Instead, I propose to enrich the debate with some issues with which the general public might be less familiar, all of which issues lead strongly to the conclusion that electric power generation from nuclear reactors should be phased out with deliberate speed and the technology abandoned — permanently.

This essay consists of three sections: First of all, the recent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan urgently brings the science of plate tectonics into the debate, and raises the question of whether the promoters of nuclear power are willing and able to take the long-term implications of that technology into consideration as they select sites for these facilities.

In the second section, we ask whether it is possible to accurately and reliably assess the safety of nuclear reactors.  A failed attempt to do so thirty years ago suggests that such an assessment is impossible, not simply because of a lack of scientific knowledge and technological capacity, but more fundamentally, because of the insurmountable inability to anticipate all possible circumstances that might occur in the operation of the plant.

Finally, these and other considerations lead to the conclusion that nuclear power is not economically viable and sustainable without massive government subsidies that are unavailable to its competing technologies.

Fukushima: A Disaster Waiting to Happen

What were Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and General Electric thinking when they decided to site the world’s largest nuclear power complex at Fukushima, on the eastern coast of Northern Japan?

Perhaps they weren’t thinking at all, or at least they were thinking only for the short-term. Myopia is endemic to the corporate mind, which is dedicated to an early return on investment. “In the long-term,” John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, “we’ll all be dead.”

Nonetheless, a disastrous earthquake followed by a tsunami was certain to happen along the eastern coast of Japan. Not a question of if, but of when. That certainty was ordained by the science of plate tectonics and validated in the geological record.

The sword of Damocles hanging over Fukushima is the Japan Trench, located about 100 miles due east of, and parallel to, the coastline where the plant is located.

The trench is a subduction zone, where the Pacific plate dives down under the Okhotsk plate and into the mantle. The Japanese islands, like the Marianas and the Aleutians, owe their very existence to subduction which, as it grinds along, produces great earthquakes and tsunamis.

Tsunamis can be produced by volcanoes and landslides. But they most reliably occur along subduction zones, as the ocean floor during an earthquake is suddenly and violently jolted, causing a pulse of water to move outward and perpendicular to the fault line. The Indonesian tsunami of December 26, 2004, which killed almost a quarter of a million people, was caused by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake along a subduction zone about 100 miles west of Sumatra. Among other noteworthy subduction quakes/tsunamis are the “Good Friday” Alaska earthquake in 1964 (magnitude 9.1), and the Chilean earthquake of 2010 (magnitude 8.8).

And so, because the Japan Trench is parallel to the coast of northern Japan, the tsunami was aimed directly at that coast.

Because of the dynamics of plate tectonics, earthquake/tsunamis are endemic to Japan. For example, in 1923 a magnitude eight earthquake struck central Japan, leveling the city of Yokohama and destroying more than half of Tokyo, at the cost of about 100,000 lives.

The investors of the Fukushima plant knew all this, and yet they went ahead and built a facility that was designed to withstand a magnitude seven earthquake. (The Richter magnitude scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. Accordingly, the energy released in a magnitude nine quake is not two-ninths greater than that of a magnitude seven. It is about a thousand times greater). TEPCO continued to operate the facility, despite warnings from the International Atomic Energy Commission.

To put the matter bluntly, the investors and designers of Fukushima gambled that during the operational lifetime of the plant, there would be no earthquake greater than magnitude seven. They gambled, and the people of northern Japan lost. Economists call this loss an “externality.”

In California two commercial nuclear power facilities, at San Onofre between San Diego and Los Angeles and at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obisbo, are located along the Pacific coast and near seismically active faults.  As a resident of southern California, I must wonder if the operator of that plant, Southern California Edison, like TEPCO in Japan, is likewise gambling with my life and the lives of my neighbors.  Heads they win, tails we lose.

And earthquakes and tsunamis are not the only, or even the greatest, threat posed by nuclear power reactors. The Three Mile Island accident was caused by a mechanical failure, and the Chernobyl disaster was caused by human error.

Building a nuclear power complex along a shoreline opposite a subduction zone is risky. That fact is a “known known.” How risky? That is an unknowable unknown. Any attempt to assess the risk, or for that matter the risk associated with any and all nuclear power plants, is almost certain to underestimate that risk. A reliable and accurate assessment of the risk of a failure of a nuclear power reactor is unobtainable, now and forever.

These are bold assertions that I will endeavor to demonstrate below. To do so, we will examine an ambitious and massive attempt, some thirty years ago, to assess the safety of nuclear power plants, and its subsequent spectacular failure to achieve that objective. Because the reasons for that failure remain valid today, this is a tale well worth retelling in the light of the disaster at Fukuyama and in the face of the determination of the Obama Administration, despite that disaster, to proceed with the construction of the first new nuclear power plants in thirty years.

Reactor Safety: The Rasmussen Report Revisited

Concerned about public criticism of their nuclear energy ambitions, the promoters of commercial atomic energy at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) initiated in 1972, the “Reactor Safety Study,” which was to become known as “The Rasmussen Report,” after its Director, Norman Rasmussen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In August, 1974, the draft Report was released with much fanfare in a public-relations extravaganza that prompted one newspaper to proclaim: “Campaigners Against Nuclear Power Stations Put to Rout.” Following this triumphant entrance, scrupulous scientific assessment began behind the facade, after which it was all downhill for the Report. The AEC’s successor organization, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), quietly withdrew endorsement of the Rasmussen Report in January, 1979.

Rushed into print to provide support for a renewal of the Price Anderson Act (a federally mandated limit of industry liability following a nuclear reactor failure), an eighteen page “Executive Summary” of the final Report was distributed to Congress and the Press in October, 1975, and in advance of the release of the full, 2300 page Report.

Perhaps the most famous item of the Executive Summary was the claim that the chances of being killed by a nuclear power plant “transient” is about equal to that of being killed by a meteorite. This mind-catching statistic has proven to have a longevity far exceeding that of the Report which spawned it. In general, the Summary concluded that:

…The likelihood of reactor accidents is much smaller than that of many non-nuclear accidents having similar consequences. All non-nuclear accidents examined in this study including fires, explosions, toxic chemical releases, dam failures, airplane crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, are much more likely to occur and can have consequences comparable to, or larger than, those of nuclear accidents.

Closer examination revealed a startling discrepancy between the cheerful reassurances of the Executive Summary and the nine volumes of technical information. In his splendid book, The Cult of the Atom (Simon and Schuster, 1982), based upon tens of thousands of pages of AEC documents pried loose by the Freedom of Information Act, Daniel Ford observes that:

As one moves from the very technical material … to the Executive Summary … a change of tone as well as of technical content is evident. In the “back” of the study, there are cautionary notes, discussion of uncertainties in the data, and some sense that there may be important limitations to the results. The qualifications successively drop away as one moves toward the parts of the study that the public was intended to see. In the months following the study’s completion, the honesty of the official summary … became the most controversial issue.

The reassuring conclusions of the Rasmussen Report were based upon numerous highly questionable assumptions and methodologies. Among them:

• By definition, the report estimated damage and casualties due to anticipated events. There is no clear acknowledgment that all possible significant events were not, and could not be, covered by the study. As it turned out, the near-disaster at Three Mile Island was just one of several “unanticipated” events. And as noted above, a magnitude nine earthquake was not anticipated by the designers of the Fukushima plant.
• In fact, whole categories of failures were excluded from the risk estimates. For example, it was assumed that back-up safety systems would always operate in case of the failure of a primary system. Given this assumption, the risk of a catastrophic accident would be the product of the probability of the independent failure of both systems, and thus highly unlikely. However, this discounted the possibility of a “common-mode failure,” such as that at Browns Ferry, Alabama, in 1975 (soon after the release of the Report), where, due to faulty design, an accidental fire disabled both systems at once — yet another event excluded by the Rasmussen rules. Similarly, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 disabled both the primary and backup safety systems at the Fukushima facility.
• The Report focused on mechanical and equipment failures, and discounted design flaws and “human error,” as if these were in some sense insignificant. Also overlooked was the possibility of sabotage and terrorism.
• The report adopted the so-called “fault-tree” method of analysis, described by the Report as “developed by the Department of Defense and NASA … [and] coming into increasing use in recent years.” Not so. As Daniel Ford reports, “long before [Rasmussen] adopt the fault-tree methods … the Apollo program engineers had discarded them.” [146] As a retired professor of engineering recently explained to me: “the simulation or probability tree … analyses … are used to locate the weak links in your design, given the possible sources of failure that you know of or can specify… [However, the analyses] are not meant to yield a credible probability of failure, but instead yield at best a lower bound for that probability.” (EP emphasis)
• The “probabilities” assigned to the component “events” in the “fault tree,” leading to a hypothetical failure, were based upon almost pure speculation, since, because the technology was new, the evaluators lacked any precedents upon which to base probability assessments. (Both Rasmussen himself, and his Report, admitted as much). (Ford 138, 141). Thus, because the Report was fundamentally an advocacy document, this gave its pro-nuclear investigators the license to concoct unrealistically low risk assessments.
• These “low risk estimates” in the Executive Summary were startling, to say the least: “non-nuclear events,” it claimed, “are about 10,000 times more likely to produce large numbers of fatalities than nuclear plants.” But the footnote to this statement gave it away, when it added that such “fatalities … are those that would be predicted to occur within a short period of time” after the accident. However, few fatalities due to radiation exposure are “short-term.” In fact, as Physicist Frank von Hipple pointed out, a careful reading of the voluminous technical material would disclose that for every ten “early deaths” conceded in the Summary, the same accident would cause an additional seven thousand cancer deaths. (Ford, 170) This was only one of the several scandalous discrepancies between the “public” Executive Summary and the Technical material in the Report, which led Morris Udall, then Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, to demand a new Executive Summary. The NRC refused.
• The “peer review” of the Report was perfunctory at best. The reviewers were given eleven days to assess an incomplete 3,000 page draft report — a schedule virtually designed to yield invalid assessments. Even so, many of the referees returned withering criticisms, especially of the statistical methods employed by the studies. The findings of this review group were not released by the AEC or the NRC, and the published Report was unaltered by these criticisms.

These and numerous other flaws in the study led one critic to wryly comment that “the chance of the Rasmussen Report being substantially wrong is somewhat more than the chance of your being hit by a meteorite.”

Though the general public was much impressed by the public relations show orchestrated by AEC, informed professional investigators immediately began the erosion of credibility. Among these were the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and, most significantly, an independent panel set up by the American Physical Society and chaired by Harold Lewis of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Each of these returned severe criticisms of the Report.

All this bad news eventually led the Reactor Safety Study into the halls of Congress. Daniel Ford describes what followed:

In some cases [congressional] members and staff probed the issues [of reactor safety] carefully, prepared detailed follow-up reports, and tried to bring about needed reforms. Congressman Morris Udall’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, for example, held extensive hearings on the validity of the Reactor Safety Study. His protests about the misleading manner in which the report’s findings were presented to the public forced the NRC, in January 1979, to repudiate the results of the study. (p. 226)

And so, at length, the relentless discipline of science and scholarship, combined with a rare display of uncompromising congressional oversight investigation, brought about the downfall of the AEC/NRC “Reactor Safety Study.”

The NRC’s “withdrawal of endorsement” stood in stark contrast to its release, scarcely four years earlier. This time there were no publicity releases, media interviews or press conferences. It was hoped that the announcement would go unnoticed amidst the usual gross output of news out of Washington. Given the widespread public opposition to nuclear power, this expectation was bound to be frustrated.

In the end, the Rasmussen Report was yet another attempt at justification of “the peaceful atom” which backfired on the proponents. Historians looking back on this technological extravaganza may note, with some bewilderment, that however severe the attacks by the critics, commercial nuclear power was, in this case at least, inadvertently done in by its defenders.

Nuclear Power Fails the Free Market Test

Still more substantial objections to nuclear power have been raised by scientists and engineers much more qualified than I am. So I will not repeat them here. (To read these objections, google “Physicians for Social Responsibility,” “Union of Concerned Scientists” “Natural Resources Defense Council” and “The Rocky Mountain Institute“). However, in closing, a few additional concerns are worthy of mention.

(1) First of all, every source of electric power, with the exception of nuclear power, “fails safe.” A failure at a coal-fired plant would, at worst, destroy the plant. But the damage would be localized and short-term. Failures at a wind-farm or solar facility are trivial. However, the damage caused by a nuclear meltdown and radiation release endures for millennia and can render huge areas permanently uninhabitable, as they have in Ukraine and Belarus due to the Chernobyl disaster, and as they likely will in Japan following the Fukushima catastrophe.

(2) Nuclear industry assurances as to the safety of their facilities are flatly refuted by their unwillingness to fully indemnify the casualty and property losses that would result from a catastrophic release of radiation from a nuclear accident. Since 1957, the Price Anderson Act has set a limit on the liability that private industry must pay in the event of an accident. The amount of that limit, originally $560 million for each plant, has been routinely revised, so that as of 2005 the limit is now $10.8 billion for each incident. Clearly, the Fukushima disaster will exact a cost far exceeding that amount. Were such an event to occur in the United States, the cost of such a disaster in excess of ten billion would be born by the victims and by the taxpayers. The contradiction is stark: the nuclear industry and its enablers in the NRC tell the public that nuclear energy is safe. And yet, at the same time, they are unwilling to back up these assurances with a full indemnification of their facilities.

(3) The public has not been adequately informed of the ongoing hazards of nuclear power. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists report that in the past year, there were fourteen “near misses” among the 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States. And according to the Washington Post (March 24), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has disclosed that “A quarter of U.S. nuclear plants [are] not reporting equipment defects.”

(4) The widely-heard claim that “nobody in the United States has ever died due to commercial nuclear power” utilizes “the fallacy of the statistical casualty.” Specific cancer deaths due to artificial nuclear radiation are, of course, indistinguishable from cancer deaths due to other causes. Yet epidemiological studies show, beyond reasonable doubt, that some deaths are attributable to artificial radiation. The inference from “no identifiable specific deaths” to “no deaths whatever” is fallacy made infamous by the tobacco industry’s successful defense against suits filed by injured smokers or their surviving families.

(5) The claim that nuclear power is the “safest” source of energy commits the “fallacy of suppressed evidence.” Such a claim pretends that the risk of nuclear power is confined to the radiation risks adjacent to a normally operating plant and immediately following each “event.” Usually excluded from such assessments are deaths and injuries involved in the mining, milling, processing, shipment, reprocessing, storage and disposal of fuel — in short, the entire “fuel cycle.”

(6) Similarly, the claim that nuclear power is the “cheapest” power available is likewise based upon “the fallacy of suppressed evidence.” Specifically, nuclear proponents arrive at this conclusion by “externalizing” (i.e., failing to include) such costs as government subsidies for research and development, the costs of disposing of wastes, the cost of decommissioning of facilities, and, again, the cost of risks to human life, health and property. As noted above, the risk factor is excluded due to the Price Anderson Act and the failure to acknowledge “statistical casualties.   Once all these “externalized costs” are included, nuclear power adds up to the most expensive energy source, hands down.  Over fifty years of industry research, development and operation have not altered this fact.  Meanwhile, as R & D of alternative energy sources progress and economies of scale kick in, the costs of solar, wind, tide, geo-thermal and biomass energy continue to fall.  (See UCS, “Nuclear Power Subsidies: The Gift that Keeps on Taking,” and Amory Lovins, “With Nuclear Power, ‘No Acts of God Can Be Permitted’”).

