Stuff Not By Jlhart7

Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam

2010-07-25T09:56:00.001-07:00

Douthat, Ross, and Reihan Salam. 2008. "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream." New York: Doubleday.

6 - Frank's central agrument, in particular, is appealing but flat wrong: The poorest Americans haven't turned right over recent decades, under the influence of "hallucinatory" culture war issues. Instead, they've turned left, voting for Democrats more reliably than even in the heyday of the Great Society. But this turn hasn't delivered liberals a majority, because most working-class voters aren't poor. They're relatively prosperous, in spote of left-wing claims about their supposed immiseration.
The problem for Frank and like-minded liberals is that they imagine the working class as it was sixty years ago--a mix of Joad-like farmers and unionized industrial workers, bound together by their antagonistic relationship to big business and dependent on redistributionist policies for their economic security. In reality, if you're a Sam's Club voter today, you're far more likely to be working in education or health care, office administration or business services than on a farm or an assembly line. You're more likely to belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year than one that makes $30,000. You probably own an array of electronics that would have dazzled your parents and grandparents; [. . .] and thanks to Wal-Mart and all its big-box peers, you spend less of your income on the necessities of life than any generation before you. (It's worth noting, too, that just about all of these advances can be attributed to the very same "job-killing trade agreements" so often described as the natural enemy of lower-income Americans.)
None of this means that the working class no longer exists, or that class politics no longer resonate. But it means that the

7- working class of today is defined less by income or wealth than by education--by the lack of a college degree and the cultural capital associated with it. a diploma isn't a prerequisite for individual success: Many men and women in the Sam's club demographic become quite comfortable, even rich, without graduating from college. But these individuals are the exception, and the larger non-college-educated demographic is enduring a slow-burning crisis, just as Frank argues [. . .] But it's not a crisis created by wicked plutocrats and their Republican enablers, and it's unlikely to be solved by stronger unions, more food stamps, a war on Wal-Mart, or the nationalization of a major industry or two. It's a crisis of insecurity and immobility, not poverty, and it's a crisis that has as much to do with culture as with economics.
The economic trends are important, certainly. Globalization and the rise of the knowledge-based economy, growing outsourcing and the demise of lifetime employment, the expansion of credit card debt, the decline of retirement and health-care security, the pressure from below created by unprecedented illegal immigration--all of these developments of the last trhee decades have made American workers feel more insecure, even though they're materially better off than ever before. And there's no question that the Republican Party has failed to adequately address these concerns, or that the GOP's emphasis on economic growth over economic security has made working-class life more unstable than it otherwise would have been.
But the "social issues," from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration, aren't just red herrings distracting the working classs from the economic struggles, as liberal have insisted for the better part of forty years. Rather, they're at the root of working-class insecurity. Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic

8 - institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy, and upwardly mobile. Public disorder, family disintegration, cultural fragmentation, and civic and religious disaffection, on the other hand, breed downward mobility and financial strain--which in turn breeds further social dislocation, in a vi9cious cycle that threatens to transform a working class into an underclass.
Sam's Club voters have been wobbling on the edge of this abyss ever since the social revolution of the sixties, whichwas a liberation for those equipped to deal with its freedoms but a slow-motion disaster for those Americans who lacked the resources and social capital to rebound from illegitimacy, broken homes and failed marriages. Over the last thirty years, familial stability has gone from being a near-universal feature of American life to a privlege reserved for the mass upper class, whose wealth and education protect them from the disruptions that create divorce and single parenthood, and who have the social capital to pass these advantages on to the next generation. The result has been a persistently stratified America, in which working-class voters lack both personal and professional stability--and lack, as well, a way to rise in a country where success is increasingly tied to education, and education is tied to stable families, and both are out of reach.

[. . .]
9 - [. . .] Given these perils, where are Sam's Club voters to turn? The populist Left is responsive to their economic difficulties but allergic to moralism in public policy, and deeply resistant to any cultural critique of post-sixties America. Worse, its immediate wish list of economic "solutions" [. . .] often seem designed to take money out of the average Sam's Club voter. The moderate middle, meanwhile, is defined by its support for the status quo--free trade and cultural progressivism, secularism or a liberral religiousity, fiscal responsibility and continued large-scale immigration. These are the politics, allowing for certain variations, of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, the mass media and the business class. They aren't the worst set of ideas to dominate American politics, but they're inadequate to the challenges facing working-class America and the country as a whole.
[. . .]

11 - [. . .]conservatives have become confused about the legacy of the greatest conservative president of the modern era, Ronald Wilson Reagan. To hear today's conservatives tell it, Reagan was a man of unbending libertarian purity, whose domestic policy consisted of heroic tax cutting and little else. Cut taxes the Gipper surely did, but he was fare more flexible and innovative in his pursuit of reform than his admirers [. . .] would have you believe. Reagan was a president who cut income taxes dramatically but also closed corporate loopholes and raised taxes on gasoline; who slashed welfare spending but also midwifed the working poor-friendly Earned Income Tax Credit into being; who proposed reforming Social Security but also floated a plan for catastrophic health-care coverage; who attacked big government

12 - but also insisted, in his first inaugural, that his mission was not "to do away with government" but "to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back."

19 - The contrast with how Europe's governments treated the working class during the same period [ 18th and 19th centuries, as compared the U.S.-JH] is instructive. Both continents extended the franchise, but Europe's nations did so out of fear: As British prime minister Earl Grey put it with admirable

20 - honesty in 1831, "The Principle of my reform is to proevent the necessity of revolution"--the nonmetaphorical kind of revolution in which elites get their heads chopped off. America, on the other hand, did so out of hope--the hope of attracting settlers, as states competed to offer the most expansive definition of political freedom, the better to lure enterprising pioneers. Similarly, Bismarck's Germany adopted the most ambitious program of social insurance in the world, the better to keep the factories running smoothly, but German elites were far less inclined to expand access to education. The goal was to create a docile working class, not an educated and ambitious one. America, in contrast, expanded schooling fist and adopted social insurance programs only in the twentieth century. In each case, America's leaders wanted self-sufficiency and independence; Europe's wanted conformity and obedience.

62 - [. . .] In theory, at least, the Democrats have had as many chances as the Republicans to ride anti-elitism to a political majority by attacking those aspects of the elite consesnus--free trade, deregulation, privatization--that dovetailed with the GOP's positions and often cost working-class voters their jobs. The emerging mass upper class included plenty of juicy Republican targets for blue-collar ire: Ken Lay was part of the new transnational elite; so was Michael Milken. As David Brooks pointed out, the political divide of 2006 pitted a "ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush" against a "vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi," in a "clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas." In this landscape, poulism could easily cut both ways.
But in practice, the overclass's public face--academics and actors, journalists and bureaucrats, scientists and filmmakers and social workers--was liberal and Democratic, and try as it might, liberalism couldn't escape its identification with the elitist side of an increasingly polarized culture.

133 - The most important thing to understand about today's stratification--economic, social, and cultural-- is that it starts at home, where working-class Americans are far less lilely than their better-educated peers to enjoy the benefits that flow from stable families. In the fifties as we have seen, mariage rates, divorce rates, and illegitimacy varied only a little by class and education. In the sevenites, that began to change imperceptibly at first, and then dramatically. The divorce rate exploded across all classes in the late 1960s, but among the college educated it leveled off quickly and then began to drop.

134 - [. . .]
As with divorce, so with illegitimacy [. . .]In the early 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5 percent among the best-educated third of the population and just 7 percent among the least-educated third. Over the next forty years, the illegitimacy rate would triple for the least-educated third,w hile barely budging among the best-educated segment of the population.

135 - [. . .]
Where do these tendencies come from? In her invaluable book on the stratification of family life, Marriage and Caste in America, Kay Hymowitz points out the paradox of the Sexual Revolution--namely, that the very women who have benefited the most from their newfound freedoms, the well-off and well educated, are also the most likely to embrace the kind of bourgeois lifestyle that predominated before the birth control poll changed the world forever. It's not exactly the same, of course; they're more likely to have sex and cohabit before marriage than their mothers were, more likely to delay childbearing into their thirties, and more likely to stop at one or two children rather than pushing on to three or four. But at a fundamental level, they're accepting a conservative understanding of what marriage is and ought to be--a lifelong commitment that predates childbearing and exists in large part for the benefit of the children.
They do so, Hymowitz argues, out of the abiding practicality that has defined upper-middle-class life in America ever since the sixties ran out of steam. "Educated middle-class mothers," she writes, "tend to be dedicated to the Mission--the careful

136 - nurturing of their children's cognitive, emotional, and social development, which, if all goes according to plan, will lead to the honor rool and a spot on the debate team, which will in turn lead to a good college, then ... eventually to a fulfilling career, a big house in a posh suburb, and a sense of meaningful accomplishment." Ideologically, they may believe that marriage should be optional, just one lifestyle choice among many; they accept adultery in their politicians and unwed motherhood from their movie stars; and they have no interest in anything so harsh as bringing back the stigma that used to apply to illegitimacy, divorce, and cohabitation. But "like high-status women since status began, they are preparing their offspring to carry on their way of life," and an old-fashioned marriage offers as good a guarantee of stability and prosperity as you're likely to get.
Working-class women, on the other hand, may actually be more idealistic about marriage, in a sense. But this means that they tend to either rush into impulsive unions that don't end well or place marriage on a pedestal, often putting it off till after they've had children with a man they love but may not quite trust to provide for them permanently. (In a more skill-based economy [. . .] the typical working-class man isn't as good a catcdh as he was in the age of lifetime employment.) As Kathryn Edin and Andrew Cherlin have argued, these women often regard marriage as the capstone, rather than the foundation, of family life. And this, in turn, creates a sexual climate in which nobody--not women, not men, not grandparents, and not even children--quite understands what their obligations are, in which a pervasive mistrust clouds every relationship. Women feel used for sexd by men who don't want to get married; men feel used for money, "valued only for their not-so-deep pockets," as Hymowitz puts it.
All of this instability is intimately linked to both emotional and economic stress.

140 - [. . .] Liberal pundits get a great deal of mileage out of the fact that the so-called Red states, in spite of their piety and social conservatism, have higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births than their Blue counterparts. But this isn't evidence of Red American hypocrisy, or stupidity; rather, it's evidence that lower-income Americans (Red states are generally poorer than Blue states) have been adversely affected by the dislocations and disarray that followed the Sexual Revolution, and have responded by embracing a conservative politics that promises to shore up the institutions that provide stability and support--their families, their churches, and their neighborhoods.

How Race Survived U.S. History by David R. Roediger

2010-05-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

Roediger, David R. 2008. How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. New York: Verso.

175 - This sort of coercion from Southern Democrats occured repeatedly, a particularly striking example being the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938.

176 - That bill began by serving Southern planter interests in laying out wages and hours provisions, which, it stipulated, would not apply to agricultural workers--who in the South and Southwest were overwhelmingly black and Mexican. As the legislation proceeded, Dixiecrats wanted and won still more, forcing no fewer than five Senate roll calls to expand exemptions to those trucking farm produce or packaging and preparing fesh fruits and vegetables; in each case, they held Northern liberal' feet to the fire, and the whole law hostage.

181 - In a fascinating mid-1960s speech at Howard University, President Lyndon Johnson retrospectively acknowledged that thirty-five years previously "the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same." He continued, "Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high." Johsnon might have added that the origins of this pattern lay in the New Deal, during which black women suffered especially great losses in job opportunities, and reformers either ignored or contributed to the problem. Such differentials in employment solidified the notion that African Americans sought handouts rather than work. That notion, developing decisively outside as well as within the South, was driven by racist fantasies but also by specific national policies contributing to job loss and to discrimination in the provision of welfare. In much of the North, where African Americans voted and could successfuly demand access to welfare but not to good jobs, ADC payments, in the words of the historian of welfare Michael Brown "coercively substitute[d] for jobs." Denied training, the black poor could get a measure of cash relief, fueling yet again the notion that they were among the undeserving poor. [. . .]
New Deal housing policy similarly showed that national failures to address racial justice stemmed from more than simply Southern racism. The post-World War I campaigns to enforce residential segregation through the mass signing of restrictive covenants by whites had left the real estate industry, and many homeowners, convinced that stable property values required Jim Crow practices everywhere. While the New Deal never began to budget enough money for housing to address the needs of the third of all Americans whom Roosevelt counted as "ill-housed," its housing

182 - policies did manage to set pernicious precedents where race was concerned. Initiatives took place on two tracks.
One set of programs funded highly unequal, overwhelmingly segregated, public housing: the very shoddiness of the structures and crowding of the units could unfairly identify residents as undeserving recipients of welfare. The other track of federal housing policy subsidized and stabilized private homebuyers' loans, the overwhelmingly white recipients of which were cast as embodiments of an American Dream based on individualism, rather than as welfare recipients. Using realty indistry guidelines on the quality of neighborhoods, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1933 to 1935 and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) set up in 1934 developed metrics to "grade" the desirability of neighborhoods partly based on their racial composition. The color-coding of FHA maps of the neighborhoods outlined the often African American and/or diverse neighborhoods graded as least desirable in red. Since the lowest grade meant the denial of loans, the term "redline" came into the language to mean the identifying of a neighborhood for unfavorable treatment. The "color line" defined the state-sponsored "redline" more than any other factor. "Segregation," fair housing activist Charles Abrams wrote in 1955, "was not only practiced. . .but openly exhorted" in the federal home loan programs. Rating neighborhoods, the FHA grouped "racial occupancy alongside pollutants like smoke and odors." It offered a model restrictive covenant enforcing segregation and extolled such devices as the "surest possible protection against undesirable encroachment."

205 - Affirmative action, the main "wedge issue" dividing voters over race since 1969, took shape during a moment when the Nixon adminsitration posed itself as a liberalizing force. [ . . .] "quotas" themselves had already been found legally untenable in a series of rulings growing out of the language on "preferential treatment" in Title 7 Section J of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So strong was the wording of that passage, and so explicit the denail of any intent of racial preferences by Democratic leader Senator Hubert Humphrey in debates on the bill, that

206 - those in the Johnson administration wanting to attach firm numbers to plans to desegregate the skilled construction trades had to abandon such plans in cities like St. Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. [ . . .]
But Nixon, on taking office in 1969, subverted the OeO even as he resurrected Johsnon's abandoned Philadelphia Plan to desegregate the building trades in that city, finding language to circumvent explicit reference to quotas. Although applying to just hundreds of jobs initially, the plan had great symbolic impact--the building trades so expressed craft-union racism as to make James Baldwin doubt that there was a labor movement in the US at all--and effectively divided trade-union and African American Democratic constituencies. Some Nixon scholars find evidence that the Philadelphia Plan expressed a longstanding and continuing commitment by the president to a dying strain of moderate Republican anti-racism. This certainly was the case with Arthur Flectcher, the dynamic black liberal Republican who provided much of the plan's language and who spoke of it as a continuation of Dr. King's work. But the larger truth is that Nixonian affirmative action matured in the thrall of a presidency committed to a Southern strategy of coded racism and to dividing and conquering his enemies. Moreover, by 1970, Nixon's Democratic adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, urged a period of "benign neglect" of supposedly overly polarizing questions of racial justice. [. . .] The Philadelphia Plan and Fletcher were both gone by 1973. Affirmative action thus implied at best a return to a gradualist approach to racial justice and an atmosphere of partisan angling for advantage.

207 - Liberal Democrats soon became the reluctant cusodians of affirmative action, as Republicans turned increasingly against the initiatives that Nixon had helped to instigate, branding them forms of "reverse racism." Reagan was an especially effective and insistent enemy of largely non-existent "quotas."

The Bell Curve Wars

2010-04-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

Fraser, Steven, editor. The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America. 1995. New York: BasicBooks.

Jeffrey Rosen and Charles Lane, 'The Sources of The Bell Curve'

60 - Murray and Herrnstein also introduce readers to the work of J. Phillipe Ruston, a Canadian psychologist. Rushton has argued that Asians are more intelligent that Caucasians, have larger brains for their body size, smaller penises, lower sex drive, are less fertile, work harder, and are more readily socialized; and Caucasians have the same relationship to blacks. [. . .]
In a gratuitous two-page appendix, Murray and Herrnstein go out of their way to say that "Rushton's work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot." But in an interview with Rolling Stone, Rushton colloquially summarized his research agenda: "Even if you take things like athletic ability or sexuality--not to reinforce stereotypes--but it's atrade-off: more brain or more penis. You can't have everything." And in a 1986 article in Politics and Life Sciences, Rushton suggested that Nazi Germany's military prowess was connected to the purity of its gene pool, and warned that egalitarian ideas endangered "North European civilization."

Andrew Hacker, 'Caste, Crime, and Precocity'

97 - It will save time if I aver my full agreement with Howard Gardner, who reminds us that there are many kinds of intelligences. (The Bell Curve never explores the nuances of Gardner's position.) Indeed, there are many skills and aptitudes that do not even get this designation. We hardly ever speak of an "intelligent poet" Or an "intelligent sculptor" or, for that matter, an "intelligent chef." Nor do we often hear someone described as an "intelligent lover." Nor am I sure that we percieve a bootstrap entrepreneur as being an "intelligent businessman." (Some polished corporate types may win that appellation.) These and other talents tend to be regarded as intuitive traits, perhaps having their sources in the torso rather than the cerebrum.
Indeed, what is usually thought of as "intelligence" is more an academic concern than in the working world. To continue with an example just cited, men and women who have proved themselves in

98 - business are often suspicious of people who own more than one degree. This is why Adam Smith, the philosopher of a free economy, was an egalitarian in the matter of mental endowments. The people he saw bulding enterprises had seldom done well on schoolmasters' tests. In his view, even savants like himself were essentially like other people, save for a verbal veneer. [. . .]
The principle source for The Bell Curve's finding and conclusions is the National Longitidinal Survey of Youth, which has tracked a sample of Americans from the time they left high school through their middle thirties. As part of the project, its participants were given a series of questions taken from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. [. . .]
[. . .] What do these tests test? There is, of course, the issue of whether even supposedly simple questions can be culturally biased or favor a certain social stratum.

99 - While the aim may be to measure inborn aptitudes, all tests call for substantive amounts of acquired knowledge.
Moreover, high scores have a strong correlation with whether individuals were raised in a setting which habituated them to the kinds of mental processes the tests assess. [. . .] The very format of the test determines who will do well. Given that one must produce the answers at just about a one-a-minute rate, doing well demands that you have a matrix in your mind that mirrors the multiple-choice format. In part, this can be assisted through schooling. But some people also seem to possess an instinctive capacity for unsnarling these kinds of questions, indeed getting their gist in the first twenty seconds. This said, wan can grant that what is being tested are cer-

100 - tain modes of mental functioning. And what is being rated is the degree to which an individual has this one kind of intelligence.
Those who score well readily gain admission to colleges like Amherst and Stanford, from which they move on to Yale Law School and fellowships at Rockefeller University. These institutions require and reward this bookish form of intelligence, one better suited to seminar problem-solving rather than the rough-and-tumble of an unruly world. So I do not accept Murray and Herrnstein's forecast that a caste of high scorers will come to predominate in positions of power. On the whole, most such persons will peak during their academic years, or perhaps during an initial job they receive on the strength of test results. However, after that they will soon be surpassed by individuals who possess more applied forms of intelligence that are not revealed by tests taken while sitting at desks. People like George Patton, Lee Iacocca, and Newt Gingrich come to mind.
At best, The Bell Curve authors have identified not a generic meritocracy, but what could be called a testocracy: individuals possessed of a specialized skill which, on further examination, has little relation or relevance to most human endeavors.

John B. Judis, 'Hearts of Darkness'

126 - Murray has also denied that he approves of a society stratified according to intelligence, or simply IQ. In speeches, he has assured his fellow conservatives, many of whom fancy themselves to be populists, that he wants to curb the cognitive elite and "return control of daily life to the people who live it." But The Bell Curve is a brief for a society divided along exactly these lines. Murray deplores court rulings forbidding the use of IQ tests in hiring. He wants school funds shifted from the "disadvantaged" toward the "gifted." He wants a voucher program that will reward elite private schools. The result of these policies will be still greater segregation of society along the lines of income and of achievement in standardized tests.

Mickey Kaus, 'The "It-Matters-Little" Gambit'

130 - In Losing Ground, the 1984 book that made his name, Charles Murray pooh-poohed the role of race in America's social pathology. Instead, Murray blamed liberal welfare programs that trapped black and white alike in poverty. "Focusing on blacks cripples progress," he declared in a 1986 op-ed piece (entitled "Not a Matter of Race"),

because explanations of the special problems facing blacks nearly all begin with the assumption that blacks are different from everyone else, whether because of racism (as the apologists argue) or because of inherent traits (as the racists argue).

But that was then. Now, it turns out, Murray indeed thinks blacks face problems because they "are different from everyone else," and they are different "because of inherent traits (as the racists argue)" or, at any rate, because of immutable traits.

Que Tal, Essay? More Hippie Shit

2010-03-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Kaufman, Alan, editor. The Outlaw Bible of American Essays. Compilation copyright 2006. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.

Paul Krassner, The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book

113 - An executive in the publishing industry, who obviously must remain anonymous, has made available to The Realist a photostatic copy of the original manuscript of William Manchester's book, The Death of a President.
Those passages printed here were marked for deletion months before Harper & Row sold the serialization rights to Look magazine; hence they do not appear even in the "complete" version published by the German magazine Stern.

115 - Gore Vidal [. . .] On a television program in London, he explained why Jacqueline Kennedy will never relate to Lyndon Johnson. During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, she inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. This disclosure was the talk of London, but did not reach these shores.

116 - Of course, President Johnson is often given to inappropriate responses--witness the puzzled timing of his smile when he speaks of grave matters--but we must also assume that Mrs. Kennedy had been traumatized that day and her perception was likely to have been colored by the tragedy. This state of shock must have underlain an incident on Air Force One that this writer conceives to be delirium, but which Mrs. Kennedy insists she actually saw.
[. . .]
She corroborated Gore Videl's story about Lyndon JOhnson, continuing, "that man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realize--there is only one way to say this--he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president."
[Handwritten marginal notes: 1. Check with Rankin--did secret autopsy show semen in throat wound? 2. Is this simply necrophilia or was LBJ trying to change entry wound from grassy knoll into exit wound from Book Depository by enlarging it?]
The glaze lifted from Jacqueline Kennedy's eyes.
"I don't believe that Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with a conspracy, but I do know this--my husband taught me about the nuances of power--if Jack were miraculously to come back to life and sudenly appear in front of Johnson, the first thing Johnson would do now is kill him." She smiled sardonically, adding, "Unless Bobby beat him to it."

Eldrige Cleaver, The Courage To Kill: Meeting the Panthers [blog note: compare this essay to the bell hooks essay below - JH]

124 - Suddenly the room fell silent. [. . .] From the tension showing on the faces of the people before me, I thought the cops were invading the meeting, but there was a deep female gleam leaping out of one of the women's eyes that no cop who ever lived could elicit. I recognized that gleam out of the recesses of my soul, even though I had never seen it before in my life: the total admiration of a black woman for a black man. I spun round in my seat and asw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: four black men wearing black berets, powder-blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, shiny black shoes--and each with a gun!

bell hooks, Love as the Practice of Freedom

317 - Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political visionand our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination--imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white-supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conlcude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, and end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. [. . .]

318 - [. . .] The civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King Jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had "decided to love" because he believed deeply that if we are "seeking the highest good," we "find it through love," because this is "the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality." And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice, all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement, which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist movement, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice--and because it was proufoundly rooted in a love ethic.
The sixties black power movement shifted away from that love ethic. The emphasis was now more on power. and it is not surpirising that the sexism that had always undermined the black liberation struggle intensified, that a misogynist approach to women became a norm among black political leaders, almost all of whom were male. Indeed, the new militancy of masculinist black power equated love with weakness, announcing that the quinessential expression of freedom would be the willingness to coerce, do violence, terrorize, indeed, utilize the weapons of domination. This was the crudest embodiment of Malcolm X's bold credo "by any means necessary."
On the positive side, the Black Power movement shifted the focus of black liberation struggle from reform to revolution. This was an important political development, bringing with it a stronger anti-imperialist, global perspective. However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led to the suppression of the love ethic. Hence progess was made even as something valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies, Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care of blackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked about the importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our enemies. Ultimately,

319 - neither he nor Malcolm loved long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would provide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred.

320 - M. Scott Peck's self-help book The Road Less Traveled is enormously popular [. . .]
Peck offers a working definition for love that is useful for those of us who would like to make a love ethic the core of all human interaction. He defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." [. . .]
His words echo Martin Luther King's declaration, "I have decided to love," which also emphasizes choice.

Big Hippie Book

2010-02-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. Edited Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenburg and Barney Rosset. Collection copyright 2004. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, "Please Kill Me"

Iggy Pop: Once I heard the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and even Chuck Berry playing his own tune, I couldn't go back and listen to the British Invasion, you know, a band like the Kinks. I'm sorry, the Kinks are great, but when you're a young guy and you're trying to find out where your balls are, you go, "Those guys sound like pussies!"
[. . .] I went to Chicago with nineteen cents.
{. . .] I went out to Sam's neighborhood. I really was the only white guy there. [. . .]
So I hooked up with Sam Lay. He was playing with Jimmy cotton and I'd go see them play and learned what I could. And very occasionally, I would get to sit in [. . .]
It was a thrill, you know? It was a thrill to be really close to some of those guys--they all had an attitude, like jive motherfuckers, you know? What I noticed about these black guys was that their music was like honey off their fingers. Real childlike and charming in its simplicity. It was just a very natural mode of expression and life-style. [. . .]
I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did.
[. . .]

164 - [. . .] then it hit me.
I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...
So that's what I did. I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase--either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs. So "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is probably my mishearing of "Baby Please Don't Go."

Meridel Le Sueur, "Ripening"

Minneapolis, 1934

181 - I HAVE NEVER BEEN in a strike before. It is like looking at something that is happening for the first time and there are no thoughts and no words yet accrued to it. If you come from the middle class, words are likely to mean more than an event. You are likely to think about a thing, and the happening will be the size of a pin point and the words around the happening very large, distorting it queerly. It's a case of "Remembrance of Things Past." When you are in the event, you are likely to have a distinctly individualistic attitude, to be only partly there, and to care more for the happening afterwards than when it is happening. That is why it is hard for a person like myself and others to be in a strike.
Besides, in American life, you hear things happening in a far and muffled way, One thing is said and another happens. Our merchant society has been built upon a huge hypocrisy, a cut-throat competition which sets one man against another and at the same time an ideology mouthing such words as "Humanity," "Truth," the "Golden Rule," and such. Now in a crisis the word falls away and the skeleton of that actions shows in terrific movement.

Emma Goldman, "Living My Life"

211 - ["] Cardinal Manning long ago proclaimed that 'necessity knows no law' and that 'the starving man has a right to a share of his neighbor's bread.' Cardinal Manning was an ecclesiastic steeped in the traditions of the Church, which was always been on the side of the rich against the poor. But he had some humanity, and he knew that hunger is a compelling force. You, too, will have to hearn that you have a right to share your neighbor's bread. Your neighbors--they have not only stolen your bread, but they are sapping your blood. they will go on robbing you, your children, and your children's children, unless you wake up, unless you become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich, demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!"

Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"

258- The news spread around intellectual-hip circles in the San Francisco-Berkeley area like a legend. In these circles, anyway, it once and for all put Kesey and the Pranksters up above the category of just another weirdo intellectual group. They had broken through the worst hangup that intellectuals know--the real-life hangup. Intellectuals were always hung up with the feeling that they weren't coming to grips with real life. Real life belonged to all those funky spades and prize fighters and bullfighters and dock workers and grape pickers and wetbacks. Nostalgie de la boue. Well, the hell's Angels were real life. It didn't get any realer than that, and Kesey had pulled it off.

Paul Beatty, "The White Boy Shuffle"

298 - In the middle of the throng stood a commemorative sculpture. A slightly abstract cast-iron flick of birds in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., who received his doctorate in theology from Boston University. "Do you see that sculpture?" I asked, [. . .] I was speaking to the Negroes, but the white folks were listening in, their ears pressed to my breast, listening to my heart. "Who knows what it says on the plaque at the base of the sculpture?" [. . .]
"[. . .] I saw what the plaque said. It says, 'If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live. Martin Luther King, Jr.' How many of you motherfuckers are ready to die for black rule in Sout Africa--and I mean black rule, not black superintendence?"
Yells and whistles shot through the air.
"You lying motherfuckers, I talked to Harriet Velakazi, the ANC lieutenant you heard speak earlier, and she's willing to die for South Africa. She don't give a fuck about King's sexist language, she ready to kill her daddy and

299 - if need be kill her mama for South Africa. Now don't get me wrong, I want them [. . .] to get theirs, but I am not willing to die for South Africa, and you ain't either."
[. . .] "So I asked mysself, what am I willing to die for? The day when white people treat me with respect and see my life as equally valuable to theirs? no, I ain't willing to die for that, because if they don't know that by now, then they ain't never going to know it. Matter of fact, I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die. I'm just ready to die."

The Afghanistan situation Is Even More Fucked Up than I Knew

2009-12-03T10:01:00.000-08:00

Whoa. Check this out:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston

Links on Vegitarian and Vegan Weightlifting

2008-11-12T20:26:00.000-08:00

[for the record: I am not now a vegitarian or vegan, although I tried it once - jlhart7]

From http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/mahler21.htm

What To Eat To Gain Weight?

One of the biggest problems that people tell me about on a vegan diet is the difficulty in gaining muscle. They usually state that they could not find enough high calorie sources to consume to put on weight rapidly and got discouraged. The bottom line is that they were not consuming enough protein and fat. To gain weight rapidly, eat 1-1.5 grams of protein for each lb of lean bodyweight. Thus, if you weigh 200lbs and have 10% bodyfat, eat 190 to 285 grams of protein per day, every day. Start off on the lower end of the scale and work your way up.

Next, get an ample supply of quality fats in your diet. Almonds, sunflower seeds, walnuts, and pistachios, are all high quality sources and are loaded with both protein and fat. Also, add a tablespoon of flaxseed oil to your salads and protein shakes. Next, unlike the weight loss advice, eat several servings of rice, potatoes, and bread. The key to gaining weight rapidly is an abundance of calories. Thus, do not hold back and have 6-7 high quality meals a day. Also consider having a protein shake before and after workout as well as before bedtime. When you go shopping load up on tofu, tempeh, lentils, avocadoes, nuts and seeds, and high calorie fruits such as bananas, tropical fruits, and try adding some coconut milk to your routine as well.

What I Do?

I have tried many diets in the past that have all worked to some degree. For example, to lose weight, I once tried substituting a few meals with protein shakes and then having a few moderate meals throughout the day. Combined with an effective exercise regimen, this worked pretty well. However, I was not fond of the calorie counting and feeling like I needed to eat something every 2-3 hours. Also, to gain weight I have tried eating several moderate meals during the day, with protein shakes and bars in between meals and then a large meal at night. This worked very well for putting on size. However, again it was not convenient and I did not like having my whole day revolving around eating food.

-------

from http://www.grapplearts.com/Vegan-diet-for-size.htm

The number one thing that people always ask me is where do I get my protein. Many vegans that I have met make the mistake of thinking that you do not need much protein at all. I even had one guy tell me that only 5% of one’s diet should come from protein. Of course this guy looked like Don Knots and would be blown off like kite if a strong wind came by. I had another guy tell me that I can get protein from a cucumber and that I should not even worry about it. Of course, this guy was not in shape either and was in no position to give me nutrition advice. We have to be much more sensible than that. Especially, if we expect anyone to give up meat and adopt a vegetarian diet. Telling people that they can get all of the protein that they need from eating spinach and leafy green vegetables is impractical. Just because it works for the gorillas does not mean that it will work for us. Not getting enough protein and thinking that only 5% of your diet needs to be comprised of protein are sure-fire ways to be spindly and weak for the rest of your life.

