buddenblog

Bush's Culture of Death: Updates

Culture of Death is a dramatic moniker, but it is after all truly apt. The Christian Right, George Bush, Tom DeLay, et. al. are pushing policies that kill people, not just in war, but in peace.  They kill the meek and the humble and the sick and the hungry.

Some Updates:
On April 8, 2005 Barbara Boxer, D-California introduced an amendment to a bill currently in front of the Senate which would lift the "global gag rule" against funding clinics associated in some way with abortions.  This bill is cosponsored by Republican Senator Olympia Snow of Maine. Eight Republicans supported it so that it passed in the Senate, 52-46.  Ms Boxer attached a similar amendment two years ago which also was passed by the Senate.  It died in the House.  If it should by some miracle pass in the house, the President has, of course, promised to veto it.

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The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress are now moving to establish a rule similar in intent to the "global gag rule," this time against needle exchanges in the struggle against the spread of AIDS.  In an editorial in the NYTimes published February 26, 2005, the Times reports that "While Washington does not buy syringes for needle-exchange programs, it does give money to groups that use other people's money to administer needle exchanges....The asistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, Robert Charles, warned the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which currently holds the rotating chairmanship of the joint program Unaids, that the organization should not work on needle-exchange issues and should remove positive references from its web site, which it did.

Needle exchanges do assist in preventing the spread of AIDS.  They do not encourage drug use.  Republicans have used, according to this editorial, grossly inaccurate charts to push their position. 

Needle exchanges are especially valueable in parts of Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

Opponents argue that needle exchange "muddies the message that illegal drug use is unacceptable, and keeps drug abusers from suffering the consequences of their addiction."  As The Times points out, by this logic, doctors should refuse to treat lung cancer in smokers.

The editorial concludes, "Washington's antipathy toward needle exchanges is a triumph of ideology over science, logic and compassion.  The United States should help pay for these important programs,  If it cannot bring itself to do so, it should at least allow the rest of the world to get on with saving millions of lives."

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Here in San Antonio, the local affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundations has received calls and e-mails from anti-choice activists "pressuring Komen to end support for Planned Parenthood's Habla Con Tu Hermana breast health education programs.  The folks at comen have pledged "full support of Planned Parenthood."  You can read more about this at www.ppaction.org/pptx/

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I've added a new typelist, called Bad Guys -- somewhat less familiar members of the Bush Culture of Death who have a lot to do with developing and promoting Culture of Death policies.  Only three so far, but that is only due to a my need to stop writing now.

George Bush and Family Planning and Abortion in Poor Countries

The first time I got pregnant, my husband and I were teaching and living as Peace Corps Volunteers at a secondary school, a boarding school, sprawling across a rural neighborhood on a slope of Mount Masaba in Eastern Uganda.  We had decided we wanted a child, though I was skeptical that I could actually do it. So miraculous, a baby growing inside you.  My husband teased me, look around you, he said, babies everywhere, human babies, calves, chicks, baby goats, bugs, rats. In fact the rats he kept in cages in our spare room for the biology classes he taught produced a never-ending flow of what looked like little pink thumbs.

The British doctor, all those years ago, would not consider a pregnancy test until I'd missed two periods. Nature coughed out so many fertilized eggs, he said.  Why should mamas experience these events as miscarriages? 

In Uganda I was thrown off balance by the death and dying as  much as I was dazzled by the brilliant, almost garish, abundance of life. I hadn't see the death at home, though of course it was there in my hometown, New York City. Years after we left Uganda, we took our by then four year old daughter for a visit to my family.  I was so happy to be showing her Macy's and to weave with her through the carts and shouts and smells of the Garment District that I didn't realize her gaze had been caught by a drunk curled up in a doorway.  "He's dead, Mama!  Why doesn't someone help him!"  Disconcerted, I told her he was sleeping as I picked up our pace.  She said, "But he's not in a bed."

At our house at our school in Uganda, outside our kitchen door, blood spurt as our houseman decapitated chickens for our dinner.  Tiny, pale, unformed blobs and threads of blood nestled in the smooth, brown-shelled eggs the eggman brought.  At the market, the butcher swiftly sliced large chunks of muscle meat -- how much, one pound, five pounds?  from the cattle carcass hanging in his stall.  He wrapped them carefully in banana leaf packets, tied them with banana leaf fibers.  They never leaked. The local men suspected certain small animals, I don't remember what they were, of stealing chickens.  They chased them through the underbrush banging sticks and grunting in low, inhuman voices, till the terrified animals had to run into the open.  The men clubbed them to pulps near the flower beds in front of the school offices, leaving them in shreds,  hearts  pulsing through shredded muscle and membrane as they died.

More images: Brittle shells of giant insects my husband found for an entomologist friend and stored in small cardboard boxes in the pantry.  The corpse of a giant black snake slit open on our front lawn, my husband's students lifting out the soft, translucent eggs of the unborn young.  Rats, dogs,hyenas, giant birds feeding on tattered roadkill. A huge giraffe alongside the road in a game park, head intact, hyenas tearing at its belly.  Ants scouring bones until they shone. 

Wails, high pitched,  frequent.  Four men  holding high a litter, the outlines of the body clear under the cloth.  The death of babies.  So much life, but so much death, so fast in coming, the life and then the death.   And the sicknesses that sapped life: skin ulcers that wouldn't heal;  the endless cycle of malaria, its fevers sapping strength: pararasites at home in skinny kids; kwashiorkor's visible signs in babies: swollen bellies and tufts of reddish hair; elephantiasis swelling legs to painful, enormous size. People lived with these problems and persevered, often with great good humor. But the more severe, the more chronic, the more debilitating the problem became, the harder everyday life, the shorter life itself.

After several mornings of waking up sick to my stomach, I sat up in bed to see a plate of soda crackers and a glass of water next to my bed: a successful salve for morning sickness from our houseman.  I was late several times to my first period class.  One day, I walked in to find a cartoon drawing of myself, a huge pumpkin of a belly appended, on the blackboard.  The caption read, "Congratulations, Mrs. Fisher!"  The boys perched nervously on the edges of their seats.  I laughed.  They burst into applause. 

"We thought you and Mr. Fisher might perhaps be brother and sister," one of my students told me.  "You have been here so long and just now you are going to have a baby!"

Everyone in our neighborhood, not surprisingly, knew  instantly. Finally, after it was obvious to everyone, the doctor confirmed my pregnancy.

One day, I opened the door to two neighbors, women who lived a bit down the road. They were dressed formally in the long crisp cotton dresses with puffy sleeves that were the custom in the area.  We sat straight-backed, the three of us, on the edges of the chairs in my living room.  The houseman brought us tea syrupy with milk and sugar. They wanted to discuss a delicate and very private subject: birth control.  When it became known that I was not my husband's sister, but in fact his wife and capable of getting pregnant, local women immediately realized I had used birth control to avoid pregnancy.  Women where I lived were not ignorant, but they did not know specifics.  Not only that,  even if they knew the specifics, their chances of being able to use any method including or perhaps especially the rhythm method were slender indeed. Men had absolute rights over their wives.  They had the right to demand sex and they valued large numbers of children.

Each woman was in her late twenties, each had already given birth to six or seven surviving children and a couple who had died at or near birth. Though they were my contemporaries, they looked vastly older.  They told me how tired they were, how easily they got sick.   They had so much to do, so many responsibilities, and their families depended on them.  Women are responsible for the production -- the gardening and harvesting -- and preparation of their family's food, for taking care of the sick, for cleaning house and doing the laundry, without machines of course, and for getting water and fuel.  We saw them often on the roads carrying huge loads of firewood on their backs.  Even a healthy mom, if she has a lot of kids has to spread the basics of food and shelter thin.  Moms  worry about not being able to afford to send their kids to school.  In Uganda, families had to pay for all their kids' education, and schooling was increasingly seen as the only alternative to the rapidly diminishing ability to make one's living on the land.  So women have a lot of motives, not just their own health, for for trying not to have so many kids. It is not easy to see your own kids hungry.

