DiStasi Blog

Monsanto's Saintly CEO

2012-01-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

Here’s a little addendum to the last post on Monsanto. The CEO of Monsanto is a Brit or a Scot named Hugh Grant; he’s also Chairman and President of what, to hear him tell it, is a corporation modeled on the work of Mother Theresa. That’s if you can ignore the “compensation” he gets for all his good works, including, in 2009, a salary of $10.8 million, and, in 2011, his sale of 150,620 shares of his corporation’s stock at $75 a share, amounting to another $11,296,500 (yes, Monsanto’s stock has done well in recent years, with annual average earnings growth of 19.2% over the last 10 years.) Of course, the business pundits don’t feel any need to ignore the compensation: indeed, they seem to take it as indicative of Grant’s prowess, with Barron’s putting him on its annual “most respected CEO” list in 2009, and Chief Executive Magazine naming him its CEO of the year in 2010.

Grant himself seems to agree. In a speech featured on the Monsanto.com website, he spoke, believe it or not, to the 2010 Business Social Responsibility Conference in New York. He started by raising the specter of population growth—“Between the time you got up this morning and the time you’ll go to bed, there will be 210,000 new people on the plant. By 2050, that’s three new Chinas.” Here, according to Grant, is where Monsanto, the alleged champion of “how to do more with less,” comes in as saviour. For Grant, that’s developing new, more efficient agricultural products, specifically a more “water-efficient Maize” that can transform the low-efficiency African farmer (corn farms yielding only 20 bushels/acre) into an operator more akin to his high-tech American counterpart (160 bushels per acre). Grant cited a recent trip he made to Malawi, where one Monsanto project giving villagers American hybrid seed produced so much corn the ecstatic villagers had to use the local schoolhouse to store the bumper crop. For Grant, this pointed to two things: first, new partnerships to produce, store and sell the new bumper crops, and second “the promise in a seed, giving people tools we’ve had for 70 years.” Perfect language for the conference Grant was addressing, the BSR being, according to the article, the “largest and most highly-regarded conference in corporate responsibility.”

Just gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it? Seeing Monsanto and its CEO being so socially responsible, so concerned about the poor wogs in Africa, about sustainable agriculture for the newly-starving masses? But wait. What about the great GMO products, the ‘frankenfoods’ Monsanto has pioneered? What about the gathering evidence that the application of increasing quantities of glyphosate to Roundup Ready seeds are undermining the most productive agricultural acreage in the world (the American Midwest) with their deleterious effects on microorganisms upon which all life depends? What about the evidence that crops grown in such conditions and fed to livestock are turning the stomachs of the ruminants into breeding grounds for god-knows-what monstrous organisms? What about Monsanto’s lawsuits against small organic farmers whose fields have been contaminated with GMO seeds—which Monsanto terms an unlicensed use of its patented products? What about Monsanto’s corruption of the USDA, the FDA, the EPA to not only accept this genetic tinkering but to try to force it on farmers worldwide? What about the fact that higher food yields inevitably lead to benighted optimism and increasing populations that soon outstrip the new capacity? Grant mentions none of this. Nor, apparently, does the Business for Social Responsibility Conference, nor Barron’s nor Chief Executive. All simply keep on keeping on with “newspeak”—criminality dressed up in the language of empathy and social responsibility that we’ve come to expect. Forget shame. Forget the truth. All is hype and advertising and the most voracious wolves still, after all these years, safe in their sheep’s clothing, still able to persuade the majority of the sheep that steely fur is wool, that rapacious eyes are loving, that razor teeth are not for slashing and tearing but only for nuzzling.
And the lambs, ah, the lambs are silent.

Lawrence DiStasi

Monsanto's Killing Fields

2011-12-29T13:01:00.000-08:00

I have recently watched an interview with Dr. Don Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue specializing in microbiology, that will curl your hair (see the whole 57 minute interview at http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issue/alert/?alertid=58601501, and/or another shorter interview with Huber at http://vimeo.com/22997532). It deals with Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup (main ingredient glyphosate), and its growing panoply of Roundup Ready seeds which have been genetically engineered to resist the killing effects of glyphosate, thus allowing farmers to spray Roundup liberally, killing all other plants and allowing the Roundup Ready ones to ‘thrive.’ Roundup Ready seeds now in use include Soy (87% of the worldwide crop), Corn, Canola, Cotton and the recently-authorized-by-USDA Alfalfa and Sugar Beets (despite Huber’s urging to Ag Secretary Vilsack to delay the approval of Roundup Ready Alfalfa). Corporate Agriculture considers this a miracle of American science and a boon to farmers and profits and even our health (with Roundup Ready crops, we are told, fewer pesticides have to be applied; Roundup alone does the job).

Dr. Huber, however, informs us in his dry, unemotional style, that this is not merely a mirage, it is a con, a disaster, a crime against nature itself (my words, not his.) The reasons are legion. To begin with, glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, is, like many other pesticides, a “chelator.” That means it binds or creates a barrier around essential mineral micronutrients which are critical to the very heart of life and growth, especially enzyme function. Most critically, it is not just plants that require enzyme function; all organisms and microorganisms need them. So, to cripple the efficiency of a plant’s mineral uptake is essentially to kill them, and to counteract this killing, Monsanto has genetically engineered seeds whose plants have an alternative pathway for the uptake of some of these essential nutrients. They can ‘survive’ the poison of Roundup thereby. But the key point is this: the plant that gets sprayed with Roundup, even the GMO plant, still gets dosed with large quantities of the Roundup sprayed upon it. So does the soil, with all its microorganisms. Thus you get crops that have glyphosate on and in them (the glyphosate goes to key parts, like the seeds), and soil whose microorganisms are damaged the same way—microorganisms, one of whose main functions is to fight diseases. According to Huber, there are already 40 newly-thriving pathogens on many of our crops—diseases that used to be managed. No more. What’s worse, since these GMO crops—especially corn, soy and alfalfa—are the main feed we give to our stock animals, they too are being affected. A botulism has been seen recently in the intestinal tract of cows because glyphosate in the feed is killing or disabling the normal organisms in the cow’s gut that used to fight it.

Now here is where it gets scary. As noted above, all life employs the same basic mechanisms. So if glyphosate impairs the gut ecology in animals, we can expect that the effect in human stomachs will be similar if not exactly the same. Studies have already been done showing that in virtually 100% of cases, stock animals are showing a deficiency in manganese (needed for its antioxidant properties, its role in protecting plants from disease, and its enzyme-activating role in digestion) due to the chelating effect of Roundup Ready feed. There are also studies showing high levels of glyphosate in animal manure (so how use this animal manure on crops???) due to the feed they’re eating (all those Roundup Ready crops, now to include alfalfa), plus some new organism from hell (the electron microscope image of this thing is terrifying) that is suspected of causing reproductive failure in farm animals. First noted by vets in 1998, the fertility failure rate in dairy cattle has reached such proportions—45 to 70%--that dairies now worry about maintaining their stocks (note that Roundup Ready soy and corn were first used as feed in 1998.) And of course, the real killer in all this: though hordes of researchers are trying to identify it, no one yet knows what it is. It seems to be about the same size as a virus, it can be cultured, it is self-replicating, there’s lots of it in GMO corn and soy, but scientists don’t know what it is.

Thus publication about its causes is lagging, but not just for reasons of uncertainty, and here the lugubrious Dr. Huber got as animated as he allows himself to get. Monsanto controls the science in this area. Anyone who does research that is not favorable to its products is either silenced, fired, or prohibited access to all products under patent. Why? because Monsanto makes such research illegal. And the EPA and the FDA and the USDA all go along with it, because the lobby for big agribusiness controls the Congress and all government agencies dealing with such products.

So here’s what we’ve got, folks. We’ve got the most widely-used herbicide in the world killing not only plants (including impairing their ability to fix nitrogen from the air) but essential soil microorganisms and beneficial intestinal organisms in animals. We’ve got GMO crops that allow that product to be used in higher concentrations than ever because we’re told the magic of GMO somehow keeps the stuff off the GMO crop in question, when it doesn’t. And we’ve got symptoms now of some new monster organism that seems to be spreading abortions, infertility and premature aging among the farm animals (not only cattle but chickens, pigs and horses too) on whom we depend. And we haven’t even talked about glyphosate’s proven record as an endocrine disruptor—Huber mentions, in this regard, the notably lowered sperm count of human males, less than half of what it was only 20 years ago. And above all, we have a totally compromised government and its agencies supposedly protecting us, but keeping themselves busiest blackballing and outlawing the science and the scientists who have been trying to sound the alarm about all this.

I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready to call for all-out war on Monsanto, on the USDA and Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, and everyone else involved in the monstrous system we have allowed to thrive. I’m about ready to sign on with Lierre Keith, who recently called for serious radical action—whatever force it takes—to bring the entire sick system down. I mean, what else is there to do? Appeal to their better nature? It is to laugh, because these people—the CEOs, the so-called scientists Monsanto employs, the toadies in Congress who protect them to keep their state revenues jangling—are willing to poison every living thing on earth in order to maintain their stranglehold on the markets they have cornered. They care not a whit for life—plant life, microbial life, animal life, human life. They care only about killing. Why should we care about them or their sick, profit-driven lives? Why should we not begin a movement that a recent Newsweek column (Newsweek! imagine) predicted would include the following:

There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. (Michael Thomas, Newsweek, Dec. 28)

And I believe there will. And if it targets any of the evil bastards who work, in any way shape or form, for the devil-spawned corporate monstrosity called Monsanto, I for one will cheer and salute and encourage it until the beast is choked on its own deadly brew.

Lawrence DiStasi

Incarnation

2011-12-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

As I’ve come to expect in this “Season of Joy,” my mood has been growing more gloomy as the season progresses. Too many “Christmas Specials” with too many expected songs; too many commercials urging us to ‘hurry: only a limited and steadily decreasing number of shopping days left’; too much of the sense that increasingly each year the remembered spirit of this once-holy season becomes more and more degraded by the over-hyped orgy of conspicuous consumption it has become.

Then this morning, a possible turn. Though I have long since abandoned the theology the season supposedly represents—the virgin birth of a God called Jesus in a manger marked by a star—the underlying mystery is both profound and worthy of contemplation. I mean the idea of incarnation. Christian (in my case, Catholic) teaching makes a good deal of this: God comes to earth to save us (that’s the big takeaway) by incarnating: he deigns to become flesh, he takes human shape, as one of us. That’s what the joy is supposed to be about: God himself, or rather, his only begotten son, has come to be us all, to save us all. The problem is that this is hyped as something fantastic, something special, something that has happened only once in history, with the corollary that we, the chosen ones, are the only ones who know this and can thereby benefit from it. That’s where the bullshit creeps in. Because incarnation really is a big deal, only not in the manner of something special, something unique to us fortunate humans of the Christians persuasion, who alone will ride to heaven on its back. No. It’s a big deal because it is the great mystery at the center of all our lives, of all life, of all being. Incarnation. Something becomes flesh. Something that is presumably without substance, i.e. nothing, becomes something. And that is a big deal.

Now humans have long noticed this, have long made it a central mystery. A plant appears out of the ground in the spring. Miracle. Mystery. Repeated millions of times. Millions of fishes sprout from the sea: mystery; gazillions of bugs appear in flight from nowhere, as do thousands upon thousands of birds and gophers and all the beasts of the field. Miraculous, and beneficial to us, mostly, the humans who must depend upon crops and flocks and fishes. And so arise the mystery cults, the stories of Demeter and her child Persephone miming the miracle of birth of all nature in the Spring. And of course, in the Christ story, a child bursts forth from a virgin womb, signifying not only the miracle of human birth, but the mysterious birth of God himself. The mystery of incarnation. The problem is that we now know too much to be awed by this anymore, to genuflect or sacrifice to it anymore. We know how plants arise from seed. We ‘know’ that they convert energy from the sun via photosynthesis, and from the soil via mineral transport, and grow cell by cell. We know how humans and all other animals are conceived, via sperm and egg and growth by cell division, all governed by those helical strands of DNA. So the old mysteries, the pretty stories, become myths—tales told by the ignorant to explain processes too deeply embedded in tiny events for the ancients to perceive. And we abandon them, we replace mystery with the “holidays” whose chief purpose is to get us to spend lavishly and keep feeding an economy which depends for its continuance on the utter stupidity of our buying what neither we nor anyone else needs. (I should say that when I was young many years ago, Christmas still had, at least for us, the quality of need: we got coats or boots or gloves we sorely needed to replace outgrown or worn-out ones; and for something impractical, an orange or tangerine that in winter, in the northeast, still had the aura and taste of a rarity.)

But I digress. I was saying how we’ve abandoned the mysteries that are no longer believable—except I suppose in art, like Handel’s Messiah, which still, despite our knowledge, retains some power. But I digress again. What I meant to say, to remind myself, is that incarnation, even stripped of all its mythological trappings by our science, still radiates power. Indeed, it remains the central mystery. And we can, at least partly, thank science for that too. That’s because while rational science has swept away all the “myths” with its penetrating revelations of biology at the cellular level, when it goes deeper, and it has gone deeper, it brings us right back to the mystery again. Though it has shown us, objectively, what happens at the molecular level and even at the atomic level, at the quantum level things get spooky again, mysterious again. That is to say, at the quantum level, we are now told (and virtually none of us can verify this ourselves) that much of elementary matter—those teeny tiny components of atoms and even electrons, with names like quarks and leptons and gluons and bosons—simply appears out of the void. Matter at its most elementary level, the things of which we are made, simply pop into existence and then pop out again. And we don’t know why. Physicists have, of course, named this. They call it “quantum fluctuation” (see www.newscientist.com, “It’s confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations” by Stephen Battersby). They even attribute the birth of the universe, our universe, that is, to quantum fluctuations (no deity needed) which initiated the process leading to the big bang, which burst in this unimaginably fierce explosion to send all those compressed bits careening out into what has become our universe, inflating and expanding faster and faster until gravity gathered things together to produce galaxies and stars and planets and us.

And it all came from incarnation. Matter just popping into existence. Something from nothing. Here is how Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow put it in their recent book, The Grand Design (2010):

Quantum fluctuations lead to the creation of tiny universes out of nothing. A few of these reach a critical size, then expand in an inflationary manner, forming galaxies, stars, and, in at least one case, beings like us. p. 137.

Now I don’t know about most physicists, but to me, that’s pretty mysterious stuff. And it’s not just that I don’t understand quantum mechanics, which I don’t. The truth seems to be that nobody really understands it. There are formulas to explain things, and experiments that seem to prove it works, but when I read that multiple universes (the concept rather makes the word ‘universe’ an oddity) probably sprang from quantum fluctuations and the big bang, and that all those parallel universes probably exist somewhere; or that when particles split through a screen, there is the possibility that though some land where we can identify them, some have probably tripped out to the most distant corners of the universe; or that we and our whole universe may be a holographic projection of some outer surface of a black hole, well then I have to say that the great mystery of incarnation still exists. The great mystery, that is, is and has always been: why there is something rather than nothing? How is there something? Is there a where from which we and all else derive?

This, I think, is really what we should be pondering during this season. Incarnation. Whether we should be joyful about it or not I suppose depends, at least in part, on one’s situation. But it also depends on the very fact of being. It depends on the improbable fact that something rather than nothing exists. It depends on the fact that the void, the vacuum, the nothing has produced and continues to generate, every day, every hour, every second, every millisecond more stuff, more of this improbable glory, more impossible incarnation. And though keeping the stupid economy going does not deserve celebration, this, this continuous mysterious incarnation, this ongoing mystery of the word (or whatever it is) made flesh, surely does.

Lawrence DiStasi

Occupy Everywhere

2011-12-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

Police nationwide having moved in, at this point (Police on Dec. 7 finally attacked and destroyed the Occupation in downtown San Francisco), the Occupiers in public spaces of dozens and dozens of American cities have been forced to leave. But is this the end, as many have feared?

Not quite. In what some have called the next logical and brilliant move, the Occupiers have shifted their locus (not their focus) to the core of the crisis: bank foreclosures of homes. As Stephen Lerner, an organizer with SEIU, says: “…we’ve occupied public space — now we need to occupy private space that’s been stolen by banks.” Sean Barry of VOCAL-NY adds: “One of our messages is that there’s more empty homes that banks are sitting on than there are homeless families.”

Still, some might think, ‘oh, foreclosures; that’s old hat, a story that’s over.’ But it isn’t. According to many insiders, the banks have yet to foreclose on the majority of homes in the U.S., perhaps as many as 4 million more. More than that, the AP reports in its story on foreclosure occupations that “Nearly a quarter of all U.S. homeowners with mortgages are now underwater, representing nearly 11 million homes” (CT Post, December 6). That’s 11 million homes, folks, 1 out of 4. Talk about the Great Depression. Which is what, by the way, Rachel Maddow did on a recent MSNBC show (well worth watching). As an introduction to her sympathetic segment on the Occupy Foreclosures movement, she showed news reports and movie clips of exactly the same kind of resistance during the early 1930s when millions of Americans were losing their homes and farms. Huge crowds would show up and resist not just passively or peacefully, but by first putting the furniture that had been removed by authorities back into the homes, and then by throwing rocks and utensils and farm implements at police arriving to enforce the evictions. These people were pissed off and they were serious.

So, it seems, are today’s occupiers. The AP report cited above claims that homes in more than 25 cities were involved in Tuesday’s protests. And more are on the way. Said one of the Seattle organizers: “It's pretty clear that the fight is against the banks, and the Occupy movement is about occupying spaces. So occupying a space that should belong to homeowners but belongs to the banks seems like the logical next step for the Occupy movement.” In response, Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb insisted that occupying private property represented the same violation—trespassing—that occupying public space did. The police response, and the penalties, would be the same. But the occupiers are unfazed. In Atlanta, protesters disrupted a home auction of foreclosed properties with whistles and sirens. Several individual home foreclosures have already been stopped, and the evictees given more time to try to work out a deal with the banks. One woman in Cleveland expressed gratitude to the occupiers, who came and camped out in tents in her backyard, frightening off officials who were supposed to come and evict her. She was still in her home on December 6 (see Maddow video). Moreover, the Occupiers have joined forces with groups that have been active for several years (Take Back the Land, Viva Urbana) in defending homes against evictions—supplying fresh and enthusiastic troops for the earlier efforts. The movement also derives encouragement and tactics from movements in other countries like Spain, where the 15M movement has stopped hundreds of evictions and occupied vacant buildings.

That this movement has moral authority can be seen by what NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent interview with a Chase banker named Theckston:

He (Theckston) says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less-savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up. (Kristof cited by Sarah Seltzer, Alternet, Dec. 5)

We’ve all heard accusations about this type of cruel and intentional fraud before, but to hear an admission of it of from one of the bankers involved is stunning.

This—the moral authority they have, both currently and historically—is why the Occupy movement has the powers-that-be scrambling for ways to de-legitimize it. I mentioned in my last blog the rumor about a public relations firm being hired by bankers. More recently, Republican talking-points guru, Frank Luntz, expressed his concern about it to the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando: “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” he said, and offered 10 tips on what specific language to use to counter it. First and foremost, “Don’t say ‘capitalism.’ Use ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market’ instead.” Now this is really interesting: even the Republicans are admitting that the American public now thinks ‘capitalism’ is immoral! And if Republicans are seen as “defenders of ‘Wall Street’,” says Luntz, “we’ve got a problem.” (Yahoo News, Dec. 1)

Karl Marx must be smiling. Imagine, the Republican Party, that bastion of mindless boosterism, is running away from capitalism as a concept. Moreover, Luntz also advises Repubs not to say government ‘taxes the rich;’ instead say government ‘takes from the rich,’ because Americans respond favorably to ‘taxing the rich.’ By God, I sure hope the clueless, pusillanimous Democrats have read this. Because Luntz urges other verbal subterfuge as well, and all reflect two things: the Republicans are vulnerable and scared (as well they should be, their policies having brought this nation to the brink of disaster), and at the other end, have thoroughly absorbed the lessons of the TV age about framing a message properly, while Democrats have not. Now, finally, there’s a golden opportunity to hang the Republicans with the real message and practice they and their financial masters have been promoting for years: advancing the cause of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

So far, the only element in the nation that has understood this, and been willing to act on it, are the Occupiers. We can only hope that the American people in ever greater numbers will begin to get it as well, and that the hapless talking heads they elect to public office will follow. The only question is, how much of everywhere has to be occupied and how many of the rest of us have to be jailed before the worm turns?

Lawrence DiStasi

Occupy, Occupy, Here Comes Occupy

2011-11-20T14:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve been wanting to comment on the #Occupy movement for quite some time, but events keep outrunning my prose. That’s still true today. So this is just going to be some disjointed musings to emphasize how delighted I am with these young people—the ones who’ll have to live in the mess we’ve created—and how crucial I think their movement is. Just consider: a few weeks ago, the wacky right seemed firmly in command of the entire political spectrum. Obama was reeling from hits to every one of his proposals, no matter how lame. All we heard was the Tea Party and the rantings and ravings of the Republican pretenders to the White House: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber-by-the-minute (I mean really, has there ever been such a gathering of cruel, incompetent morons in a presidential primary?)

Now, though, the #Occupy movement in city after city has changed all that. Just this morning, for example, I read a piece about the latest initiative in Congress: Ted Deutch, (D-FL) has offered a constitutional amendment (he calls it OCCUPIED: Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy) to affirm that “rights protected by the Constitution belong to human beings, not to for-profit corporations or other business entities.” It would “prohibit business corporations and their associations from using money or other resources to influence voting on candidates or ballot measures anywhere in America.” Amazing. The Democrats in Congress are clearly feeling the heat from the occupiers, and some, at least, are starting to find some damn backbone.

Of course, it won’t be enough. But this is what such movements are supposed to do: change the debate, and force legislators to act rather than hide behind mealy-mouthed rhetoric. And just before this, I watched a video of a few dozen occupiers marching—on foot, along the highway where people can stop and congratulate them—from New York to Washington. They plan, according to some of their interviews, to barge in on the deadlocked “Super Committee” that’s supposed to be coming up with compromise measures to reduce the deficit. Of course, this “stupor committee” will do nothing of the kind, but the occupiers are pushing ahead, getting some press, and dramatizing the determined inaction of the U.S. Congress.

Even before that, I read the beautiful op-ed written (NY Times)by former poet laureate Robert Hass about his encounter with the police at UC Berkeley’s occupy gathering last week. In brief, Hass and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, decided to monitor police behavior the night they were to remove the occupiers from UC’s Sproul Plaza. Instead, the Hass’s found themselves stuck in a crowd being forced together, and when Hillman sought to engage a policeman in dialogue, he struck her to the ground, also striking Hass when he tried to come to her aid. Hass, nursing bruised ribs, decries the militaristic tactics of the Darth Vader forces that have attacked, without provocation, the occupiers from New York to Denver to Oakland to San Francisco in what many see as a coordinated attempt to intimidate the occupiers, break their movement, and discourage any others who might be thinking of joining them. It hasn’t worked so far. Each broken-up demonstration has simply come back stronger—a fact we learned in the 60s, i.e. that inducing the authorities to overreact is part of revolutionary strategy. And these days, i.e., post-9/11, one hardly has to induce at all. The militarized police forces—the equipping of whom has become a booming industry for America’s military-industrial complex—seem to all be either on hair-trigger alert, or specifically instructed to beat the hell out of a few hundred demonstrators, regardless of provocation or law-breaking, to send a message. Fortunately, the message is having the opposite effect. Police brutality is encouraging, rather than discouraging more people to join the movement. And if polls are correct, millions of Americans, like myself, are cheering them on from the sidelines.

The police will, and already have scaled back their brutalities—especially after the horrific video of a helmeted officer walking calmly back and forth spraying pepper gas directly on a sitting group of UC Davis students blocking a sidewalk; which spraying called forth condemnation and an investigation by the UC Davis Chancellor. But things have gone very far already, and the police, like all authorities, are fixed in their attitudes. Crowds threaten them. Protest types disgust and alarm them. Used to intimidating, used to immediate compliance with their orders no matter how unreasonable, their responses are virtually automatic (their force has been rationalized by one spokesperson who said “linking arms is a form of violence”). Indeed, the conflict between police/soldiers and unarmed demonstrators has become the emblem of our time—in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Yemen, in Burma, in Libya, in Syria. The only question in any such situation is how far these “upholders of law and order” will go to snuff out the legitimate cries of the suffering.

And this is why, in the end, the #Occupy movement is so important. Ordinary people, mostly young people, are demonstrating that the situation—of inequality, of organized theft, of corporate malfeasance, of ecological disaster—has become so dire that they are willing to put their bodies on the line to change not just rhetoric, but everything. Even former lawmen—I know of two who have recently joined the occupiers, Ray Lewis, former police chief of Philadelphia (arrested), and Norm Stamper, former police chief of Seattle—are adding their voices to the rising chorus. Where all this will end is anybody’s guess: it could fizzle in the cold and wet. But one thing is sure. Those in power are taking note, and planning furiously to deflect the movement, infiltrate the movement, discourage and discredit the movement (this just in: Reader Supported News is reporting that a well-known DC Lobbying Firm has proposed an $850,000 plan to conduct ‘opposition research’ on the Occupy Movement and construct ‘negative narratives’ about it. See it at readersupportednews.org). There is fear in their hearts, because they know that the movement has focused on the one truth that cannot be denied: We really are the 99%, and without our cooperation, they cannot maintain their exploitation of the masses. For that alone, I salute the occupiers. And hope, when the time is ripe, to join them.

Lawrence DiStasi

One Continuous Mistake

2011-11-16T11:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve recently read an inspiring book called Fire Monks, which tells the story of how five Zen monks from the San Francisco Zen Center, against all odds, saved the center’s monastery at Tassajara, near Big Sur during the raging forest fire there in 2008. In one segment, the writer, Colleen Busch, quoted a phrase that SF Zen master Suzuki Roshi liked to use: it referred to life, even a Zen master’s life, as shoshaku jushaku, Japanese for “one continuous mistake.”

That resonated with me. Being a perfectionist, I’m always trying to get everything just right. I think it’s a common ailment among humans: We think we can outwit life and, by doing things just right, insulate ourselves—from rain water coming into our houses, from waste water leaking out, from fire, from flood, from storm, from sickness and death, from all the shocks that flesh is heir to. We cannot. Everything we do, every decision we make is dogged by mistakes. Indeed, when looked at carefully, most life decisions are impossible decisions, impossible to get right, that is. We are constantly making mistakes, always falling short to one degree or another, except where we’re very lucky.

Even in baseball (I’ve also been reading A. Bartlett Giamatti’s profound study of American sport, especially baseball, Take Time for Paradise), the situation is the same. As Giamatti points out, America’s sport is a game dominated by failure. Most attempts to reach base safely, not to mention getting home, are failures. Even the .300 hitter, the game’s crème de la creme, fails to hit safely 2 out of 3 times. Which is to repeat that life is one continuous mistake; we work hard to realize our “dreams,” but most of the time, most of us fail.

I have been reminded of this lately while doing work on my house. To engage in this kind of work—carpentry, painting, roofing—is to engage in continuous mistakes. Measurements don’t work out. One forgets to consider some inner cut. A carpenter I used to work with years ago had a wonderful way of dealing with this: “The universe,” he said only half joking, “is off by a quarter of an inch. Measure all you want, you’ll always be off.” I think he was right. We humans insist on making right angles of the world, when in fact, nature is all circles and curves. So whole pieces of lumber or fittings get wasted. The paint is either too thick or too thin and the color never looks the way it did on the sample. And when it comes to painting it on, there are always “holidays,” or slips of the brush splattering glass instead of wood, and if you’re really paying attention, boards that turn out to be dry-rotted or termite-infested. One continuous mistake.

Nor is it any different in the writing business. Years ago at Harcourt Brace, a manuscript I was preparing for publication had book titles typed in capital letters—a convention for typed manuscripts before computers (typewriters had no italics). The editor was always supposed to convert such caps for the printer by marking them ‘ital’ and lower-casing all but the first letter. In the first book I edited on my own, I overlooked this little detail, so the book was printed with book titles in all caps. Humiliating; but I never mentioned it and no one seemed to notice. Writing one’s own books carries the same, or even greater hazards. The writer lives in fear of that mistake—the one that appears in the title, in chapter titles, in boneheaded misquotes, in whole paragraphs that get cut off. In fact, I have never written an essay for publication that didn’t get mangled by the publication in one way or another. Most people never notice, but the writer does, living always with the knowledge that no book, no piece of art is ever perfectly rendered, and it haunts him. One continuous mistake.

Even when a star rises to the top, how many are there who avoid conspicuous, often fatal mistakes? Consider the last few presidents we’ve had—successes in the most exalted sense, having made it to the highest position available in America, or, for that matter, the whole world. And yet, think of the recent ones: Lyndon Johnson resigning in frustration over the Vietnam War, with war protesters shouting outside the White House, “Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” Richard Nixon following him, with a great landslide victory over Humphrey, with a re-election landslide over McGovern, which triumph led to encomiums about his political genius; and within weeks had him embroiled in the greatest scandal in American history, Watergate, and within months, with impeachment looming, resigned in disgrace. Consoling himself only with that pathetic mantra, “I am not a crook.” Then Ford pardoning Nixon, another scandal, mouthing his presidential mantra that no one is above the law, but of course sometimes the law must accede to “reality” (i.e. power). Jimmy Carter taking office next, with high hopes, but shortly after his major achievement at Camp David, confronted with the Iran hostage crisis that drove him from office in ridicule. Then Reagan: Mr. “Morning in America.” But before too long, mired in his own disgrace, Iran-Contra, confirming him as lawbreaker-in-chief, and in hindsight seen by many as the architect of the long-term collapse not so much of the Soviet Union, but of American capitalism itself. Then G. H. W. Bush faltering on every level, shortly after claiming a transformative victory over Iraq. And Clinton with a few victories in the economy, but so unable to control his wee wee he ends up barely fighting off impeachment, his legacy “I never had sex with that woman.” And W; need we say anything about W? Non-existent weapons of mass destruction as justification for war? Deaths in the millions for what? To create the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression? And now Obama, failing utterly to fulfill the promise, siding with the worst elements that brought the nation to the brink, abandoning those who swept him into office, and unable now to get even a small bill through Congress.

In short, the U.S. presidency, not to mention the current Congress, is one continuous mistake.

The trick, for the zenist, and for all of us, is how to come to terms with this, with this knowing that no matter how carefully one proceeds, mistakes are continuous. (The obverse is that in zen, it is said, one can never make a “wrong” decision; or a “right” decision, for that matter. One just does what is needed at the time.) Or, as Suzuki Roshi used to say, just commit and do your best: ‘It’s the effort that counts, the sincere commitment to wake up, wherever you are. That’s all anyone can ask.’ Which is also to say, awake to what life is. Despite the assurance of our myths, life is not success; life is not progress; life is not keeping the rain out completely (other animals simply get rained on; and don’t melt). Life is one continuous mistake. Which is pretty much how it proceeds. Mistake after mistake, leading over time, perhaps, to a little tinkering here, a bit of tinkering there with just enough of us getting by to keep it going, the only success being its continuation; our continuation. It goes on; we go on: the entire creation. Which is about all we can say; and isn’t that, mistakes and all, miraculous enough?

Lawrence DiStasi

Wake-up Time?

2011-11-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

I have to confess that I didn’t go to the polls yesterday, having glanced at the sample ballot to find mostly school bond issues of little interest to me now. But across the country, what an election it was. Though it may be too much to hope, it seems that our great unwashed are finally waking up to the fact that capitalist democracy, in its present form, is not going to save them. Rather, the oligarchs and banksters and Wall Street billionaires now in control of both the economy and the political process will never be satisfied until they have ground the faces of the working classes into the dirt, stripped them of all dignity, and forced them to shut up, watch the circus, and become slaves. But wait: enter the Wall Street occupiers who, contrary to all expectations, seem to have changed the conversation, and now, voters across the country have shown that they, too, are fed up.

In Ohio, where Governor John Kasich had emulated his Republican counterpart in Wisconsin by pushing a law, SB 5, that stripped public sector unions of their right to collectively bargain, the voters repealed the law in a huge victory for union rights. Over 60% of voters stood with nurses, teachers, policemen and firefighters in a victory that had the Ohio governor sheepishly acknowledging that he had “heard the voters.” I just bet he did. I bet the smart-ass governor of Wisconsin heard too. Perhaps even the billionaire Koch brothers, who financed much of this concerted Republican attack on workers, heard it as well. Because this wasn’t the only reversal for the conservatives who just months ago appeared poised to take over the whole nation.

No. Progressive victories took place in several more states, including Maine, Mississippi, Iowa, Arizona and North Carolina. Something is happening here, Mr. Jones. In Maine, the people voted to maintain their same-day voter registration policy after the right-wing legislature had passed a law to repeal it—employing their usual argument about “voter fraud.” The people didn’t believe it, saw it as disenfranchisement, and yesterday took their right back. In Mississippi, voters struck back on a different front, rejecting another attempt by fundamentalists to pass a constitutional amendment granting “personhood” to a “fertilized egg.” That’s right. On the one hand, these right-wing bozos grant personhood to corporations; on the other, to “fertilized eggs”, thus putting at risk not just abortions, but even birth control. Even benighted voters in Mississippi said “no thanks” thank god.

But my two favorites, at least in the U.S., were Arizona and Missoula, Montana. In Arizona, the Republican state Senator who had pushed the state’s nasty immigration bill, SB 1070, one Russell Pearce by name, was recalled. Tossed out of office. The gopher for the notorious American Legislative Council (ALEC)—funded by corporate special interests including the aforementioned Koch Brothers—Pearce this morning was talking about having to re-examine his options after his big defeat. Which probably means figuring out how to maintain his racism by putting a more palatable face on it. No matter. He’s gone and SB 1070 should be toast. The Koch brothers suffered another defeat in Wake County, North Carolina where voters defeated four conservative school board candidates backed by the Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity” who wanted to get rid of the district’s diversity policies. In other words, to re-segregate the schools. The voters said no, and replaced them with Democrats. Why, it might even be called morning in America!

Finally, in Missoula MT, (site, incidentally, of the camp where Italian Americans were interned during WWII), citizens passed a resolution proposing to amend the U.S. Constitution to END CORPORATE PERSONHOOD. To me, this is potentially the most important victory of all. This is because the absurd notion that corporations are actually persons, with all the First Amendment rights granted to human beings by the U.S. Constitution—including and specifically free speech (the basis for the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United granting corporations complete freedom to throw money at any and all candidates for public office without restrictions)—makes a mockery of democracy itself. Corporations are fictitious entities. Persons organize themselves into corporations specifically to limit their liability as individual humans in business dealings. That limited liability is granted because it allows corporations to do what individuals cannot—so to then turn around and grant a fiction with immunity the same protections as vulnerable humans is an absurdity. Further, the Supreme Court itself never actually decided on this issue; it was a clerk working for the court, J.C. Bancroft Davis, who added a headnote to the 1886 Santa Clara case that assumed the personhood of corporations—a headnote that slipped by and became precedent ever after. In other words, corporate personhood should never have had the force of law. Since it does, however, the remedy is to pass a constitutional amendment to bring the situation back to where the Founders—Jefferson, Madison, and others who insisted that it was the people who needed protection from corporations—initially put it. Humans have human rights. Corporations do not, except in the fictitious world established in the United States in recent years. As one sign in the Occupy movement put it, “I’ll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.” It is time to abolish this so-called right, and the voters of Missoula, Montana took a first step. My hope is that before too long, the entire nation will wake up as well, and take the necessary actions to put corporations and their power back in the bottle where they belong. If, that is, it isn’t already too late—which it will be if now all of Italy comes undone (Berlusconi’s downfall another victory), joining Greece, and the whole Eurozone follows suit. Then, it might be too late not only to save Europe, but to save capitalism as well.
First things first, though, and today we can raise a glass to some small, but significant victories. May they continue.

Lawrence DiStasi

Greed Be Good

2011-09-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

In 1965, Alan Greenspan wrote:

“It is precisely the greed of the businessman, or more precisely, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer” (Madrick, 228).

This should really be the epitaph inscribed on the tombstone of the American economy. Far from ‘protecting’ consumers, the greed that has defined American business and especially Wall Street these last 40 years has decimated the economy, loaded businesses with debt, put millions of Americans out of work, and transferred huge chunks of American industry to foreign countries such as China. Therein lies the theme of Jeff Madrick’s crucial book, The Age of Greed, (Knopf: 2011). To read it, with its portraits of banksters and junk bond traders and acquisition specialists and CEOs of America’s largest corporations, is to learn of chicanery, conniving and contempt for average Americans on such a scale as to sometimes deceive the reader into thinking he is reading Dante’s Inferno. Such characters—some of the mightiest names in corporate and political America in the latter years of the 20th Century, names like Rubin and Weill and Reagan and Greenspan and Friedman and Milken and Boesky and Welch—do deserve a poet like Dante to fix them in an appropriate level of pain and torment. While Madrick is not that poet, he does a creditable enough job of this to sicken even the most cynical reader, for his is the tale of the outright looting and crippling of the American industrial might (along with its workers) that was once the envy of the world.

