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What’s
Next? Occupy These Ideas!
An Earth
Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
January
21, 2012
Our
political system in the United States is profoundly corrupted by the
domineering influence of wealthy people and narrowly-focused corporate
entities. Corporations have only two
primary legal purposes: to minimize the
liabilities of owners and executives and shareholders, and to maximize the
profits that this group receives. These
purposes are generally achieved at the expense of the greater good of the
nation as a whole. In addition,
government bureaucrats, public sector unions, and a wide range of other special
interests compete to maximize their own self-interested advantages, and
political corruption allows this intense competition to skew and complicate the
national equation of determining the best courses of action to pursue.
The
“invisible hand” that guides these outcomes does not steer us anywhere near the
optimum, fairest, most sensible, or most-likely sustainable path. Of the many interests that compete for perks
and privileges in our societies, vested interests occupy the figurative inside
track, so they drastically distort our national priorities. In the process, they undermine democratic
fairness and prevent the most societally-desirable usages of resources. As a result, the aggregate impulse is to
focus on trying to satisfy short-term-oriented exigencies and narrowly-focused
expediencies. Since these interests are
heavily invested in the status quo, they oppose fair-minded reforms, and they selfishly
defend the gravy train of the way things are.
Special
interest groups which represent environmental protections, humanitarian causes,
young people, future generations, fair-minded and egalitarian initiatives, progressive
ideas and smart governance are significantly less well-funded than special
interests that represent narrower and arguably more selfish interests like banks,
corporate executives, Wall Street fat cats, the gun lobby, businesses involved
in the sprawling military-industrial complex, senior citizens, large unions, social
conservatives, and the Christian Coalition.
This aspect of our political system deplorably makes the status quo
quite misguided.
The
Supreme Court essentially ruled in the Citizens
United case that Big Money should be allowed to have unlimited influence in
financing our elections. This decision facilitates
the distortion, corruption and perversion of our national decision-making. It is a ruling which has been called one of
the worst decisions in our nation’s entire judicial history, right up there
with the dreadful Dred Scott decision that justified slavery and denied the
right of all people of African descent to ever be U.S. citizens.
Mark
Twain famously observed that “We have the best government that money
can buy.” He would have
been aghast to find out that five unelected government officials (the conservative
Justices on the Supreme Court) have officially sided with giant corporations against
the vast majority of American people by authorizing them to continue to scam
our democratic processes.
The
Citizens United ruling is
antithetical to our founding principles, so it is now necessary to enact new
laws, or a Constitutional Amendment, to specifically limit the outsized influence
in electioneering and lobbying of corporate and union money in our nation’s
politics. These laws should stipulate
that corporations are legal entities with wider responsibilities to society,
and that they do not have the same rights as people. This Amendment would serve as a declaration of independence from corporate
power; it would reduce the influence of
what Thomas Jefferson called “the aristocracy of moneyed corporations.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said,
“Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice.” This is demonstrably true in
an aggregate sense since the founding of our nation, but the proverbial
pendulum swings back and forth between progress and regress, and the last 30
years have seen significant retrogressive trends. When people are allowed wide freedoms of behavior, there is a
natural tendency for social inequities to increase, and for the distribution of
wealth to become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the Few. And when corporations are given too much
unaccountable laissez-faire latitude by the government, socially undesirable
outcomes result, like the maximizing of private profits while many costs are allowed
to be “socialized”, i.e., foisted onto society as a whole.
Inequality and injustices
naturally increase under such conditions.
The economic insecurity of the public can consequently become so extreme
that remedial measures must be taken.
If they are not, anger and frustration and despair can create insistent
demands for radical reforms. Stubborn
opposition to fairer national policies in the face of widespread dissatisfaction
and political protest can aggravate dangerous revolutionary forces and increase
the power and motivation of people who militate for the overthrow of the
abusers of privilege and power.
“Each man must for himself alone decide what is
right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. … To
decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor,
both to yourself and to your country …”
--- Mark Twain
When John Lennon and Paul McCartney witnessed the political
protests of 1968, they foresaw the possibilities of revolutionary change,
presumably based on love, empathy, free societies and enlightened understandings. Let it be!
The Beatles sang these lyrics in their evocative song, Revolution:
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
…
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
…
You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
…
All right, all right, all right!
Farsighted solutions to global dilemmas are contained throughout
the writings in the Earth Manifesto, together with a wide-ranging variety of
good plans for a more salubrious future.
A detailed summary of specific ideas awaits anyone concerned, in Part
Four.
A Classic Earth Manifesto Ecological Aside
“In the nineteenth
century, anti-capitalist critics like Marx insisted that economics must be
contained within an ethical context;
they contended that social justice counted for more than industrial
efficiency or private profit. In the
late twentieth century, the environmental movement is trying to teach us that
both economics and ethics must be contained within an ecological context.”
--- The Voice of the Earth, An Exploration of Ecopsychology, Theodore
Roszak
Accurate
big picture understandings of social and ecological truths are becoming the
most existentially important ideas ever conceived. They reveal that we need to pursue courses of action that are saner
and more consistent with the greater good in the long run. These ideas lead to the transcendental need
for a Bill of Rights for Future Generations to provide us with overarching
guidance in our national decision-making. Essentially, a new
ecosystem-centered morality is required.
“Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us
to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of
these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the
larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are
essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”
--- President Theodore Roosevelt
The wise Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull gave a haunting speech at the
Powder River Council in 1877, as quoted in a proposed Bill of Rights for Future
Generations in the Earth Manifesto. In
this speech, Sitting Bull lyrically bemoaned the arrogant, treacherous,
wantonly wasteful and mindlessly destructive ways of the Manifest-Destiny-rationalizing
pioneers and the ruthless U.S. Army during the distinctly genocidal invasion of
Indian lands by miners, trappers, settlers, and missionaries in the nineteenth
century.
