Anatole Beck Commentaries

IRAN - December 8, 2011

2011-12-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

We have been hearing so much these days about Iran, and the danger that their nuclear program supposedly subjects us to that one might reasonably think there is no foundation for the trouble there or to the animus of so many Iranis to the US, and especially also to the UK. Actually, the trouble between the Iranis and the English goes back some 200 years at least, and the US has joined on the UK side only in the wake of WW II and the Eisenhower administration. As soon as the nascent UN had finished off the imperial pretentions of Germany and Japan, the US resumed the cold war that had started between the elites of capitalism and the USSR with Lenin’s October Revolution. It had been paused for the 4 years 1941-45 while part of the world set aside the doctrinal hatred of the sort that Europe had seen since the French Revolution in order to crush Hitler. Then the US immediately started to collect the remaining forces of the plutocrats from fear that the spectre of Communism would take away the sand pile that we call our world. The world was split between the protectorates of the West and those of the Soviet Union. In the middle, a small package of countries that wanted no part of yet another world war opted out and formed the shaggy uncommitted bloc, notably Yugoslavia, India and little Iran. Although Truman had lived easily with countries that resisted being US protectorates without joining the Warsaw Pact group, the Eisenhower administration under the leadership of John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen implicitly declared that all those that were not with us were against us, and Ike joined the UK in overthrowing the elected government of Iran, which had just then nationalized the oil under Iran. They installed the military fascist regime there, which the Iranis overthrew in 1979, dumping the dictator, and violated international precedent by taking the US keepers as hostages. For some reason, the Iranis thought they had a grievance against US. We live today with the remains of that history.

ELECTRICITY - December 1, 2011

2011-11-29T07:18:00.000-08:00

We are now embarking again on the famous WI winter. This year, there has been an especially large outbreak of rains, floods and snows that have had the effect of felling trees, many falling across power lines and depriving whole areas of electricity, often for an extended period. Whenever this happens, it reminds me of my effort to interest MG&E in the enormous benefits that could accrue to places like the City of Madison if it were possible to be less dependent on long-distance power lines. Such a condition could be obtained by Madison and many other towns and cities, many in WI, through the advantages that could accrue to us if we had widespread mini-combined heat and power, abbreviated mini-CHP. This technology, which has been proven in use in Europe, especially Scandinavia, would provide electricity each user as a nearly free by-product of home heating. The yearly cost of natural gas and electric power for each such user would be about the cost of gas alone, with savings of about 50%. Into the bargain, the supply of electricity would be a nearly perfect guarantee to the user of continuity of that service, while saving about half the cost of the two utilities billed separately. MG&E advertises that they are eager to help us cut our total energy use, thus saving both money and nearly half of the natural gas and its attendant electricity. I was never successful in winning over the gas company to this proven technology and the side benefits of almost total freedom from power outages due to felled grid lines. There may be some unknown reasons why this company, which could profit handsomely from the benefits that could flow from mini-CHP, refuses to undertake a test in a few dozen homes that would demonstrate the benefits that would flow to the whole city, including the gas and electric company itself.

GEOMETRY - November 24, 2011

2011-11-14T13:43:00.001-08:00

As we struggle to save the State of Wisconsin from the disaster that is sure to befall it if the Kochs and their hand puppet governor have their way, it is time to consider the likely outcome of the proletarianizing of the teaching profession. In case you have not had occasion to measure, I can vouch for the fact that very few Wisconsin High School graduates have been equipped in the matter of understanding what is going on in mathematics, with a similar notation for physics. Indeed, there are very few teachers in our High Schools who have had any acquaintance with either subject beyond the memorization of a few rules that would enable them to make routine calculations in it, thus qualifying themselves as inferior competitors in carrying out mechanical tasks to the machines widely available. Most egregious is the deficiency in experiencing the process of knowing when a given proposition has been proven. Often fairly talented students in our colleges are prevented from appreciating even the simplest subtleties of formal logic. And as the management of our schools falls increasingly into the hands of administrators and parents who already are handicapped in this way, the ability to hire any of the few available teachers who understand that triumph of human understanding vanishes, and that rules our graduates out of keeping pace with the intellectual accomplishments of the past centuries, and certainly of those now happening. The judgment of who can even teach the material at the High School level falls increasingly to people who do not know it themselves. Almost any teacher might be chosen for that task. And as the profession is made increasingly unattractive by bosses who are themselves ignorant of its subtleties, it will be increasingly difficult to hire the replacements for those who have quit it or been forced out. Governors and Principals who are ignorant of the intellectual achievements that brought us to this time will offer the students increasingly barren educations.

DEMOCRACY - November 17, 2011

2011-11-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

At this moment in mid-November, WI stands at the crossroads for the State, and likely for USA. In a sort of poetic way, we will be following the shade of Bob Lafollette, or that of Joe McCarthy, and will likely set the course for whether we will reignite the Progressive spirit or sink into what sociologists have called the Peasant Mentality. The past 60 years have indicated that the Age of Reason has been losing its battle with sluggish contentment out here on the prairie. The Billionaire’s Lobby has paid to set a hand puppet in charge of the State government and there is no Enlightenment on the horizon to take the place of the German immigrants of 1848. If there is not a flash of clarity to bring the working people of WI to act to rid ourselves of the laws enacted in a virtual flash of an eye as decided by the Kochs and their ilk, we will forfeit all claim to the Progressive tradition and the prosperity it has brought us in the XX Century. We are blessed at this time that Dave Obey has peeked out of retirement to lead the cause of removal of the puppet regime. And if we are lucky, Kathleen Falk will condescend to the office of Lieutenant Governor for a few years, she might well earn the right to succeed him in the statehouse. As for Jon Erpenbach, we will need him desperately in the Senate until our State has regained its intelligence and its Mission. If we lose this chance for the working people to vote for their Enlightenment, the Billionaires’ Lobby will most likely close off that chance for the remainder of this century at least. The move to vote their needs in democracy and prosperity is being negated as quickly as the Kochs are sending bills to negate what we used to think was our traditional recourse to sense and sensibility.

IMMIGRANTS - November 10, 2011

2011-11-09T18:27:00.001-08:00

In all the controversy over who has a “right” to move into a space where someone else has a claim of right, there is very little that addresses the Q in its extremes, though they often fail to exclude those extremes. These consist of the claim that the established people of an area have a right to say who will share that right and who has no such legitimacy. Still, I have not heard anyone claim that the right is universal, or even limited to the sane and legally innocent, while no I have not heard that there are those (e.g. those imported by their parents without their legal consent) who obtain that right without being subject to the laws and practices of the “legitimate” owners. Indeed, I am convinced that almost no one maintains the absoluteness of either of those claims. I do not know of anyone who claims that a child obtains citizenship by such an act of their parents, nor the right to obtain cheap labor in circumstances approaching serfdom. However, I do believe that the entitlement to immigration lies with the legitimate adults of a free land, by unanimous or overwhelming consensus. Until I hear such argument, I eschew all those who claim that their own preferences are the voice of divine law. However, I do believe that the most extreme actions are not necessary as alternatives to allowing the excesses claimed by either side. The most regulated options would, in the opinions of many, at least extend to the benefits of the social compact enacted by those with legitimate standing, especially the coverage of the welfare state, and the forbidding of employment to those without such recognition as a valid claim to citizenship can be policed in a mild way by fining employers who refuse to cooperate in determining who is a legal resident, and the use of substantial penalties against those with resources should be enough to prevent their profligate abuse. Laws like those in AZ and AL are not necessary to minimize those abuses.

LEGAL FICTIONS - November 3, 2011

2011-10-22T15:28:00.000-07:00

We have already had a bellyful of decisions from the SC like those deciding that money is protected speech and corporations are people with all the rights of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. Now comes the Chamber of Commerce, among other institutions, standing up for the principle that corruption is not criminal, but a legitimate means of obtaining profits, and thus business. And since business has been sanctified as a function of civilized life, this legitimizes it to the point that it is most likely to put the veil of trade secrets around practices that ordinary people think should be subject to the ordinary criminal laws. By a current report, almost all the GOP congressfolk adhere to the move to repeal the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, together with some Democratic Senators and Representatives. The fact that people are making money out of such actions is said to lend it the presumptions of legitimacy unless the contrary can be proved, likely requiring such proof beyond doubt. When I studied the law, I already saw the early form of this argument when e.g. the CEOs of the tobacco corporations all swore under oath that they believed that cigarettes were not addictive, and none were indicted for perjury. Even when strong evidence was found that they did not believe what they were saying, the fact that business was involved shielded them from prosecution. This is how low we have sunk in the deification of money, and the bulk of the US population seems able to accept the decision, together with the other ways in which the SC has proclaimed that money cleans all activities. The alchemists of the Middle Ages sought the universal solvent, which would dissolve every material, and in our own time, it seems to be gold. If we do not stand up for ourselves, we shall all be for sale. If we don’t vote for our autonomy, we shall likely lose it.

LEAVES - October 27, 2011

2011-10-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

Every year at this time, we collect the discarded leaves of our beautiful green city. We pay to have them swept up and taken away, with many of them composted for eventual use as mulch and fertilizer for our lawns and gardens. This composting is a vast improvement on the earlier practice of burning most of them and releasing the CO2 into the air. However, it is still distinctly inferior to subjecting them to anaerobic digestion, in which much of the chemical energy that our thousands of trees have stored in them is made available for chemical energy of a very high level, compared with the CO2, which is generally acknowledged as a pollutant and a contributor to the warming of the planet. Of course, even the digestion gives off part of its output as CO2, but in the case of the composting, the part of the organic process yields methane, which is a far worse product than the CO2. Also, the sludge that is the residue of the composter is a far richer fertilizer, since its proteins and oils have not been degraded by the oxidation of the rest. In addition, the average time needed to reduce the leaves to mulch is much less in the digester than in the open air, even when deprived of O2. There is of course an investment needed in the building of a digester, but the additional energy needed (if any) can easily be provided by solar cells yielding both power and heat to run the digester. For a city that hopes to be graced by its new Inst. of Discovery, it is a step further into the world of the future than the one on the ceremonial quarter, which features a cow, corn and cheese. As the modern efforts abandoned in the past century to avoid the pretended threat of commonism, it would be a claim on the kind of world we hope to build.

PROOFS - October 13, 2011

2011-10-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

The struggle over the teaching of school, particularly HS, continues to confront us, and everyone who has actually been to one imagines that he is an expert on what needs to be learned there and how to present that. Even in the ranks of professors of Mathematics in U, there remains a disagreement on how that should be accomplished. Thus, like most of those in that line of work, I find that entry level undergraduates have no idea of what constitutes a proof in elementary Euclidean geometry or any other part of Mathematics, or in any other discipline. This reduces technical argument to something just barely amounting to plausibility, or even less. In noting this failing, teachers of Calculus are unable to find the time or opportunity to teach this aspect of proof within the Calculus agenda. As a result, the most important feature separating proof from plausibility does not reach many students. There is simply no space, time or opportunity to take up the two disciplines in the same format. The discipline enforced by the traditional 2-column proof separating assertions and justifications is denounced as anachronistic and stultifying by those possibly tired of exacting that kind of effort from unwilling adolescents. Yet it is the keystone upon which the entire edifice of Mathematics (which is much more than the mere art of calculation) stands. Computers have been built to replace human thought in calculation, at least on the undergraduate level, but the matter of logical proof, once passed by, is highly unlikely to reappear in the later levels of learning. And in USA, we are even suffering in the HS a shortage of teachers who have learned that and understand it. The penetration of a faulty narrative proof entails a search of the mind and intent of the putative prover, and if one faces the attempted work of novices, is exhausting. At the same time, attempts by teacher unions to obtain space and time for that in school has always fallen before school board intransigence.

TEAPOT DOME - October 6, 2011

2011-09-28T18:43:00.000-07:00

Reading the Guardian news page from UK I came upon a story which, if true, smacks of corruption in the Obama WH reminiscent of the Teapot Dome Scandal of nearly 90 years ago in the Harding administration. If the report in The Guardian is to be believed, a pipeline across the upper midWest and down into Texas carrying an especially toxic and filthy effluent of oil from Canadian oil sands represents a threat to the environment, and that threat has been swept under the rug due to the efforts of a group in the State Dept. consisting of the leavings of Hillary Clinton’s move for the presidential nomination about 4 years ago. And the muscle behind the hiding of the nearly secret signing away of the rights of the US people lies in that group, likely Hillary herself and possibly the strength of her power exerted not through the Interior Department but a misuse of the State Dept. itself. If the report is accurate, it makes the scandal from about 90 years ago sound like child’s play by comparison. And it all happened while the BP negligence was flooding the delicate ecosphere of the Gulf with tons of polluting oil. It may be that this is larceny pointing up what we may have been spared by the defeat of Hillary’s grasp for national power beyond what she may have exercised as First Lady. Yet whatever power may have initiated this grab, what is more frightening was the total hiding of a possible corruption of this magnitude from the “free press”, which is supposed to prevent this sort of action from taking place out of the grasp or reach of the supposedly free People. It is shameful that only the reach of the UK press can bring such a crime to the attention of the nation. What would the administration of the Billionaire Lobby have made of this if it had happened in a country not allied to the movement to rule the whole world, domestic and international, out of DC? Maybe it is time that Lady Clinton be consigned to the slag heap of history?

GAME THEORY - September 22, 2011

2011-09-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

The reality of Game Theory reveals the weakness that underlies its role in destroying the economy. The theory involves antagonists playing a game for a prize, and in order to do what usually passes for mathematics, and thus for science, the prize, and its probabilities, has to be reckoned in real numbers. The fact that the economy includes many things, like life and health and justice and education, which cannot be measured in mutually understood numbers, reveals why the attempt to reduce it to a game over real numbers cannot take account of some of the subtleties, and this gives the lie to the claim of the economic theorists that they are analyzing with science. The attempt to measure things in imaginary units called utiles ends up measuring them in dollars. Thus this 3-cushion shot gives us the 300-year-old error that money alone measures the effectiveness of economics. In the region of elections, we see the failure of that theory. The New Labour Party in UK acted in accord with the theory when they moved their policies to as near that of the Tories as they could without erasing any difference, but in the end they came so close that a substantial portion of their base in UK labor did not see enough difference between them and the Tories to make it worthwhile voting for Gordon Brown. Now that the Tories are in the saddle, they have plenty of opportunity to see that difference, and who knows how long the workers who abandoned the New Labour Party will sweat and bleed under that yoke before they will be able to rescue their lives and those of their children and grandchildren. Now Obama has the chance to make the error of Blair and Brown and submit US to the yoke of the tea party, in which case the ruination of obsolete economics may extend a century. The threat, as in UK, has no obvious road back to sanity if they regain the whip hand.

ECONOMY - September 15, 2011

2011-09-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

About 300 years ago, about the beginning of the Age of Reason, as the economy of EU was making the transition from the Imperial mode to what was called the Free Market, the economy was defined as one of need, when even the emerging industrial revolution could not provide the basic needs of life for even the advancing population of the new industrial countries. Life under the remains of serfdom remained marginal for many of those working on the land. For the new working class it was actually more secure, though barely so. The social and economic thinking of the day saw no alternative to the greedy and rapacious market and death from hunger was not unknown. Still, it seemed to many as the only way, despite the optimistic thinking that was experimenting with the idea of cooperation as an acceptable alternative to the whipping that was competition, often called cutthroat. Today, at least in the industrial world, it is clear that an economic model built on a standard work life of 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year over 45 years produces enough to provide a living wage for all those willing and able to do it, with the increase in productivity giving more than enough for that and an ample surplus to provide rewards for those who genuinely exceed the average to a notable degree. Still, in almost all the world, the Free Market does not provide jobs for all willing and able to meet the need and joblessness of eager workers rears its head frequently, even constantly. And the economic profession is apparently unable to find a way to use the prospective labor surplus to supply manifest needs in the infrastructure, the schools, health provision and other places, like clean air and water, where only governmental initiative can provide what would be a benefit in the lives of all the people. The paid propaganda of the continuing greedy classes has convinced most of the people that would lead to the Gulag, via the workings of the now defunct Soviet Union.

STIMULUS - September 8, 2011

2011-09-06T10:07:00.001-07:00

For those who had read and understood “The Affluent Society”, the demands of support for the economy back in November 08 lay supporting the States. Instead of waiting to learn what promises those governments might make as a support for the payroll, it would have been wise to immediately announce a program of federal support for those commitments they had made when they thought they were staking their own money. Obama should have announced that there would be an immediate infusion of about $200 billion to them on a per capita basis to enable them to retain their public employees, especially teachers, and to continue the infrastructure contracts they had already made under the same belief, with further help to follow based not on promises, but on the way in which the first payment sustained the economy. Of course, the economic establishment was operating not on the basis of Keynes, but on Ayn Rand, as dictated by the business schools, under the illusion that Game Theory was the answer to every problem in the economy. It would have been hard for Obama to move against the nearly unanimous opinion of those who proclaimed their dicta scientific, having armored themselves by buying themselves a counterfeit Nobel Prize to crown each other with. Of course, we now know that the Democrats had abandoned the legacy of the New Deal and had lost even the history of that remedy 80 years ago. So the result was to undertake a recovery that would have been weak even in the hands of Herbert Hoover. There remains the wisdom that those who have not learned the lesson of history will be condemned to repeat it, and we are now reaping the harvest of the policies that did not work for Hoover and now not for Obama. Game Theory is an interesting study in the situation of a simple game, but the economy is deeper than that, and has many more dimensions.