So to safeguard the kids they have, without access to safer methods, many moms resort to what we would call back alley abortions.  And yet they can die this way, and do.  So in an effort to safeguard their kids, they leave them vulnerable.  Without mothers, children are often neglected, often join the ranks of orphans, of street kids.

The two women hoped that I might know a kind of birth control that they could keep secret from their husbands.    I thought birth control pills might work.  How silly of me.  If they had had the money, they would have had to take a taxi  the thirty miles to the nearest town with a clinic and a  pharmacy.  Of course they didn't have the money.  But if they had, they assured me, their husbands would surely find out what they'd used it for: money would be missing for one thing, or the doctor would talk, or someone in the clinic who knew them would talk, or someone would see them buying the pills and would talk. 

The only option they saw open to them was abortion, then and now the most prevalent form of birth control in rural Uganda. With an abortion they risked infection and hemorraging, infertility and death. At the least, if their husbands found out, they risked a serious beating.  But yet one more birth seemed an even worse choice.  Talk about the lesser of two evils.  Imagine, abortion as the only option.

I don't know what the statistics describing these issues were in the 1960's.Since then, Uganda as a country has been afflicted with terrible travails, from Idi Amin's murderous dictatorship in which hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were slaughtered to the AIDs epidemic to the ongoing war in the north of the country today.  In spite of this history, or maybe because of the lessons learned from it, The Uganda government has initiatives and policies strongly favoring women's right to family planning, to education, to participation in public life and to employment.  However, as with many poor countries, especially in Africa, not only the disasters mentioned above but the consequences of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies as well as other ramifications of globalization have left the country no better off, possibly worse off economically, than it was when I was there in the 1960s.  "Modernization" has undone many wage earning, family and social structures without alternatives being developed.  There are few resources to change the status of women's health, especially in rural areas.

As I've indicated, abortion is intimately tied to reproductive practices in Uganda as, especially among the rural poor, the first line of defense against unwanted pregnancies.  Why so many unwanted pregnancies, you ask:

• Ignorance. 
• Lack of available women's health care.  In rural areas, a woman has to travel an average of twelve miles to existing services which may be inadequate.  The twelve miles (or thirty, as in the case of the two women I spoke with) is unrealistic if your only available means of transportation is walking.
• Lack of available contraceptives.
• Lack of skilled health care workers: doctors, nurses, trained aides, teachers.
• Lack of communication between men and women.
• The culture still values a large number of children in a family, though this is changing even in rural areas.
• Men often don't approve of birth control or are ignorant themselves and regard it as their right to have sex with their wives whenever they want it.  The culture condones this.  Even if women don't want more children, their position in the marital relationship denies them a say.
• Men may beat their wives if they discover them practicing birth control.
• In situations where men regard sex with their spouses as a right, "abstinence only" doesn't have a chance, not that it does in many other situations.

What makes a pregnancy unwanted in Uganda and elsewhere?

• Even in completely healthy women, pregnancy at a young age and repeated, too-close-together pregnancies, especially started under 18 and continued after thirty five, present health problems to both mother and child.
• Existing health problems increase the danger of complications in pregnancy.
• Pregnancy increases the seriousness of health problems.
• Too many kids in a family stretches available resources too thin.
• Too many kids even in extended families stretch available attention to thin.

What are some of the health issues?

• In Uganda, the risk of dying as a consequence of pregnancy is around 1 in 14, compared to the risk in North America where it is 1 in 6,366.  If there are no other health problems compounding the pregnancy or being compounded by the pregnancy, the risks are about the same as in the West: hemorrhage, sepsis, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, obstructed labour and abortion.  About twenty percent die from a disease aggravated by pregnancy.
• According to WHO, "it is estimated that for each maternal death in a developing country, there are 124 women suffering illnesses or complications related to pregnancy and childbirth.  These conditions include anaemia, ante and postpartum hemorrhage, hypertension, infertility, prolapsed uterus, reproductive tract infections, and sepsis among others."  The report continues, "72% of women in sub-Shaharan Africa" are at risk of a pregnancy-related problem.
• The more times over five a woman delivers a child, the greater the risk for anemia, hemorrhaging, and death from hemorrhaging. 
• Risk of death is exacerbated in women with anaemia, cholera, heart diseas, hepatitis, malaria and renal disease.
• The risk of worsening of the very common infections of the genitourinary tract.
• Health consequences of high risk pregnancies can lead to social ostracism.  For instance, women who become sterile can be shunned by their husband and may end up having to support themselves as prostitutes.  WHO reports that a common complication of childbirth "among young women is obstetric fistula: awomen who suffer from the condition are often socially ostracized."

So do these women really think an unsafe abortion is a better alternative?  Apparently they do as seen by the statistics for those that didn't work out well.  For instance,

• According to WHO, "immediate complications include uterine perforation and injury to other internal organs, cervical lacerations, hemorrhage and infection.  Long term complications include increased risk of subsequent ectopic pregnancy, chronic pelvic infection, and infertility."  Safe abortions provided by people with appropriate skills and equipment under sterile conditions do not result in these complications except rarely.
• In Africa, "up to 50% of maternal deaths are due to unsafe abortion" and in Latin America, unsafe abortion may be the main cause of death in women between 15 and 39.

Remember, most of the women in Uganda who resort to unsafe abortions don't have realistic access to other methods of birth control.  The situation is complicated by the fact that safe abortions can only be provided in the case of threat to the mother's life.  Many women are afraid of getting crosswise with this law -- more afraid of this than of an unsafe abortion. 

Why should we in the US condone, or at least not condemn, legal, safe abortions in poor countries?

• Because women, especially poor women, in these countries for the reasons listed above, don't have reasonable access to contraception to prevent pregnancy.
• Many of these womens face severe consequences from unwanted pregnancies.
• Because therefore abortion is often the only line of defense against unwanted pregnancy.
• Because if legal abortions are not available, women will seek illegal, unsafe ones.  This is a universal truth.  If women are desperate to terminate a pregnancy, they will resort to an illegal abortion.
• Because if a women's health clinic provides safe abortions, the clinic will have access to that woman and her family for teaching safer, less distressing, less morally disturbing, methods of contraception.

Here's where George W. Bush's administration comes into the picture.  George and his posse have disrupted US aid to international family planning clinics in poor countries, even if they don't provide abortions, even if they themselves have nothing to do with abortion.  All these clinics have to have is the bad fortune to in some way be linked to a group that gives money to clinics that do talk about and/or provide abortions or is alleged to.  Even though these clinics save women's lives, and even though providing safe, legal abortions would also save women's lives. .

Shortly after he was elected, Bush and his posse restored what has been called "the global gag rule" of the Reagan years.  This  "rule" bans the giving of money to any group that even discusses abortion as an option with the only exceptions being threats to the life of the mother, or  pregnancy rape or incest.  The Bush Administration has withdrawn funding from the United Nations Population Fund and from The Reproductive Health for Refugees Consortium saying both of them give money to groups that support abortion in China to enforce limits to population growth.  Even their own investigator says that China is not forcing abortions. The Bush posse withdrew from a major international health conference last year because it received funds from Planned Parenthood International which does provide legal but not in any sense forced abortions as part of its efforts to improve women's health.  The Administration  tries to urge other countries notably in Latin America, sometimes with a heavy hand, to support its anti-family planning efforts including, surprise surprise, promoting abstinence over the use of condoms "particularly in developing countries ravaged by H.I.V. and AIDS." (Lizette Alvarez, NY Times, September 1, 2004)

As Timothy E. Wirth, former Senator from Colorado and current president of the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund said,  "On issue after issue, the current administration has placed ideology above evidence and bias above science.  Isn't it shameful that so many of the men talking about the sanctity of life are by their actions effectively condemning women to die?" (Alvarez)

I don't think there is anything we can do to convince politicians like George Bush that he is killing women.  He's not interested.   It doesn't cross his mind that he can be wrong.  It doesn't cross his mind that he can be responsible for terrible acts.  It doesn't cross his mind to put himself in someone else's shoes.  It doesn't cross his mind to care.

"Culture of life," my foot.  "Culture of death" is more like it. 