Sitting
Bull’s nickname was Hunkesi, meaning “Slow” because he never hurried and he did
everything with care. Doing things with
care, rather than mindlessly, seems like a very good plan! Sitting Bull could not have imagined, from his
vantage point long ago, the full extent to which the flood of humanity would
transform and degrade the land, the streams, the lakes, the wetlands, the
forests, the fisheries, the wild animals, the wilderness areas, and even the
atmosphere in the century to follow.
There were, after all, less than 50 million people in the U.S. when
Sitting Bull spoke his incisive words in 1877, and relatively few of them were
in the beautiful lands of the Wild West.
Today, there are more than 310 million Americans -- and plenty of them
reside in Western states. Also, the
means and methods by which we are exploiting resources are imprudently heedless
of consequence, as if there will be no tomorrow.
This
is my story, and I’m sticking to it: There
will be a tomorrow, and we must let serious and honest considerations of its
nature guide our national activities!
Preoccupations
with Smart Plans
Today, the most financially
fortunate people always tend to be obsessed with fortifying their positions on
Easy Street, even when conditions on Main Street are deteriorating and the
circumstances on “the wrong side of the tracks” are becoming dangerously unsafe
and ever-more environmentally unjust. Wealthy
people exploit the narrowly-purposed and amoral tool of legal incorporation to
gain the preponderance of wealth for themselves.
We simply cannot allow rich people
to continue to abuse the inadequately restricted and unwarranted power of their
moneyed influence. We cannot let them
be so doggone dominating of our national policy-making. To best create more sustainable and safer societies,
we must manage them more wisely, and structure them more fairly. We must change the political system that
facilitates extremes of unfairness and the concentration of wealth.
It is not only practically insane
for people to deny the implications of overarching ecological truths, but it is
madness to continue to allow the fortunate to dictate our national priorities
in the face of adverse economic conditions and trends. It is deeply unwise to allow opportunities for
higher education to be narrowed down and made significantly more expensive. It is highly unfair to saddle students with
large amounts of debt at high interest costs for their education. It is foolishly risky to allow the economy to
be destabilized by risk-taking bankers and overly-leveraged speculators and
Inside Job hucksters, and to be reluctant to help those who lose their jobs or
their homes as a result. It is an
extreme injustice to perpetuate an unfair system of health care that denies
coverage to millions of people and allows profiteering in medical care to drive
costs higher at a much faster rate than the general rate of inflation, year
after year after year. And it is all
but insane to allow vested interests to create conditions that subject the vast
majority of citizens to increasing levels of stress and hardship.
Remember
that Our Founders created a brilliant framework for fair-minded governance by establishing
a representative democracy in the United States to assure the people that they
would wield the political power in the nation.
They realized that competing interests with narrow goals would threaten
democratic fairness and the civil liberties of the people. Our elected Representatives have unfortunately
failed to adequately safeguard the power of the people. They have allowed special interests to dominate
our public decision-making and become deeply entrenched in our politics, thus contributing
to the unfairness of the status quo.
The
good news is that power still constitutionally belongs to the people, and it
still ethically belongs to the people.
This is true despite the corruption in Congress that prevents fair
compromises and smarter long-term planning for the greater good. Power still belongs to the people despite the
narrow Supreme Court majority that panders blatantly and partially to moneyed
interests. It is high time a new
political movement gathers together the voices of the people to revolutionarily
reform our economic and political systems. Grassroots power is needed, and not merely artificial grassroots
marketing by “astroturfing” lobbyists who promote public propaganda for vested
interests. Grassroots power is needed
instead of excessive influence by zealots for anti-progressive taxation or
fundamentalist religious dogmas.
The
Greater Good
Everyone
does better when everyone does better.
Despite the tautological truth of this observation, vested interests
still work tirelessly to try to convince us that everyone will do better only
if we pursue a single-minded strategy of giving more and more benefits to the wealthiest
Americans. Right-wing ideologues, and partisans
in conservative think tanks, and politicians who are beholden to moneyed
interests have all been claiming since 1981 that the best national plan is to provide
the preponderance of benefits of our economic system to the wealthy. This is the way, they say, to create well-being
that will trickle down to everyone else.
By
yielding to these demanding voices and adhering to policies that are narrowly focused,
an ever-more extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the Few has resulted,
along with a concomitant on-going outrageous increase in inequality and
inequities. These outcomes are proving
that the trickle-down theory is actually a colossal deception, and that fairer
and smarter approaches must be effected in order to create societies that are more
fiscally sound and socially fair and ecologically responsible.
Dr. Jane Goodall once made
the following insightful observation (paraphrased):
"Someone
said that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from
our children. But look at the world
around us. This sentiment is technically
not in the least bit true. We aren’t
borrowing from our children. Borrowing
means that we will pay it back, but we aren't paying back. We are in actuality STEALING from our children
..."
The
time has come today for us to embrace common sense and fairness by honestly
reforming our economic and political systems!
A
Simple Solution for the National Debt Crisis
Trickle-down
economic theories have gone hand-in-hand with ideological expediencies which
facilitate enormous and unfair increases in the national debt. See the Earth Manifesto essay, Sad Implications of the Two Dueling Santa Claus Strategies in
Political Economics for
an entertaining but sobering assessment of the details surrounding this
assertion.
Business magnate Warren Buffet has suggested that federal budget
deficits could be ended “in five minutes.”
“You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more
than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for
re-election.” Of course our lawmakers
would never pass such a law -- well, unless there was intense pressure from
their constituents. Occupy that
thought!
