From Xico

Running of the Bulls Ursulo Galván-Style

This is the second post on our Fiesta de la Virgen de Guadalupe here in Colonia Ursulo Galván. The first is directly below.

Anyway, on the day of the Fiesta, I chickened out and stayed home.  I am MUCH better about cohetes (I did, after all, follow the Procession, knowing there would be a few booms, although not a whole lot of unpredictable ones) but on Saturday, I dunno, I just didn't want surprises right behind me.  Jim went to see one of the main events, the running of the bulls.  He stayed long enough to see the little bulls.

This event was covered in the Xico blog of  La Voz by Margarito Elox who wrote (my translation):

The completely orderly bull run took place in the colonia of Ursulo Galván, muncipio de Xico, as reported by Citizen Edgar Muñoz Baizabal, the director of Civil Protection of Xico who arrived in the colonia early in the day along with his team of coworkers which included paramedics, drivers and volunteers who, following the insttructions given by the municipal president of Xico, M. V. Z. Antonio Rogelio Soto Suárez, protected the safety of the hundreds of visitors who came to the colonia to enjoy the fiesta.  At two o'clock the bull run began, first with two small bulls who were immediately followed down by the bravest of boys Emiliano Zapata Street, testing their luck with the cape.  After about an hour,  bigger bulls were let out. Everyone's adrenaline flow speeded up when some brave souls who'd already had some beer and didn't understand the danger, put the paramedics on alert.  The paraamedics were very watchful indeed, to insure they were available if needed. According to the report which the director of Protección Civil of Xico provided, only four people were seen for what were minor injuries, one of whom was taken to the hospital. [The article mentions the wounded by name and thanks the paramedics by name.] No one was arrested for any reason. 

Here is a piicture from La Voz:

 

Our neighbors went to most of the festivities.  They told us that there was a dance and pastorelas put on in front of the church by a children's group from Xico.  AND a lot of fun was had by all.  Next year for sure I will go.

Our neighbor, Doña Vicky, sent over some actually homemade mole that was wonderful.  Mole has about a million ingredients and requires painstaking attention so most women buy a locally bottled version these days.  Reminds me of my grandmother buying Manischewitz mixes in her later years, a secret I only discovered when I asked her for some recipes. "Why go to the bother," she said.  "The mixes are just as good."  Doña Vicky's mole is different from the bottled stuff -- not so sweet and with a lot of different flavors.  She also sent over some triangular tamales steamed in hoja santa.  They were sweet, made from blue corn.  It's hard to keep the weight off here!

La Fiesta de la Virgén de Guadalupe en Nuestra Colonia de Ursulo Galván

The night before last, the celebration of our colonia's santa patronal, La Virgen de Guadalupe, erupted with clowns dancing and men draped in noisy cowbells spiralling up the street as they escorted the arcos on their way to the entrances  of the church and the capilla. Our colonia's fiesta patronal is on the same day that the whole country celebrates the Virgen's feast day. Every pueblo in Mexico has a feast day and a patron saint, though often they are less well-known or less significant nationally.  Xico has María Magdalena, for instance, and Coatepec has San Jeronimo.  But because ours is La Virgén, our fiesta merges with the larger one that spreads across Mexico and our colonia joins in the vast celebration that celebrates La Virgen's final and most glorious appearance to a poor peasant, Juan Diego. The official Catholic Church and  Mexicans have been in something of a tug of war ever since: does she represent the Catholicization of Mexico or the Mexicanization of the Catholic Church?  It is pretty clear that it is the latter.  As I've said before, La Virgen appears more important than Jesus in the lives of ordinary people, and as a Mexican.

Jim took the pictures below.  The electricity in much of the colonia was off  for some reason, so the processions took on an almost medieval quality.

Here at the start of the festivities the arc passes our streetcorner.

 

The clowns, payasos, dancing around our corner:

 

As I said, every pueblo has a patron saint, and every pueblo celebrates its saint's fiesta with dancing and arcos and cohetes and church masses and often with carnival rides and discotecas.  Alfombras decorate many streets leading up to capillas and churches.  In our colonia, we also have a small bull run, a la the fiesta in Xico. I know that people in Xico smile a bit condescendingly at our tiny imitation of their gigantic and nationally popular festival which takes place every July. 

