buddenblog

Barak Obama's Commencement Speech

HERE is the first truly inspiring speech by a Democrat in years.  It is Barak Obama's commencement speech at Knox College in Illinois. 

http://www.knox.edu/x9803.xml

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.

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.

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.

                                                 ------

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....

                                                  ===============

 

 

....

Bush and Friends, The Trans-Texas Corridor, The Texas Rangers, Fascism, Corporatism and all that

The Rant:
There is no unified Right Wing: The robber-barons are ruling the roost.  They've created an army of  business leaders, think tanks, politicians, government workers, academics, religious leaders and general zealots to do their dirty work.  These people -- leaders and followers -- hold some or all of the following dangerous beliefs: that free enterprise is holy; that the true core American values are that competition and private ownership of everything one can own is sacrosanct;  that what motivates people are profits and nothing comes close to profits as a motivational tool; that cost-cutting in the name of profits is a holy activity; that God is on their side; that wealth proves one's righteousness; that their success proves the worth of democracy and proves US democracy is just fine the way it is; that the United States is chosen specially by God; that Rapture is coming and they've got to get all Jews to Israel and while they're doing it, they can do whatever we want as saved Christians since they ARE saved since they've proclaimed Jesus their personal savior; having so declared, there's nothing they can do that is really going to get them in trouble with Jesus when he comes; that poor and suffering people have only themselves to blame; that therefore it's fine to perpetuate their problems; that the government should never interfere in the market if it's not in their interest for it to do but should when it is.

They imagine their own wealth or their own imagined salvation or both prove the truth of these beliefs. The beliefs gild tawdry unexamined motives: greed and power lust.  Humble as it may sound, being one of the guys may also be a motive.  These people socialize with each other all over the place.  And fear, too, may haunt some of them: fear of meaningless, emptiness, loss of prestige, who knows?  Maybe even fear of prison.  Maybe fear of damnation.

This army is organized from the top.  When the organization starts to slip, the army will start falling apart: anti-gay Christians will start noticing that there are gays in the Bush Administration.  Libertarians will see that their private enterprise friends have turned into the state and are actually intruding on their lives.  Small businesses will realize they have no power -- if they haven't already -- and that there is no such thing as competition: there are only alliances and payback schemes and cutthroat tactics. Superpatriots will realize that many of  the most powerful business interests are international and don't give a shit about whether the U.S. as a nation survives as long as they do.  Free enterprise folks will realize there's no such thing anymore.

How can we push them along the road to disintegration?  With the facts, among other things, and with some big efforts to draw them together and to present them and to yell about them and show how the facts betray the values and needs of the little people that the Republican Party so assiduously courts.

Here in Texas, we ourselves footsoldiers starting down the road of state and national fascism.

Fascist is a strong word to throw around and maybe not quite right.  Maybe corportist would be better.  But let's look at fascism for a minute.  According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001 Edition,

Fascism, especially in its early stages, is obliged to be antitheoretical and frankly opportunistic in order to appeal to many diverse groups.  Nevertheless, a few key concepts are basic to it.  First and most important is the glorification of the state and the total subordination of the individual to it.

"Aha!" you say, but this is not just the United States of America, this is TEXAS we're talking about:  Texas, the heart of the home of individualism!  But just look around you...at the Ford trucks and the W stickers and the giant, glittering churches and the carefully cultivated drawls and the cowboy boots in the suburban Wal-Mart..  We wear the talismen of individualism to prove our membership in the state of mind of Texas.  The Encyclopedia continues:

A second ruling concept of fascism is embodied in the theory of social Darwinism.  The doctrine of survival of the fittest and necessity of struggle for life is applied by fascists to the the life of a nation state.  Peaceful, complacent nations are seen as doomed to fall before more dynamic nes, making struggle and aggressive militarism a leading characteristic of the fascists state.  Imperialism is a logical outcome of this dogma.

Now Texas is not an imperial power, but the drive to trample over decision-making processes and to insist on the rightness of things like true discussions of gigantic plans like the Trans Texas Corridor are justified by a belief in a very aggressive use of fear of "falling behind."  And you'll note it's in gigantic private-public profit.making projects that all this glitz is applied.  It's not applied to the needs of the people who actually live in the state, like children.  The Encyclopedia continues,

[Fascism's] essentially vague and emotional natue facilitates the development of unique national varieties whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all. (All quotes from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001.

Texas state government is at this point in the hands of one party which is in control and partner to enormous business interests.  It's not just the corrupt good-old-boy network with dirty hands of a decade or so ago. Today, although lipservice is given to public participation, mechanisms for effective discussion are practically nonexistent. Texas practices are linked to national practices: they are the cutting edge, if you will (though obviously not because our leaders are progressive), the vanguard. 

A look at the development of the Trans Texas Corridor will prove this.  Before we hit the really big time, however, we will find the development of the Camino Colombia Toll Road outside of Laredo instructive.

Remember the falling dollar?