Warren
Buffet’s point was that a plan like this would put “the incentives in the right
place”. By doing this, our
representatives would be effectively prevented from continuing to cheat future
generations by avoiding making the difficult revenue-generating and
spending-control decisions which are necessary to honestly balance the budget.
An
even better idea is recommended in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively
Transform Our Societies. This plan would give the primary deciders in
our political system -- wealthy people and big corporations -- a compellingly powerful
motivation to strongly support federal budgets that do not rely on large
deficits year after year after year. It
would really put the incentives in the proper place! Check it out, in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto!
Note that the pretext that national governments are “broke”
is being used to impose austerity measures on people in nations worldwide. This pretext is also being used to undermine
vital protections of the environment, and to thwart common sense regulations, and
to attack family planning programs, and to eliminate funding for important
public interest broadcasting, and to pander to those who advocate for pet
projects that are aligned with the retrograde ideas of backward-looking
ideologues.
Annie Leonard has created a new animated video, The Story of Broke, which can be viewed online
right now. The video helps people better
understand important and provocative issues that relate to the misuse of our
tax dollars and the misleading idea that our nation is broke. Leonard refers to the established status quo
as “The Dinosaur Economy”, pointing out that far too much money is given to
entrenched companies through the often misguided expediencies of tax subsidies,
risk transfer subsidies, freebie subsidies, and resource extraction
subsidies. Annie Leonard also examines
the folly of allowing businesses to externalize pollution and toxic waste
clean-up costs upon society for things that they should be required to include
in their determinations of real bottom-line profits.
The
concept of a smarter structuring of incentives in our economy is a key to
solving many of our most daunting problems.
The perspectives of Pigou Club economists corroborate this contention,
as related in Existence, Economics, and
Ecological Intelligence.
In
summary, if we embraced a boldly forward-thinking system of incentives and
disincentives, and took steady action to implement a new long-term strategic
plan, we could transform our nation into a leaner, meaner, fairer, safer, more
responsible, and more sustainable civilization which would give greater respect
to future generations. By doing so, we
would alter the current patchwork of perverse incentives and subsidies that
characterize the Dinosaur Economy, and we would change the parameters of the jerry-rigged
system which has been designed to satisfy the imbalanced influence of
power-abusing vested interests. In
place of this antiquated economy, we would establish a new system that advances
the goals of sensible and wisely-conceived national planning.
A
proposed smarter structure would help create new systems where doing the best
things for the greater good would be as natural as “falling off a log”, where
the everyday acts of work and life and aspiration would accumulate into a
better world as a matter of course, and not merely as a matter of personal
virtue or conscious altruism.
Tangential
Reflections on Envy and Jealousy
In
sporting contests, enthusiasts for winning teams exult in victory and
supporters of teams that lose show signs of disappointment, frustration and
chagrin. There is a natural pleasure in
victory and an equally natural sense of agony in defeat. Buddha would have said that it such
attachments to outcomes that cause mental difficulties for us in the form of
angst, frustration, envy, jealousy, anger, disappointment, and suffering in
general. John Fowles, on the other
hand, made a cogent point when he wrote in The
Aristos:
“We are designed to want; with nothing to want, we are like windmills
in a world without wind.”
In
our societies, people who are financially fortunate adopt an attitude similar
to the exultation of winners by lording it over others who are less
fortunate. Wealthy people often tend to
be seriously unempathetic and uncompassionate toward financially unfortunate
people. They also tend to abuse the power of their wealth to make the gap
between their own good fortune and the worser fortunes of others ever wider. It astonishes me that people can begrudge
others food stamps while defending the lowest tax rates on billionaires in 80
years.
Envy
and jealousy are profoundly powerful impulses in our human psyches. Envious people selfishly wish they had the
good fortune of others who are more fortunate.
Jealous people selfishly react to the envious by staunchly defending the
systems and policies that allow them to continue to enjoy their good
fortune. Just as a man with a sexy and
attractive mate can be exceptionally jealous of any envious aspirants to the
attentions of his mate, those who are wealthy generally jealously oppose
policies that would make the distribution of wealth fairer.
In
the arena of growing disparities of fortune between the rich and the poor, envy
and jealousy can turn ugly. I feel
passionately that a magnanimous and generous-hearted attitude in victory or
good fortune is much more noble and honorable than an inconsiderately selfishly
and greedy one. In any case, it is time
we took bold steps to ensure that our societies are fairer.
Addressing
Too Big to Fail
Since our political system is so dominated by vested interests, we are
failing to properly address the transcendental challenges of our time. One hundred years ago, corporate
conglomerates had grown too big and too powerful to prevent them from indulging
in anti-competitive monopoly practices and other highly unfair activities, so
President Theodore Roosevelt acted to regulate business actions and monitor
labor relations and steer our economy in a fairer direction by creating a
cabinet-level Department of Commerce and Labor.
Roosevelt and his successor William Howard Taft also engaged in “trust-busting”
to break up large businesses into smaller and less powerful
organizations so that they would be less able to abuse the power of their size. The biggest offenders in those days were
John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and J.P. Morgan’s giant railroad
conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company, and James B. Duke’s American
Tobacco Company, and Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel. These wealthy “robber barons” were indignantly opposed to this
plan of action, and it is unsurprising that today we are not pursuing similar
courses of action because conglomerate entities have grown too big and powerful
and effective in their political efforts to be adequately controlled.
Theodore Roosevelt called for new “Square Deal” policies
to curb the abuses of power by these corporate entities and to root out
corruption and reduce the excessive exploitation of workers, farmers and
consumers. As a part of his Square
Deal, Roosevelt also farsightedly worked to ensure that resources were
conserved and public lands were protected.