That every pueblo has a patron saint is the result of the Conquista.  The Spanish invaders were intent not simply on conquering but on imposing the Catholic faith.  You may remember that at the time of the Conquista, at the beginning of the 16th century Spain had managed to defeat the Muslims that had dominated at least the southern two thirds of the country for maybe seven hundred years. Spain was possessed by a religious fervor -- a Catholic fervor -- that fed its desire to find and conquer new worlds. In Mexico, the Spanish tried at first to replace everything not-Catholic with everything Catholic.  They tore down the temples of the indigenous religion and built churches on their sites.  The Spanish imposed Catholic saints on the images of local gods.  It was not exactly successful, for in Mexico, old and new mixed quite completely.  The indigenous dominant female deity and the Virgen María are entwined.

Many pueblos explain the choice of a patron saint by recounting a local legend that says the saint was looking for a home and had been rejected in numerous places until they found the home in the pueblo which now celebrates them.  This is true in Xico, where Maria Magdalena reigns. I asked my neighbor whose family is one of the original families in the colonia how la Virgén de Guadalupe became the patron saint.  She said that La Virgén had always protected the people of the Colonia whose travels to Ursulo Galván were difficult.  It was to her that they turned in times of need, and indeed turn now.  Every house I've been in has a little shrine to the Virgen. If I remember correctly, the Colonia was established maybe seventy or eighty years ago, a result of land reform. The national government had been redistributing hacienda land from the rich to the campesinos.  The efforts to do this with one particular hacienda somewhere in the mountains near here failed, so the government gave the land for the colonia of Ursulo Galván to the campesinos, as well as the ejido surrounding it.  So, not unlike the Exodus, they made their difficult way here. 

The payasos are people who are dancing for La Virgén in thanks for answered prayers for healing.  This is the first time payasos have been in the procession.

A view from the rear:

Here are the people carrying the crucifix and statues of La Virgén:

As darkness enveloped the colonia, the arco arrived at the church.  In the picture below, behind the payasos, you can see (if you try hard) the arco going up.

 

 Then the procession turned to go towards the capilla which is dedicate to La Virgén.  Everyone got a candle.  Here is a picture of all of us enveloped in incense:

 

The capilla sits alone atop a tall flight of steps and overlooks the whole community from on high.  Only the people carrying the arco and the dancers went up. Since there was no electricity, the arco was set up by flashlight and candlelight.  We watched them flickering.  We knew when finally it was up by the cohetes that boomed and flashed in the darkness. 

The next day, lots of the young people in the community were out making a sawdust alfombra (as in Xico) that stretched from the bottom of the Colonia to the steps up to the capilla.  Rain threatened much of the afternoon and in fact fell hard enough to smudge the images.  But everything is temporary in these celebrations.  It is part of life, one of the lessons the fiestas impart. If rain doesn't destroy the alfombra, the procession on the actual feast day will.  

Yesterday, the actual feast day, was filled with activities AND cohetes. Next year I will have to write about these. For now, the Christmas season is in full swing here.

 

 

Challenging the False Gods of Free Market Fundamentalism

A friend sent me a private email protesting my characterization of Monsanto employees as people who think of themselves as good guys.  I remember writing this, but I can't find it in the most recent Monsanto post. I must have deleted it.  BUT I do remember writing it.  My motivations were twofold (at least). I said that because an old friend, a member of my writers group in St. Louis worked as an underling at Monsanto.  I don't remember exactly what his job was, but at that point Monsanto wasn't yet in the seed business: it was (and still is) in the making really dangerous chemicals business.  He made an effort to make clear he wasn't involved in the Agent Orange, etc. stuff.  He also talked about kids and mortgages and health insurance and so forth.  This is what I think a lot of people who are not the bosses think about.  I imagine in times when it is hard to get jobs, hard to transfer jobs, hard to uproot, hard to sacrifice a pension, people will say to themselves, "But I'm a good guy.  AND I don't work in the bad areas."  BUT that is almost beside the point. Here I would like to modify what I said.  I think Monsanto bosses and owners and stock owners have plenty of self-justification which probably has little to do with thinking they are good guys. But I don't imagine they think they are bad guys, either. Some of the things I imagine they believe might include:

