switch of the MACS, they
are doomed.
Sort of like that. The flight surface is controlled by a
big screw. Normally an electric motor spins the nut that
drives the screw up and down. The switch cuts out the motor,
and they have hand cranks to move the screw. But in this
last crash, the too-clever-by-half software system had
already run the screw all the way to the 'nose down' end,
and it would have taken them several minutes of hand
cranking to get it back to the center position. They didn't
have several minutes, and the motor is capable of driving
the screw the other way. Since the problem was intermittent
(software kicks in on a time interval), they were hoping it
would behave for a few seconds, and switched the motor back
on. It didn't.
On a side note, the Airbus does not have these hand-crank
controls. Everything is run by the computer -- so if
anything goes wrong, the pilot must 'reason' with the
computer to correct it. . . "Sorry Dave, I can't do that".
Well, this is what happens when MBA bean counters take
over a former proud engineering company.
This reminds me of Feynman's analysis of what went wrong
with the Space Shuttle Challenger. The engineers said the
O-rings would be too stiff and brittle, and the launch
should wait until it warmed up a bit. But a delay was
costing the shuttle program a million dollars a minute, or
whatever.
Feynman explained that the early space program was run by
the pocket-protector guys with slide rules. And it worked.
But over time the management had been replaced by people
whose careers depended on influencing other people and not
on matter, energy, and materials.
Another thing, the pilots had commanded full throttle and
never throttled back during the whole ordeal. So when
they killed the trim motor, they couldn't overcome the
aerodynamic force on the stab to move the trim screw back
into position.
Apparently they could have got the trim
corrected ENOUGH to make a difference if they could have
moved it more easily, but at the speeds they were going,
the airspeed over the stab was too high to manually move
the screw fast enough to make a difference.
Sort of. When you kill the electric trim motor, you have to
use a manual wheel to adjust trim. The issue came that their
airspeed was so high that the load on the stab made it
nearly impossible to move without the electric motor.
They
had been at full throttle from rotation until they hit the
dirt. The pilot had told the copilot to throttle back but it
got lost in the chaos somewhere and never happened.
So when they killed the trim motor and tried to move it
manually, they had to overcome all the aerodynamic force on
the stab, and they just couldnt do it at those airspeeds
without the electric motor to overcome the force.
The bigger the fuselage the bigger the engines needed. The
bigger the engines needed the more forward on the wing they
go to keep from scraping on the ground. The more forward on the
wing the more unbalanced then plane became. They've stretch a
frame which was developed in the 60's beyond its original
design.
The executives who oversaw the fiasco that is now Boeing, long ago
parachuted out with multi million dollar pensions and stock
options while their Seattle workers had their pensions slashed.
They're now assembling Dreamliners in NC with off the street non
unionized labor, former TacoBell and Subway workers. They moved
their Corp headquarters to Chicago away from where the actual work
was being performed to pursue the "work" of stock buy backs and
cozying up to the FAA. All the above a recipe for disaster. A
perfect mirror of how the 1/10th of 1% operate in the Oligarchy we
call America.
Boeing is in full on crisis mode because of the 737 Max fiasco.
Anything else they say or do is pure show and fraud.
The are not to far from losing the entire narrowbody airline
market, pretty much the meat and bones of Airline production.
Today Airbus still has the A-320 neo, and Russia and China are
chomping at the bit with the MC21 and C919, all far more advanced
and superior than a 1960's designed stretched pulled and too late
737 .
If Boeing loses market share and the narrow body airline
market, shame on the USA.
This will become a text book expample of the fall of a nation
and empire.
How can a Company like Boeing have technology like the B2 and
everything the DOD gives them and lose the international market
for narrowbody airliners..
To call this a national disgrace is a compliment to Boeing and
the US aerospace industies complete disregard and hubris in such
an important component of worldwide aviation.
This in not a sad chapter for Boeing, its sad for the USA
BeanCounters, Parasitoids, and Bells-WhistlesMktg Types Running
an Aerospace/Aviation Engineering and Defense Tech Conglomerate
into the Ground - Literally.
Civil Aviation Div "Jumped the
Shark" the moment they passed on a redesigned Successor to the
737 Base Model in the mid 2000s and decided to strap on Larger
Engines and GunDeck the Revision and Certifications.
Failure to disclose regulatory capture is a tough one. Do you
issue an 8K on that one? Maybe bury it in the 10K in risk
statements
"We maintain several regulatory relationships that
will rubber stamp approvals for our aircraft. In the event of a
major safety violation, those cozy relationships could be exposed
and we be found to not only be negligent, but also nefariously so
through regulatory capture."
You bought an airline manufacturer that had a malfunction.
There's plenty of people to blame, but it's part of the business
you own.
The 737 Max is a legacy of its past, built on
decades-old systems, many that date back to the original version. The strategy, to keep
updating the plane rather than starting from scratch, offered competitive advantages.
Pilots were comfortable flying it, while airlines didn't have to invest in costly new
training for their pilots and mechanics. For Boeing, it was also faster and cheaper to
redesign and recertify than starting anew.
But the strategy has now left the company in crisis, following two deadly crashes in less
than five months. The Max stretched the 737 design, creating a patchwork plane that left
pilots without some safety features that could be important in a crisis -- ones that have
been offered for years on other planes. It is the only modern Boeing jet without an
electronic alert system that explains what is malfunctioning and how to resolve it.
Instead pilots have to check a manual.
The Max also required makeshift solutions to keep the plane flying like its ancestors,
workarounds that may have compromised safety. While the findings aren't final,
investigators suspect that one workaround, an anti-stall system designed to compensate for
the larger engines, was central to the crash last month in Ethiopia and an earlier one in
Indonesia.
"They wanted to A, save money and B, to
minimize the certification and flight-test costs," said Mike Renzelmann, an engineer who
worked on the Max's flight controls. "Any changes are going to require recertification."
Mr. Renzelmann was not involved in discussions about the sensors.
... ... ...
On 737s, a light typically indicates the
problem and pilots have to flip through their paper manuals to find next
steps. In the doomed Indonesia flight, as the Lion Air pilots struggled
with MCAS for control, the pilots consulted the manual moments before
the jet plummeted into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people aboard.
"Meanwhile, I'm flying the jet," said
Mr. Tajer, the American Airlines 737 captain. "Versus, pop, it's on your
screen. It tells you, This is the problem and here's the checklist
that's recommended."
Boeing decided against adding it to the
Max because it could have prompted regulators to require new pilot
training, according to two former Boeing employees involved in the
decision.
The Max also runs on a complex web of
cables and pulleys that, when pilots pull back on the controls, transfer
that movement to the tail. By comparison, Airbus jets and Boeing's more
modern aircraft, such as the 777 and 787, are "fly-by-wire," meaning
pilots' movement of the flight controls is fed to a computer that
directs the plane. The design allows for far more automation, including
systems that prevent the jet from entering dangerous situations, such as
flying too fast or too low. Some 737 pilots said they preferred the
cable-and-pulley system to fly-by-wire because they believed it gave
them more control.
In the recent crashes, investigators
believe the MCAS malfunctioned and moved a tail flap called the
stabilizer, tilting the plane toward the ground. On the doomed Ethiopian
Airlines flight, the pilots tried to combat the system by cutting power
to the stabilizer's motor, according to the preliminary crash report.
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Once the power was cut, the pilots tried
to regain control manually by turning a wheel next to their seat. The
737 is the last modern Boeing jet that uses a manual wheel as its backup
system. But Boeing has long known that turning the wheel is difficult at
high speeds, and may have required two pilots to work together.
In the final moments of the Ethiopian
Airlines flight, the first officer said the method wasn't working,
according to the preliminary crash report. About 1 minute and 49 seconds
later, the plane crashed, killing 157 people.
The Seattle Times published what I consider a
devastating article a few Sundays ago. It highlighted the depth to which Boeing and the FAA cut
corners on the certification of the Max, more specifically the characterization of the impact of
a failure of the new MCAS system. This allowed them to utilize the cheaper single sensor AOA
vane instead of 2 or 3. The aircraft also got delivered with the MCAS system applying many more
nose down units of trim than what was published in the certification process. Topping it off was
the failure of Boeing to disclose to its customers that the MCAS system was installed or what
abnormal or emergency procedures would accompany the system.
True, there are two kinds of pilots, and some are
better. BUT no pilot should be put in a critical situation by bad and rushed design. What was
Boeing thinking? `Yes, there is slight chance that things can go wrong... but if the pilot is
experienced, if the weather is fine, if the FO is focused (and so on...) they will surely make
it.' Why taking that risk? They should design a plane that even a drunk pilot can handle.
The MCAS moves the entire horizontal tail (aka
horizontal stabilizer) not just "a tail flap called the stabilizer". Normal stabilizer trim also
moves the whole horizontal stabilizer. Presumably the "flap" being referred to here,
incorrectly, is the elevator, a flight control surface on the trailing edge of the horizontal
tail, which is control by pulling and pushing the flight control column. Both horizontal
stabilizer trim and elevator affect the pitch (nose up, nose down) of the aircraft. Typically,
horizontal stabilizer trim is used to maintain a particular attitude (e.g. level flight in
cruise) without requiring the pilot to continously apply significant forces to the control
column, which is tiring. When MCAS engages it effectively is attempting to "cancel out" the
pilot's elevator command (pulling back on the control column to bring the nose up by ) by moving
the horizontal stabilizer to counteract the pilots action (rotating the the horizontal
stabilizer so that it's leading edge points down).
Boeing should have gone with a clean sheet of
paper design. Look at the Airbus A220, previously known as Bombardier C Series. It has nearly
similar seating, yet it carries less fuel, but has a longer range than the MAX8. Modern wing
design. Heck, Boeing should have just bought Bombardier 10 years ago. Now they are in the arms
of Airbus.
Why doesn't BA just trash the entire max8 program
and become a subcontractor for A320s instead? After all there is a demand for 5000 aircraft that
now will not be fulfilled. Boeing management should be put on trial for criminal negligence.
Finally, a comprehensive report that doesn't go on
and on about software. The problem was a mechanical and training one, and instead of fixing the
problems, the Bean Counters took over and went on the cheap.
"... The problem was that the marketing department has been totally divorced from production and works as instructed by the financiers in Chicago whose concern is only for the next quarter's profits. ..."
The safety violations and regulatory blindness in this case appear to be so flagrant that it
is difficult to believe that any engineers would not have advised against selling the
'plane.'
The problem was that the marketing department has been totally divorced from
production and works as instructed by the financiers in Chicago whose concern is only for the
next quarter's profits.
Had the corporation been publicly owned the compulsion to put a flawed and dangerous
'plane into the air would have been greatly mitigated -- one imagines that as soon as it was
deemed operational massive bonuses were paid out to key individuals. Which is incidentally
something that ought to be revealed if there is a proper trial.
So far as democratic control-workers management- is concerned is there any doubt that the
views and opinions of those who built and tested the Max would have made it impossible for
the psychopath financiers to sell the 'product' in an unsafe condition?
Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You:
Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbines.
By Paul Krugman
There's a lot we don't know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is, of
course, hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if
he's a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature
deaths of a large number of Americans.
Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists,
who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls
them "very fine people."
Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane
Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto
Ricans are U.S. citizens.)
Some will come from the administration's continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which
have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured,
meaning that many people still aren't getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump
gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much
worse.
But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump's agenda of deregulation -- or
maybe we should call it "deregulation," because his administration is curiously selective
about which industries it wants to leave alone.
Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what's going
on.
One is the administration's plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal
responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It's not as if we've seen safety
problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever
experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S.
government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?
Now, you could see the Trump administration's willingness to trust the meat industry to
keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to
trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there's
something to that, but it's not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump's
declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.
Now, you could put this down to personal derangement: Trump has had an irrational hatred
for wind power ever since he failed to prevent construction of a wind farm near his Scottish
golf course. And Trump seems deranged and irrational on so many issues that one more bizarre
claim hardly seems to matter.
But there's more to this than just another Trumpism. After all, we normally think of
Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, as people who minimize or deny the "negative
externalities" imposed by some business activities -- the uncompensated costs they impose on
other people or businesses.
For example, the Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of
mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental
Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions,
such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.
But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about
supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year
the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity
grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were
threatening to destabilize those grids -- but the grid operators themselves denied that this
was the case.
So it's deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others.
What's going on?
Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing
industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost
exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.
There are probably other things, too. If you're a party that wishes we could go back to
the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you're going to have a hard time
accepting the reality that hippie-dippy, unmanly things like wind and solar power are
becoming ever more cost-competitive.
Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people.
Wind turbines don't cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do -- along with many other
ailments. The Trump administration's own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal
pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to
implement its full agenda -- not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination
against industries it doesn't like, such as renewable energy -- the toll will be much
higher.
So if you eat meat -- or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air -- there's a real
sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he's turned out of office next
year, for many Americans it will be too late.
Trump does not want to go back to the 50s when government policy was to greatly increase
costs by paying more workers more, while driving down prices, and elinimating rents and
scarcity profits.
Trump wants to kill jobs that are paid, but force work that is unpaid.
Well, if you means 1850, by the 50s, that's when Trump would have excelled by raping his
slaves to create more workers he would force to work, probably Brazil style, worked to death
to cut costs, based on continued enslavement of slaves, ie, no ban on slave imports after
1808.
Trump may be trying to kill us...but do Democrats have a plan to save us? So far, I can
discern no coherent message or plan from corrupt, comatose Democrats other than 'Trump is
guilty [of something or other.]
You are simply rejecting Democrats calls to reverse policies since 1970 to MAGA as failed
liberal policies because its not new, never tried before, and not free.
The growth of the 50s and 60s was too costly, requiring people to work, save, and pay ever
rising prices, taxes, and living costs.
You want economics where you can buy a million dollar home for $50,000 and have schools
funded by modest property taxes on million dollar homes, but with low tax rates on houses
assessed at $40,000.
TANSTAAFL
The only way working class families get better off is by paying higher costs.
Meet the democratic socialist who sent Rahm's floor leader packing
By Mark Brown
There's never been a Chicago politician who quite fits the profile of Andre Vasquez, the
former battle rapper and current democratic socialist who just took down veteran 40th Ward
Ald. Patrick O'Connor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's city council floor leader.
That probably scares some people.
But those folks might want to nod to the wisdom of the 54 percent of voters in the North
Side ward who waded through an onslaught of attack ads and concluded they have nothing to
fear from the 39-year-old AT&T account manager, his music or his politics.
I stopped by Vasquez's campaign office to satisfy my own curiosity about this new breed of
aldermen. Vasquez will be part of a Chicago City Council bloc of at least five, probably six
democratic socialists who, if nothing else, will alter the debate on a range of issues.
Vazquez said he understands democratic socialism as "just injecting a healthy dose of
democracy in a system we already have.
"Where we see the influence of big money and corporations in our government, where we see
the corruption in the council, where we see elected officials as bought and paid for, to me,
democratic socialism is providing a counterbalance," he said.
Vasquez also reminded me that generalizing about democratic socialists is as foolish as
generalizing about Democrats.
"I think even within democratic socialism there's such a spectrum of different folks,
right? I tend to be a counterbalance to some of the louder stuff, the louder hardcore, what
some would view as extreme," said Vasquez, noting that he sometimes takes flak within
democratic socialist circles because he's never read Marx and doesn't "bleed rose red."
"Everyone's got their part to play," he said. "Somebody's going to be the loud one in the
room because you need that kind of impetus to move things forward. And someone's got to be
the one who's making deals on legislation. You can't have ideological fights and think you're
going to come up with solutions."
Though Vasquez prefers the dealmaker role, his background suggests he also could get loud
if the occasion demanded.
Until he decided it was time to do something else with his life around 2010, Vasquez was a
battle rapper who performed under the stage name Prime. He had enough success to pay the
bills for a while, touring nationally and appearing on MTV's "Direct Effect" and HBO's "Blaze
Battle."
For old people like me who are unclear on the concept (begging the pardon of the rest of
you), battle rapping involves performers trading insults in rhyme put to music.
"Then, imagine you have a crowd around you," Vasquez explained. "And now people are
cheering you on, and the insults are getting more vicious and intricate, and it becomes a
sporting match. Right? So, in that arena, you're getting heralded for how well you can insult
the person in front of you while rhyming and improvising all as this stream of consciousness
is coming out."
I suggested a battle rap might occasionally be just the antidote to the drudgery of a
council meeting, but Vasquez wasn't amused.
The problem with battle rapping, as 40th Ward voters were reminded ad nauseam during the
runoff campaign, is that the genre relies heavily on crude insults invoking disrespectful
terms for women and LGBTQ individuals.
"The issue is toxic masculinity plagues everything," said Vasquez, who obliquely fronted
an apology for his past verbal misdeeds early in the campaign -- and more directly when hit
with a barrage of negative mailers detailing a greatest hits of his transgressions.
A lesser candidate would have been toast at that point, but Vasquez had girded himself in
advance through his door-to-door organizing.
By then, enough 40th Ward residents knew who Vasquez really was -- the son of Guatemalan
immigrants, a city kid from the neighborhoods who had become a family guy with two young kids
and a late-discovered talent for politics -- that they couldn't be scared off.
Vasquez, who lives in Edgewater, was introduced to politics when he felt the Bern in 2014
and volunteered for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. A left-leaning community group,
Reclaim Chicago, then recruited Vasquez to expand upon his organizing talents -- and taught
him how to build a classic grassroots campaign.
The result is a new Latino alderman in a ward where fewer than one-fifth of the voters are
Latino. And a Democratic Socialist representing a ward previously ruled by Emanuel's floor
leader.
"I'm not trying to plant a flag," Vasquez said. "I'm trying to make sure that people can
live here and not be forced out."
"Vasquez, who lives in Edgewater, was introduced to politics when he felt the Bern in 2014
and volunteered for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. A left-leaning community group,
Reclaim Chicago, then recruited Vasquez to expand upon his organizing talents -- and taught
him how to build a classic grassroots campaign."
I like the centrists like Krugman and liberals here like EMike who dismiss Bernie as a
cult of personality. No he's spurring local organizing which doesn't revolve around him.
Will Bernie as president build walls around big cities like Chicago, build iron Curtains, to
keep the rich inside these cities where all their wealth is taxed away every year, and they
are prevented from moving to the towns outside Chicago city limits?
@Anon
You are no Christians. USAism and all radical Protestantism is abusing the surface of
Christianity for satanic anti-Christianity.
There is no Christianity but what is rooted in the old and everlasting Church of which
Christ is the Head in the Holy Spirit, as laid in apostle's hands and transferred by Church
fathers.
Christianity is genuinely collectivist, it has nothing to do with the perverted
individualism of Anglosaxon background and does not agree with the inherent nihilistic energy
of capitalism.
Thought it hasn't been publicly released yet, a preliminary report on the circumstances that caused
flight ET302 to plunge out of the sky just minutes after takeoff was completed earlier this week,
and some of the details have leaked to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. And for Boeing
shareholders, the findings aren't pretty.
Appearing to contradict Boeing's insistence that
procedures for deactivating its MCAS anti-stall software were widely disseminated, and that pilots
at airlines around the world had been trained on these procedures,
WSJ
reported that the pilots of ET302 successfully switched off MCAS as they struggled to right
the plane after the software had automatically tipped its nose down. As they struggled to right the
plane, the pilots ended up reactivating the software, while trying a few other steps from their
training, before the plane began its final plunge toward a field outside Addis Ababa, where the
ensuing crash killed all 157 people on board.
Though the pilots deviated from Boeing's emergency checklist as they tried to right the plane,
investigators surmised that they gave up on the procedures after they failed to right the plane.
But when MCAS reengaged, whether intentionally, or on accident, it pushed the nose of the plane
lower once again.
The pilots on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 initially reacted to the emergency by shutting
off power to electric motors driven by the automated system, these people said, but then appear
to have re-engaged the system to cope with a persistent steep nose-down angle.
It wasn't
immediately clear why the pilots turned the automated system back on
instead of
continuing to follow Boeing's standard emergency checklist,
but government and industry
officials said the likely reason would have been because manual controls to raise the nose
didn't achieve the desired results.
After first cranking a manual wheel in the cockpit that controls the same movable surfaces on
the plane's tail that MCAS had affected, the pilots turned electric power back on, one of these
people said. They began to use electric switches to try to raise the plane's nose, according to
these people. But the electric power also reactivated MCAS, allowing it to continue its strong
downward commands, the people said.
Reuters
, which was also the recipient of leaks from investigators, offered a slightly different
version of events. It reported that MCAS was reengaged four times as pilots scrambled to right the
plane,
and that investigators were looking into the possibility that the software might
have reengaged without prompting from the pilots.
After the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people back in October, Boeing and the FAA published a
bulletin reminding pilots to follow the emergency procedures to deactivate the software if a faulty
sensor - like the one that is believed to have contributed to the Lion Air crash - feeds erroneous
data to the system.
The data show the pilots maneuvered the plane back upward twice before deactivating the
software. But between the two reports, one detail is made abundantly clear.
The software's
reengagement is what doomed everybody aboard. That is an unequivocally bad look for Boeing, which
has been deflecting questions about the software's bugs, and gaps in the dissemination of its
training materials, while working on an update that the company says will make the software less
reliant on automated systems.
The aviation industry has been trying to make the human pilots
obsolete, just as in so many industries. But they all do their,
these days, their R & D on the job. Recall the Amazon Robot that
went berserk recently. The idea is to rid all industry of people
progressively so that they can end up not needing people at all.
They'll end up with nothing. Some how they think that if they take
people out then profits will be assured, which is actually
psychotic. They have had remote auto pilot for 7 decades now. They
can bring down any aircraft at will, and do so regularly. They can
shut down or affect engines remotely, or alter the actions as is
imbedded into just about all new machinery, other than knives,
forks and spoons. Yet they still need consumers and workers to
create hedged exchange to profit from. That is the dilemma
industry owners are facing, that without pesky people they are
doomed as much as the doom they are creating for even their own
off spring = psychosis.
"... "It's a very, very serious investigation into basically, was there fraud by Boeing in the certification of the 737 MAX 8 ?" Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney who is representing six families whose relatives died in the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes, explained. ..."
"... Rosenberg expects the criminal probe to question whether Boeing fully disclosed to the FAA the engineering of the 737 Max 8's MCAS flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), during the plane's certification process. The flight control system was designed to prevent the plane from stalling. ..."
"... Unfortunately for Boeing and the passengers its crashed aircraft were carrying, the MCAS system was very poorly implemented. ..."
"... The single sensor was the result of regulatory capture, not to say gaming; see below. ..."
"... Black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash. ..."
"... Regulatory Capture : Commercial aircraft need to be certified by the FAA before launch. The Washington Post labels today's process "self-certification": ..."
"... In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer would act as the FAA's representative , signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety regulations, people familiar with the process said. ..."
"... (Note that a 10-year-old process would have begun in the Obama administration, so the regulatory process is bipartisan.) I understand that " safety culture " is real and strong, but imagine the same role-playing concept applied to finance: One bankers plays the banker, and the other banker plays Bill Black, and after a time they switch roles . Clearly a system that will work until it doesn't. More: ..."
"... The process was occurring during a period when the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General was warning the FAA that its oversight of manufacturers' work was insufficient. ..."
"... The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. ..."
"... Alert readers will note the similarity to the Neoliberal Playbook , where government systems are sabotaged in order to privatize them, but in this case regulatory capture seems to have happened "by littles," rather than out of open, ideological conviction (as with the UKs's NHS, or our Post Office, our Veteran's Administration, etc.). ..."
"... Several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing . ..."
"... In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification, was delegated to Boeing . ..."
"... It should be clear at this point that the central claims of Muilenburg's letter are false. ..."
"... The self-certification debacle that allowed MCAS to be released happened on Muilenburg's watch and is already causing Boeing immense reputational damage, and a criminal case, not to mention the civil cases that are surely coming, will only increase that damage. Mr. Market, the Beltway, and even Trump, if his trade deals are affected, will all soon be bellowing for a sacrificial victim. Muilenburg should recognize the inevitable and gracefully resign. Given his letter, it looks unlikely that he will do the right thing. ..."
"... Beyond that ultimate problem is the ultimate regulatory problem: regulatory capture of the FAA by the airline companies. As a result, the FAA represents "its customers" the airplane makers, not the public users and customers. This is like the banks capturing the Fed, the Justice Dept. and Treasury to promote their own interests by claiming that "self-regulation" works. Self-regulation is the polite word for fraudulent self-indulgence. ..."
"... I would be surprised if the European Airbus competitors do not mount a campaign to block the 737-Max's from landing, and insisting that Boeing buy them back. This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes. ..."
"... This probably will throw Trump's China trade fight into turmoil, as China was the first country to ground the 737-Max's and is unlikely to permit their recovery without a "real" federal safety oversight program. Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane, so as to represent users and stakeholders, not only stockholders. ..."
"... The moral: Neoliberalism Kills. ..."
"... Rule #2 of Neoliberalism: Go die. ..."
"... > "Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane." ..."
"... As if the 737 MAX were the chlorinated chicken of aircraft. ..."
"... "This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes." ..."
"... Regulatory capture is rampant throughout the economy. Boeing self-certification being delegated by the FAA is not unlike the situation with electric transmission utilities. ..."
"... that is subject to both FERC and NERC regulation. ..."
"... In hindsight Boeing would have perhaps been better off to leave off the MCAS altogether and depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling. ..."
"... Reports I've read indicates that Boeing ignored even the clearly inadequate certification. "Documentation provided to the FAA claims that the MCAS system can only adjust the horizontal tail on the plane by 0.6 degrees out of a maximum of five-degrees of nose-down movement. But that limit was later increased to 2.5-degrees of nose-down movement. Boeing didn't communicate the change from 0.6-degrees to 2.5-degrees until after Lion Air." ..."
"... Boeing could also be liable for damages due to 737 groundings and due to delays in delivery of contracted planes. ..."
"... The analogy has been made between this the 737 MAX story and the Tylenol story. J&J got out in front of the problem and saved the product (and their company). Boeing's problem is of that order, and Muilenberg -- that letter! -- seems incapable of understanding that; insular, arrogant. One more reason to fire the dude toot sweet. If he comes out of his next review with a raise -- Everything Is Like CalPERS™ -- consider shorting Boeing ..."
"... Allowing this to happen seems the ultimate in short term thinking by Boeing. US manufacturers have always had an advantage over competitors because the FAA was held in such high regard worldwide that it was the de facto world safety regulatory body – every country followed its lead. But this chipping away of its authority has led to a near fatal loss of faith, and will no doubt lead to European and Asian regulatory authorities being strengthened. And no doubt commercial realities will mean they will look much more closely at US manufactured aircraft if there is some benefit to their own manufacturers. ..."
"... The Times thinks Boeing is too big to fail. Without a blockbuster Max, I don't see how Boeing maintains its current status in the industry. ..."
"... I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality. ..."
"... Yes, the famous McDonnell-Douglas reverse takeover , where financial engineers inserted their sucking mandibles into an actual ..."
"... Note that Muilenberg came up through the defense side of the company not the commercial aircraft side. He may simply not have been equipped to understand FAA regulation at any deep level, hence the rot that finally surfaced. ..."
"... The tragedy is that corporate media in pursuit of profits will keep us up to date but will never mention the 6 or 8 minutes of terror for the 346 souls aboard the two flights. They will cover the criminal negligence trial if there are ever indictments. But, the news reports never will say that neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization are the root causes of the deaths. ..."
"... Boeing also clearly did not know its customers . It should be engineering for the sort of pilots who are going to be hired by Lion Air, or any rapidly expanding airline in what we used to all the Third World. Hegemony, it seems, makes you insular and provincial. ..."
"... "The FAA, citing lack of funding and resource": I don't suppose I'll survive to see any arm of government not blame lack of funds for its boneheaded or corrupt incompetence. ..."
"... That's how I feel. The tech doc department at Boeing sounds like a horrible place to work; MBAs or their goons telling you all the time to do stuff you know is wrong. It's not surprising people were willing to talk to the Seattle Times; I bet there are more people. (Hey, Seattle Times! How about people testing the 737 MAX in simulators (assuming this is done)). ..."
"... Interestingly, and maybe relevant to the problem of confusion for the pilots, is that Boeing has had another automatic trim-modifier operating on its 737s for some time, the speed-trim system (STS): ..."
"... This system also modifies the stabilizer position during manual flight. Like MCAS, it was brought in to improve stability under certain flight conditions (the reasons for which are far beyond my knowledge). There is an indication that the pilots on the flight before the Lion Air crash misinterpreted MCAS actions for STS behavior. ..."
"... authority would revert to the pilot ..."
"... How many years ago did Wall Street take over the fortunes of the company? Why did they move their headquarters from their birthplace of Seattle to Chicago? Why did they start assembling planes in South Carolina and China? Was it to improve aviation safety? Or, to allow the profiteering parasites to feed off the carcass of the company? ..."
"... President Trump, here's a reelection tip: "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S." ..."
"... Amazingly, Trump seems to have done OK on this. First, he didn't cave to Muilenberg's (insane, goofy, tone-deaf) request to keep the 737 flying; then he frames the issue as complexity (correct, IMNSHO), and then he manages to nominate a Delta CEO as head of the FAA . ..."
"... we're seeing signs that a crapification process has begun on the safety side in this industry. (It has been proceeding for years on the service/amenities side.) ..."
"... Considering the fact that all these 737s are grounded as no airline trust them to not kill a plane load of passengers and crew, this is a really big deal. Putting aside the technical and regulatory issues, the fact is that the rest of the world no longer trusts the US in modern aviation so what we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal. ..."
"... Loss or at least wobbliness of imperial hegemony, like. It's not just the aircraft, it's US standards-setting bodies, methods, "safety culture," even -- dare we say it -- English as the language of aviation. French is no longer the language of diplomacy, after all, though it had a good run. ..."
"... Because markets. Neoliberalism puts everything up for sale. Including regulation. Oversimplifying absurdly: And so you end up with the profit-driven manufacturer buying the regulator, its produce killing people, and the manufacturer canceling its future profits. That's what the Bearded One would call a contradiction.* ..."
"... know your customer ..."
"... Like you, I am a retired software engineer, so I have followed an aviation blog discussion of this issue quite closely since it emerged as a probable software and system design failure. As the blog is open to all, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, but it seems not too difficult for any technically-minded person to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current understanding, which I believe others here are in a position to correct, if necessary: ..."
"... this story is really fascinating and seems to be true a sign of the times. ..."
"... The Post's article on the FAA and Regulatory Capture is incomplete. The process for the FAA (and probably MANY government agencies) started under Reagan, did not revert to safety under Clinton (make government smaller and all that), and then accelerated under Bush II in 2005 (not a bi-partisan time). In particular, big changes to the FAA were made in 2005 that were executive in nature and did not require Congressional approval. CF: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/ ..."
At some point in the future, I'd like to do failure matrix for the pathways to misfortune (
example of such a matrix here ) that precipitated
two deadly Boeing 737 MAX crashes on take-off in five months , but I don't feel that I have enough information yet. (I'm not
unsympathathetic to the view
that the wholesale 737 MAX grounding was premature on technical grounds , but then trade and even geopolitical factors enter
in, given that Boeing is a "national champion.") We do not yet have results from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders of either
aircraft, for example. But what we do know is sufficiently disturbing -- a criminal investigation into Boeing had already been initiated
after the Lion Air crash, but before the Ethiopian Airlines crash -- that I think it's worthwhile doing a play-by-play on the causes
of the crashes, so far as we can know them.
About that criminal investigation
:
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Washington D.C. grand jury issued a March 11 subpoena requesting emails, correspondence,
and other messages from at least one person involved in the development of the aircraft.
"It's a very, very serious investigation into basically, was there fraud by Boeing in the certification of the 737
MAX 8 ?" Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney who is representing six families whose relatives died in the Ethiopian Airlines
and Lion Air crashes, explained.
"Nobody knows the answer to that yet," Rosenberg cautioned, adding that he had not yet seen the Justice Department's subpoena
and therefore could not know its full scope.
Rosenberg expects the criminal probe to question whether Boeing fully disclosed to the FAA the engineering of the 737 Max
8's MCAS flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), during the plane's certification
process. The flight control system was designed to prevent the plane from stalling.
A possible criminal investigation during an aircraft accident investigation is highly unusual . While airline accidents
have at times raised criminal issues, such as after the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane in the Florida Everglades, such cases are
the exception.
Safety is at the core of who we are at Boeing, and ensuring safe and reliable travel on our airplanes is an enduring value
and our absolute commitment to everyone. This overarching focus on safety spans and binds together our entire global aerospace
industry and communities. We're united with our airline customers, international regulators and government authorities in our
efforts to support the most recent investigation, understand the facts of what happened and help prevent future tragedies. Based
on facts from the Lion Air Flight 610 accident and emerging data as it becomes available from the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302
accident, we're taking actions to fully ensure the safety of the 737 MAX. We also understand and regret the challenges for our
customers and the flying public caused by the fleet's grounding.
Boeing has been in the business of aviation safety for more than 100 years, and we'll continue providing the best products,
training and support to our global airline customers and pilots. This is an ongoing and relentless commitment to make safe
airplanes even safer .
Soon we'll release a software update and related pilot training for the 737 MAX that will address concerns discovered in the
aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 accident.
Fine words. Are they true? Can Boeing's "commitment to everyone to ensure " safe and reliable travel" really be said to be "absolute"?
That's a high bar. Let's see!
I've taken the structure that follows from
a tweetstorm by Trevor Sumner (apparently derived from
a Facebook post by his brother-law,
Dave Kammeyer ). However, I've added topic headings, changed others,
and helpfully numbered them all, so you can correct, enhance, or rearrange topics easily in comments (or even suggest new topics).
Let me also caveat that this is an enormous amount of material, and time presses, so this will not be as rich in links as I would
normally like it to be. Also note that the level of abstraction for each topic varies significantly: From "The Biosphere" all the
way to "Pilot Training." A proper failure matrix would sort that out.
* * *
(1) The Biosphere : The 737 MAX story beings with a customer requirement for increased fuel efficiency. This is, at bottom,
a carbon issue (and hence a greenhouse gas issue , especially as the demand for air travel increases, especially in Asia). New
biosphere-driven customer demands will continue to emerge as climate change increases and intensifies, and hence the continued 737
MAX-like debacles should be expected, all else being equal. From
CAPA – Centre for Aviation :
The main expected impacts of climate change on aviation result from changes in temperature, precipitation (rain and snow),
storm patterns, sea level and wind patterns. In addition, climate change is expected to lead to increased drought, impacts on
the supply of water and energy, and changes in wildlife patterns and biodiversity. Consequences for aviation include reduced aircraft
performance, changing demand patterns, potential damage to infrastructure, loss of capacity and schedule disruption.
All of these factors will affect aircraft design, manufacturing, maintenance, and use, stressing the system.
(2) Choice of Airframe :
The Air Current
describes the competitive environment that led Boeing to upgrade the 737 to the 737 MAX, instead of building a new plane:
Boeing wanted to replace the 737. The plan had even earned the endorsement of its now-retired chief executive. We're gonna
do a new airplane," Jim McNerney
said in February of that same year. "We're not done evaluating this whole situation yet, but our current bias is to not re-engine,
is to move to an all-new airplane at the end of the decade." History went in a different direction. Airbus, riding its
same decades-long incremental strategy and chipping away at Boeing's market supremacy, had made no secret of its plans to
put new engines on the A320. But its own re-engineered jet somehow managed to take Boeing by surprise. Airbus and American forced
Boeing's hand. It had to put new engines on the 737 to stay even with its rival .
Why? The earlier butchered launch of the 787:
Boeing justified the decision thusly: There were huge and excruciatingly painful near-term obstacles on its way to a new single-aisle
airplane. In the summer of 2011, the 787 Dreamliner wasn't yet done after billions invested and years of delays. More than 800
airplanes later here in 2019, each 787 costs less to build than sell, but it's
still running a $23 billion production
cost deficit. .
The 737 Max was Boeing's ticket to holding the line on its position "both market and financial" in the near term. Abandoning
the 737 would've meant walking away from its golden goose that helped finance the astronomical costs of the 787 and the development
of the 777X.
So, we might think of Boeing as a runner who's tripped and fallen: The initial stumble, followed by loss of balance, was the 787;
with the 737 MAX, Boeing hit the surface of the track.
(3) Aerodynamic Issues : The
Air Current
also describes the aerodynamic issues created by the decision to re-engine the 737:
Every airplane development is a series of compromises, but to deliver the 737 Max with its promised fuel efficiency, Boeing
had to fit 12 gallons into a 10 gallon jug. Its bigger engines made for creative solutions as it found a way to mount the larger
CFM International turbines under the notoriously low-slung jetliner. It lengthened the nose landing gear by eight inches, cleaned
up the aerodynamics of the tail cone, added new winglets, fly-by-wire spoilers and big displays for the next generation of pilots.
It pushed technology, as it had done time and time again with ever-increasing costs, to deliver a product that made its jets more-efficient
and less-costly to fly.
In the case of the 737 Max, with its nose pointed high in the air, the larger engines "generating their own lift" nudged it
even higher. The risk Boeing found through analysis and later flight testing was that under certain high-speed conditions both
in wind-up turns and wings-level flight, that upward nudge created a greater risk of stalling.
Its solution was MCAS , the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System control law that would allow for both generations
of 737 to behave the same way. MCAS would automatically trim the horizontal stabilizer to bring the nose down, activated with
Angle of Attack data. It's now at the center of the Lion Air investigation and stalking the periphery of the Ethiopian crash.
(4) Systems Engineering : Amazingly, there is what in a less buttoned-down world that commercial aviation would be called a Boeing
737 fan site, which describes the MCAS system in more technical terms
:
MCAS was introduced to counteract the pitch up effect of the LEAP-1B engines at high AoA [Angle of Attack]. The engines were
both larger and relocated slightly up and forward from the previous NG CFM56-7 engines to accomodate their larger diameter. This
new location and size of the nacelle causes it to produce lift at high AoA; as the nacelle is ahead of the CofG [Center of Gravity]
this causes a pitch-up effect which could in turn further increase the AoA and send the aircraft closer towards the stall. MCAS
was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during steep turns with elevated load factors (high AoA)
and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall.
Unfortunately for Boeing and the passengers its crashed aircraft were carrying, the MCAS system was very poorly implemented.Reading between the lines (I've helpfully labeled the pain points):
Boeing have been working on a software modification to MCAS since the Lion Air accident. Unfortunately although originally
due for release in January it has still not been released due to both engineering challenges and differences of opinion among
some federal and company safety experts over how extensive the changes should be.
Apparently there have been discussions about potentially adding [A] enhanced pilot training and possibly mandatory [B] cockpit
alerts to the package. There also has been consideration of more-sweeping design changes that would prevent [C] faulty signals
from a single sensor from touching off the automated stall-prevention system.
[A] Pilot training was originally not considered necessary, because MCAS was supposed to give 737 MAX the same flight
characteristics as earlier 737s; that's why pilots weren't told about it. (This also kept the price low.) [B] Such alerts exist now,
as part of an optional package, which Lion did not buy. [C] The single sensor was the result of regulatory capture, not to say
gaming; see below.
(The MCAS system is currently the system fingered as the cause of both the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes; we won't know for sure
until the forensics are complete. Here, however, is
the scenario for an MCAS-induced crash :
Black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the
fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times
during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled
with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.
(5) Regulatory Capture : Commercial aircraft need to be certified by the FAA before launch. The
Washington Post labels today's process "self-certification":
The FAA's publication of pilot training requirements for the Max 8 in the fall of 2017 was among the final steps in a multiyear
approval process carried out under the agency's now 10-year-old policy of entrusting Boeing and other aviation manufacturers to
certify that their own systems comply with U.S. air safety regulations.
In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer
would act as the FAA's representative , signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety
regulations, people familiar with the process said.
(Note that a 10-year-old process would have begun in the Obama administration, so the regulatory process is bipartisan.) I
understand that " safety culture " is real and strong, but imagine the same
role-playing concept applied to finance: One bankers plays the banker, and the other banker plays Bill Black, and after a time they
switch roles . Clearly a system that will work until it doesn't. More:
The process was occurring during a period when the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General was warning
the FAA that its oversight of manufacturers' work was insufficient.
Four years after self-certification began, fires aboard Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets led to the grounding of the fleet and
a wave of questions about whether self-certification had affected the FAA's oversight.
Why "self-certification"? Investigative reporting from
the Seattle Times -- the article is worth reading in full -- explains:
The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more
of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.
Alert readers will note the similarity to
the Neoliberal Playbook , where government systems are sabotaged in order to privatize them, but in this case regulatory capture
seems to have happened "by littles," rather than out of open, ideological conviction (as with the UKs's NHS, or our Post Office,
our Veteran's Administration, etc.).
(6) Transfer of Authority to Boeing : In the case of the 737 Max, regulatory capture was so great that certification authority
was transferred to Boeing. In order to be certified, a "System Safety Analysis" for MCAS had to be performed.
The Seattle Times :
The safety analysis:
Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the
plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther
than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.
Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of
the system repeatedly pushing the airplane's nose downward. Assessed a failure of the system as one level below "catastrophic."
But even that "hazardous" danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor --
and yet that's how it was designed.
So who certified MCAS? Boeing self-certified it. Once again
The Seattle Times :
Several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process.
Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing .
"There wasn't a complete and proper review of the documents," the former engineer added. "Review was rushed to reach certain
certification dates."
In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification,
was delegated to Boeing .
(I'm skipping a lengthy discussion of even more technical detail for MCAS, which includes discrepancies between what Boeing self-certified,
and what the FAA thought that it had certified, along with the MCAS system acting like a ratchet, so it didn't reset itself, meaning
that each time it kicked in, the nose was pitched down even lower. Yikes. Again, the article is worth reading in full; if you've
ever done tech doc, you'll want to scream and run.)
(7) Political Economy : This tweet is especially interesting, because even I know that
Muddy Waters Research is a famous short seller:
What's the
result? Two $BA planes have been grounded:
787 and Max. Last FAA grounding of a type of plane was 1979. In the case of the Max, FAA outsourced more than planned bc BA was
9 months behind Airbus 320neo 3/4 2 replies 4 retweets 19 likes
This is a great example of real short-termism by a corporate. It's clearly in
$BA LT interest to have robust cert system,
but those chickens come home to roost years later, allowing mgmt to meet ST expectations. BTW, semi-annual reporting would do
NOTHING to fix this mentality. 4
And here we are! There are a myriad of other details, but many of them will only prove out once the black boxes are examined and
the forensics are complete.
* * *
It should be clear at this point that the central claims of Muilenburg's letter are false. I understand that commercial
aviation is a business, but if that is so, then Muilenburg's claim that Boeing's commitment to safety is "absolute" cannot possibly
be true; indeed, the choice to re-engine the 737 had nothing to do with safety. Self-certification makes Boeing "a judge in its own
cause," and that clearly contradicts Muilenburg's absurd claim that "safety" -- as opposed to profit -- "is at the core of who we
are."
The self-certification debacle that allowed MCAS to be released happened on Muilenburg's watch and is already causing Boeing
immense reputational damage, and a criminal case, not to mention the civil cases that are surely coming, will only increase that
damage. Mr. Market, the Beltway, and even Trump, if his trade deals are affected, will all soon be bellowing for a sacrificial victim.
Muilenburg should recognize the inevitable and gracefully resign. Given his letter, it looks unlikely that he will do the right thing.
IIRC, one of the big constraints that was leveled was the need to keep the 737, regardless of version, into the same height
relative to all other generations of the 737, whereas Airbus kept their height a lot higher than the 737.
If you look at many 737's over the years, some of the engine's nacelles were flat at the bottom to accommodate larger engine.
Why? Boeing kept the height the same in order to maintain built-in stairs that, with virtually all airports having adjustable
jetways, was basically redundant.
When you compare an A320xeo against a B737, you'll find that the Airbus rides higher when it comes to the jetways.
It seems to me that the Boeing 737-Max with the heavier, larger fuel-saving engines is so unbalanced (tilting over and then
crashing if not "overridden" by a computer compensation) that it never should have been authorized in the first place.
When Boeing decided to add a much larger engine, it should have kept the airplane in balance by (1) shifting it forward or
backward so that the weight did not tip the plane, and (2) created a larger landing-gear base so that the large engines wouldn't
scrape the ground.
The problem was that Boeing tried to keep using the old chassis with the larger engines under the wings – rather than changing
the wings, moving them forward or aft, and expanding the plane to permit a more appropriate landing gear.
The computer system has been blamed for not being a "smart enough" workaround to tell the plane not to plunge down when it
already is quite close to the ground – with no perception of altitude, not to mention double-checking on the wind speed from both
sensors.
Beyond that ultimate problem is the ultimate regulatory problem: regulatory capture of the FAA by the airline companies.
As a result, the FAA represents "its customers" the airplane makers, not the public users and customers. This is like the banks
capturing the Fed, the Justice Dept. and Treasury to promote their own interests by claiming that "self-regulation" works. Self-regulation
is the polite word for fraudulent self-indulgence.
I would be surprised if the European Airbus competitors do not mount a campaign to block the 737-Max's from landing, and
insisting that Boeing buy them back. This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes.
This probably will throw Trump's China trade fight into turmoil, as China was the first country to ground the 737-Max's
and is unlikely to permit their recovery without a "real" federal safety oversight program. Maybe Europe, China and other countries
henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane, so as to represent users and stakeholders, not only
stockholders.
> "Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane."
As if the 737 MAX were the chlorinated chicken of aircraft.
* * *
I'm not sure about redesigning the wing and the landing gear. That might be tantamount to designing a new plane. (I do know
that the landing gear is so low because the first 737s needed to accommodate airports without jetways, and so there may be other
facets of the design that also depend on those original requirements that might have to be changed.)
Regulatory capture is rampant throughout the economy. Boeing self-certification being delegated by the FAA is not unlike
the situation with electric transmission utilities.
After the 2003 northeast & Canada blackout, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It directed FERC to create an "electric
reliability organization". Previously there were voluntary organizations set up after the 1966 blackout to establish operating
standards in the industry. One of them was the North American Electric Reliability Council which morphed into the North
American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) in 2006.
NERC is headquartered in Atlanta and employs hundreds of people. The standards setting generally takes place in NERC Committees
and Subcommittees and sometimes from FERC itself. These are typically packed with industry people, with a patina of diversity
that includes some governmental types and large industrial consumers. Let it suffice to say the electric transmission industry
itself largely sets the rules how it operates.
Now consider the article in yesterday's NYT "
How PG&E Ignored
California Fire Risks in Favor of Profits ". The transmission circuit featured in the article (the Caribou-Palermo line) that
caused the destruction of Paradise is a transmission line that is subject to both FERC and NERC regulation. As described
in the article the circuit had many previous failures and was well beyond its design life.
However, both FERC and NERC have a laser focus on "market players" (think Enron or JP Morgan) and system operations (e.g.,
prevent collapses like the blackout of 2003). AFIK, neither FERC or NERC have prescriptive standards for routine maintenance or
inspection and replacement (i.e., very expensive capital replacement that was not done on the Caribou-Palermo line), these are
left to the discretion of the transmission owner. While substantive information about electric reliability is maintained by industry
trade groups and submitted to FERC, what is available to the public is generally useless and subjected to scrubbing and polishing
(often under the guise of Critical Energy Infrastructure Information).
We can see how self-policing work, can't we??? Rent-seeking market players can arbitrage markets, inflating prices consumers
pay and make billions in profits, while California burns.
The neglectful rot in California is endemic in the industry as a whole.
That Seattle Times investigative story is indeed very good and a rare instance of newspaper writers troubling to carefully
and cogently explain a technical issue.
In hindsight Boeing would have perhaps been better off to leave off the MCAS altogether and depend on pilot retraining
to cover the altered handling.
One reason they may not have was that crash several years ago of a commuter plane in upstate NY where the plane started to
stall and the confused pilot pulled up on the controls rather than making the airplane dive to regain speed. Still one has to
believe that no automation is better than badly designed or malfunctioning automation.
"depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling"
IANAP, but maybe the problem is that "nose up" situations can go south very quickly. For those with the stomach for it, there
are videos on youtube of the 747 freighter that went nose up at Bagram a few years ago (perhaps due to loose cargo shifting backwards
on takeoff). It was over very quickly.
Yes, I was impressed with it. Unfortunately the investigation precludes Boeing from responding as they did indicate they would
have had something to say about it otherwise. But the analysis looks pretty cut and dried:
Boeing underestimated the risk rating for the sensor, excluding the possibility of a catastrophic failure as occurred in
the two incidents to date;
Boeing also failed to implement the redundancy that would have been required even for their lower risk rating;
Manual correction by the pilot as a possible risk mitigation was constrained by the fact that pilots weren't trained on
the new system due to commercial factors.
Fixing any one of those three issues would have averted the disasters, although #3 is pretty precarious as you're relying on
manual pilot actions to correct what is a clear systems defect at that point.
It sounds like #1 was partly because they failed to account for all the scenarios, like repeat activation raising the risk
profile in certain circumstances. This is very easy to do and a robust review process is your best defense. So we could add the
tight timelines and rushed process as a contributing factor for #1, and probably the others as well.
People who work on accident investigation would probably agree on 2 things:
(o) Accidents are invariably a confluence of a myriad of factors that all happened to line up on one day. There is never
a single cause of an accident.
(o) A minor change to some part of the system would have prevented the accident.
So while there is much to be profitably learned by investigating everything here, an effective "fix" may be surprisingly (or
suspiciously) small in scope. There will be much clamoring for the whole plane to be resigned or scrapped, for better or worse.
The Colgan crash, whose pilot, Renfrew, was chatting with the co-pilot below the allowed altitude? And who had apparently lied
about his background, and had a pay-to-play pilot's license?
I think the Air France Airbus 447 also had a high-altitude stall (due to a faulty air speed sensor) and needed its nose pushed
down, not up (which the copilots didn't realize).
Also, very informative article / OP, thanks for posting.
MCAS was added to change the behavior of the plane from to tend to stall as speed increases. That is stall and crash, because
such a high speed stall makes polit recovery very, very difficult.
In addition the MCAS driven amount of elevator change was initially 0.6 to 2.5, which indicates the 0.6 increment was found
to be too low.
According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from
both angle-of-attack sensors.
It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the
system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.
Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.
–Seattle Times
So apparently the greater elevator setting is not so necessary that they are not willing to reduce it. Also the max power setting
would normally be on take off when the pilots are required to manually fly the plane.
Yes, that was an excellent Seattle times piece. Surprising to see that kind of truth-telling and, especially, *clarity* in
an MSM piece these days. So what's the angle?
Reports I've read indicates that Boeing ignored even the clearly inadequate certification. "Documentation provided to the
FAA claims that the MCAS system can only adjust the horizontal tail on the plane by 0.6 degrees out of a maximum of five-degrees
of nose-down movement. But that limit was later increased to 2.5-degrees of nose-down movement. Boeing didn't communicate the
change from 0.6-degrees to 2.5-degrees until after Lion Air."
Apparently this was done after simulations showed that 0.6 degrees was inadequate and the new 2.5 degree setting was not extensively
tested before the planes were rolled out. IANAL, but this may be a serious problem for Boeing. Boeing could also be liable
for damages due to 737 groundings and due to delays in delivery of contracted planes.
Big question is how 737 issues will affect 777X rollout, due at the end of the year. If 777X certification is called into question,
this may cause further delays and put it at a further disadvantage against A350.
The 777 has been a great plane. Let's all pray the MBAs didn't fuck it up, too.
If I were Boeing, I'd have a team looking into the 777 certification process right now. And I'd set up a whistleblower line
(so the Seattle Times doesn't get to the story first).