Because of considerations such as these, no nuclear plants have been commissioned since the completion in 1985 of the Diablo Canyon facility along the central coast of California. The Obama Administration is prepared to change all this, as the President has announced $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to allow the building of the first nuclear power plant since Diablo Canyon.

Without this “federal intervention,” along with the Price-Anderson liability cap, no new nuclear plants would be built. The “free market” would not allow it. And yet there are no conspicuous complaints from the market fundamentalists on the right.

Why am I not surprised?

PostScript: My involvement in the Diablo Canyon controversy goes way back. In 1981, a group of local citizens blockaded the Diablo Canyon construction site in an act of civil disobedience, for which, predictably, they were arrested. At the time, I was a Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The defense team asked me to testify as to the “reasonableness” of the protesters’ belief that the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors posed a significant danger to their community and to themselves. The prosecution objected on the grounds that the defense was asking me to “do the jury’s work.” The judge concurred, and so I was not permitted to testify. My account of this experience and critique of the ruling may be found in my unpublished paper, “A Philosopher’s Day in Court” at my website, The Online Gadfly, The discussion above of the Rasmussen Report is a revision of my unpublished class discussion paper from 1980, “The Strange Saga of the Rasmussen Report”.

Enough separate drinking fountains, enough all-night drives because no motel would provide a room, and enough refusal of service at restaurants and lunch counters.

“Screw this,” they said, and so they sat at Woolworth’s lunch counters anyway, where they were taunted, spat upon, beaten, and arrested.

The white restaurant owners resisted, most notably one Lester Maddox in Atlanta who stood at the door of his Pickrick restaurant, axe handle in hand, threatening to use it on any black citizen who might attempt to enter. Enough white Georgia citizens were sufficiently delighted by Maddox’ act of defiance that they elected him Governor of the state.

But the students persisted, organizing “freedom rides” throughout the south, where they were joined by supporters of all ages and races from around the country until, at last, they prevailed. In 1964 the Congress of the United States passed the first Public Accommodations law, which stipulated:

All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, … without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

Today, the right of all persons to access to motels, restaurants, transportation facilities, etc., is settled law and is accepted throughout the land by most citizens.

“Most,” but not all. Among the remaining dissenters is Rand Paul, a libertarian and the Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky.

Racial discrimination in public facilities is morally wrong, Paul agrees, and those who disapprove have a perfect right to boycott establishments that discriminate.

But the property rights of the owners, he insists, are sacrosanct. And however much we might deplore and protest the owners’ decision to refuse service on the basis of race, the facilities are still private property and the owners have the indisputable right to do with their property as they wish.

The Myth of “Absolute Rights”

The moral center of libertarian dogma is a triad of rights: the rights to life, liberty and property. William Bayes expresses the dogma with admirable clarity:

Where do my rights end? Where yours begin. I may do anything I wish with my own life, liberty and property without your consent; but I may do nothing with your life, liberty and property without your consent….¹

This proclamation is accompanied by a qualification – the so-called “like liberty principle”: You have “the right to live your life as you choose so long as you don’t infringe on the equal rights of others.”² As we shall see, this qualification proves to be the undoing of libertarian absolutism.

An unyielding defense of property rights runs afoul of an inescapable moral conundrum: anyone who holds more than one moral principle must face the possibility of a conflict of principles, whereby one principle might have to yield to another. I call this “the moral relativism of conflict.” And as Charles Frankel wisely pointed out, the person who attempts to escape this dilemma through an unyielding adherence to one and only one principle is not a moralist, the correct description is “a fanatic.” Moliere’s Misanthrope, whose single moral precept was to never tell a lie, is the classical example of a fanatic.

For example: If you are asked directly by a Mafia hit-man the location of his intended victim, do you tell the truth? In fact, in defense of the target’s “right to life,” you are morally required to tell a lie. In fact, the law so stipulates, for if you tell the truth you will be charged with being an accessory to murder. A scene from the sixties movie “Dr. Strangelove” exemplifies another such conflict: Is it permissible to steal coins from a Coke machine in order to make a phone call that saves the world from nuclear annihilation?

Libertarians cannot escape from this “relativism of conflict,” for they insists upon not one, but at least three fundamental principles: the rights to life, liberty and property.

And yet, David Boaz, in his Libertarianism – A Primer, proclaims that “Fundamental rights cannot conflict. Any claim of conflicting rights must represent a misinterpretation of fundamental rights.”³ Boaz offers no defense of this dogmatic pronouncement.. Small wonder. It is indefensible. Talk to a libertarian for a few minutes, and if he affirms that all persons are entitled to equal rights (the “like liberty principle”) and if that libertarian has even a modicum of moral rationality, he must yield on this point. For consider:

Is there an inviolable right to establish a hog farm on one’s property in a residential area? Such a “right” degrades the property values of one’s neighbors.

Is there an inviolable right to own a tactical nuclear weapon or to manufacture explosives in one’s basement? This violates the neighbors’ right to life.

Is there a right to run past a “No Trespassing” sign to rescue a drowning child or an infant in a burning building? The law permits such exceptions; it is called a “defense of necessity.”

Is a person permitted to steal a loaf of bread to avoid starvation? To condemn such an exercise of one’s “right to life” is too much even for the dogmatic libertarian. Yet David Boaz’ evasion of this trap is curious, and ultimately inconsistent. On the one hand, he writes that “[property] rights cannot apply where social and political life is impossible,”⁴ which is to say that property rights are not absolute. And yet, earlier in the book, Boaz, citing John Locke, writes that the rights to life, liberty and property are “prior to the existence of government – thus we call them ‘natural rights,’ because they exist in nature.”⁵ This latter pronouncement would seem to indicate that because property rights are “prior to government,” a starving person is never justified in saving his life and that of his family by stealing the property of another. But does not the libertarian also insist that the right to life is also “prior to government”? Thus the libertarian offers no resolution to this conflict between the rights of life and property.

Which brings us, at last, to the right of access to public accommodations.

Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 curtails the absolute property rights of the owner of a motel or a restaurant, etc. But the act does so to affirm and protect the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness of those who would otherwise be discriminated against. For racial, religious, or other discrimination is a fundamental insult to the dignity of the affected individuals and a validation of their second-class citizenship. This is intolerable in a civilized society. The libertarian agrees: “The ethical or normative basis of libertarianism is respect for the dignity and worth of every (other) person.” (Boaz 97)

By defending the right of the owner of a public facility to deny access “on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin,” the libertarians repudiate their proclaimed adherence to the “like liberty principle” and they betray an absence of that most fundamental of moral sentiments, empathy. In other words, they fail to comprehend what it is like to be the victim of discrimination.

Martin Luther King’s elaboration of this point, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is unsurpassed in its force and eloquence:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

The Upshot

As a youngster, I was taught that virtue in the individual and justice in the state consisted of the triumph of good over evil. But then I entered the university and studied philosophy, where I learned that the moral life is not as simple as that. For, in addition, virtue and justice can also consist in making the optimal forced choices among several competing “goods” or among several necessary evils – what moral philosophers call “tragic choices.” These include engaging in a defensive war to resist aggression, performing an abortion to preserve a woman’s life, stealing food to avoid starvation, and requiring the owner of a motel or a restaurant to serve all customers regardless of their race, religion or national origin.

It is all well and good for citizens to engage in lofty abstractions as they discuss moral principles and political rights. As a practicing philosopher, I would be the last to decry such an activity.

But, as Aristotle taught us, morality and politics are, in the final analysis, practical. They are about the conduct of our lives and the ordering of society in specific, particular, day-by-day circumstances. Thus moral principles and political rights must have application to ordinary particular life experiences. Otherwise, they are of no use to us, merely “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.” Accordingly in the arena of ordinary day-by-day life, moral dogmatism and absolutism have no place.

Thus it was that Martin Luther King, when confronted with the charge that “the law” must be upheld without exception, answered not with competing abstractions but with a bill of particulars – with a list of specific indignities and insults that the afro-American must face every day.

Put simply, it is not enough to have the will to do what is right. One must also have the practical intelligence to know what is right. And, in ordinary life, the application of abstract moral rules has consequences that often impact competing rules. Just as the ecologists have taught us that due to the complex interrelationships among organism, “you can’t do just one thing,” the morally sophisticated citizen must constantly ask the ecologist’s question: “and then what?”⁶

Like Lester Maddox in 1964, Rand Paul today has failed to acknowledge the complex ecology of morality, as he insists that absolute property rights must allow the owner and proprietor of a public facility to discriminate if he so chooses. And also, typical of the dogmatic libertarian, David Boaz fails to acknowledge the ecology of morality when he proclaims, without a shred of supporting argument, that “fundamental rights cannot conflict.”

Yet it is just this kind of unyielding fanaticism that is polluting our civic and political discourse today. If the American republic is to survive the polarization of today’s politics, we must, on both sides of the political divide, learn to pause and think through the implications of our moral precepts and our rhetoric. And the ultimate test of those precepts and that rhetoric must be in the laboratory of our practical everyday experience.

Libertarians and other dogmatists to the contrary notwithstanding, fundamental rights and abstract moral precepts can and do conflict. Accordingly, if one affirms, as both the liberals and the libertarians affirm, that we must respect the dignity of each individual and that each person’s rights must be consistent with the equal rights of others, then it clearly follows that property rights are not absolute and that the public accommodation law of 1964 is correct:

All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, … without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

1. Bayes, William W. (1970). “What is Property?”, The Freeman, July 1970: 348.
2. Boaz, David (1997) Libertarianism – A Primer, The Free Press: 59.
3. Boaz, 89.
4. Boaz, 86.
5. Boaz, 37.
6. Hardin, Garrett (1985), An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament, Filters Against Folly, Viking.

This is the most famous quotation never said by Charles Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. (He actually said “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”)

Still, the misquote nicely summarizes the central dogma of libertarianism and right-wing regressivism: “free market absolutism” — the conviction that the “invisible hand” of the unconstrained and unregulated free market will always result in the greatest benefit for the public at large. As Milton and Rose Friedman put it: “A free market [co-ordinates] the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off..” (Free to Choose, p 13-4). Note the universal quantifier, “everyone.” Good for each, good for all.

The dogma of market absolutism gains some credibility from the fact that it is at least a half-truth. No doubt, the individual’s striving to maximize self-interested gain accounts for numerous improvements in the quality of life in industrial countries. Presumably, the inventors and developers of computers and the internet were more concerned with their own economic prospects than they were of the “social benefits” thereof. (Bill Gates’ benevolence was manifested later as a result of, his economic success, with the establishment of The Gates Foundation). Similarly, many scientific, scholarly, technological and artistic achievements, motivated primarily by self-interest and self-satisfaction, benefit society at large “as if by an invisible hand.”

The dogmatism of free market absolutism resides in the belief that the unregulated market never fails to be beneficial to all; the belief, in other words, that there are no malevolent effects of unconstrained market activity, no “back of the invisible hand.” From this belief follows the insistence that the free market is self-correcting, and that there is thus no need for regulation – that, in Ronald Reagan’s enduring words, “government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.”

Market absolutism is a “dogma” in the same sense that creationism and biblical inerrancy are dogmas; it is accepted “on faith” despite clear and compelling evidence that it is false. Moreover, it is a “keystone belief:” refute market absolutism, and the entire structure of libertarianism collapses. Not that this significantly alters the convictions of the libertarian and regressive true-believer, any more than the existence of fossils or the science of molecular biology inclines the religions fundamentalist to accept evolution.

Be that as it may, for those open to evidence and plain common sense, here are a few compelling reasons to reject the dogma of market absolutism – reasons to believe that what is good for an individual corporate stockholder may not be good for the public in general. I focus below on corporate behavior since corporations are far and away the most significant “players” in both national and multi-national economic activity. And after all, didn’t the “conservative” majority in the Supreme Court rule, in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations are “persons”?

Common to all the cases listed below is the corporate imperative to maximize profits and the return on stockholder investment. This imperative is called “fiduciary responsibility” and it is required by law. Accordingly, a failure to meet this responsibility can trigger a stockholder’s law suit against a corporation and its executives.

Private Prisons. Good for the corporations: more prisoners, “three strikes” laws, mandatory sentencing. The cost to society: less rehabilitation and early release, increased government expenditures and taxes. It is noteworthy that the United States has the largest prisoner to population ratio in the industrialized world.

War, Inc. Good for the corporations (i.e., the military-industrial complex and “private contractors” such as Halliburton and Blackwater): more wars, expenditure of rockets, bombs and ammunition (requiring restocking of inventories). Cost to society: avoidance of diplomatic solutions, increased military budget and battlefield casualties, disobedience to international law (e.g., the Geneva and Nuremberg protocols).

The Tobacco Industry. Good for the corporation: More sales and more customers, the younger the better, unregulated advertising of products. Cost to society: half a million premature deaths per year due to smoking, cost of medical treatment of tobacco related diseases.

Fast (“Junk”) Food. Good for the corporation: Increased sales and profits. Cost to society: obesity epidemic, diseases due to malnourishment (e.g., cardiovascular disease)

Privatized Health Insurance. Good for the corporation: denial of benefits (e.g., due to “pre-existing conditions”), inflated executive compensation. Cost to society: lack of affordable and universal health care.

Promotion of fossil fuel consumption. Good for the corporation: profits and return on investment. Cost to society: global warming, devaluation of scientific research, oil spills and contamination of the ocean, loss of fisheries and recreation facilities, devastation of marine ecosystems.

Outsourcing of jobs. Good for the corporation: increased profits and return on investment of stockholders. Cost to society: poverty, loss of educational opportunities, redistribution of wealth “upward,” shrinkage of customer base, economic depression.

Unlimited corporate campaign contributions. Good for the corporations: “legislators for hire” resulting in laws favorable to the corporations, deregulation, public subsidy of corporate activity. Cost to society: deregulation resulting in corporate irresponsibility and increased “externalization” of costs to the public, failure of the “privatized” government to act “with the consent of the governed.”

And so on, with the manufacture, sale and distribution of untested chemicals such as CFCs (causing ozone depletion and ultraviolet radiation) and DDT (devastating ecosystems), etc. The list of socially and ecologically harmful effects (“negative externalities“) of unregulated “free market” activity is virtually endless.

I refer above to “costs to society.” The libertarians neatly dispose of these embarrassments by asserting that “there is no such thing as society” (Margaret Thatcher) and “there is no such entity as ‘the public’” (Ayn Rand). It then follows that if “society” and “the public” do not exist, there is no public interest, no social responsibility, no social injustice.

When we cite such specific cases, free market absolutism collapses in the face of plain common sense. For if, as the absolutists insist, the unregulated free market always results in benefit for “everyone” why not allow a “free market” in child pornography, or extortion (“the protection racket”), or murder for hire?

The absolutist is compelled to reply, “because such activities harm or violate the rights of innocent persons.” With this admission, the absolutist gives away his dogma. For by this admission, the absolutist concedes that in some readily identifiable cases, what Robert Nozick dubs the right to engage in “capitalist acts between consenting adults” can, at times, be trumped by the rights and the welfare of innocent, unconsenting and non-participating third parties.

But if so, if there are legitimate reasons to outlaw extortion, child pornography and murder for hire, why then not also outlaw, or at the very least regulate, the sale of tobacco products and junk food, for-profit health insurance, junk bonds (CDOs) and hedge funds, and why not forbid the privatization of prisons, of warfare, and most fundamentally, the privatization of government through unlimited corporate campaign contributions?

I submit that while there may be a difference in degree between the prohibition of murder for hire on the one hand, and the sale of cigarettes and junk food and the privatization of warfare and government on the other, there is no difference in kind. All these activities harm and violate the rights of innocent and unconsenting victims.