• I deserve what I get.
• It's a dog-eat-dog world.
• It's all about the bottom line.
• They deserve what they get.
• I'm better than most people.
• Most people aren't as human/worthy as I am.
• I don't understand other people's claims that they suffer because of what I do. If they do, it's their own fault. 
• Capitalism (the free market system, whatever) is the greatest system in the world and it exists in the greatest country in the world and I am a champion in this world.

It seems to me that people who rise to the top in our ruthless environment can only do it because they have ruthless personalities that fit beautifully with the current dominant ideology.

In the world of the West, especially the US, our national ideology has not only enabled but elevated ruthless activity as if it was a supreme good.  This ideology makes for the conversion into enemies of people who stand for the true common good. 

It has created a peculiar group of measures of success in virtually all areas of public life leading to and justifying social and environmental harm that I believe is as profound as any caused by more conventional corruption.  Since it has so permeated our society, it is hard to figure out how to combat it.  

It is all the more important to do so today because damage caused by its beneficiaries and advocates can spread so rapidly and so profoundly: for instance, Monsanto's seeds permeate the planet along with its power to disrupt local cultures, livelihoods and environments.

Some of the values that make up this ideology include notions such as:

• Maximum profit is the greatest good.
• Efficiency trumps everything in just about everything. A particular and peculiar example: the stripping-down of work places of anything management thinks of as distracting, including windows. 
• Human beings' welfare is secondary to corporate efficiency and profit-making.
• One can evaluate the success of any undertaking in terms of "the bottom line" and the business methods which improve this.  
• People can be seen as socioeconomic units. 

It's as if forgotten is the fact that economic activity is for improving the lives of people, not that the lives of people exist to maximize the money-making aspects of economic activity.

Some of the institutions and fields that have been dramatically affected by free market fundamentalism and its language and methods include:

• Health care
• Universities
• Religious institutions
• The military
• Government civilian services including, among others, transportation, postal services, and tax collection.
• School systems and their curricula and measures of success.

It's not that services shouldn't be run efficiently and well, it's that they are not necessarily doing what they're supposed to be doing when they have to try to make a profit.  Some services serve society best when they don't make a profit, quite a surprise to some.  

So basically I think we face the necessity of challenging our current basic national values in order to address the problems of our society and our environment and our planet.

Since people hold these beliefs more strongly the more they benefit from them, it is hard to figure out how to do this.  I think yelling isn't working.  I also think maybe efforts to chip away at the business model in medicine may prove a good start.  To this end, here are links to two posts by physicians which do just this.  You can find more on the blog and on the web.

This first link leads to an article by Philip Caper, MD which gives an excellent short history of the change in medicine from non-profit to profit-making. The second, by a physician named Marya Zilberg challenges forcefully the suitability of a business model for medicine. My father, as I've mentioned before, was a physician who would be absolutely horrified at the idea of medicine as a for-profit business.

Perhaps through a close look at health care, we can start to remember our humanity.

Transgenics Threaten to Trample Food Sovereignty in Mexico

The efforts of Monsanto to plant transgenic maize in Mexico continue in the news.  Monsanto won't be able to fade into the woodwork and silently go about its business.  Today in Enlaces Veracruz 212, the following appeared (my translation -- the awkwardness is totally mea culpa).  This is, I probably don't need to remind you, in Veracruz, not the states in the north and northwest where the experimental plots are supposed to be created.

By Benigno Montes de Oca M./Acayucan, Ver.

"Mexican officials authorized the transnational company Monsanto to cultivate in an experimental manner genetically modified maize in national territory, this in spite of the innumerable voices of protests and alerts which scientists, ecologists, campesinos, artists and citizens in general have raised.