The analogy has been made between this the 737 MAX story and the Tylenol story. J&J got out in front of the problem and
saved the product (and their company). Boeing's problem is of that order, and Muilenberg -- that letter! -- seems incapable of
understanding that; insular, arrogant. One more reason to fire the dude toot sweet. If he comes out of his next review with a
raise -- Everything Is Like CalPERS™ -- consider shorting Boeing
Thanks, Lambert, for post and comments. I don't know if this angle has been covered or explored: the relatively new way that
Boeing now "manufactures" "tests" and "assembles" parts of its planes. I had dinner with new acquaintance, Boeing engineer for
decades (I live near a plant in WA state). For the last few years, this engineer is stationed half year in Russia annually to
oversee assembly there. In this newish, more profitable manufacturing system for Boeing, the parts come in from around the world
with sketchy quality control, are then assembled by Russian workers this engineer (and other Boeing employees sent from States)
supposedly oversees. But the engineer doesn't speak Russian and has too little access to translators .Needless to say, this engineer
is planning an exit as soon as possible. Having grown up in WA state for 60 years with neighbors/friends who were Boeing engineers,
assemblers, line workers, etc it makes me heart sick to see the current decimation of talent, rigor and wages with additional
far-flung assembly factories (Russia with few translators?! who knew?). Might these manufacturing/assemblying "improvements" also
be a contributing factor in these terrifying woes for Boeing?
Thanks for this Lambert, fantastically informative and interesting post.
Self regulation only works when liability is transferred with it – over example, in construction whereby certification by the
engineers or architects designing the building are also taking on liability in the event something goes wrong. It seems unlikely
that this is the situation with Boeing.
Allowing this to happen seems the ultimate in short term thinking by Boeing. US manufacturers have always had an advantage
over competitors because the FAA was held in such high regard worldwide that it was the de facto world safety regulatory
body – every country followed its lead. But this chipping away of its authority has led to a near fatal loss of faith, and will
no doubt lead to European and Asian regulatory authorities being strengthened. And no doubt commercial realities will mean they
will look much more closely at US manufactured aircraft if there is some benefit to their own manufacturers.
Airbus will no doubt try to take advantage – just as Boeing (with some justification) tried to focus attention on the Air France
Airbus loss which was attributed at least in part to excessive automation. China is pushing hard with its new Comac aircraft,
but they seem to be poorly regarded worldwide (only Chinese airlines are buying). The Canadians have missed their chance with
the Bombadier C-series.
The more I read of this the more baffling it is. What was there stopping Boeing from just highlighting the changes and installing
an easy manual override instead of this hidden change with effectively no way to permanently do so? Especially when in crisis
mode? One could make a case of no extra training needed so long as the pilot knows about it and can easily turn it off.
I didn't see this before I posted my response. A more concise statement of my thoughts. This plus more robust redundant sensors.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
The Times thinks Boeing is too big to fail. Without a blockbuster Max, I don't see how Boeing maintains its current status
in the industry.
I am leaning towards thinking the kludgy design of the 727 Max could have been rolled out with no major problems if Boeing
had been up front about design changes, made a robust and conservative MCAS, fully at the command of the pilot, and provided ample
training for the new aircraft.
They still could have saved billions on the airframe. They would have had to acknowledge the significant modifications to the
airlines with the attendant training and other costs and delays. They would have lost some sales. They still would have been far
ahead of Airbus and light years ahead of where they are now.
I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality.
Note that Muilenberg came up through the defense side of the company not the commercial aircraft side. He may simply not
have been equipped to understand FAA regulation at any deep level, hence the rot that finally surfaced.
The 737 Max crashes and Brexit are the chickens coming home to roost. NC is a treasure for your coverage of both.
Clearly upper management in Chicago only knows short term finance. Boeing stuck with old fashion hydraulic controls in the
737 but faced with an unacceptable flight characteristics of the larger more efficient engines added a fly-by-wire system to compensate
for it.
The criminal charges are that besides being a faulty design (it relies on one fragile exposed sensor that if out of position
keeps triggering dives until switched off) but Boeing hid it and self-certified that it was safe. Adding a discrepancy warning
and position indicator for the two independent flight sensors to the cockpit video display is an extra cost feature.
Neither of the planes that crashed had the added safety display. All are cost saving measures. Finally, if a faulty sensor
triggers dives, the pilot at the controls is busy with both hands on the yoke forcing the airplane to stay in the air with stall
and proximity warnings are sounding. The second pilot also must realize what's going on, immediately turn off the electricity
to the screw jack motor and manually turn the stabilizer trim wheel to neutral.
You can't learn this on an iPad. Both pilots should practice it together in a Flight Simulator. If the co-pilot was experienced,
unlike the one in the Ethiopian crash; just maybe, they could have survived the repeated attempts by the airplane to dive into
the ground on takeoff.
The tragedy is that corporate media in pursuit of profits will keep us up to date but will never mention the 6 or 8 minutes
of terror for the 346 souls aboard the two flights. They will cover the criminal negligence trial if there are ever indictments.
But, the news reports never will say that neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization are the root causes of the deaths.
> if a faulty sensor triggers dives, the pilot at the controls is busy with both hands on the yoke forcing the airplane
to stay in the air with stall and proximity warnings are sounding. The second pilot also must realize what's going on, immediately
turn off the electricity to the screw jack motor and manually turn the stabilizer trim wheel to neutral. You can't learn this
on an iPad. Both pilots should practice it together in a Flight Simulator. If the co-pilot was experienced, unlike the one
in the Ethiopian crash; just maybe, they could have survived the repeated attempts by the airplane to dive into the ground
on takeoff.
That's what I mean by horrid UI/UX. Might as well as both pilots to pat their heads and rub their tummies in synch. And since
the two pilots have to both understand what's going on, we've multiplied the chances for failure.
Boeing also clearly did not know its customers . It should be engineering for the sort of pilots who are going to be hired
by Lion Air, or any rapidly expanding airline in what we used to all the Third World. Hegemony, it seems, makes you insular and
provincial.
Added cost, "mandatory" safety feature. Does not seem to square with the [soon to be former?] CEO's apology-industry written
claim to be committed to absolute safety.
"The FAA, citing lack of funding and resource": I don't suppose I'll survive to see any arm of government not blame
lack of funds for its boneheaded or corrupt incompetence.
But the bigger picture: suppose the FAA is to do its job properly. From where is it going to recruit its staff?
Smaller picture: it doesn't really matter whether the cocked-up MCAS killed all those people or not. Even if it's innocent
of the charge, the account of its development and application is a horror story.
Bigger picture: what other horrors have been hidden by Boeing?
> the account of its development and application is a horror story.
That's how I feel. The tech doc department at Boeing sounds like a horrible place to work; MBAs or their goons telling
you all the time to do stuff you know is wrong. It's not surprising people were willing to talk to the Seattle Times; I bet there
are more people. (Hey, Seattle Times! How about people testing the 737 MAX in simulators (assuming this is done)).
Sounds like the MBAs in Chicago have been busy planting land mines everywhere. Somebody stepped on this one; there are others.
The unfortunate pilots were made test pilots; the unsuspecting passengers: Guinea pigs. Lab rats. And paid for the privilege.
Some others may share this opinion. Change one little thing? Chaos Theory Rules. Same with weather/climate; folks. That rant is
for later.
Boeing stuck with old fashion hydraulic controls in the 737 but faced with an unacceptable flight characteristics of the
larger more efficient engines added a fly-by-wire system to compensate for it.
Interestingly, and maybe relevant to the problem of confusion for the pilots, is that Boeing has had another automatic
trim-modifier operating on its 737s for some time, the speed-trim system (STS):
This system also modifies the stabilizer position during manual flight. Like MCAS, it was brought in to improve stability
under certain flight conditions (the reasons for which are far beyond my knowledge). There is an indication that the pilots on
the flight before the Lion Air crash misinterpreted MCAS actions for STS behavior.
At what point does "crapification" become insufficient to describe Boeing's product and process here? At what point do we have
to speak of " ford-pintofication"?
OK, I'm told to resubmit my crib re: "Boeing options" from the ZeroHedge "tweetstorm" by Trevot Sumner, and include a link
got it:
Economic problem. Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree light, which lets
pilots know that this problem was happening. Both 737MAXes that crashed were delivered without this option. No 737MAX with
this option has ever crashed
Ooops! "Options package"? Wait, a "package" that in the interim corrects a potentially catastrophic mfg. defect and airlines
have to pay for it? Whoa, here's your late capitalism in play.
> Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree light
This is one of the details I could not get to (and we don't 100% know this is an issue until the forensics are done. Right
now, we have narrative. Truly excellent narrative to be sure -- if only we thought of government the same way as pilots think
of their aircraft! -- but narrative nonetheless).
Let me see if I have this right. Pilots, chime in!
"Authority" is one of the big words in this discussion; MCAS takes authority away from the pilot (and can do in such a drastic
fashion as to crash the plane). Worse, the default case is that it can do so on the basis of a single sensor reading. In a design
appropriate to the consequences for failure (i.e., a different design from that described in the "System Safety Analysis" that
Boeing self-certified) MCAS would take readings from two sensors, and if they disagreed, authority would revert to the pilot
. That's a general principle at Boeing, and so it's reasonable for pilots to assume that they retain authority of MCAS has not
told them they don't have it any more.
Hence, the disagree light, which tells the pilots to take back authority because the sensors are confused. However, I think
there are UI/UX issues with that, given that the 737 cockpit is extremely noisy and pilots have a lot to do on take-off. So a
light might not be the answer. (The light also strikes me as a kludge; first, MCAS feels to me like a kludge, in that we're making
the aircraft flyable only through software.* Fine for fighter jets, which can be inherently unstable, but perhaps not so fine
for commercial aircraft? Then we have a second kludge, a light to tell us that the first kludge has kicked in. I dunno.)
NOTE * However, it's also true that automation affects flight characteristics all the time. So I'm not sure how savage to make
this indictment.
The AOA indication is Service Bulletin 737-31-1650 (there may be others) and is on the both Pilot Flight Displays (PFDs). Pilots
would likely abort a takeoff if they saw the indication come on before getting airborne.
"Boeing has been in the business of aviation safety for more than 100 years, "
How many years ago did Wall Street take over the fortunes of the company? Why did they move their headquarters from their
birthplace of Seattle to Chicago? Why did they start assembling planes in South Carolina and China? Was it to improve aviation
safety? Or, to allow the profiteering parasites to feed off the carcass of the company?
I want to fly on Boeing planes put together by well paid members of the Seattle Machinists Union, not low wage peons. Let's
not even mention the maintenance of American aircraft in China and El Salvador.
President Trump, here's a reelection tip: "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American
airspace must be maintained in the U.S."
> "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S."
Amazingly, Trump seems to have done OK on this. First, he didn't cave to Muilenberg's (insane, goofy, tone-deaf) request
to keep the 737 flying; then he frames the issue as complexity (correct, IMNSHO), and then he manages to
nominate a Delta CEO as head of the FAA .
And your suggestion is very good one. I wonder if he could do that by executive order? And I wonder how many grey-beards would
come off the golf courses to help out? I bet a lot.
The aircraft is NOT CRAP!!! However. It should have been flown A WHOLE LOT MORE before receiving certification.
*Real* test pilots should have their a–es on the line ; operating for a lot more hours at *the edge of the envelope*, as it
is known. Stability should be by design; not software*patch*. Patch this!
What portion of its' MCAS system flight testing was in computer simulation? Like the so-called Doppler Radar; which *magically*
predicts what the future will bring; while the experts pitch it as fact? And make life-or-death decisions on the theoretical data???
Rush to market; markets rule. We can die.
Agreed, but I think we're seeing signs that a crapification process has begun on the safety side in this industry. (It
has been proceeding for years on the service/amenities side.)
Didn't say it was. The headline reads "Boeing Crapification," not "737 Crapification."
That said, the 737 clearly has issues, as Boeing itself knew, since if they'd had their druthers, they would have launched
a new plane to replace it. See point #2.
> What portion of its' MCAS system flight testing was in computer simulation?
That is a very good question. If I understand the aerodynamics issues aright, MCAS would be most likely to kick in at takeoff,
which raises a host of UI/UX issues because the pilots are very busy at that time. So was MCAS not tested in the simulators? If
so, how on earth was a scenario that included sensor failure not included? It may be that there are more issues with Boeing's
engineering process than the documentation issues raised by the Seattle Times, though those are bad enough.
I say the 737-whatever is a flying Turd, and always has been. It has a bad wing design which means it has to fly nose up compared
to other models( I always remember that when going to the restroom while going somewhere on one). And because of its poor design
it has to takeoff and land at higher speeds. So when flying into someplace like Mexico City it can be quite a harrowing experience,
and the smell of cooking brakes is relatively normal.
Boeing never should have let go of the 757. Now that was a good plane that was simply ahead of its time.
Considering the fact that all these 737s are grounded as no airline trust them to not kill a plane load of passengers and
crew, this is a really big deal. Putting aside the technical and regulatory issues, the fact is that the rest of the world no
longer trusts the US in modern aviation so what we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal.
We now know that the FAA does not audit the work done for these aircraft but the airlines themselves do it. It cannot be just
Boeing but the other aircraft manufacturers as well. Other countries are going to be asking some very hard questions before forking
over their billions to a US aircraft manufacturer in future. Worse is when Ethiopia refused to hand over the black boxes to the
US but gave them instead to a third party.
That was saying that based on how you treated the whole crash, we do not trust you to do the job right and not to change some
of the results. It has been done before, ironically enough by France who the Ethiopians gave the black boxes to. And when you
lose trust, it takes a very long time to gain it back again – if ever. But will the changes be made to do so? I would guess no.
But if the discount foreign airlines had just trained their pilots and paid for the non-crashintothegroundat500mph upgrade,
all of this could have been avoided.
> we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal
Loss or at least wobbliness of imperial hegemony, like. It's not just the aircraft, it's US standards-setting bodies, methods,
"safety culture," even -- dare we say it -- English as the language of aviation. French is no longer the language of diplomacy,
after all, though it had a good run.
Because markets. Neoliberalism puts everything up for sale. Including regulation. Oversimplifying absurdly: And so you
end up with the profit-driven manufacturer buying the regulator, its produce killing people, and the manufacturer canceling its
future profits. That's what the Bearded One would call a contradiction.*
NOTE * There ought to be a way to reframe contradiction in terms of Net Present Value which would not be what we think it is,
under that model.
I wish it were as complete as it should be! There are a ton of horrid details about sensors, the UI/UX for the MCAS system,
737 cockpit design, decisions by the marketing department, and training and maintenance for Asian airlines that I just couldn't
get to. (Although most of those presume that the forensics have already been done.) But I felt that dollying back for the big
picture was important to. Point #1 is important, in that all the factors that drove the 737 decision making are not only still
in place, they're intensifying, so we had better adjust our systems (assuming Boeing remains a going concern -- defenestrating
Muilenberg would be an excellent way to show we accept the seriousness of customer and international concern).
Bloomberg is reporting that : "The Indonesia safety committee report said the plane had had multiple failures on previous flights
and hadn't been properly repaired."
And the day before when the same plane had the problem that killed everyone the next day: "The so-called dead-head pilot on
the earlier flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor driving the nose down, according to the people
familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize."
There's an enormous expansion of air travel in Asia. The lower end -- not flag -- carriers like Lion Air and also Air Asia
are in that business to be cheap ; they're driven by expansion and known to be run by cowboys.
That said, know your customer . I would translate this into an opportunity for Boeing to sell these airlines a service
package for training their ground operations. But it seems that cutting costs is the only thing the MBAs in Chicago understand.
Pilots, pipe up!
Pilot training and requirements are in the hands of the country, not Boeing. If the story that the copilot of the Ethiopian
Airlines plane had only 200 hours of experience that is astounding.
In the US that requirement is 1500 hours. In addition most US airlines would require more than that. And then they slot 'beginning'
pilots for flights in good (better) weather as high minimums pilot.
"sell these airlines a service package" That won't help an airline that is in the business to be cheap. The Indonesia airplane
was repeatedly reported for problems in prior days/flights that was never fixed.
and this quote makes an interesting follow-on to the thread yesterday with 737 Pilot (which Lambert linked to in the first
paragraph here):
"The combination of factors required to bring down a plane in these circumstances suggests other issues may also have occurred
in the Ethiopia crash, said Jeffrey Guzzetti, who also directed accident investigations at FAA and is now a consultant.
"It's simply implausible that this MCAS deficiency by itself can down a modern jetliner with a trained crew," Guzzetti said."
Setting aside Mr Guzzetti's background (dismissing his claim here as tendentious right off the bat would strike me as uncharitable),
and without wishing to exculpate anyone, it does lend some credence to the idea that Ethiopia Airlines may have some contributory
negligence here, staffing the flight with such an inexperienced first officer.
Setting aside Mr Guzzetti's background (dismissing his claim here as tendentious right off the bat would strike me as uncharitable),
and without wishing to exculpate anyone, it does lend some credence to the idea that Ethiopia Airlines may have some contributory
negligence here, staffing the flight with such an inexperienced first officer.
One can often point to inexperience, incompetence, stupidity, incompetence or just bad luck when some disaster happens, but
Boeing counted on perfect performance from flight crews to successfully work with a workaround needed for other workarounds that
needed perfect performance to not catastrophically fail. I know enough about complexity that you cannot depend on perfection because
something will always fail.
Your excellent summary lacks some MCAS details that are not widely reported by the general-audience press.
Like you, I am a retired software engineer, so I have followed an aviation blog discussion of this issue quite closely
since it emerged as a probable software and system design failure. As the blog is open to all, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty
low, but it seems not too difficult for any technically-minded person to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current understanding,
which I believe others here are in a position to correct, if necessary:
A. The requirement for MCAS apparently emerged very late in the MAX's development, when it became clear that the upper cowling
around the larger engines, being moved up and forward with respect to earlier 737 versions, adds nose-up force as the angle of
attack (AoA) approaches the upper limits of the MAX's operating envelope because at such angles, the cowling itself generates
lift beyond that of the wing.
B. As perceived by a pilot flying manually (not on autopilot), this added nose-up force makes it easier to pull back on the
control column ("stick"), increasing the AoA further. This is like a car running off the asphalt onto a muddy shoulder: the steering
wheel wants to turn the wrong way (toward the ditch) rather than the right way (back on the road).
C. An FAA regulation prohibits certification of an aircraft that presents the pilot with changing stick forces near stall that
nudge the pilot toward the wrong reaction, 14 CFR 25.203(a)
, IIRC (unfortunately, I can't find the original blog citation).
D. MCAS was put in place to satisfy this certification requirement -- not to automagically correct stalls without pilot action.
E. Other means of meeting this requirement exist, ranging from an airframe redesign that avoids the extra nose-up effect of
the larger repositioned engines down to a "stick pusher" that increases the force a pilot would need to pull the stick back further
in this situation.
F. Any of the other options would negate one or both of the MAX's chief selling points: little cost or schedule impact to Boeing
(in a rush to meet the Airbus 320 NEO challenge) and to its customers ("No new flight crew training necessary, because to the
pilot, the MAX feels just like its 737 predecessors.") That is, all the other options introduce new hardware to a completed design
and the more fundamental changes could require new type certification.
G. The easiest fix was pure software: at high indicated AoA, under manual control, and with flaps up, automatically rotate
the horizontal stabilizer a little bit nose-down, which increases the pressure needed to pull the stick back (nose-up). No need
to tell the pilot about this in training or real time, since it's just to make MAX feel like any other 737.
H. The design presented for certification described a single small rotation. Testing showed this was insufficient to provide
the tactile feedback necessary for certification in all cases, so the software fix was obvious: if the trigger conditions still
hold after a 5 sec. pause, do it again.
I. Apparently nobody asked at that point, "What if the AoA indication is stuck high?" We're under schedule and cost pressure,
so who wants to complexify things by (1) adding additional sanity-checking to the aircraft's AoA computations or (2) limiting
how many times we add a little bit of nose-down.
J. When these details combine with a consistently erroneous AoA reading, MCAS can -- if not repeatedly countermanded or disabled
and manually reversed -- eventually rotate the horizontal stabilizer to its maximum nose-down position, where it was found in
both recent incidents, IIRC.
Even if the pilots figure out that's what's happening amid a cacophony of seemingly contradictory instrument readings and warnings
(stick-shaker, trim wheel clacking, alarm chimes, and synthesized voices), the pilots still have to (1) cut power to the electrical
trim systems and (2) restore the required trim, which may then require as many as 50 manual turns of a trim wheel. If you're near
the ground, time is short
A minority of commenting pilots assert that any competently trained cockpit crew should be able to identify MCAS misbehavior
quickly and power off automatic trim per the same checklist that was prescribed for "runaway automatic trim" on every 737 variant,
MAX included. Most seem to agree that with aircraft control difficulties, multiple alarms, and disagreement among the pilot's
and first officer's airspeed and AoA readings almost from the moment of takeoff (not yet officially confirmed), an MCAS-commanded
runaway trim event may feel very different from the runaway trim flavors for which pilots have had simulator training, making
problem identification difficult even given knowledge of the earlier Lion Air incident.
I imagine most software developers and engineers have seen cost/schedule pressures lead to short cuts. If their life was at
stake, I doubt that many would think self-certification that such a project complies with all relevant safety requirements is
a good idea.
Thank you for that. And just 'wow'. I don't really know anything about aircraft/flying but this story is really fascinating
and seems to be true a sign of the times. I guess we'll know what the current 'temperature' is out there when the fallout
(civil liability, criminal liability, plane orders cancelled/ returned, etc) manifests. If Boeing skates, we'll know we've got
a long way to go.
The Post's article on the FAA and Regulatory Capture is incomplete. The process for the FAA (and probably MANY government
agencies) started under Reagan, did not revert to safety under Clinton (make government smaller and all that), and then accelerated
under Bush II in 2005 (not a bi-partisan time). In particular, big changes to the FAA were made in 2005 that were executive in
nature and did not require Congressional approval. CF:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/
Yes, but. Part of what we are seeing in this case is a rush to judgement based on less than full evidence and analysis, and
so prejudices and ideological positions (which I share actually) are plainly to be seen (and perhaps worth analyzing). "Crapification,"
says the headline.
Yet, I cannot say that I disagree with BA's business decisions as such in a highly competitive environment as regards the tradeoffs
in the development of the MAX and there is a certain absurdity in the idea that Boeing would knowingly take a high reputational
risk, in an industry where failure is front page news (contrast banking or pharma failures).
I have no reason to believe that an FAA fully in charge of all aspects of certification would have prevented these crashes,
as banking and drug regulators have not kept us safe either. What seems worthy of note is that neither the airlines that buy the
product nor the foreign aviation regulators nor pilots' associations do their own testing and certification, in an area where
more redundancy would be good. Nor is there any kind of private third party watchdog testing, like a Moody's or S&P, evaluating
potentially toxic products and services for a price.
Finally, I suppose we have to ask ourselves why the price of the stock is holding up fairly well even as the news flow on these
tragedies is helping the short sellers. Lest we forget that Boeing is the 5th largest defense contractor in the US.
Is engine throttle automated in the flight regime where these accidents occurred? Or are the pilots controlling power? Is the
lag in thrust response interacting with the MCAS in an unanticipated way? Aerodynamic lift of nacelles is mentioned several times;
there is another lift factor relating to the thrust angle; which is not necessarily aligned with the fuselage axis in flight.
Departure procedures often require speed limits and altitude changes; so it is likely multiple power demand levels get set through
takeoff and climb until cruise altitude is reached. Does Autopilot/Flight Director integrate with MCAS; or are they independent
systems? Even without touching flight controls; power changes affect pitch forces. I am wondering if consequences of manual power
changes on an otherwise automated departure were adequately investigated in the certification of the MCAS. Please excuse my ignorance
of these details.
Regulatory elements that have been getting attention include the use of *standard* weights for passengers; IIRC, 170 lbs for
US (and possibly ICAO) passengers comes to mind . Many aircraft accidents have an element of disregard for proper weight distribution,
either accidental, or negligent. For instance: Tail-heavy bad! Intentional loading outside of subsequently approved C.G. and/or
max weight limits is a common, if not ubiquitous part of determining certification limits.There is a safety factor in the certificated
limits; but banking on this; using estimates; is proven risky or disastrous when actual weights, and distribution thereof, is
uncertain. Cargo with false weight values could also occur. One might find incentive to claim lower weights than actual to save
on freight charges. How many 170 lb passengers do you know? I am not familiar with scales being used to check aircraft weight
and balance before takeoff; only calculations; based on formulas and charts.
Scales ARE USED during certain maintenance procedures; for airworthiness certificates; and following certain modifications.
Here is an interesting article by a professional pilot blogger Patrick Smith. He calls the 737, "the Frankenplane", and traces
its history all the way back to the 707 in 1959. According to Smith, "We wonder if the 737 MAX even needed to exist in the first
place. Somewhere deep down, maybe the heart of this whole fiasco is Boeing's determination to keep the 737 line going, variant
after variant, seemingly forever. I'm not saying this is the reason for what happened in Indonesia or Ethiopia, but the whole
737 program just seems misguided and unnecessary. Instead of starting from scratch with a new airframe, they took what was essentially
conceived as a regional jet in the mid-1960s, and have pushed and pushed and pushed the thing -- bigger and bigger engines, fancier
avionics and more seats -- into roles it was never intended for. The "Frankenplane," I call it.
See the article here .
As a pilot myslef, I feel the airlines have a lot to answer for as well. Their constant "dumbing down" of pilots, which comes
from making pilots work long hours for low pay, results in pilots not being the best of the best. And training is a cost to airlines.
Training doesn't result in revenue. Better to have the pilots actually flying, hence Boeing selling this new version of the 737
as not requiring further training. But, training and practice is everything in flying. Flying a plane is actually a relatively
easy skill to acquire. Most people can learn to fly a trainer in 5 hours or so. Most people solo (fly the plane without an instructor)
with only 10-20 hours of instruction. It takes a lot longer to learn how to drive a car for most people (45 hours is the average).
So it really isn't that difficult .until something goes WRONG. That is when the training kicks in. An often quoted flying truism,
is that flying is "99% boredom and 1% stark terror". What happened with these two crashes is that you had some inexperienced pilots
who were not fully trained on the systems (a lot of that blame goes to Boeing). When things start going wrong, information overload
can easily occur if you have not been properly trained, even with two pilots.
Thanks for that correction. We can expect a deluge of blame-the-other-guy PR from the aircraft manufacturer and certification
agencies. Billions are on the line for Boeing if a cascade of judgments it made materially contributed to these crashes. The usual
strategic corporate bankruptcy might follow. I presume Boeing is considered much TBTF by the USG.
Great job summarizing and connecting dots Lambert. I might add one more bullet point though. Items #5 and #6 were aided, abetted
and perhaps somewhat necessitated by 'ye ole NeoLiberal playbook' you spoke of, but more specifically, the current regulatory
FAA/Boeing milieu is attributable to years of budget cuts and strategically applied austerity. The old Grover Norquist, ' not
destroyed, but small and weak enough to be drowned in a shallow bath' saw. Exact same thing we've witnessed with other formally
effective regulators like the EPA, the SEC or the IRS.
I remember having a conversation with an FAA maintenance inspector, an old timer, about ten years ago. He looked to be upwards
of seventy, and he told me he was eight years beyond eligibility for a full retirement. He informed me that a few years back he
was supervising a team of ten people that was now down to two. Their positions had been cut outright or eliminated after they
resigned or transferred when the remaining positions were made miserable by the increased workload and bureaucratic headaches.
The inspector said he had not retired yet because he knew he would not be replaced and he felt the work was important. I asked
him if his department was atypical and he said it was not. Same thing, across the board, with the exception of the executive level
desk jobs in DC and Oklahoma City. Readers can draw their own conclusions but when it comes to funding Federal regulators, I believe
you should never attribute anything to incompetence that you could attribute to malice.
No doubt Neo-Liberal ideologues in high places pushing the corrosive "customer/client" model of regulating along with the requisite
deference and obsequious to industry played a large role as well.
I understand the published materials to boil down to this possible scenario:
To remain competitive and profitable, Boeing needed to improve the fuel efficiency and flight characteristics of a mainstay
medium-haul aircraft. Instead of designing a new aircraft, it modified an existing airframe. Among other changes, it added more
powerful engines, new lift and control surfaces, and enhanced computerized controls.
The modified Max aircraft **did not** fly like the earlier version. That meant Boeing would have to disclose information about
those changes. It would need to train pilots in them, in how to integrate new protocols into existing ones, and in what to do
if the enhanced computer controls malfunctioned, requiring the pilot to regain manual control.
These steps could have increased cost and time to market, might have involved new certifications, and might have reduced sales.
Boeing appears to have relied on enhanced computer flight controls to avoid them.
The newly enhanced computerized controls meant that the computer would do more of the actual flying – the part that was different
from the pre-Max version – and the pilot less. It gave the pilot the virtual – but not real – experience of flying the older aircraft,
obviating the need, in Boeing's judgment, for additional disclosures and training. That worked except when it didn't. (See, driverless
car development.)
One possible failure mode derives from the Max's reliance on a single sensor to detect its angle of attack, the aircraft's
nose-up or nose-down deviation from level flight. Reliance on a single sensor would make it harder to detect and correct a fault.
(Boeing's version of commitment to "absolute" safety.)
In these two crashes, the sensor may have given a faulty reading, indicating that the aircraft's nose was higher than it should
have been for that stage of flight, an attitude that risked a stall. The programmed response was to drop the nose and increase
power. A normal reaction to a real stall, this response can become catastrophic when unexpected or when the pilot cannot correct
it.
In both crashes, it appears that the pilot did attempt to correct the computer's error. Doing so, however, reset the automated
control, leading the computer to reread the faulty sensor to mean "stall." It again dropped the nose and increased speed. The
pilot recorrected the error in what would become a deadly loop, a tug of war that ended in a powered dive into the ground.
What is interesting is what comes next. The FAA was drowned in the bath tub along with the EPA, FDA, SEC, etc. It doesn't have
the money or staff to recertify the 737 Max. An incompetent Administration that is interested only in extracting resources is
in charge. It is clear that Boeing hid the changes to save money and time. Adding a warning indicator that the flight sensors
are not in the correct position to the pilot's display, including it in the preflight checklist, plus flight training would have
prevented the Indonesian crash. But these changes would have raised questions on the adequacy of the new flight critical system
and may have delayed certification overseas. It is easy to overlook problems if your paycheck is at risk. The Boeing managers
who pushed this through deserve jail time for manslaughter.
Canada said it will recertify the 737 Max before it flies in their airspace. China won't recertify the Max until the Trump
Trade War is over. Also, a delay boosts their replacement airliner. If Chicago and DC paper this over like the 2008 Great Recession;
the final nails will have been hammered into the coffin of the hegemon. Trust is gone
hen United Airlines flight 1462 made an unexpected landing in Chicago last month, it was not due to mechanical issues, weather
conditions, or flight logistics, but a battle over legroom in the aisles. As one passenger
tried
to
recline her seat and another used a $20 device called a
Knee
Defender
to prevent the occupant ahead of him from leaning back, the battle over personal space descended into a scuffle. The
pilot opted to make an additional stop to remove the unruly passengers.
Flight 1462 hasn't been alone. Not just the random dispute of irate travelers, similar flights have been diverted because of the
airlines' frenzied drive to wring as much money out of customers as possible. Airlines are increasingly cramming more passengers
onto each flight, termed "densification," and regularly overbooking flights. Any aspect of a flight that was once provided free
of charge -- from a checked bag to a complementary drink to using a credit card to pay for a ticket -- can now be charged à la
carte.
So relentless has this nickel and diming been that when
news
reports
claimed the discount airline Ryan Air was about to start charging for in-flight bathroom use, many people took them
seriously. But the story wasn't true -- it was all a ploy for free press from a company unwilling to pay for advertising,
help
disabled
passengers, or
provide
ice
for drinks.
Such frugality is only one of the problems wrought by airline deregulation. If the greatest benefit of deregulation has been that
more people can afford to fly, it has come at the cost of increased tumult within the industry and
reduced
pay
for workers.
Before the airlines were deregulated under President Jimmy Carter, the Civil Aeronautics Bureau (CAB) maintained flight pricing
structures, airport gate access, and flight paths. There were rules that stipulated which airlines could compete in which market
and what prices they could charge. Loosening restrictions meant abandoning the CAB and its pricing structures, and allowing an
unmediated flow of competition.
With fewer restrictions, upstart fly-by-night airlines could compete against major airlines like American/US Airways, United,
Delta, Alaskan, and Hawaiian Airways. Such competition, conservative and
liberal
advocates
claimed, would bring down flight costs, providing more savings and convenience to the customer.
But allowing this level of competition also unleashed chaos. While the discount airlines would win over passengers for a time by
offering flights half as expensive, the major airlines would respond by slashing their prices in an attempt to drive the upstarts
out of business.
By drastically reducing ticket costs, the major airlines would take on an unsustainable amount of debt that, combined with the
loss of business to the new entrants, would lead to layoffs or bankruptcy. Pension funds were then raided and labor contracts
voided to pay for the price wars. With each airline company collapse, thousands of employees were laid off, decimating union
membership.
To compete, the legacy airlines also
drove down
the
salaries of their pilots, and cut benefits and vacation time. Besides a reduction in compensation, a two-tiered pay system has
been set up with decent pay for incumbent pilots and markedly low wages for new entrants.
Starting
salaries
for pilots are now as low as $15,000 a year, even as CEO pay rises inexorably.
Remarking
on
a career in which he had seen his pay cut in half and his pension eliminated, captain Sully Sullenberger told the BBC in 2009
that he did not know "a single professional pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps."
While unions were still strong in the industry, they were constantly embroiled in bitter labor disputes. Between the voided
contracts and the hemorrhaging membership caused by regular bankruptcy, they were left fighting to maintain wage standards in an
unnecessarily competitive industry.
The only way discount airlines could offer such low prices was by paying their workers less, using less experienced pilots and
sometimes non-unionized labor, offering fewer frills, and running spartan operations that only serviced a handful of routes with
a single type of jet liner (thus simplifying pilot and mechanic training). Instead of a single union representing
employees across the industry -- typified by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), which represented a majority of pilots --
some discount airlines maintained relationships with offshoot unions with smaller membership rolls and less leverage.
The discount airlines also depended on secondary, class-B airports that charged less in landing fees. But those discounts
eventually disappeared when the secondary airports no longer needed to cut their fees to attract business.
To maintain their dominance over the market, the major airlines shifted from a direct city-to-city flight standard to the
hub-and-spoke system of today. The hub-and-spoke setup allowed large centralized airports like Dallas-Ft. Worth and Atlanta to be
ruled by a single company that determines which flights can use which terminals and at what cost.
While the hub-and-spoke system has some benefits, it's largely inefficient, dependent as it is on multi-stage connecting flights.
Combined with the need to cut costs, it would also cause longer airport delays as planes were left waiting on the tarmac to make
sure all passengers from connecting flights made it aboard. A single delay in a connecting flight could throw passengers'
itineraries askew, leaving them stuck in a random airport overnight.
The major airlines used other tricks to keep out nascent airlines. They paid off travel agents and travel reservation sites to
give preference to their particular airline. They introduced frequent flier miles to maintain brand allegiance.
Upstart discount airlines like
Southwest
were
able to survive the vicious price wars by leaning on quality of service and direct flights, but most did not. The list of
companies that were liquidated, temporarily or permanently, as a result is impressively long considering what it takes to start
an airline: America West, PanAm, TransWorld, Western, Piedmont, Frontier, Northwest, National, Texas International, People
Express, ValuJet, Air Florida, Eastern, Braniff, Skytrain, Pacific Southwest, Western Pacific, and many more.
Once bankrupt, the major airlines then bought the upstarts, creating an effective oligopoly. So much for competition.
Already on a spending spree during the heady years of the 1990s dot-com boom, buying up failed companies only saddled major
airlines with more debt. While most people assume that the airlines had to be bailed out in 2001 because of the decrease in
traffic after the September 11 attacks, it was also because the airlines
were
insolvent
from previous financial problems, largely as a result of the price wars.
The actions of the major airlines may seem ruthless, but they were largely protecting their position in a deregulated industry
that allowed the discount airlines to undercut labor standards just to offer cheaper prices to customers. They were defending
themselves from disruption.
Considering the skill, education, and investment needed to maintain a safe and reliable airline, it is not exactly a business
that needs to be disrupted. Running an airline is labor intensive, and it only turns a profit at random intervals. There's little
money to be skimmed off.
With profit margins so thin, tickets on a half-empty flight have to cost twice as much as a fully booked one. Which is why, for a
time, smaller cities that weren't necessarily travel hubs bore the brunt of deregulation. Routes that weren't fully booked
experienced skyrocketing flight costs, which, for small-town travelers, was a huge disincentive to fly.
The bilking of transportation costs to and from smaller cities after a run of chaotic competition is eerily similar to what
happened during the railway mania of the 1800s. Investors rushed to build rail lines everywhere and anywhere while money was
flush. But once cash became tight, the rail industry used their monopoly power to charge exorbitant prices for anybody trying to
ship in and out of smaller towns like Cincinnati. Such predatory pricing is what led to transportation regulation in the first
place.
Since the 2001 airline bailout, things have calmed down a bit. It no longer costs $600 to fly from New York to Pittsburgh. Fewer
discount airlines are entering the market, and the handful that are still in operation work with the major airlines on various
routes (e.g. "flight provided by Frontier"). The price wars have settled to a quiet struggle played out on online travel
registration websites like Kayak.com and Hipmunk.com, which have wholly replaced the job of travel agents.
But for airlines, the lower revenue from cheaper tickets has to be made up somewhere, and convenience may be the easiest element
to remove. Airlines are pushing petty indignities on passengers and flight attendants by way of a million miscellaneous charges.
Half the time, the discounts saved by cheaper tickets from deregulation are recouped in add-on fees. Eventually airlines may just
offer extra-saver flights devoid of the most basic accommodations and simply force passengers who can't afford first-class seats
to be stacked in the cargo hold like cord wood.
So what's the alternative? The airline industry is close to being a natural monopoly, there's little reason to foster
competition. Indeed, the industry would benefit from nationalization or a well-regulated public option. At the very least, more
regulation is necessary.
Without subsidization and some rules about flight costs, there is little incentive for the airline industry to provide affordable
flights to locations that aren't fully booked. The irony is that we already subsidize airline travel. It just occurs through
bailouts and bankruptcies after each airline has fought tooth and nail for market dominance. Public funds wind up paying for a
wasteful, inefficient system characterized by irrational, destructive competition.
Through regulation or more aggressive means, it's quite possible to ensure good wages and working conditions and safe,
affordable, reliable service -- all without blackout dates, three layovers, or all-out battles for legroom.
He has long been a vocal critic of the Federal Aviation Administration, saying the agency
lacks the resources and willpower to aggressively police airlines and manufacturers.
Mr. Nader said Boeing may be exposed to civil and possibly criminal liability. After the
first fatal crash in October -- a Lion Air flight that crashed into the Java Sea minutes after
takeoff -- company officials "were put on notice about the problem" with an automated
stall-prevention system that can misfire and override pilot commands by repeatedly pushing down
an aircraft's nose, he said.
The Justice and Transportation Departments are
scrutinizing Boeing's dealings with the FAA over safety certifications, people familiar
with the matter have said.
... ... ...
Mr. Nader has expressed his concerns to lawmakers and former regulators, and called for
congressional hearings. Before
the U.S. grounded the planes last week, he championed the idea of a sweeping boycott of all
versions of 737 MAX aircraft. He also has stressed the importance of having Mr. Muilenburg,
Boeing's CEO, testify on Capitol Hill about safety issues with the fleet.
Criticizing Boeing's original design of the automated flight-control feature, dubbed MCAS,
Mr. Nader said it reflected a misguided view driven by engineering overconfidence and called it
"the arrogance of the algorithms."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
"... In Orwell's imagination, society was ruled in the future by Big Brother. It wasn't a computer, but rather the collective expression of the Party. But not like the Republicans; this Party was an autonomous bureaucracy and advanced surveillance state interested only in perpetuating itself as a hierarchy. In this dystopia, "the people" had become insignificant, without the power of "grasping that the world could be other than it is." ..."
"... Concepts like freedom were perverted by a ruthless Newspeakperpetuated by the Party through the media. A Goodthinker was someone who followed orders without thinking. Crimestop was the instinctual avoidance of any dangerous thought, and Doublethink was the constant distortion of reality to maintain the Party's image of infallibility. ..."
"... Writing in 1948, Orwell was projecting what could happen in just a few decades. By most measures, even 70 years later we're not quite there yet. But we do face the real danger that freedom and equality will be seriously distorted by a new form of Newspeak, a Trumpian version promoted by the administration and its allies through their media. We already have Trumpian Goodthinkers -- the sychophantic surrogates who follow his lead without thinking, along with Crimestop -- the instinctual avoidance of "disloyal" thought, and Doublethink -- the constant distortion of reality to maintain Trump's insatiable ego and image of infallibility. Orwellian ideas are simply resurfacing in a post-modern/reality TV form. ..."
"... As community life unravels and more institutions fall into disrepute, media have become among of the few remaining that can potentially facilitate some social cohesion. Yet instead they fuel conflict and crisis. It's not quite Crimestop, but does often appeal to some of the basest instincts and produce even more alienation and division. ..."
"... In 1980, Ralph Nader called the race for president at that time -- between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan -- a choice between mediocrity and menace. It was funny then, but now we can see what real menace looks like. Is Trump-ism what Orwell warned us about? Not quite, though there are similarities. Like Trump, you can't talk to Big Brother. And he rarely gives you the truth, only doublespeak. But Trump is no Big Brother. More like a Drunk Uncle with nukes. ..."
"... Security is tight and hard to avoid, on or offline. There are cameras everywhere, and every purchase and move most people make is tracked by the state. Still, there are four bombings in the first week of the Games. There is also another kind of human tragedy. Four runners collapse during preliminary rounds as a result of a toxic mix -- heat and pollution. ..."
"... Greg Guma is the Vermont-based author of Dons of Time, Uneasy Empire, Spirits of Desire, Big Lies, and The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. ..."
"... This article was originally published by Greg Guma: For Preservation & Change . ..."
More people are becoming alienated, cynical, resentful or resigned, while too much of
mass and social media reinforces less-than-helpful narratives and tendencies. The frog's in the
frying pan and the heat is rising.
On the big screens above us beautiful young people demonstrated their prowess. We were
sitting in the communications center, waiting for print outs to tell us what they'd done before
organizing the material for mass consumption. Outside, people were freezing in the snow as they
waited for buses. Their only choice was to attend another event or attempt to get home.
The area was known as the Competition Zone, a corporate state created for the sole purpose
of showcasing these gorgeous competitors. Freedom was a foreign idea here; no one was more free
than the laminated identification card hanging around your neck allowed.
Visitors were more restricted than anyone. They saw only what they paid for, and had to wait
in long lines for food, transport, or tickets to more events. They were often uncomfortable,
yet they felt privileged to be admitted to the Zone. Citizens were categorized by their
function within the Organizing Committee's bureaucracy. Those who merely served -- in jobs like
cooking, driving and cleaning -- wore green and brown tags. They could travel between their
homes and work, but were rarely permitted into events. Their contact with visitors was also
limited. To visit them from outside the Zone, their friends and family had to be screened.
Most citizens knew little about how the Zone was actually run, about the "inner community"
of diplomats, competitors and corporate officials they served. Yet each night they watched the
exploits of this same elite on television.
The Zone, a closed and classified place where most bad news went unreported and a tiny elite
called the shots through mass media and computers, was no futuristic fantasy. It was Lake
Placid for several weeks in early 1980 -- a full four years before 1984.
In a once sleepy little community covered with artificial snow, the Olympics had brought a
temporary society into being. Two thousand athletes and their entourage were its royalty, role
models for the throngs of spectators, townspeople and journalists. This convergence resulted in
an ad hoc police state, managed by public and private forces and a political elite that
combined local business honchos with an international governing committee. They dominated a
population all too willing to submit to arbitrary authority.
Even back then, Lake Placid's Olympic "village" felt like a preview of things to come. Not
quite George Orwell's dark vision, but uncomfortably close.
In Orwell's imagination, society was ruled in the future by Big Brother. It wasn't a
computer, but rather the collective expression of the Party. But not like the Republicans; this
Party was an autonomous bureaucracy and advanced surveillance state interested only in
perpetuating itself as a hierarchy. In this dystopia, "the people" had become insignificant,
without the power of "grasping that the world could be other than it is."
Concepts like freedom were perverted by a ruthless Newspeakperpetuated by the Party through
the media. A Goodthinker was someone who followed orders without thinking. Crimestop was the
instinctual avoidance of any dangerous thought, and Doublethink was the constant distortion of
reality to maintain the Party's image of infallibility.
Writing in 1948, Orwell was projecting what could happen in just a few decades. By most
measures, even 70 years later we're not quite there yet. But we do face the real danger that
freedom and equality will be seriously distorted by a new form of Newspeak, a Trumpian version
promoted by the administration and its allies through their media. We already have Trumpian
Goodthinkers -- the sychophantic surrogates who follow his lead without thinking, along with
Crimestop -- the instinctual avoidance of "disloyal" thought, and Doublethink -- the constant
distortion of reality to maintain Trump's insatiable ego and image of infallibility. Orwellian
ideas are simply resurfacing in a post-modern/reality TV form.
Our fast food culture is also taking a long-term toll. More and more people are becoming
alienated, cynical, resentful or resigned, while too much of mass and social media reinforces
less-than-helpful narratives and tendencies. The frog's in the frying pan and the heat is
rising.
Much of what penetrates and goes viral further fragments culture and thought, promoting a
cynicism that reinforces both rage and inaction. Rather than true diversity, we have the mass
illusion that a choice between polarized opinions, shaped and curated by editors and networks,
is the essence of free speech and democracy. In reality, original ideas are so constrained and
self-censored that what's left is usually as diverse as brands of peppermint toothpaste.
When the Bill of Rights was ratified, the notion that freedom of speech and the press should
be protected meant that the personal right of self-expression should not be repressed by the
government. James Madison, author of the First Amendment, warned that the greatest danger to
liberty was that a majority would use its power to repress everyone else. Yet the evolution of
mass media and the corporate domination of economic life have made these "choicest privileges"
almost obsolete.
As community life unravels and more institutions fall into disrepute, media have become
among of the few remaining that can potentially facilitate some social cohesion. Yet instead
they fuel conflict and crisis. It's not quite Crimestop, but does often appeal to some of the
basest instincts and produce even more alienation and division.
In general terms, what most mass media bring the public is a series of images and anecdotes
that cumulatively define a way of life. Both news and entertainment contribute to the illusion
that competing, consuming and accumulating are at the core of our aspirations. Each day we are
repeatedly shown and told that culture and politics are corrupt, that war is imminent or
escalating somewhere, that violence is random and pervasive, and yet also that the latest
"experts" have the answers. Countless programs meanwhile celebrate youth, violence, frustrated
sexuality, and the lives of celebrities.
Between the official program content are a series of intensely packaged sales pitches. These
commercial messages wash over us, as if we are wandering in an endless virtual mall, searching
in vain for fulfillment as society crumbles.
In 1980, Ralph Nader called the race for president at that time -- between Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan -- a choice between mediocrity and menace. It was funny then, but now we can see
what real menace looks like. Is Trump-ism what Orwell warned us about? Not quite, though there
are similarities. Like Trump, you can't talk to Big Brother. And he rarely gives you the truth,
only doublespeak. But Trump is no Big Brother. More like a Drunk Uncle with nukes.
So, is it too late for a rescue? Will menace win this time? Or can we still save the
environment, reclaim self-government, restore communities and protect human rights? What does
the future hold?
It could be summer in Los Angeles in 2024, the end of Donald Trump's second term. The
freeways are slow-moving parking lots for the Olympics. Millions of people hike around in the
heat, or use bikes and cycles to get to work. It's difficult with all the checkpoints, not to
mention the extra-high security at the airports. Thousands of police, not to mention the
military, are on the lookout for terrorists, smugglers, protesters, cultists, gangs, thieves,
and anyone who doesn't have money to burn or a ticket to the Games.
Cash isn't much good, and gas has become so expensive that suburban highways are almost
empty.
Security is tight and hard to avoid, on or offline. There are cameras everywhere, and every
purchase and move most people make is tracked by the state. Still, there are four bombings in
the first week of the Games. There is also another kind of human tragedy. Four runners collapse
during preliminary rounds as a result of a toxic mix -- heat and pollution.
... ... ...
Greg Guma is the Vermont-based author of Dons of Time, Uneasy Empire, Spirits of Desire,
Big Lies, and The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution.
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
"... Yes, Minister was a neoliberal attack on government as such. It set the "entrepreneurial" political hero/leader against the corrupt "civil service". ..."
"... Following this line of reasoning, it seems to me that the US military establishment has been in decline ever since the Pentagon was built and the temporary Navy Dept. buildings erected on the National Mall were razed ..."
"... Being that the Pentagon opened in 1943 and the buildings on the Mall were razed in 1970, which roughly coincides with our costly imperial adventures in Korea and Vietnam, I think Parkinson's Law #6 is dead on here. ..."
Years ago, while working in an Australian state public service department, we considered 'Yes Minister' to be a documentary,
and used it amongst ourselves as training material.
Yes, Minister was a neoliberal attack on government as such. It set the "entrepreneurial" political hero/leader against the
corrupt "civil service". It made the latter the "deep state", thereby tainting forever the welfare state as an evil hidden conspiracy
that (mysteriously) pandered to the meritocratically worthless. If that is what you mean by "Deep State" then you can have it.
It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse . [P]erfection
of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters.
The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is
death.
Following this line of reasoning, it seems to me that the US military establishment has been in decline ever since the Pentagon
was built and the temporary Navy Dept. buildings erected on the National Mall were razed.
Being that the Pentagon opened in 1943
and the buildings on the Mall were razed in 1970, which roughly coincides with our costly imperial adventures in Korea and Vietnam,
I think Parkinson's Law #6 is dead on here.
Conventional wisdom is that it is too early to speculate why in the past six months two
Boeing 737 Max 8 planes have gone down shortly after take off, so if all that follows is wrong
you will know it very quickly. Last night I predicted that the first withdrawals of the plane
would happen within two days, and this morning China withdrew it. So far, so good. (Indonesia
followed a few hours ago).
Why should I stick my neck out with further predictions? First, because we must speculate
the moment something goes wrong. It is natural, right and proper to note errors and try to
correct them.(The authorities are always against "wild" speculation, and I would be in
agreement with that if they had an a prior definition of wildness). Second, because putting
forward hypotheses may help others test them (if they are not already doing so). Third, because
if the hypotheses turn out to be wrong, it will indicate an error in reasoning, and will be an
example worth studying in psychology, so often dourly drawn to human fallibility. Charmingly,
an error in my reasoning might even illuminate an error that a pilot might make, if poorly
trained, sleep-deprived and inattentive.
I think the problem is that the Boeing anti-stall patch MCAS is poorly configured for pilot
use: it is not intuitive, and opaque in its consequences.
By the way of full disclosure, I have held my opinion since the first Lion Air crash in
October, and ran it past a test pilot who, while not responsible for a single word here, did
not argue against it. He suggested that MCAS characteristics should have been in a special
directive and drawn to the attention of pilots.
I am normally a fan of Boeing. I have flown Boeing more than any other plane, and that might
make me loyal to the brand. Even more powerfully, I thought they were correct to carry on with
the joystick yoke, and that AirBus was wrong to drop it, simply because the position of the
joystick is something visible to pilot and co-pilot, whereas the Airbus side stick does not
show you at a glance how high the nose of the plane is pointing.
Pilots are bright people, but they must never be set a badly configured test item with tight
time limits and potentially fatal outcomes.
The Air France 447 crash had several ingredients, but one was that the pilots of the Airbus
A330-203 took too long to work out they were in a stall. In fact, that realization only hit
them very shortly before they hit the ocean. Whatever the limitations of the crew (sleep
deprived captain, uncertain co-pilot) they were blinded by a frozen Pitot air speed indicator,
and an inability to set the right angle of attack for their airspeed.
For the industry, the first step was to fit better air speed indicators which were less
likely to ice up. However, it was clear that better stall warning and protection was
required.
Boeing had a problem with fitting larger and heavier engines to their tried and trusted 737
configuration, meaning that the engines had to be higher on the wing and a little forwards, and
that made the 737 Max have different performance characteristics, which in turn led to the need
for an anti-stall patch to be put into the control systems.
It is said that generals always fight the last war. Safety officials correct the last
problem, as they must. However, sometimes a safety system has unintended consequences.