Now I am not saying that you need two grams of protein per pound of bodyweight like the bodybuilding magazines state. That is way too much protein and a case of overkill. For athletes, 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of lean muscle is optimal for increasing strength and size. For example, if you weigh 180lb and have ten percent bodyfat, then you should shoot for 150-160 grams of protein to build more muscle. If you want to maintain your size, then 100-120 will probably be sufficient.

Next, vegans like anyone else need to load up on healthy sources of fat. Without enough fat in your diet, your skin will dry up, your energy will plummet, and you will look like death. Getting 20-30% of your calories from fat is a good way to go. Load up on healthy fats such as: flaxseed oil, olive oil, almonds, walnuts, almond butter, and avocadoes. Also, vegan diets are free of all saturated fats, which is great for the most part. However, some saturated fat is required for optimal health, so get some coconut oil or coconut milk in you diet as well.

Finally, make sure that you eat a variety of food to get a full array of muscle building amino acids. Some examples of good combinations include: black beans and quinoa, lentils and brown rice, almond butter sandwich, Rice protein/soy milk shake, green peas and almonds. Have some veggie burgers and other fake meat products from time to time, but make sure that the majority of your diet comes from fresh organic food.

Here is a sample of my diet:
Breakfast
3 tablespoons of Rice Protein Powder (nutribiotic brand) with 8oz of almond milk and 8oz of soy milk. I add ½ cup of frozen mango or strawberries to the mix and one tablespoon of coconut oil. I also add in two teaspoons of Vitamineral Green (www.healthforce.com)

Mid afternoon snack
½ cup of almonds and ½ cup of raisins

Late afternoon snack
Two Veggie burgers with olive oil and some sprouted bread (“Ezekial” or "Man's Bread)

Post Workout Shake
3 scoops of Rice Protein Powder with 8oz of oat or rice milk. I throw in
1 tablespoons of flaxseed oil and ½ cup of frozen fruit.

Dinner
Mixed Green Salad with 1 tablespoon of olive oil or one avocado.
One cup of lentils steamed with squash, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, and some tofu. One tablespoon of olive oil is added to the mix.
One cup of quinoa
A pear or apple
Some dark chocolate for dessert and some ginger cookies
Glass of red wine

Late Night snack
Peanut butter or almond butter sandwich and a cup of berries

---------

from http://www.musclemonthly.com/bodybuilding-vegetarian-diet.htm

There are different types of vegetarians, some will eat only vegetable, beans, lentils e.t.c, while some are lacto-ovo and will eat eggs and drink milk, pesco vegetarians will eat fish and drink milk. The biggest problem is getting enough protein into the diet when you are a vegetarian, obviously if you are a lacto-ovo veggie then you can get protein from the eggs, cheese and milk, while fish is a great source of protein for the pesco vegetarian.

One very important point to remember that while you can get protein from vegetables they are of a lower quality than those found in animal proteins; therefore you will have to be careful to take protein from as many different sources as possible. You need to make sure you take in enough protein for the strict workout you are giving your body.

Carbohydrates also help you to gain that much needed weight and are low in fat, examples of these foods are beans, Soya, coconut, hummus, oat milk and rice milk. A vitamin B supplement may also be advisable for the vegetarian because without meat in the diet you could be lacking this vital vitamin, an alternative to taking a supplement is eating seaweed in your diet.

Drinking plenty of water throughout the day is essential for anyone on a high intake of protein and carbohydrates; this will help to displace the substances of your diet to where your body needs them.

Example bodybuilding diet

Meal 1 - oatmeal made with rice or soya milk.

Meal 2 - soya protein drink.

Meal 3 - peanut butter sandwich.

Meal 4 - fruit.

Meal 5 - soya burger, potatoes and vegetables.

Meal 6 - soya protein drink.

Always make sure you drink plenty of water with your meals and drink 100% fruit juices, there are also plenty of meal replacement drinks available from your health store which are rich in soya protein. Soya protein is not only good for your muscles but is also good for the heart in particular; 25g of soya protein can help reduce the risk of heart disease

------

from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FDE/is_4_22/ai_110805469/pg_2?tag=artBody;col1

MANY WEIGHTLIFTERS THINK A VEGAN DIET might be detrimental to their efforts because of the lower protein content of a typical vegan diet. Other weightlifters feel that a vegan diet enhances their training regimen by reducing fatigue and improving general health. Unfortunately, there are no studies looking directly at vegan weightlifters, but there is a fair amount of research that can be used to extrapolate to vegans.

While reading this article, keep in mind that weightlifting can be divided into two types:

* BODYBUILDING to achieve the most noticeable muscles.

* POWERLIFTING to produce the largest amounts of strength.

ENERGY

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Project Management Standard Program Carbohydrates, fat, protein, and alcohol all provide energy. Resistance training, exercises where muscles push or pull against some force, is used to develop and maintain muscular strength and requires an increase in energy above that of sedentary individuals. The amounts vary depending upon training regimen, as well as other factors, including exercise efficiency, gender, non-exercise habits, and genetics. Because of the variation in needs, there is no one easy formula for caloric requirements; it is a matter of experimentation.

It is important to note that not eating enough calories to meet needs will tend to reduce muscle mass. Eating adequate calories spares muscle protein that would otherwise be used for energy. Paying attention to hunger signals can be a good guide in knowing whether you are eating enough energy. For a general ballpark figure, novice male weightlifters increased muscle mass and size, and lowered body fat, on a diet of about 18 calories/lb of body weight per day (3240 calories/day for a 180-lb person). (1) In another study, highly trained male bodybuilders ate 22.7 calories/lb (4,086 calories/day for a 180-lb person). (2)

PROTEIN

Depending on the source, protein needs among weightlifters are reported at values equal to the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) to values as high as four times the RDA (Table 1). During the 1800s, it was believed that protein was the main fuel used during exercise. But work in the early part of the 1900s indicated that exercise did not change protein needs and, until the 1970s, was accepted without further research. (3) Recently, there has been more research on protein requirements of athletes, with varying interpretations.

Determining how much protein a person needs is often done by using nitrogen balance studies. Nitrogen is a component of amino acids, the building blocks of protein, and can serve as a marker for protein metabolism. Positive nitrogen balance means that the person is taking in more nitrogen than he or she is excreting, and is therefore using that nitrogen to build muscle. Negative nitrogen balance means more nitrogen is being excreted than consumed, and thus muscle is breaking down. When looking solely at athletic performance, nitrogen balance is an indirect method of measuring protein needs; what really matters is whether the person increases muscle mass, strength, or speed.

Two studies are particularly relevant. Lemon et al. studied 12 men starting an intensive weight training program of 1.5 hours, six days a week. (1) They compared one month of supplementing with carbohydrates (on a diet of 1.4 g/kg of protein per day) to one month of supplementing with protein (for a total of 2.6 g/kg of protein per day) for the same people. They determined that a protein intake of 1.6 to 1.7 g/kg was needed to achieve nitrogen balance. However, muscle size and strength increased the same amount on both regimens. The authors thought that extra amino acids for the muscle-building during the carbohydrate treatment were coming from amino acid pools found in the digestive tract, kidneys, or liver. These sources are small and will eventually be depleted.

The second study was conducted by Tarnopolsky et al. on six lacto-ovo vegetarian bodybuilders who had been training intensively for at least three years. (2) The bodybuilders normally ate 2.77 g/kg of protein. Upon reducing their protein "intake to 1.05 g/kg, the group remained in nitrogen balance and changes in lean (non-fat) body mass did not occur. Two individuals, however, were found to have a negative nitrogen balance while eating 1.05 g/kg of protein. These results indicated that protein needs for the majority of advanced bodybuilders are fairly close to 1.05 g/kg but that some may have higher requirements.

Taken together, these studies on a small number of athletes imply that protein needs (per body weight) may be greater in the beginning stages of training (when muscles are making larger increases and protein is deposited) than when muscle mass has plateaued.

The Food and Nutrition Board, which sets the RDA, reviewed Lemon et al.'s study and others and concluded there is no sufficient evidence to support that resistance training increases the protein RDA of .80 g/kg for healthy adults.

Some vegan health professionals have recommended slightly higher protein intakes (.9-1.0 g/kg of body weight) than the RDA for vegans in general. (5,6) However, the Food and Nutrition Board recently said that if complementary sources of protein are used (generally mixing beans and grains throughout the day), vegetarians' protein needs are no greater than non-vegetarians. (4) It should be noted that the RDA for protein has a margin of safety such that many sedentary adults meeting the RDA will actually get more protein than they need. Considering the information reviewed above and the lack of other specific research, it seems reasonable to conclude that the protein needs of most vegan bodybuilders are somewhere between .8 and 1.5 g/kg (.36 and .68 g/lb) of body weight.

study of vegans to date shows that they consume about .9 g of protein/kg of body weight and obtain 13 percent of their energy from protein. (7) Thus, if a vegan eats 18 calories/lb, which seems to be on the lower end for serious weightlifters, he or she will naturally consume 1.3 g of protein/kg of body weight, likely meeting protein needs. However, if more carbohydrates, such as pasta, are primarily chosen to increase caloric intake, the percentage of protein may be less.

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Project Management Standard Program For this reason, vegan weightlifters should make an effort to also select high protein foods. Legumes, soyfoods, and wheat gluten (seitan) are the typical vegan foods highest in protein (Table 2). It is also possible for vegans to take a protein supplement, though this is not necessary. If vegans do supplement on occasion, Naturade makes a number of vegan protein supplements, including a soy-free protein supplement for those allergic to soy or who do not want more soy in their diet. Most health foods stores can order these if they do not carry them.

FAT

Based on studies of endurance athletes, some researchers believe that fat is an important part of the athlete's diet. Diets that are too low in fat (15 percent or less fat) may compromise immunity, reduce intramuscular fat stores (which could spare muscle protein), and reduce energy intake. (8) While this has not been studied in bodybuilders, the novice bodybuilders in Lemon et al.'s study received about 31 percent of their calories from fat and succeeded in increasing strength and muscle size. (1) Higher intakes might also reduce the chances of irregular menstrual cycles in women from low body fat.

Average fat intake for vegans is about 28 percent of calories. (9) Some weightlifters try to avoid fats to lose body fat, but this is inadvisable for vegans who already eat relatively lowfat diets. A good estimate of optimal fat intake for vegan weightlifters is about 20 to 28 percent of calories.

Fried foods and hydrogenated oils (such as in many margarines) should not be used to increase fat intake. They have a high trans-fatty acid content, which increases the risk of heart disease. Avocados, nuts, flaxseed oil, olive oil, canola oil, vegan "mayonnaises" (such as Vegenaise), tofu, and chocolate are better choices.

All vegans should pay attention to omega-3 fatty acid intake. As an essential amino acid, omega-3 helps to conduct nerve impulses; to form the membranes around the brain, heart, muscles, and other organs; and to maintain optimum cardiovascular health. These needs can generally be satisfied by taking a teaspoon of flaxseed oil per day. Ground flaxseeds, canola oil, and walnuts are also good sources of omega-3 fats.

How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People, by John K. Wilson

2008-10-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

Wilson, John K. 2001. How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People: A Tactical Manual for Pragmatic Progressives. New York: New York University.

133 - Income taxes have remained steady for more than a half century at about 50 percent of federal government revenues. The problem is that the proportion of revenue from exise taxes and corporate taxes has been cut in half during this period while payroll taxes have grown to fill the gap. If corporations paid their fair share, there could be huge tax breaks.

134 - Two factors determine how progressive an income tax would be: the rate of taxation at different incomes, and the standard deduction. Progressives are accustomed to seeking a more progressive tax rate, rising as income increases. But there's no reason that the same result couldn't be achieved with a flat tax rate and a dramatically higher standard deduction.
The Forbes flat tax is an appalling giveaway to the wealthy that would add to the tax bueden on the poor and the middle class. But imagine a progressive flat tax with a stanard deduction of $20,000 for each individual (instead of the current $4,300 for singles and $7,200 for couples). After that, all income would be taxed at a rate of about 44 percent. A married couple with children could earn up to %50,000 tax free. The result would be lower taxes for 98 percent of Americans, a 100 percent tax break for the working poor, and a clear-cut, popular issue for progressives to stand on.

135 - [P}rogressives have become so attached to fighting these tax cut proposals for the wealthy that they haven't proposed a popular alternative: substantially reducing taxes on the poor. Politically, it' and amazing opportunity: a substantial cut in taxes for all Americans living in poverty would require only a tiny tax increase on less than 1 percent of the richest people. [. . .]
[. . .] Because the poor make so little money compared with the rich in America, their totoal federal income taxes are barely noticeable. The top 50 percent of wage earners pay 95.7 percent of federal income taxes (the top 25 percent pay 81 percent of the income taxes). This means that the government could essentially eliminate deral income taxes on anyone earning below the average income (around $25,000 a year) and lose only 4.3 percent of revenue--an amount that could be taken from the propsed budget surpluses* or raised by a tiny increase on the taxes of the wealthiest 1 percent.

*[Note: Since this book was published, we obviously no longer have a budget surplus. I don't know how much of Wilson's argument would have to be revised in the face of our massive deficit, but not knowing that, I still think the basic principles of what he's proposing are sound--JLHart]

136 - Currently, we have a crazy tax system in which we heavily tax the working poor for Social Security and impose an income tax on them, but then we give them back some of the money with the earned-income tax credit (EITC).

137 - Imagine if we simplified the system: reduced the payroll and income taxes on the working poor (while still giving them credit for Social Security) and eliminated much of the need for an earned-income tax credit.

140 - Many progressives make the mistake of attacking the capital gains subsidy in the tax code soley as a "giveaway to the rich." Of course, it is precisely that. But progressive ideas are most persuasive when they don't use the standard rhetoric of attacking the rich. The capital gains subsidy (and the proposal by virtually all Republicans--including Steve Forbes's flat tax--to increase this tax break) can be effectively countered on libertarian, antigovernment grounds. What business is it of the government to judge the value of the way we earn our money? [. . .]
Why should someone who makes his money by investing stocks benefit from a lower tax rate than does the construction worker who goes out and works hard all day to make a living? The construction worker pays more in income taxes than the speculator--and the far right wants the speculator to pay nothing at all.

141 - The reason that the construction worker pays higher taxes in order to subsidize the stock speculator, we are told, is that paper shufflers are more important to our economy than construction workers are. Yet there's never been any sound eceonomic theory to prove that $50,000 made on Wall Street is important to our economy than $50,000 made on Main Street. [. . .]
Isn't it interesting that the advocates of "tax simplication" suddenly want more complicated taxes when it comes in the form of a tax break for the rich? After all, keeping capital gains income separate from other forms of income only complicates people's taxes [. . .]
The low tax rate on capital gains also distorts the economy. Instead of investing in safe bonds or CDs (which pay interest

142 - taxed as income) or stable, profitable companies (which provide dividends taxed at the higher income rate), many investor seek high-risk, unprofitable companies that provide no dividends but have the potential to rise in value and create the desirable low-taxed capital gains. The stock m arket is precarious enough without the government providing handouts to the people taking the biggest risks.
The principle of fairness in taxation demands a reformed tax code that lowers income taxes (especially for the poor) while providing for equality between income and capital gains taxes. By challenging the current tax structure that favors the wealthy and the powerful, progressives could take away one of the most powerful and popular issues manipulated by conservatives. But even more important, the left could use tax policy and tax cuts to help the poor more than any government program could accomplish. Until progressives address tax cuts, they will always find themselves on the losing end of American politics.

Is Bill Cosby Right? by Michael Eric Dyson

2008-09-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Dyson, Michael Eric. 2005. Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? New York: Basic Civitas Books.

46 - The civil rights movement perceived universalism in the guiding ideals of democracy and justice that should benefit all peoples. The movement argued that the "self-evident" claims of humanity for each community must be respected;

47 - one needn't destroy one's particular identity to fit in. As W.E.B. Du Bois argued in 1903, black folk didn't want to lose our identity as the price of our survival. [. . .] Unlike Du Bois, Cosby didn't see that black identities needn't give up their particular ethnic or racial slants to be universal; that's a false dichotomy engineered by the white merchants of a variety of universalism that seeks to project the normative as the universal. The two surely aren't the same.

80 - But I also thought of Elizabeth Chin's marvelous ethnographic study of the consumer behavior of poor black children, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture [. . .] Chin contends that black youth are not the "combat consumers" they are portrayed as being: either captives of a powerful fetish for brand names or predatory consumers willing to steal for Air Jordans or kill for a bike [. . .] Chin also notices that, unlike their middle-class and upper-class peers, the children she studied were made profoundly conscious of what it costs to clothe, feed and take care of them; hence, they usually spent part of the money they had on nec-

81 - essary, not pleasurable, itens. Chin explains her work in a powerful anecdote about the prejeduice she confronted and, by extension, the black youth she studied, in examining the consumer behavior of black youth. She says she had developed, as do most researchers, a one-line response to questions at cocktail parties about the nature of her research in New Haven.

"I'm studying the role of consumption in the lives of poor and working-class black children." Here I would more often than not get a knowing look. "Ah," the response would be, "you must have seen a lot of Air Jordans.". . . "Actually, no," I'd answer. "I only saw two pairs of Air Jordans on the kids I worked with." [T}his statement was nearly always met with incredulity. More than once people responded with something to the effect of "There must have been something wrong with your sample.". . . [T]hese comments also disturb me because so many people seemed to prefer haning on to ideas about poor black kids that had been gleaned from the pseudo experience provided by the kinds of news stories I have so extensively critiqued in the preceding pages. Like the terms inner city and ghetto, the "Air Jordans" response to thinking about poor and working-class black children and consumption obscures more about those children than it reveals.44

[page 255, note 44.] Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 60-61

92 - None of this is meant to dismiss black crime or serve a s an apologia for destructive behavior, but it is necessary to under-

93 - line the social and personal forces that drive criminal activity, even as we fight against an unjust criminal justice system that targets black men with vicious regularity. I speak as one who has been a victim of crime.

178 - Even Cosby's attacks on single black mothers contain an irony: Their numbers have actually gone down. In 1970, for black females between ages fifteen and seventeen, there were 72 pregnancies per 1,000, while in 2000, there were 30.9 per 1,000 [note 83]

[page 268, note 83.] From Michael Males, cited in Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Mushmouth Reconsider: you Can't Say That on TV--But Bill Cosby Can," Village Voice, July 13, 2004

212 - I suggest that we hold in mind several dimensions of responsibility, summarized in the dynamic, reciprocal relation between three interrelated types of responsibility: personal and social responsibility, moral and intellectual responsibility, and immediate and ultimate responsibility. Personal responsibility involves the individual's being accountable for her actions and acting in a

213 - moral fashion that is helpful to herself and to the members of her family, community and society. Social responsibility involves the society's exercising collective accountability to its citizens by acting, through agencies (social services, psychological services and the like), institutions (schools, religious organizations, governmment and the like), and spheres (private and public employment and the like) to enhance their well-being, especially the most vulnerable. [. . .]
Moral responsibility involves self- and other-regarding behavior that aims to realize the good intentions, and maximize the just actions, of persons and societies. Intellectual responsibility involves the exercise of mental faculty for the purpose of self-development and the development of society. [. . .]
Immediate responsibility involves persons and societies acting accountably to address issues, ideas and problems in

214 - the present time and environment. Ultimate responsibility involves persons and societies acting accountably to address issues, ideas and problems with an eye on their personal and social impact in the long run. [ . . .]
These meanings of responsibility should be kept in mind as we make demands for the poor to be more responsible. Too often we fail to give them credit for how they are already being personally and morally responsible, given the conditions they confront [. . .] We have at the same time failed to calculate, or to as aggressively demand, social responsibility toward the poor.

227 - One of the most dishonest effects of elevating Cosby as a spokesman of black interests is that conservative commentators pretends that he is the first prominent black leader to call for personal responsibility. [. . .] One conservative white columnist praised Cosby's bravery for airing dirty laundry while decrying the "complete breakdown of leadership within the [black] community," claiming that folk like Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson have "spent the past 20 years telling the black community that their problems are due to the white man keeping them down." [. . .] Farrakhan, of course, has been promoting a gospel of black self-help for decades, and while he assaults white supremacy, he recognizes the virtue of black folk, including the black poor, assuming responsibility for their destinies. [. . .]

228 - Sharpton has constantly applauded the virtues of hard work and self-determining action for black fol. And Jesse Jackson is in a long list of leaders who have understood the dynamic relationship between personal and social responsibility.

A People's History of Science, by Clifford D. Conner

2008-09-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

Originally transcribed 9/11/08, then added to later in April 2010 - JH

Conner, Clifford D. 2005. "A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks." New York: Avalon.

130 - Finally, a people's history of science would be remiss if it failed to explicitly refute the insinuation of nineteenth-century "racial science" that the black people of sub-Saharan Africa were incapable of creating civilizations. The history of Kumbi Saleh--not to mention Gao, Jenne, Timbuktu, and any number of other African cities--is sufficient to counter that falsehood. More than a thousand years ago Kumbi Saleh was a thriving commercial city in West Africa, in the Kingdom of Ghana, with a population of fifteen to twenty thousand people. Neither London nor Paris was anywhere near that size until hundreds of years later.
It must also be emphasized that no sharp line can be drawn between the history of early Egypt and that of sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal maintained that "Egyptian civilization is clearly based on the rich Pre-dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin is uncontested."40 The prehistoric origins of Egyptian civilization came from far south along the Nile River, which is to say from the heart of the African continent. Sub-Saharan Africans constituted a significant part of the Egyptian population in the age of the pharaohs, and they frequently rose to the pinnacle of political power. Statues, wall paintings, and documents make it clear that there were black African Pharaohs--Pepys I, for example, circa 2360 B.C.E.--and that there were periods during which all of Egypt was ruled by the territories along the southern stretches of the Nile.
Herodotus, who traveled extensively in Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E., said of the Egyptian people that "they are black-skinned and have wooly hair."41

[40. M. Bernal, Black Athena, p. 15
[41. Herodotus, History, book II, 104

144 - In fact, Plato believed that government was only possible on the basis of a lie, and he "devoted his life to the elaboration" of that lie.72 To uphold that falsehood, Plato urged that the books of the Ionian materialists be destoyed and "that his own fradulent book [the Laws] should be imposed by the State as the one and only obligatory source of doctrine."73 For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. This was Plato's idea of a political utopia, as he spelled it out in the Republic. [. . .]
What was the famous "noble lie" that Plato wanted to impose as the official doctrine of the state? Here is how he described it. Written in dialogue form, he had one of his interlocutors ask him: "How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke--just one royal lie?" He answered:

I propose to communicate [the audacious fiction] gradually, first to the rules, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. . . . Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power to command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be perserved in the children.75

[72. Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World, p. 126
[73. Ibid. p. 127
[74. Ibid., p. 94
[75. Plato, The Republic, book III, chapter 8, 1074b

145 - Plato's "noble lie," then, was the ultimate ideological justification of elitism: that social hierarchies are immutable because they were created by God, and that the ruling class deserves to rule because God made its members out of superior material. The aristocrats are the Golden Men, whereas the farmers and artisans are composed of brass and iron. As part of this ideological program, Plato promoted two separate religions--a sophisticated, abstract one for the intelligentsia, and a cruder one, with the traditional anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, for the masses. To ensure the continued observance of the latter, Plato proposed sentencing disbelievers to five years in prison for a first offense and death for a second. [. . .]
Platonic elitism, unfortunately, is not merely a matterof ancient history; it is stil drastically afflicting the human race even in the twenty-first century. The architects of American foreign policy who carried out the imperialist asaults on Afghanistan and Iraq are known to be zealous disciples of political philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Plato. "The effect of Strauss's teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite," said Shadia Drury, who has written extensively on Strauss's ideas and their consequences.78 "Leo Strauss," she continued, "was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics" who "justifies his position by an appeal to Plato's concept of the noble lie."

[78. See Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss; and Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right.

159 - Before leaving this subject [alchemy-JH], a word about its "dark side"--the mystical aspect--is in order. Alechemy has, throughout the ages, been closely linked with mysticism, an association that was especially strong in Hellenistic Alexandria. The seemingly miraculous transformations that the artisans were able to produce in their firey furnaces had such a powerful effect on the imagination of Neoplatonic philosophers that it induced the latter to spin fanciful metaphysical systems from alchemical metaphors. As a result, "to the already confused terminology of alchemy was added a still greater mass of philosophical speculation, using chemiccal terms, but with almost no chemical content." The mystical philosophers scorned the practical alchemists as mere "puffers" (an allusion to their use of bellows to stoke their fires). However, it was the practical alchemists "who preserved and advanced alchemy as a science until it became chemistry, while the others lost in a cloud of obscure nomenclature and speculation, contributed nothing further to chemistry."123

[123. Leicester, Historical Background of Chemistry, p. 47

161 - Arabic-Islamic scholarship was not simply a passive reflection of previous Greek triumphs; it also received major inputs from Persia, India, and China was itself a source of original contributions to scientific culture. That can be seen most clearly (but not only) in the field of mathematics. Whereas Greek mathematicians kept almost exclusively to geometry and scorned arithmetic as a tool fit only for lowly practical pursuits, Muslim mathematicians adopted the base-ten, position-value number system from India and utilized it to further mathematical knowledge in ways unimaginable to their Greek predecessors. [. . .]

162 - But Muslim scholars were not simply translators and copyists; they added extensive critical commentaries, sometimes based on their own scientific investigations, to the corpus of Greek science. When scholarship in Europe begain to revive in the twelfth century, the works of Aristotle and Galen recovered from Arabic sources had been refracted through the interpretive lenses of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi (Rhazes), and many others. The new learning, however, rapidly hardened into an orthodoxy that hindered further acquisition of knowledge of nature.

262 - Leonardo da Vinci is today hailed as the supreme example of a Renaissance man who mastered many diverse fields of knowledge and combined achievements in the beaux arts and in science to a degree attained by no individual before or since. Ironically, however, in his own time he was denied the prestige of a fully learned man because he lacked a classical education and was not literate in Latin. His originality, one leading historian of science has written, "was partly due to his ignorance and his lack of academic ambitions."

455 - The important lesson to be learned from all this is that the social meanings attributed to biological theories are "not logically inherent in the theories themselves."16 Whether evolution proceeds slowly or in bursts has nothing whatsoever to do with the way political struggles unfold. Nor is the red-in-tooth-and-claw competition of biological evolution a model human societies should aspire to emulate. In general, attempts to reduce the laws of the science of society to the laws of biology is bad science that encourages bad social policy.

[16. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, p. 378

473 - The privatization of science was greatly facilitated by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed universities and small businesses to patent the findings produced by federally funded research. As surely as night follows day, major corporations were certain eventually to gain the same priviledges, which they did in 1987. The boundary lines separating government, industrial, and academic research have increasingly blurred. The upshot is that public dollars pay universities to produce knowledge that becomes the private property of corporations.

Socialism: Past and Future by Michael Harrington

2008-08-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

Harrington, Michael. 1992 (1989). Socialism: Past and Future. New York: Mentor.

32 - IT IS, MARTIN BUBER wrote, "the goal of Utopian socialism. . .to substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible, moreover a society that is 'genuine' and not a State in disguise." That is as good a definition as you will find--even though it is more complex than it might at first seem. For though utopia exalted society as against the state, it led to technocracy as well as anarchism, to Stalinism as well as the Israeli kibbutz.

97 - There are few generalizations that can be made about the capitalist revolution since it happened in very specific ways in different countries. But it is true that Britain and France went through a similar process, which was quite different from that of Germany and Japan. In the earliest variants of the new economy, there were tremendous upheavals from below as the old society was challenged--the revolutions of 1640 and 1688 in Britain, 1789 in France--and capitalism evolved spontaneously from that beginning. In Germany and Japan, as Barrington Moore has pointed out, there were "revolutions from above" in which the bureaucracies of the agrarian ruling class made an alliance with weak commercial classes (the "coalition of iron and rye" as it has been called in the German case). Capitalist development in these instances was statist, authoritarian, and was

98 - eventually to take a completely right-wing form of Naziism or military dictatorship. [. . .]
As Alexander Gerschenkron outlined the progression, in the countries where capitalism started from relatively high levels of development, the factory was the source of capital; in areas of moderate backwardness, funds came from the banks and then the factories; in situations of extreme backwardness, first the state intervened, then the banks, and finally the factories came on line as a source of capital.

234 - Tax policy should be used to direct wealth into jobs and production. That can be done in a variety of ways: by giving preferential treatment to capital actually invested in people and work and discriminating against the speculative uses of money; by a levy on passive and parasitic wealth; by inheritance laws that limit the right of passing control over economic decisions from one generation to the next (by distinguishing, as some of the French socialists have proposed, between the transmission of cash and the transfer of voting rights in enterprises); and more generally by "limiting the rewards of success and the punishments of failure" in society. On this last case, we know that the most dynamic capitalist economy of the recent past, Japan, has less of a differential between the top and bottom quintiles of income recipients than any Western society.
All of these policies canbe justified in terms of maximizing investments, environmental quality, productivity, efficiency, and growth and minimizing the scandalous capitalist wastefulness that became so marked in the seventies and eighties. But at the very same time, such measures move in a direction the social-democratic welfare state, even in its heyday, never followed: toward making the distribution of income and wealth more equal.

244 - The fact is, we cannot evaluate or deven describe the workings of markets independent of the social structure in which they operate. The "free choice" of goods, jobs, or investments is one thing in a laissez-faire economt of extreme inequality; another in a monopoly or oligopoly system; still another in a democratic welfare state; and quite different in a Communist dictatorship. And, under conditions that must be carefully specified, free choice--without quotation marks--would have a completely new, and potentially positive, significance in any forseeable

245 - transition to a socialist society. In other words, generalizations about the meanings of markets in the abstract are all suspect. [. . .]
Let me put my point most paradoxically: only under socialism and democratic planning will it be possible for markets to serve the common good as Adam Smith thought they did under capitalism.

247 - In the calculated oversimplification of his [Marx's] basic analysis--which generations have mistaken for a flawed description of the real world--it was assumed that raw materials, machines, and finance were all exchanged according to their value, and that sellers charged buyers a fair price. Where, then, was the source of profit? In the labor market. The workers sold their labor power like any other commodity. In theory, the resulting wage was the outcome of a bargain between equals, each of which was "free" to deal with the other. In reality, this was a deal between unequals: between a wealthy buyer and a precarious seller trying to keep body and soul together. The content of the market agreement was, therefore, determined not by markets per se but by the social conditions under which markets operated.

254 - It is possible to make the intial physical investments in modernization in a brutal way. The slave laborers of the gulag could be, and were, drvien to dig canals because the productivity of a person with a pick or a shovel is not of great moment. That is what the Soviets now refer to as "extensive" growth, and it corresponds to

255 - the period of "absolute surplus value" when capitalism thrived by working people to the edge of death. But the basis of a truly modern system, particularly in the age of automation and the computer, is "intensive" growth, an exponential increase in productivity that rests upon the facility of both human beings and machines. That requires a concern for the quality of work that slaves, or driven workers, will never exhibit.

274 - Jacques Attali suggests that there must then be room for failure in a socialist society. An incompetent cooperative or an ineffective managemnt in a socialized industry wates human skills and materials that could be put to a better social use, and, as the Swedish socialists have understood within the context of capitalism, there must be socially acceptable ways of putting an end to such activities. The resulting "discipline" of markets must not be vicious, as it is in the present, where entire industries were sacrificed in Britain under Margaret Thatcher in order to make industry "lean" and competitive.

Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant

2008-07-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

Bageant, Joe. 2007. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. New York: Crown Publishers.

http://www.joebageant.com/

13 - In the days before the spine of the labor movement was crushed, back when you could be a gun owner and a liberal without any conflict, membes of the political left supported these workers, stood on the lines taking beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now there is practically no labor movement, and large numbers on the left are comfortably ensconced int he true middle class, which is only about 20 to 30 percent of Americans, as well shall see.

26 - In the old days class warfar was between the rich and the poor, and that's the kind of class war I can sink my teeth into. These days it is clearly between the educated and the uneducated, which of course does make it a culture war, if that's the way you choose to describe it.

28 - The lives an intellectual cultures of these, the hardest-working people, are not just stunted by the smallness of the society in which they were born. They are purposefully held in bondage by a local network of moneyed families, bankers, developers, lawyers, and businesspeople in whose interests it is to have a cheap, unquestioning, and compliant labor force paying high rents and big medical bills.

29 - Meanwhile, the conservative Republicans ballyho "personal responsibility" to working-class employees like the guys and gals here at Royal Lunch. Most working people around here believe in the buzz phrase "personal responsibility." [. . .] Consequently, they don't like

30 - social spending to give people a lift. but self-reliant as they are, what real chance do they have living on wages that do not allw them to accumulate savings? What chance do they have living from paycheck to paycheck, praying there will be no layoffs at J.C. Penney or Toll Brothers Homes or Home Depot? [. . .]
We first started hearing about the average Joe needing to take complete responsibility for his condition in life, with no help from the government, during the seventies, when Cold War conservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz dubbed themselves "neoconservatives."

31- But what sort of personal responsibility is possible in the neocon environment? A wage earner's only asset is his willingness to give a day's work for a day's pay, the price of which he does not determine. So where does he get the wherewithal to improve his circumstances? He gets that wherewithal from the wages he earns. Bt in the new neocon environment, that wage does not support savings. It does not support higher education. it only allows the wage earner to survive from paycheck to paycheck [. . .]
Admittedly, a real blue-collar middle class still exists in some places, just as unions still exist. But both on are on the ropes [. . .]

64 - Tom is intensely antiunion, which amazes me since I can remeber when he had a Che Guevara poster on his apartment wall. You'd think after twenty years in a southern factory a guy would be begging union organizers to sweep through this town like Grant took Richmond. But Tom and most other plant workers here have bought the rightist mantra that goes: "Maybe unions were once valuable, but they have priced American labor completely out of the market. They always want more money for less production." Tom, like me, has heard this line from birth; we know it by heart. He still believes it.

65 - "Whaaaat? How can you be such a corporate advocate?" I ask.
"I'm not a corporate advocate. I'm for the common worker. When unions demand a twenty percent pay raise for the same amount of output and prevent management from firing the screw-offs, it raises the cost of everything. It makes it just that much harder for the average worker in a nonunion job to survive."
In Tom's world, "unions workers getting paid forty dollars an hour are not the working man" but are "greedy assholes who drive up the price of American cars so the rest of us can't afford them." Never mind that very few union workers make $40 an hour or that union membership is down to about 12 percent of the American workforce and by no means dictates the price of cars or anything else. It's maddening to talk to Tom on this subject. But when you do, you are talking to the real Joe Sixpack/NASCAR Papa that the media bullshit about.
"Give me one example of a union demanding a twenty percent pay increase for zero productivity growth."
That was a slipup on my part. Most people don't cite real facts. They recite what they have absorbed from the atmosphere. [. . .] So I know there is no use in pointing out that corporations are very good at increasing productivity using every means available except increasing wages and benefits. Or that corporations are beholden to Wall Street, not to the workers, and vastly prefer Asian sweatshops to the bargaining tables of free

66 - men and women. In Tom Henderson's world, there are no sweatshops. "The Asians in the so-called sweatshops working for two dollars a day are the middle class of their economy," he says. A Limbaugh-ism if ever there was one.
I cannot resist: "So you think we all should be reduced to the level of some guy on a sampan in Asia? Is that what you want for Americans?"
"Well pardon me, ole buddy," he replies, poking around in his crumpled cigarette pack for a Camel, "but I don't think anybody in Washington is asking Tom Henderson what he thinks. But the bottom line is that globalization is in our national interests."
It's not wonder Tom cannot distinguish his own political interests. The very language we use to talk about globalization hides its class structure. "National interest is consistently yapped about in the media without defining exactly who is getting what and how much. So when American workers are told that "the Chinese are taking American jobs," no one points out that the "China threat" is just another global business partnership, one among Chinese elites who supply cheap labor, American capitalists who supply technology, and global capitalists who finance China's exports.

71 - Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladitorial theater of the free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism.

73 - what haunted me was this: Tom is every bit as intelligent as I am. He was a better writer than I was in high school and often said back then that his goal in life was to be a writer, painter, musician. Where did those dreams go? The same place any such dreams go for the children of lower-working-class families. They go out the same door that opportunity for a decent education never walks in through.

78 - Active in her church, Nance does not drink and seldom dates. She is predictably antiunion [. . . ]
Nance is a Republican pretty much by default. She doesn't think of herself as one, but she votes Republican every time. Because of her caste--lower working class, southern, high school educated, fundamentalist Christian--she does not personally know a single registered Democrat. [. . .]
Inconceivable though it may seem to urban Americans, it is easily possible for many working Americans not to know a person of the liberal persuasion. Why? Partly because most middle-class liberals are uncomfortable being around people like Nance. She lives in a modular home close to the interstate and is raising two kids, one of whom has ADHD, is half black, and was fathered by her ex with a previous wife. She sends her kids to a "Christian academy" on a scholarship.

80 - Naturally, there is the ever-present antiunion pressure. From the first employee training and indoctrination sessions, Newell Rubbermaid makes the corporate position clear. this is not really necessary. We learned the lessons as kids. I remember my nineth-grade history teacher at Handley High School spending an entire classroom hour on "communist labor unions." [. . .]
It is safe to say that radio supplies the workers with most their knowledge of things political.

94 - Most disturbingly, the Iraq War, despite all the noise, is at this writing in 2006 a distant thing that occasionally spits a coffin in our direction containing some local working-class son or daughter. The flag-draped box is shown on the front page of the local paper, everyone salutes and remarks on how sad it is, but really nobody but the soldier's family and church gives a hoot. They really don't. [ . . .] It is one of the hologram's biggest media myths that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq. There was a time when that would have been true, but long ago our lives were numbed by the money grind and by the birth-to-death drenching in marketing and messages and sports spectacles, by the complete absence of genuine public questioning of the notion that America is the best nation on earth, superior in all things and therefore unassailable. Consequently, there is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but, in this town at least, it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead.

128 - Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. Snort at the proposition if you want, but that was the view I grew up with, and it still is quite prevalent, though not so open as in

129 - those days. These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections. [. . .]
So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid.

182 - Yo don't need a degree in sociology to see that the most obvious class indicator in America is religious belief and that religious zeal is concentrated in lower-class and working-class whites.

188 - When I look at the fundamentalists I know personally, I see many kind, brave, and hardworking people, embodying all those things and American is supposed to be. But knowing what they used to be and what they have become, I see something else. I see that one of the most significant yet least understood political events in America is the conversion of millions of people from apolitical Christians into Christian political activists.

200 - Whatever you think of the leash girl of Abu Ghraib, Lynnie England never had a chance. Abu Ghraib, or maybe something even worse (an RPG up the shorts, for instance), was always her destiny. Nearly half of the three thousand Americans killed thus far in Iraq are from small towns like hers, like mine--towns of fewer than forty thousand. Yet these towns make up only 25 percent of America's population. Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead-end jobs like the one Lynnie had at the chicken-processing plant, though many deny it or do not even see it in their quick and ready patriotism and youthful blindness to the larger national scheme of things. [. . .]
And don't forget those big bucks for college later. Up to $65,000. Lynnie was supposedly going to college after her enlistment to become a "storm chaser," as in the Helen Hunt movie Twister. Perhaps many poor and working-class kids do go to college on their military benefits. But I can count on one hand the

201 - number I know who did it.

205 - Liberal America in particular lives in thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every working white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture an what James Webb rightly called America's "paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers." Whether educated liberal believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots-Irish and thousands of Scots-Irish-influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.
Years ago, when Newt Gingrich became the first to describe the struggle in these terms, I winced because the truth of what he said was so obvious.

What Nietzsche Really Said

2008-07-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

Solomon, Robert C. and Kathleen M. Higgins. 2000. "What Nietzsche Really Said." New York: Schocken Books.

17 - He did not, however, praise either the mechanism [of power] or many of its expressions, much less raw instances of powermongering. Indeed, he claims, "Power makes stupid." We might not that the German word for "power" is Macht, not Reich, indicating something more like personal strength than political might [...]
None of this points to anything resembling political power, or, for that matter, power over other people. Indeed, what Nietzsche most often celebrates under this rubric is self-discipline and creative energy, and it is not so much having power or even feeling power that Nietzsche cites as the motiva-

18 - tion of our behavior as the need to increase one's strength and vitality to do great things--for example, to write great books in philosophy.

30 - But what Nietzsche really celebrates, in the passages that follow his treatment of suffering, is justice, conceived not as the fair distribution of punishments but as "love with open eyes," in the words of Zaranthusra. Nietzsche sees real justice as involing a largeness of spirit that considers all forms of punishment petty, and which does not feel lessened by showing mercy.
What Neitzsche offers us is not celebration of cruelty. Instead, his accounts provide a mirror in which we can see ourselves, ideally without hypocrisy. He aims to spur us into a different way of life, withou resentment and vengefulness, but he argues that this requires, first of all, an honest assessment of what we are.

39 - What Nietzsche does for us, among many other things, is to call into question our facile use of such notions as selfishness, self-interest, egoism, and their opposites, altruism and self-sacrifice. Noble actions are both for the sake of the actor and serve some larger purpose. To force and "either/or" opposition onto our behavior--asking, for example, "Is this self-serving or is this altruistic?"--is to distort and cripple the complex (and often unknown) motives that go into every significant action.

93 - Nietzsche contends that early Christianity was popular among the powerless because it represented a healthy gesture of self-assertion, if only inwardly. However, this improvement developed potentially dangerous psychological mechanisms that flourished when Christianity itself became a pervasive and powerful social institution, undermining the healthy self-assertion that earlier it had promoted.

Good to Remember: Simone Weil Quote

2008-06-08T22:17:00.000-07:00

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."
-- Simone Weil

cited from
http://static.twoday.net/oraclesyndicate/files/how%20black%20is%20black%20metal1.pdf

from "Dark Nature" by Lyall Watson.

2007-09-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

Watson, Lyall. 1995. "Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil." New York: HarperCollins.

147 -- The fact that that humans are, on occasion, both aggressive and violent presents the Asmat with no problem and requires no heart-searching or remorse. They have stereotyped and ritualized such tendencies, allowing them full and satisfying play in headhunting, while at the same time resolving a pressing environmental problem. Without denying their nature, they seem to have found a way of using it to their own advantage. I have never been amongst people more consistently good-nauted, or less prone to unregualted personal violence. By giving aggression a socially approved form, a license to practice, with rules an appropriate displays, they have hit on a very effective strategy. Another of the universal by which our species may be recognized is our love of such regulation and ritual. And given half a chance, as in headhunting or football, we are often quite content to minimize killing or aggression in favor of its alternative--the ritual display.

164 - One survey of 130 social systems found just six that could be described as peaceful in the sense that they were not involved in collective violence and provided no special role for warriors. And at least one of these sic ought to be excluded on the grounds that feudlike killings sometimes take place. The numbers involved may be small, but for a population of "peaceful" !Kung Bushmen in which twenty-two such deaths have been reported, this is a high percentage, as high as any recorded for homicides in our "violent" societies.

169 -- War, despite what the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz might have believed, is not just a continuation of policy by other means. War represents a major change in human history, a shift

170 - from hostility to something far more organized and more lethal. A venture beyond what American anthropologist and cavalryman Harry Turney-High has called "the military horizon."
[. . .] Making it quite clear that primitive man already had blood on his hands, but also pointing out that none of this mattered when it came to looking for the origins of our current military and political systems. The state, he suggested, only emerged when society moved from primitive conflict to something quite different, to what he called "true" or "modern" war. The transition took place, he concluded, with the appearance of an army under the orders of appointed officers. Then, and only then, was it possible for a state to come into being [. . .]
There is a simple functional difference between Yanomamo skirmishes and Zulu war, between Asmat raids and campaigns of the Austro-Hungarian army. The Yanomamo and the Asmat are interested in women and food, in simple resources; and their conflicts, while undoubtably bloddy, are strictly and severely curtained by ritual and custom

172 -- Pastoralists had the military advantages of polished cooperative hunting routines, a familiarity with the techniques of slaughter, and an unsentimental attitude toward their flocks.

173 - [. . .] rugged footsoldiers who were also farmers of small holdings they could not afford to leave for too long. They favored settling matters as quickly and decisively as possible. So it was through and for them that the Greek phalanx--a tightly massed rank that fought in a very narrow field--came into being, producing a terrifying, short-lived clash of bodies and weapons at the closest possible range. This, for the first time ever, was war without quarter, battle without ceremony, in which flags and uniforms counted for nothing. It was cutthroat and back-stab conflict, hand to hand, hard and short, with a swift follow-up designed to dispatch the wounded and to lay waste to the land.
Such fighting, face to face, with death-dealing weapons and without restraint, defies nature. There was no precedent for it in human or natural history, and no possible defense in Persian ranks accustomed to more procrastinated conflict, in which ritual and restraint were as common and time-consuming as actual combat.

283 - I have [. . .] looked closely at some of these [Satanic] cults and their

284 - rites, and have to say that most represent nothing more than desperate and misdirected attempts to find some personal significance; to create some sense of belonging, in otherwise very dreary lives. They appear, I believe, largely as an artifact of a western religious and ethical tradition that insists incorrectly on condemning everything that seems antisocial, and consigning it automatically to the realm of evil.

285 - Genes are the enemy only when their selfishness interferes with greater happiness. Evil is undesirable only when it prevents us from being as good as we can be. Trying to rid the world of genetic or evil influences is impossible and as pointless as trying to keep weeds out of a garden. A "weed," anyway, is little more than a flower that happends to be growing in the wrong place. [. . .]
Gardeners choose, as we all must, from a catalog of options; letting these selections be acted upon in turn by weather, nature and a little judicious pruning. [. . .] We give a little, take a little, try to find the best accommodation we can between mindless biological pressures and thoughtful cultural restraints. Most ordinary, decent people succeed in reaching some kind of compromise, but the fact remains that it is exactly such people, those like you and me, who have in this century alone been beguiled into the massacre of well over 100 million other ordinary, decent people.

from What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank

2007-07-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

6 - The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture warrior of them all was a notorious cop-out once it came time to deliver. "Reagan made himself the champion of 'traditional values,' but there is no evidence he regarded their restoration as a high priority," wrote Christopher Lasch, one of the most astute analysts of the backlash sensibility. "What he really cared about

7 - was the revival of the unregulated capitalism of the twenties: the repeal of the New Deal."
This is vexing for observers, and one might expect it to vex the movements true believers even more. Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every tow years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindistrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat-packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

23 - "Rural America is pissed," a small-town Pennsylvania man told a reporter from Newsweek in 2001. Explaining why he and his neighbors voted for George Bush, he said: "These people are tired of moral decay.

24 - They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street." Let me repeat that: they're voting Republican in order to get even with Wall Street.

74 - So it is with Sam Brownback right down the line: a man of sterling public principle, he seems to take the side of corporate interests almost regardless of the issues at hand. This is true even when the corporate interests in question are industrieswhose products Brownback considers the source of all evil. Such, at least, was the case in 2003, when one of Brownback's Senate committees was called upon to consider the growing problem of monopoly ownership in radio since the industry's deregulation seven years previously. Brownback, of course, has made a career out of denouncing the culture industry for its vulgarity, its bad values, presumably for the damage it has done to America's soul. Taking this opportunity to rein it in should have been a no-brainer. After all, as the industry critic Robert McChesney points out, the link

75 - between media ownership, the drive for profit, and the media's insulting content should be obvious to anyone with ears to hear. "Vulgarity is linked to corporate control and highly concentrated, only semi-competitive markets," McChesney says. And for many conservatives, "the radio fight was the moment of truth. If people are seriously concerned about vulgarity, this was their chance to prove it." For that reason, McChesney notes, certain right-wing culture warriors were happy to join the fight against further relaxation of radio ownership rules. But Brownback was not one of them. Faced with a choice between protecting corporate profits and actually doing something about the open cultural sewer he has spent his career deploring, Brownback chose the former.

82 - Let me take you first to the tiny western Kansas

83 - town of Lucas, home to a remarkable sculpture garden illustrating that grandest of subjects, the condition of mankind. Constructed out of concrete by an old fellow named J.P. Dinsmoor, the "The Garden of Eden" mixes biblical stories with the unmistakeable political iconography of Populism: Here is Cain, having just slain Abel. There is "Labor Crucified" and surrounded by his tormentors--doctor, lawyer, preacher, and capitalist. Bigger animals eat smaller animals in an endless chain of exploitation and oppression.
[. . .] I noticed a sculpture of an octopus grasping at a map of the Americas, with one tentacle reaching menacingly across Panama. For a viewer of the early twentieth century, such a tableau would ahve been easily recognizable as a left-wing denunciation of the imperial ambitions of the trusts [. . .]
[. . .] That a regular guy like J.P. Dinsmoor would have opposed U.S. imperialism, well, that's simply unthinkable out here; everyone knows that such views are the affectations of latte-drinking rich kids at fancy colleges, while the average working man stands tall for firearm and flag.

114 - This sounds like a complicated manuever, but it should be quite familiar after all these years. We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore "class warfare"--meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism--and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the "media elite" or the haughty, Volvo-driving "eastern establishment."
[. . .] The conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan even uses the straightforward term class war to describe the face-off between rich liberals and more humble Republicans. But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox--a class divide in which class doesn't matter--is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature [. . .]

118 - Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer. Ann Coulter's case is instructive. A daughter of the creamy suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut, she grew up in what she describes as a happy right-wing family headed by a corporate lawyer who, in 1985, helped engineer a landmark union decertification (that is, the total destruction of a bargaining unit) for the greater glory of the Phelps Dodge mining interests. This coup was one of the earliest fruits of the anti-union policies of the Reagan administration, which over the years have done so much to shrink the power of organized labor and to rain down blessings on the inhabitants of New Canaan and their upper-bracket brethren across the nation.
Coulter was there at the union-busting creation [. . .] but she insists nonetheless that discussions of that aspect of social class are simply a figment of liberal propaganda. [. . .] In saying this, Coulter is not referring to the cold shoulder that Bill Clinton's New Democrats have turned to the labor movement; like most conservatives, she believes that Clinto was in fact a man of the radical left. Rather, she is trying to construct

119 - an entire system of class relations on the observation that the haughty hedonists of Hollywood are largely Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, drink beer, go to church, and own guns; they are, ipso facto, the true representatives of the common man. Economics simply do not count in her world.

160 - Dwight Sutherland, Jr., the Kansas City brahmin [. . .], also uses the analytical framework of the left, but in a far more measured and thoughtful way, employing it to decipher the denatured Republicanism of his wealthy neighbors in Mission Hills. When I talk to him, he inveighs against "wedge issues," deploring the way abortion, gun control, and evolution have been used to manipulate voters. But he means this in precisely the opposite of the usual way. For Sutherland "wedge issues" aren't a Republican strategy to split off parts of the New Deal coalition, but a moderate and maybe even a Democratic strategy to keep conservatives in check, to split working-class conservatives from the upper-middle-class conservatives who ought to be their allies. "They cynically play these social issues to scare the soccer mommies with guns," Sutherland tell me, "scare the Jewish community with the bugaboo of the religious right, scare the suburban ladies that Planned Parenthood is going to be shut down, when there's no chance that any of these [conservative] people, even if it was their fondest desire, could overturn Roe v. Wade."
It's all sham battles and empty culture-war issues, distracting the rich from their real concerns. It is even "false consciousness." In using this Marxist term, the archconservative Sutherland is not referring to workers being tricked by some misguided fear of black people into ignoring their interests and voting Republican, but to wealthy people being tricked by some misguided fear of the religious right into ignoring their interests and voting Democratic. "A friend of mine who's a multimillionaire," he says, "told me in all seriousness that he couldn't vote for [George H.W.] Bush's reelection because Bush was less that committed to a woman's right to choose. Of course in '93 this guy's taxes go up, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he's screaming and

161 - yelling about Clinton and the Democrats, and I said, 'Yeah, but you made the symbolic choice and repudiated those nasty pro-lifers, and that's worth it in psychic income alone.'"
[. . .] All the contradictions come together in the person of Jack Cashill [. . .]
But above all else, Cashill is a class warrior, fond of telling stories from his own working-class childhood and heaping scorn on the precious affectations of Kansas City's Johnson County overlords. He derides Cupcake Land's cars and its clothes and its shrubbery and the names of its subdivisions and its compulsive fear of East Coast disapproval and its lemminglike tastes in consumer goods. And he does it well.
What's peculiar is that he does most of this bourgeoisie-baiting from his perch as the executive director of Ingram's, the local business magazine. Does this mean that Ingram's is a crusading business magazine, like Dwight Macdonald's Fortune, sniffing out local Enrons before they explode? On the contrary; it is in fact a run-of-the-mill booster sheet, offering "Forty Under Forty" lists and plans for how KC can position itself for this or that future windfall. Its most notable innovation is the aforemen-

162 - tioned annual feature, "The Power Elite," which is startling in its forthright sycophancy. The same Jack Cashill who loves to mock upper-middle-class etiquette usually writes it.

171 - O'Conner seems peculiarly given to dizzy ideas such as this one. Like many of the Cons, she gives the impression of intelligence, choosing and enunciating each word carefully, but she also seems oddly naive, like a person who has sat down and worked out the world's problems all on her own.

172 - The O'Conners are not wealthy people, by any standard. Her husband works as a monitor technician at a nearby hospital, and she went out of her way to impress upon me their lack of means. But her thoughts on the issues seem all to have been drawn from the playbook of the nineteenth-century Vanderbilts and Fricks.

175 - On the left it is common to hear descriptions of the backlash as a strictly top-down affair [. . .] What the Wichita Republicans have accomplished, though, should dispell this myth forever.

177 - With Democrats and Republicans having merged on free trade, the issues that remained were abortion and guns. And, of course, government itself.

178 - The corporate powers-that-be in Wichita, it seems, don't really mind a politician's God-talk or his Operation Rescue sensibilities if he will help them fight their great enemy, government. After all, as Kay O'Conner put it so well, the people on top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piery of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but case their votes to exalt Caesar. Dwight Sutherland, for his part, knows the gulf can someday be bridged--just look at how Mission Hills turns out for the born-again George W. Bus--and Jack Cashill's day-to-day fieldwork among the "power elite" suggests he knows it as well. The Mods, for their part, will probably never give Tim Golba the keys to Leawood, and they will surely never toast John Altevogt, the raging Marat of the Kansas revolution, at the finest restaurants in Corporate Woods. But somehow, I think, they'll find it in their hears to take the tax cuts, thank you, and the deregulation and the helping hand in dealing with those troublesome labor unions.

188 - And the abolitionists themselves? Strictly blue-state: effete, Anglo-Saxon, tea-sipping, college-educated--the sort of people that David Brooks would mock for turning up their noses at NASCAR and whom Bill O'Reilly would razz for not understanding real life as it's lived by tough mugs on the street. Indeed, they were strongest in those states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York--and on those liberal college campuses--Oberlin, Grinnell, Amherst--that are routinely reviled by conservatives today for their speech codes and third-world sympathies. And while they were indeed religious people, the denominations to which abolitionists belonged were the mainline Protestant churches now pilloried by the right for not spreading the damnation around sufficiently: Unitarians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers.

226 - The Kansas conservatives, it seems to me, can be divided into two basic groups. One one side are the true believers, the average folk who have been driven into right-wing politics [. . .]
On the other side are the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the

227 - great right wing groundswell an easy shorcut to realizing their ambitions. Many of them once aspired to join--maybe even did join--the state's moderate Republican insider club. Rising up that way, however, would take years, maybe a lifetime, when by mouthing some easily memorized God-talk and changing their position on abortion--as Brownback and other leading Cons have done--they could instantly have a movement at their back [. . .]

239 - A while back the Wall Street Journal ran an essay about a place "where hatred trumps bread," where a manipulative ruling class has for decades exploited an impoverished poeple while simultaneously fostering in them a culture of victimization that steers this people's fury back persistently toward a shadowy, cosmopolitan Other. In this tragic land unassauageable cultural grievances are elevated inexplicably over solid material ones, and basic economic self-interest is eclipsed by juicy myths of national authenticity and righteousness wronged.
The essay was supposed to be a description of the Arab states and their conflict with Israel, but when I read it I thought immediately of dear old Kansas [. . .]

259 - Again and again, in the course of the electoral battle, I heard striking tales of this tragically inverted class consciousness: Of a cleaning lady who voted for Bush [over Kerry- JH] because she could never support a rich man for president.

excerts from Framed! by Christopher R. Martin

2007-07-05T13:09:00.000-07:00

x - If you don't know much about labor unions, or if your main information source about them is the mainstream news media, it's easy to blame unions (or the Japanese, or recent immigrants, or some other scapegoat) for every bad working situation.

12 - Michael Parenti catalogued seven generalizations about the way the news media protray labor:
1. The larger struggle between capital and labor is ignored, making it possible to present labor struggles as senseless conflicts that could be solved if only the union would be willing to negotiate in good faith.
2. Company "offers" are emphasized, while company takebacks, employee grievances, and issues such as job security, health insurance, and safety are underplayed or ignored. As a result, workers appear irrational, greedy, and self-destructive.
3. While "fat" labor wages are reported, management compensation usually is not. Especially when workers are asked to make concessions, no coverage is typically given to management salaries, bonuses, and other perquisites.
4. The problems a strike has on the economy and public convenience are emphasized to the detriment of in-depth coverage on the cause(s) of the strike. Striking workers are thus portrayed as indifferent to the interests of the public's well-being.
5. Reports fail to consider the impact on the workers if they were to give up the strike and accept management's terms.
6. Instances of union solidarity and broader public support are rarely covered, eliminating the class dimension of a strike.
7. Governemntal agencies are cast as neutral entities upholding the public interest, yet the president, courts, and police often act to force workers back into production, protect private property, or guard strikebreakers.[25]

212 -- 25. Parenti, Inventing Reality. The list of seven generalizations paraphrases Parenti's list.

79 -- Plant closings in particular can lead to a breakdown in community cohersion and values and can foster an "anti-union animus," with the blame for the shutdown directed at the union, according to economists Bluestone and Harrison.[20]

84 -- So that the moral of the fable was not lost on the audience, Cummins concluded by remarking "the workers in Texas made concessions, and now they're celebrating." The fable of worker concessions framed stories at the New York Times as well. [. . .]
The convergence of a narrative frame that argued concessions were the key to success with the apparent acceptance of GM's statments that concessions did not matter created stories with high levels of contradictio. The same article also paraphrased the plant manager, who attributed the decision favoring Arlington to "labor peace." The unproblematic acceptance of the manager's statement suggest that doing nothing (what Willow Run workers did) is somehow a hostile (bad) posture, whereas voting to accept concessions (what Arlington workers did) is a peaceful (good) stance.

94 -- Meanwhile, in Arlington, Texas--as the national news media turned their eyes away--the prize of being the most flexible workforce slowly lost its luster. Texas newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle, along with national media reports, had congratulated Arlington workers on their flexibility [. . .]

95 -- The editorial seem to be inspired by managerial textbooks. The phrasings are subtle, but illustrate that "teamwork," "cooperative spirit," and "flexibility," are often euphemisms for a "team" or "quality" organizational strategy in which a disciplined workforce ultimately accepts top-down managerial policies and unilateral sacrifices instead of truly participating in joint decision making.[59]
As it turned out for Arlington workers, the idea of being a flexible and concessionary workforce was more important than the actual concessions. The Arlington union local's vote to add a third shift was cited as the primary concession that won GM's favor. Yet, round-the-clock production was unnecessary for manufacturing GM's increasinglyunpopular large sedans. By 1996, production of the Chevy Caprice, Buick Roadmaster, and Cadillac Fleetwood sedans had slipped from two shifts to one. The sedan production at Arlington was phased out completely at the end of the year.
Keeping the Arlington plant open required winning a new GM product to build, and again it was the workers and community who were expected to make concessions. Gm proposed to convert the plant to truck production, investing $264 million to create what the automaker refers to as a "flex-build" plant. The plans called for reducing the union workforce from 1,900 to 1,350 and outsourcing many jobs to Lear Seating Corp. and Mackie Automotive Systems, to nonunion suppliers who would locate plants in Arlington. GM also proposed that it get city property tax abatements worth at lwast $11.7 million over ten years for its plant improvements (which it later received). Finally, GM said that it would commit to maintaining production at the Arlington plant for two years--until mid-1999--when Arlington would again be considered for shutdown.

97 -- But the story of "winning" a new product line for GM included selling out a new generation of workers at Mackie Automotive Systems and Lear Seating Corp., who assembled the same parts once done inside the Arlington plant but for less than half the wages. [. . .] these three hundred Mackie workers [. . .] frustrated by work conditions, medical and pension benefits, and a $6.50 starting wage, went on strike.

from The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

2007-06-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

10 -- Even at its most radical, however, fascists' anticapitalist rhetoric was selective. While they denounced speculative international finance (along with all other forms of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalization--capitalist as well as socialist), they respected the property of national producers, who were to form the social base of the reinvigorated nation. When they denounced the bourgeoisie, it was for being too flabby and individualistic to make a nation strong, not for robbing workers of the value they added. [. . .] Once in power, fascist regimes confisticated property only from political opponents, foreigners, or Jews. None altered the social hierarchy,

11 -- except to catapult a few adventurers into high places. At most, they replaced market forces with state economic management, but, in the trough of the Great Depression, most businessmen initially approved of that.

66 -- Close scrutiny of business archives shows that most German businessmen hedged their bets, contributing to all the nonsocialist electoral formations that showed any signs of success at keeping the Marxists out of power. Though some German firms contributed money to the Nazis, they always contributed more to traditional conservatives.

102 -- In a situation of constitutional deadlock and rising revolutionary menace, a successful fascist movement offers precious resources to a faltering elite.
Fascists could offer a mass following sufficiently numerous to permit conservatives to form parliamentary majorities capable of vigorous decisions, without having to call upon unacceptable Leftist partners.