"The organization Greenpeace staged an unusal demostration in the country's capital, giving in a symbolic manner, voice to national heroes.  On October 18  the column of the Angel of Independence was draped in a banner that read: "Maíz transgénico: fin de la independencia [Transgenic maize: end of independence]."  [The Angel of Independence monument, one of the most famous icons of Mexico City and Mexico itself, also has statues of national heroes, and they, too, were robed. below is a picture, sans banner.] Meanwhile, the statue of the father of the country, Miguel Hidalgo, had a banner reading, "The evil government which authorizes transgenics will die."

 

"According to what Aleira Llara, Coodinator of the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture and Transgenics of Greenpeace said to Forum, represented by Nelly Olivos [who said (?)-- this is a phrase I'm having trouble with.  It reads in Spanish: "De acuerdo a lo expresado por, Aleira Lara, coordinadora de la Campaña de Agricultura Sustentable y Transgénicos de Greenpeace a Forum, representado por Nelly Olivos." Please help.  This doesn't seem like a complete sentence to me.]

"Even when permits are approved, one ought to "to join in an appeal demanding review the in accordance with the Law of Biosecurity of Genetically Modified Organisms (LBOGM).  We have identified various irregularities in the approval of these applications.  Furthermore, the modification of the LBOGM and its rules, in March of 2009, was done in an illegal manner.  

"According to the activist, the permits recently awarded to Monsanto violate Article 2, Section 11 of the aforementoned law, which establishes a special system of protection of maize owing to the fact that our country is the center of origin of this crop.

"The LBOGM says that in determining the centers of origin and of genetic diversity it should be taken into account that, in the case of cultivars, "the geographic regions in which the organism (maize) was domesticated,  should remain centers of genetic diversity. 

"In a warning directed at Felipe Calderón on the 29th of September this year, the Union of Scientists Committed to Society argued:

"'Mexico encompassses the centers of origin, domestication and diversification of maize, and for this reason, it harbors the largest part of maize's genetic diversity in the world, and is, in addition, home to all the known wild ancestors....Farmers in diverse agricultural systems of the distinct regions of Mexico depend on a reserve of seeds which they keep from one farming season to another, while they frequently exchange seeds with other producers inside and outside of each community.  These activities are at the heart of a dynamic system which guarantees the production and continuity of the genetic diversity of maize.'"

"This is a system which is at risk owing to the transgenic contamination which has been detected for some years in our country.  Before March of this year, the sowing of transgenics was not permitted, but in spite of the fact that it was illegal to plant transgenics in Mexico, already various cases of contamination have been documented in laboratory studies.

"The cases in which the transgenes were recorded in maize varieties and documented in corresponding studies are the following: Sierra Juárez, Oaxaca (2000, 2002-2004); in the conservation area of Mexico DF (2003) and in regions of the states of Guanajuato, Veracruz and Yucatán (2002).

"In the cases of contamination detected in Yucatán, Guanajuato, and Oaxaca, it was observed that the source of contamination was a government program called "Kilo por Kilo."  Regarding a program of the Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (Sagarpa) which operated between 1996 and 2001, the Greenpeace activist indicated that "this type of maize [used in the program] isn't monitored nor does it have laboratory tests which  rule out the presence of transgenics."

"TO WHAT INTERESTS IS THE GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO RESPONDING?

"This is the question that the Network in Defense of Native Maize is asking in its Bulletin 0910, published the 19th of October following the authorization of the experimental planting of genetically modified maize.  Made up of 600 non-governmental organizations, the network predicts that with these authorizations, the production of maize is being surrendered to corporations, putting in danger the independence and capacity of the country to produce its own food, and risking our diet by submitting our basic food to a technology which poses serious threats to human health."

"Furthermore, it [the Network] answers the question framed above: the government does not respond to the interests of the people and of the nation.

"We would have to ask the relevant authorities if the interests to which they are responding are those of Monsanto, the company that leads in the production of genetically modified seed. Lara noted that this company holds 90 percent of the patents on transgenic seeds in the world and the approval of Monsanto's cultivation of this type of maize, would signify a major dependency on this transnational which seeks to control via monopoly [the production of] maize.