The book begins with the general proposition that while industry and transportation and communications and retailing were once the foundations of American wealth and prosperity, “by the 1990s and 2000s, financial companies provided the fastest path to fabulous wealth for individuals” (24). And where government was once seen as a needed supporter and regulator of such enterprises, Milton Friedman’s economic doctrines, put into saleable form by Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, turned government into the enemy. As Friedman wrote, “The fact is that the Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government (mis)management rather than by the inherent instability of the private economy.” The answer to all problems, in this tortured view, lay not in government actions to help those who need it, but in reducing government and lowering taxes so as to (allegedly) make the poor better off, eliminate inequality and discrimination, and lead us all to the promised free-market land. As noted above, Alan Greenspan believed wholeheartedly in these and other theories (especially those espoused by his friend Ayn Rand), and Ronald Reagan became the shill for selling such pie-in-the-sky nonsense to the American public. As with his sales work for General Electric, Reagan marketed the kool-aid more successfully than anyone could have anticipated. In office in California as governor, he blamed welfare recipients for the state government’s financial problems: “Welfare is the greatest domestic problem facing the nation today and the reason for the high cost of government.” When he got to the national stage with inflation rampant, he hit government profligacy even harder. “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well,” he said. “We have inflation because government is living too well” (169). All this was coupled with his mantra that getting back to the kind of “rugged individualism” that had made America (and himself) great required reducing taxes. And reduce he did. From a tax rate that was at 70% on the highest earners when he took office, he first signed the 1981 Kemp-Roth bill to reduce it to 50%, and then, in 1986, with the Tax Reform Act, reduced it even further to 28%. Meantime, the bottom rate for the poorest Americans was raised from 11% to 15%, while earlier, Reagan had also raised the payroll tax (for Social Security) from 12.3% to 15.3%. This latter raise, it should be noted, coupled with the provision that only wages up to $107,000 would be taxed for SS, meant that “earners in the middle one-fifth of Americans would now pay nearly 10% of their income in payroll taxes, while those in the top 1% now paid about 1-1/2%” (170). And what Reagan never mentioned about his “rugged individualism” is that he was made wealthy by those rich men who cajoled him to run for office: his agent arranged for 20th Century Fox to buy Reagan’s ranch for $2 million (he had paid only $65,000 for it), giving him a tidy profit with which to buy another ranch that also doubled in price when he sold it.

But such tales treat only the enablers. It is when we get to the actual hucksters of this story that things get interesting (or nauseating, depending on your point of view.) The basic scheme went like this: find a company that is undervalued—often because it had managed its assets so well it had cash on hand—and acquire it, using debt to finance the takeover. Then make money—and I mean millions and billions—on all the steps involved in the takeover, including the debt service, the legal fees, and the rise (or fall) in the stock price. For in the age of greed that Madrick documents, the stock price was all. Anything that pushed the stock price of a company up was good. Anything that pushed it down was bad (unless you were one of those smart guys like hedge-fund ace George Soros who worked the “shorts”). And of course, the best way to get a company’s stock price to go up was to increase profits. And the best way to do that was not to innovate or develop better products, but to slash costs, i.e. fire workers. Here is how Madrick puts it:

American business was adopting a business strategy based on maximizing profits, large size, bargaining power, high levels of debt, and corporate acquisitions…Cutting costs boldly, especially labor costs, was a central part of the strategy. (187)

What began to happen in the 1980s and into the 1990s was that all companies, no matter how successful, became targets of the ruthless merger mania that replaced normal business improvements. Lawyers like Joe Flom and takeover artists like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens could spot an undervalued, or low-stock-price company (the process reminds one of wolves spotting a young, or lame deer in a herd) to take over, using borrowed money to finance it (90% of the purchase price). The borrowing then demanded that the new merged company cut costs in order to service the huge debt required for the merger—which in turn required firing workers. If a company did not want to be taken over, the only way to do so was to get its stock price to rise, and this, too, required the firing of workers. In either case, the workers took the hit. But the CEOs running the merged ventures, often sweethearted into selling by generous gifts of stock, “usually made a fortune.” As Madrick notes, in 1986, Macy CEO Ed Finkelstein arranged for a private buyout of his firm, for $4.5 billion, and became the “envy of fellow CEOs” (174). Like many other mergers, however, this one drained what was one of America’s most successful retail operations, and Macy’s went bankrupt in 1992. Madrick concludes:

The allegiance of business management thus shifted from the long-term health of the corporations, their workers, and the communities they served, to Wall St. bankers who could make them personally rich... (173)

In the process, of course, the Wall Street bankers and leveraged buyout firms (LBOs) like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts who arranged the buys and the financing took in obscene amounts of money. So did risk abitrageurs (who invest in prospective mergers and acquisitions, angling to buy before the stock price rises on the rumor of a merger) like Ivan Boesky. Earning $100 million in one year alone (1986 when he was Wall Street’s highest earner), Boesky needed inside information to buy early, and got into the little habit of paying investment bankers for that information, i.e. on upcoming deals. Unfortunately for him, he got caught in his banner year because one of his informants (Dennis Levine of Drexel Burnham) was arrested and agreed to name those he had tipped off. Boesky was one (the deal was to pay Levine 5% of his profits for early information on a takeover), and he too was subpoenaed in the fall of 1986. Boesky immediately agreed to finger others (agreeing to wear a wire at meetings), and nailed Martin Siegel, also with Drexel, who, in turn, kept the daisy chain of ratting out associates going by naming Robert Freeman, an arbitrageur at Goldman Sachs. Nice fellows. Boesky ended up serving three years in prison, but he fingered an even bigger fish, Michael Milken. Then the wealthiest and most ruthless Wall Streeter of all, Milken, who made his money in junk bonds (risky high-interest bonds to ‘rescue’ companies in trouble) was sentenced to 10 years in jail (reduced to 2 years for good behavior) for securities violations, plus $1.3 billion in fines and restitution. He’d made so much money, though, that he and his family still had billions, including enough to start a nice foundation for economic research, to commemorate his good name in perpetuity.

There are, of course, lots of other admirable characters in this tale, but one in particular deserves mention, Jack Welch, the revered CEO of General Electric. This is because Welch’s reign at GE typifies what greed did to a once-great American institution, the very one that Ronald Reagan shilled for in a more innocent age, the one that brought the Gipper to the attention of the big money boys. Welch made enormous profits for GE (in 2000, the year he left, GE earnings had grown by 80 times to more than $5 billion), and himself, but he didn’t do it the “old fashioned way,” i.e. by developing new and better products. He did it by shifting the emphasis at GE from production to finance. Welch saw the value of this early:

“My gut told me that compared to the industrial operations I did know, the business (i.e. GE Capital) seemed an easy way to make money. You didn’t have to invest heavily in R&D, build factories, or bend metal…” (191)

To give an idea of how this works, Madrick points out that “in 1977, GE Capital…generated $67 million in revenue with only 7,000 employees, while appliances that year generated $100 million and required 47,000 workers” (191). Welch did the math. It didn’t take him long to sell GE’s traditional appliance business to Black & Decker, outraging most employees, though not many of them were left to protest: in his first two years, Welch laid off more than 70,000 workers, nearly 20% of his work force, and within five years, about 130,000 of GE’s 400,000 workers were gone. Fortune Magazine admiringly labeled him the “toughest boss in America.” And by the time he left the company in 2001, GE Capital Services had spread from North America to forty-eight countries, with assets of $370 billion, making GE the most highly valued company in America. The only problem was, with the lure of money and profits so great, GE Capital acquired a mortgage brokerage (Welch was no mean takeover artist himself) and got into subprime lending. In 2008, GE’s profits, mostly based on its financial dealings, sank like a stone, with its stock price dropping by 60%. Welch, the great prophet of American competition, now had to witness his company being bailed out by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company: since it owned a small federal bank, the FDIC guaranteed nearly $149 billion of GE’s debt. So after turning a U.S. industrial giant into a giant bank, the man Fortune Magazine named “manager of the century” also succeeded in turning it into a giant welfare case. Perhaps there’s a lesson here somewhere.

There’s more in this disturbing book—such as the fact that Wall Streeters not only attacked corporations in takeovers, they also attacked governments (George Soros’ hedge fund attacked the British pound, as well as Asian currency in 1999, causing crises in both places, and ultimately, cutbacks in government programs for the poor)—but the story is the same. During several decades of Wall Street financial predation, insider trading, and more financial chicanery than most of us can even dream of, the high-rolling banksters made off with trillions of dollars, and most others (including union pension funds) lost their shirts. Madrick quotes John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds, concerning the bust of the high-tech IPO bubble: “If the winners raked in some $2.275 Trillion, who lost all the money?...The losers, of course, were those who bought the stocks and who paid the intermediation fees…the great American public” (332). The same scenario was played out again and again, in derivatives trading, in the housing boom, in the mortgage-backed securities boom, in the false evaluations of stock analysts like Jack Grubman, in the predatory mergers and subprime shenanigans of Citibank CEO Sandy Weill, and on and on, all with an ethic perfectly expressed in an email, made public by the SEC, commenting on how ‘the biz’ was now run:

“Lure the people into the calm and then totally fuck ‘em” (334).

That’s essentially the story here. And the sad ending, which most of us haven’t really digested yet, is that the very vipers who cleverly and maliciously calculated each new heist and made off with all the money while destroying the economy, then got federal guarantees and loans that came to more than $12 trillion, that’s trillion, to “save the country.” And now lobby for “austerity” and “leaner government” and fewer “wasteful social programs” like social security and Medicare, and fewer regulations so that their delicate business minds can feel safe enough to invest again. And save us all again with their unfettered greed.

In which case, I’ll sure feel protected. Won’t you?

Lawrence DiStasi

Avatars and Immortality

2011-09-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has read or heard even a little history knows that the dream of immortality has existed among humans for a very long time. Most of these dreams (though not all, as the Christian fundamentalist notions of the “rapture,” and Islamic fundamentalist notions of a heaven full of virgins awaiting the martyrs who blow themselves and others up, prove) have been debunked in recent years, when even the Roman Catholic Church has pretty much abandoned its notion of an afterlife in fire for those who’ve been ‘bad’ (whether Catholics still believe in a blissful Heaven for those who’ve been ‘good’ remains unclear to me).

What’s astonishing is that this dream of living forever now exists in the most unlikely of places—among computer geeks and nerds who mostly profess atheism. It exists, that is, in two places: virtual reality, and the transformation of humans into cyborgs (though cyborgs don’t specifically promise immortality, they do promise to transform humans into machines, which is a kind of immortality—see Pagan Kennedy, “The Cyborg in Us All,” NY Times, 9.14.11). If you can create an avatar—a virtual computerized model—of yourself (as has been done for Orville Redenbacher, so that, though dead, he still appears in his popcorn commercials), you can in some sense exist forever. The title of the avatar game on the internet, “Second Life,” reveals this implicitly. So does the reaction of volunteers whom Jeremy Bailenson studied for a Stanford experiment purporting to create avatars that could be preserved forever. When the subjects found out that the science to create immortal avatars of themselves didn’t yet exist, many screamed their outrage. They had invested infinite hope in being among the first avatar-based immortals.

Before dismissing this as foolish dreamery, consider how far this movement has already gone. Right now, the video games that most kids engage in (my grandson has a Wii version of Star Wars in which he ‘becomes’ Lego-warrior avatars who destroy everything in sight) “consume more hours per day than movies and print media combined” (Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blascovich, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, Morrow: 2011, p. 2) The key point about this, moreover, is that countless neuroscience experiments have proved that “the brain doesn’t much care if an experience is real or virtual.” Read that again. The brain doesn’t care whether an experience is “only virtual.” It reacts in much the same way as it does to “reality.”

Frankly, until I read Infinite Reality, all of this had pretty much passed me by. I had read about virtual-reality helmets such as the kind used to train pilots, but I had no idea that things had gone so far. I had no idea that millions of people sign up for the online site called “Second Life” (I tried; it seemed impossibly complex and stupid to me), and invest incredible amounts of time and emotional energy setting up an alternate personality (avatar) that can enter the website’s virtual world and interact in any way imaginable with other people’s avatars. Needless to say, most people equip their avatars with qualities they would like to have, or have wondered about having. Then they go looking for people (avatars) with whom to experiment in a wished-for interaction. The most common interaction, not surprisingly, seems to be sex with another avatar, or several others; but there’s also a lot of wheeling and dealing to gain wealth and prestige. Talk about “be all that you can be!”

Still, the really interesting stuff happens when you get into a virtual laboratory. Whereas “Second Life” takes place on a flat computer screen, virtual reality really comes into its own when you don a headset that can simulate real scenes in 3D fidelity so real that when people approach a simulated pit in front them, they invariably recoil (even though they’re “really” walking on a level floor). While virtual reality of this kind is expensive today, there can be little question that it soon will have become commonplace. Rather than spending tons of money traveling to China, say, one will be able to go there “virtually,” without having to endure the travails of travel, including bothersome other people. What makes this eerie is that video games are already working with this kind of VR, and creating avatars. In games like Pong, Wii, Move, and Kinect the game computer can already “track” a user’s physical movements and then “render” a world incorporating those movements into a virtual tennis scene that is authentic in all necessary details. So,

In a repetitive cycle, the user moves, the tracker detects that movement, and the rendering engine produces a digital representation of the world to reflect that movement…when a Wii tennis player swings her hand, the track wand detects the movement and the rendering engine draws a tennis swing. (p. 44)

As Bailenson notes, “in a state of the art system, this process (of tracking and rendering the appropriate scene from the point of view of the subject) repeats itself approximately 100 times a second.” Everything in the virtual scene appears smooth and natural, including, in the game “Grand Theft Auto,” an episode where players can “employ a prostitute and then kill her to get their money back.” And remember, the brain reacts to all this in the same way it does when it is “really” happening.

The implications to a psychologist like Bailenson are profound. Short people, for example, who adopt a tall avatar for themselves, show definite improvements in their self-image, even after they’ve left the avatar behind. They also show improvements in competition: in real games held afterwards, the person whose avatar was taller became a more successful negotiator. Those who fashion a trim, beautiful avatar, show the same rise in self-esteem. Bailenson also notes the importance of people’s attributions of “mind” or reality to inanimate objects like computers, and this includes avatars. In one experiment, subjects were shown a real person named Sally, and then her avatar disfigured with a birthmark (neurophysiological studies show that interacting with a “stigmatized other,” even someone with a birthmark, causes a threat response). After four or five minutes interacting with Sally’s disfigured avatar, subjects displayed the heart-rate response indicating threat—even though they knew the real Sally had no birthmark. And the games sold to consumers keep getting more sophisticated in this regard. In the Sony PlayStation game, THUG 2 (over 1 million sold in U.S.) players can upload their photos onto the face of a character, and then have their “clones” perform amazing feats of skateboarding, etc. They can also watch them performing actions not under their control. This brings up the question of the effect of watching one’s “doppelganger” (a character with one’s appearance) do something in virtual reality. It appears to be profound: the more similar a virtual character is to the person observing, the more likely the observer is to mimic that character. This can be positive: watching a healthy person who seems similar can lead a person to adopt healthy behavior. But other possibilities are legion. Baileson mentions the commercial ones:

…if a participant sees his avatar wearing a certain brand of clothing, he is more likely to recall and prefer that brand. In other words, if one observes his avatar as a product endorser (the ultimate form of targeted advertising), he is more likely to embrace the product. (119)

In short, we prefer what appears like us. Experiments showed that even subjects who knew their faces had been placed in a commercial, still expressed preference for the brand after the study ended. Can anyone imagine most corporations aren’t already planning for what could be a bonanza in narcissistic advertising?

More bizarre possibilities for avatars, according to Bailenson and Blascovich, seem endless. In the brave new world to come, “wearing an avatar will be like wearing contact lenses.” And these avatars will be capable of not only ‘seeing’ virtual objects and ‘feeling’ them (using ‘haptic’ devices), but of appearing to walk among us. More ominously, imposters can “perfectly re-create and control other people’s avatars” as has already happened with poor old Orville Redenbacher. Tracking devices—which can see and record every physical movement you make—make this not only possible, but inevitable. Everyone, with all physical essentials, will be archived.

All of this makes the idea of “the real world” rather problematic. Of course, neuroscience has already told us that the ‘world’ we see and believe in is really a model constructed by our brains, but still, this takes things several steps beyond that. For if, in virtual reality, “anybody can interact with anybody else in the world, positively or negatively,” then what does it mean to talk about “real” experience? If “everything everybody does will be archived,” what does privacy mean?

At the least, one can say this: a brave new world is already upon us (think of all those kids with video games; think of how much time you already spend staring at your computer screen), and you can bet that those with an eye to profiting from it are already busy, busy, busy. One can also say, take a walk in the real outdoors with real dirt, grass, trees, worms, bugs, and the sweet smell of horseshit; it may soon be only a distant memory.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Spirit of Capitalism

2011-09-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Max Weber’s seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism lately and it illuminates a great deal about the spirit of our times—a spirit that has been termed The Age of Greed by Jeff Madrick in his recent book of that name. And while what Madrick describes is really the transformation in the last 40 years of America from an industrialized society to a financialized one, it doesn’t address the origins that interest me here. Weber was interested in this too. His question really was not only ‘why do people work to begin with’ (primary cultures had no concept called “work” at all and only exerted themselves periodically in war or in short-term hunting and gathering), but more relevant to his time, ‘why do people in modern society identify themselves as laborers?’ How was it possible for western culture to transform itself from a traditional culture where labor hardly existed except as part of a manorial household, to post-1600s capitalist society where free laborers are yoked to paying jobs in capitalistic enterprises? More specifically, how could a state of mind that Weber finds best illustrated in Ben Franklin (a penny saved is a penny earned; time is money; credit is money—i.e. it is a duty to increase one’s capital) come to be adopted by whole societies when, in the Middle Ages and before, that state of mind would “have been proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice?” As sinful greed? To illustrate how remarkable this is, Weber compares traditional laborers with modern laborers. A farm owner, for example, who pays his workers at a piece-rate (like modern farm workers paid at so much per bushel), thinks to increase production by increasing rates. This works with modern workers, but when applied to traditional laborers, the increased rate backfires. The traditional worker, that is, not only does not increase his work rate, he decreases it—he works slower so as to still earn the same daily amount. As Weber summarizes it, “the opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less.” Thus the attitude of traditionalism:

A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. (60)

Weber then devotes his entire book to explaining how Protestantism, especially the Calvinist branch of the Reformation, changed this traditionalist attitude towards work. While a “surplus population which it can hire cheaply” is necessary for capitalism to develop and thrive, so, he says, is a “developed sense of responsibility.” That is, for capitalism to work, “labour must…be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.” Far from being natural, or even the product of high or low wages, this attitude “can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education” (62). And the educating body was, originally at least, Protestantism. It is important to note that this education in work did not, at least at first, involve an education in greed, much less enjoyment. To the contrary, Weber makes clear that the essential ingredient, in the beginning, involved a kind of asceticism—not the asceticism of the monastery, but an asceticism in the world. To make labor a calling, that is, meant making labor an obligation in the service of God, of salvation. One was schooled in the idea that hard and constant work was an end in itself, the way of salvation for the average person, and that saving the money one earned was part of that obligation. In order to save, of course, one had to be frugal, buying only what was absolutely necessary. The asceticism that had been the mark of the otherworldly Catholic monastery, that is, was brought into the world. So one worked, one saved (“a penny saved is a penny earned”) and one eventually prospered. It is a commonplace that in the American colonies during the Puritan period (Boston, etc.), these essential elements were merged in such a way that prospering in business became synonymous with salvation—or rather, prospering became a sign of salvation. This is because though election (salvation) or damnation was pre-determined by God, the actual judgment was uncertain, and this uncertainty was almost intolerable. One’s prosperity thus became a sign, a way for the uncertainty to be resolved. The opposite was also true: poverty became a sign of damnation, making the poor doubly damned—both in this world and the next. The sad truth is that many Americans still maintain these essential attitudes.

Work as a calling then, work as a duty, and success in work as a sign of salvation are the essential elements of the Protestant ethic. They are also the essential elements of the spirit of capitalism. As Weber puts it,

the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available…but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism (68).

This is not to say that Protestantism ignored the dangers of wealth. Weber cites the writings of Richard Baxter as illustrative. And there, the key to this danger involved idleness and the temptations of the flesh it exposed one to. As Weber interprets Baxter, “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins….Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, more sleep than is necessary for health..is worthy of absolute moral condemnation” (157). A person was thus led to work constantly, to save what he earned, never to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but rather invest those savings as an entrepreneur in new opportunities for more work (and wealth). So while the ethic frowned on wealth and the luxuries it fostered, it at the same time had the “psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of the traditionalist ethic. It broke the bonds of the impulse of acquisition in that it not only legalized it, but looked upon it as directly willed by God” (171).

Weber ends his work with the ironic contradiction involved in this religiously inspired ethic. He quotes John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, as follows:

“I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches….So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.” (175)

The protestant entrepreneur, in this way, not only won the “feeling of God’s grace” for doing his duty in getting rich, but also a supply of “sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.” This ethic comforted the capitalist entrepreneur as well that the “unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence.” For had not Calvin himself said that ‘only when people, i.e. the mass of laborers and craftsmen, were poor did they remain obedient to God?’ (177). He had. So low wages, themselves, had been rationalized and justified by the divine.

The Protestant ethic, in sum, according to Weber, not only sanctified labor as a calling enabling a worker to be certain of his election, it also legalized, for the capitalist, the “exploitation of this specific willingness to work.” A Daily Double if there ever was one.

It takes little to see how these attitudes and rationalizations are still in use today. America sanctifies capitalism as literally the manifestation of both God’s will and the natural order of things. American media also lionizes those entrepreneurs who, at least according to their own myth, raise themselves by their own bootstraps to become rich—to become “elect” in modern society’s terms. Finally, American capitalism rationalizes the unequal distribution of wealth and goods in this world as simply the workings of natural or divine laws with which mere humans cannot quarrel.

To Max Weber’s credit, he ends his study with a scathing reminder that though this ethic began in the cloak of saintliness, its apotheosis in industrial capitalism became “an iron cage.” Had he known about capitalism’s most recent metamorphosis into an ongoing financial heist creating ever more inequality, his critique would have been far more savage.

Lawrence DiStasi

Decision Fatigue, Anyone?

2011-08-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

Among the several enlightening articles around last weekend, one stood out for me: John Tierney’s 8/17 NY Times piece on Decision Fatigue. It’s something everyone feels, but few of us understand that it’s a real syndrome, with roots in brain chemistry. That means that it’s not just some anecdotal phenomenon of people who complain, after shopping till dropping, that they’re exhausted—although that’s probably the most common experience for most of us. It’s far more general than that, and, apparently, far more universal (I always thought it was just me who hated shopping at whatever time of the year.) What this means is that the brain actually gets depleted of energy when it has to make lots of decisions—whether or not to eat another donut; whether or not to go online for a few more minutes; whether or not, as a judge, to grant parole to an inmate before you.

According to Tierney, the latter situation was a key one examined recently. In a report this year, two researchers looked into the decisions judges make, in an effort to account for why they rendered different judgments for defendants with identical records. After looking at the usual suspects (racism, other biases), they started to zero in on the time of day the judges made their decisions, and found that judges who made their rulings early in the day were far more likely to grant parole than those who saw a defendant late in the day. Looking even more closely, they found that if you were unlucky enough to appear before a judge just before the noon break, or just before closing time, you would likely have your parole plea rejected; if you saw the judge at the beginning of the day, or right after lunch, you were more likely to get your parole granted. The cause: decision fatigue. As the researchers noted, “the mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever their individual merits, wore them down.”

What this and other experiments have demonstrated is that each of us possesses “a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control.” And self-control requires that old bugaboo “will power”—a form of mental energy that can, and often is, exhausted. If you’ve spent your day resisting desire—whether it’s a yen for a cigarette, a candy bar, or a trip onto the internet—you’re less capable of resisting other temptations. Nor is this just a curious finding. What researchers argue is that this kind of decision fatigue is “a major—and hitherto ignored—factor in trapping people in poverty.” People who are poor, that is, constantly have to make that hardest of decisions, the trade-off (can I afford this? can I afford that? Should I pay the gas bill or buy good food?), and such decisions sap their energies for other efforts like school, work or improving their job prospects. This is confirmed by images that have long been used to condemn the poor for their failure of effort: welfare mothers buying junk food, or indulging in snacks while shopping. Far from being a condemnation of “weak character,” however, such activities often indicate decision fatigue, which the poor experience more than the rich because of the increased number of trade-offs their lives require, and hence the decreased willpower left them to resist impulse buying.

The big surprise in this research, though, comes with the brain studies. Everyone knows that the brain is a great consumer of sugar, or glucose, for energy. But what no one had expected was the specific connection between glucose supply and willpower. In a series of experiments, researchers tested this by refueling the brains of some subjects performing tasks with sugary lemonade (glucose), and some with lemonade sweetened with diet sweetener (no glucose.) The results were clear: those who got the glucose found their willpower restored, and thus their ability to exercise self-control augmented. They made better choices, and even when asked to make financial decisions, they focused on long-term strategy rather than opting for a quick payoff. In short, more mental energy allowed them to persist in whatever task was at hand. Even more to the point, the researchers found that the effect of glucose was specific to certain areas of the brain. As Tierney puts it:

Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards, and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

This is critical information, especially in our choice-and-distraction-filled culture. Yet another study in Germany, where subjects were monitored by frequently reporting their activity via their Blackberries, concluded that people at work spend as much as 4 hours a day “resisting desire.” The most common of these desires were “urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure” (i.e. taking a break by playing a computer game, etc.). Sexual urges were next on the list, slightly higher than checking Facebook or email. The most popular general type of desire was to find a distraction—and of course, the workplace of large numbers of people these days centers on the computer, that click-of-the-mouse distraction machine.

And the trouble with all this is that willpower depletion doesn’t manifest with a specific symptom, like a runny nose, or a pain in the gut. As Tierney says:

Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful.

Perhaps this is why tired politicians so often say, and do stupid things. Not to mention the howlers of our physicians, our generals, our corporate execs, and our media pundits. Perhaps, too, it explains why Ronald Reagan always kept a jar of jellybeans on his desk—though it is true that his decision-making stemmed from a malady of a different sort.

In any case, the lesson from all this might be: take breaks. Eat candy (or better still, protein). And don’t make important decisions when you’re exhausted (like responding to that nasty email). Most decisions can wait, and will profit from a glucose-rich, rather than a glucose-depleted brain.

Lawrence DiStasi

Growing the Economy

2011-08-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished watching the PBS News Hour (8/16), with a major segment on the problems with Europe’s faltering economy. Sheherezade Rehman, an economics professor from George Washington University, stated the conventional wisdom:

“The real long term issue is growth,” she said. “Without growth, there is no way out of this crisis.”

Barack Obama has been saying the same thing, adding that the growth in jobs can’t come from the government; it has to come from business. And everyone nods, and agrees, and reinforces the point in whatever way possible: our system, corporate capitalism, requires growth. Constant and incessant growth. If growth stops, our economy is in trouble, capitalism is in trouble, capitalism dies.

But wait. What kind of system can sustain constant growth? Is there anything in nature that’s like that? Don’t most systems have limits, lemmings for instance, which grow and grow and then hit a certain point of overpopulation that strains the resources lemmings need, and then they stampede off cliffs in a kind of mass suicide? Or don’t natural systems all have predators which, when a population grows too fast, fatten up on the growing population, thereby cutting it back to a sustainable or balanced level? They do. But not humans; not capitalism. It’s as if capitalism is a kind of cancer: it has to grow and keep growing without cease, without limit, no matter what. Until, that is, the host organism dies.

Many thinkers have noted the logic in this. The constant growth demanded by capitalism drives us to the brink of disaster. With the human population out of control (only in the last few hundred years) we humans are drowning in our own waste, we are destroying the resources (like fossil fuels or rare minerals) needed to keep growing, our oceans and rain forests are being devastated, our water sources are being polluted or emptied. And then, there’s the carbon we’ve poured into our atmosphere, producing a little tent for ourselves that traps heat, leading eventually to a deadly rise in the temperature of the planet. Growth, in a word, is fatal to our planet. One of my neighbors has a bumper sticker that sums this up:

Growing the economy is Shrinking the ecology.

The people who are urging more growth, or lamenting the lack of enough of it, then, are either ignorant or insane. They are ignoring the fact that our only salvation, not as individual communities or nations, but as a species, as a planet, is to stabilize growth. To reduce growth to a sustainable level. And one way to do that, perhaps, is to distribute the wealth we already have more equitably. Since that is unlikely to happen, however, (and this is another subject that’s been getting increasing attention: the astonishing inequality of wealth in the United States, with the top 1% controlling upwards of 90%, and the bottom 40% controlling essentially ZERO—see the same PBS News Hour, 8/16/11), I see only one solution (aside from a mass revolt aimed at killing the obscenely wealthy among us, that is.)

Indeed, in some ways, I think that solution to reduce or stop growth is already under way. People, consumers are not doing this intentionally, of course. They are limiting their buying to absolute necessities because that’s all they can afford: a bit of food, a bit of transportation to jobs, a bit of clothing to cover their asses. And that is precisely what we need. In fact, though, we need even more radical action than that. We need a mass movement, an intentional movement, of outright refusal.

We refuse to take part in this global insanity. We refuse to buy more gadgets we don’t need, faster computers we never asked for, bigger cars we can’t afford to fuel, more elaborate toys to keep our minds off the real issues of life, including our enslavement. We refuse it all. We are boycotting the idiocy of modern capitalism, of planned obsolescence, of disposable diapers and clothes and shoes and packaging for our gadgets and toys and foods, of more and more automation that eliminates jobs for real people so corporate pigs can make more profits, of more and more hospital procedures that extend life beyond the point where it is bearable so hospitals and doctors can get rich. We refuse. We see through the brainwashing (buying beyond what we need is a fairly modern ploy of U.S. capitalism, designed by a few market researchers in the 1920s alarmed at the prospect that mass production had become so efficient that people would soon satisfy all their needs and corporations would drown in un-bought products, and who therefore invented campaigns to stimulate endless psychological desires for useless crap (see the documentary The Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis), we know what brainwashing portends and who profits from it, and we have had enough.

This is what millions need to say directly to corporations, especially those who have moved their “offices” to foreign countries to avoid U.S. taxes. CBS’ 60 Minutes had a segment on this issue Sunday night, and it had me screaming at my TV set where the CEO of Cisco Systems not only admitted that Cisco had moved its corporate headquarters and thousands of jobs to Ireland, but glorified it into a threat that either the United States lower its tax rate to parity with countries like Ireland and Switzerland, or face losing even more corporate taxes. In essence, he and his ilk are holding a gun to our heads, saying if you don’t lower our taxes (already at the lowest point in almost a century), we’ll all be leaving.

If there is a crime called 'treason', this is it.

And my answer, and every refusing American’s answer should be: GO. Take your shit headquarters to whatever country you like, take your shit products with you, and don’t bother coming back. And don’t bother trying to sell your products here either because we will slap a boycott or a tariff upon you and all you produce.

There’s a lot more that I’m thinking, of course, such as the fact, brought up on Yahoo News today, that Pay Pal founder Peter Thiel, one of our wonderful billionaires so incensed about high taxes, has been revealed as a “big backer of the Seasteading Institute.” Guess what this utopian innovation, to which Thiel has recently donated $1.25 million, proposes to do? Well, given that even all their bought-off lackies in Congress may not be enough to protect these money hogs from government intrusion, Seasteading seeks to “build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties.” It’s the ultimate libertarian wet dream. Set up safe havens in international waters

free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details say the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

Nor is this some pie-in-the-sky venture. One rep from the Institute is quoted as saying the group actually plans to launch an “office park off the San Francisco coast next year.” (To see that this isn’t an urban myth, check out http://seasteading.org/ )
And these are our sunshine patriots, tearfully singing America the Beautiful.

So think about it next time you are inclined to buy something. Do you really need it? Can you do without it? Patriotism--not national patriotism but planetary patriotism--demands a short, simple response: I prefer not to. (for more on this, see my “Bartleby Option” at www.lawrencedistasi.com.)

Lawrence DiStasi

Waka in Bolinas

2011-08-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

I was just finishing morning meditation when my neighbor Walter knocked on the door. Toting two cameras, he said, “Come on. You have to see this.” I asked what, as I was getting my shoes on, thinking it might be a large yacht or perhaps some monster pieces of the Bay Bridge nearing completion (we saw some heading to the Golden Gate a couple years ago, shipped in from China where they’d been fabricated). He said nope, and we walked across the field to the cliff overlooking Bolinas Bay. And there lined up was a fleet of seven boats, with these strange double sails that looked a bit like felucca sails on the old fishing boats Italians used to fish San Francisco bay with. Walter had his high-powered binoculars on a tripod so I was able to get a pretty good look. We could see crews on board each strangely marked boat, plus a white yacht accompanying them. At least one Bolinas fishing boat motored out to talk to them and, I found out later, bring them ice cream. Then it became apparent that these were catamarans, double canoes of traditional Maori design, their red sails and prows decorated with fantastic Maori art forms.

Walter explained what he knew. The boats were from New Zealand, and they were on a Pacific voyage to try to draw attention, via traditional sailing craft, to the plight of the oceans and the related plight of many Pacific Islanders threatened by global warming. They were sailing to San Francisco today, to take part in a World Oceans conference for a week. Then they’d head back to New Zealand, probably stopping again at Hawaii where they’d already been, and other Pacific islands from which their crews had come. That they’d decided to stop in Bolinas for the night added a bit of local pride to the visual thrill. Walter had actually seen them yesterday when fishing for salmon (some of which he gave me) out beyond Point Reyes.

I did a little search on the web and eventually found several accounts of what now seemed an almost magical voyage. What I learned was that the Waka (or vaka; the name of their boats) voyagers had left New Zealand on April 13, after traditional ceremonies, and headed for several other islands as well as Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. According to Hoturoa Kerr, chief of the Haunui waka:

“We’ve got people here whose islands have been covered by rising water levels and their fishing grounds are no longer as abundant. We’re trying to raise awareness to people who live thousands of miles away that what they do affects ordinary people who are, in some cases, subsistence living.” (Otago Daily Times, April 13, 2011).

Kerr also pointed out the “eco friendly” nature of the boats, constructed of carved wood and twine, and which use sail power supplemented by solar-powered motors for harbor navigation. Their food would consist of a great deal (they hoped) of caught fish, plus canned and dried goods plus locally-produced organic food. They intended, said Dieter Paulmann, filming the voyage for a documentary, to “map their way in the wake of their ancestors, using the stars, sun, wind, and wildlife as their guides.” The plan was to reach Hawaii by early June where the crews would attend the Kava Bowl Summit 2011 for discussions with scientists, media, political and corporate leaders to create ways to move toward the sustainable use of the ocean’s resources. Then it was on to San Francisco for another ocean conference on Treasure Island, with the return via numerous other Pacific islands, and the 11th Pacific Arts Festival on the Solomon Islands in 2012.

By the time we saw them in Bolinas, the wakas had already labored through the Pacific gyre where a revolting “continent” of plastic debris has taken up residence (see my June 6, 2008, blog, “Plastics etc.”). They had been through storms and food deprivation, as well as space deprivation (16 crew members on each 22-foot craft don’t have much space). But they were clear about their mission. The voyage was a kind of dress rehearsal for what humans were going to have to do on a larger scale:
adapt to dwindling natural resources. Here are a few entries from their website--http://www.pacificvoyagers.org/-- blogs:

After a few minutes of deep breathing and relaxing my mind I got the image of a whale’s tail in my head. It slapped the water. “Listen. Listen to the breathing of the tides and know that all the world beats with one heart, breathes with one breath. I started getting distracted by the music and noise behind me. Slap, slap, slap. “Listen, listen, listen! You (humanity, the waka crews, us as individuals) have a special place. You are the Key….
We do have a special place. It is by our hand that the world and the creatures in it will live or die….
We’ve been becalmed for two days and for two days we’ve been surrounded by all the Life in the sea. Well, seals, dolphins and whales, lots of them. Last night the seals were coming in like aquabats (acrobats with a speech impediment) zigzagging in formation thru the phosphorescence leaving trails of stars behind them. They’ve scared the girls by popping up beside the canoe and barking loudly. They’ve entertained us with their showing off, leaping and jumping, one even going so far as climbing on board the Samoan canoe and sitting on the bow doing nothing and barking at the captain whenever he talked to it (just like the rest of the crew so he tells me)….
And if we hadn’t been halted by the wind we would’ve missed it all. We would’ve zoomed on thru as we do for most of lives, distracted by the music and the white noise of the modern world and really just missing the point.
“Listen, listen, listen!”

and another:

We were told today in an email (thank you Shantparv) that our entry has coincided perfectly with a phase described in the Mayan calendar wherein a great unfolding of consciousness is seen for the first time. I’m all for that! I think a great unfolding of consciousness is somewhat overdue. I think our consciousness has been folded for a very long time. It’s time to take out the creases and realise we’re all on the same page! The healing of the planet will by necessity include the healing of ourselves. We are all essentially the same. We experience all the same stuff in human terms. The words we use to describe Life, the Universe and Everything don’t really matter.

Some lovely photos and quite a few videos are available for viewing on the Pacific Voyage website (http://pacificvoyagers.org/). That’s probably the best way to get a sense of the visual impact these boats and their crews make. Indeed, it’s something no one should miss—though I have to admit that seeing them off my own home coast gave it added juice for me. But you can also “join” they voyage by following along online and sending messages to the crew; they truly appreciate the support and the knowledge that someone is paying attention. And hadn’t we all better do that? The time for action is getting very very short.

Lawrence DiStasi
Image 9/23 Uto Ni Yalo © Tanja Winkler

The Real GOP Agenda

2011-07-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

In the crisis over approving a rise in the debt ceiling which they themselves created, the Republican Party has reached a new high in hypocrisy and cruelty, not to mention madness. But since calling someone “insane” tends to let him or her off the hook (see Anders Breivik and his 1500-page manifesto), I’ll table that as well as the hypocrisy, and get to the point. The GOP has a clear agenda—to cut government to the bone—and that is what needs to be examined. This is because it is obvious that the GOP doesn’t seem to have any problem with government handouts—so long as the handouts go to banks/Wall Street execs, military contractors, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, big Pharma and giant agribusinesses. They also don’t seem to have any axe to grind when it comes to government privileges for their favorite fundamentalist churches and anti-science wackadoos. What they have set their sights on are “entitlement” programs for the poor, the elderly, the underprivileged: you know, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Nevermind that Social Security is paid for over a lifetime of labor by those who get it (providing, by the way, a handy fund for the politicians themselves to “borrow” from whenever they need a little extra cash for a war they refuse to pay for). Nevermind that without Medicare, millions would be deprived of the minimal care that can’t even approach the luxurious health plan the pols have crafted for themselves. The most visible targets are government agencies like the EPA, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Parks, the Department of Education, Head Start, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, OSHA etc; and at the local level, the public schools, the public colleges, the parole and prison departments, and all departments that service, again, the poor, the unprivileged young, the elderly, the handicapped. What they can’t get rid of, they will try to privatize—again for the benefit of their corporate funders.