103 -- Fascists had also found a magic formula for weaning workers away from Marxism. Long after Marx asserted that the working class haqd no homeland, conservatives had been unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century nostrums--deference, religion, schooling--had worked. On the eve of World War I, the Action Francaise had enjoyed some success recruiting a few industrial workers to nationalism, and the unexpectedly wide acceptance by workers of their patriotic duty to fight for their homelands when World War I began foretold that in the twentieth century Nation was going to be stronger than Class.
Fascists everywhere have built on that revelation. [. . .] As for the Nazi Party, its very name proclaimed that it was a workers' party, an Arbeiterpartei. Mussolini expected to recruit his old socialist colleagues. Their results were not overwhelmingly successful. Every analysis of the social composition of the early fascist parties agrees: although some workers were attracted, their share of party membership was always well below their share in the general population. Perhaps those few fascist workers were enough. If the fascist parties could recruit some workers, then fascist violence would take care of the holdouts. This formula of divide and conquer was far more effective than anything the conservatives could provide on their own.
Another seductive fascist offer was a way to overcome the climate of disorder that fascists themselves had helped cause. Having unleashed their militants in order to make democracy unworkable and discredit the

104 -- constitutional state, the Nazi and Fascist leaders then posed as the only nonsocialist force that could restore order. [. . .] Fascist terms for a deal were not insuperably high. Some German conservatives were uneasy about the anticapitalist rhetoric still flaunted by some Nazi intellectuals, as were Italian conservativesby Fascist labor activists like Edmondo Rossoni. But Mussolini had long come around to "productivism" and admiration for the industrial hero, while Hitler made it clear in his famous speech to the Dusseldorf Industrialists' Club on January 26, 1932, as well as in private conversations, that he was a social Darwinist in the economic sphere, too.
Even if one had to admit these uncouth outsiders to high office in order to make a bargain, conservatives were convinced that they would still control the state. It was unheard-of for such upstarts to run European governments.

130 -- Since Nazism's defeat in 1945, German conservatives have made much of their opposition to Hitler and of his hostility to them. As we have seen, Nazis and conservatives had authentic differences, marked by very real conservative defeats. At every crucial moment of decision, however--at each ratcheting up of anti-Jewish repression, at each new abridgment of civil liberties and infringement of legal norms, at each new aggressive move in foreign policy, at each further subordination of the economy to the needs of autarky and hasty rearmament--most German conservatives (with some honorable exceptions) swallowed their doubts about the Nazis in favor of their overriding common interests.

218 -- Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in whihc a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Noam Chomsky Quotes

2007-05-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Essential Chomsky.

200 - MAN: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarian" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist--because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.
If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"--but that's a joke. If you're choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice--it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.
The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though--nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm libertarian, I'm against that tax"--but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.
Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [American academic]--and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don' see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want aroad,you get together with a bunch of other people who aregoing to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19
The whole things not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second--and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

254 - [. . .]
Look: the basic assumption of the classical economists was that labor is highly mobile and capital is relatively immobile--that's required, that's crucial to proving all their nice theorems. That was the reason they could say, "If you can't get enough to survive on the labor market, go someplace else"--because you could go someplace else: after the native populations of places like the United States and Autralia and Tasmania were exterminated or driven away,then yeah, poor Europeans could go somewhere else. [. . .] And back then, capital was indeed immobile--first because "capital" primarily meant land, and you can't move land, and also because to the extent that there was investment, it was very local: like, you didn't have communication systems that allowed for easy transfers of money all around the world, like we do today.
[. . .]
Well, by now the assumptions underpinning these theories are not only false-- they're the opposite of the truth. By now labor is immobile, through immigration restrictions and so on, and capital is highly mobile, primarily because of technological changes. So none of the results work anymore.

255 - [. . .] there is not a single case on record in history of any country that has developed successfully through adherence to "free market" principles: none. Certainly not the United States. I mean, the United States has always had extensive state intervention in the economy, right from the earliest days--we would be exporting fur right now if we were following the principles of comparitive advantage.
Look, the reason why the industrial revolution took off in places like Lowell and Lawrence is because of high protectionist tariffs the U.S. government set up to keep out British goods. And the same thing runs right up to today: like, we would not have successful high-tech industry in the United States today if it wasn't for a huge public subsidy to advanced industry, mostly through the Pentagon system and N.A.S.A. and so on--that doesn't have the vaguest relation to a "free market."

256 - [. . .]
Of course, the "free market" ideology is very useful--it's a weapon against the general population here, because it's an argument against social spending, and it's a weapon against poor people abroad, becuase we can hold it up to them and say "You guys have to follow these rules," then just go ahead and rob them. But nobody really pays any attention to this stuff when it comes to actual planning--and no one ever has.
So there was just a British study of the hundred leading transnational corporations in the "Fortune 500," and it found that of the hundred, every single one of them has benefited from what's called "state industrial policy"--that is, from some form of government intervention in the country in which they're based. And of the hundred, they said at least twenty had been saved from total collapse by state intervention at one point or another. [. . .]
Or take the fact that so many people live in the suburbs and everybody has to drive their own car everywhere. Was that the result of the "free market"? No, it was because the U.S. government carried out a massive social-engineering project in the 1950s to destroy the public transportation system in favor of expanding a highly inefficient system based on cars and airplanes-- because that's what benefits big industry. It started with corporate conspiracies to buy up and eliminate streetcar systems, and then continued with huge public subsidies to build the highway system and encourage an extremely inefficient and environmentally destructice alternative.

257 - [. . .] Bengal was one of the first places colonized in the eighteenth century, and when Robert Clive [British conqueror] first landed there, he described it as a paradise: Dacca, he said, is just like London, and they in fact referred to it as "the Manchester of Indian." It was rich and populous, there was high-quality cotton, agriculture, advanced industry, a lot of resources, jute, all sorts of things--it was in fact comparable to England it in its manufacturing level, and really looked like it was going to take off. Well, look at it today: Dacca, "the Manchester of India [incomplete: hope to return]

286 - [...] See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it's because American actions are the things that I can do something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world--which obviously is very far from the truth--that tiny fraction would still be what I'm responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. And that's based on a very simple ethical principle--namely that the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated consequences for human beings: I think that's kind of like a fundamental moral truism.
So, for example, it was very eaasy thing in the 1980s for people in the United States the denounce the atrocities of the Soviet Union in its occupation of Afghanistan--but those denunciations had no effects which could

287 - have helped people. In terms of their ethical value, they were about the same as denouncing Napoleon's atrocities, or things that happened in the Middle Ages. Useful and significant actions are ones which have consequences for human beings, and usually those will concern things that you can influence and control--which means for people in the United States, American actions primarily, not those of some other state.
Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to follow. So what principle did we expect Sakharov [a Soviet scientist punished for his criticism of the U.S.S.R.] to follow? [. . .] Sakharov did not treat every atrocity as identical--he had nothing to say about American atrocities. When he was asked about them, he said, "I don't know anything about them, I don't care abvout them, what I talk about are Soviet atrocities." And that was right--because those were the ones that he was responsible for, and that he might have been able to influence. [. . .]
Now, just personally speaking, it turns out that I do spend a fair amount of effort talking about the crimes of official enemies--in fact, there area number of people now living in the United States and Canada from the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who are there because of my own personal activities on their behalf. But I don't take great pride in that part of my work, particularly; I just do it because I'm interested in it. The most important thing for me, and for you, is [. . .] what you can have the most effect on. And especially in a relatively open society like ours, which does allow a lot of freedom for dissent, that means American crimes primarily.

355 - MAN: Noam, another view I frequently encounter [. . .] stems from the idea the human nature is corrupt [. . .] and that as a result, society will always have oppressors and oppressed, be hierarchical, exploit people, be driven by individual self-interest, etc. [. . .] I'm curious what you would say to someone like that.

Well, there's a sense in which the claim is certainly true. First of all, human nature is something we don't know much about: doubtless there is a rich and complex human nature, and doubtless it's largely genetically determined, like everything else--but we don't know what it is. However,

356 - there is enough evidence from history and experience to demonstrate that human nature is entirely consistent with everything you mentioned [. . .] But what does that mean? Should people therefore not try to stop torture? If you see somebody beating a child to death, should you say, "Well, you know, that's human nature"--which it is in fact: there certainly are conditions under which people will act like that.
To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it's just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.

www.understandingpower.com [for footnotes to text]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky [has links to other sources]

http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20050113.htm

2007-05-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Mitchell, Brian Patrick. 2007. Eight Ways to Run the Country: A New and Revealing Look at Left and Right. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

9 - For present purposes, we'll define arche as the concept of rank and archy as a ranking order. We'll define kratos as the use of force, especially the state's use of force. Arche is essentially voluntary, based as it is on each person's recognition and acceptance of rank; kratos is essentially involuntary, being in essence what others will do to us by force regardless of our regard for them.
Arche is essentially personal in that it concerns our regard for others. Do we look to other persons for our lead in life and believe ourselves to be responsible for leading others? Or do we see ourselves as morally autonomous and neither subject to nor responsible for other persons?
Kratos is essentially political in that it concerns the use of force--actual physical force. Governments are all about the use of force. Everything they do is backed by force. [...]
Thus instead of might and right, we have two rights: the right to pull rank and the right to use force. Some of us believe in both, some of us believe in neither, and some of us believe in one but not the other. For example, people who accept "democratic authority" but reject "hierarchical authority" don't much dislike using force to get people to go along with the group, but they very much dislike recognizing a ranking order that expects them to humble themselves before someone else. Others have no problem with patriarchy, but don't believe in the government's right to coerce at all.
As it happens, this distinction of arche and kratos is not always evident. In the ancient world in particular, they often went hand in hand. Rank entailed the right to use force. The social order was coercive at all levels. There were therefore no social leaders to be distinguished from political leaders and no organized society independent of the state. Limits on kratos therefore necessarily entailed a limited denial of arche. Greek democracy and the Roman Republic were both such limited denials--they would have no kings--but both kept the archy of masters over slaves, men over women, elders over youngsters, citizens over foreigners, and patrons over clients.

10 - [...]
It is possible for kratos to exist without arche. A mob unorganized and leaderless can exert great force for brief moments. A small group, gang, or clique can be kept together by peer pressure and even coercion without a recognized leader. But group action over time and against resistance requires organization and direction and thus some acceptance of arche.
It is more common for arche to exist without kratos. All that is required is willing submission to a leader. All voluntary organizations are akratic by definition. Families and clans, held together by respect and affection, are akratic, though small children may need a little kratos now and then. Commercial corporations also are akratic: if you don't do as you are told, they stop giving you things to do and paying you for it.
[...]

11 - [...] some people today are still passionately opposed to arche, while others reject all use of kratos. The former we rightly call anarchists, the latter we should call akratists.
Anarchists are power egalitarians, rejecting all relationships based on dominance and submission, in which one person lords it over another, superior over subordinate, master over servant. They regard all relationships of unequal power as inherently unjust and would decide all common matters by consensus.
Akratists, on the other hand, are opposed in principle to coercion in human relations and would instead have everything managed by contract. They are not bothered by the master/servant relationship as long as it is based on a freely made contract. They even reject a state's claim to sovereignty over people and property, absent a contact with all involved parties, a contract that any party can opt out of if need be.

2007-02-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

The Invisibles - MSI - Tornado

2007-02-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

Justin H Hates His Voice

from "The Scientist as Rebel" by Freeman Dyson

2007-01-18T17:10:00.000-08:00

Dyson, Freeman. 2006. The Scientist as Rebel. New York: New York Review of Books.

Chapter 1, "The Scientist as Rebel." Pages 3-18. 1995. Originally published 1995.

3 - [. ..] Science is a mosiac of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white.

13 - [. . .] But it happens at least equally often in the history of science that the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole.

Chapter 2, "Can Science Be Ethical?" Pages 19-31. Originally published 1997.

20 - [. . .] The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do. But always, even for the most brilliantly successful technology, an ethical question lurks in the background: the question whether the job the technology is designed to do is actually worth doing.
The technologies that raise the fewst ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people. Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs. [. . .]

24 - [. . .] As a general rule, to which there are many exceptions, science works for evil when its effect is to provide toys for the rich, and works for good when its effect is to provide

25 - necessities for the poor. Cheapness is an essential virtue. [. . .] "Toys for the rich means not only toys in the literal sense but technological conveniences that are available to a minority of people and make it hardr for those excluded to take part in the economic and cultural life of the community. "Necessities for the poor" include not only food and shelter but adequate public health services, adequate public transportation, and access to decent education and jobs.
The scientific advances of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth were generally beneficial to society as a whole, spreading wealth to rich and poor alike with some degree of equity. The electric light, the telephone, the refrigerator, radio, television, synthetic fabrics, antibiotics, vitamins, and vaccines were social equalizers, making life easier and more comfortable for almost everybody, tending to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather thannto widen it. Only in the second half of our century has the balance of advantage shifted. During the last forty years, the strongest efforts in pure science have been concentrated in highly esoteric fields remote from contact with everyday problems. Particle physics, low-temperature physics, and extragalactic astronomy are examples [ . . .] The intensive pursuit of these sciences does not do much harm, or much good, to either the rich or the poor. The main social benefit provided by pure science in esoteric fields is to serve as a welfare program for scientists and engineers.
At the same time, the strongest efforts in applied science have been concentrated upon products that can be profitably sold. Since the rich can be expected to pay more than the poor for new products, market-driven applied science will usually result in the invention of toys for the rich. The laptop computer and the cellular telephone are the latest

26 - of the new toys. Now that a large fraction of high-paying jobs are advertised on the Internet, people excluded from the Internet are also excluded from access to jobs. The failure of science to produce benefits for the poor in recent decades is due to two factors working in combination: the pure scientists have become more detached from the mundane needs of humanity, and the applied scientists have become more attached to immediate profitability.
[ . . .] there is a single underlying cause that has affected them both. The casue is the power of committees in the administration and funding of science. In the case of pure science, the committees are composed of scientific experts performing the rituals of peer review. If a committee of scientific experts selects research projects by majority vote, projects in fashionable fields are supported while those in unfashionable fields are not. In recent decades, the fashionable fields have been moving further and further into specialized areas remote from contact with things that we can see and touch. In the case of applied science, the committees are composed of business executives and managers. Such people usually give support to products that affluent customers like themselves can buy.
[. . .] scientists and entrepeneurs must assert their freedom to promote new technologies that are more friendly than the old to poor people and poor countries. [. . .]

27 - [. . .] The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, drvien by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation. [. . .] They are likely to bypass the poor and reward the rich. [. . .]
The poorer half of humanity needs cheap housing, cheap health care, and cheap education, accessible to everybody, with high quality and high aesthetic standards. The fundamental problem for human society in the next century is the mismatch between the three new waves of technology and the three basic needs of poor people. The gap between technology and needs is wide and growing wider. If technology continues along its present course, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies. In the future, as in the past, the revolt of the poor is likely to impoverish rich and poor together.
The widening gap between technology and human needs can only be filled by ethics.

31 -

Postscript, 2006

[. . .] The cell phone is no longer a toy for the rich but is becoming ubiquitous.

Chapter 24, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil." Pages 287-304. Originally published in 1972.

287 - The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul is the full title of Desmond Bernal's first book, which he published in 1929 [. . .]

288 - Bernal saw the future as a struggle of the rational side of man's nature against three enemies. The first enemy he called the World, meaning scarcity of material goods, inadequate land, harsh climate, desert, swamp, and other physical obstacles that condemn the majority of mankind to lives of poverty. The second enemy he called the Flesh, meaning the defects in man's physiology that expose him to disease, cloud the clarity of his mind, and finally destroy him by senile deterioration. The third enemy he called the Devil, meaning the irrational forces in man's psychological nature that distort his perceptions and lead him astray with crazy hopes and fears, overriding the feeble voice of reason. [. . .]

Briefly summarized, the radical measures which Bernal prescribed were the following. To defeat the World, the greater part of the human species will leave this planet and go to live in innumerable freely floating colonies scattered through outer space. To defeat the Flesh, humans will learn to replace failing organs with artificial substitutes until we become an intimate symbiosis of brain and machine. To defeat the Devil, we shall first reorganize society along scientific lines, and later learn to exercise conscious intellectual control over our moods and emotional drives, intervening directly in the affective functions of our brains with technical means yet to be discovered. This summary is a crude oversimplification of Bernal's discussion. He did not imagine that these remedies would provide a final solution to the problems of humanity. He well knew that every change in the human situation will create new problems and new enemies of the rational soul. [. . .]

289 - [. . .] The first and most obvious difference between 1929 and 1972 is that we now have a highly vocal and well-organized opposition to the further growth of the part that technology plays in human affairs. The social prophets of today look upon technology as a destructive rather than a liberating force. In 1972 it is highly unfashionable to believe as Bernal did that the colonization of space, the perfection of artificial organs, and the mastery of brain physiology are the key's to man's future. People in tune with the times regard space as irrelevant, and they consider ecology to be the only branch of science that is ethically respectable. However, it would be wrong to imagine that Bernal's ideas were more in line with popular views in 1929 than they are in 1972. Bernal was never a man to swim with the tide. Technology was unpopular in 1929 because it was associated with the gas warfare of the First World War [. . .] In 1929 the dislike of technology was less noisy than today but no less real. Bernal understood that his proposals for the remaking of man and society flew in the teeth of deeply entrenched human instincts. [. . .] He foresaw that mankind might split into two species, one following the technological path which he described, the other holding on as best it could to the ancient folkways of natural living. [. . .] The wider perspective which we have gained between 1929 and 1972 concerning the harmful effects of technology affects only the details and not the core of Bernal's argument.

"Is God in the Lab?" Pages 305-314. Originally published 1998.

306 - Polkinghorne compares two historic intellectual struggles, one from science and one from religion. From science he takes the discovery and development of quantum mechanics [. . .] From religion he takes the theological understanding of the nature of Jesus [. . .] He devides each of the two struggles into five periods, and shows how events in each of the five periods in the development of quantum mechanics correspond in detail to events in the matching period in the development of theology. In the first period, the breakdown of classical mechanics, the enigma of atomic spectra, and the discovery of the light-quantum by Max Planck and Albert Einstein correspond to the death of Jesus, the enigma of his ressurrection as experienced by his disciples in Jerusalem, and the new understanding of these events by Saint Paul.

In the second period, confusion reigns both in physics and in theology: classical and quantum pictures in conflict in physics, orthodoxies and heresies in conflict in theology. In the third period, there was the great triumph of quantum mechanics as it emerged in 1925 and solved most of the outstanding problems of physics, and the great triumph of Christology in the year 451, when the assembled theologians at the Council of Chalcedon promulgated the doctrine concerning the nature of Jesus that orthodox Christians were thereafter required to believe. In the fourth period, a continued wrestling with unresolved problems, the paradoxes of interpretation of quantum

307 - theory in physics and the paradoxes of the incarnation of Jesus in theology. In the fifth period, recognition in both physics and theology that the new insights have deep implications and that we are very far from any final truth.

[. . .] When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. Quantum mechanics works equally well in all countries and all cultures. [. . .] Theology works in one culture alone.

309 - It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. There is nothing analogous to theology in Judaism or in Islam. I do not know muchabout Hinduism and Buddhism, but my Asian friends tell me that these religions also have no theology. They have beliefs and stories and ceremonies and rules of behavior, but their literature is poetic rather than analytical. The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian.

The prominence of theology in the Christian world has had two important consequences for the history of science. On the one hand, Western science grew out of Christian theology. It is probably no an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between science and Christianity have cause conflicts between science and Christianity that do not exist between science and other religions. It is more difficult for a modern scientist to be a serious Christian, like Polkinghorne, than to be a serious Muslim, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Abdus Salam.

"Comparison of Libertarians and Anarchists" from Laughnet

2007-01-03T15:21:00.000-08:00

http://laughnet.net/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=510

Comparison of Libertarians and Anarchists

What's the difference between Anarchists and Libertarians??
Libertarians are anarchists with money.
Anarchists believe property is theft. Libertarians believe everything
is property.
Libertarians are bosses; anarchists work for them when they run out of
other options.
Libertarians buy more guns, but anarchists use more ammo.
Libertarians ride in stretch limos; anarchists throw bricks through
their windshields.
Libertarians go shopping; anarchists go shoplifting.
Libertarians go to the police after they've been mugged; anarchists
get mugged by the police.
A libertarian wants to marry another libertarian, but only after
sleeping with enough anarchists.
Anarchists ignore the IRS; Libertarians hire accountants and attorneys
to fight them.
Libertarians think the government is trying steal the property they
rightfully own; anarchists think the government is trying to defend
property that nobody rightfully owns.
Libertarians are organized in a political party; anarchists aren't
organized in anything.
Anarchists ignore elections; Libertarians run for office, vote and
lose.
Libertarians think anarchists are naive and unrealistic; anarchists
don't care what libertarians think.
This article was added to LaughNet on Wednesday 10 August, 2005.

from "The Moral Mind" by Henry Haslam

2006-11-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

Haslam, Henry. 2005. The Moral Mind. Charlottesville, VA: Societas Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center.

8 - For most of history, it would have been taken for granted that morality was important and that the word 'ought' had meaning. Great thinkers have considered what was good and bad behaviour, and may volumes have been written on the subject. However, for a large part of the twentieth century, much of what had previously been taken for granted was questioned. New philosophical approaches, combined with the decline of religious belief, left many people confused about ehe value and validity of moral sentiments. Many decent, honest, caring people became uncomfortable with the idea of moral scruple, fearful that such scruples may not be intellectually defensible, and yet equally uncomfortable with a world view that has no place for the moral dimension.
[. . .] Tolerance, understanding and compassion are, of course, also moral virtues, and, as Mary Midgley (1991) points out, many of the objections to the practice of making moral judgements are, in fact, moral objections. However, the word 'morality' was apt to be associated with rigid codes of the past which many people wanted to overthrow anyway.

11 - The fundamental weakness of the relativist argument is the same as that of the emotivist argument: that people think that their moral sentiments are more than just personal opinions or a reflection of social customs and shared attitudes. [. . .]
Could we be mistaken in our sense that objective morality exists? Certainly, people can be deluded in their beliefs, and we often are, but our delusions are generally personal to ourselves, and there is generally evidence, visible to ourselves or to other people, that we are deluded. In contrast, the belief that our moral values relate to something outside ourselves is common to everyone who possesses a moral sense, and there is no evidence that can persuade us to doubt it.
In fact, it has been seriously suggested that a belief in an objective morality is just that: a collective illusion, put together by our genes in order to make us function better (Ruse and Wilson, 1986). The idea that a collective illusion could be created by evolutionary processes is curious, and does seem to invite criticism:

(1) Howard Taylor (2004) and Philip Rolnick (2004) point out that if the delusion is good for us, it must be bad that Ruse and Wilson have disillusioned us. [. . .]

13 - [. . .] their assumption that moral thinking and moral behaviour are favoured by natural selection is not supported by the evidence (see pages 34-36 and 81-88), and this undermines their reasoning and their conclusion.

(3) If it was our genes that caused the illusion, was it their genes that led Ruse and Wilson to tell the world that morality was an illusion? Mikael Stenmark (2001) points out that, [. . .] if they want us to believe their results, they have to tell us that they were motivated not by fitness but by the objective search for truth and understanding -- in other words that scientific enquiry is an exception to their evolutionary theory (this theme is discussed at some length by O'Hear, 1997).

If the case for saying that objective morality is an illusion is dismissed, Occam's Razor1 would lead us to favour the existence of an objective morality that we cannot explain, in preference to a delusion of an objective morality that we cannot explain. It is reasonable to conclude, on present evidence, that object moral values do exist.

21 - Since humans are moral beings, moral considerations have a part to play in the economic decisions that we make [. . .]
For much of the twentieth century. however, economics generally ignored the role of moral considerations in human economic behaviour -- a remarkable omission. 'Can the people whom economics studies really ... stick exclusively to the rudimentary hard-headedness attributed to them by modern economics?' asks Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen (1987). He goes on to draw attention to 'the contrast between the self-consciously "non-ethical" character of modern economices and the historical evolution of modern economics largely as an offshoot of ethics. Not only was the so-called "father of modern economics". Adam Smith, a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow ... but the subject of economics was for a long time seen as something like a branch of ethics.'

29 - The existence of highly moral non-believers and of morally bad deed performed by people who claim to have a religious faith supports the view that religious faith and moral sense are different entities (two different dimensions, perhaps), and I consider that it is valid to examine the one without the other, as in this book. We should recognise, however, that for many people the two are inseparable [. . .]

For believers, their moral principles are closely bound up with their religious faith, but a great deal of moral thinking today is divorced from religious belief and it is widely acknowledged, by believers and non-believers alike, that we need to establish some kind of moral consensus that is not founded on religion.

36 - Both theory and observation support the view set out on the preceding pages, recognising the role of natural selection in weeding out the worst, but also allowing other processes to play their part in shaping evolution. In every edition of The Origin of Species Darwin himself clearly stated his belief that natural selection was not the only process involved in evolution, and in the 1872 (and last) edition he expressed his displeasure at the way that his views had been misrepresented by those who stated that he attributed the modification of species exclusively to natural selection. When we consider the strength of Darwin's advocacy of natural selection we might not be surpirsed that he should have been misunderstood in this way, but he himself saw it as a serious misrepresentation of his views. Natural selection is an extremely important process, but there are other things going on as well. This applies most of all to humans and their behaviour.

37 - The existence of a moral sense does not lead automatically to morally good behavior. When there are choices to be made, the result is not a foregone conclusion. This means that, where morality and moral choices exist, temptation and wrongdoing are there as well. We have the potential for conflict between our natural emotions and impulses and our understanding of right and wrong. The idea of temptation seldom gets a mention in modern discussions of the human personality, but it is central to any concept of morality, a necessary and integral part of what it is to be a moral being. If there is temptation, there is no morality, for if everybody automatically does what is right on every occasion there is no moral choice. [. . .]

Human beings have many natural wants and impulses, and these emotions can be unpredictable and uncontrollable. Some of them can be described as good; some are, by any standards, bad; and many of them are morally neutral. To those who ask whether human nature is fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, the answer is that we are both. Human nature is full of opposites. We are competitive and cooperative, aggressive and peaceable, conformist and autonomous and selfish as well as altruistic (Talbot, 2005). We are all a mixture. The human mind is not a computer (Tallis, 2004). [. . .] In all kinds of ways, from anxiety and depression to simple forgetfulness and lack of concentration, the mind takes us down roads that we would rather not travel and it fails to give us the emotions, the will power and the rationality that we would wish to have at our command. There is therefore no reason for surprise that we should find our minds leading us away from what we know to be morally right. In other words, temptation is a natural part of the

38 - human personality. Everybody experiences it, to a greater or lesser extent, and it is not always successfully resisted. We have moral ideals, and we know that we fail to live up to them. This knowledge is central to the human predicament, and leads us to explore the great religious themes of forgiveness, judgement and redemption. [. . .]

Not every moral action results from a struggle against temptation, however. Not every moral decision involves a stark choice between good and evil. Much of moral thinking involves weighing up two or more courses of action, all of which we think are 'good'.

Two people ask us to do something for them. We would like to oblige them both and our moral sense tells us that we should, but time only permits us to agree to one of the requests. Which do we do? Questions of temptation, sin and evil do not arise here, but we do have to make a moral decision. The choice may be dictated by a moral principle (family first, for example) or by a morally based consideration of the consequences.

45 - The basic human economy is an example of cooperation. At its heart lie mutuality of reciprocity. It is a system based on division of labour, free trade and market forces [. . .] At its best, such a free-market economy works to everyone's benefit. Customers, providers, employers and employees only receive what they require if they also deliver their part of the bargain, and this ensures that the principles of fair dealing are upheld. [. . .]
When we make a purchase, for example, or take a job we are furthering our own interests -- but we are also furthering the interests of the other party to the deal. Simple self-interest thus lies at the heart of the free market. It is the driving force behind it, but, as Amartya Sen (1999) points out, the success of the capitalist economy is also dependent on 'powerful systems of values and norms. Indeed to see capitalism as nothing other than a system based on a conglomeration of greedy behaviour is to underestimate vastly the

46 - ethics of capitalism, which has richly contributed to its redoubtable achievements.'
Sen goes on to say that the weakness of capitalist ethics lies, in part, in its failure to deal with the issues of economic inequality and environmental protection. A free market exists to benefit those who freely put something into it, and thus has nothing to offer, directly, to the destitute, if they have no bargaining power and nothing to contribute in return, nor to the environment or posterity. However, it has the flexibility to adapt to what its contributors/consumers ask of it.
A concern about economic inequality is a moral concern, and it can readily be integrated into a thriving free-market economy. The richer we are, the more we pay in taxes. We can make charitable donations with the wealth generated by a successful economy. Many of our individual choices in the free market may be based on moral considerations. We may decide to buy fairly traded food, to benefit people in poorer countries, for example, or we may buy locally grown food, to benefit local producers. We may choose a job because of the opportunities it gives us to help other people. The economy and society in general are greatly helped by people who do voluntary work, or in some other way contribure more to society than they are paid for: there is a strong link between the amount of voluntary work in a community and the level of life satisfaction (study by Essex University; Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2004). [. . .]
At its best, then, free-market capitalism is a sound basis for an economy. At its worst, however, it can enable the strong to impose their own terms on the weak, and the latter have no choice but to accept: this is where a modern government may intervene and regulate the economy.
Cooperation in modern human societies and modern economies goes far beyond the cooperative hunting parties of other animals. Our inherited instincts for cooperation may be sufficient to make the free market work in small communities, but in larger communities, where people don't all know each other, these instincts need the support of intelligent, moral thinking. We depend on other people, many of whom we do not know personally, and we count on them to carry out their functions in the way that we expect. We have

47 - to trust one another, and trust is a moral issue. The widespread denial of the moral dimension during the twentieth century (see Chapter 2, particularly, page 21) may be patly responsible for recent failures in the capitalist economy. Adam Smith, the 'father of modern economics', recognised the importance of the moral dimension in economics, but we have sometimes lost sight of this in recent years. The view that the sole responsibility of company managers is to their shareholders, for example, can lead to disaster if we do not also recognise the importance of satisfied customers, a motivated workforce and the respect of the community. Robert McGarvey (2005) writes that 'during the 1990s deception and fraud had in some sense become established norms in the upper echelons of corporate America. In the interests of maintaining a free and liberal economy perhaps we should be re-examining some of these "customs".' He goes on to call for a review of the ethical foundation of free-market capitalism.

95 - If we are to attain a morality of consensus, it is essential that we should recognise both the subjective nature of our own moral sense and the reality of obective morality. Our moral convictions, however strongly held, are our own and we should be willing to challenge them. However, they are pointers towards objective moral values, and it is this search for objective values that unites us all.

Abortion stuff

2006-10-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

Gastrulation: around 3rd week – followed by organogenesis

End of embryonic stage: End of 8th week

Quickening: around 18th week

Pregnancy test: after a missed menstruation, or 2 to 3 weeks after ovulation

· Full text of Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"
· When life begins, by Michael Bender

I'm such a hippie: excerpts from The Zinn Reader by Howard Zinn

2006-10-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

Zinn, Howard. 1997. The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press.

"Agressive Liberalism," 1970, pages 309-321:

313 - Expansionism, with its accompanying excuses, seems to be a constant characteristic of the nation-state, whether liberal or conservative, socialist or capitalist. I am not trying to argue that the liberal-democratic state is especially culpable, only that it is not less so than other nations. Russian expansionism into Eastern Europe, the Chinese moving into Tibet and battling with India over border territorie--seem as belligerent as the pushing of that earlier revolutionary upstart, the United States.

314 - And in these cases, the initial revolution followed by others, led to a paranoid fear of revolution beyond the real potential.
Thus, six years after the American Revolution, France was convulsed in hers. After the turn of the century, Latin American caught fire: Haiti the first, suspiciously close to the American shore, then Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, and the rest. Europe's despots pointed accusingly at the United States, much as we now point to Soviet Russia (or more lately to China or Cuba) whenever there are rumblings of change anywhere in the world. The philosophy of Manifest Destiny in America was not far from the Soviet rationale today, that (in Weinburg's words) "one nation has a preeminent social worth, a distinctively lofty mission, and consequently unique rights in the application of moral principles." Socialism and liberalism both have advantages over feudal monarchies in their ability to throw a benign light over vicious actions.

316 - Interestingly, Metternich in central Europe saw this commonplace action of modern nationalism with the same ideological phobia that the United States sees the Soviet Union and other Communist nations. He responded to the Monroe Doctrine as follows: "These United States of America...lend new strength to the apostles of sedition and reanimate the courage of every conspirator. If this flood of evil doctrines and pernicious examples should extend over the whole of America, what would become of our religious and political institutions..."