With Bush's blessing, the Right to Life movement is not only seeing to the death of women in poor countries who never had a chance, but is pushing women in this country, poor and rich, back to a similar place where there is no option available: no knowledge of birth control, no birth control, no emergency contraception, no legal abortion.

Modern family planning, including contraception (not just abstinence) and safe abortion has saved untold numbers of women's lives since they became available and with those lives, the lives and well-beings of their families..

The dog flew so we went to Charlotte, Texas

A week or so ago, Rita the dog tried to fly.  She had chased a cat up and over a concrete retaining wall which was maybe ten feet off the ground and sloped at maybe an 80 degree angle.   I was strolling a few feet ahead of Rita and Jim who called out to me so I could see what what was going on.  At the exact instant I turned to look, Rita sailed back towards us in a giant arc up over the top of the wall, ears flying, rear legs out behind her and front legs folded in front, just like Pegasus the flying horse.  But she had no wings, so she landed with the proverbial sickening thud on hard ground.  You can imagine what we feared.  Fortunately, although shaken (all of us), she had only suffered a not too serious injury to her left knee.  The vet ordered rest and then only limited, controlled walks for the next couple of weeks.

Restricted to the life of a quiet house dog wasn't to her liking, so we decided she needed a country drive.  We almost always take her on our country drives, but this time, we would not take her up dirt roads to chase cats and cows, only to towns where we could keep her on the leash.

We headed south on small roads, passing through, for instance, Poteet, "The Strawberry Capital of the World."  That Monday, the town was picking up after its annual strawberry festival.  Trash collectors wandered through the remains of carny rides and booths on the fairgrounds  and men hanging off the backs of pickup trucks were still picking up thousands of orange cones along the road.  One of those perennially sad days after.  No more the hundred thousand visitors: just a dusty, somewhat battered looking small town with a water tower that was a giant strawberry.

More or less randomly we had chosen Charlotte, Texas, maybe 45 miles from home, as our destination.  If we hadn't chosen it, we'd likely have driven right through barely making an effort to  notice it.  As in a lot of South Texas towns, even its few downtown buildings were scattered, set back from the main crossroads. 

Here you see the front of the library and the side of the grocery store.  Caticornered from where we were standing and across the street were the garage for schoolbuses and next to it, a small fairly new building that seemed to house some regional offices.  We were standing next to a converted garage-mechanic workshop which I'll describe below, because it is a good contradiction to the saying, "what you see is what you get."

To our right as we faced the library, there was a playing field on which kids were playing baseball when we arrived with the water-tower behind it. 

As Jim took pictures (he takes lots more than I do), I walked Rita alongside the garage/mechanic building and realized it looked a little odd.  One part of the side facing the street had been stuccoed and three nice outdoor chairs sat around a table. 

So I continued around the corner.  Behind a chain link fance sat a garden which, if it were a bit bigger I would have taken for a garden in a city park in Mexico.  And lo and behold, this side of the building looked sort of like a house, or maybe some kind of rendition of a house as installation art.  I was attempting to get some photos of the flowers when the owner appeared and -- invited me in!

Well, not just right away: after we'd talked enough for her to be sure I wasn't going to try to scam her or worse.  She and her husband, the mechanic who presided over the workshop side of the building had moved to Charlotte from nearby Jourdanton (see pictures of Jourdanton in the Charlotte and Jourdanton, Texas photo album) and converted half the structure to their home with the proceeds from the sale of the sale of their more conventional ranch-style home in Jourdanton.  What gives the house its unusual installation art aspect are the painted windows: there is only a double french door, no real window facing the garden.

Here is just a hint of her garden:

The owner gave us a tour of the inside: her dreams of home realized. Just as examples: Mrs G.  had created an ideal kind of farm kitchen: very large, lined with white, glass-fronted kitchen cabinets combined with the family room: no partition, no "bar" or island so her family, grandkids, kids, husband, in-laws could hang out together, sprawled on the couches, playing games, cooking, together. 

I didn't take any interior pictures, but you can see Mrs G's garden in the Charlotte Jourdanton, Texas photo album.

Charlotte had another jewel.  Driving down a dirt road that circled the town, we came upon the Mexican Cemetery.  Mexican cemeteries are filled with color and life.  I imagine gatherings of the living and the dead happen regularly, not just on the Day of the Dead.

And there are many pictures of the Mexican Cemetery in the photo album.

Here is some information about Charlotte.

It is 45 miles south of San Antonio at the intersection of State Highways 97 and 85.  The population is about 1727.  Although many people are accustomed to think of small towns in the US as dying and only having old people left in them, Charlotte is growing, albeit slowly, and the median age is 29.6 years.  The population is 81.2% Hispanic, 18.1 Anglo and 1.9% American Indian.  The Anglos are a mix of German, English, Irish and "United States" which I take to mean mutt.

It's a poor town.  The median household income is around $25,000, and the median house value is around $26,000.  Only 49.4% of the people over 25 have a high school diploma.  Only 2.6% have a bachelors degree.  Only 0.3% have a graduate or professional degree.

Unemployement is around 9%.  Most working people work elsewhere, the average commute being more than half an hour one way.  It's worth noting that there are a number of adults who don't have cars.

The library squeezes about 9000 books into its storefront as well as about some audio and video materials.  It maintains three subscriptions.  It looks very well used.  The Charlotte high school has 136 students, the elementary school, 256 and the junior high 106. At least one of the teachers is an artist.

Charlotte also has girls' baseball teams: we saw them playing.

A relatively young town, being founded in the late 1800s, Charlotte never appears to have boomed, though oil exists. Farmers shifted from cotton to peanuts awhile ago, but since peanuts have lost a lot of their value, nothing has really replaced them.  You see cattle in the fields around Charlotte.  I don't know anything about how well the cattle business is doing.  The picture to the
left shows an active oil pump.

Most of South Texas is poor and is losing population.   Schools are poor with few services and few courses past the bare bones ones.  Post-high school opportunities are scattered far and wide.  Land prices are falling.  There are few medical services.  And while there are plenty of hard-working people, the jobs don't pay much.  In fact, the barter system seems to cover a lot of exchange. 

It's pretty in Charlotte. The air is clean and fresh in the spring; Mrs. G says there's always a breeze, even in the heat of summer.  She and her husband sit out on the swing in the garden to watch sunrises and sunsets.  She says the stars fill the sky: her stars, she calls them.  She likes living "right downtown" where she can walk to the grocery store and the post office and the library and her church.   She works hard.  She cleans houses. There aren't too many people in Charlotte who can afford a housekeeper, so I imagine she's one of the commuters.  There are some "ranchettes," five acre lots with suburban houses on split-up ranch land further north, within commuting distance of San Antonio. Her husband repairs cars and trucks and does some welding, though I gather he thinks of himself as retired.

Mrs G. exchanged housekeeping for the paintings on the walls of her house, inside and out,  with the teacher who is an artist at one of  the Charlotte schools.  In her spare time, she's laid all the brick surfaces and walkways in her garden and planted it.  The bricks she's found and been given; many of the flowers are heirloom, from her mother's garden.  She's also refinished much of the furniture in her house, found at flea markets and garage sales, in bright, smooth colors.

Check out the photo album of Charlotte and Jourdanton, Texas.  It should be available today or tomorrow.

Christian Peacemaker Team in Arizona/Sonoma Border: Watching the Minutemen

Christian Peacemaker Teams have a presence on the Arizona border in order to observe the Minute Men who have taken it upon themselves to report "illegal immigrants" to the Border Patrol.  The interaction between Migrants and US anglos is a terrible and overwhelmingly complicated situation,  and already scarred by much tragedy.  I used to think that if only people knew the facts, they could work out a reasonable approach to a problem, but I no longer think so.  We have so few forums in which different people with different knowledge and different points of view can sit down peaceably and talk.  We have increasingly hatred among ourselves, and quiet people of good faith on all sides feel compelled to accept being corralled in with extremists.

The following is an article from www.cpt.org:

CPTnet, April 9, 2005
Arizona/Sonora: Watching the wAtchers

Two CPT Arizona members, both grandparents, spent a day watching "Minuteman Project" personnel.  The Minutemen, a vigilante group were watching for migrants to cross fromm Mexico into the United States West of Douglas, Arizona.