Today, because of the fact that corporate conglomerates are much larger
and more global in influence, they dominate our economy and completely control
our national decision-making. Bureaucratic
interests in the government and in public-sector unions also play significant
roles, and all of these interests together are making it nearly impossible for
the American people to make smart common sense reforms and limit abuses of
power and safeguard the future. The
Supreme Court, with its narrow 5-4 majority of conservative
Republican-appointed corporate facilitators, stands on the wrong side of
history in assisting this impasse.
One vitally important issue that must be addressed is the
tendency of banks and merging corporate entities to become “too big to fail.”
“I
want to be very, very clear: too big to fail is one of the biggest problems we
face in this country, and we must take action to eliminate too big too
fail.”
--- Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke, December 2009
In this observation, Ben Bernanke was talking about the too-big-to-fail
phenomenon from the perspective that big banks have become too big and powerful
to prevent them from creating serious risks to the entire financial system and
the international economy. Since the
trend toward mergers in the banking industry has only increased since the
economic crisis of 2008, banks have become larger, so these systemic dangers
have increased. This is a problem that
requires more scrupulous and focused attention.
Public debt in the United States and European nations threatens to
create another global economic crisis which may prove to be even more wrenching
than the recent Great Recession, sooner or later. We should take bold, honest, and effective steps to prevent such
an eventuality!
Corporate entities today have become far more multi-national than they
were a century ago. They are sprawling
across the planet like giant octopuses on steroids. They ruthlessly take advantage of workers and violate laws, evade
taxes, exploit natural resources, externalize costs onto society, and exacerbate
Tragedy of the Commons outcomes, in addition to contributing substantially to
the foisting of enormous amounts of debt onto future generations. As a consequence, too big to fail has taken
on new complexities with even more crucial implications.
In addition to banks being too big to be prevented from creating
unacceptably far-reaching risks to the international economy, too big to fail
has become a domineering aspect of international corporatism. Corporations have become:
(1) too powerful to be held
responsible and accountable for acting in ways consistent with greater good
goals;
(2) too influential to keep from
squandering resources and overly exploiting workers;
(3) too profit-prepossessed and
liability-evading to be allowed to operate in a less regulated laissez-faire
economic system;
(4) too amoral and unscrupulous
to be allowed to have equal rights of “personhood” with real citizens;
(5) too influential in the
media, resulting in the misuse of the tools of mass persuasion, spin, deceptive
advertising, and detrimental propaganda;
(6) too deceptive to be
prevented from preying on children in the marketing of junk food, thereby
contributing to a national epidemic of obesity, and in generally from wasting
resources by promoting mass consumption;
(7) too narrow in legal purpose
to be trustworthy;
(8) too deep-pocketed to be prevented
from using phalanxes of lawyers and accountants to cheat on taxes and corrupt
our political system;
(9) too unaccountable to be
prevented from significantly contributing to gathering ecological risks like
global warming and the disruption of weather patterns and ominous changes in the
global climate;
(10) too sprawling and global
to be adequately controlled and kept from abusing laws of individual nations;
(11) too powerful to be prevented
from radically contributing to ever-growing disparities of power and
compensation between executive management and all other employees;
(12) too influential to be kept
from contorting the societies in which they operate by making them more unfair,
more inegalitarian, and more unjust through the pursuit of initiatives that
give ever-more perks, privileges and power to the Few while imposing ever-worsening
austerity on the Many; and,
(13) too narrowly-focused in
empowering the military-industrial complex and our national security state
through excessive secrecy, misallocated spending, and the perversion of our
national priorities.
Insights
of Deep Ecology
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”
--- Henry David Thoreau
The
new surge of progressive grassroots energy represented by Occupy movements will
hopefully create constructive change to effectively reduce economic unfairness. After all, economic unfairness and the
concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the Few is a political
phenomenon, whether of capitalist systems or socialist systems. Once we sensibly understand the true nature
of things, we will create systems that are more responsible.
The
late Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, the founder of the deep ecology
movement, felt strongly that people need to begin conceiving of themselves in
an ever-widening process of self-identity.
This new kind of self-realization would place more value on doing the
right thing for ourselves AND for the greater good, and to do so without
feeling that it is merely an altruistic course of action that is contrary to
our own self-interest.
This
“greening of the self” would help ensure our societies become more socially and
ecologically sane. This new form of self-actualization
would not require sermonizing or moral exhortation to motivate people to act in
ways that are more closely aligned with the greater good.
Eco-philosopher
Joanna Macy observes that we are living in a period which she sees as an “essential
adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a
life-sustaining civilization.” She
calls this the “Great Turning”. It involves
an expansive awareness of who we really are.
Ms. Macy is hopeful that this greening of the self will be more attuned
to a new willingness to accept greater responsibility toward others, including
those people in future generations.
“The most remarkable feature of this historical
moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world -- we’ve
actually been on that way for quite a while.
It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep,
to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”
--- Joanna Macy
Human
clans managed to flourish during the many millennia of our hunter and gatherer
days by cooperating together to minimize violence within their groups. Clan groups whose members willingly worked
with each other for the greater good of the group had survival advantages over
less adaptive clans. The size of the
groups that human beings live in has grown steadily over the years, especially
in the past two centuries when human numbers have increased from 1 billion to 7
billion. As a consequence, the need has
grown great for us to find ways to accomplish ever-more expansive versions of the
greater good rather than following old ways and pursuing narrower goals. As our senses of self grow more inclusive, it
may help us overcome our alienation from the rest of creation. Otherwise, the mindless abandon of our
assaults on the natural world and our resource depleting and
wildlife-slaughtering activities will make today’s challenges seem minor by
comparison.