The key of the matter is that pilots fly normal 737s every day, and have internalized a
mental model of how that plane operates. Pilots probably actually read manuals, and safety
directives, and practice for rare events. However, I bet that what they know best is how a
plane actually operates most of the time. (I am adjusting to a new car, same manufacturer and
model as the last one, but the 9 years of habit are still often stronger than the manual-led
actions required by the new configuration). When they fly a 737 Max there is a bit of software
in the system which detects stall conditions and corrects them automatically. The pilots should
know that, they should adjust to that, they should know that they must switch off that system
if it seems to be getting in the way, but all that may be steps too far, when something so
important is so opaque.
What is interesting is that in emergencies people rely on their most validated mental
models: residents fleeing a burning building tend to go out their usual exits, not even the
nearest or safest exit. Pilots are used to pulling the nose up and pushing it down, to adding
power and to easing back on it, and when a system takes over some of those decisions, they need
to know about it.
After Lion Air I believed that pilots had been warned about the system, but had not paid
sufficient attention to its admittedly complicated characteristics, but now it is claimed that
the system was not in the training manual anyway. It was deemed a safety system that pilots did
not need to know about.
This farrago has an unintended consequence, in that it may be a warning about artificial
intelligence. Boeing may have rated the correction factor as too simple to merit human
attention, something required mainly to correct a small difference in pitch characteristics
unlikely to be encountered in most commercial flying, which is kept as smooth as possible for
passenger comfort.
It would be terrible if an apparently small change in automated safety systems designed to
avoid a stall turned out have given us a rogue plane, killing us to make us safe.
Pilots are used to pulling the nose up and pushing it down, to adding power and to
easing back on it, and when a system takes over some of those decisions, they need to know
about it.
I have read that Boeing kept MCAS out of the limelight as otherwise the 737 MAX would need
to be certified as a new plane and airlines would need to do $$$ pilot retraining, making
their product less competitive.
Interesting response from a "by-stander", who compares a sophisticated aircraft with a new
model car !!!
As an experienced captain on 737s (not the MAX) I say, let the investigation begin; and
let us not have by-standers giving their penny worth. A normal 737 . is there also an
abnormal 747 or 777 or 787, or a 737 ??
Pilots carry the can . but, are the most respected profession in the world. What ever
happened, let the investigation decide the outcome, and not the "un-trained" (is there such a
term !!!!).
If one takes a look at the (released to date) information about the Lion Air crash –
"unreliable airspeeds" (the airspeed indicator is providing erroneous information during a
critical phase of flight (like climb out after take-off)) could have been the cause of that
aircraft crash – not AI.
A simple explanation – the airspeed indicator is "unreliable", as one moment the
indication is under-speed, then overspeed, followed by under-speed, and so it goes; like a
yoyo going up and down; the indicated speed is erroneous and the pilots cannot rely on what
is presented on the airspeed indicator. Pilots, according to the Boeing Training Manual, are
trained to handle unreliable airspeeds – the key is to fly the plane based solely on
pitch attitude and thrust (there are memory items for unreliable airspeed occurrences, along
with the reference items in aircraft's Quick Reference Handbook – the QRH (Boeing term)
is the pilots "bible" for any issues and problems when the aircraft is in the air !! ).
The point of the above paragraph is to enlighten the 'un-trained' as to not speculate too
soon with ideas and a "hypothesis" of what may have happened, until the knowledgeable ones
– the aircraft manufacturer (probably being the most knowledgable), the country's
aviation authority, the engine manufacturer, and (dear I say) the FAA (the Yanks just cannot
help themselves delving into other countries' affairs; when for 9/11 not one minutes was
spent by anyone (FAA, Boeing, no one) investigating the so-called crashes of four aircraft
– on one day, within one and a half hours of each other, and in the most protected
airspace in the world (got the hint !!) – I have digressed, though for reason .. have
completed their investigations.
I can assure you that no pilot wants to crash a plane we (pilots) all want to live to 100,
and beyond.
Humans make mistakes, but technology needs humans to correct technology's mistakes. Boeing
build reliable and trustworthy aircraft; pilots undertake their duties in a safe and
controlled manner (according to training and aircraft manufacturer stipulated standards); but
errors happen – and the investigator is there to establish what happened, so that these
do not happen again. Unfortunately, it is just possible that the cause of the first MAX
accident is the same as the second. But, let the knowledgable ones determine that fact
– and let me, and us, not speculate.
AI in the MAX hhmmmmm – let Boeing release that information, before we start
speculating again (on AI – is an auto pilot AI; the B737 I fly has two auto pilots; is
that double AI ??).
To the rest of the travelling public – airline travel remains, and has been, the
safest form of transport for decades. I am confident that the status quo will remain.
Time will reveal the answers to these two accidents, when the time is right – when
the investigators (for both) have concluded their deliberations.
My guess is, the majority of people will have forgotten these two MAX events (but, for
those who have lost loved ones), as some other crisis/event will have occurred in their lives
and/or in the world.
@Captain 737 I respect your analysis especially coming from a seasoned 737 captain. I
have over 5,000 flying hours in single and twin-engine, conventional and jet, all military. I
have not flown since 1974 so the advances in auto-pilot technology are beyond my
comprehension. My question to you is simple–I think. If the aircraft took off in VFR
conditions I assume the pilots knew the pitch attitude all during the takeoff phase. Is there
no way to manually overpower the auto-pilot once the pilots knew the pitch attitude was
dangerously high or low?
If this is a made in china airplane, the empire would mobilize the whole world to ground the
entire fleet. The diatribes, lies, cruel sick jokes, lawsuits, etc, etc, would fly to the
heavens.
But NO, this is an empire plane. Designed, built and (tested?) in the heart of the empire.
And despite the fact that more than 300 people had died, IT IS STILL SAFE to fly!
Quite a short and to-the-point article, although the link to "artificial intelligence" is
tenuous at best.
What is sold as Artificial Intelligence nowadays is massive statistical processing in a
black box (aka as "Neural Network Processing"), it's not intelligent.
The most surprising fact is that it works so well.
Neural Networks won't be in high-assurance software soon. No-one knows what they really do
once configured (although there are efforts underway to
attack that problem ). They are impossible to really test or design to specification.
Will someone underwrite that a system incorporating them does work? Hardly. You may find them
in consumer electronics, research, "self driving cars" that never really self-drive without
surprises and possibly
bleeding edge military gear looking for customers or meant to explode messily anyway.
But not in cockpits. (At least I hope).
Check out this slideshow about the ACAS-X
Next Generation Collision Airborne Collision Avoidance System. It has no neural network in
sight, in fact if I understand correctly it doesn't even have complex decision software
in-cockpit: it's all decision tables precomputed from a high-level, understandable
description (aka. code, apparently in Julia) to assure safe outcome in a fully testable and
simulatable approach.
In this accident, we may have a problem with the system, as opposed to with the software.
While the software may work correctly and to specification (and completely unintelligently)
the system composed of software + human + physical machinery will interact in interesting,
unforeseen, untested ways, leading to disaster. In fact the (unintelligent software + human)
part may disturbingly behave like those Neural Networks that are being sold as AI.
@Anatoly Karlin I'm guessing that it would require a change in the TCDS and possibly a
different type rating, which would be anathema for sales.
I'm a little airplane person, not a big airplane person (and the 737 is a Big Airplane
even in its smallest configuration) but I know there have been several instances where
aircraft had changes that required that pilots of the type have a whole different type
rating, even though the changes seemed minor. I'm guessing airlines are training averse and
don't want to take crews off revenue service beyond what is statutorily required. The margins
in airline flying are apparently much leaner now than in the glory days.
I never approved of allowing fly by wire in commercial airliners, I never even really
liked the idea of FADEC engine control (supervisory DEC was fine) because a classical
advantage of gas turbines (and diesels) was that they could run in an absolutely electrically
dead environment once lit. Indeed, the J-58 (JT11-D in P&W parlance) had no electrical
system to speak of beyond the instrumentation: it started by mechanical shaft drive and
ignited by triethyl borane chemical injection. The Sled could make it home on needle-ball and
alcohol compass, and at least once it did. Total electrical failure in any FBW aircraft means
losing the airplane. Is the slight gain in efficiency worth it? I'm told the cables, pulleys,
fairleads and turnbuckles add 200 pounds to a medium size airliner, the FBW stuff weighs 80
or so.
The jet transports we studied in A&P school had a pitot head and static port on either
side of the flight deck and the captain and F/O had inputs from different ones, though IIRC
the altimeter and airspeed were electrically driven from sensors at the pitot head or inboard
of it. I have a 727 drum-pointer (why are three pointer altimeters even legal anymore??)
altimeter and it has no aneroids, just a couple of PCBs full of TTL logic and op amps and a
DB style connector on the back. Do crews not cross check airspeed and altitude or is there no
indicator to flag them when the two show something different?
Also, not being a jet pilot myself, my understanding is that anyone with T-38 experience
is forever after thinking in terms of AOA and not airspeed per se, because that airplane has
to be flown by AOA in the pattern, and classically a lot of airline pilots had flown Talons.
Is there no AOA indicator in the 737? Flying in the pattern/ILS would make airspeed pretty
dependent on aircraft weight, and on a transport that can change a lot with fuel burn, do
they precisely calculate current weight from a totalizer and notate speeds needed? (I presume
airliners don't vary weight other than fuel burn, not being customarily in the business of
throwing stuff out of the airplane, although they used to fly jumpers out of a chartered 727
at the parachute meet in Quincy)
Many problems in the world arise because many computing people reckon themselves very clever
when they are merely rather clever. And often they combine what cleverness they have with a
blindness about humans and their ways. I shouldn't be at all surprised if programmers at
Boeing decided that they always knew better than pilots and doomed the planes accordingly.
I saw recently an expression that made me grin: "midwits". It describes rather well many
IT types of my acquaintance.
@fish And that's the problem, as Mr. Kief also points out. The individuals at the
decision making level (let's call them "executives") don't or can't think that far ahead, at
least when the corporation they run is concerneed.
@dearieme One corollary is that the Midwits take such joy in their cleverness that they
assume their wit has value in and of itself. This is most evident when they design clever
solutions to invented problems. Billions of dollars of venture capital have been set on fire
in that way, when technical and financial midwittery combine.
@Andrei Martyanov It's almost nitpicking. But – James Thompson says it above: The
MCAS in this Boing model 737 MAX 8 is used to cover up a basic construction flaw. This has
undoubtedly worked for quite some time – but it came with a risk. And this risk might
turn out to have caused numerous deaths. In this case, if it will turn out, that the MACS
system didn't do what it was supposed to do and thus caused numerous deaths – will this
then be looked upon as a problem of the application of artificial intelligence? Yes, but
not only . It was a combination of a poorly built (constructed) airliner and software,
which might not have been able to compensate for this flawed construction under all
conditions.
It's cheaper to compensate via software – and this might (might) turn out to be a
rather irresponsible way to save money. But as I said: Even in this case, the technical
problem would have to be looked upon as twofold: Poor construction plus insufficient
software compensation. I'd even tend to say, that poor construction would then be the main
(=basic) fault. With the zeitgeisty (and cheap!) software-"solution" for this poor
construction a close second.
@Captain 737 Curiously, this is "Captain 737″'s first and only comment here.
It's almost as if Boeing hired a high-priced PR firm whose offerings include pseudonymous
online "messaging" to "shape opposition perceptions" etc. Note the over-obvious handle. (Just
like globalist shills like to pretend to be regular blue-collar guys in small fly-over
towns.)
By their words shalt ye know them.
PREDICTION: In 3-4 years, we will "discover" a long paper trail of engineers warning early
on about the risk of hastily kludging a half-assed anti-stall patch MCAS onto a system that
had undergone years of testing and refinement WITHOUT the patch.
Only somebody PAID not to see the problem could fail to perceive that this means that as
so altered, the ENTIRE SYSTEM goes back to being technically immature.
@Dieter Kief What "basic construction flaw" are we discussing here? The 737 airframe is
pretty well established and has a good record-there have been incidents but most have been
well dealt with.
@Anonymous I've read today, that in the aviation world there is a consensus, that what
James Thompson says in his article is right:
"Boeing had a problem with fitting larger and heavier engines to their tried and trusted 737
configuration, meaning that the engines had to be higher on the wing and a little forwards,
and that made the 737 Max have different performance characteristics, which in turn led to
the need for an anti-stall patch to be put into the control systems."
– A German engineer wrote in a comment in the Berlin daily Die weLT, this
construction flaw makes the 737 MAX 8 something like a flying traktor . He concluded,
that Boing proved, that you can make a tractor fly, alright. But proper engineering would
have looked otherwise – and would for sure had come at a higher cost.
(The different performance charactersitics mentioned by James Thompson is an
extraordinarily nice way to express, that the 737 MAX 8 is a tad more likely to stall, just
because of the very design-changes, the bigger turbines made necessary. And this is a rather
nasty thing to say about an airplane, that a new design made it more likely to stall!
).
The 737 family is the best selling commercial airliner series in history with more than
10,000 units produced. However, this airplane in its various configurations has had many
crashes since it first entered service in 1968.
"... Instead of serving as a counter weight to the market, then, the family was invaded and undermined by the market. The sentimental veneration of motherhood, even at the peak of its influence in the late nineteenth century, could never quite obscure the reality that unpaid labour bears the stigma of social inferiority when money becomes the universal measure of value. ..."
"... Commercial television dramatizes in the most explicit terms the cynicism that was always implicit in the ideology of the marketplace. The sentimental convention that the best things in life are free has long since passed into oblivion. Since the best things clearly cost a great deal of money, people seek money, in the world depicted by commercial television, by fair means or foul. ..."
"... Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and (not withstanding its initial misgivings about government) toward the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle-the cardinal principle of liberalism-that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighbourhood, the school, and the church, all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. ..."
"... The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pres sure on every activity to justify itself in the only items it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image. ..."
"... In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens social trust, undermines the willingness both assume responsibility for one's self and to hold others accountable for their actions destroys respect for authority and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Neighbourhoods, which can serve as intermediaries between the family and the larger world. Neighbourhoods have been destroyed not only by the market-by crime and drugs or less dramatically by suburban shopping malls-but also by enlightened social engineering. ..."
"... "The myth that playgrounds and grass and hired guards or supervisors are innately wholesome for children and that city streets, filled with ordinary people, are innately evil for children, boils down to a deep contempt for ordinary people." In their contempt planners lose sight of the way in which city streets, if they are working as they should, teach children a lesson that cannot be taught by educators or professional caretakers: that "people must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other." When the corner grocer or the locksmith scolds a child for running into the street, the child learns something that can't be learned simply by formal instruction. ..."
"... The crisis of public funding is only one indication of the intrinsic weakness of organizations that can no longer count on informal, everyday mechanisms of social trust and control. ..."
If terms like "populism" and "community" figure prominently in political discourse today, it is because the ideology of the Enlightenment,
having come under attack from a variety of sources, has lost much of its appeal. The claims of universal reason are universally suspect.
Hopes for a system of values that would transcend the particularism of class, nationality, religion, and race no longer carry much
conviction. The Enlightenment's reason and morality are increasingly seen as a cover for power, and the prospect that the world can
he governed by reason seems more remote than at any time since the eighteenth century. The citizen of the world-the prototype of
mankind in the future, according to the Enlightenment philosophers-is not much in evidence. We have a universal market, but it does
not carry with it the civilizing effects that were so confidently expected by Hume and Voltaire. Instead of generating a new appreciation
of common interests and inclinations-if the essential sameness of human beings everywhere-the global market seems to intensify the
awareness of ethnic and national differences. The unification of the market goes hand in hand with the fragmentation of culture.
The waning of the Enlightenment manifests itself politically in the waning of liberalism, in many ways the most attractive product
of the Enlightenment and the carrier of its best hopes. Through all the permutations and transformations of liberal ideology, two
of its central features have persisted over the years: its commitment to progress and its belief that a liberal state could dispense
with civic virtue. The two ideas were linked in a chain of reasoning having as its premise that capitalism had made it reason able
for everyone to aspire to a level of comfort formerly accessible only to the rich. Henceforth men would devote themselves to their
private business, reducing the need for government, which could more or less take care of itself. It was the idea of progress that
made it possible to believe that societies blessed with material abundance could dispense with the active participation of ordinary
citizens in government.
After the American Revolution liberals began to argue-in opposition to the older view that "public virtue is the only foundation
of republics," in the words of John Adams -- that proper constitutional checks and balances would make it advantageous even for bad
men to act for the public good," as James Wilson put it. According to John Taylor, "an avaricious society can form a government able
to defend itself against the avarice of its members" by enlisting the "interest of vice ...on the side of virtue." Virtue lay in
the "principles of government," Taylor argued, not in the "evanescent qualities of individuals." The institutions and "principles
of a society may be virtuous, though the individuals composing it are vicious."
Meeting minimal conditions
The paradox of a virtuous society based on vicious individuals, however agree able in theory, was never adhered to very consistently.
Liberals took for granted a good deal more in the way of private virtue than they were willing to acknowledge. Even to day liberals
who adhere to this minimal view of citizenship smuggle a certain amount of citizenship between the cracks of their free- market ideology.
Milton Friedman himself admits that a liberal society requires a "minimum degree of literacy and knowledge" along with a "widespread
acceptance of some common set of values." It is not clear that our society can meet even these minimal conditions, as things stand
today, but it has always been clear, in any case, that a liberal society needs more virtue than Friedman allows for.
A system that relies so heavily on the concept of rights presupposes individuals who respect the rights of others, if only because
they expect others to respect their own rights in return. The market itself, the central institution of a liberal society, presupposes,
at the very least, sharp-eyed, calculating, and clearheaded individuals-paragons of rational choice. It presupposes not just self
interest but enlightened self-interest. It was for this reason that nineteenth-century liberals attached so much importance to the
family. The obligation to support a wife and children, in their view, would discipline possessive individualism and transform the
potential gambler, speculator, dandy, or confidence man into a conscientious provider. Having abandoned the old republican ideal
of citizenship along with the republican indictment of luxury, liberals lacked any grounds on which to appeal to individuals to subordinate
private interest to the public good.
But at least they could appeal to the higher selfishness of marriage and parenthood. They could ask, if not for the suspension
of self-interest, for its elevation and refinement. The hope that rising expectations would lead men and women to invest their ambitions
in their offspring was destined to be disappointed in the long run. The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate
gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce
rate, already a source of alarm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seemed to reflect a growing impatience with the constraints
imposed by long responsibilities and commitments.
The passion to get ahead had begun to imply the right to make a fresh start whenever earlier commitments became unduly burden
some. Material abundance weakened the economic as well as the moral foundations of the "well-'ordered family state" admired by nineteenth-century
liberals. The family business gave way to the corporation, the family farm (more slowly and painfully) to a collectivized agriculture
ultimately controlled by the same banking houses that had engineered the consolidation of industry. The agrarian uprising of the
1870s, 1880s, and l890s proved to be the first round in a long, losing struggle to save the family farm, enshrined in American mythology,
even today, as the sine qua non of a good society but subjected into practice to a ruinous cycle of mechanization, indebtedness,
and overproduction.
The family invaded
Instead of serving as a counter weight to the market, then, the family was invaded and undermined by the market. The sentimental
veneration of motherhood, even at the peak of its influence in the late nineteenth century, could never quite obscure the reality
that unpaid labour bears the stigma of social inferiority when money becomes the universal measure of value.
In the long run women were forced into the workplace not only because their families needed extra income but because paid labour
seemed to represent their only hope of gaining equality with men. In our time it is increasingly clear that children pay the price
for this invasion of the family by the market. With both parents in the workplace and grandparents conspicuous by their absence,
the family is no longer capable of sheltering children from the market. The television set becomes the principal baby-sitter by default.
Its invasive presence deals the final blow to any lingering hope that the family can provide a sheltered space for children to grow
up in.
Children are now exposed to the out side world from the time they are old enough to be left unattended in front of the tube. They
are exposed to it, moreover, in a brutal yet seductive form that reduces the values of the marketplace to their simplest terms.
Commercial television dramatizes in the most explicit terms the cynicism that was always implicit in the ideology of the marketplace.
The sentimental convention that the best things in life are free has long since passed into oblivion. Since the best things clearly
cost a great deal of money, people seek money, in the world depicted by commercial television, by fair means or foul.
Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and (not withstanding
its initial misgivings about government) toward the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the
principle-the cardinal principle of liberalism-that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore
be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speak
for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there
are no values except those of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighbourhood,
the school, and the church, all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market.
The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to
principles antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market
tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pres sure on every activity to justify itself in the only items it recognizes:
to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship
into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its
own image.
Weakening social trust
In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves
to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens
social trust, undermines the willingness both assume responsibility for one's self and to hold others accountable for their actions
destroys respect for authority and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Neighbourhoods, which can serve as intermediaries between
the family and the larger world. Neighbourhoods have been destroyed not only by the market-by crime and drugs or less dramatically
by suburban shopping malls-but also by enlightened social engineering.
The main thrust of social policy, ever since the first crusades against child labour, has been to transfer the care of children
from informal settings to institutions designed specifically for pedagogical and custodial purposes. Today this trend continues in
the movement for daycare, often justified on the undeniable grounds that working mothers need it but also on the grounds that daycare
centers can take advantage of the latest innovations in pedagogy and child psychology. This policy of segregating children in age-graded
institutions under professional supervision has been a massive failure, for reasons suggested some time ago by Jane Jacobs in The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, an attack on city planning that applies to social planning in general.
"The myth that playgrounds and grass and hired guards or supervisors are innately wholesome for children and that city streets,
filled with ordinary people, are innately evil for children, boils down to a deep contempt for ordinary people." In their contempt
planners lose sight of the way in which city streets, if they are working as they should, teach children a lesson that cannot be
taught by educators or professional caretakers: that "people must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if
they have no ties to each other." When the corner grocer or the locksmith scolds a child for running into the street, the child learns
something that can't be learned simply by formal instruction.
What the child learns is that adults unrelated to one another except by the accident of propinquity uphold certain standards and
assume responsibility for the neighbourhood. With good reason, Jacobs calls this the "first fundamental of successful city life,"
one that "people hired to look after children cannot teach because the essence of this responsibility is that you do it without being
hired."
Neighbourhoods encourage "casual public trust," according to Jacobs. In its absence the everyday maintenance of life has to be
turned over to professional bureaucrats. The atrophy of informal controls leads irresistibly to the expansion of bureaucratic controls.
This development threatens to extinguish the very privacy liberals have always set such store by. It also loads the organizational
sector with burdens it cannot support. The crisis of public funding is only one indication of the intrinsic weakness of organizations
that can no longer count on informal, everyday mechanisms of social trust and control.
The taxpayers' revolt, although itself informed by an ideology of privatism resistant to any kind of civic appeals, at the same
time grows out of a well-founded suspicion that tax money merely sustains bureaucratic self-aggrandizement
The lost habit of self-help
As formal organizations break down, people will have to improvise ways of meeting their immediate needs: patrolling their own
neighbourhoods, withdrawing their children from public schools in order to educate them at home. The default of the state will thus
contribute in its own right to the restoration of informal mechanisms of self-help. But it is hard to see how the foundations of
civic life can be restored unless this work becomes an overriding goal of public policy. We have heard a good deal of talk about
the repair of our material infrastructure, but our cultural infrastructure needs attention too, and more than just the rhetorical
attention of politicians who praise "family values" while pursuing economic policies that undermine them. It is either naive or cynical
to lead the public to think that dismantling the welfare state is enough to ensure a revival of informal cooperation-"a thousand
points of light." People who have lost the habit of self-help, who live in cities and suburbs where shopping malls have replaced
neighbourhoods, and who prefer the company of close friends (or simply the company of television) to the informal sociability of
the street, the coffee shop, and the tavern are not likely to reinvent communities just because the state has proved such an unsatisfactory
substitute. Market mechanisms will not repair the fabric of public trust. On the contrary the market's effect on the cultural infrastructure
is just as corrosive as that of the state.
A third way
We can now begin to appreciate the appeal of populism and communitarianism. They reject both the market and the welfare state
in pursuit of a third way. This is why they are so difficult to classify on the conventional spectrum of political opinion. Their
opposition to free-market ideologies seems to align them with the left, but 'their criticism of the welfare state (whenever this
criticism becomes open and explicit) makes them sound right-wing. In fact, these positions belong to neither the left nor the right,
and for that very reason they seem to many people to hold out the best hope of breaking the deadlock of current debate, which has
been institutionalized in the two major parties and their divided control of the federal government. At a time when political debate
consists of largely of ideological slogans endlessly repeated to audiences composed mainly of the party faithful, fresh thinking
is desperately needed. It is not likely to emerge, however, from those with a vested interest in 'the old orthodoxies. We need a
"third way of thinking about moral obligation," as Alan Wolfe puts it, one that locates moral obligation neither in the state nor
in the market but "in common sense, ordinary emotions, and everyday life."
Wolfe's plea for a political program designed to strengthen civil society, which closely resembles the ideas advanced in The Good
Society by Robert Bellah and his collaborators, should be welcomed by the growing numbers of people who find themselves dissatisfied
with the alternatives defined by conventional debate. These authors illustrate the strengths of the communitarian position along
with some of its characteristic weaknesses. They make it clear that both the market and the state presuppose the strength of "non-economic
ties of trust and solidarity" as Wolfe puts it. Yet the expansion of these institutions weakens ties of trust and thus undermines
the preconditions for their own success. The market and the "job culture," Bellah writes, are "invading our private lives," eroding
our "moral infrastructure" of "social trust." Nor does the welfare state repair the damage. "The example of more successful welfare
states ... suggests that money and bureaucratic assistance alone do not halt the decline of the family" or strengthen any of the
other "sustaining institutions that make interdependence morally significant." None of this means that a politics that really mattered-a
politics rooted in popular common sense instead of the ideologies that appeal to elites-would painlessly resolve all the conflicts
that threaten to tear the country apart. Communitarians underestimate the difficulty of finding an approach to family issues, say,
that is both profamily and profeminist.
That may be what the public wants in theory. In practice, however, it requires a restructuring of the workplace designed to make
work schedules far more flexible, career patterns less rigid and predictable, and criteria for advancement less destructive to family
and community obligations. Such reforms imply interference with the market and a redefinition of success, neither of which will be
achieved without a great deal of controversy.
"... It would seem that many of the Trotskyites of the past have now become neocons favouring capitalism and imperialist military intervention under guise of "human rights" promotion, as have some other communists. ..."
@Commentator Mike
Today's system is a hybrid of a late finance-stage global capitalism and cultural–not
economic–Marxism. Instead of class struggle, we have identity politics. Instead of the
ownership of the means of production, we have tranny bathrooms.
So the right-wingers (like Peter Hitchens) who say that 'Marxism won' are half right
culturally, not economically. What causes all the confusion (among the libertarian types
especially) is that capitalism in reality does not in any way resemble how it ought to
work according to libertarian theories and never did. But when you point out to them
that capitalism never worked in practice to begin with, they answer: 'But true
capitalism has never even been tried!' And of course, they're right. 'True' capitalism (i.e.,
what libertarian theory calls capitalism) really never has been tried, and for exactly the
same reason that perpetual motion machines have never been tried either: they're
impossible.
None of which means I'm a 'pure' socialist. I'm open to mixed-economies and new
experiments. I usually characterize myself more as a national socialist, mostly to
differentiate myself from the 'world revolution' Trotskyite socialists who now predominate on
the far-left.
That means I also take some inspiration from some fascists and national-syndicalists,
although I don't regard any of them as holy writ, either.
In my opinion, the number one success factor for a civilization is not what theory
it professes, but rather who controls it. Theories will always have to be modified to
suit the circumstances; but the character of a people is much harder to change.
China's prospering because it's controlled by Chinese engineers; our civilization is
suffocating because it's controlled by Jew-bankers and Masonic lawyers. Get rid of them
first, and we can debate monetary theory till we're blue in the face.
I think that applying the old concepts of Marxism is no longer possible in the west since
there is hardly a genuine proletariat as a proper class any more with the deindustrialisation
and the transfer of major industries to China and other Asian and Latin American countries.
On the other hand the lumpenproletariat has grown and will grow further with greater
automation in industry.
Many more people are now unemployed, underemployed, in service industries, part-time and
temporary jobs, or ageing old age pensioners and retirees.
With the greater atomisation of the individual, break up of families, greater mobility,
the concept of classes rooted long-term in their communities seems less applicable. You could
say most of the global proletariat is now in China.
It would seem that many of the Trotskyites of the past have now become neocons favouring
capitalism and imperialist military intervention under guise of "human rights" promotion, as
have some other communists.
Paul Edward Gottfried's "The Strange Death of Marxism" seems to offer some explanations
but is not of much use in developing a new activism capable of taking on the system or
providing a more viable alternative.
classical concepts of socialism and capitalism, and left and right politics
The left/right concept is no longer valid. For one thing, of what use is a $15. minimum
wage (apparently a standard "left" plank) if there aren't any jobs? Take a look at Andrew
Yang. At least he is posing the right questions.
Andrew Yang's Pitch to America – We Must Evolve to a New Form of
Capitalism
The book adhere to "classic" line of critique of neoliberalism as a new "secular religion" ( the author thinking is along the lines
of Gramsci idea of "cultural hegemony"; Gramsci did not use the term 'secular religion" at all, but this close enough concept) that
deified the market. It stress the role of the state in enforcing the neoliberalism.
The book adhere to "classic" line of critique of neoliberalism as a new "secular religion" ( the author thinking is along the
lines of Gramsci idea of "cultural hegemony"; Gramsci did not use the term 'secular religion" at all, but this is close enough
concept) that deified the market. It stresses the role of the state in enforcing the neoliberal ideology much like was the case
with Bolsheviks in the USSR:
Gramsci's question is still pressing: How and why do ordinary working folks come to accept a system where wealth is produced
by their collective labors and energies but appropriated individually by only a few at the top? The theory of hegemony suggests
that the answer to this question is not simply a matter of direct exploitation and control by the capitalist class. Rather,
hegemony posits that power is maintained through ongoing, ever-shifting cultural processes of winning the consent of the governed,
that is, ordinary people like you and me.
According to Gramsci, there was not one ruling class, but rather a historical bloc, "a moving equilibrium" of class interests
and values. Hegemony names a cultural struggle for moral, social, economic, and political leadership; in this struggle, a field
-- or assemblage -- of practices, discourses, values, and beliefs come to be dominant. While this field is powerful and firmly
entrenched, it is also open to contestation. In other words, hegemonic power is always on the move; it has to keep winning
our consent to survive, and sometimes it fails to do so.
Through the lens of hegemony, we can think about the rise of neoliberalism as an ongoing political project -- and class struggle
-- to shift society's political equilibrium and create a new dominant field. Specifically, we are going to trace the shift
from liberal to neoliberal hegemony. This shift is represented in the two images below.
Previous versions of liberal hegemony imagined society to be divided into distinct public and private spheres. The public
sphere was the purview of the state, and its role was to ensure the formal rights and freedoms of citizens through the rule
of law. The private sphere included the economy and the domestic sphere of home and family.
For the most part, liberal hegemony was animated by a commitment to limited government, as the goal was to allow for as
much freedom in trade, associations, and civil society as possible, while preserving social order and individual rights. Politics
took shape largely around the line between public and private; more precisely, it was a struggle over where and how to draw
the line. In other words, within the field of liberal hegemony, politics was a question of how to define the uses and limits
of the state and its public function in a capitalist society. Of course, political parties often disagreed passionately about
where and how to draw that line. As we'll see below, many advocated for laissez-faire capitalism, while others argued for a
greater public role in ensuring the health, happiness, and rights of citizens. What's crucial though is that everyone agreed
that there was a line to be drawn, and that there was a public function for the state.
As Figure 1.1 shows, neoliberal hegemony works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society
-- in fact, an entire world -- based on private, market competition. In this way, neoliberalism represents a radical reinvention
of liberalism and thus of the horizons of hegemonic struggle. Crucially, within neoliberalism, the state's function does not
go away; rather, it is deconstructed and reconstructed toward the new' end of expanding private markets.
This view correlates well with the analysis of Professor Wendy Brown book "Undoing the Demos" and her paper "Neoliberalism
and the End of Liberal Democracy" (pdf is freely available)
In this sense neoliberalism are just "Trotskyism for the rich" with the same utopian dream of global neoliberal revolution,
but much more sinister motives. And is as ruthless in achieving its goals, if necessary bring neoliberal "regime change" on the
tips of bayonets, or via 'cultural revolutions".
If we follow the line of thinking put forward by Professor Philip Mirowski's in his book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to
Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown," we can say that neoliberals essentially "reverse-engineered" Bolsheviks
methods of acquiring and maintaining political power, replacing "dictatorship of proletariat" with the "dictatorship of financial
oligarchy".
I would say more: The "professional revolutionary" cadre that were the core of Bolshevik's Party were replaced with well paid,
talented intellectual prostitutes at specially created neoliberal think tanks. And later "infiltrated" in economic departments
(kind of stealth coup d'état in academia financed by usual financial players).
Which eventually created a critical mass of ideas which were able to depose New Deal Capitalism ideology, putting forward the
set of remedies that restore the power the financial oligarchy enjoyed in 1920th. Technological changes such as invention of computers
and telecommunication revolution also helped greatly.
At the same time unlike Bolsheviks, neoliberals are carefully hiding their agenda. Funny, neoliberalism is the only known to
me major ideology which the US MSM are prohibited to mention by name ;-)
The role of state under neoliberalism is very close to the role of state under Bolsheviks' "dictatorship of proletariats".
It no way this still a liberal democracy -- this is what Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarism". Less brutal then Bolsheviks'
regime, but still far from real democracy. Under neoliberalism the state is a powerful agent needed to enforce markets on unsuspecting
population in all spheres of life, whether they want it or not (supported by 12" guns of neoliberal MSM battleships):
As Figure 1.1 shows, neoliberal hegemony works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society
-- in fact, an entire world -- based on private, market competition. In this way, neoliberalism represents a radical reinvention
of liberalism and thus of the horizons of hegemonic struggle. Crucially, within neoliberalism, the state's function does not
go away; rather, it is deconstructed and reconstructed toward the new' end of expanding private markets. Consequently, contemporary
politics take shape around questions of how best to promote competition. For the most part, politics on both the left and right
have been subsumed by neoliberal hegemony. For example, while neoliberalism made its debut in Western politics with the right-wing
administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders associated with the left have worked to further neoliberal
hegemony in stunning ways. As we will explore in more depth below and in die coming chapters, both U.S. presidents Bill Clinton
and Barack Obama have governed to create a privatized, market society. In other words, there is both a left and a right hegemonic
horizon of neoliberalism. Thus, moving beyond neoliberalism will ultimately require a whole new field of politics.
One of the most interesting part of the book is the brief analysis of the recent elections (with very precise characterization
of Hillary Clinton defeat as the defeat of the "neoliberal status quo"). The author claims that Trump supporters were mainly representatives
of the strata of the US society which were sick-and-tied of neoliberalism (note the percentage of Spanish speaking electorate
who voted for Trump), but they were taken for a ride, as instead of rejection of globalism and free movement of labor, Trump actually
represented more right wing, more bastardized version of "hard neoliberalism".
In the period which followed the elections Trump_vs_deep_state emerged as a kind of "neoliberalism in one country" -- much
like Stalin's "socialism in one country". It and did not care one bit about those who voted for him during election . As in classic
"The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go."
So in a way Trump represents the mirror image of Obama who in the same way betrayed his votes (twice) acting from "soft neoliberalism"
position, while Trump is acting from "hard neoliberalism" position.
On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party was critical
of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly
embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-,
it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.
Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering.
Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in
the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories
of good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election,
Trump effectively tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality,
channeling political anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism
(corporate diversity, political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie
Sanders, Trump was a crisis candidate.
... ... ...
In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as
Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism
that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.
We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and
left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here.
As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled
politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized
equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive,
left neoliberalism.
While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking
with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected
the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'
"... While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. ..."
"... Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders' energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood" path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy. ..."
"... In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism. ..."
"... We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism. ..."
"... While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."' ..."
In Chapter 1, we traced the rise of our neoliberal conjuncture back to the crisis of liberalism during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, culminating in the Great Depression. During this period, huge transformations in capitalism proved impossible
to manage with classical laissez-faire approaches. Out of this crisis, two movements emerged, both of which would eventually shape
the course of the twentieth century and beyond. The first, and the one that became dominant in the aftermath of the crisis, was the
conjuncture of embedded liberalism. The crisis indicated that capitalism wrecked too much damage on the lives of ordinary citizens.
People (white workers and families, especially) warranted social protection from the volatilities and brutalities of capitalism.
The state's public function was expanded to include the provision of a more substantive social safety net, a web of protections for
people and a web of constraints on markets. The second response was the invention of neoliberalism. Deeply skeptical of the common-good
principles that undergirded the emerging social welfare state, neoliberals began organizing on the ground to develop a "new" liberal
govemmentality, one rooted less in laissez-faire principles and more in the generalization of competition and enterprise. They worked
to envision a new society premised on a new social ontology, that is, on new truths about the state, the market, and human beings.
Crucially, neoliberals also began building infrastructures and institutions for disseminating their new' knowledges and theories
(i.e., the Neoliberal Thought Collective), as well as organizing politically to build mass support for new policies (i.e., working
to unite anti-communists, Christian conservatives, and free marketers in common cause against the welfare state). When cracks in
embedded liberalism began to surface -- which is bound to happen with any moving political equilibrium -- neoliberals were there
with new stories and solutions, ready to make the world anew.
We are currently living through the crisis of neoliberalism. As I write this book, Donald Trump has recently secured the U.S.
presidency, prevailing in the national election over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Throughout the election, I couldn't
help but think back to the crisis of liberalism and the two responses that emerged. Similarly, after the Great Recession of 2008,
we've saw two responses emerge to challenge our unworkable status quo, which dispossesses so many people of vital resources for individual
and collective life. On the one hand, we witnessed the rise of Occupy Wall Street. While many continue to critique the movement for
its lack of leadership and a coherent political vision, Occupy was connected to burgeoning movements across the globe, and our current
political horizons have been undoubtedly shaped by the movement's success at repositioning class and economic inequality within our
political horizon. On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party
was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was
perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-,
it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.
Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering.
Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in
the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories of
good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election, Trump effectively
tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality, channeling political
anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism (corporate diversity,
political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie Sanders, Trump was a crisis
candidate.
Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders'
energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood"
path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy.
Universal health care. Free higher education. Fair trade. The repeal of Citizens United. Trump offered a different response to
the crisis. Like Sanders, he railed against global trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, Trump's
victory was fueled by right neoliberalism's culture of cruelty. While Sanders tapped into and mobilized desires for a more egalitarian
and democratic future, Trump's promise was nostalgic, making America "great again" -- putting the nation back on "top of the world,"
and implying a time when women were "in their place" as male property, and minorities and immigrants were controlled by the state.
Thus, what distinguished Trump's campaign from more traditional Republican campaigns was that it actively and explicitly pitted
one group's equality (white men) against everyone else's (immigrants, women, Muslims, minorities, etc.). As Catherine Rottenberg
suggests, Trump offered voters a choice between a multiracial society (where folks are increasingly disadvantaged and dispossessed)
and white supremacy (where white people would be back on top). However, "[w]hat he neglected to state," Rottenberg writes,
is that neoliberalism flourishes in societies where the playing field is already stacked against various segments of society,
and that it needs only a relatively small select group of capital-enhancing subjects, while everyone else is ultimately dispensable.
1
In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg
argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many
concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.
We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left
neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested
in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right
and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political
philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism.
While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking
with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the
chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'
Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, put it this way:
The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness
of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately
great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under
capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.4
I think that, for the first time in the history of U.S. capitalism, the vast majority of people might sense the lie of liberal,
capitalist democracy. They feel anxious, unfree, disaffected. Fantasies of the good life have been shattered beyond repair for most
people. Trump and this hopefully brief triumph of right neoliberalism will soon lay this bare for everyone to see. Now, with Trump,
it is absolutely clear: the rich rule the world; we are all disposable; this is no democracy. The question becomes: How will we show
up for history? Will there be new stories, ideas, visions, and fantasies to attach to? How can we productively and meaningful intervene
in the crisis of neoliberalism? How can we "tear a hole in the grey curtain" and open up better worlds? How can we put what we've
learned to use and begin to imagine and build a world beyond living in competition? I hope our critical journey through the neoliberal
conjuncture has enabled you to begin to answer these questions.
More specifically, in recent decades, especially since the end of the Cold War, our common-good sensibilities have been channeled
into neoliberal platforms for social change and privatized action, funneling our political energies into brand culture and marketized
struggles for equality (e.g., charter schools, NGOs and non-profits, neoliberal antiracism and feminism). As a result, despite our
collective anger and disaffected consent, we find ourselves stuck in capitalist realism with no real alternative. Like the neoliberal
care of the self, we are trapped in a privatized mode of politics that relies on cruel optimism; we are attached, it seems, to politics
that inspire and motivate us to action, while keeping us living in competition.
To disrupt the game, we need to construct common political horizons against neoliberal hegemony. We need to use our common stories
and common reason to build common movements against precarity -- for within neoliberalism, precarity is what ultimately has the potential
to thread all of our lives together. Put differently, the ultimate fault line in the neoliberal conjiuicture is the way it subjects
us all to precarity and the biopolitics of disposability, thereby creating conditions of possibility for new coalitions across race,
gender, citizenship, sexuality, and class. Recognizing this potential for coalition in the face of precarization is the most pressing
task facing those who are yearning for a new world. The question is: How do we get there? How do we realize these coalitional potentialities
and materialize common horizons?
Ultimately, mapping the neoliberal conjuncture through everyday life in enterprise culture has not only provided some direction
in terms of what we need; it has also cultivated concrete and practical intellectual resources for political interv ention and social
interconnection -- a critical toolbox for living in common. More specifically, this book has sought to provide resources for thinking
and acting against the four Ds: resources for engaging in counter-conduct, modes of living that refuse, on one hand, to conduct one's
life according to the norm of enterprise, and on the other, to relate to others through the norm of competition. Indeed, we need
new ways of relating, interacting, and living as friends, lovers, workers, vulnerable bodies, and democratic people if we are to
write new stories, invent new govemmentalities, and build coalitions for new worlds.
Against Disimagination: Educated Hope and Affirmative Speculation
We need to stop turning inward, retreating into ourselves, and taking personal responsibility for our lives (a task which is ultimately
impossible). Enough with the disimagination machine! Let's start looking outward, not inward -- to the broader structures that undergird
our lives. Of course, we need to take care of ourselves; we must survive. But I firmly believe that we can do this in ways both big
and small, that transform neoliberal culture and its status-quo stories.
Here's the thing I tell my students all the time. You cannot escape neoliberalism. It is the air we breathe, the water in which
we swim. No job, practice of social activism, program of self-care, or relationship will be totally free from neoliberal impingements
and logics. There is no pure "outside" to get to or work from -- that's just the nature of the neoliberalism's totalizing cultural
power. But let's not forget that neoliberalism's totalizing cultural power is also a source of weakness. Potential for resistance
is everywhere, scattered throughout our everyday lives in enterprise culture. Our critical toolbox can help us identify these potentialities
and navigate and engage our conjuncture in ways that tear open up those new worlds we desire.
In other words, our critical perspective can help us move through the world with what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated
hope means holding in tension the material realities of power and the contingency of history. This orientation of educated hope knows
very well what we're up against. However, in the face of seemingly totalizing power, it also knows that neoliberalism can never become
total because the future is open. Educated hope is what allows us to see the fault lines, fissures, and potentialities of the present
and emboldens us to think and work from that sliver of social space where we do have political agency and freedom to construct a
new world. Educated hope is what undoes the power of capitalist realism. It enables affirmative speculation (such as discussed in
Chapter 5), which does not try to hold the future to neoliberal horizons (that's cruel optimism!), but instead to affirm our commonalities
and the potentialities for the new worlds they signal. Affirmative speculation demands a different sort of risk calculation and management.
It senses how little we have to lose and how much we have to gain from knocking the hustle of our lives.
Against De-democratization: Organizing and Collective Coverning
We can think of educated hope and affirmative speculation as practices of what Wendy Brown calls "bare democracy" -- the basic
idea that ordinary' people like you and me should govern our lives in common, that we should critique and try to change our world,
especially the exploitative and oppressive structures of power that maintain social hierarchies and diminish lives. Neoliberal culture
works to stomp out capacities for bare democracy by transforming democratic desires and feelings into meritocratic desires and feelings.
In neoliberal culture, utopian sensibilities are directed away from the promise of collective utopian sensibilities are directed
away from the promise of collective governing to competing for equality.
We have to get back that democractic feeling! As Jeremy Gilbert taught us, disaffected consent is a post-democratic orientation.
We don't like our world, but we don't think we can do anything about it. So, how do we get back that democratic feeling? How do we
transform our disaffected consent into something new? As I suggested in the last chapter, we organize. Organizing is simply about
people coming together around a common horizon and working collectively to materialize it. In this way, organizing is based on the
idea of radical democracy, not liberal democracy. While the latter is based on formal and abstract rights guaranteed by the state,
radical democracy insists that people should directly make the decisions that impact their lives, security, and well-being. Radical
democracy is a practice of collective governing: it is about us hashing out, together in communities, what matters, and working in
common to build a world based on these new sensibilities.
The work of organizing is messy, often unsatisfying, and sometimes even scary. Organizing based on affirmative speculation and
coalition-building, furthermore, will have to be experimental and uncertain. As Lauren Berlant suggests, it means "embracing the
discomfort of affective experience in a truly open social life that no
one has ever experienced." Organizing through and for the common "requires more adaptable infrastructures. Keep forcing the existing
infrastructures to do what they don't know how to do. Make new ways to be local together, where local doesn't require a physical
neighborhood." 5 What Berlant is saying is that the work of bare democracy requires unlearning, and detaching from, our
current stories and infrastructures in order to see and make things work differently. Organizing for a new world is not easy -- and
there are no guarantees -- but it is the only way out of capitalist realism.
Getting back democratic feeling will at once require and help us lo move beyond the biopolitics of disposability and entrenched
systems of inequality. On one hand, organizing will never be enough if it is not animated by bare democracy, a sensibility that each
of us is equally important when it comes to the project of determining our lives in common. Our bodies, our hurts, our dreams, and
our desires matter regardless of our race, gender, sexuality, or citizenship, and regardless of how r much capital (economic,
social, or cultural) we have. Simply put, in a radical democracy, no one is disposable. This bare-democratic sense of equality must
be foundational to organizing and coalition-building. Otherwise, we will always and inevitably fall back into a world of inequality.
On the other hand, organizing and collective governing will deepen and enhance our sensibilities and capacities for radical equality.
In this context, the kind of self-enclosed individualism that empowers and underwrites the biopolitics of disposability melts away,
as we realize the interconnectedness of our lives and just how amazing it feels to
fail, we affirm our capacities for freedom, political intervention, social interconnection, and collective social doing.
Against Dispossession: Shared Security and Common Wealth
Thinking and acting against the biopolitics of disposability goes hand-in-hand with thinking and acting against dispossession.
Ultimately, when we really understand and feel ourselves in relationships of interconnection with others, we want for them as we
want for ourselves. Our lives and sensibilities of what is good and just are rooted in radical equality, not possessive or self-appreciating
individualism. Because we desire social security and protection, we also know others desire and deserve the same.
However, to really think and act against dispossession means not only advocating for shared security and social protection, but
also for a new society that is built on the egalitarian production and distribution of social wealth that we all produce. In this
sense, we can take Marx's critique of capitalism -- that wealth is produced collectively but appropriated individually -- to heart.
Capitalism was built on the idea that one class -- the owners of the means of production -- could exploit and profit from the collective
labors of everyone else (those who do not own and thus have to work), albeit in very different ways depending on race, gender, or
citizenship. This meant that, for workers of all stripes, their lives existed not for themselves, but for others (the appropriating
class), and that regardless of what we own as consumers, we are not really free or equal in that bare-democratic sense of the word.
If we want to be really free, we need to construct new material and affective social infrastructures for our common wealth. In
these new infrastructures, wealth must not be reduced to economic value; it must be rooted in social value. Here, the production
of wealth does not exist as a separate sphere from the reproduction of our lives. In other words, new infrastructures, based on the
idea of common wealth, will not be set up to exploit our labor, dispossess our communities, or to divide our lives. Rather, they
will work to provide collective social resources and care so that we may all be free to pursue happiness, create beautiful and/or
useful things, and to realize our potential within a social world of living in common. Crucially, to create the conditions for these
new, democratic forms of freedom rooted in radical equality, we need to find ways to refuse and exit the financial networks of Empire
and the dispossessions of creditocracy, building new systems that invite everyone to participate in the ongoing production of new
worlds and the sharing of the wealth that we produce in common.
It's not up to me to tell you exactly where to look, but I assure you that potentialities for these new worlds are everywhere
around you.
"... Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who recently posed the once-blasphemous question: "What comes after capitalism?" ..."
"... He rightly described a global impasse: "Given the political constraints on redistribution and the constraints from capital mobility, we may just not be able to alleviate inequality and insecurity enough to prevent populism and revolutions." ..."
"... Martin Wolf, respected columnist for the Financial Times, recently concluded, if "reluctantly," that "capitalism is substantially broken." This year, many books with titles such as "The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition" and "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" blamed an unjust economic system and its beneficiaries for the rise of demagogues. ..."
"... Reading Mazzucato's book, it is hard not to wonder just how "neoliberal" ideas and values, which uphold the rationality of the market and exclude notions of the common good, came to shape the conduct of individuals and institutions. ..."
"... Neoliberals, he argues, are people who believe that "the market does not and cannot take care of itself," and indeed neoliberalism is a form of regulation -- one that insulates the markets from vagaries of mass democracy and economic nationalism. ..."
...A Western consensus quickly formed after the collapse of communist regimes in 1989. It was widely believed by newspaper editorialists
as well as politicians and businessmen that there was no alternative to free markets, which alone could create prosperity. The government's
traditional attempts to regulate corporations and banks and redistribute wealth through taxes were deemed a problem. As the economist
Milton Friedman put it, "The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests." Neither individuals nor companies needed
to worry much about inequality or social justice. In Friedman's influential view, "There is one and only one social responsibility
of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits."
Political fiascos in the West, following its largest financial crisis -- events accompanied by the emergence of China, a Communist-run
nation-state, as a major economic power, as well as an unfolding environmental calamity -- have utterly devastated these post-1989
assumptions about free markets and the role of governments.
Confessions to this effect come routinely from disenchanted believers. Take, for instance, Olivier Blanchard, former chief
economist of the International Monetary Fund, who recently posed the once-blasphemous question: "What comes after capitalism?"
Blanchard was commenting on the recent demonstrations in France against President Emmanuel Macron. He rightly described a
global impasse: "Given the political constraints on redistribution and the constraints from capital mobility, we may just not be
able to alleviate inequality and insecurity enough to prevent populism and revolutions."
... ... ...
Thus, Martin Wolf, respected columnist for the Financial Times, recently concluded, if "reluctantly," that "capitalism is
substantially broken." This year, many books with titles such as "The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition"
and "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" blamed an unjust economic system and its beneficiaries for the rise
of demagogues.
It is becoming clear that the perennial conflict between democracy, which promises equality, and capitalism, which generates inequality,
has been aggravated by a systemic neglect of some fundamental issues.
... ... ...
Her targets range from pharmaceutical companies, which uphold a heartless version of market rationality, to internet companies
with monopoly power such as Google and Facebook. Her most compelling example, however, is the workings of the financial sector, and
its Friedman-style obsession with "shareholder value maximization," which has infected the corporate sector as a whole.
Reading Mazzucato's book, it is hard not to wonder just how "neoliberal" ideas and values, which uphold the rationality of
the market and exclude notions of the common good, came to shape the conduct of individuals and institutions.
In the conventional account of neoliberalism, Friedman looms large, along with his disciple Ronald Reagan, and Britain's Margaret
Thatcher. Much has been written about how the IMF's structural adjustment programs in Asia and Africa, and "shock-therapy" for post-Communist
states, entrenched orthodoxies about deregulation and privatization.
In these narratives, neoliberalism appears indistinguishable from laissez-faire. In "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth
of Neoliberalism," Quinn Slobodian briskly overturns this commonplace view. Neoliberals, he argues, are people who believe that
"the market does not and cannot take care of itself," and indeed neoliberalism is a form of regulation -- one that insulates the
markets from vagaries of mass democracy and economic nationalism.