"Non-violent Direct Action", 1965/1966, pages 612-619

614 - What of revolution? Here the balance of achievement and cost is less haphazard, though still far from rational. The four great revolutions of modern times (the American, the French, the Russian and the Chinese) though all erratic in their movement towards social progress, in the end, I believe, justified the relatively small amount of violence required to fulfill them. But today, can we still look to revolutions as the chief means of social change, and as a useful means, whereby great change can be achieved at relatively small cost?
In some exceptional instances, yes. But, as a general rule, it seems to me that the conditions of the contemporary world have removed the feasibility of revolutions in the old sense. There are several reasons for this. One is that the power of weapons in the hands of the ruling elite makes popular uprisings, however great is the base of support, a very dubious

615 - undertaking. The other consideration, and probably more important, is that revolutions like wars no longer can be contained. They almost always involve one or more of the great nations of the world, and are either crushed by an outside power (as were the Hungarians in their revolt) or are prolonged to the point of frightful massacre (as the revolt in Viet Nam was met by the intervention of the French and then the Americans, and as the revolt in the Congo was stymied by Belgians and other forces). The Cuban revolution was an oddity; it was able to subsist because it brought into the picture not one but both the two leading world powers. There, even in success we can see the perils posed by revolution in the contemporary world, for the Cuban missile crisis almost set off a global disaster.
This removal of both war and revolution as methods of ushering in the inevitable changes would seem to leave us with the stock-in-trade of Western liberals: gradual reform. [. . .] [Note - Zinn believes gradual reform will not work either]

616- [. . .] Thus, none of the traditionally approved mechanisms for social change (not war, nor revolution, nor reform) is adequate for the kind of problems we face today in the United States and in the world. We need apparently some technique which is more energetic than parliamentary reform and yet not subject to the dangers which war and revolution pose in the atomic age.
This technique, I suggest, is [. . .]

617 - [. . .] I speak of non-violent direct action.

excerpts from "Nine Crazy Ideas in Science" by Robert Ehrlich

2006-09-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

From: Ehrlich, Robert. 2001. Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.219 - ... my ratings for the nine ideas discussed in this book. I've used a subjective rating scheme that goes like this: Zero cuckoos means "why not?" One cuckoo means "probably true, but who knows?" Two cuckoos means "very likely not true." Three cuckoos means "almost certainly not true." And four cuckoos means "certainly false."Crazy Idea Rating--------------------------------------------------------More guns means less crime 3 cuckoosAIDS is not caused by HIV 3 cuckoosSun exposure is beneficial 0 cuckoosLow doses of nuclear radiation are beneficial 1 cuckooThe solar system has two suns 2 cuckoosOil, coal, and gas have abiogenic origins 0 cuckoosTime travel is possible 2 cuckoosFaster-than-light particles exist 0 cuckoosThere was no big bang 3 cuckoos122 - Thomas Gold, a well-respected scientist in his own right ... a retired professor of astronomy from Cornell University, has a track record of coming up with weird ideas, some of which were shown to be correct after being initially rejected by the experts in a field. One of Gold's weird ideas (attacked or ignored by most geologists) is that hydrocarbons are not the fossil fuels we believe them to be, but were part of the original composition of the planet, and that they are present in the deep crust and mantle of the Earth in far greater abundance than geologists believe ... If Gold is right, the practical stakes are enormous, since it would mean that fears of an oil or gas shortage could be put off to the distant future. It would also mean that deep sources of natural gas and oil could be found at far more location around the globe than those found to date.What is the nature of the evidence that convinced most geologists of the biogenic origin of petroleum? First, petroleum is almost always found to contain certain groups of molecules that are only produced in the breakdown of living matter. Second, petroleum frequently exhibits "optical activity," meaning that polarized light passing through it has its plane of polarization rotated. This observation can be understood in terms of the kinds of molecules found in petroleum, which often come in mirror-image, right- and left-handed varieties, just like right- and left-handed screws.124 - The phenomenon f optical activity shows that petroleum contains unequal numbers of right- or left-handed molecules. Here again we have an indicator of the effects of life, since living organisms have evolved to eat substance such as right-handed sugar (dextrose) but not its left-handed mirror image (levitose). A third indicator of the biogenic origin of petroleum is the predominance of molecules having an odd number of carbon atoms--another sign of processes involving living systems.Why Reopen the Debate?Gold points out that each of the preceding pieces of evidence for a biogenic origin of petroleum has a plausible alternative explanation in the light of new discoveries. Finding biological traces in petroleum need not point to a biogenic origin, but could equally well be explained based on a biological contamination of a hydrocarbon fluid coming up from great depth.125 - Another new piece of information that warrants reopening the question of the origin of hydrocarbons involves theories about the formation of the Earth. At one time it was believe that the Earth was molten shortly after its formation. Given an initially molten Earth, any hydrocarbons present when the Earth was formed would be destroyed before the Earth solidified ...Current theories about the Earth's formation involve collisions of cold chunks of material yielding an Earth that was not molten throughout. Much of the Earth's mantle is quite hot, but not molten, and this fact has also been offered as a reason that hydrocarbons could not originate from great depths. But these objections fail to consider the stabilizing effects of high pressure, which would prevent oxidation of hydrocarbons if they originated from depths of up to 330 kilometers.126 - A third reason for reopening the debate about the origin of hydrocarbons is that large amounts have been found throughout the solar system on every planet but Venus, Mars, and Mercury. They are also found on many planetary moons. Methane has been found most frequently, but ethane, other hydrocarbon gases, and tar have also been observed. The absence of hydrocarbons on Mars and mercury is due to the lack of a sufficiently dense protective atmosphere, and no information exists about surface hydrocarbons on Venus because of its dense, opaque atmosphere. Hydrocarbons have also been found in solid and gaseous form on a number of comets and asteroids. They have even been found in interstellar space.127 through 140 [page breaks not indicated here -- JH] -Problems with the Biogenic Theory of Oil and Gas1. Crude oil has the wrong chemical composition.2. Sediments often lack fossils.3. Deep petroleum lacks biological traces.4. Oil from each areas has a chemical signature.5. Oil and gas are often found in long linear or arc-shaped regions.6. Hydrocarbons are found at all depths.7. Methane is found in biologically improbable places.8. Surface soils above gas fields have a very high methane content.9.Helium is always found in association with methane.10. Rocks at great depths can contain open pores in isolated domains.11. Petroleum reservoirs refill spontaneously.12. Diamonds exist.13. The Earth's surface layers are very rich in carbon.14. Carbon isotope fractionation in methane varies with depth.15. Carbon isotope fractionation in marine carbonates is constant.144 - According to Gold's theory, nonsedimentary rocks (largely avoided by petroleum geologists) should be just as promising a place to drill for oil as sedimentary rocks, provided they have sufficient porosity ...If Gold is right, the stakes for humanity are enormous, which makes it all the more important to examine his hypothesis with an open mind, unburdened by long-held beliefs whose basis does not rely on fundamental principles. Currently, the world relies on the so-called fossil fuels for a major portion of its energy. If humanity is to have along-term future, eventually we will need to switch to renewable options. Abundant sources of coal, oil, and gas would make that transition much easier. It would also reduce the chances of global conflict that might arise from uneven access to energy supplies. On the other hand, superabundant supplies of coal, oil, and gas would be a mixed blessing. While the145 - extent of climate change resulting from the burning of these fuels for another century might be tolerable (or possibly even beneficial), their indefinite long-term use is bound to lead to problems.You might imagine that, given the financial stakes involved, some oil companies would have taken advantage of Gold's theory (assuming he were right), and their lack of interest, therefore, would seem to argue against the correctness of his theory. But it is dangerous to make arguments based on the motivations of oil company executives. One could argue, for example, that it is in the interest of the oil companies to keep oil prices high by promoting an image of scarcity, and that currently they would have little interest in finding that oil is far more plentiful than had been thought.My rating for the idea that coal, oil, and gas do not have a biogenic origin, and were part of the Earth's original composition, is zero cuckoos.

"Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco

2006-09-27T15:19:00.000-07:00

The New York Review of BooksJune 22,1995UR-FASCISMBy Umberto Ecohttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/1856In 1942, at the age of ten, Ireceived the First Provincial Award of LudiJuveniles (avoluntary,compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists –that is, for everyyoungItalian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on thesubject"Should wedie for the glory ofMussolini and the immortal destinyof Italy?" Myanswer was positive. I was a smart boy.I spent two ofmyearly yearsamong the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisansshootingatoneanother, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It wasgood exercise.InApril 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two dayslater they arrived inthesmalltown where I was living at the time.It was a moment of joy.The mainsquare wascrowded with peoplesinging and waving flags,calling in loudvoices for Mimo, thepartisan leader of that area. Aformer maresciallo oftheCarabinieri, Mimo joined thesupporters ofGeneral Badoglio, Mussolini'ssuccessor, and lost a leg during one of thefirst clashes withMussolini'sremaining forces. Mimo showed up on thebalcony of thecity hall, pale,leaning on his crutch, and with one handtried tocalm the crowd. I waswaiting for his speech because my wholechildhoodhad been marked by thegreat historicspeeches of Mussolini,whosemost significant passages wememorized in school. Silence.Mimospoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible.He said: "Citizens, friends.Afterso manypainful sacrifices . . . here weare. Glory to thosewho havefallen for freedom." And thatwas it. He wentback inside.The crowdyelled, the partisans raised their guns and firedfestivevolleys. We kidshurried to pick up the shells, precious items, butIhad alsolearnedthat freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.Afew days later Isaw the first American soldiers. They wereAfrican Americans.ThefirstYankee I met was a black man, Joseph,who introduced me to themarvels ofDickTracy and Li'l Abner. Hiscomic books were brightly coloredandsmelled good.One of theofficers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guestin the villa of a family whosetwo daughters were my schoolmates. I methimin their garden wheresome ladies,surrounding Captain Muddy, talkedintentative French.Captain Muddy knew someFrench, too. My first imageofAmericanliberators was thus – after so many palefaces inblackshirts –thatof a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying:"Oui,mercibeaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j'aime le champagne . . ."Unfortunatelythere wasno champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my firstpiece ofWrigley'sSpearmint and Istarted chewing all day long. Atnight Iput my wad in awater glass, so it would be freshfor the nextday.2In May weheard that the war was over. Peace gave me acurioussensation. I had beentold that permanent warfare was the normalcondition for a young Italian. Inthe followingmonths I discoveredthatthe Resistance was not only a localphenomenon but a Europeanone. Ilearned new, exciting words like réseau,maquis, arméesecrète, RoteKapelle,Warsaw ghetto. I saw the firstphotographs ofthe Holocaust,thus understanding themeaning before knowingtheword. I realized whatwe were liberated from.In my country today thereare people who arewondering if the Resistance had a realmilitaryimpact onthe course ofthe war. For my generation this question isirrelevant: weimmediatelyunderstood the moral and psychologicalmeaning of theResistance. For us itwas a point of pride to know thatwe Europeans did notwait passivelyfor liberation. Andfor theyoung Americans who were payingwith theirblood for our restoredfreedom itmeant something to know thatbehindthe firing linesthere were Europeans paying theirown debt inadvance.In my countrytoday there are those who are saying that the myth oftheResistance wasaCommunist lie. It is true that the Communists exploitedthe Resistanceas if it were theirpersonal property, since they playedaprimerole in it; but I remember partisans withkerchiefs of differentcolors.Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights – the windowsclosed,theblackout making the small space around the set a loneluminous halo –listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to thepartisans.Theywere crypticand poetic at the same time (The sun alsorises,The roses willbloom) and most of themwere "messaggi per laFranchi." Somebody whisperedto me that Franchi was the leaderofthemost powerful clandestine networkin northwestern Italy, a man oflegendarycourage. Franchi became my hero.Franchi (whose real name wasEdgardoSogno) was amonarchist, so stronglyanti-Communist thatafter the warhe joined very right-winggroups, and wascharged withcollaborating ina project for a reactionary coup d'état. Whocares?Sogno still remains thedream hero of my childhood. Liberation was acommondeed for people ofdifferent colors.In my country todaythereare some who say that theWar of Liberation was a tragicperiod of division,and that all we needis national reconciliation.The memory of thoseterrible years should berepressed, refoulée,verdrängt. But Verdrängungcauses neurosis.Ifreconciliation meanscompassion and respect for allthose who fought theirown war ingood faith, to forgive does not mean toforget. I can evenadmitthat Eichmann sincerelybelieved in his mission,but I cannot say,"OK, come back and do it again." We are hereto rememberwhathappenedand solemnly say that "They" must not do it again.But who areThey?If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruledEuropebefore the SecondWorld War we can easily say that it would bedifficultforthem to reappear in the sameform in differenthistoricalcircumstances. IfMussolini's fascism was based upon the ideaof acharismatic ruler, oncorporatism, on the utopia of theImperial Fate ofRome, on animperialisticwill to conquer newterritories, on anexacerbated nationalism, on the idealof an entirenation regimented inblack shirts, on the rejection ofparliamentarydemocracy, onanti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty inacknowledging that today theItalian Alleanza Nazionale, born from thepostwar Fascist Party, MSI,and certainly aright-wing party, has bynowvery little to do with theold fascism. In the same vein, eventhough I ammuch concerned about thevarious Nazi-like movementsthat have arisen hereand there in Europe,including Russia, I do notthink that Nazism, in itsoriginal form, isabout to reappear as anationwide movement.Nevertheless, even thoughpolitical regimes can beoverthrown, andideologies can becriticizedand disowned, behind aregime and its ideologythere is always a way ofthinking and feeling, agroup of cultural habits,of obscure instinctsand unfathomable3drives. Is there still anotherghost stalkingEurope (not to speakof other parts of theworld)?Ionesco once saidthat "only wordscount and the rest is mere chattering."Linguistichabits are frequentlyimportant symptoms of underlying feelings.Thus itis worth askingwhy not only the Resistance but the Second World Warwasgenerallydefined throughoutthe world as a struggle against fascism. Ifyoureread Hemingway's For Whom the BellTolls you will discover thatRobertJordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even whenhe thinksoftheSpanish Falangists. And for FDR, "The victory of the American peopleandtheir allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand ofdespotism itrepresents."During World War II, the Americans whotookpart in theSpanish war were called"premature anti-fascists" –meaningthat fightingagainst Hitler in the Forties was a moraldutyfor everygood American, butfighting against Franco too early, in theThirties,smelled sour because itwas mainly done by Communists andotherleftists. . . . Why wasanexpression like fascist pig used byAmericanradicals thirty years later torefer to a copwho did notapprove oftheir smoking habits? Why didn't theysay: Cagoulard pig,Falangist pig,Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?Mein Kampf is amanifesto of a completepolitical program. Nazism had atheory ofracism and of the Aryan chosenpeople, a precise notion ofdegenerate art, entarteteKunst, aphilosophy of the will to powerand ofthe Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedlyanti-Christian andneo-pagan, whileStalin's Diamat (the officialversion of SovietMarxism) was blatantlymaterialistic and atheistic. Ifbytotalitarianism one means aregime thatsubordinates every act of theindividual to the state and to its ideology, thenboth Nazism andStalinismwere true totalitarian regimes.Italianfascism wascertainly adictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, notbecauseof itsmildness but rather because of the philosophicalweakness ofits ideology.Contraryto common opinion, fascism inItaly had no specialphilosophy.The article on fascismsigned byMussolini in the TreccaniEncyclopediawas written or basically inspiredbyGiovanni Gentile, but itreflecteda late-Hegelian notion of theAbsolute and Ethical Statewhich wasneverfully realized byMussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: hehadonly rhetoric.He was a militant atheist at the beginning and latersignedtheConvention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessedtheFascist pennants.In his early anticlerical years, according to a likelylegend, he once asked God, in order toprove His existence, to strikehimdown on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited thename of Godinhisspeeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.Italianfascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over aEuropean country,and all similar movements later found a sort ofarchetypein Mussolini'sregime. Italianfascism was the first toestablish amilitary liturgy, afolklore, even a way of dressing –far moreinfluential, with its blackshirts, than Armani, Benetton,or Versace wouldeverbe. It was only in theThirties that fascistmovements appeared,with Mosley, in GreatBritain, andin Latvia,Estonia, Lithuania,Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece,Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal,Norway, and even in South America. It wasItalian fascismthat convincedmany European liberal leaders thatthe newregime was carrying outinteresting social reform, and that itwas providinga mildlyrevolutionary alternative tothe Communistthreat.Nevertheless,historical priority does not seem to me asufficient reason toexplain whythe word fascism became a synecdoche,that is, a word that couldbe usedfor differenttotalitarianmovements. This is not because fascismcontained in itself, so to speak intheir quintessential state, all theelements of any later form oftotalitarianism. On thecontrary, fascismhadno quintessence.Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of4differentphilosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.Can oneconceiveof a truly totalitarian movement that was able tocombinemonarchy with revolution, theRoyal Army with Mussolini'spersonalmilizia,the grant of privileges to the Church withstateeducationextollingviolence, absolute state control with a free market? TheFascistParty wasborn boasting that it brought a revolutionary neworder; but it was financed bythe most conservative among the landownerswhoexpected from it acounter-revolution.At its beginning fascismwasrepublican. Yet it survivedfor twenty years proclaiming itsloyalty tothe royal family, while the Duce(the unchallengedMaximal Leader) wasarmin-arm with the King, to whom healsooffered the title of Emperor.But when the Kingfired Mussolini in1943, the party reappeared twomonths later, with German support,under thestandard of a "social"republic, recycling its oldrevolutionary script, nowenriched with almostJacobin overtones.There was only a single Naziarchitecture and asingle Nazi art. Ifthe Nazi architect wasAlbert Speer,there was nomore room for Miesvan der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin'srule, if Lamarckwas right therewas no room for Darwin. In Italy there werecertainlyfascist architectsbut close to their pseudo-Coliseums were manynewbuildings inspiredby the modern rationalism of Gropius.There wasno fascist Zhdanovsetting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were twoimportant artawards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical anduncultivatedFascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art aspropaganda.(I canremember paintingswith such titles as "Listening byRadio to theDuce's Speech" or "States of Mind Createdby Fascism.") ThePremioBergamowas sponsored by the cultivated and reasonablytolerantFascist GiuseppeBottai, who protected both the concept of art for art'ssake andthe manykinds of avant-garde art that had been banned ascorrupt and crypto-Communistin Germany.The national poet wasD'Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany orin Russia would havebeen senttothe firing squad. He was appointed as thebard of the regime becauseof hisnationalism and his cult of heroism –which were in factabundantlymixed up withinfluences of French fin desiècledecadence.TakeFuturism. One might think it would have beenconsidered an instance ofentarteteKunst, along with Expressionism,Cubism,and Surrealism. Butthe early Italian Futuristswerenationalist; theyfavored Italianparticipation in the First World Warfor aestheticreasons;theycelebrated speed, violence, and risk,all of which somehow seemed toconnectwith the fascist cult of youth.While fascism identified itself withtheRomanEmpire andrediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (whoproclaimed that a car was morebeautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,andwanted to kill eventhe moonlight) wasnevertheless appointed as amember ofthe ItalianAcademy, which treated moonlightwith greatrespect.Many ofthefuture partisans and of the future intellectuals ofthe Communist Party wereeducated by the GUF, the fascist universitystudents' association, whichwassupposed tobe the cradle of the newfascist culture. Theseclubs became asort of intellectual meltingpotwhere new ideascirculated without any realideological control. It was notthat themen of the party were tolerant ofradical thinking, but few ofthemhad the intellectualequipment to controlit.During thosetwenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writersassociated withthegroup called the Ermetici was a reaction to thebombastic style oftheregime, and thesepoets were allowed to develop theirliteraryprotestfrom within what was seen as theirivory tower. The mood ofthe Ermeticipoets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult ofoptimismandheroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, eventhough socially5imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply didnot pay attention tosuch arcanelanguage.All this does not meanthat Italian fascismwastolerant. Gramsci was put in prison untilhis death; the oppositionleadersGiacomo Matteotti and the brothersRosselli wereassassinated;the freepress was abolished, the laborunions were dismantled, andpoliticaldissenters were confined on remoteislands. Legislative powerbecame a merefiction andthe executivepower (which controlled thejudiciary as well asthe mass media)directlyissued new laws, amongthem laws calling forpreservationof the race (the formal Italiangesture of support for whatbecame theHolocaust).The contradictorypicture I describe was not theresultof tolerance but of political andideological discombobulation. Butitwas a rigid discombobulation, astructuredconfusion. Fascism wasphilosophically out of joint, butemotionally it was firmlyfastenedto somearchetypal foundations.So we come to my second point. There wasonly oneNazism. We cannotlabel Franco'shyper-Catholic Falangismas Nazism, sinceNazism isfundamentally pagan, polytheistic,andanti-Christian. But thefascistgame can be played in many forms, andthe name of thegame does notchange. The notion of fascism is notunlike Wittgenstein's notion of agame.A game can be either competitiveor not, it can require somespecial skill ornone,it can or cannotinvolve money. Games aredifferent activities thatdisplay only some"family resemblance," asWittgenstein put it. Consider thefollowingsequence:1 2 3 4abcbcd cde defSuppose there is aseriesof political groups in which groupone is characterized by thefeaturesabc, group two by the features bcd, andso on. Group two is similartogroup onesince they have two features incommon; for the same reasonsthree is similar to two andfour is similarto three. Notice thatthree isalso similar to one (they have in common thefeature c). Themost curiouscase is presented by four, obviouslysimilar to three andtwo,but with nofeature in common with one.However, owing to theuninterrupted series ofdecreasing similaritiesbetween one and four,there remains, by a sort ofillusorytransitivity,a familyresemblance between four and one.Fascism became an all-purposetermbecause one can eliminate from a fascistregime oneor morefeatures, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.Take awayimperialism fromfascism and you still have Franco and Salazar.Takeaway colonialism and you still havethe Balkan fascism of the Ustashes.Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism(which never muchfascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celticmythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) andyou haveone of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.Butinspite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list offeaturesthat aretypical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism,orEternalFascism. These features cannotbe organized into asystem; manyof themcontradict each other, and are also typical ofother kinds ofdespotism orfanaticism. But it is enough that one ofthem be present toallow fascism tocoagulate around it.1. Thefirst feature ofUr-Fascism is the cult oftradition. Traditionalism isof course mucholder than fascism. Not only wasit typical ofcounter-revolutionaryCatholic thought afterthe Frenchrevolution,but it was born in thelate Hellenistic era, as a reaction toclassicalGreek rationalism. Inthe Mediterranean basin, people of differentreligions (most of themindulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon)starteddreaming of arevelation received atthe dawn of humanhistory. Thisrevelation,according to the traditionalist mystique, had6remained fora longtime concealed under the veil of forgottenlanguages – in Egyptianhieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls ofthe little knownreligions of Asia.This new culture had to besyncretistic. Syncretismisnot only, as the dictionary says,"thecombination of different formsofbelief or practice"; such acombination musttolerate contradictions.Eachof the originalmessages contains a silver of wisdom, andwheneverthey seemto saydifferent or incompatible things it is only because all arealluding,allegorically, to the same primeval truth.As aconsequence, therecan be noadvancement of learning. Truth has been alreadyspelled outonce and forall, and we can only keep interpreting itsobscure message.One has only tolook at the syllabus of every fascistmovement tofind the majortraditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis wasnourished bytraditionalist,syncretistic,occult elements. The mostinfluentialtheoretical source ofthe theories of the new Italianright,JuliusEvola, merged the Holy Grailwith The Protocols of the Elders ofZion,alchemy with the Holy Roman andGermanic Empire. The very factthatthe Italian right,in order to show itsopen-mindedness, recentlybroadened its syllabus to include works byDeMaistre, Guenon, andGramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.If youbrowse in theshelvesthat, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, youcanfind thereeven Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not afascist. Butcombining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is asymptom ofUr-Fascism.2. Traditionalism implies the rejection ofmodernism. BothFascists and Nazis worshipedtechnology, whiletraditionalist thinkersusually reject it as a negation of traditionalspiritual values.However,even though Nazism was proud of itsindustrial achievements,its praise ofmodernism was only the surface ofan ideology based uponBlood and Earth(Blut und Boden). The rejectionof the modern world wasdisguised as arebuttal of thecapitalisticway of life, but it mainlyconcerned therejection of the Spirit of 1789(and of1776, of course).The Enlightenment,the Age of Reason, isseen as the beginning ofmoderndepravity. In thissense Ur-Fascismcan be defined as irrationalism.3.Irrationalism alsodepends onthe cult of action for action's sake. Actionbeingbeautiful initself, it must be taken before, or without, anyprevious reflection.Thinkingisa form of emasculation. Thereforeculture is suspectinsofar as it isidentified with criticalattitudes.Distrust of theintellectual world hasalways been a symptom of Ur-Fascism,fromGoering's alleged statement ("WhenI hear talk of culture I reachfor mygun") to thefrequent use of suchexpressions as "degenerateintellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs,""universities are a nest ofreds." The official Fascist intellectuals weremainly engaged inattacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsiafor havingbetrayed traditionalvalues.4. No syncretistic faith canwithstandanalytical criticism. The critical spirit makesdistinctions, andtodistinguish is a sign of modernism. In modernculture the scientificcommunity praises disagreement as a way to improveknowledge. ForUr-Fascism,disagreement is treason.5. Besides,disagreement is asignof diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks forconsensus byexploiting andexacerbating the natural fear ofdifference. The first appealof a fascistor prematurely fascistmovement is an appeal against theintruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racistby definition.6. Ur-Fascismderives from individualor socialfrustration. That is why one of the mosttypical features of thehistorical fascism was the appeal to afrustrated middle class, aclasssuffering from an economic crisis orfeelings of politicalhumiliation, andfrightenedby the pressure oflower social groups.In our time, when the old"proletarians" are7becoming pettybourgeois (and the lumpen arelargely excluded from thepoliticalscene),the fascism of tomorrow willfind its audience in thisnewmajority.7. To people who feel deprived of aclear social identity,Ur-Fascism says that their onlyprivilege is the mostcommon one, tobeborn in the same country. This is the origin ofnationalism. Besides,theonly ones who can provide an identity to thenation are itsenemies.Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology thereis theobsession with aplot,possibly an international one. The followersmust feel besieged.The easiest way to solvethe plot is the appealtoxenophobia. But theplot must also come from the inside: Jewsareusuallythe best targetbecause they have the advantage of being at thesame timeinside andoutside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of theplot obsessionis to befoundin Pat Robertson's The New WorldOrder, but, as we haverecentlyseen, there are manyothers.8.The followers must feelhumiliatedby the ostentatious wealth and forceof theirenemies. When I wasa boyI was taught to think ofEnglishmen as the five-meal people.They atemore frequently than thepoor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and helpeachother through asecret web of mutual assistance. However, the followersmustbeconvinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by acontinuousshifting ofrhetorical focus, the enemies are at the sametime toostrongand too weak. Fascistgovernments are condemned to losewarsbecause theyare constitutionally incapable ofobjectivelyevaluating the force of theenemy.9. For Ur-Fascism there is nostruggle for life but, rather, life islived for struggle. Thuspacifismis trafficking with the enemy. It is badbecause life ispermanent warfare.This,however, brings about an Armageddoncomplex. Since enemies have tobe defeated, theremust be a finalbattle,after which the movement willhave control of the world. Butsucha "finalsolution" implies a furtherera of peace, a GoldenAge, which contradicts theprinciple of permanentwar. No fascist leaderhas ever succeeded in solvingthispredicament.10. Elitism is atypical aspect of any reactionaryideology, insofar asit isfundamentallyaristocratic, and aristocratic andmilitaristicelitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.Ur-Fascism canonlyadvocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best peopleofthe world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, everycitizen can(or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannotbepatricians withoutplebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing thathispowerwas not delegated to himdemocratically but was conqueredbyforce, alsoknows that his force is based upon theweakness ofthemasses; they are soweak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since thegroupis hierarchicallyorganized (according to a military model), everysubordinate leaderdespiseshis own underlings, and each of themdespises his inferiors. This reinforces thesense of mass elitism.11.In such a perspective everybody is educatedto become a hero. Ineverymythology thehero is an exceptional being, butin Ur-Fascistideology,heroism is the norm. This cult ofheroism isstrictlylinked with thecult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of theFalangists was Vivala Muerte (in English it should be translated as"LongLive Death!").Innon-fascist societies, the lay public istold that deathis unpleasant butmust be facedwith dignity;believers are told that it isthe painfulway to reach a supernaturalhappiness.By contrast, theUr-Fascist herocraves heroic death,advertised as the best reward for aheroic life. TheUr-Fascist hero isimpatient to die. In his impatience, hemore frequentlysends otherpeople to death.12. Since both permanentwar andheroism aredifficult games to play, the Ur-Fascisttransfers hiswillto powerto sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (whichimpliesbothdisdain for women and intolerance and condemnation ofnonstandardsexual8habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since evensex isadifficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play withweapons– doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.13. Ur-Fascism isbasedupon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.In ademocracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens intheirentirety have apolitical impact only from a quantitativepoint ofview –one follows the decisions of themajority. ForUr-Fascism,however,individuals as individuals have no rights, and thePeople isconceived as aquality, a monolithic entity expressing theCommon Will.Sinceno largequantity of human beings can have acommon will, theLeader pretends to betheir interpreter. Having losttheir power ofdelegation, citizens do notact; they are onlycalledon to play therole of the People. Thus the Peopleis only a theatricalfiction. Tohave a good instance of qualitativepopulism we no longerneed thePiazza Venezia inRome or the NurembergStadium. There isin our futurea TV or Internet populism, inwhich theemotionalresponse of a selectedgroup of citizens can be presented andacceptedas the Voice of the People.Because of its qualitative populismUr-Fascism must be against "rotten"parliamentarygovernments. Oneof thefirst sentences uttered byMussolini in the Italian parliamentwas"I couldhave transformed thisdeaf and gloomy place into abivouac for my maniples" –"maniples" being asubdivision of thetraditional Roman legion. As a matterof fact, heimmediately foundbetter housing for his maniples, but a littlelater heliquidated theparliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on thelegitimacy of aparliament because itno longer represents the Voice ofthePeople,we can smell Ur-Fascism.14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.Newspeakwas invented by Orwell, in 1984, as theofficial language ofIngsoc,EnglishSocialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are commontodifferent forms ofdictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooksmadeuse of animpoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, inorder tolimit theinstruments forcomplex and critical reasoning.But we must beready toidentify other kinds ofNewspeak, even ifthey take theapparently innocentform of a popular talk show.Onthe morning of July27, 1943, I was toldthat, according to radioreports, fascism hadcollapsed and Mussolini wasunder arrest. When mymother sent me out tobuy thenewspaper, I saw thatthe papers atthe nearest newsstand haddifferent titles. Moreover,afterseeingthe headlines, I realized thateach newspaper said different things. Iboughtone of them, blindly, andread a message on the first pagesigned byfive or six politicalparties– among them the DemocraziaCristiana, theCommunist Party, the SocialistParty,the Partitod'Azione, and the LiberalParty.Until then, Ihad believed thatthere was a single party in everycountry and that inItaly itwasthe Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I wasdiscovering thatin my countryseveralparties could exist at the same time.Since I wasa cleverboy, I immediately realized thatso many parties couldnot havebeenborn overnight, and they must have existed for sometime asclandestineorganizations.The message on the front celebrated the endofthedictatorship and the return of freedom:freedom of speech, ofpress, ofpolitical association. These words, "freedom,""dictatorship,""liberty," –I now read them for the first time in my life. I was rebornasafreeWestern man by virtue of these new words.We must keepalert,so that thesense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is stillaround us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be somuch easier, for us,ifthere appeared on the world scene somebodysaying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz,Iwant the Black Shirts toparadeagain in the Italian squares." Life is notthat simple. Ur-Fascism cancome back under the most innocent of disguises.Our dutyis to uncover it9and to point our finger at any of its newinstances – every day,in every part of the world.FranklinRoosevelt'swords of November 4,1938, are worth recalling:"Iventure the challengingstatement that ifAmerican democracy ceasesto move forward as a livingforce, seeking dayand night by peacefulmeans to better the lot of ourcitizens, fascismwill grow instrength in ourland."Freedom andliberation are anunendingtask. Let me finish with a poem by FrancoFortini:Sullaspallettadel ponteLe teste degli impiccatiNell'acqua della fonteLa bavadegli impiccati.Sul lastrico delmercatoLe unghie deifucilatiSull'erba secca del pratoI denti deifucilati.Morderel'aria mordere i sassiLa nostra carne non è piùd'uominiMorderel'aria mordere i sassiIl nostro cuore non è piùd'uomini.Ma nois'è letto negli occhi dei mortiE sulla terrafaremolibertàMal'hanno stretta i pugni dei mortiLa giustiziache si farà.(On thebridge's parapetThe heads of the hangedInthe flowingrivuletThe spittle of the hanged.On the cobbles in themarket-placesThefingernails of those lined up and shotOn the drygrass in the openspacesThe broken teeth of those lined up and shot.Biting the air,biting the stonesOur flesh is no longer humanBiting the air,bitingthe stonesOur hearts are no longerhuman.But we have readinto theeyes of the deadAnd shallbring freedom on the earthButclenched tightin the fists of thedeadLies the justice to be served.)– poemtranslated by StephenSartarelli* * *