Consider a few lines from a piece by Nicholas Krisof (“Republicans, Zealots and Our Security”) in last Sunday’s NY Times. He first quotes Congresswoman Rosa Di Lauro:

“The attack on literacy programs reflects a broader assault on education programs,” said Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic member of Congress from Connecticut. She notes that Republicans want to cut everything from early childhood programs to Pell grants for college students. Republican proposals have singled out some 43 education programs for elimination, but it’s not seen as equally essential to end tax loopholes on hedge fund managers.
So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.

What struck me in this last line was Kristof’s qualifier: “however unintentional.” The truth is, the GOP’s rampage against “bloated government” is both quite rational and viciously intentional (again, Anders Breivik comes to mind). It is to gut every program put together by Democrats from FDR’s Depression programs to LBJ’s Great Society, programs to provide not just a minimal safety net for the least fortunate Americans, but opportunity for all those who have been able, finally, to gain a tentative purchase on a decent life by finding government jobs at various levels. This is the whole point of the GOP’s coordinated campaign to destroy unions, “cut waste from government,” and cut taxes. It’s about eliminating the revenue source for those government jobs. It’s about cutting off the voter base—mostly Democrat—that those government jobs represent. And at its core, it’s about putting back in their place—at the lowest levels of society—all those “uppity” minorities who, through government equal-employment mandates, have ‘risen above their station.’ This includes blacks, Hispanics, and women, as well as the lefties and liberals who have long argued for the inclusion of such minorities in America’s prosperity.

It is this that most grates on the Republican zealots—now concentrated more than ever in the South and the West/Midwest. They hate the fact that teachers have tenure and all those “luxurious” pension plans. They hate the perceived “laziness” of government workers with “cushy” jobs and pension plans. Though it may bring them down as well (and it is doing just that; the massive loss of government jobs in the wake of the 2008 collapse is responsible for a large part of the high and persistent unemployment rate), they are willing to sacrifice their own well-being in order to appease their toxic resentment. This resentment is clear in the symbolic language (“to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”) used by the guru of this movement, Grover Norquist. Drown it in the bathtub? What is the size Norquist means here? Baby size? An infant drowned in a bathtub? Who would use such imagery? A privatizing Republican zealot, that’s who. An artist of propaganda, of revenge, of cruelty. The heir to those massive crowds in the pre- and post-Civil War South who could relish the spectacle of torturing, burning, hanging a human being who had dared to transgress their sacred code of two worlds that could never, ever meet.

And with a black man in the White House, that resentment has only festered and grown more virulent, more ugly. Of course not even the most conservative of GOP leaders can come right out and give this voice. So they use the symbolic language of cutting taxes to cut government spending.

But don’t be fooled. If you’re wondering why the GOP is hell-bent on destroying government (even as Republicans and their corporate masters suck from the tit of that same government, and display a fierce determination to re-take its most visible power source), you can start with two simple but toxic causes: racism and resentment. Then add the infinite greed and casual cruelty of the elite (the top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined; median wealth of Anglo households is now 20 times that of black households—see July 27 Pew Research report), and you’re pretty much there.

Lawrence DiStasi

Mondegreens

2011-07-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

I was reading James Gleick’s new book, The Information, the other day, and came across this new (relatively; it was added to dictionaries in this century) word that struck me as both hilarious and fertile. It’s mondegreen, and it refers to a situation that most of us have experienced at one time or another: You hear a line of poetry or music, and interpret it in your own unique—and erroneous—way. Here’s the type case, recorded by Sylvia Wright in her essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” published in Harper’s in 1954. As a girl, Wright wrote, she misheard the ballad “The Bonny Earl O’Moray,” which her mother would always read to her, as follows:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

This made sense to a young girl, until she discovered the real last line:

“And laid him on the green.”

As I thought about this later, it sounded more and more hilarious, perhaps because I heard a mondegreen even more ridiculous when I was a child. It involved the Lord’s Prayer, whose last line (in the Catholic rendering) was: “And deliver us from evil.” Now for some reason, that didn’t make sense to me—I suppose because I knew about delivering things to someone, but what could possibly be meant by delivering me from something, and particularly something like “evil.” What, I was to become a package that the Lord would deliver? Whatever the reason, instead of “from,” I heard “And deliver us strom evil,” which of course doesn’t make sense either, but that’s how I heard it. To my 6- or 7-year old mind, it apparently made more sense. I can’t even remember when I figured out the real words.

It appears that lots of people have mondegreens in their past, and maybe in their present too. Here are some others Wright herself suggested:

Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23)
The wild, strange battle cry "Haffely, Gaffely, Gaffely, Gonward." ("Half a league, half a league,/ Half a league onward," from "The Charge of the Light Brigade").

Wikipedia provides more examples, the first from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, whose top all-time favorite submissions from readers include:

“There's a bathroom on the right (the line at the end of each verse of "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bad moon on the rise")

This points to Gleick’s notion that mondegreens have been proliferating more lately due to mass forms of communication such as the internet. Thus, the most misheard lyric of all time may be a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light,” where the line, “revved up like a deuce,” is heard by millions as “wrapped up like a douche.”

What’s behind mondegreens is the simple, but not obvious fact that our perceptions are not passive, but actively constructed by our brains. Our brains constantly seek meaning in what we see, hear, smell, touch. If what we perceive doesn’t make sense to us (at whatever age or level of understanding), then our brains construct an interpretation that fits our understanding or our preferences or our expectations based on the world we commonly experience. Since lyrics in music are notoriously hard to understand, it is often lyrics that get mangled into mondegreens. What may be oddest about mondegreens, though, is what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker notes about them: “that the mishearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics.” To wit, “deliver us strom evil.”

Implausible or ridiculous or silly, something about these things just tickles me. Here are some more.

Bennie and the Jets: “She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit.”
mondegreen: “She’s got electric boobs, and mohair shoes.”
Malachy McCourt, from the Hail Mary: “Blessed art Thou amongst women.”
mondegreen: “Blessed art Thou a monk swimming.”
Beverly Cleary’s Ramona on The Star Spangled Banner: “By the dawn’s early light.”
mondegreen: “By the dawnzer lee light.”
“Away in a Manger:” “The cattle are lowing/ The poor Baby wakes”
mondegreen: “The cattle are lonely…”
“God Rest Ye merry, Gentlemen:” “God rest ye merry, gentlemen/ Let nothing you dismay”
mondegreen: “Get dressed ye married gentlemen/ Let nothing through this May.”
“The Pledge of Allegiance:” “I pledge allegiance to the flag.”
mondegreen: “I led the pigeons to the flag.”
“He’s Got the Whole World:” “He’s got the whole world in his hand”
mondegreen: “He’s got the whole world in his pants.”
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:” “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”
mondegreen: “The girl with colitis goes by.”

What more is there to say? Perhaps to recommend just a little more ability to laugh at ourselves: We so often get the words, and the world, wrong.

Lawrence DiStasi

And Justice For All

2011-07-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you: I’m no fan of the so-called “justice system” in America these days. “Liberty and Justice for All?” Don’t make me laugh. Because what we have is a system that has become so rigged—against the poor and unfortunate, in favor of the rich and powerful—that the line in the Pledge of Allegiance begins to seem a sick joke.

Consider just some recent instances. Jaycee Dugard just gave her first in-depth interview to one of our blonde sweeties on TV, and though what she said had mostly sentimental interest (we all wait breathlessly for such people to cry or at least tear up), the reminder of how easily a convicted sex offender outwitted his parole officers for 18 years—officers who made over 60 visits to the property where Phillip Garrido held Jaycee and her two children without ever once thinking to look in the backyard; with one such visit actually videotaped by Garrido’s “wife” showing this idiot parole officer being led around the house and ushered out the door before he could even think to ask about the backyard horror show—leaves one gasping for breath. So does the reminder that after a neighbor called 911 to report the presence of two young girls in this sex offender’s backyard, a sheriff was duly dispatched to the place BUT limited his visit to the front porch and some fluff questions of Garrido, again without ever looking into the backyard! Even when the parole department was informed by a UC Berkeley policewoman that she had seen Garrido on campus several times with two young girls who appeared “robotic,” these cretins tried to explain the young girls away as “perhaps his granddaughters.” Until some Sherlock realized that since Garrido had no daughters, granddaughters might be problematic, and so called him in; whereupon he solved their case for them by bringing in the whole family, Dugard and all.

Now mix with what Frontline displayed on their riveting program this week. Titled “The Confessions,” it related the case of the “Norfolk 4,” a group of US Navy underlings who ran into the buzz saw of a rape/murder case and paid dearly (no “support our troops” blather here). That is, a fellow Navy man returned to his garden apartment to find his wife Michelle Bosko raped and murdered, whereupon his neighbor Danial Williams, himself married for little more than a week, came to his aid, called 911, and reported the crime. Enter the brilliant cops of Norfolk, VA, who decided it was this good Samaritan neighbor who had done the deed, and called him in for questioning. “Questioning” is a euphemism here, for after the female detective, Maureen Evans, in charge was unable to wring a confession out of Williams, she called in the “bulldog” of the force, Detective Robert Glenn Ford. Ford was notorious for his interrogation technique, one apparently modeled on Rambo types like Sipowicz on NYPD Blue. And sure enough, after about eleven hours of denials, and assurances that he had failed his lie detector test (he hadn’t), Danial Williams succumbed to Ford’s grilling and confessed. Not only did he confess, he gave details of the crime, such as beating Michelle with his shoe. The only problem was that Danial’s confession didn’t match the forensics; Michelle wasn’t hit with a shoe, she was stabbed and strangled. Danial was then induced to amend his confession to match the details he had been given by the detectives (itself a crime), and the investigation was closed.

But four months later, another problem: Danial’s DNA didn’t match the semen recovered from the crime scene. Now, rather than admitting their mistake, detectives “reasoned” that there must be an accomplice, and they picked up Williams’ roommate on the USS Saipan, Joe Dick. It was now Dick’s turn to be grilled by Detective Ford. And eventually, the poor sailor confessed as well, actually coming to believe that he had been involved in the crime (he hadn’t). The police then asked for his DNA and he gave both hair and blood samples thinking he’d surely be in the clear. But though his DNA didn’t (and couldn’t) match the crime, this didn’t exonerate him either; the Norfolk police simply concluded that there must be yet another accomplice, and grilled Dick to supply one.

To make a long story short, the police eventually got no less than seven men charged as accomplices in the crime. Four of them (Williams, Dick, Eric Wilson, Derek Tice), after intense interrogations, gave the police confessions, and under pressure even named three others (Rick Pauley, Geoffrey Farris, John Danser) as accomplices. Still, though, that pesky DNA match refused to turn up. What is even more bizarre is that a DNA match did eventually turn up; it belonged to a sex offender in prison, Omar Abdul Ballard, who wrote to a friend boasting that it had been he who had raped and murdered Michelle Bosko. The letter made its way to the police, and when Ballard’s DNA was compared to that found at the crime scene, it matched. Now, at last, the police had their man. Surely the others would be released; or at least this is the way it would have happened on TV. But this was real life in a real case, with defendants who are not wealthy, nor gifted with much confidence or self-esteem, not to mention a police force and a justice system—this is Virginia, after all, the state with the third highest death penalty conviction rate in the nation—that doesn’t have any truck with bleeding-heart liberal presumptions like the one that presumes a person is innocent until proven guilty. No, these are tough guys (and girls) who believe in their innate ability to see through the lies and denials of bad guys, and their sacred duty to put them away, DNA be damned. Besides, they had those detailed confessions. So they came up with the most preposterous scenario of all: the Navy suspects had run into Ballard in the parking lot of the apartment complex, and conspired to all go in and rape Michelle Bosko. The confessions—at least of the four above—proved it. So three men were acquitted, but five of them—the actual killer, Ballard, and the four sailors who had confessed—were all convicted and sentenced to prison, most to languish there (from eight to thirteen years) until a reluctant Governor Kaine, yielding to growing publicity, granted the four conditional pardons that released them but did not overturn their convictions. They are still convicted felons and registered sex offenders.

Frontline’s web page has several auxiliary articles about this case that reveal some astonishing research. First, confessions are an ironclad element in most prosecutions, convincing not only the police but also prosecutors, judges, juries, and even the defendants’ lawyers of a suspect’s guilt. Especially when it contains details of the crime which an innocent defendant could not know, the confession remains an irrefutable demonstration of guilt in the minds of most people. Otherwise, why would an innocent person confess?

The answer is that it is surprisingly easy to get a person to confess after hours of grilling by bulldog cops like Robert Ford. Countless research projects have proved this, including one by law professor Richard Leo, who was interviewed on the Frontline program. In a 2009 paper (“False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, Implications,” J Ac Ad Psychiatry Law 37:332– 43, 2009) Leo details the personality types who are most susceptible to police pressure: they are often those “who are highly suggestible, (and) tend to have poor memories, high levels of anxiety, low self-esteem, and low assertiveness.” In addition they tend to be conflict avoiders, acquiescent, and most important in the Norfolk 4 case, “eager to please others, especially authority figures.” Conditions like sleep deprivation, fatigue, and drug and alcohol withdrawal add to their susceptibility. All or most of these conditions were met in the case of the Norfolk 4, including those conditions specifically designed to entrap the innocent: isolation, disempowerment, and the type of high stress that some individuals find almost unbearable. Add to this the type of psychological coercion that interrogators like Robert Ford specialize in (assuring the suspect that the only way out is to confess; alternately threatening and offering to provide leniency for cooperation; lying to the suspect about evidence, like the result of lie detector tests or the presence of confirming witnesses; and feeding information to the suspect to guide him in providing details of the crime he has supposedly committed). All of these are highly illegal procedures, but unless a videotape is made of the interrogation, the suspect has no way of proving that his confession was coerced or even guided. And the prosecution has that damning evidence, the confession, to cinch its case. Still, can even these techniques actually persuade an innocent person to sign a detailed confession of his guilt? Though most people believe they cannot, the Norfolk 4 case and numerous others prove that they can, and do, and have: as one researcher (Kassin) notes, “the pages of legal history are filled with stories of coerced-compliant confessions.”

One other macabre note to this Norfolk 4 case: Detective Robert Glenn Ford, the man who extracted (one might even say “authored”) those confessions, was subsequently charged with criminal conduct of his own: taking “bribes from criminals in exchange for getting them favorable treatment in court.” The Virginia Pilot noted that “on February 25, 2011, Robert Glenn Ford was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison following his conviction in 2010 for extortion and lying to the FBI.” But not even this proof of corruption by Ford was enough to convince the legal system it had made a mistake. On March 2, even after Governor Tim Kaine’s pardon, Chief Judge Everett Martin dismissed petitions filed by Williams, Dick, and Wilson that their convictions be thrown out. The judge said that “evidence was lacking” to support the claim that Ford’s conviction should invalidate his questionable interrogations in the Norfolk 4 case. Nothing, it seems, can stop the wheels of the law from grinding onward, corruption and DNA proof be damned.

This is actually what I wanted to write about. Justice, in our vaunted system, is supposed to be impartial. The female image of Justice with a blindfold conveys the idea: justice is blind, i.e., blind to differences that might favor one group over another. But in actual practice, it is the administrators of alleged justice—police, prosecutors, judges and juries—who prove to be blind in the most pernicious sense. American jails offer mute testimony to this, filled as they are with the unfortunate discards that our society increasingly finds superfluous, countless people of color who are sentenced for drug crimes, for third-strike often-petty crimes, and as we now know, those like the Norfolk 4 who are coerced into plea bargains or coerced confessions with the promise of staying out of the death chamber. At the other end of the spectrum are those whom “justice” favors: police like Johannes Mehserle, actually filmed killing a black man on the Bart platform in Oakland, yet sentenced to a mere two years in prison; the countless high-rollers on Wall Street whose crime was global in bringing down the entire financial system, but who as yet remain unpunished; the lawyers advising the Bush administration (John Yoo et. al.), who literally legalized torture and war, yet are never charged; “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney, who got a slap on the wrist (30 months in prison, the sentence then commuted by Pres. Bush) for his role in lying and other crimes related to his outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

What this comes down to is that the enforcers of our great system—and I include cops on the beat, parole officers, and those “officers of the court,” the lawyers, prosecutors and judges; as well as the soldiers who kill for the empire in wars and “police actions” around the globe like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, et. al.—have a very clear assignment. It is not to protect the innocent, the poor, the helpless women and children we hear and see so much about on the TV programs designed to valorize and glorify the FBI, the cops, and our heroes in battle. It is to protect the life, liberty and property of the rich and the powerful. All other functions are in the nature of a “by the way.” This is easiest to see in foreign policy. The wars we have engaged in over the last half-century and more have been increasingly (perhaps always) aimed at places and countries where American business has vital property interests and investments. Since America is a global empire whose chief policy is “globalization,” the bases meant to protect these investments now number more than 1,000 (“The Worldwide Network of U.S. Military Bases, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5564, counts 737 foreign bases in 63 countries, plus bases in continental U.S., covering millions of acres). Any nation that dares to arrogate to itself too much of its own natural or unnatural resources is quickly disabused of the notion, by force if necessary. The war in Iraq is only the latest large example of this procedure. Smaller actions in Guatemala, Honduras, and Haiti, and threats to Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Pakistan provide smaller instances. If we accept Proudhon’s notion that “property is theft” (we could also use deSade’s formulation, “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation” or Saint Ambrose’s “the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen”), we can conclude that “law” enforcement (including the military) primarily serves to protect systems of organized theft and the enslavement of the masses. Looking at the history of supposed free democracies like our own and, more recently, Israel, we can see that nation states are organized around this simple principle: expropriate the land and resources from the indigenous (and necessarily weaker) people who live there, and then create powerful armies and constabularies to protect and extend the theft—both the original one, and the continuing subtler expropriations by those in power (usually those who got to steal the property earliest).

“Justice” can then be shaped in two ways: for the masses, systems of mass propaganda to persuade the plebes that all have the same opportunities to gain power and obtain justice; for the elites, welcome access to the halls of legislation creating the “justice” that allows them to increasingly consolidate their power and add to their property. Thus, both property and justice are cumulative, increasing almost like forces of nature. In the opposite direction, slavery is also cumulative, increasing in proportion as justice for the many diminishes. By slavery, here, I mean not only the original kind enslaving those from Africa; I mean also the kind of powerlessness that led the Norfolk 4 (and thousands of others like them) to serve years in prison, even though a rational assessment of the evidence would have freed them years before. I mean the loss of property by millions in the housing and retirement-fund debacle of 2008, at the same time that the financial perpetrators of that debacle made off with billions, much of it provided by the government (i.e. John Q. Taxpayer) without any accountability whatever, with, rather, more wealth than ever.

As for the solution to this systemic rapine, I don’t have much to offer. One thought that occurs, though, especially after witnessing the outrageous injustice in the Norfolk 4 case, is this: turn the tables. Give the rich (and their Republican lackeys) a choice, one reflective of the choice offered to coerced suspects: they can either share the burden of the debacle they helped create by paying far more taxes, or they can take their chances as targets of the revolutionary tumbrels even now rumbling towards them. It’s their choice (and isn’t free choice the value our system cherishes most?)

Lawrence DiStasi

Tomatoland

2011-07-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

One of the keys to eating these days is to strictly avoid knowing too much about where your food comes from. My last blog about modern pork-growing made that point, as have numerous books and documentaries like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the documentary Food, Inc., both of which show us the horrors of industrial meat growing. The latest addition to these nightmares is Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, by former editor of Gourmet Magazine, Barry Estabrook. The book has been showing up on radio shows recently, like NPR’s "All Things Considered," and Terry Gross’ "Fresh Air." I heard a segment on ATC the other day, and though we’ve all known for years that supermarket tomatoes, especially in winter, taste like wax, we didn’t know the whole gory story. Estabrook provides the details and it may make you swear off fresh tomatoes forever, except for those that come from your own garden.

That indeed, is how Estabrook starts out, reminding us that even in Vermont where he lives, he can take a patch of ground, put in a tomato seedling, and a couple of months later harvest something that tastes like a tomato. Then he notes that he recently asked Monica Ozores-Hampton, the chief guru for tomato farmers in Florida, what would happen if this same procedure were applied in Florida, and she simply replied “Nothing.” When Estabrook pressed her, she added:

“There would be nothing left of the seedling, not a trace. The soil here doesn't have any nitrogen, so it wouldn't have grown at all. The ground holds no moisture, so unless you watered regularly, the plant would certainly die. And, if it somehow survived, insect pests, bacteria, and fungal diseases would destroy it.” (quoted from excerpt of Tomatoland, (http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato)

And yet, one-third of all the fresh tomatoes grown in the U.S. are grown in Florida. How could this be? As Estabrook himself says, given the soil conditions—Florida’s tomatoes are grown on pure sand, in an environment rife with tons of bacteria and other “pests” that if left alone (the lack of winter allows them to multiply like fleas) would make mince-meat of a tomato crop—you would have to be an “idiot” to try growing tomatoes commercially in Florida. So, again, why are tomatoes Florida’s most valuable—in money terms, that is, amounting to about $1.5 billion annually--crop?

That’s what Estabrook’s book is about. And the story he tells is as revolting as the parallel stories about the American way of growing pigs, or cattle, or chickens or corn or any other industrial crop. That’s because tomatoes in Florida have to be virtually manufactured. Estabrook uses another metaphor, to convey what Florida growers must do to overcome soil with no nutrients or water, and teeming with insects and fungi—total war:

Florida growers have to wage what amounts to total war against the elements. Forget the Hague Convention: We're talking about chemical, biological, and scorched-earth warfare against the forces of nature.

In truth, the metaphor of “total war against nature” pretty much describes all large-scale agriculture in the United States because that is what has happened in this country since World War II. Farming, small family farming that is, once the backbone of our great democracy (forgetting slavery and a few other problems), took its cue from the total war of WWII, and became a chemicalized, machine-dominated pursuit that only huge agribusinesses could compete in. The growing of tomatoes in Florida is a perfect type case (though if you look into wheat, soy or corn farming in the Midwest these days, you’d see equally revolting instances of the same paradigm.)

In the tomato case, though, it’s even more manufactured due to the soil. Because where the prairies of the Midwest, at one time, consisted of huge expanses of rich, virgin soil, Florida’s terrain is pretty much sand. To turn sand into a growing medium, you have to add a few things: water, for one. But of course, sand won’t hold water, so the growers adopt the technique of flooding entire areas with some of the abundant ground water in Florida. It’s called “seepage irrigation” and it involves pumping huge quantities of water into the canals and ditches that cross farmers’ fields, letting the water seep down into the impermeable hard pan that underlies the sand, and letting the water “seep outward, moistening the sand from below.” Only in Florida could such irrigation be done because it has the necessary ingredients: sand for soil and that impermeable hard pan to keep the water from draining even further down.

After water, the next problem with sand is its lack of nutrients. This is where U of Florida Prof. Ozores-Hampton comes in. Originally from Chile, her specialty is soil nutrients and “the optimal level at which fertilizers should be applied so as to maximize production, leaving as little surplus nitrogen and potassium in the soil as possible” (so as to minimize costly waste as well as complaints about polluting groundwater, lakes and rivers in Florida’s vulnerable habitats like the Everglades). And if you were wondering just how much and how many fertilizer and chemical nutrients are required to make sand yield tomatoes, Estabrook has an answer: a lot. Some comes from cover crops planted in the off-season (the normal growing season of spring to summer); some comes from the laboratory. But that’s only the beginning; there are also those pesky bacteria and fungi thriving in Florida’s year round warmth and humidity to keep under control. In an interview Estabrook noted that Florida “applies more than 8 times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower.” He added:

“In order to get a successful crop of tomatoes, the official Florida handbook for tomato growers lists 110 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides that can be applied to a tomato field over the course of the growing season. And many of those are what the Pesticide Action Network calls ‘bad actors’ — they’re kind of the worst of the worst in the agricultural chemical arsenal.”

So you’ve got chemicals for nutrients and chemicals to kill all the buggies that want to eat those nutrients, and then chemicals (ethylene gas) to fumigate the green, rock-hard tomatoes (growers have been breeding rock-hard tomatoes for years, at first so they could be picked by machine) that result so that they’ll turn orange or red at the proper time (they are required to keep for at least 10 days from the time they’re picked), and voila—picture-perfect, firm, tomatoes…that taste like plastic. But not to worry about the taste: as Estabrook explains, growers reason that they’re not paid to grow tasty tomatoes; they’re paid to grow tomatoes that will look good for as long as possible to taste-deaf American consumers.

All this, of course, says nothing about the temporary labor force required to pick all these tomatoes. Estabrook doesn’t mince words here. Describing the Mexicans and Guatemalans who make up this labor force, he says outright that it’s slavery:

“I came into this book chronicling a case of slavery in southwestern Florida that came to light in 2007 and 2008. And it was shocking. I’m not talking about near-slavery or slavery-like conditions. I’m talking about abject slavery. These were people who were bought and sold. These were people who were shackled in chains at night or locked in the back of produce trucks with no sanitary facilities all night. These were people who were forced to work whether they wanted to or not and if they didn't, they were beaten severely. If they tried to escape, they were either beaten worse or in some cases, they were killed. And they received little or no pay. It sounds like 1850. ... There have been seven [legal cases] in the last 10 or 15 years ... successfully brought to justice in Florida involving slavery. And 1,200 people have been freed. The U.S. Attorney for the district in Southern Florida claims that that just represents a tiny, tiny tip of an iceberg because it’s extraordinarily difficult to prosecute a modern-day slavery case.”

Of course, the growers have recently caved in to demands from a workers’ association (with prior pressure from Taco Bell, alarmed at the bad publicity slavery generates) to provide the workers with a penny more per pound picked, and even some tarps to provide the poor bastards with some shade. But it didn’t happen before a long, drawn-out fight. And with all the anti-immigrant laws being passed by states such as Arizona and Georgia, who knows how long it will last? Or how long before the need for these desperate migrant slaves disappears entirely—to succumb, like so many other jobs, to some more highly evolved machine.

Meantime, though, most Americans can continue to enjoy their year-round tomatoes, a continuing tribute, if only unconsciously, to the triumph of American technology over American taste—or American conscience.

Lawrence DiStasi

More Piggish than Pigs

2011-07-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

My diet doesn’t include much pork—every week or two I will have a sausage and pepper sandwich, and perhaps once a year, eat pork roast on a holiday. But after this week, I will eat pork products no more: no sausage, no ham, no bacon, no pork chops, no salami or prosciutto. That’s because I’ve been jolted by more detailed information on what I’ve long known was a scandal, the corporatized factory-farming of pigs run by huge conglomerates like Smithfield Inc—the largest pork producer in the world. These are the folks that advertise their lovely sliced hams on the tube, evoking the recent past when pigs were raised by countless rural families (I used to see and hear a neighbor in suburban Connecticut slaughter his pig each year, a gory business but local, and known and understood by all as simply a family’s way of getting good clean meat for the year). The reality of today’s pork production, however, is far different and far more alarming.

The numbers alone are staggering: 27 million hogs killed in one year by Smithfield alone, equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of 32 of America’s largest cities. More astonishing is the quantity of pig excrement produced in these factory farms—because hogs produce three times more shit than a human being. As noted in Jeff Teitz’s, “Boss Hog,” Rolling Stone, December 2006:

The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums.

And what do the hog producers do with all this shit? It’s enough to make you swear off pork, in fact off all meat produced by America’s industrial farm system, forever. Typically, the excrement is stored in ponds euphemistically called “lagoons.” So many chemicals pour into these lagoons via the antibiotics and other “medicines” needed to keep pigs more or less free of the bacteria that thrive in their crowded quarters that the ponds become toxic to anything that falls into them (several fatal cases of workers and even truckers falling into these lagoons have been documented by investigators—see “Boss Hog,” noted above ). The runoff from the ponds is equally toxic to rivers and bays and their fish; at one point, Smithfield, under attack for fouling the waters in North Carolina so badly that it was fined millions by the EPA, decided to engage in what it called “pollution control.” And what was that? Here’s what Teitz observed:

Looking down from a plane, we watch as several of Smithfield’s farmers spray their
hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison control center and described her symptoms. “Ma'am,” the poison-control officer told her, “the only symptoms of hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately.”

Never ones to waste anything, Smithfield’s operators then used the shit spray to fertilize nearby fields, supplying the feed to both the hogs and other farm animals. A perfect “made-in-America” solution, except for the fact that this nitrate-laden hay made livestock sick. But then, every solution has a down side. A few sick cattle, a few asthmatic humans breathing shit in their air, are nothing compared to the ingeniously productive farm methods of corporate America (Smithfield’s sales for the year ending in April 2010 were over $11 billion, with 48,000 employees).

As to the animals themselves, well they’re only pigs after all. Housing them—the artificially-inseminated females, that is, producing more little piggies for Smithfield—in fiendish devices called “gestation crates,” is no more than they deserve. And what are gestation crates? They’re cramped metal cages “too small to turn around in, devoid of sunlight, straw, air or earth.” The sows, which produce and nurse five to eight litters in their four years of existence, literally go mad from their confinement, biting the metal bars till they bleed, with immune systems completely broken down. When these conditions were publicized, Smithfield in 2007 (and several other hog producers) vowed to eliminate the crates from their facilities. But then, in 2009, Smithfield reneged on its commitment, saying the transition to more humane pens would be too costly. In 2010, yet another investigation, this time by the Humane Society, produced a report, with video, of the same inhumane conditions at Smithfield facilities. The video and excerpts from its report can be seen on http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Smithfield_Foods, but be careful: it will break your heart if it doesn’t nauseate you first.

The latest bit of news about the nation’s hog farming, this time from an operation in Iowa, the state with the highest hog production in the country, asked a new question: “Animal Cruelty: Could a Barbaric Pig-Handling Video Hurt Major Grocery Chains?” Posted on Time.com, and on Yahoo News on June 30, 2011, the new report tells of a
“horrific undercover video” shot by the group Mercy For Animals. It showed the brutal treatment of hogs as they are confined (tails docked or “cut off”; pigs casually tossed across pens by workers; sickly ones slammed head-first on the floor to eliminate them) and slaughtered. To record his findings, the investigator got himself hired and worked undercover for several months (several states have now banned such recording of industrial operations by these bleeding hearts). And what the article wonders is, will this cause consumers to boycott pork at the big chain stores specifically supplied by this producer: Kroger’s, Safeway, Costco and Hy-Vee?

One can only hope this is the least that results. As for me, I repeat my vow: refusal to eat any pork product whatever, perhaps any meat product either. Because what has been revealed about pigs is no aberration on America’s vile torture-farms. Rather it is the rule. Efficiency and profit are all that matters. And the worst part is that we are exporting that “efficiency” and “profit-making” and “torture” all over the world. One of the expedients used by Smithfield in the face of all the negative publicity they’ve been getting is to buy up huge facilities in Poland and Rumania to transfer their operations there.

And if those operations succumb to public revulsion as well? Perhaps a special place in hell—with a nice hot suite of offices for those in charge, including visitor facilities for the politicians who enable them—could be fitted out.

Lawrence DiStasi

Joko

2011-06-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

Her name was Charlotte Beck, she was trained at Oberlin as a pianist, she came to Zen practice in her forties, and after she was authorized to teach she set out in her own, uniquely American direction. Mainly, she eschewed most formalities and titles (she stopped shaving her head and wore plain skirts and tops rather than robes, though she kept her Dharma name, “Joko”) and emphasized not “enlightenment experiences” but coming to grips with daily life and its problems. If a student told her about an ‘experience,’ she would say, “Yeah, that’s O.K. Don’t hold onto it. And how are you getting along with your mother?”

I started to study with her in the 80s and sat several “sesshins” with her, one at her zendo in San Diego, most in Oakland. Though she eschewed formality (her second book is titled Nothing Special), she was nevertheless a formidable figure: big-boned, plainspoken, imposing, authoritative. Too, she urged one to be “meticulous” in everything concerned with practice: meticulous attention to one’s thoughts and emotions (she grouped them together as “emotion/thoughts”), meticulous attention to the physical care of one’s sitting space, to whatever job one was given. She never sugar-coated what we were doing or what life was about, often saying without ornament that it was hopeless, or simply, a mess. Once she compared our condition to someone falling from a tall building: ‘Are you going to focus on what the scenery is like or what your real situation is?’ In a recent interview, she said that the important thing in Zen practice is “Learning how to deal with one’s personal, egotistic self. That’s the work. Very, very difficult.” In Nothing Special she wrote, “Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher. (47)” She also told me once, after a betrayal, that there is no one we can truly trust (in this she was following Huang-Po, one of the great Zen masters, who told his students, “There is nothing on which you can rely.”)

She knew this first hand. Her own life included disappointments and betrayals, not least her discovery that her own teacher, Maezumi Roshi of Los Angeles, could not control his drinking or his sexual attraction to her daughter. Her break with the traditional style of zen teaching came partly as a result of this. She determined that her style of zen would not sweep such ‘mundane’ concerns under the rug, but would place them at the center of practice. What resulted was one of the most influential modes of teaching and expression (her genius for making Buddhism accessible and comprehensible to westerners was uparalleled) in American Zen. For Joko, Zen was not some mystical, baffling presentation of esoteric stories or doctrines aimed at transcendence. It focused on the problems of everyday life—but as meditated upon in the very particular, silent environment of zen training—and with the guidance of an experienced teacher.

Of the many brilliant phrases I heard her utter, one sticks in my mind. I’m not sure what her subject was—perhaps something about being judgmental, or our penchant for putting ourselves above others—but at some point she said this:

“Everyone is trying their best.”

It’s as simple yet profound a sentence as one can imagine, the insight that, in essence, we are all always trying to do the best we can. This includes those who shine in a task, as well as those who fail miserably. It includes those who have endless talent as well as those who are hopelessly inept. It includes those who work hard and honestly as well as those who slough off and cheat; those who sacrifice themselves on behalf of others, and those who scheme to secure their own advantage; those who push through to victory and those who give up too early. It does not leave out the lame, the halt, the criminal, the saintly, the deluded and the visionary, the luminary and the suicide. It is, really, the ultimate expression of compassion and, typical of Joko Beck, without a shred of fake optimism or sugary solace in a divine plan. It is simply a profound insight into the fact that everyone is different, everyone is differently endowed, and that everyone is conditioned by whatever set of circumstances prevail at a given moment. In such a world view, the outcome of any situation is simply what conditions make it, with no grounds for anyone taking credit over anyone else. Taking credit, or assigning blame are the functions of that “personal, egotistic self” one has to study and know, and see for the self-coddling illusions they are. By contrast, comprehending that everyone, without exception, is trying their best is to see with the eye of compassion upon which Buddhism, or any spiritual tradition is founded. It is, I would suggest, the arrow pointing towards true wisdom.

Lest anyone think that because she spoke such words, Joko Beck was proof against the frailties of the egotistic self, it should also be noted that her retirement led to a public conflict with those she left in charge of her Zen Center, and a formal break with them. The letter she wrote on that occasion is living proof that she was not exempt from the mess of “emotion/thought.” But of course, she never claimed to be. She was “nothing special,” a frail and courageous human being who was, like all the rest of us, simply “trying her best.”

Joke Beck died, at age 94, on June 15. Though she would have scorned any notion of the ‘special’ place she occupied in American Zen, the truth is, she did. She will be missed.

Lawrence DiStasi

Wieners, State Murder, and Morality

2011-06-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to ignore these days: sex scandals by the powerful (Congressman Anthony Wiener, Presidential candidate John Edwards, French Director of the IMF Dominque Strauss-Kahn, ex-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, ex-NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, and dozens of lesser lights) provide us with one amusing spectacle of self-immolation after another (isn’t it always amusing to see the fall of a narcissist?) Less amusing and more ominous are the increasing episodes of powerful leaders turning their military might on their own people: the government-directed thugs in Egypt’s Tahrir Square now seem like choirboys compared to the savagery unleashed on protestors by “leaders” in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and nearly everywhere else these days, where those in power seem quite willing to murder their own people to keep it. Indeed, it seems that the major use of the military these days is to exterminate internal dissent: it happens no less frequently in Israel (murderous attacks on the Palestinians whom Israel, as an occupying power, is by law bound to protect) than in Iran; with the related threat clear in every so-called “advanced democracy” to spy on and cripple any form of even consideration about dissent that may raise its head (“domestic terrorist” is the appellation given in the U.S.).

What this leads me to (aside from dreaming about actual revolution) is speculation about what drives apparently sane men (and sometimes women) to the kind of immorality, or amorality, that is so conspicuous these days: sexual misconduct suitable to teenagers, or the casual murder of the innocent. The two seem related, if only to the extent that, as the old saw goes, Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Indeed, a recent piece on the corruption inherent in sexual misadventures by politicians puts it this way: politics “selects for people with risk-taking behavior and a high degree of self-regard” (Katherine Zernike, NY Times, 6/12/11). So you get people in power who are narcissistic juveniles deluded into thinking they’re gods. Some might even call them psychopaths.

Is this the answer, then? That the people who, as leaders, commit stupid and terrible acts, are self-selected psychos?

Probably many would like to believe that; because what it implies is that we, the normal ones, the moral ones, aren’t prone to such behavior. We would never do such things. It was to test this thesis that Philip Zimbardo, in 1975, embarked on a now-famous study known as The Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo has written about this in a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House: 2007). The conclusions are stunning and quite discomfiting. What the study (graduate students were told they were to engage in an experiment about prisons; some were chosen as “guards” while others were chosen as “prisoners”) found was that it was startlingly easy to elicit violent and aggressive behavior by the “guards,” even though they had been selected for stability and told they were engaged in an experiment with fellow students. Once they were put in the role of “guards,” that is, the students began to act like authoritarian and even sadistic controllers of those subject to their whims. The “prisoners,” by contrast, in the role of the controlled, began to break down with crying, depression and disorganized thinking, to the point that by the fifth day of the experiment all asked to be released from the game and the experiment had to be stopped ahead of time.