Between, say, the “free market” in such services as auto repair and hair styling (acceptable) and the “free market” in extortion and murder (unacceptable) there is a vast “gray area” of economic activity in which the advantages of market activity may or may not be outweighed by harm to innocent others. Toward the “light gray” end of this continuum, caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) may suffice to minimize abuses by sellers and entrepreneurs without the intervention of the law and government. However, in the “dark gray” side of the continuum is found those transactions that cause unacceptable harm to innocent and unconsenting third parties. Also in the “dark gray realm” are those transaction wherein the potential customers are totally incapable of knowing the consequences of their transactions (e.g., the sale of prescription drugs) or whose judgment is overwhelmed by the black arts of public relations and advertising (e.g., junk food sales to children and cigarette sales to teenagers). According to “free market theory” of neo-classical economics, each participant in an economic transaction possesses “perfect knowledge,” which is one of several reasons why it is compellingly obvious that there is no such thing as a “perfect market” outside of the publications of these economic theorists. And all of us, neo-classical economists included, are compelled to live in the real world.

Once the high-pressure political rhetoric and the highfalutin scholarly jargon is set aside and undeniable economic and social facts are brought to the fore, the conclusion is inescapable: totally unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism cannot work, and attempts to make it work can only lead to oligarchy: opulent wealth for the very few, poverty for all others, and the disintegration of social order and the just rule of law. In addition to all that, oligarchy leads, paradoxically, to the destruction of the free market for, as history testifies and we are discovering anew in the daily news, oligarchy detests competition and leads to monopolies. Hence “mergers and acquisitions.”

Equally obvious is the remedy for all this: government regulation and the rule of law – law based, not on economic theory, but on historical experience and fundamental moral principles.

Government is essential, for no complex social activity, markets included, can take place without rules, referees to enforce the rules, and sanctions to deter the violations of these rules. Markets, after all, are essentially games: they are cooperative, rule governed, goal oriented, and the success of each “player” is contingent upon the behavior of the other players. Thus a market without rules, referees, and sanctions (i.e., laws and regulations) is unthinkable. And as with games, the referees, rules and sanctions must be supplied by a neutral and unbiased entity. What else could this be, but government? But while government is indispensable, there remains the ever-present danger that it can become oppressive and unresponsive to “the consent of the governed” due to control by self-serving individuals or corporations elites. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

In a just society, the welfare and rights of those “innocent, non-participating and unconsenting” third parties to economic activities must be protected. Can they be protected by the benevolent “invisible hand of the free market”? Certainly not, if the above argument has any merit. The only legitimate protector of the interests of those third parties from the “negative externalities” of market activity must be that institution established by the public at large to protect each individual’s rights not to be harmed by “capitalist acts by consenting adults.” And “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Mr. Reagan, meet Mr. Jefferson!

In the final analysis, the self-described “conservatives” aren’t. Liberals and progressives insist, in the words of the U.S. Constitution, that it is the government’s legitimate role “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Accordingly, the liberals are the authentic conservatives.

How then have the regressives succeeded in foisting a belief in the dogma of market absolutism upon a sizeable portion of the United States population, including the media and perhaps a majority of the U.S. Congress? They have accomplished this through the expenditure of vast sums of private money in support of “think tanks,” in the purchase of media, and in political campaign contributions.

But what arguments have been presented in support of the dogma? Very few, I suggest. The widespread acceptance has been accomplished through simple repetition, devoid of argument and rich in the rhetoric of “freedom.” About the only supporting argument form of note is “anecdotal evidence” and “false generalization.” Supporters of market absolutism cite examples of the benefits of free markets, and from that conclude that all “free markets” are always benign. However, as noted above, the fact that free market activity is often beneficial is not in dispute. Yes, we are all better off due to innovation, entrepreneurship and competition in the production of goods and the performance of services. This is the aforementioned “half-truth” of market dogmatism. But this half truth does not yield a whole truth. It does not follow from the admitted advantages of free market activity that there are never any harmful consequences thereof. Simple reflection, as noted above, yields abundant examples of what economists call “market failures” and “negative externalities.”

“The Reagan Revolution” of 1981 ushered in the grand experiment in applied market absolutism. Before more and greater harms befall us all, it is past time for the people and the government of the United States to recognize and to proclaim that the experiment has failed. We have learned what we need to know about the attempt to institutionalize this dogma, and it is time now to return to proven modes of governance: the rule of law, the protection of the environment and common resources, just distribution of the fruits of our combined and coordinated labor, and the subordination of economic activity in the service of the public good. It is time, in short, to bring back the rules, the umpires and the sanctions. Time to scrap the ethic of “you are on your own,” and to restore the ethic of community: “we’re all in this together.”

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but can not do at all or can not do well for themselves in their separate or individual capacities.

– Abraham Lincoln

It is written that when Rabbi Hillel (a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth) was asked to recite the essence of The Law of Moses while standing on one foot, he replied: “What is hateful to thyself do not do to another. That is the whole Law, the rest is Commentary.”

After several decades of studying, publishing and teaching moral philosophy, I believe that I can identify the foundation of morality in a single breath: “Morality is a plus-sum game.”

These precepts are not contrary, for they are of differing logical orders. Hillel’s precept is a moral commandment – an ethical rule of conduct. On the other hand, “morality is a plus-sum game” is an account of the foundation of morality; what philosophers call “meta-ethics.”

So just what is the meaning of “morality is a plus-sum game?” While it is easy enough to articulate this question, spelling out an answer might require volumes of elaboration, as indeed it has. But here, at least, are a few initial steps.**

The late American philosopher, John Rawls, explained this principle with admirable clarity when he wrote:  “[A] society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage… [S]ocial cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts.”¹

This insight is by no means original with Rawls. It resounds throughout the history of philosophy and political theory. Moreover, it is proven time and again in the experience of successful civilizations and, conversely, in the decline and fall of other civilizations.

Accordingly, this proven insight clearly explains why a radically individualistic political dogma such as libertarianism is not only immoral, it is empirically unworkable. Any society based upon such a dogma is bound to fail to satisfy the legitimate needs of its citizens.

About Game Theory:

Game theory, which was developed by John von Neuman and Oskar Morgenstern in the forties, “attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends upon the choices of others.” (John Nash, portrayed in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, won his Nobel Prize in economics for his work in game theory). While game theory can involve some highly advanced mathematical elaborations, the essentials can be readily understood by the ordinary citizen.²

In its most general sense, a “game” is a cooperative, rule-governed and goal-directed activity.

With the rare exception of solitaire, games involve multiple “players:” two individuals (e.g., tennis and chess), two teams (e.g. football), several individuals or teams (e.g. lotteries, tournaments), and entire societies (e.g., governments, morality). If there are two players or teams and the game is designed to result in one winner and one loser, it is called a “zero sum game.” Tennis and chess are zero sum games. If there are multiple players and only one winner, the game is designated as “minus sum.” Lotteries and tennis tournaments are minus sum games. Competitive games are either zero-sum or minus-sum. Such games are also “cooperative” in the sense that the players agree to obey the rules.

However, there are other “cooperative, rule-governed, goal oriented” activities in which the players cooperate to produce positive results, i.e. “wins,” for all players. While such activities are generally not called games, they nonetheless fit the definition: “cooperative, rule-governed and goal oriented.”

For example, from the point of view of the teams and the spectators, football is a zero sum game: one team wins and the other loses. But from the point of view of the participating players, it is a plus-sum game: each player interacts with the other team members in a well-coordinated activity which, when well-executed, results in a gain for all the team players that none can accomplish alone; namely, a win.

A freely consummated barter or purchase is a plus-sum game – cooperative, rule governed and goal oriented – in that each participant gains through the transaction. If I have more vehicles than I want and my house is in need of repair, and if my neighbor, a skilled carpenter, needs a car, then a trade of my car for his labor leaves us both better off. For a sale to take place, both the buyer and the seller must perceive a personal advantage in the transaction. Not surprisingly, game theory has attracted the intense interest of economists.

Science is a plus-sum game.  It is cooperative: an accumulated accomplishment of millions of working scientists through the centuries. It is rule-governed: following strict rules of inference and evidence, and requirements of publicity, replicability and falsifiability. And it is oriented toward the goal of establishing verifiable truth.

A well-ordered society is also a plus-sum game, whereby capital, labor, education and government function cooperatively according to mutually acknowledged and enforceable rules (i.e., laws and regulations) in pursuit of common goals. These common goals are clearly articulated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution: justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and “the blessings of liberty.”

Each institutional “player” in a successful “plus-sum game” of a just economic/political order needs the cooperative efforts of the other players if that society is to accomplish, in John Rawls’s words, “a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts.”

In contrast, a libertarian (unregulated “free market”) economy is minus-sum game in the extreme: few winners, a great many losers. As we are discovering in the United States today.

Many non-competitive sporting activities are also plus-sum games, including mountain climbing, sailing, and tandem (two person) canoeing, all of which require well coordinated “team play” to achieve a well-defined goal.

A personal example: I am a life-long aficionado of white-water boating (in kayaks and canoes). Well before I acquired much experience and skill in this sport, I persuaded my brother to run a swift Utah river with me in his new canoe. Each of us had independent ideas as to how to maneuver the thing. In short, two captains and no crew. Rock straight ahead?  Bow wants to go right, and stern wants to go left.  It was a near disaster. As any tandem canoeist will tell you, a successful river run (a plus sum) can only be accomplished with an ability to “read the water” and to execute coordinated paddle strokes according to unambiguous decisions by the designated “captain.” Similarly with successful team climbs and sailing cruises.

The Virtues as Plus-Sum:

Time now to assess my contention that a moral order in society is a plus sum game. Consider the usual roster of moral virtues: honesty, trustworthiness, courage, compassion, charity, loyalty and, perhaps most fundamentally, empathy – the capacity to share another’s joy and to feel another’s pain.  Is it not abundantly obvious that the more virtuous the members of a society, the greater the plus-sum “payoffs” of social life?  Economic transactions would be conducted with full knowledge and confidence, with no “inefficient” losses due to default, deceptive advertising, or fraudulent contracts. Marriages would be secure and enduring. Government officials could be expected to serve their constituents, free of bribery and corruption. In a community of optimally trustworthy, compassionate, tolerant and generous individuals, there would be no need to invest community resources in police, criminal courts and prisons.

Such a consideration led James Madison to conclude that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.³ Regarding the codification and enforcement of criminal law, Madison was no doubt correct. Even so, his pronouncement is an overstatement, for even in a society of angels, some government would be necessary. For example, there would have to be traffic laws, no matter how virtuous the drivers, if traffic were to move safely and efficiently. Once the traffic lights fail, the freedom to move is obliterated in the resulting chaos. In general, if a game is to be played successfully – including the “game” of economic/political activity – the players must know the rules, even if there is total assurance that no one will cheat and thus there is no need whatever to enforce the rules with the threat of penalties.

There are, to be sure, some traditional “virtues” that contribute little to the mutual advantages of community life. David Hume called these “the monkish virtues,” and they include celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, silence and solitude. Of these, Hume observed: “they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society…”⁴ With Hume, I conclude that these traits scarcely qualify as “virtues” at all, but rather are the consequences of “superstition and false religion.”

The Vices as Minus-Sum:

In contrast, moral vices subvert and stifle the mutual advantages of social life, which, I contend, is precisely why they are vices. Foremost among these are pride, cruelty, ruthlessness, hatred, prejudice, dishonesty, selfishness, greed. Add to these “an absence of empathy” which, as I have argued elsewhere, may be the most fundamental of the vices.

Each of these vices shred the fabric of an orderly society, as they make cooperation impossible or even counter-productive, as they undermine rules, and as they subvert the pursuit of common goals. In a society of liars, contracts can not be made. When prejudice and hatred prevail, all citizens can not be equal before the law. A representative republic can not endure if public officials can not be trusted. And an ideology that prizes selfishness and greed cannot be the foundation of a flourishing economic/political system.

The Inevitable Failure of Libertarianism as a Social Theory:

I most emphatically do not wish to suggest that libertarians are wicked people. Many libertarians that I know personally, and others that I know by reputation, are as tolerant, unbiased, generous and charitable as any liberal, and even more so than some liberals of my acquaintance. Some libertarians are so tolerant that they invite me and other liberals to publish in their journals and participate in their conferences.

However, as libertarians, they believe that the promotion of these virtues is no business of the government. Charity and tolerance, they insist, are, and must remain, private virtues. To the libertarian, a voluntary contribution to the poor or to a school, museum or park is morally commendable. But taxation in support of welfare, education, museums and parks is theft. As for cruelty, ruthlessness and dishonesty, these vices are regarded by the libertarians as self-defeating and, when exposed in practice, these vices fail in a free market and in the unregulated association of free individuals. Any vices that constrain the fundamental “negative” rights life, liberty and property, can legitimately be sanctioned and punished by the “minimalist” libertarian government.

Even so, despite any private virtues of individual libertarians, as a public political philosophy libertarianism is morally inadequate. In practice, it will produce minus-sum consequences.

Consider once again, our criteria of a plus-sum game: a cooperative, rule-governed, goal directed activity aimed toward accomplishing mutual advantage.

Libertarian doctrine drops the cooperation criterion of gamesmanship in favor of “YOYO” – “you’re on your own.”  The libertarian dogma of “the invisible hand” decrees that a collection of self-serving individuals seeking only to maximize their own personal freedom and wealth, will somehow, by “spontaneous generation,” evolve into an optimum social arrangement. No explicit rules and regulations are required apart from those laws designed to achieve the goal of the protection of the lives, liberties and property of each individual.

It is a neat and simple belief system which, unfortunately, neither history nor practical experience will validate. Instead, history has taught us that when a society officially embraces what Ayn Rand calls “the virtue of selfishness” and greed becomes the controlling force in community life, wealth and power do not “trickle down” to the masses, they “percolate up” to those in control, leaving those masses impoverished and disenfranchised. Government, having been “drowned in a bathtub,” offers no relief to the oppressed. “The free market” and “competitive enterprise,” extolled by the libertarians in theory, are set aside in practice. The prevailing capitalists regard competition as inefficient and inconvenient, and still worse, the constant competitive pressure to improve and innovate erodes profits. Hence mergers and acquisitions. Say goodbye to Mom and Pop stores and Downtown, USA. Say hello to Wall-Mart, Costco and Home Depot. Say goodbye to a free and diverse media. Say hello to the new “Ministry of Truth:” six media mega-corporations in control of 80% of the nation’s media, spewing out the official doctrines of “the free market” and “government is the problem.”

How, then, are diversity, free markets and competition to be preserved?  How else than through the intervention of anti-trust laws, which means an activist government, which, of course, is anathema to the libertarian.

The eventual result? “Life, liberty and property” for the privileged few, with poverty and servitude for all the rest. A minus-sum game.

“You are on your own” does not work with tandem canoeing, nor with a social order. Without cooperative effort, without commonly acknowledged rules sanctioned and enforced by law, and without shared goals, a society cannot succeed.

Liberty and Autonomy in a Plus-Sum Society.

“What you are describing,” replies the libertarian, “is the ‘order’ of bee hive or of an ant colony. Pure communism. Not a place where I would want to live. How can personal liberty and autonomy thrive in your ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’?”

A wise answer was told to me by a Russian friend, a professor at Moscow University, during the “cowboy capitalism” days following the collapse of Soviet communism. “Under communism,” she observed, “we had order without freedom. Then we had freedom without order, only to discover that without order, there is no freedom.”