"Aleira Lara added that 'lamentably in those countries where they have begun to cultivate this type of seed, they have displaced production destined for national consumption with production on a grand scale, that is to say, there is a reconfiguration of production so that it is destined for export or for the production of biocombustibles instead of local consumption thus signifying the dismantelling of food sovereignty for the people.'

WMonsanto has made demands on farmers across the world whose fields have been contaminated with its patented seeds .  On Monsanto's web page in Mexico (www.monsanto.com.mx) you can read the following justification for this legal activity:

"'Monsanto patents many varieties of seeds which it develops.  The patents are necessary to assure that we receive payment for our products and for all the investment we make to develop these products.....When farmers buy a variety of patented seed, they sign a contract in which they agree that they will cultivate only the seed they are buying from us and that they will not save seeds nor plant the seeds which the plants cultivated from our [patented] seeds produce....A very small number of farmers do not respect this agreement.  Monsanto knows, through the actions of our business or through third parties who those people are who are suspected of , our patents and our agreements.  In the cases in which we encounter violations, we may fight the majority of cases without going through the courts.'

"In the text cited above, Monsanto signals, basically, three arguments for demanding restitution from campesinos who supposedly use Monsanto's patented seeds: 1) to obtain remuneration from the products generated, 2) to prevent the loss of these remunerations because such losses would not permit invesment in investigation and development and 3) to rectify the injustice caused by those who do not pay for the seeds enjoying their fruits. [My comment: Monsanto has hounded farmers in whose fields they find transgenics which were probably brought in by the wind] 

"CONSUMER'S RIGHT TO INFORMATION VIOLATED

Around 10 million tons of yellow corn for forrage is entering Mexico from the United States. It is not known exactly what percentage of this grain is transgenic, but we do know that about 90 percent of the crops supposedly grow with conventional seeds in the US already are contaminated.  We do not know whether this maize is destined for animals or for human consumption.

"The LBOGM establishes in Article 101 that 'OGMS [genetically modified seeds] or products that contain genetically modified organisms authorized by the SSA [Secretariat of Health], although they are considered innocuous in terms of the law and may be consumed directly by humans, should have explicit reference made identifying organisms genetically modified.  Information should be provided on the nutritional label that identifies the composition of the food and its nutrient properties, in those cases in which these characteristics may be significantly different from conventional products.'"

"The point that is not respected by any of the concerned industries, as activist Lara points out is that 'in the products which derive from this type of transgenic maize, which in fact we are already importing, it is not specified on the label that these products are derived from genetically modified organisms. This is violating the right of consumers to know what they are consuming.  They are being denied the right to choose what they want to eat.  This brings us to another point, which is the impact these products can have on human health.  The industry has refused to list its products, because evidently when consumers aren't sure these products are not going to have an impact on human health, they are going to choose organic products and food produced conventionally [instead of food produced by transgenic seeds].'

"The argument that the genetically modified organisms will end the hunger that millions of people in the world suffer from is not credible, since 'hunger in the world is not a problem of the lack of food, but rather a problem of its bad distribution,'* says Aleira Lara who adds that the conclusion of a study in the US found that 'transgenic cutivation has not succeeded in producing a larger harvest than conventional cultivation, that we are talking about an increase of 2.3 percent which, if you translate it into terms of investment and economics, is not a significant increase since the technology of transgenics costs up to ten times more than conventional production.'

"The repercussions of the sowing of transgenic maize start with the disappearance of traditional cultivation practiced by small producers which can unleash a new wave of migration by campesinos; the disappearance of original species of maize and ecological repercussions; in addition to the economic consequences, since Monsanto seems to be prepared to initiate a new legal strategy to demand that the farmers who 'are abusing their good faith' used seeds without permission and corresponding payments.  In all, these consequences signify a blow to the food sovereignty of our country.

*In a December 2 post by Bill Niman and Nicolette Hahn Niman on the Atlantic Monthly food blog the authors cite a University of Arizona study concluding that about half the food in the US is never eaten and that the typical American household throws away almost $600 worth of food a year; that the Environmental Protection Agency claims that food waste is the single largest component (by weight) of American garbage and that the Department of Agriculture estimates that recovery of "just 25 percent of waste food would feed 20 million people."

