OBAMA - February 4, 2010

So here we sit, over a year since Obama came to the Presidency, and still waiting for the supposed salvation. Faced with a President who is far more like Hoover than Roosevelt and being dictated to by the very forces that have impoverished the poorest fifths of the work force and resisted the possibility that a Dem administration could have extracted us from a philosophy of economics that is 250 years out of date. We sit still for a Supreme Court that declares the rights of personhood devolve on every gang of pirates who have come up with a corporate charter. Adam Smith knew better and so did Roosevelt. But the likes of Larry Summers have led us to pawn off our future, but only when the proceeds end up in the pockets of the super-rich. And while Obama does make annoyed noises, he seems incapable of galvanizing even the Dem Party, to say nothing of the whole nation, or even the Congress. It is nice that he can make good speeches, but he does not have the attributes that we know as leadership. Just as GOP keeps telling the reactionaries that they stand for the outlawing of abortion but exert all their efforts in further enriching the super-rich, so does Obama use his rhetorical skills not in passing essential legislation but in immobilizing the liberals while people like the Ford heirs get the nation to tolerate their hold on what they have the nerve to describe as their “hard-earned dollars”. So while we worry about the poor millionaires five generations removed from anyone who can be reasonably described as having “earned” that money, we are immobilized while the banksters rob our children of their health and education, and our Nation crumbles intoeconomic ruin. And while Obama might be up to snuff on the law, there is nothing to indicate that he has learned anything from the Roosevelt Administration’s leading of us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

SHOWDOWN - January 28, 2010

The Supreme Court has taken the unprecedented step of ruling in an issue that no one had asked them to adjudicate. It is plain that a majority wanted to make a law and they have done nothing other than legislating from the Bench. They claim to have used their own
version of the First Amendment in making a free debate between corporate America and the unions. This is something like saying that if a person has a dispute with Exxon, the oil company is free to hire Mike Tyson to fight it out, bare knuckles, with the individual, one on one. They pretend not to note the disparity in power between the Plutocracy and the unions, which has been obvious in American life, and a subject of legislative redress, for over a century. Stripped of disingenuous verbiage, the five justices have decided that it is a matter of constitutional fairness that Big Money should be able to drown out the efforts of talk in paid media by their antagonists. It is a giant step in the Class War waged by the Robber Barons for at least the last 60 years on the remaining shreds of equality between themselves and the People, most especially the working people, in which group I include everyone that lives on less than 100 G and quite a few besides. It has been labeled as obvious by every commentator and is taken to foreshadow domination in future elections by those calling themselves Republicans, though they act more like monarchists with every passing term. It is generally said that this will guarantee the rule of the Robber Barons, to a degree that we have not seen in over 120 years. The only answer is that the representatives of the People must repeatedly denounce every message in the paid media as suspect. For those who do not have the means of separating the sheep from the goats, we must recognize that there is no individual thinking in the Republican party and vote against all their candidates unless we see overwhelming evidence of individual thinking.

ECONOMICS - January 21, 2010

We are having tons of troubles these days with Economics. For at least 50 years, this has been in the hands of professionals who flatter themselves under the caption of the Free Market. This lovely name comes to us out of the Enlightenment, when the change out of the traditional system of Feudal and Guild economics was a notable advancement, and catered to the sense of liberalism of 250 years ago when freedom was in its infancy as a way of dealing with economic reality. Yet even then many of the best thinkers recognized the enormous power of corporations. Even Adam Smith, who advanced the Free Market, was against the monopolistic power of companies like the East Indian and Hudson’s Bay corporations. That was kid stuff compared with the power of world-spanning companies like those we see today. And these corporations use the power of good jobs to tell the business schools what they expect their graduates to believe, and that trickles down to the Economics departments of universities, most of whose students are not genuinely interested in their subject, but are ready to study whatever they are asked as the price for admission to the executive suites of the wealthy corporations. The result is that the beliefs of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman reach us through their acolytes, like Robert Rubin and Larry Sommerfeld, who are now the economic advisors steering Pres. Obama. It is true that they echo the majority view of the most prominent economists, so how can we expect anything else in a president with almost no economic thinking of his own? I have been unhappy with that subject since being exposed to it at the London School of Economics, and we must all live with it as long as it holds sway over the majority of that profession. I do not know how we will get out of it as long as the corporations continue to hold sway over what our schools are teaching as received science.