The libertarian and the liberal concur in their desire to maximize personal liberty. However, the libertarian advocates freedom without order – without, that is, an institutional structure that will ensure freedom for all. Absent such a structure, liberty, like wealth, will “percolate up” to those in charge, “with liberty for some,” leaving the masses with nothing but their squalor and oppression.

The liberal, on the other hand, strives to establish and maintain the social, economic and political order without which there is no freedom. The liberal understands that the economic output and the civil liberties of a society are the products of the joint contributions of all members of society – of the plus-sum cooperative, rule governed and goal oriented efforts of all. Because no social order operates without some “friction,” there are inevitably victims of social and economic misfortune: the unemployed, the bankrupt, the abandoned.  Add to these, the victims of natural misfortunes – accidents, disease, birth defects, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.

Voluntary charity to these unfortunates, as advocated by the libertarians, is commendable. But it is insufficient. Good for the souls of the charitable, but not very helpful to those in need. There are just too many of them. Moreover, voluntary charity is a “tax on virtue,” as are private donations to education, museums, libraries, concerts and parks. Most citizens correctly reflect, “I might contribute, but even if I do, my one contribution will not abolish poverty and ignorance, nor will it add significantly to civic excellence.” To accomplish these common benefits, all must contribute through taxes. And with this understanding, most enlightened citizens will pay their taxes willingly, as they likewise support legislation designed to relieve suffering and to promote the common good.

“Taxes,” wrote Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, “are the price we pay for civilization” — the very civilization that is prerequisite to any and all personal wealth.  Accordingly, it is not unjust to require the beneficiaries of civilization to share in the burden of its maintenance.  However, there may be justifiable reasons to complain about the distribution of this burden.

“Necessitous men are not free men,” FDR observed in 1936. The liberal realizes, as the libertarian does not, that if personal liberty is to be maximized in society, it is not enough merely to guarantee the life, liberty and property of each individual.

The social contract of a just community also requires that if the citizens are to enjoy “the blessings of liberty,” the pre-conditions of liberty must be attended to: namely, public education, economic opportunity, equal opportunity, the protection of common resources, and the promotion of civic institutions.

As the English conservative, Edmund Burke observed “[Society is] a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.

1. A Theory of Justice, p. 4.
2. For more about game theory and the “plus-sum” nature of a just society, see Chapter 5 (“Good for Each, Bad for All” ) and Chapter 6 (“The Moral Point of View”) of my book in progress, Conscience of a Progressive.
3. The Federalist, 51.
4. Enquiry Concerning Morals, IX:1.

In the coming days, many tributes to Stewart will no doubt be written and published about his distinguished service to our nation as the Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and as an environmental lawyer, activist and writer. So there is little need for me to add to these accounts of his public life. Instead, I would like to share some personal reflections.

I first met Stewart some thirty years ago, through the initiative of my mentor, the late Sterling M. McMurrin, a professor of Philosophy and graduate school dean at the University of Utah, and the U.S. Commissioner of Education in the Kennedy Administration. I was, at the time, completing work on my anthology, Responsibilities to Future Generations (Prometheus Books, 1981), and looking for some noteworthy individual to write a Foreword to the book. Sterling immediately suggested his friend, Stewart Udall, who promptly and graciously accepted my invitation.

In that Foreword, Udall wrote:

I recall well the infatuation Americans had with “atomic age” science in the 1960s: we believed implicitly in those days that the energy problem was ‘solved’ (i.e., by nuclear electricity, which would be ‘so cheap it wouldn’t have to be metered’) and had a soaring belief that the kinds of minds that had unlocked the secret of the atom could literally ‘create’ whatever resources we needed from air, sea, water, or common rock….

It goes without saying that this prospect has withered. In the remaining years of this century, we who inhabit this planet will have a preview of the future, as nations are forced to lower their sights and deal with the consequences of resource overutilization.

Stewart’s fascination with the atomic age and its implications prompted him to write his penultimate book, The Myths of August, sub-titled “A personal exploration of our tragic Cold War affair with the atom.” Broad in scope and deeply disturbing in content, Myths is, in my opinion, his most provocative work. Not surprisingly, because of its severe criticism of political and economic establishments and its debunking of “popular wisdom,” the book received meager promotion by the media and has not attracted appreciable public notice. Sadly, then as now, it seemed that the American public “can not handle the truth.”

I was privileged to witness the development of The Myths of August from start to finish, as Stewart honored me with a request that I review and comment on each chapter draft as he wrote them. As many journal editors will testify, as a referee I am not renowned for my tact and gentleness, and thus some authors have taken offense at the candor of my responses to their efforts. Not Stewart. He was unfailingly appreciative of my comments as he treated me, undeservedly to be sure, as an equal.

The Myths of August is a bombshell of a book. In it, Stewart Udall deplores the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pointing out that the Japan was then at the point of military collapse and was actively seeking to negotiate an end of the war. He thus debunks the oft-stated dogma that the atomic bombs saved the lives of a million invading American troops. To this day, Udall’s repudiation of the “official” justification for “the bombs of August” remains a radically heretical idea.

The book continues with Udall’s account of his personal efforts, as an attorney representing Navaho uranium miners, to win compensation for these victims of radiation-induced cancers. He also exposes the government cover-up of the radiological havoc visited upon the Utah and Nevada “downwinder” residents resulting from the atmospheric atomic testing in Nevada. Especially chilling is the account of reassurances by AEC officials of the “safety” of the tests, while at the same time these officials were quietly moving their families out of the affected areas.

Throughout the book, Udall validates President Eisenhower’s warning of the “unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex” as he writes in the Preface of the “abnormal political and cultural changes which were the outgrowths of the Cold War.” He continues:

My experiences and observations told me that the cold warrior’s contempt for restraint had poisoned our politics. In the 1980s, I cringed as Mikhail Gorbachev and Andrei Sakharov emerged as the world’s most effective partisans for peace at the same time that two U.S. presidents, imbued with military machismo, were saddling future generations with trillions of dollars of debt by amassing an unprecedented array of superexpensive weapons of mass destruction. (p. xi)

Unlike George Bush and Dick Cheney, who enthusiastically promoted wars though manifestly unwilling to personally fight them when it was their turn, Stewart was an indefatigable advocate of peace and non-violence who had put his life on the line in defense of his country. As a member of bombing crews in World War II, he flew fifty missions, including the fabled “tree-top” B-24 raid on the Ploiesti oil refinery in Romania, which resulted in the loss of 53 out of 177 aircraft.

Stewart Udall was both a conservative and a liberal. In their original senses, uncontaminated by contemporary media rhetoric, these concepts are complementary rather than contradictory. Janus-like, Stewart looked both backward and forward, cherishing the proven traditions and ideals of the past, and valuing innovative policies for the future. This conservative-liberal dualism is eloquently summarized in the closing pages of The Myths of August:

… Through our media and educational institutions, we must be constantly reminded of just who we are as a people, and what we stand for — that when we are called upon to sacrifice for “national defense,” what we are defending are moral and philosophical traditions that proclaim the dignity of human beings and the inviolability of their rights.

In short, during the sad history of the atomic age and the Cold War, our political institutions have not failed us; our leaders have betrayed those institutions, and thus the American people. The remedy lies, not in a replacement of those political institutions or a reconstruction of our laws, but rather in a re-affirmation of those institutions and a determination to enforce and extend the rule of law.’

And so, paramount among the tenets of this report to future generations, is this: We give to you, in our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other founding documents of our republic, and in the institutions and law which embody them, the supreme expression of political wisdom and morality of our civilization. And in the failures of our own generation, we offer you a lesson and extend a warning: this priceless political legacy is forever vulnerable to subversion by special interests, by inflated fear, by self-serving rhetoric, and by public ignorance and indifference. Jefferson’s maxim is timelessly true: ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ (p. 358)

There is so much wisdom and insight in this book that it is tempting to go on and on with extended quotations from it. Instead, I can only urge that you purchase and read this valuable work by an author who participated in and favorably affected much of the history about which he wrote. If wiser heads eventually prevail over the current political, economic and military insanity, The Myths of August will be recognized as prophetic.

In the spring of 1993, as the book was nearing completion, I visited Stewart and his incomparable wife Lee, at their canyon home in Santa Fe. Stewart led me on a walking tour of “old Santa Fe,” where he introduced me to his oldest son, Tom, who was then the Attorney General and is now the Senator from the state of New Mexico. Stewart was a font of historical knowledge, as he pointed out old colonial buildings and sites and told of the founding of this city by the Spanish conquistadores. Established in 1609, Santa Fe is the oldest European city west of the Mississippi River.

As I walked through old Santa Fe with the Udalls, I recalled a moment several years earlier when, as a radio talk-show host in Salt Lake City, I received a call from in irate citizen: “Why don’t these Hispanics go back to where they came from?,” he said. That call was immediately followed by another: “Go back where we came from?! I am one of those ‘Hispanics,’ and I grew up on a ranch in New Mexico that was given to my family three hundred and fifty years ago by the King of Spain!” I don’t recall if I told Stewart about that incident. I hope that I did.

A couple of years later, at my suggestion, Stewart was invited to give the commencement address at Northland College in northern Wisconsin. I was, at the time, a member of the Northland faculty. Stewart’s contribution to the region was well-known and much appreciated, for while he was the Secretary of the Interior, he successfully promoted the establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, located in Lake Superior a few miles north of the Northland campus.

Stewart Udall was a consummate gentleman: gracious, generous and soft-spoken. He was genuinely interested in hearing and weighing the opinions of others, which he was pleased to assimilate into his own world view when presented with a compelling argument. The appearance of empathy with one’s constituents is an essential asset for a politician: (“above all, be sincere – if you can fake that, you have it made”). With Stewart, that empathy was 100% authentic. No one, outside his family, knew this better than those of us who worked with him on his writing projects, as he yielded to sound criticisms and, when warranted, gratefully accepted our suggestions.

Immediately after the publication of “Myths,” Stewart commenced work on his final book, The Forgotten Founders (Island Press, 2002). As he told me at the time, his primary objective in writing the book was to debunk the myth, promoted first by “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Zane Grey, and later by Hollywood, that the Old West was settled by “rugged individualists” and dominated by gun-slinging outlaws, occasionally tamed by fearless lawmen. On the contrary, he continued, “the West was won” by community-builders, who labored cooperatively in common purpose at the ageless task of establishing secure homes for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. As he later wrote in The Forgotten Founders:

No aspect of western history has been so inflated and overdramatized as the activities of … legendary figures [such as Billy the Kid]. Those who insist that robbers such as Jesse James were widely admired in some circles as American Robin Hoods too easily ignore the high value attached to law and order in communities where the great bulk of westerners resided. (172)

The Forgotten Founders celebrates community at this moment of our history (hopefully temporary) when libertarian individualism is ascendant. For this reason alone, it is an urgently timely book.

Stewart Udall, like myself, was the descendant of Mormon pioneers who settled Utah and much of Arizona and New Mexico after fleeing persecution in Missouri and Illinois in the mid-nineteenth century. And while, like myself, he found himself unable to accept the theological doctrines of that religion, he cherished his Mormon heritage. And so, in The Forgotten Founders, he draws engaging portraits of his and his wife Lee’s Mormon forbearers – exemplars of the courage, self-sacrifice, and mutual support that were crucial to the settlement of the west.

Two years ago, High Country News published “A Message to Our Grandchildren” signed by Stewart and his late wife, Lee, which I urge you to read. The final paragraphs, which eloquently express Stewart’s abiding optimism and vision even during these bleak times, serve as an fitting epitaph for this great man:

Americans must finally cast aside our notion that we can continue the wasteful consumption patterns of our past. We must promote a consciousness attuned to a frugal, highly efficient mode of living. In closing, I leave you with these thoughts, and hope you will hold to these ideals throughout your lives:

Foster a consciousness that puts a premium on the common good and the protection of the environment. Give your unstinting support to all lasting, fruitful technological innovations. Be steadfast enemies of waste. The lifetime crusade of your days must be to develop a new energy ethic to sustain life on earth.

In the 1960s, when the carbon problem and the exhaustion of the world’s petroleum were still beyond our gaze, I advocated a new ethic to guide our nation’s stewardship of its resources. I realize now this approach was too narrow, too nationalistic. To sustain life on our small planet, we will need a wider, all-encompassing planetary resource ethic based on values implemented by mutual cooperation. This ethic must be rooted in the most intrinsic values of all: Caring, sharing, and mutual efforts that reach beyond all obstacles and boundaries.

Go well, do well, my children. Cherish sunsets, wild creatures and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.

Ridicule the tea baggers? A cheap thrill, to be sure.

But also lousy political strategy!

News flash! Most people react negatively to insults, and turn against those who make fun of them. Moreover, those who are insulted are likely to respond with renewed and enhanced convictions. That’s how I respond. You too, I dare say. It’s simple human nature.

To be sure, Schultz’s “Psycho Talk” and Olbermann’s “Worst Persons” and other such attacks on right-wing crazies are worthy exercises. So too the clever antics of “Billionaires for Wealthfare” and “The Yes Men.” But no one expects such attacks to persuade Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Backman, deMint, et al. to forsake their wicked ways. Instead, such well deserved ridicule is designed to discredit these sources of tea-bag delusions. Accordingly, they are appropriate targets of derision.

But not the tea-bag movement, en masse, and most assuredly, not each of those who identify with it.

So how should the strategically savvy progressive deal with the tea-baggers, both collectively and face-to-face?

Above all, one should acknowledge that many, and perhaps most, tea-baggers are not the right-wing enemy, they are the victims of the right-wing along with the vast majority of the rest of us.

Face it: Dick Armey, Glenn Beck, FAUX News, and the billionaires that are funding the tea-bag movement have accomplished a truly astonishing feat. They have persuaded millions of the victims of the banksters, big pharma, insurance, energy conglomerates, etc. to protest in behalf of their oppressors, and against their potential liberators and their own self-interest. One could almost admire the well-funded geniuses who pulled this off, but for the fact that they are greedy, unprincipled and ruthless bastards.

Progressives and tea-baggers share two fundamental complaints against the corporate oligarchy: economic injustice and disenfranchisement. The “powers-that-be” have effectively deprived the vast majority of American citizens of their fair share of the national wealth, and they have excluded “We the People” from the political process. Progressives are well aware of these injustices, and their political programs are directed to the alleviation of these abuses.. On the other hand, Dick Armey’s “Freedom Works” and the other puppet-masters behind the tea-bag movement hide these just grievances behind a smoke screen of epithets, irrelevancies and empty slogans: “socialists!,” “communists!,” “fascism,” “liberal elites,” “ACORN,” “big government.”

When dealing with a tea-bagger, perhaps the most effective tactical maneuver is to “parry” these accusations gently and, if possible, with an affirmative response and then to move on to economic issues.

Case-in-point: if you are asked “are you for abortion?,” answer directly, “no I am not.” The question is ambiguous, and in one interpretation it is doubtful that anyone ever needs to answer otherwise. In a strict sense, absolutely no one believes that abortion, per se, is a good thing. No woman ever attempted to get pregnant for no other reason than to enjoy the ordeal of having an abortion. At the very least, abortion is an inconvenience, and at worse, murder. Therein lies the controversy. Advice: move on before you get bogged down in that controversy. It is not relevant to the essential political issues now before us.

Likewise for the issues of “God, guns and gays.”