What this indicates is that even playing roles for which they had no previous experience led apparently decent people to become torturers and bullies. As one summary of the study put it:

The Zimbardo prison study, like the Milgram study, was valuable in showing how easily ordinary people could slip into a brutal and aggressive pattern of behavior, especially if it was approved by an authority. (from Psychology: An Introduction, by Russsell A. Dewey, PhD, (http://www.intropsych.com/ch15_social/zimbardos_prison_study.html). (NB: the earlier Milgram study demonstrated that normal subjects could be easily persuaded to punish “learners” with what they thought were powerful electric shocks, if they were urged to by authorities).

This study (and previous studies, including Hannah Arendt’s examination of the Nazis who committed horrifying acts in the guise of “just doing my job,” which led her to coin the term, “the banality of evil”) thus means that, to a degree yet to be determined, most humans are quite capable of immoral or amoral behavior. More, it means that, to some extent, humans conform to the role they are given to play. The role itself—be it prison guard or U.S. Congressman or head of state—determines how those in that role behave. Those who manage to get themselves into a position of power, that is, often find that the immunity from punishment the position confers leads them to behaviors that they might otherwise contemplate with disgust or condemnation. We can see this on a smaller scale in our own lives: if we think we can get away with it, we might run a red light or cheat on our taxes. If we are authorized to exercise power over others, even over students (as teachers) or our own children (as parents), we might become authoritarian and punitive to a degree that shocks us in retrospect. Of course, this is always justified as being “for your own good.”

If we agree, then, that humans are capable of brutal or evil actions, the question becomes why? Are we as humans naturally inclined to behave badly and simply await the right opportunity? Or are we naturally inclined to be good and moral, and get drawn to brutal behavior by circumstances—either the role we are given, or the deprivation we are desperate to move out of? And more deeply, do we have a choice, i.e. are we equipped with free will to choose one or the other? Or are we driven like automatons by forces deeper than we know? Did Anthony Wiener, to get specific, have control over his computer finger in sending out his silly photograph? Or was he compelled to take that idiotic risk (what could possibly be the payoff for such a risk?) by internal or external forces beyond his conscious control? And what about the monsters like Syrian President Assad, who has killed thousands of his own people? Or the King of Bahrain who brought in Saudi forces to kill his own people for seeking a better life? Or any of a million others we could name?

Clearly, conservatives, especially religious ones in the Christian tradition, believe (or claim to believe) in strict personal responsibility. If you commit any act that “breaks the law,” you are guilty and deserve punishment. Behind this view lurks the doctrine of “original sin,” first promoted by St. Augustine, that humans are tainted at birth because of the original sin of Adam in disobeying God in the Garden of Eden. Hence, humans are born depraved and require strict laws and punishments to back up God-dispensed or government-created laws in order to be “good.” Jews, while rejecting this original-sin doctrine, subscribe to a somewhat related concept: that humans in this world are imperfect, and therefore prone to commit sins for which they must atone. The important point about both these views, and about most social/religious views in general, is that humans have free will and can choose either good or evil. Humans are inclined, by nature (or Satan), to sin, and it is through the appeal to Christ or God or the moral law (Torah, Ten Commandments, Koran etc.) that these inclinations can be controlled and turned to good.

By contrast, there are more recent traditions (starting with Jean Jacques Rosseau, who specifically rejected the doctrine of innate human depravity) which see humans as basically good, with the evils of society forcing them to behave badly. Most progressive or reformist political theories begin with this general idea, and therefore seek to compensate for societal inequality by instituting laws and programs that give the poor and oppressed a better chance at advancement. Social security, Medicare, unemployment compensation and progressive tax policies are all designed to this end. The root idea is that all people can thrive if the “unfair” advantages of birth are mitigated and all are given a level playing field on which to operate.

Aside from the rightness or wrongness of such policies, the issue here is whether or not the root ideas are sound. Do humans actually have control over their own destinies? Does free will actually exist? Because if not, if humans are in fact driven by forces beyond or beneath their conscious control (the “conscious self”), then the recent questioning of the very idea of free will and the social/legal system resulting from it (and morality itself), becomes a serious issue. Thomas Metzinger, in The Ego Tunnel (Basic Books: 2009), has framed this question quite clearly:

Free will does not exist in our minds alone—it is also a social institution. The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies—rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt…If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not really exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing. (Metzinger, p. 127)

What Metzinger is referring to is a host of neuroscientific discoveries that have begun to cast serious doubt (as the Buddha did two millennia ago) on the reality of what we feel and call “the conscious self.” We feel ourselves, that is, as autonomous beings with control of our actions; we feel ourselves (and everyone else) to be the conscious agents of our own actions. But what neuroscience has increasingly found is that we feel this only because the subconscious or unconscious precursors to our actions in the brain are invisible to us. This is why we have the absolutely certain feeling that our minds initiate actions that our bodies carry out. Since we are blind, that is, to the model we have created of ourselves and our bodies, we are correspondingly blind to the workings of our own brains. This is proved in countless experiments which show that injuries to certain parts of the brain (often via stroke) impel people to do things which surprise their conscious selves, and importantly, cause that “self” to make up preposterous stories to account for those baffling actions or perceptions. It is also proved in research into what are called “canonical neurons,” which demonstrate that our perception is not objective in the sense that we simply see an apple or a cup; we actually perceive such objects as “what I could do with (them).” Perception and action are not separate, that is; perception automatically includes a program or inclination for a possible interaction with the object perceived: A desire or intention to grasp or eat it is already included in seeing an apple. Metzinger then concludes:

When modern neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for our willing, desiring, deliberating, and executing an action…it will become clear that the actual causes of our actions, desires and intentions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us. From a scientific, third person perspective, our inner experience of strong autonomy may look increasingly like what it has been all along: an appearance only…(p. 131)

What will we do then? Will we still condemn the Wieners in the same way? Will we continue to lock people up for their “willful” actions? Continue to declare opposing leaders monstrous aberrations of humanity? Continue to set ourselves off as separate and different (and, of course, superior) from such ‘sinners’? No doubt many will. For others, though, it will appear critical that the moral arbiters of society be shaken from their long hallucination that some supreme being has handed down fixed laws for all to follow, and that those laws equate with something called “justice.” We will all have to either accept the fact that life or evolution or whatever power we name is no respecter of human imaginings about its meaning, or the fact that our laws and strictures and goals are little more than vain desires for humans (especially other humans) to be far more, and far better than they apparently are. Either one of which might deliver more of what we pretend to want (justice, tolerance, compassion) than what we have now.

Lawrence DiStasi

Vivoleum

2011-06-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

I was listening to an interview Caroline Casey (The Visionary Activist on KPfA) was doing with this “trickster” named Mike Bonnano. He and his group, The Yes Men, had created what I had been thinking for a while was so needed in our time: a new Jonathan Swift. I don’t mean the Swift of Gulliver, but rather the Swift of “A Modest Proposal,” generally considered the finest piece of satire in the English language. Bonnano and the Yes Men did something that doesn’t duplicate Swift, but reverberates with the same brilliant outrage.

They call their piece, Vivoleum, and it was actually presented at a conference of 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held this year at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta from June 7 through June 9. Posing as the “NPC rep” delivering the conclusions of a study commissioned by US Energy Secretary Bodman, ‘Shepard Wolff’ (allegedly an ex-Exxon exec, actually Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men) announced from the stage that despite the fact that current energy policies were increasing the chances of extensive global calamities, there was a perfect way to keep energy flowing: transform the billions of people who die into oil.

“We need something like whales,” he said, “but infinitely more abundant.”

That infinite abundance would be tapped by rendering newly-dead human flesh into a new Exxon oil product called Vivoleum. ‘Wolff’ then showed a 3-D animation of the process. (see it and the whole hilarious story on http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/vivoleum).

“Vivoleum works in perfect synergy with the continual expansion of fossil fuel production,” noted “Exxon rep” ‘Florian Osenberg’ (Yes Man Mike Bonnano). “With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”

The “oilmen” then lit “commemorative candles” they said was made of Vivoleum obtained from the flesh of an “Exxon janitor” whose death resulted from his job cleaning up a toxic spill. The “reps” then showed a video tribute to the janitor selflessly announcing his desire to be transformed into candles after his death.

It was only at that point that Simon Mellor, Director for the company putting on the event, caught on to the hoax and forced the Yes Men from the stage. As he left, pursued by journalists, Bichlbaum, still in character as the NPC rep, said: “We’re not talking about killing anyone. We’re talking about using them after nature has done the hard work. After all, 150,000 people already die from climate-change related effects every year. That’s only going to go up—maybe way way up. Will it all go to waste? That would be cruel.”

I urge everyone to go to the Yes Men’s website. It carries descriptions of other brilliant satires, including one that actually pre-empted Chevron’s absolutely infuriating commercials, seen on PBS’s News Hour each night, in which sincere “teachers” and “engineers” urge us to “get serious” about finding renewable energy sources. Called their “We Agree” campaign, the commercials are supposed to “greenwash” the public into thinking that Chevron, one of the world’s great polluters, really cares about the environment and global warming when in fact they have been a major source of resistance to anything that would interfere with their obscene profits. What the Yes Men did was leak, just before Chevron’s campaign was launched, a press release from a spoof Chevron campaign. The Yes Men also created numerous posters mimicking the We Agree campaign, but carrying actual critiques of the company such as “Oil Companies Should End the Wars They Helped Start;” and “Oil Companies Should Kill Fewer People.” At the end of each is the mocking “WE AGREE” in red ink over the signatures of oil companyy CEOs. See the posters at http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/chevron. The posters and many others are downloadable.

Thank god for the Yes Men. We need many more tricksters like them in several other arenas, including politics. Satire and ridicule may be our last, best hope of laughing the evil profiteers and charlatans who now control our world out of existence.

Lawrence DiStasi

Jefes of the Empire

2011-06-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

I was listening to Amy Goodman’s interview of illegally-ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya yesterday, when Zelaya offered this stunner:

“The United States is an empire, and so Obama is the President of the United States, but he is not the chief (jefe) of the Empire.”

Whoa! I said, urging Goodman in my mind to ask the obvious follow-up question: ‘So who is the chief (capo di tutti capi) of the Empire?’ But she didn’t. She had asked the question that led to this answer, i.e. didn’t the coup take place under President Obama? which itself had been in response to Zelaya’s contention that it was the Bush-era ambassador, Charles Ford, who had set up the coup just before he left Honduras to join the Southern Command (one of ten U.S. commands, responsible for planning and operations in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Cuba, and for ensuring the militarization of the Panama Canal, located in Miami, FL). Ford’s parting gesture, that is, had been a profile of Zelaya that he left for Obama’s incoming ambassador, Hugo Lawrence. That profile, published by Wikileaks, had urged Amb. Lawrence to make plans to “detain” then-Pres. Zelaya because he was tied to “narco-trafficking, terrorism,” and many other nefarious things. This was consistent with Ford’s posture towards Zelaya from as soon as eight days after he, Zelaya, took office: forbidding him to join ALBA (Alianza Bolivaraiana para los Pubeblos de Nuestra America—the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—first proposed by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, to integrate the social, political and economic aspects of several countries of Latin America such as Antigua, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent, and Venezuela, many of them now run by socialist leaders); saying he couldn’t have a friendship with Hugo Chavez; and urging Zelaya to give political asylum in Honduras to the convicted terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. So Charles Ford, employed by the Southern Command at the time of the coup against Zelaya, was the one who had set in motion.

Earlier in the interview, Zelaya had implicated several others, many of them well-known right-wing zealots and Reagan/Bush I/Bush II appointees:

The conspiracy began when I started to join ALBA…Otto Reich (of Iran/Contra fame, former ambassador to Venezuela, and a board member of the notorious School of the Americas where most Latin American death squads get their training) started this, Roger Noriega (also involved in the Iran/Contra scandal, the U.S. backed coup in Venezuela in 2002, and the ouster of Pres. Aristide from Haiti in 2004), Roberto Carmona and the Arcadia Foundation created by the CIA (according to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Venezuelan lawyer Roberto-Carmona Borjas helped to draft some of the infamous anti-constitutional "Carmona decrees" after Hugo Chávez was overthrown in the April 2002 military coup. After Chávez was returned to power, Carmona Borjas fled to the United States where he found his calling as a leading anti-Chávez figure and, more recently, as a fierce critic of the Zelaya regime in Honduras. see Nikolas Kozloff, Buzzflash.org, 7/14/09). They associated themselves with the right wing and formed a conspiracy. They said I was a communist, a friend of Fidel, a friend of Chavez.

Whether all this means that the “Jefe” of the American Empire is some combination of the Southern Command, Otto Reich, Roberto Carmona, Roger Noreiga, and the CIA is never made clear. But it seems that some combination of these notorious figures, most of them quite prominent during the Bush years and before, together with whatever economic interests still dominate what’s left of the U.S. empire in Latin America (United Fruit Co., Chevron & Big Oil, AT&T, and mining interests, not to mention the bankers who dominate—and sometimes bring down—the world’s finances) can be assumed to be involved.

Still, I wish Amy Goodman had asked the question. Because it’s one thing to make assumptions about a conspiracy; it’s another to have its “jefe” (or jefes) named and outed.

We need no conspiracy, however, to see that whoever is or is not the empire’s “jefe,” the agreed-upon strategies and tactics are getting always more ruthless. This is laid out in detail by Conn Hallinan’s piece, “The New Face of War,” posted on CommonDreams.org on May 28. There, Hallinan points out that with the openly-acknowledged assassination of Osama bin Laden, and the appointment of General David Petraeus as head of the CIA, the United States has in essence announced that the firewall that used to exist between intelligence gathering and military action, between suspicion and extra-judicial murder has now evaporated. If the empire decides that someone—based on shadowy evidence or no evidence at all—is considered a threat to “stability” or “order,” then the legitimate response is to simply kill that person. No trial necessary. No evidence necessary. No declaration of war necessary. If you show up on the anti-terrorist or anti-U.S. radar, you can be eliminated with further ado. In a sense, this constitutes the merger of the Rambo-type tactics we see in countless movies and TV dramas with real-world policy (apparently, many Bushies were great fans of rogue agent Jack Bauer, of the TV series, “24.”) Concern for the niceties of the law are routinely characterized as silly and counter-productive. The criminal can get away; he can “lawyer up;” he can get off on technicalities. Or simply disappear. “Justice” cannot be done. So the Rambo types dispense their own ‘rough’ justice. And though there is always a curtsy to the legal procedures that should have been followed, the satisfaction on the faces of all concerned and the relief on the faces of those who have lost their “loved ones” to the predatory criminals, provide justification enough to the viewer. Kill first and worry about the law later. That’s the mantra being chanted daily and nightly on countless shows. And it has now become the mantra of the government that increasingly infiltrates our lives and monitors our communications via the internet. All snooping is legal. And once that is legal, so are all the eliminative tactics that weapons manufacturers can dream up.

What an irony. After the failure, as Hallinan points out, of the Powell doctrine (total war power), the Rumsfeld Doctrine (lean, technical military), and the Petraeus Doctrine (counterinsurgency by establishing trust with the locals), we have now come to the Obama doctrine: targeted assassination. Nevermind capturing the “jefes” and bringing them to justice. Just kill them. It’s cheaper, more efficient, and the cause of far less complication, and, as a bonus, public approbation.

In a sense, then, perhaps Zelaya and Aristide and Chavez should count themselves among the lucky ones. If today’s policies had prevailed, all might have been simply assassinated. On the other hand, perhaps our “jefes” of Empire should start to watch their backs as well, for while the truism doesn’t always hold, with enough time it often does: what goes around comes around.

Lawrence DiStasi

addendum, June 3:
An interview Amy Goodman did today with investigative journalist Seymour Hersh adds some steam to the “jefe of the Empire” question raised by Manuel Zelaya. Hersh, in a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th, described a Bush administration “executive assassination wing” that reported directly to Vice-President Dick Cheney. Hersh said that the wing, over which Congress has no oversight, has been going into countries, “not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.” Hersh referred to a statement confirming the existence of the wing made by John Hannah, deputy chief of staff for Cheney, who admitted to Wolfe Blitzer on CNN, in Hersh’s description of it, that “Yes, we go after people suspected of crimes against America. And I (this is Hersh speaking) have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.” Hersh went on to say that the hit squads have gone into “at least a dozen countries” in the Middle East and Latin America, with, contrary to what John Hannah said, “no legal basis for it whatever.”

The upshot: another candidate for Jefe of Empire is none other than our old friend, Dick Cheney. In addition to his nefarious role as Vice President under George W. Bush, he has also been Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford, and U.S. House of Representatives Minority Whip prior to being chosen as Defense Secretary under Bush I. When one considers that this same George H.W. Bush was also head of the CIA in the late 70s before he became VP under Ronald Reagan, then President himself, then behind-the-scenes President under his son, (i.e. the central power broker from the 70s through the first decade of the 21st century), one can easily envision him and/or his family (his father Prescott Bush was a long-time senator from Connecticut and, along with father-in-law banker George Herbert Walker a powerful financial supporter of the Nazis—see “Nazis and Bush Family History,” online at http://www.rense.com/general17/bushhitler.htm) as, if not the “jefes” of empire, then as the center around which other “jefes” would cluster. If they would support the Nazis and import several to the U.S. after WWII to serve as American "advisers," what would such distinguished patriots NOT do?

Death Cheers

2011-05-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

One of the nauseating aspects of being American is what occurs when the military or a sporting team in some form or other registers a triumph. The killing of Osama bin Laden represents this phenomenon perfectly. Though the president did not gloat when he made his late night announcement on Sunday, he left no doubt that “justice had been done,” and that the “world would be a safer place” without this monster. The clear implication, from him and from his chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was that there had been a “fierce firefight” in the course of which the evil terrorist had been slain. Brennan also asserted that Osama had used his wives as human shields (see, he’s just a coward; actual words: “I think it really just speaks to how false his narrative has been over the years.”), a claim the administration later backed away from. Only later still did we discover the details, and they are not pretty.

First we learned that far from the evidence being made public—the body in question, or even photos of the dead leader—it was gone: the corpse had been disposed of at sea (what, Osama the sailor?) and there would be no photos either. Osama bin Laden had been shot in the eye and apparently his dead head was not suitable for primetime viewing—the children, you know. Then we were told that fiercely opposing the notoriously-efficient 25-man death squad of Navy Seals were only two (2) men besides Osama—his courier and the courier’s brother, with one or both families—and one or two women or wives, in addition to Osama’s children. So the “courage and bravery of these men who risked their lives” was not so conspicuous after all. They had not assaulted an enemy encampment bristling with murderous guards, but a domestic scene of about 7 or 8 people. Their usual night raids in Afghanistan and Iraq probably posed far more dangers for this assassination squad on a nightly basis than this, their most conspicuous mission.

Now we learn from White House press secretary Jay Carney, in response to questions from reporters, that the great emblem of global evil was NOT ARMED. He had no weapon with which to defend himself, but of course the press secretary was quick to add that a woman had attacked the brave Navy Seals, who shot her in the leg. Then Osama’s wife apparently threatened them, or made threatening gestures, and they then shot Osama bin Laden in the head—through the eye. Others, like Brennan, have said bin Laden resisted, though how is not clear. No matter: Navy Seals armed to the teeth and coated in body armor apparently feared for their lives and quite reasonably had to shoot him. (We will no doubt hear the inside story from one of them, after the narrative has been duly ghost-written to best display their heroism).

None of this makes sense, except in this way. Though the Attorney General (Tuesday News Hour) insisted that the instructions were to take bin Laden into custody, or if necessary, to kill him, the clear implication of all we’ve learned so far indicates that the kill order was primary. These guys were sent to kill Osama bin Laden, and there was little or no chance that he would be brought back to the United States alive to stand trial. And so, what the President crowed was “justice” and what pundits in every forum have continued to proclaim as “justice” was really a targeted assassination. The evil bin Laden received justice by assassination, American justice in this case consisting of a bullet in the head, and a dump in the ocean.

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t strike me as justice to cheer about. What it reminds us of is the kind of “justice” the Israelis have perfected: targeted assassination. They decide that some Palestinian is a “terrorist” who deserves to die, and then send in a team or a rocket to act as judge, jury, and executioner, collateral damage be damned. We seem to have learned well from them; for justice in the bin Laden case was streamlined to the killing of someone you prefer not to bring to trial for fear that a courtroom is far less efficient and far more uncertain. And when we reflect that even Saddam Hussein, that prior emblem of evil (isn’t is marvelous how the mantle of ultimate evil can be shifted from one postered head to another, and back, without so much as a by your leave?), was captured and brought to trial, we have to wonder why Osama was not shot in the leg or the arm or simply overpowered (he had no weapon!) rather than being shot in the eye (one wonders about the caliber of the weapon that shot that eye, but with the rapid-fire cannons these guys carry, the resulting wound was no doubt ample).

The logical answer is that, like many other American operations designed to rally us round the flag, this was a revenge killing. Americans, as after Pearl Harbor when revenge took the form of nuclear destruction, have been thirsting for revenge, but were diverted to Saddam and Iraq right after 9/11. What remained, though, after flattening both, was that emotional need to “get” the bastard who allegedly masterminded 9/11. When the opportunity presented itself, the current president, like all politicians with an eye to poll numbers, took the cue from his Israeli partners: assassinate the bastard. The rubes will cheer and shout “USA USA,” which indeed they did. And the pundits will pontificate about “justice” being done, and the people will be satisfied with being, once again, NUMBER ONE. As if killing people in cold blood is equivalent to some Olympic sport. All that’s lacking is a tradition that used to prevail among tribal societies, where you not only dance over the killing of your enemy, but eat his significant organs. Perhaps soon, that great atavism will return among us as well. Meantime we can content ourselves with a “courageous” brain explosion via a bullet to the eye (is there symbolism here? i.e., that evil eye can no longer fix us in its sights?), and the feeding of the corpse to our ravenous surrogates, the fishes.

Lawrence DiStasi

The End of Empire

2011-04-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

Various observers, including myself, have been speculating for years on the resemblance of America in the 21st century to the Rome described by Gibbon in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Especially after George W. led the country into a useless and illegal war in Iraq, all of it on America’s already overdrawn credit card, and the madness emanating from the fundamentalist revival of recent years, the comparison has become all but inevitable, if always couched in the future tense. Now, however, the IMF has dropped what Brett Arends has called a “bombshell.” Its latest economic forecast of economic activity has predicted that “China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016—just five years from now” (Brett Arends, “IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End,” Yahoo Finance, April 26, 2011, online). That’s five (5) years from now, folks. The figures are based on something called “purchasing power parities,” a figure Arends calls the true figure for comparison because it “compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.” As Arends explains the figures, by 2016, China’s economy is predicted to expand from $11.2 trillion this year to “$19 trillion in 2016.” The U.S economy will also rise, but at a slower rate: from “$15.2 trillion this year to $18.8 trillion” in 2016. America’s share of world output would thus shrink to 17.7% while China’s will rise to 18% and beyond. For a comparison, Arends startles us with this: 10 years ago the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.

Now there are lots of ramifications to this prediction, but one cited by Arends has great relevance to our current mess. He quotes Ralph Gomory, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, comparing China’s “state-guided capitalism,” with our “free” one:

What we have seen, he [Gomory] said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That's very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.” (Emphasis mine.)

I think that tells us a lot of what we need to know. Apparently, Chinese businessmen are not allowed to sell their own country down the river; quite the opposite, in fact. Chinese policy has emphasized “national expansion and power,” while the U.S. has allowed its corporate giants and speculating Wall Steeters to outsource the world’s premier production enterprise along with the American jobs that once went with it—enriching themselves, of course, via lower costs, but bankrupting the nation.

Again, the ramifications for what Arends calls a “paradigm shift” are massive, not just regarding who becomes the world’s military hegemon (we can hardly afford the wars we’re already stuck in, not to mention the 700 or so military bases we maintain), but especially with respect to the value of the dollar, because when it is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, no one can predict what will happen. It’s a fair bet, though, that it won’t be good—which is probably why gold has been shooting up in value recently.

For the average American, though, this is going to be strange. Most of us have had the “good” fortune to grow up in an America that essentially ruled the world. Its way of life and opportunities for average people were said to be the standard by which the world measured such things. Indeed, it was only a short time ago that the Bushies were prating on about our responsibilities, military and didactic, as the “only remaining Superpower.” To suddenly be living in a nation which has lost its mojo (the U.S. credit rating has already been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s) and has to ask or petition rather than command is going to feel like a brave new world, indeed. Oh there will still be cheerleaders and politicians who will insist it ain’t so, or who will blame it on the poor. But the odor of change is already blowin’ in the wind and it won’t be the kind Bob Dylan was singing about.

Lawrence DiStasi

Conservative Morality

2011-04-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

We have seen in grim detail recently just what the Republican program for “solving” our deficit problem is going to entail when Representative Paul Ryan (now Chair of the House Budget Committee) presented his plan for cutting nearly $6 trillion from the deficit. It involved big cuts in spending for social programs—especially Medicare and Medicaid—and NO raising of taxes, especially on the rich. The bitter pill prescribed by the Republicans, in brief, puts the onus of sacrifice on the poorest, most helpless of our citizens in order that the wealthiest, most powerful can avoid sacrifice altogether and continue to thrive beyond all imagining. The House passed this plan April 15 on a strictly party-line vote, nearly all Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats opposing it.

What we have come to in this country, then, is a situation where a major party makes little attempt to hide its callousness toward the poor and weak and its devotion to the strong and rich. Oh, Republicans prate on about the “great crisis” of growing deficits, but their emphasis is on the unsustainability of the “social handouts” instituted by Democrats: Social Security, Medicare, and other attempts to mitigate the suffering of the least among us.

What I keep wondering is what kind of people could adopt programs and policies of this kind. Who could be so heartless as to essentially thumb their noses at the vast majority of human beings on this planet (see also Republican-led House vote April 7 to kill EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and the science they’re based on)? A recent book by Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) may offer a few answers. It is not that Harris’ book proposes any kind of socially conscious program. It is that in reviewing neuroscientific and psychological research on the possible cognitive bases for morality, Harris cites studies that are quite revealing indeed about such subjects as psychopathology, religion, belief, and the human capacity for empathy.

Begin with a series of studies by the psychologist Paul Slovic, especially concerning our capacity to reason morally about suffering. What Slovic has found is that humans seem to have an innate mechanism that predisposes most of us to show concern when a single, identifiable human life is threatened, but to decrease our concern almost to indifference when more lives are involved. In other words, there is a “psychic numbing” that sets in as the number of victims of any kind of disaster rises. Instead of being MORE concerned the more people are affected by an earthquake, say, our concern grows progressively less as the death toll rises. This is revealed in donations: people give generously when they are shown a single child suffering; but with two children, the donations drop, while, as more children are shown suffering, the donations (and compassion) grow progressively less. There’s even a name for this: the “identifiable victim effect.” What I wonder is if Republicans/conservatives operate in a more exaggerated way than others in this regard. They pride themselves on being very compassionate to their own. But when it’s thousands or millions of inner city kids who are starving, or millions of homeless who have fallen on hard times, or many millions of seniors who depend on the pittance they derive from social security or medicare, Republican compassion disappears. Let them eat cake.

Such focus on the concern (or lack of it) for the suffering of others brings to the fore another area of research, the study of psychopathology. Psychopaths (and we seem to have had some great examples in high office recently) are characterized by able intelligence and even “sanity” (they understand the difference between right and wrong), but a kind of deficit in their ability to feel compassion for the pain or suffering of others. Many violent criminals are categorized as psychopaths: they simply seem unable to feel anything for their victims. Neuroimaging work now suggests that psychopathy is

…a product of pathological arousal and reward. People scoring high on the psychopathic personality inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating monetary gains. (p. 98)

Researchers speculate that since psychopaths respond excessively to anticipated rewards (I’m gonna get rich!), their ability to learn from the negative emotions of others is correspondingly reduced or blocked. In fact, in tests asking psychopaths to identify the mental states of other people from photographs, psychopaths do as well as others except in one area: they seem “unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.” This failure in emotional learning (a human trait crucial to socialization that is shared even by our primate relatives) seems to be one key to psychopathy: neuroscientists believe that impairments in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are associated with the emotional failure. Thus blind to the suffering he causes, the psychopath keeps reinforcing his callousness and cruelty, and simply never learns to care about others. While no one would say that all Republicans or conservatives are psychopaths, surely we can see that their apparent failure in empathy (or perhaps their reduced “circle of empathy”—i.e. limited to only those with whom they have close relations) resembles in alarming ways the indifference to human suffering exhibited by the psychopathic personality.

Finally, we see that Republicans/conservatives often tend to be those who demand open, public fealty to religious belief, more specifically, belief in the literal Christian dictates of the Bible (“57% of Americans think one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, and 69% want a president guided by strong religious belief”). Their demands to end abortion (Rick Santorum recently made a speech in which he attributed the allegedly failing Social Security system to a high abortion rate—so many children not born means too few contributing to Social Security income!), and to make religion more prominent in public forums, schools, and social legislation, are but a few examples of this mania. Harris is very hard on the effects this has for American public life and for morality in general. For if, as Harris maintains, morality can be understood as fostering the well-being of the highest number in any population (rather than with how many profess belief in God), the United States falls far short of other developed nations. Though the U.S. scores extremely high on the religiosity scale, it scores far lower than many allegedly atheistic nations on the well-being/equality scale. As Harris writes, “In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality.” By contrast, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, among the most atheistic societies on the planet, all do better on measures of well-being like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, education, political stability, charity to poorer nations, and so on. As the capper to this critique, Harris cites a 2010 study (Hall, Matz, and Wood, “Why don’t we practice what we preach?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1) indicating that American religious commitment is “highly correlated with racism” (146). If this isn’t strong enough, Harris also cites a recent Baltimore court case in which a small Christian group (One Mind Ministries) was accused of murdering an 18-month-old infant, Javon Thompson. His sin: he stopped saying “Amen” before breakfast, an act considered rebellious by the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette. His punishment: being deprived of all food and water for days. The mother agreed to help the prosecution indict the others on condition that all charges against them would be dropped if her dead child was resurrected. Though the group carried the corpse with them for some time, the resurrection has yet to take place. (Dan Morse, “Plea deal includes resurrection clause,” Washington Post, March 31, 2009.)

Harris does not contend that religious training and/or belief trains people in murder or racism. He does suggest that ignorance and such beliefs go hand in hand, as indicated by these statistics: “42% of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world” (149). This is tantamount to saying that evolution, as confirmed by virtually all scientists, simply does not exist. Another 78% believe that the Bible is actually the word of God, while 79% of Christians believe that Jesus will “physically return to the earth.” The point is clear: If so many Americans believe in such “truths,” how can anyone expect them to be able to discern truth from falsehood, or right from wrong in any arena whatever? How can they be expected to understand or exhibit compassion towards all the “unbelievers” out there—including the billions who will be most affected by global warming? How can anyone expect them to care in the least for those homeless “sinners” on our streets who have “failed” to provide for themselves?

When I contemplate the fact that much of this nation has fallen into the hands of such fanatics and incipient psychopaths, I have to tell you, it is very hard not to despair.

Lawrence DiStasi

G.E.: No Tax Special

2011-03-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

If I hadn’t just read it, I’d never believe it. G.E.—you remember, the company Ronald Reagan used to shill for; the company that built many of the nuclear reactors now under suspicion; the company whose CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was recently appointed by President Obama to be his liaison to the business community, as well as to head up the President’s “Committee on Jobs and Competitiveness” (slated to discuss corporate tax policy, the Pres. says, so as to LOWER the corporate tax rate)—last year “reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion,” $5.1 billion of which came from its U.S. operations. And its American tax bill? ZERO. No tax paid. “In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion,” writes David Kocieniewski in the 3/25/11 New York Times.

How can this be? you might ask. The government is crying about its indebtedness. Republicans and even Democrats are calling for austerity—i.e. cutting spending, i.e. cutting the benefits to the neediest members of our society, with plans to cut even more. And one of the richest corporations in America is paying NO TAX? Could it be that America doesn’t have a spending problem, that it has an INCOME problem because the richest individuals and corporations are paying less and less each year??? Do you think? Listen to what Kocieniewski writes, after recounting how G.E. spends a fortune in lobbying ($200 million over the last decade), and on a G.E. tax department headed by former IRS employees and lawyers numbering no less than 975 individuals! who do nothing but work on how to take advantage of tax breaks so that G.E. pays NO taxes:

Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

Did you get that? Corporations—the alleged lifeblood of our economy, the ones who were just given permission, as PERSONS, to contribute unlimited amounts to political campaigns—not long ago paid nearly a third of the U.S. tax burden, but now pay less than a tenth and may soon pay less than a twentieth.
Ah but, they keep saying, we need to be competitive. What’s good for us is good for America and American workers. Oh really? Here’s the truth:

Since 2003, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States, while increasing overseas employment. In that time, G.E.’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.

And what does earning all that money overseas do for G.E.? Well several things. This is because the other big change in G.E.’s business has been a shift from producing goods (like lightbulbs and all the “good things G.E. brings to life”) to providing financing for its products. “GE Capital” is the name of this finance division and more than half of G.E.’s profit recently has come from financing. Then the company managed to muscle changes in the tax laws that allow multinationals “to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income.” This is known as “active financing.” It means that “if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.” G.E. has been diligent in doing this, that is, booking a huge percentage of its profits in low-tax countries like Ireland and Singapore and keeping them there, a practice that, according to one tax economist, has “allowed G.E. to bring its U.S. effective tax rate to rock-bottom levels.” In the past year, in fact, to ZERO. No, less than zero, because it got a tax benefit of $3.2 billion!

So, in effect, G.E. has said to the United States and its people: “fuck you.” It manufactures more and more of its goods abroad, thus destroying American jobs, makes and keeps its profits abroad, and then gets tax benefits for all this that are applied to the little tax obligation (from goods still manufactured in the U.S.) it hasn’t found a loophole to worm its way out of. G.E. explains this by saying it has an obligation to its shareholders to “legally minimize its costs.” Some would call it more like “corporate welfare” (I would call it corporate thievery.) And what I’m wondering is, How is it that Americans who can barely buy food are pilloried as “welfare queens,” and made to work for their benefits, while these big time welfare queens get lionized, deferred to in every way, and even appointed to the President’s inner circle of advisers?

It’s called corruption, folks, and because of it the United States is looking more and more like one of those banana republics we used to laugh at in the old days. No more. If there’s a question left, it can only be: how long can such wanton pillaging of a nation go on? The answer is simple: as long as we the people let it.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Billionaires Behind the Hate

2011-03-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

That would be the brothers Koch (pron. Kock?), Charles and David. The bros have come into prominence since the rise of the Tea Party, which they direct and supply most of the money for. Staunch Libertarians, which party they also pretty much underwrite, their aim has long been to tear the government “out at the root.” As Jane Mayer in her brilliant article about these dogs in a recent New Yorker article (“Covert Operations,” Aug. 30, 2010) notes, the Libertarian Party platform in 1980, with David Koch on the ticket, advocated abolishing the SEC and the Department of Energy, as well as Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control and all income taxes (especially corporate income taxes). What’s alarming is not only the scope of this “anarcho-totalitarianism” (William Buckley’s term), but the fact that so much of it is beginning to come true. And Koch brothers’ money is part of the reason. That’s because they have oodles of it (ca $35 billion), originally coming from the oil-refining business started by their father, Fred Koch (he joined the John Birch Society in the 50s as one of the loonies who called Pres. Eisenhower a communist). It’s laughable, really. These guys give off the aura of that quintessential American culture hero, the self-made man. But what Mayer points out is that they didn’t exactly start on the level playing field they’re so fond of advocating. No. David Koch was left, upon his father’s death, the neat little sum of $300 million dollars! His other brothers no doubt inherited similar sums. Then David and his brother Charles (the CEO of Koch Industries) bought out their younger brother, and now own the family business lock, stock and barrel. That means no nosy stockholders. They are now nearly as rich as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and a whole lot of that money goes to their political foundations. Between 1998 and 2008, according to Mayer, these are the donation figures—Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation: $48 million; Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation (controlled by Charlie): $28 million; David H. Koch Charitable Foundation: $120 million; plus $50 million in lobbying, and $8 million to political campaigns through KochPAC (more than 80% to Republicans). In 2010, Koch Industries led all other energy companies (including Exxon) in contributions to political campaigns. And just in case that weren’t enough clout, it was Koch money that in 1977 launched the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank (they have been prominent in attacking Global warming), and a bit later gave millions to another think tank, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University—“ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”

The activities of these “think” tanks would be laughable if they weren’t so perversely effective. Mayer cites a court case in 1997 when the EPA tried to reduce surface ozone pollution, much of it coming from oil refineries (the original Koch business, which has been sued constantly for polluting everything from air to ground water). One Susan Dudley, of the Mercatus Center, argued that the EPA had neglected to consider that “smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer.” The Circuit Court actually believed this crap about smog being good, and ruled that, indeed, the EPA had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” The fact that the judges in the majority had attended “legal junkets” arranged by another group of Koch foundations, allegedly did not affect the ruling.

You get the picture. Big money buys big results, and the Koch brothers have big money they are quite willing and eager to spend. Another of their spin-off groups (this one designed to inspire and direct the grass roots activism the Tea Party is famous for) is named Americans for Prosperity (all of these names are a lesson in Orwellian language.) Minutely managed by the Kochs, Americans for Prosperity has been a key player in attacking the Obama presidency. That great conservative strategist, Grover Norquist, admitted to Mayer that the rowdy rallies by activists in the summer of 2010 were key to “undermining Obama’s agenda.” The people in the streets gave Republican lawmakers the cover they needed to refuse any cooperation with Obama, and changed the thinking of corporate donors. Prior to the demonstrations, even the Chamber of Commerce had been willing to work with the president; after the loonies took to the streets and “terrorized” Congress, this attitude changed.