... ... ...
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include "Age of Anger: A History of the Present," "From the Ruins
of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia," and "Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion
The near future is more likely to be a neoliberal dystopia than the tech-enabled utopia
conjured up by big business, writes Peter Fleming in The Worst Is Yet to Come: A
Post-Capitalist Survival Guide . He argues that we need "radical pessimism" to aim for the
future we actually want, and aids the effort with sardonic humor that skewers the mythologies
of our exploitative economic system.
In 1949, the right-wing economist F. A. Hayek published an essay entitled "The Intellectuals
and Socialism," which aimed to change the way capitalism thought about itself. Up until then,
he argued, it was mainly the socialists who had claimed the intellectual space of
utopianism.
Hayek sought to rectify this. Free-market conservatives ought to come up with their own
utopias and sell them to the public as glorious futures to come. Capitalist individualism and a
minimal state were prominent components, elevated like secular gods.
As with most utopian blueprints, however, when put into practice, the outcome was frequently
appalling. Yet these failures didn't stop the power elite from trying again, no matter how many
casualties fell along the way. That's why capitalism today consists of an uneasy confluence of
brazen destructiveness and implacable self-confidence, convinced that we will soon be
approaching a Panglossian Best of All Possible Worlds.
The problem is that the worst is yet to come. We therefore require a good understanding of
the ideological terrain upon which that struggle will unfold. Most importantly, we won't
necessarily see the clean death of neoliberalism but an exaggerated and unsustainable deepening
of it. It will then buckle under its own weight, yielding a windswept post-capitalist dystopia
if nothing is done to counteract it now.
Mainstream economic theory might first appear rational and objective, especially given its
clinical quantification of human behavior. The mathematical models and algebraic theorems add
to the veneer of scientificity. But beneath the numbers is an unyielding and often mysterious
faith in the rectitude of monetary individualism. That conviction is conveyed in buzzwords and
fads, many of which have entered daily life, and will only intensify in the next few years. We
require a counter-lexicon. Towards that end, here is my take on some of the key features of the
bad business utopias that are busy colonizing the future.
Glossary
Artificial Intelligence:
Machine learning and robotics that soon may be capable of reflective cognition, with
much attention focusing on work and employment.
Automation of production has defined capitalism from the start. As has the fear (or hope)
that machines will soon replace most of the workforce. The application of Artificial
Intelligence in the "second machine age" will center on routine cognitive work (e.g.,
accountants and airline pilots) and nonroutine manual jobs (e.g., care providers, drivers,
and hairdressers). However, this is where fantasy enters the picture. Namely, capitalism
without laborers, a dream that is integral to neoliberal economics. In reality, AI will
probably follow the same path as previous waves of automation: mechanizing certain parts of a
job rather than replacing it entirely, especially the skilled part that affects wages.
Moreover, the old Keynesian point still holds: Workers are also consumers. Thus, the
disappearance of labor would also eliminate consumption, which is integral to capitalism.
That might not be a bad thing, as advocates of "fully automated luxury communism" suggest.
However, a bleaker scenario is possible. The retention of a highly polarized and class-based
society (as we have today) but without labor or consumption, given the widespread application
of AI. This would represent a kind of inverted rendition of capitalism. High-tech and
primitive. This model of society has no name yet, but something like "Blade Runner
Capitalism" might suffice.
Corporate Social Responsibility:
A concept designed to spread the fallacy that corporations can be driven by
profit-maximization and have a positive ethical role in society; a disavowal of the key
contradictions of capitalism; an idea closely associated with other disingenuous terms such
as "conscious capitalism" and "green capitalism."
Milton Friedman famously argued against Corporate Social Responsibility. Focus on profits,
he said, and let the state and churches deal with human welfare. However, CSR became popular
nevertheless and is now big business. Almost every corporation has a CSR program of some
kind. The concept is fundamental to neoliberal utopianism because it peddles the falsehood
that capitalism can be both ruthlessly profiteering and kind to the planet. Have its
cake and eat it too. As a corollary, governmental regulation is deemed unnecessary. CSR
provides an excuse for corporations to regulate themselves, and we all know where that leads.
It is no surprise that CSR is most visible in controversial industries like mining, oil and
gas, arms manufacturing and tobacco (often involving glossy brochures and websites depicting
happy African children playing in green rainforests). Moreover, the tax benefits enjoyed by
billionaire philanthropists are another good reason they like CSR.
Game Theory:
The use of mathematics to model human reality; one of the more bizarre offshoots
that followed the mathematization of economic thought in the 20th century.
Game theory focuses on strategies used by competing actors to make rational decisions.
What should I do given my opponent may subsequently decide A, B, C, or D? It was pioneered by
John von Neumann, John Nash, and Oskar Morgenstern. The assumption that social life is a game
of logic between conniving actors is foundational to this view of economics. But do we really
behave in such a "me versus you" manner?
Game Theory's rational individualism closely resonates with neoliberal capitalism because
it reconceptualizes everyone as mini corporations who are totally selfish.
Individuals compete rather than share; seek to outsmart the next person rather than
empathize. Proponents of the approach often use the "as if" defense. The model might not
perfectly match reality, but we can approximate how someone behaves in the real world by
assuming they act "as if" they're Nashian plotters.
It's the normative assumptions underlying this "as if" that are problematic that at bottom
we're all greedy and impatient bankers. One could just as well argue that people act "as if"
they're trusting and altruistic socialists, but Game Theory won't have any of that.
Human Resource Management:
An ultra-corporate manifestation of business management; a practice informally
called "Inhuman Resource Management" by workers.
Even the very phrase Human Resource Management sounds weird, like something dreamed up by
extraterrestrials who plan on harvesting mankind. The objectification is important to
understanding HRM. In the old days, most large organizations had personnel departments. They
dealt with payroll and hiring. In the 1980s and 1990s, this role slowly focused in on the
nature of the employee. Testing potential recruits.
Developing employee engagement programs to revive flagging morale and so on. However, the
covert agenda was to replace unions, who had previously fulfilled these functions. As
neoliberalism spread through the economy like wild fire, HRM became a tool for
pathologizing the recalcitrant employee. Rather than view the unhappy worker from a
structural perspective (i.e., low wages, unfair treatment, boring job), it was their
personality that was singled out as a problem. Following the financial crisis, HRM has become
the punitive arm of organizational power. Their main role is to undermine unions, protect
employers from discontented workers and enforce financial miserliness.
Leadership: The assumption that when humans organize they require top-down control and
only special individuals are capable of doing this; the valorization of elitism.
When social actors are encouraged to behave as capsulelike monads -- as they are under
neoliberal capitalism -- then some kind of extra-individual steering mechanism is soon required
to avert chaos. In the workplace, this could include workers' councils. At the societal level,
a democratically elected government. But capitalists naturally distain those options and evoke
the mythology of leadership instead, sold to us as great men and women who've been blessed with
amazing skills. To understand this bizarre veneration of elitism, we might recall Max Weber's
argument about charismatic leaders. These individuals function as supplements to market
rationality rather than replacements, which is why fascism was so attracted to the idea. The
economic system can have bourgeois individualism and an overarching, CEO-like führer at
the same time. The conflation serves to ward off social democratic solutions to economic
coordination.
Lean In: Faux-feminism for the corporate age; an attempt to render feminism
business-friendly; what feminism looks like after patriarchy wins .
Radical gender politics is dangerous to capitalism because it rallies against the
patriarchal structures essential to it. In many ways, neoliberalism is a male-driven horror
show. However, identity politics has severely diluted that radicalism and finally made feminism
palatable to the establishment, including the multinational corporation. Lean In: Women,
Work and the Will to Lead , by Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook's chief operating of officer) is
the end product of that betrayal. Sandberg gives advice to her readers about how to be both a
woman and ruthlessly ambitious in the corporate world. Capitalism and the multinational
corporation are all taken for granted, and feminism becomes a matter of women landing a seat in
the boardroom and getting rich.
Moral Hazard: The cynical belief that you will automatically behave irresponsibly if not
held accountable for your actions, especially in terms of financial responsibility; a moral
pretext for demolishing the public sphere; the belief that everyone is a feckless
opportunist .
The concept of moral hazard originated in insurance economics. It argues that once people
are protected by insurance (say home and contents) they'll automatically engage in riskier
behavior than normal (leaving their homes unlocked, for example). The theory assumes that
people are not only stupid but have no sense of civic responsibility. The rationale has been
deployed by neocons to lay ruin to the welfare state. Unemployment insurance incentivizes work
avoidance. Public health care encourages unhealthy lifestyle choices, etc. We could follow the
rationale reductio ad absurdum : public fire brigades shouldn't be funded because they
inadvertently encourage people to be careless in the kitchen, and might result in them burning
down their homes.
Office Email: An electronic communication system that has become ubiquitous among the
modern workforce; an instrument for spreading wage-theft and unpaid overtime; something 50
percent of the workforce now "check" outside of office hours.
What is colloquially called the "tyranny of email," started life as a cool invention by Ray
Tomlinson in 1971. With the birth of the internet, email rapidly replaced memos and postage. In
the workplace, it was meant to make life easier. However, smartphones turned this tool of
convenience into a slave master, since the office is always there, in your pocket. Not so long
ago, management consultants used to say they loved flying because only then could they turn off
their phone. Now even that respite has disappeared, as Wi-Fi coverage is included in most
methods of travel. Email fits so snugly into the neoliberal order because it exemplifies
individual mobility. You're always switched on no matter what. Work and life merge.
Self-exploitation becomes rife. But does email improve your productivity on the job? One study
decided to find out. A large office was deprived of email access for a day and its productivity
levels actually soared. Therefore, not only does the "tyranny of email" increase our workload
and render us permanently exposed to the supervisor's gaze, it also hinders our ability to get
things done, making life harder for no obvious reason.
Tax Avoidance: How corporations and rich plutocrats sidestep the taxes that you and I
have to pay; a mechanism for increasing wealth inequality to levels unheard of in the modern
era; a method for starving the public sphere of cash; what greed looks like in the end
times.
Neoliberalism has always hated tax, especially corporate tax. Trickle-down economics assumes
that low taxes incentivize employers to hire more workers, invest and grow. Instead, firms
usually keep the extra equity and get richer. Building on that sentiment, corporations have
devised an elaborate international system to facilitate tax avoidance, with the help of
countries like Ireland (the "Double Irish") and Holland (the "Dutch Sandwich"). Corporations
are taxed on profits rather than revenue. They can therefore artificially reduce these profits
by setting up a parent company in Ireland, for example, and then a subsidiary in, say the UK,
which is charged steep licensing and administrative fees. This is how Google can enjoy yearly
sales in the UK of £1.03 billion yet post a pretax profit of £149 million, with a
tax bill of £36.4 million. Some firms might even record a "loss" (despite healthy
revenues), then use the "Double Irish" with a "Dutch Sandwich," and pay no tax whatsoever.
Combined with shadow banking, transfer pricing, trade mis-invoicing and tax havens, here we see
where neoliberal capitalism is heading in the end times. The ultrarich -- and their phalanx --
floating above the state as the public sphere shrinks and society descends into disorder.
Moreover, it is precisely here that neo-feudal social structures make a comeback, linked to
family oligarchies and their tremendous influence over governments, bypassing the democratic
process.
This excerpt is from The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide by
Peter Fleming. ( Repeater
Books 2019). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
tain those options and evoke the mythology of leadership instead, sold to us as
great men and women who've been blessed with amazing skills. To understand this bizarre
veneration of elitism, we might recall Max Weber's argument about charismatic leaders. These
individuals function as supplements to market rationality rather than replacements, which
is why fascism was so attracted to the idea. The economic system can have bourgeois individualism
and an overarching, CEO-like führer at the same time. The conflation serves to ward off
social democratic solutions to economic coordination.
Lean In: Faux-feminism for the corporate age; an attempt to render feminism
business-friendly; what feminism looks like after patriarchy wins .
Radical gender politics is dangerous to capitalism because it rallies against the patriarchal
structures essential to it. In many ways, neoliberalism is a male-driven horror show. However,
identity politics has severely diluted that radicalism and finally made feminism palatable to the
establishment, including the multinational corporation. Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to
Lead , by Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook's chief operating of officer) is the end product of that
betrayal. Sandberg gives advice to her readers about how to be both a woman and ruthlessly
ambitious in the corporate world. Capitalism and the multinational corporation are all taken for
granted, and feminism becomes a matter of women landing a seat in the boardroom and getting
rich.
Moral Hazard: The cynical belief that you will automatically behave irresponsibly if not
held accountable for your actions, especially in terms of financial responsibility; a moral
pretext for demolishing the public sphere; the belief that everyone is a feckless opportunist
.
The concept of moral hazard originated in insurance economics. It argues that once people are
protected by insurance (say home and contents) they'll automatically engage in riskier behavior
than normal (leaving their homes unlocked, for example). The theory assumes that people are not
only stupid but have no sense of civic responsibility. The rationale has been deployed by neocons
to lay ruin to the welfare state. Unemployment insurance incentivizes work avoidance. Public
health care encourages unhealthy lifestyle choices, etc. We could follow the rationale
reductio ad absurdum : public fire brigades shouldn't be funded because they inadvertently
encourage people to be careless in the kitchen, and might result in them burning down their
homes.
Tax Avoidance: How corporations and rich plutocrats sidestep the taxes that you and I have
to pay; a mechanism for increasing wealth inequality to levels unheard of in the modern era; a
method for starving the public sphere of cash; what greed looks like in the end times.
Neoliberalism has always hated tax, especially corporate tax. Trickle-down economics assumes
that low taxes incentivize employers to hire more workers, invest and grow. Instead, firms
usually keep the extra equity and get richer. Building on that sentiment, corporations have
devised an elaborate international system to facilitate tax avoidance, with the help of countries
like Ireland (the "Double Irish") and Holland (the "Dutch Sandwich"). Corporations are taxed on
profits rather than revenue. They can therefore artificially reduce these profits by setting up a
parent company in Ireland, for example, and then a subsidiary in, say the UK, which is charged
steep licensing and administrative fees. This is how Google can enjoy yearly sales in the UK of
£1.03 billion yet post a pretax profit of £149 million, with a tax bill of
£36.4 million. Some firms might even record a "loss" (despite healthy revenues), then use
the "Double Irish" with a "Dutch Sandwich," and pay no tax whatsoever. Combined with shadow
banking, transfer pricing, trade mis-invoicing and tax havens, here we see where neoliberal
capitalism is heading in the end times. The ultrarich -- and their phalanx -- floating above the
state as the public sphere shrinks and society descends into disorder. Moreover, it is precisely
here that neo-feudal social structures make a comeback, linked to family oligarchies and their
tremendous influence over governments, bypassing the democratic process.
This excerpt is from The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide by
Peter Fleming. ( Repeater
Books 2019). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"... By Couze Venn, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory in the Media & Communications Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Associate Research Fellow at Johannesburg University. His recent book is After Capital, Sage, 2018. Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... From working conditions to welfare policies, from immigration to the internet – this zero sum game of winners and losers benefits only the far right. ..."
"... Image: Homeless man with commuters walking past, Waterloo Station, London. Credit: Jessica Mulley/Flickr, CC 2.0. ..."
"... As Ha Joon Chang has shown, by the 1990s, financial capitalism had become the dominant power, prioritising the interest of shareholders, and incentivising managers through share ownership and bonuses schemes. ..."
"... Meanwhile, neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Its initial success in terms of growth and prosperity in the 1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of 2008. ..."
"... political economy ..."
"... Neoliberalism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of winners and 'losers'. Apart from the alt-right in the USA, we find its exemplary advocates amongst leading Brexiteers in the UK, backed by dark money. It is not the social democratic compromise of capitalism with a human face that could support the welfare state. Seen in this context, there is an essential affinity between alt-right, neoliberal political economy and neo- fascisms, punctuated by aggressivity, intolerance, exclusion, expulsion and generalised hostility. ..."
Neoliberalism puts markets above all else. In this paradigm, you are supposed to uproot
yourself if work dries up where you live or if there are better opportunities elsewhere. The
needs of your family or extended family are treated as secondary. And your community?
Fuggedaboudit. And this attitude has also led to what is arguably the most corrosive practice,
of companies treating employees like tissue paper, to be trashed after use.
Companies have increasingly adopted a transactional posture towards customers. This shift
happened on Wall Street as a result of deregulation in the 1980s (Rule 415; if anyone cares,
I'll elaborate in comments). The reduced orientation towards treating customers well as a sound
business practice, and merely going through the form is particularly pronounced at the retail
level. I can't tell you how many times I have had to go through ridiculous hoops merely to get
a vendor to live up to its agreement, and even though I am plenty tenacious, I don't always
prevail. It didn't used to be anywhere near this bad. And this is corrosive. Not only are
customers effectively treated as if they can be abused, the people in the support ops wind up
being on the receiving end of well deserved anger even though they aren't the proper target.
The phone reps are almost certainly not told that they are perpetrating an abuse (which then
leads to the question of who in the organization has set up the scripts and training with lies
in them) but for certain types of repeat cases, they have to know their employer is up to no
good. I am sure this is the case at Cigna, where at least twice a year, I have a problem with a
claim, the service rep says it should have been paid and puts it in to be reprocessed and I
typically have to rinse and repeat and get stroopy about it, meaning the later reps can see the
pattern of deliberate non-payment of a valid claim and continue to act as if they can do
something about it.
By Couze Venn, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory in the Media & Communications
Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Associate Research Fellow at Johannesburg
University. His recent book is After Capital, Sage, 2018. Originally published at openDemocracy
From working conditions to welfare policies, from immigration to the internet –
this zero sum game of winners and losers benefits only the far right.
Image: Homeless man with commuters walking past, Waterloo Station, London. Credit:
Jessica Mulley/Flickr, CC 2.0.
The hostile environment is not just about the Windrush generation in the UK, or the
harassment of migrants at the Mexican border in the USA, or the unwelcoming treatment of
refugees trying to reach Europe. It has become ubiquitous and widespread. We encounter it in
many aspects of daily life. In worsening conditions at work such as zero-hour 'contracts'. In
obstacles to accessing social and health services due to cutbacks, making people's lives more
precarious. Online threats and trolling are other signs of this normalisation of hostility.
The normalisation of hostile environments signals a worrying and global shift in values of
tolerance, empathy, compassion, hospitality and responsibility for the vulnerable. It's a
normalisation that was criticised recently in the UK by UN Poverty Rapporteur Philip Alston,
who described how "punitive, mean-spirited, often callous" government welfare policies were
contributing to an "
increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society ".
There's a pattern to hostile environments that harks back to the 1930s and 40s. As we know,
at the time, those targeted were considered as the enemy within, to be subject to expulsion,
exclusion and indeed, genocide, as happened to Jews and other so-called 'inferior races'. In
more recent time, the iterations of this discourse of the alien other who must be expelled or
eliminated to save the 'pure' or 'good race' or ethnicity and reconstitute the broken community
have found traction in Europe, the USA, Rwanda, India, parts of the Middle East. In its wake,
refugees have become asylum seekers, migrants are labelled illegal or criminal, cultural
differences become alien cultures, non-binary women and men are misgendered, and at the
extreme, those targeted for violence become vermin. It marks a shift in political culture that
inscribes elements of fascism.
Why has this atmosphere of hostility become the default position in politics? What have been
the triggers and what are the stakes in this great moving rightwards shift? One may be tempted
to identify the change in mood and attitudes with recent events like the election of Trump in
the USA. But the far right has been on the rise in Europe, the UK and the US for some years, as
seen in movements like the Tea Party, UKIP, or the National Front in France . They
have been given a boost by the flood of refugees generated by wars in the Middle East,
Afghanistan, parts of Africa, as well as by the spread of fundamentalist religious creeds that
have an affinity with forms of fascism.
Why? Two related sets of developments that from the 1970s have gradually altered the
political terrain. Economically, globalisation emerged as an integral part of a transnational
corporate strategy aimed at securing advantageous conditions for the consolidation of global
capital at a time of risky structural changes in the global economy. And politically,
neoliberalism took hold when the crises of the 1970s started to undermine the postwar consensus
in the Keynesian mixed economy and the role of the welfare state.
Globalisation saw the systematic deployment of outsourcing production in countries offering
cheap labour, minimised corporate tax burdens and other incentives for transnational
corporations, and the invention of the trade in derivatives (financial mechanisms intended to
leverage the value of assets and repackaged debts). They contributed to the 2008 crash. The
general public were made to bail out the banks through increased taxation and the establishment
of policies across social services that produce hostile environments for claimants seeking
state support.
As Ha Joon Chang has shown, by the 1990s, financial capitalism had become the dominant
power, prioritising the interest of shareholders, and incentivising managers through share
ownership and bonuses schemes. The disruptions due to this recomposition of capital have
been a global squeeze on income, the creation of a new precariat, and the debt society. People
who feel insecure, abandoned to forces outside their control become easy prey to demagogues and
prophets of deceit who promise the return of good times, provided enemies and outsiders who
wreck things are expelled.
Meanwhile, neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing
its impact through right wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in
academia and economic thought. Its initial success in terms of growth and prosperity in the
1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of
2008.
What is important here is the radical shift in values and attitudes that recall utilitarian
values in the 19th Century. In particular, it is reflected in the neoliberal hostility towards
the poor, the weak, the destitute, the ' losers', expressed in its denial or abnegation of
responsibility for their plight or welfare, and its project of dismantling the welfare or
providential state.
This pervasive atmosphere of hostility is the real triumph of neoliberal political
economy . Not the economy – privatisation, monetisation, deregulation,
generalised competition, and structural adjustments are immanent tendencies in globalised
capitalism anyway. But neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that
legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an
indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. It
promotes new servitudes, operating on a planetary scale. What is rejected are ideas of common
interest and a common humanity that support the principle of collective responsibility for
fellow humans, and that radical liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill defended. They were
the values, along with the principles of fundamental human rights, that informed major reforms,
and inspired socialism. The establishment of the welfare or providential state, and programmes
of redistribution, enshrined in Beveridge or New Deals, draw from these same principles and
values.
Neoliberalism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style
individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a
closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those
towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a
zero-sum game of winners and 'losers'. Apart from the alt-right in the USA, we find its
exemplary advocates amongst leading Brexiteers in the UK, backed by dark money. It is not the
social democratic compromise of capitalism with a human face that could support the welfare
state. Seen in this context, there is an essential affinity between alt-right, neoliberal
political economy and neo- fascisms, punctuated by aggressivity, intolerance, exclusion,
expulsion and generalised hostility.
There are other important stakes at this point in the history of humanity and the planet. We
tend to forget that support for fundamental human rights, like equality, liberty, freedom from
oppressive power, has long been motivated by the same kind of concern to defend the vulnerable,
the poor, the destitute, the oppressed from the injustices arising from unequal relations of
power. We forget too that these rights have been hard won through generations of emancipatory
struggles against many forms of oppressions.
Yet, it is sad to see many institutions and organisations tolerate intolerance out of
confusion about the principles at stake and for fear of provoking hostile reactions from those
who claim rights that in effect disadvantage some already vulnerable groups. Failure to defend
the oppressed anywhere and assert our common humanity is the slippery slope towards a Hobbesian
state and great suffering for the many.
"... The ruling class has successfully ruled out any concept of consent. Keep bringing consent up and their philosophies will be shown to be the same as gang rapists. ..."
"... They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. ..."
"... They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden ..."
'Liber' in Latin means:
1) free (man)
2) free from tribute
3) independent, outspoken/frank
4) unimpeded
5) void of
The author needs to recheck his definitions. Voluntary exchange, consent, free markets,
free will, etc are just some of the concepts at the heart of the true libertarian thought.
The ruling class has successfully ruled out any concept of consent. Keep bringing consent
up and their philosophies will be shown to be the same as gang rapists.
"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system
which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of
improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They
call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves
revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings
of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.
Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble
cause to fight!" – Ludwig Von Mises
"... Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishised – art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources. ..."
"... At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that – because of a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the economic logic of the military-industrial complex – culminated in the development of nuclear weapons. We have now devised the most complete and horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit genocide on a global scale ..."
"... Those among the elites who understand that neoliberalism has had its day are exploiting the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while deflecting attention from their greed and the maintenance of their privilege by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats. ..."
"... The criticisms of the neoliberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive because they are rooted in truths about neoliberalism's failure. But as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system. ..."
"... This trend – what I have previously ascribed to a group I call the "dissenters" – understands that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old neoliberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to. ..."
Ok neoliberalism is bad and is collapsing. We all understadn that. The different in opinions
here is only in timeframe of the collapse and the main reason (end of cheap oil, WWIII, etc).
But so far no plausible alternative exists. Canwe return to the New Deal, if top management
betrayed the working class and allied with capital owners in a hope later to became such
capital owners themselves (and many did).
The experience of the USSR tells as that each Nomenklatura (technocratic elite with the goal
of "betterment" of people) degrade very quickly (two generations were enough for Bolshevik's
elite for complete degradation) and often is ready switch sides for the place in neoliberal
elite.
So while after 2008 neoliberalism exist in zombie states (which is more bloodthirsty then
previous) they issue of successor to neoliberalism is widely open.
In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the [neo]neoliberal tradition are
coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are
pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble – the ordinary people they have so
little faith in.
Rather, it is because a long experiment in Neoliberalism has finally run its course.
Neoliberalism has patently failed – and failed catastrophically.
... ... ...
Neoliberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his
freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of "universal values"
over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.
But neoliberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more
accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of neoliberalism's
abandonment rather than inherent to the neoliberal's political project.
The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left
people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay
lip service to universal values, but in our atomised communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and
angry.
Humanitarian resource grabs
The neoliberal's professed concern for others' welfare and their rights has, in reality,
provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of
neoliberalism's humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage
and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela.
We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims' inheritance.
Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishised
– art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also
encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or
not, and however wasteful of resources.
At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that – because of
a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the economic logic of the
military-industrial complex – culminated in the development of nuclear weapons. We have
now devised the most complete and horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit
genocide on a global scale .
Meanwhile, the absolute prioritising of the individual has sanctioned a pathological
self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism,
materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged
neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet's
wealth out of reach of the rest of humanity.
Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded
us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual
connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of
our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.
And so the neoliberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our species and
possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to hoard resources for personal
gain, to plunder nature's riches without respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so
compulsive that the planet will have to find a way to rebalance itself. And if we carry on,
that new balance – what we limply term "climate change" – will necessitate that we
are stripped from the planet.
Nadir of a dangerous arrogance
One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some time.
Competition, creativity, selfishness predate neoliberalism, after all. But neoliberalism
removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing sentiment as irrational, as uncivilised,
as primitive.
Neoliberalism isn't the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a dangerous arrogance
we as a species have been indulging for too long, where the individual's good trumps any
collective good, defined in the widest possible sense.
The neoliberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise, eclipsing
ancient and future wisdoms, those rooted in natural cycles, the seasons and a wonder at the
ineffable and unknowable. The neoliberal's relentless and exclusive focus is on "progress",
growth, accumulation.
What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but an entirely new
vision that removes the individual and his personal gratification from the centre of our social
organisation.
This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more neoliberalism, not less, is
the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone who aspires to be more than a
technocrat correcting minor defects in the status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the
modesty of their proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US have been
reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested in blindly pursuing the
path to self-destruction.
Status-quo cheerleaders
As a result, we now have three clear political trends.
The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of neoliberalism's latest
– last? –
manifesto . With every utterance they prove how irrelevant they have become, how incapable
they are of supplying answers to the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse
both to look inwards to see where neoliberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider how
we might extricate ourselves.
Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second and third trends
in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both trends are derided indiscriminately
as "populism", as the politics of envy, the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally
opposed, alternative trends are treated as indistinguishable.
This will not save neoliberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much worse of the two
alternatives.
Those among the elites who understand that neoliberalism has had its day are exploiting
the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while deflecting attention from their greed
and the maintenance of their privilege by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats.
The criticisms of the neoliberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive
because they are rooted in truths about neoliberalism's failure. But as critics, they are
disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing,
failed, self-sabotaging system.
The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic nationalism,
scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are ditching the ostentatious,
conscience-salving sensitivities of the neoliberal so that they can continue plundering with
heady abandon. If the ship is going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the
waters reach the dining-hall ceiling.
Where hope can reside
The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend – what I have
previously ascribed to a group I call the "dissenters" – understands that radical new
thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old neoliberal
elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its
ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to.
Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the old, failed
system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to contemplate and share radical new ideas,
and to mobilise. But the neoliberals and authoritarians understand this as a threat to their
own privilege. Under a confected hysteria about "fake news", they are rapidly working to snuff
out even this small space.
We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible path to
salvation – even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as insect populations
disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to cough us out like a lump of infected
mucus.
We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals: the philosophers,
historians and writers – the public relations wing – of our suicidal status quo.
They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in our midst. They failed to see the danger
looming, and their narcissism blinds them still.
We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our hands, who shone a
light along a path that has led to the brink of our own extinction. We need to discard them, to
close our ears to their siren song.
There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying neoliberal elites
and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to
share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world. One where the individual
is no longer king. Where we learn some modesty and humility – and how to love in our
infinitely small corner of the universe.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
With the growing movement towards nuclear war, we have indeed reached the nadir. It is
important to see how humanity got here, for the signs are ominous.
The pattern of history is clear. Power (manifested as interest) has been present in every
conflict of the past – no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war.
Other
cultural factors might change, but not power. Interest cuts across all apparently unifying
principles: family, kin, nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite
with the enemies of our principles, because that is what serves our interest. It is power,
not any of the above concepts, that is the cause of war.
Maybe it is just me but I didn't see any actual solution or much of anything in his third
group. You know, the one with all the "correct" answers. All I saw was that it was a glorious
vision without all the failings of the other two while rejecting all the badthink.
Every major tragedy in human history starts out with people thinking they have a system
better than all the previous that ever occurred. It too soon becomes a religion that needs to
defend itself by executing all the blasphemers.
Maybe it is just me but I didn't see any actual solution or much of anything in his
third group. You know, the one with all the "correct" answers. All I saw was that it was a
glorious vision without all the failings of the other two while rejecting all the
badthink.
Exactly.
I've been waiting for the author, or some from his "group", to post here at least a LINK
to that solution, even a suggestion, of theirs. Hell, even the proper analysis of what's not
right. A foundation of sort.
So far, as you said, nothing.
Anon[248], February 3, 2019 at 5:29 am GMT
Levy another Jewish "intellectual" shilling for globalization and open borders - for Western nations only, to hasten their
demise. What else is new?
A historic interfaith covenant was signed in the Middle East on Monday, and the mainstream
media in the United States has been almost entirely silent about it.
Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb is considered to be the most important imam in Sunni Islam, and he
arrived at the signing ceremony in Abu Dhabi with Pope Francis
"hand-in-hand in a symbol of interfaith brotherhood" . But this wasn't just a ceremony for
Catholics and Muslims. According to
a British news source , the signing of this covenant was done "in front of a global
audience of religious leaders from Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other faiths"...
The pope and the grand imam of al-Azhar have signed a historic declaration of fraternity,
calling for peace between nations, religions and races, in front of a global audience of
religious leaders from Christianity, Islam , Judaism and other faiths.
Pope Francis
, the leader of the world's Catholics, and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Sunni Islam's
most prestigious seat of learning, arrived at the ceremony in Abu Dhabi hand-in-hand in a
symbol of interfaith brotherhood.
In other words, there was a concerted effort to make sure that all of the religions of the
world were represented at this gathering.
According to
the official Vatican website , a tremendous amount of preparation went in to the drafting
of this document, and it encourages believers from all religions "to shake hands, embrace one
another, kiss one another, and even pray" with one another
The document, signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, was
prepared "with much reflection and prayer", the Pope said. The one great danger at this
moment, he continued, is "destruction, war, hatred between us." "If we believers are not able
to shake hands, embrace one another, kiss one another, and even pray, our faith will be
defeated", he said. The Pope explained that the document "is born of faith in God who is the
Father of all and the Father of peace; it condemns all destruction, all terrorism, from the
first terrorism in history, that of Cain."
There is a lot of language about peace in this document, but it goes way beyond just
advocating for peace.
Over and over again, the word "God" is used to simultaneously identify Allah and the God of
Christianity. Here is just one example
We, who believe in God and in the final meeting with Him and His judgment, on the basis of
our religious and moral responsibility, and through this Document, call upon ourselves, upon
the leaders of the world as well as the architects of international policy and world economy,
to work strenuously to spread the culture of tolerance and of living together in peace; to
intervene at the earliest opportunity to stop the shedding of innocent blood and bring an end
to wars, conflicts, environmental decay and the moral and cultural decline that the world is
presently experiencing.
On top of that, the document also boldly declares that "the diversity of religions" that we
see in the world was "willed by God"
Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought,
expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and
language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine
wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be
different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion
or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do
not accept;
In essence, this is saying that it is the will of God that there are hundreds of different
religions in the world and that they are all acceptable in His sight.
We know that the elite want a one world
religion , but to see the most important clerics from both Catholicism and Islam make such
a dramatic public push for it is absolutely stunning.
You can find the full text of the covenant that they signed
on the official Vatican website . I have also reproduced the entire document below...
* * *
INTRODUCTION
Faith leads a believer to see in the other a brother or sister to be supported and loved.
Through faith in God, who has created the universe, creatures and all human beings (equal on
account of his mercy), believers are called to express this human fraternity by safeguarding
creation and the entire universe and supporting all persons, especially the poorest and those
most in need.
This transcendental value served as the starting point for several meetings characterized by
a friendly and fraternal atmosphere where we shared the joys, sorrows and problems of our
contemporary world. We did this by considering scientific and technical progress, therapeutic
achievements, the digital era, the mass media and communications. We reflected also on the
level of poverty, conflict and suffering of so many brothers and sisters in different parts of
the world as a consequence of the arms race, social injustice, corruption, inequality, moral
decline, terrorism, discrimination, extremism and many other causes.
From our fraternal and open discussions, and from the meeting that expressed profound hope
in a bright future for all human beings, the idea of this Document on Human Fraternity was
conceived. It is a text that has been given honest and serious thought so as to be a joint
declaration of good and heartfelt aspirations. It is a document that invites all persons who
have faith in God and faith in human fraternity to unite and work together so that it may serve
as a guide for future generations to advance a culture of mutual respect in the awareness of
the great divine grace that makes all human beings brothers and sisters.
DOCUMENT
In the name of God who has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and
who has called them to live together as brothers and sisters, to fill the earth and make known
the values of goodness, love and peace;
In the name of innocent human life that God has forbidden to kill, affirming that whoever
kills a person is like one who kills the whole of humanity, and that whoever saves a person is
like one who saves the whole of humanity;
In the name of the poor, the destitute, the marginalized and those most in need whom God has
commanded us to help as a duty required of all persons, especially the wealthy and of
means;
In the name of orphans, widows, refugees and those exiled from their homes and their
countries; in the name of all victims of wars, persecution and injustice; in the name of the
weak, those who live in fear, prisoners of war and those tortured in any part of the world,
without distinction;
In the name of peoples who have lost their security, peace, and the possibility of living
together, becoming victims of destruction, calamity and war;
In the name of human fraternity that embraces all human beings, unites them and renders them
equal;
In the name of this fraternity torn apart by policies of extremism and division, by systems
of unrestrained profit or by hateful ideological tendencies that manipulate the actions and the
future of men and women;
In the name of freedom, that God has given to all human beings creating them free and
distinguishing them by this gift;
In the name of justice and mercy, the foundations of prosperity and the cornerstone of
faith;
In the name of all persons of good will present in every part of the world;
In the name of God and of everything stated thus far; Al-Azhar al-Sharif and the Muslims of
the East and West, together with the Catholic Church and the Catholics of the East and West,
declare the adoption of a culture of dialogue as the path; mutual cooperation as the code of
conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard.
We, who believe in God and in the final meeting with Him and His judgment, on the basis of
our religious and moral responsibility, and through this Document, call upon ourselves, upon
the leaders of the world as well as the architects of international policy and world economy,
to work strenuously to spread the culture of tolerance and of living together in peace; to
intervene at the earliest opportunity to stop the shedding of innocent blood and bring an end
to wars, conflicts, environmental decay and the moral and cultural decline that the world is
presently experiencing.
We call upon intellectuals, philosophers, religious figures, artists, media professionals
and men and women of culture in every part of the world, to rediscover the values of peace,
justice, goodness, beauty, human fraternity and coexistence in order to confirm the importance
of these values as anchors of salvation for all, and to promote them everywhere.
This Declaration, setting out from a profound consideration of our contemporary reality,
valuing its successes and in solidarity with its suffering, disasters and calamities, believes
firmly that among the most important causes of the crises of the modern world are a
desensitized human conscience, a distancing from religious values and a prevailing
individualism accompanied by materialistic philosophies that deify the human person and
introduce worldly and material values in place of supreme and transcendental principles.
While recognizing the positive steps taken by our modern civilization in the fields of
science, technology, medicine, industry and welfare, especially in developed countries, we wish
to emphasize that, associated with such historic advancements, great and valued as they are,
there exists both a moral deterioration that influences international action and a weakening of
spiritual values and responsibility. All this contributes to a general feeling of frustration,
isolation and desperation leading many to fall either into a vortex of atheistic, agnostic or
religious extremism, or into blind and fanatic extremism, which ultimately encourage forms of
dependency and individual or collective self-destruction.
History shows that religious extremism, national extremism and also intolerance have
produced in the world, be it in the East or West, what might be referred to as signs of a
"third world war being fought piecemeal". In several parts of the world and in many tragic
circumstances these signs have begun to be painfully apparent, as in those situations where the
precise number of victims, widows and orphans is unknown. We see, in addition, other regions
preparing to become theatres of new conflicts, with outbreaks of tension and a build-up of arms
and ammunition, and all this in a global context overshadowed by uncertainty, disillusionment,
fear of the future, and controlled by narrow-minded economic interests.
We likewise affirm that major political crises, situations of injustice and lack of
equitable distribution of natural resources – which only a rich minority benefit from, to
the detriment of the majority of the peoples of the earth – have generated, and continue
to generate, vast numbers of poor, infirm and deceased persons. This leads to catastrophic
crises that various countries have fallen victim to despite their natural resources and the
resourcefulness of young people which characterize these nations. In the face of such crises
that result in the deaths of millions of children – wasted away from poverty and hunger
– there is an unacceptable silence on the international level.
It is clear in this context how the family as the fundamental nucleus of society and
humanity is essential in bringing children into the world, raising them, educating them, and
providing them with solid moral formation and domestic security. To attack the institution of
the family, to regard it with contempt or to doubt its important role, is one of the most
threatening evils of our era.
We affirm also the importance of awakening religious awareness and the need to revive this
awareness in the hearts of new generations through sound education and an adherence to moral
values and upright religious teachings. In this way we can confront tendencies that are
individualistic, selfish, conflicting, and also address radicalism and blind extremism in all
its forms and expressions.
The first and most important aim of religions is to believe in God, to honour Him and to
invite all men and women to believe that this universe depends on a God who governs it. He is
the Creator who has formed us with His divine wisdom and has granted us the gift of life to
protect it. It is a gift that no one has the right to take away, threaten or manipulate to suit
oneself. Indeed, everyone must safeguard this gift of life from its beginning up to its natural
end. We therefore condemn all those practices that are a threat to life such as genocide, acts
of terrorism, forced displacement, human trafficking, abortion and euthanasia. We likewise
condemn the policies that promote these practices.
Moreover, we resolutely declare that religions must never incite war, hateful attitudes,
hostility and extremism, nor must they incite violence or the shedding of blood. These tragic
realities are the consequence of a deviation from religious teachings. They result from a
political manipulation of religions and from interpretations made by religious groups who, in
the course of history, have taken advantage of the power of religious sentiment in the hearts
of men and women in order to make them act in a way that has nothing to do with the truth of
religion. This is done for the purpose of achieving objectives that are political, economic,
worldly and short-sighted. We thus call upon all concerned to stop using religions to incite
hatred, violence, extremism and blind fanaticism, and to refrain from using the name of God to
justify acts of murder, exile, terrorism and oppression. We ask this on the basis of our common
belief in God who did not create men and women to be killed or to fight one another, nor to be
tortured or humiliated in their lives and circumstances. God, the Almighty, has no need to be
defended by anyone and does not want His name to be used to terrorize people.
This Document, in accordance with previous International Documents that have emphasized the
importance of the role of religions in the construction of world peace, upholds the
following:
– The firm conviction that authentic teachings of religions invite us to remain
rooted in the values of peace; to defend the values of mutual understanding, human fraternity
and harmonious coexistence; to re-establish wisdom, justice and love; and to reawaken
religious awareness among young people so that future generations may be protected from the
realm of materialistic thinking and from dangerous policies of unbridled greed and
indifference that are based on the law of force and not on the force of law;
– Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief,
thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex,
race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.
This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to
be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain
religion or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that
others do not accept;
– Justice based on mercy is the path to follow in order to achieve a dignified life
to which every human being has a right;
– Dialogue, understanding and the widespread promotion of a culture of tolerance,
acceptance of others and of living together peacefully would contribute significantly to
reducing many economic, social, political and environmental problems that weigh so heavily on
a large part of humanity;
– Dialogue among believers means coming together in the vast space of spiritual,
human and shared social values and, from here, transmitting the highest moral virtues that
religions aim for. It also means avoiding unproductive discussions;
– The protection of places of worship – synagogues, churches and mosques
– is a duty guaranteed by religions, human values, laws and international agreements.
Every attempt to attack places of worship or threaten them by violent assaults, bombings or
destruction, is a deviation from the teachings of religions as well as a clear violation of
international law;
– Terrorism is deplorable and threatens the security of people, be they in the East
or the West, the North or the South, and disseminates panic, terror and pessimism, but this
is not due to religion, even when terrorists instrumentalize it. It is due, rather, to an
accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to
hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride. This is why it is so necessary to stop
supporting terrorist movements fuelled by financing, the provision of weapons and strategy,
and by attempts to justify these movements even using the media. All these must be regarded
as international crimes that threaten security and world peace. Such terrorism must be
condemned in all its forms and expressions;
– The concept of citizenship is based on the equality of rights and duties, under
which all enjoy justice. It is therefore crucial to establish in our societies the concept of
full citizenship and reject the discriminatory use of the term minorities which engenders
feelings of isolation and inferiority. Its misuse paves the way for hostility and discord; it
undoes any successes and takes away the religious and civil rights of some citizens who are
thus discriminated against;
– Good relations between East and West are indisputably necessary for both. They
must not be neglected, so that each can be enriched by the other's culture through fruitful
exchange and dialogue. The West can discover in the East remedies for those spiritual and
religious maladies that are caused by a prevailing materialism. And the East can find in the
West many elements that can help free it from weakness, division, conflict and scientific,
technical and cultural decline. It is important to pay attention to religious, cultural and
historical differences that are a vital component in shaping the character, culture and
civilization of the East. It is likewise important to reinforce the bond of fundamental human
rights in order to help ensure a dignified life for all the men and women of East and West,
avoiding the politics of double standards;
– It is an essential requirement to recognize the right of women to education and
employment, and to recognize their freedom to exercise their own political rights. Moreover,
efforts must be made to free women from historical and social conditioning that runs contrary
to the principles of their faith and dignity. It is also necessary to protect women from
sexual exploitation and from being treated as merchandise or objects of pleasure or financial
gain. Accordingly, an end must be brought to all those inhuman and vulgar practices that
denigrate the dignity of women. Efforts must be made to modify those laws that prevent women
from fully enjoying their rights;
– The protection of the fundamental rights of children to grow up in a family
environment, to receive nutrition, education and support, are duties of the family and
society. Such duties must be guaranteed and protected so that they are not overlooked or
denied to any child in any part of the world. All those practices that violate the dignity
and rights of children must be denounced. It is equally important to be vigilant against the
dangers that they are exposed to, particularly in the digital world, and to consider as a
crime the trafficking of their innocence and all violations of their youth;
– The protection of the rights of the elderly, the weak, the disabled, and the
oppressed is a religious and social obligation that must be guaranteed and defended through
strict legislation and the implementation of the relevant international agreements.
To this end, by mutual cooperation, the Catholic Church and Al-Azhar announce and pledge to
convey this Document to authorities, influential leaders, persons of religion all over the
world, appropriate regional and international organizations, organizations within civil
society, religious institutions and leading thinkers. They further pledge to make known the
principles contained in this Declaration at all regional and international levels, while
requesting that these principles be translated into policies, decisions, legislative texts,
courses of study and materials to be circulated.
Al-Azhar and the Catholic Church ask that this Document become the object of research and
reflection in all schools, universities and institutes of formation, thus helping to educate
new generations to bring goodness and peace to others, and to be defenders everywhere of the
rights of the oppressed and of the least of our brothers and sisters.
In conclusion, our aspiration is that:
this Declaration may constitute an invitation to reconciliation and fraternity among all
believers, indeed among believers and non-believers, and among all people of good will;
this Declaration may be an appeal to every upright conscience that rejects deplorable
violence and blind extremism; an appeal to those who cherish the values of tolerance and
fraternity that are promoted and encouraged by religions;
this Declaration may be a witness to the greatness of faith in God that unites divided
hearts and elevates the human soul;
this Declaration may be a sign of the closeness between East and West, between North and
South, and between all who believe that God has created us to understand one another,
cooperate with one another and live as brothers and sisters who love one another.
This is what we hope and seek to achieve with the aim of finding a universal peace that all
can enjoy in this life.
It's not One World Religion, for crying out loud. It's actually a great statement. The
Pope is trying to protect Christians living in Muslim or Jewish lands and the Iman Muslims
living in Christian or Jewish lands. If there were a Rabbi signing it, he would have wanted
to protect Jews living in Christian lands (and possibly Muslim lands but frankly I think Jews
are happy to have all Mideast Jews driven to Israel so I don't think they currently care much
about that).
One World Religion requires the same religion for everyone. Secular humanism is the One
World Religion. It is sold as actually not being a religion, the better to fool the masses.
But it is entirely a religion. And the Beast will rise from Secular Humanism, as will the
Mark of the Beast.
Christianity will definitely not be part of the One World Religion.
Orwell, in his book, 1984 wrote that the government had two terms: Oldspeak and Newspeak. One
was not permitted to use old speak.
" This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating
undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so
far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.
To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be
used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from
weeds."
It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free,"
since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were
therefore of necessity nameless."
Were sliding down a slippery, ever-darkening slope. When I step back and try to examine
the whole picture, it's very concerning. Take, for instance, [MORE]
The article had a link to a WordPress article, penned by John Whitehead, The Rutherford
Institute about what has crept into America, via the Militarization of the Police Force.
I subscribed to his newsletter, years ago when Bush and, then, Obama gave Military
Armament to Civilian Police forces. When the "FBI raids Stone's Home" story hit, complete
with CNN presence, I realized that we do, in fact have policing by fear in the U.S.,
advertised by Cable News. I'm not an alarmist but, I am taking this all in and it doesn't
look good for us. I've also read that millions of Americans are leaving this country, yes, in
droves. I've thought about it, before but, don't know if I can convince Wifey this is what we
need to do since were in our 70s.
Whiteheads sight has an ongoing ledger of Police incompetence, armed to the teeth just to
deliver a warrant, often going to the wrong house, creating chaos, shooting people and their
animals and then finding out that they raided the wrong house and killed the wrong person. A
flash-band grenade was launched into the wrong residence, landed on a toddler in a crib and
burned a hole in its stomach. The scales are tipped in the favor of cops and, if a homeowner
attempts to defend himself, he's prosecuted to the full extent of the "law."
Our 4th amendment is gone. Our First and Second Amendment Rights are under heavy attack.
There's a call for a Constitutional Convention with almost all of the States sign on for an
Article Five Convention.
Were all in deep shit. It doesn't matter if you are guilty of a crime or not. If they'll
go after an unarmed Roger Stone, guns pointed, in front of his family, terrorizing them for
National TV, what do YOU think is their intent? With 10 Zillion Super-Cop shows on TV for the
last forty years, where they always get their man, never make errors and show how violent
they are, legally, what do you think is the intent?
Nothing happens on the government level by accident NOTHING
First, Myspace sucked in all of the youngsters and they learned how easy it was to
communicate, online. Then, Twitter and Facebook arrived as beacons of free speech. Then,
other commentary friendly web site pop up everywhere, allowing you to spew your agitated
heart out and argue with each other and call each other names and then opposite ideologies
manifested in separate sites on the net with "moderators" that throw registrants off
(banning/banishing) them for defending their positions echo chambers for the "alt" Right or
the politically correct Left Trump bashers. Sometime, I suggest you go to these and read the
commenters' remarks. They're literally insane. I was even banned from a DISCUSS site for
suggesting some civil discourse, identifying myself as a Trump Voter.
Do you really believe that all of these issues simply morphed to lock out Conservatives?
No way. This was all planned, possibly to I.D. individuals who are "potential" adversaries of
a different ideology or possible "problem people" that get put on a watch list. If the DNA
Ancestry sights are GIVING your DNA results to the Government, what good can come of it?
Money quote: " neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at large, and to
make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were under
feudalism."
Notable quotes:
"... ... if you take the Bible literally, it's the fight in almost all of the early books of the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, all about the fight over indebtedness and debt cancellation. ..."
"... neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at large,and to make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were under feudalism. ..."
"... They call themselves free marketers, but they realize that you cannot have neoliberalism unless you're willing to murder and assassinate everyone who promotes an alternative ..."
"... Just so long as you remember that most of the strongest and most moving condemnations of greed and money in the ancient and (today) western world are also Jewish--i.e. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, the Gospels, Letter of James, etc. ..."
"... The history of Jewish banking after the fall or Rome is inextricable from cultural anti-judaism of Christian west and east and de facto marginalization/ghettoization of Jews from most aspects of social life. The Jewish lending of money on interest to gentiles was both necessary for early mercantilist trade and yet usury was prohibited by the church. So Jewish money lenders were essential to and yet ostracized within European economies for centuries. ..."
"... Now Christianity has itself long given up on the tradition teaching against usury of course. ..."
"... In John, for instance most of the references to what in English is translated as "the Jews" are in Greek clearly references to "the Judaeans"--and especially to the ruling elite among the southern tribe in bed with the Romans. ..."
Just finished reading the fascinating
Michael Hudson interview I linked to on previous thread; but since we're discussing Jews
and their religion in a tangential manner, I think it appropriate to post here since the
history Hudson explains is 100% key to the ongoing pain us humans feel and inflict. My
apologies in advance, but it will take this long excerpt to explain what I mean:
"Tribes: When does the concept of a general debt cancellation disappear historically?
"Michael: I guess in about the second or third century AD it was downplayed in the Bible.
After Jesus died, you had, first of all, St Paul taking over, and basically Christianity was
created by one of the most evil men in history, the anti-Semite Cyril of Alexandria. He
gained power by murdering his rivals, the Nestorians, by convening a congress of bishops and
killing his enemies. Cyril was really the Stalin figure of Christianity, killing everybody
who was an enemy, organizing pogroms against the Jews in Alexandria where he ruled.
"It was Cyril that really introduced into Christianity the idea of the Trinity. That's
what the whole fight was about in the third and fourth centuries AD. Was Jesus a human, was
he a god? And essentially you had the Isis-Osiris figure from Egypt, put into Christianity.
The Christians were still trying to drive the Jews out of Christianity. And Cyril knew the
one thing the Jewish population was not going to accept would be the Isis figure and the
Mariolatry that the church became. And as soon as the Christian church became the
establishment rulership church, the last thing it wanted in the West was debt
cancellation.
"You had a continuation of the original Christianity in the Greek Orthodox Church, or the
Orthodox Church, all the way through Byzantium. And in my book And Forgive Them Their Debts,
the last two chapters are on the Byzantine echo of the original debt cancellations, where one
ruler after another would cancel the debts. And they gave very explicit reason for it: if we
don't cancel the debts, we're not going to be able to field an army, we're not going to be
able to collect taxes, because the oligarchy is going to take over. They were very explicit,
with references to the Bible, references to the jubilee year. So you had Christianity survive
in the Byzantine Empire. But in the West it ended in Margaret Thatcher. And Father
Coughlin.