CPT  members have been trained as "Legal Observers" by Ray Ibarra, law student and representative of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).  During training, Ray said, "The problem to be addressed is not the Minutemen themselves, but the fear and misunderstanding among the U.S. people that is allowing hundreds of migrants to die in the desert while they seek available work...in the U.S."

The CPT members and three other observers, in T-shirts labeled "Legal Observer" and "observadores legales" and carrying vido cameras, deployed themselves to high points above the broken barbed wire fence that represents the U.S.-Mexico border.  East and West as far as the eye could see along the hilly road, Minuteman pickups, vans and SUV´s with California, texas and other registrations were parked at quarter mile intervals.  About two hundred minutemen sat in camp chairs and peered south through their binoculars.

Who are the Minutemen?  They are women and men, many grandmothers and grandfatehrs, who believe that the U.S. government is not doing enough to stop thousands of migrants from entering the U.S.  Some of them believe that these migrants are "diluting" American culture.  A few Minutement carry side arms, which is legal inArizona, and state that they intend to stop any migrants they encounter and turn them over to the Border Patrol.  Ray Ibarra said, "stopping and/or confining anyone except for a breach of the peace is illegal undr U.S. law."  The planned actions of the Minutemen make them vigilantes.

Despite rumours to the contrary, no migrants appeared.  During the afternoon, Mexican authorities on four wheelers were seen to be scouring their frontier making sure that migrants were moved to less confrontational areas of the border.

The CPT suffered no ill treatment apart from some dehydration and sun burn.  Two senior citizen men passed the time of day with the CPTers, and two sheriffs invited the CPTers to call on them for assistance, if needed, as well as warning them of sharp bushes, rattlesnakes and wildcats.  Cochise Sheriff Larry Dever said, "I am very pleased that there has been no violence and no arrests so far, despite several Minuteman demonstrations on the weekend."

Hearing of Dever's words, Ray Ibarra commented, "There was no violence because local law enforcement have alllowed the Minutemen a free hand to operate in Cochise County."  In some California and Texas counties, law enforcement has shut down vigilante activity.

In light of recent abuses that have been perpetrated by Minutemen Project personnel and the lack of response by local and federal officials, it promises to be another long, hot summer for undocumented migrants in the Sonoran desert.

And some correspondence from CPT members in Arizona:

11 April 2005
[Three] VPT Arizona members went on their first night patrol in the Coronado National Forest, about an hour's drive North-West of Douglas.  It is a hot spot for Mexican migrants moving through the area with Minuteman Project personnel camping nearby and trying to turn migrants over to the Border Patrol.  CPT members work with "Legal Observers" who, like CPT workers, are connected to the "No More Deaths" Campaign in the desert.

When CPT members and two Legal Observers arrived at the forest just after dark, ten migrants were already in the hands of Border Patrol officers.  A Minuteman allegedly assaulted a Legal Observer by pushing his camera down.  The Legal Observer called the sheriff who arrived in ten minutes to investigate the charge and counter charges.  The Legal Observers left, the CPT members remained, and the sheriff departed giving both groups warnings of an arrest if he had to return.  Silent tension remained between CPT members and the Minutemen until, eventually, all of the Minutemen left the area.

[One CPTer] decided to stay in the CPT vehicle while [the other two] patrolled a dirt road paralleling the highway outside the park where Minutemen were camped for the night.  As identification the CPTers used glow sticks attached to their red hats.  They walked the back trails from the direcdtion that migrants would be walking in a potential encounter with Minutement.

CPT members met three groups of older Minutemen from Illinois, Colorado and Florida.  Some of the exchanges went like this:  "Who are you?  You must be scouts for migrants.  You won't mind if we call immigration?"  Another speaking into his walky-talky, "They are at my osition right now."  Another Minuteman asked, "What are you guys doing?" [The CPTers] replied, We're just out for a walk in the desert.  We are Christian Peacemaker Teams Members and we want to make sure there is no violence."  A Minuteman's response, "You don't need to be here.  There is no voilence.  Yous houldn't be out walking at night.  Someone might shoot you."  CPT members' reply, "And you guys say there's no violence?"  HIs response, "You shouldn't be walking along [the dirt road] and tripping hte Border Patrol¿s sensors and disturbing people  You should walk along the highway; it is safer."

A Minuteman who had shone an extremely bright light into [a CPTer's] eyes. momentarily blinding him (an agressive act usually intended for migrants) replied when asked the wattage of his light, "That's of no consequence."  [The CPTer] replied, "You know in the desert it is a tradition to offer water and food to strangers.  Do you have some water?"  The man sent the CPTers to his partner in another car where they received a bottle of water to share.

[The two CPTers] held friendly conversations with Michael from Illinois and Grady from Colorado who appreciated that the CPT members were Christians.  At one point Michael said, "I wish there could be a guest migrant visa that would permit these migrants to work at available jobs in the U.S. and then go home to Mexico."  [A CPTer] replied, "we couldn't agree more."

12 April 2005

Below are selections from the CPT journal from the Arizona/Sonora Peacemaker Team.

"Conflict zones are famous for rumors.  Everywhere CPT members work they are careful to identify rumors and avoid passing them on....Douglas, Arizona is as vulnerable to rumors as any place where CPT has a presence.

"Here, U.S. border enforcement policy deliberately channels migrants into the most deadly, inhospitable areas of the desert leading to hundreds of people's deaths each year as they attempt to cross the border.

"As well, currently a vigilante gropup called the Minuteman Project is present in the region.  One of their goals is to round up migrants and turn them over to Border Patrol personnel.  The Minuteman PRoject personnel believe the U.S. government is not doing enough to keep pople out of the U.S: if they don't have official immigration documents. Here in Douglas, a lot of rumors have been flying around.  When I asked a season rporter if this was common, he said, "No, people are scared."

Here are some of the rumors I heard recently over a cup of coffee:

1. Wal-Mart in Douglas has stopped selling bullets during... April in response to the presence of the Minuteman Project.
2. The local schools, including the local college, have had special meetings to talk about what to do in the event that Minuteman personnel come on campus with weapons.
3. Because some of the Minuteman personnel are camping in the Wal-Mart parking lot, supervisors at the store have said that it is ok if people do not want to report to work because of fear of confrontation.
4. White civilians have been knocking on doors and asking people their citizenship.
5. Triple A has been telling its members to not travel through Douglas becaue of increased threats of violence.

"These rumors may or may not be true, and some would be easy to trace.  I think the significance of these rumors is that many reasonable people believe them to be true, and this speaks to the level of terror that many people in Douglas are feeling.  The population of Douglas is 80% Hispanic.  The MInuteman Project and the presenceof other white supremacist groups has made many people feel like outsiders in their own city and country.

Gloria -- A Story

This is a link to the PDF file. Download gloria2.pdf

A visit to Nueva Rosita

From 12 March to 17 March, eleven us --five  adults and six teenagers from our San Antonio Episcopal Church traveled to Nueva Rosita, Mexico to paint their Episcopal church. Our fearless youth leader  has as one of her personal missions exposing our US teenagers to other cultures in a way that breaks down barriers of prejudice about Mexico, Mexicans, and poverty.

The great Mexican state of Coahuila is largely desert, much of it stark and rugged and beautiful.  It is also one of the richest states in Mexico, the seemingly empty landscape concealing a cache of minerals and the cities a growing number of industries which bring with them as many problems as solutions. Nueva Rosita sits in the middle of Coahuila's Región Carbonifera whose towns have done well with coal mining. 

The drive in March from San Antonio to Nuevo Rosita, about five hours, passes from the green of South Central Texas farms and ranches through the rolling brush country and scruffy towns thrown down along the highway in Mexico. Maybe thirty or so miles this side of Nueva Rosita, you can get on a Cuota, a fancy new toll road.  It cuts through uninhabited landscape so you think there's no one there, but that's not true.  The free road is surprisingly close, though invisible from the cuota.  If you take the free road, you see people not just in pueblitos but riding horses and burros alongside the road, waiting at bus stops, eating at outdoor tables at little  restaurants for travelers,  and driving all manner of vehicles.  You see cattle and goats at pasture, and horses tied up in a bit of grass while their owners work.  And of course you see industry, especially coal-fired electric plants with large signs out front proclaiming their devotion to protecting the environment.