There is much more to find out about these latter-day bagmen (their bought-out brother recently called their operation an “organized crime” operation because of their history of stealing oil from under Native American reservations—see Reader Supported News, March 20, 2011: “Koch and Native-American Reservation Oil Theft”), and I would recommend Mayer’s article as indispensable. It’s not just that David Koch is the guy who financed Governor Scott Walker’s election, and no doubt had a say in his recent anti-union legislation in Wisconsin; the Kochs also have bought numerous companies to supplement and diversify their oil-refining business, so the stink of their corruption is everywhere. Here’s a partial list of mostly paper products that they now control, sent to me by Eleanor Walden:

Paper products from Georgia-Pacific, including: Angel Soft toilet paper; Brawny paper towels; Dixie plates, bowls, napkins and cups; Mardi Gras napkins and towels; Quilted Northern toilet paper; Soft 'n Gentle toilet paper; Sparkle napkins; Vanity fair napkins; and Zee napkins. There’s a national campaign to boycott all of these products. I would urge everyone to do so, because if there’s one place these guys can be hurt, it’s in their deep, dirty pockets.
(Related addendum: a March 14 article in Yahoo news noted that U.S. millionaires in a survey complained that even $7 million was not quite enough to feel rich. The poor guys compare themselves to their fellow princelings, and also worry a lot about outliving their meager assets. Doesn’t your heart just bleed for them?)

Lawrence DiStasi

Nuclear Reactors--Full Speed Ahead

2011-03-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

Amid all the horrors engulfing Japan (and the rest of the world as it watches in fear and trembling) not only via the earthquake and tsunami, but also via the possibility, increasing hourly, of one or more nuclear meltdowns, it is “encouraging” to note that some intrepid Americans are undaunted. Today, for example, that great representative from Texas, Joe Barton, was badgering Energy Secretary Stephen Chu in a hearing before his Energy and Commerce Committee. Barton—who some may remember as the “bright light” who apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward: “I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is again in my words amounts to a ‘shakedown’ so I apologize” (seriously, those are the words he used) and who, it was later revealed, has received some $1,330,160 in “oil money” during his career—kept asking Chu if the Obama administration’s earlier promise to push for the building of more nuclear plants in the U.S. by providing loan guarantees of $56 billion still held. Chu answered in a complex way, and Barton persisted: “Is that a “yes?” Chu danced a bit more, but then answered, “Yes.” Barton then asked a further question amounting to the same thing, and this time got a prompt “Yes” from Chu. “Ah, you’re learning,” chortled the chairman; for he had the answer he wanted. The United States was not going to be deterred by a little meltdown in Japan, or by the rising panic among the world’s peoples about all the nuclear power plants that could spew radiation in unforeseeable directions due to unforeseeable accidents, or the minor problem of what to do with all that spent fuel lasting millennia. Hell no! Energy is needed, plutonium is needed, and real men like Barton aren’t afraid of what a little radiation does to the human body (nor, it seems, is the Obama administration), so it’s full speed ahead.

So here we are. The Japanese are running out of options to cool down these out-of-control nuclear reactors. They’ve been pumping sea water, probably using fire trucks in tandem to get enough pressure to pump the water onto the fuel rods, or replace the evaporating water from the pools storing spent rods still generating radioactive materials and heat, but they’re running out of fuel to keep the fire engines running. Worse, they’ve just this morning had to allow the skeleton crew (no pun intended) of 50 workers or so to take a break because the radiation levels were getting too high even for these sacrificial lambs. Meantime, the temperature in these reactors keeps rising inexorably. 2500 degrees. 3000 degrees. It’s hell on earth.

Herein lies the crux of the matter. Nuclear fission creates heat. So does just the normal process of radioactive decay of the materials that are used in the fuel rods (i.e. even after the reactor is shut down). The geniuses who designed this technology figured that all they’d have to do was keep the process cool with water. Keep circulating water to cool the fuel rods and all would be fine. But all isn’t fine. Electricity to pump the water fails. Generators to replace the electricity are stored in the basement and a tsunami floods the basement and disables the generators. Then sea water gets pumped in, but that also has its limits. Helicopters are called in to dump sea water into the blown-apart reactors (the explosion caused by the steam created by water on hot rods, and the release of hydrogen which blows up), but the radiation gets too high for the helicopter pilots to fly over the reactors. In short, the breakdown and remedial measures amount to a chain reaction that mimics the chain reaction that creates nuclear energy (and bombs) in the first place.

This hellish, impossible-to-control technology is the reason that governments, like the Obama administration, have to guarantee the loans needed to build these reactors. Investors on Wall Street want no part of this stuff. Banks won’t take the risk on their own. And why? Because the whole process is too hazardous, too fraught with potential disasters: Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; and now Fukushima. So whose money is going to fill the gap? Why, yours and mine, courtesy of the United States government, which pledges that if anything goes wrong (and how could it not go wrong eventually?), the federal government will pay off whatever loans or costs have accrued. And they are huge. Because though it seems “free,” this is expensive technology. And the only entity willing to take the risk by subsidizing it is the government. Reminds us of that other huge risk the government provides welfare checks for: war, the insanely expensive machines of war.

But will the world backtrack from its insane nuclear gamble? Hell no. We need war; we need energy. And so we get Joe Barton, that dimwit who considers global warming natural,

I believe that Earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural reasons. And I think mankind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth…Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.

Global warming? Just adapt, says Joe. Nuclear meltdowns? Just adapt. And the Obama administration, in the face of pressure from the likes of Barton, has to demonstrate its courage even in the face of planetary disaster. It’s what we elect these big boys for, after all: Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.

Lawrence DiStasi

Addendum, Mar. 24: Listening to an interview this morning on KPFA with Dr. Jeanette Sherman, consulting editor for the recent book, Chernobyl: Consequences for People and the Environment, I heard something I hadn't heard before (there are apparently lots of these little nuggets being kept under wraps). When asked what was the most important little-known aspect of the Chernobyl accident, Dr. Sherman said: "Its adverse effects on all life." She then pointed out that scientists have now studied not just the meltdown's effects on people, but on "domestic and wild animals, birds, fish, trees, mushrooms, bacteria and viruses." They found damage to them all. They found birth defects, damage to heart and brain, in short, "adverse findings in all systems tested."

This, of course, makes sense. Radiation affects life at its most basic, genetic level, and at that level, all life shares a common inheritance and structure. So the technology we have unleashed, and which its cheerleaders keep assuring us is perfectly safe, if and when it gets hit by the unforeseen accident, attacks not just humans and their cells, but the cells of all living things. Like global warming, the deleterious effects spread out to damage the entire planet. It's something to keep in mind, and, if you're writing your representative, something to point out.

Forget Shame

2011-03-10T13:58:00.000-08:00

As I watched Michael Moore deliver a white hot speech in Wisconsin a few days ago, and heard the voices of his audience—state workers protesting the concerted Republican assault on public sector unions by yelling “Shame! Shame! Shame!”—it occurred to me. This time, folks, shaming those in power isn’t going to be enough. Though it was enough to bring down two presidents—Johnson and Nixon—in the 60s and 70s, and to eventually stop the Vietnam War, it won’t make even a dent in the armor worn by today’s ruling class. I mean, just think of it: two short years ago, the country seemed so disgusted by the overt criminality of Bush and his gang in the White House that his name was too toxic to even mention. The entire Republican Party was said to be near extinction, while a Prince of the Left had been elected to the White House. And yet, today that same prince is in retreat on every front, groveling to the right, while the worst yahoos ever seen in public office are screaming for the blood of gliberals and their devastated constituency. So we can forget tears, forget revulsion about war, murder, the evisceration of the social net so laboriously put in place over several generations, the enslavement of the newly impoverished, and all the rest. The power mongers and their lackeys in office are simply not susceptible to these common human emotions. Like their forebears in the Germany of the 1930s, they seem to rather enjoy the suffering of those beneath their boot heels. And they’ll do anything, from dirty tricks to the crippling and/or poisoning of workers, to the poisoning of the entire planet, to protect what they view as “theirs.” Hence, we have this so-called Representative from New York, Peter King, our era’s Joe McCarthy, opening hearings on the “radicalization of the Muslim-American community by Al-Qaeda,” impervious to the tears of Congressman Ellison testifying about the sacrifice of one of these “terrorists” who died trying to save his fellow Americans on 9/11, and begging for the hearings to focus on a wider population than this already terrorized minority. And we have this punk governor of Wisconsin along with his newly-empowered Republican majority, ramming through in secret, when he couldn’t persuade by reason, the bill to strip unionized state employees of their collective bargaining rights. Shame? This crude piece of plastic doesn’t even register the stuff in whatever constitutes his innards. All he registers is the coin he gets from the likes of David Koch, the energy baron who’s the largest funder of anti-global-warming science in the world (even larger than Exxon) and the main bankroller of the Tea Party. I haven’t been able to find out if Koch is involved in ‘hydrofracking,’ the latest darling of energy bandits—see the NY Times, Feb. 27, for information on what ‘horizontal hydraulic fracturing’ does to the huge volume of water needed to “frack” the natural gas out of rock, and the corrosive salts, carcinogens, and yes radioactive elements like radium polluting that water when it drains into nearby rivers and aquifers used for drinking—but I wouldn’t be surprised.

So here’s what we’re up against now. These billionaires who brought the country to its knees and emerged richer than ever have now been given even greater power to control politicians and laws than they had during the Gilded Age. The gap between them and the rest of us has grown in the last thirty years—since that corporate shill Ronald Reagan began his assault on graduated income taxes and regulations keeping the corporate rape of the rest of us within some bounds—to a level of inequality in the distribution of wealth and power that rivals Arab sheikdoms. A few of these mandarins control more wealth than whole counties, whole states, whole regions of us. And they will do anything, corrupt any politician, commit any crime, decimate whole countries, whole planets, to keep it.

Shame them? It doesn’t even merit discussion. The only thing that impresses these robots is force. The force of millions of people screaming for their heads. The force of organized and constant pressure outing them and their crimes. The public employees in Wisconsin have begun this movement. So have a few thousands in states like Michigan and Indiana, where similar bills have been passed or are pending. But it is quite clear from the Wisconsin experience that more, far more, is going to be needed. There’s going to have to be not just a few victories over crumbs; a few compromises like “carbon trading” and extended unemployment; there’s going to have to be systemic change. And as far as I can see, that’s not going to happen unless these bastards are made to fear not only for their fortunes, but for their very existence. How is this to happen? I have no specific solutions; besides, it’s a project for the young. But as Michael Moore pointed out in Wisconsin, and as the people always seem to forget: there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. That’s what terrifies them in the night. They know that if the people ever wake up, if the people ever become conscious of their power and use it, the game, the game whereby the corporate pooh-bahs have not only seized obscene amounts of wealth and power, but used it to exploit and blight everything that makes life itself possible, is over.

I’m putting my money on an awakening. But it had better happen soon, because the damage is accelerating so fast that before long there won’t be much left to save.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Illusion of Control

2011-02-26T11:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was observing someone playing with a new iPad, waxing enthusiastic about how great it was. And in fact, the graphics are gorgeous, the screen luminous, the applications almost endless and endlessly powerful. You can have your favorite music on the thing, your favorite photos, your favorite books on its super reader, your favorite blogs constantly updated, and all of it available at the literal touch of your finger as it scrolls effortlessly through your increasingly digitized world. Fully loaded, it knows all kinds of things about you, including when you need to enter data, whereupon it automatically displays a keyboard on your screen.

And as I mulled about this later, and about the marvelous control offered by iPhones and iPods and all the other gadgets beguiling each of us with constantly-updated information geared specifically to ME, this notion of ‘the world at your fingertips’ started to appear in a slightly different light. My music, my websites, my blogs, my photos, my world—it’s all about some postmodern illusion that if I can just buy enough gadgets, I can inhabit a world that is tailor-made for me alone. I don’t have to wait for a radio to play my favorite song: I can have it and all my other favorites on my iPod/Phone/Pad. I needn’t listen to other crap—other songs, traffic, bird calls, jabbering other people, construction noise--ever again. Plugged in, I can control my sound environment, and then my visual environment, and my information environment, and everything else in my world.

And yes, it’s an illusion. And the question always is, who—and I can be sure it’s not only me—benefits from this illusion of control. Who gains from my thinking that I can actually, and for an increasingly affordable price, control my world? Well, how about the mandarins who actually do control the world? How about the corporate masters who have, in the last 30 or 40 years, increased by geometric leaps and bounds their share of the wealth of not just this country but the entire world? It’s a bit like bread and circuses in ancient Rome: If the plebes can be given entertainments that are gripping enough (and the slaughter of a few Christians, or gladiators, or lions is quite tolerable for this), then they’re less likely to demand a real life. In our world, it’s bread and circuses as well—the Super Bowl and all sporting events, the Academy Awards and all contests, stupid sitcoms and countless murder-and-mayhem cop shows keep everyone at home and off the streets—but increasingly now, it’s our gadgets. If the plebes can be sold the illusion of control, they won’t notice that they have no control at all. Democracy? A joke. No matter who’s in power, money talks. Not votes. Money. Those with it get more powerful, those without it get the illusion of power via more and more gigabytes, greater capacity to find a new restaurant via GPS, and even the occasional ‘opportunity’ to cast a meaningless vote or two.

Lest one think that this illusion of control is peculiar to our age, it’s important to see that the illusion goes deeper than iPads. Or rather, the human urge to get control does. If one thinks about it, all of civilization constitutes an attempt to assert control over the constantly changing vicissitudes of life. Humans invent fire to control it, to warm themselves with it, to frighten threatening animals with it, to cook with it. Levi Strauss made a great deal of this, of cooking, drawing an elementary distinction between the raw and the cooked. Those who eat things raw are animals; primitive life forms. Those who cook are the civilized ones. Cooking not only makes food more digestible, it sets up the basic distinction upon which civilization is built: raw vs. cooked. And it leads to other distinctions: tame vs. wild, agriculture vs. hunting/gathering; protection from the elements vs. exposure to them. And it is all a question of control, of controlling the environment, making it habitable no matter the weather or the availability of wild food, no matter the gods who control such things. And of course, this level of control can be extended almost infinitely: control of weather, control of travel, control of life itself in its most fundamental code, the gene.

More deeply still, the very symbol of humanity, conscious thought, if introspected, can be viewed in this light as well. Those who meditate find this out very quickly. The mind is an inexhaustible thought machine. Consciousness, or what we think of as consciousness, is almost totally consumed with a continuous train of thoughts: thoughts about what we shall do later, thoughts about what we have done earlier, thoughts about how we can prevent this event from going bad or get even with the one who made that event go bad, thoughts about how to best control the situations that are coming and/or edit the past dramas we’d like to change. Very little time is spent, under normal circumstances, attending to what is happening now. The actual conditions of this moment. And the illusion is that as long as I—what I consider to be my basic self, which is this conscious self thinking and apparently controlling my story—am engaged in this sort of thinking and controlling what I see and feel and am, then “I” am in control. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The conscious “I” controls very little in life. Most of what we perceive, and most of what we make decisions about, is perceived and decided upon long before the conscious self appears to resolve it. Milliseconds before I choose to go get a snack from the frig, the impulse has already been set in motion in stomach and brain. Well before I think to go chat up that lady, interior impulses have already impelled me to do so. So where Descartes famously concluded that “I think, therefore I am,” a galaxy of information indicates that human being is controlled at a considerable remove from conscious thought. This is not to say that the illusion of control afforded by such ‘thinking’ can’t be useful and even necessary. Imagining that we are in control has undeniably beneficial effects, especially for those who have grown up in chaotic environments where the feeling of chaos and lack of control can be deeply debilitating. But as an exclusive diet, as a controlling illusion, it leads us to all the ills to which humans are subject. As Stephen Asma notes in a recent book (Why I Am a Buddhist), the desire to be a self in control is the fundamental problem: “Once we give up on this exaggerated delusion of control, we attain some degree of liberation—we stop trying to own everything; this is my experience, this is mine, this is I, this is myself.”

Nor do we have to buy into the Buddhist idea of liberation to see that the illusion of control, the desire for control over all life has led humans into a serious dilemma. One aspect of it has already been noted: being deluded about our control, being diverted into meaningless forms of control, makes it easier for those who have ruthlessly grabbed power to maintain their power over us. A population busy with iPads or iPods is less likely to make trouble over the growing income gap. But even more serious consequences of this mania for control can be seen just as easily. Civilization and the “control” it provides humans has driven us to the edge of a cliff. In this ultimate sense, we have gained “control” over our environment—we use fossil fuel to power our lives; we use corporate agriculture to reduce the work necessary to feed more and more of us; we use scientific ingenuity to control our susceptibility to disease and even death--only to find that we are controlling ourselves into overpopulation, global warming from overuse of fossil fuels, and the feverish destruction of the critical varieties of plant and animal life we have evolved with and will, at some point, be unable to do without.

In this sense, control is a paradox: The more we control our planet, the more we lose what it provides us to survive. And we are all, without exception, susceptible to this; all of us, to one degree or another, ‘control freaks.’

So what to do? How control the mania to control?

If I knew, I wouldn’t have to write about it. But quite possibly it’s as simple as recognizing it in ourselves and others, and gradually letting go of the illusion. The fundamental truth is that life cannot be controlled. Life is defined by its uncontrollability (Interesting how word usage intuits this: the term “out of control” is now used as a superlative akin to “awesome”). The more we try, the unhappier we get. The more we try, the unhappier all other life gets as well. I’m reminded of George Carlin’s wonderful riff on “stuff.” We spend our lives trying to accumulate as much “stuff” as we can, as much stuff as our neighbors seem to have. And then as our apartments and houses and garages fill up with “stuff,” we have to find or buy new stuff to store all the useless stuff we’ve accumulated, and so have to keep accumulating ad infinitum, our lives reduced to the idiocy of getting and keeping and finding ways to store more and more until we are more controlled by our stuff than it is by us. Carlin made this funny. But the humor came from the fact that we all know how truly, sadly insane it is.

Lawrence DiStasi

In Case You Had Any Doubts

2011-02-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

In case you had any doubts about what the recent elections (a landslide for Republicans) and the continuing effects of the economic meltdown portend, a few episodes should dispel them. I think my favorite this week is what’s going on in Wisconsin. There, once the cradle of radical politics not to mention the birth in the 50s of the public employee union movement, a yahoo by the name of Scott Walker was elected governor, and both houses of the legislature fell to the Republicans as well (not to mention the defeat of one of the last ethical Senators, Russ Feingold.) I’m not sure what happened to the drinking water in Wisconsin, but the results are beginning to play out big time. Governor Walker has initiated a bill, just passed by the budget committee, that would strip Wisconsin’s public employee unions of their right to collective bargaining. So where most of us thought that the right to collective bargaining was an issue long-since settled (after millions marched, endured beatings from hired thugs, and were murdered by those same thugs in the battles for union rights), it now turns out that this wannabe dictator in Wisconsin is coming close to turning back the clock on teachers, prison guards and other public employees. This so his plan to force these employees to pay more of the cost of their pensions and health care costs could not be reversed by collective bargaining. Isn’t that nice? Not only that, the unions would be hamstrung so that pay increases would be tied to the Consumer Price Index only. And to enforce his decrees, Walker has threatened to call out the National Guard to run the prisons (just in case the prison guards try to strike). So there you have it: no collective bargaining, no effective striking, no power to unions at all (does it need to be said that public unions are about the only large groups left contributing to the Democratic Party?).

If this bill goes through—and the Gov claims he has the votes to do it—another nail in the coffin of unions and collective bargaining would be hammered in. The movement started shortly after WWII by big corporations, and sent into high gear by Ronald Reagan when he fired Air Traffic Controllers to cripple their union (and all others), will have come to fruition. Does it need to be pointed out that this comes at just the time when American corporations are at the very height of their power, having been given, in the Citizens United case in the Supreme Court, carte blanche to pay politicians for the favors they already controlled before? Now, with this complete judicial sanction to corporations to buy whatever government they please (is it any wonder that Obama has kowtowed almost completely to the moneyed interests, and hired the head of General Electric, for god’s sake, which outsources to foreign countries more than half of its work, to be his top economic advisor in charge of “putting Americans back to work?”), the fiction that America is a “government of the people” has become laughable, a cruel, sick joke.

One could add more. In Florida, the Governor there has just axed the planned high-speed rail project, saying the state could not afford it. But the federal government was providing millions in seed money, and the state had already spent more millions in planning for the rail system that was projected to add millions to the tourist economy on which Florida depends (not to mention reducing automobile pollution). And hundreds of thousands of workers would have been hired to complete and then run the project. Nevermind. Those were just “workers” after all, and in the Republican version of economics, workers, like the environment, are simply expendable.

The irony, I suppose, is that all this is taking place at a time when in the Middle East, where democracy has only been a label to dress up dictatorships, the people really are in revolt. So as we watch thousands and millions in Egypt and Tunisia rise up, protest their powerlessness, and force their dictators to resign, and thousands more in Bahrain and Yemen take to the streets to try to do the same, here in the U.S.A. the “people” have so far been mute. Not in Wisconsin, thankfully, where thousands of teachers camped out in the state capitol to protest the proposed slashing of their rights. But in most other places, the “people” have been largely sidelined by the logic of what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine.” That is, when those in power wish to cripple their opposition and remake society to their liking (i.e. privatize publicly-owned utilities/schools/industries, eliminate social programs that benefit the poor, reduce taxes on the rich), the best way to do so is to wait for or engineer a shock to the system—something like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or 9/11 throughout the nation. And so, what we are seeing now, after the “shock” of the financial collapse in 2007-08, and to combat which the federal government bailed out banks and wall street with borrowed money, is all this conservative blather about THE FEDERAL DEFICIT. ‘We have to bring spending under control. We have to manage our nation’s budget the same way families do. Control our spending. Trim our sails.’ And what has to be trimmed? Why all that spending on the poor, all that spending on health care for those who can’t afford it like Medicaid, all those handouts to those lazy ones who line up for food stamps and health care for their children and block grants to local clinics and, ultimately, that major “handout” conceived by the demon Roosevelt Administration, Social Security.

Ah yes. The shock has been administered, and now come the shocking proposals. Not the masters of war, not the crooks on Wall St, not the bankers and corporate CEOs, but public employees are the freeloaders. Why should they get pensions? Why should they get free health care? Why should their unions get to hold up taxpayers with their threats of strikes? Why should we get taxed to pay for their benefits? Privatize everything. Bring in the corporate mavens to run (or is it ruin?) everything.

Ah America. The day of awakening is coming, the day of accounting is coming, and it’s not going to be pretty.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Roman Republic of 1849 (4: Wherever We Go, There is Rome.)

2011-02-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

After June 3, the long slog began. In essence, the Italian forces—mostly the same ones whose ranks had been decimated attacking the Corsini--dug in to hold the Janiculum against hopeless odds and superior siege forces under French General Vaillant. The General knew his business and proceeded methodically to take inch by inch, yard by yard the ground where his infantry could dig themselves in, edging always closer to Rome’s walls. From the Corsini, French batteries mostly aimed their fire at the defenders, but also bombarded parts of the city, particularly the nearby Trastevere. This only enraged the citizens more, leading them to hurl oaths at the man they held responsible, now rechristened as Rome’s “King Bomba:”

The citizens, as they grew accustomed to the bombardment, greeted each projectile with the cry : ‘Ecco un Pio Nono !’ — ‘There goes another Pio Nono !’ Women and children of the Trastevere were seen to pick up live shells and throw them into the Tiber…. (Trevelyan, 196)

The siege came in basically two parts: June 4 through June 21, and June 22 through June 30. In the first, night raids from both sides attempted to breach enemy defenses, but for the most part came to little. Against all odds, Garibaldi’s defenders were holding on to places like the Casa Giacometti and the Vascello, still outside the walls. But the walls themselves were under a fierce bombardment and would go at any moment. Still, even on the night of June 21, a few men from the Unione regiment heard a French troop advancing, and, first firing at them point-blank, drove them off in bayonet combat. Garibaldi, meanwhile, headquartered in the Villa Savorelli, wrote to his Anita, safe, he thought, in Nice (she never received this letter since she had already decided to join him once again, and was en route, pregnant, to Rome):

My dear Anita, I know that thou hast been and maybe still art ill. I wish to see thy handwriting and my mother’s, and then I shall feel easy.
Cardinal Oudinot’s Gallic-friars content themselves with cannonading us, and we are too much accustomed to it to care. Here the women and children run after the balls and
shells and struggle for their possession.
We are fighting on the Janiculum and this people is worthy of its past greatness. Here they live, die, suffer amputation to the cry, ‘Viva la Repubblica !’ One hour of our life in
Rome is worth a century of common existence. (quoted in Trevelyan, 205)

Even as he was writing this letter, however, the French had already begun to breach the central bastions holding the walls. Wearied troops guarding the Casa Barberini awoke to find French troops already in their midst, panicked, and fled. Within minutes, Casa Barberini and the Central Bastion were in French hands. Though many thought he should have tried to retake these crucial positions, Garibaldi chose instead to fortify a defense line along the inner Aurelian wall. Those who feared that the Janiculum could not but fall that night were surprised to find that it still held. This was not the end of the issue, however, because Mazzini and Roselli, seeing the enemy on the walls, ordered Garibaldi to attack and retake the outer positions. This led to another quarrel between Garibaldi and his commanders, though in this he was supported not only by his own officers (they knew another suicidal attack would fail, so weary and dispirited were their troops by now), but also by the war minister, General Avezzana.

Thus began the second part of the siege, the defense of the ancient Aurelian wall. It lasted nine days, much to the defenders’ surprise. For all knew that Rome was lost. Yet the defenders seemed to fight even harder at this point. To explain this apparent contradiction, Trevelyan observes:

But the Italian character has in it something beyond the reasonable, and, when all was lost, the idea of perishing with the murdered Republic seemed to fortify the morale and brace the nerves of the tired men, whose conduct became now more uniformly heroic than it had been during the fortnight past, when it was still possible to indulge a shadowy hope. An English army might have held the bastions from which the Italians fled on the night of June 21-22, but an English army might well have capitulated if those bastions had been lost, seeing that there was no force in the wide world to come to their relief...If the Englishman does not know when he is beaten, the Italian sometimes knows it and does not care. (209)

Thus the final battles went—the French bombarding the defenses and the city with a rain of cannon balls while sappers crept through trenches to breach the walls—the Italian defenders fighting with their last reserves of strength and valor to hold off the inevitable. With the Villa Savorelli perilous, Garibaldi had now moved his headquarters to the Villa Spada, just behind the infantry stationed along the inside of the Aurelian Wall, and in front of the last Roman batteries firing from the platform of San Pietro in Montorio and the nearby Pino Hill. Before long, the Villa Spada itself, fired upon from both inside and outside the walls, was riddled with holes torn by cannon fire. The roof of San Pietro in Montorio collapsed, while most of the gunners on Pino Hill were killed or wounded. Still the defenders kept rebuilding the defenses as they collapsed, while the wounded, as soon as they were bandaged up, returned to their posts undaunted. This was what Mazzini, when he ordered that the defense should continue, had intended: rather than a final episode of ignominious flight, the last chapter of Rome’s defense would be dominated by death-defying courage and heroism.

As if to underline this message, on June 26, Anita Garibaldi, pregnant and disguised, appeared at the Villa Spada unannounced. Garibaldi, when he saw her, cried out and embraced her. Though he would have forbid her to come if he had known of her plan, he was overjoyed to see his companion in battle. She, and her death at the end of it, would become a major part of the legendary retreat from Rome that would follow in a few days.

Meantime, the French concentrated much of their fire on the Vascello, battering it day and night with cannon balls. Almost alone, its defenders under Giacomo Medici were holding off the final assault on the Porta San Pancrazio and full entry into the city. They continued to do so even after the main portion of the structure collapsed from the bombardment, and French infantry stormed the walls. At the same time, artillery shelled not only the main defenses of the Janiculum, but fired, as diversionary tactics from the main assault, on other sacred areas of the city. In addition to the destruction in Trastevere, considerable areas around the Piazza di Spagna were hit. Protests by foreign consuls about this attack on an international heritage fell on deaf ears. So did the dispatches of Margaret Fuller, who, already on May 27, had written about the bombardment that had started and the far worse she feared would come:

I shall not go till the last moment; my only fear is of France. I cannot think in any case there would be found men willing to damn themselves to latest posterity by bombarding Rome. Other cities they may treat thus, careless of destroying the innocent and helpless, the babe and old grandsire who cannot war against them. But Rome, precious inheritance of mankind—will they run the risk of marring her shrined treasures? Would they dare do it?
Two of the balls that struck St. Peter’s have been sent to Pius IX by his children, who find themselves so much less “beloved” than were the Austrians…(Letter XXX)

When the siege was over, Fuller wrote more about that later, fiercer bombardment—“The house where I lived was filled as early as the 20th [of June] with persons obliged to fly from the Piazza di Gesu, where the fiery rain fell thickest” and the terror felt by civilians:

The night of the 28th the effect was truly fearful, as they whizzed and burst near me. As many as thirty fell upon or near the Hotel de Russie, where Mr. Cass has his temporary abode. The roof of the studio in the pavilion, tenanted by Mr. Stermer, well known to the visitors of Rome for his highly-finished cabinet pictures, was torn to pieces. I sat alone in my much exposed apartment, thinking, “If one strikes me, I only hope it will kill me at once, and that God will transport my soul to some sphere where virtue and love are not tyrannized over by egotism and brute force, as in this.” (Letter XXXIII. Rome, July 6.)

Fuller’s fear was increased by the fact that her husband, Marchese Ossoli, had been put in charge of northern defenses near the Porta Popolo, another scene of fierce bombardments meant to panic Roman citizens.

In the face of all this, and the growing certainty that only days were left before the French would successfully breach the Aurelian Wall, Garibaldi and Mazzini engaged in yet another quarrel around June 27. As he had done before, the general urged that the government, with the army, should leave the capital and carry on the war in the mountains of central Italy or in the south (Scirocco maintains that Garibaldi’s plan, rejected by Gen. Roselli, was to lead about 1,000 troops in an attack on the French from the rear.). But Mazzini and his advisers insisted that the defense of the walls should continue to the bitter end. At this point, Garibaldi gave in to a rare emotional outburst, abandoned his command, and led his Legion away from the walls and into the city. Only the pleading of officers like Luciano Manara finally persuaded him to return. The return of Garibaldi and his Legion was made all the more dramatic that day by the donning of red shirts by the entire group. It was just in time for the final French assault.

On the night of June 29-30, after the Feast of St. Peter and Paul had been celebrated in the city with candles and fireworks, the last assault began. The French, trained in this sort of combat, methodically took over each point of resistance: the Casa Merluzzo bastion, now almost decimated, the Porta San Pancrazio, the almost demolished Villa Spada, all defended by the Italians fighting in hand-to-hand combat in the pitch-black night. Among those to die in these fierce battles was the young Bersaglieri named Morosini, an almost angelic 18-year-old often compared to St. Francis by his companions. Even the French, who captured him, were impressed by his demeanor, prompting General Oudinot to write to his mother about the noble way in which her son had died. Garibaldi fought like a man possessed, leaping to action as soon as he heard that the “ultima prova” had begun. Seeing his Italians fleeing before the French onslaught, he gathered a few men and stopped the French advance, inspiring the rest to return to the fighting once more. Emilio Dandolo saw his chief “spring forward with his drawn sword, shouting a popular hymn.” Unsparing of himself, he employed his sword to devastating effect, leading what became a grisly battle of Frenchmen and Italians fighting to the death in hand-to-hand combat over ground littered with dead bodies.

At dawn, the Italians still held on to what was left of the Aurelian Wall and a nearby road, but the French had captured almost all the rest. From their close-in positions, they could now launch their most furious cannonade. On the other side, the Italian cannons were now a mere memory, most lying broken among numerous dead bodies. Aware now that the city would fall in moments, Garibaldi recalled Medici and his defenders still holding out in the Vascello, and ordered them into the city. Though a few positions remained, including the Villa Spada defended by the Lombard Bersaglieri, it was clear that the end was near. Emilio Dandolo was inside the Spada for this last defense, and describes the terror of being in the interior of a place pounded by cannon ricocheting from the walls, the floor slippery with blood. He also described the death of his leader, Luciano Manara:

…he was standing at an open window, looking through his telescope at some of the enemy who were in the act of planting a cannon, when a shot from a carabine passed through his body. “I am a dead man,” he said, falling; “I commend my children to you.” (223)

Shortly after, Luciano Manara, having taken the last sacrament, again pleaded for his children to be raised “in the love of religion, and of their country.” Then to a weeping Dandolo he said his final words: “Does it indeed pain you so much that I die?” then added, “It grieves me also.” And finally, giving Dandolo his prized ring: “I will embrace your brother for you.” (Trevelyan, 224-25 )

There would be one final charge, by Garibaldi and his Legionnaires, against the advancing French positions, but it was futile in the end. Just before a truce was agreed to around noon, Garibaldi was called to the Capitol to discuss surrender. He agreed to leave his post for one hour and entered the Assembly covered in dust and blood, grieving at the news he had just heard, that his comrade Aguiar was dead. The Assembly wanted his advice on three options: surrender; die fighting in the streets; or take their government and army into the mountains. Garibaldi opted for the plan he had long urged, to take the government and army into the mountains. “Wherever we go, there will be Rome,” he said. Having given his opinion, he rode quickly back to the Janiculum. The Assembly debated, with Mazzini arguing for Garibaldi’s proposal. But only a few opted for such a course; the rest of the Assembly resolved to “cease from a defense that has become impossible, and remain at its post.” Protesting, Mazzini refused to take part in a surrender, and resigned. The Assembly then gave Garibaldi and Roselli “plenary powers in the territories of the Roman Republic,” a grant Garibaldi considered in force even years later. The agreed-upon date for the French entry into Rome was July 3.

Meantime, Garibaldi prepared to organize his army for retreat. Some 4,000 men, many against the wishes of mothers and lovers, would take the wild march with him. Many would desert, many would be captured, many would die, but their chief, amazingly, would escape to fight again. Among those to join him were the Swiss Gustav Hoffstetter, again risking his life for a country not his own, and, of course, Anita Garibaldi, who insisted, despite her husband's entreaties to return to Nice, that she was coming on that fatal march, her last.

Margaret Fuller, hanging on in what she had recently called “Undaunted Rome,” was one of those who watched the July 2 departure of Garibaldi, Anita with hair cropped and dressed in male garb, and the ragtag army of patriots that followed him out of Rome, to be hunted by armies of French, Austrians, Spanish, Tuscans, and Neapolitans seeking, above all, to kill him and destroy the last vestiges of resistance in Italy. It is the most moving description of a departing army I know of:

Toward the evening of Monday, the 2d of July, it was known that the French were preparing to cross the river and take possession of all the city. I went into the Corso with some friends; it was filled with citizens and military. The carriage was stopped by the crowd near the Doria palace; the lancers of Garibaldi galloped along in full career. I longed for Sir Walter Scott to be on earth again, and see them; all are light, athletic, resolute figures, many of the forms of the finest manly beauty of the South, all sparkling with its genius and ennobled by the resolute spirit, ready to dare, to do, to die. We followed them to the piazza of St. John Lateran. Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic, so sad…The sun was setting, the crescent moon rising, the flower of the Italian youth were marshalling in that solemn place. They had been driven from every other spot where they had offered their hearts as bulwarks of Italian independence; in this last strong-hold they had sacrificed hecatombs of their best and bravest in that cause; they must now go or remain prisoners and slaves. Where go, they knew not; for except distant Hungary there is not now a spot which would receive them, or where they can act as honor commands. They had all put on the beautiful dress of the Garibaldi legion, the tunic of bright red cloth, the Greek cap, or else round hat with Puritan plume. Their long hair was blown back from resolute faces; all looked full of courage. They had counted the cost before they entered on this perilous struggle; they had weighed life and all its material advantages against liberty, and made their election; they turned not back, nor flinched, at this bitter crisis. I saw the wounded, all that could go, laden upon their baggage cars; some were already pale and fainting, still they wished to go. I saw many youths, born to rich inheritance, carrying in a handkerchief all their worldly goods. The women were ready; their eyes too were resolved, if sad. The wife of Garibaldi followed him on horseback. He himself was distinguished by the white tunic; his look was entirely that of a hero of the Middle Ages—his face still young, for the excitements of his life, though so many, have all been youthful, and there is no fatigue upon his brow or cheek. Fall or stand, one sees in him a man engaged in the career for which he is adapted by nature. He went upon the parapet, and looked upon the road with a spy-glass, and, no obstruction being in sight, he turned his face for a moment back upon Rome, then led the way through the gate. Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye, that had no tear for that moment. (Letter XXXIII, July 6, 1849)

What ensued, besides the inglorious entry into Rome of the French and the return of Pio Nono, was the legendary retreat of Garibaldi and his band of 4,000, now commemorated, in dozens of towns and villages where they found shelter, with statues of the hero of two worlds. An entire adventure in itself, it could be read as a modern thriller, complete with hairsbreadth escapes, tragic betrayals, and the rare courage of those who aided Garibaldi, his dwindling band, and his dying wife, usually at the risk of their own lives. Suffice it to say here that by 1850, Garibaldi was in New York, Mazzini was back in England, and Italians would have to wait another decade before one of them would, at long last, light the fire to end foreign rule in Italy. As for the Roman Republic, which had glowed so brightly, if briefly, in that Roman Spring, it would not be seen again for nearly one hundred years.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Roman Republic of 1849 (3: The Siege Begins, June 3)

2011-02-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

Oudinot began his siege with deception. He wrote General Roselli on June 1 that though the armistice was over, he was deferring the attack on ‘the place’ (‘piazza’) until Monday, June 4. The gullible Roselli believed him, and, countering Garibaldi’s plans to fortify the outer defenses to high alert, toured the outposts of the Villa Pamfili assuring the troops that they could relax until Monday morning. With Garibaldi too ill on the night of June 2-3 (he had been wounded in the side on April 30 but swore his doctor to secret, private treatment) to urge vigilance, the defenders manning the Pamfili/Corsini outposts slept that night, the main point Oudinot targeted. At 3 AM, therefore, French troops penetrated the walls of the two villas with hardly a fight, and by the time Italian sentries fired their muskets, were pouring, wave after wave, into the Pamfili grounds. Half the 400 Italians there were captured quickly, while the other half tried to set a defense at Villa Corsini, closer to Rome’s walls. Reinforcements from the city helped them hold on, but French artillery and superior numbers soon drove the defenders down the hill to the Vascello, a villa shaped like the prow of a ship. By morning light on June 3rd, the critical Villa Corsini, without which Rome could barely be defended, was in enemy hands.