"Tribes: He was the '30s figure here in the States.
"Michael: Yes: anti-Semite, right-wing, pro-war, anti-labor. So the irony is that you have
the people who call themselves fundamentalist Christians being against everything that Jesus
was fighting for, and everything that original Christianity was all about."
Hudson says debt forgiveness was one of the central tenets of Judaism: " ... if
you take the Bible literally, it's the fight in almost all of the early books of the Old
Testament, the Jewish Bible, all about the fight over indebtedness and debt
cancellation. "
Looks like I'll be purchasing Hudson's book as he's essentially unveiling a whole new,
potentially revolutionary, historical interpretation.
@ karlof1 with the Michale Hudson link....thanks!!
Here is the quote that I really like from that interview
"
Michael: No. You asked what is the fight about? The fight is whether the state will be taken
over, essentially to be an extension of Wall Street if you do not have government planning.
Every economy is planned. Ever since the Neolithic (era), you've had to have (a form of)
planning. If you don't have a public authority doing the planning, then the financial
authority becomes the planners. So globalism is in the financial interest –Wall Street
and the City of London, doing the planning, not governments. They will do the planning in
their own interest. So neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at
large,and to make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were
under feudalism.
"
karlof1, please email me as I would like to read the book as well and maybe we can share a
copy.
And yes, it is relevant to Netanyahoo and his ongoing passel of lies because humanity has
been told and been living these lives for centuries...it is time to stop this shit and grow
up/evolve
@13 / 78 karlof1... thanks very much for the links to michael hudson, alastair crooke and the
bruno maraces articles...
they were all good for different reasons, but although hudson is being criticized for
glossing over some of his talking points, i think the main thrust of his article is very
worthwhile for others to read! the quote to end his article is quite good "The question is,
who do you want to run the economy? The 1% and the financial sector, or the 99% through
politics? The fight has to be in the political sphere, because there's no other sphere that
the financial interests cannot crush you on."
it seems to me that the usa has worked hard to bad mouth or get rid of government and the
concept of government being involved in anything.. of course everything has to be run by a
'private corp' - ie corporations must run everything.. they call them oligarchs when talking
about russia, lol - but they are corporations when they are in the usa.. slight rant..
another quote i especially liked from hudson.. " They call themselves free marketers,
but they realize that you cannot have neoliberalism unless you're willing to murder and
assassinate everyone who promotes an alternative ." that sounds about right...
@ 84 juliania.. aside from your comments on hudsons characterization of st paul "the
anti-Semite Cyril of Alexandria" further down hudson basically does the same with father
coughlin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin..
he gets the anti-semite tag as well.. i don't know much about either characters, so it's
mostly greek to me, but i do find some of hudsons views especially appealing - debt
forgiveness being central to the whole article as i read it...
it is interesting my own view on how money is so central to the world and how often times
I am incapable of avoiding the observation of the disproportionate number of Jewish people in
banking.. I guess that makes me anti-semite too, but i don't think of myself that way.. I
think the obsession with money is killing the planet.. I don't care who is responsible for
keeping it going, it is killing us...
Just so long as you remember that most of the strongest and most moving condemnations
of greed and money in the ancient and (today) western world are also Jewish--i.e. Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Micah, the Gospels, Letter of James, etc.
The history of Jewish banking after the fall or Rome is inextricable from cultural
anti-judaism of Christian west and east and de facto marginalization/ghettoization of Jews from
most aspects of social life. The Jewish lending of money on interest to gentiles was both
necessary for early mercantilist trade and yet usury was prohibited by the church. So Jewish
money lenders were essential to and yet ostracized within European economies for
centuries.
Now Christianity has itself long given up on the tradition teaching against usury of
course.
I too greatly admire the work of Hudson but he consistently errs and oversimplifies
whenever discussing the beliefs of and the development of beliefs among preNicene followers
of the way (as Acts puts is) or Christians (as they came to be known in Antioch within
roughly eight or nine decades after Jesus' death.) Palestinian Judaism in the time of Jesus
was much more variegated than scholars even twenty years ago had recognized. The gradual
reception and interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in tandem with renewed research into
Phili of Alexandria, the Essenes, the so-called Sons of Zadok, contemporary Galilean zealot
movements styles after the earlier Maccabean resistance, the apocalyptism of post exilic
texts like Daniel and (presumably) parts of Enoch--all paint a picture of a highly diverse
group of alternatives to the state-Church once known as Second Temple Judaism that has been
mistaken as undisputed Jewish "orthodoxy" since the advent of historical criticism.
The
Gospel of John, for example, which dates from betweeen 80-120 and is the record of a much
earlier oral tradition, is already explicitly binitarian, and possibly already trinitarian
depending on how one understands the relationship between the Spirit or Advocate and the Son.
(Most ante-Nicene Christians understood the Spirit to be *Christ's* own spirit in distributed
form, and they did so by appeal to a well-developed but still largely under recognized strand
in Jewish angelology.)
The "theological" development of Christianity occurred much sooner
that it has been thought because it emerged from an already highly theologized strand or
strands of Jewish teaching that, like Christianity itself, privileged the Abrahamic covenant
over the Mosaic Law, the testament of grace over that of works, and the universal scope of
revelation and salvation as opposed to any political or ethnic reading of the "Kingdom."
None
of these groups were part of the ruling class of Judaean priests and levites and their
hangers on the Pharisees.
In John, for instance most of the references to what in English is
translated as "the Jews" are in Greek clearly references to "the Judaeans"--and especially to
the ruling elite among the southern tribe in bed with the Romans.
So the anti-Judaism/Semiti
of John's Gispel largely rests on a mistranslation. In any event, everything is much more
complex than Hudson makes it out to be. Christian economic radicalism is alive and well in
the thought of Gregory of Nysa and Basil the Great, who also happened to be Cappadocian
fathers highly influential in the development of "orthodox" Trinitarianism in the fourth
century.
I still think that Hudson's big picture critique of the direction later Christianity
took is helpful and necessary, but this doesn't change the fact that he simplifies the
origins, development, and arguably devolution of this movement whenever he tries to get
specific. It is a worthwhile danger given the quality of his work in historical economics,
but still one has to be aware of.
This "apostolic exhortation" is probably the most sharp critique of neoliberalism by a church leader.
Notable quotes:
"... "In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world," the pope wrote. "This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting." ..."
"... In his exhortation, the pope also attacked economic inequality, suggesting Christians have a duty to combat it to comply with the Ten Commandments -- specifically the prohibition on killing. ..."
Pope Francis delivers a speech March 15, 2013, during a meeting of the world's cardinals. (Osservatore Romano/EPA)
Pope Francis has released a sharply worded take on capitalism and the world's treatment of its poor, criticizing "trickle-down"
economic policies in no uncertain terms.
In the
first lengthy writing of his papacy -- also known as an "apostolic exhortation" -- Francis says such economic theories naively
rely on the goodness of those in charge and create a "tyranny" of the markets.
"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a
free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world," the pope wrote. "This opinion,
which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and
in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting."
While popes have often warned against the negative impact of the markets, Francis's verbiage is note-worthy because of its use
of the phrase "trickle-down" -- a term that came into popular usage as a description for former president Ronald Reagan's economic
policies. While the term is often used pejoratively, it describes an economic theory that remains popular with conservatives in the
United States today.
The theory holds that policies benefiting the wealthiest segment of society will also help the poor, by allowing money to "trickle
down" from the top income levels into the lower ones. Critics, including President Obama, say the policies, usually focused on tax
cuts and credits that primarily benefit upper-income Americans, concentrate wealth in the highest income levels and that the benefits
rarely trickle down to the extent proponents suggest.
In his exhortation, the pope also attacked economic inequality, suggesting Christians have a duty to combat it to comply with
the Ten Commandments -- specifically the prohibition on killing.
"Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also
have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality," the pope wrote. "Such an economy kills."
"We have created new idols," Francis wrote. "The worship of the ancient golden calf ... has returned in a new and ruthless guise
in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose."
The pope also attacks "consumerism": "It is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging
to the social fabric."
Here is the entire passage:
I. SOME CHALLENGES OF TODAY'S WORLD
52. In our time humanity is experiencing a turning-point in its history, as we can see from the advances being made in so many
fields. We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people's welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications.
At the same time we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences.
A number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich
countries. The joy of living frequently fades, lack of respect for others and violence are on the rise, and inequality is increasingly
evident. It is a struggle to live and, often, to live with precious little dignity. This epochal change has been set in motion
by the enormous qualitative, quantitative, rapid and cumulative advances occuring in the sciences and in technology, and by their
instant application in different areas of nature and of life. We are in an age of knowledge and information, which has led to
new and often anonymous kinds of power.
No to an economy of exclusion
53. Just as the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we
also have to say "thou shalt not" to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not
a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a
case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality.
Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.
As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any
means of escape.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a "disposable" culture
which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has
to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's underside or its
fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the
"leftovers".
54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by
a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has
never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the
sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which
excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without
being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain,
and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity
deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for
lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.
No to the new idolatry of money
55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves
and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the
denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35)
has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly
human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of
real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.
56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity
enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and
financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise
any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its
own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their
own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving
tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which
tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless
before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.
No to a financial system which rules rather than serves
57. Behind this attitude lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God. Ethics has come to be viewed with a certain scornful
derision. It is seen as counterproductive, too human, because it makes money and power relative. It is felt to be a threat, since
it condemns the manipulation and debasement of the person. In effect, ethics leads to a God who calls for a committed response
which is outside of the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable,
unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement.
Ethics – a non-ideological ethics – would make it possible to bring about balance and a more humane social order. With this in
mind, I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: "Not to share
one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but
theirs".
[55]
58. A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political
leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics
of each case. Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ
to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and a return of economics
and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings.
No to the inequality which spawns violence
59. Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples
is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without
equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode.
When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes
or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply
because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust
at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence
and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences,
an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized
in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called "end of history",
since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.
60. Today's economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with
inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot
and never will be able to resolve. This serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though
nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply
content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations,
they claim that the solution is an "education" that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even
more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in
their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.
CHAPTER TWO: AMID THE CRISIS
OF COMMUNAL COMMITMENT
50. Before taking up some basic questions related to the work of evangelization, it may be
helpful to mention briefly the context in which we all have to live and work. Today, we
frequently hear of a "diagnostic overload" which is not always accompanied by improved and
actually applicable methods of treatment. Nor would we be well served by a purely sociological
analysis which would aim to embrace all of reality by employing an allegedly neutral and
clinical method. What I would like to propose is something much more in the line of an
evangelical discernment. It is the approach of a missionary disciple, an approach "nourished by
the light and strength of the Holy Spirit".
[53]
51. It is not the task of the Pope to offer a detailed and complete analysis of contemporary
reality, but I do exhort all the communities to an "ever watchful scrutiny of the signs of the
times".
[54] This is in fact a grave responsibility, since certain present realities, unless
effectively dealt with, are capable of setting off processes of dehumanization which would then
be hard to reverse. We need to distinguish clearly what might be a fruit of the kingdom from
what runs counter to God's plan. This involves not only recognizing and discerning spirits, but
also – and this is decisive – choosing movements of the spirit of good and
rejecting those of the spirit of evil. I take for granted the different analyses which other
documents of the universal magisterium have offered, as well as those proposed by the regional
and national conferences of bishops. In this Exhortation I claim only to consider briefly, and
from a pastoral perspective, certain factors which can restrain or weaken the impulse of
missionary renewal in the Church, either because they threaten the life and dignity of God's
people or because they affect those who are directly involved in the Church's institutions and
in her work of evangelization.
52. In our time humanity is experiencing a turning-point in its history, as we can see from
the advances being made in so many fields. We can only praise the steps being taken to improve
people's welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications. At the same time
we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day,
with dire consequences. A number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are
gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich countries. The joy of living
frequently fades, lack of respect for others and violence are on the rise, and inequality is
increasingly evident. It is a struggle to live and, often, to live with precious little
dignity. This epochal change has been set in motion by the enormous qualitative, quantitative,
rapid and cumulative advances occuring in the sciences and in technology, and by their instant
application in different areas of nature and of life. We are in an age of knowledge and
information, which has led to new and often anonymous kinds of power.
53. Just as the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" sets a clear limit in order to safeguard
the value of human life, today we also have to say "thou shalt not" to an economy of exclusion
and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly
homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This
is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are
starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition
and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence,
masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without
possibilities, without any means of escape.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have
created a "throw away" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about
exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it
means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's
underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it.
The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers".
54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that
economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater
justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the
facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power
and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are
still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that
selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it,
we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other
people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's
responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the
market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of
opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.
55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly
accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us
overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of
the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf.
Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the
dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis
affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real
concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.
56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating
the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of
ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.
Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to
exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which
unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of
interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies
and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread
corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst
for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything
which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is
defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.
57. Behind this attitude lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God. Ethics has come
to be viewed with a certain scornful derision. It is seen as counterproductive, too human,
because it makes money and power relative. It is felt to be a threat, since it condemns the
manipulation and debasement of the person. In effect, ethics leads to a God who calls for a
committed response which is outside the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are
absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable, unmanageable, even dangerous, since he
calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement.
Ethics – a non-ideological ethics – would make it possible to bring about balance
and a more humane social order. With this in mind, I encourage financial experts and political
leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: "Not to share one's wealth with
the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which
we hold, but theirs".
[55]
58. A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change
of approach on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with
determination and an eye to the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each
case. Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is
obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the
poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an
ethical approach which favours human beings.
59. Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and
inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate
violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal
opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for
growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether local, national or global –
is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent
on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not
the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the
system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to
spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and
quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If
every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a
constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social
structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the
so-called "end of history", since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development
have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.
60. Today's economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that
unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric.
Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able
to resolve. It serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security,
even though nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create
new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the
poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they
claim that the solution is an "education" that would tranquilize them, making them tame and
harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the
widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments,
businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.
61. We also evangelize when we attempt to confront the various challenges which can arise.
[56] On occasion these may take the form of veritable attacks on religious freedom or new
persecutions directed against Christians; in some countries these have reached alarming levels
of hatred and violence. In many places, the problem is more that of widespread indifference and
relativism, linked to disillusionment and the crisis of ideologies which has come about as a
reaction to any-thing which might appear totalitarian. This not only harms the Church but the
fabric of society as a whole. We should recognize how in a culture where each person wants to
be bearer of his or her own subjective truth, it becomes difficult for citizens to devise a
common plan which transcends individual gain and personal ambitions.
62. In the prevailing culture, priority is given to the outward, the immediate, the visible,
the quick, the superficial and the provisional. What is real gives way to appearances. In many
countries globalization has meant a hastened deterioration of their own cultural roots and the
invasion of ways of thinking and acting proper to other cultures which are economically
advanced but ethically debilitated. This fact has been brought up by bishops from various
continents in different Synods. The African bishops, for example, taking up the Encyclical
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis , pointed out years ago that there have been frequent attempts
to make the African countries "parts of a machine, cogs on a gigantic wheel. This is often true
also in the field of social communications which, being run by centres mostly in the northern
hemisphere, do not always give due consideration to the priorities and problems of such
countries or respect their cultural make-up".
[57] By the same token, the bishops of Asia "underlined the external influences being
brought to bear on Asian cultures. New patterns of behaviour are emerging as a result of
over-exposure to the mass media As a result, the negative aspects of the media and
entertainment industries are threatening traditional values, and in particular the sacredness
of marriage and the stability of the family".
[58]
63. The Catholic faith of many peoples is nowadays being challenged by the proliferation of
new religious movements, some of which tend to fundamentalism while others seem to propose a
spirituality without God. This is, on the one hand, a human reaction to a materialistic,
consumerist and individualistic society, but it is also a means of exploiting the weaknesses of
people living in poverty and on the fringes of society, people who make ends meet amid great
human suffering and are looking for immediate solutions to their needs. These religious
movements, not without a certain shrewdness, come to fill, within a predominantly
individualistic culture, a vacuum left by secularist rationalism. We must recognize that if
part of our baptized people lack a sense of belonging to the Church, this is also due to
certain structures and the occasionally unwelcoming atmosphere of some of our parishes and
communities, or to a bureaucratic way of dealing with problems, be they simple or complex, in
the lives of our people. In many places an administrative approach prevails over a pastoral
approach, as does a concentration on administering the sacraments apart from other forms of
evangelization.
64. The process of secularization tends to reduce the faith and the Church to the sphere of
the private and personal. Furthermore, by completely rejecting the transcendent, it has
produced a growing deterioration of ethics, a weakening of the sense of personal and collective
sin, and a steady increase in relativism. These have led to a general sense of disorientation,
especially in the periods of adolescence and young adulthood which are so vulnerable to change.
As the bishops of the United States of America have rightly pointed out, while the Church
insists on the existence of objective moral norms which are valid for everyone, "there are
those in our culture who portray this teaching as unjust, that is, as opposed to basic human
rights. Such claims usually follow from a form of moral relativism that is joined, not without
inconsistency, to a belief in the absolute rights of individuals. In this view, the Church is
perceived as promoting a particular prejudice and as interfering with individual freedom".
[59] We are living in an information-driven society which bombards us indiscriminately with
data – all treated as being of equal importance – and which leads to remarkable
superficiality in the area of moral discernment. In response, we need to provide an education
which teaches critical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.
65. Despite the tide of secularism which has swept our societies, in many countries –
even those where Christians are a minority – the Catholic Church is considered a credible
institution by public opinion, and trusted for her solidarity and concern for those in greatest
need. Again and again, the Church has acted as a mediator in finding solutions to problems
affecting peace, social harmony, the land, the defence of life, human and civil rights, and so
forth. And how much good has been done by Catholic schools and universities around the world!
This is a good thing. Yet, we find it difficult to make people see that when we raise other
questions less palatable to public opinion, we are doing so out of fidelity to precisely the
same convictions about human dignity and the common good.
66. The family is experiencing a profound cultural crisis, as are all communities and social
bonds. In the case of the family, the weakening of these bonds is particularly serious because
the family is the fundamental cell of society, where we learn to live with others despite our
differences and to belong to one another; it is also the place where parents pass on the faith
to their children. Marriage now tends to be viewed as a form of mere emotional satisfaction
that can be constructed in any way or modified at will. But the indispensible contribution of
marriage to society transcends the feelings and momentary needs of the couple. As the French
bishops have taught, it is not born "of loving sentiment, ephemeral by definition, but from the
depth of the obligation assumed by the spouses who accept to enter a total communion of life".
[60]
67. The individualism of our postmodern and globalized era favours a lifestyle which weakens
the development and stability of personal relationships and distorts family bonds. Pastoral
activity needs to bring out more clearly the fact that our relationship with the Father demands
and encourages a communion which heals, promotes and reinforces interpersonal bonds. In our
world, especially in some countries, different forms of war and conflict are re-emerging, yet
we Christians remain steadfast in our intention to respect others, to heal wounds, to build
bridges, to strengthen relationships and to "bear one another's burdens" ( Gal 6:2).
Today too, various associations for the defence of rights and the pursuit of noble goals are
being founded. This is a sign of the desire of many people to contribute to social and cultural
progress.
"... Politics must not be subject to the economy, nor should the economy be subject to the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy. Today, in view of the common good, there is urgent need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service of life, especially human life. ..."
"... Production is not always rational, and is usually tied to economic variables which assign to products a value that does not necessarily correspond to their real worth. This frequently leads to an overproduction of some commodities, with unnecessary impact on the environment and with negative results on regional economies.[133] The financial bubble also tends to be a productive bubble. The problem of the real economy is not confronted with vigour, yet it is the real economy which makes diversification and improvement in production possible, helps companies to function well, and enables small and medium businesses to develop and create employment. ..."
"... Whenever these questions are raised, some react by accusing others of irrationally attempting to stand in the way of progress and human development. But we need to grow in the conviction that a decrease in the pace of production and consumption can at times give rise to another form of progress and development. ..."
"... The principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations, reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy. As long as production is increased, little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment; as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution. In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. Yet only when "the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations",[138] can those actions be considered ethical. An instrumental way of reasoning, which provides a purely static analysis of realities in the service of present needs, is at work whether resources are allocated by the market or by state central planning. ..."
I'm an environmental scientist, not an economist, but it seems to me that Pope Francis has some
sensible things to say, as in the following from Laudato si:
IV. POLITICS AND ECONOMY IN DIALOGUE FOR HUMAN FULFILMENT
189. Politics must not be subject to the economy, nor should the economy be subject to
the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy. Today, in view of the common good,
there is urgent need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service
of life, especially human life. Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price,
foregoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute
power of a financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises
after a slow, costly and only apparent recovery. The financial crisis of 2007-08 provided an opportunity
to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of regulating speculative
financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis did not include rethinking
the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world. Production is not always rational,
and is usually tied to economic variables which assign to products a value that does not necessarily
correspond to their real worth. This frequently leads to an overproduction of some commodities,
with unnecessary impact on the environment and with negative results on regional economies.[133]
The financial bubble also tends to be a productive bubble. The problem of the real economy is
not confronted with vigour, yet it is the real economy which makes diversification and improvement
in production possible, helps companies to function well, and enables small and medium businesses
to develop and create employment.
190. Here too, it should always be kept in mind that "environmental protection cannot be assured
solely on the basis of financial calculations of costs and benefits. The environment is one of
those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces".[134] Once more,
we need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be
solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals. Is it realistic to hope
that those who are obsessed with maximizing profits will stop to reflect on the environmental
damage which they will leave behind for future generations? Where profits alone count, there can
be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity
of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention. Moreover, biodiversity is considered
at most a deposit of economic resources available for exploitation, with no serious thought for
the real value of things, their significance for persons and cultures, or the concerns and needs
of the poor.
191. Whenever these questions are raised, some react by accusing others of irrationally
attempting to stand in the way of progress and human development. But we need to grow in the conviction
that a decrease in the pace of production and consumption can at times give rise to another form
of progress and development. Efforts to promote a sustainable use of natural resources are
not a waste of money, but rather an investment capable of providing other economic benefits in
the medium term. If we look at the larger picture, we can see that more diversified and innovative
forms of production which impact less on the environment can prove very profitable. It is a matter
of openness to different possibilities which do not involve stifling human creativity and its
ideals of progress, but rather directing that energy along new channels.
192. For example, a path of productive development, which is more creative and better directed,
could correct the present disparity between excessive technological investment in consumption
and insufficient investment in resolving urgent problems facing the human family. It could generate
intelligent and profitable ways of reusing, revamping and recycling, and it could also improve
the energy efficiency of cities. Productive diversification offers the fullest possibilities to
human ingenuity to create and innovate, while at the same time protecting the environment and
creating more sources of employment. Such creativity would be a worthy expression of our most
noble human qualities, for we would be striving intelligently, boldly and responsibly to promote
a sustainable and equitable development within the context of a broader concept of quality of
life. On the other hand, to find ever new ways of despoiling nature, purely for the sake of new
consumer items and quick profit, would be, in human terms, less worthy and creative, and more
superficial.
193. In any event, if in some cases sustainable development were to involve new forms of growth,
then in other cases, given the insatiable and irresponsible growth produced over many decades,
we need also to think of containing growth by setting some reasonable limits and even retracing
our steps before it is too late. We know how unsustainable is the behaviour of those who constantly
consume and destroy, while others are not yet able to live in a way worthy of their human dignity.
That is why the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order
to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth. Benedict XVI has said that
"technologically advanced societies must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while
reducing their energy consumption and improving its efficiency".[135]
194. For new models of progress to arise, there is a need to change "models of global development";[136]
this will entail a responsible reflection on "the meaning of the economy and its goals with an
eye to correcting its malfunctions and misapplications".[137] It is not enough to balance, in
the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment
with progress. Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter
of redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not
leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered
progress. Frequently, in fact, people's quality of life actually diminishes – by the deterioration
of the environment, the low quality of food or the depletion of resources – in the midst of economic
growth. In this context, talk of sustainable growth usually becomes a way of distracting attention
and offering excuses. It absorbs the language and values of ecology into the categories of finance
and technocracy, and the social and environmental responsibility of businesses often gets reduced
to a series of marketing and image-enhancing measures.
195. The principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations,
reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy. As long as production is increased,
little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the
environment; as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses
entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution.
In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved.
Yet only when "the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized
with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations",[138]
can those actions be considered ethical. An instrumental way of reasoning, which provides a purely
static analysis of realities in the service of present needs, is at work whether resources are
allocated by the market or by state central planning.
196. What happens with politics? Let us keep in mind the principle of subsidiarity, which grants
freedom to develop the capabilities present at every level of society, while also demanding a
greater sense of responsibility for the common good from those who wield greater power. Today,
it is the case that some economic sectors exercise more power than states themselves. But economics
without politics cannot be justified, since this would make it impossible to favour other ways
of handling the various aspects of the present crisis. The mindset which leaves no room for sincere
concern for the environment is the same mindset which lacks concern for the inclusion of the most
vulnerable members of society. For "the current model, with its emphasis on success and self-reliance,
does not appear to favour an investment in efforts to help the slow, the weak or the less talented
to find opportunities in life".[139]
197. What is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a new, integral and interdisciplinary
approach to handling the different aspects of the crisis. Often, politics itself is responsible
for the disrepute in which it is held, on account of corruption and the failure to enact sound
public policies. If in a given region the state does not carry out its responsibilities, some
business groups can come forward in the guise of benefactors, wield real power, and consider themselves
exempt from certain rules, to the point of tolerating different forms of organized crime, human
trafficking, the drug trade and violence, all of which become very difficult to eradicate. If
politics shows itself incapable of breaking such a perverse logic, and remains caught up in inconsequential
discussions, we will continue to avoid facing the major problems of humanity. A strategy for real
change calls for rethinking processes in their entirety, for it is not enough to include a few
superficial ecological considerations while failing to question the logic which underlies present-day
culture. A healthy politics needs to be able to take up this challenge.
198. Politics and the economy tend to blame each other when it comes to poverty and environmental
degradation. It is to be hoped that they can acknowledge their own mistakes and find forms of
interaction directed to the common good. While some are concerned only with financial gain, and
others with holding on to or increasing their power, what we are left with are conflicts or spurious
agreements where the last thing either party is concerned about is caring for the environment
and protecting those who are most vulnerable. Here too, we see how true it is that "unity is greater
than conflict".[140]
The French economist Thomas Piketty argued last year in a surprising best-seller, "Capital in
the Twenty-First Century," that rising wealth inequality was a natural result of free-market policies,
a direct challenge to the conventional view that economic inequalities shrink over time. The controversial
implication drawn by Mr. Piketty is that governments should raise taxes on the wealthy.
Notable quotes:
"... His speeches can blend biblical fury with apocalyptic doom. Pope Francis does not just criticize the excesses of global capitalism. He compares them to the "dung of the devil." He does not simply argue that systemic "greed for money" is a bad thing. He calls it a "subtle dictatorship" that "condemns and enslaves men and women." ..."
"... The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution. "This is not theology as usual; this is him shouting from the mountaintop," said Stephen F. Schneck, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic studies at Catholic University of America in Washington. ..."
"... Left-wing populism is surging in countries immersed in economic turmoil, such as Spain, and, most notably, Greece . But even in the United States, where the economy has rebounded, widespread concern about inequality and corporate power are propelling the rise of liberals like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who, in turn, have pushed the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the left. ..."
"... Even some free-market champions are now reassessing the shortcomings of unfettered capitalism. George Soros, who made billions in the markets, and then spent a good part of it promoting the spread of free markets in Eastern Europe, now argues that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. ..."
"... Many Catholic scholars would argue that Francis is merely continuing a line of Catholic social teaching that has existed for more than a century and was embraced even by his two conservative predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Pope Leo XIII first called for economic justice on behalf of workers in 1891, with his encyclical "Rerum Novarum" - or, "On Condition of Labor." ..."
"... Francis has such a strong sense of urgency "because he has been on the front lines with real people, not just numbers and abstract ideas," Mr. Schneck said. "That real-life experience of working with the most marginalized in Argentina has been the source of his inspiration as pontiff." ..."
"... In Bolivia, Francis praised cooperatives and other localized organizations that he said provide productive economies for the poor. "How different this is than the situation that results when those left behind by the formal market are exploited like slaves!" he said on Wednesday night. ..."
"... It is this Old Testament-like rhetoric that some finding jarring, perhaps especially so in the United States, where Francis will visit in September. His environmental encyclical, "Laudato Si'," released last month, drew loud criticism from some American conservatives and from others who found his language deeply pessimistic. His right-leaning critics also argued that he was overreaching and straying dangerously beyond religion - while condemning capitalism with too broad a brush. ..."
"... The French economist Thomas Piketty argued last year in a surprising best-seller, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," that rising wealth inequality was a natural result of free-market policies, a direct challenge to the conventional view that economic inequalities shrink over time. The controversial implication drawn by Mr. Piketty is that governments should raise taxes on the wealthy. ..."
"... "Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labor is not mere philanthropy," he said on Wednesday. "It is a moral obligation. For Christians, the responsibility is even greater: It is a commandment." ..."
"... "I'm a believer in capitalism but it comes in as many flavors as pie, and we have a choice about the kind of capitalist system that we have," said Mr. Hanauer, now an outspoken proponent of redistributive government ..."
"... "What can be done by those students, those young people, those activists, those missionaries who come to my neighborhood with the hearts full of hopes and dreams but without any real solution for my problems?" he asked. "A lot! They can do a lot. ..."
ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay - His speeches can blend biblical fury with apocalyptic doom. Pope Francis
does not just criticize the excesses of global capitalism. He compares them to the "dung of the devil."
He does not simply argue that systemic "greed for money" is a bad thing. He calls it a "subtle dictatorship"
that "condemns and enslaves men and women."
Having returned to his native Latin America, Francis has renewed his left-leaning critiques on
the inequalities of capitalism, describing it as an underlying cause of global injustice, and a prime
cause of climate change. Francis escalated that line last week when he made a
historic apology for the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church during the period of Spanish colonialism
- even as he called for a global movement against a "new colonialism" rooted in an inequitable economic
order.
The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution. "This is not theology as usual; this is him shouting from the mountaintop," said Stephen F. Schneck,
the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic studies at Catholic University of
America in Washington.
The last pope who so boldly placed himself at the center of the global moment was John Paul II,
who during the 1980s pushed the church to confront what many saw as the challenge of that era, communism.
John Paul II's anti-Communist messaging dovetailed with the agenda of political conservatives eager
for a tougher line against the Soviets and, in turn, aligned part of the church hierarchy with the
political right.
Francis has defined the economic challenge of this era as the failure of global capitalism to
create fairness, equity and dignified livelihoods for the poor - a social and religious agenda that
coincides with a resurgence of the leftist thinking marginalized in the days of John Paul II. Francis'
increasingly sharp critique comes as much of humanity has never been so wealthy or well fed - yet
rising inequality and repeated financial crises have unsettled voters, policy makers and economists.
Left-wing populism is surging in countries immersed in economic turmoil, such as Spain, and,
most notably, Greece. But even in the United States, where the economy has rebounded, widespread
concern about inequality and corporate power are propelling the
rise of liberals like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,
who, in turn, have pushed the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton,
to the left.
Even some free-market champions are now reassessing the shortcomings of unfettered capitalism.
George Soros, who made billions in the markets, and then spent a good part of it promoting the spread
of free markets in Eastern Europe, now argues that the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
"I think the pope is singing to the music that's already in the air," said Robert A. Johnson,
executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which was financed with $50 million
from Mr. Soros. "And that's a good thing. That's what artists do, and I think the pope is sensitive
to the lack of legitimacy of the system."
Many Catholic scholars would argue that Francis is merely continuing a line of Catholic social
teaching that has existed for more than a century and was embraced even by his two conservative predecessors,
John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Pope Leo XIII first called for economic justice on behalf of workers
in 1891, with his encyclical "Rerum Novarum" - or, "On Condition of Labor."
Mr. Schneck, of Catholic University, said it was as if Francis were saying, "We've been talking
about these things for more than one hundred years, and nobody is listening."
Francis has such a strong sense of urgency "because he has been on the front lines with real people,
not just numbers and abstract ideas," Mr. Schneck said. "That real-life experience of working with
the most marginalized in Argentina has been the source of his inspiration as pontiff."
Francis made his speech on Wednesday night, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, before nearly 2,000 social
advocates, farmers, trash workers and neighborhood activists. Even as he meets regularly with heads
of state, Francis has often said that change must come from the grass roots, whether from poor people
or the community organizers who work with them. To Francis, the poor have earned knowledge that is
useful and redeeming, even as a "throwaway culture" tosses them aside. He sees them as being at the
front edge of economic and environmental crises around the world.
In Bolivia, Francis praised cooperatives and other localized organizations that he said provide
productive economies for the poor. "How different this is than the situation that results when those
left behind by the formal market are exploited like slaves!" he said on Wednesday night.
It is this Old Testament-like rhetoric that some finding jarring, perhaps especially so in the
United States, where Francis will visit in September. His environmental encyclical, "Laudato Si',"
released last month, drew loud criticism from some American conservatives and from others who found
his language deeply pessimistic. His right-leaning critics also argued that he was overreaching and
straying dangerously beyond religion - while condemning capitalism with too broad a brush.
"I wish Francis would focus on positives, on how a free-market economy guided by an ethical framework,
and the rule of law, can be a part of the solution for the poor - rather than just jumping from the
reality of people's misery to the analysis that a market economy is the problem," said the Rev. Robert
A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which advocates
free-market economics.
Francis' sharpest critics have accused him of being a Marxist or a Latin American Communist, even
as he opposed communism during his time in Argentina. His tour last week of Latin America began in
Ecuador and Bolivia, two countries with far-left governments. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who
wore a Che Guevara patch on his jacket during Francis' speech, claimed the pope as a kindred spirit
- even as Francis seemed startled and caught off guard when Mr. Morales gave him a wooden crucifix
shaped like a hammer and sickle as a gift.
Francis' primary agenda last week was to begin renewing Catholicism in Latin America and reposition
it as the church of the poor. His apology for the church's complicity in the colonialist era received
an immediate roar from the crowd. In various parts of Latin America, the association between the
church and economic power elites remains intact. In Chile, a socially conservative country, some
members of the country's corporate elite are also members of Opus Dei, the traditionalist Catholic
organization founded in Spain in 1928.
Inevitably, Francis' critique can be read as a broadside against Pax Americana, the period of
capitalism regulated by global institutions created largely by the United States. But even pillars
of that system are shifting. The World Bank, which long promoted economic growth as an end in itself,
is now increasingly focused on the distribution of gains, after the Arab Spring revolts in some countries
that the bank had held up as models. The latest generation of international trade agreements includes
efforts to increase protections for workers and the environment.
The French economist Thomas Piketty argued last year in a surprising best-seller, "Capital
in the Twenty-First Century," that rising wealth inequality was a natural result of free-market policies,
a direct challenge to the conventional view that economic inequalities shrink over time. The controversial
implication drawn by Mr. Piketty is that governments should raise taxes on the wealthy.
Mr. Piketty roiled the debate among mainstream economists, yet Francis' critique is more unnerving
to some because he is not reframing inequality and poverty around a new economic theory but instead
defining it in moral terms. "Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human
labor is not mere philanthropy," he said on Wednesday. "It is a moral obligation. For Christians,
the responsibility is even greater: It is a commandment."
Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist, said that he saw Francis as making a nuanced point
about capitalism, embodied by his coinage of a "social mortgage" on accumulated wealth - a debt to
the society that made its accumulation possible. Mr. Hanauer said that economic elites should embrace
the need for reforms both for moral and pragmatic reasons. "I'm a believer in capitalism but
it comes in as many flavors as pie, and we have a choice about the kind of capitalist system that
we have," said Mr. Hanauer, now an outspoken proponent of redistributive government policies
like a higher minimum wage.
Yet what remains unclear is whether Francis has a clear vision for a systemic alternative to the
status quo that he and others criticize. "All these critiques point toward the incoherence of the
simple idea of free market economics, but they don't prescribe a remedy," said Mr. Johnson, of the
Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Francis acknowledged as much, conceding on Wednesday that he had no new "recipe" to quickly change
the world. Instead, he spoke about a "process of change" undertaken at the grass-roots level.
"What can be done by those students, those young people, those activists, those missionaries
who come to my neighborhood with the hearts full of hopes and dreams but without any real solution
for my problems?" he asked. "A lot! They can do a lot. "You, the lowly, the exploited, the poor
and underprivileged, can do, and are doing, a lot. I would even say that the future of humanity is
in great measure in your own hands."
Religion is definitely a useful tool fight neoliberalism. Actually outside of far right and religious
fundamentalists almost any tool that is useful for fighting neoliberalism should be viewed positively.
Currently Catholicism opposes neoliberalism more actively and probably somewhat more successfully due
to the statute of Pope Francis then Orthodox Church.
Notable quotes:
"... The conflict between Russia and the West, therefore, is portrayed by both the ROC and by Vladimir Putin and his cohorts as nothing less than a spiritual/civilizational conflict. ..."
Amidst the geopolitical confrontation between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the US and its allies,
little attention has been paid to the role played by religion either as a shaper of Russian domestic
politics or as a means of understanding Putin's international actions. The role of religion has long
tended to get short thrift in the study of statecraft (although it has been experiencing a bit of
a renaissance of late), yet nowhere has it played a more prominent role – and perhaps nowhere has
its importance been more unrecognized – than in its role in supporting the Russian state and Russia's
current place in world affairs.
And while much attention has been paid to the growing authoritarianism of the Kremlin and on the
support for Putin's regime on the part of the Russian oligarchs whom Putin has enriched through his
crony capitalism, little has been paid to the equally critical role of the Russian Orthodox Church
in helping to shape Russia's current system, and in supporting Putin's regime and publicly conflating
the mission of the Russian state under Vladimir Putin's leadership with the mission of the Church.
Putin's move in close coordination with the Russian Orthodox Church to sacralize the Russian national
identity has been a key factor shaping the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Russian government
under Putin, and strengthening his public support, and must be understood in order to understand
Russia's international behavior.
The close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Russian state based upon
a shared, theologically-informed vision of Russian exceptionalism is not a new phenomenon. During
the days of the Czar, the Russian ruler was seen as God's chosen ruler of a Russian nation tasked
with representing a unique set of value embodied by Russian Orthodoxy, and was revered as "the Holy
Orthodox Czar". Today, a not dissimilar vision of Russian exceptionalism is once again shared by
the ROC and the Kremlin, and many Russians are beginning to see Vladimir Putin in a similar vein
– a perception encouraged both by Putin and by the Church, each of which sees the other as a valuable
political ally and sees their respective missions as being interrelated.
... ... ...
When Putin came to power he shrewdly noted the ROC's useful role in boosting nationalism and the
fact that it shared his view of Russia's role in the world, and began to work toward strengthening
the Church's role in Russian society. Early in his presidency the Russian Duma passed a law returning
all church property seized during the Soviet era (which act alone made the ROC one of the largest
landholders in Russia). Over the past decade and a half, Putin has ordered state-owned energy firms
to contribute billions to the rebuilding of thousands of churches destroyed under the Soviets, and
many of those rich oligarchs surrounding him are dedicated supporters of the ROC who have contributed
to the growing influence of the church in myriad ways. Around 25,000 ROC churches have been built
or rebuilt since the early 1990′s, the vast majority of which have been built during Putin's rule
and largely due to his backing and that of those in his close circle of supporters. Additionally,
the ROC has been given rights that have vastly increased its role in public life, including the right
to teach religion in Russia's public schools and the right to review any legislation before the Russian
Duma.
The glue that holds together the alliance between Vladimir Putin and the ROC, and the one that
more than any other explains their mutually-supporting actions, is their shared, sacralized vision
of Russian national identity and exceptionalism. Russia, according to this vision, is neither Western
nor Asian, but rather a unique society representing a unique set of values which are believed to
be divinely inspired. The Kremlin's chief ideologue in this regard is Alexander Dugin (see a good
summary of the historical roots of Dugin's philosophy and of his impact on the Russian government
here.) According to this vision of the relationship between church, state, and society, the state
dominates, the ROC partnering with the state, and individuals and private organizations supporting
both church and state. This has provided the ideological justification for Putin's crackdown on dissent,
and the rationale behind the Church's cooperation with the Kremlin in the repression of civil society
groups or other religious groups which have dissenting political views. And the ROC's hostility toward
the activities in Russia of other religious groups have dovetailed with that of Putin, who views
independent religious activity as a potential threat to his regime.
Internationally, Russia's mission is to expand its influence and authority until it dominates
the Eurasian landmass, by means of a strong central Russian state controlling this vast territory
and aligned with the ROC as the arm of the Russian nation exercising its cultural influence. This
vision of Russian exceptionalism has met with broad resonance within Russia, which goes a long way
to explaining Putin's sky high polling numbers. Putin has successfully been able both to transfer
to himself the social trust placed by most Russians in the ROC and has also to wrap himself in the
trappings of almost a patron saint of Russia. The conflict between Russia and the West, therefore,
is portrayed by both the ROC and by Vladimir Putin and his cohorts as nothing less than a spiritual/civilizational
conflict. If anyone thought Europe's wars over religion were finished in 1648, the current standoff
with Russia illustrates that that is not the case.
"... The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. ..."
From Encyclical Letter Laudato Si' of the Holy Father Francis, On Care For Our Common Home:
The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated
and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively
approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental
method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find
itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature,
but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a
matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on
things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us.
Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.
This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers
and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth's goods, and this leads to the
planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that "an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available,
that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily
absorbed"
"The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance
in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the
real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons
of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems,
and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market
growth.
They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual
operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theories with words, but nonetheless support them with their
deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment
and the rights of future generations. Their behavior shows that for them maximizing profits is enough. Yet by itself the market
cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion. At the same time, we have "a sort of 'superdevelopment' of a
wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation", while
we are all too slow in developing economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic
resources. We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social
implications of technological and economic growth."
Leaving aside his frequent criticisms of populism, Pope Francis called for a "Christian populism" during a visit
to Sicily this weekend, insisting that true populism must listen to and serve the people.
"Be afraid of the deafness that fails to hear the people," Francis said during his
homily
at Mass in Palermo Saturday. "This is the only possible populism: listening to your people, the only
Christian populism: listening to and serving the people, without shouting, accusing, or stirring up contentions."
Seeming to channel John F. Kennedy, the pope invited his hearers to take initiative rather than asking what the
Church and society can do for them.
"Wait not for the Church to do something for you, but begin yourself," Francis said. "Wait not for society to do
it, do it yourself."
The pope's apparent openness to populism -- or at least a version of it -- marks a significant change from earlier
discourses, in which Francis condemned populism, tying its rise to selfishness and egotism.
Last year, the pontiff
warned
of the perils of populism in western democracies, telling the German newspaper
Die Zeit
that "populism is
evil and ends badly, as the past century showed."
In an anti-nationalist
speech
in March 2017, the pope told European heads of state that there is a need "to start thinking once again as
Europeans so as to avert the opposite dangers of a dreary uniformity or the triumph of particularisms."
The European Union will only be lasting and successful if the common will of Europe "proves more powerful than the
will of individual nations," Francis said, advocating for a stronger, consolidated Europe against the rising tide of
populist movements.
Solidarity is "the most effective antidote to modern forms of populism," Pope Francis told the European Union
leaders, Francis said, while denouncing nationalism as a modern form of selfishness.
The pontiff contrasted solidarity, which draw us "closer to our neighbors," with populism, which is "the fruit of
an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and 'looking beyond' their own narrow vision."
This past June, Pope Francis went further still,
insisting
that populism was not the solution to Europe's immigration crisis, just as Italy's new populist
government was beginning to enact measures to curb illegal immigration.
In an interview with Reuters, the pope was asked what he thought the solution is to the immigration crisis that
seems to be causing Europe to crumble.
"Populism is not the solution," Francis said emphatically, adding that Europe would disappear without migrants
because no one is having children.
Summing up, the pope said that "populism does not solve the problem; what solves it is welcoming, studying,
settling, and prudence, because prudence is a virtue of government and the government must reach an agreement. I can
receive a certain number and settle them."
On Tuesday, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches (WCC) will begin a two-day joint
conference
in Rome on "Migration, Xenophobia and politically motivated Populism."
The WCC is
partnering
with the Vatican department for Promoting Integral Human Development in organizing the conference as
part of ongoing work toward "peace-building and migration."
The secretary general of the WCC, Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, said the meeting would be a "very useful and significant
workshop to dig a bit deeper" into the problems of xenophobia as an expression of populism, as well as its links to
racism, conflict, and violence in countries around the world.
"... By #SlayTheSmaugs, an elected Bernie delegate in Philly. ..."
"... #STS believes that the billionaire class are Smaugs (the greed incarnate dragon of The Hobbit), immorally hoarding wealth for no reason beyond ego gratification. To "Slay" the Smaugs, we need a confiscatory wealth tax, stronger democratic institutions to impose it, and a shared moral agreement that #GreedIsEvil to justify it. ..."
"... More; charitable foundations are not the same thing, in many cases, as true charity. Instead foundations often function as hoard preservers as well, and enrich their leadership too. ..."
"... After a certain level of accumulation money is simply ego gratifying points, it's not money any more. ..."
"... Wealth on this scale has nothing to do with financial security or luxurious living. For the trivial, it is (as per D. Trump) a game and money is how you keep score. For the serious, it has to do with power, with the ability to affect other people's lives without their consent. That is why the Smaugs' wealth is absolutely our business. It should be understood that we're talking about taking very large amounts of money and power away from very rich people, people for whom money and power are pretty much the only things they value. It will not be pretty. ..."
"... If we fail to prevent the imposition of this transnational regime there will only be three classes of humans left: kleptocrats, their favored minions, and slaves. ..."
"... A more modern similarity of the US is Rome. Vassals have been going full retard for several years now, traitors sell international competitors military secrets while the biggest merchants buy off the Senate. ..."
"... Isn't there an idiom about cutting off the head of the snake? Once you deal with the strongest opponents, it's easier to go after the others. Too big to fail is nothing short of feeding the beast. ..."
"... I disagree strongly with your premise that some sort of pure and natural meritocracy has ever existed, or could ever exist in human society. Corrupt and oppressive people will always define as "meritorious" those qualities that they themselves possess– whether wealth, "gentle birth," "technical skills," or whatever. We all possess the same merit of being human. ..."
"... Meritocracy is not the same as recognizing greater and lesser degrees of competence in various activities. It is absurd to deny that some are more skillful at some things than others. Assigning the relative "merit" to various competencies is what I find objectionable. ..."
"... Encouraging ethical behavior has nothing to do with ranking the "merit" levels of different occupations. While some occupations are inherently unethical, like that of an assassin, most can be performed in such a way as to do no harm to others, and some are nearly always beneficial to society at large. ..."
By #SlayTheSmaugs, an elected Bernie delegate in Philly.
#STS believes that the billionaire class are Smaugs (the greed incarnate dragon of
The Hobbit), immorally hoarding wealth for no reason beyond ego gratification. To "Slay" the Smaugs,
we need a confiscatory wealth tax, stronger democratic institutions to impose it, and a shared moral
agreement that #GreedIsEvil to justify it.
Worshiping Wealth
When Gordon Gekko proclaimed that 'Greed is Good' in 1987, it was an obvious rejection of several
millennia of teachings by traditional prophets and priests. Yet when Gekko preached greed, he was
merely reinforcing the current cultural norm; greed had already been rebranded a virtue. (Still,
the speech was to remind us Gekko was a bad guy). Consider that Madonna had proclaimed herself a
Material Girl three years earlier, and "Living Large" was cool. Conspicuous consumption is walking
the talk that greed is good.
Why had greed become good? I blame the creation of a credit-fueled culture of constant consumption
that necessarily praises coveting stuff, plus the dismantling of the regulatory state that had kept
Wall Street and wannabe oligarchs in check.
Our healthy cultural adoration of the self-made man, of respect for success, warped into worship
of the rich. They are not the same. Wealth can be inherited, stolen through fraud and other illegal
activities, or harvested from bubbles; none of these or myriad other paths to riches is due respect,
much less worship. Paired with another 80's definition-government is the problem-worshiping wealth
facilitates all the dysfunction in our government.
Remembering Greed is Evil
Thirty years later, the old social norm-the one that protected the many from the few, the one
that demonized greed as a deadly sin-is resurgent. We have a Pope who preaches against greed, and
who
walks his talk . We had a Presidential candidate of a major party-Bernie Sanders-who railed against
those living embodiments of greed, the Billionaire Class, and walked his talk by rejecting their
money. At the convention, he has invited delegates to four workshops, one of which is "One Nation
Now: Winning the Fight Against Racism and Greed". We have a late night comedian-John Oliver-
ridiculing the prosperity gospel
and taking on the debt
industry . We have mass consciousness rising, reflected in Occupy, the label "the 99%", BLM and
more.
But we need more voices insisting #GreedIsEvil. We need to teach that basic message at home, in
school, and in houses of worship. We need to send the right signals in our social interactions. We
need to stop coveting stuff, and start buying with a purpose: Shopping locally, buying American,
buying green and clean, and buying less. We need to waste less, share more and build community. We
need to re-norm-alize greed as evil, make it shameful again. Then we will have redefined ourselves
as citizens, not consumers.
But make no mistake: America cannot become a just nation simply by the 99% becoming more virtuous.
The cultural shift is necessary but not sufficient, for norms alone do not deliver social and economic
justice. Shame will not slay the Smaugs; we need structural change in the political economy.
Extreme greed, the greed of Smaugs, is categorically different than the petit greed underlying
the irrational, constant consumption and the worship of wealth. Extreme greed manifests as a hoard
of wealth so great that "purchasing power" is an irrelevant concept; a hoard so great it lacks any
utility other than to be sat upon as a throne, gratifying the Smaug's ego and symbolizing his power.
That greed must be understood as an intolerable evil, something so base and malevolent that the full
power of the state must be used against it.
This essay is my contribution to the cause of returning extreme greed to its rightful place in
the pantheon of ultimate evils. Here is the thesis: extreme greed must be 'slain' by the state because
extreme greed is brutally violent.
The Stealth Violence of False Scarcity and "Cutting Corners"
Greed's violence is quiet and deadly: The violence of false scarcity and of "corner cutting".
Scarcity is not having enough because there just isn't enough to go round, like the
nearly 50 million people who don't reliably have food during the year, including 15 million kids.
False scarcity is when actually, there's plenty to go around, but people generally don't have enough
because of hoarders.
It's a concentrated version of what happened to pennies in 1999. People keeping pennies in piggy
banks created a
shortage felt throughout New York City . If only people had broken open their piggy banks, and
used their pennies, there would have been plenty of pennies in circulation, and shopkeepers wouldn't
lose money by rounding purchases down. In this piece, I'm focusing on false scarcity of dollars,
not pennies, and the maiming and premature death that results from false dollar scarcity. But the
idea is essentially the same; there's just far fewer relevant piggy banks.
By the quiet violence of 'corner cutting', I'm referring to unsafe, even deadly, workplaces that
could be safe if the employers invested in safety.
Sporadically, greed also drives overt, and sometimes profoundly bloody violence to protect the
hoard. Think of employer violence against unions and union organizers,
a la Henry Ford , or
John D. Rockefeller . Nonetheless in this country now, the violence of greed tends to be more
covert. It is that quiet violence, in both forms, I want you to hear now.
As Sanders often reminds us, in this, the richest nation in the world, nearly 50 million people
are living in poverty; roughly one in seven Americans. And as Sanders explained, in a
speech in West Virginia , 130,000 people die each and every year as a result of poverty. I have
not read the study Sanders referred to, so I don't know how much it overlaps with
the rise
of suicide that accelerated after 2006 and which appears to be correlated with financial stress.
Nor do I know how it overlaps with the
documented increase in white mortality that also appears to correlate with financial stress.
Regardless of overlap, however, each of these studies reflects the quiet violence of false scarcity.
Naked Capitalism has featured many posts documenting the damage of greed;
this is a recent one .
Chronic and acute financial stress from false scarcity maims, and kills. And Smaugs create false
scarcity to feed money to their egos and maintain their oligarchic power.