Nueva Rosita is about 70 miles from the Mexico-Texas border  within sight of the stark dark desert mountains.  It is a fairly new town by Mexican standards.  One of a cluster of towns in the región carbonifera of Coahuila, the vast number of its citizens are associated one way or another with the coal mines.  It sits on a bit of a rise, so when you walk to the edge of the town you can easily look out over pueblitos in one direction and mining operations in another towards the mountains. Very quickly you can find the openness, the emptiness that is endemic to this kind of landscape which I love. In March, it was cool, cold for a Texan on one day, in fact, and for the most part, clear.

There are some pictures of the church's neighborhood in the photo album.  As in many Mexican towns, the downtown is dense in the center and peters out quickly around the edges.The neighborhood the church is in is spacious and airy with houses set wide apart from each other, even the not so prosperous ones.  In the pictures, you can see some, and you can see walls of richer houses and views of some of the mine works behind a church.  A couple look out toward the mountains over a cluster of the smaller houses of some poorer miners.  In our San Antonio papers we occasionally read about accidents in the coal mines in this area.   Some people pay especially dearly for energy, and especially dearly for a livelihood somewhat better than those of many Mexicans.

The church we'd come to paint sits in the corner of a large, scruffy lot, tufts of tough grass standing  between the paths worn down by baseball players and kids running and jumping on the swings and slides and tires in the playground.  It's dusty.  Every step kicks up small puffs of dust. The church was a mustardy yellow when we arrived, chipping around the edges and peeling in large, thin sheets.  Jim and I liked the color, but we were in a minority.  Anglo Episcopalians I think go in more for what they consider good taste, Anglo-style.  Padre Martín chose a pleasing beige-mauve kind of color for his Texas painters to use.

This is not a rich church.  Some of the windows are broken, a piece of roof is loose, molding is missing here and there on the outside.  But the windows, paned with all kinds of glass, let in a soft light, and you can sit in the pews and look out at trees and sky.  Out of one, you can see a huge, yellow rose hanging there, right at eye level.  Inside there is a feeling of serenity: the soft light, the pale blue walls, the simplicity.  We went to Mass on Sunday and sat up front, special guests.  Padre Martín gave his sermon so that every few sentences, one of the Spanish speakers among our group could translate.  It was a lovely sermon, about grabbing on to the joy of life and living it and sharing it though life is hard and short.  Mexicans are much more willing to deal with this true nature of life than many of us USAers are.  Unlike in an Episcopal church in the US, a bleeding, suffering Jesus hung on the cross above the altar.  No abstract crucifix here.  And of course there was a large picture of La Virgén de Guadalupe in the Narthex.  The communion cup was plastic; the wine in a plain old wine bottle, the water in a plastic water bottle.  A parishioner, a plump man in a plaid sports shirt, sat up front to play  Mexican hymns on a boombox, and everyone sang along. 

After the service, we all repaired to the parish hall, an austere, longish cinderblock building.  Some of the women had prepared a lunch for us.  We were all kind of shy with each other, not quite sure what to say or do.  Jim and I sat on a bench with a mother, a grandmother and an incredibly beautiful little boy.  It was easy to talk about him -- and to him. His picture is in the photo album.  In it, he is peaking over the top of the table.
It was a good meal, with fluffy, light homemade wheat tortillas made by Nena, whom I mention further below.  There were corn tortillas, too.  When we were still back at the Padre's house before the service, the man who owned the tortillería delivered them to the front door and joked around a bit with Padre.  Later he turned up at the service, and then of course at the lunch where he wanted to be sure we knew he'd made the corn tortillas.  The men sat in a group by the front door, talking to each other and greeting us. 

The parish hall is the big money-maker for the church.  People rent it for wedding receptions and quinceañeras and baptisms, piñatas and loterías.  Our girls slept in it, clearing out for the events.  The boys and Jim and I slept in Padre's house, a largish cinder-block building which Padre Martín finds considerably bigger than he needs.  He'd never had guests before. The boys and we slept in large, unfurnished bedrooms on air mattresses.  At night we heard the burbling of the aerator in Padre's fish tank and thought it was raining.  One night it was raining. Ferocious tormentas rolled across the night sky, the rain pounding the dust into mud and the brittle, stick like grass into the ground.

There is also a playing field that Padre Martín wants to turn into a football pitch, a basketball court and some playground equipment.  I have snapshots my friend Kim took showing me coming down one of the slides. This picture is definitely not in the photo album.  One of the best times I had there, though, was being  a baseball- playing grandmother.  I even got a single.  Missed most of the catches, though.

I wish I had pictures of the center of town.  It is busy and looks pretty prosperous. Unlike in US towns, the narrow sidewalks are crowded with people going and coming and pausing to talk to each other.  As is our habit in towns we haven't visited before, Jim and I, along with our friend Kim and Padre Martín, checked out the supermarket, Gutierrez, just off the main street. With Padre Martín we criss-crossed the aisles picking up local cheeses and spaghetti and chorizo and ground meat and very good-looking and cheap avocadoes and fruit and brown eggs which in Mexico are not fancier than white. We scooped pinto beans out of a bin and Padre Martín  talked with people he knew.  There is also a local market, but it was not open the days we were there. 

We bought all our supplies in a well-stocked ferraría where we got a discount because we were painting a church.  We passed small-engine repair shops, dress stores, panaderías, internet cafes, farmacías, papelerías, auto parts stores, and schools.  We saw a lot of veterinarias.  In Mexico, veterinarians are usually associated with pet stores.  Padre Martín, an animal lover, has a dalmation which was in need of some attention, so we visited his favorite veterinarian/store a couple of times.  An elegent older woman sat at a desk in the midst of a jumble of supplies and feeds and medicines and baby chicks in cages and stacked up  tanks glittering with swirling fish.  She called the vet for Padre Martín and intermediated between the two.  In the end, we didn't have enough cash to pay for the flea (bicha) medicine and the small, glittery fish Padre chose to add to his tank. La Señora said, that's fine.  You can pay when you can pay.  At our second visit, the vet himself, a tall, lanky cowboy-looking man listened carefully to the description of the dog's problems, prescribed  medicines for skin disease and parasites and set up an appointment so Padre Martín could bring Rubí in for a physical and a spaying if she was healthy enough. When we arrived in Nueva Rosita, Rubí didn't have a name because she is deaf and Padre said she didn't need one because she couldn't hear a name if he used it to call her. I must have looked sad when I asked how he could refer to her when he talked about her if she didn't have a name.  A little later he told me he'd given her the name  Rubí, I think after the villainous but gorgeous namesake of a recently ended telenovela.  Both Rubís are beautiful.

Women from the parish cooked us lunch every day -- a Mexican version of spaghetti and meat sauce one day, with guacomole made in a molcajete; beans and rice and meat in tortillas another; a heap of steamed fresh vegetables and mac and cheese another. All delicious We took Padre Martín out for cena in the evenings at at a variety of local restaurants.  The restaurants all had specialties distinct to each. The best was a plain, brightly lit restaurant that offered a specialty of spiced, shredded, grilled beef, delicious smoothies and a very jovial and welcoming owner.  We failed to eat in an outdoor one which served only charcoal-grilled meats and smelled delicious.  Jim and I will definitely look it up on our next trip.  Our leas satisfying meal: pizzas a la Dominos in a large, white, empty chain restaurant. The kids with us found they didn't miss pizza as much as they thought they did though it tasted just the way it did at home.

One night, the most hospitable Maria Elena, a woman of the church, invited us to her home to eat home-made tamales.  She and her family, including the adorable Danyito her five-year-old grandson whose picture you can see in the photo album sitting on a swing, live in an attractive middle-class house built maybe in the seventies, in a row with similar houses.    They got to sit without the grownups at the big dining room table in front of the glass-fronted cabinet filled with china collected over the years.  The grownups sat in the big kitchen at the back of the house, along the counter.  The walls were tiled with handpainted azulejos -- images of kitchen tools and vegetables on them.  On the stove, an ever-present pot of beans simmered; on the counter, a huge, shiny steamer filled with Doña Elena's tamales sat waiting.  Such tamales I have never had as Doña Elena's.  Nor had any of the rest of us.  Our tiny, skinny group leader ate eleven of them.  Most of the rest of us came close.  They were chicken, obviously seasoned with a secret recipe.  Accompanying them was a green salsa using green tomatoes, not tomatillos, and a few other things.  Simple.  I'm sure when we try to duplicate the recipe, we will fail.  And the beans of course were delicious.