AIRPORT - September 1, 2011

2011-08-31T12:04:00.002-07:00

Last week I had the unpleasant experience again of reaching Madison through Chi from a foreign airport. After going through the security check in London, I had togo outside the customs barrier at Chi, carrying my hand luggage, and taking a train from one building to another and then repeating the security inquisition for a second time in the same trip. As earlier, it occurred to me that any city or state that wants to play in the arena of excellence in international science or business must have easy access by the standard air routes. I figured out once how WI could do that without involving any State costs. When I raised the suggestion with my Assemblyman, I was rebuffed with no reason given. When I asked my State Senator, I was told that it was too ambitious for WI to consider. This time, it occurred to me that unless there were a desire in MSN and MKE to be included in the wider world of science and business, the idea that the State capital and the seat of the University were only accessible dependably by local bus was a substantial impediment to keeping competitive with MI and MN, which have the national and international connections. Our world reaches out to the edges of the universe, both geographically and philosophically. Yet in many ways, it feels as though Madison is a leftover, as in the dismissal of the Middle West as the Flyover People. The sense that the real world is absent on another planet is one that plays a central part in luring talented people from the Midwest. The possibility of having an international airport in Jefferson County, linked to MSN and MKE by high-speed electric railroad is one that might still exist, if there were the desire to move this part of the world closer to the intellectual center of this country

UK RIOTS - August 25, 2011

2011-08-31T12:04:00.001-07:00

I have been following the news on this outbreak of rioting in UK, but until yesterday, I had only the vaguest idea of what it was that was driving the onset. It stems from the killing of a black man named Duggan by a policeman. The exact sequence of events was never clear at first. What was patent was that the policeman did kill Mr. Duggan and there was no indication that there was even a suspicion that the killing was unjustified. In similar circumstances, one might have expected that the killer would have been suspended pending an investigation of the circumstances, but no such announcement was made. After several days, a crowd went to the local police station to inquire after the state of matters. They were left standing in the street for four hours without comment, after which they turned their backs and walked away. In the light of decades of relationship between the police and the black community in UK, the absence of any recognition of the urgency of having something to say was left to die unanswered. It had come upon the heels of an announcement that Mr. Duggan had killed a policeman or, in a later version, that he had had an exchange of gunshots, and seemed to validate the killing. The crowd exploded. They turned to the one thing that was sure to elicit a response. They broke things. Like the story of the mule trainer that started out beating the mule with a 2x4 “to get its attention”. But the Government has taken shelter in the canard that those who sought attention to the events leading up to the riot were claiming that that justified the explosion of anger and by the allegation that those who demanded clarification were justifying the theft. The issue was not the theft. It was the killing of Mr. Duggan. The attempt to focus on the theft shows the shallowness of Tory understanding.

OBAMA, AGAIN - August 18, 2011

2011-08-18T07:48:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, a writer produced a book called What’s wrong with Kansas? His thesis was that the Conservatives never produce the laws that their conservative voters want, but they continue to re-elect them. All that seems required is that they show themselves as minded in the indicated directions, as a contrast to the Dems. Since I have doggedly tied myself to the desire that Obama wishes to do the things he says, and he seems to make no effort to achieve those things, I am in the same position as the Kansas voters, though in reverse. Since I do not take Obama for a fool, I am forced to the conclusion that he takes me for one, and you too. The purpose for his failure to exhibit any of the strength that he patently showed in the 08 election might be his re-election rather than one of the Tories, but there does not seem to be any urgent desire to accomplish the things that the US people gave him the mandate to do, or at least to attempt. So maybe he does consider me a fool, and maybe you, too. I thought Gore was not worth voting for and, in the light of the present President, maybe that was right, but look what the Bush regime has cost us. And when I succumbed and backed Kerry, that also looked like Kansas in reverse. Meanwhile, UK is now suffering from a government even worse than Blair or Brown, and it looks like there will be no release from the ravishing of the present generation of adolescents as far into the future as anyone can see. And back at home I have the choice of settling for a President who is a block against progress or taking a chance on a Bush clone, or even worse, if that is possible. And I tremble at the thought of who may be orchestrating this parody of Democracy and how they bring it about, while desperately clinging to the hope that we have not been sold out while saluting the Democrats’ shining banner and marching in the ranks of the betrayed believers.

TRAFFIC - August 11, 2011

2011-08-11T12:58:00.001-07:00

Here in London, we are coming to understand that the re-allocation of road space from cars to bicycles contains costs that are not apparent from the outset. It is one thing when we are dealing with little-used suburban and local streets, but quite another when the appearance of bicycles in dozens and scores forces following traffic to advance at bicycle speed. This is especially true when outraged motorists are impeded and demand that bikes share their lanes with cars and trucks, often close and frequently fast. The law in WI has always required that they take a full lane, so as not to subject this fragile traffic to the danger of being forced off the road or crushed. I have even been harassed by police in the Arboretum for not moving over to share a single lane with a police car. The secret lies in the growth of traffic. As urban housing and offices dictate the razing of 3- and 4-story houses to apartment blocks of 12 or 20 stories, even worse in cities like London, where, as 30- and 40-story buildings are increasingly to be seen, the streets will have no room into which to expand. As an engineering problem, I see no solution but the division of the space over the roads into motorized traffic at the street level and elevated promenades for pedestrians and non-motorized bikes and skates. A civilizing dent can be made by saving the sky over the sidewalks and having the light traffic as high as the third story to allow a sense of space to those using the lower level. Otherwise, in time the bicycles will push the cars and trucks off the streets entirely, though at significant peril. And if we are to find some recourse in downtown construction, we had better get building very soon. If we wait long enough, the construction alone will be very costly and more intrusive. Meanwhile, we can expect the existing roads to become increasingly crowded and dangerous, and increasingly unattractive as an engineering problem.

ENTITLEMENT - August 4, 2011

2011-08-04T06:44:00.001-07:00

The fiasco of the collapsing of the Murdoch regime in US and UK makes clear the expectation of entitlement on the part of the proprietor class in the world of the Free Market (FM) and the relative triviality of the application of that term when relating to the struggle of the poorest and least powerful among us merely to stay alive and retain the most basic of the amenities of life. The ruling of UK by the coalition government, led by a cabal of Eton men who consider that their privileged status includes the right to rule, overshadows the claim of working people to a level of at least decency, and by a margin that makes us realize that their use of the term, like that of the word “elitism” is in a large part a move to disarm the word itself to prevent its being applied to them. For just as that can refer to a statement about whether the rich have a right to rule, it can merely note that Einstein was smarter than most people. And a similar comment applies to the word “entitlement”. Anyone who has any experience with seeing how the rich in college feel they are entitled to certification as superior thinkers for routine memorization without any meaningful degree of understanding must look with scorn on their complaints against those who are merely collecting belatedly on their share of the wealth that their generation has conferred on those who have profited from the fruits of their labors. The economy, which was one of distributing a meager weal, is now so fruitful that “hot money” is plentiful in the strata of those who have never worked for a living. The growing productivity of labor in each succeeding generation creates more wealth to supply all with a comfortable living and still have plenty left to act as a spur to creativity. Indeed, it is really only those who are at most merely comfortable who are genuinely moved to that accomplishment by the promise of prosperity.

STEM CELLS - July 28, 2011

2011-07-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

I was recently in contact with a friend about a notion I had had about creating a bank of stem cells harvested from human placentas, a source which had almost invariably been discarded. It seemed to me that the potential supply was endless there and only a brutal indifference to the possible benefits could stand against such a blood bank. It could be sustainably renewed as soon as any degeneration in old stem cells from that showed a sign of decay. What I got in reply from my medical friend was a long list of links to the work of the past decades since the pioneering work of Prof. Thomson and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. It turned out that there has been a flood of results, culminating in some investigations in Australia involving two placentas donated by women who had had well-planned Caesarian deliveries, yielding a total of about 4.5 m cells of extremely high quality and great promise. I was astounded to learn that I had heard nothing of the work, despite my lay interest in scientific advance. However, if the ordinary considerations applied, this should put paid to the controversy and we should all celebrate together, regardless of our religious orientations. Still, I cannot imagine that there could be any objection to applying this nascent technology, at least in the cases of people with no other sources of hope. Yet it would seem that there must be objection somewhere to going further at full speed, at least in the case of special urgency. I hope that someone would fill me in to the information of any objection and why it carries weight in our supposedly advanced society. It is so rare these days that the advance of knowledge seems not to have any down side, even for those who appear congenitally to oppose the advances of knowledge that is not grounded in ancient texts. When

HOPE - July 14, 2011

2011-07-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

This month will go into USA history as the time when Pres. Obama finally drained the Dem Party of hope, leaving the Enlightenment to be extinguished by the ignorant depredations of the ideological know-nothings that put the welfare of GOP functionaries ahead of the desperate needs of the nation. In the dismantling and castrating of the Labour Party in UK, we see the future of our country as far ahead as the horizon. We do not need the stirrings of hope we saw in the 08 elections as a foil for the strangulation of the Enlightenment, such as that of Government in UK under Blair and Brown. The presence of Obama apparently softening the sharp edge of labor servitude is not an adequate payment for the circumstances that will deprive civilized life of the advantages that were piled up in the XX Century making life more tolerable, and even somewhat pleasant, for the working people and laying the grounds for advancement and participation in the economic life of US. We will actually not replace Obama at the head of the ticket in 2012 and that will doom us to total non-participation in the decisions of our lives until 2017, by which time the Dem Party will join New Labour on the ash heap of History. The loss of the lesson of the New Deal has been lost by the working people who have benefitted from the example of FDR and have escaped the wreck visited upon this nation by the greed and predation of the Golden Era, culminating in the Great Depression. In the belief that the method of Obama was the best we could hope for, we have followed a false Messiah not to the Peaceful Kingdom but back into the chains of the Old Regime. Whether Obama wins or loses next year, the future for the working people of US is very dark, and there does not appear that any new home for the Enlightenment offering itself in the very dark days that seem to lower on the horizon.

LAST WEEK - July 7, 2011

2011-07-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

To misquote Lincoln Steffens from his autobiography, “I have seen the future and it stinks”. UK is so dysfunctional it almost makes Wisconsin look intelligent. The Tory government is so eager to unravel the advances made in the lives of average people in the XX Century that one fears that the human race is in the process of abandoning the advances of that century and returning to the abuses of the Golden Age, or even back to the time when the Free Market represented an advance on the pattern of old Liberal economics that were an advance 250 years ago on the Administered prices of imperial Europe. Meanwhile, all the nations of the planet are shrinking their budgets, neglecting the teachings of Keynes and their proof in the New Deal of Roosevelt. Even Pres. Obama seems to be reliving the policies of Herbert Hoover as the robust economy that USA had in the 1960s and 70s grinds to a slow crawl. UK seems like WI on sleeping pills, waiting for the super-rich to decide to invest in industry, just as they didn’t in the 1930s. And the supposed experts tell us that the route to prosperity is to deny ourselves the results of fostering the middle class through having them work, producing so many things that we all seem to want while cashing in on the good life that would follow if all of the working people had jobs, good jobs that could support the nation to the degree that we knew it in the years of the late century just past. Instead, the Tories and their owners are pulling the carpet out from under the working people and our children, creating a Lost Generation of those who are being denied access to the universities, and denying health care to those who do not have the money to buy it at its current prices, even in some cases stretching to the point of denying life-saving treatment. For most of the population the choice is to fight this reversal of prosperity or succumb to the threat of a Dark Age crawling over the horizon.

CHICKEN - June 23, 2011

2011-06-23T07:01:00.001-07:00

We are now past the expiration date of the US debt limit, and living on the scraps and bits of money that we can scrounge up in the treasury, but the Obama administration hardly looks like they are facing a screeching halt. The only ones who are facing that eventuality are the members of the Tea Party who appear to have taken John Boehner captive and are threatening to oust him from his Chair after only a few months of his achieving the life goal of his ambition in Congress. If we were to believe the mouthings of the national press, there remain only a few months until everything would stop, including even the few nickels it would require to pack up the US effort in Iraq and Afghanistan and get the warriors home. So it looks like the only reality that would match the effort is that Obama is preparing to cede once again to the bluster of a few maniacs. If he were actually playing the game of Chicken that he says has him trapped, he would certainly be having the forces pack up for a decent departure back to the Western Hemisphere while there were a few cents left to pay their way Home. Instead, GOP can always complain that his body English was always consonant with their having him over a barrel and that he was always moving to conform to the force majeure. Indeed, he has left that message with people like me, and that is why so many of us on his Left are responding to polls with the opinion that we are not satisfied with this conduct of the Government. It is clear that all he wants is a plausible tale to cover his surrender, and that is all GOP is planning on letting him have. On the other hand, if he gives the order to prepare to bring the forces home, the ball would then be in the Tea party’s court, and we might see a two-sided game of Chicken.

BILLIONS - June 16, 2011

2011-06-15T08:39:00.001-07:00

The US Supreme Court has never actually ruled that anyone who had a billion dollars was entitled to a billion extra votes, but it began to feel like it. Certainly the Koch brothers had more influence on the outcome of the 2010 vote in WI than the hundreds of thousands of voters who had been persuaded by their slick advertising that it was not worth the time and effort to get down to the polls and vote. And that on top of those who felt that if the Dems could not get over the obstructionist tactics of GOP, then it didn’t matter who won the election. So it is proven again that if the People did not take account of who was primed to do them more damage (not to mention the few that were actually acting in their interests), then Plato’s dictum on the worthlessness of democracy would be reinforced. On top of that, the prospect that the Kochs didn’t have to say who was paying for the slick ads that flooded the TV made it appear as the cool thing that year was to “turn the rascals out” or to “starve the beast” or any of the shallow slogans by the use of which they could be persuaded to act against their own better interest (not to mention their best ones). It must, after all have looked like the Dems would lie battered in the ditch after deciding that it would be ungentlemanly to give GOP a dose of what the representatives of the billionaires had been offering the negligent People as the strategy that they said was their way out of the dead end. Both in DC and in Madison, it seemed that those who were threatening to kill off the People’s democracy and blame it on either the machinations of the Dems or at least a law of nature were going to get away with it and secure an almost unconditional surrender for the hirelings of the Plutocrats. So it looked to many that the appropriate way to punish their false friends in the Center Left was to vote to empower their true enemies on the Far Right.

GUILTY! - June 9, 2011

2011-06-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

From time to time we hear reports from the US Government about events in the Great World in which this nation or another stands in the court of public opinion. Sometimes DC will contribute this principle or that to indicate which nation or another is in violation of something that DC likes to call the opinion of humankind. It often happens that the choice of judgment coincides with whether the accused country is a US ally or not. Today we are witnessing the opening of the trial of Serbian General Mladic. People parroting the US line are saying that since he was in charge of the Serbian army at the time, any violations of common understanding can be laid to his command, and that he is thus individually guilty of many crimes, one of which is murder. Yet when the accused is a major political figure of a DC ally, or even DC itself, a different set of rules is adduced, notably what actions the accused has provably done. Just as a coincidence, the past 2 weeks featured the exhumation of President Salvatore Allende of Chile. The Nixon administration, which had borne the accusation by many observers of having sponsored the Pinochet coup, was thought by many to have murdered President Allende. But they had Allende buried without a post-mortem and all succeeding presidents, including Pres. Obama, have not rushed to condemn Nixon, who announced that Allende had killed himself with his AK47. The burden of individual conviction for murder, they said, required proof of individual action beyond reasonable doubt. General Mladic, by contrast, was said to be convicted by the suspicions of the observers. Now, by coincidence, it is reported that Allende’s body showed 2 shots: a small caliber to the head and a major one from the assault rifle. It is hard to imagine the scenario, in which a coup soldier had found the corpse and put an extraneous bullet in the head, which can still be tested for as the cause of his death. I think that he was murdered, and that under the Mladic precedent, Nixon must be accorded the status of his murderer.

HOT MONEY - June 2, 2011

2011-05-31T10:16:00.001-07:00

We are being told that there is a recovery happening, but the only real evidence for that is a rise in the stock market. Meanwhile, the housing industry is in collapse, the auto plants are just making money on the pent-up demand, abut 15 million people who want real jobs on which one can raise a family are either jobless or do lower-level work that takes in no evidence that they are skilled workers, or work only part-time but have the training for an advanced job that they are barred from by the slack in the labor market. The rise in the stock market or similar deposits called “investments” are signs only of the purchase of securities by the minority that have money and are used to the expectation that they can increase their wealth not through genuine accomplishments but only through the fact that there are others who will pay even more to agglomerate wealth without making anything of value or inventing anything of worth. This motivation is so widespread that the demand for these supposed pots of gold keeps building up in a bubble until a wrinkle punctures it. We have seen from the New Deal how to get out of a depression caused by such a puncture, but now we have a new Keynesianism from Galbraith that points out that the draining of hot money into projects of genuine social need not only can spread health, wealth and prosperity but also reduces the apparent need of everyone with a bit of spare cash (Spare as shown by the ability to wager it in the Big Casino) in the search for reward for winning the gamble against others similarly ignorant and similarly driven. If we understand the motives that drive people to play in this game in which most are the rankest of amateurs compared with those with enough to bend the rules to their benefit, then we can see the shifting of funds from the feeding of the professionals to the People, in the form of health, education, justice and stability is to nearly everyone’s advantage.