As Lambert often says, they don't call it class warfare for nothing.
But wait, you might insist, how false is the scarcity, really? How much do a few billionaires
matter? Ranting that greed is evil is all well and good, but really, can a relative handful of people
be manufacturing scarcity where there is none, shortening and taking millions of lives in the process?
Aren't you making your target too narrow in going after the Smaugs?
Twenty people had hoarded $732,000,000,000. America is a nation of about 300,000,000 people. That
means 20 people could give a combined $2,370 to every American, and still hoard $1 billion each.
I'm not suggesting that's how the redistribution should be done, but it's notable that in an era
when
some 200 million Americans haven't been able to save $1000 for an emergency, twenty people could
give everyone over two grand while remaining fabulously wealthy.
Now, these 20 monstrous people, these full grown Smaugs, are not alone in their extreme greed.
Adding in the assets of the next 380 richest Americans brings the total wealth hoarded to $2.34 trillion.
That number is so large it's hard to process , so let's think this through.
First, imagine that we took all of that money with a confiscatory tax, except we again left each
of the 400 people with $1 billion. They would still be obscenely rich, so don't pity them.* Our tax
thus netted $1.94 trillion. Since that's still an unimaginable number, let's compare it to some recent
government spending.
In December 2015, Congress funded five years' worth of infrastructure construction. Congress and
President Obama were very self-congratulatory because our infrastructure is a mess, and building
things involves good paying jobs. So, how much did five years of infrastructure building and job
creation cost?
$305 billion . That's less than the $400 billion we let the 400 Smaugs keep at the start of this
thought experiment. With the $1.94 trillion we imagine confiscating, we could keep building at the
2015 pace for 32 years. Or we could spend it much faster, and create an economic boom the like of
which this nation hasn't seen in generations.
Even Bernie Sanders, he of the supposedly overly ambitious, unable-to-be-paid for initiatives,
only
proposed spending $1 trillion on infrastructure over five years -a bit more than half what our
tax would net. (Nor did this supposed radical call for a confiscatory wealth tax to fund his plan.)
Sanders estimated his proposal would create 13 million good paying jobs. With nearly double the money,
surely we get nearly double the jobs? Let's be conservative and say 22 million.
In sum, we could confiscate most of the wealth of 400 people-still leaving them obscenely rich
with $1 billion each-and create 22 million good paying jobs over five years. But we don't; we let
the Smaugs keep their hoards intact. Now consider this is only taxing 400 people; what if we taxed
the richest 2,000 people more justly? What if we taxed corporations effectively? What if we stopped
giving corporate welfare? A confiscatory wealth tax, however, simply isn't discussed in polite company,
any more than a truly progressive income tax is, or even serious proposals to end corporate welfare.
The best we can do is agree that really, someday soon, we should end the obscenity that is the carried
interest loophole.
False scarcity isn't simply a failure of charity, a hoarding of wealth that should be alms for
the poor. False scarcity is created through the billionaires' control of the state, of public policy.
But the quiet violence of greed isn't visited on the 99% only through the failure to pay adequate
taxes. Not even through the Smaugs' failure to have their corporations pay adequate wages, or benefits.
Predatory lending, predatory servicing, fraudulent foreclosure, municipal bond rigging, and pension
fund fleecing are just some of the many other ways immoral greed creates false scarcity.
While false scarcity has the broadest impact, it is not the only form of stealth violence used
by the billionaires in their class war against the rest of us. The Ford and Rockefeller style violence
of fists and guns may be rare in the U.S. these days, but a variant of it remains much too common:
Unsafe workplaces, the quiet violence of "cutting corners". Whether it's
the coal industry , the
poultry
industry , or the
fracking and
oil industries, or myriad other industries, unsafe workplaces kill, maim and sicken workers.
Part of the political economy restructuring we must do includes transforming the workplace.
Feel the Greed
Let us remember why this stealth violence exists-why false scarcity and unsafe workplaces exist.
People who have more money than they hope to spend for the rest of their lives, no matter how
many of their remaining days are "rainy"; people who have more money to pass on than their children
need for a lifetime of financial security, college and retirement included; people who have more
money to pass on than their grandchildren need for a similarly secure life–these people insist on
extracting still more wealth from their workers, their clients, and taxpayers for no purpose beyond
vaingloriously hoarding it.
Greed is evil, but it comes in different intensities. Petit greed is a corrosive illness that
decays societies, but can be effectively ameliorated through norms and social capital. Smaug greed
is so toxic, so potent, that the state is the only entity powerful enough to put it in check. Greed,
particularly Smaug greed, must be put in check because the false scarcity it manufactures, and the
unsafe workplaces it creates, maim and kill people. The stealth violence of Smaug greed justifies
a tax to confiscate the hoards.
#GreedIsEvil. It's time to #SlayTheSmaugs
*One of the arguments against redistribution is that is against the sacrosanct efficient market,
which forbids making one person better off if the price is making someone else worse off. But money
has diminishing returns as money after a certain point; the purchasing power between someone
with one billion and ten billion dollars is negligible, though the difference between someone with
ten thousand and a hundred thousand, or a hundred thousand and a million is huge. After a certain
level of accumulation money is simply ego gratifying points, it's not money any more. Thus taking
it and using it as money isn't making someone 'worse off' in an economic sense. Also, when considering
whether someone is 'worse off', it's worth considering where their money comes from; how many people
did they leave 'worse off' as they
extracted the money? Brett ,
July 22, 2016 at 10:07 am
After a certain level of accumulation money is simply ego gratifying points, it's not
money any more.
It quite literally isn't "money" as we regular folks know it beyond a certain point – it's
tied up in share value and other assets. Which of course raises the question – when you decide
to do your mass confiscation of wealth, who is going to be foolish enough to buy those assets
so you actually have liquid currency to spend on infrastructure as opposed to illiquid assets?
Or are you simply going to print money and spend it on them?
Wealth on this scale has nothing to do with financial security or luxurious living. For
the trivial, it is (as per D. Trump) a game and money is how you keep score. For the serious,
it has to do with power, with the ability to affect other people's lives without their consent.
That is why the Smaugs' wealth is absolutely our business. It should be understood that we're
talking about taking very large amounts of money and power away from very rich people, people
for whom money and power are pretty much the only things they value. It will not be pretty.
People become rich and stay that way because of a market failure that allows them to accumulate
capital in the same way a constricted artery accumulates blood. What I'm wondering, continuing
this metaphor, is what happens when all that money is released back into the market at once via
a redistribution - toxic shock syndrome.
You can see what happens to markets in places where "virtual money" (capital) brushes up against
the real economy: the dysfunctional housing situation in Vancouver, London, New York, and San
Francisco.
It may be wiser to argue for wealth disintegration instead of redistribution.
Yes I was thinking about that money is just something the government prints to make the system
work smoothly. But that, and pretty much any view of money, obscures the problem with the insanely
"wealthy".
If these people, instead of having huge bank accounts actually had huge armies the government
would move to disarm them. It wouldn't re-distribute the tanks and rifles. It would be obviously
removing a threat to everybody.
Now there would be the temptation to wave your hands and say you were "melting it into plowshares"
but that causes an accounting problem - that is, the problem being the use of accounting itself.
Destroying extreme wealth and paying for say roads is just two different things and making them
sound connected is where we keep getting bogged down. Not a full-on MMT'er yet but it really has
illuminated that fact.
The western assumption is that money is a commodity, from salt to gold, to bitcoin, we assume
it can be manufactured, but the underlaying reality is that it is a social contract and every
asset is presumably backed by debt.
Here is an interesting link which does make the point about the contractual basis of money in
a succinct fashion; http://rs79.vrx.palo-alto.ca.us/opinions/ideas/economics/jubilee/
Since the modern commodity of money is backed by debt and largely public debt, there is enormous
pressure to create as much debt as possible.
For instance, the government doesn't really budget, it just writes up these enormous bills, attaches
enough goodies to get the votes and the president can only pass or veto it and with all the backing
and no other method, a veto is a weak protection.
To budget is to prioritize and spend according to ability. What they could do would be to break
these bills into all their various "line items," have every legislator assign a percentage value
to each one, put them back together in order of preference and then the president would draw the
line.
It would balance the power and reduce the tendency to overspend, but it would blow up our financial
system, which if anyone notices, is based on the sanctity of government debt.
If instead of borrowing the excess money out of the system, to spend on whatever, if the government
threatened to tax it out, people would quickly find other ways to store value than as money in
the financial system.
Since most of us save for the same general reasons, from raising children to retirement, we
could invest in these as public commons, not try to save for our exact needs. This would serve
to strengthen communities and their environments, as everyone would be more dependent on those
around them, not just having a private bank account as their personal umbilical cord.
We treat money as both medium of exchange and store of value. As Rick points out above, a medium
is like blood in the body and it needs to be carefully regulated. Conversely, the store of value
in the body is fat and while many of us do carry an excess, storing it in the circulation system
is not wise. Clogged arteries, poor circulation and high blood pressure are analogous to a bloated
financial system, poor circulation and QE.
Money is not a commodity, but a contract.
Do you realize that this supposed billionaire wealth does not consist of actual US dollars
and that, if one were to liquidate such wealth (in order to redistribute it in "fair" equal-dollars)
that number might drastically change?
The main thing these people (and indeed your pension funds) are actually hoarding are financial
assets, and those, it turns out, are actually "scarce". Or, well, I don't know what else you would
call trillions of bonds netting a negative interest rate and an elevated P/E stock market in a
low-growth environment.
It's a bit of a pickle from a macro environment. You can't just force them to liquidate their
assets, or else the whole system would collapse. It also kind of escapes the point that someone
has to hold each asset. I would be excited to see what happens when you ask Bill Gates to liquidate
his financial assets (in order to distribute the cash). An interesting thought, for sure. And
one that would probably bring the market closer to reasonable valuations.
It is simply a wrong conclusion to say "Wealth is x, and if we distribute it, everyone would
get x divided by amount of recipients in dollar terms". Now if you wanted to redistribute Bill
Gates' stake in Microsoft in some "fair" way, you could certainly try but that's not really what
you proposed.
Either way you can't approach wealth policy from a macro perspective like this, because as
soon as you start designing macro-level policy to adjust (i.e. redistribute) this wealth, the
value of it will fluctuate very wildly in dollar terms and may well leave everyone less well off
in some weird feedback loop.
"The full power of the state must be used against" #extremegreed: Except, of course, "L'etat
c'est moi "
Of course as a Bernie supporter, the writer knows that, knows that it is a long game to even
start to move any of the hoard out of Smaug's cave, that there are dwarves with glittering eyes
ready to take back and reduce to ownership and ornamentation the whole pile (maybe they might
'share" a little with the humans of Lake Town who suffered the Dragon's Fire but whose Hero drove
a mystical iron arrow through the weak place in Smaug's armor, all while Sauron and Saruman are
circling and plotting and growing hordes of genetically modified Orcs and Trolls and summoning
the demons from below
The Elves seem to be OK with a "genteel sufficiency," their wealth being useful durable stuff
like mithril armor and those lovely houses and palaces up in the trees. Humans? Grabbers and takers,
in Tolkien's mythology. I would second that view - sure seems to me that almost any of us, given
a 1000-Bagger like Zuckerman or Jobs or that Gates creature fell into, or Russian or Israeli or
African or European oligarchs for that matter (pretty universal, and expected given Davos and
Bilderberg and Koch summits) the old insatiable lambic system that drives for pleasure-to-the-max
and helps our baser tribal drives and penchant for violence to manifest and "thrive" will have
its due. Like 600 foot motor yachts and private-jet escape pods and pinnacles islands with Dr.
No-style security provided by guns and accountants and lawyers and faux-legitimate political rulers
for hire
Lots of analysis of "the problem." Not so much in the way of apparent remedies, other than
maybe lots of bleeding, where the mopes will do most of it and if history is any guide, another
Smaug will go on around taking all the gold and jewels and other concentrated wealth back to another
pile, to sit on and not maybe even gloat over because the scales are just too large
Still hoping for the emergence of an organizing principle that is more attractive that "take
whatever you can and cripple or kill anyone who objects "
"People who have more money than they hope to spend for the rest of their lives, no matter
how many of their remaining days are "rainy"; people who have more money to pass on than their
children need for a lifetime of financial security, college and retirement included; people
who have more money to pass on than their grandchildren need for a similarly secure life–these
people insist on extracting still more wealth from their workers, their clients, and taxpayers
for no purpose beyond vaingloriously hoarding it."
These are people who are obscenely wealthy as opposed to merely wealthy. The fastest way to
challenge their toxic power would be to help the latter group understand that their interests
are not aligned with the former. Most millionaires (as opposed to billionaires) will eventually
suffer when the last few drops of wealth remaining to the middle and working classes are extracted.
Their future prosperity depends on the continued existence of a viable, mass consumer economy.
The billionaires imagine (in my view falsely) that they will thrive in a neo-feudal future–
where they own everything and the vast majority of humanity exists only to serve their needs.
This is the future they are attempting to build with the new TPP/TISA/TTIP regime. If we fail
to prevent the imposition of this transnational regime there will only be three classes of humans
left: kleptocrats, their favored minions, and slaves. Most neoliberal professionals, who imagine
that they will be in that second group, are delusional. Did the pharaohs have any need for people
like Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd?
Pharaohs didn't need a middle/professional class as large as the ones in most western democracies
today. But, we are going in the pharaonic direction.
The problem our polite, right wing professional classes face is that they are increasingly
too numerous for society's needs. Hence the creeping gig-i-fication of professional employment.
The wage stagnation in all but the most guild-ridden (medicine) professions.
It's so reminiscent of what happened to the industrial working class in the late 70s and 80s.
I still remember the "well-reasoned", literate arguments in magazine op-eds proclaiming how line
workers had become "excess" in the face of Asian competition and automation. How most just needed
to retrain, move to where the jobs are, tighten their belts, etc. It's identical now for lawyers,
radiologists, and many layers of the teaching professions. If I weren't part of that "professional"
class I'd find the Schadenfreude almost too delicious.
If we fail to prevent the imposition of this transnational regime there will only be three
classes of humans left: kleptocrats, their favored minions, and slaves.
Sounds about right, but you are overlooking the fact that the largest class will be The Dead.
They will not need nearly so many of Us, and we will be thinned, trimmed, pruned, marooned, or
otherwise made to go away permanently (quietly, for preference, I assume, but any way will do).
Ergo, the violence of ineffectual health care, toxic environment, poisonous food, dangerous
working conditions and violence (for instance, guns and toxic chemicals) in our homes, schools,
streets, workplaces, cities and, well, everywhere are not only a feature, but a major part of
the plan.
It has been extensively documented that the merely wealthy are very upset at the obscenely
wealthy.
If the author is truly focusing on a tax for obscene wealth I'd like to know a specific threshold.
Is it 1 Billion and up? annual limit how many times the median income before it kicks in?
Well, I'm happy to have a discussion about at what threshold a confiscatory wealth tax should
kick in; it's the kind of conversation we have with estate taxes.
I'm thinking a one off wealth tax, followed by a prevention of the resurrection of the problem
with a sharply progressive income tax. Is $1 billion the right number for this initial reclamation?
maybe. It is about the very top few, not the merely wealthy.
$1 billion is a reasonable amount of assets for determining whether to confiscate a portion
of a person's wealth in taxes. Or perhaps we could base it on a percentage of GDP. The U.S. GDP
in 2015 was approximately $17.9 trillion. Anyone with $1.79 billion or more in assets would have
1% of 1% of the U.S. GDP (0.01%). That's a lot of wealth, and surely justifies a heavy tax.
'Professionals, who imagine that they will be in that second group, are delusional. Did the
pharaohs have any need of Paul Krugman'
Sure they did. Those were called Priests who told the people what the gods were thinking. And
since Pharoah's concluded themselves gods. The slaves revolt by working less. Anybody notice the
dropping production levels the last couple of years? Whipping the slaves didn't turn out well
for the Egyptians.
A more modern similarity of the US is Rome. Vassals have been going full retard for several
years now, traitors sell international competitors military secrets while the biggest merchants
buy off the Senate.
Ceasar becomes more a figurehead until one leads a coup which has not happened yet. Aquiring
more slaves begins to cost more than what the return in general to the society brings but the
Smaugs do not care about that until the barbarians begin to revolt (See Orlando for example, the
shooter former employee of DHS. Probably pissed some of his comrades were deserted by US in some
manner.
My point was that the category of people in this priestly caste will likely be far, far smaller
than the millions of credentialed neoliberal professionals currently living large in the top 10%
of the developed world.
Interesting mental image– to see Paul Krugman chanting praises to the new Son of the Sun God
the Donald!!
Look, there's a simple way to #SlayTheSmaugs, and it's a confiscatory wealth tax coupled with
a sharply progressive income tax, as part of an overall restructuring of the political economy.
Simple, is of course, not easy; indeed my proposal is currently impossible. But like Bernie
I'm trying to change the terms of political debate, to normalize what would previously be dismissed
as too radical to be countenanced.
I don't think the looting professional class needs to be slain, in the #SlayTheSmaugs sense.
I think they can be brought to heel simply by enforcing laws and passing new ones that are already
within acceptable political debate, such as one that defines corruption as using public office
for private gain. I think norms matter to the looting professional class as well. Another re-norm-ilization
that needs to happen is remembering what a "profession" used to be
Friends and neighbors!! Most of this "wealth" is ephemeral, it is based on the "value of assets"
like stocks, bonds, real estate, et al. If all of this "wealth" gets liquidated at the same time,
values would collapse. These people are fabulously wealthy because of the incredible inflation
we have seen in the "assets" they hold.
Remember, during the Great Depression the "wealth" wasn't confiscated and redistributed, it
was destroyed because asset values collapsed and over 2000 banks failed wiping out customer accounts.
This also collapsed the money supply causing debt defaults, businesses failures, and worker laid
offs. No one had any money because there was none.
The US was on the gold standard limiting the creation of liquidity. President Roosevelt went
off the gold standard so that he could work to increase the money supply. It took a long time.
The result of the depression was decades of low debt, cheap housing, and hard working people who
remembered the hard times. The social mood gradually changed as their children, born in more prosperous
times, challenged the values of their parents.
Even though the bulk of what the super rich hold is in paper assets, they still hold tons of
real economy assets. They've succeeded in buying enough prime and even merely good real estate
(like multiple townhouses in Upper West Side blocks and then creating one monster home behind
the facade) to create pricing pressure on ordinary renters and homeowners in the same cities,
bidding art through the roof, owning mega-yachts and private airplanes, and most important of
all, using the money directly to reshape society along their preferred lines, witness charter
schools.
If you are going to fight against the "Greed is Good" mentality, you are going to have to address
the habits of the average middle class household. Just take a look at the over accumulation of
amenities and creature comforts. The desire to signal ones status/wealth through "stuff" is totally
out of control and completely divorced from means/income.
"But we need more voices insisting #GreedIsEvil. We need to teach that basic message at home,
in school, and in houses of worship. We need to send the right signals in our social interactions.
We need to stop coveting stuff, and start buying with a purpose: Shopping locally, buying American,
buying green and clean, and buying less. We need to waste less, share more and build community.
We need to re-norm-alize greed as evil, make it shameful again. Then we will have redefined ourselves
as citizens, not consumers."
Isn't there an idiom about cutting off the head of the snake? Once you deal with the strongest
opponents, it's easier to go after the others. Too big to fail is nothing short of feeding the
beast.
There was a time not that long ago that I would have opposed a "confiscatory wealth tax". After
looking at what most of those in the .1% are doing with their wealth, and their contempt for the
average person, those days are long gone. Plus it's good economics.
The only question is what is "obscene wealth". Well like pornography, I think we know it when
we see it.
I am wondering about the distribution of all this concentrated wealth; how much of it is spread
around in the equities and bond markets?
And if that amount was redistributed to the general public how much of it would return to the
equities and bond market?
I'm thinking not very much which would have catastrophic effects on both markets, a complete
reordering. This would undoubtedly crush the borrowing ability of our Federal government, upset
the apple cart in other words. With less money invested in the equities market it would undoubtedly
return to a lower more realistic valuation; fortunes would be lost with no redistribution.
Fair to ask: How do we achieve a confiscatory wealth tax without catastrophic unintended consequences?
But that's a very different question than: should we confiscate the Smaug's wealth?
One mechanism might be to have a government entity created to receive the stocks, bonds and
financial instruments, and then liquidate them over time. E.g. Buffett has been giving stock to
foundations for them to sell for awhile now; same kind of thing could be done. But sure, let's
have the "How" conversation
If lobbying were outlawed at the Federal level the billionaires and multi millionaires would
need to invest in something else. That signal has a multiplier effect.so your right eboit enforcement
of mostly what is on the books already. A 'wall' doesnt have to be built for illegal immigrants
either. Fine a couple dozen up the wazoo and the signal gets passed the game is over.
But until a few people's daughters are kidnapped or killed like in other 3rd world countries,
it wont change. That is sad but reality is most people do not do anything until it effects them.
I started slightly ahead of the crowd in summer of 2007 but that is because a regional banker
told me as we liked discussing history to look at debt levels of 1928 and what happened next.
On top of that, we are the like the British empire circa 1933 so we get the downside of that as
well.
Pain tends to be the catalyst of evolution that fully awakens prey to the predators.
I am sorry, Sir Smaug slayer. The underlying theme of your lengthy disquisition is that Sanders
is the legitimate voice of the 99%, and his future complicity within the Democratic Party is thereby
ameliorated by his current proposals within it. This is the true meat of your discourse ranging
so far and wide – even with the suggestion early on that we the 99% need tutoring on the evils
of greed.
Not so. That ship has sailed. Our Brexit is not yet upon us, but that it is coming, I have
no doubt. The only question is when. To paraphrase a Hannah Sell quote on such matters. . . for
decades working class people have had no representation in the halls of Congress. All of the politicians
. . . without exception, have stood in the interests of the 1% and the super-rich.
Bernie Sanders included. Hannah's remarks were more upbeat – she made an exception for Jeremy
Corbyn. Unfortunately, I can't do that. Bernie has folded. We need to acknowledge that.
One of the arguments against redistribution is that is against the sacrosanct efficient
market, which forbids making one person better off if the price is making someone else worse
off.
I think you mean downward redistribution here since upward redistribution seems to be rather
sacrosanct and definitely makes one person better off at the price of making many someones worse
off to make it happen.
Confiscatory wealth tax is too blunt an instrument to rectify the root causes discussed in
this article, and you do not want a blunt impact to the effect of disincentivizing pursuit of
financial success.
Further Centralization the populous' money will incite more corruption which is what allows
the have's to continue lording it over the have nots.
What are alternatives?
Instead Focus on minimizing corruption,
Then it will be possible to implement fair legislation that limits the options of the greed to
make decisions that results in unfair impacts on the lower class.
Increase incentives to share the wealth, (tax deductible charitable giving is an example).
We do need to encourage meritocracy whenever possible, corruption and oppression is the antithesis
to that.
We need to stop incentivizing utilization of debt, that puts the haves in control of the have
nots.
"Financial success. " As long as those words go together, and make an object of desire, the
fundamental problem ain't going away.
Of course the underlying fundamental problem of human appetite for pleasure and power ain't
going away either. Even if a lot of wealth was taken back (NOT "confiscated") from the current
crop and hopeful horde of kleptocrats
"We do need to encourage meritocracy whenever possible, corruption and oppression is the antithesis
to that."
I disagree strongly with your premise that some sort of pure and natural meritocracy has
ever existed, or could ever exist in human society. Corrupt and oppressive people will always
define as "meritorious" those qualities that they themselves possess– whether wealth, "gentle
birth," "technical skills," or whatever. We all possess the same merit of being human.
An Egyptologist, with an Oxbridge degree and extensive publications has no merit– in any meaningful
sense– inside a frozen foods warehouse. Likewise, the world's best frozen foods warehouse worker
has little to offer, when addressing a conference focused on religious practices during the reign
of Ramses II. Meritocracy is a neoliberal myth, intended to obscure the existence of oligarchy.
An Egyptologist, with an Oxbridge degree and extensive publications has no merit– in any
meaningful sense– inside a frozen foods warehouse. Likewise, the world's best frozen foods
warehouse worker has little to offer, when addressing a conference focused on religious practices
during the reign of Ramses II. Meritocracy is a neoliberal myth, intended to obscure the existence
of oligarchy.
I am confused.
You claim meritocracy is "a neoliberal myth, intended to obscure the existence of oligarchy",
but (seemingly) appeal to meritocratic principles to claim a warehouse worker doesnt offer much
to an academic conference. Can you clear up my misunderstanding?
I agree, btw, that Idealized meritocracy has never existed (nor can). Follow up question: There
has never been an ideal ethical human, does that mean we should stop encouraging ethical behavior?
Meritocracy is not the same as recognizing greater and lesser degrees of competence in various
activities. It is absurd to deny that some are more skillful at some things than others. Assigning
the relative "merit" to various competencies is what I find objectionable.
Encouraging ethical behavior has nothing to do with ranking the "merit" levels of different
occupations. While some occupations are inherently unethical, like that of an assassin, most can
be performed in such a way as to do no harm to others, and some are nearly always beneficial to
society at large.
Someone who did nothing but drink whiskey all day, and tell funny stories in a bar, is far
more beneficial to society at large than a busy, diligent economist dreaming up ways to justify
the looting of the kleptocrats.
Wealth Redistribution occurs when the peasants build a scaffold and frog march the aristocracy
up to a blade; when massive war wipes out a generation of aristocracy in gas filled trenches or
in the upcoming event.
"... "Among us is the great accuser, the one who will always accuse us in front of God to destroy us: Satan. He is the great accuser. And when I enter into this logic of accusing, cursing and looking to do evil to others, I enter into the logic of the 'Great Accuser' who is a 'Destroyer,' who doesn't know the word 'mercy," he added. ..."
"The only possible populism," Francis said, is a Christian kind that "listens to and serves
the people without shouting, accusing, stirring up quarrels,"
according to The Associated Press .
... ... ...
"Only the merciful resemble God the father. 'Be merciful, just as your father is merciful.'
This is the path, the path that goes against the spirit of the world," Francis said in a
Thursday homily.
"Among us is the great accuser, the one who will always accuse us in front of God to destroy
us: Satan. He is the great accuser. And when I enter into this logic of accusing, cursing and
looking to do evil to others, I enter into the logic of the 'Great Accuser' who is a
'Destroyer,' who doesn't know the word 'mercy," he added.
"... The Russians say that the preposterous Protestant fundamentalist evangelicalism is a "pseudo-religion that represents Western egoism and noting more." This type of Protestantism is obviously anti-Christian at its very core, but this is precisely the type of bastardized and heretical Christianity that would be expected to unfold in the radical individualist atmosphere of the US. ..."
"... You may be interested to know that many Russian Orthodox Christians think the radical individualist Libertarianism so popular in the US is actually "Satanic." What they mean by that is that it is the polar opposite of the Church's teaching. ..."
"... You can have Christ or you can have Mammon. Which do you choose to worship? You surely cannot worship both. ..."
"... The modern economy is built largely on fraud; it creates money out of thin air. Who's going to pay for all of this? Why, the simple worker is going to, who produces the value behind all of this bubble. We need a fair economic system where money and capital are equivalent, and are the expression of real work. ..."
The truth is that neoliberalism really does against the teaching of the Church, especially the Orthodox and Catholic branches
of the Church which adhere more to the true religion.
The Russians say that the preposterous Protestant fundamentalist evangelicalism is a "pseudo-religion that represents Western
egoism and noting more." This type of Protestantism is obviously anti-Christian at its very core, but this is precisely the type
of bastardized and heretical Christianity that would be expected to unfold in the radical individualist atmosphere of the US.
You may be interested to know that many Russian Orthodox Christians think the radical individualist Libertarianism so popular
in the US is actually "Satanic." What they mean by that is that it is the polar opposite of the Church's teaching.
... You can have Christ or you can have Mammon. Which do you choose to worship? You surely cannot worship both.
Moscow Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church:
The modern economy is built largely on fraud; it creates money out of thin air. Who's going to pay for all of this? Why,
the simple worker is going to, who produces the value behind all of this bubble. We need a fair economic system where money and
capital are equivalent, and are the expression of real work.
His Holiness Kirill Gundyaev Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias
The process of the marketization of the economy from Mill to Becker described earlier is
concluded in Becker's notions of "Human Capital" and "Economics of Crime and Punishment."
Becker reformulates the ethical modes by which one governs one's self by theorizing the
economic self as human capital that generates labor in return for income. Such self-government
is conducted by economizing one's earning power, the form of power that one commands over one's
labor. Theorizing self-government as a form of command over one's own labor, Becker inserts the
power relations of the market, which Smith identified as purchasing power over other people's
labor, into the ethical sphere of the relationship between a person andherself.
Becker's theory of self-government also entails a transformation of the technologies of the
self into an askesis of economizing the scarce means of the marketized self that have
alternative uses for the purpose ofmaximizing the earning and purchasing power one commands in
the mar- ketized economy.
The marketization of the self that turned zoon oikonomikon into a power-craving homo
economicus also makes him governable by the political monarch, as demonstrated in the Economic
analysis of Crime and Punishment. Economic man is governed through the legal framework of the
mar- ket economy. Human action is controlled by tweaking a matrix of punishments and incentives
that make the governed subject, as a prudent creature who craves to maximize his economic
power, freely choose the desired course of action that will ensure economic growth. At the same
time that Becker's technologies of the conduct of the marketized self establish a neoliberal
self-mastery, they also enable the governmental technology of conducting one self conduct in
the all-encompassing and ever growing marketized economy. Although Becker seems to reverse the
ageold ethical question, that is, how can a human, as a governed subject, become free in the
economy, into the technological one of how one can make a free human governable, the end result
is pretty much the same, as the economy is reconstituted as a sphere in which the subject is
seen as free and governed.
A neoliberal interpretation of Hobbes's economic power is found in Tullock and Buchanan's
use of economic theory to "deal with traditional problems of political science," that is, to
trace the works of Smithian economic power that have by now been transposed onto the political
sphere: Incorporat(ing) political activity as a particular form of exchange; and, as in the
market relation, mutual gains to all parties are ideally expected to result from the collective
relation. In a very real sense, therefore, political action is viewed essentially as a means
through which the "power" of all participants may be increased, if we define "power" as the
ability to command things that are desired by men. To be justified by the criteria employed
here, collective action must be advantageous to all parties. (Tullock and Buchanan 1962:23)
"... This interview with Henry Giroux was conducted by Mitja Sardoč, of the Educational Research Institute, in the Faculty of the Social Sciences, at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. ..."
"... Not only does it define itself as a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas. In this instance, it has defined itself as a form of commonsense and functions as a mode of public pedagogy that produces a template for structuring not just markets but all of social life. ..."
"... In this sense, it has and continues to function not only through public and higher education to produce and distribute market-based values, identities, and modes of agency, but also in wider cultural apparatuses and platforms to privatize, deregulate, economize, and subject all of the commanding institutions and relations of everyday life to the dictates of privatization, efficiency, deregulation, and commodification. ..."
"... Since the 1970s as more and more of the commanding institutions of society come under the control of neoliberal ideology, its notions of common sense – an unchecked individualism, harsh competition, an aggressive attack on the welfare state, the evisceration of public goods, and its attack on all models of sociality at odds with market values – have become the reigning hegemony of capitalist societies. ..."
"... What many on the left have failed to realize is that neoliberalism is about more than economic structures, it is also is a powerful pedagogical force – especially in the era of social media – that engages in full-spectrum dominance at every level of civil society. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's promotion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence to its ability to willingness and success in making education central to politics ..."
"... The Crisis of Democracy, ..."
"... At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a desire to undermine the university's commitment to the truth, critical thinking, and its obligation to stand for justice ..."
"... Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done everything possible to eliminate higher education as a space where students can realize themselves as critical citizens ..."
"... It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory, words, meaning, and politics. Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense. ..."
"... Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of the fittest mode of behavior. ..."
"... First, higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good in order to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic impulses. Educators need to initiate and expand a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, a site that makes a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage. ..."
"... The ascendancy of neoliberalism in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. ..."
"... It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. ..."
"... First, too little is said about how neoliberalism functions not simply as an economic model for finance capital but as a public pedagogy that operates through a diverse number of sites and platforms. ..."
"... I define neoliberal fascism as both a project and a movement, which functions as an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys, the commanding institutions of a democracy while undermining its most valuable principles ..."
"... As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. In addition, it transforms the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization, and law and order to discredit the critical press and media, undermine civil liberties while ridiculing and censoring critics. ..."
This interview with Henry Giroux was conducted by Mitja Sardoč, of the Educational Research Institute, in the Faculty of the
Social Sciences, at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Mitja Sardoč: For several decades now, neoliberalism has been at the forefront of discussions not only in the economy and
finance but has infiltrated our vocabulary in a number of areas as diverse as governance studies, criminology, health care, jurisprudence,
education etc. What has triggered the use and application ofthis'economistic'ideologyassociatedwith the promotion of effectiveness
and efficiency?
Henry Giroux: Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of the times and has established itself as a central feature
of politics. Not only does it define itself as a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the hands
of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas. In this instance, it has defined itself as a form of commonsense
and functions as a mode of public pedagogy that produces a template for structuring not just markets but all of social life.
In this sense, it has and continues to function not only through public and higher education to produce and distribute market-based
values, identities, and modes of agency, but also in wider cultural apparatuses and platforms to privatize, deregulate, economize,
and subject all of the commanding institutions and relations of everyday life to the dictates of privatization, efficiency, deregulation,
and commodification.
Since the 1970s as more and more of the commanding institutions of society come under the control of neoliberal ideology,
its notions of common sense – an unchecked individualism, harsh competition, an aggressive attack on the welfare state, the evisceration
of public goods, and its attack on all models of sociality at odds with market values – have become the reigning hegemony of capitalist
societies.
What many on the left have failed to realize is that neoliberalism is about more than economic structures, it is also is a
powerful pedagogical force – especially in the era of social media – that engages in full-spectrum dominance at every level of civil
society. Its reach extends not only into education but also among an array of digital platforms as well as in the broader sphere
of popular culture. Under neoliberal modes of governance, regardless of the institution, every social relation is reduced to an act
of commerce.
Neoliberalism's promotion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence to its ability to willingness and success in making
education central to politics. It also offers a warning to progressives, as Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that the left has underestimated
the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front."
Mitja Sardoč: According to the advocates of neoliberalism, education represents one of the main indicators of future economic
growth and individual well-being.How – and why – education became one of the central elements of the 'neoliberal revolution'?
Henry Giroux: Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site of struggle over which there are
very high stakes regarding how young people are educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and future should
be most valued and privileged. Higher education in the sixties went through a revolutionary period in the United States and many
other countries as students sought to both redefine education as a democratic public sphere and to open it up to a variety of groups
that up to that up to that point had been excluded. Conservatives were extremely frightened over this shift and did everything they
could to counter it. Evidence of this is clear in the production of the Powell Memo published in 1971 and later in The Trilateral
Commission's book-length report, namely, The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. From the 1960s on the, conservatives,
especially the neoliberal right, has waged a war on education in order to rid it of its potential role as a democratic public sphere.
At the same time, they sought aggressively to restructure its modes of governance, undercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge
that was instrumental to the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers, and reduce the function of higher education
largely to training students for the global workforce.
At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a desire to undermine the university's commitment to the truth, critical
thinking, and its obligation to stand for justice and assume responsibility for safeguarding the interests of young as they
enter a world marked massive inequalities, exclusion, and violence at home and abroad. Higher education may be one of the few institutions
left in neoliberal societies that offers a protective space to question, challenge, and think against the grain.
Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done everything possible to eliminate higher education
as a space where students can realize themselves as critical citizens, faculty can participate in the governing structure, and
education can be define itself as a right rather than as a privilege.
Mitja Sardoč: Almost by definition, reforms and other initiatives aimed to improve educational practice have been one of
the pivotal mechanisms to infiltrate the neoliberal agenda of effectiveness and efficiency. What aspect of neoliberalism and its
educational agenda you find most problematic? Why?
Henry Giroux: Increasingly aligned with market forces, higher education is mostly primed for teaching business principles
and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in a neoliberal-based audit culture. Many
colleges and universities have been McDonalds-ized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity resulting in curricula that
resemble a fast-food menu. In addition, faculty are subjected increasingly to a Wal-Mart model of labor relations designed as Noam
Chomsky points out "to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility". In the age of precarity and flexibility, the majority
of faculty have been reduced to part-time positions, subjected to low wages, lost control over the conditions of their labor, suffered
reduced benefits, and frightened about addressing social issues critically in their classrooms for fear of losing their jobs.
The latter may be the central issue curbing free speech and academic freedom in the academy. Moreover, many of these faculty are
barely able to make ends meet because of their impoverished salaries, and some are on food stamps. If faculty are treated like service
workers, students fare no better and are now relegated to the status of customers and clients.
Moreover, they are not only inundated with the competitive, privatized, and market-driven values of neoliberalism, they are also
punished by those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, astronomical debts owed to banks and other financial institutions,
and in too many cases a lack of meaningful employment. As a project and movement, neoliberalism undermines the ability of educators
and others to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and the civic courage necessary to
make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical.
As an ideology, neoliberalism is at odds with any viable notion of democracy which it sees as the enemy of the market. Yet, Democracy
cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective, and independent – qualities that are indispensable
for students if they are going to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday
life, institutional reform, and governmental policy.
Mitja Sardoč: Why large-scale assessments and quantitative data in general are a central part of the 'neo-liberal toolkit'
in educational research?
Henry Giroux: These are the tools of accountants and have nothing to do with larger visions or questions about what matters
as part of a university education. The overreliance on metrics and measurement has become a tool used to remove questions of responsibility,
morality, and justice from the language and policies of education. I believe the neoliberal toolkit as you put it is part of the
discourse of civic illiteracy that now runs rampant in higher educational research, a kind of mind-numbing investment in a metric-based
culture that kills the imagination and wages an assault on what it means to be critical, thoughtful, daring, and willing to take
risks. Metrics in the service of an audit culture has become the new face of a culture of positivism, a kind of empirical-based panopticon
that turns ideas into numbers and the creative impulse into ashes. Large scale assessments and quantitative data are the driving
mechanisms in which everything is absorbed into the culture of business.
The distinction between information and knowledge has become irrelevant in this model and anything that cannot be captured by
numbers is treated with disdain. In this new audit panopticon, the only knowledge that matters is that which can be measured. What
is missed here, of course, is that measurable utility is a curse as a universal principle because it ignores any form of knowledge
based on the assumption that individuals need to know more than how things work or what their practical utility might be.
This is a language that cannot answer the question of what the responsibility of the university and educators might be in a time
of tyranny, in the face of the unspeakable, and the current widespread attack on immigrants, Muslims, and others considered disposable.
This is a language that is both afraid and unwilling to imagine what alternative worlds inspired by the search for equality and justice
might be possible in an age beset by the increasing dark forces of authoritarianism.
Mitja Sardoč: While the analysis of the neoliberal agenda in education is well documented, the analysis of the language
of neoliberal education is at the fringes of scholarly interest. In particular, the expansion of the neoliberal vocabulary with egalitarian
ideas such as fairness, justice, equality of opportunity, well-being etc. has received [at best]only limited attention. What factors
have contributed to this shift of emphasis?
Henry Giroux: Neoliberalism has upended how language is used in both education and the wider society. It works to appropriate
discourses associated with liberal democracy that have become normalized in order to both limit their meanings and use them to mean
the opposite of what they have meant traditionally, especially with respect to human rights, justice, informed judgment, critical
agency, and democracy itself. It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory,
words, meaning, and politics. Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and
celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense.
Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of
the fittest mode of behavior.
The vocabulary of neoliberalism operates in the service of violence in that it reduces the capacity for human fulfillment in the
collective sense, diminishes a broad understanding of freedom as fundamental to expanding the capacity for human agency, and diminishes
the ethical imagination by reducing it to the interest of the market and the accumulation of capital. Words, memory, language and
meaning are weaponized under neoliberalism.
Certainly, neither the media nor progressives have given enough attention to how neoliberalism colonizes language because neither
group has given enough attention to viewing the crisis of neoliberalism as not only an economic crisis but also a crisis of ideas.
Education is not viewed as a force central to politics and as such the intersection of language, power, and politics in the neoliberal
paradigm has been largely ignored. Moreover, at a time when civic culture is being eradicated, public spheres are vanishing, and
notions of shared citizenship appear obsolete, words that speak to the truth, reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis
also begin to disappear.
This makes it all the more difficult to engage critically the use of neoliberalism's colonization of language. In the United States,
Trump prodigious tweets signify not only a time in which governments engage in the pathology of endless fabrications, but also how
they function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism designed to animate his base in a glut of shock while reinforcing a culture
of war, fear, divisiveness, and greed in ways that disempower his critics.
Mitja Sardoč: You have written extensively on neoliberalism's exclusively instrumental view of education, its reductionist
understanding of effectiveness and its distorted image of fairness. In what way should radical pedagogy fight back neoliberalism
and its educational agenda?
Henry Giroux: First, higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good in order to reclaim its egalitarian
and democratic impulses. Educators need to initiate and expand a national conversation in which higher education can be defended
as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, a site that makes
a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage. At the same time, the discourse on defining higher education
as a democratic public sphere can provide the platform for a more expressive commitment in developing a social movement in defense
of public goods and against neoliberalism as a threat to democracy. This also means rethinking how education can be funded as a public
good and what it might mean to fight for policies that both stop the defunding of education and fight to relocate funds from the
death dealing military and incarceration budgets to those supporting education at all levels of society. The challenge here is for
higher education not to abandon its commitment to democracy and to recognize that neoliberalism operates in the service of the forces
of economic domination and ideological repression.
Second, educators need to acknowledge and make good on the claim that a critically literate citizen is indispensable to a democracy,
especially at a time when higher education is being privatized and subject to neoliberal restructuring efforts. This suggests placing
ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility, and compassion at the forefront of learning so as to combine knowledge, teaching,
and research with the rudiments of what might be called the grammar of an ethical and social imagination. This would imply taking
seriously those values, traditions, histories, and pedagogies that would promote a sense of dignity, self-reflection, and compassion
at the heart of a real democracy. Third, higher education needs to be viewed as a right, as it is in many countries such as Germany,
France, Norway, Finland, and Brazil, rather than a privilege for a limited few, as it is in the United States, Canada, and the United
Kingdom. Fourth, in a world driven by data, metrics, and the replacement of knowledge by the overabundance of information, educators
need to enable students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. They need to
become border crossers who can think dialectically, and learn not only how to consume culture but also to produce it. Fifth, faculty
must reclaim their right to control over the nature of their labor, shape policies of governance, and be given tenure track lines
with the guarantee of secure employment and protection for academic freedom and free speech.
Mitja Sardoč: Why is it important to analyze the relationship between neoliberalism and civic literacy particularly as an
educational project?
Henry Giroux: The ascendancy of neoliberalism in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy,
a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making.
It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion
of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic
institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing.
As these institutions vanish – from public schools and alternative media to health care centers– there is also a serious
erosion of the discourse of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. At the same time reason and truth are
not simply contested, or the subject of informed arguments as they should be, but wrongly vilified – banished to Trump's poisonous
world of fake news. For instance, under the Trump administration, language has been pillaged, truth and reason disparaged, and words
and phrases emptied of any substance or turned into their opposite, all via the endless production of Trump's Twitter storms and
the ongoing clown spectacle of Fox News. This grim reality points to a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will,
and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding
of education as a public good. What we are witnessing under neoliberalism is not simply a political project to consolidate power
in the hands of the corporate and financial elite but also a reworking of the very meaning of literacy and education as crucial to
what it means to create an informed citizenry and democratic society. In an age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the
anti-democratic forces governing all the commanding economic and cultural institutions of the United States, truth is viewed as a
liability, ignorance becomes a virtue, and informed judgments and critical thinking demeaned and turned into rubble and ashes. Under
the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and
science is confused with pseudo-science. Traces of critical thought appear more and more at the margins of the culture as ignorance
becomes the primary organizing principle of American society.
Under the forty-year reign of neoliberalism, language has been militarized, handed over to advertisers, game show idiocy, and
a political and culturally embarrassing anti-intellectualism sanctioned by the White House. Couple this with a celebrity culture
that produces an ecosystem of babble, shock, and tawdry entertainment. Add on the cruel and clownish anti-public intellectuals such
as Jordan Peterson who defend inequality, infantile forms of masculinity, and define ignorance and a warrior mentality as part of
the natural order, all the while dethroning any viable sense of agency and the political.
The culture of manufactured illiteracy is also reproduced through a media apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle
of violence. Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of neoliberal zombie
politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations, and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding
institutions that now control American society. In the age of manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work than simply an absence
of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can the reign of manufactured illiteracy be solely attributed to the rise of the new social
media, a culture of immediacy, and a society that thrives on instant gratification. On the contrary, manufactured illiteracy is political
and educational project central to a right-wing corporatist ideology and set of policies that work aggressively to depoliticize people
and make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their
lives. There is more at work here than what Ariel Dorfman calls a "felonious stupidity," there is also the workings of a deeply malicious
form of 21 st century neoliberal fascism and a culture of cruelty in which language is forced into the service of violence
while waging a relentless attack on the ethical imagination and the notion of the common good. In the current historical moment illiteracy
and ignorance offer the pretense of a community in doing so has undermined the importance of civic literacy both in higher education
and the larger society.
Mitja Sardoč: Is there any shortcoming in the analysis of such a complex (and controversial) social phenomenon as neoliberalism
and its educational agenda? Put differently: is there any aspect of the neoliberal educational agenda that its critics have failed
to address?
Henry Giroux: Any analysis of an ideology such as neoliberalism will always be incomplete. And the literature on neoliberalism
in its different forms and diverse contexts is quite abundant. What is often underplayed in my mind are three things.
First, too
little is said about how neoliberalism functions not simply as an economic model for finance capital but as a public pedagogy that
operates through a diverse number of sites and platforms.
Second, not enough has been written about its war on a democratic notion
of sociality and the concept of the social.
Third, at a time in which echoes of a past fascism are on the rise not enough is being
said about the relationship between neoliberalism and fascism, or what I call neoliberal fascism, especially the relationship between
the widespread suffering and misery caused by neoliberalism and the rise of white supremacy.
I define neoliberal fascism as both
a project and a movement, which functions as an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys, the commanding institutions of a democracy
while undermining its most valuable principles.
Consequently, it provides a fertile ground for the unleashing of the ideological
architecture, poisonous values, and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under fascism. Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin
and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worse excesses of capitalism with fascist
ideals – the veneration of war, a hatred of reason and truth; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the
suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, a demonization of the other, a discourse of decline,
brutal violence, and ultimately state violence in heterogeneous forms. As a project, it destroys all the commanding institutions
of democracy and consolidates power in the hands of a financial elite.
As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic
inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems.
In addition, it transforms the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization, and
law and order to discredit the critical press and media, undermine civil liberties while ridiculing and censoring critics.
What critics
need to address is that neoliberalism is the face of a new fascism and as such it speaks to the need to repudiate the notion that
capitalism and democracy are the same thing, renew faith in the promises of a democratic socialism, create new political formations
around an alliance of diverse social movements, and take seriously the need to make education central to politics itself.
Nancy Pelosi is worth several hundred million dollars. I don't think she's a Marxist in
the classical sense. Although she would fit the classic Soviet politburo member with their
private dachas on the Black Sea. I would argue she and her ilk across both parties have
enabled massive market concentration across many many sectors just in the past 4 decades.
They're elitists who back an oligarchy of their fellow elitists. They are the basis for the
symbiotic relationship between Big Business and Big Government. As Steve Bannon calls them,
they're the Party of Davos. IMO, the only difference between the two parties are their
rhetoric. Both of course engage in identity politics with the Democrats focused on the SJW
virtue signaling while the Republicans have for decades channeled the evangelicals.
Trump is an outsider. They consider him to be an uncouth nouveau riche. And are appalled
that his media savvy upended their Borg candidates. Nancy believes she is now the
opposition leader with the mandate from the Party of Davos to ensure the defeat of
Trump. This brouhaha over SOTU is just the first skirmish. I wouldn't underestimate
Trump in these media centered battles. While the corporate media who as Bannon calls the
opposition party creates the perception of a Trump administration in chaos, the Deplorables
are still backing him. His approval rating at this midway point in his presidency is no worse
than Obama and even GOP megagod Reagan. It's the reaction of the people from the heartland
when he served the Clemson team Big Macs and fries compared to the derisive commentary of the
urban/suburban crowd.
McConnell is also a card carrying member of the Party of Davos or else he would have
jumped to invite Trump to speak from the Senate. But Trump's shtick is the people's leader.
So he should speak from a heartland location. Your suggestion is a good one. Another could be
a cornfield in Iowa, the first primary state where all the Democrats presidential contenders
will be camping out soon.
"... Identity politics are no help here either. Indeed, to Scialabba, they are part of the problem because they are too easily coopted by capital: "Identity politics are an essential component of neoliberalism, the extension of market relations across borders and into all spheres of life. When rewards are assigned efficiently in proportion to merit, then not only is total output maximized, but the winners feel no qualms about the plight of the losers." Corporate power sees no distinction between funding diversity efforts and pursuing profit, becoming "woke" through advertising. ..."
"... vigorous self-assertion of working classes and small proprietors, which I think as close to mass democracy as the world has come, was transformed, largely by the advent of mass production, into a mass society of passive, apathetic, ignorant, deskilled consumers ..."
George Scialabba continues to work in a political-literary vein almost forgotten in our
partisan times. Along with Todd Gitlin, Thomas Frank perhaps, Jedediah Purdy (who introduces
this volume), and a few others, Scialabba is a liberal without being progressive, in solidarity
with workers against the capitalists rather than "woke" activists aligned with corporate
interests, and respectful of tradition while also criticizing the past's faults.
The last two years have seen a drastic realignment of conservatives, where the stranglehold
free-market and interventionist conservatives had has been loosened. Arguments from
traditionalists such as Russell Kirk are being heard once again, and new voices are rising
against Conservatism, Inc.
But the debate among liberals is just as interesting, if not more so, because of
[neo]liberalism's own dominance over the media, academia, and entertainment. They are fighting
in public, whereas conservatives mostly argue in the corners of the internet. A new generation
of activists and progressives disdain the liberalism espoused by their once-radical elders. A
world where Angela Davis gets awards rescinded for being insufficiently progressive and
prominent liberals are protested at commencements is very different indeed from the heady 1960s
and 1970s.
This new progressivism is sincere, but largely performative. It is too often in service to
an individualistic view of the self and lacks the solidarity Scialabba sees as one of the
strongest points of the Left. Resistance is a workers' collective, not a world in which choice
-- mediated by corporations and advertising -- is king.
Identity politics are no help here either. Indeed, to Scialabba, they are part of the
problem because they are too easily coopted by capital: "Identity politics are an essential
component of neoliberalism, the extension of market relations across borders and into all
spheres of life. When rewards are assigned efficiently in proportion to merit, then not only is
total output maximized, but the winners feel no qualms about the plight of the losers."
Corporate power sees no distinction between funding diversity efforts and pursuing profit,
becoming "woke" through advertising.
This collection covers what may broadly be called questions of political culture. Like the
best philosophical critics, Scialabba wants to know how we can live our common life with
dignity and justice. He considers writers like Ronald Dworkin, Christopher Lasch, Yuval Levin,
Michael Sandel, and others to probe how best to achieve public goods. The goods Scialabba
advocates, it should be obvious, are not aligned with mainstream conservative goals. And one
can argue with Scialabba's romance with a non-market economy in which redistributive justice
has pride of place. The "utopia" toward which we are slouching is remote indeed.
But perhaps not that remote. In an interview republished here, "America Pro and Con,"
Scialabba praises the " vigorous self-assertion of working classes and small proprietors,
which I think as close to mass democracy as the world has come, was transformed, largely by the
advent of mass production, into a mass society of passive, apathetic, ignorant, deskilled
consumers ." That vision would attract not a few Benedict Optioners, and not only
them.