The Bush Administration has been depending on the falling dollar to boost American exports and dampen imports in an effort to moderate our huge national debt.  Remember, when the dollar falls, exports grow because our goods become cheaper overseas, and imports decline because imported goods become more expensive.  We sell more of our stuff and buy less of theirs.  The huge debt has been a cause of great concern among quite a number of non-politician economists because our government is paying daily expenses through indebtedness -- kind of like paying your rent and your utility bills on credit cards which you can't pay off every month.  The conservative stance has been to argue that it isn't really a problem because our dollar is so strong and we are so important that we can keep going like this for quite awhile.  The stance from The Other Sides has been that large indebtedness is okay periodically if it is used to stimulate the economy in down times, to build infrastructure which also would stimulate the economy, or to pay for time limited expenses like war (hopefully time-limited).  They have argued that if other countries start to lose confidence in the dollar and start to replace their dollar reserves with Euros, say, it would weaken the dollar to the point that we could start to have really serious problems with an unsound currency.  That is, for example, we would need more and more and more dollars to pay off other countries who now hold considerable quantitities of our debt.  China and Japan come to mind.  Under normal circumstances, or maybe we should say relatively stable circumstances, countries don't "call in" other supposedly economically sound countries' debt like repo men, but if they lost confidence in us, or for that matter they wanted to see us decline, they could.  An example on a small scale basis:  If you borrowd fifteen thousand dollars from someone in Europe six months ago, today you would owe her close to twenty thousand dollars.

Here is a link to today's New York Times which indicates that some players on the international scene are beginning to do just what economists on The Other Sides fear.  It also discusses the Administration's continuing failure to undertake problems that really matter and o make worse what was bad before.

Here is a link to an op-ed piece in the Times putting a  pin very close to the Alan Greenspan bubble -- the bubble in which live  Administration optimists.  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/opinion/10grant.html

Damning the Current Health Care System:Administrative Costs of Healthcare

The success of  The Right in damaging some of themselves and most of the rest of us can be seen in the strange situation we have with health care coverage. Here we have in one of the rich industrialized countries, a system of health care which many of us can't even afford and which many more of us access through expensive, cumbersome, inefficient, frustrating insurance plans.  Most of us will face hardship if we are faced with serious, ongoing health problems because we will have to start juggling our money to cover health costs.  Yet in most other industrialized countries, nobody considers that they will become poor because of health problems or that they will have more severe health problems because they are poor.  It's a no-brainer, but not for us.

You can take almost any aspect of medical care and single-payer systems do it better for less. Let's examine, for a start, administrative costs. 

Administrative costs of health care:

If in the United States we streamlined our administrative costs so that they matched Canadian levels,

• we would save $286 billion of the 1660.5 billion we spent in 2003.
• This would leave $6940 for each currently uninsured person in this country, quite enough more than is necessary for them to be covered.

How large a percentage of our bill are administrative costs?

• In 1999, administrative costs of health care in the United States were 31% of the total costs.  In Canada, they were 16.7%. 
• For US insurers themselves, overhead was the highest for investor-owned Blue-Cross/Blue-Shield plans (26.5%), second highest for commercial carriers (19.9%) and lowest for government-run Medicare (3.1%), the closest thing we have to a single payer system.

Our administrative costs are due to:

• the fact that we have more than 1200 private health insurers in the US which each have varying numbers of kinds of coverages.  This causes "fragmentation, inefficiency and dupicative bureaucracy" because hospitals, clinics and doctors offices have to sort through  thousands of different forms dealing with different amounts and types of coverage, different regulations on coverages, different requirements for documentation, different rules for eligibility, different copays, etc. etc.  A study cited in more than one article finds that in Seattle, 2000 patients with depression were covered by 189 different insurance plans and 755 different policies.
• Private insurance requires functions that are not necessary in a single-payer system:
  • Underwriters
  • Marketing
  • corporate incentives to increase profits by erecting hurdles to payment such as complicating and stalling payment so that companies can hold their money longer and so that some hospitals and clinical offices will give up trying to recover payments.
• Having to bill a multiplicity of insurance companies and institutions means that hospitals cannot pay a lump sum, and have massively complex accounting costs.

The   National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank tightly tied to supporting The Right has tried to challenge the conclusions about bureaucratic costs attributable to our private system of insurance.  The Right's position is laid out in Twenty Myths about Single-Payer Health Insurance: International Evidence on the Effects of National Health Insurance in Countries around the World by John C. Goodman and D.M Herrick(see below) and elsewhere.  Goodman and Herrick say the conclusions of single-payer supporters are based on three false assumptions:

• That low costs are considered to be synomymous with effectiveness.
• That higher costs of private insurance bureaucracy result in worse outcomes.
• That the relatively low cost of bureaucracy results in better incomes.