-----------------------------------------------
See also:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004/11/holiday-break.html

From CLB: "The Social Cost of China's Accession to the WTO" by Cai Chongguo

2006-09-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

From an e-mail I got from the China Labour Bulletin:____________________________________________________________________________________________Commentary: The Social Cost of China's Accession to the WTOBy Cai ChongguoChina joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) four years ago in December 2001, after preparing and negotiating for membership for 15 years, a process that resulted in major changes in the country.Over the years, the Chinese government and mainstream economists regarded China's accession to the WTO as a trading policy issue, that they were never able to accurately calculate the impact on people's livelihood. It was regarded as a technical problem, confined to how to open up China's economy to foreign investment. But very few of them considered the high price that society, especially ordinary Chinese citizens, would have to pay for this economic commitment.The massive propaganda campaign and real "reforms" made in preparation for WTO membership produced a complete change in the collective consciousness of society in China as well as changes in the economic culture and the political and economic elite. The WTO campaign intentionally created a new fantasy to replace the fantasy of Communism, purporting that once China joined the WTO, foreign investment would flood into the country and China's economy would develop rapidly, creating job opportunities for many Chinese. The legal system, economic management and corporate management would improve rapidly and this would accelerate China's industrial and technological modernisation. This fantasy of the central government, however, had a highly detrimental impact at the local level as well as among the leaders of state enterprises. They gave up attempts to strengthen the enforcement of existing laws and regulations and efforts to modernize government administration, economic planning and management, and corporate management, focusing instead on attracting foreign investment. They lost confidence and the patience to improve the operations of state-owned enterprises and collectively-owned enterprises. They even lost interest in their own enterprises. Attracting foreign investment and increasing exports became their singular goal. Joining the WTO would ultimately change China's entire strategy on economic development, i.e. by building it on expanding external trade and increasing foreign investment. As a result, China's economy is heavily dependent on foreign trade, which now accounts for more than 70 percent of China's national income - about 20 percent higher than that of Western countries. China has becomes the "world's factory" for cheap goods, and government offices throughout China have in fact become the China offices of international investors.The Chinese people, in particular the ordinary workers, are suffering as a result of this reform programme.The first result of this phenomenon is that the number of unemployed and the poor in the cities has grown dramatically. Government and businesses have laid off large numbers of workers under the programme of "quickening the pace of enterprise reform" to prepare for the entry of China into the WTO. In fact what has happened is that without the supervision of an independent workers' organisation and without an effective employees' committee, many enterprises which were faced with temporary difficulties have been forced to close down or be privatised. At the same time, other companies that are performing well have also cut their workforce, or forced some employees to take early retirement in order to improve competitiveness. Over the past 10 years, millions of workers in China have been laid off or suffered retrenchment. (The latter term applies to employees of state-owned enterprises, who once they are retrenched, lose the job they were assigned under the centrally planned economic system and are forced to accept a gradually diminishing set of social security benefits.) As of the end of 2004, some experts estimate that the number of unemployed living in urban areas in China had reached more than 20 million and that the unemployment rate lies somewhere between 15 and 18 percent. The rate of impoverishment in urban areas has also quickened. According to official statistics, about 24 million people living in urban areas depend on the minimum living allowance for their existence. This is a 10-fold increase in 10 years. However, there are a large number of poor who do not even receive this.A second development is that more jobs are just temporary positions and working conditions have worsened. For those employed and living in urban areas, few have any kind of job security with the exception of civil servants. The head of the state enterprise or the owner of a private enterprise can fire or lay off workers at any time. Thus, for today's workers, the hours are long, the workload is heavy, and the wages are low.According to a survey done by China's Ministry of Labour and Social Security at the end of 2004, workers in all industries in China work longer hours than the law designates, working on average about 50 hours a week. Separately, a survey done by the Guangdong Provincial branch of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) released at the beginning of 2005, revealed that 76.3 percent of those working in the Pearl River Delta area in urban areas earned less than 1,000 yuan a month. In the past 12 years, monthly wages have risen by just 68 yuan. At the same time, work-related injuries and occupational illnesses had risen rapidly around the country. Every week there is a report of another coal mine explosion or accident.A third phenomenon of this rapid pace of reform is the breakdown of the social security system and the privatization and commercialization of public services such as education and medical facilities. In order to quicken the pace of reform and before the set up of the new social security system, the government and enterprises have thrown out the existing pension and medical payment plans which were part of the state enterprise system. According to official reports, less than 15 percent of the workforce in China has a pension plan and medical insurance. The privatisation and the commercialisation of the medical system has brought about yearly increases in the cost of medical care. According to one report that was released in May this year, about half the population in China does not go to the doctor when they are ill because they can not afford to. As for education, in the past 10 years, tuition fees and charges have risen 15-fold.Everyone is aware of the fact that over the past decade the inequalities in society and the wealth gap between different geographic areas in China have worsened; domestic enterprises, especially heavy industry, are near collapse. Strikes, marches, demonstrations and other forms of protest are more frequent. The oppression of the government has become more severe. China's entry into the WTO has put more workers in prison for daring to fight against the injustices in today's society.19 December 2005

Poverty rate rising; poor getting poorer

2006-09-27T15:06:00.000-07:00

Poverty Rate Continues To Climb 2004 Census Data Show Labor Market Is Still StrugglingBy

Jonathan Weisman and Ceci Connolly

Washington Post Staff Writers

Wednesday, August 31, 2005;A03

The Washington Post

Despite robust economic growth last year, 1.1 million more Americans slipped into poverty in 2004, while household incomes stagnated and earnings fell, the Census Bureau reported yesterday. The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 800,000, to 45.8 million.The Census Bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance sheds light on voter discontent with the economy in the face of seemingly strong economic data. The broad data draw a picture of a labor market still struggling to find its footing, three years after the 2001 recession.The poverty rate climbed in 2004 to 12.7 percent, from 12.5 percent in 2003 -- the fourth year in a row that poverty has risen. The increase was borne completely by non-Hispanic whites, the only ethnic group that saw its poverty rate rise. The percentage of whites in poverty rose from 8.2 percent in 2003 to 8.6 percent. African Americans saw no change in their poverty rate, which remained at 24.7 percent. The poverty rate for Hispanics remained at 21.9 percent, while Asian Americans' poverty levels dropped by two percentage points, to 9.8 percent.

Also, from a different source:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND POLICY RESEARCH

For ImmediateRelease: September 21, 2005

Economists Document Long-Term Growth Fall-Off for Developing CountriesSuggest Topic for IMF/World Bank Fall Meetings

Progress in Health Outcomes, Education Also Reduced

Washington, DC:

The last 25 years have seen sharply reduced economicgrowth and reduced progress in health and education outcomes for low-and middle-income countries in comparison with previous decades, asdocumented in a new paper by the Center for Economic and Policy Research."The official data show a very different picture than most policy-makersand the public have in mind," said economist Mark Weisbrot, Co-Directorof CEPR and co-author of the report."The number one question for the IMF and World Bank at their fallmeetings this weekend should be: what has gone wrong over the last 25 years in the vast majority of developing countries?

The paper, "The Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress" http://www.cepr.net/publications/development_2005_09.pdf compares the last 25 years (1980-2005) with the prior two decades(1960-1980) on:- Growth (GDP per capita)- Health outcomes (life expectancy, mortality rates for adults,children, and infants)- Education (public spending on education, school enrollment rates, literacy)

The paper finds a sharp slowdown in growth of GDP per capita and reduced progress for the vast majority of countries on almost all ofthe social indicators. The paper also briefly addresses the possiblereasons for this economic failure, as well as the exceptional successesof China and India over the last 25 years.The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) is a non-partisan,non-profit policy institute that was established to promote democraticdebate on the most important economic and social issues that affectpeople's lives.

CEPR's Advisory Board of Economists includes Nobel Laureate EconomistsRobert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz, and Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

from SojoMail letters section: Words from an expert

2006-09-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

The following comes from my weekly e-mail from Sojourners. Part of the weekly e-mail is a section called Boomerang, in which readers write in to respond, like in a newspaper editorial section. This is what one person wrote to Sojourners, and NOT from me. The letter's author, Ritagail Burleson, refers to the Katrina Pledge that is being sponsored by Sojourners, in which signers are asked to press elected officials to focus government priorities on poverty, inspired by the poverty that was both displayed and worsened by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath -- JH:

-----------------------------

Readers write----------

Ritagail Burleson writes from Bartlesville, Oklahoma

I live in poverty in the state of Oklahoma. I will not be signing your Katrina Pledge for the following reasons:

1. The pledge states: "As a person of faith, I believe that the poverty we have witnessed on the rooftops of New Orleans and the devastated communities of the Gulf Coast is morally unacceptable." If I am only moved by the sight of poverty when I see the people on their rooftops on the news, then I have had a very hardened heart - especially if I am "a person of faith."

2. I am already doing #1 in the Katrina Pledge, and did even before the hurricane hit, as soon as I saw that the hurricane was aimed at the Gulf Coast. And I wasn't praying merely for "the poor," but for everyone. (And I have given money, not much because I have little, but I still have done it. But then, I have given money to others before the hurricane.) I also do what I can, with my extremely limited resources, to help people God may send my way, regardless of their socio-economic class. Have the rest of you been doing the same, especially those of you who have more resources than I have?

3. I might support #2 in the Katrina Pledge, except for the way the first part is worded: " I pledge to work for sweeping change of our nation's priorities. I will press my elected representatives...." If we leave the "sweeping change" to our "elected representatives" we are merely passing on the responsibility. I wish something like the following would have been included: "As a person of faith, I will do what I can to personally help the people who God brings into my life, no matter who they are. I will strive to be an example in my own faith-based group (church) so that we are welcoming to people other than those of our own socio-economic level.

A cool quote by some guy; don't hate him for being a Frenchie

2006-09-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

This quote, from some guy named Francois Perroux, was taken from the book One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse quotes Perroux in French, and then has an English translation in a footnote (don't know who did the translation). The Perroux quote was taken by Marcuse out of Perroux's book La Coexistence pacifique; it says loc. cit. vol. III, p. 631:

"They believe they are dying for the Class, they die for the Party boys. They believe they are dying for the Fatherland, they die for the Industrialists. They believe they are dying for the freedom of the Person, they die for the Freedom of the dividends. They believe they are dying by orders of a State, they die for the money which holds the State. They believe they are dying for a nation, they die for the bandits that gag it ..."

I don't know if i'm for or against the Iraq war and all that, but this quote seems to be just generally to think about for all sorts of situations. The Iraqi insurgents and other terrorists should remember this too -- JH.

from "Lifelines from Our Past" by L.S. Stravrianos

2006-09-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

Stavrianos, L.S. Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.

142 - A few Third World countries--Taiwan, South Korea, and Brazil--have advanced from being export platforms to becoming integrated, self-generating, industrialized national economies. In fact, their products have developed to such a point that Brazilian steel, Taiwanese textiles, and Korean autos have provoked protectionist demands in First World countries. But these exceptional successes have not been and are unlikely to be repeated on any significant scale in the Third World as a whole. Brazil is unique in the richness of its natural resources, while South Korea and Taiwan (along with Japan) received massive American financial and technical aid and preferential trade privileges--almost the equivalent of an Asian Marshall Plan--during the Korean and Vietnam War periods. Between 1951 and 1965, the United States pumped about $1.5 billion of economic aid into Taiwan, and much more into South Korea--about $6 billion between 1945 and 1978.

In the rest of the Third World, export platforms have yielded few lasting benefits because the semiskilled and unskilled jobs they generate do not provide the technical training needed for local de-

143 -- velopment, because the low wages they pay offer no way out of a domestic market inadequate for local industrial development, and because the multinational do little more than the former colonial powers to encourage the development of a local industrial base. [. . .]

The gap in average per capita income between what we now call the First and Third Worlds was roughly 3 to 1 in 1500. Since then it has widened exponentially: 6 to 1 by 1900; 14 to 1 by 1970; and an estimated 30 to 1 by 2000 [ NOTE TO SELF: check what gap is now]. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein con-

144 - cludes that the great majority of the human race at the base of the global economic pyramid is worse off today than in precapitalist times:

Without any attempt to romanticize the nature of a peasant's life in the Middle Ages, either in Europe or anywhere else in the world, let me offer this brief analysis. If you compare similar strata of the population of the world-economy as a whole, with 70-80% at the bottom, this "bottom" appears worse off today than they were 500-600 years ago, and the top 20% is unvevenly spaced geographically throughout the world, and live primarily in such countries as the United States, France, Britain, Germany and Japan. Those who make up the top 20% of thw world population may comprise up to 50-70% of the population of those industrial countries. Consequently if someone from one of those countries asks, "Are we better off than our ancestors were 500 years ago?" their answer is not only "yes," but obviously "yes." But that is because those countries have a high percentage of the world's upper strata. 41

255 - 41. I. Wallerstein, "The World-System: Myths and Historical Shifts," in E.W. Goldolf et al., eds., The Global Economy: Divergent Perspectives on Economic Change (Westview Press, 1986), pp. 20-21

209 - Not only hasthe USSR failed as a socialist model--whether judged economically or in terms of gains in social freedom--but so have the numerous other socialist societies that emerged in Europe, Asia, and Africa following World War II. If the destructive side of capitalism has created immense problems for the world, socialist attempts to restructure societies have spawned even more serious and immediate problems in countries like China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Ethiopia, as well as in the Soviet Union itself. Two general factors stand out as primarily responsible for the difficulties experienced by these widely scattered socialist societies.

The first is their uniformly underdeveloped and impoverished historical origins. Marx has assumed that his long-awaited revolution would occur in the devloped industrialized countries before it did in their colonies. Instead, post-World War II revolutionary socialism emerged mostly in the underdeveloped, poverty-stricken former colonial or semicolonial areas. Socialism everywhere (with the partial exception of eastern Europe) has appeared on the historical stage as a substitute for rather than a successor to capitalism. 21 [I didn't record citation -- JH]

215 - The reference to the American New Left is significant because like them the Soviet left inteliigentsia represents only a small minority of its country's people. This raises the crucial question of the views of Soviet workers and peasants who comprise the overwhelming majority of the total population and who appear to be deeply ambivalent about developments, perhaps because their status is, in fact, highly equivocal. On the one hand, they have plenty of firsthand kowledge of the corruption and cronyism that characterized the preceding Brezhnev regime. On the other hand, they have enjoyed a secure and comfortable niche within that regime, including guaranteed jobs, as well as food, housing, and medical care that have been subsidized and ceap, even though of mediocre or poor quality. The Soviet people as a whole have learned to accept their socialist society as a national insurance policy, whose security is generally welcomed and popular. What is not popular is the quality of the goods and services provided, especially as more information

216 - is received on the high-quality goods and services available in the West. [. . .] The ideal arangement for most Soviet citizens would involved an improvement in the quality of goods and services together with a continuation of the existing lifetime security polices. [. . .]

So the USSR of the 1980s resembles in certain ways the USA of the mid-1930s--the same unrest, anxiety, dreams, nightmares, and impatient social experimentation that is at once exhilirating and sobering.

220 - The historical experience of England provides a good example of the difference between past and present industrialization. During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, English workers were severely exploited because medieval guilds had atrophied and trade unions were not yet legalized. Hence, the machinery-smashing by Luddites and the 1819 "Peterloo massacre" of rioting workers. After 1850 the "trickle down," so talked about in the Third World today but which so rarely materializes, did actually occur and did benefit the British working class, resulting in industrial peace and general prosperity. But this was possible only because British industry enjoyed the unique advantage of a monopoly of world markets. [. . .]

Developing countries today have no such broad avenue beckoning to the future--no such foreign markets open to their products. Instead, world price levels for their raw materials continue steadily to decline, while their few industrial exports (textiles, steel, shoes, and clothing) enounter increasing demands from the already industrialized world for "fair trade"--the most recent euphemism for protectionism. Equally serious for Third World countries aspiring to climb up the economic ladder has been the inelasticity of their own domestic markets. Native industries not only have problems of access to foreign makrets but also are fettered by inadequate purchasing power at home, the two phenomena being, of course, linked.

from "Tolstoy and Englightenment," by Isaiah Berlin

2006-09-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

Note: Just because I'm a liberal wuss, please don't assume I agree with whatever Tolstoy believes (or I should say, what Isaiah Berlin says Tolstoy believes). However, just because I'm a hate-filled asshole, please don't assume I disagree with Tolstoy about everything either. Remember the following is not by Tolstoy, but by Isaiah Berlin.

-------------------------------

39 - Truth, for Tolstoy, is always discoverable, to follow it is good, inwardly sound, harmonious. Yet it is clear that our society is not harmonious or composed of internally harmonious individuals. The interests of the educated minority--what he calls "the professors, the barons and the bankers"--are opposed to those of the majority--the peasants, the poor. Each side is indifferent to, or mocks, the values of the other. Even those who, like Olenin, Pierre, Nekhlyudov, Levin, realize the spuriousness of the values of the professors, barons and bankers, and the moral decay in which their false education has involved them, even those who are truly contrite, cannot, despite Slavophil pretensions, go native and "merge" with the mass of the common people. Are they too corrupt ever to recover their innocence? Is their case hopeless? Can it be that civilized men have acquired (or discovered) certain true values of their own, which barbarians and children may know nothing of, but which they--the civilized--cannot lose or forget, even if, by some imposible means, they could transform themselves into peasants or the free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the Terek? This is one of the central and most tormenting problems in Tolstoy's life, to which he goes back again and again, and to which he returns conflicting answers.

Tolstoy knows that he himself clearly belongs to the minority of barons, bankers, professors. He knows the symptoms of his condition only too well. He cannot, for example, deny his passionate love for the music of Mozart or Chopin or the poetry of pushkin or Tyutchev--the ripest fruits of civilization. He needs--he cannot do without--the printed word and all the elaborate paraphernalia of the culture in which such lives are lived and such works of art are created. But what is the use of Pushkin to village boys, when his words are not intelligible to them? What real
40 - benefits has the invention of printing brought the peasants? We are told, Tolstoy observes, that books educate societies ("that is, make them more corrupt"), that is was the written word that has promoted the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Tolstoy denies this: the government would have done the same without books or pamphlets. Pushkin's Boris Godunov pleases him, Tolstoy, deeply, but to the peasants mean nothing. The triumphs of civilization? The telegraph informs him about his sister's health, or about the political prospects of King Otto I of Greece; but what benefit do the masses gain from it? Yet it is they who pay and have always paid for it all, and they know this well. When peasants in the "cholera riots" kill doctors because they regard them as poisoners, what they do is no doubt wrong, yet these murders are no accident: the instinct which tells the peasants who their oppressors are is sound, and the doctors belong to that class. When Wanda Landowska played to the villagers or Yasnaya Polyana, the great majority of them remained unresponsive. Yet can it be doubted that it is these simple people who lead the least broken lives, immeasurably superior to the warped and tormented lives of the rich and educated? The common people, Tolstoy asserts in his early educational tracts, are self-subsistent not only materially but spiritually--folksong, ballads, the Iliad, the Bible, spring from the people itself, are are therefore intelligible to all men everywhere, as Tyutchev's magnificent poem Silentium, or Don Giovanni, or the Ninth Symphony are not. If there is an ideal of human life, it lies not in the future but in the past. Once upon a time there was the Garden of Eden, and in it dwelt the uncorrupted human soul--as the Bible and Rousseau conceived it--and then came the Fall, corruption, suffering, falsehood. It is mere blindness (Tolstoy says over and over again) to believe, as liberals or socialists--"the progressives"--believe, that the golden age is still to come, that history is the story of improvement, that advances in natural science or material skills coincide with real moral progress. The truth is the reverse of this.

The child is closer to the ideal harmony than the man, and the simple peasant than the torn, "alienated," morally and spiritually unanchored, self-destructive parasites who form the civilized elite. From this doctrine springs Tolstoy's notable anti-individualism; and in particular his diagnosis of the individual's will as the source of misdirection and perversion of "natural" human tendencies, and hence the conviction (derived largely from Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will as the source of frustration) that to plan, organize, rely on science, try to create ordered patterns of life in accordance with rational theories, is to swim against the stream of nature, to close one's eyes to the saving truth within us, to torture

41 - facts to fit artificial schemes, and torture human beings to fit social and economic systems against which their natures cry out. From the same source, too, comes the obverse of this moral: Tolstoy's faith in the intuitively grasped direction of things as being not merely inevitable but objectively--providentially--good; and therefore belief in the need to submit to it: his quietism.
This is one aspect of his teaching, the most familiar, the central idea of the Tolstoyan movement. It runs through all his mature works, imaginative, critical, didactic, from The Cossacks and Family Happiness, to his last religious tracts; this is the doctrine which both liberal and Marxists duly condemned. It is in this mood that Tolstoy (like Marx, whom he neither respected nor understood) maintains that to imagine that heroic personalities determine events is a piece of colossal megalomania and self-deception. His narrative is designed to show the insignificance of Napoleon or Alexander, or of aristocratic and bureaucratic society in Anna Karenina, or of the judges and official persons in Resurrection; or again, the emptiness and political impotence of historians and philosophers who try to explain events by employing concepts like "power" attributed to great men, or "influence" ascribed to writers, orators, preachers--words, abstractions, which, in his view, explain nothing, being themselves more obscure than the facts for which they purport to account. He maintains that we do not being to understand, and therefore cannot explain or analyse, what it is to wield authority or strength, to influence, to dominate. Explanations that do not explain, are, for Tolstoy, a symptom of the sestructive and self-inflated intellect, the faculty that kills innocence and leads to false notions and the ruin of human life. [. . .]

His other strain (interwoven with the first) is the direct opposite of this. [. . .] In his famous essay entitled What Is Art? Tolstoy unexpectedly tells the educated reader that the peasant "needs

42 - what your life of ten generations uncrushed by hard labour has given you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to suffer--then give him that for whose sake you suffered; he is in need of it . . . do not bury in the earth the talent given you by history . . ." Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive. Progress can occur; we can learn from what happened in the past, as those who lived in that past could not. It is true that we linve in an unjust order. But this itself creates direct moral obligations. Those who are members of the civilized elite, cut off as they tragically are from the mass of the people, have the duty to attempt to rebuild broken humanity, to stop exploiting other men, to give them what they most need--education, knowledge, material help, a capacity for living better lives [. . .]

43 - That God exists, or that the Iliad is beautiful, or that men have a right to be free and to be equal, are all eternal and absolute truths. Therefore, we must persuade men to read the Iliad and not pornographic French novels, and to work for an equal society, not a theocratic or political hierarchy. Coercion is evil; this is self-evident and men have always known it to be true; therefore they must work for a society in which there will be no wars, no prisons, no executions, in any circumstances, for any reason--for a society in which there is the highest attainable degree of individual freedom. By his own route Tolstoy arrived at a programme of Christian anarchism which had much in common with that of the "realist" school of painters and composers--Mussorgsky, Repin, Stassov--and with that of their political allies, the Russian Populists, although he rejected their belief in natural science and their doctrinaire socialism and faith in the methods of terrorism. For what he now appeared to be advocating was a programme of action, not of quietism; this programme underlay the educational reforms that Tolstoy attempted to carry out. [. . .]

If it were not for ignorance, human beings could not be exploited or coerced.

2006-09-26T19:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/williams06302006.html

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3284

http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/press/press.cfm?pressReleaseID=40

http://www.yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/winter05/review03.shtml.htm

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/7/24/145554/061

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/seandonahue/

http://www.globalexchange.org/getInvolved/corporateHRviolators.html

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/123996/1/4536

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/americas/14615385.htm
a book review of "Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know and What You Can Do About Them," by Cynthia Shapiro.http://www.washtech.org/news/labor/display.php?ID_Content=5035Second, a report by Workers Rights Watch on the National Labor Relations Board. The e-mail says, "the NLRB, which is tasked with playing referee to employers, workers, and their unions, is also playing coach to unionbusting employers. We rounded up a series of decisions from 2005 that read like a playbook for how employers can bust unions and not get caught."http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/workersrights/eye1_2006.cfm

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=registration.general&returnURL=action%3Dnews%2Edisplay%5Farticle%26mode%3DC%26NewsID%3D5134

http://www.zmag.org/hahnelaudio.html (this talk in part)http://www.jonahhouse.org/Hahnel,%20Robin.htm (the entire talk)

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/123996/1/4536

Against John Perkins (which at this point seems more likely to me)http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Feb/02-767147.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/26/AR2006022601265.htmlIn Perkins' defense:http://www.JohnPerkins.org Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

from "The Post-Corporate World" by David C. Korten (remember him?)

2006-09-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

[Note: Again, I do not claim to agree necessarily with all of what is written here -- JH]

9 - For nearly three hundred years Western societies, and increasingly societies the world over, have been living out a deadly tale inspired by the basic precepts of Newtonian physics. According to this tale,

The universe resembles a giant clockwork set in motion by a master clock maker at the beginning of creation and left to run down with time as its spring unwinds. In short, we live in a dead and wasting universe. Matter is the only reality, and the whole is no more nor less than the aggregation of its parts. By advancing our understanding of the parts through the reductionist processes of science, we gain dominion over the whole and the power to bend nature to our ends.

10 - Consciousness is an illusion; life is only an accidental outcome of material complexity. We evolved through a combination of chance genetic mutations and a competitive struggle in which those more fit survived and flourished as the weaker and less worthy perished. Neither consciousness nor life have meaning or purpose. People are just extremely complicated machines, whose behavior is dictated by knowable natural laws.

Competition for territory and survival is the basic law of nature. We cannot expect humans to be or become more than brutish beasts driven by basic instincts to survive, reproduce, and seek distraction from existential loneliness through the pursuit of material gratification. A primary function of the institutions of civilized societies is to use the institutional control structures of hierarchy and markets to channel our dark human instincts toward economically productive ends.

This story has had numerous positive effects. It liberated Western societies from the stultifying intellectual tyranny of the church and gave legitimacy to learning through empirical observation. It brilliantly focused attention on mastering the material world and gave rise to extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and technology that brought previously unimaginable affluence to some 20 percent of the world's population and propelled our species into new levels of planetary awareness and communication.

The story's negative effects, however, are now putting us on a path of self-destruction. It has led to the embrace of money as the defining value of contemporary societies and given birth to a hedonistic ethic of material self-gratification; the hierarchical, control-oriented megainstitutions of the state and the corporation; and an economic system that rewards greed and destroys life.

11- Our embrace of the old story's prophecy of death is leading our species inexorably toward self-destruction. The time has come for a story that acknowledges life's creative power and inspires us to strive for new levels of consciousness and function.

This is the powerful message of theologian Thomas Berry, who argues eloquently in Dream of the Earth that our future depends on a new

12 - cosmic story that restores meaning to life and draws us to explore life's still-unrealized potentials. Such a story is taking shape and drawing inspiration from many sources, including findings from the modern physical and life sciences and the world's richly varied spiritual traditions. Though it remains both partial and speculative, the new story goes something like this:

The universe is a self-organizing system engaged in the discovery and realization of its possibilities through a continuing process of transcendence toward ever higher levels of order and self-definition. Modern science has confirmed the ancient Hindu belief that all matter exists as a continuing dance of flowing energies. Yet matter is somehow able to maintain the integrity of its boundaries and internal structures in the midst of apparent disorder.

Similarly, the cells of a living organism, which are in a constant state of energy flux, maintain their individual integrity while functioning coherently as parts of larger wholes. This ability implies some form of self-knowledge in both "inert" matter and living organisms at each level of organization. Intelligence and consciousness may take many forms and are in some way even present in matter. What we know as life may not be an accident of creation but rather integral to it, an attractor that shapes the creative unfolding of the cosmos.

To the extent that these premises are true, they suggest we have scarcely begun to imagine, much less experience, the possibilities of our own capacity for intelligent, self-aware living. Nor have we tested our potentials for self-directed cooperation as a foundation of modern social organization. Evolution, although it involves competitive struggles,violence, and death, also involves love, nurturance, rebirth, and regeneration--and is a fundamentally cooperative and intelligent enterprise.

There is substantial evidence that it is entirely natural for healthy humans to live fully and mindfully in service to the unfolding capacities of self, community, and the planet. Yet in our forgetfulness we have come to doubt this aspect of our being. Nurturing the creative development of our capacities for mindful living should be a primary function of the institutions of civilized societies. It is time that we awaken from our forgetfulness and assume conscious responsibility for reshaping our institutions to this end.

13 - Unlike the dead-universe story, this sotry beckons us to deepens our understanding of the potentials of life and consciousness and the master the art of living at both individual and societal levels. It calls us to embrace life as the defining value of society and recongize that we have the freedom and the capacity to make this choice.

Some may argue that the new story is hardly new at all. Rather, it is one of the most ancient of stories, a rediscovery of the wisdom of traditional cultures that see evidence of the hand of conscious intelligence at work in all of creation and stress the integral relationship of the individual to the community. This is partially true. What is new is the way in which this story integrates the ancient wisdom with modern scientific findings, insights, and methods of observation to achieve new understanding and potentials for growth to higher levels of individual and community function.

14 - In the past, it has been mainly biological determinists, such as sociobiologists and social Darwinists, who have turned to biology for political and economic insights, usually used to justify existing structures of racism, gender discrimination, inequality, and capitalism's ruthless competition. Those efforts have ben characterized by a limited and fatalistic view of the human condition consistent with the dead-universe story. It is radically different to look to the fuction and evolution of living systems for insights into our as yet unrealized potentials.

34 - False promises are the money world's stock in trade. Most often its Sirens sing not of greed but of a universal material paradise--a world in which modern technology will banish poverty, war, and violence by providing everyone with a life of material comfort and luxury. Yer behind the promise lies a disturbing paradox. Although money-world institutions profit from the mass production and distribution of goods and services and are leading proponents of growth in production and consumption, scarcity plays a central role in their global quest for profit.