Scialabba has harsh words for Republicans -- the free market Paul Ryan types and the later
MAGA incarnations. These comments are less interesting, and not just because they are
unsurprising. It is more because Scialabba realizes the problem is more nuanced than just bad
Republicans. Most of the elite Left and Right is in thrall to capital, and he can be as harsh
on liberal autonomy as any conservative. In an essay titled "Ecology of Attention," which
discusses Simon Head's Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans and
Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head , he writes: "Seeing past this liberal
model of individual autonomy might also mean recognizing that consumerism can have civic
consequences. Just as atmospheric fine particles can clog our lungs and impair our society's
physical health, an unending stream of commercial messages can clog our minds, fragment our
attention, and, in the long run, impair our society's mental and civic health."
Drawing on a long left-wing tradition, he disputes the liberal capitalist view of people as
those who simply seek to maximize their own individual gain (in wealth, pleasure, or status,
for example). Rather, he says we are "situated beings" with our own pasts. In a perceptive,
sympathetic piece on Leszek Kolakowski, the "Conservative-Liberal Socialist," Scialabba
catalogs the failings of "existing socialism" that the Polish philosopher so ably described.
However, Scialabba cannot find much in that critique today. Soviet socialism may have been
rotten, but the liberal capitalism that has been triumphant since the 1980s in the West "has
seen the rampant financialization of the economy, the pulverizing of organized labor, a drastic
increase in economic inequality, the capture by business of the regulatory system, and the
growth of the national security state." Scialabba instead reaches for the anti-capitalist and
anti-Stalinist Left as a possible source of solutions for these ills. But the problem with this
resort is the same as the neoconservatives' attachment to an abstract capitalism. The dominance
or liberation of private life by the state is no longer the most pressing issue: media
(especially social media) and the supremacy of the "self" against all forms of community are
the new challenges.
As Shadi Hamid has
written recently , "It is difficult to think of a time less suited to Marxist economism
than the current one."
But back to Kolakowski. Scialabba nevertheless praises him for his willingness to be a
debunker of the debunkers, rejoicing in his affliction of "the comfortable unbeliever."
Although Scialabba cannot ultimately follow Kolakowski either in his political or religious
beliefs, nonetheless he praises Kolakowski for two things: the skepticism that allowed him to
break free -- and break others free -- of the illusions of totalitarianism, and a recognition
of the limits of that skepticism. Scialabba concludes that "as he continually reminded
rationalists, the skeptical impulse can't be sustained indefinitely or directed toward
everything simultaneously. We need traditions too."
It is premises like these that make Scialabba interesting to conservatives. Because
beginning from those premises Scialabba goes in directions conservatives typically do not
follow. Because he opposes [neo]liberal capitalism, he is fond of unions. Because he believes
we cannot completely extract ourselves from our cultural, ethnic, and religious inheritances,
ingrained injustices must be recognized and remedied. Because he believes we are situated
beings with traditions, we must construct an economic system that serves our nature rather than
invent abstractions that we then serve. A defender of America's middle-class (described here,
in reviewing a book by Alan Wolfe, as on the whole "generous, trusting, and optimistic"),
nevertheless he faults them for being too gullible in responding to the call of capital and the
military-industrial complex. But he also faults the Left for failing to understand that their
fellow Americans are, in fact, decent, and, for the most part, tolerant people.
Scialabba might be surprised that he has sympathetic readers on the Right, or even that a
form of nationalism might work with his premises. This possible compatibility isn't to ignore
that American nationalism can and has been racist and inhospitable to minorities. But the
conclusion that there is an "America" that has meaning beyond being simply a machine to
generate GDP (on the backs of workers, perhaps, here or elsewhere) could fit, even if not fully
comfortably, within Scialabba's generous intellectual world.
While not quite a utopia, it would be a start.
Gerald J. Russello is editor of The University Bookman .
"Russian Orthodox Church says smartphones a harbinger of the Antichrist"
"MOSCOW (AP) -- The head of the Russian Orthodox Church says the data-gathering capacity
of devices such as smartphones risks bringing humanity closer to the arrival of the
Antichrist.
In an interview shown Monday on state TV, Patriarch Kirill said the church does not oppose
technological progress but is concerned that "someone can know exactly where you are, know
exactly what you are interested in, know exactly what you are afraid of" and that such
information could be used for centralized control of the world.
"Control from one point is a foreshadowing of the coming of Antichrist, if we talk about
the Christian view. Antichrist is the person who will be at the head of the world wide web
that controls the entire human race," he said."
"... Excessive financialization is the Achilles' heel of neoliberalism. It inevitably distorts everything, blows the asset bubble, which then pops. With each pop, the level of political support of neoliberalism shrinks. Hillary defeat would have been impossible without 2008 events. ..."
Barkley insists on a left-right split for his analysis of political parties and their attachment to vague policy tendencies
and that insistence makes a mess of the central issue: why the rise of right-wing populism in a "successful" economy?
Naomi Klein's book is about how and why centrist neoliberals got control of policy. The rise of right-wing populism is often
supposed (see Mark Blyth) to be about the dissatisfaction bred by the long-term shortcomings of or blowback from neoliberal policy.
Barkley Rosser treats neoliberal policy as implicitly successful and, therefore, the reaction from the populist right appears
mysterious, something to investigate. His thesis regarding neoliberal success in Poland is predicated on policy being less severe,
less "shocky".
In his left-right division of Polish politics, the centrist neoliberals -- in the 21st century, Civic Platform -- seem to disappear
into the background even though I think they are still the second largest Party in Parliament, though some seem to think they
will sink in elections this year.
Electoral participation is another factor that receives little attention in this analysis. Politics is shaped in part by the
people who do NOT show up. And, in Poland that has sometimes been a lot of people, indeed.
Finally, there's the matter of the neoliberal straitjacket -- the flip-side of the shock in the one-two punch of "there's no
alternative". What the policy options for a Party representing the interests of the angry and dissatisfied? If you make policy
impossible for a party of the left, of course that breeds parties of the right. duh.
Likbez,
Bruce,
Blowback from the neoliberal policy is coming. I would consider the current situation in the USA as the starting point of this
"slow-motion collapse of the neoliberal garbage truck against the wall." Neoliberalism like Bolshevism in 1945 has no future,
only the past. That does not mean that it will not limp forward in zombie (and pretty bloodthirsty ) stage for another 50 years.
But it is doomed, notwithstanding recently staged revenge in countries like Ukraine, Argentina, and Brazil.
Excessive financialization is the Achilles' heel of neoliberalism. It inevitably distorts everything, blows the asset bubble,
which then pops. With each pop, the level of political support of neoliberalism shrinks. Hillary defeat would have been impossible
without 2008 events.
At least half of Americans now hate soft neoliberals of Democratic Party (Clinton wing of Bought by Wall Street technocrats),
as well as hard neoliberal of Republican Party, which created the " crisis of confidence" toward governing neoliberal elite in
countries like the USA, GB, and France. And that probably why the intelligence agencies became the prominent political players
and staged the color revolution against Trump (aka Russiagate ) in the USA.
The situation with the support of neoliberalism now is very different than in 1994 when Bill Clinton came to power. Of course,
as Otto von Bismarck once quipped "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." and another
turn of the technological spiral might well save the USA. But the danger of never-ending secular stagnation is substantial and
growing. This fact was admitted even by such dyed- in-the-wool neoliberals as Summers.
This illusion that advances in statistics gave neoliberal access to such fine-grained and timely economic data, that now it
is possible to regulate economy indirectly, by strictly monetary means is pure religious hubris. Milton Friedman would now be
laughed out the room if he tried to repeat his monetarist junk science now. Actually he himself discarded his monetarist illusions
before he died.
We probably need to the return of strong direct investments in the economy by the state and nationalization of some assets,
if we want to survive and compete with China. Australian politicians are already openly discussing this, we still are lagging
because of "walking dead" neoliberals in Congress like Pelosi, Schumer, and company.
But we have another huge problem, which Australia and other countries (other than GB) do not have: neoliberalism in the USA
is the state religion which completely displaced Christianity (and is hostile to Christianity), so it might be that the lemming
will go off the cliff. I hope not.
The only thing that still keeps neoliberalism from being thrown out to the garbage bin of history is that it is unclear what
would the alternative. And that means that like in 1920th far-right nationalism and fascism have a fighting chance against decadent
neoliberal oligarchy.
Previously financial oligarchy was in many minds associated with Jewish bankers. Now people are more educated and probably
can hang from the lampposts Anglo-Saxon and bankers of other nationalities as well ;-)
I think that in some countries neoliberal oligarchs might soon feel very uncomfortable, much like Soros in Hungary.
As far as I understood the level of animosity and suppressed anger toward financial oligarchy and their stooges including some
professors in economics departments of the major universities might soon be approaching the level which existed in the Weimar
Republic. And as Lenin noted, " the ideas could become a material force if they got mass support." This is true about anger as
well.
"... As for the international financial system - "a lottery whose winnings flow from the South to the North", according to Mshana's definition - the general consensus was that it needed to be reformed. Mechanisms need to be put in place to limit the arbitrary movement of speculative capital and make sure that the capital invested in poor countries actually stays there and is used for development. ..."
"... As far as the new methods of debt cancellation are concerned, "these are inadequate and do not solve the problem", Mshana explained. "What is needed is total cancellation and the introduction of a whole new system". One striking proposal was for an International Court under the aegis of the United Nations to judge the legitimacy of debts, taking into account the joint responsibility of debtors and creditors. ..."
Criticism of neoliberal globalization cannot only be economic; it must also be theological. Theological analysis formed part of
two workshops in which the WCC covered the theme of alternatives to economic globalization. "We have seen that the neoliberal paradigm
is a new Tower of Babel, an arrogant project that aims to impose a uniformity that is contrary to God's will for a kingdom that respects
diversity", stated Mshana. "The churches have a great opportunity here for prophetic condemnation and education."
Participants at the workshops agreed that in matters such as access to clean water, "when it comes to choosing between the technical
or the ethical approach, between the market or human rights, priority must go to the latter", Mshana stated. The churches can therefore
make a valuable contribution: "The churches must work very hard to bring pressure to bear on the international financial institutions
not just to go along with the market solution".
The workshops also tackled the subjects of world trade, the international financial system and debt, all of which, in their present
form, are harmful to the poor. With regard to trade, participants gave their backing to campaigns for fair trade like the Trade for
people, not people for trade campaign sponsored by the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance.
As for the international financial system - "a lottery whose winnings flow from the South to the North", according to Mshana's
definition - the general consensus was that it needed to be reformed. Mechanisms need to be put in place to limit the arbitrary movement
of speculative capital and make sure that the capital invested in poor countries actually stays there and is used for development.
As far as the new methods of debt cancellation are concerned, "these are inadequate and do not solve the problem", Mshana explained.
"What is needed is total cancellation and the introduction of a whole new system". One striking proposal was for an International
Court under the aegis of the United Nations to judge the legitimacy of debts, taking into account the joint responsibility of debtors
and creditors.
"... While we have failed to live out our love, international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization have enforced finance and trade policies which have indebted nations and forced them to service social and economic debt rather than their people and Earth. ..."
"... When US and Canadian corporations extract minerals and resources from other countries in order to operate without environmental safeguards or labour codes, do not pay their fair share of taxes and royalties, and use paramilitary forces against protesters and to displace indigenous communities; ..."
"... There is a new world in the making. You are working on behalf of Your people and restoring the good Earth You created. This world matters as do people's concrete struggles within it. It is our reminder to care for each other and all of Creation. You are a God of redemption, not of destruction, and invite us to participate in redemptive acts. ..."
We confess that the whole of Creation bears the marks of God. God is our Creator; we love
God, all of Creation and one another. We see that God wants the world to be a circle where
everyone has a place. However, in North America, we have failed to live out our love.
While we have failed to live out our love, corporations have pursued violent development
grabbing air, land and water; drowning islands; desertifying lands; violating human rights; and
creating conditions of war.
While we have failed to live out our love, international financial institutions like the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization have enforced finance and
trade policies which have indebted nations and forced them to service social and economic debt
rather than their people and Earth.
In our limitless pursuit of individual and national wealth and power, we are complicit in a
market system that exploits natural resources and people within and beyond our borders:
When temporary foreign workers care for our children and grandparents, work on our farms,
receive low wages, work long hours, live and work in harsh conditions, are vulnerable to abuse,
have their human rights violated, fill other jobs that the common excuse says: "no North
American would do";
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those
things which we ought not to have done.
When companies designate landfills and chemical dumps in the neighbourhoods of poor and
marginalized people;
When US and Canadian corporations extract minerals and resources from other countries in
order to operate without environmental safeguards or labour codes, do not pay their fair share
of taxes and royalties, and use paramilitary forces against protesters and to displace
indigenous communities;
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those
things which we ought not to have done.
When those who have contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions are the first to
suffer the effects of climate change, and we demand that they reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions without taking care of our own;
When we have watched the increased reliance on the military to pursue national
self-interest, defend corporate interests, and cause forced migration in the rest of the
world;
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those
things which we ought not to have done.
For too long, we have said and done too little. We have prioritized profit at the expense of
clean air and water, devastated species and ecosystems, devalued people and their cultures,
enriched the wealthy few and impoverished the poorest in our society and the global family.
These examples demonstrate the ecological debt we owe to Earth and the ecological
indebtedness of the rich to the poor. The cry of Earth and the poor are one.
Wisdom
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from
the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side
of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each
month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ( Revelation
22:1-2)
We are compelled and inspired by this vision of hope with respect to poverty, wealth and
ecology, a new vision of Earth and the people who are dependent upon its abundance.
The great tree, echoing Genesis description of an idyllic garden, spans the river of the
water of life. This image evokes not a singular tree but a vast, verdant forest that provides
twelve kinds of fruit. In this way, the tree will bring food for all of God's people every
month of the year. The vision of a redeemed Creation is one of a healthy Earth that will bring
healing to the nations.
We have heard the wisdom of the worker, the scientist, the ancestor, the great tree, the
river of the water of life. We have heard the wisdom of Your whole Creation calling us toward
healing.
There is a new world in the making. You are working on behalf of Your people and restoring
the good Earth You created. This world matters as do people's concrete struggles within it. It
is our reminder to care for each other and all of Creation. You are a God of redemption, not of
destruction, and invite us to participate in redemptive acts.
Healing
Creator, You endowed all of Your Creation with dignity, including human beings, a shining
strand in the glimmering web of life.
Yet today, Creation is not the way it is supposed to be. We've seen the toxic pools, the
gouged Earth, the forecasts of increased global average temperatures that will permanently
change life on Earth. Climate change is the enveloping reality we live in.
We are alarmed by the increased concentration of wealth owned by a few. We know that poverty
strips dignity away.
We have put our faith in what we have created – idols of gold and silver, luxury and
consumer goods, markets and technology - rather than in You, our Creator.
Creator, enliven our imaginations to restore Your Creation. Heal our broken lives and
communities.
Redeemer, save us from our greed, and the structures, policies and laws we've established
that sustain and protect unearned privilege. We have heard the indictment in the gospel of
Luke: "we take what we did not deposit, we reap what we did not sow." Already, we are taking
more than Earth can offer, and returning more waste than Earth can absorb.
Save us from a "prosperity" gospel that neglects Your radical gospel of justice and hope for
all.
Redeemer, grant us the courage to restore Your Creation. Heal our broken lives and
communities.
Holy Spirit, come quickly. We are poor, we are rich; we are oppressed, we are oppressors.
Reconcile us to one another, reconcile us with Earth. May the churches we represent be agents
of reconciliation, centres for caring communities and shared sacrifice, models of an ethic of
solidarity with future generations and our neighbours. Light us with a passion for justice,
peace and solidarity.
Holy Spirit, breathe into us the passion to work together, to restore Your Creation. Heal
our broken lives and communities.
Thanksgiving
We give thanks for young people who are inventing new forms of resistance to greed and
injustice through forums like the Occupy movement and the "people's microphone."
We give thanks for the prophets among us who challenge our idolatry of the unregulated
Market and who confront us with our addiction to the carbon economy.
We give thanks for the elders among us, who help us remember a time when it wasn't always
like this; who call on the community's invisible heart to counter the Market's invisible hand;
who help us to remember what a moral economy looks like.
We give thanks for the witness of those of our ancestors who have taught us our rightful
place in Creation and who have spoken truth to power; who understood that Christ is found among
those who are hungry, homeless, imprisoned and downtrodden.
We give thanks for our ecumenical partners who continue to deepen our common witness based
on ecojustice principles of solidarity, sufficiency, sustainability and equity in the economy
and Earth.
We give thanks for the power of being together, and for all those friends and allies who
help us to remember who we are as a justice loving people.
************
Vision & Action
Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.For
there is still a vision (Habbakuk 2: 2-3)
We see a time of new beginnings, of Jubilee, when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere no
longer threaten life, when the carbon economy has been transformed, and we no longer mortgage
our children's future. We see a time when unsustainable development has been rejected in favour
of just, participatory and sustainable communities. We see a time when Earth has begun its
regeneration and like God with Noah, we have covenanted with God and Creation to never destroy
it again.
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have
works? (James 2:14)
We commit ourselves to lives of integrity and justice where we share all God's resources
equitably, reduce our carbon footprint, seek right relationship in our economic transactions
and strengthen the campaign for climate justice.
We call on churches, interfaith partners and all people of goodwill to work together to
achieve this timeless and compelling vision. In order to mobilize appropriate resources and as
a first step we call on the World Council of Churches, its member churches, and its sister
ecumenical bodies to undertake a decade of action on ecojustice encompassing both ecological
and economic justice.
We call on our North American churches to take action to transition from carbon-based to
renewable energy, to narrow the gap between those of us who are rich and those of us who are
poor, to respond to the needs of climate refugees, to hold their pension fund and investment
managers accountable for the ethical implications of their investments, and to advocate for
policies that will restore ecological balance.
We call on businesses and industries to commit to principles of integrity by complying with
human rights codes; by shifting investments from carbon-based to renewable energy; and by
showing leadership in reducing the gap between the rich and the poor by paying fair wages and
paying their fair share of taxes.
We call on our governments to govern with integrity by implementing a moratorium on further
development of the tar sands; compelling corporations to operate with the highest available
environmental and labour standards wherever they do business on the globe; prohibiting
excessive interest rates; legislating an international financial transactions tax to begin to
make restitution for ecological debt; reallocating budgets from the military and systems of
death and destruction to systems that promote the abundance of life; working for a new
financial architecture; and ensuring that commercial banking is clearly separated from
investment banking (speculative investments and financial transactions).
"... 47 representatives of churches from Central and Eastern Europe, along with resource persons, met June 24-28 in Budapest, Hungary. They were from Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, including a presenter delegated by the Council of the European Bishops' Conferences. In addition, 30 guests and staff persons of regional and international ecumenical and civil organizations from around the world were present. All these came to Budapest at the invitation of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), the Conference of European Churches (CEC) and the WARC European Area Committee. Also accompanying the process was the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The consultation is part of the joint process on globalization of these organizations that grew out of the call of the WARC General Council in 1997 in Debrecen, Hungary for "covenanting for justice in the economy and the earth (Processus Confessionis)" and the recommendations on globalization made by the General Assembly of the World Council Churches 1998 in Harare. It is the second in a series of regional meetings that began with a symposium in Bangkok and will continue with meetings of churches in the Pacific, Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and North America. The consultation was graciously supported and hosted by the Reformed Church in Hungary, and was held at the Reformed Theological College (Raday) of Budapest. ..."
"... The Foundations of the Social Concept of the ROC ..."
MESSAGE FROM THE JOINT CONSULTATION ON GLOBALIZATION IN CENTRAL
AND EASTERN EUROPE: RESPONSES TO THE ECOLOGICAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES, JUNE, 24-28,
2001, BUDAPEST
47 representatives of churches from Central and Eastern Europe, along with resource
persons, met June 24-28 in Budapest, Hungary. They were from Orthodox, Protestant and Roman
Catholic churches, including a presenter delegated by the Council of the European Bishops'
Conferences. In addition, 30 guests and staff persons of regional and international ecumenical
and civil organizations from around the world were present. All these came to Budapest at the
invitation of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the World Alliance of Reformed Churches
(WARC), the Conference of European Churches (CEC) and the WARC European Area Committee. Also
accompanying the process was the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The consultation is part of
the joint process on globalization of these organizations that grew out of the call of the WARC
General Council in 1997 in Debrecen, Hungary for "covenanting for justice in the economy and
the earth (Processus Confessionis)" and the recommendations on globalization made by the
General Assembly of the World Council Churches 1998 in Harare. It is the second in a series of
regional meetings that began with a symposium in Bangkok and will continue with meetings of
churches in the Pacific, Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and North America. The
consultation was graciously supported and hosted by the Reformed Church in Hungary, and was
held at the Reformed Theological College (Raday) of Budapest.
To be more
vigilant
About a decade ago, we, the people and churches in Central and Eastern Europe rejoiced as we
realized we were free. It was as if a deep shadow had passed by and that full daylight had
returned.
As we review the past ten years, it becomes clear that the magnitude and content of the
problems encountered have been grossly underestimated by both governments and churches. Also,
as we listen to reports from those whose suffering is most severe, we conclude that not all
their difficulties arise directly out of what happened more than ten years ago. This suggests
the need to be more vigilant in our journey with the women and men of Central and Eastern
Europe.
The countries in the region enjoy great cultural and religious diversity. We heard that some
of them show economic growth, increasing employment and environmental improvements according to
the data available. In the region as a whole, however, rising unemployment and the falling
value of pensions and wages has plunged millions of women and men into poverty. UNDP statistics
report (cf. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report for Central and
Eastern Europe and CIS, New York 1999; http.//www.undp.org/rbec/publications) , that
1989 about 14 million people in the former communistic block lived on less than four
dollars a day. By the mid-nineties that number had risen to 147 million people.
At the same time, and in sharp contrast, there has developed a new feature, that of
excessive wealth for a small minority.
Life expectancy fell significantly in some of the countries.
Health care, schooling and education standards declined.
Commerce based criminality grew rapidly.
Search for explanations
In relation to these facts, we felt a moral duty to search more diligently for additional
explanations for the prevailing mood of disappointment and the sense of betrayal. Working in
groups, the consultation examined the ecological, cultural, economic and social effects of
globalization on the region. The groups produced reports including the analysis, evaluation and
proposals for alternative action, which are reflected in this message. They identified two main
reasons behind the present difficulties in the region.
First was the actual way in which the challenge of the transformation of society was handled
by most authorities after 1989. Whereas Communism had depended on unrestricted state planning,
politicians and leaders now embraced the unrestrained market-mechanism as the path to a better
future. They did not discern that a market without social, cultural, and institutional
frameworks would undermine the very fabric of society. Privatization, liberalization and
deregulation of the market for the sake of economic growth was made a prerequisite for
receiving external loans and financial assistance . This neo-liberal �shock therapy',
requiring a shrinking role for the state, simply disabled existing social provisions for
ordinary women and men.
Second was the dynamic released by the new global information and communication technologies
and the phenomenal expansion of new �global' markets. These are often labeled �
globalization '. It is a complex term. Where it refers to growing possibilities for genuine
co-operation between nations and peoples with opportunities for communication and common
action, it has a positive connotation. Our consultation, for instance, benefited greatly from
the participation of Christians from many continents.
It has negative connotations where it refers to the dominance exercised by an ideology
legitimizing and promoting the unrestrained activities of players in the global markets, and
the unprecedented concentration of financial power in the hands of self-appointed
�rulers'. The unregulated flow of capital becomes the arbiter of the economic goodness
or badness of all human or political actions. In our consultation we made a clear distinction
between this neo-liberal project, which some call � globalism ', and the historic
process of �globalization' already referred to. It is driven by powerful economic self
interest. It commercializes human and institutional relationships and the very sources of life;
the earth, water, air and even the human body itself. The ideology, power structures and
practices this project entails accounts for dramatic changes in the economies and societies of
Central and Eastern Europe. Its immediate effects are to put pressure on governments at all
levels to cut social, medical, educational and environmental expenditure in order to be
�attractive' in the eyes of �global' capital. Women and other vulnerable groups
bear the greatest burden of its consequences.
This ideological emphasis on privatisation at any price, has undermined existing
infrastructures. Minimising the role of the state, it left the poor without adequate protection
and support and opened the door to criminal and speculative activities. Irresponsible owners
who had no interest in the fate of either companies or employees bought out many of the newly
privatised enterprises and banks. Alternative paths to ownership were hardly considered, nor
the idea that ownership brings social obligations.
Justice to the poor
This confusion about �globalization' is often used as an alibi, not only by important
international agencies, such as the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank, but also a growing number
of national governments. They demand harsh sacrifices of ordinary women and men as indicated
already. They do this despite reliable evidence that economic growth fails to promote human
development unless there is
adequate support for the poor, unemployed, and other vulnerable groups;
environmental protection;
transparency and accountability in government, and
effective participation by civil society (including labor unions).
Given this situation, our meeting arrived at the unequivocal conclusion:
No authority inside or outside the region should ever escape its responsibility to do to
justice to the poor and the needy by claiming the unavoidability of the requirements of
globalization.
Policies justified in this way are contrary to both scientific findings and the core of
Christian faith. They have to stop unconditionally and immediately. For, as it is stated so
well in the recent Basic Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church:
"...the danger of differences that may emerge between people's will and international
organization's decisions should not be underestimated. These organizations may become
instruments for the unfair dominion of strong over weak countries, rich over poor, the
technologically and informationally developed over the rest. They may also practice double
standards, by applying international law in the interest of more influential states. All this
compels the Orthodox Church to call the powers that be, both on national and international
levels, to utter responsibility." (cf. The Foundations of the Social
Concept of the ROC )
12. It is vitally important for Christians to recognize that dependence upon this
neo-liberal ideology has deeply spiritual implications. It compels every participant to invest
his or her faith in Mammon. The question for us is a simple one, in whom do we put our trust
and in whom do we believe. Faith in the God of life sets us free from domination by Mammon.
This is not only a domain where churches can speak, but should speak. This faith, translated
into appropriate actions, is the ground of hope against that despair which, until now, so
characterizes the present situation and not just in this region.
SERVE PEOPLE, NOT POWER
CALL TO GOVERNMENTS AND TO THE WIDER PUBLIC IN THE REGION
1. Globalization dramatically transforms the nature of power. Democratically elected
governments and their delegates in international organisations are increasingly losing power to
the growing influence of international bureaucracies, transnational corporations, media-owners
and actors in the field of financial �global' capital. We challenge these power
structures, urging them to become more transparent, accountable and representative. The peoples
of the world should seize control of global political and economic processes. Democracy should
be reinstated in the new forms of decision-making, at local, national and international
levels.
2. Many political and economic processes require some kind of regulation at the
international level. They should not be employed by the state at the expense of the necessary
protection of vulnerable people.
3. The guiding idea for all our recommendations is the Biblical motif of Jubilee (Lev 25, Dt
15,Neh 5,Jes 61, Luc 4). This implies that all people are entitled to the basic resources of
life and the public provision that enables them to live in the household (oikonomia) of God's
creation. The economy of our societies ought therefore to be always household-orientated.
This insight leads us to the following recommendations.
Recommendations
4. Global finance should not be allowed to monopolise the decisive role in national and
regional economies by rendering them over-dependent on Foreign Direct Investment and
speculative capital. We strongly recommend that governments persist in striving for the
development of their home-economy, with special attention to the role of medium and small
businesses, and warn them against prioritising export-orientation at their expense.
5. Local economic initiatives need to be supported. This implies the strengthening of local
governments. Public authorities at all levels should insist on the maintenance of adequate
social support for the poor and strong environmental standards and resist international
financial pressure to eliminate them. 6. We ask governments to support the international
actions of those governments and civil organisations which, in order to democratise the
international monetary system, seek to regulate the flow of speculative international capital.
We ask the same support, especially from the rich industrialised countries, for international
efforts (like in Rio and Kyoto) in favour of the environment.
7. Nations seeking entry to the European Union should equip their electorate to make
informed decisions through accurate and transparent evaluation of the impact on social security
and other vital interests of their citizens.
8. Governments should safeguard cultural values, the dignity and rights of all women and
men, and their unhindered development. Economic globalization in its present form threatens
values such as justice, charity, peace and sobriety which are rooted in Christian traditions.
It replaces them with the values of unrestrained consumerism and increasing commercialisation
(or monetisation) of society. Education, health care, arts, sports, the media, the environment
and even safety are increasingly dominated by financial considerations. The culture of economic
rivalry is usurping the culture of social co-operation with adverse consequences for weak and
vulnerable people.
9. Public resources, which from a Christian perspective are designed to serve the common
good, should not be ransomed to privatisation policies by governments whether or not they are
under pressure from external donors.
10. We ask governments to serve people, not power.
CHOOSE LIFE, NOT DEATH
A call to churches
1. Today we are confronted by the domination of the idols of competition, consumption and
comfort. The Christian understanding of oikonomia , of the world as God's household,
embraces relations between people and God, social harmony and peaceful coexistence of human
beings with the whole of God's creation. This urges churches and Christians to show the world
the example of living according to the principles of cooperation, interdependence and
compassion deeply rooted in the Trinitarian basis of our faith. We ask the Holy Spirit for the
gift of discernment by which to read the signs of our time and to �distinguish the
spirits'.
2. In challenging economic globalization the Church is confronted with Jesus' words, "You
cannot serve God and mammon." (Mt. 6:24). Will the churches have the courage to engage with the
�values' of a profit-orientated way of life as a matter of faith, or will they withdraw
to a private life? This is the question our churches must answer... or lose their very
soul!
3. The message of the Gospel and our traditions teach us neither to be acquiescent to the
dominant powers of this world, nor to escape the responsibilities into private expressions of
faith. Christian communities should radiate love, joy and peace, attract and call others to a
new way of life. Our mission is to transform life around us and to respond to all human beings,
especially those who are suffering, oppressed and marginalized. In doing so, we proclaim
Christ. We urge the churches to raise their prophetic voice so that changes are made for the
benefit every person in every part of the world.
4. Churches need to engage in a serious way with the following questions.
Which processes in international politics and the economy are caused by the intrinsic
development of trade, information flow, cultural exchange etc.? and
Which are the result of �forced global transformation' aimed at securing the
dominance of the richest countries, as well as economic and political groups?
What are the positive aspects of increasing international cooperation which can be
employed for advancing the Christian mission in word and deed?
How can Christian values, traditions and cultures be preserved and thrive in the context
of globalization?
5. Global economy and global power can be called to account by a global civil society
equipped for broad social advocacy. International Christian organizations can provide a basis
for cooperation open to and responsive to others, including research bodies, trade unions,
environmental movements, and communities of followers of world
faiths.
Recommendations
6. The negative social consequences of globalization must be counterbalanced by effective
attention to the needs of the poor, the vulnerable and the powerless.
We call upon churches:
To resist socially counterproductive policies, especially social and tax dumping and to
preserve the dignity of labour.
To support economic and cultural alternatives to homogenization, including small
businesses, local credit and savings mechanisms, independent information exchange systems,
with efforts to protect and revitalize national cultures and identities, through mutual
tolerance and dialogue.
To encourage a process of 'localization', by having regard for to the expectations,
traditions and lifestyles of people in their own place and supporting their initiatives.
To increase their efforts in the fields of charitable service and social advocacy.
To raise awareness that integration is accompanied by growing ethnic and religious
tension in some parts of the world and separation in others; and to investigate the roots of
these conflict situations, which lie not only in these specific regions, but also in the
field of international politics and economy.
7. We call the churches to remember that they are founded on families and therefore need
them to be strong. Family crises have been caused by forced industrialization and now by
globalization. The solution lies in a rediscovery moral values, the ties between the
generations, respect for parenthood and the place of women in families and society.
8. We call our churches to make the care of the environment a major priority for Christian
reflection and social action. It is the �sustainable society' and �sustainable
communities' rather than economics, which matter. The European Christian Environmental Network
is a useful contact.
9. We urge the churches in the region to increase public awareness about globalization and
its consequences for their population. People need to be informed about the nature of decisions
made by their governments in relation to international institutions, and must be able to
influence those decisions. Churches can empower the voice of ordinary people by raising their
concerns with the authorities.
10. Churches and ecumenical groups in the region are encouraged to use the expertise and
linkages that the Centre for Networking, Training and Development being established by European
Contact Group, the Work and Economy Network, and the Ecumenical Academy in Prague can
provide.
11. We ask churches in our region to respond more actively to WCC's invitation to reflect on
globalization and to search for alternatives to it; to CEC's process on the role of churches in
European integration and also to WARC's Debrecen call for Processus Confessionis - a committed
process of recognition, education and confession regarding economic injustice and ecological
destruction.
12. We call the churches in the West to resist the destructive forces of economic
globalization and to be advocates for global social justice.
We ask the churches and the people in the West to influence public opinion and to persuade
decision-makers in politics, economy and other sectors of society to stop the exploitation and
exclusion of the majority of the population of the world and the destruction of the earth by
the 'golden billion' - the population of Western industrialised countries.
14.We ask the churches to educate their members so that they may rediscover the traditional
Christian values of self-restraint and asceticism (simplicity of lifestyle), and to propagate
them in society as a way of counteracting individualism and consumerism, and as an alternative
foundation for economic and social development.
15. We strongly support the Message to the Churches in the North from the participants of
the Symposium on the Consequences of Economic Globalization (Bangkok, Thailand, November 12-15,
1999) that was shared at our meeting.
16.We assure the churches in the global South of our solidarity. Our part of Europe bears a
considerable measure of responsibility for many developments, with both good and bad
consequences, in Southern countries.
17.Today our peoples share many similar problems and challenges, and we deeply need each
other in order to find solutions. In the spirit of ecumenical partnership for mutual being we
call the WCC and other ecumenical organizations to support cooperation and networking between
churches in CEEurope and with churches in the global South through consultation on
globalization. 18. Global networking between Christians and others on the issues of
globalization is urgently needed, especially from parish to parish, from one group of
researchers to another, e.g. from a Reformed radio in Hungary to a Catholic newspaper in
Indonesia and a Moslem TV studio in Kazakhstan. Ecumenical and interfaith organizations will
play the key role in this network building. We should not let the spirit of this world separate
us. The difficult reality we are facing requires a response which we can only make
together.
19. We acknowledge the work done by Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches, as
well as international Christian organizations, which have studied the problems of globalization
and have acted in this regard. The process started by the World Coucil of Churches and the
World Alliance of Reformed Churches must be encouraged, continued and broadened.
20. We commit ourselves to establishing an effective follow-up process to this consultation
in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.
And Elijah
came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be
God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word (I
Kings 18:21).
It seems to me that for many Christians the Gospel of Neoliberalism has replaced
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I've known that for a long time, and have blogged about it before ( here , and
here , and
here
).
But today I was reminded of it again when several people brought various articles on it to my
attention:
Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is
a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology
it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance
anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on
external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has
aptly described as the "infantilisation of the workers".
Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as
neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic
and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be.
Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be
freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our
norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly
colonising the rest of the world.
Neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a
state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently
selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism
celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to
innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.
When a Christian script was running in many people's minds (see Counterscript to know what
that refers to) Greed was regarded as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in the Gospel according
to Neoliberalism, it is the supreme virtue.
And
for many Christians, the Neoliberal script has started to drown out the Christian one, and so
raises the question of Elijah: How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God,
follow him: but if Baal, then follow him .
"Baal" is a word that means lord or master, and the deity referred to was Melqart, the god of
the Phoenician city of Tyre. Melqart was a god of rain and fertility, and hence of material
prosperity, and was invoked by Phoenician traders for protection of their commercial
enterprises. In other words, the cult of Baal was a prosperity cult, which had lured the people
of Israel, and was actively promoted by their Phoenician queen Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab.
The people of Israel had the prosperity script playing in their minds.
In our day too, many Christians have the prosperity script playing in their minds.
The post immediately preceding this one, on
Neopentecostal churches and their celebrity pastors [& here ]
, points to a phenomenon that Christian missiologists like to refer to as inculturation or
contextualisation, which, in a good sense, means making the Christian gospel understandable to
people living in a particular culture or context. But in the prosperity gospel preached by some
Neopentecostals, the Christian gospel has been swamped by the values of Neoliberalism. One
could say that "prosperity theology" is the contextualisation of the Christian gospel in a
society dominated by Neoliberal values, but to such an extent that the result is
syncretism.
But while the Neopentecostals sometimes do this explicitly, many other Christian groups do it
implicitly, and we need to ask ourselves where our values really come from -- from the gospel
of Jesus Christ, or from the gospel of the Market. Jesus Christ is the love of God incarnate,
but the Market, or Melqart, or Mammon, is the love of money incarnate.
When the world urges us to celebrate the virtues of Greed, whether subtly or blatantly, do we
resist it? Are we even aware of what is happening? Or do we simply allow that script to play in
our heads, telling us "You deserve it"?
Last week a couple of journalists were asking me why Neopentecostal churches that preach a
properity gospel, like T.B. Joshua's Synagogue Church of all Nations, are growing in
popularity, and one answer is that given by George Monbiot in the article quoted above -- that
the values of Neoliberalism, promoted by Reagan and Thatcher, are now colonising the whole
world.
Blessed are the sarcastic, for they shall succeed in business
I have sometimes suspected that the phrase "Christian Businessman" was an oxymoron, a
contradiction in terms, and that suspicion was reinforced by an article I have just read on the
Web. Harvard
Study Shows that Sarcasm is Actually Good for You :
Data from a recent study entitled, The Highest Form of Intelligence: Sarcasm Increases
Creativity for Both Expressers and Recipients, suggests that the delivery and deciphering of
sarcasm offers psychological benefits that have been largely underappreciated and long
overlooked.
The article tells us that the research was sponsored by Harvard Business School,
Columbia Business School and INSEAD ("The Business School for the World").
For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of the saying "Sarcasm is the lowest form of
wit."
The article I just cited tells us that people who believe that are stupid and uncreative.
So what is sarcasm, and why is it something that Christians should avoid if possible?
sarcasm n. Bitter or wounding remark, taunt, esp. one ironically worded [1]
The English word
sarcasm is derived from the Greek sarkasmos , which suggests the image of a
predator devouring its prey. So if, as the article, suggests the people most likely to succeed
in business are those who habitually go around making nasty remarks about others, and the most
effective bosses are those who habitually tear strips off their underlings, the term
"unscrupulous businessman" is a pleonastic redundancy.
Well what's new? I think most of us knew that.
I think we all knew that "business ethics" was a contradiction in terms. I recall seeing a
cartoon in Mad magazine that had some tongue-in-cheek suggestions for
commemorative postage stamps (remember them?), and one showed two people hugging each other,
each with knife in hand, stabbing the other in the back. That was to commemorate 100 years of
business ethics.
What's new in this article is a kind of psychological proof that nastiness works, that
being sarcastic gives you the edge in business. So sarcasm is a virtue to be inculcated and
cultivated. Yet it is the very opposite of ubuntu and Christian values.
Nearly every Sunday in Orthodox Churches we sing the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12).
Why so often?
Perhaps because of the frequency with which we are bombarded with propaganda to do the
opposite. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy , but being sarcastic is the
very opposite of being merciful. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth . Wrong, say the business
gurus. Blessed are the pushy.
It is perhaps easier to find Christian values among the scruffy beatniks and drop-outs from
society than among the business leaders.
As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: 'I'll
scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp
for you, stool for you or rat for you.'[2]
It is the worshippers of the bitch-goddess Success who hold out sarcasm as a
virtue and a behavioural ideal.
______________
Notes
[1] Concise Oxford Dictionary , Fifth Edition.
[2] Lipton, Lawrence. 1959. The holy barbarians . New York: Messner.
"... In an increasingly fragmented world, the Orthodox churches acknowledge and defend the dignity of every human being and cultivate human solidarity. In addressing violence in the marketplace, even if people accept in their hearts the virtues of justice and peace, the market operates with its own autonomous logic and economic practices. It is guided by the belief that there can be a 'total free market' in which unregulated competing economic relationships of individuals in pursuit of their economic gains can lead to optimum good. It advocates that free markets without government 'interference' would be the most efficient and socially optimal allocation of resources. ..."
"... Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank Chief Economist (1997-2000) and Nobel Laureate in Economics notes that economic globalization in its current form risks exacerbating poverty and increasing violence if not checked, because it is impossible to separate economic issues from social and political issues. ..."
"... Orthodoxy believes that all political and economic theories and practices are subject to criticism and modification aimed to overcoming those aspects of them that generate violence and injustice. ..."
"... The logic of the market must not only seek the maximization of profits favoring and serving only those who have economic capital and power. Economic practices must ensure just and sustainable development for all people. We cannot talk about a really free economy without entering into particular judgments about what kinds of exchange are conducive to the flourishing of life and what kinds are not. ..."
The peacemaking vocation of the church is a dynamic process of a never-ending personal and
communal transformation that reflects the human and fallible struggle to participate in God's
Trinitarian life. St. Nicholas Cabasilas epigrammatically summarizes the Orthodox view on
peacemaking: "Christians, as disciples of Christ, who made all things for peace, are to be
'craftsmen of peace.' They are called a peaceable race since 'nothing is more characteristic of
a Christian than to be a worker for peace." In being "craftsmen of peace" the Orthodox churches
unite themselves in prayer, vision, and action with all those Christians who pray that God's
Kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven. The aspiration to live in peace and justice
unite Christians with people of living faiths and ideologies in a shared vision, hope, and
actions for less violence, injustice, and oppression. An effective intervention in situations
of conflict, injustice and oppression requires the churches not to ignore what is possible to
learn from advances in political sciences and economics as well as from successful economic and
political policies and practices that aim to transform conflicts into life opportunities.
In addressing the root causes of injustice and violence in the marketplace, the Orthodox
Churches recognize the autonomy of the inherent rationality of the market and leave the
development of economic theories and policies to those who understand its dynamics better. The
Churches, however, critique economic theories and practices based on their performance and
their effects upon the people. Their criticism contributes towards a revisionary logic of the
market that favors economic practices that generate greater opportunities for a more equitable
and just distribution of power and resources.
Today, one-and-a-half billion people live in areas affected by instability, conflict or
large-scale, organized criminal violence. The causes of conflict arise from economic, political
and security dynamics. Political exclusion and inequality affecting regional, religious, or
ethnic groups are associated with higher risks of civil war, while inequality between richer
and poorer households is closely associated with higher risks of violence. The disparity
between the rich and poor between and within nations is increasing. Unemployment is on the
rise, pushing more and more people into poverty, malnutrition, poor health, depression,
violence, insecurity, fear, and desperation. There are nearly one billion undernourished people
on our planet and this number is increasing by 68 people every minute; that is more than one
every second. The human cost of violence cannot be ignored by anyone who considers all human
beings to be icons of God.
The economic and monetary crisis that leads to an increased disparity between rich and poor
is understood mostly by the Orthodox Churches to be primarily a 'spiritual' and/or cultural
crisis. It is attributed to unrestrained individualism that leads to an excessive desire for
wealth and to consumerism. Individualism and consumerism have disconnected people from loving
God and their neighbor, thus preventing them from reflecting in their lives God's love for all
creation.
St. John Chrysostom, a notable preacher of the undivided Church, stated that not to be an
advocate of the poor would be "the worst inhumanity." [1] Being
the advocate of the poor leads him to refute point by point all the arguments by which the
affluent justified the marginalization of the poor and their indifference towards them. Christ
in a privileged manner is identified with the poor. The poor are not the spectacle of human
misery and suffering that evokes compassion or disgust, but they are the icons of Christ, the
presence of Christ in the broken world. This is their dignity! If you refuse to give bread to
the poor, you ignore Christ who desires to be fed: "You eat in excess; Christ eats not even
what he needs At the moment, you have taken possession of the resources that belong to Christ
and you consume them aimlessly." [2] The
poor for St. John Chrysostom are the liturgical images of the most holy elements in all of
Christian worship: the altar and the body of Christ. [3]
The Orthodox Churches advocate a culture of compassion in which people share their material
resources with those in need. Charity and compassion are not virtues to be practiced just by
those who have the material resources and means. They are virtues that promote the communal
love that Christians should have for all human beings. Every human being, regardless of whether
he or she is rich or poor must be charitable and compassionate to those lacking the basic
material resources for sustenance. [4] St.
Basil exhorts the poor to share even the minimal goods that they may have. [5]
Almsgiving leads people to God and grants to all the necessary resources for sustenance and
development of their human potential. However, a voluntary sharing of resources in the present
world is not enough. Building a culture of peace demands global and local institutional changes
and new economic practices that address at more fundamental level the root causes of poverty.
It calls for a fusion of the Christian culture of compassion with the knowledge that we have
acquired through experience and the advances of social science about the structural sources of
poverty and its multifaceted aspects that urgently need to be addressed through reflective
concerted actions.
In an increasingly fragmented world, the Orthodox churches acknowledge and defend the
dignity of every human being and cultivate human solidarity. In addressing violence in the
marketplace, even if people accept in their hearts the virtues of justice and peace, the market
operates with its own autonomous logic and economic practices. It is guided by the belief that
there can be a 'total free market' in which unregulated competing economic relationships of
individuals in pursuit of their economic gains can lead to optimum good. It advocates that free
markets without government 'interference' would be the most efficient and socially optimal
allocation of resources.
Many economists and institutions of global development agencies
embrace economic globalization as indisputable reality and suggest that there is no alternative
to this. They assume that Neoliberalism contributes to the prosperity and the equitable
development of all nations. Unfortunately though, its economic practices have not been designed
to meet the immediate needs of the world's poor people. Global inequalities between nations and
within nations are widening. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank Chief Economist (1997-2000) and
Nobel Laureate in Economics notes that economic globalization in its current form risks
exacerbating poverty and increasing violence if not checked, because it is impossible to
separate economic issues from social and political issues.
The Orthodox Churches are not in a position to suggest concrete alternatives to economic
globalization, nor do they intend to endorse or reject complex economic policies and practices
that regulate the global economy. Yet, based on the eschatological orientation of the Christian
gospel, Orthodoxy believes that all political and economic theories and practices are subject
to criticism and modification aimed to overcoming those aspects of them that generate violence
and injustice.
The logic of the market must not only seek the maximization of profits favoring
and serving only those who have economic capital and power. Economic practices must ensure just
and sustainable development for all people. We cannot talk about a really free economy without
entering into particular judgments about what kinds of exchange are conducive to the
flourishing of life and what kinds are not.
The Churches are led by their faith to take an
active role in fostering economic practices that reflect God's peace and justice. These
economic practices integrate in their logic those elements of social life that promote a
culture of compassion that unites all human beings in peace and justice. Indispensable aspects
of this culture are: respect for the dignity and the rights of all human beings; equitable
socio-economic relationships; broad participation in economic and political decision-making;
and just sharing of resources and power.
Once, we put human faces to all those millions of people who suffer the consequences of an
inequitable distribution of power and resources, it becomes evident that it is an indispensable
aspect of the church's mission to the world to be involved through prayers and thoughtful
actions in noble efforts to eradicate poverty and injustice.
"... Neoliberalism basically makes culture a personal choice. You are free to choose whatever culture you want. Freedom is the ability to do whatever you want to do and no one can stand in your way. But that doesn't work if you are a Christian. ..."
"... In neoliberal ideology, culture is something that humanity added to the world. Culture doesn't reflect any reality out there. There is no purpose. There is no God. It's just biology, chemistry, physics, what they call "natural laws". ..."
"... But what are neoliberals trying to do? They are trying to impose a multicultural culture. That's the problem. A multicultural culture is impossible, It's a contradiction. On one side, they talk about women`s rights and on the other side they support radical islamists who want legalization of Sharia law in the US. It's just insane! There is no way of making sense of it. And that's why I think they don't have any future ..."
You are not alone in asking the question: How is it possible that we can be so antagonistic towards conservative traditional Christianity
and yet so accepting of Islam?
I think we have to understand that there has been a revolution in the US and the West in general. An ideological revolution for
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is dedicated to scientific rationalism, the neoliberal conception of life: science, biology, chemistry, physics,
mathematics, that's it. Everything else is the matter of your own personal opinion.
When that began to make its way into our culture and policy, in the 1960's in particular, it gave rights to something called "emancipatory
politics". The emancipation has to be freedom or liberation.
Emancipatory politics basically says that traditions are bad and that customs discriminate people. Emancipation dictates that
If a person want to be Islamic, he can be Islamic, if he wants to be homosexual, he can be homosexual, if he wants to change gender,
he can change it. And any tradition that stands against that has to be pushed aside because it is considered to be discriminatory.
Over the last several decades we've seen a redefinition of the American Public Square. The American Public Square used to be very
Christian. It was guided by primarily Anglo-Protestant traditional norms. Now it is being governed much more by these emancipatory-politics
norms. Therefore, if you are considered to be a part of the group that was not allowed into the Public Square because of Christianity,
now you are going to get special treatment. They are going to make laws for you and, as a part of those laws, they have to cast out
the Christianity that was impeding you from coming into the Public Square.
Traditional morality and customs are now considered as evil and discriminatory. Neoliberalism is actually much more accommodating
to Islam than to Christianity. Why? Because Islam was considered to be discriminated as well as feminists, LGBT, African-Americans,
and other national minorities. Any group that was once pushed out from public participation will now be allowed in.
Neoliberalism basically makes culture a personal choice. You are free to choose whatever culture you want. Freedom is the
ability to do whatever you want to do and no one can stand in your way. But that doesn't work if you are a Christian.
Remember, neoliberalism says science is the only way we can know. So, if science is the only way we can know, what is culture?
In neoliberal ideology, culture is something that humanity added to the world. Culture doesn't reflect any reality out there.
There is no purpose. There is no God. It's just biology, chemistry, physics, what they call "natural laws".
So, in that way, culture is how we impose meanings and purposes on a meaningless and purposeless world. Who am I to tell you that
your way of imposing meanings is bad and the way how I impose it is good? The problem is culture itself. One cannot think about biology,
chemistry, physics without culture. Those things are culture. So culture is inescapable.
But what are neoliberals trying to do? They are trying to impose a multicultural culture. That's the problem. A multicultural
culture is impossible, It's a contradiction. On one side, they talk about women`s rights and on the other side they support radical
islamists who want legalization of Sharia law in the US. It's just insane! There is no way of making sense of it. And that's why
I think they don't have any future.
"... He wrote in the first chapter of this 2005 book, "Like cancer in the human body, liberalism in the body of the church begins undetected and unrecognized. By the time Christians recognize the cancer of liberalism and are stirred to action, often it is too late to stop its deadly progress. The damage has been done, and a spiritual crisis is upon the church. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church [OPC] is now in such a spiritual crisis, and the crisis has spread well beyond it. ..."
"... He asserts, "neo-liberals pretend to be what they are not, and profess to believe what they do not Neo-liberals profess salvation by faith in Christ alone, but they teach salvation by Christ plus man's faithfulness. Neo-liberals profess to believe in the authority of Scripture, but they teach the primacy of human scholarship Neo-liberals profess to preach the all-sufficiency of His obedience for the salvation of souls. Neo-liberals profess to believe in full assurance of salvation, but they teach that the believer can never be assured." (Pg. 65-66) ..."
"... He asks, "how does a neo-liberal minority dominate the OPC today?... liberals rely on the cooperation, or at least inaction, of the doctrinally indifferent . Their watchword is tolerance. They see controversy as one of the greatest evils, and they see tolerance of varying views under one big confessional tent as the way to avoid controversy Doctrinal disputes are an airing of dirty laundry that must be avoided Intolerance of error becomes the only intolerable thing." (Pg. 313-314) ..."
He wrote in the first chapter of this 2005 book, "Like cancer in the human body, liberalism
in the body of the church begins undetected and unrecognized. By the time Christians recognize
the cancer of liberalism and are stirred to action, often it is too late to stop its deadly
progress. The damage has been done, and a spiritual crisis is upon the church. The Orthodox
Presbyterian Church [OPC] is now in such a spiritual crisis, and the crisis has spread well
beyond it. The crisis centers on the conflict between authentic Biblical Christianity and an
Antichristian counterfeit. The church needs to understand the nature of this crisis, how it
came about, its deadly effects, and what Scripture says must be done. That is the purpose of
this book." (Pg. 11-12) He adds, "we shall see how present-day neo-liberalism strikingly
parallels the old liberalism, but with contemporary points of emphasis and new subtleties we
shall examine neo-liberalism's corrupting influence on the OPC and other denominations." (Pg.