In conversation with a tea-bagger, remember that “A soft answer turneth away wrath.” Don’t try to engage in an academic discussion. Evidence and rules of inference mean little to a typical tea-bagger, who regards science and intellect as an elitist conspiracy of “eggheads.” In such an encounter, what you are dealing with is not a coherent world-view, but with incoherent yet justifiable rage, skillfully re-directed toward the innocent. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jews. In the post-confederate South, it was the blacks. At the time of Senator Joe McCarthy, it was “pinkos” and “com-symps” (“communist sympathizers”), and now it is “liberal elites.” It is a familiar and effective tactic known as “scapegoating.”

Faced with such an attitude, I have found that questions are much more effective than assertions. Given the simplistic, exaggerated, and ill-defined notions behind the slogans and labels, it can be rather easy to come to some vague sort of agreement and then move on to the essential issues: the restoration of economic justice and responsive government “of, by, and for the people.”

Because the tea-bag phenomenon issues from the gut and not from the head, most attempts to talk plain common sense to these true believers will be futile – like trying to persuade a “young earth” creationist to accept evolution. While most will be unmoved by evidence and well-directed questions, a few might. After all, it should not be all that difficult to articulate a few shared political convictions or to identify the culprits who are exploiting us and who have captured our goverment. The typical tea-bagger is a follower, not an original or independent thinker. Thus, once a few of them come to recognize the manipulative corporate “men behind the curtain,” others may join them. It is just possible that a significant minority of the puppets might cut their strings and turn upon the puppet-masters.

So how does one talk to a tea-bagger? Let’s try this out with an imaginary conversation:

Progressive: Please explain to me, just what is your complaint against the liberals and the Obama administration.

Tea-Bagger: They are a bunch of socialists and fascists who are taxing us to death, want to take away our guns, give our jobs to illegal aliens, and tear up our Constitution.

P: Let’s take these one at a time. First, guns. Clearly, the Second Amendment says that we have the right to own guns. I agree. So if you can show my any instances of a law or government activity involved in seizing the guns of a law-abiding citizen I will join you in opposing it. Are you aware of any such law or activity supported by the federal government?

I am also opposed to illegal immigration. But do you believe that immigrants would cross our borders illegally if there were no jobs available to them? If not, then isn’t this a problem of illegal employers as much as illegal immigrants? So will you join me in demanding strict enforcement of employment laws?

TB: Surely you must agree that we are paying too much in taxes, and that much of our tax money is thrown away on waste, fraud and abuse.

P: Yes, I agree. And if we had a fair tax system, you and I would pay less in federal taxes – unless you are much richer than I believe you are. Did you know that most millionaires and billionaires pay a smaller percentage of their incomes to taxes than average Joes like us? And most corporations evade their taxes through loopholes or by incorporating offshore in foreign countries? Yet these corporations and rich folks use the public roads, benefit from public police and fire protection, are protected by the military, and hire workers educated at public expense. Shouldn’t they pay a fair share for these benefits? As for waste, fraud and abuse of government funds, who approves except, of course, the scoundrels who benefit? And clearly that’s neither of us. So if you want to crack down on those scoundrels, I am completely with you.

TB: Now look , everybody knows that Obama is a socialist, or maybe even a fascist!

P: Help me out here. What do you mean by “socialist”?

TB: Socialism is when the government runs everything. No private enterprise.

P: Well, unless I am mistaken, you’re not describing the Obama program. Can you cite any Obama proposal to abolish private businesses? I can’t think of any. Seems to me that the federal government is, if anything, too much under the control of private business – big business, I mean. Big drug companies, big insurance, big energy, Wall Street, the six corporations that control 90% of the mass media. Meanwhile, small business is being squeezed. Family businesses on Main Street, perhaps yours, can’t compete with Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc. If your complaint is that the government in Washington, under the Bushes, Clinton and now Obama, are not looking after the little guy, I’m with you. But is this because of creeping socialism, or is it instead, because of unregulated national and international corporations?

TB: About fascism?

P: Well, “fascism” as a political movement originated with Mussolini in Italy, who defined it as the merging of corporate and government interests. And yes, as we just noted, so defined, it is a genuine threat. But are the Republicans, and the sponsors of the Tea Bag movement such as Freedom Works, a solution to corporate control of government, or in fact a large part of the problem? Which party in the Congress is responsive more to the corporate contributors than to the voters?

TB: Both are.

P: Sadly, that is true. But which party is more responsive? Show me a politician of either party that ignores the interests of the voters and is “bought” by corporate contributors, and we will both do our best to separate that politician from his office. Agreed?

TB: When I say “fascism,” I mean that Obama and the liberals are taking away our freedoms.

P: So who set aside trial by jury, habeas corpus, the Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure, the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment? Not Obama. True, he hasn’t restored all of these and other violations of the Constitution that were put in place by the Bush administration, and I am damned angry that he hasn’t. But can you cite for me one instance of an attempt by the Obama administration to take away our Constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms? If you can, then I will join you in protesting such an outrage.

TB: Now look, you are just playing with my mind. I am a conservative, and I want to take our country back from you liberal elites.

P: “Liberal?” “Conservative?” I’m not sure I understand what these words mean any more. So let me tell you what I do believe, and I will leave it to you to decide what label to pin on me. Most fundamentally, I endorse the founding documents of our republic: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thus I believe that it is the function of government to secure the rights of each citizen to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Furthermore, in the words of the Preamble to the Constitution, it is the function of government to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” With the late Barbara Jordan, I affirm that “my faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.”

Now isn’t that what you would call a “conservative” point of view? And if some wealthy and powerful individuals and trans-national corporations attempt to “buy out” our Congress, our courts, and yes, our Chief Executive, then, with Barbara Jordan, “I am not going to … be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

You want your country back? So do I. But “back” from whom and from what? Sure, we have our differences, but these are distractions from the central political issues of our time about which, I submit, we agree. We both support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We both agree that the wealth produced cooperatively by workers, investors, educators and government in the national economy should be fairly distributed. We both agree that the government of the United States, in particular the Congress, belongs to the people, not to corporations and most assuredly not to trans-national corporations. And we both believe in free markets and open competition, both of which are subverted by the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the very wealthy.

We have come a long way from the ideals of the founding of our republic, and it will be a long and arduous struggle to get our country back.

Will you join me and other so-called “liberals” in this effort? And if not, please explain to me why not?

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

– Richard Feynman

The same sort of public relations wizardry that once convinced a sizeable portion of Americans that cigarette smoking was harmless, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, and that John Kerry’s war record was fraudulent, is now convincing an increasing number of our citizens that global warming is at least of little consequence, or, at most, a massive hoax.

This trend is reported by the Pew Research Center which, in August, 2006, found that 77% of the public believed that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming. In October, 2009, that number had dropped to 57%. In the same period, the percentage of those who denied that there is such evidence increased from 17% to 33%. An early Pew poll found that “global warming ranked dead last among 40 concerns ranked by the 1503 respondents to the poll.”

Unfortunately, as John Adams observed, “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Here are some of those stubborn facts:

• The decade of the 2000s was the warmest on record, containing eight of the ten warmest years.
• The summer Arctic ice cap is likely to disappear completely in 30 to 40 years. This alarming trend is reported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and McGill University (Canada). Ice reflects 80% of solar radiation, while the open sea absorbs 80% of the radiation, which means that an open Arctic Ocean is certain to heat up the atmosphere.
• Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means that it “captures” incoming solar radiation. This is fortunate, for without atmospheric CO2, most of the earth would be too cold to support human life. These facts were discovered by John Tyndal in 1859 and confirmed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. But with the advent of the industrial revolution and the massive consumption of fossil fuels, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide has almost doubled to nearly 390 parts per million today.
• Methane is about 22 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and vast amounts of methane are being released in the warming arctic tundra and from the warming oceans (in the form of methane cathrate).

Climate change skeptics have succeeded in convincing much of the public that global warming is a live issue of contention among climate scientists. The facts tell us otherwise. For example, in December, 2004, Science magazine (AAAS) reported:

The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the AAAS all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

… [While these reports] might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions, [that] hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change.”

… Of all the [928] papers, 75% .. either explicitly or implicitly accept[ed] the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. (My emphasis)

Furthermore, according to a survey conducted by Peter Doran of the University of Chicago 97% of climatologists active in research concur that global warming is real and that human activity plays a role in it.

While I could go on with this recitation, it is not my task to offer yet another argument that global warming is a fact. Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers support that conclusion. These papers are by qualified climate scientists, which I am not. No citation here of scientific data will persuade a single individual determined not to be persuaded. So instead, I pose a different question: how credible is the denialists’ rejection of this scientific consensus?

No skeptic has ever offered me a plausible explanation as to how thousands of climate specialists from around the world — the vast majority of such specialists — can all be so profoundly mistaken about conclusions from research, both independent and coordinated, conducted at the cost of billions of dollars. Not that there is a shortage of implausible explanations.

For example, William Bennett (the Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration) recently told Sean Hannity on FOX that all those scientists were “driven by ideology,” though he never identified the ideology that united the scientists from dozens of different nations and cultures. He did, however, compare all those scientists to the Nazi doctors who performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

A more common explanation is that climate scientists pretend to believe in global warming in order to get research grants. But clearly, if that is the researchers’ motivation, there is much more cash to be found from the energy corporations and their foundations. Moreover, the “grant-search” explanation begs an even greater mystery: What could possibly motivate the funding agencies (primarily governments) into encouraging gullible scientists to conclude that the climate is warming due to human effects? Most governments, and especially the US government, have a stake in the status-quo and in placating international corporations and industries.

In a sense, however, William Bennett is correct: scientists the world over are united by an “ideology,” though “ideology” is hardly the correct word. That “ideology” is what Jacob Bronowski called “the habit of truth:”

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice or to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science. Individually, scientists no doubt have human weaknesses. . . But in a world in which state and dogma seem always either to threaten or to cajole, the body of scientists is trained to avoid and organized to resist every form of persuasion but the fact. A scientist who breaks this rule, as [Soviet agronomist, Trofim] Lysenko has done, is ignored. . .

The values of science derive neither from the virtues of its members, nor from the finger-wagging codes of conduct by which every profession reminds itself to be good. They have grown out of the practice of science, because they are the inescapable conditions for its practice.¹

Science, albeit imperfect, is the human institution best organized and equipped to discover and validate truths about “the nature of nature” including, the nature of the global atmosphere and climate.

Is the scientific affirmation of anthropogenic global warming a “hoax,” as Sen. Inhofe would have us believe? Possibly. But to believe this one would also have to believe either that (a) hundreds of millions of dollars of funded and peer-reviewed research have systematically led to a false conclusion, or (b) that thousands of scientists from around the world are engaged in a giant conspiracy, or (c) that all these scientists are simply fools. Sorry, but that is much more than I can swallow.

On a personal note, I am convinced that these scientists are neither knaves nor fools, for I know many of them and have worked with them. In 1991 I organized a scholarly conference on Environmental Ethics at Cal State Fullerton. Keynoting that event were Stephen Schneider (climate scientist, Stanford University) and John Holdren (now the President’s Science Advisor). Previously I worked for two years under a National Science Foundation grant at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, where I got to know several climate scientists, including Steve Schneider (then at the National Center for Atmospheric Research) and John Birks, a collaborator with Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Laureate. While my work was in applied seismology, not climate science, I was nonetheless able to gain a moral measure of these individuals. They were neither knaves nor fools. They were, each and every one of them, scrupulous scientists. Moreover, they had families and hoped for a prosperous future for their children and their posterity. Accordingly, they were and are appalled at what their research was and is disclosing about the future prospects of the earth and of humanity.

And so should we all be.

How then do we explain the persistence of global warming denial? Upton Sinclair’s observation is instructive: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Thus the behavior of tobacco industry executives when presented with laboratory and statistical evidence from cancer researchers, and the response of the chemical industry to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the effect of CFCs on atmospheric ozone. Thus the proliferation of industry sponsored and scientifically trained “biostitutes” (to use Robert Kennedy Jr’s term) many of whom, I am confident, sincerely and firmly believe what they are paid to believe. This enlistment of scientific “experts” has been effective for, as Ross Gelbspan noted in 1995:

The people who run the world’s oil and coal companies know that the march of science, and of political action, may be slowed by disinformation. In the last year and a half, one of the leading oil industry public relations outlets, the Global Climate Coalition, has spent more than a million dollars to downplay the threat of climate change. It expects to spend another $850,000 on the issue next year. Similarly, the National Coal Association spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993. In 1993 alone, the American Petroleum Institute, just one of fifty-four industry members of the GCC, paid $1.8 million to the public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller partly in an effort to defeat a proposed tax on fossil fuels….

These 1994 figures grossly understate the current industry PR expenditures. Continuing:

For the most part the industry has relied on a small band of skeptics—Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Sherwood Idso, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, among others—who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis. Through their frequent pronouncements in the press and on radio and television, they have helped to create the illusion that the question is hopelessly mired in unknowns.

And what if brute reality raises its ugly head? Just suppress it. As Andrew Revkin of the New York Times reports:

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The “biostitution” of climate science should come as no surprise. We’ve seen it with the tobacco, chemical, atomic, advertising and financial services industries. Why should the coal and petroleum industries be any different?

Nonetheless, the “stubborn facts” of atmospheric chemistry and physics are what they are, totally indifferent to public relations campaigns and their effect upon public opinion. “In nature,” Robert Ingersoll observed, “there are neither rewards nor punishments. There are consequences.” The world governments and multi-national corporations may choose to ignore those consequences. Nature will not.

That being so, “climate skeptics” are doing a great disservice to humanity as they obstruct and forestall urgent action in the face of a planetary emergency. Skepticism in science is, in principle, commendable, as long as it is conducted responsibly according to rigors of scientific method — of Bronowski’s “habit of truth.” But I find little if any such “responsibility” among the climate skeptics. Not William Bennett, not Sean Hannity and his FOX colleagues, most assuredly not Senator Inhofe, and not at such regressive think-tanks as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute.

If global warming is as real and as serious as the consensus of climate scientists say that it is, then unconstrained free market industrialization has much to answer for, and mitigation of the dire consequences thereof will require the kind of coordinated action at the national and international level that free-market absolutists deplore (as I argue in my essay, “Climate Reality Bites the Libertarians“). What is required is a world-wide economic and industrial mobilization on the scale of that which took place in the United States after the Pearl Harbor attack. Instead, what we are offered are pipsqueak palliatives, too little and too late.

Today, as the Copenhagen fiasco indicates, the deniers and their corporate sponsors appear to have the upper hand. Thus the public belief in and concern about global warming continue to erode. Quite frankly, I am very pessimistic.

And yet, the aforementioned history of corporate abuse offers some hope. The public eventually got the message: cigarettes kill, and today the per-capita consumption of cigarettes in the United States is about a third of what it was in 1965. Eventually, Rachel Carson was vindicated, as DDT was removed from the market. Likewise, CFCs were eventually phased out.

Eventually!

Trouble is, if the climate scientists are to be believed, an “eventual” solution to global warming is no solution at all.

We face the acute urgency of NOW. The lost Bush/Cheney decade has already condemned humanity to untold misery. But it is not too late to avoid still worse catastrophes. Meanwhile, the carbon continues to be pumped into the global atmosphere, the seas are becoming still more acidic, and “peak oil” is upon us. Time is common enemy of all mankind.

1. Science and Human Values, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 59-60.

Why, in the midst of the greatest economic emergency in seventy years, with the public sector of the U.S. economy starved for funds required for economic recovery, and with urgent global climate and energy crises directly before us, have we failed to benefit from a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War? Why are we instead engaged in two wars in nations that pose no threat to us?