Where We Are and Why We Shouldn't Be Here

Note: We've just returned from Thanksgiving in Boston. I didn't post while we were gone. 

Life in the United States for many isn't pretty these days. And it seems as if the collective spirit drifts and sags. Daily life, family life, life in Boston's North End, can be quite happy, but there is a serious malaise in the country. And Obama doesn't appear to be the doctor we need. He seems to be a Republican, maybe of the old school, but a school not that old, a Ronald Reagan school, supporting the rich because, perhaps, he believes in that old trickle-down song. It shouldn't be so surprising: he comes to us fresh from teaching at The University of Chicago, that bastion of Milton Friedmanism. Yes, he taught law there, but the economics department must have permeated his soul. I really hope I'm wrong. But one of the problems extremely smart people have is that they think that since they are smarter than a lot of other people,  when they finally come to a decision, having poured through mountains of research and opinion, it must be the right one.  Anyway, mostly here I offer a reduced version of an article in The New York Review of Books by Tony Judt, an Englishman, a professor of European history in the history department at New York University, and probably as smart as Obama. It is called, "What is Living an What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" I want to use a la-de-da word like seminal to describe it for it takes the assumptions that govern political beliefs in the US and turns them on their heads....and then shows us why it is necessary to reframe our basic conceptions. Below, I provide large ungainly hunks of the article for you and leave out far too much of the historical explanation of why we are where we are. You will have to (and should) read the whole article to get the real deal. This stuff is basic and crucial. 

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

"Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime. 

"When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an 'interventionary' state, many of those same Americans respond: 'But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.' 

"This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story. A century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked: Why is there no socialism in America? There are many answers to this question. Some have to do with the sheer size of the country: shared purposes are difficult to organize and sustain on an imperial scale. There are also, of course, cultural factors, including the distinctively American suspicion of central government. ....A willingness to pay for other people's services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do. 

"....Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?"

"....We simply do not know how to talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, some history is in order: as Keynes once observed, "A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind." For the purposes of mental emancipation... I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to "economism," the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.

"For the last thirty years... when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste. 

"....[H]ow did we, in our own time, come to think in exclusively economic terms? ....If we ask who exercised the greatest influence over contemporary Anglophone economic thought, five foreign-born thinkers spring to mind: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker. 

"....All were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria. Following the cataclysm of World War I and a brief socialist municipal experiment in Vienna, the country fell to a reactionary coup in 1934 and then, four years later, to the Nazi invasion and occupation. 

"....Each, albeit in contrasting keys, drew the same conclusion: the best way to defend liberalism, the best defense of an open society and its attendant freedoms, was to keep government far away from economic life. If the state was held at a safe distance, if politicians—however well-intentioned—were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay. 

"The same challenge—how to understand what had happened between the wars and prevent its recurrence—was confronted by John Maynard Keynes. The great English economist, born in 1883 (the same year as Schumpeter), grew up in a stable, confident, prosperous, and powerful Britain. And then, from his privileged perch at the Treasury and as a participant in the Versailles peace negotiations, he watched his world collapse, taking with it all the reassuring certainties of his culture and class....Keynes, too, would ask himself the question that Hayek and his Austrian colleagues had posed. But he offered a very different answer. 

"....Indeed, the essence of his contributions to economic theory was his insistence upon uncertainty: in contrast to the confident nostrums of classical and neoclassical economics, Keynes would insist upon the essential unpredictability of human affairs. If there was a lesson to be drawn from depression, fascism, and war, it was this: uncertainty—elevated to the level of insecurity and collective fear—was the corrosive force that had threatened and might again threaten the liberal world. 

"Thus Keynes sought an increased role for the social security state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention. .... 

"....The common theme and universal accomplishment of the neo-Keynesian governments of the postwar era was their remarkable success in curbing inequality. If you compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether by income or assets, in all continental European countries along with Great Britain and the US, you will see that it shrinks dramatically in the generation following 1945. 

".... The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past. But their successors—even in Sweden—began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place. 