When he heard that Rome was under attack, Garibaldi rushed from his sick bed with his several officers—many in their twenties, most to lose their lives that day— to join his troops. Gathering his forces in the Piazza of St. Peter’s, he led them to the Porta Cavalleggieri, contemplating where, with Corsini now swarming with French, he could make a stand. All the bells of Rome were clanging the alarm, soldiers and their equipment flying everywhere, most headed for the Janiculum. Garibaldi with his Legion made it to the Porta San Pancrazio about five-thirty in the morning. Inside the walls, the Italian regiments were gathering to prepare for the attack; outside the walls, and opposite San Pancrazio stood the key to the entire battle—the Villa Corsini, four stories high, perched like a fortress commanding the entrance to the city—now in possession of the French. Garibaldi judged that it had to be retaken, no matter what the cost. The cost would be great that day, June 3, when so many martyrs of the siege of Rome would die. This was due in part to the way in which the Corsini had to be attacked—through a narrow gate and uphill 300 yards to a long staircase that allowed only a few soldiers at a time to run, and during which they were open targets for French sharpshooters. Even if the French had to yield the Corsini Villa, as they did several times that day, they could retire to the Pamfili grounds where a hollow provided cover for a new attack. With a force approaching 30,000 troops, they had ample reserves to do so. The Italian defenders under Colonel Galletti, meantime, had possession of the Vascello, at the bottom of the hill. They also had a battery at the Casa Merluzzo, left of the San Pancrazio gate, from which they could shell the Villa Corsini.

This became the crux of the battle on June 3, 1849. The Corsini windows, balconies and walls sprouted French soldiers firing at detachment after detachment of Garibaldi’s legionnaires dashing for the narrow, deadly entrance gate, filing through, and rushing up the narrow way to the villa. Then, the survivors of that deadly fire, if any,

would storm up the double staircase, gain the balcony, bayonet the French in the drawing-room, and stand for a few minutes masters of the villa. Often the charge failed half-way up, from sheer want of numbers. But several times the Corsini was carried, and held for awhile, against the concentrated fire of a whole army in the woods of the Pamfili beyond. On one of these occasions the Garibaldians piled up their dead comrades in the open loggias on the west side of the villa, and repulsed the French attacks from behind that barricade. (Trevelyan,175)

At 7:30 that morning, Garibaldi made his first announcement of several that day that the Corsini had been retaken. But it was soon lost again, and a new attack would begin. The losses on the Italian side were terrible: Garibaldi’s chief of staff, Daverio, was killed early. Angelo Masina was wounded and refused to go to the hospital until Garibaldi ordered him to; he was back in an hour with his arm bound in bandages. When the 900 Lombard Beraglieri finally arrived (they had been held, against Garibaldi’s plea for assistance, inside Rome by an order from the feckless General Roselli), Garibaldi sent one company to occupy the nearby Casa Giacometti, from which they could fire into the Corsini villa. Then he ordered most of the rest to capture the Corsini. Led by Luciano Manara and Enrico Dandolo, the Bersaglieri stormed the villa, only to be mowed down by the French firing from inside windows and behind protective walls. Rather than retreat, they took up positions and sought to trade fire in what was becoming a massacre. Enrico Dandolo was among the first to be killed. When Manara saw how hopeless his situation was, he ordered the retreat, but that turned out to be more fatal than the attack. As the Swiss volunteer Gustav Hoffstetter later recorded it:

And now as these defenceless men poured out of the garden, the deadly harvest began in earnest. At first I imagined that the numbers of men falling on their faces had merely stumbled in their haste over the roots of the vines. But their motionless bodies soon showed me the truth….(quoted in Trevelyan, 179)

Having lost some of his best soldiers, Garibaldi probably should have fallen back for an artillery bombardment (indeed, many commentators have criticized him for not having softened the French position before ordering the Bersaglieri to attack). In part he did. But then he indulged in what has been called a ‘piece of madness.’ Finding a reserve of Bersaglieri inside the walls, he asked for a small party to engage in a “difficult undertaking.” Though Emilio Dandolo, in charge, had just heard a rumor that his brother had been slain, he volunteered to lead the undertaking. He later wrote:

“Go,” said Garibaldi to me, “with twenty of your bravest men, and take Villa Corsini at the point of the bayonet.” Involuntarily I remained transfixed with astonishment — with twenty men to hurry forward to attack a position which two of our companies and the whole of Garibaldi's Legion, after unheard-of exertions, had failed to carry. . . .

But the 19-year-old Dandolo obeyed the order and charged towards the Corsini Villa. By the time his little band reached the entrance, only twelve men remained. His account continues:

.

.would twelve men do against a place occupied by several hundreds of the enemy ? I had nothing left but to stoop to that which more numerous forces had already done — give the signal to fire, and then retreat. When we had got half-way down the road, S and I were both struck in the thigh by the same ball. We returned to the Vascello, six in number, in a deplorable condition, and with the conviction that the really extraordinary courage which had just been so conspicuously and recklessly displayed would have no effect, beyond that of showing the French that Italians were still capable of fighting with temerity, whatever the fortune of war might be.

Dandolo, severely wounded and out of action, dragged himself from post to post that afternoon, seeking his older brother. No one had the courage to tell him the truth until he entered the Casa Giacometti and found Manara and Hoffstetter beside the dead body of his brother, Enrico. Hoffstetter stepped away, while the Colonel grasped Emilio’s hand:

“Do not seek your brother any more—it is now too late; I will be a brother to you.” The young man, sick with wounds and grief, fell fainting against Manara, who carried him out of the room in his arms. (Trevelyan, 181-82)

The afternoon then proceeded with a fierce cannonade by the Italians from the Casa Merluzzo and the walls. The effect was to make an absolute ruin of the Villa Corsini, its floors collapsing, the French trying to hold on. When fire from the French side slowed, Garibaldi ordered his last attack, with Masina’s lancers in the vanguard, followed by now-General Galletti and Masina himself with bandaged arm. The horsemen made it up the slope and followed Masina galloping up the steps of the Corsini. Behind them, Manara and Garibaldi led the infantry in clearing the last of the French from the Villa, and occupied it. Cheers erupted at the gate below, and a mad rush by citizens, artists, gunners, and stray infantrymen charged the villa in a race to glory. A defense was hastily prepared in expectation of the inevitable French counterattack, which was not long in coming. And though the mob defended the Villa with tenacity and courage, before long the overwhelming numbers of French broke through the defenses, and the retreat was called. The Villa Corsini could be taken by the Italians, but it could not be held. The most bitter casualty of that attack was Angelo Masina himself, abandoned in the confused retreat. His body, left lying a few yards from the steps he had charged on horseback, would remain there, his bleached, unburied bones to be recovered only after Rome fell.

Another renowned warrior would fall late that day: Goffredo Mameli, the 21-year-old poet of Genoa and author of the most famous hymn of the Risorgimento, Fratelli d’Italia (music by Michele Novaro). He was wounded in one last desperate charge against the Corsini ordered by Garibaldi, one which Mameli, who had served till then as adjutant, begged to join. He did, and was wounded in the knee, lay for a month trying to recover, and died from the gangrene that had set in. That last attack also failed, leaving the French in possession of the high ground outside the walls, and Garibaldi’s men in possession of the Casa Giacometti and the Vascello. Without the high ground, as everyone knew, Rome’s fate was sealed.

About 1,000 Italians lost their lives in that fierce opening battle, 30 officers and 200 soldiers from Garibaldi’s legion alone. Manara’s Lombard Bersaglieri, often called the flower of northern Italy, also estimated their losses at 200. And though many conceded that Garibaldi himself had made several mistakes (he should have prepared his attacks with more cannon fire), he emerged from the June 3rd battle more revered than ever. He had given Italians a lesson in heroism, had inspired them to a day of martyrdom that would bear fruit, if not in 1849, then in the next decade. As Alfonso Scirocco notes, that heroic defense astonished Europe, turning “June 3 into the first of several events that made it increasingly difficult to reverse the momentum toward national unification” (Garibaldi, 165). It was this that Mazzini understood, and in the month of fighting that followed, as more Italians lost their lives in what all knew was a noble but futile defense of the indefensible, the inspiration they gave to the rest of Italy would prove to be enduring, invaluable. As Trevelyan notes:

Some patriots, indeed, regretted that the defence of Rome was ever made since it was so spendthrift of Italy's treasure; yet the treasure was profitably spent. Because men remembered and told with pride and anguish the story of the uncalculating devotion of those young lives in this hopeless struggle, there grew up, as the years went by, an unconquer-
able purpose in the whole nation to have their capital: there rose that wild cry of the heart — Roma, o Morte!— (192)

Lawrence DiStasi

The Roman Republic of 1849 (2: "We Are Again Romans")

2011-02-02T13:03:00.000-08:00

The first test came quickly, on April 30. The Italian defenders numbered around 7,000 men: 2500 regular Papal troops and Carabinieri (both of whom had defected to the revolution); Garibaldi’s First Italian Legion, now about 1300 men; some 1400 men from Roman volunteer regiments; and an assortment of inexperienced citizens, including 300 students, about 1,000 National Guards, and several hundred unattached civilians armed with whatever they could find. Garibaldi had been put in charge of defending the Janiculum—Rome’s ‘eighth’ hill and its highest, most crucial defense point, being west of the Tiber and bordering the Trastevere district, but inside the city walls. Should it fall, the French attackers could bombard the city below at their leisure. It should be added that other citizens continually helped with building ramparts and aiding the wounded, particularly the revolutionary Princess Cristina Belgioioso, who took charge of the hospitals. One of her first acts was to put Margaret Fuller, whom she had met previously, in charge of the Fate Bene Fratelli hospital sited on an island in the Tiber River.

On the other side were the French—also with about 7,000 fully-equipped troops (a rearguard was left behind to protect Oudinot’s communications), confident that with the first cannonade and charge by the best army in the world, Rome’s defenses would melt like so much butter. Indeed, so confident were the invaders that they brought field artillery but no heavyweight siege-guns or scaling ladders. Their plan was to enter by the Porta Pertusa, unaware that that gate no longer existed (some recent scholarship suggests that the French attack had focused on the Porta Cavalleggieri all along). Garibaldi, meantime, had been zealous in setting up his defenses. He saw that, due to the height of the ground outside the walls, batteries set up there could easily bombard defenders below to shreds. So he set up his men outside the crucial San Pancrazio gate, on the high ground of the Villa Corsini and the Pamfili Villa and gardens behind it. Thus, when General Oudinot’s forces reached the non-existent Pertusa gate, they had to change plans and attack the Porta Cavalleggieri further south. This meant they had to move down a hill and over a thousand yards of open country—easily fired upon by National Guard troops on the wall and Roman batteries near St. Peter’s. By around noon, the initial French attack was stalled, though not yet driven away.

Now it was Garibaldi’s turn. Watching from his high position at the Corsini Villa, he never hesitated, but took the offensive to turn the initial rebuff of the French into a defeat in the open field. To do so, however, his soldiers had to charge down from the Pamfili Gardens and cross a walled lane connecting the Porta San Pancrazio with the main road to Civitavecchia. Unfortunately, coming up this lane were about 1,000 French infantry. Garibaldi’s students and artists suddenly found themselves fighting at close quarters with an army of veterans, and soon had to retreat. Some of Garibaldi’s Legion, under the artist Nino Costa, managed to set up a defense nearby and stalled the French advance. But the situation was perilous: both Corsini and Pamfili were being overrun, and their loss would be devastating. Garibaldi sent for reinforcements—about 800 volunteers under Colonel Galletti, still smarting from the previous year’s defeat in Lombardy. This time, however, the odds were better and, led by Garibaldi and Galletti, the Italian Legion charged the French to recapture the Corsini Villa and Pamfili Gardens. Here is how Trevelyan describes it:

Swarming over the Corsini hill, and across the little stream and valley that divide it from the Pamfili grounds, the Legionaries came crashing through the groves. The Garibaldian officers, ‘the tigers of Montevideo,’ with long beards, and hair that curled over their shoulders, were singled out to the enemy’s marksmen by red blouses, falling almost to the knees. This was the day that they had waited for so long in exile, this the place towards which they had sailed so far across the ocean. Behind them Italy came following on. And above the tide of shouting youths, drunk with their first hot draught of war, rose Garibaldi on his horse, majestic and calm as he always looked, but most of all in the fury of battle, the folds of his white American poncho floating off his shoulders for a flag of onset. (132)

The Italians managed to relieve Costa as he was about to be overrun, and soon pushed the French off the two hill positions, pursued them down into nearby vineyards, and “after fierce struggling, body to body, with guns, and hands, and bayonets, put the French to flight.” Nor was that all. The main body of the French was so slow in retreating that nearly 400 were taken prisoner. Coupled with the 500 French soldiers killed that day, this capture of prisoners made the rout—Oudinot and his ‘invincible’ army were fleeing rapidly towards Civitavecchia—both complete and sweet. And the people of Rome knew it:

That night the city was illuminated, the streets were filled with shouting and triumphant crowds, and there was scarcely a window in the poorest and narrowest alley of the mediaeval slums that did not show its candle. It was no vulgar conquest which they celebrated. After long centuries of disgrace, this people had recovered its self-respect, and from the highest to the lowest ranks men felt, “We are again Romans.” (Trevelyan, 134)

Sadly, Garibaldi’s superiors did not understand, or did not wish to understand the situation he had presented them with. The French were in full retreat, on unfamiliar ground. They must be pursued, he argued, and driven into the sea; the whole of Italy could be aroused. But Mazzini gave greater weight to two considerations. First, imposing a total defeat on the French might be satisfying, but it would probably further alienate Louis Napoleon, and Mazzini still hoped that the French would come to their senses and aid a fellow republic fighting for liberty. Second, Rome’s leaders worried about the other armies closing in on them—King Ferdinand’s Neapolitan army advancing from the south, and the Austrian forces driving down from the north. If Garibaldi were to march forty miles to Civitavecchia, and get caught there in a drawn-out battle, Rome would be left without her most capable defender. It was the first, but not the last quarrel that would divide the two titans of Italian unification. In the end, the soldier had to yield to the statesman. And to demonstrate their difference from the despots ruling elsewhere, the Roman leaders ordered that their French prisoners get medical care and a tour of the city before being released. In response, the French reluctantly released some of their prisoners, including the priest, Ugo Bassi, who had been captured administering the last rites to fallen Romans.

Now the Roman forces had to turn to the threat from the south. King Ferdinand, with an army of 10,000 men, was camped a mere 20 miles from Rome near two cities in the Alban Hills, Frascati and Albano. Still fearing an attack from the French, Rome’s military leadership under General Avezzana decided it could only spare some 2300 soldiers, mostly Garibaldi’s Legion, some students and assorted volunteers, and one experienced troop, Luciano Manara’s Lombard Bersaglieri. The latter had fought the previous year in the famous “five days” of Milan, endured the subsequent loss to the Austrians, and had then headed to Rome; stopped at Civitavecchia by the French, they were only able to gain passage by promising not to engage in the fight. Though they honored their pledge by staying out of the April 30 battle, they were now eager to show what they were made of.

Garibaldi quickly saw that it was foolhardy to make a frontal attack on such a large force, so he chose to employ his guerrilla tactics—to so harass Ferdinand’s army that it could not move on Rome. Marching at night, Garibaldi on May 4 and 5 feinted north from Tivoli, before he turned south to his real target, Palestrina, where he set up headquarters on May 7. By now aware of what they were faced with, the Neapolitans sent General Lanza and Colonel Novi to dislodge the “bandit” hampering their advance. But from his high observation point, the guerrilla leader saw the columns advancing on him, and rather than waiting to be attacked, sent Manara’s Bersaglieri and another troop to attack first. So shocked were the Neapolitans by Garibaldi’s offensive that the battle was over in three hours, with the enemy in full flight—Lanza’s right wing abandoning towns right and left and not stopping till they got near enough to Ferdinand’s headquarters on the Alban lake to feel safe; Novi’s left wing retreating first to Colonna and then to Frascati. Captured prisoners made it clear that Garibaldi’s reputation as a “devil” had preceded him; the prisoners begged for their lives, and in despair over the lack of protection given them on their papal crusade, “cried out in their dialect, ‘Managgia Pio Nono.’” (Trevelyan, 144)

Once again, however, Rome’s leaders stopped Garibaldi’s advance and recalled him to Rome, fearing a new move by General Oudinot. They were mistaken. Oudinot was awaiting reinforcements that would swell his army to 40,000 men. To disguise this intention, Louis Napoleon sent Ferdinand de Lesseps (of later Suez Canal fame) as an envoy, allegedly to try to arrange a peace between Roman leaders and Pius IX. On May 17, the Assembly and the Triumvirate agreed to halt hostilities to give de Lesseps time to fashion such an agreement. But what they really did was give the French time—first for Oudinot to get his reinforcements; and then for Louis Napoleon to await elections that would increase the power of French Catholics in Paris necessary to overwhelm objections from the Left. Both would prove fatal to the Roman Republic’s survival.

For the moment, though, a truce reigned and Garibaldi took advantage of it by ordering red shirts for all of his legionnaires (previously, only his officers had them). It was a master stroke in the long run for the red shirt became not only a symbol of the sacred cause of Italian unification, but also a moral symbol of camaraderie for those who took part in apparently hopeless battles. The triumvirate also took advantage of the truce to renew their attempt to try to drive King Bomba’s army out of Roman territory. Though they made Garibaldi a General of Division commanding part of the army, they still kept him subservient to the Roman, General Roselli, who became Commander-in-Chief. This, too, would have nearly disastrous consequences because Roselli, though decent, was a wholly conventional, timid commander. Thus the Roman army moving south now combined conventional and guerrilla forces that never quite jelled. As Trevelyan describes it:

The army moved with the uncomfortable and jerky motion of a man with an excitable dog on a leash; Garibaldi dashed about in front locating and engaging the enemy, and then was forced to wait till Roselli came sulkily lumbering up with the bulk of the troops. (153)

The upshot was that though he had a force five times the one Garibaldi had led earlier, Roselli chose to avoid a direct attack, and harass the enemy flanks once again.

The picture was of a lumbering army moving slowly across the plain, with Garibaldi racing ahead to see what the enemy were up to. It turned out that, intimidated by an army as large as his own, King Bomba was in full retreat. To Garibaldi, the only danger was that the enemy would escape. Taking the initiative, he decided to try to cut off the King’s retreat by attacking him with an advance guard, simultaneously calling for Roselli to rush up quickly to finish the job. It was a breach of discipline, but absolutely justified in his mind. With 2000 soldiers, many of them his trusted legionnaires, he could disrupt the enemy’s retreat and, once joined by the main force, strike a decisive blow for Rome, and possibly for all of Italy.

Garibaldi placed his advance force outside Velletri. The main engagement there demonstrated his courage and will under any conditions. A troop of Angelo Masina’s mounted lancers, pursuing enemy soldiers ahead of them, suddenly ran into a large column of enemy cavalry. With Masina absent at another post, his young cavaliers turned and raced back towards where Garibaldi was watching, with the enemy in hot pursuit. So angered was the General by this retreat that he, alongside the giant Aguiar, sat on horseback like a statue, blocking the road. Unable to halt or turn their own horses, the cavaliers smashed into the two immovable objects, and all went down in a jumble, Garibaldi at the bottom. Fortunately, a group of young Legionnaires were fighting nearby, and rescued their chief. Suddenly, Ferdinand's troops realized that they were in the middle of the “red devil’s” position, caught in opposing fire. They fled, leaving thirty prisoners, and with Masina's lancers in pursuit, were driven up into the town of Velletri. Before even the first of Roselli’s lumbering reinforcements began to appear, Garibaldi’s men were entrenched, laying siege to the town.

When the Commander-in-Chief arrived, however, far from rejoicing in Garibaldi’s courage and valor, he focused on his subordinate’s breach of discipline in beginning the battle without him. Sulking, he refused to attack that evening, or position troops, as Garibaldi suggested, to stop the enemy retreat. Ferdinand’s army was thus able to take advantage of the night, steal out of the southern gate of Velletri, and retreat down the road towards safety. When, early next morning, some of the Roman forces climbed into the town to reconnoiter, they found the streets empty, until the townspeople emerged, overjoyed at their deliverance.

Garibaldi now sensed that King Ferdinand’s rule would not survive an invasion and urged his superiors to authorize an all-out attack. It was a repeat of the French situation. Mazzini, worried about the Austrians, who had just seized Bologna and were advancing towards Rome, recalled Roselli and half the army, allowing Garibaldi, undermanned, to pursue Ferdinand as far as he could. Garibaldi’s troops were welcomed in town after town as deliverers until they crossed into Neapolitan territory at a town called Rocca d’Arce. The townspeople had all fled, the village empty. Instead of pillaging, however, Garibaldi ordered his forces to sit down in the square and rest. Emilio Dandolo was in that group (Count Dandolo was a member of the Lombard Bersaglieri and wrote a seminal account of his experiences later) and described it as follows:

“..when the terrified inhabitants observed from the surrounding heights this admirable spirit of order and self-restraint, they hurried down to welcome us, threw open their houses and shops, and in a few minutes the whole village had regained its accustomed activity. They then related to us how many superstitious fables the Neapolitans had spread among them; according to which we were so many ogres let loose by the devil, to devour children and burn down houses…” (Dandolo, quoted in Trevelyan, 158)

Instead of allowing their Achilles to pursue his advantage and possibly bring the whole of southern Italy into the uprising (Garibaldi always believed this would have happened), however, the Triumvirs once again recalled him to Rome to fend off the attack by the Austrians they feared was imminent. With no choice but to obey, Garibaldi re-entered Rome at the end of May, followed by his exhausted troops between May 30 and June 2. With Rome secure, all hoped they would get a long-deserved rest, but it was not to be. Neither was the strategy Garibaldi favored: guerrilla war in the mountains and valleys throughout the country. As Trevelyan puts it:

Mazzini’s dream was to be realized instead—the fiery martyrdom of the Republic in one supreme scene of defiance and death. (160)

For General Oudinot’s reinforcements had now arrived, and the treacherous siege of Rome by 30,000 French regulars was about to begin (treacherous, because on the very day de Lesseps had signed a treaty with the Triumvirs agreeing that the French would protect Rome from Austria and Naples, Oudinot was outside Rome beginning his siege.)

Lawrence DiStasi

The Roman Republic of 1849 (Part 1)

2011-01-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

Probably the most renowned phase of the Italian Risorgimento—Italy’s achievement of independence and unification—occurred in 1860 when Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “1,000” (i Mille) landed in Sicily and almost miraculously liberated not just that island, but, shortly afterward, the southern half of the Italian peninsula. When joined with King Vittorio Emmanuele’s victory in the north, Garibaldi’s triumph united all of Italy but Venice and Rome.

A decade before this, however, there was a battle that, even though it ended in defeat, lives just as vividly in Italian hearts. This was the battle to defend the short-lived, but seminal Republic established in the city of Rome in 1849. The struggle included not only Garibaldi in his first real appearance as hero of Italy, but also that other giant patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini. As G.M. Trevelyan says in his beautifully-written history, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic:

That there should ever have been a time when Mazzini ruled Rome and Garibaldi defended her walls, sounds like a poet’s dream. (Trevelyan, Intro, 3)

But it was no dream. As Mazzini makes clear in his writings, the 1849 battle for Rome in the face of hopeless odds was a necessity in order to trumpet to the Italian people not just the dream of liberation, but its possibility, its inevitability:

To the many other causes which decided us to resist, there was in my mind one intimately bound up with the aim of my whole life—the foundation of our national unity. Rome was the natural center of that unity, and it was important to attract the eyes and reverence of my countrymen towards her… (Mazzini, quoted in Trevelyan, 112)

To understand what happened and why it happened in Rome, some acquaintance with prior events is necessary. Mostly this involves the European uprisings of 1848. Due partly to crop failures in 1845-7, and partly to revolutionary ideas of liberation among the middle classes, popular uprisings rocked Europe’s monarchies in 1848, forcing many rulers to either flee or to grant concessions. Prince Metternich was forced to resign as Austria’s foreign minister; King Louis Philippe fled France and a Republic was declared; similar revolts took place in Krakow, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Madrid and elsewhere. In Italy, insurrections shook all the major territories. In January, citizens struck against Austrian rule in Lombardy by refusing to smoke or play the lottery—thus denying the Austrians needed taxes. Soon Sicily revolted against the Bourbon King Ferdinand, who then granted his Kingdom of Two Sicilies a constitution. Tuscan revolts in February ousted the Grand Duke and led to a constitution and a provisional government. Later in February, the newly installed Pope, Pius IX (Pio Nono), surprised the Papal States by initiating reforms and granting a constitution there as well. Despite the concessions, however, tensions continued to grow. An insurrection in Milan starting on March 18 resulted in the famous five days (cinque giornate) of street fighting that expelled the Austrian garrison and forced Marshal Joseph Radetzky’s army to retreat. With Daniele Manin leading a similar revolt in Venice, King Charles Albert of Sardinia/Piedmont concluded that Italy’s struggle for unification was at hand, and declared war on Austria. The whole of Italy seemed to be in revolt against her foreign rulers.

It was at this point that the two revolutionary exiles, Mazzini in London and Garibaldi in Uruguay, returned to their homeland to join the struggle. They met, for the first time, in Milan sometime in the summer of 1848. Mazzini had gone to Milan in April hoping to inspire the Milanesi to form a Republic, but after offering Charles Albert his services, became increasingly disenchanted with the King’s timidity. Garibaldi, too, had offered his services to Charles Albert on July 5, but the King mainly wanted to get rid of this uncontrollable firebrand and passed him on to staff in Turin. On the way, Garibaldi stopped in Milan, where he was offered a Generalship and, at the end of the month, asked to defend Bergamo with 3700 men under his command. Mazzini took up a rifle and joined Garibaldi’s troops at Bergamo, but both were so disgusted with King Charles Albert’s easy defeat by the Austrians (at Custoza July 25, 1848) and the subsequent armistice that Garibaldi issued a proclamation:

“The king of Sardinia may have a crown that he holds onto by dint of misdeeds and cowardice, but my comrades and I do not wish to hold on to our lives by shameful actions.” (Alfonso Scirocco, Garibaldi, Citizen of the World, Princeton U Press: 2007, 145)

Garibaldi’s legionnaires were then hunted by both the Austrians and a force sent by King Charles Albert to capture him (the second time Charles Albert had ordered Garibaldi’s arrest). By the end of August, after daring battles in Luino and Morazzone, an exhausted Garibaldi took refuge in Switzerland, where Mazzini had earlier gone, and then in his hometown of Nice (Nizza).

Though he took some time to recover, Garibaldi was soon ready to renew his efforts, deciding in October that Sicily, now at war with King Ferdinand (newly christened “King Bomba” for his bombardment of Messina), was ripe. A stop at Livorno interrupted his plans when patriots there asked that he lead a revolution in Tuscany. Though this, too, failed for lack of recruits, Garibaldi then opted to aid Daniele Manin, still holding the Austrians out of Venice. Once again, though, the hero was detained enroute, this time by Liberals in Bologna begging him to lead their revolt against Papal rule.

Just as matters were coming to a head in Bologna, stunning news arrived from Rome: On November 15, the Pope’s prime minister, Pellegrino Rossi, was murdered. Luigi Brunetti, son of Rome’s populist “leader” Ciceruacchio, had stabbed the minister on his way to the opening of Parliament. Rome, and most of Italy, had been simmering with resentment against Pio Nono—once hailed, not least by Mazzini and Garibaldi himself, as the potential savior of Italy, the one whose troops could finally put an end to all foreign rule. Just as his 12,000 soldiers were joining Charles Albert in Lombardy, however, the Pope backtracked with his infamous “Allocution” of April 29, 1848. It declared, among other things, that the Pontiff was not the least inclined to wage offensive war against Austria (a Catholic power). For this reversal, the democrats and liberals who had placed their hopes in Pius IX were beside themselves with rage, venting it by attacking the Quirinal Palace and firing on the Swiss Guards. So petrified was the Pope by this demonstration that, on November 24, he disguised himself as a simple priest and fled south to the protection of King Ferdinand. Then, from his safe fortress in Gaeta, the Pope refused all overtures for negotiations and demanded unconditional surrender to his temporal rule over Rome and all the Papal States.

Garibaldi saw his opportunity. He set out for Rome with his Italian Legion, now 500 in number—a force that included the recently-added cavalry of Angelo Masina. This rather motley crew passed through the Papal States, and settled in the village of Rieti to await developments. They were not long in coming. Republican leaders put together a Provisional Government. Not yet sure of itself, the government made no offers to Garibaldi when he took a quick trip on his own to Rome. But in February 1849, when a Constituent Assembly was summoned, Garibaldi again traveled to Rome with his constant companion, Aguiar—a giant of a black man from Brazil—and Ignazio Bueno, who carried the arthritic Garibaldi up the steps to the Assembly. This time, Garibaldi, as a member of the Assembly, made a speech urging quick action, and was given a command, though not of the whole army as he had hoped. Rather, he was made a lieutenant colonel in the Roman army, but with authority for only 500 troops to defend Porto San Gregorio on the Adriatic. Like Charles Albert, Rome’s leaders clearly wanted to keep him at a distance.

Still, Garibaldi remained ready—recruiting more troops as well as outfitting his legion—as Rome’s government, on February 9, declared itself a Republic. In its Fundamental Statute of Four Articles it declared: the Papacy was deposed from temporal authority, though the Pontiff was granted full independence regarding his spiritual power; the form of government was to be a complete democracy; and the resulting Roman Republic was to join the rest of Italy in a movement for a common Italian nationality. The new republic had put monarchs and foreign rulers of any kind on notice: their days were numbered. As the revolutionary priest, Ugo Bassi, had declared weeks earlier, “Choose now—Garibaldi or Pius IX! Italy or continued slavery!” Romans had now chosen Italy (though not Garibaldi as yet). They had also chosen Mazzini (he was called with these words: Rome. Republic. Come!), one of their first acts being to make him a Roman citizen (he’d never been in the city before). When he did arrive on March 5, Giuseppe Mazzini was not only welcomed as Rome’s latest and greatest citizen, he was named a triumvir—one of three men to rule the city, though in fact he was the real ruler. Mazzini then set out organizing the government, and marginalizing the criminal elements that had been threatening to pervert democratic rule. As Trevelyan notes, Mazzini replaced the unruly elements with “a spirit of tolerance and liberty almost unexampled in time of national danger.” Mazzini, at one point, put it thus to the Assembly: “We must act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.”

It was the first of these objectives that induced the Roman government to finally turn to Garibaldi. The enemy was indeed at the gates. Pius IX, faced with the end of his temporal rule, had called for help not only from the hated Austrians, but also from the Spanish and the French—indeed from any Catholic monarch who would restore him. That the Austrians and the Spanish came to his aid was not surprising. But that the French—a fellow Republic and the initiators of revolution against despotic rule—would answer it was met with near disbelief. As the American, Margaret Fuller, wrote in one of her letters from Rome:

The interference of the French has roused the weakest to resistance. “From the Austrians, from the Neapolitans,” they cried, “we expected this; but from the French—it is too infamous; it cannot be borne;” and they all ran to arms and fought nobly. (May 6, 1849)

Nonetheless, the French President Louis Napoleon saw an opportunity to regain some of the influence France had lost when the Pope chose Naples as a refuge, rather than France. His ministers, too, saw an opportunity to curry favor with French Catholic voters in the future. And when the Austrians won a total victory in the battle of Novara (Charles Albert had decided to try war with Austria again; even more soundly defeated on March 22-23, 1849 at Novara, he resigned his throne to his son, Vittorio Emanuele) the French president, worried about Austrian domination, ignored his republican scruples and joined in the race to be the first to “liberate” Rome. As justification, he used words similar to these used by the Pope in his April 20 Allocution:

Who does not know that the city of Rome, the principal seat of the Church, has now become, alas, a forest of roaring beasts, overflowing with men of every nation, apostates, or heretics, or leaders of communism and socialism? (Trevelyan107)

Rome’s Republic was portrayed not as a movement for liberation, that is, but as a plot hatched by foreign agitators and terrorists. If they could get there first, the French would be the liberators.

Accordingly, the French Army, consisting of some 10,000 troops under General Oudinot, landed at Rome’s sea port, Civitavecchia, on April 25. Within days, they would be at the gates of Rome, expecting an easy victory over the “cowardly” Italians.

What Oudinot did not count on, of course, was the genius and charisma of Giuseppe Garibaldi, now elevated to general. With skills honed in South America, and in guerrilla war against the Austrians, Garibaldi was now at the height of his powers. Though he would have preferred to retreat to the Italian hills and fight a guerrilla war there, he yielded to Mazzini’s urging that Rome had to be defended at all costs (even though both knew the defense was eventually doomed to fail). When he arrived in the city on April 27, Garibaldi was met by the citizens of Rome in a manner befitting a god, or, at least, one of the Caesars:

“He has come, he has come!” they cried all down the Corso. (Trevelyan, 111)

In the next two days, he supervised the preparations for the coming siege, mainly digging trenches and fortifying villas near the expected point of attack. Never standing on ceremony, he rode round the city, encouraging the diggers—which even included elegantly-dressed women—himself. In later years, one Italian artist related his first encounter with him:

I had no idea of enlisting. I was a young artist; I only went out of curiosity—but oh!
I shall never forget that day when I saw him on his beautiful white horse in the market-place, with his noble aspect, his calm, kind face, his high, smooth forehead, his light hair and beard — every one said the same. He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour's head in the galleries. I could not resist him. I left my studio. I went after him; thousands did likewise. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him; we could not help it. (Trevelyan, 119)

Nor was it only the great warrior who was described in these terms. Margaret Fuller, in describing Mazzini’s March 8 visit to her three days after he arrived in Rome, used similar metaphors in two separate letters, the first to her friend Marcus Spring:

I heard a ring; then somebody speaks my name; the voice struck me at once. He looks more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings. Freely would I give my life for him….

and two weeks later to her friend Caroline Tappan:

His soft radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life that like the Magdalen I may at the important hour shed all the consecrated ointment on his head.
(both from Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: A Romantic Life, 119)

With two such leaders and an aroused citizenry facing thousands of battle-seasoned French troops, the battle for Rome could not help being legendary.
(First of four parts.)

Lawrence DiStasi

The Essential American Soul

2011-01-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Years ago, in graduate school, I was introduced to D.H. Lawrence’s seminal work, Studies in Classic American Literature. It is a brilliant tour-de-force, a foreigner’s slant on the American classics hardly taken seriously before its publication. What came to mind after the assassination attempt this weekend on Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords (a chunk of the left side of her brain was destroyed by the assassin’s bullet, though she seems to be heading for a miraculous recovery; six bystanders, including a federal judge, were killed and another fourteen wounded) was one of the most shocking of Lawrence’s prophetic statements. In his examination of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels (The Last of the Mohicans, the Deerslayer, et. al.), up until that time passed off as “children’s literature,” Lawrence pens this adult analysis: “And Natty (Bumppo), what sort of white man is he? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer…” And then Lawrence expands his assessment to include all of mythic America:

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Writers are often said to be prophets, and here, D. H. Lawrence, an Englishman who lived some of his later life in and around Taos, NM (where, perhaps, he saw firsthand what the essential American was like), was more prophetic than he knew. Think of the major American figures gunned down in the past half century: Pres. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, John Lennon, Mayor of San Francisco George Moscone and now Gabrielle Giffords and Judge Roll. And that doesn’t even consider the numbers of citizens gunned down in the streets who make the news for a few days, and are then forgotten. Bill Quigley reminds us in a Jan. 10 column on Common Dreams:

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association. That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world. In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Did you get that? In one year, seven other countries have a combined total of 545 gun murders, while the United States alone registers 9,484. And of course, when it comes to an assassination like the recent one, by a young white male, the first thing the gun-lobby folks want to say is: “a nut case.” The guy was a lone nut case. Can’t blame that on guns. Can’t blame that on the insane political rhetoric spewing from the hate-mongers on the right. Can’t blame that on Sarah Palin, whose web site—until Saturday of course, when it was quickly wiped clean—had a map of Arizona with gun sights targeting the districts of “traitorous” democrats to be defeated, one of them the district of Gabrielle Giffords herself. Oh no. These are not terrorists. These are not respectable gun-toting National Rifle Association zealots. These are nut cases. Like Clay Duke, Michael Enright, Byron Williams and Joe Stack, these are just mentally deranged white guys who happened to be attacking the big government types taking our money, nothing right-wing about it.

Same applies to the state of Arizona, where it happened. Right wing? Perish the thought. Except when you look at the proposed bills to be debated this very day, Monday, January 10. One, H2001, will allow faculty members to carry concealed weapons on campus. Another, H2014, will allow students themselves to carry weapons on campus. After all, what’s so special about places of learning? If Arizonans can carry concealed weapons into bars and restaurants, and everyplace else in Arizona (bills signed into law by Governor Brewer in 2009 and last April), why can’t everyone be armed on campus? Has anything bad ever happened at a college? (Well, aside from that aberration at Virginia Tech!) But this is Arizona. In Arizona, the Firearm Freedom Act allows weapons and ammunition made in Arizona to be sold without being hampered by those socialistic federal regulations. So anyone can buy whatever weapon he or she chooses. Even someone named Loughner who virtually announces on his website that he’s getting ready to commit murder. And does.

But then he was deranged.

Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think this whole country is deranged. A nation that allows the open carrying of weapons, even to political rallies, is a deranged nation. A nation that allows the purchase of the most deadly weapons, like the Glock 19 automatic used by Loughner, and a host of other assault weapons for the common shooter, is absolutely deranged. A nation that hides behind the notion that every red-blooded American male has a right to hunt and shoot like his forefathers did—with Glock 19s? with Kalashnikovs?—is confirming what D. H. Lawrence said years ago:

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.

And we had better start taking measures to keep the hate mongers, the inciters to violence, the hypocrite politicians prating about their devotion to “freedom,” from jump-starting more of the truly sick puppies in our midst to act our their fantasies. (And don’t even get me started on the power-broking bastards—David Koch, the oil money behind the Tea Party, comes to mind—who finance all this hate. And don’t even get me started on the video games training all of our kids to destroy every “being” that comes in sight so when they grow up they can be just as nimble maneuvering drones; or the TV airwaves filled with murder-and-mayhem cop shows twenty-four hours a day. Don’t get me started. )

Lawrence DiStasi

Who/What Do You Think You Are?

2010-12-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

The year’s end often brings up thoughts about fundamentals, and this one is no different. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this odd fact: though we have all kinds of religions and spiritual practices, and though science has brought us insight and evidence about natural processes from the inconceivably huge—the universe, said to have originated 15 billion years ago with a Big Bang—to the infinitely small—particles so puzzling they can hardly be said to have an actual existence beyond a certain probability, yet the whole existence in which we are engaged is still an almost total mystery. Who are we? What are we? We don’t know. We all have beliefs about this; and half-baked ideas from popular versions of science; but when it comes right down to it, we not only don’t know who we are or what we are, but even less about why we’re even here. How we’re even here. Why the human race is even here (sometimes, and often these days, it appears we’re here to fuck up the planet so badly that it becomes unlivable not just for us, but for all else. Even prehistorically, as Edward O. Wilson in The Future of Life says, man, far from being a “noble savage,” was and is “the planetary killer…Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse.”)

But for now, let’s just look at this simple question: Which is primary, matter or mind (sometimes referred to as spirit, soul, etc.)? Science, of course, has few doubts about this. Matter spontaneously generated life (it used to be thought that light energy, a flash of lightning perhaps, was needed to ignite basic chemicals into amino acids; now, much research is focused on life originating in the oceans near the deep vents—sites where exudations of sulfur and heat from the earth’s interior generate anaerobic bacteria, and strange life-forms that require neither light nor oxygen), and from tiny one-celled organisms continued to evolve into more and more complex organisms over billions of years until finally, there was us. In fact, for most of the previous hundreds of years, scientists did not even consider ‘mind’ a fit term to investigate. More recently, though, psychologists and neuroscientists have been looking more seriously into this thing called ‘mind.’ And though they’re still not sure what mind is, or where it’s located, it appears to be some product of matter, specifically the brain, and to have a ‘real’ existence. When it comes to priority, though, most scientists would be adamant: matter comes first. And this has meant, logically, that our era has become the age of materialism. Matter is what matters. All conclusions about origins and purpose stem from that.

Materialism, though, is precisely what many thoughtful people—philosophers, artists, spiritual seekers, religious leaders—find wanting. And so the origin stories that have come down to us from great thinkers and spiritual leaders all put matter secondary to something else: spirit, soul, mind, ideal forms, consciousness, something immaterial. And, that that something immaterial either is or gives birth to mind. In Genesis, God—the great spiritual, eternal being—creates the universe and all in it, including all the various animals and humans, in seven days. God speaks the Word (or is the word), and it is made flesh, or is clothed in flesh. Thus, the breath of some creator God instills life and order into a previously dead and chaotic mess of something, or nothing. And keeps it going. And the task of beings, especially human beings, is to seek to obey and eventually to reunite with that creator God in a more ideal place, an Afterlife. In eastern traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, the theoretical base suggests that some sort of Cosmic Mind has priority. From that big mind emerges the forms that are designed to survive in the material world: cells, bodies, and all that drives them from the beginning, mainly desire for increase and security. The task of the human—built as a vehicle for contemplating all of existence, sometimes imaged as the desire of the creator mind to reflect or contemplate itself—is to come to some sort of realization of what is true and real, above and prior to the material self that is secondary and, in some sense, illusory. As Karen Armstrong puts it in the Great Transformation: “The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self.” It takes most humans several lifetimes to accomplish this; meantime, the imperishable part keeps recycling through life forms (rebirth or reincarnation) over and over. Plato’s image of the cave provides a concrete image for a similar idea. That is, the ideal forms that are primary and eternal for Plato, are not seen by normal beings, who see only reflections—reality reflected by firelight on the wall of a cave. Most humans, that is, see only the physical world, which is changing constantly, and which was created by a demiurge. Though the world he created was based on the eternal forms, it is really only a weak, pale reflection of the true forms. These eternal forms themselves are accessible only to philosophical reason and exalted perception.

It is clear then that two positions are available to us all. Either we consider material existence the be-all and end-all; which is to say that we are born, our brains generate an entity we call mind, we mature, and we die; one shot and that’s the end of it. OR, we are aggregates of some stuff that is really only a pale shadow of a more fundamental reality—a prior and superior mind or soul that we can unite with through the proper rational, behavioral, spiritual, or contemplative practices. Those who subscribe to the first view are sometimes called ‘realists;’ those who subscribe to the second are sometimes called ‘idealists.’ Which are you?

What has given new life to such questions is the emergence, in recent years, of formerly esoteric practices, mostly from the east, coupled with interpretations of scientific developments that appear to provide real-world support for those esoteric views. Consider this quote from a recent book, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind, Robert Nadeau and Menos Kafatos, Oxford U Press: 1999:

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious. (p. 197)

What this interpretation leads to—starting from a wholly materialistic view based in the most materialistic of all scientific paradigms, evolution—is the rather idealistic view that the material universe is actually not dead matter at all; it is alive. It is, in some sense that we are still not clear about, conscious. More, that this universal, conscious whole—that which may have given rise to the idea called ‘God’—“exists in some sense within all [its] parts.” Which is to say, in each one of us.

So what are we? Are we truly separate selves going about our daily lives as best we can—which is to stay alive long enough to reproduce our kind in a way that helps them not just survive, but out-compete all other beings? Or are we interconnected manifestations of some incomprehensible whole, some mind that has not only generated us, but which is within each one of us and thus accessible to our self-reflection?

And how can we tell? What would serve as proof of one or the other position? Is there such a thing as proof; or is there simply belief? And what does it matter?

I would suggest that the view one settles on matters profoundly. For what we believe about who or what we are is the basis for all sorts of decisions about how to act—both towards all other humans (not just those in our tribe), and towards the world as a whole. And it is this that will increasingly, I think, become the crucial matter for all of us.

Obviously, there is more to say about this. Later.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Obama Administration is Dead

2010-12-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

The just-announced compromise between President Obama and gloating Republicans seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the Obama Administration. This guy, to put it simply, seems to have no stomach for a fight at all. Like some modern anti-hero, when the going gets rough, he caves. So today, as he’s been hinting all along, he announced that he would extend the Bush tax cuts for all Americans, including those making over $250,000/year or even $1 million a year (as Senator Schumer proposed.) No, Obama ate the whole poisoned meal, and tried to defend it to outraged colleagues. More than that, he added a couple of new wrinkles. First, he proposed to provide a year’s drop of 2% in the FICA or Social Security taxes that all Americans pay (progressives have proposed making wealthy Americans pay more by extending the amount of income subject to SS taxes, but Obama, predictably, went the other way). While Obama claims that this will put more money in the hands of working Americans (and it will, short term), other progressives have pointed out that it makes a start in a direction favored by the most rabid reactionaries, who have been trying to get rid of Social Security for 80 years. That is, by reducing the amount going into the Social Security Trust Fund (already raided for years by mainly Republican presidents to finance their shitty wars), the President’s action will add to the pressure to bankrupt Social Security to the point where it will be abandoned as too costly. After all, Americans need their military-industrial complex. But there’s another element to the plan as well, again a major cave-in to slavering Republicans and their millionaire constituency. The hated estate tax would be lowered, on estates worth more than $5 million, to 35%. Democrats, Obama’s party, wanted to make the tax 45% on all estates over $3.5 million (still a lowering from the 55% it had been), but again, the Republican plan won.

Sort of makes you wonder if perhaps Obama isn’t a closet Republican, doesn’t it?

Whatever he is—and it certainly is not progressive—it now seems clear that he has decided that his only hope for winning in 2012 is to follow Bill Clinton’s example, and turn to the right after a mid-tern ‘shellacking’. It is a bitter pill for progressives to swallow after the euphoria that greeted his election. It is also, unless I miss my guess, the death knell for his administration. Because the one thing Americans despise more than a loser is a president so weak he can’t even muster the courage to use his bully pulpit to fight for what he believes in. Instead, at every turn, Obama has caved in to conservative forces—whether it’s on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Health Care “reform”, or taxes on the rich. Perhaps he long ago concluded that as a black man, he had to present himself as a non-threatening, non-combative intellectual. But he’s done that, and it has backfired every time. According to Republican rhetoric, he’s a socialist, a communist, a Muslim and a Nazi all rolled into one. Why he thinks he can somehow ingratiate himself with them and their constituency now is a mystery no one seems able to solve. The only thing that appears certain to me, again, is that it—plus his continuing cowardice in confronting his enemies—will condemn him to one term. Given the lack of backbone he’s displayed thus far (and sadly, he has tons of company among his Democratic comrades in Congress), perhaps that’s a good thing.

Lawrence DiStasi

Wikileaks: An Inside Job?

2010-12-01T12:38:00.000-08:00

The news has been alive with alarms about the catastrophe that could result from the latest Wikileaks revelations—over 250,000 cables from the U.S. State Department that could compromise U.S. diplomacy and diplomatic relations for years. Hilary Clinton expressed grave concern about the damage not only to the United States but to the world. The Justice Department announced it would be doing all in its power to prosecute those responsible—chiefly, it seems, Private Bradley Manning, now in custody as the lead, and only suspect in the investigation.

But the real hysteria has centered on those two remaining members of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ Iran and North Korea. Of course, it’s understandable that pooh bahs would be alarmed about North Korea, what with its two recent attacks on the South ratcheting up fears of a renewed all-out war (hard to believe that there has never really been an end to the 1950s Korea “conflict,” isn’t it). Still, the major alarums and trial balloons have concerned Iran. In England’s Guardian, the Nov. 28 headline read: “Saudi Arabia urges US attack on Iran to Stop Nuclear Programme.” The very first sentence adds that “other Arab allies have agitated for military action against Tehran.” These “other allies” include such democratic stalwarts as Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. All see Iran as a “threat”, as “evil,” or as a “snake.” “Cut off the head of the snake,” Saudi King Abdullah is quoted as urging.

All this was, of course, real music to the Israelis. As prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quoted by the Washington Post on Monday Nov. 29, "More and more states, governments and leaders in the Middle East and the wider region and the world believe this is the fundamental threat." Netanyahu went on to expose what he called the “gap” between what Arab leaders say privately and publicly, their public “script” alleging that the “greatest threat is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” while “in reality, leaders understand that this narrative is bankrupt. There is a new understanding,” i.e. the malignancy of a nuclear Iran.

And of course, the American media ran with this as the major story of the Wikileaks revelations. Both the PBS News Hour, with its pundits seriously discussing how bad the Iranian situation is, how unstable its leader, how worried the Arab states are about threats to their own regimes from a rising Iran; and Charlie Rose, where other pundits reviewed the “real” threat of a nuclear Iran (still, by the way, without even a hint of a nuclear weapon, though that no longer matters to the alarmists), and the “consensus” in the Arab states about this (the consensus of the Arab monarchies, at least, most of whom quietly sided with Israel against the Palestinians in the original war in 1948; though Hosni Mubarak of Egypt only jumped on the “throw Palestine to the wolves” bandwagon much later, to maintain U.S. aid and save his dictatorial ass increasingly threatened by popular revolt); in both arenas the ‘experts’ shook their heads gravely as they observed that the time is getting short for someone—Israel or the Obama administration—to do something. And the something was clear to all: someone has to bomb Iran’s still peaceful nuclear facilities.

It was amazing really. Out of 250,000 cables released or soon to be released, the big story was Iran: bomb bomb bomb Iran. No wonder Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president, scornfully dismissed the leaks as U.S. propaganda. But even that was taken as a sign that the man is as totally divorced from reality as his unstable nation.

Until, that is, on November 30, we heard from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Speaking on KPFA’s “Letters to Washington” show, Wilkerson had some fascinating things to say about Wikileak’s latest revelations. First, he said that all the worry about the leaks threatening U.S. diplomatic relations was a “tempest in a teapot.” Diplomats, according to Wilkerson, know that harsh words often get said in private, that governments all try to spy on each other, and that everyone understands the game. What he was really concerned about, he said, was the lack of capability, not to mention supervision of the alleged leaker, Pvt. Bradley Manning. “I have serious difficulty,” the Colonel said, “accepting the fact that this private downloaded what appears to be over a million documents and then gave them to others…Where was his chain of command when he was doing this? when he was downloading thousands of documents?” And then the Colonel came to the real nub of it:

This looks increasingly like (and I’m not a conspiracy theorist) someone is either jumping on top of this, opportunistically, to take advantage of it, or perhaps they were involved in it all along. And why is the information contained in these latest leaks in particular so proof positive of so many things that the United States, or certain parts of the United States, are trying to get across to the public—not least of which is Israel’s threatened position, that an existential threat exists to Israel and Iran is that threat. ‘Look how perilous, look how dangerous this situation is.’ That comes out of these leaks. (emphasis added)

Remember: this is not some ‘expert’ who may or may not have a private agenda with regard to the leaks or the substance of the leaks; nor, as he says, a conspiracy theorist. This is an army colonel, former chief of staff to the previous Secretary of State. This is a man who knows how Washington works, how diplomacy works, how the world of statecraft works. And his chief concern is not the alleged “damage” to the nation’s diplomacy posed by the leaks; it is the twin questions: 1) how did the United States allow this to happen? and 2) was someone taking the opportunity (either by leaping on what was leaked, or actually facilitating the leaks in the first place) to plant disinformation to affirm things they want affirmed?

And what do they want to affirm? It appears that the main objective is to provide further ammunition undergirding the administration’s—driven mainly by Israel and its U.S. lobbies—position that Iran constitutes the greatest threat to world peace since the Soviets, and the increasing justification for a military mission to take that threat out. As Zeid Rifai, the president of the Jordanian senate is quoted as telling a US official: “Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.” Or, as Major General Amos Yadlin, Israel’s military intelligence chief, warned last year: “Israel is not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the US was on 11 September 2001.”

I have to admit, it never crossed my mind that the Wikileaks cables could be part of a disinformation campaign. Perhaps it takes someone with inside knowledge of how such things work, like Colonel Wilkerson, to get it. But there it is. And my guess is that increasingly, especially as Obama is further harried by Republican zealots howling for his head, the refrain is going to get louder: Bomb Iran now, or suffer another 9/11.

Will the American public go for it? Normally I’d say no. But given what they’ve swallowed recently, and given the fear in this nation, can anyone be sure?

Lawrence DiStasi

Social Security Scapegoat

2010-11-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

It’s time for the American public to blow a big hole in the proposals now being seriously considered to “solve the budget crisis.” As noted in my last blog, the onus, as always, is meant to fall on the poorest among us. We have been hearing ad nauseam the mantra that the Social Security system is driving the nation into insolvency. Therefore, recent proposals to “solve” the debt crisis—brought on, it should be remembered, by two unpaid-for and unnecessary wars, the Reagan-Bush-Bush reductions in tax income on the wealthy, and of course the outright thievery of Wall Street financiers that produced the housing bubble, and crash—always target Social Security. ‘We’ll all have to make sacrifices,’ is the song line. Which means, you, you poor gullible assholes, will have to sacrifice as usual.

Unless, that is, everyone remembers some simple facts, the first of which is: Social Security is NOT responsible in any way for the current deficits. Indeed, Social Security right now runs surpluses—that is, the money paid in, by workers themselves—outstrips the money paid out. And remember, it’s your money you’ve been paying in for a lifetime. You may recall, in fact, the campaign promises of our presidential candidates a few years ago, who promised that Social Security funds would be “put in a lock box.” What that referred to is the fact that right now, according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (www.ncpssm.org), there is a “$2.6 trillion dollar trust fund built up by American workers over decades.” That’s $2.6 trillion folks. Except for the fact that the federal government, to disguise the deficit it runs each time we have a war, borrows from the SS trust fund, and is thereby obligated to pay it back, with interest. This raiding of the Trust Fund started in 1968 when Pres. Lyndon Johnson got legislation passed—he was building up American involvement in the Vietnam War, and of course wanted to tout “both guns and butter” (their guns, our butter)—started the game. The Trust Fund was allowed to be mixed with the General Fund, and off we went.

Bottom line: not only does Social Security run a surplus, the Federal Government owes the Social Security Trust Fund a ton of money, which it has to pay back with interest. It is in this sense only that Social Security could be said—by a blatant liar—to be contributing to the deficit. A more honest assessment would admit that, in fact, Social Security has contributed to the government’s solvency by supplying it with unused SS funds (the surplus) to disguise its deficits. Is the government grateful? Are the fiscal hawks grateful? Au contraire, mon ami. These bastards resent having to pay all that money back. It will break us! they whine. So let’s kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!

Sounds unbelievable, but that is the proposal coming out of such august bodies as the President’s Commission on Reducing the Deficit, and the Domenici/Rivlin plan referred to in a previous post. Let’s raise the retirement age, cut the COLAs (cost of living adjustments), force seniors to pay more for prescription drugs, and find other ways to cut benefits to the poorest among us. The key thing is to help business! Domenici/Rivlin, in fact, propose giving businesses a one-year Social Security tax “holiday” (we all love holidays, right?) that would reduce government income by $650 billion. It’s not enough that the money-grubbing swine who drove us into this ditch have all been bailed out—with government funds, some of which no doubt came from that SS Trust Fund. Now we have to give them another “holiday” while cutting the pathetic benefits given to the old folks. I tell you, if the American people fall for this one, they deserve to be rooting around in garbage bins to survive.

Fortunately, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has organized a day of protest. The Committee is calling on all interested parties (and if there’s someone who plans on not getting older, I’d like to hear from him/her) to take part in a day (Tuesday, Nov. 30) of calling Congress and making two demands: 1) NO cuts to Social Security for deficit reduction, and 2) a $250 payment this year to SS beneficiaries in lieu of no cost-of-living increases (COLAs) the past two years. Here’s the number of a hot line that will connect you to your Congressperson’s office: 800-998-0180. CALL, because you can be sure the other side will be shouting their ears off.

While you’re at it, you might want to cast a vote of support for Representative Jan Schakowsky’s plan for deficit reduction. Shakowsky is the only people’s representative on the Budget Deficit Commission, and her plan amounts to getting some budget reductions by such unheard-of expedients as “$144.6 billion in tax increases, $110.7 billion in defense cuts and $17.2 billion in healthcare savings through a public option.” And definitely no cuts in Social Security. As the Huffington Post quoted Shakowsky re: the Bowles-Simpson proposal to cut SS benefits: Using Social Security to address the deficit “is like attacking Iraq to retaliate for the September 11 attacks.”

Of course there are legions of benighted souls in America who would respond: what’s wrong with that? But perhaps there are other legions who get the point. Let us hope so; because as it stands now, the greatest push seems to be coming from the yahoos, who clearly see the current series of shocks (remember the Shock Doctrine?) as their best opportunity to, once and for all, get rid of the most hated of Roosevelt’s “giveaways”: Social Security.

Lawrence DiStasi

Destroying the Working Classes

2010-11-19T13:27:00.000-08:00

It has become Republican party policy to scream “class warfare” any time Democrats try to blame the rich for our current economic troubles. This is supposed to embarrass those who, according to the code of our time, are reviving socialistic or communistic dogma. The truth, though, is that the wealthy in this country—aided and abetted by the last three Republican administrations (and often enough by Democratic ones as well)—have been waging class warfare since at least the Reagan administration, have succeeded beyond anything they could have imagined, and are still not satisfied. They apparently want to reduce most of us to literal peonage. And the response? Well just think about the difference in the silence here, compared to near-riots in Europe—where Greek and French workers have had massive strikes and taken to the streets to condemn their governments’ proposals to reduce benefits won over years of struggle. Americans, by contrast, simply sit back and take it, or worse, ally themselves with the very people who have done them in.

Consider some facts assembled by Robert Freeman in a recent article (“Rich Declare War on the Middle Class,” Nov. 14, Commondreams.org). He begins with Ronald Reagan’s ‘revered’ administration, which “cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war.” Result: the national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992. But did anyone howl then? No, conservative economists kept saying, debt doesn’t matter; it’s a small percent of GDP. Both Bushes continued the trend, with W getting the prize, reducing the tax rate even more, spending trillions on war, and more than doubling the share of income to the top 1% (40% of his tax cut went to the top 1% of earners), and tripling the share to the top 1/10th of 1%. In dollars, this means that from 1973 till today, real wages for workers dropped, with adjusted income of the bottom fifth falling by about $7000/year, while yearly income for the top 1% increased by no less than $741,000. The figures for wealth held by each class are even starker: the top 1% now holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom half holds a mere 2.5%. As for the bottom two-fifths, they hold nothing, zero, zilch.

You might think, if you’re one of the working or middle classes—i.e., one of the growing numbers on food stamps (1 out of 8 Americans) or in official poverty (1 out of 5 Americans)—that perhaps this would satisfy the rich. But greed is insatiable. So now we hear from some of those alarmed individuals who have suddenly grown concerned over our national debt—particularly at the Obama adminstration providing a stimulus to create jobs for some of the 25 million unemployed, and also trying to reform the health care system to include more Americans left out of the worst system in the world—that something must be done. Our nation will go broke, they cry. We can’t sustain this kind of spending, they moan. And so we have the recommendations of the National Deficit Commission—to rip off the working classes even more. To allegedly lower the deficit by $4 billion, they propose remedies like this: eliminate the tax deduction for mortgage payments, which will decimate one of the last remaining sources of wealth for most people, their homes. They also propose to cut back the meager benefits provided by Social Security, lowering cost-of-living adjustments, raising the minimum retirement age, and while they’re at it, increasing the co-pays and deductibles for Medicare. And of course, they propose to reduce spending—which always means not cutting the military spending that’s bankrupting the country (recent govt estimates place the cost of keeping one (1) soldier in Afghanistan for a year at $1 million; that’s one soldier!), but the paltry programs that benefit the poor and the indigent.

And the monstrous benefits for the rich? Not a word about that. Or rather, those are slated to be increased! The Commission proposes to lower the maximum tax on the highest income earners from 35% to 24%, while their great buddies, the corporations, also get a drop in their nominal tax rate from 35% to 24% (those who actually pay taxes, that is.)

Amazing. But that’s not all. Into the fray, recently, has come yet another proposal from a front organization calling itself the Bipartisan Policy Center, made up of 19 prominent citizens, ex-legislators, ex-governors, and so on, chaired by retired Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico and a former budget director, Alice Rivlin. And what do they propose to “solve” our crisis? Why yet another tax holiday, this time a suspension of the Social Security payroll tax for a year or two, cutting and simplifying individual and corporate tax rates, and, get this, instituting a new 6.5% national sales tax. That’s to make up for the huge tax losses from the tax holiday. Now anyone who knows anything about taxation knows that sales taxes (and fees for things like drivers’ licenses, etc.) are regressive: that is, because the tax on purchases constitutes a much larger percentage of disposable income for the poor and working classes than it does for the rich, its impact on the poor is orders of magnitude greater. This is the whole theory behind a graduated income tax: to help make up for the disparity in wealth (and the wealthy always consume more natural resources and public services than their poorer counterparts), the tax on those who earn more should comprise a greater percentage of their earnings. But increasingly in our “everything for the wealthy” nation, progressive taxes are seen as unfairly depriving the wealthy of their just desserts. Tax has become a dirty word—as if any nation or any community could long survive without it. And increasing taxes, why that has become the equivalent of the black plague. So we have more and more proposals for sales taxes to bail out state and local governments, as well as the federal government, from the income tax-deprived holes they’ve dug for themselves.

The question is, why would elected representatives be so inclined to ignore the poor and aid the rich (the cost of the recent bailout of banks and Wall Street has been estimated at $13 trillion, and growing)? Perhaps a recent statistic about members of Congress will help clarify. In an article on Yahoo Finance (“Members of US Congress Get Richer Despite Sour Economy,” Nov. 17, 2010), a study by the Center for Responsive Politics reported this: about half of all members of Congress, 261 of them, were millionaires, one in five being worth at least $10 million, with eight in the $100 million-plus range (Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California, led with personal wealth of $303.5 million). Then contrast median household incomes between these mandarins and those they represent: for a House member, it was $765,010 in 2009r, an increase of more than $100,000 from 2008 (senatorial median income rose by a smaller percentage but a comparable dollar amount, ca. $100,000, to $2.38 million/yr), while for average working slobs, median household income dropped 3% at the same time (between 2008 and 2009) to about $50,000 annually. When stock holdings were examined, it should come as no surprise that these “people’s representatives” had most holdings in the “bigs,” like General Electric (which owns CNBC), Bank of America, Cisco Systems, Proctor & Gamble, and Microsoft. Also popular were Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Citygroup, all of whom received TARP money. As the report put it:

The most popular investment among congressional members reads as a who's who list of the most powerful corporate political forces in Washington, D.C. -- companies that each spend millions, if not tens of millions of dollars each year lobbying federal officials.

Nice work if you can get it.

So we’re left with this. Unless you’re one of the wealthiest 1% in this country, you’re being taken to the cleaners by the most well-oiled machine ever invented to do the job. They have the money, the legislators, the lobbyists (moving in a revolving door from Congress to lobbying and back again, like the recently elected Senator Dan Coats of Indiana) the propaganda organs at every level, and the stupidity of the public to help. They also have a level of unbridled greed that would make ancient Roman plutocrats blanche with shame. It sort of makes one wonder: how long can this organized theft and thuggery continue? Where is the righteous (and I don’t mean the manipulated Tea Party variety) wrath of “the people?” Are there any “people” left?

Lawrence DiStasi

Wag the Dog

2010-11-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

So many bizarre results from the Republican tsunami in last week’s mid-term elections—which to choose first?

How about this? Pick a target for the United States military to attack—urr, uh, how about Iran?—and see if it flies. Might even be able to convince Obama, now that he’s staggering from his ‘shellacking,’ to use it as a surefire way to get re-elected. You know, the old Wag the Dog scenario, where a weakened president starts a war to galvanize public opinion in his favor (Clinton allegedly did it in Bosnia; Bush clearly did it in Iraq after 9/11). Nevermind that we’re already engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Nevermind that another war would surely raise the deficit to newer more dizzying heights. War works.

Unlikely as such madness might seem to most of us, some recent trial balloons suggest that we should all think again.

For example, Senator Lindsey Graham (one of the so-called Republican “moderates” in the Senate who was flirting with voting for the Health Care Bill) just recently raised the issue of attacking Iran at a security conference in Canada (Saturday, Nov. 6). Asserting that “containment is off the table,” Graham said that war on Iran had several positive components to recommend it: “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.” (Matt Duss, ThinkProgress, 7 November 2010). This is astonishing, not only because countless international observers have opined that such an attack would prove counterproductive—actually leading more surely to a nuclear-armed Iran than anything else (Duss in the above-referenced article cites several of these informed opinions)—but also because it was not that long ago that the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate stated that “not only was Iran NOT working on a nuclear weapon, but it had ended its nuclear weapons efforts in 2003” (see my blog “Iran Again,” June 9, 2008). No matter, the "reasonable" Senator Graham had no hesitation at all in calling for another war against this “great threat.”

He’s not alone. But more subtly than Graham’s, the notion of a military strike on Iran has recently been framed as a great way for President Obama to rescue his tattered reputation in time for the 2012 elections. ‘Wag the Dog.' The amazing thing here, though, is that the nation’s oldest and most respected journalist, is proposing the war option. David Broder, of the Washington Post, wrote a piece on October 31 on the eve of the election, titled, “How Obama Might Recover.” Beginning with his august opinion that conventional policy options would probably not work to revive the economy in time since no one can design surefire economic measures, Broder gets to his “inside” advice to the President on one measure that might:

What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.
Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.
Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve. (Broder, Washington Post, 10/31/10)

Now this is truly bizarre. Broder is no nutball conservative; if anything, he tends toward the liberal end of the spectrum. And yet, here he is, seriously and publicly proposing that the President of the United States start a pre-emptive war with a nation that has attacked no one, in order to rescue his failing presidency and improve the economy. After what we’ve been through in the last ten years with Bush’s pre-emptive wars and the huge hole they put in the nation’s budget (estimates for the Iraq war go as high as $3 trillion! not to mention the cost in death, the drubbing of America’s reputation in the world, and so on), for a respected journalist to seriously offer a plan like this begins to make Tea Party wackos look sane. Broder, of course, is quick to stress that he’s “not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected.” Oh heavens no. But he goes on to close his piece with precisely that suggestion:

But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

No proof, of course, for his assertion that Iran is, in fact, “the greatest threat to the world in the young century.” Nothing but the uncontested assertion of our senior pundit—and the appetizing carrot to the young president that he will have “made the world safer” and be regarded by history (or at least by Broder) as one of our most “successful presidents.”

How is one to explain such a thing? Has the 81-year-old Broder gone senile? Or is he just listening to a few other pundits who have actually said the same thing recently. Like, for example, the rabidly pro-Israel Elliott Abrams (he of Iran-Contra fame, resuscitated as a ‘National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy’ for Bush) who said recently: “The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one.” Or the equally rabid Daniel Pipes: “a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene.” (both quoted by Eric Alterman, www.americanprogress.org, Nov. 4, 2010). Whatever the source for his loony idea, it is enough to give one pause. And though most commentators on Broder’s lunacy have discounted the fact that it might influence President Obama, we would do well to consider where the president stands with respect to Iran. When he was running for President, he spoke to AIPAC, the America Israel Political Action Committee, a front for promoting even the most right-wing Israeli policies in Washington. As I noted in the above-mentioned blog, what candidate Obama said, at that time, was that he was holding Iran responsible for the rockets launched by Hezbollah on Israel after the latter attacked Lebanon. He added,

we must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing to work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs…(to) help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza.

The Obama administration’s rhetoric excoriating Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program has only escalated since then.

Is it beyond the realm of possibility, then, that a severely wounded Obama would consider the Broder/Abrams/Pipes suggestion (NB: Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 2010 piece in the Atlantic Magazine, “The Point of No Return,” in which he essentially predicts and rationalizes the fact that Israel will, in the next year, attack Iran itself, may be the mother of all such Israeli-promoted trial balloons; it ends with this quote from Israeli President Shimon Peres: “We don’t want to win over the president,” he said. “We want the president to win.”)?

Given the madness now at large in this nation, it would be folly to think so.

Lawrence DiStasi

Quantitative Easing, or, The Rich Get Richer

2010-11-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

Here’s my favorite take on the elections.

The Federal Reserve and its head, Ben Bernanke, have recently announced their latest initiative, called “quantitative easing.” Aside from the fact that this sounds somewhat pornographic, it apparently means that a central bank creates money ex nihilo, i.e. out of nothing (sometimes called printing money, though these days it’s not so crude; the Fed just magically adds billions to its account), and then uses the funds to purchase financial assets (including government bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and corporate bonds) from regular banks and financial institutions. The Fed, this time, is apparently going to create some $600,000,000,000 (that’s billions), a sum, according to Chrystia Freeland of Reuters, “nearly as big as the TARP. It’s nearly as big as the first stimulus was.”

Now why, you might ask, would the Fed be doing this now. Well apparently, the Fed and most economists really think it’s imperative that the economy get another boost to prevent it from going into a second tailspin. And since the Fed is pretty sure, especially now that the “people” have spoken and swept out Democrats and swept in Republicans (giving the latter control of the House) that there is going to be even worse gridlock in Congress and the White House than before, they have to act. In short, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that this Congress will pass another stimulus, so the unelected Fed has to do it.

Here's where it gets interesting. The “people,” according to pundits and pollsters, have decided that Obama and the Democrats have spent too much money keeping the country out of depression; the stimulus, in particular, has been rejected as the product of “big spending Democrats.” It’s time to cut back on spending, is the alleged popular message, to get money back to the people. And how to do that: why by putting back into power the Republicans—the very party that crashed the economy in the first place. NO MORE STIMULUS, is the message. And yet, economists agree a stimulus is needed, and so the Fed rides to the rescue. The irony of all this? Listen to Chrystia Freeland:

I think the problem is, when the Fed acts as it does, printing more money, it’s a rich-get-richer phenomenon. This is going to be great for the banks. It’s going to be great for people whose personal finances are strong enough that they can re-mortgage—refinance their mortgages. But it’s not so great for the people who are in trouble. And that’s one reason why it might not have as powerful an impact as the Fed would like.

Now isn’t that sweet? The poor working-class slobs in the Midwest and South (the Tea Partiers) who voted the Republicans into office presumably believed they were voting to help themselves. But by voting for gridlock, they are doing exactly the opposite! They are forcing the Fed to push a stimulus through the back door. And that stimulus, quantitative easing, is going to help the very people—the bankers and financial pirates—voters are supposedly pissed off at. Banks are infused with tons of money, presumably to induce them to lend to small businesses and households to increase buying. But the banks don’t really have to do that (and all indications are that they don’t want to). Rather, they’ll invest in foreign assets where they can make more profit (have people still not caught on that financial institutions and corporations couldn’t give less of a damn about the USA?). And because there’s a whole lot more money in circulation, it’s going to increase inflation. All of which will help make people like us even poorer. We’ll be poorer, too, because the Fed’s stimulus doesn’t create jobs directly, as another stimulus from Congress presumably would.

Is our democracy not a wondrous thing? It allows damned fools, like the ones who enjoyed victory on Tuesday, the freedom to vote against themselves! While the financiers laugh all the way the bank.

There are other, perhaps more serious global downsides to this latest move of the Fed. But frankly I’m not sure I understand how it all works well enough to explain it. To get some ideas, check out Professor Michael Hudson, “U.S. Quantitative Easing is Fracturing the Global Economy,” at http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21716). Meantime, and remembering that “quantitative easing” didn’t work for Japan in the 1990s, enjoy the irony. It may provide the only laughs we get for a while.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Eve of Elections

2010-10-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

Less than a week before the 2010 midterm elections for Congress, anyone with a soul feels the need to expel some of the indigestion that has been building in the gut. Recent news affords ample material, even if it seems a bit disjointed.

Let’s begin with the types of candidates that are threatening to actually win—even above and beyond the idiots like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. Consider the lovely candidate threatening to unseat the blue dog Democratic incumbent in North Carolina, Ilario Pantano. Republican Pantano is a 38-year-old veteran of the Iraq war, but what a veteran! He had actually fought in the first gulf war as a marine, but after 9/11 decided to leave his job at Goldman Sachs (where else?) and re-enlist. Serving as a 2d Lieutenant, he was involved in an “incident” in 2004 shortly after the highly-publicized hanging of four American private contractors in Fallujah. As reported in the Oct. 26 Guardian, on 15 April, Pantano and crew stopped two unarmed Iraqi men in a car—suspects, as all Iraqis were. After a car search, he

unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine over them—some 60 rounds in total. Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: ‘No better friend, No worse enemy.’

A few months later, a member of his own unit reported him and he was charged with murder. Other facts emerged: the bodies of the two men, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were found in a kneeling position, and they were shot in the back. But Pantano’s defense alleged that weapons had been found in the house the Iraqis exited, and the men had “turned on Pantano unexpectedly” as he was guarding them, so he fired in self-defense. It didn’t take long for the charges against Pantano to be dropped for ‘lack of evidence,’ though the officer in charge of the hearing did recommend non-judicial punishment for “extremely poor judgment.” In his campaign, Pantano has refused to defend himself “for something that happened five years ago.” As to the placard he left (which also became the title of a book he wrote, part of the reason for his fame), Pantano has said: “I don’t need to explain anything…If folks are alarmed, well war is alarming.”

Yes. War is alarming. First and foremost for the brutality it rewards—rendering to psychopaths like Pantano hero worship, a book, and now a chance to be a U.S. Congressman endorsed by Sarah Palin (she called Pantano “another dedicated patriot running for Congress”) and Pamela Geller (of ‘mosque at ground zero’ fame, whom Pantano, returning the praise, calls “a patriot” whose endorsement “thrills him”) all in return for his brave murder of unarmed, kneeling civilians. Second, for the brutality it inevitably brings not only to those who take part in it, like Pantano, but to those at home who cannot help but be polluted by its ethos. And this includes not just those in Pantano’s district, which, not unexpectedly, sits only a few miles from the main marine training center at Camp Lejeune.

No. I would include, among others, the sweet man from Arkansas who made the news recently. His name is Clint McCance, and he’s vice-president of the Midland School District in a place called (get this) Pleasant Plains, Arkansas. Allegedly upset over a gay rights group’s “Spirit Day” recently, that urged wearing purple to raise awareness about harassment and bullying of gay youth, Mc Cance commented on his Facebook page:

The only way I’m wearin’ it (purple) for them is if they all commit suicide. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. (Yahoo News, 10/29)

Faced with a firestorm, including, according to McCance, death threats that prompted him to send his wife and children into hiding, the school board VP resigned. He apologized, saying he’s “sorry” for what he wrote on his Facebook page. “I would never support suicide for any kids,” McCance is quoted as saying; indicating that perhaps he’s heard about the rash of gay suicides recently. Isn’t that gratifying? I mean, given the way our politics are going, it shouldn’t be too long before the Tea Party and Sarah Palin are endorsing the very contrite McCance for political office.

As if all this weren’t enough, a recent book and article by sociologist Gar Alperovitz (Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back) puts what looks to be our late, great nation in perspective. You’ve all no doubt heard about how the financial gains of the last 30 years have gone disproportionately to the very rich, while middle class income has stagnated or dropped. Alperovitz points out that the United States now ranks with such advanced nations as Turkmenistan in inequality of income. That is, when measured for income inequality (the gulf between the rich and the rest of us), the United States ranks 77th out of 142 countries—this according to a recent estimate by the United Nations Human Development Report. It is tied not only with Turkmenistan, but also with such bastions of liberty as Tunisia and Georgia. That means that the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. today is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s.