Any economist will happily tell us that scarcity creates values. Intelligent people pay money only for goods that are scarce. which has the greater real value: air or diamonds? Air is free, diamonds are pricey. Life says air, because we must have it to live, and provides it in abundance. Money says diamonds, because they are scarce, and its institutions limit supply to inflate the price.

That's the money world's little secret. Though it promises abundance, its preference is for scarcity--the source of its profits. If wastes contaminate our municipal water supplies and create a scarcity of potable water, the money world profits from the sale of bottled drinks. Where there is a scarcity of good public transit, it profits from cars, gasoline, and road building. when soil fertility declines, it sells us more fertilizer. Where jobs are scarce, it finds labor cheap. The money world thrives on scarcity, not abundance, and its greatest prize is a monopoly that allows it to restrict supply.

38 - Market theory, as articulated by Smith and those who subsequently elaborated on his ideas, developed into an elegant and coherent intellectual construction grounded in carefully articulated assumptions regarding the conditions under which such self-organizing processes would indeed lead to socially optimal outcomes. For example,

* Buyers and sellers must be too small to influence the market price

*Complete information must be available to all participants and there can be no trade secrets

39 - *Sellers must bear the full cost of the products they sell and pass them on at the sale price.

*Investment capital must remain within national borders and trade between countries must be balanced

*Savings must be invested in the creation of productive capital.

There is, however, a critical problem [. . .] Herein lies the catch: the conditions of what we currently call a capitalist economy directly contradict the assumptions of market theory in every instance.

Bear in mind that the optimally efficient market exists only as a theoretical construction. No economy has ever fully satisfied its assumptions and probably non ever will. The challenge facing those of us who would create an economy that approximates the market's promised outcomes of fair but modest returns to capital, full employment at a living wage, and socially optimal allocation of society's productive resources is to establish a framework of rules that create as closely as possible the conditions that market theory assumes.

Unsubstantiated Shit on the Historical Unity of Some Religions

2006-09-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

common suggestion, as articulated by biblical scholar Mark S. Smith in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, is that the Israelite Yahweh was derived from the traditions of the Shasu, linguistically Canaanite nomads from southern transjordan. An Egyptian inscription from the Temple of Amun at Karnak from the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BCE) refers to the "Shasu of Yhw," evidence that this god was worshipped among some of the Shasu tribes at this time. Biblical archaeologist Amihai Mazar, in Archaeology of the Land of the Bible Volume I, suggests that the association of Yahweh with the desert may be the product of his origins in the dry lands to the south of Israel. Egyptologist Donald Redford, in Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, suggests that the Israelites themselves may have been a group of Shasu who moved northward into Canaan in the 13th century BCE, appearing for the first time in the stele of Merenptah, and as Israel Finkelstein has shown in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts settled the Samarian and Judean hills at this time.Even Earlier there are signs that Yahweh was worshipped as Yah at Ebla (2,350 BCE) and as Yaw at Ugarit (1800-1200 BCE), where he was one of the Elohim (Canaanite 'lhm) - the sons of El. Jean Bottero in Mesopotamia:Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, suggests that Yah was the West Semitic version of the Akkadian God of Wisdom Ea, a name derived from the Sumerian E=house, A=water, a title given to the Sumerian God Enki. Yah and Ea were pronounced alike. Yahweh, like Ea was the creator of humankind, who saved the flood hero (Noah / Utnapishtim) from the flood.--Wikipedia, “Tetragrammaton”Many higher-level relationships between PIE and other language families have been proposed. Due to the great time depths, there is necessarily a great deal of speculation involved, and as a result the proposals are very controversial. Perhaps the most widely accepted proposal is of an Indo-Uralic family, encompassing PIE and Uralic. The evidence usually cited in favor of this is the proximity of the proposed Urheimaten of the two families, the typological similarity between the two languages, and a number of apparent shared morphemes. Frederik Kortlandt, while advocating a connection, concedes that "the gap between Uralic and Indo-European is huge", while Lyle Campbell, an authority of Uralic, denies any relationship exists. Other proposals, further back in time (and correspondingly less accepted), model PIE as a branch of Indo-Uralic with a Caucasian substratum; link PIE and Uralic with Altaic and certain other families in Asia, such as Korean, Japanese, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut (representative proposals are Nostratic and Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic); or link some or all of these to Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, etc., and ultimately to a single Proto-World family (nowadays mostly associated with Merritt Ruhlen). Various proposals, with varying levels of skepticism, also exist that join some subset of the putative Eurasiatic language families and/or some of the Caucasian language families, such as Uralo-Siberian, Ural-Altaic (once widely accepted but now largely discredited), Proto-Pontic, etc.Wikipedia, “Proto-Indo-European language”According to Russian painter and scholar Alex Fantalov, there are only five main archtypes for all gods and goddesses of all Indo-European mythologies[2], and quite possibly, these five archetypes were the original deities of ancient PIE pantheon. These, according to Fantalov, are:1. God of the Sky2. God of Thunder3. God of the Earth/Underworld4. Cultural Hero5. Great GoddessThe Sky and Thunder gods were heavenly deities, representing the ruling class of society, and in subsequent cultures they were often merged into a single supreme god. On the other hand, the Earth god and the Cultural Hero were earthly gods, tied to nature, agriculture and crafts, and in subsequent cultures they were often split into more deities as societies grew more complex. And while it seems there existed some enmity between the Thunderer and the God of the Earth (which may be echoed in myths about battle of various thunder gods and a serpentine enemy, see below), the Cultural Hero seems to be a sort of demigod son of either the Sky God or the Thunder God, and was considered to be the ancestor of the human race, and the psychopomp. Together with the character of Great Goddess, who was a wife of the ruling Sky God,Wikipedia, “Proto-Indo-European religion”A proto-Sinaitic mine inscription from Mount Sinai reads ’ld‘lm understood to be vocalized as ’il dū ‘ôlmi, 'Ēl Eternal' or 'God Eternal'.The Egyptian god Ptah is given the title dū gitti 'Lord of Gath' in a prism from Lachish which has on its opposite face the name of Amenhotep II (c. 1435–1420 BCE) The title dū gitti is also found in Serābitṭ text 353. Cross (1973, p. 19) points out that Ptah is often called the lord (or one) of eternity and thinks it may be this identification of Ēl with Ptah that lead to the epithet ’olam 'eternal' being applied to Ēl so early and so consistently. (However in the Ugaritic texts Ptah is seemingly identified instead with the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis.)Wikipedia, “El (god)”This is a partial list of possible Proto-Semitic deities.· *Il-Āh (Supreme God, see El, Elyon, Elohim and Allah)· *Ad' (Storm God, see Adad, Hadad, Adonai and Adonis.o Ba'al and Bel may have been aspects of *Ad', possibly in the form of a fertility god.· There was also a mother goddess (See Astarte, Ashtoreth, Asshur and Ishtar)According to Russian painter and scholar Alex Fantalov, there are only five main archtypes for all gods and goddesses of all Indo-European mythologies[2], and quite possibly, these five archetypes were the original deities of ancient PIE pantheon. These, according to Fantalov, are:1. God of the Sky2. God of Thunder3. God of the Earth/Underworld4. Cultural HeroGeneticsThe rise of Archaeogenetic evidence which uses genetic analysis to trace migration patterns also added new elements to the puzzle. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, one of the first in this field, recently used genetic evidence to in some ways combine Gimbutasʼ and Colin Renfrewʼs theories together. Here Renfrewʼs agricultural settlers, moving north and west, partially split off eventually to become Gimbutasʼ Kurgan culture which moves into Europe.In any case, developments in genetics take away much of the edge of the sometimes heated controversies about invasions. They indicate a strong genetic continuity in Europe; specifically, studies by Brian Sykes show that some 80% of the genetic stock of Europeans goes back to the Paleolithic, suggesting that languages tend to spread geographically by cultural contact rather than by invasion and extermination, i.e. much more peacefully than was described in some invasion scenarios, and thus the genetic record does not rule out the historically much more common type of invasions where a new group assimilates the earlier inhabitants (e.g. Romans in Southern Europe, Britons in Brittany, Arabs in North Africa, Slavs in Russia, Chinese in Southern China, Spanish in Mexico and Turks in Anatolia, etc.). This very common scenario of successive small scale invasions where a ruling nation imposed its language and culture on a larger indigenous population was what Gimbutas had in mind:The Process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of imposing a new administrative system, language and religion upon the indigenous groups.On the other hand, such results also gave rise to a new incarnation of the "European hypothesis" suggesting the Indo-European languages to have existed in Europe since the Paleolithic (see Paleolithic Continuity Theory).“Proto-Indo-Europeans”
Neolithic religionFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchThe Neolithic religion is the hypothetical religion believed by the people in the Neolithic period in the Levant and Europe, and probably related to the Indoeuropean and Semitic religions.Deities and SpiritsThese are the possible Deities, Spirits and other characters from Neolithic Mythology. The Mother Goddess seems to be the Supreme deity (see Venus figurines).DeitiesMother Goddess: Indo-European: *Dg'hōm (Earth Goddess), Semitic: Atiratu (fertility goddess)Sky God: Indo-European: *Dyeus (sky God), Semitic: *Ilu (sky god)Thunder God: Indo-European: *Perkwunos / *Tarun, Semitic: *Haddu / *Ba'lu God of Death and the Underworld: Indo-European: *Yemnos, Semitic: Yaw Sun Goddess in Sun Boat: Indo-European: *Sawelyosyo, Semitic: *Śamšu, Pre-Indo-European: See Stonehenge Moon God: Indo-European: *Ménot, Semitic: *WarihuLesser SpiritsMinor Spirits*: Indo-European: Pan / Faunus, Cernunnos, Brownie, Domovoi, Tomte, Genii, Nymph, Faeries, Semitic: Jinn, Se'irim, Teraphim, Tawaret & Bes (Egyptian)Serpent: Indo-European: Jörmungandr, Typhon, Vrtra, Veles, Illuyanka, Semitic: Tiamat, Lotan, Tannin, Pre-Indo-European: See Ley lines (possibly related)*The spirits were of Household and Nature spirits.Others'Earth-Man': Indo-European: Manu (from *Dg'hōm-on, sometimes a god), Semitic: Adapas and `Adamu (from *`Dm)Axis mundi: Indo-European: World tree, Mount Olympus, Semitic: Trees of Knowledge and Life in Eden, Mount Sinai, see also Daniel 4:10-12 (possibly a Babylonian version)Motifs in Neolithic MythologyThe TwinsThese are two twins, one is sacrificed (Remus, Tuisto, Abel, Osiris) and becomes the God of Death, the other sacrifced his twin (Romulus, Mannus, Cain, Seth) and starts mankind. They are the sons of the supreme god.Indo-European mythologies have Yemnos and Manu - Romulus and Remus (Roman), Castor and Pollux (Greek), Tuisto and Mannus (Germanic).Semitic mythologies have Cain and Abel (Hebrew) , Lahmu and Lahamu (Mesopotamian). In Egyptian mythology Seth and Osiris may be related.The Thunder God's EpithetIn Neolithic mythology, the Thunder god is probably the (if not one of few) gods that have an epithet to their name. In Indo-European, *Perkwunos had the epithet *Tarun, so Perkwunos Tarun meant The thundering Striker. In Semitic, *Haddu had the epithet *Ba'lu, so Haddu Ba'lu meant The Thunder lordWikipedia, "Neolithic Religion"
http://fantalov.tripod.com/idea.htm http://www.ceisiwrserith.com/pier/whatwasreligion.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic(thing with Il-Ah, etc, from “Semitic gods”)http://www.historyofreligions.com/forum1.htm http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/ancient/aryan/aryan_frawley_1.html http://www.eblaforum.org/library/bcah/intbibarch05.html
http://www.scn.org/rdi/kw-3so.htm http://afrikaworld.net/afrel/http://afrikaworld.net/afrel/goddionah.htm http://www.ucalgary.ca/~nurelweb/books/atoms/fred.html

------------------------------------More on Africa, from Wikipedia: These sites are more political than religious per se, but where else am I going to put these links?:
from "Africa", Wikipedia:

Africa Action Africa Action is the oldest organization in the United States working on African affairs. It is a national organization that works for political, economic and social justice in Africa.African Anarchism: The History of a Movement An Irish anarchist in Africa, western Africa from anarchist perspective.Commission for Africa African Unification Front Working class history in Africa -- people's and grassroots histories
And stuff from Wikipedia's "Economy of Africa" (again, where else to put it?):
Africa: Living on the Fringe - Monthly Review. Samir Amin offers a Marxist analysis of Africa's continued economic crisis.Africa's Failed Economic History - Yale Economic ReviewLending Africa an Invisible Hand - Yale Economic ReviewBBC: Africa's Economy Africa Economic Analysis World Economic Forum - Africa African Development Bank Group IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) -- September 2003 -- Public Debt in Emerging Markets Language and Africa

2006-09-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

Brooks, David. 10 Sept. 2006. "Populist myths behind income inequality." Akron Beacon Journal. Page B2. Brooks, David. 12 Sept. 2006. "Human capital is the smart investment." Akron Beacon Journal. Page B2.Chapman, Steve. [date unknown - before Sept. 5]. "Paternalism without the nanny state." Akron Beacon Journal. Page B2.Dykman, Jackson and Karen Tumulty. 18 Sept. 2006. "Why Voters (and Politicians) Are Anxious." Time. Page 36.Hoy, George. 16 Aug. 2006. "The rich don't work harder." Akron Beacon Journal. Page B3.Kiviat, Barbara. 7 Aug. 2006. "The Big Deals Wheel Again." Time. Pages 50-51.Krugman, Paul. 11 Sept. 2006. "Economy's apologists lost touch with reality."Akron Beacon Journal. Page B2.Raum, Tom. 8 May 2006. "Economy a political football? Go figure." Akron Beacon Journal. Pages A1 and A6.Roberts, Cokie and Steven V. Roberts. 10 Sept. 2006. "Storefronts instead of high rises." Wooster Daily Record. Page A4.Schleis, Paula and David Knox. 1 Sept. 2006. "Middle class gets poorer." Akron Beacon Journal. Pages A1 and A5."Time Poll Christians Reflect On." 18 Sept. 2006. Time. Page 56.Zmyslinski, Bruce. 12 Sept. 2006. "Sticking it to the middle class." Akron Beacon Journal. Page B2.

Excerpts from a Nonexistent Book in the Appendix of a Real Book

2006-09-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

On August 14, 2005, I had just finished reading "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, and I was going to type in an excerpt from one of the trilogy's appendices (actually the appendices in the final book of the trilogy, which i read in an edition that combined them into one book). This appendix purports to be an excerpt from a fictional book written by one of the fictional characters in the trilogy. However, by dumb luck I happened to find the same exact text I wanted to type in online already, on Robert Anton Wilson's website. The fictional book is called "Never Whistle While You're Pissing," a title that refers to the Buddhist-ish idea of concentrating fully on doing one thing at a time. I should mention that when I re-discovered this link and decided to post it here, I was eating lunch at the computer, effectively not concentrating fully on eating like in the potato-chip meditation. I'm still not too sure about that whole no-multi-tasking thing, but that's not the point. The point is you should read this:

http://www.rawilson.com/whistlepiss.html

Also, there's this, which is in a different appendix of the trilogy. Didn't record the pages -- sorry:

--------------------------------------

APPENDIX ZAIN: PROPERTY AND PRIVILEGE

Property is theft —P. J. PROUDHON

Property is liberty. —P. J. PROUDHON

Property is impossible. —P. J. PROUDHON

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction "property" covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists and examine his triad with subscripts attached for maximum clarity.

"Property1 is theft" means that property1, created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on armed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property1; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.

"Property2 is liberty" means that property2 , that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people's interests are comingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other's toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly "This is mine and this is thine," and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by all parties to it, can true independence be achieved.

"Property3 is impossible" means that property3 (= property1) creates so much conflict of interest that society is in perpetual undeclared civil war and must eventually devour itself (and properties1 and 3 as well). In short, Proudhon, in his own way, foresaw the Snafu Principle. He also foresaw that communism would only perpetuate and aggravate the conflicts, and that anarchy is the only viable alternative to this chaos.It is not averred, of course, that property3 will come into existence only in a totally voluntary society; many forms of it already exist. The error of most alleged libertarians— especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand— is to assume that all property1 is property2. The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, "Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of a State to force people to honor it?" If it be the former, it is property? and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property1 and represents theft.

Excerpts from "When Corporations Rule the World" by David C. Korten

2006-09-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

Page 113 - From 1977 to 1989, the average real income of the top 1 percent of U.S. families increased by 78 percent, whereas that of the bottom 20 percent decreased by 10.4 percent. [16]

Thus the pooerest among us became not only relatively poorer but absolutely poorer. What these figures don't tell us is that these absolute decreases occurred in spite of the fact that those who were employed in 1989 were working longer hours than they had in 1977, and far more families had two people working full time as more women entered the workforce. For many U.S. families among the bottom 60 percent, even longer hours and an extra breadwinner were not enough to make up for the decline in wages.

Notes page 349 -- 16. Mishel and Bernstein, The State of Working America, 46; based on data from the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, 1991. Figures are in 1992 dollars.[Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein, The State of Working America: 1992-1993 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993).]

Page 207 - ... when markets are global, the forces of monopoly transcend national borders to consolidate at a global level. As soon as borders are opened, the pressure mounts to allow domestic firms to merge into ever more powerful combinations in order to be "competitive" in the global marketplace ...As a rule of thumb, economists consider a domestic market to be monopolistic* when the four top firms account for 40 percent or more of sales. Through a series of mergers and consolidations, the top four major appliance corporations in the United States (Whirlpool, General Electric, Electrolux/WCI, and Maytag) controlled 92 percent of the U.S. appliance market as of 1990, and four airlines (United, American**, Delta, and Northwest) accounted for 66 percent of U.S. revenue passenger miles. Four computer software companies (Microsoft, lotus, novell/Digital, and WordPerfect) controlled 55 percent of the U.S. software market in 1990, and two of them (Novell and WordPerfect) merged on June 27, 1994. [6]

When five firms control more than half of a global market, that market is considered to be highly monopolistic. The Economist recently reorted five-firm concentration ratios for twelve global industries. The greatest concentration was found in consumer durables, where the top five firms control nearly 70 percent of the entire world market in their industry. In the automotive, airline, aerospace, electronic components, electrical and electronics, and steel industries, the top five firms control more than 50 percent of the global market, placing them in the monopolistic category. In the oil, personal computers, and media industries, the top five firms control more than 40 percent of sales, which shows strong monopolistic tendencies. [7]

The argument that globalization increases competition is simply false. To the contrary, it strengthens tendencies toward global-scale monopoly.

Notes from page 357 -- 6. "The Age of Consolidation," Business Week, October 14, 1991, 86-94. "Making the Perfect Connection," WordPerfect Report, Summer/Fall 1994, 2.7. These estimates are from "A Survey of Multinationals: Everybody's Favourite Monsters," The Economist, March 27, 1993 (special supplement), 17.

*[I assume Korten means oligopolistic, since it's not just one but a few firms - JH]

** [My father is a pilot for American Airlines. Formerly he had been a pilot for Trans World Airlines (TWA) before American bought that company. -- JH]

From "The Redneck Manifesto' by Jim Goad

2006-09-15T16:23:00.000-07:00

The following comes from a book called "The Redneck Manifesto: America's Scapegoats: How We Got That Way and Why We're Not Going to Take It Anymore," by Jim Goad, 1997, Simon & Schuster. I must point out that i do NOT agree with everything Goad says here. i do agree with a good portion of it, though. i won't go through here which parts i do and don't agree with, but basically i thought both the stuff i agree and disagree with are relevant to put here. i find what may be inconsistencies and i suspect Goad has read his Nietzsche (oogly-boogly!) and applied it only to the "priests" instead of both the priests and the underclass, as Nietzsche did.Specifically, this comes from Chapter 10, pages 231-255, called "Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals." Before we begin, i should mention that i myself, Justin Hart, should probably be counted among the white liberals, not because i am all that party-line liberal, but because i am sort of bleeding-heart feed-the-poor liberal hypocrite in instinct, fairly affluent by birth, and a major wuss.

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Goad, Jim. 1997. "The Redneck Manifesto: America's Scapegoats: How We Got That Way and Why We're Not Going to Take It Anymore," Simon & Schuster.

[232] ... I find myself unclassifiable politically. People ask me where I stand, and I say, "Anywhere you aren't standing." I'm not too keen on human nature. I think that anyone, given power, acts like an oppressor. I believe in an equality of corruptibility. I'm not pure. I'm corruptible. What did you have in mind? I have a hunch that the Grim Reaper isn't a liberal, although he is an equal-opportunity employer. I hope I'm wrong about all this. And even if I'm right, I suspect I'll be blamed.I've often wondered how one becomes credentialed to be a social critic. Most writers have extremely poor social skills. That's why they

[233] write. It's true that most social critics have appalling social lives. I am no exception. In my case, it's social criticism from a sociopath. I'm pushing for Enlightened Sociopathy. Maybe that's my political agenda.Part of my job is to ensure that this book gets misinterpreted the RIGHT way. so I'll predict some of the blatant ways that book reviewers will decontextualize my words to fit their framework ...When not accusing me of being a talentless hog-slopper, the criticism will either hinge on my "privilege" or my "bigotry" or my "fear." I'll be called an extremist, but that's not so bad, considering the middle. They'll continually try to ally me with the "right wing," although I steadfastly claim to be wingless ... They'll say I'm merely trying to offend. Why would I have to try? Most people wake up in the morning offended. They go to sleep offended. Trying to offend them would be like trying to make them breathe. I have better things to do

[234] with my time. I realize they'll get pissed off, and yet I blame their sensitivity rather than my obnoxiousness.They'll use whatever tage that makes them feel as if I've been safely defused and pigeonhold and compartmentalized and debunked. They'll ...The only risk, as I see it, is that they'll actually like me. That could be trouble.Liberal bastards.Whoa, hold your horses, Nellie--I realize that the word "liberal" is often booted around in a knee-jerking, reactionary way. When I say "liberal," I'm not using coded speech because I really want to say "gay" or "Jew" or "black" or "female" instead. Your sexual preference, religion, country of origin, and genitalia bore me to tears. If you though I was losing sleep over any of these things, I'm sorry to disappoint. The word "liberal," as I'm using it, isn't meant to imply anything other than someone who identifies himself or herself as a liberal. Since I don't believe in the tangible existence of "left" and "right," I don't believe liberals actually exist. The problem is that liberals believe they exist.Liberalism, like obscenity, is in the eye of the beholder. Because I criticize liberals, some binary brain automatically register me as a conservative. If the marble doesn't fall on the left, it HAS to fall on the right. What neither liberals nor conservatives comprehend is that anyone could be anything other than a liberal or a conservative. Liber-

[235] als and conservatives are two ass cheeks surrounding the same hairy bunghole. Constipervative. Liberrhea. They need each other.Conservatism is a bedtime story believe in only by fat old grizzly bears. I don't identify at all with conservatives. They're varicose-veined manneqins. Blow-dried crash-test dummies. Middle of the roadkill. Walking around as if they forgot to remove the coat hanger from their suit jacket. You had mentioned the huckleberry-pie, fuddy-duddy, Burl Ives, Choo-Choo Charlie, psychoevangelical, anal-rententive, hanging-judge-loving, sex-fearing, missile-worshipping, Satan-obsessed, xenophobic, law-abiding, abortion-clinic-bombing, flag-draping, kill-for-Christ, deport-the-Arabs, bash-the-queers, horn-swoggler type? It ain't me. People think that if you attack liberalism, you must be a straw-hat-and-seersucker-suit-clad old puff of flatulence. I don't think so. Limbaugh is Limburger to me. Reagan was a dopey thespian who nearly nuked the planet. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed are as useless as testicle cheese. I don't like churches or book-burnings or witch-hunts. I don't like crowds, period. I hate both liberals and conservatives. I have plenty of hate to go around.Some people probably assume I was born a shit-kicker and never cleaned off my boots. They presume I've never pondered the liberal platform's glorious wisdom and that I'd see the light if I opened my eyes JUST ONCE. Funny thing, I used to identify myself as a liberal. I used to be one of THEM. I'm a recovering liberal. That's what makes me such a slippery eel. If I seem unnecessarily angry with American liberalism, it's because I feel betrayed by it. I'm mad at white liberalism like I'm mad at Christianity--because it's a lie that I once believed. These days, I hate liberalism with the ferocity of a vengeful ex-lover. I'm a STALKER of liberalism.After a while . . . NO, I just didn't have the same endlessly lachrymose resovoirs of compassion that they did. I had my own problems. But just to be an asshole, I was a liberal throughout the eighties. There seemed to be no other choice during the time. Everyone was a conservative, so I veered the other way. The eighties will go down as one of the worst decades in American history. Everyone pretended. Perceived status was more important than reality. Lifestyles of the Rich

[236] and Famous and infomericals. Greedy and empty. Multiplexes and malls and scented potpourri and ATM machines. A cold time. icy synthesizer dance music, jingoistic flag-waving, and the Moral Majority ... That faceless pestilence known as the yuppies. I hated it all. After working a nighttime job in Manhattan, I'd pass the POVERTY SUCKS posters and smirking preppy society-brat New York magazine covers at newsstands. Down in the basement at Port Authority bus terminal at two A.M. , it was a much different world. Homeless women dragging rags, smelling like barrels of rotted potato peels. A man calmly lighting a crack pipe while waiting for a bus to Jersey. A guy running around waving a needle in his hand, threatening to spike people with AIDS. Realizing there was social chaos beneath all the yuppie pretense, there was no way I'd buy the conservative line of bullshit. In targeting the poor, conservatism pointed a finger at those who weren't to blame. But the liberals eventually lost me, too. They pointed a finger at me, and I wasn't to blame, either. I started losing faith in liberalism when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come form a more privileged socioeconomic background than I did. I got sick of their middle-class hypocrisy that shed tears for the black "struggle" while laughing at my white-trash roots. If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjected to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park full of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke. I've heard ideological Marxists scream about capitalistic exploitation all while gleefully exploiting their parents' economic generosity. City kids living on their attorney parents' trust funds howling that rural rednecks are the oppressors. I tired of "anarchists" whose mommies paid the bills. They can't even kick their coke habit, and yet they claim to know what's best for the world. They still wear the lobster bibs of cultural entitlement, no matter how they try to hide it. With all the intestine-scrubbing granola they ate, they STILL acted as if there was something stuck up their ass. Could it be that CLASS is what's stuck up their ass? Let's take a peek inside a coffeehouse of white liberals. Esspresso

[237] hipsters. Gentrified radicals. Earth Shoe-wearing, burlap-clad conformist shitheels. Bean-sprout totalitarians. Bleeding hearts. Postnasal drio. Diarrhea pudding. Mealy-mouthed macrobiotic mouse-haired mendicants. Insufferable sufferers. Pinched faces sipping chamomile tea. Each anus clenched tightly enough to cut diamonds. So uptight, it's a wonder their heads don't pop off their shoulders and fly around. Major-league victims. Self-pitying pukes. Unethical moralists. Mean-spirited peaceniks. Doe-eyed, self-important drones. Ideologically as rigid as an ironing board. Just a bore. CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING. Close your eyes and deny everything. EMPOWERMENT. Complaining more loudly than usual. NEW AGE. Old superstition. GODDESS IS COMING. She'd better douche this time. VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE. A global lobotomy. PEOPLE OF COLOR. Do you mean colored people? STOP THE HATE. Honey, I ain't even STARTED hatin'. It's Liberal Pentecost--everyone in the coffeehouse has a holy flame dancing atop their head. Meek little worms wriggling on a fish hook of sensitivity. A delicate web of frightened arachnids. Crippled Waster Bunnies bleeding on the roadside. Skateboarders for racial equality. Surfers against hunger. Mansion-owning crusaders against homelessness. It's all flaky pastry and fine cheese. The bourgeois masquerading as the oppressed. Their little marches and candlelight ceremonies and boycotts. Their false, self-generated sense of stylistic oppression. Sitting there with their thumbs in their asses, they've convinced themselves they're making a difference. Over near a huge glass of chocolate-covered coffee beans stands a stack of free alternative weekly newspapers. No doubt ... This week (like last week) the editors are outraged that women workers only make seventy cents compared to every dollar that men make. But they never mention

[238] that rural workers suffer similar economic disparities compared to city dwellers. Or that Southern incomes have always been much lower than those in the North... The artists are clueless. They've never had the slightest idea how to rule the world. That's why they're artists. It's "revolution" as conceived by Hollywood brats rather than the working class. Clove cigarettes and patchouli oil and black lipstick and rubber whips. Smelly

[239] armpits and vegetable breath. Tongue piercings and ironic comments about Saturday-morning cartoon shows. The girls with backpacks and Edith Prickley horn-rimmed glasses. The boys with dirt-blond Julius Caesar haircuts and fuzzball-laden old sweaters. Inarticulate slacker pop-culture inbreds. Crumpled tinfoil and a scab on the lip. Stuttering autism as genius. Compassion as fashion. Meaningful emptiness. Scratch-and-sniff attitudinal posturing. All butter, no potato. All frosting, no cake. The hipsters have been entirely subsumed into the Uber-culture. Their "rebellion" is fashion-ad posery, a million skulls with green crewcuts and no brains inside. Their "culture" is merely a syncretic jumble of received media images. Their ideas of "freedom" are pruely a fashion show--freedom to suck cock, smoke crack, and wear loud clothing. Consensual enemas and purple hair and iron cock rings are just dandy, but they're kinda hard to enjoy when you can't put food on the table. Yessiree, Buffalo Bob, they really have tamed the post-Woodstock kiddies with bread and circuses. For much longer than I care to remember, the "counterculture" has been ... The rotten produce of post-World War II prosperity, taking money from their parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other. While the angriest segment of society--and thus the most disillusioned, open to new ideas, and most potentially creative--was stinking up the assembly line with its bone-snapping labor, the leisure-class art geeks tossed out frilly satirical lead balloons, weighted by irony and one-hundred-percent substance-free. And this counterculture congratulated itself on its unbending sympathy for oppressed peoples everywhere--everywhere, that is, but the traler parks across the tracks on the other side of town. White liberals will recycle anythign but white trash. Their "alternative lifestyles" never include being a redneck. Punk rockers, whose entire schtick rested on making people sick, were themselves nauseated by the hilbillies. After the Sex Pistols toured the South in 1978, guitarist Steve Jones lamented that the experience had been "like Deliverance." Iggy Pop's self-mutilation and G.G. Allin's coprophagy were

[240] somehow palatable, but rednecks were just too disgusting. Even thought white-liberal Punky Brewsters proposed grotesquerie as an aesthetic paradigm, white trash seemed just too repulsive for them to stomach. The liberal only goes halfway. Liberal dribbles. Limp noodles. Happy doobles. French poodles. Yolkless eggs. The white liberal wants to be hard-hitting, but he doesn't want to offend the advertisers. He wants to ride the rollar coaster, but he doesn't want to muss his hair. He pretends to enjoy trash, but he won't get his hands dirty. He craves excitement, but he doesn't want to get a heart attack. The white liberal eschews all forms of extremism. It's too bad that he lives in an extreme world. I wonder when a five-mile-an-hour wind will come and blow him away. Children of pain. The enshrinement of the victim. The victim pinned to velvet-covered cardboard like a butterfly in a science-fair project, unable ever to wriggle free. Pity the young white liberal who tries to sleep atop a stack of twenty matresses, flapping and flailing about his Princess and the Pea-sized problems. And it's people such as this who've woven the myth of the Angry White Male and have accused him of whining. That's right--white American liberals, one of the whiniest, most protected classes in earth's history, have the Rocky Mountain-sized gallstones to accuse your average Spam-eating ditchdigger of whining. Listen, Bucky Beaver, I'm aware that anyone can whine, including Angry White Males. I've whined. I can bear to hear my own whining for a while, but even I can't stand it after a point. That's why this is the last chapter. But white liberals really are in no place to cast judgment about whininess. They NEVER TIRE of hearing themselves whine. Liberal muralists will portray the archetypal "whiny white guy" with a fishing rod and a CAT tractor hat. interesting that you don't hear so much about the whiny entertainment lawyer or the whiny civil-rights activist. Or the whiny alternative-weekly writer. Or the whiny art-gallery owners ... They don't think performance artists can whine about being denied NEA grants to stick yams up their asses, but Angry White Males are somehow throwing temper tantrums about being taxed and worked to

[241] death. At least the white boys are "whining" about losing jobs and economic exploitation, rather than naughty words and fashion mistakes ... Complaining is bad enough. Party-line piety is unforgivable. The white liberal is an unsavory hybrid of Joseph Stalin and Mother Teresa. Too many rules mixing with too much righteousness... They've somehow convinced themselves that if they aren't members of the "Christian right," this makes it IMPOSSIBLE for them to be uptight, censorious meddlers in others' affairs. Liberalism, for all its self-conscious distancing from Bible-thumpers, fulfills the same sort of masochistic impulse as does classic Christianity. The average liberal's intentions are probably no more or less pure than your average idiot Christian's and about equally as misguided ... Liberals are as simplistically fearful of (and naive about) racism, sexism, and homophobia as Christians are about Satanism, communism, and pornography ... Liberals are right about one thing: "Politically incorrect" is a shopworn phrase that implies that only leftists can be humorless ideologues. So instead of the overused "PC," I prefer "self-righteous" or "ideologically constipated," because such terms can apply to any asshole in

[242] the cosmos. But like all other starry-eyed Pious Creeps, white liberals willsay they're not being self-righteous, they're just DOING THE RIGHT THING. So do the right thing. Go home. Your life is in shambles. Clean up your own nest before you try to save the spotted owl. It'd help matters if white liberals actually WERE correct. But they blame anger when they should blame frustration. They blame whiteness when they should blame greed. They blame maleness when they should blame power. Instead of dismantling the very architecture of bigotry, they merely slap on a new coat of paint ...