"It was social democracy that bound the middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II... They received in many cases the same welfare assistance and services as the poor: free education, cheap or free medical treatment, public pensions, and the like. In consequence, the European middle class found itself by the 1960s with far greater disposable incomes than ever before, with so many of life's necessities prepaid in tax. And thus the very class that had been so exposed to fear and insecurity in the interwar years was now tightly woven into the postwar democratic consensus. 

"By the late 1970s, however, [fear of insecurity and inequality faded and with this fading,]…[s]tarting with the tax and employment reforms of the Thatcher-Reagan years, and followed in short order by deregulation of the financial sector, inequality[once again grew and] has once again become an issue in Western society. After notably diminishing from the 1910s through the 1960s, the inequality index has steadily grown over the course of the past three decades. 

"In the US today, the "Gini coefficient"—a measure of the distance separating rich and poor—is comparable to that of China. When we consider that China is a developing country where huge gaps will inevitably open up between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the fact that here in the US we have a similar inequality coefficient says much about how far we have fallen behind our earlier aspirations. 

.... In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens. 

"Why are we so unmoved by the stigma attaching to [those who need assistance]? This 'disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...is...the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.' Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us. 

"....In the last thirty years, a cult of privatization has mesmerized Western (and many non-Western) governments. Why? The shortest response is that, in an age of budgetary constraints, privatization appears to save money. If the state owns an inefficient public program or an expensive public service—a waterworks, a car factory, a railway—it seeks to offload it onto private buyers. 

"....What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage. In the first place, privatization is inefficient. Most of the things that governments have seen fit to pass into the private sector were operating at a loss: whether they were railway companies, coal mines, postal services, or energy utilities, they cost more to provide and maintain than they could ever hope to attract in revenue. 

"For just this reason, such public goods were inherently unattractive to private buyers unless offered at a steep discount. But when the state sells cheap, the public takes a loss. It has been calculated that, in the course of the Thatcher-era UK privatizations, the deliberately low price at which long-standing public assets were marketed to the private sector resulted in a net transfer of £14 billion from the taxpaying public to stockholders and other investors. 

"To this loss should be added a further £3 billion in fees to the banks that transacted the privatizations. Thus the state in effect paid the private sector some £17 billion ($30 billion) to facilitate the sale of assets for which there would otherwise have been no takers. These are significant sums of money—approximating the endowment of Harvard University, for example, or the annual gross domestic product of Paraguay or Bosnia-Herzegovina. This can hardly be construed as an efficient use of public resources. 

"In the second place, there arises the question of moral hazard. The only reason that private investors are willing to purchase apparently inefficient public goods is because the state eliminates or reduces their exposure to risk. In the case of the London Underground, for example, the purchasing companies were assured that whatever happened they would be protected against serious loss—thereby undermining the classic economic case for privatization: that the profit motive encourages efficiency. The "hazard" in question is that the private sector, under such privileged conditions, will prove at least as inefficient as its public counterpart—while creaming off such profits as are to be made and charging losses to the state. 

"The third and perhaps most telling case against privatization is this. There can be no doubt that many of the goods and services that the state seeks to divest have been badly run: incompetently managed, underinvested, etc. Nevertheless, however badly run, postal services, railway networks, retirement homes, prisons, and other provisions targeted for privatization remain the responsibility of the public authorities. Even after they are sold, they cannot be left entirely to the vagaries of the market. They are inherently the sort of activity that someone has to regulate. 

"In the US today, we have a discredited state and inadequate public resources....

"...[B]y eviscerating the state's responsibilities and capacities, we have diminished its public standing. The outcome is "gated communities," in every sense of the word: subsections of society that fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the collectivity and its public servants. If we deal uniquely or overwhelmingly with private agencies, then over time we dilute our relationship with a public sector for which we have no apparent use. It doesn't much matter whether the private sector does the same things better or worse, at higher or lower cost. In either event, we have diminished our allegiance to the state and lost something vital that we ought to share—and in many cases used to share—with our fellow citizens....

"....What, then, will serve as a buffer between citizens and the state? Surely not "society," hard pressed to survive the evisceration of the public domain. For the state is not about to wither away. Even if we strip it of all its service attributes, it will still be with us—if only as a force for control and repression. ....Indeed, the impetus to state-building as we have known it derived quite explicitly from the understanding that no collection of individuals can survive long without shared purposes and common institutions….