How did this happen? Taxes, for one. Remember the great tax reforms of the Reagan, Bush I and II eras? including a reduction to 15% on capital gains? Well over the last 25 years, “IRS data indicate that the top 1% of American taxpayers increased their share of the nation’s total pre-tax adjusted gross income from 10% in 1980 to 23.5% in 2007.” What’s more, the gain has little to do with individual efforts. Writes Alperovitz:

…not only do income shares of the kind that flow to the top 1% have little to do with what anyone has actually done to deserve them; rather the flows are largely traceable to technologies that ultimately were either paid for by the public, or more importantly, that derive from our collective inheritance of scientific and technical knowledge. (Alperovitz, Huffington Post, 10/28/10)

Now, of course, the Republican mantra is always that ‘lowering taxes frees up capital so that the rich can invest in job-creating businesses’; but what Alperovitz points out is that top marginal tax rates stood at 91% during several Republican and Democrat presidencies (Eisenhower, Truman, etc.) and those high rates “coincided with the postwar boom, the greatest period of economic growth in all of American history.” The shame is that the pusillanimous Democrats of recent years—Clinton, Obama, and the rest, including, this year in California, Jerry Brown running for governor—have echoed this crap about no new taxes. The result (helped by war, of course) has been the devastation of not just the federal economy, but also the economies of most of the states in the union. The prescribed remedy, always, is to “cut spending.” In other words, cut the benefits to the poor and working classes, who will sink even lower relative to the rich already enjoying the lowest tax rates in history.

What can one say? We seem to be wallowing in an era best described by William Butler Yeats in the early part of the twentieth century:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.

The poem, The Second Coming, continues,

Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand

.
But whether its dismal conclusion is apropos now is anyone’s guess:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at least,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Lawrence DiStasi

Fallout from War

2010-09-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

Two books I’ve read recently have led to my musings on the fallout from humanity’s favorite pastime—and I don’t mean the obvious stuff like thousands of deaths, more thousands with absent limbs or battered brains, and still more with PTSD and other anti-social maladies. I’m talking about the lovely by-products of war which shape our societies for years afterwards. Jaron Lanier in his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, for example, points out that modern computers were developed to guide missiles and break secret military codes. He lumps chess and computers as having derived from violence and competition. Even more specific, however, is Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (first published 1997; recently expanded and reissued). There she points out the often-direct relationship between war innovations and the chemicals that cause cancer. In commenting about the steep rise in lymphomas, for example, she writes that they seem to be correlated with exposure to synthetic chemicals, “especially a class of pesticides known as phenoxy herbicides.” And where did these originate? They were “born in 1942 as part of a never-implemented plan by the U.S. military to destroy rice fields in Japan” (52). Never implemented, of course, because we dropped two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead. Nonetheless, the chemicals referred to are the now-infamous 2,4,5-T (2,4,5 trichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4-D (2,4, dichlorophenoxyacetic acid). In combination, they are known as Agent Orange, which the military was finally able to use in Vietnam between 1962 and 1970, and which contributed to uncounted deaths among Vietnamese, and a still rising incidence of non-Hodgkins lymphomas and lesser ailments among American veterans of Vietnam. The combination was outlawed in 1970, but one of the pair, 2,4-D is still in use, having become one of our most popular domestic weed killers for lawns, gardens, golf courses and farm fields. Its use on lawns may be one of the reasons why so many of our dogs—rolling happily in our chemicalized lawns--have been contracting lymphomas.

More generally, war provides industry, including the chemical industry, with a wonderful testing ground for all kinds of products. And when the war is over, those products find a new home in our homes. Steingraber again points out that after 1940,

…synthetic organic chemical production [doubled] every seven to eight years. By the end of the 1980s, total production had exceeded 200 billion pounds per year. In other words, production of synthetic organic chemicals increased 100-fold between the time my mother was born and the year I finished graduate school. Two human generations (90.)

These “synthetic organics” are marvelous little concoctions, perfectly designed, because of their similarity to our natural body chemicals, to react with us, but different enough to be hard to excrete. And what they do? “Some interfere with our hormones, some cripple the immune system, and some overstimulate the activity of certain enzymes.” And they are associated with what the World Health Organization concluded are the “80% of all cancers attributable to environmental influences.” Yes, you read that correctly: 80%.

Why don’t we know this? Why isn’t someone investigating this stuff? That’s the job Steingraber assumed. And her conclusions are not encouraging. First of all, cancer is not some random misfortune; it is specific in that fully “one-half of all the world’s cancers occur among people living in industrialized countries…especially North America and Northern Europe. Breast cancer rates are 30 times higher in the U.S. than in parts of Africa.” The places, in other words, where the fallout from two world wars and countless smaller ones has been greatest. Among them are those chemicals we’ve been hearing about recently, the estrogen mimickers which, “at a low level inside the human body mimic the female hormone estrogen.” Regarding this estrogenic fallout of war, Steingraber then gives us this zinger:

Many of the hypermasculine weapons of conquest and progress are, biologically speaking, emasculating (109.)

Read that again. And then consider further facts: In 1939 (i.e., pre-WWII) there were a mere 32 pesticidal active ingredients registered with the federal government, while

At present, 860 active ingredients are so registered and are formulated into 20,000 different pesticidal products. Current U.S. annual use is estimated at 2.23 billion pounds….82% of U.S. households use pesticides of some kind….Between 45,000 and 100,000 chemicals are now in common commercial use…Of these only about 1.5 to 3% (1200 to 1500 chemicals) have been tested for carcinogenicity. (95 & 97).

You get the picture. We are being bathed in a chemical soup (much of our drinking water is also contaminated; worse, the effects of bathing and showering in such water may be as bad or worse than drinking it, so don’t count on bottled water) whose effects are unknown to us because governments pass laws that sound good, but lack implementation. For example, in Illinois, Steingraber’s home state, the legislature passed a Health and Hazardous Substances Registry Act but though the State Cancer Registry compiles cancer deaths, it does nothing to try to correlate these deaths with exposure to hazardous substances: the state funded the cancer registry, but not a hazardous substances registry. In fact, from the data that Steingraber compiles, it is clear that a concerted effort has been made to keep the environmental causes of cancer out of the public’s consciousness.

This is clear from Steingraber’s rundown of the information on cancer prevention. There’s the much-heralded “war on cancer.” There are marches on behalf of funding for breast cancer and other cancer research. But with regard to causes, the onus is placed on—your guessed it—the victims. DNA, we are told, will solve the cancer puzzle because cancer is hereditary (you got it from your parents.) Or it’s your lifestyle that’s at fault: eat less fats, eat vegetables, don’t smoke, get lots of exercise. After that, if you still get cancer, it’s your own fault. But what Steingraber points out (with some suppressed fury, for she herself got bladder cancer in her teens), is that hereditary cancers are rare: “Collectively, fewer than 10% of all malignancies are thought to involve inherited mutations.” That leaves 85 to 90% unaccounted for; and thus likely due to environmental influences. It also leaves 30% to 40% of Americans due to get cancer in their lifetimes.

What are those environmental influences? Consider the class of chemicals called “triazines.” These must be some of the most diabolic substances ever conceived. Why? Because some of these emissaries from hell actually “strike directly at the process by which plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.” That is, they block the most fundamental process in life—photosynthesis—the process whereby earth produces plants not only to eat, but to be used as food by herbivores upon whom we depend for meat and dairy products as well. In short, the entire food chain. Imagine this! Aside from the question (which is all the pooh-bahs would like to consider) of whether such chemicals cause cancer, consider, as Steingraber puts it, “the wisdom of broadcasting over the landscape (atrazine is one of the top two most widely used pesticides in U.S. agriculture) chemicals that extinguish the miraculous fact of photosynthesis—which after all, furnishes us our sole supply of oxygen” (160). I mean, if this be not madness, what is? Soluble in water, traces of atrazine have now been found in ground water, 98% of surface waters in the Midwest, and in raindrops. Meanwhile, the EPA dithers and delays, no doubt influenced by mega-farmers and the chemical industry, to the point that 30 years from the time they were introduced, we still do not know the cancer risks of triazines coating our corn, our peaches, our plums, our apples, our cherries, peaches, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes and pears. Not to mention the long-term effects of interfering with photosynthesis (algae are also affected).

There’s more in this courageous, disturbing book, and I haven’t even looked at the updated edition. Read it if you dare. And the truth is, we all need to dare, or have our lives controlled by the conscienceless hucksters who now drive our agriculture, our household cleaning habits, our drinking water, our immune systems, our entire way of life. DuPont used to have a commercial slogan: “Better things, for better living…through chemistry.” We don’t hear that too much anymore. I wonder why.

Lawrence DiStasi

Addendum, 10/7: On KPFA's Morning Show, epidemiologist Devra Davis was talking about her new book, Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation. She reported that the blood-brain barrier that normally protects the brain from contaminants in the blood, has been shown to be vulnerable to cell phone radiation. Swedish researchers have reported that by exposing lab animals to cell phone radiation, they can get chemicals for chemotherapy past the barrier and into cells. For chemotherapy treating brain tumors, this is a good thing; for normal adults and especially for children, it is a breach in the body's natural defenses, and perhaps another environmental cause for alarm. Caution would seem to be warranted.

Assault on a Public Good

2010-09-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

Since at least the Reagan administration and before, conservative zealots in this nation have been hard at work trying to dismantle government and all it stands for. Attacks on the EPA, the FDA, social security, and most regulatory agencies have become standard fare. In recent years, though, the most sustained attack has targeted public education—witness the school districts in Washington, DC, New Orleans after Katrina, and New York City under Michael Bloomberg. With Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the rallying cry of “accountability” has been codified into a mantra that Democrats, including President Obama, have slavishly echoed.

Now we have a book that tells us what all this has been about, and it is not pretty. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, goes behind the scenes to explain the programs, the facts, and the failure of charter schools, testing regimes, and much more. If you’re at all interested in education (and what is a democracy without an educated electorate?), it’s a must-read. Ravitch might seem an unlikely critic of these conservative dogmas, because she’s been on the conservative side for years. She supported the takeover of the NY Public Schools, NCLB, charter schools and all the rest. But to her credit, she stopped to examine the data and, horrified by what she found, has written a stinging criticism of the whole mess. Whether it will stop the train wreck that’s coming is something else, but this is a noble effort.

To begin with, let’s be clear: conservative Republican hatred for the public schools has its roots in racism (and classism). That’s what the public schools signify: mixed-race classes, busing, early childhood education to compensate for years of discrimination, and teachers’ unions encouraging black and brown people to enter the education workforce. Vouchers were an attempt to have government pay for private schools—“school choice” in their lingo—which was a thinly-disguised way to get separate-but-equal back. It was also a convenient way to get god back in the classroom, and godless evolution out. But vouchers were too transparently discriminatory. So the always-busy conservatives came up with charter schools and now NCLB, and that seems to be working. If, that is, you can call destroying public education “working.”

Ravitch slams NCLB from several angles (and isn’t it strange that anyone expected George W. Bush, one of the dumbest men ever to sit in the White House, to come up with a plan to improve public schools?) To begin with, NCLB never refers to what students should learn, i.e. there’s no curriculum in it at all. That’s left up to each state. All NCLB did was demand that schools produce higher test scores, proficiency, in basic skills—math and reading. Even so, proficiency might seem a reasonable goal until one realizes that the states are left to determine what “proficiency” means as well. All they are told is that their schools have to show regular increases in proficiency (average yearly progress or AYP), until—and this is the laughable part—in 2014 all schools in all states produce students who are fully proficient. If schools fail to show AYP, or, in 2014 fail to show full proficiency (fully mastering the grade standards) for ALL students, they will be closed, teachers will be fired, principals will lose their jobs, and “some—perhaps many—public schools will be privatized.” According to Ravitch, this is an impossible goal. But there’s more:

the most dangerous potential effect of the 2014 goal is that it is a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States….indeed, scores of schools in New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and other districts were closed because they were unable to meet the unreasonable demands of NCLB. Superintendents in those districts boasted of how many schools they had closed, as if it were a badge of honor rather than an admission of defeat. 204.

Now one might think, well those schools in those districts were ‘bad’ schools and deserved to be closed. But Ravitch has the facts:

…In the year 2006-2007, 25,000 schools did not make AYP. In 2007-2008, the number grew to nearly 30,000, or 35.6 percent of all public schools. That number included more than half the public schools in Massachusetts, whose students scored highest in the nation on the rigorous tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)….To date, there is no substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. Converting a “failing” school to a charter school or handing it over to private management efforts offers no certainty that the school will be transformed into a successful school. 204.

So what can we expect from public schools and states put under this kind of gun (“in 2008, a team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation predicted that by 2014, nearly 100% of California’s elementary schools would fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress”)? You guessed it, they will cheat. States, that is, define “proficiency” themselves. So a state like Mississippi recently claimed that 89% of its fourth graders were at or above proficiency in reading, but, according to a national test given by NAEP, only 18% were proficient. How does this happen? The variety of ways to cheat is impressive. First of all, under the testing regime, teachers are incentivized to teach to the test (in some cases, this means actually giving the children practice in the actual test they will take.) Second, states change both the tests (making them easier) and the scoring required for “proficiency,” to make it easier to pass the tests. This is what New York State did. So,

Between 2006, when the state introduced a new test, and 2009, the proportion of students in grades 3 through 8 who reached proficiency on the state math test leapt from 28.6% to an incredible 63.3% in Buffalo, from 30.1% to 58.2% in Syracuse, and from 57% to 81.8% in New York City….But in reality, state officials made it easier to pass the tests. In 2006, a student in 7th grade was required to get 59.6% of the points on the test to meet state standards in math; by 2009, a student in that grade needed only 44% to be considered proficient. 157.

The same thing is documented in Chicago—where Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, took credit for huge increases in scores. You get the picture: if you can’t make the grade, cheat. One wonders how teachers in such a system can urge students to be honest when cheating reigns all up and down the line. As Ravitch concludes: “This sort of fraud (fiddling with scores, teaching to the test) ignores the students’ interests while promoting the interests of adults who take credit for nonexistent improvements.”

Perhaps the most alarming news in Ravitch’s book comes from her chapter called “The Billionaire Boys’ Club.” This refers to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart) and the Broad Foundation, among others, who are now pouring billions of dollars into the effort to change American education in the ways noted above. The basic idea of these “venture philanthropies” is to reform education to mimic the business model that made them their money: schools should be accountable (or be closed, or fired), should advance school choice (charter schools or vouchers), be competitive as in business, and move towards privatization as a final goal. In this effort, they fund charter schools (many run as private enterprises by people who know nothing about education; in that regard, the foundations have funded the hiring of “chancellors” such as Joel Klein, a lawyer, in New York and Michelle Rhee, with two years with Teach-for-America and no education training, in Washington DC) that will compete with the public schools. The irony, pointed out by Ravitch, is massive:

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in a common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions…The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one…They are bastions of unaccountable power. 200-01.

She also quotes the Broad Foundation: “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.”

There is much more in this crucial book. It deserves to be read and brought to the attention of all legislators, including the President himself—who, as Ravitch points out bitterly, has “warmly endorsed” the Gates-Broad agenda by hiring Arne Duncan, one of the biggest beneficiaries of foundation money when he headed the Chicago public schools. Not surprisingly, and despite his hype, the schools there are still failing. Thousands more will be put on the chopping block in 2014 when NCLB comes due. Which will be nothing less than a tragedy, this death of American public schools, for, as Ravitch points out, going to school is not like shopping: “Schools are not businesses; they are a public good.” Privatizing them makes about as much sense as privatizing police and fire departments. What should be attended to is not testing, but what is being taught—the curriculum. One of the few states that does this is Massachusetts, and its students have the “highest academic performance in the nation on the NAEP and rank near the top when compared to their peers in other nations.” In other words, we know how it should be done, and it is not by testing, not by privatizing, not by killing public education in America. Most decidedly, it is not by letting the worst boondoggle in education history, the NCLB, to come to its bloody fruition. Look to it.

Lawrence DiStasi

Toxic Wall Street

2010-09-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent pieces on the late financial debacle have me puzzling over this stuff again—mostly because I still understand little of it (the big boys, naturally, like it that way). But here goes.

Too Big to Fail is a 2009 book by reporter Andrew Sorkin treating the agonizing days in September 2008 when the system almost collapsed. It’s a fascinating read, if for nothing else than the fact that it familiarizes us with the major mandarins of finance and government. We become chummy with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and NY Fed chairman Tim Geithner, the latter now Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Of the two, Paulson comes off as the better man—more capable, more sensitive to the personalities he had to deal with (and therefore more respected by them), more concerned to save the system. Geithner strikes us as a bit of a tyrant, jealous of his perks, prone to order his bankers to jump through the hoops he has set for them. Paulson, by contrast, always solicits the ideas of those he tries to persuade. We also get the feeling that the entire ordeal—having to bail out the free-market system he was and is so much a part of—was one Paulson would have avoided if he could. He was perfectly happy as CEO of Goldman Sachs. As Treasury Secretary, on the other hand, he has to persuade, cajole, and take crap from Congress; at various points, we are told that he actually vomits from the political tension he is under. No wonder. If all reports are to be believed, the financial system was on the very brink of collapse. The way Sorkin tells the story also indicates that the renowned TARP bailout of major financial institutions was actually a political/psychological ploy meant to calm markets and the American people—a plan that forced nine major banks to accept an infusion of billions of dollars each, whether they needed it or not. Many did: Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and AIG. Others, especially Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, did not. But in order to create the illusion of equality and stability, Paulson’s plan required all banks to accept the money.

The story begins with the impending collapse of Lehman Brothers. We feel almost sorry for the CEO, Dick Fuld, who had spent his life building the firm, and who, until the very end, thinks he can work a deal to get another bank to rescue his. Such a buyout is what Geithner and Paulson spend most of their time trying to arrange. But Lehman’s problems, coming after the bailout of Bear Stearns, suffered from bad timing: the public was already alarmed by the first bailout and it was clear another would ignite a firestorm of protest. So Lehman’s failure was political as much as financial. Indeed, one of the failings of this book is that we never really get a clear explanation of why any of these financial giants was hemorrhaging so badly. We learn about the fall in their stock prices; we hear that the “short sellers” are driving their price down; but we don’t really quite understand what the root problems or mistakes are. What we get mostly are vignettes dramatizing little episodes in the long series of near-mergers and deal collapses. Some of these vignettes are telling: Bob Diamond, CEO of Barclay’s Bank, approached by Geithner to buy Lehman, wants the Federal Reserve to guarantee the deal (it is amazing to realize how alergic these financial “geniuses” are to the free market economics they’re always preaching).

“We need to be seen, to be invited by you and shepherded by you,” Diamond insisted. “You guys asked me if there was a price at which we’d be interested and you asked me, if so, ‘What do you need?’ That doesn’t mean I’m gonna call Fuld. That’s completely different.”
Giethner, growing frustrated with his equivocation, asked again, “Why can’t you just call Fuld? Why can’t you do it?”
“I’m not going to ask a guy if I can buy him, you know, at a distressed price,” Diamond said. “It only works if you guys are looking to arrange a deal. If you’re not, fine, no hard feelings, we’re okay.”

Then comes Sorkin’s comment:

However much Barclays may have wished to avoid giving the impression that they might be taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune, it was, of course, precisely what they were seeking to do. (p. 262)

This is really the key to the entire skein of deals and deal-making that Sorkin portrays. All these pooh bahs knew each other, played golf with each other, sat on boards together, had dinners together (at the finest restaurants on the planet, of course). They wanted to appear to be friends; but, in fact, they were sharks, circling each other, keen always to detect the smell of blood from a wounded competitor.

Unfortunately, during those terrible days of September, there was a lot of blood in the water. Once Lehman was allowed to fail, fear ruled Wall Street and Washington as well. No one knew who would be next because all the firms were interrelated financially. AIG had written enormous amounts of insurance—credit default swaps—for Goldman Sachs and others. If banks tried to collect on these insurance policies, which many did, AIG was going down. It was this domino of collapses that Paulson and Geithner, in Sorkin’s telling, were so desperate to prevent. At one point, before Paulson promoted his TARP program, we listen in on one of his conversations with Steve Schwarzman, chair of private-equity giant, the Blackstone Group. Schwarzman says:

“I have to tell you, the system’s going to collapse in the next few days. I doubt you’re going to be able to open the banks on Monday….People are shorting financial institutions, they’re withdrawing money from brokerage firms because they don’t want to be the last people in—like in Lehman—which is going to lead to the collapse of Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Everybody is just pursuing his self-interest,” Schwarzman told him. “You have to do something.” (emphasis mine).

What strikes me here is the language: Everybody is pursuing his self-interest. Well now, isn’t that a damn shame! These are the people who have raised the individual pursuit of self-interest to the level of holy dogma: this is what makes capitalism, free markets great. But when it happens within the club, when the dogs turn on each other, then they cry foul! You have to do something! And of course, Paulson did do something, for it was right after this that he put together, and rammed through Congress, the TARP bailout program.

This is fascinating stuff. We actually find ourselves rooting for the Treasury Department, for financial leaders like Dick Fuld, to succeed. I liken this feeling to the similar feeling one gets when watching mafia movies: no matter how heinous their behavior, we root for the characters who are portrayed from the inside as protagonists. Their cause becomes our cause. Sadly, what Too Big to Fail leaves out are the series of fraudulent, near-criminal activities that led these Wall Street powerhouses to run aground: the sub-prime mortgages, the collateralized debt obligations, the credit default swaps, all the exotic instruments whereby they and their executives enriched themselves to obscene levels, and brought the entire financial system and the economy it supports to near ruin. A recent article, “Banks Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis,” indicates just how culpable these guys were. What the analysis by ProPublica reveals is that when these Wall Street banks saw how the market for the mortgage-backed securities they’d been packaging at great profit was faltering, they “created fake demand.” They simply bought their own products—the worst of the mortgages in their CDOs—and put them together in new CDOs, which they then proceeded to sell. They knew these new CDOs were junk, because that’s why they’d separated them out in the first place. And when the new ones proved hard to sell in full, they created yet more CDOs to buy those. ProPublica calls this a “daisy chain that solved one problem but created another.” And when the daisy chain could no longer be hidden, when, as we learn in Too Big to Fail, the banks could no longer get away with valuing these toxic assets at the inflated levels they claimed for them, the banks started to collapse.

That’s when we American taxpayers came to the rescue: TARP, Toxic Asset Relief, means that the U.S. government was forced to buy the worst of these bank “assets” to get them off their books—because with them, the big banks would fail.

I don’t know about you, but this just gives me a warm feeling all over.

Lawrence DiStasi

Lazio Takes the Low Road

2010-08-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

Rick Lazio has always had boyish good looks and a charming personality. I discovered this working with him on the World War II legislation—the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act—of which he was the co-sponsor, and which was signed into Public Law 106-451 on November 7, 2000. Lazio was able to work with Democrat Eliot Engel and others in the House of Representatives, and, as a Republican, seems to have had some influence with then-Judiciary Committee Chairman, Henry Hyde, in granting the Una Storia Segreta project the critical Judiciary hearings that ensured the bill’s passage. For all this I was and am grateful, as is the entire Italian American community.

Recently, however, in his attempt to become New York State’s governor, another side of Rick Lazio has come to the fore, and it is neither handsome nor charming. Though he seems to have repudiated the Tea Party in his state (partly, at least, because his primary opponent, Carl Paladino, has become their darling of the moment), Lazio has concluded that the silly flap over the building of an Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero can be a winning issue for him, and, despite vigorous criticism from all sides, is milking it for all it’s worth. Some have accused Lazio of being so desperate for campaign funds that he has sunk to this level to raise money. Whether or not this is true, his words and his position in this controversy make clear that Lazio’s moral compass can easily go missing when he senses an opportunity. In this, of course, he has ample company—including most of the Republican Party and a large number of Democrats as well.

To briefly review the controversy: plans to build a 13-story Islamic Cultural Center once known as Cordoba House, now known as Park51, two blocks from Ground Zero, were recently approved by the New York State landmark preservation board. Tea Party activists including Sarah Palin, have raised hell about this “insult” to the memory of 9/11 victims and the alleged sacrilege to what is called “hallowed ground.” Notwithstanding the fact that the structure is the brainchild of Imam Faisel Abdul Rauf—a man so associated with bridge-building among faiths that he was chosen as an ambassador without portfolio to help the Bush Administration reach out to Muslim nations and promote the American image abroad—and notwithstanding the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, the project is being compared to planting a Nazi sign at Auschwitz, or building “a memorial to kamikaze pilots next to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor.” (this last from Carl Paladino, Lazio’s opponent in the Republican primary.)

Incredibly, Lazio has taken the accusations several steps further. Claiming that his objection is not religious (President Obama has stated publicly that religious freedom guarantees Muslims the same rights to build a center as anyone else), but involves only a plea for “transparency,” Lazio has raised the issue of “safety and security.” He has therefore attacked his expected opponent and current Attorney General of New York, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, for failing to investigate the “books” of the project to find out who is funding it. This call for transparency is clearly shorthand for raising the issue of terrorism—a barely veiled warning that mosques should be suspected as fronts for terrorist groups bent on harming New Yorkers. Here is how he framed it in an appearance on the PBS News Hour on August 16:

“What I’ve been calling for is transparency. There’s a certain defiance about the need to put it right there…This Cordoba initiative has $18,000. right now for a $100 million mosque…Where is this money coming from? Who’s behind this?....Let’s open the books, let’s find out where it’s coming from, whether it’s a foreign government or militant organizations that are funding this. The question here is whether or not we should feel safe, this is about safety and security…This is about what’s right, what’s ethical, what’s decent, what’s fair, and from a standpoint of safety…”

Thus, where most criticism of the Islamic Center project focused on its alleged insult to the memory of the dead, Lazio, though he refers to “what’s ethical, what’s decent, what’s fair,” has abandoned ethics, decency and fairness to foreground the element of fear: is this project funded by the same terrorists who funded 9/11?

As if to amplify his verbal raising of the fear factor, Lazio has recently released a two-minute video described as “a collage of various opinions from people filmed near Ground Zero,” featuring “images taken on September 11, 2001 depicting firefighters running into the debris of the former World Trade Center Towers.” So outrageous is this ad that it has incited criticisms from the very people Lazio was trying to associate himself with. According to an August 20 NBC.com report, both the NY Fire Department and the Police Department have demanded the video’s removal:

“The Uniformed Fire Officers Association and the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association has sent Lazio letters denouncing the use of the 9/11 footage. ‘We have always been opposed to the use of images from the attack on the World Trade Center in political advertising. Virtually every candidate for public office has honored that sentiment to date. So it was with a mix of surprise and disappointment to see your new video that seeks to capture the attention of the viewer with graphic images of Ground Zero that day,’ read a letter signed by UFOA President Alexander Hagan. ‘For someone whose argument against the mosque is that it is insensitive to those who lost loved ones on that day, it is unconscionable that he would display similar insensitivity by evoking these painful memories for his own political purposes,’ wrote SBA President Edward Mullins.”

Whether Rick Lazio can summon the courage to come in from the moral desert he’s placed himself in remains to be seen. Given the national attention his stance has garnered for him, though, and given the Tea Party competition from his rival Paladino, such an attack of conscience doesn’t appear likely. Rather, in this year when the twin specters of racism and McCarthyism seem to have risen from what we hoped was their grave, we can probably expect more of the same, if not worse. And though the politics are sad, sadder still is what is likely to result from all this—the conviction among Muslims worldwide that our so-called war on terror is really a war on them.

Lawrence DiStasi

Is Democracy Possible?

2010-08-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

No one needs to be reminded that we’ve all just been through some pretty depressing times. The economy nearly collapsed and remains anemic, BP pretty much trashed the Gulf of Mexico with its oil eruption, the health care “reformers” couldn’t even squeeze a public option into their pathetic bill, and the promised legislation to begin to bring greenhouse gases under control was just abandoned because of a lack of votes in the Senate. Barack Obama, hailed into office with so much fanfare and hope (at least from progressives) seems shell-shocked at best, and ineffectual at worst. Hounded on the right by Tea Party idiots who call him both a socialist and a Nazi, and criticized on the left by his own supporters as disinclined to fight for his beliefs, his poll numbers have plummeted so rapidly since the BP spill that some of the Democrats running for Congress have warned him to stay away from their districts. As to the congressional and gubernatorial races coming this Fall, most seem headed for disaster, with Republican yahoos threatening to take over one or both houses of Congress—a result that would doom any prospects for reasonable legislation and perhaps result in repealing the few decent items already passed (like health care).

To counteract their catastrophe, the Democrats are doing their usual dance—kowtowing to conservative ideas and slogans, and courting the banks and corporations which brought the country to its knees. With their need for campaign cash as primary, such so-called “representatives of the people” make ever clearer that they represent not you and me, but the biggest, dirtiest, most ruthless elements in the nation: Wall Street operators, corporate crooks, energy barons, health care frauds, and the military-industrial complex which profits from war and terror.

In short, though we all like to think that we the people control our government because we get to vote every two or four years, the sad truth is that our control is illusory, a con game meant to pacify the masses while the same old robber barons and insiders get to set the agenda, invent the terms of debate, and offer up the candidates (in recent years, bypassing the back rooms and seeking elective office themselves—i.e. Michael Bloomberg in New York, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina running for governor and senator in California). And in the few instances where their control fails, they hire armies of lobbyists to hamstring any legislation that might threaten their profits, their incomes, their mandarin lifestyle.

The question this raises is the one in my title: Is Democracy Possible? Or more pertinently, is democracy doomed?

I’m not sure I can answer this question (surprises are always possible), but a recent documentary raises some fascinating alternatives. That’s why I’m suggesting here that you take a look at what average people in several other parts of the world are doing. The basic idea is simple: since those who represent/rule us are captives of the moneyed interests who brought the whole system to its knees, and since our so-called leaders could think of nothing to do but to rescue these same criminals and try to restore the very system of organized thievery that failed, the people themselves are obliged to find other ways. Other ways to survive. Other ways to come together as a society of human beings. Other ways to barter and bargain and aid each other without the mediation—and rapacious profit-taking—of the banks and corporations who care nothing for people or the planet they’re daily trashing but only for their precious bottom line. Other ways; because if the bigs can’t or won’t do it—and they’ve made crystal clear that they will fight tooth and nail not to—it makes no sense to wait until they sink the whole ship; the change has to come from the bottom up.

So here’s the url for the documentary. It comes from the web site, solari.com, of Katherine Austin Fitts, a longtime economist and U.S. government official who’s talking some of the most radical economics around. Take a look. I did, and though I’m not yet sure how or if it can apply to me or my community, just the fact that ordinary people are thinking and acting in these ways—opting out of the nefarious system that has us all bound and gagged, and implementing amazing alternatives—made my day. The website:

http://solari.com/blog/?p=8543

Lawrence DiStasi

Shallower and Shallower

2010-08-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is must reading for anyone interested in the major transformation ignited by the rise of computers and the Internet in recent years—that is, if there are still people who can concentrate enough to read a full-length book. That’s the idea Carr is promoting, with statistics like these about reading (and “printed works” include books, newspapers, magazines, etc.):

"By 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the time that the average American over the age of fourteen devoted to reading printed works had fallen to 143 minutes a week, a drop of 11% since 2004. Young adults between 25 and 34, among the most avid Net users, were reading printed works for a total of just 49 minutes a week in 2008, down 29% from 2004." (p. 87)

And therein lies Carr’s major point: where the Gutenberg revolution (which around 1439 mechanized printing and made books possible for everyone) changed human brains by making them able to focus for long periods on a single subject (a book, a long article) and plumb its meaning, computers and the Internet are changing brains in the opposite direction. They are inducing brains to jump from one item to another, to become addicted to multiple messages and hyperlinks, email alerts, moving, flashing ads, and countless other media devices in such a way that even Carr, a book writer, confesses that he finds it difficult to concentrate in the old way. In short, says Carr, Marshall McLuhan was absolutely right when he wrote nearly forty years ago about television that “the medium is the message.” That is, the way we absorb material via our computers and the Internet is not neutral; the medium changes our brains, or more precisely, our brains, due to their astonishing neural plasticity, adapt to the electronic medium, and even merge with it: “we program our computers, and thereafter they program us.”

Though some of the science of brain plasticity Carr references is complex—involving the way our eyes convert symbols into meaning or the brain areas where the various functions of perceiving and interpreting occur at split-second intervals—the basic idea is simple to grasp because we are all familiar with it: “Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies.’” One of the main technologies for this interruption or distraction mode is the hyperlink—those typed portions in blue which signal that by clicking on one, you are immediately transported to an expansion (often the original article) of the point being made. Whether or not we click on the hyperlink, our brain is distracted, even if only to the extent of deciding whether or not to follow the link. Thus, as Carr notes, unlike a footnote, which can be ignored or saved for later (and only provides a reference), a hyperlink actually “propels us toward” the related material; it “encourage(s) us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them.” Rather than the linear, calm attentiveness fostered by reading a book, that is, reading online encourages us to jump around, to pursue one after another distraction. If this makes you think of TV commercials—which every parent notices absolutely transfix children with their colorful, high-volume quick cuts and false excitement—that is no accident. The idea is essentially the same: provide the brain with the hyped-up perceptual stimulation it automatically responds to, and you get “mindless consumers” of data. Carr refers to the Net as a “high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards,” thus turning us metaphorically into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” We go to our email, we go to our facebook page, we go to our news page or favorite website for constant updates about “what’s happening.”

The problem is that the type of intellectual activity this hyped-up perception fosters is not concentration or depth, but superficiality: “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” Our thoughts are scattered and our attention distracted. Rather than reading deeply in a way that promotes reflection or meditation, we become pursuers of endless data. Carr explains how the brain’s structure and architecture facilitate this, explaining recent research in memory formation and the two types of memory involved—short-term and long-term—and the brain changes that are involved in both. It makes for fascinating reading. For our purposes, it is only necessary to understand that short-term or working memory (what we remember for a few moments as we perceive it) can be overloaded, and that is precisely what happens in the “cognitive overload” that can result from Net activity:

"When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory. We can’t translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow." (p. 125)

Carr cites several areas of research leading to the same conclusions: people who read linear text “comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.” This is reinforced by studies showing that people on the Net spend an average of 19 to 27 seconds looking at a page before switching to a new one. That clearly does not encourage concentration or thinking, and a related study showed that, for over a hundred well-educated people, reading habits over the last 10 years for most had changed from in-depth reading to “browsing and scanning.” This is precisely what the Internet encourages. When we consider the rise of technologies like the Kindle and Apple’s I-Pad, where thousands of books are readable on a screen—with hyperlinks everywhere—and the Google Book project which has already scanned millions of books that are available for reading online, it is clear that reading from a physical book is well on its way to becoming an anachronism. Indeed, one of the more bizarre situations that Carr relates is the phenomenon of cell-phone novels that started in Japan in 2001, when young Japanese women “began composing stories on their mobile phones by texting.” They then uploaded them to a website, where others commented on them, added new ideas, and created the group novel, several of which became best sellers. One of the reasons for their popularity is their simple love plots and short sentences; one novelist named Rin explained that readers no longer like novels written by professional writers because their sentences seem “intentionally wordy” and the stories “unfamiliar.”

What this augurs for our future is anyone’s guess. Judging by the many studies Carr cites, the prospects are not good. As brain researcher Antonio Damasio notes about a study his lab performed, neural processes that relate to the “higher emotions” such as empathy and compassion are “inherently slow.” His study showed that though the brain reacts quickly to “demonstrations of physical pain,” more sophisticated processes of empathizing with suffering respond far more slowly, because of the time it takes for the brain “to transcend the immediate involvement of the body” and comprehend the “psychological and moral dimensions.” This could mean that the speed and distraction encouraged by the Internet (and everything else in our high-speed world) may well be eroding the uniquely human ability to respond deeply to others via those empathic moral responses that require “adequate time for reflection.” That would truly be a tragedy.

Lawrence DiStasi

Class Warfare

2010-08-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

In case you were wondering where all the money went and why the economy is still in the doldrums, here are a couple of clues. “The 500 largest non-financial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in uninvested cash.” That’s a stat from Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, quoted by Paul Buchheit in 7/22 CommonDreams.org. The piece goes on to note that whereas the Republicans blame big government’s lavish spending on the poor, the truth is quite a different story: IRS figures report that “the richest 1% have TRIPLED their cut of America’s income pie” since 1980 (that’s when Reagan began cutting taxes for the rich, and blaming “welfare queens” and big government for everything). From taking 1 out of every 15 income dollars, the rich now take 3 of every 15 income dollars, or a TRILLION extra dollars a year. Put another way, instead of taking $7 of every $100 of America’s income, the rich now take $20 of every $100.

If this sounds like class war, it is, only it’s the rich doing the firing (literally).

Then there’s this, from Bob Herbert’s Sunday column. Top corporations (you know, the guys who have been declared to be “persons” by the Supreme Court, and thereby free to pour as much money—it’s free speech!—as they like into buying politicians) have been using the economic collapse to fire workers in droves. Those who are left are forced to take pay cuts, or else. Here are the stats:

“from the 4th quarter of 2007 to the 4th quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by GDP, fell by about 2.5% but employers cut their payrolls by 6%.”

Worse, when the economy started to rebound (due to that evil government stimulation), the corporations somehow forgot to start hiring again. Herbert quotes economics Prof. Andrew Sum this way:

“At the end of the 4th quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go DOWN by $122 billion.”

In other words, the corporations are “making out like bandits” and, as Fakaria noted, sitting on mountains of cash, saved from not rehiring workers. As Prof. Sum writes: this economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”

Meantime, the Republicans blame Obama and the Democrats for a “jobless” recovery (demanding lower taxes to stimulate hiring; more “trickle-down”—that’s what we need). And the electorate appears ready to do the same thing.

Isn’t our capitalist democracy a wonder?

Lawrence DiStasi