This
adaptive and evolving modern sense of self leads us to a shared
understanding: we are all in this world
together, interconnected and interdependent.
Such a realization should help inspire us to collaborate together to
create healthier and more sustainable societies.
The
Century of the Self
When
we explore issues involving our selves and our values, some fascinating things
are discovered. I highly recommend
watching the provocative BBC documentary The
Century of the Self. It provides a surprising perspective of
the enormous influence on the world that the ideas of Sigmund Freud and his
nephew Edward Bernays and his daughter Anna Freud have had. The four segments of this compelling film
can be viewed on the Internet. Take the
time to watch it (in total, it is almost 4 hours long). It is easy to toggle along so that it can be
watched in segments at your leisure.
Take notes!
Edward
Bernays more or less invented the persuasive art of public relations. He was called “the father of spin” in a 1998
book by Larry Tye. Bernays developed
clever uses of propaganda that appealed to the subconscious mind and utilized methods
of mass persuasion to stimulate mass consumption. His far-reaching efforts helped transform our economic system from
one that sold products and services based on needs to a demand economy based on
expanded desires. He believed that people
could be made to feel good about themselves and find self-gratification by
means of shopping and buying things. Partially
as a consequence, citizens in our societies have become more materialistic and more
passive consumers rather than being actively-involved good citizens. Besides, a self-identity defined to a large
extent by shopping is a somewhat sad and pathetic thing, and distinctly
contrary to a sensibly conservative level of resource consumption.
Our
Founders recognized in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed. Edward Bernays saw that mass persuasion could be used to
engineer this consent through manipulative strategies that use the media to
play on people’s desires -- and their insecurities, and their fears.
Edward
Bernays loved the ballyhoo hype of a media circus. He would likely have loved to work with Fox News to manipulate
public opinion. According to Wikipedia,
Bernays’ most extreme political propaganda activities were conducted on behalf
of the multinational corporation United Fruit Company. Bernays was involved in a propaganda
campaign to brand General Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the democratically-elected
president of Guatemala, as a communist.
Guatemala was known as a “banana republic” because of the overwhelmingly
influential role that United Fruit Company played in dominating Guatemala’s
politics. Bernays’ efforts helped
facilitate the overthrow of General Arbenz by the CIA in 1954. This sordid story of covert operations makes
it perfectly clear that multi-national corporations, aided by the federal government
and the CIA, actively strive to subvert democracy and control people by psychologically
manipulating them.
One
of Bernays’ early successes was achieved by covertly contriving events for his business
clients to secure news coverage without paying for advertizing. This was clever because it saved the cost of
securing attention for the client’s products through paid ads. In 1929, for example, Bernays created a “Torches
of Freedom” campaign that was targeted to encourage women to smoke cigarettes
in public. The campaign linked cultural
discrimination against women with the freedom to light up cigarettes in
public. This campaign had the insidious
ulterior motives of promoting Lucky Strike cigarettes, and it had terribly unhealthy
side effects. “What billed itself as a
feminist promotion of the emancipation of women was in reality a public
relations ploy to open a new market for tobacco by getting women addicted to
cigarettes.”
Sigmund
Freud saw people as primarily driven by dark forces and powerful sexual urges,
so he used psychoanalysis as “a talking cure” to unearth his patients’
unconscious drives and hidden motives.
He did this in the belief that bringing these feelings into conscious
discourse would help people lead healthier lives. His nephew Bernays ironically used psychological techniques “to
mask the motives of his clients as part of a deliberate strategy aimed at
keeping the public unconscious of the forces that were working to mold
their minds.”
Bernays
also exploited feminist ideals, according to one commentator, to serve as a
“systematic re-engineering of the morals of women as a way of moving them out of
the home and into the workforce, thereby lowering wages and weakening the power
of organized labor and the working class family.” Hmmm … this is a complex issue.
Only 25% of women were in the work force in the 1920’s, and 75% of them
are today, so megatrend shifts have definitely taken place, for better or for
worse.
Hey,
in thinking about this, it occurs to me that presidential candidate Newt
Gingrich could use this idea to advance his shrewd suggestion that children be
used as workers in schools. He claims
that this would teach poor kids a work ethic and drive down wage costs and save
lots of money by getting rid of union janitors and professional custodians. Are child labor laws “truly stupid”, as
Gingrich asserts? Or are the truly
stupid things actually the right-wing attempts at radical social engineering
with all of their failing ideologies?
Assessing
the Role of Conservatism in American Society Today
“The modern conservative
is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral
philosophy; that is, the
search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
--
American
economist John Kenneth Galbraith
It
seems that radically conservative people have been corrupting our politics for
decades and polluting our national understandings in order to advance the
self-interest of the wealthiest people in our society. Conservative politicians stubbornly and
obediently advocate regressive tax policies and de-regulatory dogmas and trickle-down
economic theory. They sure seem to be
preoccupied with the curious Big Lie that giving tax breaks to millionaires and
billionaires is an optimum way to create jobs and make America better. And they also shortsightedly deny the nearly
unanimous scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is causing
global warming and disruptions of global weather patterns. These are insidiously dangerous and costly
ploys.
Social
conservatives have been nakedly exposing themselves in the past 30 years by
embracing ideological absurdities as if they are the Holy Grail itself. Many of them deny the greatest and most
expansive human understandings ever achieved by clinging to antediluvian
creation myths in the face of extensive scientific knowledge of the
billions-of-years-old genesis of the physical universe and the eons-long unfolding
expansion of galactic matter and energy.