It appears that Einstein was right: everything has changed except our modes of thinking, and thus, as he warned, “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

The good news is that we have the means to avoid catastrophe. The far worse news is that there is little evidence that the political and economic structures in place will allow us to escape that catastrophe

TIT FOR TAT

Last September, President Obama announced that the United States was cancelling plans to establish a ballistic missile defense system (BMD) in Poland and the Czech Republic. This decision, which appalled Republicans and neo-cons in the U.S., along with many Czech and Polish politicians, delighted peace activists both in the U. S. and throughout the world.

Also delighted were the Russians, who had regarded the missile defense shield, first proposed by George Bush (the lesser), as a provocation, aimed at neutralizing the Russian strategic missile capability. The Russians were unconvinced by Bush’s assurance that the BMD was designed as a defense against a missile attack from Iran, a skepticism that was shared by many American critics.

Obama’s decision to cancel the BMD was shortly followed by a Russian announcement that it would not deploy missiles in the Baltic city of Kaliningrad, along with an indication that this decision was in response to Obama’s announcement regarding the bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Thus began the first two moves of a de-escalation strategy known to game-theorists and political scientists as “Tit for Tat,” whereby an initiation of a conciliatory act is responded to in kind, and so on reciprocally, until one player elects to take advantage of the cooperating opponent (i.e., “defects”).

This particular game came to an abrupt halt the following month when Vice President Biden, in a visit to the Czech Republic, assured the Czech President that the U.S. would, after all, install a “modified” missile defense shield.

One can only speculate as to what might have happened had the American/Russian Tit For Tat game continued. Following the Kaliningrad announcement, it was Obama’s “turn.” Instead of reneging on the original BMD decision, Obama might have announced that ICBMs would henceforth be equipped with in-flight “abort” mechanisms, to minimize the chance of an accidental nuclear war (which, as I have argued elsewhere, is the most likely cause of a global thermonuclear catastrophe).

Russia’s turn? Presumably the same. Then, to “up the ante,” perhaps an agreement to cooperate with the U.S. and NATO in their opposition the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

And so on. The opportunities and options for reciprocating “Tit For Tat” cooperation and de-escalation are endless.

So why haven’t these opportunities been pursued and accomplished? The question encompasses nothing less than the history of the Cold War and the enormously complicated theories and ideologies of international diplomacy. However, I have a simple suggestion: there is too much wealth and power invested in diplomatic “business as usual” to allow significant change.

THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

Great power rivalries have often been described as “prisoner’s dilemmas” – a thought experiment also familiar to game theorists and political scientists. This is the paradigm example:

Two conspiring prisoners are separately brought before a judge, who presents each prisoner with this proposal: “If you confess and implicate your accomplice and he remains silent, I will sentence him to ten years and release you. If you both confess, I will sentence each of you to five years. And if you both remain silent, I will sentence each of you to one year.”

If you reflect on this “deal,” you will find some fascinating implications, both moral and practical. First of all, “the best is the enemy of the good”; the more each prisoner is inclined to achieve the best outcome for himself, the less likely he is to get it. Second, the best outcome for both (both silent, a year each) is not the best outcome for each (release). Third, the more each prisoner trusts the other the more likely the best outcome for both (i.e., both silent). (I examine The Prisoner’s Dilemma in more detail here).

The Prisoner’s dilemma is much more than an idle thought-experiment. You can see it in action almost every week on TV in “Law and Order” or other such crime dramas. It’s called “plea bargaining.” We all know the script: “here’s the deal – you give up the other guy and we’ll go easy on you. Your buddy is in the other room right now, and the first to cooperate gets the deal. Your time is running out.”

This is how the prisoner’s dilemma might apply to an arms race: During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had a choice: to arm or to disarm. Disarming, while the other did not, invited attack and/or economic and political defeat (loss of global dominance). Mutual disarmament allowed national resources to be invested in the domestic economies. Mutual arming – i.e., the arms race – resulted in the impoverishment of both economies and a constant “hair-trigger” danger of a catastrophic thermonuclear exchange.

As we all know, it was the last option that was followed by the great powers until, with the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, the Soviet Union unilaterally disarmed. To the amazement of the Cold Warriors on both sides, this did not, as feared, result in an attack by the U.S. and NATO nor the defeat of Russia, though it did accompany the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Today, a pale vestige of the Cold War remains, as both the United States and Russia still have strategic nuclear missiles armed and ready and, as the dispute over the Czech and Polish BMD sites testify, each side is suspicious of the intentions of the other. Both sides face severe economic crises, and thus have much to gain by disarming and directing their national resources to dealing with domestic issues. There is much more cooperation and trust today between the United States and Russia than there was during the Cold War. Accordingly, the time is right, at long last, to prevent the outbreak of a new Cold War and to secure a lasting peace between the United States and Russia.

So why was Joe Biden dispatched to Prague to put an end to the developing “benign circle” of Tit For Tat mutual de-escalation?

That question is a small piece of a much larger question: Why does the United States government find it necessary to spend close to a trillion dollars on “national defense” – roughly equal to the military budgets of all other nations combined – while this nation is in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in seventy years, and as the entire planet faces the catastrophic consequences of climate change and end of abundant fossil energy sources? We are told that we are engaged in a “war on terror” against a band of outlaws, hiding in caves and remote tribal villages. Why, then, do we build multi-billion dollar nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers to use against an “enemy” without a navy, and build fighters and bombers to use against an “enemy” without an air force?

EISENHOWER HAD IT RIGHT

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

The answer is compelling: Obama and Biden chose not to play Tit For Tat with the Russians, simply because “the powers that be” in Washington, Wall Street, and the Military-Industrial Complex do not desire a de-escalation, and furthermore would be rather pleased to see a resumption of the Cold War.

I understand that this sounds unspeakably paranoid. But consider the stakes involved. In January, 2002, the Pentagon auditors admitted that some 2.3 trillion dollars of defense budgets were “unaccounted for.” That’s “trillion” with a “T” – 2.3 million times a million. Now where do you suppose all those trillions went? And as we are well aware, billions upon billions of public money is going into the private hands of the “contractors” in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for Iraq, Halliburton, Inc., now awash in public cash, would be bankrupt due to the mismanagement of its former CEO, one Richard Cheney. And Cheney is by no means the only beneficiary of Pentagon largesse. In short, enormous fortunes and thousands of careers, both military and industrial, depend upon a continuation of strategic business as usual.

Now of course, nobody wants a nuclear war. But face it, the threat of nuclear war, or of nuclear terrorism, is a gift to the military industrial complex that keeps on giving. No threat, no fear – no appropriations.

As the late economist, Kenneth Boulding, commented to me some twenty-five years ago, “the American and Soviet military establishments are symbiotic allies ‘at war’ with their own domestic economies.”

Not only does a hypertrophic military suck the lifeblood out of our domestic economy, still worse it succumbs to Maslow’s rule: “to a carpenter, all problems can be solved with a hammer.” Madeleine Albright admitted as much when she said to Colin Powell, “what’s the point of [having] this superb military … if we can’t use it?” (Albright, Madam Secretary, p. 182) Diplomacy? Negotiations? International law? Treaties? The United Nations? Fagetaboutit! Send the Marines!

Face it, if there were no “enemy” to keep the military-industrial complex humming along would it not be necessary to invent one? Come to think of it, perhaps, in large part, the enemy has been invented. During the Cold War, the Department of Defense published an annual report, Soviet Military Power: An Analysis of the Threat. Primarily addressed to the Congress, it was in effect a wish list and a sales pitch for an ever-increasing military budget. When, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the military capability of the Soviets was closely inspected, the DoD assessment was found to be wildly inflated. (See my “What About The Russians? Personal Encounters“).

And now, the “necessary enemy” is Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Whatever would we do without OBL? Had Osama (“wanted dead or alive” – George Bush) been captured or killed shortly after the 9/11 attacks, what then would have become of “the War on Terror:” Gitmo, “enhanced interrogation,” The Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, suspension of habeas corpus. How might the 2004 election have turned out? So we ask today, how was it possible for OBL to escape when he was surrounded at Tora Bora? And how is it possible for an individual with failing kidneys on dialysis to survive in the Afghan wilderness for eight years? “If there were no enemy, would it not be necessary to invent one?” Just wondering.

SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES

There is a need to create ideals even when you can’t see any route by which to achieve them, because if there are no ideals then there can be no hope and then one would be completely in the dark, in a hopeless blind alley.”

– Andrei Sakharov

If these “paranoid” suspicions are even partially correct – if the military-industrial complex has a death-grip on our economy and politics – how can we possibly escape? After all, just about the only thriving manufacturing enterprise remaining in the United States is the defense industry. If the Department of Defense appropriations were cut to a “reasonable” one-third, would not unemployment skyrocket and tax revenues plunge? Would not our already sick economy lapse into critical condition? In short, can we afford peace?

We can and we must, for the environmental and resource perils immediately before us far outweigh any military threats, either real or imagined.

If managed skillfully, a drastic cut in the military budget, far from aggravating the current economic crisis, can lead us out of it. After all, we’ve done it before. Just as, in 1942, the U.S. economy mobilized from a peacetime to a war economy in months, and then, in 1945, reversed the process in less time and led to a sustained era of prosperity, we can do it again.

What it will take is a unified sense of national purpose – a realization that as we take leave of a fictional crisis, we are facing an actual global emergency: global warming and the end of the petroleum age.

And just as World War II ended the great depression of the thirties, the new crises might put an end to the present economic emergency and inaugurate a renaissance of education, research, development, and industrialization, which means innovation, jobs and investments. New sources of energy and modes of transportation might be developed and installed. The next generations must then be educated to deal with the new world that we are leaving to them.

Simply stated, the military-industrial complex must not be dismantled, it must be converted.

All this is possible. But as long as the present political and economic structures prevail, I fear that it is very unlikely.

Quite frankly, I don’t see a way out. I’m not saying that there is no escape, just I can’t see one. But history has a way of surprising us. In 1933, new leaders took power in Germany and in the United States. One led his nation to ruin, and the other to renewal. “Two roads diverge…”

I once believed that Barack Obama might be another FDR who might inspire and unite the American people to overcome the dreadful crisis that he inherited from the disastrous Bush regime. But now, that hope has faded as Obama has apparently been co-opted by “the enemy.”

As I have often noted before, the situation before us appears to be hopeless: as hopeless as George Washington’s prospects at Valley Forge, as hopeless as Gandhi’s struggle against the British Empire, as hopeless as Martin Luther King’s Birmingham bus boycott, as hopeless as Andrei Sakharov’s protest against Soviet oppression.

And yet, somehow, they all ultimately prevailed.

In the final analysis, the oligarchs who own our government and control the media, however wealthy and powerful, are few. Their victims – all the rest of us – are many, and we are the ultimate source of their wealth and, through our passive acquiescence, of their power.

Shakespeare’s Cassius spoke to us as well a Brutus, when he said: “men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

The People (well, maybe a small fraction of one percent of them) have spoken, however confused and inchoate the message.

And so, in response, I have a simple proposal: let’s make all tax payments voluntary.

Grover Norquist of “Americans for Tax Reform” proclaims that he wants to “drown government in the bathtub,” by which he must mean abolish government services. What gives government the right, we are often asked, to seize our property through taxation? “It’s your money!” Bob Dole shouted. And George Bush repeatedly asked, “who is better qualified to spend your money? You, or the government?” To the libertarian-right, tax payments for any purpose other then the protection of individual rights to life, liberty and property, is theft. (More on the “qualification” of the government to “spend your money” here).

No one likes to pay taxes. But for that matter, no one likes to pay the mortgage on one’s house, utility bills, or car payments. However, we all understand that if we do not make these payments, we will be evicted from our homes, or the electricity will be shut off, or our cars will be repossessed – and justly so.

So here is my proposal: make all tax payments voluntary. If all those April 15 “tea party” tax protesters find tax-paying so onerous, then they should be excused from paying taxes.

The only provision is that if they do so, they are no longer entitled to the services that are supported by taxes.

To wit:

• They may no longer use the public highways.
• In case of fire, they can not call the fire department to save their homes.
• In case of home invasion, armed robbery or other criminal threats, they can not call the police for help.
• They can not sue for damages in court. (Judges, bailiffs, court reporters, etc. are on the public payroll).
• They can not hire workers that were educated in public schools or universities.
• They can not use computers (micro-circuitry developed by NASA) or the internet (originated in DARPA, a federal agency).
• They can no longer purchase prescription drugs (certified safe and effective by the FDA).
• They can no longer purchase meat and dairy products that have been inspected by the Dept. Of Agriculture.
• They can not visit the National Parks or National Forests.
• They can not purchase airline tickets, (since that industry is regulated by the FAA) or use public airports.
• Their bank accounts may not be protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
• For that matter, they cannot use United States currency, since it is guaranteed by the Federal Government. Instead, they will have to conduct all transactions by barter.

And that’s just the beginning of a long list.

Any takers?

Of course, it will be impossible to deprive the tax protesters of all government services – in some cases they will, of necessity, be “free riders.” For example, the air they breathe will be cleaner due to the enforcement of clean air standards, paid for by other citizens. Similarly, they will be safer from foreign invasion thanks to a military paid for by others.

All free-loading tax protesters who are caught using the above listed services, will be assessed charges. In other words, they will be required to pay their taxes.

Which kinda leaves things pretty much where they were to begin with, doesn’t it?

Politicians like Bob Dole and George Bush, and the FAUX News screech-merchants keep telling us that taxes are “your money!” – in other words, that we are entitled to keep it. Activists such as Grover Norquist and his “American for Tax Reform” demand that taxes be cut, and cut, and cut again, until, as Norquist puts it, government is reduced to the size where we can “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” which I take to mean, eliminate government. All this, notwithstanding the obvious and manifest public benefits that are “purchased” by tax revenues.

And yet, somehow, this subversive nonsense strikes a responsive chord among our fellow citizens. Why is this?

To be sure, many citizens are not opposed to paying their taxes, per se. Their complaint is that so much of their tax assessment is lost to waste, fraud and abuse. But this complaint is legitimately voiced by all citizens, regardless of political persuasion – right, left, and center. Everyone, that is, except those scoundrels who benefit from that waste, fraud and abuse. The solution, however, is not to abolish taxes — not, that is, if the above listed services are to be supported. The answer is improved law enforcement and harsh penalties. Put bluntly, where there is waste, fraud and abuse, we should root it out and then nail the bastards – including Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton and other “contractors” who seem to have “lost”a few billions of “our” money in Iraq.

The more outrageous injustice in our tax system is the unfair distribution of the tax burden: a tax structure that allows the mega-billionaire to pay a smaller percentage of his income than his secretary or his house keeper. The traditional principle of tax assessment is that it be based upon the ability to pay. It is self-evidently true that the value of a constant sum of money, say a thousand dollars, is far greater to a poor person than to a wealthy person. If a Wal Mart clerk loses a grand, she and her children will go without food for several days. If Bill Gates loses that amount, it is of no consequence whatever to him. Hence the graduated income tax rates, and the inherent injustice of Steve Forbes’ “flat tax.” Similarly, the wealthy individual’s income from investments should not be taxed less than the poor workers’ salaried income. And yet, more and more, the tax burden is shifting away from the wealthy to the poor and middle class. This is legitimate reason for complaint and reform. But meanwhile, those aforementioned public services must be paid for.