SOVEREIGNTY - January 14, 2010

The American public is clearly confused by the threat of terrorism. They are clearly unwilling to accept that when they accept the status of a nation at war, they are likely to have to face up to the possibility of getting killed in the process, particularly when the form that the war takes is one of killing others who get in the way of what DC considers its legal and rightful option to declare the rules of the game. For at least the last 60 years, DC has spoken in terms of declaring what it is that they and other nations may do, and has expected other peoples to adhere to the will of the world, as they propound it. The natural consequence of such an arrogant posture is to assure that some other people will take exception, even violently, to the claim that there is nothing they can do about it, most especially to the most unstable among them, of whom there is no lack in the world. The response that the Greeks, the Romans, and the British took in such situations was to write off the response as natural and tolerable, part of the costs of fighting, and especially of winning, such wars. The United States, possibly alone of such sovereignty-wielding powers, expects to be immune from retaliation and is outraged by counter-attacks, however unsuccessful, by individuals or small groups. A lesson we could take from other imperial powers from the past, is to maintain dignity and accept losses for civilians in this war with the same aplomb that we confer on the killing and maiming of the children that DC sends oversees to enforce its will. If Americans want the fleeting glory of being Boss nation and ruling the World, then the population that glories in that power must expect that those who are unwilling to submit themselves to subservience will, from time to time, get around the rules of conduct set out for the world by DC and declare themselves for action, as Timothy McVeigh did, but it seems we have no stomach for that.

BELIEF - January 7, 2010

It is hard these days to know whom to believe, and there is so much to know that we can not be responsible for making up our minds. For many of us, the question of belief lies in a choice of authorities: whom to believe. So there are many of us that are prepared to trust in Science, but even that has been undercut by the number of people who are peddling special interests disguised as objective scientific fact. This fault is available in all areas, including economics, social policy, and even sometimes in Physics. So there is an understandable willingness to go with the preponderance of opinion in an area of reputable study, but even that has a history in almost every science of denying the truth of some new belief that turns out to be the new truth. We think of people like Copernicus, or Pasteur, or Einstein. Most recently the bulk of opinion in economics, which proclaims itself a science, has favored the dicta of the predator school out of the U of Chicago, which touted the self-correcting forces of the Market, only to be bounced from one bubble to the next until we faced the threat of total economic collapse and were told by one expert after another that we would have to pawn the product of the nation far into the future and put the proceeds into the pockets of the predators. How is a nation to choose when the whole of an established area of study gives its voice to a position that turns out to be a disaster? How is the President to know whom to believe in an area in which he has no expertise of his own? It is easy to say that something is obvious after the fact, but the voices of doubt were few and far between. So when we have some people denying the truth of Global Warming or questioning the benefits to be had from the study of stem cells the evidence is hardly convincing, except to those especially inclined to believe when the scientific voice is strong and explicit. Science, after all, flourishes on doubt.

PLASTIC BAGS - December 31, 2009

A strange disease of the mind has come over to us from somewhere. I encountered it when living in London. There is a campaign to get people to save their plastic grocery bags and recycle them. Those who now use them for disposing of their kitchen garbage are told that they should use specially prepared bags for that purpose, under penalty of being heavily fined for wasting. This is in spite of the fact that re-making the small, light ones requires more energy, including human effort, than making them from scratch. The attention is paid on the re-use of materials, rather than the re-use of the bags themselves. I observe that each of the big black bags carries about two or three times as much as the little ones, and uses even more plastic. And then there is the fact that many of the used bags are not suitable, due to contamination by the likes of spilled milk. And there is the cost, in money and oil, of packing the big bags, distributing them into the supermarkets and taking them home, together with the groceries in the condemned little ones. A little consideration would tell us that using the same bags twice each would save on cost, on energy, on convenience and that no bag, on average, is saved as thoroughly as the one left on the supermarket shelf and unsold. The attention to only a single feature, as well as the attention to a current idea, leaves us with a poor attention to the wrong feature of the problem. I do not think that this campaign is motivated by the desire to get people to pay for additional bags, under the illusion that they are contributing to the solution. I really do think that those pursuing the problem by a campaign of punishment are following an old folly that the answer to every difficulty is to be found in outlawing the imagined problem. That is a folly especially common in Western Europe and North America.

TEACHERS - December 24, 2009

So we have finally heard the solution to the fact that the standings of American students in the international comparison continues to fall, as measured in the master of one’s native language and the command of elementary mathematics. And the self-appointed wizards of education have put their finger on one cure-all: fire the teachers. And this firing will be put in the hands of people hired by an establishment consisting of many who know no more than the people badly enabled by the last generation of teachers. No one tells us where we will find the people who will do better in the classroom. In fact, the supposed experts have found no way to improve the facility of those being turned out by the departments of education. It is developing that very few of those who teach even in high school have qualifications comparable with a BA in Mathematics, and the situation is even worse in Physics and only slightly better in Chemistry, while the expertise of most elementary teachers of Arithmetic display no understanding of the subject better than the ability to get a good B in an 8th grade test. But many people who are themselves anarithmetic consider that they know who is a bad teacher. Worse, many of them take the word of their children and the children’s classmates. In the meantime, ever fewer of the entrants to our university know what was taken as the basis for pursuing a scientific education a mere 5o years ago. But that does not prevent them from imagining that they can make a wonderful difference by firing people the principals finger out as incompetent and replacing them with others of equally shabby preparation. People with the rare competence to handle difficult conceptual problems are lining up to get to Wall Street, not to our overcrowded, underpaid, harassed and criticized classrooms. The evidence is there for us to see. The cure-alls are just snake oil.