Additionally, they claim that they assume that "administrative costs do not produce offsetting benefits.  Among the benefits of the plethora of private insurance providers, say Goodman and Herrick, are:

• the ability to appeal to different tastes and preferences among consumers for amenities such as varied levels of copayment, choice of physician network, limited waiting for physicians visits, etc.  (I have to interject here that I never thought of any of the above as amenities...more like juggling what I could afford.)
• the administrative use of a portion of the funds to ensure that "the remaining funds are spent wisely providing quick and convenient service."
• the control of "moral hazard (e.g. the tendency to overconsume when the service is perceived as being free rather than rely on the Canadian approach of using waiting lines as a method of rationing services.)" 
• According to Goodman and Herrick, we actually save bureaucratic costs because we don't have hidden administrative costs such as to cover the costs of "rationing by waiting," wasted resources because national health systems have "perverse incentives", the Canadian fee structure (and others for national health plans) makes patients make multiple, and therefore more expensive, visits.  (Incentives!!! Legitimate incentives for The Right are pretty much limited to the thrill of competition and profits.  These folks promote "entrepreneurial providers in an unfettered marketplace and direct access to specialists and specialty services based on the willingness to pay.")

In his article, Myths and Memes about Single-Payer Health Insurance in the United States:  a Rebuttal to Conservative Claims, (see below) John P. Geyman demolishes Goodman's and Herrick's "myths." After pointing out that they present data either from biased sources or no data, he presents the following comparison of specific adminstrative costs per capita in US dollars and provides the source, a study in The New England Journal of Medicine:

• Insurance overhead: U.S. 259, Canada    45
• Employer's cost to manage health benefits: US 57, Canada 8
• Hospital administration:  US 315, Canada 103
• Nursing home administration:  US 62, Canada 29
• Administrative costs of practitioners:  US 324, Canada 107
• Home care administration: US 42, Canada 13
  Total          US 1,059, Canada 307

Here I have only dealt with administrative costs.  I haven't touched the stuff that really matters: cost, availabilty and quality of medical care.  But it should be clear from just the examinationof administrative costs that many of them have to do with trying to maintain a multi-party private system of insurance based on competition and profits.  The trends indicated here continue throughout.

The two main sources I used:
Geyman, John P. Myths and Memes about Single-Payer Health Insurance in the United States: A Rebuttal to Conservative Claims, International JOurnal of Health Services, Volume 35, No. 1, pp 63-90, 2005.  It is available online for a fee at:
http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp

Goodman, J.C. and Herrick, D.M., Twenty Myths about Single-Payer Health Insurance: International Evidence on the Effects of National Health Insurance in Countries around the World, National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas, 2002.

 

The Right Protects its Own: A Bit of A Rant as Prelude to Administrative Health Care Costs

If you have read the preceding posts on health care coverage, you are aware that we have a huge tangle of a system that is for many prohibitively expensive to buy into and for all very expensive to operate.  The response to the issue has been framed as single-payer vs. private coverage.  This is yet another one of those terrible dichotomies we have allowed ourselves to fall into, a dichotomy again framed by the Right.   When I say The Right, I mean quite specifically the Administration, many of the appointed heads of government departments, most current Republican congressmen, certain major corporations including some media corporations, and the network of think tanks that churn out disinformation in support of The Right's positions and the foundations funding them. This fairly well defined and overwhelmingly powerful bloc has created the current mythology which mixes into one unholy ideology patriotism, democracy, freedom, liberty and the free enterprise system, the latter meaning really, themselves.  This dominant group demonizes the concept of government and seeks by talking about "ownership" to make us think we can, without government, look after our needs best.  No mention that the "free enterprise" system of today, the one they tout, is a far cry from anything that Adam Smith would have supported.  In fact, capitalist theoreticians over the centuries have feared what has happened today: the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, increasing concentration of power outside the hands of "we the people."

There are a lot of economic theorists today who work within the framework of capitalism. Generally, they attempt objective analyses of specific situations. As has been true since Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations they also examine how and whether aspects of capitalist economics are working to take care of the needs of our society.  The difference between legitimate economists and those of The Right is that the basis of investigation of the former is ethical.  That is, they try to use tools that are as objective as possible and to have their conclusions reflect findings obtained from the use of those tools.  They may not be right, but they are careful not to deliberately distort or deceive. They may have certain basic values such as a belief that economics should serve the welfare of the larger body of citizens, but they don't try to shape their findings to support an ideology. The driving goal of the economists on the Right  is to protect the interests of those wealthy people and groups who support them.  One way to tell if you are looking at a Right Wing think thank is that you will see phrases such as, "Seeking innovative private solutions to today's policy challenges." Or free enterprise will be right in the title.  As if you couldn't possibly think of any solution outside the walls of "private" or "free enterprise."

To look after the welfare of the nation is in fact one of the basic responsibilities of our government as expressed in the preamble to the Constitution: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common  defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." 

The Right wants us to think this is what they are doing, but in fact what they are doing is protecting corporate wealth at our expense, dismantling the very structure, which is supposed to be, if you remember, "of the people, by the people, for the people"  that the Constitution put in place to bind us as a nation, to protect us and to "promote the general welfare."   They want us to believe that the unimpeded  growth of corporate wealth is necessary to our well-being, but it is not.  They are  "my ideology right or wrong" and "my ideology: love it or leave it" demagogues. 

Someone said if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.  This is what our corporate-government complex does best.  In fact, its members repeat lies so much so that I think they themselves believe them.