ENLIGHTENMENT - May 26, 2011

2011-05-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that we are reaching the end of the Enlightenment. I had never heard of it until I reached literature in college German class, which now seems strange, since it was the moving spirit of the US Revolution and the intellectual life of the latter 18th Century in EU. In fact, as I later realized to my surprise, it was the Enlightenment that endeared US to the dreams of the educated people there in the 19th Century. The Enlightenment was the force of mind that led politics in UK, philosophy in France, and music and literature in Germany during that time, but only US was successful promoting it as a political philosophy, though France kept trying and falling back into autocracy. Still, there was enough of that outlook in US so that the attempt to believe in it kept Columbia as the Gem of the Ocean until it finally broke over the issue of slavery. What it had left behind was a beacon of hope in the practical policies of Democracy for almost 100 years and a very prosperous economy for most of its second century. But underneath there was always a strange mixture of the Wild West and peasant life in EU imperial life to undermine the glorious vision of a nation governed by the philosophy of Reason. By the early 20th Century, the cracks in the attendant belief in the perfection of the Free Market were challenging the rule of money that had been part of the credo of the Free Market for over 200 years. In the meantime, the Germans fleeing the crumbling of the Prussian Revolution in 1848 came to WI, bearing the Enlightenment with them and were the torch of Liberty for about 100 years until being swallowed by McCarthyism after WW II. Today we struggle to maintain the faith that made us the Capital of Reason during most of the US centuries until the class war of the billionaires has put our heritage in peril. The next few years will chart WI’s course for the next few centuries. This is a call to fight for the Light.

MISSOURI - May 12, 2011

2011-05-11T09:04:00.001-07:00

Today the Mississippi R is flooding again, as it does from time to time, but today it is within 2” of the record flood at Memphis in 1937. When I was a kid in the 1930s, the R flooded almost every year, as did its companion, the Tennessee. And the TN valley was a mess of swamps, malaria, and underdevelopment. But the New Deal changed that for them, as new dams converted the swamps into lakes, managed the mosquitoes by manipulating the water levels in them, and electrified SE TN into the industrial giant of that State. After being interrupted by WW II, the move to do a similar thing to the MO R was restored. Since that did not have the same geography, it would have involved diverting the R SE through many farm fields when necessary prevent the destruction caused in river cities. But after 1945, the anger of the corporate bureaucracy against what they called the Red Menace in the form of the TVA not only prevented the upper Midwest from profiting from TN’s example, but as soon as GOP got their hands on government, Eisenhower began to restrict the socially beneficial effects of the TVA, resulting on a stress on coal burning power plants which left a toxic legacy of coal ash in place of the long-past floods. MVA was out of the Q, and remained so to this day. Today 400 miles W of TVA in TN, Memphis is the victim of the lack of flood control while TX is consumed by a drought and could dearly love the MO R water if they could get it. Of course, TX leads the country in finding Reds under their beds, so perhaps it is plain divine justice that they are not getting the MO Valley’s surplus to wet their fields. But a week or so back one part of MO was flooded to save the city of Cairo IL, while MO raged and TX was bone dry. But just try to get the Senators from TX to see the value in MVA today, even as they thirst and pray for rain.

JOBLESS - May 5, 2011

2011-05-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

As I listen to the ease with which the comfortable middle class tolerates the agonies of the jobless, I observe that many of the prosperous find the troubles of those who are without work, without income, often losing their homes, their marriages, their families, and often even their health, and even their lives. Often those who seemingly have learned that the least painful place to endure a beating is on someone else’s back may prattle about sharing the pain even when the pain is in many cases a temporary lack of what many of us recognize as a luxury will talk about the shared sacrifice as though the temporary absence of that luxury is somehow equivalent to the deep troubles being suffered by people who genuinely have to suffer privation of the deep needs of life. It seems that the President’s lack of urgency in pressing the needs of the needy indicates that he is indifferent to the pain of the jobless. In this he may be unconscious of the depth of the suffering of others, or he might be just genuinely indifferent to it. I remember that 18 years ago, I had an interview with Russell Feingold just before he left for DC. I had been a supporter of his from the day when he entered politics and I pressed upon him the position that the urgent needs of the jobless was more pressing than the accumulated debt. I could not manage to make my point. Feingold had been raised in middle-class comfort and, though he took on almost every protest against the treatment of the poor and powerless, it weighed lightly on his shoulders. He often voted for its amelioration, but it never seemed to have the urgency that its pain should carry. As a result, although he had the support of many unions, it did not turn out enough voters to carry the day when the fat was in the fire. Possibly Obama is tempting a similar fate, as many who should be supporting him register their lack of commitment.

IRAN AND IRAQ - April 28, 2011

2011-04-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

It is an insult to informed listeners when the US administration tells us things that we can easily know are untrue. This supposed right of the rulers to tell lies that will support their policies is a balance to their supposed right to keep us from knowing the truth, as is seen in the wikileaks prosecutions. Not only do they tell us the lies, but they claim the right to inflict punishment upon those who discover them and tell what they have learned. In the case of Iran, they long ago branded them an enemy of US, and succeeding governments have repeated their untruths as though they knew no better, and called upon the law and the patriotism of US to second the deceptions, far into the future when no legitimate grounds for them continue to exist. An outstanding example is when US labels their allies as democracies, overlooking deeds that we would excoriate in those whose offenses do not exceed the unwillingness to join an alliance against some US interest. As an example, we have the contrast between our propaganda about Iran and Sa’udi Arabia. The former is attacked for its undemocratic government while the hereditary monarchy of the latter is called a democracy, or at least we take no notice of their medieval excesses. Also, Iraq was called the worst tyranny in the world while their neighbor Syria was being excused. Now Syria has suddenly joined the ranks of the worst, while Yemen continues being mostly overlooked. In the meantime, we have supported military dictatorships of the worst sort over the decades since WW II even heaping accolades on the likes of Pinochet and Ferdinand Marcos. When Pakistan joined US in standing against the Chinese, they were wonderful, while India was treated as an enemy for decades, and Iran had its government overthrown, leading to the “choice” of the mullahs and the Shah, probably dooming democracy there for the foreseeable future. The people of Iran are due an abject apology but instead they are excoriated because they are at political odds with their natural foes in the Israelis. It is time that some respect be shown to the intelligent US people.

DEBT - April 21, 2011

2011-04-20T13:55:00.001-07:00

In the discussion of debt, it is important to recognize the cultures surrounding this institution in our world. The most serious consideration on the part of the lender is whether the borrower has the genuine intent and also the ability to repay the principal, and also the interest, if any. It is usually considered that this consideration must fall upon the lender, if he has any genuine concern for the loan. Of course, in our time, we are familiar with the bankster game of inducing a loan by a borrower who may not repay the principal, but can be expected to submit to usurious interest costs, possibly coming to exceed even a large multiple of the whole loan. This seems to support the whole of the credit card scam, usually foisted upon the unwary. Young adults especially seem to fall for this gambit. In the case of nations, the issue of the willingness and capacity to pay the contracted costs seems to be essential in making the loan. Yet our literature is replete in cases in which the borrower genuinely believes that he will repay somehow, but is without any real motivation to deprive himself to do that, and maybe there will be no way to succeed in that. Any observer seeing the contortions of the two major US parties must realize that the People have been seduced into debt by the inability of either party to remain in elective contention unless they promise to reduce the taxes from which the money to repay the debt will come. Thus we have the canonical situation in which the loan cannot be repaid, even if the debtor wishes he could. In that case, we see extraordinary efforts being made to secure the cost of the debt from someone else. In general, it is the onus of the lender to see that he does not lend to someone who will not pay, even if he wants to. Unless the borrower has the will to exact the debt from himself, or from those who own him, it is the action of a fool to lend him money. So much for confidence.

DEMOCRACY. NOW? - April 13, 2011

2011-04-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

No matter how you slice it, approximately half the electorate of WI has voted to continue the control of our government by the corporate plutocrats, and while there is a lot of difference between 49% and 51% in terms of who holds office, it can hardly fail to be noticeable that most of those below the median in their share of the goodies have voted for the regime of the Kochs and their ilk. Thus, while the Tories sell the working and lower middle classes on endless promises of the likes of abortion prohibition, the Dems are doing the same with empty promises of economic justice. Barack Obama continues to sell himself in the role of the Weak King, soliciting pity for his fecklessness, and others will be paying the costs of his weakness. In AZ, the State made a political decision to forego the program of replacement organs for medical victims. Middle class citizens paid with their lives for the election of Tories who call themselves Republicans, and the Republic is ratifying that election. In many states, middle class teens are being priced out of the economic benefits, if any, of a college education. By the time this depression turns itself around, they might have missed the boat and will have to live their lives as a lost generation. Corporatized health insurance will continue to empty the bank accounts of many and fill the graves of many of those who don’t have the money the plutocrats want to rob. But as I have often mentioned, and many before me for over 2K years, including Plato and Socrates, democracy is subject to the depredations of demagogues selling political snake oil and the public is often too sleepy to act sensibly in their own interest. Still it remains the truth that the People can make a revolution at the ballot box, without needing to pick up a gun. If we wait too long, we will share the agonies of the people of Libya. Even in this pinch, democracy offers the People their best deal, until it becomes too late, as it often does.

EMPIRE - March 23, 2011

2011-03-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

As US once again takes the position that our voice is the voice of the whole human race, I must admit that I am again feeling queasy. I am sensitive to the ancient Greek concept of hubris, and of my sense that there are many others on this lost little planet of ours that take a similar feeling from such imperial statements coming out of DC. I have no use for Col. Kaddafi, but that puts him into company with other military dictators, many of whom have been allies and supporters of US governments in the past. Some of these, notably Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen, are showing their colors these days, and their misdeeds extend to deploying battlefield type weapons, especially tanks and fighter- bombers, against unarmed or slightly-armed political protesters. There are no international conventions outlawing such blatant use of the People’s money by the nation’s rulers against political protesters, though I thin there should be. By contrast, we have the issue of piracy, lately appearing in the Straits of Malacca and now issuing from the fishing villages of Somalia. These incursions take place in international waters, and even the imperial US Government shies away from enforcing the centuries-old reading of international law that proclaimed pirates as the enemies of all humanity. An international problem courts an international solution, and the Charter of the United Nations used to include an armed force. I cannot imagine any infraction of world-wide law that has such a uniform condemnation. Who would stand up for piracy on the high seas as a form of Freedom of the Seas? Yet the Emperor of the Planet in DC has never proposed a UN Navy to enforce this unanimous opinion against the violation. Perhaps such a general agreement might be a start toward a day when tanks in the streets against protesters can be generally condemned, and not on a case-by-case basis arising from the opinions of the Boss Nation. I know US love being Boss, but catering to this addiction has proven very dear to US over the past 50 years, in money, lives and moral honor.

TEACHERS - March 17, 2011

2011-03-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

This year, in accord with the plans of GOP, 65K teachers will be laid off. This is in the face of a time when high school math teachers are enormously under-certified with only a few percent holding undergraduate degrees in the subject they are to teach and only a few of the elementary teachers having an understanding of how elementary arithmetic works as noted by professors of mathematics in reputable universities. And the decision of which of them are to be made jobless over money will be taken in a majority of cases by administrators who are themselves ignorant of the logical substructure underlying the subject, at least by the ordinary criteria of scholarly attainment. Indeed, many of those who are retained may have only fractional awareness of the underpinnings of the subject, and those will necessarily be working in classes that are increasingly overcrowded. As a matter of fact, many of those teaching high school math are e.g. athletic coaches. The best that can be said of many of those is that they are no more incompetent at math than at any other academic area. The conclusion is that any warm body capable of elementary arithmetic would be equally considered of capability for the task, if only able to persuade an administrator almost equally unfamiliar with the task. In addition, no resources are being made available to the schools to correct this deficiency. On the contrary, those like with new governor of Wisconsin will be cutting the funds that would be needed to make any inroad on the problem. At the same time, such State officials are acting as though any person with any teaching certificate can be assigned the task, up only to the day when the students or their parents wake up to his/her weakness in the face of the challenge. When these do come out of their denial, there will be no one to hire for the work, even worse than it was on that day in 1957 when we discovered the Sputnik beeping overhead.

CLASS WAR, AGAIN - March 4, 2011

2011-03-03T07:24:00.000-08:00

As we look upon the demonstrations taking place on the Capitol Square, it must surely come to us to wonder how we acquired this predatory government, and how we can relieve ourselves of it. Seen at the simple level, it seems as though there is no way out of this dead end. Through sloth and inattention, the US people have allowed ourselves to be saddled with a Supreme Court that has annunciated the principled that we must tolerate persons and corporations of great wealth to turn that inequality in riches into a control of the means of ruling us, even to our great disadvantage. In places like France in the XVIII Century or Egypt in the past 30 years, people allowed things to get bad enough that only a willingness to put their lives at risk before an unprincipled and murderous government might free them. And in US, we have watched a government bought by billionaires try to deprive us of the political and economic freedoms that we have taken for granted in the XX Century, and they seem to be on the way to succeeding. And it seems that we have put that power in the hands of the forces that will reduce us to economic and political servitude. And they have moved us into a class war in which we seem powerless before the entrenched power of money. If we turn our backs on this reality, as we have for the past 40 years, the collar of servitude will continue to grow tighter, as we fall for their well-paid lies to grant them power over us. We may be facing our last chance to turn things around during the coming two years, and we had better be ready to vote for our own best interest. The Class War is a reality and has come into open view, and we must be ready to vote for our own benefit while we still have the chance. The predator class has taken control of the levers of power, and unless we close our ears to the lies pouring out of their well-paid propagandists, we may see our children reduced to the choices of the Egyptians this month facing the guns of the predators.

SINGLE PAYER - February 10, 2011

2011-02-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

The constitutional lawsuits against he Obama health insurance bill now offer the liberal minority a golden opportunity, which should not be missed. It appears from all the writing on this subject that a decision to raise taxes to pay for a single-payer health insurance plan would be legal, and that the machinations of the blockers would have to rest on advisability rather than mandates to buy. Once a plan payed for by a general levy, say by a percentage addition to the income tax and was named for the cost of a gift to the general population of “free” health insurance paid by US, the cost would become an issue in its own right. At the time that Obama decided to play softly, softly with the party of NO, there was a substantial majority in favor of single payer, and the closing of other ways of paying it by constitutional maneuverings leaves it in a position to raise the issue again, this time in time for the 2012 election. Also, the blockage of the compromise was not by the Dems, but by those championing the predatory blockage by the profiteers. In an atmosphere where the alternative has been closed, it would be just right to turn the 2012 election around that question. And it would not be the liberals that blocked the soft turn to compromise. Of course, all this would bespeak a hormonal recovery by the Dem party, and a straight opportunity for the people to enact their own health salvation by kicking the GOP out of the Congress. Those who believe in the people can propose this resolution under the urgency of the word “must”. There is a certain satisfaction in the stratagem of laying this matter into the hands of the People, and for them to rise or fall by their own vote. Then we might see what the People really want. The theorists of Democracy have always told us that taking a good or bad outcome by your own choice beats having it forced upon you by someone else’s power.

ENTITLEMENTS - February 3, 2011

2011-02-02T18:53:00.000-08:00

We hear a lot about entitlements these days, in a tone of inaudible snickering, as though the laws which detail the safety net provisions detailing them were somehow suspect, like the Obama birth certificate also beloved by the snickerers. Actually, it might be worthwhile to master this skill, for use in referring to Republicans. There are many cases of laws laid down for the benefits of a particular section of society, but the subtle sneers seem reserved for those who are poor and nearly helpless, unlike banksters and hedge fund scams. Attacks on these latter are dismissed as class warfare. The public is so used to special laws favoring the rich and well-connected that they have long since quit taking note of those special laws, such as the one passed in the 1930s tailored for the tax needs of Louis B. Mayer, the movie mogul. In the late 18th century, the laws of monarchial France favoring the princes and dukes were so old and well-established that the struggling masses had ceased to comment on them. Even in more democratic England in the XIX Century, it was common for a bank or an economic scheme to rent the name and title of a duke, or at least a baron, as a façade to legitimatize its predations. Those without any particular talent for the enterprise understood that society would rather enter any such undertaking as the underling of a man who called himself a noble than take a chance with one of the (sneer) common people. The idiocy continues today in nations that still vote for the scions of supposedly superior people. It is time to announce that the snickering use of the word “entitlements” is the mark of a snake-oil salesman, seeking to turn the working population against the laws that protect their homes, their jobs, their incomes, and their pensions. We should recognize that the sneer should apply instead to those who implicitly suggest that legal protections apply solely to working people and that there is something dirty about them. Only a fool would fall for that scam.