15-16) Significantly, he adds, "this book is a call to recognize the dangers of remaining in
the OPC, and to acknowledge that the time has come to separate from it." (Pg. 28)
He is strongly critical of Norman Shepherd [e.g., The
Call of Grace ]: "Norman Shepherd and those who follow his errors substitute the waters of
baptism for the blood of Christ. They teach, in effect, that God's covenant is a covenant in
water, not blood." (Pg. 53) He adds, "In God's economy, faith and works are mutually exclusive
in justification; mingling the two is impossible but Shepherd says that the impossible is not
only possible, but necessary. He redefines faith to be 'faith-plus.' He erects a false doctrine
of justification that un-Scripturally packs all sorts of works into the 'saving faith' which he
equates with 'justifying faith.'" (Pg. 55)
He asserts, "neo-liberals pretend to be what they are not, and profess to believe what they
do not Neo-liberals profess salvation by faith in Christ alone, but they teach salvation by
Christ plus man's faithfulness. Neo-liberals profess to believe in the authority of Scripture,
but they teach the primacy of human scholarship Neo-liberals profess to preach the
all-sufficiency of His obedience for the salvation of souls. Neo-liberals profess to believe in
full assurance of salvation, but they teach that the believer can never be assured." (Pg.
65-66)
He argues, "In the long run, it is not simply a matter of the OPC tolerating the preaching
of two gospels. The true Gospel is being displaced. Satan is quite content to fight a war of
attrition. If the false gospel continues to be propagated at the seminary level as the one that
is 'truly Reformed,' it will take only a generation for the preaching of the true Gospel to
become rare or even die out entirely in the denomination. That is exactly what has happened in
other denominations." (Pg. 125) He charges, "The OPC has had thirty years to purge itself of
these errors, and has repeatedly refused to do so. Instead of removing the cancer it has
stimulated its growth. In 2004 it showed once again that it has no stomach for the hard choices
it needs to make." (Pg. 237) He adds, "it is not surprising that Norman Shepherd's heresies,
which were allowed to take root over thirty years ago, have spread like a cancer in the years
since. It is not surprising that Shepherd and his followers continue to be welcome in many
parts of the OPC. It is not surprising that Richard Gaffin's teachings have become the dominant
position at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and have flowed from there into the churches
of the OPC and other denominations." (Pg. 284)
He asks, "how does a neo-liberal minority dominate the OPC today?... liberals rely on the
cooperation, or at least inaction, of the doctrinally indifferent . Their watchword is
tolerance. They see controversy as one of the greatest evils, and they see tolerance of varying
views under one big confessional tent as the way to avoid controversy Doctrinal disputes are an
airing of dirty laundry that must be avoided Intolerance of error becomes the only intolerable
thing." (Pg. 313-314)
He recalls the separation of his own home congregation from the OPC: "before deciding to
recommend separation from the OPC, the session authorized a Sunday evening study series on the
doctrinal issues at stake The study shifted its focus to the errors commonly
taught---Shepherdism, Federal Vision theology, and the New Perspective on Paul The congregation
subsequently separated from the OPC by voting on a resolution of separation It also made it
clear that the congregation was separating from the authority of a body that has abandoned the
marks of a true church of Jesus Christ, rather than withdrawing under the authority of that
body as if it still possessed the Biblical qualities to exercise spiritual authority." (Pg.
339-340) He concludes, "this book has been a call to recognize the new dangers of remaining in
the OPC, and to acknowledge that the time has come to separate from it. We urge you to be
obedient to that Biblical imperative, no matter what the cost." (Pg. 365)
This book will be of interest to those concerned with the Federal Vision and Norman Shepherd
controversies, as well as debates within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and other
conservative Reformed denominations.
"... Whereas previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom. ..."
In Bannon's telling, the greatest mistake the baby
boomers made was to reject the traditional "Judeo-Christian" values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime,
because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European
fascism, and, subsequently, to create an "
enlightened
capitalism
" that made America great for decades after World War II.
The
enormous
amount
of
media
attention
he
has received and his various
interviews
,
talks
,
and
documentaries
strongly
suggest that he believes the world is on the verge of disaster -- and that without Judeo-Christianity, the American culture war
cannot be won, enlightened capitalism cannot function, and "
Islamic
fascism
" cannot be defeated.
This is where Bannon invokes the "Russian
traditionalism" of Vladimir Putin, and it's important to recognize why he does so. In his 2014 Vatican talk, Bannon made it
clear
that
Putin is "playing very strongly to U.S. social conservatives about his message about more traditional values." As a recent
Atlantic
essay
convincingly argues, upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that "large patches of the West despised feminism and
the gay-rights movement." Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the "New World Leader of Conservatism" whose
traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
... ... ...
...Bannon also highlights differences between
Judeo-Christian traditionalism and the thinking of Alexander Dugin, who
he
(hyperbolically) credits
as being the intellectual mastermind of the traditionalist movement in Russia. In contrast to
mainline American social conservatives, Dugin
sees
the
anti-globalism and anti-Americanism of certain expressions of Islam as having much in common with his own distinctive brand of
traditionalism. In fact, Dugin
views
conservative
American evangelicalism as an aberration from historical Christianity, and a cipher for neoliberal capitalism.
In contrast to Bannon's realpolitik, Sergei Lavrov, the
Russian minister of foreign affairs, has called for a greater long-term cooperation with the West -- for a "partnership of
civilizations" to combat modern geopolitical problems, especially ISIS.
In
his words
, "We believe that universal human solidarity must have a moral basis resting on traditional values which are
essentially common for all of the world's leading religions. I would like to draw your attention to the joint statement made
by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia and Pope Francis, in which they reiterated their support for the family as a
natural center of life for individuals and society." The same values that motivate Russia's foreign policy (especially its
role in the Middle East) are, to Lavrov, the bedrock of the Christian civilization represented by the Patriarch and the pope.
"... The second reason is now more pertinent than when it was first given. The capitalist system, by its very nature, places the preponderance of wealth in the hands of a small minority. ..."
"... As G.K. Chesterton rightly stated, the problem with capitalism is that it produces too few capitalists! ..."
"... The above were only some of the reasons why the Distributists, who formed the Distributist League in 1926, thought that the capitalist economy would eventually collapse. These were not, however, the only problems which they found with the system. ..."
"... The idea that if every man simply seeks after his own economic interest, all will be provided for and prosper, was almost universally rejected during these decades. We see strong reactions to economic liberalism in Russian Communism, German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, Austrian, Portuguese, and Spanish Corporatism, British Fabian Socialism, along with the American "New Deal" leftism. Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the world was ordered by ideologies which explicitly rejected the premises of economic liberalism. We must, also, not forget the international economic crash of the late 20s and early 30s, which produced economic depression, totalitarian regimes, and, finally, world war. ..."
In truly "prophetic" utterances, the analysis of present circumstances, along with a
consideration of the laws written into human nature which manifest themselves in history, can
yield a prediction concerning the general outline of things to come. This judgment of the
well-informed and perceptive mind, is somewhat undermined by only one factor. The universe and
the "universe" of human society in which the inherent laws written into human nature by its
Creator reveal themselves in historical events, is also a universe which contains free
creatures who are undetermined as regards the means they can employ to achieve their
specifically human end. Human freedom inserts a variable in the material necessity of the
universe.
This contingency and variability has its ultimate source in the spirituality of the
human soul. It is precisely on account of his materialistic rejection of the human soul, that
Karl Marx, for instance, could make such ridiculously precise predictions as to the "necessary"
movement of economic, political, and social history. This does not mean, however, that there is
not an inherent natural law which determine which human endeavors will "work" and which will
lead to catastrophe.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were a group of scholars,
theologians, philosopher, social critics, and poets, who predicted the inevitable demise of the
capitalist economic system which was just developing in Continental Europe, but had been
operative for 100 years in England. When you read their works, especially the British authors
of the early 20th century, here we include Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Arthur Penty,
one is struck by the fact that their analyzes are more valid today than they were 70 or 80
years ago, their predictions more likely to be imminently fulfilled.
What they predicted was
nothing less than the collapse of the capitalist system. In the case of Belloc, in his book The
Servile State, it was predicted that capitalism would soon transform itself into an economic
and social system which resembled the slave economies of the pre-Christian and early Christian
eras. Why did they predict such a collapse or inevitable transformation? In their writings,
many reasons are given, however, we can narrow them down to three. The first, they referred to
as the "capitalist paradox." The paradox is a consequence of capitalism being an economic
system which, in the long run, "prevents people from obtaining the wealth produced and prevents
the owner of the wealth from finding a market." Since the capitalist strives both for ever
greater levels of production and lower wages, eventually "the laborer who actually produces
say, boots cannot afford to buy a sufficient amount of the boots which he himself has made."
This leads to the "absurd position of men making more goods than they need, and yet having less
of those goods available for themselves than they need."1
The second reason is now more pertinent than when it was first given. The capitalist system,
by its very nature, places the preponderance of wealth in the hands of a small minority. This
monopoly on the money supply by banking and financial concerns, becomes more absolute as the
capital-needing consumer must go to the banks to borrow money. Usury, now called "interest,"
insures that those who first possesses the money for loan, will end up with a greater portion
of the money supply than they possessed before the loan was issued. As wages stagnate and
interest payments become increasingly impossible to make, massive numbers of defaults will
inevitably produce a crisis for the entire financial system.2
When entire nations default on
loans, there will be a crisis throughout the entire international financial system. Demise is,
therefore, built into the very structure of the capitalistic system in which capital (i.e., all
kinds of wealth whatsoever which man uses with the object of producing further wealth, and
without which the further wealth could not be produced. It is a reserve without which the
process of production is impossible)3 is primarily in the hands of the few.
As G.K. Chesterton
rightly stated, the problem with capitalism is that it produces too few capitalists! The third
fact concerning capitalism which the Distributists thought would inevitably bring down the
system or lead to its fundamental transformation, was the general instability and personal
insecurity which marks a full-blown capitalist economy. What accounts for this general feeling
of insecurity and instability, which characterizes both the individual "wage-earner" and the
society living under capitalism, is the always present fear of unemployment and, hence, of
destitution and the fact that a laborer's real wages leave him with only enough money to cover
the expenses of the day. Saving, so as to provide an economic hedge against the misfortune of
unemployment or personal crisis, becomes almost impossible.4
The above were only some of the reasons why the Distributists, who formed the Distributist
League in 1926, thought that the capitalist economy would eventually collapse. These were not,
however, the only problems which they found with the system.
The social consequences of the majority being unable to afford real property, the decline
and, eventual, disappearance of the trade guilds and vocational corporations, the "necessity"
of wives and mothers entering the "work force," the end of small-scale family -owned businesses
and farms, the decline of the apprentice system were all indictments of capitalism in the mind
of those who sought to chart out a "third way" between capitalism, which is simply liberalism
in the economic sphere, and socialism.
There is little doubt that the problems with capitalism which were cited by the
Distributists have only grown in their proportion in our own time. The concentration of wealth,
exemplified by the recent merger of Citicorp and Travelers which produced the largest banking
institution in the United States with assets of $700 billion, simply boggles the mind. The
institution of usury, always an necessary adjunct of economic liberalism, has caused in recent
years more bankruptcies and personal debt than ever before in history. Nations, such as
Indonesia, are tottering on the brink of social, economic, and political chaos because of their
inability to pay the interest on their hundreds of billions of dollars in bank debt. If such a
nation should go into default, it could threaten to throw a whole variety of nations into
recession, depression, or worse.
It is not proper to say that the predictions of the imminent demise of capitalism were
totally without fulfillment. The 1920s, 30s, and 40s witnessed reaction after reaction to the
radical individualism which is the fundamental idea of liberal capitalism. Truly, the market is
the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is
responsible for anything but himself.5
The idea that if every man simply seeks after his own
economic interest, all will be provided for and prosper, was almost universally rejected during
these decades. We see strong reactions to economic liberalism in Russian Communism, German
National Socialism, Italian Fascism, Austrian, Portuguese, and Spanish Corporatism, British
Fabian Socialism, along with the American "New Deal" leftism. Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s,
most of the world was ordered by ideologies which explicitly rejected the premises of economic
liberalism. We must, also, not forget the international economic crash of the late 20s and
early 30s, which produced economic depression, totalitarian regimes, and, finally, world
war.
There is one fact which separates our day from the days of the 30s and 40s, however. The
concentration of wealth and capital, the inadequacy of a man's pay to provide the basics of
life and to provide for savings for the future, the lack of real property generously and
broadly distributed, is masked by the reality of easy credit. Easy credit, which is not
ultimately "easy" at all on the borrower, anesthetizes the populace to the grim facts of
capitalist monopoly. Since we seem to be able to get all the things that we want, the reality
of real money being increasingly unavailable to the average man is lost in the delusionary
state of the consumerist utopia. Only when the "benefit" of usurious credit is cut off, do we
realize the full extent of the problem. The greatest problem with liberal capitalism, however,
is not the concentration of wealth or real property, the greatest "existential" problem created
by capitalism is the problem of the very meaning and reality of work. To work is essential to
what it means to be a human being. Next to the family, it is work and the relationships
established by work that are the true foundations of society.6 In modern capitalism, however,
it is productivity and profit which are the basic aims, not the providing of satisfying work.
Moreover, since "labor saving" devices are the proudest accomplishments of industrial
capitalism, labor itself is stamped with the mark of undesirability. But what is undesirable
cannot confer dignity.7
It is not merely that industrial capitalism has produced forms of work, both manual and
white-collared, which are "utterly uninteresting and meaningless. Mechanical, artificial,
divorced from nature, utilizing only the smallest part of man's potential capacities,
[sentencing] the great majority of workers to spending their working lives in a way which
contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self-perfection, no chance of development, no
element of Beauty, Truth, Goodness."8 Rather, capitalism has so fundamentally alienated man
from his own work, that he no longer considers it his own. It is those with the financial
monopoly who determine what forms of work are to exist and which are "valuable" (i.e., useful
for rendering profits to the owners of money).9 Since man spends most of his days working, his
entire existence becomes hollowed out, serving a purpose which is not of his own choosing nor
in accord with his final end.
In regard to the entire question of a "final end," if we are to consider capitalism from a
truly philosophical perspective, we must ask of it the most philosophical of questions, why?
What is the purpose for which all else is sacrificed, what is the purpose of continuous growth?
Is it growth for growth's sake? With capitalism, there is no "saturation point," no condition
in which the masters of the system say that the continuous growth of corporate profits and the
development of technological devices has ceased to serve the ultimate, or even the proximate,
ends of mankind. Perhaps, the most damning indictment of economic liberalism, indeed, of any
form of liberalism, is its inability to answer the question "why."
A) Corporatism: The Catholic Response
1) The History of the "Third Way"
To understand the history of the "Third Way," a name given to an economic system which is
neither Marxist nor Capitalist by French corporatist thinker Auguste Murat (1944), we must
consider the social, political, and economic realities which originally motivated its main
advocates. Originally, "Corporatism," later to be termed "Distributism" by its British
advocates Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, was a response on the part of German
traditionalists and Catholics to the inroads which the ideology of the French Revolution had
made into their country in the early and middle years of the 19th century. The institutions
which were being defended in Corporatist thought were the ancient "estates" or "guilds" which
had been the pillars of Christian Germany for centuries. These corporate bodies, grouping
together all the men of a particular occupation or social function, were an institutional
opposition to the revolutionary doctrines of individualism and human equality. One early
rightist thinker, Adam Muller, upheld the traditional idea of social stratification based upon
an organic hierarchy of estates or guilds (Berufstandische). Such a system was necessary on
account of the essential dissimilarity of men. Moreover, such a system would prevent the
"atomization" of society so much desired by the revolutionaries who wished to remake in a new
form that which had been pulverized by liberalism.10
2) Von Ketteler and the Guild System
It was, however, a German nobleman and prelate, Wilhelm Emmanuel, Baron von Ketteler
(1811-1877), Bishop of Mainz, who directed Corporatism into new avenues and forced it to
address new concerns. The realities which Bishop von Ketteler knew the Catholic mind had to
address was the new reality of industrialism and economic liberalism. As Pope Leo XIII himself
admitted on several occasions, it was the thought of Bishop von Ketteler which helped shape his
own encyclical letter on Catholic economic teaching Rerum Novarum (1891).11 The "new things"
His Holiness was addressing were capitalism and socialism. Both meet with his condemnation,
although capitalism is condemned with strong language as an abuse of property, a deprivation of
the many by the few, while socialism is dismissed outright as being contrary to man's inherent
right to own property.12
Von Ketteler, also, in his book Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christenthum (Christianity and the
Labor Problem), attacks the supremacy of capital and the reign of economic liberalism as the
two main roots of the evils of modern society. Both represented the growing ascendancy of
individualism and materialism, twin forces that were operating to "bring about the dissolution
of all that unites men organically, spiritually, intellectually, morally, and socially."
Economic liberalism was nothing but an application of materialism to society." The working
class are to be reduced to atoms and then mechanically reassembled. This is the fundamental
generative principle of modern political economy."13 What Ketteler sought to remedy was "This
pulverization method, this chemical solution of humanity into individuals, into grains of dust
equal in value, into particles which a puff of wind may scatter in all directions."14 Bishop
von Ketteler's solution to this problem of the pulverization of the work force and the ensuing
injustice which this would inevitably breed, was to propose an idea which was the central
concept of medieval and post-medieval economic life, the guild system. When responding to a
letter from a group of Catholic workers who had submitted the question "Can a Catholic
Workingman be a member of the Socialist Worker's Party?," Bishop von Ketteler outlined the
basic structure of these vocational guilds or Berufstandische: First, "The desired
organizations must be of natural growth; that is, they must grow out of the nature of things,
out of the character of the people and its faith, as did the guilds of the Middle Ages."
Second, "They must have an economic purpose and must not be subservient to the intrigues and
idle dreams of politicians nor to the fanaticism of the enemies of religion." Third, "They must
have a moral basis, that is, a consciousness of corporative honor, corporative responsibility,
etc. Fourth, "They must include all the individuals of the same vocational estates." Fifth,
"Self-government and control must be combined in due proportion."
The guilds which von Ketteler was advocating were to be true social corporations, true
vocational "bodies" which were to have a primarily economic end, and yet, be animated by the
"soul" of a common faith. These "bodies," just like all organic entities, would be made up of
distinct parts all exercising a unique role in their particular trade. In the days of corporate
giants and trade unions, it is, perhaps, impossible to imagine vocational organizations which
include both owners and workers, along with technicians of all types. These organizations would
regulate all aspects of their particular trade, including wages, prices for products, quality
control, along with certifying that all apprentices has the requisite skills to adequately
perform the guild's particular art.
3) The Guild System and Social Solidarity
Following the intellectual path charted by von Ketteler, another German Catholic, Franz
Hitze (1851-1921), wrote of the social, psychological, and, even, spiritual purposes which
would be served by the vocational corporations or guilds. Claiming that "economic freedom" was
only a myth serving to disguise the fact that capital actually ordered things completely with a
single eye to its own advantage, Hitze saw no alternative to the economic and social control
traditionally exercised by the guilds. It would be such organizations which overcame the
antagonism between capital and labor which fed Marxist propaganda. In his book Kapital und
Arbeit und die Reorganisation der Gesellschaft (Capital and Labor and the Reorganization of
Society), Hitze states that such organizations would also end the fierce competition which is
totally inconsistent with the idea of the Common Good and social solidarity. This idea that an
economy can be ordered on the basis of "mutuality" and the identification of the interests of
employer and employee, is difficult for those who assume that an economic system must be
powered by competition and self-interest. It must be remembered, however, that such was the
economic system of Christendom until the guilds were destroyed by the advent of the French
Revolution.
What these traditional vocational groups were able to foster during the ages in which they
ordered the life of the craftsman, was a decentralization both of property and of economic
power. They, also, enabled the average craftsman to have a real say in the workings of his
trade. Such economic "federalism" or decentralization prevented the development of financial
monopolies. As Hilaire Belloc states, "Above all, most jealously did the guild safeguard the
division of property, so that there should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the
one side, and no monopolizing capitalist upon the other."15
B) Chesterbelloc and Distributism
It was in the early years of this century, that Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, joined
by a former Socialist Arthur Penty, inspired by Rerum Novarum, attempted to articulate an
economic system which stood on a totally different set of principles than did the "new things"
of capitalism and socialism. The name they gave to this system, Distributism, awkward as they
themselves realized, expressed not the socialist idea of the confiscation of all private
property, but rather, the wide-spread distribution of land, real-property, the means of
production, and of financial capital, amongst the greater part of the families of a nation.
Such a concept, along with their encouragement of the guild system, of a return to the agrarian
life, and of their condemnation of the taking of interest on non-productive loans, formed the
core of this "new" economic model.
In his book Economics for Helen, Belloc identifies the nature of the Distributist State by
distinguishing this type of state and social and economic system from that of the Servile State
and the Capitalist State. The Servile State is the one of classical antiquity, in which vast
masses of the people work as slaves for the small class of owners. In this way, the economic
state of antiquity is very similar to the economic system of our own time, insofar as a very
small minority possess real property, land, the means of production, and financial capital,
while the great mass of the population does not possess these goods to any significant degree.
How does Belloc distinguish the Servile State from that of the Capitalist State, in which he
counts the Britain of his own time? The difference is that, whereas the Servile State is based
on coercion to force the greater part of the population, which does not possess property, to
work for those who do, the Capitalist State employs "free" laborers who can choose to sign a
work contract with one employer or another. In the liberal Capitalist State, one is "free" to
choose to apply for work or accept work from one of the various owners of the means of
production. In return for this work, the laborer receives a wage which is a small portion of
the wealth that he produces.16
What distinguishes the Distributist State from the two States mentioned above, is that
instead of a small minority of men owning the means of production, there is a wide distribution
of property. In this regard, Belloc defines property as "the control of wealth by someone."17
Property must, then, be controlled by someone, since wealth which is not kept or used up by
someone would perish and cease to be wealth.
1) England's Journey for Distributism to Capitalism
It is Belloc's historical thesis, that it was not the industrialism of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries which brought about the rise of capitalism, but rather, England was a
capitalist state in the making long before the emergence of the railroad or the factory. The
Servile State, the state in which a small number of owners controlled the land and the men who
worked the land, was a mark of the Roman civilization which gradually transformed itself, under
the influence of the Catholic Church, into the feudal system in which the servus went from
being a "slave" who owned nothing, to being a "serf" who could retain [some] of what he
produced in the fields. The serf had the right to pass the land down to his own kin and he
could not be throw off his land. Thus, the personal security and economic and social stability
which characterized the Roman estate system, was carried over into medieval times.18
This historical movement, under the aegis of the Church, towards a man working on the land
which he himself owned, and working for his own benefit and for that of his family, came to an
end in England in the 16th century during the reign of King Henry VIII. Since the Distributist
State had grown up under the eye of Holy Mother Church, it should not be surprising that it
would end when She was attacked and surpressed. According to Belloc, it was King Henry's
confiscation of the monastery lands in England, and his action of parceling them out among his
wealthy supporters, which marked the beginning of the transformation of England from a nation
in which property, the land, and the means of production were widely distributed, to one in
which a small number of families control increasingly greater shares of the land. The coming of
protestantism marked the transformation of the average Englishman from independent yeoman to
tenant farmer. The concentration of wealth would occur, then, long before England would become
the industrial power of the world in the 19th century.19
2) Small is Beautiful
There can be no doubt as to the most general form of family ownership foreseen and advocated
by Belloc and Chesterton. For them, the most humane and stable economic system was one in which
a majority of families farmed land which they themselves owned, doing it with tools which were
also their own.20 Here he was following the lead of Pope Leo XIII, who in Rerum Novarum,
advocates a similar aim: "We have seen therefore that this great labor question cannot be
solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and
inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership and its policy should be to induce as
many as possible to obtain a share in the land, the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty
will be bridged... A further consequence will be the greater abundance of the fruits of the
earth. Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them;
nay, and those that are dear to them. . . men would cling to the country of their birth, for no
one would exchange his country for a foreign land if his own afforded him the means of living a
decent and happy life."21
Being Englishmen, the idea that the land meant wealth was inevitably ingrained in their
conception of economics. Ownership of the land by the families who themselves worked the land
would also mean financial stability, no fear of unemployment, a family enterprise which could
engage, in some measure, all members, an ability to put aside food and supplies to create a
hedge against destitution, a way of providing not only for one's children but for one's
children's children, along with creating an economic structure which is not oriented towards
corporate profits but towards providing for familial subsistence and a local market. Belloc
speaks of this type of Distributist economy as the one most general throughout the history of
mankind, with the possible exception of the slave economy. Capitalism and Socialism are
certainly recent interlopers on the human economic scene.22
Next we must address the ways in which such a Distributist idea can be implemented on the
personal and community level. In this regard, our next article will focus on the concept of a
"parallel economy" formed by those who wish to begin to implement the economic teachings of
Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, along with focusing on the agrarian idea both as Catholic
thought and human good sense.
"... Consolidation of mankind on the basis of the moral commandments of God is fully consistent with the Christian mission. This incarnation of globalization provides an opportunity for fraternal mutual assistance, free exchange of creative achievements and knowledge, respectful coexistence of different languages and cultures, the joint protection of nature - would be a reasonable and pious. ..."
"... If the essence of globalization is only to overcome the division between the people, the content of its economic processes had to be overcome inequalities, the prudent use of earthly riches, equitable international cooperation. ..."
"... In contrast to the immutability and universality of moral commandments, the economy cannot have a universal solution for all peoples and all times. A variety of people, God created in the world, reminds us that every nation has its task by the Creator, each valuable in the sight of the Lord, and everyone is able to contribute to the creation of our world. ..."
"... Although outwardly visible collapse of the world colonial system, the richest states of the world in pursuit of the ever-receding horizons of consumption continue to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is impossible to recognize to be just international division of labor in which some countries are suppliers of absolute values, especially human labor or raw materials irreversible, while others - suppliers of conditional values in the form of financial resources. ..."
"... Money payed for non-renewable natural resources are often taken in the literal sense "from the air", due to the work of the printing press - thanks to the monopoly position of issuers of world currency. As a result, the abyss in the socio-economic status between the nations and entire continents is becoming increasingly profound. This one-sided globalization, giving undue advantages to some of its participants at the expense of the others, entails a partial and, in some cases, virtually completes loss of sovereignty. ..."
"... If mankind needed freely traded currencies throughout the world to serve as a universal yardstick for economic calculations, the production of such units should be under fair international control, where all states of the world will proportionally participate. Possible benefits of such emissions could be channeled to the development of the poverty-stricken regions of the planet. ..."
"... National governments are increasingly losing their independence and becoming less dependent on the will of their own people, and more and more - the will of the transnational elite. Themselves, these elites are not constituted in the legal space, and is therefore not accountable to neither the people nor the national governments, becoming a shadow regulator of social and economic processes. Greed shadow rulers of the global economy leads to the fact that a thin layer of "elite" is getting richer and at the same time more and more relieved of the responsibility for the welfare of those whose labor created the wealth. ..."
"... Moral society should not increase the gap between rich and poor. Strong does not have the moral right to use their benefits at the expense of the weak, but on the contrary - are obliged to take care of those who are dispossessed. People who are employed should receive decent remuneration. ..."
"... Whole countries and nations are plunged into debt, and generations that are not yet born are doomed to pay the bills of their ancestors. ..."
"... Business expectations in lending, often ghostly becomes more profitable than the production of tangible goods. In this regard, it must be remembered about the moral ambiguity of the situation, when money is "make" new money without the application of human labor. Declaring credit sphere to be the main engine of the economy, its predominance over the real economic sector comes into conflict with the moral principles, reveled by God condemning usury. ..."
"... Attempts by indigenous people of the rich countries to stop the migration flow are futile, because come in conflict with greed of their own elites who are interested in the low-wage workforce. But even more inexorable factor driving migration was the spread of hedonic quasi -religion capturing not only elite, but also the broad masses of people in countries with high living standards. Renunciation of procreation for the most careless, smug and personal existence becomes signs of the times. The popularization of the ideology of child-free, the cult of childless and without family life for themselves lead to a reduction in the population in the most seemingly prosperous societies. ..."
"... We must not forget that the commandment to all the descendants of Adam and Eve, said: "Fill the earth and subdue it." Anyone who does not want to continue his race will inevitably have to give way to the ground for those who prefer having children over material well-being. ..."
"... Globalization has accelerated the consumer race disproportionate to earth resources granted to mankind. Volumes of consumption of goods in those countries, which are recognized worldwide for the samples and which are equal to billions of people, have long gone beyond the resource capabilities of these "model" countries. There is no doubt that, if the whole of humanity will absorb the natural wealth of the intensity of the countries that are leaders in terms of the consumption, there will be an environmental disaster on the planet. ..."
The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate
has published a draft of the document "Economy in the context of globalization. Orthodox
ethical view. " This document demonstrates the key positions of the Russian Church on a number
of issues relating to the economy and international relations.
1. The Russian Orthodox Church demonstrates that it supports only the trends in modern
international processes that aim to build a multi-polar world, and the dialogue of
civilizations and cultures on the basis of traditional, non-liberal values:
Consolidation of mankind on the basis of the moral commandments of God is fully
consistent with the Christian mission. This incarnation of globalization provides an
opportunity for fraternal mutual assistance, free exchange of creative achievements and
knowledge, respectful coexistence of different languages and cultures, the joint protection of
nature - would be a reasonable and pious.
If the essence of globalization is only to overcome the division between the people, the
content of its economic processes had to be overcome inequalities, the prudent use of earthly
riches, equitable international cooperation.
2. At the same time a large part of the document critically examines the process of
globalization. Church officials say that globalization "remove barriers to the spread of sin
and vice." The Russian Church condemns Westernization and dissemination of the Western cult of
consumption, noting that "the Western way of development" is a road to nowhere, to hell, and
the abyss:
Catch-up model of modernization", having before people's eyes uncritically perceived
external sample, not only destroys the social structure and spiritual life of the "catch-up"
societies, but often does not allow to approach the idol in the material sphere, imposing
unacceptable and ruinous economic decisions.
In contrast to the immutability and universality of moral commandments, the economy
cannot have a universal solution for all peoples and all times. A variety of people, God
created in the world, reminds us that every nation has its task by the Creator, each valuable
in the sight of the Lord, and everyone is able to contribute to the creation of our
world.
3. The Church denounced neocolonialism and the exploitation of the Third World by Western
multinationals. The Russian Orthodox Church considers such a policy to be deeply unjust and
sinful. Control over the financial sector as the main weapon of the new colonialism is
specially marked:
Although outwardly visible collapse of the world colonial system, the richest states of
the world in pursuit of the ever-receding horizons of consumption continue to enrich themselves
at the expense of everyone else. It is impossible to recognize to be just international
division of labor in which some countries are suppliers of absolute values, especially human
labor or raw materials irreversible, while others - suppliers of conditional values in the form
of financial resources.
4. The Christian approach to the economy that the Russian Orthodox Church insists on is
primarily ontological. The only alternative to the global fictitious liberal economy can only
be a real Christian economy. The hegemony of global plutocracy, which is based on financial
capital and the dollar as the universal currency, can be countered only by a global policy of
sovereignty:
Money payed for non-renewable natural resources are often taken in the literal sense
"from the air", due to the work of the printing press - thanks to the monopoly position of
issuers of world currency. As a result, the abyss in the socio-economic status between the
nations and entire continents is becoming increasingly profound. This one-sided globalization,
giving undue advantages to some of its participants at the expense of the others, entails a
partial and, in some cases, virtually completes loss of sovereignty.
5. As one of the ways to solve this problem (dollar hegemony), the Church proposes to
establish international control over global currencies:
If mankind needed freely traded currencies throughout the world to serve as a universal
yardstick for economic calculations, the production of such units should be under fair
international control, where all states of the world will proportionally participate. Possible
benefits of such emissions could be channeled to the development of the poverty-stricken
regions of the planet.
6. However, the strengthening of international institutions, according to representatives of
the Russian Orthodox Church, should not lead to the strengthening of the transnational elite.
The unconditional support of state sovereignty against the transnational elite is a distinctive
feature of the position of the Orthodox Church. This differs the Orthodox from Catholics, who
are members of the globalist transnational centralized structure, in contrast to the Orthodox
Churches, which are united in faith, but not administratively.
National governments are increasingly losing their independence and becoming less
dependent on the will of their own people, and more and more - the will of the transnational
elite. Themselves, these elites are not constituted in the legal space, and is therefore not
accountable to neither the people nor the national governments, becoming a shadow regulator of
social and economic processes. Greed shadow rulers of the global economy leads to the fact that
a thin layer of "elite" is getting richer and at the same time more and more relieved of the
responsibility for the welfare of those whose labor created the wealth.
7. The gap between rich and poor, predatory morality of "free capitalism" in the version of
Hayek, and neoliberal thoughts, according to the representatives of the Russian Orthodox
Church, is incompatible with Christian teaching:
Moral society should not increase the gap between rich and poor. Strong does not have
the moral right to use their benefits at the expense of the weak, but on the contrary - are
obliged to take care of those who are dispossessed. People who are employed should receive
decent remuneration.
8. The Russian Church openly declares his attitude to usury as a sinful phenomenon, and
notes the destructiveness of the global debt economy:
Whole countries and nations are plunged into debt, and generations that are not yet born
are doomed to pay the bills of their ancestors.
Business expectations in lending, often ghostly becomes more profitable than the
production of tangible goods. In this regard, it must be remembered about the moral ambiguity
of the situation, when money is "make" new money without the application of human labor.
Declaring credit sphere to be the main engine of the economy, its predominance over the real
economic sector comes into conflict with the moral principles, reveled by God condemning
usury.
9. Such an important aspect of modern life like mass migration is not left unattended.
Unlike the Catholic approach that unduly favors migrants, particularly in Europe, the Orthodox
notices the negative nature of the process, as well as the fact that it leads to confrontation
of different identities and value systems. In addition, the Orthodox Church propose to look at
the roots of this phenomenon. The reason for the migration is the liberal, hedonistic ideology
bleeding the peoples of Europe and the interests of the capitalist elite, who need a cheap and
disenfranchised workforce:
Attempts by indigenous people of the rich countries to stop the migration flow are
futile, because come in conflict with greed of their own elites who are interested in the
low-wage workforce. But even more inexorable factor driving migration was the spread of hedonic
quasi -religion capturing not only elite, but also the broad masses of people in countries with
high living standards. Renunciation of procreation for the most careless, smug and personal
existence becomes signs of the times. The popularization of the ideology of child-free, the
cult of childless and without family life for themselves lead to a reduction in the population
in the most seemingly prosperous societies.
We must not forget that the commandment to all the descendants of Adam and Eve, said:
"Fill the earth and subdue it." Anyone who does not want to continue his race will inevitably
have to give way to the ground for those who prefer having children over material
well-being.
10. The Russian Church noted that the current level of consumption and the ideology of
infinite progress are incompatible with the limited resources of the planet:
Globalization has accelerated the consumer race disproportionate to earth resources
granted to mankind. Volumes of consumption of goods in those countries, which are recognized
worldwide for the samples and which are equal to billions of people, have long gone beyond the
resource capabilities of these "model" countries. There is no doubt that, if the whole of
humanity will absorb the natural wealth of the intensity of the countries that are leaders in
terms of the consumption, there will be an environmental disaster on the planet.
This document is very important because it shows that the Russian Orthodox Church not only
occupies a critical position in relation to the liberal globalization, but also offers a
Christian alternative to globalization processes. While Catholics and most Protestant
denominations have passionate humanist ideas, and in the best case, criticize globalization
from the left or left-liberal positions, the Russian Orthodox Church advocate sovereignty and
national identity. The most important aspect of the Orthodox critique of globalization is the
idea of multipolarity and the destructiveness of modern Western civilization's path.
It in known that the problem of human rights is thoroughly Orthodox: "The power and means for
promoting worldwide equality and brotherhood lie not in waging crusades but in freely accepting
the cross." He urges a radically personal solution, one that takes as its model the saint, the
martyr, and the ascetic. Here Anastasios draws on the traditional Orthodox understanding of
freedom, which is ordered and tempered by ascetical practice, self-control, and placing limits on
material desires. Churches are to become "laboratories of selfless love," places where the
Kingdom of God is manifest on earth. "Our most important right is our right to realize our
deepest nature and become 'children of God' through grace," he says.
Lest this approach be interpreted as a justification of passiveness and quietism, Anastasios
also urges Christians to exercise their ethical conscience in the world. "Christians must be
vigilant, striving to make the legal and political structure of their society ever more
comprehensive through constant reform and reassessment," he says.
"... An exclusive interview with Dr. Ovidiu Hurduzeu, Romanian economist and sociologist, and one of the main proponents of Distributism in Romania. Special for Katehon.com ..."
An exclusive interview with Dr. Ovidiu Hurduzeu, Romanian economist and sociologist, and
one of the main proponents of Distributism in Romania. Special for Katehon.com
Why distributism?
To understand the importance of distributism, we need to compare it to both communism and
capitalism, the two systems that distributism is opposed to. In a distributist society there is
wide and equitable distribution of property and ownership. In communism you have collective
ownership and collective redistribution of property. People do not have economic freedom; they
are wage-slaves to the state. In the so called "free, democratic and capitalist" society, the
capital, and most of the property, belong to a small class called 'capitalists', while the mass
of the citizens are obliged to work for the few capitalists in return for a wage. Distributism
does not separate ownership and work any longer. It seeks to establish an economic and social
order, where most people have real, debt-free productive property. (In capitalism, the
"property" of the common person is mortgaged or purchased on credit; it is merely a rented
good). In practical terms a distributist order is achieved through the widespread dissemination
of family-owned businesses, employee ownership, cooperatives, and any other arrangement
resulting in well-divided property.
What are the main problems that plague Romania and other Eastern European countries? How can
they be solved?
The main problem that has confronted Romania and other Eastern European countries is the
reckless adoption of the neoliberal economic model. In the aftermath of communism's collapse,
the collective ownership of land and the means of production (state assets) were transferred to
the private sector (local oligarchs and foreign individuals and companies). Such a process was
the main culprit behind the huge concentration of wealth, widespread poverty and the
destruction of the national economies. Today, Eastern Europe is made up of what distributists
call "servile states", with Romania being a case in point. Politically and economically, the
country is enslaved to the globalist power centers, while its citizens are constrained to work
under servile conditions in the rich EU countries, or are wage-slaves for transnational
corporations operating in Romania. There is no long-term solution unless the system of property
rights is completely reformed. Only the widespread ownership of property will make Romanians
sufficiently well off so that they can have a say in how they are governed.
Romania is a Christian-orthodox country while distributism is a catholic economic doctrine.
Do you see some contradictions here?
Distributism is more than an economic doctrine. It is a set of concrete economic practices
based on the Christian anthropology of the person. The main economic actors of liberalism are
homo oeconomicus and homo interlopus, while distributism can function only within a community
of persons. What I mean by person and personal has nothing to do with the atomistic
individualism of liberalism. It refers to the relational aspect of creation. Both Catholicism
and Orthodoxy envisage the human person in relation to God, to other human beings, and to the
rest of creation. The personalist aspects of distributism and its "small is beautiful" tenet
are what makes it very attractive to the orthodox world. It is not surprising that Solzhenitsyn
greatly admired the famous distributist thinker G.K. Chesterton. Solzhenitsyn conceived his own
version of distributism as a "democracy of small areas" (Rebuilding Russia) in the tradition of
Russian zemstvos. Catholic writers such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were very
influential in disseminating the distributist ideas of the West. And yet distributism could
never really challenge liberalism and its economic doctrines. In the light of history, one can
discern two main reasons for its failure in the Western countries. One reason is the
forgetfulness and abandonment of the Person and of the community of persons created in the
image and likeness of God; another reason is the loss of the agrarian tradition that
Distributism was based on. The Western world replaced the person with the monadic individual of
liberalism, while the agrarian Weltanschauung gave way to an addiction to technology and
unbridled commercialism.
Distributism had its moment of glory in the 1920's. What can you tell us about the "Green
Rising"?
The aftermath of World War I saw an agrarian-distributist revolution, known as "the Green
Rising", which swept across Europe from Ireland and Scandinavia through Germany to the Slav
world. G.K. Chesterton underscored its historical significance: "It is a huge historical hinge
and turning point, like the conversion of Constantine or the French Revolution...What has
happened in Europe since the war (World War I) has been a vast victory for the peasant, and
therefore a vast defeat for the communists and the capitalists." Chesterton does not exaggerate
at all. "To observers in the 1920's" - writes the conservative writer Allan C. Carlson in the
'Third Ways' – "the future of Eastern Europe seemed to lie with the peasant 'Green', not
the Bolshevik 'Red' ". The Green Rising saw agrarian parties, with their radical distributist
programs, come to power in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Finland, and strongly
influenced the situation in the Baltic States and Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, the great
distributist movement of the 1920's was largely crushed by the mid 1930's, and is now mostly
forgotten.
What distributist principles of organizing an economy are most suitable to the orthodox
countries? Is a "Christian-orthodox economy" still possible?
A Christian-orthodox economy is not only possible; it is the only way that could lead to the
transformation of our societies for the better. When communism collapsed, the liberals injected
the virus of a plutocratic economy and rampant individualism into our societies. If communists
dispossessed the populace in the name of collective ownership and a communal monopoly, the
liberals created a dispossessed "lonely crowd" that was forced to work for subsistence wages in
the name of the "free market". Both communism and the "new capitalists" instituted master-slave
relations in the former Soviet bloc. That is unacceptable from a Christian point of view. As
Christians, we cannot accept the neoliberal tenet that "there is no such thing as society"
(Margaret Thatcher). Individualism and ruthless competition are utterly unchristian. A
Christian orthodox society is a cooperative one in which loving our neighbors is the norm, and
the common rules are enforced in a way that maximizes personal responsibility. Due to their
communal organization, there was simply no poverty among the first Christians; they had no fear
of becoming slaves in order to support themselves. Today, a distributist society should
challenge the neo-liberal economic model in the way the cooperative society of the first
Christians challenged the slave-based economic order of the Roman Empire. We are not talking
here about idealism, utopia or socialist solutions in the form of welfare and punitive
taxation. We do not want to repeat the cycle of disempowerment and dependency. We need to
provide the conditions for social justice through a widespread distribution of property, the
remoralization of the markets, and recapitalization of the poor.
Does Romania have an intellectual tradition of non-liberal economic thought? What value does
this heritage have for today's economists?
Indeed, Romania had a solid intellectual tradition of non-liberal economic thought. A
mention must be made to the agrarian economists Virgil Madgearu (one of the leaders of the
National Peasant Party), Mircea Vulcanescu (one of Romania's greatest thinkers ever, he died in
prison as a Christian martyr), and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of the ecological
economy. They belong to different economic schools and yet they share the same fondness for
agrarian and Christian values. Today's Romanian economists are too busy following orders from
the West to pay any attention to the great Romanian economists of the past.
How can the distributist principles be implemented in real economic policies? Are there any
political forces in Romania that want to bring the distributist ideas into reality?
The country needs a new "Green rising" to complete what the Romanian agrarians left
unfinished. "If the Peasants' Party is to be victorious in elections" - wrote Virgil Madgearu
– "the shape of things would be changed." The National Bank would no longer be the
economic fortress of the Liberal oligarchy. Trusts would no longer enslave and exploit the
state. Their selfish and venal leaders would no longer be enthroned in overseeing positions
over the country's destiny. Civil liberties, nowadays suffocated, and stolen civil rights would
be fully restored, and the constitutional-parliamentary regime would become a reality,
benefiting the development of popular masses as well as civilization."
Unfortunately, I do not see any real chance for Romania of adopting sweeping changes like
the ones envisaged by Madgearu in the 1920's. There are no political forces in today's Romania
strong enough to challenge the dominance of liberalism.
Do you see any relevance of the distributist model to Russian society in general, and the
Russian economy in particular?
I think that distributism is germane to Russian realities and not a foreign import like
communism and liberalism. And it is the only economic model that can vanquish the Liberals on
their own ground (the economy). Russia, like the Third Rome, should not forget the lessons of
Byzantine recovery. When confronted with a series of serious crises in the 7th century, the
Byzantine Empire adopted a brilliant distributist strategy. As a consequence, it went from near
disintegration to being the main power in Europe and the Near East. The pillar of this strategy
was the peasant-soldier who became a producer rather than consumer of the empire's wealth.
Fighting for their own lands and families, soldiers performed better. As staunch Christians,
the Byzantines survived by simplifying their social, political, and economic systems within the
constraints of less available resources. They moved from extensive space-based development to
simplified, local, intensive development. (That's the lesson the Soviet Union did not learn,
and failed as a result.) "In this sense, Byzantium" - writes Joseph A. Tainter – "may be
a model or prototype for our own future, in broad parameters but not in specific details."
Today's Global Empire is an integrated hyper-complex system that is very costly to human
society. It has reached the limits of its expansion and faces collapse because it tries to
solve its problems in the same outdated way: investing in more complexity and expansion. So far
its growth has been subsidized by the availability of cheap human and natural resources, as
well as a "world currency" that the Global Empire totally controls. A multipolar world and a
finite planet make investment in complexity no longer a problem-solving tool – the costs
exceed the benefits. If Russia could adopt distributism and follow the Byzantium-like
strategies of intensive development, the Third Rome can save herself and become a genuine
"prototype of our future".
The institutional church, in the afore-mentioned "Orthodox countries," basically functions
as a neoliberal corporation. If we think of bishops and patriarchs as "top managers" (CEOs),
and priests as lower-level administrators, in charge of specific, money-making divisions, and
the lay people as simple workers (or, worse, resources), the parallel is striking. The church
normally enjoys the monopoly status, and exploits it to a very high degree. There are many
direct and indirect benefits that the church (just as any major corporation in the neoliberal
world) enjoys: the state support, which ranges (depending on the country) from special,
tax-free status for its property and income, priests' salaries and pensions paid by the state,
to the privileged access to state officials, party leaders and the media, privileged treatment
in the (in)justice system, etc. In return, the church provides useful ideological narratives,
and the "moral support" to the dominant socio-political system.
When it comes to its internal functioning, the parallel with the neoliberal corporate world
is even more discernible. The selection of new top managers (bishops) is highly nontransparent,
subject to various types of corruption, and only occasionally and secondary based on
meritocracy and their (real) social contribution. In many (although, to be fair, not all)
dioceses, if you're a priest (lower-level administrator) that means that your primary duty is
to make money and send the assigned sum/percentage to the top management (bishop and/or
patriarch). The more money you produce/collect the better. If you're really successful (you
send a lot of money), and you make the senior management really happy, you will be rewarded by
certain privileges and the management will be ready to overlook many of your misconducts,
incompetence, lack of the very elementary Christian sense of compassion, etc. It normally does
not matter whether you're a good priest or not (in the old-fashioned sense, that is
someone who cares about the people, who is fully invested in liturgical services and parish
life in a self-sacrificing way, who aspires to live, as much as possible, according to the
Gospel, and so forth); following our neoliberal church, making a lot of money makes you a good
priest. (This, of course, does not mean that there are no many wonderful bishops and priests,
who exercise their pastoral service with the utmost care and love, to which the above described
system does not apply.)
If you are, on the other hand, a priest who believes in Christ, who tries to practice your
faith through the loving relationships with other people, if you, out of that faith and love,
use the church property in such a way that is beneficial for others and for the whole
community, but you do not produce "profits," you're potentially in trouble. If you, moreover,
dare to speak your mind, to tell the truth, to criticize the "management" for their
misconducts, for not living Christian lives, for not really practicing Orthodoxy and so on --
you're, more often than not, finished.
The neoliberal senior management does not tolerate disobedience, protests, different ways of
thinking. Neoliberalism is not there to promote freedom, critical thinking, creativity, general
well-being, or, for that matter, anything else that might be meaningful from a human
and humane point of view. It is there to affirm obedience, vertical distribution of
power, and, above all, profits, that contribute to the replication and expansion of power. This
neoliberal, corporate slavery is, of course, not advertised that way; it is normally advertised
as "competitiveness," "flexibility," "innovation," and so forth. In the church context, it is
advertised as "tradition," "centuries-old practices," "Christian life," "reverence," etc.
The alliance between big businesses, political ideologies and religion is not something new.
In the U.S. the alliance between the corporate sector and the religious (church) institutions
is a very well-known phenomenon. Not so much in the Orthodox world, which often believes that
it is immune to the various monstrosities coming from the "West." And many in the West
believe the same, except that they formulate it differently -- for them Orthodoxy appears as
fundamentally incompatible with the "Western values." It's a high time to reconsider and reject
this narrow ideological frame, which seriously distorts the image of (our neoliberal)
reality.
Davor Džalto is Associate Professor and Program Director for Art History and Religious
Studies at The American University of Rome President of the Institute for the Study of Culture
and Christianity.
Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a forum for diverse perspectives
on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity. The positions expressed in this essay
are solely the author's and do not represent the views of the editors or the Orthodox Christian
Studies Center.
"... Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world. ..."
"... How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him ..."
"... But in the prosperity gospel preached by some Neopentecostals, the Christian gospel has been swamped by the values of Neoliberalism. One could say that "prosperity theology" is the contextualisation of the Christian gospel in a society dominated by Neoliberal values, but to such an extent that the result is syncretism. ..."
And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if
Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word (I Kings 18:21).
It seems to me that for many Christians the Gospel of Neoliberalism has replaced the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I've known that for
a long time, and have blogged about it before (
here , and
here , and
here ). But today I was reminded of it again
when several people brought various articles on it to my attention:
Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent
venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging
from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This
results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the "infantilisation of the workers".
Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells
is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us,
the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from
social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since
Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world.
Neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market)
and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics,
neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic
growth, enhancing the welfare of all.
When a Christian script was running in many people's minds (see
Counterscript to know what that refers to)
Greed was regarded as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in the Gospel according to Neoliberalism, it is the supreme virtue.
And for many Christians, the Neoliberal script has started to drown out the Christian one, and so raises the question of Elijah:
How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him .
"Baal" is a word that means lord or master, and the deity referred to was Melqart, the god of the Phoenician city of Tyre. Melqart
was a god of rain and fertility, and hence of material prosperity, and was invoked by Phoenician traders for protection of their
commercial enterprises. In other words, the cult of Baal was a prosperity cult, which had lured the people of Israel, and was actively
promoted by their Phoenician queen Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab. The people of Israel had the prosperity script playing in their
minds.
In our day too, many Christians have the prosperity script playing in their minds.
The post immediately preceding this one, on
Neopentecostal churches and their celebrity pastors , points to a phenomenon that Christian missiologists like to refer to as
inculturation or contextualisation, which, in a good sense, means making the Christian gospel understandable to people living in
a particular culture or context. But in the prosperity gospel preached by some Neopentecostals, the Christian gospel has been swamped
by the values of Neoliberalism. One could say that "prosperity theology" is the contextualisation of the Christian gospel in a society
dominated by Neoliberal values, but to such an extent that the result is syncretism.
But while the Neopentecostals sometimes do this explicitly, many other Christian groups do it implicitly, and we need to ask ourselves
where our values really come from -- from the gospel of Jesus Christ, or from the gospel of the Market. Jesus Christ is the love
of God incarnate, but the Market, or Melqart, or Mammon, is the love of money incarnate.
When the world urges us to celebrate the virtues of Greed, whether subtly or blatantly, do we resist it? Are we even aware of
what is happening? Or do we simply allow that script to play in our heads, telling us "You deserve it"?
Last week a couple of journalists were asking me why Neopentecostal churches that preach a properity gospel, like T.B. Joshua's
Synagogue Church of all Nations, are growing in popularity, and one answer is that given by George Monbiot in the article quoted
above -- that the values of Neoliberalism, promoted by Reagan and Thatcher, are now colonising the whole world.
"Neoliberalised healthcare requires every patient (or rather, "client" of healthcare
"services") to take
responsibility for her own state or behaviour. Mental healthcare is therefore being
reframed as a series of "outcomes" geared at measurable improvement which the "service
user" must manage by themselves as far as possible.
Access to psychiatric diagnosis and support from public health services (and also within
private or employer-run occupational healthcare schemes) sometimes depends on completion of a
mood or symptom diary using smartphone or Fitbit self-tracking
techniques .
And there may well be more punitive future consequences for failure to self-track, as
employers and perhaps benefit agencies
gain more power to command this sort of performance from workers." •
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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