Even so, there is in this country a tradition of the clever and resourceful tax evader as some sort of a hero. Ronald Reagan said as much in 1985 as he all but advocated rebellion against the very government over which he presided:

The members who spoke in this capital [Williamsburg, Virginia] said ‘no’ to taxes because they loved freedom. They argued, “why should the fruits of our labors go to the crown across the sea.” Well, in the same sense we ask today, “why should the fruits of our labors go to that capital across the [Potomac] river?” . . . . We, like the patriots of yesterday, are struggling to increase the measure of liberty enjoyed by our fellow citizens. We’re struggling, like them, for self-government — self-government for the family, self-government for the individual and the small business, and the corporation… What people earn is their money. Seventy-two years after its inception, what is our Federal tax system? It is a system that yields great amounts of revenue, even greater amounts of disorder, discontent and disobedience. [Tax cheating] is not considered bad behavior. After all, goes this thinking, what’s wrong with cheating a system that is itself a cheat? That isn’t a sin, it’s a duty! (Transcribed from a tape of Reagan’s speech, NPR, May 30, 1985)

This was a message that was repeated throughout the realm in the astroturf “tea parties” on Wednesday.

And so, by hiring a coterie of skillful accountants and lawyers to seek out loopholes, or by setting up phony off-shore corporations, the enterprising tax evader is admired by many for striking a blow against the despised and unworthy “big government.” In fact, he is transferring his tax burden to the rest of us, the honest taxpayers. Somehow, too many of us seem to forget as he evades his tax responsibility, legally or otherwise, he continues to take advantages of the services paid for by the rest of us: the roads and bridges, the protection of his property and person by the police and fire departments, the knowledge and skill of his workers, most of whom were educated at public expense. Some hero!

Pause for a moment and reflect upon what you are paying for with the federal income tax that your filed before Wednesday, along with the property and sales taxes that you pay to your state and community: the roads, schools, public safety, safe food and drugs, secure investments, parks and museums, clean air and water, and so much more. And if you are annoyed by your tax burden, direct your anger, not at the government which provides these services, but at the tax cheats and the politicians who write the tax laws that benefit their “sponsors”– their campaign contributors.

“Government” is not the culprit – “the problem,” as Ronald Reagan put it. The authentic villains are the free-loaders who “purchase” the tax loopholes and the sweetheart government contracts through their political “contributions,” and who thus leave it to the rest us to pay for the vital public services of which all of us, honest and dishonest alike, are the beneficiaries. Included among the villains are demagogues of the right-wing media who incite masses of gullible “sheeple” to protest against their own self-interest, and against their democratically elected leaders.

Are you “mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore”? Then don’t simply act angry. In addition, act smart. Don’t blindly demand the abolition of taxes. Public services, supported by taxes, are both desirable and, in many cases, indispensable. Instead, demand tax justice, and insist that public officials either get with the reform program or step aside and be replaced by those who will.

The collapse of market fundamentalism in economies everywhere is putting the Chicago School theology on trial. Its big lie has been exposed by facts on two levels. The Chicago Boys’ claim that helping the rich will also help the poor is not only exposed as not true, it turns out that market fundamentalism hurts not only the poor and the powerless; it hurts everyone, rich and poor, albeit in different ways . . . The fruits of Friedman test are in – and they are all rotten.

– Henry Liu

An economist and his guide, while hunting in Africa, fall into an elephant trap: twenty feet deep with vertical walls.

“That does it,” says the guide, “we’re done for. No escape, no food, no chance of being found in time.”

“Nonsense,” said the economist, “I can get us out of here.”

“And how do you propose to do that?,” the guide asks.

The economist replies: “Well, first we posit a ladder.”

Economists are no more inclined than the rest of us to live in a fantasy world – not, that is, as they go about the practical business of living their everyday lives. But when economists write technical papers and teach university courses, they often enter a theoretical realm of abstract concepts such as “economic man” (homo economicus) and “perfect markets,” articulated with virtuoso advanced mathematical manipulations. Very elegant, and very unreal.

Many economists, perhaps most, appreciate the limitations of economic theory in explaining and predicting social behavior and political trends. Some economists, however, claim to find in traditional (i.e. “neo-classical”) economic theory, the key to articulating and proposing public policy. It’s called “market absolutism,” and it has dominated American politics since the Reagan administration. It has also led this nation to the brink of economic disaster.

Market absolutism has led us to this crisis because its proponents in academia, politics and the media have been bewitched by theoretical concepts that apply imperfectly, if at all, to the real world in which we live and work. In particular: they posit an imaginary creature (“economic man”) that inhabits a mythical environment (the “perfect market.”)

Economic Man (Homo Economicus)

In neo-classical economic theory, “economic man” is a hypothetical individual who is a complete egoist, motivated solely by the self-interested desire to maximize his “preference satisfaction.” Homo Econ’s motivation is manifested by his willingness to pay for these satisfactions in a “free market.” Neo-classical theory also postulates that “all goods that matter to individuals … must be capable of being bought and sold in markets” and “anything that is valued instrumentally … can be handled by economics, be it acts of friendship or love.” (Freeman and Edwards. For citation of sources, follow this link). “Economic man’s” behavior is described, in neo-classical jargon, as “rational.” By implication, the self-sacrificing behavior of saints and heroes is “irrational.”

Clearly, “economic man” exists nowhere outside of Ayn Rand’s novels and, perchance, on Wall Street. And this is fortunate, for we wouldn’t want him for a neighbor.

In fact, there is much more to a fulfilled and moral life than self-interested “preference satisfaction.” Such a life also includes values that can not be priced in a free market. Among them:

* Truth. Scientists and scholars offer evidence and sound arguments, not bids. In courts of law, purchased verdicts are not only invalid, they are crimes.

* Civic Values such as justice, due process, civil rights, and the franchise, are not for sale. The governing impulse of economic man (qua consumer) is “I want.” The governing impulse of the citizen is “we need.”

* Distributive Justice. The economic concepts of “efficiency” and “utility maximization” do not touch upon the moral issue of the just distribution of wealth. “Just compensation” and “fair distribution” are moral, not an economic, concepts. A slave economy can, in classical economic theory, be perfectly “efficient” (i.e., “Pareto Optimal”).

* Love, friendship and loyalty which is bought is less valuable than that which is given freely. As philosopher Mark Sagoff reminds us, “a civilized person might climb the highest mountain, swim this deepest river, or cross the hottest desert for love, sweet love. He might do anything, indeed, except be willing to pay for it.”

* Moral values, which refer to the worth of persons, are systematically excluded from neo-classical economic theory.

A public policy for “economic man,” systematically detached from criteria of truth, civic value, distributive justice, friendship and loyalty, is a policy that any civilized person should reject, and reject on non-economic grounds. (See my “Why Economics Fails as a Sole Foundation of Public Policy,” for an elaboration of these points and a citation of sources).

The Perfect Market

Neo-classical economists, and their political acolytes, are convinced that “free markets,” completely undisturbed by government interference, yield optimum social and economic results. For example:

“In the free market, the individual would have to produce a good that the other person desired in order to receive a good in return. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market guides all participants in society to promote the best wishes of everyone else by pursuing his own wants and desires.” (Jacob Halbrooks)

“[T]he free market allows more people to satisfy more of their desires, and ultimately to enjoy a higher standard of living than any other social system… We need simply to remember to let the market process work in its apparent magic and not let the government clumsily intervene in it so deeply that it grinds to a halt.” (David Boaz, Libertarianism, a Primer, p. 40, 185.)

“A free market [co-ordinates] the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off… Economic order can emerge as the unintended consequence of the actions of many people, each seeking his own interest.” (Milton and Rose Friedman: Free to Choose, pp 13-14).

History has taught us, time and again, that such assertions are true only in the purely abstract world of neo-classical economic theory. They are not true in the real world that we inhabit. To understand why this is so, we need only list the conditions of “the perfect market” postulated by economic theory.

* All participants are “perfectly rational” egoists – i.e., are “economic men.”

* There are many participants in the market.

* All participants have access to all relevant knowledge.

* There are no transaction costs.

* All transactions are mutually beneficial.

* There are no externalities (i.e., consequences to non-participating “third parties”).

Clearly, there are no “perfect markets” anywhere on earth, apart from the imaginations of economists. For consider:

(a) “Economic man” is a myth, or at the very least extremely rare. As noted above, most individuals engage in economic transactions for several reasons, some of them non-economic.

(b) Participation in markets is restricted to those with the ability to pay. Public policy decisions, on the other hand, should involve the rights and welfare of many who are systematically excluded from market activity; namely, the very young, the very poor, animals, and future generations. Furthermore, unregulated markets are self-eliminating, because capitalists detest competition and strive constantly to eliminate it. The remedy? The enforcement of anti-trust laws and regulation, which means, of course, “interference” by governments in the marketplace.

(c) The multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations industries are devoted to the task of persuading rather than informing. And persuasion involves the withholding of relevant information (e.g. health risks) and the dispensing of distorted and false information. Caveat Emptor!

(d) All transactions in the real world exact costs. Among them are the costs of enforcing the laws required for markets to take place at all (e.g. fair disclosure, patents and copyrights, contracts, civil and criminal courts, etc.), and this of course means government, which is so despised by “free marketeers.”

(e) Transactions are frequently not mutually beneficial, due to fraud (i.e., violation of “relevant knowledge condition”), the remedy of which is civil suits, which requires the “transaction costs” of the enforcement of law and the appeal to courts.

(f) External costs of market transactions are more the rule than the exception. Innocent, non-consenting parties are routinely impacted by economic activity. Among these external costs are environmental pollution, urban decay, public health costs, etc. Third-party “stakeholders” have no say in economic transactions. Their only recourse for protection and compensation is to the sole agency legitimately established to represent all citizens: the government. (See my “Market Failure: The Back of the Invisible Hand).

Summing up: “Economic man” and “perfect markets” are abstract constructs which, due to their clarity and simplicity, allow theoretical economists to devise complex mathematical models. However, they have no counterparts in the real world, which compromises the application of these concepts in public policy.

Case-In Point: Milton Friedman on Free Trade

Foreign trade and currency exchange rates provide a vivid example of the rule, “The theory is beautiful, but reality is baffling.”

According to free market theory, foreign exchange rates should be self-regulating, negative feedback functions, like house thermostats. The heat rises, the furnace shuts off, the heat drops, the furnace kicks in, perpetuo moto.

Similarly with foreign trade. If there is a “trade imbalance,” say between Japan and the United States, as dollars go to Japan and consumer goods are imported to the U.S., the Japanese will acquire a surplus of dollars causing the value of the dollar to fall with respect to the yen. U.S. consumer goods will then be less expensive than Japanese products, thus encouraging a flow of the yen to the U.S. to purchase American goods. Then the value of the dollar will rise until foreign goods once again become competitive. And so on, back and forth, like a thermostat. It’s all perfectly automatic – a “spontaneous order,” as the libertarians call it – no governmental interference (e.g. tariffs) required.

This is how Milton Friedman describes it:

If foreign exchange rates are determined in a free market, they will settle at whatever level will clear the market. The resulting price of the dollar in terms of the yen, say, may temporarily fall below the level justified by the cost in dollars and yen respectively of American and Japanese goods. If so, it will give persons who recognize that situation an incentive to buy dollars and hold them for a while in order to make a profit when the price goes up. By lowering the price in yen on American exports to Japanese, it will stimulate American exports; by raising the price in dollars of Japanese goods, it will discourage imports from Japan. These developments will increase the demand for dollars and so correct the initially low price. (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, p. 47).

In theory, it’s all very neat and so simple: “all things being equal.” But in the real world, “all things” are never equal. Instead, the ecologist’s rule applies: “you can’t do just one thing.”

What if that flow of dollars abroad is accompanied by a dismantling of the U.S. industrial base? Then, when the time arrives for U.S. manufacturing goods to be competitive with foreign goods (due to the weakening of the dollar), there will be no more American-made goods on the market. Moreover, with the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas and the decline of median disposable income, fewer American can afford to buy foreign consumer goods. Regressive tax rates cause the nation’s wealth to flow to the very rich, who send their investments abroad in outsourced industries. A shrinking tax base results in a disintegrating physical infrastructure and a decline in higher education, followed by fewer scientists and engineers, and less basic research and development. Thus today the United States excels only in military technology, as it needlessly spends more on the military than all the rest of the world combined, building 3.5 billion dollar aircraft carriers to fight an “enemy” without an air force, and billion dollar submarines to fight an “enemy” without a navy.

This is what happens when public economic policy is abandoned to “the will of the free market” – an abstraction with, we are expected to believe, a benevolent “mind” of its own. This is what happens when a government puts the fate of the nation’s economy in the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations; individual agents without social conscience and with nothing more than their short-term profits in mind.

In the face of such grim realities, the neat “negative feedback” model of Friedman’s free-trade theory is irrelevant. It belongs to the abstract world of “theory,” not to the real world. In the real world, the thermostat is broken, the furnace will not turn on: down, down, down, goes the temperature.

“Physics Envy:” Formal modeling vs. Empirical Investigation

Neo-classical economists regard themselves and their discipline as more “formalist” than “empirical.” “Applied economists” such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly who study the behavior of markets in “the real world” and attempt to draw inferences and conclusions from these studies, are regarded as an inferior caste: they rarely win Nobel Prizes and are conspicuously absent from the rosters and the publications of right-wing and libertarian think-tanks. (The remainder of this section is adapted from my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality”).

Economic formalists are ever-ready to offer explanations of the state of the nation’s economy, and to issue warnings of dire consequences if their recommendations are not adopted, a willingness that is compounded as the economist’s academic training is mixed with his political sentiments and motives.

Consider, for example, an analysis of the prosperity of the Nineties, the longest sustained economic boom in our history. Who gets the credit? The Democrat replies, “Why Bill Clinton, of course!” “Not so fast,” says the Republican economist. “That prosperity was a time-lagged result of the policies of Bush I, aided by the wise legislation of the Republican Congress after the GOP took control in 1995.”

And what caused the stock market bust and recession early in the Bush II administration, and the humungous deficits that followed? Quoth the Democrat: “Clearly, those tax breaks to the rich failed to ‘trickle down’ and stimulate economic growth as the GOP promised.” “Wrong again,” says the GOP apologist. “The bust and the recession were “time-lag” effects of Clinton’s horrible economic policies. As for the stimulus from the tax breaks, be patient – just you wait.”

I trust that you can see where this is going. “Time lag” – the gift to the economic theorist that keeps on giving — is just one of several “explain-away” devices that economists fall back on, when their policies and predictions don’t quite turn out right.. Whenever “our” policies fail, or “their” policies succeed, there is always one or another of a myriad of macroeconomic imponderables to fall back on for an explanation. It’s no wonder that the disputes that ensue are never definitively resolved.

The problem is not that economic theories explain too little – it’s that they “explain” too much, so that whatever happens, their defenders have an “explanation,” and likewise, their opponents have a contrary “explanation.” That’s just another way of saying that politically motivated economic projections and explanations are “non-falsifiable,” and non-falsifiability is the definitive mark of non-science.

Astronomers can predict within seconds, eclipses hundreds of years into the future. If economists had a reliable 60% success rate in their macro-economic predictions, they could all retire at forty on the returns from their stock market investments. And as we all know, they don’t.

Please understand: I am not “anti-markets.” The failed economic experiment in the Soviet Union proved conclusively that a centralized command economy is vastly inferior to a market-based system of pricing, distribution, innovation and quality control. Having “shopped” in both the Soviet Union and the United States, I know this from personal experience. Furthermore, because human beings in significant aspects of their lives, do, in fact, act upon economic motives, a scholarly examination of market behavior has valuable implications for numerous disciplines, including environmental studies and political science.