WATER - January 27, 2011

2011-01-26T10:59:00.001-08:00

Once again, the newspapers tell us of minor contamination in the drinking water in Madison. Sometimes it is a chemical element, particularly if it is radioactive. At other times, it might be a whole chemical or a bacterium or a virus. Often it is a pollutant that cannot be surely written off as harmless, but threatening enough that there are people who will buy bottled water or invest in a filtering system that requires rejuvenation every six months or so. There are several ways to deal with such a marginal threat, but the cheapest one is for the answerable agency to deny that there is an actual threat there, until all the dodges have been exhausted and the responsible authorities must, finally, deal with the situation. Even when they must eventually do the right thing, the time to correct it can be stretched out by the injection of uncertainty until, in the meantime, much harm can have been done. An outstanding example was the downwinders of Utah living to the NE of the testing range for nuclear weapons. The US Government denied for a whole generation that they were facing deadly radiation while the children grew up to lives dominated by thyroid cancer. Less horrible, but bad enough, were the denials that coal dust was causing cancer, similarly with asbestos, cotton lint, and various sorts of dust. In every such instance there was a commercial interest that would benefit financially by having the threat overlooked, permanently if possible but profitable if temporary. So there was the campaign to prevent the removal of lead from gasoline, to say nothing of the decades of denials that smoking helps cause cancer. In Madison, it is time to take by the horns the obligation to provide the city with drinking water as safe as can be, either by running a system of providing pure water as soon as possible or at least a filter system that flushes itself automatically so that decades can pass between replacement of filters. Until that happens, many people will drink bottled water, and many will discard the bottles where their disposition will be a burden on the City, which will not be adequately addressed by complaining about the bottles that have to be rounded up and disposed of.

KING - January 20, 2011

2011-01-19T16:49:00.000-08:00

Once again, as Martin Luther King moves from civil beatification to sainthood, it is time to remember who has won a place with him in the memory of the American people. For it is easy to forget that the Civil Rights Movement, while advancing the civilization of our people, was a noisy and somewhat disorderly experience, marked by civil disobedience and some that occasionally lacked some of its civility. It is always the case that there are those who would prefer that protest take place at low decibels, so that the ruling classes can get on with their agenda. Cynics describe this as the desire of those classes to have their war in peace. There were places, including some universities, some cities, some states and some countries, that signed on to the protest, and there were others for which the ripples in the fabric of order were enough that they labeled people like Dr. King as disturbers of the peace, even when that peace, paradoxically, involved the passive signing on to war, despite the nagging of conscience. Two of the latter class were named Wisconsin, both the State and the University. In the academic year 1967-68, Dr. King had come out in support of protests against the war, in both places. This irregularity was taken as nearly treasonable by the establishments in both. In the University, he was nominated for an honorary doctorate by the Department of Sociology with scattered support. As nearly as can be discerned in a committee that declined to offer any rationale, the anger that was manifest in some of the Establishment over his failure to second the false account that put us into the war was taken as nearly treasonable. And thus Wisconsin managed to place itself into the dishonor roll of those who would not join in praising Dr. King’s message of peace until later in that year, when he had already been assassinated, and in many cases not until much later. One poet wrote of those who would hold back their praise for Truth “till her cause shall come to flower and ‘tis prosperous to be just”. So today the State and University praise Dr. King every January as though we had not denied him when he was still alive to do his great work.

MATH - January 13, 2011

2011-01-12T16:32:00.000-08:00

Close to the center of the rage about the adequacy of teaching in US K-12 schools is the difficulty in reaching students in Mathematics, even elementary Arithmetic. This is due in part to the fact that most students, their parents and their teachers think of Math as the art of carrying out calculations, and these have been reduced to carrying out certain memorized procedures. Indeed, the art of teaching the procedures has been sharpened specifically to eliminate almost all need for a deep understanding, which can command time and attention. In the process, we rob our students of the intellectual adventure that has been so central in creating the growing discipline of commanding the artificial intellectual structure we call Mathematics. When we attempted to improve the students’ understanding in the 1960s and 70s by teaching what became known as the New Math, we ran into a block by parents and teachers who thought that what they knew was all that it was required to know, and resented the idea that they would need to learn some “new” ideas to improve that understanding. The belief in Mathematics not as an adventure in human knowledge of this intellectual structure, but as just the art of getting the answers without being “burdened” with comprehension infects our understanding even well into graduate study. Meanwhile, almost all of the intellectual world (excluding the portion that speaks English) has adopted the New Math and has left us behind while it caters to those who can handle the development of this discipline. Attempts by the universities to expand those theoretical limitations has been rejected by the students, their administrators and parents, who seem to prefer a world of authoritarian rules that can be applied with rote ease and without mental strain. The history and philosophy of this voyage out of ignorance are dismissed as luxuries, with the mechanical extraction of calculation being thought of as the true meaning of the study. Since this end is available without the “philosophy” and can be increasingly built into machines, the human content is eliminated. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is not standing still.

CHAINS - January 6, 2011

2011-01-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

Just this Monday morning, the new WI government slipped all the working people into the chains of an economy run by the representatives of the predator class, a fate that we all bought into in November. Largely through indifference, or ignorance, or pique or not paying attention, we fell into the peril that has always surrounded democracy whenever the electorate slackens its eternal vigilance. It is not as though we have not had most of the XX Century in which to learn that the J. P. Morgans and the bankers and the Enrons and the BPs and the Exxons of the world are not the friends of the working people of US, but for most of this century the Hearsts and the Murdochs of the West have been driving home the pernicious lie that our best interests in escaping the fate of the Russian Empire lie in entrusting our fates and those of our children and grandchildren to the super-rich representatives of the class of the economic pirates and banksters. And last year we again put our treasuries at their disposal, with the economy of the state of WI being put into the care of one of those predatory corporations pledged to the enrichment of their stockholders, instead of the elected leaders of the People. It is not as though the past 10 years had not shown us, in the hands of the Bush-Cheney gang, how thoroughly they could fleece us via the defense scam. But since the socialists, and then the communists, overthrew the medieval Russian Tsars, it has been a prime project of the owners of US newspapers, followed by radio, television, and blogs, to convince us that in order to be free of the Bolsheviks, and even the Cubans, we must entrust our economic welfare to those who have shriveled our unions, overturned the Progressive movement, and turned us back toward the Old Regime in EU in the XIX Century. And now our negligence has meant that it will be at least 4 years, and more likely 8 or 10, until we will have any chance to begin restoring the government of WI to the needs of the People, and away from the predatory rule of WMC and their ilk.

TAKING STOCK - December 30, 2010

2010-12-29T18:56:00.000-08:00

As we come to the end of the first decade of the XXI Century, it is time to see where we have come in recent time and to compare it to the accomplishments of the preceding 50 years. The comparison should be humbling, and to indicate where we have failed in building the world to be occupied by our children and grandchildren. 50 years ago we had just barely seen the first of the Sabin vaccine, hard on the heels of the Salk, and the trip to the moon was still sci-fi. Indeed, the Sputnik launch was still wet behind its ears, having appeared from seemingly nowhere to shake the hubristic dream of American scientific dominance. But these triumphs were small compared with the results that were to follow in the half century that marked US superiority in science, in culture, in industrial engineering and in many cultural and educational areas. US measured things in dollars, so the polio vaccines actually lost GDP in lowering the costs expended in the fear, cost and danger of the plague, which far outweighed the relatively trivial expenditure on the vaccine itself. Today we do not value in dollars any of the benefits of clean air and water, or of the vast blooming of graduate education here. The benefits we see in the science of the XXI Century are most evident on the wonderful mobile telephones and computer games, many of which feature simulated extermination. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. The major benefit we have from the abandonment of the effort to build the civilization is a modest reduction in taxes and a shrinking in our expectation for the lives of our descendants and a huge blooming in the prizes swept up by the members of the proprietor classes for nearly no accomplishment on their parts. The kept press keep telling us that we are much richer. Well, not richer in hope and certainly not in expectation. As long as we continue to follow that siren song, we will show the weakness in democracy, wherein the blandishments of the sirens of the rich make us all a lot poorer, through the seduction of the naïve.

SECRETS - December 23, 2010

2010-12-22T18:34:00.000-08:00

When I took a course in Constitutional Law, the discussion spent some time on the Jeffersonian view that the First Amendment to the Constitution was a prevention against secretive government and was the basic guarantee of freedom in a democracy. In the period just after the American Revolution, all the empires of Europe subsisted on the secrets of the royal houses and their hereditary power centers, even the British, which was the least bad of the lot. To the extent possible, it spoke to a world in which there were no governmental secrets, so that the People could know what and whom they were actually voting for. Of course, there would always be secrets, but these would have to be limited to things held close to the vest by a few people, and not be the recognized legal property of the ruling forces. At the same time, the Fourth Amendment guaranteed the right of the People to be secure in their persons, papers, houses and effects. A corollary of this statement is that personal secrets could only be penetrated by officials when a legal order attested to specific knowledge recognized by due process requiring certain officers to penetrate the Amendment’s shield of private life. In today’s world, these two conflicting injunctions have been stood upon their heads. The government spies on the People, as by telephone taps, whenever it wants to, and the intrusion of individuals into knowledge labeled sacrosanct by the simple stamp of SECRET is promoted to a crime, even up to the constitutionally defined offense of treason. In Britain, the Thatcher government prosecuted Clive Pontyng for violation of the Official Secrets Act for revealing that Thatcher had lied to Parliament in the matter of the sinking of the Argentine battleship Belgrano during the Falklands War. A British judge was willing to direct a verdict of guilty, but that was too much even for Thatcher. The jury gave the judge a lesson in due process by acquitting the truth-teller. It is a lesson that the US public no longer cares about, if we ever did.

DEBT, AGAIN - December 16, 2010

2010-12-22T18:33:00.000-08:00

There is a peculiarity about many peoples and debt. One gets the feeling, in the debates on it in DC, that US do not think about debt as a burden commanding the debtor to take the measures necessary to discharge it, like undertaking the sacrifices to collect the assets to attend to it. Rather, the response is rather like debt being an alternative to paying. We who see the way our college students deal with the credit cards that have been sold to them every September understand that reality, as do the banks that irresponsibly handed out the cards in the hope of attracting interest-bearing balances. And the press accounts about the many who think that making the minimum payment each month is all that they need do sustain that same attitude. Endless preaching about the mountainous interest seems to wash off their backs. Eventually we hear about parents being threatened with permanent blacklisting of their irresponsible children and forced to pay the usurers their ransom. The same casual bearing of debt manifests itself in the debate over the deficit, in which the Class War is reflected by groups seeking to load the problem onto others than their members. On the one hand, we see demands for austerity, which amount to meeting the shortfall by slighting the civic programs by which the poor are able to evade the most horrendous consequences of their condition, as well as the demands that the bulk of the costs should be borne by the members of the class whose members seem to have profited so fully by fleecing those who have been seduced into thinking that they can expect to eat their cake and have it too. If we expect to be able to borrow, it is necessary that our prospective creditors see that those who have the means to pay it off will in fact be tapped to do so. Otherwise, we will more likely slough off the sacrifice onto the weak and powerless, whose suffering is already beyond the limits of toleration, and those who claim to lead those people had better figure out how they will put the onus where it belongs.

FILIBUSTER - December 9, 2010

2010-12-09T06:32:00.000-08:00

Now that Obama has dishonored his pledge and given in to the conservative agenda on taxes, the fight is yet far from over. At least one senator has pledged to prevent the deal until the middle class gets its tax cut back. And that senator is not subject to Obama’s dictum, since he is openly a Socialist and has pledged to use his senatorial privilege to prevent the renewal of the tax swindle for the richest 2% of the country, those who have overwhelmingly profited by the larceny of the Cheney raid on the Treasury. Further, we can hope that other principled senators, like our Feingold and possibly Schumer and others, will stand alongside and not leave this kind of obstructionism as a tool of solely the GOP and the renegade Dems. It would be interesting to see whether Obama will turn all the force of his strategic sense against the principled faction of the Senate, having not fought for the establishment of his own oath. I have seen this movie before, it seems. In UK, Gordon Brown joined with Tony Blair to eviscerate what used to be called the Labour Party, and this May many of those who have always voted Labour discovered that they had plenty to do rather than travel to the polls to vote for those that had betrayed them. The result was that they got an even worse captain for their Government, just as US did when they found that their only champion was Gore, and later Kerry. I predict that if Obama’s surrender stands, the horrors of US in the next few years will have him ejected from the WH even though standing by his pledge might have proven unpopular also. Many who neglected to vote for his ostensible cause this year would surely fail to run out to vote for the lesser evil and he would share in 2 years the fate of Gordon Brown, making us all the losers for his lack of integrity. I wonder whether he would fight fairly with Sen. Sanders or have the gall to attack him as a Red. The abandonment of decency makes strange bedfellows.

STRATEGY - December 2, 2010

2010-12-02T07:30:00.001-08:00

I have been wavering these past few weeks between the positions that Obama is a fool and the equally unpleasant conclusion is that he has deceived all of us who cheered for him in 08, taking us for the asses we might well be. There remains a third option, one that is hard to believe but at least offers a ray of hope. It is manifest to me that his best strategy for dealing with the GOP is to let the tax giveaway expire and then move the reduction for the working and middle classes before taking up anything for the millionaires who profited so thoroughly from the Bush-Cheney raid on the Treasury. If the GOP are so stupid as to take the bait, then he has the text for his counter-attack on their abuse of the general population. I don’t think he can count on the GOP doing that, but if they do not, he will have what he promised us in 08, and re-election to boot. On the other hand, if they fail to vote the middle-class tax relief, we will at least be free of their pretense to represent the little people. But he is showing every indication of preparing to extend the raid on the Treasury and sticking the vast public with the bill for his cowardice. He seems to want to yield on the issue of doing what the GOP demands, even though he has the upper hand strategically. Or else his dithering is merely further posturing to lure them into his trap. That seems too hard to believe, but he may be a better tactician than I have given him credit for. On the other hand, my left wing friends might be right when they declare that he is owned by the bankers who financed his presidential campaign and is merely stalling until he can manage to give them what they want. We all know he has given them more already than they seem to realize, and he might even believe in the Gospel according to Larry Sommers and the neoliberal financiers. I must admit that I cannot really believe he is fooling them, but maybe it is easier for him to fool me, which is not so hard to do.

SACRIFICE - November 25, 2010

2010-11-24T13:06:00.001-08:00

I am getting heartily sick of listening to the paid lobbyists and their hirelings claiming that the various plans being put forward by the representatives of the proprietor class to the effect that we all have to sacrifice. At the worst, this supposed equality of sacrifice does not apply to special provisions protecting the rich and powerful, who get special provisions for themselves in the tax laws. Only slightly less onerous are the provisions, like increases in per capita taxes or per vehicle taxes or tuition charges for the children. Even flat taxes like consumption taxes fall far harder on the poor than on the rich. And the provision that e.g. income taxes on hedge funds are lower than on genuinely earned income, are especially onerous. But even the supposedly progressive taxes are far from the category of equal sacrifice. How much must you take from a billionaire, or even a mere millionaire before it matches the suffering of a worker who has been unemployed for over 2 years, and no end in sight, and has perhaps lost his home, maybe his marriage or his mental health, or possibly even his life, while the President tells him he must bear the losses stoically until the Depression cures itself? Or the stockholder who maintains a fictitious identity and foreign address where his dividends are paid? The charade in that case is especially onerous, as it deprives other people of the opportunity to rid themselves of their deficits accrued over decades of under-taxation that have enabled those debts to be accumulated? The bulk of the US government has been bent in the direction of holding the tax man away from “bothering” the rich while they have raided the Treasury for decades. As Anatole France once famously noted, the law in its supposed equality forbids both rich and poor from stealing bread, begging in the streets and sleeping under the bridges at night. That is the kind of equality of sacrifice that GOP is urging upon us as a substitute for restorative justice.

COLLEGE - November 18, 2010

2010-11-18T12:03:00.001-08:00

In this week’s news, we see the fallout from the program of the Tories in UK to increase the tuition charges in their universities. The students have been protesting all over the kingdom. For many this will inevitably mean their being unable to afford college so long as the Conservatives, supported by the Liberals, remain in power. That could easily last as long as 5 years or even more and for many of the youngsters that will result in a new lost generation, considering how hard it is to pick up the academic mantle after pursuing the exigencies of adult life for a stretch of years. For some of the students, this denial of the chance for a middle-class life is a destruction of the dreams toward which they have worked all their young lives and they are very angry. Some have yielded to that anger to the point where their decorous UK training gives way before the enormity of that vile denial, and they express their rage in breaking things of value to the proprietor class. In response, the representatives of that class, notably those such as the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London, who have been raised in the entitled surroundings of Britain’s rich, want to know why they have to break things. They want the demonstrators to carry out their protest in a decorous way where, just incidentally, the rich can safely pay no heed to it, without suffering any loss of any kind. Here in US, Obama announces that there is nothing the jobless can do about it but sit quietly in the corner waiting for the current Depression to cure itself and go away, with the fallout so far being only that so many of the working class make their protest by failing to go to the polls to vote for the Democrats, despite the fact that the GOP are even worse. When things get bad for longer, as they surely will, there will be disorderly protests, like those we see in France. The anger of the jobless, the resulting homeless, the dreamless and the hopeless may get out of order and turn ugly here also.