Doña Maria´s daughter, also Maria Elena, but known as Nena, is an elementary school teacher who has continued her education and is now certified to teach teachers.  She was at home for several months due to some surgery she had to have.  Incidentally, she was the maker of the fluffy wheat tortillas we'd had at the Sunday parish lunch.  Since she was off work, she wanted to take us to see one of the surface mines.  She talked to us of the importance of coal to the region.  Unfortunately, the ferocious storms I mentioned above flooded the open mine she wanted us to see.  The whole mine was closed the only day we could go.  I would like to learn a lot more about Nueva Rosita and the whole area. The Mexican Revolution gained much if not most of its strength from these vast northern areas.  It also was a seedbed of strikes for workers' rights in the 1950s. And the oldest winery in Mexico is south of Nueva Rosita in an old monastery in an oasis.

Check out the Nueva Rosita album. 

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Revolution of Values

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  Here is a quote from him, painfully timely.  From The Daily Dig: Caffeine for the Conscience.

A Revolution of Values

               

Martin Luther King Jr.

               

 

            

Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world...

Yet it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities.

If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers around the world wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? That the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours.

  To this I would add that fanatacism is poisoning our public life as a nation.          

It really really really is the economy, stupid! (as well as almost everything else)

In case you haven't read either Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers" or the extract of his final chapter in a previous post, below you will find a summary.  In the US right now,  we live and act in a human-created economy, not in some supernatural system driven by mysterious, inexorable,  forces.  Thank God.  But pause here only briefly in gratitude.  We must examine and restructure our economic life prontito.  This means Democrats have to stop drifting around in the void looking for the right "message" as much as we have to disabuse the Republicans of the notion that they are royals.  Damn the Democrats!  This is as much their fault as it is the Republicans who at this point are very happily and easily filling the void.  The Democrats are sitting around, for the most part, like a bunch of cowardly ninnies sending out talking points and pleas for money and a lot of hot air, Barney Frank and a few others excepted.  They are trying to find the right clever words a la Lakeoff and Luntz to say absolutely nothing.

The world is changing rapidly before our eyes.  We can either look at it full in the face and learn from it and join it or crumple like Rome, only much, much faster.  Let's go for a few clichés: the deadly entanglement of corporate and government greed and right wing religion is driving us to our downfall.  A little extra on the right-wing religious danger: their anti-science attitude and the fake education they provide in their schools may be damning millions of our young people to an economically marginal existence.

Heilbroner and history are important because they put us in our place. If we can face our place, we can adapt.  If we want to turn into donkeys like Pinocchio and his buddies who found themselves trapped when they fell for the line about going to playland forever, then we can follow our current path.

A short summary of Robert Heilbroner's Final Chapter, "The End of Worldly Philosophy?" with liberties taken in the arrangement of material.

FIRST OF ALL; Heilbroner calls the present version of economics paraded before us by Alan Greenspan, et.al. "dessicated residue."  In other words, dead, dried up, useless for any decent purpose, Alan Greenspan's mumblings of mysterious mantras meant to magically channel our economy into smooth sailing waters notwithstanding.  This doesn't mean that economics, or various kinds of capitalism are useless: just what passes for them in the current Administration.

Economics, according to Heilbroner, is "an explanation system" for the purpose of enlightening us about the workings, problems, and prospects of the economy.  The economy in the modern world is a "complex social entity."  That is, it's not just numbers, it's not simply raising or lowering interest rates to prevent inflation.  It IS a system within which virtually all of us exist to meet our material needs and to provide them for other people.  It is COMPLEX because it is a bunch of interlocking systems which undergird our national and international lives.  It ISN'T all there is to life: there are spiritual, familial, creative, artistic, community sides -- sides more important to our identities and our ability to find meaning and hope in our lives.  But we cannot extricate ourselves from the economy as we pursue our greater endeavors.

Capitalism differs from previous social organizations.  American capitalism developed from English and German roots and Heilbroner traces our origins back through these societies.  It's important to note that there are other economic historians who are more expansive. This will be important in another post, if I ever get to it. 

In any event, in our own cultural sphere, capitalism differs from previous historical epochs because it depends on "the acquisitive drive as the principle means of organizing the production and distribution of society's material needs."  Previously, the dominating form of goods distribution was in the hands of kings and  feudal structures.  Rather than the general human "acquisitive drive" being important, power and custom were. 

In northern and anglo Europe pre-capitalism, only the wealthy could be wealthy.  And only the upper castes of society could be wealthy.  The sons and daughters of the wealthy who were left out by inheritance rules (primogeniture) and failure to marry became priests, monks and nuns with fair frequency.  The poor were in fact always with us by inherited position.  In the feudal system, serfs took care of the growing and making of stuff.  They didn't stand a chance to profit from it.  Later on, there was a lower middle class, urban dwellers often, who were craftsmen.  They had to rise through a guild system which was rigid and did not allow for much innovation and certainly not for making excesses of money. 

Capitalism as it developed differed in that people didn't produce by custom or fiat or because that's how it was always done or because the king said that's what was needed.  Instead, individuals of whatever rank who were fortunate enough to be ingenious or to have a bit of extra cash or something to buy and sell goods with and the smarts to use these assets imaginitively could make more money than he (and sometimes she) needed.  The provision of life's necessities came to be through systems of "competitive buying and selling."  I want to add here, as Heilbroner does in his book, that these systems, too, have led to many dreadful iniquities which were of great concern historically as well as they should be right now.

The guidance of capitalist societies, according to Heilbroner, historically has been in the hands of what are supposed to be two separate authorities.  The public authority, the government, "wields force and establishes law."  It doesn't itself carry on production and distribution.  On the other hand, private, profit-seeking individuals do just this, though, theoretically at least, under a watchful public eye.

In sum, the making, selling and buying of goods in modern capitalist societies is in the hands of the none-government. Law and justice and protection of rights and conflict resolution and the general maintenance of the common weal -- the common good -- is seen to be in the hands of the government, which of course is supposed to mean in our hands, the hands of us the people.

SO....what's gone wrong with economics (not to mention the economy):

First of all, we give economics much more credit and power than it deserves.

1. Economics "is ultimately...an explanation system whose purpose is to enlighten us as to the workings, and therefore to the problems and prospects of that complex social entity we call the economy."
2. Economics is not mathematics.  Mathematics' "ever-growing presence" is not "the crucial change in the economics of our time....While there is no alternative to using mathematics...to elucidate many of the analytical purposes for which economics exists...this is not to say that mathematical models reveal how best to act on the information that bombards us: the predictive capacity of econometrics .. the modern combination of statistics and economic theory -- is by no means notable for its accuracy," Alan Greenspan, present day business economists and our government notwithstanding .  [Italics mine]
3. The most significant recent change in capitalist economics is the substitution of the "vision of science" for that of Capitalism.  This should not be confused with the notion that economics is a science, because it is not.  But by thinking of it as Science, we give it a lot more weight than it deserves -- and ask far fewer questions than we should, generally because we think we can't understand what's going on and because we think it's boring. Come on, folks, wake up!!! Situation boring but critical, to paraphrase an old European saying.
4. Economics/capitalism should not be confused with science because human beings are a lot more complicated than the consistency of apples falling to the ground..  There are some generally predictable stimulus-response relationships in human economic behavior, but, as Marshall, cited by Heilbroner, pointed out, "economics cannot be compared with the exact physical sciences for it deals with the ever-changing and subtle forces of human nature."  Heilbroner goes on, "When scientists explain the phenomenon of, say, light, with reference to the behavior of electrons, no one supposes that each electron has 'decided' whether or where it is to move.  In contrast, "when economists explain the phenomenon of price changes by the behavior of buyers and sellers, they cannot describe their object of study without assuming that each individual person has decided to act as he or she did....Human behavior cannot be understood without the concept of volition--the unpredictable capacity to change our minds up to the very last moment."
5. "Social life of humankind is by its very nature political."  Crucial economic matters such as wealth distribution and income are not determined by immutable laws as gravity is.  "They are highly mutable determinations of the sociopolitical order in which we live."
6. The idea of a scientist's objectivity falls apart in economics.  There is no "objectivity" in social arrangements:  there is nothing inevitable or preordained or replicative about social arrangements.  The existence of a growing class of poor people does not have to be accepted as a scientific truth. One can't take an objective stance about poverty.
   