Many of these social conservatives also deny that life has evolved on
Earth, despite the myriad discoveries of scientific disciplines like geology, biology
and genetics and the overwhelmingly extensive evidence of millions of
antecedent forms of life that are found in fossils around the planet.
It
irks me that religious extremists in the U.S. and abroad are having such a
defining influence in conflicts worldwide.
Perhaps it is true that a new worldwide religion is crucially needed, as
provocatively proposed in Revelations of
a Modern Prophet. This new religion
would be more ecumenical, more tolerant, and more respectful of the Earth and
its ecosystems and the other forms of life upon which we depend for our
well-being. Such a new religion would
be much more responsible in its founding tenets for the wise and providential
stewardship of Mother Earth and her natural resources.
The
awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe are, after all, far more profound and
astonishing than the simplistic, parochial, and antiquated explanations of
established religions and their doctrines.
“If you devote a little time to studying the
staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing
things that are for more awesome and mysterious and beautiful -- and more
chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding -- than any creation or end-of-days
story.”
--- The late journalist
Christopher Hitchens
Insights
into The Authoritarians
Social conservatives tend to be “authoritarian followers”, according
to Bob Altemeyer, who has outlined a list of twelve revealing tendencies in the
behavior of people in the Tea Party. He
examines many studies about authoritarian followers and the authoritarian
leaders they obey. Altemeyer concludes
in his compelling book The Authoritarians: “… the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a
militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.” The compelling perspectives in this book can
be perused for free online.
Altemeyer notes that it is “mind-boggling” that conservatives
revere those who serve their country in the military and give their lives
defending freedom, and yet they simultaneously support moves to take that
freedom away. “How can they go on
believing things,” he writes, “that have been disproved over and over again,
and disbelieve things that are well established?” He also wondered, “Why do
their leaders so often turn out to be crooks and hypocrites?”
An example of these illogical
inconsistencies is the fervent desire of many Republicans to criminalize
abortion while simultaneously eviscerating programs that address poverty and
fairness for the young. It is as if
they believe that “life begins at conception, and ends at birth,” as Rep.
Barney Frank once trenchantly observed.
It seems clear that the Republican Party has
become radicalized in the past several decades. Anti-tax, anti-government spokesmen like Grover Norquist encourage obstruction and pledges to never ever compromise. The Grand Old Party has been hijacked by
“conservatives without conscience”.
People should demand more fair-mindedness and integrity from GOP
politicians!
Yay!
for the Perspectives of Mark Twain!
“Against
the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
--- Mark Twain
I
have a great respect for Mark Twain’s brilliant drawling sense of humor and his
use of incisive wit to lampoon human follies.
I love the sincerely wild exaggerations that he employed to good effect
in many of his entertaining stories. These
droll perspectives make his stories occasionally preposterous, but
enthralling. His creative wit and
wisdom are admirable, and his sharp tongue and pen were honorable when he used
them for serious purposes, like when he criticized unjust American imperialism
and political corruption.
“We will have to repent in this generation not
merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the
appalling silence of the good people.”
--- Martin Luther King, Jr.
My
inherited Twainian impulses encourage me to ridicule the follies of our leaders
today and to lampoon their failings and hypocrisies. My own personal character is much more mild-mannered than Mark
Twain’s, and perhaps less cynical, more self-effacing, and less
deterministic. Rather than laughing out
loud at the latest reports of human folly, I tend to smile broadly and whistle
under my breath at the sensational stupidity of some of our leaders.
After
witnessing the latest suspiciously self-serving convert to global warming
denial, or hearing about beliefs of End Time Rapture prognosticators like
Harold Camping, or pondering the curious proclamations of apologists who
stridently advocate policies that will make rich people richer and poor people
worse off, one could be forgiven for thinking that the late Warren Hellman may
have glimpsed a kernel of epiphany when he observed, “Sometimes in this world,
it’s hard to believe that only half the people are dumber than average.” Ha!
Then
I turn on Fox News and listen to all the talking heads agreeing that President
Obama’s policies have been a terrible failure, and denying any culpability for
the national political party that got us into trillion dollar wars using
borrowed money, which crashed the economy and stubbornly obstructed every
initiative Barack tried to implement, and I think about the overriding goal of
Republicans to elect a “conservative” president who will slash taxes on rich
people and giant corporations, and cut spending on education and public safety
and the social security safety net and environmental protections enough to
offset the staggering losses of revenue related to this radical proposal, and I
think about the financial impossibility of balancing the budget with such a
retrogressive, demented, cynically-inegalitarian, counterproductive, lame-brained
and idiotically-prioritized plan. “Heck
of a job, Brownie!”
Satire
and ridicule are effective in exposing absurdities and hypocrisy. As it has turned out, the candidates for the
2012 Republican presidential nomination are proving to be a ridiculously entertaining
field for ridicule by late-night comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The electioneering ads and debates have been
as volatile and dramatic as a bizarre episode of a soap opera. The conservative electorate has flip-flopped
like a fresh-caught fish in a hot frying pan, alternately favoring the
establishment candidate Mitt Romney, then briefly embracing Michelle Bachmann
and even Donald Trump, then Rick Perry (oops!), then Herman Cain (whoops!),
then Newt Gingrich. The Libertarian candidate
Ron Paul has gotten a surprising level of support, and the Catholic religious
fundamentalist Rick Santorum actually won the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2012.
These
candidates have flip-flopped on many issues.
They are faced with the challenging task of pandering to a disparate and
acrimonious coalition of laissez-faire economic fundamentalists and far right
social conservatives and angry Tea Party types and way-out libertarians and
semi-crazy religious fundamentalists.