NEXT - Thursday, November 4, 2010

2010-11-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

As we move to pick up the pieces of the 2010 election, we must look at the situation more closely. Mr. Obama seems to remain the sole impediment to a restoration of the Bush policies, but that is too gloomy. He still has the vetoes and will have the votes to sustain them. Of course, if he remains wedded to his fantasy of making peace with the professional GOP by sweet-talking them, he will be left in the same pickle when he comes again to the electorate in 2012. Of course, he can pick up the standard he has let fall these past 2 years, in which case he would have a fight on his hands, which conflicts with his fantasy. Or he can succumb to McConnell’s program of disarming the troops in his left wing, which so many have said accords with his genuine middling strategy. In that case, he will follow Hoover into the history books as diddling while the economy of the US crumbles, and the second Great Depression afflicts the world for most of the rest of our lives. I do believe there is a Cause here worthy of fighting for, even if the outlook is as dismal as McConnell hopes it is. Democracy has always carried the risk that the People will be taken in by charlatans, which Plato thought was a disabling weakness, but Churchill accurately observed that its danger was less than for any other method of government. Perhaps its greatest benefit might be that as long as voting matters, the People can effect a revolution at the ballot box, regardless of the power of propaganda, without having to pick up their rifles. Stranger things have happened, even in regimes that seemed immune to that kind of democratic intervention. In the meantime, it will be a long and difficult period while the People struggle to find their way back to the dream that we called the Enlightenment, with the burden falling hardest on those least able to bear it, many of whom will have joined with others in bringing about their troubles.

DEBT - October 29, 2010

2010-10-27T07:04:00.001-07:00

The present brouhaha about debt makes me think about what happens when you switch one kind of debt for another. In this case we are being urged to exchange a naïve debt for a subtle one: the debt inherent in prolonging the maintenance and repair of a valuable asset, like a house, car or bridge. An extreme example is the neglect of the condition of the I 90 bridge in Minneapolis, whose cost in lives, wounds and money far exceeds the cost that would have been involved in repairing it as soon as its failings were uncovered. A less obvious example would be the slacking of the educational effort in the early 1950s, until the launch of Sputnik occasioned a crash effort to beat the USSR to the Moon. Even subtler is the increasing loss involved in slipping from the top of the table of countries’ elementary education to nearly the bottom of industrial nations (in spite of the oft-repeated canard that we are the best in the world). That rot has now reached the high schools and is nibbling at undergraduate universities. A similar invisible debt is found in delayed repairing of roads, hospitals, water and sewage facilities, and other essential civic services. Waiting until the neglect reaches crisis levels, as in the water supply system in London or the potholes in Madison often means urgent repair, in a short time and at an advanced cost. As real estate and automotive dealers know, such urgent repairs come at frequently at many times the cost of doing them when there is time to plan and negotiate. The cost of neglecting maintenance and repair needs are often many times the costs of interest upon debt to fix them properly, when the needs of those repairs are driven by urgency, although the costs of negligence are overlooked in what is seen as a temporary gain. That is true of the austerity budgets in education, health, fire, police, water, sanitation and other civic needs in UK today and in the crisis budgets that the GOP want to impose upon us all in the coming years.

ADVERTISEMENTS - October 21, 2010

2010-10-20T12:51:00.001-07:00

As we look upon the use that is being made of the recent decisions by the Supreme Court in the matter of political advertising by moneyed interests, we come to understand the potential of those decisions in licensing of purchasing elections by unaccountable forces. It is possible to place such an ad, even replete with false accusations, without their being traced to any source. It is not even clear that the medium involved can refuse to air the ad without risking suit for violating 1st Amendment rights. If an agent were willing to act for the advertiser, the harm of false accusations would not be fully answerable, especially in the late days before the election. Such a situation might actually apply today in the matter of foreign advertisers and the Chamber of Commerce. They have the foreign funds, and they have been inserting their ads in advancement of some candidacies and against others. They assert that none of the foreign money is involved in the payment for them, but we have only their unsupported word for that. They are not obliged to account for how they spend their money and they, or their cohorts, have voiced their constitutional right to say whatever they please without any obligation to be free of inquiry into the funding of the assertions they might put forth. And since those assertions might be in violation of the laws concerning foreign funding of political advertisements, they might also be protected by the 5th Amendment from having to make any such accounting. The laws on libel and fraud are hard to enforce, and the outcome would be after the election, as they were in the case of the Swiftboat lies against Sen. Kerry in 2004. The only defense against such abuses must be to assume that there is no compulsion to speak the truth, and that any rogue can say anything in the U. S. under the law as seen in the Supreme Court under the present leadership. It is a bitter pill for the People and our Democracy.We should have known this even before. No advertisement is fit for belief.

TRANSFER - October 14, 2010

2010-10-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

There is a concept I will call transfer that applies to school boards, legislatures, and other bodies, and does not seem to be commented on. A legislature appropriates a given amount to a school, and the school board must make it work. If not, it is ranked as the failure of the board. The easy way out for the board is to enact a budget that meets the appropriation, or they have failed. In running for election, a candidate may promise that he will make it fit. But the choice does not lie with the board. In theory, they can simply fail to enact the budget, assigning the loss to the legislature. But that rarely happens, if at all. The same applies to all institutions, whether schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, or others. The choice of making an unpopular assignment might be likened by giving an agent an amount of money that is insufficient to meet the price of a social need, and then blaming the agent for being unable to buy it. But in a democracy, the agent has the choice of claiming that he can do it, when he is seeking election, and then substituting an inferior object after being elected. The fact that the electorate continues to return the agent to office shows that they do not take democracy seriously, or that the voters do not really care. It is not really a lie, on the part of the agent. The present decline in almost all public services must be attributed to the acceptance of the inferior performance by the agents and the voters. Public careers are not advanced by agents resigning when the appropriations are insufficient. Instead, the people’s representatives fight over the blame for the inferior performance, never putting the onus on those who can be easily persuaded to accept it and making do. It is said that a strike accomplishes nothing, but when the result, as in a garbage collectors’ stoppage, can be made to hurt those with the power to change things, if they will pay the cost, it often yields results where the alternative is just a lot of blaming for an unacceptable outcome.

CERTAINTY - October 7, 2010

2010-10-08T05:56:00.001-07:00

In the matter of teacher competence, it is upsetting to see how partial is the evidence on which important people rely, and the ease with which they take devastating action in the absence of what we would ordinarily think of as due process. This applies not only to almost every school administrator, but even infects the thinking of the President. There are tests that are taken to be fully indicative of understanding. Some of these apply to difficult subjects like geometry and Physics, to name the outstanding failures of testing in US high schools. But even in subjects where there is less certainty about deep motivational understanding, the failure of these tests to be more than an educated guess of the test-takers knowledge is well known. There is a wide gap in the depth to which the tests probe understanding. Yet the schools, and the local, state and even federal governments will take on this shabby thinking to inflict permanent joblessness on those who do not come up to the standards of the administrators. If the roles were reversed, and teachers’ union officers could remove administrators on their own very partial beliefs, we would all recognize the injustice inherent in the situation. It is as though being hired in the supervisory role invests them with the ability to say definitively what is true. Teachers’ unions do not require categorical certainty in matters of competence, but do require the application of due process in such cases. When the sloth of the accusers does not allow them such a degree of certainty, they demand the power to take final action on just their own opinions or, worse, on the beliefs of their advisors. Such practices take away from teachers one of the pillars of their belief in the justice of their profession. The school administrators and boards that act without due process always want the power to act on just their guesses, often wrong, about who is doing a good job. Where will they find the substitutes for those they discharge so casually? Would the administrators survive the application of similar standards on their own work?

LAST CHANCE - September 23, 2010

2010-09-23T05:43:00.000-07:00

The key to the coming election, if there is one at all, is that this is the last chance for the populace to avoid the devastating consequence that would attend a GOP control of the US Congress. While I fully agree with the dismay of the People over the leadership of the Dem Party offered in this time of desperate crisis by Barack Obama, the imposition of the consequences upon the People of that failure of the Enlightenment’s ability to foresee and manage the affairs of the nation would be ruinous not only for the next 2 years, but for however long it would require to resuscitate the economy after that. We have seen how hard it has been to make any improvements after the catastrophic Bush-Cheney regime, and the legacy imposed upon us in the form of the manic Supreme Court will only grow worse. The People can punish Obama for failing to remedy things quickly without their support, but it is we, not he, that will bear the burden of joblessness, homelessness, and despair if we put things back into their hands. The starkness of that choice must be made clear to them right now. Another month of nursing our disappointment and annoyance will fall, unfortunately, on those seeking revenge for the slowness of response that seems to have eluded Mr. Obama’s dream of securing consensus for the methods of recovery that match his bipartisan hopes. Unfortunately, little people like me have no means to stand against the power that the SC has conferred on the wealth of the plutocracy to deliver the mechanisms of persuasion to a somnolent populace. The only voice loud enough to be heard, not to say credited, is that of Obama, not only President, but also said to be the leader of the Dem Party. It is we, the People, who will bear the true costs of having our precious Economy degenerate into a peculiar form of plutocratic servitude if it falls into the half-witted control of the unthinking mob that is the Tea Party. It is now over 2 millennia since Plato, and his ghost of the future is facing us today.

TRUMPET - Thursday, September 16, 2010

2010-09-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

It is possible that Obama has issued forth the trumpet that will never call retreat, though in any case, it is an uncertain trumpet, and late at that. In any case, there is the hope that it will not be like W’s trumpets. That one was full of promise after promise and those were all that we were offered, while his owners in the proprietor class were satisfied aplenty, due to the ministrations of Cheney. Still, it was a lesson in how easily the US people could be satisfied by talk, if it seemed full enough. But if one is going to play very hard ball, there are positions that Obama has the power to take and which would confirm his alleged concern with the vast majority of the people at the center of the income pyramid.It has been abundantly obvious from Election Day 08 that the GOP strategy was one of total obstruction, aimed at delivering a record of uselessness for the Dems. And once that was seen, the strategy of seeking to seduce them with sweetness and compromise was as dead as it could be. If the Dems could not be rallied to confront venom with anger, then that has given us the impasse we confront today. And if they will not take advantage of the fact that they have a lot of power left, in both the veto and the power of appointment, then they become the owners of the impotent mess that half-measures and failed compromise cannot cure. If that is their destiny, then it is possible to commit themselves to battle, sound the trumpet and let slip the dogs of war, to mix the metaphor. It is better to go down fighting for a worthy cause than to allow the hirelings of the plutocracy to bring a decent offer of participation to degenerate into a policy that will allow one’s self to be nibbled into impotence. There are still troops ready to fight the good fight, if one can believe the leader’s devotion. But the promise of compromise has proven to be a door to failure in this case, and we should not see Obama beaten by relying on a dream of decency from GOP.

TRUMPET - September 9, 2010

2010-09-08T06:02:00.001-07:00

It is possible that Obama has issued forth the trumpet that will never call retreat, though in any case, it is an uncertain trumpet, and late at that. In any case, there is the hope that it will not be like W’s trumpets. That one was full of promise after promise and those were all that we were offered, while his owners in the proprietor class were satisfied aplenty, due to the ministrations of Cheney. Still, it was a lesson in how easily the US people could be satisfied by talk, if it seemed full enough. But if one is going to play very hard ball, there are positions that Obama has the power to take and which would confirm his alleged concern with the vast majority of the people at the center of the income pyramid. It has been abundantly obvious from Election Day 08 that the GOP strategy was one of total obstruction, aimed at delivering a record of uselessness for the Dems. And once that was seen, the strategy of seeking to seduce them with sweetness and compromise was as dead as it could be. If the Dems could not be rallied to confront venom with anger, then that has given us the impasse we confront today. And if they will not take advantage of the fact that they have a lot of power left, in both the veto and the power of appointment, then they become the owners of the impotent mess that half-measures and failed compromise cannot cure. If that is their destiny, then it is possible to commit themselves to battle, sound the trumpet and let slip the dogs of war, to mix the metaphor. It is better to go down fighting for a worthy cause than to allow the hirelings of the plutocracy to bring a decent offer of participation to degenerate into a policy that will allow one’s self to be nibbled into impotence. There are still troops ready to fight the good fight, if one can believe the leader’s devotion. But the promise of compromise has proven to be a door to failure in this case, and we should not see Obama beaten by relying on a dream of decency from GOP.

DUE PROCESS - September 2, 2010

2010-09-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to see how the processes of law impact differently on people of differing social positions and resources. I am looking today at the behavior of the legal process in the cases of ex-Governor Blagojevich of IL and ex-House whip Delay of TX. In the one case, he was overheard bemoaning that it was not possible for him to cash in on a unique opportunity to profit from his political position, as so many others had done before him, and in the other, he was proven to have profited from his own. The apparent logic seems to be that Blagojevich was revealed to be greedy, though unavailing, while Delay was shown to be successfully corrupt, if possibly not proven beyond reasonable doubt. In the one case, Blagojevich was shown to be a Bad Man, and the federal attorney has promised to have him punished for the moral lapse, while the other managed to get his case dismissed by the Department of Justice (?) because doubt about its legal certainty hangs on a thin thread. Of course, Delay comes from TX, a state almost as widely considered morally corrupt as IL, except that he found a way to collect his booty with support from those who share his degree of exemption from the fingers of the Law. In fact, the situation of those exposed as morally corrupt is that they can be punished without any such due process, while “solid citizens” can often get away with open flouting of the law. TX conservatives, of course, are considered solid citizens, and their Party stands behind them, so Obama’s administration turns them free. Meanwhile, the US Attorney has made himself the agent of the Wrath of God, so that anything so strict and formal as certainty is not required when harassing a Democrat of working class roots. In this administration, the nature of one’s persona might be sufficient to respect the façade of a GOP grandee, while Obama’s regime might otherwise extract vengeance in a case of bare suspicion.

SAVING - August 19, 2010

2010-08-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

As a recent retiree who has a certain concern about savings for possible necessities, I find it distressing to consider the options that I see as a saver and to consider that in contrast to the options available by others more affluent and by those who are in a position to profit from the rules for lending money to the US government. For various reasons, this nation gives special benefits to those lending us money from abroad, even when that money has its origin in domestic earnings and loses its identity when shunted through the labyrinth of foreign banks and institutions. It does not seem unreasonable that our treasury should look to domestic savings as a prime source of borrowed funds, especially if that should result in economic gains for our financial situation. The middle-class saver is treated as an unwelcome supplicant when it comes to federal borrowing, while foreign companies and even nations are courted with the best rates and freedom from income taxes. Indeed there are several dimensions on which our economies would profit from the unexpected consequences if our treasury would pay private borrowers the same rates available to strangers, and as tax-free as apparently alien funds. Such a change would free us from the need to borrow as much from overseas, even not counting the fees paid to the agents that maintain the foreigner fiction for us. Also, more of the interest would be spent on domestic products, which might even help in the cause of recovery. Finally, the extension of the existing benefit to Americans might make domestic borrowing enough better so that the interest paid on that borrowing would decrease. Is it possible that this obvious result has not been seen by the supposed scientists who advise our government, or is it the case that these are again a recital of the benefits that the rich and the powerful rain on each other and that are denied to those of us who scrape by as best we can?

SOLAR VS. NUCLEAR - August 12, 2010

2010-08-16T05:44:00.001-07:00

In a stunning article in the International Herald-Tribune recently, it was revealed that the cost of a kwhr in NC has dropped (to 16c) below that for nuclear, which continues to rise. And this is in NC, not AZ. That puts a seal on the question of what we can do to rein in the peril of disasters like that at Chernobyl. Because the true cost of solar is just what was reported, while the cost of nuclear does not satisfactorily reflect the total insurance cost that should be paid by nuclear to protect the public from that kind of industrial disaster. The US law simply lays the bulk of the risk on the populace, which makes losses over a certain level unrecoverable. And we have recently seen new developments that further reduce to cost of solar panels. Indeed, a prize of Eu 800k was given by a Eu foundation for a new way of building these more cheaply, and promises transparent panels in window panes. That makes glass houses a new way of dealing with that placement problem. So the new differential will continue to grow, and we should be able soon to decommission the old nuclear reactors as the new solar ones continue to grow cheaper. It is a genuine change in the nuclear game to the advantage of the human race. Thus, the atomic age, which promised for over 65 years to deliver unlimited power, both military and electrical, to the people is now over. The new technology leaves us only with the question of how to deal with the detritus of the existing atomic works. Of course, that problem has never been solved, and we are now at least saved from having to consider what we can do to protect ourselves from the shadow that continues to hang over our future as the electrical issue clouds that one from the consideration of nations that claim that their nuclear efforts are economic in nature, while the sun continues to offer a better answer to that.