7. Power and obedience exist in all "stratified societies" (and I would suggest non-stratified ones as well). 
8. Current economic thinking and activity does not take into account power and obedience...politics, if you will.
9. We must pay at least as much heed to politics, social science, REAL science, ethical formulations, and diplomacy as to economic insights for our society to survive.  Capitalist economists CAN add insight about how the market system currently functions.  It CAN examine historical and current capitalisms (there are many, from Scandinavia and Europe to the United States and increasingly China and India) and bring to light what practices lead to what outcomes: for instance, in the US we have a culture of "greed and social indifference."  We have forgotten that capitalism has previously and successfully existed as a "bifurcation of power into two interpenetrative but still independent sectors: public and private.  But for the well-being of us, the independence and oversight of the public is equally important as the independence and creativity of the private.  Historically, in Europe government has functioned to keep the market as prosperous as possible in the context of maintaining the well-being of the common weal, or common good.  Where government has been pushed out of this role, countries have gone broke and the gap between rich and poor has grown into a gaping hole. Not to speak of what we are doing to the planet....
   

Heilbroner: Whither Capitalism

Below you will find a summary of the last chapter of the last edition of Robert Heilbroner's great work, "The Worldly Philosophers" (Touchstone,Simon and Schuster, 1999) which as I've said anyone interested in the future of our country ought to read.  Heilbroner, died this past winter.  Some obituaries and commentary can be found on the blog, http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/cgi-bin/mt_2005-2/mt-tb.cgi/147 .  Summary of important points will follow in the next post.

Heilbroner reminds us that if we don't know the history of our country, the history of the economy of our country and the thought that has gone into economics, we are trapped in a box which keeps tumbling down the path of greed, exploitation, environmental degradation and growing social inequity in the world and in our own country.  When we examine history, we discover that there isn't one single capitalism, some inexorable path which we have no power to change.   There are many paths we can go down that are, essentially capitalist paths, or paths which can encourage economic freedom while they incorporate civic responsibility, respect for the common weal, where one can find help where help is needed, where creativity is not stifled,  but along which compassion can flourish.  It is wise to remember that in fact capitalism is based on a negative perception of human nature as essentially selfish: acquisitive, and that our neoclassical US capitalism hopes if you will that the needs of society can be met by indulging in human acquisitive and competitive instincts.  Finally, we must recognize that socialism is not the only alternative.

Below are selections and some summary sentences from the final chapter, "The End of the Worldly Philosophy?" from the second version of the seventh edition of Heilbroner's  Worldly Philosophers:  The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers.  Of course it would be best to plunge in and read the whole book.  It's really delightful, though that sounds counterintuitive when it comes to economics.

....I would remind my readers that the "end" has two meanings: termination and purpose, a dual significance we must bear in mind as we go on....

....I think it is best to go back to beginnings, by reminding ourselves of what economics is ultimately about.  Needless to say, it is not merely a discussion of the figures, forecasts and government pronouncements that are the stuff of the daily economic news.  Neither is it the supply and demand diagrams and equations familiar to every economics student.  At its core, economics is an explanation system whose purpose is to enlighten us as to the workings, and therefore to the problems and prospects, of that complex social entity we call the economy.

So far what we have mainly stressed with respect to these explanatory visions and analyses is their extraordinary variety....In this final chapter, hoiwever, I suggest we look at this array from another perspectdive -- not so much emphasizing surface differences as searching for a common structural core.

[Heilbroner then summarizes what he considers the major pre-capitalist epochs for which he says the ideas of "economics" are not necessary.]

....[I]t was the slow displacement of medieval tradition and feudal command with a social order that did indeed require a new mode of clarification.  The social order would in time be called capitalism; its means of organizing material life an economy and its new explanation system economics.

I can be brief in describing the changes brought by capitalism.  The first was a dependency on the acquisitive drive as the principal means of organizing the production and distribution of society's material needs...._N]ever before, in any society, had the pursuit of wealth been legitimated, much less celebrated, for everyone.  Kings of course, ; adventurers, perhaps; the lower classes -- never.

Second, capitalism consigned both the guidance of production and its pattern of distribution to the encouragements and discouragements of the market....[T]he provision of the very stuff of life by competitive buying and selling is an arrangement that has no parallel in any other social order.

Third, capitalism is the first society to place its overall guidance under two authorities, one public, one private, each with its powers and its boundaries to power.  The public authority -- the government -- wields force and establishes law, but does not set itself up to carry on the everyday tasks of production and distribution.  This is largely the prerogative of profit-seeking individuals, who produce what they wish, hire thsoe willing to accept the wages and conditions they offer, and let go those who do not, but who cannot themselves dragoon labor power, as did the pyramid builders, or physically punish inefficient workers, as could the feudal lord.

These three innovations set the stage for the visions of all the great economists....

....[It] is not the ever-growing presence of mathematics that is the crucial change in the economics of our time.  Numbers abound in any social order that relies on modern technology.  All industrial systems generate and require a mass of quantitative information that would have been unimaginable before the advent of high-speed production and near instantaneous communication....This is not to say that mathematical models reveal how best to act on the information that bombards us: the predictive capacity of econometrics -- the modern combination of statistics and economic theory -- is by no means notable for its accuracy.  The point is, rather, that there is no alternative to using mathematics in its many forms to elucidate many of the analytical purpsoes for which economics exists.  [Italics in this paragraph are mine.  EKB]

....[H]owever, mathemaitzation is not the all-important change with which our chapter is concerned.  Mathematics today pervades economics, formalizes it, and becomes its favored mode of expression, but no one actually confuses mathematics with economics.  The deeper, and to my mind, more significant change is the increasing appearance of a new concept as the vision -- indeed the essence -- of economics, and the corresponding disappearance of another much older one.  The new vision is Science; the disappearing one, Capitalism.

Let me give greater specificity to this charge by citing from ...Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw and Economics by Joseph Stiglitz.  Both authors enjoy the highest professional esteem, and have written texts that are models of clarity, intelligence, and accessibility.  Let us now see if they illustrate my points.  I cite first from the Introduction of the Mankiw book:

Economists try to address their subject with a scientist's objectvity.  They approach the subject of the economy in much the same way as a physicist approaches the study of matter and a biologist approaches the study of life:  They devise theories, collect data, and then analyze these data in an attempt to verify their theories.

We shall consider the implications of taht central placement of science in a moment, but what of my assertion regarding the abandonment of the description of the economy as capitalist?  I turn now to Stiglitz's two-volume text to see what he has to say about the matter.  The answer is simple:  the word does not appear in its 997 pages of text.  For all intents and purposes, Capitalism does not exist in this two-volume introduction to economics.

Selective citations are, quite properly, regarded with suspicion.  I could, perhaps, ask skeptical readers to repair to the nearest public library and compare a randome selections of volumes of the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association, or its British counterpart, The Economic Journal for any ten years prior to the 1950's and a like number from the last decade.  I think I can guarantee thta the skeptic will discover in the second group a pronounced increase of references to the methods of science and a precipitous decrease in the presence of the word capitalism....[W]hy these changes have taken place:

Let us look first at science.  There is more than one reason why...the concept of science [might have] become a more and more explicit part of the vision of economists.  The first...is that students of the workings of the economy, like students of the workings of nature, seek regularities of behavior as a first clue to the discovery of the 'laws' that are perhaps the most important achievement of science.  Without knowledge of the laws of gravity, we could neither explain (or predict) the orbits of the planets or the trajecgtory of an airplane.  The question, then, is whether there are not also lawlike aspects to economic behavior?