In the words of John Stuart Mill, 'the idea is essentially repulsive of a society only held together by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interests.'

"....We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective purposes, and collective goods. If we cannot learn to "think the state" once again, we shall not get very far. But what precisely should the state do? Minimally, it should not duplicate unnecessarily: as Keynes wrote, 'The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.'

 "...[Y]ou cannot run trains competitively. Railways—like agriculture or the mails—are at one and the same time an economic activity and an essential public good. Moreover, you cannot render a railway system more efficient by placing two trains on a track and waiting to see which performs better: railways are a natural monopoly...the paradox of public transport, of course, is that the better it does its job, the less "efficient" it may be. 

"A bus that provides an express service for those who can afford it and avoids remote villages where it would be boarded only by the occasional pensioner will make more money for its owner. But someone—the state or the local municipality—must still provide the unprofitable, inefficient local service. In its absence, the short-term economic benefits of cutting the provision will be offset by long-term damage to the community at large. Predictably, therefore, the consequences of "competitive" buses—except in London where there is enough demand to go around—have been an increase in costs assigned to the public sector; a sharp rise in fares to the level that the market can bear; and attractive profits for the express bus companies.

[Of course this is exactly why private health insurance companies try to dump sick people from their rolls and why the government ends up seeming to be the most inefficient since it generally is left covering the sickest people. In a society that is functioning, the well pay more so the sicker can get coverage. The assumption is that all will eventually be "the sicker." There is also the fact that a healthy population is better for everyone; being sick is not just a problem for the sick person.] 

"A bus that provides an express service for those who can afford it and avoids remote villages where it would be boarded only by the occasional pensioner will make more money for its owner. But someone—the state or the local municipality—must still provide the unprofitable, inefficient local service. In its absence, the short-term economic benefits of cutting the provision will be offset by long-term damage to the community at large. Predictably, therefore, the consequences of "competitive" buses—except in London where there is enough demand to go around—have been an increase in costs assigned to the public sector; a sharp rise in fares to the level that the market can bear; and attractive profits for the express bus companies. 

"Trains, like buses, are above all a social service. Anyone could run a profitable rail line if all they had to do was shunt expresses back and forth from London to Edinburgh, Paris to Marseilles, Boston to Washington. But what of rail links to and from places where people take the train only occasionally? No single person is going to set aside sufficient funds to pay the economic cost of supporting such a service for the infrequent occasions when he uses it. Only the collectivity—the state, the government, the local authorities—can do this. The subsidy required will always appear inefficient in the eyes of a certain sort of economist: Surely it would be cheaper to rip up the tracks and let everyone use their car? 

"In 1996, the last year before Britain's railways were privatized, British Rail boasted the lowest public subsidy for a railway in Europe. In that year the French were planning for their railways an investment rate of £21 per head of population; the Italians £33; the British just £9.[4] These contrasts were accurately reflected in the quality of the service provided by the respective national systems. They also explain why the British rail network could be privatized only at great loss, so inadequate was its infrastructure. 

"But the investment contrast illustrates my point. The French and the Italians have long treated their railways as a social provision. Running a train to a remote region, however cost-ineffective, sustains local communities. It reduces environmental damage by providing an alternative to road transport. The railway station and the service it provides are thus a symptom and symbol of society as a shared aspiration.

" ...We need to rethink the devices we employ to assess all costs: social and economic alike. ...We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify "humiliation"? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers? …. 

"In the past, social democracy unquestionably concerned itself with issues of right and wrong: all the more so because it inherited a pre-Marxist ethical vocabulary infused with Christian distaste for extremes of wealth and the worship of materialism. 

What precisely is it that we find abhorrent in financial capitalism, or "commercial society" as the eighteenth century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What do we find unfair? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unrestrained lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost? The answers to such questions should take the form of a moral critique of the inadequacies of the unrestricted market or the feckless state. We need to understand why they offend our sense of justice or equity. We need, in short, to return to the kingdom of ends. ....