GOVERNMENTS LIE - August 5, 2010

2010-08-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I learned from my friend I. F. Stone that governments lie. Not that they always lie, or even most of the time, but they have no strong tendency to tell the truth. In fact, the only thing that we can conclude from a statement of fact from one of them is that they would rather we believe it than not. This injunction applies especially when they give us a reason for undertaking fierce action or even going to war. When we remember the Alamo or the Maine, we are very likely to be seduced into doing something that we would otherwise not do. In more recent memory, that applies to the sinking of the Lusitania or the USS Maine, or the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin or the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Today, we are being told of the long chain of events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which up until now had apparently escaped the notice of the US or UK governments. And to the extent that the leak is not exactly what the government in question wants us to believe, the revelation in question is claimed as a government secret, and we are told that deep consequences would follow if the facts in question were known. Thus is a democratic populace denied the facts on which its welfare, or even survival, is dependent, we are told. Today the issue is how we view our ally Pakistan who are, according to what we see, either supporting our needs in Asia or plotting with the Taliban to murder our soldiers there. And we have been told that that the facts in question are so dangerous for us to know that no official body can be told them without endangering us from who knows what. And this about an allegation that could engage us in a war, even an atomic one. I do not know when we shall know the truth about this, or about so many stories that have led us into a century of world wars, but we vote every so often based on what we have been told.

TERROR - July 29, 2010

2010-07-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I went to see Danton’s Death by Georg Buechner. It was a scorching play by a contemporary and supporter of the French revolution who was highly critical of the Reign of Terror, like Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson before him. It lasted 3 years and claimed the lives of 2500 people. Mark Twain, in A Connecticut Yankee, called it the little terror, comparing it with the Great Terror which lasted over 1000years, taking the lives of many hundreds of thousands and consuming those of many millions more. Still, many compare its excesses to the beastliness of a dog that has been turned wild by prolonged extreme mistreatment and whose behaviour is the result of its suffering , possibly not in its deep nature. Buechner obviously felt deeply for the agonies of the revolutionaries and even more for the suffering of the moderates for whom he spoke. It was hard not to see comparisons for our own time, as we move ever closer to the possibility of devastating war with Pakistan, with claims of virtue on both sides. The American and French revolutions were testing grounds for the theory of the Enlightenment, with the American managing to keep it alive and the French going overboard in what must have appeared to their ideologists as an excess of zeal. It never made sense to me, but in a speech from the play about Marat and Sade, Peter Weiss gives us some understanding of why it failed under the rubric of “Everybody wants to bring something with him through a revolution, a souvenir of the time before.” It has appeared to me for a long while that a society in which the ruling caste feels itself secure against revolution becomes steadily worse to those who are thought to have no option, while an actual revolution consumes all civility in its path. I fear I am about to live through such a time. Again!!

TAXES - July 22, 2010

2010-07-22T05:32:00.000-07:00

In last week’s Times, Paul Krugman alerted us to a change in polemic on the part of GOP. Abandoning their fixation on the debt, they have decided that it is more important to re-enact the Bush tax cuts for the rich. By the time this comment reaches them, they will have in their heads in their argument that the debt is unimportant, and will be pressing for the recovery potential of the tax cut. They are so deep into their hubris that they cannot see what a wonderful opening they have left for the Dems. I recommend that Obama and co. should go for a tax cut themselves, but in the form of a cut in 5G of taxable income from the bottom of the tax table. It would be a straight out tax cut for every taxpayer as against a restoration of the Bush giveaway to the rich. It would mimic the action of the Tories in GB in a simple act of money for the rich against money for everybody. And as recovery it would be surer that the taxes saved would go into consumer goods than into stock market gambling. It would be easier to enforce and cost less in income manipulation. In addition, it would be on a field where a simple veto could block the GOP move if it failed to persuade the ordinary voter that they would rather have the saving for themselves than pass it on to the banksters and their gang. If the Dems will not take this initiative, then there is 0 to be said for them, and if the voters will not respond to this choice, they become the authors of their own victimization. It has always been easy for slick lobbyists to get the voters to support the fat cats rather than themselves, but in this plan, it is tax cut against tax cut, us against them, and if the Dems will let this opportunity get away from them, then they would be as worthless as some of my left-wing friends tell me. I hope that Tammy Baldwin will take up this stratagem and pass it on to Sen. Feingold.

ENDLESS WAR - July 8, 2010

2010-07-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

For over 60 years, we have been hearing about war syndromes, as though these were in some sense individual and accidental errors, all different. Actually, they are all aspects of the same problem, which has been haunting US for the past 6 decades, and as it reappears, we act as though it were unique, something we had never seen before except for the fact that the most perceptive among us see it as a reflection of the past immediate instance, but not as a chronic weakness that threatens to afflict us until it finally brings the US experiment to a crashing ruin. In capsule, it arises from the belief that US military and diplomatic superiority is so huge in comparison with the resources of underdeveloped countries and movements that it is required only to rattle the saber to bring compliance from a force that DC considers inimical to their orders. It reflects what we imagine was the history of the late XIX and early XX centuries as we see it was still in effect. That was a history in which the disjunction between the advanced countries and their colonial servants was settled by confrontation between Gatling Guns on one side and sharpened sticks on the other. Them days is gone forever, and good riddance. Even the Spanish Empire was easier to confront than the Philippine guerrillas that fought for independence when the European masters were gone. And we have been learning over and over what it means to be arrayed against a domestic resistance movement that swims like a fish in the sea that is the population. After the Greek resistance and Tito’s Croatian socialists, there was the armies of Peru, Chile and Argentina against their people, the conquest of Guatemala by its colonels, the overthrow of the elected governments in Iran and Chile, and always the same script with new antagonists, always at a disadvantage our rulers never imagined.

DUMB WAITER – June 24, 2010

2010-06-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

Barely a month into the new coalition, the Tory government has shown its true colors, and the Liberal Democratic leader is being exhibited as bought off for a wooden medal in the form of the title of Deputy Prime Minister. The price for this empty title seems to be a total jettisoning of the entire Liberal Democratic agenda, including the items whose inclusion in the Government’s promises were an integral portion of the ostensible agreement founding the present ruling majority. The Liberal leader says nothing while the Tories rake over the earnings of public servants and working people generally, taking their past earnings in the form of their pensions, and their present and future earnings in the form of cuts in salaries and wages, essential welfare support and public benefits, and the continuation of programs in housing, education, and health, including even the costs of school lunches for indigent children. These are all things that New Labour had predicted and which the Tories had sworn to protect, though in truth the New Labour scammers would have done also, but not as much and not as blatantly, rather like the New Democrats in USA. Housing is understood by its supporters as destined for the lowest level of public support since 1924, university tuition caps are understood to face increases from 3G/year to 5G or 7G, and even 10G is mooted in the press. The children of working people would be largely excluded’ with the places being “sold off” to those who can afford the tariff, with much less emphasis on proven academic ability. And the dumb waiter sits in silence, delivers the votes when those are called for, taking the worthy defeat of Gordon Brown as full payment by the party always representing the interests of the rich and powerful. And short of a denunciation by the Liberal Democratic Party, these will have tolerated their full political castration.

BANKSTERS AGAIN - June 17, 2010

2010-06-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

For the past few years, the quiet resentment that thinking US have carried in the direction of the banks, the large corporations, and enormously wealthy robber barons have displayed have all boiled up as the people who used to love to call themselves the “masters of the Universe” carried this nation to the very brink of another Great Depression and quite possibly over it into ruin have wrung all believability out of the pernicious lie that “greed is good”. As long as there appeared to be much prosperity around, it was easy to bury one’s doubts and fears, but we are now at the beginning of the avalanche and we can hear the call to save the people if not the system. Yet some of our political leaders are still dancing to the tune of their corporate owners, and these include at least one Democrat whom so many of us had desperately hoped to see elected as President. They are still at bat to preserve the unjustified tax loopholes for the richest plunderers of the economy, even holding hostage the desperate needs of unemployed US to maintain their form of highway robbery. It is no wonder that those of us who do not worship the gospel of greed and predation have lost essentially all of the unjustified hope we had carried for what was once the party of FDR. And the faint expressions of distaste we get from Obama are no match for the terrible signs on the road ahead. We have no place to look for hope in the next six years, certainly not from the possibility that the false representatives of the “little people” might be replaced four years hence by the minions of the US version of the Tories. There is no hope to be obtained from the possibility of revolution, and equally little from the knowledge that nothing short of it will end the permanent robbing and impoverishment of the People.

OIL - June 10, 2010

2010-06-10T05:59:00.000-07:00

It seems like decades that the US populace has been pummeled by nonsense out of the mouth of Grover Norquist. He is amply paid by the corporate Robber Barons to deliver the line that the US citizen can spend his money (which would otherwise go to taxes) better and more wisely than the Government can. As for emergencies, the very rich would be able to afford them out of their tax avoidance. Among the most enthusiastic disciples of this vicious doctrine have been the substantial majorities in the Gulf states. Not all as vociferous as the gun-slinging imitation cowboys of Texas, but the others are not far behind in their attachment to the doctrine of tax-free self reliance. And they have also been devotees of drilling for oil in the oceans, down to about a mile below sea level and contemptuous of those who have argued the tremendous risk. But as some have said, it is easy to be cavalier about the Government until one suddenly needs a Big Favor, like keeping one’s job or business or not being evicted from one’s home. And suddenly, the dark cloud on the horizon turns out to be BP slipping out from underneath their obligation to make good on the costs of their negligence as a rogue oil well on the rampage threatens to wipe out the life’s investment of thousands in those same Gulf states. And suddenly we hear all kinds of unfamiliar voices demanding that Uncle Sam make good in case the corporations they have always trusted as more upstanding than the hated Government squeeze out of the responsibility by quoting laws their lobbies have paid to have enacted. And not even a word of “oops” or contrition for having participated in leading he electorate astray. Suddenly out of the rat-holes come the hirelings of the trusted corporations demanding that the taxpayers of the nation cough up hundreds of billions to secure the security of welfare that the tax avoiders voted against time after time after time.

IDEAS - June 3, 2010

2010-06-02T18:58:00.001-07:00

In the early days of the mid-XVIII Century, the US colonies were a hotbed of ideas, with many of these finding their way into the forming nation. In the XIX century, the flow of ideas through the US gave rise to an international reputation for Yankee ingenuity, and that lasted until the mid-XX. But increasingly in the XX Century, the control of industry passed from technical invention to the growth of sales and thence to the manipulation of money. The few people who approached difficulties in the economy or technology as problems to be solved like crosswords were swamped by Robber Barons who were responsive only to sure things in the market. Someone with an invention, even a simple one that was a sure thing, had a difficult time with the control of the economy, whether by public or private by deciders who were largely un-arithmetic or unschooled in even elementary science, and who paid attention only to thoughts promoted by lobbyists or other channels of power, excluding those for which there were no rewards for the middle-men or their paymasters. Even inventions that had been tried elsewhere and whose benefits had been recorded in journals like Distributed Energy were routinely consigned to the circular file by office-holders and executives that simply did not have the training to measure their worth, and had no close subordinates that could evaluate them. The management of money was all those officers could think of. No less an established genius like Thomas Edison could not get a hearing from the supposed risk-takers of Wall Street when he wanted them to support electric lighting for that area until he got the ear of J. P. Morgan, who proceeded to create the Edison General Electric Company and then used his wiles to squeeze Edison out of it. And that was Edison. More modest inventors, like me, have it much harder to reach the ears of power brokers that could improve their corners of the world, but don’t.

PRESIDENTS - May 27, 2010

2010-05-27T05:57:00.000-07:00

It is genuinely sickening to see the US President parading in the role of Emperor of the World, especially when any decently informed person knows that the leadership of the Cold War alliance has made him the apologist in chief for some of the most unattractive tyrannies on the planet. The case that should bring this issue up today is the reception of Obama for the appointment of Filipe Calderon by the Fox government in 2006 in the face of universal reports by the international press of the overwhelming exit polls indicating the victory of Lopez Obrador then. Of course, that election was held in the regime of Cheney, untrusted by hardly anyone on the world stage. To see Obama embracing him and honoring him is like a page out of history when corrupt popes pronounced blessings on corrupt monarchs. I don’t know whether it is worse that Obama knows better and lies about it or that he is blind to a fact evident to the world during his brief tour of legislative power. It is almost as bad as Reagan’s embrace of Ferdinand Marcos and his conferring upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Calderon has lived down to the dirty events of his installation, presiding over the criminal civil wars taking place in Mexico today. All this, and the pontificating over the election in Iran, where no evidence beyond suspicion indicated the true result of the recent election. In addition, the deciding of which nation must speak the truth about its atomic bombs and which is above that level of decency, and who must be believed when he professes civilian motivation for atomic power. So while US commands respect for its supposed fiscal power, the deep honor that went with our early embrace of the Enlightenment has been eroded by the Cheney regime and the embrace of their filthy hands by Obama leaves us in the position of honoring one of the most worthless corrupt governments while our president poses for holy pictures.

MIRANDA - Thursday, May 20, 2010

2010-05-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I was watching the US A G being grilled on NBC regarding the giving of “Miranda rights” to people he described as terrorists. He told us that he knew they were guilty, and assured the world that his department would do whatever they needed to assure that these guilty men would not be set free even if they were somehow acquitted by a jury of Americans acting under civilian or military law, whichever was necessary to get the job done, with or without evidence under the standards of military or civilian due process. He assured us that the application of Miranda would not stand in the way of executing or imprisoning them, lifelong if necessary, since apparently he was convinced that they were all guilty, with or without usable evidence. Since he had not seen their alleged crimes, we must understand that he was relying on a chain of evidence linking them to the criminal deed, probably a chain of hearsay without any documentation. The talking point reads like this: We all know the accused is guilty, sworn for by the Dept of
Justice (meaning the result of a star chamber-like trial) so why give them the benefit of Miranda? There is no sense in this that the US has a vested interest in being sure of the due process if it results in a conviction and punishment. I always thought that was the point of due process, the fear of unjust conviction being traditionally thought more onerous than that for an unjust acquittal. But since the press has told us that they are all guilty, we need no more cause to deny them the protections of US justice, according to the AG. And they may well be treated as though their guilt were proven by the standards of our Law, since the secret process carried out in the offices of the AG, outside the range of Due Process protections, has condemned them to any level of Justice that they may have been accorded originally by the Cheney regime.

IMMIGRANTS - May 6, 2010

2010-05-07T06:00:00.001-07:00

The argument over immigrants is another of those battles of extremes. They stand guard over the positions that attract the most opposition with the threat of condemnation for anything that does not separate the sheep from the goats. In the Right corner the drumbeat is essentially for the application of draconian law, to the extent of cruelty, in fortified borders, military patrols, arrests of illegal entrants with imprisonment and deportation even when that entails breakup of families. On the Left, no one claims that everyone in the world has the natural right to permanent residence in US, barring only criminality and human rights offenses. In fact, there is a much less cruel law now in effect that would ease the attraction to US of people from countries of middling prosperity in which the People stand for predatory government. A simple action that would put more of the onus where it belongs is a strict program of fines for companies (like some meatpackers) that seem often to hire people with questionable social security numbers. It would be reasonable to require the employers to obtain from holders of such numbers data on the date and place of birth, the parents’ names, the names and locations of the schools attended and a full schedule of alternate names and their spellings. Also the employers should be required to vouch for the use of English by workers who claim to be born and raised in US. Fines for employers that are habitual offenders should be stiff and escalating. Demanding such questions in the allegations by those with a genuinely unlikely story would be merely a way of maintaining the Social Security system. The dogged refusal of government after government to press the issue of who is using a bogus SS number is not racism, does not entail arrest or deportation, but would stem the flow of people fleeing the depredations of their ruling economic elites, into the arms of ours.

CUSTOMERS - April 29, 2010

2010-04-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

The cities, pension funds, universities, and other charities that have been ruined by the fall in the stock market (also called the economy) are looking for a place to put their anger. As in all such exercises, no one wants to acknowledge any fault for himself. As in the subprime mortgage mess, the easiest place to put it is on the borrowers, since they own no TV stations, newspapers or magazines. Even the fact that they were misled, or even lied to, does not erase all of their own participation in their losses. But the roots run deep. It is a fundamental belief of the brand of civics and economics we take in as children that the pursuit of self-enrichment by the rich and powerful will make us all into prosperous citizens. It is amazing how much contrary evidence there is to that creed, but it remains a pillar of the18th century movement called The Enlightenment. The Free Market, we are told, is what has made us rich in the XX Century, and can be relied upon to continue to do it. An extreme case is seen in Goldman Sachs. Many of their customers thought that they would never betray them for their own profit, even though the charter of The Enlightenment had no evidence for the belief that honesty is the best policy and Goldman would do best by being best. Actually, the Chicago school of economics claimed that Game Theory had proved that unbelievable statement. Still, it appears that many of us believe that the smoothest road to riches lies in being a junior partner to a successful crook. Every con man knows that the royal road to a scam lies in convincing the mark that they will together cheat a third person or, better yet, a company or a state. And so it was with the marks who bought the toxic assets, and in a sense that applies also to those who were induced to believe that they could buy without risk into a rising tide of house prices, based on lies about their ability to carry the loan. Goldman’s customers learned otherwise, to their cost.