I say 'lawlike' because individuals' behaviors are obviously more complex than that of objects moving through space.  When the price of clothing goes up, the quantity of clothing we buy is likely to go down; but it may not, if our fancy is caught by an advertising campaign.  Nonetheless, no one would deny that there is a general relationship between the prices of goods and the quantities bought by buyers -- as prices change, quantities bought usually change in the opposite direction.

Moreover, this same kind of generally predictable stimulus-response relationship can be found between changes in our incomes and our spending on consumer goods, or changes in the rate of interest and business spending on investment.  Thus, economic behavior is marked by a degree of predictability for whichit is difficult, or even impossible, to find similar examples in other areas of social life, such as politics.  Equally remarkable is that changes in economic stimuli normally bring about movements in opposing directions, depending onour roles-- namely, whether we are buyers or sellers.  This is another property that marks off economic from non-economic life.  Indeed, it is this bilateral effect of price stimuli on behavior that makes markets a means of imposing social order, not disorder, a unique stabilizing effect that again relates economic behavior to some self-balancing natural processes.

Thus it is not surprising that the realization early dawned that a market system bore a certain resemblance to the natural processes to which science directed its attention.  There is no doubt wherein lay the attraction of this resemblance.  If economics coudl become a true branch of sicence, it would enormously increase our capacity to predict the course of events, as well as the outcome of attempts to change that course.  To be sure, economic science would no more give us complete control over our future thatn physical sicence gives us control over the course of gravity, but unquestionably it would increase our ability to foresee the consequences of changing the workings of the economic system, and thereby to choose themost favorable course of action.  Why, then, whould we not applaud the increasing tendency to envision economics as a science?

Thre are two reasons.  Marshall himself noted one.  Although beguiled by the sciencelike aspects of economics, he warned that "economics cannot be compared with the exact physical sciences for it deals with the ever-changing  and subtle forces of human nature."  We speak of the laws of physics or chemistry as describing the behavior of the electrons and mesons that the scientist studies, but there is an unbridgeable gap between the "behavior" of these elements of nature and those of the human beings who constitute the objects of study of social science.  When scientists explain the phenomenon of, say, light, with reference to the behavior of electrons, no one supposes that each electron has "decided" whether or where it is to move.  In contrast, when economists explain the phenomenon of price changes by the behavior of buyers and sellers, they cannot describe their object of study without assuming that each individual person has decided to act as he or she did.  On a word, aside from pure physical reflexes, human behavior cannot be undrestood without the concept of volition--the unpredictable capacity to change our minds up to the very last moment.  By way of contrast, the elements of nature "behave" as they do for reasons of which we know only one thing:  the particles of physics do not 'choose' to behave as they do.

A second objection seems quite different, but is actually the other side of the same coin.  It is that the social life of humankind is by its very nature political.  That is, all societies, once they move from the level of hunting and gathering...create categories of privilege and disprivilege....As those last words make clear, capitalism is no exception to this general statement.  Are such crucial economic matters as the distribution of wealth or income determined by the counterpart of gravity?  Are tazes, the rights of inheritance, or the existence of sweatshops expressions of immutable laws of nature?  Or are they the highly mutable determinations of the sociopolitical order in which we live?

The question bears on Mankiw's statement that economists "try to address their subject with a scientist's objectivity."  But what does it mean to be "objective" about such things as inherited wealth or immiserating poverty?  Does it mean that those arrangements reflect some properties of society that must be accepted, just as the scinetist accepts the arrangements studied through a telescope or under a microscope?  OR does it mean that if we were scrupulously aware of our own private endorsements or rejections of society's arrangements we could, by applying an appropriate discount, arrive at a truly neutral view?   In that case, could one use the world "scientific" to describe our findings, even though the object of study was not a product of nature but of society? 

T he answer is that we cannot.  There is, of course, ample room for scientific method in analyzing many problems that economics seeks to clarify, including the requirement that economists report the data they observe as scrupulously as possible.  But when it comes to policy recommendations, it is impossible to present economic analyses as if they stemmed unchallengeably from the givens of society.  This is b ecause there are no such givens comnparable to those of nature.  Moreover to admit to the presence of power and obedience in the arrangements of all stratified societies does not thereby allow us to attribute to our explanations the objectivity we seek in our clarifications of nature.  It only applies the language by which we describe nature's workings to those of society.  If such a pseudoscientific view were to become the aim of economics, it would indeed spell its termination as a worldly philosophy.

....If economics is not to be a science of society, what is to be its ultimate usefulness?

My answer is that its purpose is to help us better understand the capitalist setting in which we will most likely have to shape our collective destiny for the foreseea ble future.  Having for many years endorsed athe ideas and objectives of democratic socialism, that is not an easy assertion for me to make.  But given the experience of socialism in its twentieth-century forms, it is difficult to expect its benign rebirth in the century to come....especially in the less developed areas where its advent is most likely, [it] will again develop tendencies for political megalomania, bureaucratic inertia, and ideological intolerance.

To be sure, these strains and stresses will exert their destructive force on capitalist societies as well.  Ecological dangers, foremost among them global warming, will bring not only the need to conain the damage of climatic change in poor nations, but the even more difficult challenge of reducting climate-warming emiisions in the richer nations that are their source.  Add to this the alarming spread of nuclear weaponry on the one hand, and ethnic, racial, and religious hatreds on the other, and the state is surely set for problems and tensions from which the capitalist powers cannot be insulated.  Finally, there is the fast growing problem of a globalized economy that arises largely within individual capitalisms, but then escapes their control to become a supranational presence that threatens the sovereignty of the wealthies of them.  In sum, here is a prospect as threatening, if not as desperate, for the rich capitalist world as that which confronts the poor capitalist or presocialist one.

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What could be the purpose of vision and analysis under these conditions?  It must be evident that there is little for economics to offer with respect to the political leadership, the diplomatic skills, and the social inspiration that must play crucial roles in preventing these strains from undoing the workability of capitalist societies.  Nonetheless, a worldly philosophy has a unique potential to provide the visionary guidance that will help at least some capitalisms make their way as safely as possible through the coming decades.

Let me stress some capitalisms.To say it one last time, the distinctive properties of all capitalisms are the drive for capital, the guidance and constraints of a market system, and the bifurcation of power into two interpenetrative but still independent sectors.  To this, however, must be added a capacity for adaptation and innovation that results in a spectrum of capitalist performances, a spectrum that is visible in the intensity of the drive for capital, the degree of freedom accorded to market dispensations, and the location of the boundary between the public and private realms.  Thus we have a considerable vareityof capitalist societies despite the general similarity of their economies..witness the gulf between the socially, if not always economically, successful capitalisms of Scndanavia and Europe, and the economically successful but socially disastrous capitalism of the United States:  consider, for example, that executive compensations in the top corporations in the United States is twice that of France or Germany, whereas the upward mobility of the Aemrican poor is half that of those country and but a third of Sweden.  The first comparison points to a culture of greed; the second to one of social indifference.  The combination hardlysuggests the instituional adaptability that will be needed by any nation seeking to minimize the strains fo the decades ahead, much less serve as a model for world leadership.,

It is with respect to these social apsects of capitalism that a reborn worldly philosophy can play its most useful role.  Economic analysis, by itself, cannot provide a torch that lights our way into the future, but economic vision could become the source of an awareness of ways by which a capitalist structure can broaden its motivations, increase its flexibility, and develop its social responsibility....

No doubt it will be objected that the realization of such a far-reaching proram would require prodigies of political leadership, and that much of the learning needed to give substance to such a vision belongs properly within te boundaries of other fields of knowledge, from psychology and sociology through political science.

....Economics alone will not guide a country that has no vital leadership, but leadership will lack for clear directions without the inspiration of an enlightened as well as an enlarged self-definition of economics....[I]f the usefulness of the worldly philosophy of the twenty-first century is to match that of the nineteenth and early twentieth, it will need to be both deepened and enlarged, above all compared to the dessicated residue with which we are left today....

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