[243] ... When you begin slicing through a liberal's flimsy cellophane ideology, his true inner meanness--hardly liberal--is revealed. It would seem strange for a King Crab such as myself to chide ANYONE for being mean. It isn't liberals' meanness per se, it's that they seem entirely unaware of it. Or if aware, they try to bury it under some ennobling excuse. My objection is to their pretense of sweetness. If they came to terms with their meanness, they might actually be fun. But like a stagnant pond is clogged with slime, the liberal is FILLED with hate, because his ideology doesn't allow him to express and release it. There are plenty of things that liberals hate, they just can't bring themselves to use that awful word. The liberal's main problem isn't that he's an asshole, it's that he can't come to terms with it. Liberals aren't evil, they're merely misguided human beings adhering to a code that denies them their humanity ...

[246] ... The Guilty White Male fears admitting exactly WHERE his heartfelt compassion ends and his instinctual self-preservation begins. Because you know it's somewhere ... he projects this fear of protential violence onto the Angry White Male. At the bottom of everything, the Guilty White Male fears confronting the fact that rednecks mostly exist in a social class BENEATH him. Hipness is a luxury. Being white trash isn't. Even by using the rules of liberalism--victims are saints--the redneck beats the white liberal. Ideologically, the Guilty White Male is down with the program; materially, he's still a filthy-rich imperialist Yankee hyena. His "shame of being white" is more a osrt of cutesy atavistic role-playing than anything tangible. He'll write bighearted articles about the homeless, but he won't offer his spare bedroom. He's tortured with guilt about his relative leisure and affluence compared to most indigenous peoples worldwide, yet he's not quick to pawn his cozy condo and Pentium chip in order to air-drop corn meal to the starving Pakistani peasantry. He's outraged about the oppression of blacks, but he isn't moving into the black slums, at least not this year. He feels terrible that the land was stolen from the Indians, but it doesn't appear as if he's giving it back anytime soon. Why doesn't Mr. Multicultural give all his cool toys back to the Injuns? Because that would release him from guilt, and he likes to live in guilt. His guilt serves a definite psychological purpose for him, and he wouldn't ever want to get rid of it. The Guilty White Male takes pride in his own shame. But guilt only serves the guilty. Ever wonder why comfy urban white liberals feel such guilt about history and rural rednecks don't? They whire liberal's guilt pangs have little to do with noble contrition; his guilt reflects an uncomfortable sense of his place in the historic order. If he feels so guilty . . . well, maybe he should. Maybe his guilt is real. Maybe that's why rednecks and blacks feel no guilt, while white liberals are stricken with it. Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, would have

[247] been a white liberal were she alive today. Her problem wasn't that she criticized black slavery in the South, it was that she was a wealthy New England society chippie who ignored all the mangled white factory workers and bruised white kiddie laborers huddled right outside the debutante ball. She was a Northern aristocrat who scolded Southern aristocrats for how they treated their underclass, yet she defecated on the underclass in her own hometown... The modern white liberal is the same way. he can't get along with the downtrodden among his own race, but he wants to prove how open-minded he is by getting along with blacks. It's suffering as viewed through the thick lens of a society matron's monocle. It's just table-lace art patronage, as it's always been. In their eagerness to help oppressed peoples across the ocean, they leapfrog right over white trash in their own pond. Starving children in India. Starving children

[248] in Africa. starving children everywhere but Appalachia. Think globally, ignore white trash locally ... Oh, these liberal kids and their vicarious oppression. Oceans of compassion from the fat-free hearts of trust-fund babies. Their love for Native Americans extends to buying Navajo jewelry and handbags. Their Holocaust reparations consist of a Sunday-morning bialy roll with butter. Their empathy for blacks is represented by an extensive collection of Motown CDs. The Guilty White Male seems to believe that blacks will appreciate his benevolent smile and conciliatory attitude and how much he hates his own skin. The Guilty White Male thinks his Michael Jordan posters and Maya Angelou books are all that's needed for appeasement. His negrophilism seems to be nothing beyond a fashion statement, almost a way of accessorizing. It's black pride without ever having to endure the downsides of being black. Ultimately, it's a way for bland white people to feel connected to the oppressed. Not to BE connected, but to feel it. A safe, packaged form of negrophilism. Freeze-dried instant-coffee negrophilism. It's convenient. He can take it along for a snack. And he'd last about five minutes in a black ghetto. The blunt-edged fact is that most guilty white liberals and proud

[249] American blacks have next to NOTHING in common. Nothing culturally. Nothing economically. Don't live in the same neighborhoods. Different belief systems. Different sensitivities. They find different things funny. They don't even breathe the same air most of the time. The bittersweet truth is that while white liberals may love black people, on could hardly say the opposite is true. That's the classic jokeof white liberalism: the self-negating, shirt-rending white person making clumsy entreaties to a crowd of blacks who don't cotton to negrophiles and might even call him a punk-ass honky to his face. Be careful whom you wish to uplift, for they may just uplift themselves. Many black radicals correctly discern the self-serving tenor of most white-liberal "philanthropy." They're tired of white liberals telling them how to be black. And I'm tired of white liberals telling me how NOT to be white ...

[250] ... Historically, the Guilty White Male has suffered a lot less than has the Angry White Male. So now it's Mr. Guilty's turn. He whimpers so much about an oppression which seems nonexistent in his life, it almost makes you want to oppress him. Being liberated and empowered has only seemed to make him cranky. Why not punish the Guilty White Male with all the angst he so deeply want to feel? The white liberal craves cinematic pain. Literary suffering. I think he deserves better. A bit of true pain to complement his fantasies. The kind I've always known. Pain ain't a thing to me. beat me up, I wipe myself off and walk away. But pain is something the white liberal either fears (when it's near) or fetishizes (when it's someone else's). I say give him a full taste of the oppression he's jonesin' for. Drag him through all the progressive beauty he finds in the Third World experience. Everyone might be happy that way. Therefore, I propose that all white liberals should be forced to pick cotton and tobacco. Chain and stuff them together in the holds to galley ships. Send all white liberals to Africa to work on plantations. They should endure all the pains of slave life except forcible rape, because that would only validate their feminist fantasies. I suggest that white liberals be herded into concentration camps in which they're forced NOT to take showers. In a white-liberal prison camp, they'd all feel each other's pain (and body funk) together. They'd love it. Or just make them WORK for a change. Put them in Moonie jumpsuits and make them pick up trash along the highway. I'd like to see white liberals as apartment-house doormen and elementary-school janitors. White liberals as shoeshine boys and bellhops and migrant workes. The editors of the Village Voice working in a chain gang. Forced all performance artists to work as sharecroppers and lumberjacks. Make drag queens labor as coal miners in the true underground. Make Hollywood liberals DRIVE limousines for a change. They should be forced to live in the hills for a year without electricity and running water before they make fun of hillbillies. Let them plow a farm for a year and then come back with bestiality jokes. Maybe white

[251] liberals should be sent off to die in war while rednecks stay at home and protest. Let's have some sensitivity training that makes sense. And perhaps some humiliating role reversal to complete the treatment. I envisiona 1990s version of Watermelon Man or Black Like Me--an urban liberal yuppie wakes up one morning as a toothless rural hillbilly and finds that he can't change. Maybe white liberals should be forced to perform in whiteface, humiliating themselves to the delight of all-black audiences. I'd like to see a minstrel show where penitent white liberals perform "Puff the Magic Dragon" and other sixties folk songs while rowdy Negro hecklers throw rotted fruit at them. I have nothing against white liberals. Everyone should own one. Maybe it's wrong to wish that they suffer. Maybe that's just what they want. Maybe the most sadistic thing would be to wish them a long, happy life. Maybe they shouldn't be murdered. Maybe they should just walk around saddled with the living knowledge of what shallow pains in the ass they are. They shouldn't be killed, but dog leashes aren't out of the question. They shouldn't be exterminated. But they HAVE to be sterilized. Since they're as literal-minded as your average fundamentalist Republican Elks Club member, they'll probably think I'm REALLY calling for the seizrue and arrest of anyone with liberal politics. maybe they'll think my words constitute actual hate speech that directly incites brutality against white liberals. A man can dream, can't he?

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[After I typed out the excerpts from Jim Goad's book "The Redneck Manifesto," I found out on the internet that Goad got out of prison a while ago, where he had served time for beating his wife and beating his girlfriend. Of course, it's going to make me sound like one of Goad's hated white liberals if I state here that I disapprove of beating women; suffice to say that I strongly disapprove. However, Goad still makes enough good points in his book to warrant the excerpt here and for me to put a link to his website in the "links" section of my blog. -- JH ]

Counteracting hatred -- excerpts from "Why We Hate" by Rush Dozier, Jr.

2006-09-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

Dozier, Jr., Rush. 2002. "Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing, and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World." Contemporary Books.

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31 - The flood of recent scientific insights into the nature of our emotions suggests a set of ten strategies that, when used in tandem, could prevent hate from ever developing and minimize or eliminate hate where it takes hold. The strategies are be specific, empathize, communicate, negotiate, educate, cooperate, put things in perspective, avoid feeling trapped, immerse yourself, and seek justice not revenge ...First, be specific--in other words, identify any source of anger, pain, or threat with as much specificity and detail as possible ...

32 - This approach is critically important with children ...Second, develop and us-us orientation, which requires you to try to empathize with others, even those with whom you have little or no natural sympathy. Empathy is not the same as sympathy. Through empathy we seek to understand--not justify--another person's thoughts and feelings ...There is a growing body of evidence that the brain is remarkably like a muscle. The more its capacities are exercised, the more they strengthen ...When violence or war is unavoidable, an empathetic us-us perspective promotes reconciliation afterward.

33 - Third, simply communicating the specific reasons that you feel angry or threatened can help dissipate negative emotions. The important point, again, is to be specific ...Fourth, beyong simple communication, whenever possible seek to negotiate constructively and specifically to resolve sources of conflict and anger.
Fifth, educate yourself and others ... The more specific the knowledge you have about an individual, group, or culture, for example, the less likely you are to fall into stereotypes, which are the breeding ground of hate ... But education itself is not enough unless it incorporates empathy, specificity, and the

34 - other elements of this strategy. When Hitler came to power, Germany was probably the best-educated nation in the world.Sixth, try to cooperate with others in mutually beneficial ways whenever possible ... social pyschologists have discovered that cooperating with others to achieve a common goal tends to activate subconscious mechanisms in the primitive neural system that can erase us-them divisions ...Seventh, try to put things into perspective rather than overreact. You might ask, for example, whether your anger is worth it or whether a threat is really that important ...Eighth, make every effort to avoud a sense of being trapped. This may require the application of all previous steps, particularly communication and negotiation. If you are unhappy in your job, for example, let people know in a constructive way and, if possible, negotiate some changes. If you find that there is nothing you can do to change things, you might start exploring opportunities elsewhere. Or you might try to put things in a different perspective by viewing the frustrations you feel as creative challenges that can lead you to a new level of personal growth.Ninth, if for whatever reason ... you find yourself gripped by hostility, even hatred, make every effort to seek out opportunities to immerse yourself in a positive way with the source of your hate. At the height of the cold war, for instance, American presidents regularly met face-to-face with Communist leaders.

35 - Tenth, and finally, seek justice, not revenge. Vengeful hated tends to lock us into the past. In areas of the world that are dominated by hate, grievances are never forgotten, and the cycle or revenge and retaliation can go on for centuries ...

36 - Obtaining justice can be complex and difficult, but it requires a determined effort to seek a fair resolution of conflicts rather than a primitive venting of hostility and agression.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
Hate is irrational. Though the initial reason for dislike may, in some cases, by perfectly reasonable, once hatred has taken hold someone cannot be rationally talked out of it any more than you can rationally talk someone out of his or her fear of heights ...But hatred is often highly resistant to change because, unlike most phobias, hate can be linked to elaborate rationalizations ... People may passionately believe in these warped meaning systems and fool themselves into thinking that they are being completely reasonable when they are not. For beneath all their rational argument is intense, primitive, stereotyped hostility.

57 - Paul MacLean, who for many years was the chief of the laboratory of brain evolution and behavior of the National Institute of Mental Health, pioneered the modern formulation of the limbic system. Though the functional specifics of the human emotional system remain a matter of controversy, many neuroscientists have found the limbic system concept useful in understanding the evolutionary structure of the brain. MacLean put the limbic system in a larger context within what he called the triune brain. This framework conceptualizes the brain as having three interconnected evolutionary levels: the reptilian brain, the old mammalian brain, and the new mammalian brain. The reptilian level consists of the upper brain stem, diencephalon, basal ganglia, and rudimentary elements of the limbic system. MacLean found that the reptilian brain con- [continued on next page]58 - tains the largely instinctual programs for self-preservation: fighting, fleeing, mating, establishing territory, hunting. Many of these instincts are lodged in the basal ganglia, which are the most highly developed portions of the reptile brain. The basal ganglia are ancient motor centers that have a special responsibility for automatic movements. In humans, it is the basal ganglia that cause us to instinctively flinch, duck, jump, brace, bolt, or freeze when threatened. Reptomammals such as the therapsides were an intermediate step toward the old mammalian brain, which fully emerged with the evolution of true mammals. At this evolutionary level, the limbic system was greatly elaborated and became the most highly developed portion of the brain. In primitive mammals such as rodents and rabbits, the limbic system--including the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate cortex, and related structures--occupies a much higher percentage of the brain than in advanced mammals such as primates. The old mammalian brain added elaborate emotional behavior to the instincts of the reptile. This included care for the young and play behavior.The most recent evolutionary level is the new mammalian brain, which reached its fullest development in primates. It is dominated by a huge neocortex. Within the neocortex of the new mammalian brain, consciousness emerged. The powers of abstraction, complex language, and planning attained their highest levels. The reptilian and old mammalian levels continue to function, however, and constitute the reptomammalian portion of the human brain--what we have previously referred to as the primitive neural system. Our version of the reptomammalian brain is more advanced than the therapsid version--because our limbic system is more highly developed--but it is still quite primitive, and its behaviors are mediated by structures such as the amygdala.

59- Complex mental states such as love and hate as well as complex behaviors such as sexuality and agression involve widespread networks of many specialized centers in the brain. Neuroscience is just beginning to understand...The basic archetecture of our brain helps explain why we consciously know the reptomammalian portion of our mind only indirectly--through the primitive emotions and stereotypes its signals to our consciousness. We never directly enter its primitive awareness. Like many other brain systems, it operates in parallel with the system that generates our consciousness, using a different network.

141 - [Dozier quotes genome scientist, J. Craig Venter, head of Celera company that sequenced genome; spaced-out dots are direct from book] "...In the five Celera genomes, there's no way to tell one ethnicity from another . . . as individuals we are all unique and population statistics do not apply. . . ."

141 - Human races, science is concluding, are fictions created by cultural meaning systems. The reason is that our species, from an evolutionary standpoint, is brand new. There has not been enough time for significant genetic differences to accumulate among different human populations ... modern humans seem to have evolved from a group of a few thousand individuals little more than a hundred thousand years ago. Scientists are learning that many of the differences in physical appearance among different human populations may boil down to the tiniest of genetic divergences--perhaps variations in only a single gene that affects the skin.

145- The racial, ethnic, and other distinctions we make among ourselves... are biologically superficial. Genetically, there are no significant differences among human groups.

228 - Psychologists have identified seven major characteristics of the primitive mind. The first of these is associative thinking. The primitive neural system tends to causally link phenomena that have only a superficial association, especially in time and space. This is a primary source of superstitions and taboos.

229 - A second characteristic of the primitive mind is generalized thinking. We have explored the limited ability of the primitive mind to grasp uniqueness. Thus, if one snake poses a threat, there is an innate disposition to see all snakes as threatening. This tendency to engage in another logical fallacy--hasty generalization--can have castastrophic consequences when combined with hatred ... Osama bin Laden doesn't limit his attacks to the governments of Israel and the United States--whose policies he abhors--but to all "Jews and crusaders." We see the same kind of primitive generalization and stereotyping over and over in genocidal conflicts. The limbic system is capable of lumping other human beings into enormous threat categories based on sweeping characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and so forth.

230 - When confronted with hated enemies the primitive mind often has a simple but terrifying response: kill them.This leads to the third major characteristic of the primitive mind, which is categorical thinking. Not only does the primitive neural system reason in terms of stereotypes, it assesses those stereotypes using a kind of either-or logic--somone or something is either good or bad, a friend or an enemy, one of us or one of them, superior or inferior. Unique individuality is lost on a racist or bigot, or on those consumed by other forms of hate. Associative thinking, misplaced causality, generalized thinking, and categorical thinking make it plain how easy it is for hate to spread ... Associations like this seem irrational to the advanced neural system, yet they are completely consistent with primitive logic. And if you talk with someone who honestly believes this kind of thing, he or she will assure you with great sincerity that he or she is being perfectly reasonable.We exist simultaneously in two worlds: advanced and primitive. As our thought processes shift from the advanced to the primitive neural system when confronted with a serious threat, ideas that once seemed preposterous can suddenly make sense.

231 - The primitive mind has other qualities that tend to subvert advanced rationality, including a fourth characteristic that can be described as personalized thinking. Here, everything is related to one's own emotional needs and desires. The primitive neural system contains stereotypes about ourselves as well as others. These stereotypes may incorporate our insecurities. Personalized thinking can lead to extreme sensitivity and overreaction to criticism ...The result could be feelings of hatred or self-hate. Personalized thinking tends to suppress empathy for others and focus only on oneself and one's perceived emotional needs.The capacity for empathy is centered in the orbitofrontal portion of the prefrontal cortex, one of the most advanced areas of the brain. Many of the attributes of the primitive mind result from disabling such advanced capacities. A fifth characteristic--thinking fixated on either the past or the immediate present--is another of these attributes. The prefrontal cortex allows us to spin sophisticated

232 - scenarios that look ahead to future possibilities. We can then analyze and choose from among these potential scenarios using advanced neural choice. But the primitive mind tends to interpret everything from the perspective of its current situation, wants, and needs. As part of this assessment, it considers past grievances, pleasures, and pains. Because it engages in little reflection or anticipation, the primitive mind often chooses quickly, reacting impulsively and emotionally. We see this in children and adolescents, whose prefrontal areas have not fully matured.

237 - Hate is personal. So is vengence. Justice is not.

264- Slobodan Milosevic, the ex-president of Yugoslavia, who was turned over to the international tribunal in June 2001 to face charges of genocide, war crimes, and crime against humanity...Milosevic... seems to represent another personality type that psychologistshave found potentially dangerous because of their extraordinary lack of empathy: the narcissist. Social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister said narcissism is "characterized by inflated or grandiose views of self, the quest for excessive admiration, an unreasonable or exaggerated sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy (that is, being unable to identify with the feelings of others), an exploitative attitude toward others, a proneness to envy or wish to be envied, frequent fantasies of greatness, and arrogance." The irrationally high self-esteem of a narcissist makes it almost impossible to admit mistakes and be empathetic with others, no matter what the situation ... Narcissists are sometimes

265 - attracted to politics because it provides the adulation and power (another word for control) to which they believe they are entitled. But the narcissist can be hypersensitive and react violently to any perceived threats....Although its inner mechanisms are not well understood, narcissism seems to include a form of primitive self-love. Primitive love--as, for example, the instinctive love between parent and child--involves primal bonding. In the case of the narcissist, this may take the form of a powerful, primitive bond with his or her positive self-image. The strength of this self-centered bond may leave little psychic energy for bonding with others, even vicariously...Thus, the narcissist's bond with his own self-image resembles the instinctive bond between a parent and child. Just as a parent tends to react strongly, even violently, to a threat to his child, the narcissist seems to feel the same protective urge toward his swollen self-image. The narcissist's limbic system, through some psychic quirk that we haven't yet discovered, appears to regard the protection of his self-image as vital to his survival and reproduction ... Thus, both individuals and groups, as Baumeister observed, "should beward of people who regard themselves as superior to others, especially when those beliefs are inflated, weakly grounded in reality or heavily dependent on having others confirm them frequently. Conceited, self-important individuals turn nasty toward those who puncture their bubbles of self-love." Narcissists make dangerous rulers.Studies of extremely violent criminals find that a high percentage believe themselves to be members of an elite group that deserves special treatment.

277 - What does all this mean? It suggests something quite remarkable: the mechanisms that produce us-them distinctions, prejudice, hate, and violence--though they are genetically structured and lodged in the mind of each of us--are largely activated by the environment.

Quotes from Zen Master Taisen Deshimaru

2006-09-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

The following was taken from the book Questions to a Zen Master: Practical and Spiritual Answers from the Great Japanese Master." In the book, master Taisen Deshimaru answers questions.The words in italics separate from his words are the words of the person in the book asking the question. When you see [. . .] in red, that is a break that I put there, which is not in the text. A break like this - ... - is in the text. I'm not sure I agree with all Deshimaru says, and I know I don't understand it all.
---------------------------

14 - What is individuality?
Individuality and a strong ego are different. Coming back to one's own originality is very important; you and I are not the same. You

15 - are only you. You must find your own you. [ . . .] Through zazen you can realize that individuality and make it strong. The duty of a religious person is to teach that to other people.

36 - It is not possible to say, "You're bad so I don't love you," or, "You're good so I love you." That is not the true Buddha's attitude.

54 - Why are we imperfect? Were we perfect once and are we supposed to become that way again? That is the whole problem of civilization. Which is better, the old civilization or modern civilization. It's a false problem, because we cannot know the answer.

68 - I say that our consciousness is swifter than the cosmos. That means that God is greater than the cosmos. In Buddhism, ku, the void, is greater than the cosmos.

74 - Neurotic people are always anxious. They're like somebody who doesn't know how to swim and falls into the water. They start to sink, become frightened and say, "I must not sink, I must not sink," they swallow more and more water ... and in the end they drown. But if they let go of their thoughts and let themselves go down to the bottom, their body will come back to the surface naturally ... That's Zen. If you are in pain during zazen you must continue, keep straight, to the end. If you are in pain you can abandon your ego and experience satori unconsciously, naturally, automatically ...

I don't understand what you mean by going down to the bottom.
When you're in the water and sinking, when you let go of any thought of life and death, let go of your ego completely, then your being contrentrates solely on breathing out and you come to the surface. It's the same state of mind as in zazen.

76 - In some religions people are always trying to acquire magic powers but those are not true religions. [. . .] To want to acquire magic powers is an egotistical desire, trivial, and ultimately of no importance. It's no different from wanting to become a prestidigitator or a circus artist. Religion is not a circus.

133 - [. . .] I find harder to understand [. . .] the possibility [. . .] of radically transcending every aspect of the ego.
It is very hard to abandon the ego, and I did not say that it disappeared completely. You can believe in your consciousness or mind that you have abandoned your ego but the body doesn't always agree. By training the body, Zen trains us to let go of the ego. You can suffer during zazen but if you are patient and let go of the pain at the conscious level, and if you repeat that practice regularly, you are unconsciously training yourself to abandon the ego. In thought nothing could be simpler than to abandon the ego, but to let go of it "here and now" is very difficult. Through the repetition of zazen one trains one's body and abandons one's ego unconsciously. That is Zen education.

Can one abandon the ego completely? Isn't that an ideal?
It is very difficult, true. But after all, what is the ego? We have no noumenon, no permanent substance. Our ego has no distinct, permanent existence.

135 - Who understands?
The true ego understands. The true ego is the one that makes the decision. [. . .]
But in reality the true ego is not ego; perhaps it is what in Christianity is known as God. But in Zen it is called true ego, absolute ego. This ego also has no noumenon. It is what understands. Something has to understand and that's the only thing that can, God or the cosmos. It's the self that has let go of everything [. . .]

excerpts from "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky - 1972, Vintage Books

2006-09-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

Alinsky, Saul. 1972. Rules for Radicals. Vintage Books.

xvii - The young react to their chaotic world in different ways. Some panic and run ... Others went for pointless sore-loser confrontations so that they could fortify their rationalization and say, "Well, we tried and did our part" and then they copped out too. Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do when berserk. These were the Weathermen and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide.

xviii - First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police "pig" or "white fascist motherfucker" and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, "Oh, he's one of those," and then promptly turn off.... Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience -- and gives full respect to other's values -- would have ruled out attacks on the American flag.

xix - For the real radical, doing "his thing" is to do the social thing, for and with people ... If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair ... Lacking communication I am in reality silent; throughout history silence has been regarded as assent -- in this case assent to the system.As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be ... Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.

10 - An organizer working in and for an open society ... does not have a fixed

11 - truth -- truth to him is relative and changing ... Does this mean that the organizer in a free society for a free society is rudderless? No, I believe that he has a far better sense of direction and compass than the closed-society organizer with his rigid political ideology.

18 - Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores ... Numerically the Haves have always been the fewest. The Haves want to keep things as they are and are opposed to change ... On the bottom are the world's Have-Nots. On the world scene they are by far the greatest in numbers.

19 - The Haves want to keep; the Have-Nots want to get. Thermopolitically they are a mass of cold ashes of resignation and fatalism, but inside there are glowing embers of hope which can be fanned by the building of means of obtaining power ... The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us your hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.Between the Haves and the Have-Nots are the Have-a-Little, Want Mores -- the middle class. Torn between upholding the status quo to protect what little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they become split personalities. They could be described as social, economic, and political schizoids. Generally, they seek the safe way, where they can profit by change yet not risk losing the little they have ... Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia. Today in Western society and particularly the United States they comprise the majority of our population.

22 - At times we do fall back and become discouraged, but it is not that we are making no progress ... The pursuit of happiness is never-ending; happiness lies in the pursuit.

Confronted with the materialistic decadence of the status quo, one should not be surprised to find that all revolutionary movements are primarily generated from spiritual values and considerations of justice, equality, peace, and brotherhood. History is a relay of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by the revolutionary group until this group becomes the establishment, and then quietly the torch is put down to wait until a new revolutionary group picks it up for the next leg of the run. Thus the revolutionary cycle goes on.

23 - A major revolution to be won in the immediate future is the dissipation of man's illusion that his own welfare can be separate from that of all others. As long as man is shackled to this myth, so long will the human spirit languish ... I believe that man is about the learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival.

59 - to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word ... If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you're 30 per cent ahead.

A free and open socierty is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises -- which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum ... A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be "compromise."81 - One can lack any of the qualities of an organizer -- with one exception -- and still be effective and successful. That exception is the art of commucation ... People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means you must get within their experience. Further, communcation is a two-way process. If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention to what they have to say to you, you can forget about the whole thing.91 - no organizer can tell a community, either, what to do.

127 to 136 - Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have ... Never go outside the experience of your people ... Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy ... Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules ... Ridicule is man's most potent weapon ... A good tactic is one that your people enjoy ... A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drage ... Keep the pressure on ... The threat is usually more terrifying that the thing itself ... The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition ... If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside ... The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative ... Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it ... The real action is in the enemy's reaction ... They enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength ... Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with the action ...

149 - The Haves possess and in turn are possessed by power. Obsessed with the idea of losing power, their every move is dictated by the idea of keeping it ... not only do we have a whole class determined to keep its power and in constant conflict with the Have-Nots; at the same time, they are in conflict with themselves. Power is not static; it cannot be frozen and preserved like food; it must grow or die. Therefore, in order to keep power the status quo must get more. But from whom? There is just so much more than can be squeezed out of the Have-Nots -- so the Haves must take it from each other ... This power cannibalism of the Haves permits only temporary truces, and only when equally confronted by a common enemy. Even then there are regular breaks in the ranks, as individual units attempt to exploit the general threat for their own special benefit. Here is the vulnerable underbelly of the status quo.

152 - The basic tactic in warfare against the Haves is a mass poltical jujitsu; the Have-Nots do not rigidly oppose the Haves, but yield in such planned and skilled ways that the superior strength of the Haves becomes their own undoing. For example ... they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations.

165 - The greatest barrier to communication between myself and would-be organizers arises when I try to get across the concept that tactics are not the product of careful cold reason, that they do not follow a table of organization or plan of attack. Accident, unpredictable reactions to your own actions, necessity, and improvisation dictate the direction and nature of tactics. Then, analytical logic is required to appraise where you are, what you can do next, the risks and hopes that you can look forward to.

186 - The rough category 'middle class" can be broken down into three groups: lower middle class ... middle middle class ... and upper middle class ... In the lower middle class we encounter people who have struggled all their lives for what relatively little they have.

187 - They are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides ... They look at the unemployed poor as parasitical dependents, recipients of a vast variety of massive public programs all paid for by them "the public."

188 - Seeking some meaning in life, they turn to an extreme chauvinism and become defenders of the "American" faith. Now they even develop rationalizations for a life of futility and frustration ... Now they are not only the most vociferous in their espousal of law and order but ripe victims for such as demagogic George Wallace, the John Birch Society, and the Red-menace perennials.

Insecure in this fact-changing world, they cling to illusory fixed points -- which are very real to them ... On the other side they see the middle middle class and the upper middle class assuming a liberal, democratic, holier-than-thou psition, and attacking the bigotry of the employed poor. They see that through all kinds of tax-evasion devices the middle middle and upper middle can elude their share of the tax burden -- so that most of it comes back (as they see it) upon themselves, the lower middle class.

189 - Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs , fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our population -- with respect, understanding, and sympathy.To reject them is to lose them by default ... Remember that even if you cannot win over the lower middle-class, at least parts of them must be persuaded to where there is at least communication, then to a series of partial agreements and a willingness to abstain from hard opposition as changes take place.