PAYING - April 22, 2010

2010-04-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

The tories, known as republicans, keep saying that they really favor wide-spread health care, but they insist that they want it to be paid by cutting federal benefits rather than adding to the debt. In this, they imagine they are presenting the face of fiscal restraint, rather than throwing the poor to the wolves. They keep hidden the idea that the bulk of the cost should be paid by those who have benefitted disproportionally from the changes of the past ten years and the cutting of high-level taxes. This cutting benefitted from tory politics and these were pursued relentlessly, with no concern for the enormous growth in the debt. It is clear that a reasonable policy would be to load the bulk of any rise in the cost of health care on the class that has benefitted so greatly and so irresponsibly from that dereliction of duty. However, the liberals have not answered that the reasonable source of the money would be from the richest quarter of the labor market, who have collected all the prizes in the past 40 years or more. Yet, oddly, the liberals do not make this argument in defense of fiscal responsibility, probably because of a sense that the idiots who have argued that taxes are optional and that taxing the rich might impede the recovery from the threat of Depression, these demagogues have hoodwinked the People to the degree that they are not about to mount the electoral barricades in defense of this kind of fiscal sense. The liberals are not even willing to rest on the example of B Clinton, who did raise taxes to clear away most of the debt until Cheney came along with his passion for what he must have imagined as world-dominating war. As long as they are silenced by the hypocritical claptrap from the right, they are abandoning the responsible route of taxing to pay the cost of a decent society. If they will not stand up for making the rich pay their some of their luxuries as the cost of health care for all, maybe the People will throw them out of Congress.

PUNISHMENT - April 8, 2010

2010-04-08T05:47:00.000-07:00

The news this week concerns a 14-year old immigrant in a US HS, who was harassed and tortured by her classmates to the point that she just killed herself. The question of who was to blame and what is to be done about it highlights the role of punishment as a way of dealing with social disruption, and more basically the role of winning or losing as the dominant features of free market thinking, most especially in the US. Because the construction of individual failure or success continues to be treated as an indicator of personal worth, it is a way of deflecting any consideration of social organization as a shaper of individual lives. This elevates the status of competition in economic and social structure and plays down the role of cooperation, which is denounced as inefficient, as socialistic, and thus as leading to the gulags. In the meantime, personal achievement, even when accidental, is lauded as worthy through the powerful voices of those who have gotten money, even by the accident of birth or the workings of chance. In the case of the suicide, one is struck by the inadequacy of harsh punishment for those who have driven her to this action, and the equal meaninglessness of dismissing their viciousness as the actions of children. To lay the response at the door of competitive life is to run afoul of the rejection of social responsibility and the lauding of personal selfishness as the engine of progress. But we do know today that where personal competition and inequality are least, personal happiness, as reported by the people, is maximized. And in those countries, there seems to be the least need for punishment as a supposed deterrent to crime and antisocial behavior. In this time of trouble, there are ways to minimize the total of destructive self-castigation and share the available jobs to maximize the total well-being of the People, but those obsessed by the doctrine of personal worth or worthlessness will not hear of them. Then we must all live with the consequences.

TESTING - April 1, 2010

2010-03-31T15:38:00.001-07:00

Judging teaching or learning by set examinations is a terrible way of learning what has been transmitted in the classroom, and everything else is worse. The mantra of accountability dictates that we need to know what students actually learn, and the result of a brief test, particularly one for which the students are deliberately crammed, is a poor predictor of how much remains months or years later if the need for it arises. Yet the mechanics of preparing the learner is an ancient practice, and often is a substitute for the kind of internalization of knowledge that is the desired result of the exercise. This applies most especially where the depth of the teacher’s knowledge does not go beyond the surface material that is the most usually the content of the test. The Continental approach, in which the examined student must reach the memorized material by an intuitive and searching extraction of the subtle material to realize how the memorized process is applied to the instant question is generally criticized for demanding insight, which is generally not teachable. A very simple example of this issue is found in what is known by various names, including “word problems” or “story problems”, in which the students is required to puzzle out how the questions are related to the processes of arithmetic. One approach is to have the same insight embedded in several different circumstances, and the true test of understanding is in ferreting out the arithmetic question from the story, if that is one in a new configuration, as where the problem of filling a swimming pool is seen to be essentially the same as the digging of a ditch or the rate of accumulation of a resource. These can be basically the same in form, but if the frame is not a practiced one, most examinees are found to be at a loss. It is there that the body is really buried. But if that form is not familiar drill, the heart of the learning is usually complained of as not having been taught that way.

TAXES - March 25, 2010

2010-03-29T05:39:00.001-07:00

In the vise between taxes and debt, there is one fairly evident fact that gets very little attention: the genuine enrichment of one’s life becomes smaller for rich people than for poor as the level of income rises. Indeed, it seems that once the basic needs for comfort and sustenance are accounted for, and the desired education and health care are in good supply as needed, one eventually reaches the point in which the major differentiation is found in comparative display of costly luxuries that attest to the wealth of the owner, inwhat Veblen gave the name of conspicuous consumption. Actually, most of the multi-million incomes wind up in the stock market, competing for the acquisition of paper that is described as “earning money”. Almost none of what is called hot money goes for the funding of new economic enterprise that could legitimately be called investment. When U.S. was deep into World War II and thereafter, the top income tax bracket was 91% and that in Britain was 97.5%. The rich continued a life of luxury, except for the few instances where they faced rationing. After the war, the display of wealth that announced the importance of the user remained the same, except for the few who made millions out of war profiteering. Today, when America is richer per capita than any nation has ever been, we hear the robber barons weeping that millions a year is hardly enough to supply them with the basics of upper capitalist life. And the struggling lower classes are taken in by propaganda that there is not enough money in the economy to clear the debts incurred by decades of living on credit and that taxes on the banksters and other “malefactors of great wealth” would be destructive of the system featuring our worship of money. It is time we paid the debts our Nation has put on the cuff, and time that we secured the money by taxing most heavily the class that has profited most by exploiting a policy of predatory lending.

TERRORISTS - March 18, 2010

2010-03-17T19:19:00.001-07:00

In the colloquy surrounding the detainees at Guantanamo, we hear them often referred to as terrorists. In view of this characterization, the claimant argues that we owe them no slack, nothing as arcane as the procedure we call by the name of due process. All we need do is condemn them to the garbage heap as guilty, and only our infinite decency should keep us from having them drawn and quartered without further ado. But the advocates of infinite punishment never question what we actually know about these captives, and seem to think it unnecessary to inquire into that apparently arcane datum. In most cases we know only that George Bush has put his signature to a document calling them that, and maybe less. We know that many were handed over to US forces in exchange for a bounty payment, and can well believe that the accusation was passed up the chain of command without any means of verification until it reached a level where it was no longer available for doubt, all without any addition of substantiating facts. If we decided that we need to assure ourselves that these people were in fact terrorists, we would honor our chosen practices and subject their cases to due process. In fact, we do now know that some were guilty only of something like changing a plane in NYC, and were mistaken for another person with a vaguely similar name or face. Instead of the standard practice we have for inquiry into such things, we often shipped them off to places where they could be tortured into signing a confession that would be taken as proving their guilt. All in seeking to force those we had somehow taken prisoner to be considered proven of the alleged crimes. And in certain civilian crimes, a sensationalist reporter will write that a captive is guilty of a heinous offense, and then the public will decide that he is not worthy of such decency as is to be found in our criminal law. It is the way of the lynch mob, and the public has no appetite for the assumption of innocence or the civilized practice of our Constitution.

CHILDREN - March 11, 2010

2010-03-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

The public press thinks they have discovered what to do about the fact that some of our teachers are not up to snuff in the opinions of their students and/or the students’ parents. One school in Rhode Island has fired all its teachers, including the principal. I don’t know where they imagine they are going to get better ones. Some of our teachers are just wonderful, making easy contact with the students and possessed of remarkable stores of valuable knowledge. Others are no better than the poorer ones of those just jettisoned. In the eyes of the school boards, they are at least cheaper than those, if they are new graduates. And maybe we are just looking at what motivates those boards. Certainly there is not a fund of superior teachers floating around without jobs and waiting to be hired by boards that do not know the importance of sticking to their promises, waiting to fire teachers by the platoons and battalions. Just 40-50 years ago, a teaching position looked very good, just waiting for a talented college graduate to come along. Unfortunately this does not look an attractive position for young people, what with a public that imagines they can improve their schools by firing people until they get what they want. Where some college students considered the life of a teacher rewarding, there are fewer who will take on challenging studies and brave getting poor grades to be turned loose in a profession where every parent and every administrator sees firing of below-average ones until everyone in the school is above average, Lake Woebegone style. And so, that profession seems less attractive as a lifetime choice for students who themselves are above average, as measured by college entrance scores. And those who have themselves had teachers who could penetrate arcane studies for them like long division, are trying instead to march off to Wall Street. Try and tempt those into a classroom. Our schools are dying. Firing teachers will not save them.

ALLEGIANCE - March 4, 2010

2010-03-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

The trouble with Toyota points to a fundamental flaw in our legal and community thinking about what corporate interests owe the public and the stockholders. There is an undercurrent in that thinking that assigns something like a holy mandate to the commitment to the stockholders to maximize dividends, almost regardless of the cost to the People generally, but it seems today that an unusual exception is being made in the case of a successful foreign corporation. We have lived for decades with outrageous behavior on the part of companies, egregiously by the promoters of lead in gasoline, by tobacco companies, by the owners of chemical corporations and petroleum refineries, and even by the US government, acting against the lives and health of the Utah families that had to live for decades under huge fallout from atomic testing. Profits, financial or geopolitical, trumped everything. In automobiles, the Ford company fought like a tiger to defend the explosive location of the fuel tank in the Pinto. Yet the interest, and even the needs, of the public were brushed aside in an appeal to an obsolete principle, the obligation of the company to maximize the return to the stockholders, an understanding that had wide support 250 years ago when the Free Market was new and in its Wild West stage, but one that now belongs to an outgrown earlier stage of civilization. Many of us can remember all the CEOs of the tobacco companies swearing under oath that they believed that cigarettes were not addictive. Many of us remember Bhopal, and now we have the ashes of the TVA running wild down the Tennessee River. But Toyota is a Japanese corporation, so we can demand attention to the needs of the US public that we have long ignored in American and European companies. I don’t approve of the indifference of the public, and I myself drive a Toyota Prius, but it is time for a higher level of civilization.

OLYMPICS - February 25, 2010

2010-02-25T05:26:00.000-08:00

Last week, I had a sudden start when I saw the Russian bobsled at the Olympics in Canada sporting the symbol of the two-headed Imperial eagle. It wasn’t nearly as bad as if the German team had arrived with a swastika on its hood, but the imperial eagle did give me a turn, and reminded me of the time in 1991 when the cousins of the Romanovs showed up in Russia, apparently expecting to be restored to the throne of the Russias. I realize that the symbol of the Tsars means little to the people of nearly a hundred years later, but I am the son of refugees from the ruins of their medieval world, and I could not help remembering the line from the poem “I am an American” by Elias Lieberman: “The history of my ancestors is a trail of blood to the palace gate of the Great White Tsar.” Of course the US was consumed in rejoicing that they had brought down the Bolsheviks, and loyalty to the spirit of the Cold War meant that no one spoke of the fact that the police state, the Gulags and the brutal way of dealing with enemies of the State had been inherited by the Reds from the old empire, to say nothing of the corruption and murderous ways that we can still read about in the Russian literature of the XIX century and the early years of the XX. So now all that is left of their pre-revolutionary history is the memory that the West was so busily shielding their dollars and pounds that they were willing to see almost all of civilization consumed by the various tyrants that the Robber Barons took on to beat the Reds. It is so in almost all of EU. The glamour and triumph of the Old Regime is remembered, whether it is in the Tomb of Napoleon or the victories of Wellington and Nelson. The memories of the grinding, ugly life of the Little People is lost in the nostalgia of people like Edmund Burke, while the excesses of Danton, Robespierre, Lenin and Mao are recited endlessly.

IRAN - February 18, 2010

2010-02-17T19:11:00.000-08:00

I don’t know why it is that I should be so angry at being lied to by the people I have worked so hard to put into government. At least in part it stems from the indignity of being lied to by people who spend their time posing for holy pictures. I resent being taken for an idiot, even if most of the people the liars take me for really are. Obama, who poses as an educated man, and Hillary, who is surely a well-schooled woman, talk about Iran as though they believe that it was not a troubled state even before the Dulles-run fascist puppet was run out of the country. So the 26 years of fascist rule until that time was AOK with them, as were all the fascist allies that were American favorites since the end of WW II 65 years ago. Of course it is in the interest of the Robber Barons that we should despair of a decent government, no matter who is in power, so that Money should rule without any trouble from minor matters like the American Constitution. I must confess that I am much less confused by Hillary than by Obama, so I am satisfied that as bad as he is, she did not actually become president, but this must surely come under the heading of what Alexander Pope described as faint praise. The real blood and sweat come from the fact that American hybris will surely lead us into yet another worthless war, after a standoff in Korea and defeat in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And we will not stop pursuing the cheap glory of kicking the butts of weak, impoverished countries until the bright dream of America lies in broken ruins about us.

LEADERSHIP - February 11, 2010

2010-02-11T05:24:00.000-08:00

The case of Sen. Shelby of Alabama stands out, but it is far from the only one. A defense contractor in his State is being reviewed with a possibility that another one will get the pork. Shelby has sworn to use his Senatorial privilege to bring all Federal activity in the Senate to a halt until his contractor gets the bacon. In his naïve belief that he can do this at no cost, he is behaving like a 4-year-old who is having a screaming fit in order to demand something he wants, who is prepared to make life miserable for all adults within hearing, and who imagines that no one dares to spank him. And Shelby is not alone. The whole GOP caucus in the Senate is sworn to stand united in support of anyone who is threatening to bring Senate business to a halt in an attempt to strangle the presidency of this Dem in the White House. It is time for Obama to take charge and say that the American government is for adults, not spoiled children, and that severe reaction will be the outcome for the child in Alabama, and for the State that seems to support him, as well the States whose Senators want to play this nursery game. It is of course beneath the dignity of Obama, but Emanuel has the reputation of dealing with screaming children who imagine they can take on the world of adults. In truth, Obama’s dealing with some of those in the Democratic party and others might well have encouraged Shelby to think he could get away with it. We have about 9 months to go until Election Day, and it is time for Obama to deal with spoiled children in Congress. That might even result in people believing that the Dem party is a real force to be dealt with, if only they had something worth while that they were willing to fight for. Into this entire equation we find the question of who is capable of leading the Democratic Party. Obama has a good heart, but not much room in it for the desperate plight of the working people, and none of those who might lead that Party seem to have it either.

OBAMA - February 4, 2010

2010-02-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T13:53:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-06T19:33:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

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.

DEBT, AGAIN - December 17, 2009

2009-12-16T17:36:00.000-08:00

Once again the question of debt shows up in the national confrontation and once again it becomes patent that our nation can be induced to shrink from paying our account, or even acknowledging that we must pay it. The national habit of paying with a credit card, not as a way of marshalling the means without carrying around wads of money, comes to the fore. We have seen the banks luring our children into accounts on which they can charge legendary amounts of interest, having committed the scam of admitting them to the vote but actually having made them easy targets of the money-lenders. In fact, we have learned that after the first vote, these children overwhelmingly do not bother to visit the polls, but they can be seduced into spending money they do not have, with no concern about how the accounts will be settled. What is more concerning is how many of the supposedly adults of our nation think that we can mount wars, cut taxes and run on spending sprees in our marts without any idea where the money will come from to free us from the usurers. But a nation that cannot pay for its extravagances and shrinks from the reality of debt is not one that lenders will be willing to entrust with a loan. So the unspoken words in the debate about paying the costs of our high living is that no one who has even a bit more caution than we would be willing to extend credit to us, certainly not in the trillions of dollars. And those of us who have saved for our retirement are sure to see our nest eggs crumble into dust while our government, Dem and Tory, look out for the self-indulgence of the rich, who have arranged not to be bothered carrying any of the load they have managed to inflict on all the rest of us. Those of us who do not have riches, to say nothing of those who have no jobs and no homes and no health, will be forced to bear the load of the banksters and their ilk.

HUBRIS - December 10, 2009

2009-12-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

As we cross the threshold into another period of imperial war, we must look back on the wisdom of the classical world and consider how we came to be impaled on the horns of yet another dilemma. The US has come through a long period when it was the shining torch of the Enlightenment, though there was always the grubby details of the human condition to mar the wonderful story of human flowering. The initial period when the rebels of the New World considered how to build a civilization eventually gave way to the Jackson Era, when the Man on Horseback started rebuilding the republic to look more like the party system of the British semi-democracy. But they were always ahead of the game, even though they did not lead, but followed, in the elimination of slavery. Eventually the temptations of power led them into the XX Century as they consumed much that remained of the Spanish Empire and we moved to replace them and the British and French Empires into the flourishing of the power of money and the money of power. Since WW II, we have styled ourselves the leaders and saviors of capitalism and when that was challenged, if only in theory, by the rise of a nation that called itself socialist, our ruling class took up the task of seeing that the threat to the power and wealth of the Robber Barons would be dedicated to bringing them down, as Napoleon was brought down in 1815. We called everyone democracies, even those that were military dictatorships, provided they were dedicated to preserving the power of the proprietor class. But we discovered that supporting every tinpot dictator in the world eventually led us into wars we could not win, even with conscription. But by that time we felt ourselves the rulers of the world, hubris had set in, and the Light had begun to go out. Now, with the riches of capitalism shrinking again under the pressure of unlimited greed, US is so consumed by the imperial hubris that even well-wishing liberal leaders are joined in a war that may finally finish the American Experiment.