Mitt Romney has flip-flopped the most, having tried to appeal to the
voters of the relatively liberal state of Massachusetts to become its Governor
from 2003 to 2007 and now trying to out-compete the scattered body of extreme
conservatives that is competing for the 2012 Republican nomination.
The
debates between Republican candidates have been a first-class saga of mistakes,
heated exchanges, extreme positions, rude and generally dishonest attacks on
President Obama, and stubborn obedience to dogmas that call for
“you’re-on-your-own economics” and further tax cuts for the wealthy.
Rick
Perry made the curious error of forgetting during a televised national debate
that the Department of Energy was one of the primary government agencies he
wanted to eliminate. “Oops!” Sigmund Freud might have had a field day
with a glaring omission like that, considering that Rick Perry is deeply
beholden to the fossil fuel industry in Texas.
Perry apparently wants Big Oil to be able to maximize profits even at
the cost of increased air and water pollution, and exacerbated changes in the
climate, and harm to the health and prospects of millions of people. In any case, Rick Perry would surely agree
that once the media has good reason to ridicule you, the assault of laughter
seriously compromises any hope for gaining power!
The Way Things Are
Our political representatives are intently pre-occupied
with pandering to the narrow interests of rich people. NOW is the time to change this state of
affairs. Now is the time for wealthy people
to accept progressive changes in laws which have provided overly generous
windfalls to them while stoking budget deficits and forestalling wiser
priorities. It is a very poor plan to
allow wealthy people to get an increasing concentration of the nation’s wealth
while forcing the middle class to struggle harder and harder. The imposition of ever-worse degrees of
hardship on the poor and the young is particularly wrong-headed.
John Bowlby once noted that “All of us, from the cradle
to the grave, are happiest when life offers us a series of excursions, long or
short, from a secure base.” This feels
quite true, and from this point of view, efforts that make the majority of
Americans increasingly insecure, simply in order to give rich people lower tax
rates, is a dastardly and unconscionable strategy.
“The United States already ranks second among
modern nations, just behind South Korea, in the share of its workers in
low-wage jobs while too many companies lobby for ever lower taxes, ever smaller
wages and ever fewer worker rights to protect the might torrents of greenbacks
flowing into their coffers. A better
balance would make America better off.”
--
David Cay Johnston, The Corporations that
Occupy Congress
In their adamant intent to
protect the privileges of wealthy people, conservative politicians are even
willing to sacrifice the future well-being of our descendents by reducing
protections of the environment and letting corporations externalize costs onto
society. The supposed need for severe
budget cuts is being used as a pretext to significantly reduce protections for
millions of acres of public lands that include national parks, national
forests, wilderness areas, Bureau of Land Management lands, wildlife preserves,
national monuments, wetlands, and open spaces.
This is crazy!
A Smackdown of Sorts
Voters sent Republicans a
loud message about “conservative overreach” in the November 2011
elections. Voters in Ohio repealed a
law that stripped public-sector union employees of their collective bargaining
rights. Voters in Arizona recalled a
rashly anti-immigrant state senator. Voters
in Mississippi rejected a so-called “personhood” amendment that would have
given fertilized human eggs -- and even cloned cells! -- the full rights that
are currently assured, more or less, to real living people.
Social conservatives and self-righteous religious
fundamentalists apparently believe fervently that fertilized human eggs should
be given the same privileged status of personhood as people who have already
been born. This eagerness to give
expanded personhood rights to fertilized eggs goes hand-in-hand with doctrines
that seek to take away the rights of women and children and even immigrants and
lesbian women and gay men. This bastardization
of morality and our laws is a direct assault on human rights. It is reminiscent of the essential madness
of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in
which patriarchal authoritarians cook up bizarrely misguided plans like this.
Many conservatives also support the idea that corporate
entities should be treated as persons under the law, even though this
diminishes the rights and fair representation of the people in our democratic
republic. This is one reason that corporate
rights and power and influence must be more strictly limited. It is also a prime reason that a “Saving
American Democracy Amendment” to the Constitution, as proposed by Senator
Bernie Sanders, should be enacted and ratified as soon as possible to reduce
the influence of Big Money in our politics.
Seriously:
The Top Ten Ways “Conservatives” Strive to Make a Mockery of Our Democracy
It
seems apparent that conservatives often oppose democratic fairness. Here are the Top Ten ways they are doing
this:
1.
They are working tirelessly to disenfranchise as many voters as
possible. They are doing this in dozens
of States with Republican Governors and legislatures, claiming to be concerned
with voter fraud, but transparently targeting their efforts to disenfranchise
poor people and young people who have more progressive democratic tendencies
than others. Republicans are ostensibly
doing this to satisfy their topmost goals of winning at any cost, consistent
with their Strict Father impulses to gain domineering power by any means
necessary. Call it Integrity Deficient.
2.
They stubbornly oppose a fair-minded tax structure where everyone pays
exactly the same rates on all levels of income, with progressively higher rates
on higher levels of income. They
advocate, instead, cutting taxes on the highest income earners while
effectively borrowing money from future generations to finance this plan. Call it Treacherously Misguided.
3.
They insist on eliminating regulations and reducing the accountability
of banks and Wall Street speculators and giant corporations. Call it Transcendentally Dishonest.
4.
Their leaders refuse to make fair-minded compromises on a wide range of
issues, including efforts to limit corporate contributions to corporate and
union Super PACs that are negatively altering election outcomes. Call it Loyally Traitorous.
5.
They strive to stack the Supreme Court with corporate fundamentalists
and social conservatives who are outside the mainstream of judicial thinking. Call it Wily Coyote Shrewd.
6. They
side with corporations and rich people and corporate executives in striving to
undermine the rights and benefits of workers.
