The End of Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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