BANKRUPTCY - December 3, 2009

2009-12-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

In the past few years, we have seen several plaintiffs take up the weapon of bankruptcy, always to their own advantage and the robbing of legitimate claimants. There was the classic case of United Airlines, in which the executives put cash for their own accounts with a financial corporation while leaving the fates of their many thousands of working people dependant on the assets of the airline. At the opportune moment, the same executives declared bankruptcy without going out of business and continued operating in the same old way. The working stiffs were left holding the bag. A similar thing happened at GM, where the incompetent front office continued in the same old way, stuffing their own pockets, spending off the means by which the workers might have had pensions, not reacting to changes in the industry, but taking care of themselves. Now the big bankers have done the same, and are already gobbling up the bonuses, and the more they take, the sooner they will call on DC for more rescues, to save the economy. At the same time, the creditor class are wringing out the little bankrupts, like college lenders and mortgagors, for money in excess of the agreed settlements in excess of the pledges. Bankruptcy has the advantage, rare in our anglosaxon society, of allowing those who make errors to start again and maybe succeed, but the creditor class has taken that decency away from those who are without power and lots of money. Meanwhile, they have taken care to feather their own nests and are busy doing it to us again. In theory, the threat of financial failure is a mark of responsibility in capitalist society that distinguishes it from the stone face of socialism, but that apparently is thought too harsh for those too big to face punishment. Capitalism has its failures, and so does socialism, but bureaucratic capitalism has all the faults of both. Welcome to the Brave new World.

RIGHT - November 12, 2009

2009-11-11T20:35:00.000-08:00

I was stunned last week to hear that the prosecutor in Council Bluffs has made the defense in a legal action that there is no constitutional bar to framing a defendant in a legal case, and I understand that prosecutors around the nation are alleging that they are protected by something like the sovereign immunity of States from being charged with deliberately denying a defendant a legal trial by keeping secret evidence of innocence. I have always been impressed by the supposed rights conferred by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, no doubt taken in by the immense brouhaha about the perfection of democratic law in this country, but to hear lawyers state that they have no constitutional obligation not to frame a defendant is more than even my cynical mind can bear. And yet I know that in Wisconsin the Attorney General’s office can connive in firing a professor out of tenure, which means out of the profession, with no evidence whatever except for the public reaction to a planted story in the local press. That and the Attorney General’s belief that he is a bad man. Even the law’s explicit requirement is defended on the claim that the State government can give the prosecutor leave to secure the firing even when the legal committees, both faculty and in the Regents, have spoken in explicit terms that there is no evidence against him. But if one can jail an innocent man for decades on forged evidence and claim that the Supreme Court should and will say that he has no remedy against deliberate fraud on the Court by the prosecutor puts the actions of State functionaries above the provisions of constitutional bars against State takings of life, liberty and property without due process. Opportunism of this magnitude makes a complete mockery of US prattling about democracy and the rule of law, operating very close to the rule that might makes right. Is the Supreme Court so openly corrupt?

HOPE - November 5, 2009

2009-11-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

It seems that Obama has shot his wad, and has little but hope to offer those who are suffering in the early stages of what appears to be the opening years of a very long Depression. Following Cheney, and listening to the self-proclaimed economic scientists of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush cabinets, Obama has dealt with the banksters with a very open hand, not knowing what they would do with hundreds of billions of Federal dollars, stalling the auto industry for a while, but leaving the States and the working class to reap the results of what the future might bring them. It has been a year now. Many of the States, pinned between constitutions that forbid deficit spending and the urgent needs of the moment, and workers, whose jobs have decreased by about 8 million, not counting those on short hours. And now there has been a trickle of recovery money and a temporary reduction of about 8 % in the number of jobless, even without counting those who have come of working age in this year. And all Obama has for them amounts to crocodile tears and Hope. But Hope delayed, as Proverbs tells us, maketh the heart sick, and hope has little to give to those whose jobs and contracts have been cancelled. The Dem party has little to offer, including many who think that they can leave the jobless to the restoration of time, rather like a farmer who is waiting for his wheat field to plant itself. And while Obama, like Hoover 80 years ago, is a decent man wishing the best for those who are suffering, he is also similarly without a program. And he is leaving the weak with little more than crocodile tears to ease their agony.

HEALTH - October 22, 2009

2009-10-22T04:08:00.000-07:00

I have been interested in the constant comments being made about the increasing cost of health care. Like many similar comments, this fails to take into account what we buy with that money. In short, we buy our lives and our good health, where that has become possible. A notable example was the carping we heard a few years ago about the cost of MRI diagnosis. It would seem that the complainers would rather that we were without that machinery, with all its costs. What many fail to take into account is that many of the uses we put MRI to are investigations that we would never have made before, because the cost, pain and danger of the investigative diagnoses would have kept us out of the picture in certain cases. I had an instance myself where such an investigation revealed an edema in my femur, a condition that was unknown until the investigations of a certain physicist from Columbia made possible the deep picturing of the inside of the human body without cutting into the flesh. Indeed, in this case I might have taken on an investigative surgery. And it would have done no good even then, as no reputable surgeon would have cut open the bone to find the cause of the pain. It was never heard of until the invention of the machine based on Prof. Rabi’s investigations into a never-before suspected phenomenon called NMR. And now it costs some money, where before all it cost was bearing the pain of the illness. In addition, we now make some medical coverage available to people who formerly had to bear the pain without recourse, a supposed disadvantage that conservatives think we could get away with by pretending not to notice the suffering of the victims. As in many other things, it is time we were paying the cost of our new blessings. And it is well worth the cost, so let’s all stop that particular complaining.

PROFLIGATE - October 15, 2009

2009-10-15T04:22:00.000-07:00

Much verbiage has been expended in the past week over the enthusiastic and (some say) excessive way in which the Nobel Peace Prize Committee received the nomination of Pres. Obama for that Prize. Lots of jokes, some pretty bitter, and much laughter, almost hysterical, attended that announcement. And almost everyone, including Obama’s friends and supporters, commented on the apparent haste of the action. To put it in its proper place, we must remember the position of America in the political and intellectual life of the world, and especially of Europe, over the past 250 years. It was the first nation to embody the (mostly French) thinking of the Enlightenment, and while France joined in shortly afterwards, was highly successful for the first century of its incorporation. Those who believed in the thinking of the Age of Reason could look over the ocean and behold it in operation, more or less, and yearn for its triumph. Meanwhile, France tumbled from republic to empire to monarchy throughout the XIX century while fighting its wars of imperial domination on the European continent. The Germans had a small revolution of their own that was put down quickly and many of the survivors fled to Wisconsin to found the Progressive movement. Meanwhile the dreams of the American founders were compromised by Jackson and their moral integrity tested by the ordeal of slavery. But in all of this, the Dream of the Enlightenment burned in the New World and bore the hopes and wishes of the cream of humanity. But in the past 50 years it has been growing harder for the rest of the world to swallow the Empire of London transplanted to Washington and New York. There was no substitute site for the impeccable moral leadership of the Enlightenment discarded by the American empire. So the resurrection of the illusion of the City on the Hill signaled by the election of Obama was hailed with millennial enthusiasm. Halleluiah!

AFGHANISTAN - October 8, 2009

2009-10-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

The news these days concerns the situation in Afghanistan, which seems to be no-win, in which the only choice seems to be between 2 unacceptable routes. Yet it is possible to expand the suggestion about buying Afghanistani poppy resin as a means to stem its use in the illegal drug trade and at the same time to provide low-cost morphine for medical use, in both the industrial and developing world. A bit of additional thought might be given to further methods to accomplish even more. It involves making Afghanistan a trading partner by paying more for the agricultural material than the illegal trade can match. A basic thought in that trade is that the heroin powder, so expensive in the supply to addicts, is far cheaper in the raw, and represents the asset that enables the Taliban to afford its costs in the arms trade. Despite the great wealth of some of their underwriters, it is hard to believe that they can keep a competition with America, especially in light of the costs of the illegal operation. If America bought the bulk of the crop and manufactured the opiates in legal factories, we should easily be able to keep ahead of the drug barons. Into the bargain, we might have found a reason why the Afghanis would want to be on the right side of US. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we have tended to put all our reliance in discouraging antisocial conduct on the practice of extracting punishment if people don’t do things the way we think we would want, rather than by socializing them to see the benefits in voluntary cooperation. It might be, after all, that we get more favorable response from the Afghani farmers as trading partners, even at some cost to us, than in trying to force them by what we imagine is our overwhelming power to live the way our puritanical nation wants them to.

WINNING - October 1, 2009

2009-09-30T19:33:00.001-07:00

Gen. McChristall has assured Pres. Obama that if he does not authorize a substantial rise in the number of US troops in Afghanistan within a year, then it will not be possible to defeat the insurgency there. People not trained in logic might miss the fact that he has not said that pouring in more troops WILL make that possible. Indeed, when asked that question, he carefully does not say so. So that leaves the possibility that it will never be possible to say so truthfully. That actually reflects my own opinion and that of a growing number of American people. Indeed, we should notice that in the lexicon of victory, there are many levels, some noted by the points Winning, Never Losing, Never Winning, and Losing. Indeed, the majority of Americans, and of Afghanis, seem to believe that we are stalled at Never Winning and that number seems to be rising. As it rises, we must be moving ever closer to Losing. The Cheney regime started with armed forces in deep trouble and moved them to the edge of Ruin. Based on the false belief that we could establish a democratic regime in Iraq, they have left us with the shreds of an Army and Marine Corps. With the failed effort in Afghanistan, the illusion of Winning has faded and left us only with a situation in which no one wants to be at the helm when this once proud ship sinks. The US armed forces have not had a victory since vanquishing those of the proud Empire of Grenada, an island with the area and population of Sheboygan County WI. Now Obama wants to intimidate the Islamic Republic of Iran, which he can order bombed or shelled, but dares not attack on the ground. All to resist Losing. And he can order a sanction, until someone needs their oil too much. As we shall see, I am afraid.

TIME - September 24, 2009

2009-09-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

One of the discouraging things about time is the circumstances in which we are supposed to have plenty in which a solution to a problem may be dealt with and those in which urgent need demands immediate attention. The model for the second is the incipient avalanche where once it starts, it cannot be stopped until it fulfills its destiny, and the destiny might be terrible. The model for the other is the time for a tree to grow and provide needed shade, and little can be done to advance it. We were told that the threat to the big banks was of the first kind, and that a collapse of the 1930s variety was the only alternative to giving the bankers and their ilk everything they claimed, and right away. In the other, the action of the Administration on unemployment, and especially of their opposition, was condemned to let it ripen in the fullness of time, no matter how many decades that would take, rather like the 100 Years’ War. By contrast, I tried to impress upon the new Senator Russell Feingold the terrible corrosive effect of joblessness, and the urgency of stringent measures to bring it under control, even if at the cost of increased debt. I tried to paint the picture of the ways in which it could destroy a family’s life and even lead to illness, divorce, homelessness, mental breakdown, or even death. I failed to move him from the position that the most urgent matter facing the US Government then was the size of the budget deficit. And all this to a politician I had always supported, and do today. But to those facing the avalanche-like collapse of their link on what they took to be the earned status of an American who had faced all the things required, there were not months and years in which to correct the destruction of their economic well-being. And today the involuntarily jobless have again the greatest need facing an inert government, and maybe losing everything they had worked for, there is no time in which to let the problem solve itself.

CREDIT - September 17, 2009

2009-09-16T20:25:00.000-07:00

The noise over debt is caused by the refusal of the moneyed interests to face the bald fact that this nation, as a people, has been living beyond our means and kicking the repaymentinto the future. Some of it has been in consumer credit, some in outsize mortgages, some in bills carefully designed to be paid later, and a lot in putting off needed maintenance and repairs and chiseling on the costs of keeping our public infrastructure up to the standards we need in order to avoid crippling correction later. All of it comes as debt, to be paid off from the imagined riches we might accrue later. And all of it is treated as an attack when it is time to pay. Right now, we cannot pay out of current earnings, or at least say we can’t. So the need is to borrow the money, hopefully at a reasonable rate, and make the sacrifices necessary to pay off the debt through progressive taxation. But those whose prosperity might be lessened by paying what is owed press the fact that paying what you owe is often not pleasant, despite the fact that some of the complainers are from exactly the group whose wealth was gained by selling installment debt and lack of social responsibility. They hide the fact that failing to pay naturally shoves the cost onto those who are most in need of new social programs. These pay with losses to their jobs, to their children’ educations, and they suffer lack of health care and sometimes lose their lives to the lack of proper attention. That is where the objections to increased debt unavoidably point, and these false maintainers of fiscal rectitude look the other way “and pretend that [they] just do not see”. So much for the hypocritical talk about being unable to pay off the debt, so as to empower people to go back to borrowing from the complainers at usurious rates.

RAILROADS - September 10, 2009

2009-09-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

Some of the recent stories concern the building of modern high-speed railroads in US, including a stretch between Madison and Milwaukee. But when specifics are mentioned, it turns out that the greatest extent that is hoped for would bring the speed up to a level that was already obsolete over a hundred years ago. Still it is comforting to know that the goal was tempting even though this State, and this country, does not have the will nor the wherefore to consider any such enterprise. For decades, I have been advocating building such a high-speed link between the 2 cities and in recent years I realized that we could combine that with an international airport in Jefferson County serving them, all for less than no money if the airport incorporated its own industrial park. The scope of such a project was beyond the thinking of some politicians I mooted it to, who seemed to prefer that Madison remain an air-fare desert, and Milwaukee somewhat also. So the wish for the lost days of rail connection joined as pie in the sky Tommy Thompson’s nonsense of hosting the super-collider project . The French can build a high-speed RR, but not US nor UK. These countries are up to their waists in tax-reduction and dreams of imperial splendor. All genuine interest in civic advancement is dismissed as communistic. The extent of the plans is to gain back 19th Century accomplishment, and even that will fail. The cargo cults of New Guinea built what they thought were airstrips in the hope that planes would land there and deliver large quantities of consumer goods, as they saw happening elsewhere. The dream of 21st Century railroads serves the same function in US and UK. It is a wish that the tax-cutters have managed to render totally unfulfillable.

PUNISHMENT - September 3, 2009

2009-09-03T18:10:00.000-07:00

The stage is set for a confrontation over whether a special counsel will undertake a study of the methods used to torture detainees by the Cheney regime. On the one hand we have the AG, who has read the report of the Inspector General of the Justice Department concerning the violation of the standards of justice in US then. On the other hand there is the word of Pres. Obama that “we should look forward, not backward”. Mr. Cheney favors closing the book on what he has done, as may be prudent on his part, if not just. Many of those who took his word that they were safe doing as he wished apparently are fearing punishment, just as he seems to be. And this is a nation that is very deep into punishment, as we see in the case of Mr. Megrahi, who has been diagnosed as shortly to die and has dropped his appeal on new evidence so that he can go home and die among his kinfolk. The clamor for vengeance by US is very strong, and has swept people widely thought to be of humane persuasion. This need for punishment is strong among people who have been accused of rape and turn out, on the DNA evidence, to look nothing like the men who are much later shown to be the rapists. One explanation given is that they have been recruited to testify against the men accused on the grounds that if they do not convince a jury of the guilt of those particular men, then the prosecutors will drop the case and no one will be convicted. I am on the side that guilt is often wrongly assigned. But in the case of torture, I do think that the truth needs to be shown to the people. The Q of whether punishment should exceed the obloquy that they might have earned should be judged by what that truth turns out to be. That would be a time, if any, to eschew the course of vengeance, not now.

FOREIGNER - August 27, 2009

2009-09-03T18:08:00.000-07:00

One of the difficult aspects of spending a lot of time in London is that I frequently find myself called upon to justify the actions of DC or else to join in condemnation of our government. The worst is when I am in sympathy with the basic orientation of the questioner but am conscious of what I take to be his oversimplifications. A great deal of what I hear is blanket assaults on what is taken to be flaws in the US character. Thus I often find that when the DC government has taken up demands by liberal foreign columnists to “do something” about a foreign situation and the actions of US are reflections of incidents in our history, then I try to draw the point that they cannot make that kind of a demand without taking responsibility for our doing it in a way that manifests our national history. Thus when Obama makes gestures or pronouncements in line with what he takes to be the understanding of US about what happened in the past, that must be expected of a leader in a nation which has been governed in the past by other men in accord with their understandings and a people that still thinks that way. An example concerns the statements of Obama based on US understandings of our history in Iran, where we and UK colluded in 1953 in overthrowing an elected government to install a military regime under the Shah, and other similar cases. Explaining US belief without subscribing to it can be taken as waffling. I t results in answering the kind of expressions like those of Rev. Wright last year. He had a position I understood, but not one I subscribed to, and I did not join in the general condemnation, nor did I attempt to justify it. It is even harder when I am abroad. It is also something like the position of soldiers who do not join in the official beliefs, but are in a situation where they are called upon to defend them, and do what they take to be their duty.