Call it the Tricky Dick Syndrome.
7.
They assault the rights of women to plan their families and use
contraceptives, and they work to deny women the option of terminating a
pregnancy even in cases of rape, incest or a risk of a woman’s death. By choosing such courses of action, they
refuse to recognize the fact that the growth in the world population, which now
exceeds 7 billion people, is a significant factor in exacerbating all of the
major global problems which confront humankind. Call it Ruthlessly Uncompassionate and Bizarrely Contradictory.
8.
They support policies that effectively create an ever-growing disparity
between the financial security of rich people and all others, along with an
ever-widening gap between people in matters that affect economic security,
reasonable medical care, and the health of the environment that sustains us. Call it Super Cynically Hypocritical and All
But Criminal.
9.
They want to give corporations and embryos the rights of personhood,
even though such actions reduce the rights and prerogatives and well-being of
all the Americans who are already alive right now. Call it Sublimely Absurd.
10. They embrace Military Keynesian
hyper-spending and other short-term-oriented goals at the expense of future
generations. Call it Conspiratorially
Sneaky.
An
Aside on Militarism
The haunting words penned by John Steinbeck in
1941 reverberate in the interstice of my mind:
“Some time ago a Congress of honest men refused an
appropriation of several hundreds of millions of dollars to feed our
people. They said, and meant it, that
the economic structure of the country would collapse under the pressure of such
expenditure. And now the same men, just
as honestly, are devoting many billions to the manufacture, transportation, and
detonation of explosives to protect the people they would not feed.”
Today, no one seems to believe that Congress is
filled with honest men, particularly not since the infusion of Tea Party
Republicans in the 2010 elections. But
our representatives sure are devoting enormous amounts of money to the
military, and the clamor is deafening for spending less on social programs that
are designed to help make people generally more secure.
Total spending on Defense Department
plans exceeded $13 trillion from 1981 through 2011. Curiously, this is almost the same amount that the national debt
increased during this period. We have
effectively borrowed the total cost for military spending in the past 30
years. I find it outrageous for people
today to steal from our descendents to finance such wasteful spending. We are effectively trying to gain national
security now by mortgaging the future, even though this almost certainly will
make people in the future less secure.
In addition, it seems obvious that the aggregate
well-being of the people in our nation is far more endangered by proposals to
make substantial reductions in programs that ensure social security than it
would be if we cancelled weapons systems that have little real justification in
mitigating actual threats to our national security. The
opportunity costs of squandering so much money on the military are
far-reaching. Less money is available
to invest in vitally important things like good public education, protections
of the environment, energy efficiency and conservation, research and
development, physical infrastructure, universal healthcare, and national
well-being in general.
The
United States has been engaged in deficit-financed hyper-spending on military
personnel, armaments, munitions, wars, Cold War conflicts, and military
occupations ever since World War II.
Spending on the military-industrial complex has increased by more than
70% since 9/11/01 to fight an endless “War on Terror”. Ideological arguments are advanced which
assert that profligate spending on the military using borrowed money is a
positive economic stimulus. This
strategy, known as “Military Keynesianism”, is a risky fiscal undertaking that
employs reckless and unfair expediencies of borrowing enormous amounts of money
from people in the future.
A
more honest national policy would be to pay as we go for military
expenditures. To finance high levels of
military spending, it would be appropriate to assess higher taxes on imported
oil, since much of our military spending is targeted to ensure the continuous
flow of oil from Middle Eastern nations.
A Pigouvian tax strategy like this would raise money to reduce budget
deficits, and it would also make the real costs clearer to the American people
of aggressive militarism and the stationing of hundreds of thousands of our
troops abroad.
We
can no longer afford to spend so wastefully on the military. It is extremely shortsighted to continue to
pursue hyper-spending military Keynesian policies. The reasons that we have been unable to control military
expenditures are primarily because of hyper-partisans strife, political
pandering, brinksmanship, corruption, fear-mongering, and hawkish
propaganda. It is extremely unfair to
our descendents to obtusely continue this course of action. The deficit-financing of expediencies is
radically out of step with sensible means of determining pragmatic, affordable,
fair-minded, and rational courses of action.
Check
out Reflections of War in Part Three
of the Earth Manifesto for more comprehensive understandings related to
military issues.
A
Summary of Reform Ideas
In
addition to congressional and legal efforts to reduce corporate influence in
our politics, we should revolutionarily reform our economic and political
systems with measures such as the following:
-- Commit
to a Bill of Rights for Future Generations.
-- Reform
the U.S. tax system to make it more steeply graduated for income and capital
gains.
-- Enact a
new Square Deal as discussed herein and in Existence,
Economics, and Ecological Intelligence in the Earth Manifesto.
-- Act to
make our national laws consistent with sensible Precautionary Principles, as
elucidated in Intelligent Precautionary
Principles Enunciated --- Holy Cow!
-- Reform
campaign finance laws to make elections fairer and cleaner.
--
Eliminate “too big to fail” by limiting the leveraging of risks by banks, and by
preventing abuses of power, and by breaking up giant corporations into less
powerful entities;
-- Create
a national bank with interest rates that are relatively low to compete with private
banks that indulge in excessive profiteering and predatory banking practices;
-- Create
a public health insurance option to compete with the monopoly practices of giant
health insurance companies.
-- Pass a new national law to specifically
limit the rights associated with claims of corporate personhood.
I
urge people to evaluate these ideas, inhabit them, and help actualize them!
OCCUPY
folks, get ready for far-reaching and smart reform, and contribute to it, and
help make it happen in this hopefully propitious year 2012!
Truly,
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
Hannibal, Missouri
Feedback? Contact me at: SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com
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