In short, I do not assert that a study of markets and economic theory should count for nothing. Instead, I protest that they should not count for everything. Homo economicus is an ingredient of our nature that we would be well advised to study. But our lives consist of much more than buying and selling. We also love and we sacrifice, and we have goals and concerns that transcend our self-interest. And we seek, both personally and collectively, truth, justice, and personal excellence, none of which can appropriately be bought or sold in markets

With this conviction, I am joined by many esteemed economists, among whom are some of the severest critics of neoclassical economics. These include Herman Daly, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith and Amartya Sen, all of whom possess a clear view of the limitations of their discipline. Indeed, my quarrel is less with economists than with politicians and policy-makers who have skimmed easy formulas and simplistic generalizations off the top of the neo-classical economic theory, and put them to work in behalf of their special political and economic interests.

Even so, the above-listed dissenting economists, whom I admire enormously, report that there is in fact a dominating “orthodoxy” of neo-classical thought in the discipline of theoretical economics, and that this orthodoxy has had enormous influence upon both public policy and politics.

I can validate their report with my own experience. Often, when I have mentioned the names of these mavericks to economist colleagues, I find that I have evoked stares of disbelief or even condescension, such as one might expect from a fundamentalist preacher upon hearing the name of Charles Darwin. I once asked Herman Daly why he is regarded as an “outsider” by the mainstream of his profession. He wryly replied that it was probably because he permits the elegance of formal economic theory to be contaminated by compelling facts of biology and physics. Meanwhile, the true believers read with admiration the pronouncements of economists such as Julian Simon, who confidently assert that the omnipotence of the free-market and the omniscience of future entrepreneurs can overcome trivial physical constraints such as the second law of thermodynamics. (See my “Perilous Optimism”). I once heard Paul Ehrlich remark to Johnny Carson that if an engineer proposed to design an aircraft for an exponentially expanding crew, he would rightly be regarded as mad. Yet when an economist proposes an economic model that posits perpetually expanding population and resource consumption, he is regarded as eligible for the Nobel Prize for economics.

Happily, this era of free-market dogmatism may be coming to an end, as the dreadful consequences of its application are cascading upon us. Some of the High Priests are, in the face of stark economic realities, abandoning the cult. Leading the way is Alan Greenspan, who told Henry Waxman’s Committee, “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief . . . I made a mistake in presuming that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.”

The dogma of market absolutism may, at long last, be replaced by what James Galbraith calls “a new spirit of pragmatism, “ which, he writes, “surely requires that we discard the metaphor of market determinism — whole and entire. No more, let us bow and scrape before that altar. Markets have their place — they are a reasonably open and orderly way to assure the distribution of services and goods. They are not a general formula for the expression of social will and the working out of social problems.”

Thus might the economic strategy of FDR’s New Deal be reinstated: constancy in ends — national prosperity and economic justice — and flexibility in means. “Don’t just sit there, do something! If it works, keep it. If it fails, try something else.” In economics, as with any viable science, theory must be tested in the real world, whereupon the theory is either validated, modified, or discarded.

Looking back through history, we might wonder how it is possible that intelligent and educated people once accepted uncritically such notions as astrology, judicial trial-by-combat, the demon-possession theory of disease, and alchemy. Today, more and more sophisticated observers of society and politics are wondering how homo economicus, a creature bereft of sympathy, humanity, and noble aspiration, and “the perfect market,” a “place” devoid of any social contacts more elevated than market transactions, ever came to be regarded by our political elites as the foundation of a just political order.

First, my router/modem developed a terminal malfunction, and then my new anti-virus software failed to install. Thankfully, three very capable and patient gentlemen at various technical support facilities found solutions.

These three gentlemen were, respectively, from India, the Philippines, and once again, India.

If you or someone in your family is about to graduate with a degree in computer science, don’t expect to find a job in the U.S. any time soon.

Amidst my computer worries, I bought a dozen or so electrical supplies from the local hardware: a surge protector, extension cords, a phone, that sort of thing. Glancing at the labels, I found that each and every one was made in China. And a new hard drive? From Malaysia.

No need to go on with this, you know about it already. It’s called outsourcing.

Damned greedy capitalists are dismantling our manufacturing base and shipping it overseas!

Were it as simple as that, it would be a waste of my effort writing about it, and of your time reading yet another complaint about that which is painfully familiar.

But outsourcing, and the consequent loss of millions of American manufacturing and service jobs, is not the plain and simple result of corporate greed. It is, instead, an inevitable result of a combination of factors, including:

• the successful enactment of the right-wing dogmas of “the invisible hand” and “trickle down,” namely the conviction that individual entrepreneurs and corporations will, by seeking only their own economic gain, obtain the best results for society at large. These are “dogmas” because they are “proven,” not by historical evidence or practical experience, but rather through repetition.
• the corollary libertarian dogma that government has no justification whatever in interfering with the economic activities of private individuals and corporations. In the words of Milton Friedman, “There is nothing wrong with the United States that a dose of smaller and less intrusive government would not cure.”
• fiduciary responsibility: the legal requirement that the primary responsibility of the corporation is to its stockholders, not the public.

Thus the necessity of outsourcing is beyond the control of any single corporation’s executives or board of directors. It is a thus a tragedy, in the sense defined by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: a consequence of “the remorseless working of things.”¹ As long as these conditions obtain, jobs will gravitate toward the individuals accepting the lowest wages, i.e., those abroad, and the middle class will wither as wealth flows from those who create the nation’s wealth to those who own and control the wealth. These are conditions that are destined to ruin the economy of the United States.

“As long as these conditions obtain…” The obvious solution, then, is to change “these conditions.”

The Problem of Fiduciary Responsibility

So why don’t corporate executives simply behave like good Americans, and keep those jobs stateside?

Because, quite frankly, if they were to do so, they would be taken to court by the stockholders and sued. And they would lose.

Near the close of the Nineteenth Century, railroad tycoon William Vanderbilt famously said, “The public be damned, I work for my stockholders.” And in 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” The title says it all.

The knee-jerk liberal response is that these quotations are expressions of plain lousy attitudes. Sadly, it’s much worse than that.

It’s the law!

The fiduciary responsibility of corporations, first and foremost to their stockholders, has been articulated in numerous court decisions, and in the statutes of several states. And so, as Daniel Brook writes in Huffington Post:

Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits even if it means betraying the nation, trashing the environment, or fomenting unconscionable levels of inequality. Nothing is unconscionable for a corporation because they don’t have consciences; they’re not really people, whatever the courts may say.

Accordingly, my internet service provider and the company that makes my anti-virus software simply had no choice: they had to hire tech support workers in India and the Philippines and to fire their American technicians. Had they not done so, they would have been put at an insurmountable competitive disadvantage with their rivals who have no qualms about outsourcing. The profits and stock value of the “socially responsible” corporations would drop, causing losses to their stockholders – i.e., those to whom they owed “fiduciary responsibility.”

And then the company would find itself in court, facing a winning suit by the stockholders.

Obviously, corporate activity affects more than managers, employees and stockholders. Corporations also involve customers who are entitled to be protected from fraud and from defective products. Civil courts exist to reimburse customers for damages from corporate abuses, and few if any libertarians would object, in principle, to the exercise and enforcement of civil law. Because civil suits can be costly and impact upon the corporate bottom line, corporations have a fiduciary responsibility not to engage in fraud or to sell defective products. (Unfortunately, as the recent Supreme Court decision on the Exxon Valdez suit reminds us, corporate-friendly courts can reduce civil settlements to trivial sums that fail to deter corporate malfeasance).

In addition to injured customers, there are unconsenting third parties, “stakeholders,” who are affected by corporate activities. These include persons residing downwind and downstream from industrial polluters, teen-agers “hooked” on cigarettes leading to a shortened life of addiction, taxpayers who pay for the public health costs of smoking, ecosystems damaged by pesticides, citizens whose government is corrupted by corporate lobbying and campaign contributions, and humanity at large the future of which is imperiled by global climate change.

Add to this, American workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing; victims of “collateral damage” resulting from the fiduciary responsibility of corporations to reduce labor costs and thus to increase profits and the return on the investments of the stockholders.

Who Speaks for the “Stakeholders”?

Who else, but the government?

Many, and perhaps most, corporate executives, when confronted by the economic and social devastation brought on by outsourcing, might reply: “Yes, it’s horrible! But what can I do about it? If I insist on hiring American workers at American wages, my firm will go broke or, before that happens, the Board of Directors will fire me. I’m helpless!”

Sad to say, they are right.

Alternatively, one might bring together the CEOs of all the competitors, and try to persuade them to agree not to outsource. Problem is, that might be collusion, which is illegal. Or if not, there would be no sanctions against violating the agreement, and enormous advantages would be gained by any renegade firm that did so. It’s a paradigm case of the prisoner’s dilemma: that which is good for all is bad for each. Without the enforcement of sanctions there is an irresistible temptation to defect from the agreement.

In any case, missing from that assembly would be delegates representing those unconsenting but seriously affected third parties, the “stakeholders.” Their claims against the corporations would exact costs that would adversely affect “the bottom line:” profits and returns on investments. And the corporations, by law, have that fiduciary responsibility to maximize the bottom line.

Leave it to the unregulated free market, the profit motive, and fiduciary responsibility, and the stakeholders, which is to say the general public, is screwed. Given these conditions, there is no escape from this “remorseless working of things.” It is a tragedy.

So the solution is compelling: abolish the conditions that bring about the tragedy.

The stakeholders must be given a place at the table that determines corporate policy.

And there is one and only one institution qualified to represent the stakeholding general public. That would be a representative government, such as that established by the founders of our republic.

To secure these rights, governments are established among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, 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.

How strange and sad it is that we have allowed the right-wing dogmas of market absolutism, libertarianism, “the invisible hand” and “trickle down” to cause us to forget the founding principles of our republic, and to forget the lessons learned from a difficult history since that founding.

We’ve tried laissez faire capitalism, and each time it has failed all but a very few wealthy and privileged individuals, and eventually those too when the economy collapses.

We learned from the crash of 1929 and the depression that followed, that corporate greed, unconstrained and unregulated, can lead to a ruined economy. Then we recovered, not by abolishing capitalism, but by reforming it and regulating it with agencies of government acting in behalf of “we the people,” i.e. the stakeholders.

Through tax incentives, tariffs, and other laws and regulations, the government can end and reverse the outflow of jobs from the United States. Goodness knows there’s abundant work to be done within our borders. The physical infrastructure of the U.S. is in an advanced state of decay, and only government appropriations can repair it, with jobs that by their nature can not be outsourced. Like it or not, the petroleum age is on its way out, opening the necessity for the development and implementation of alternative and sustainable energy sources. Here is a compelling opportunity to re-establish our dismantled manufacturing base. And be assured that if we don’t take the lead in ushering in the solar age, some other country will do it and we will be left behind.

The lessons of history notwithstanding, we have tried market absolutism and minimal government once again, and they are failing once again. The United States of America is near bankruptcy, our currency is in decline, we are massively in debt to our rivals, our manufacturing base has been dismantled, and we are despised the world over.

“When you are in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”

Time to stop digging and to start climbing out.

1. See Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

We live in a world … hardened and distorted by hate. We communicate in the language of fear and violence. Human beings are no longer viewed as human beings. They are no longer endowed in our eyes, or the eyes of those who oppose us, with human qualities. They do not love, grieve, suffer, laugh or weep. They represent cold abstractions of evil. The death-for-death means we communicate by producing corpses.

– Chris Hedges

In 1946, Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist fluent in German, was assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. The following year, his Nuremberg Diary was published, containing transcripts of his conversations with the prisoners. (Excerpts here).

In words consistent with what I have read of, and about, Gustav Gilbert, he is portrayed in the 2000 TV film Nuremberg, as telling the Head Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alex Baldwin): “I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

“Absence of empathy” is likewise, I submit, “the one characteristic that connects” most of the immoral and misbegotten tenets of Bushism: that dogmatic mix of market absolutism, libertarianism, corporatism and simple greed that falsely describes itself as “conservatism,” and which I choose to call “regressivism.” “Absence of empathy” is the essence of evil which, if unchecked and unreversed, is certain to bring about the demise of the American republic as we know it, just as it led to the fall of the Third Reich.

In contrast, empathy, the capacity to recognize and cherish in other persons, the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself, is the moral cornerstone of progressive politics. It is a principle recognized and taught in all the great world religions, reiterated by numerous moral philosophers, and validated by the scientific study of human personality.

Empathy is the foundation of the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In that most-quoted New Testament verse, the golden rule, Jesus said: “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” (Luke 6:31, also Matthew 7:2). Also, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39, also Leviticus 19;18). Both commandments imply recognition in others of the human dignity and worth that one recognizes in oneself. In a word, empathy.

The golden rule is echoed in the moral teachings of Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And as Mohamed taught in his last sermon, “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.” (Mohamed, last sermon). And Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, taught “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.”

And yet, how much empathy is to be found among self-proclaimed “Christian” end-times preachers, such as James Hagee and Tim LeHaye, who eagerly anticipate “the rapture” and the eternal torment and damnation that awaits virtually all of humanity, as punishment for the sin of failing to agree with the preachers’ theology? How much empathy is evident in the late Jerry Falwell’s on-air remark to Wolf Blitzer, about Islamic militants, “If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord,” and Ann Coulter’s infamous outburst, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Because they explicitly renounce Jesus’ injunction to “love thy enemies” these hate-mongers are, in a literal and moral sense, “anti-Christs.”

Regressivism and the Absence of Empathy

Empathy is conspicuously absent in the off-hand remarks of George Bush, his family, and his political allies. For example,

• Bush himself, to an ordinary citizen after a campaign event: “Who cares what you think?” And to Bob Woodward: “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
• The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, on Good Morning America: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” (March 18, 2003).
• Dick Cheney, in an exchange with ABC reporter, Martha Raddatz:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say [the Iraq War] is not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No….

• John McCain: “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” And in response to the news that cigarettes are a major US export to Iran, McCain remarked that it might be “a way of killing ‘em.”
• Former Senator Phil Gramm, economic advisor to John McCain, in an interview with the Washington Times, remarked that the American economy is in “a mental recession.: “We’ve sort of become a nation of whiners,” he added.

The foundational doctrines of regressivism are equally devoid of empathy. For example, Ayn Rand: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.. the process of setting man free from men.” (The Fountainhead) And “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” (The Virtue of Selfishness)

Furthermore, “economic Man” (Homo economicus), a central concept of neo-classical economic theory favored by regressives, is an uncompromising egoist, whose sole motivation is to “maximize personal utility” or “preference satisfaction.” A “perfect market” of fully informed, non-colluding, uncoerced “economic men,” free of government interference, the theory tells us, will invariably produce better results for all than any governmental system yet devised. Never mind that “economic man” and “the perfect market” are fictions, that never have been and never can be realized in any human society. (For a defense of this claim, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality”).

The unfounded yet undiminished right-wing faith in the “wisdom” of the free-market and in the superiority of the pursuit of individual “utility maximization” as the engine of social progress, was starkly summed up by “Gordon Gekko” (Michael Douglas) in the 1987 movie, Wall Street: “Greed … is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

In fact, history teaches us that greed is not good, and greed does not work. Homo economicus is, in fact, a moral monster, for he is a being devoid of empathy and even of conscience. A mere bundle of “consumer preferences” can not add up to personhood, much less moral agency. When greed (call it “the profit motive”) reigns supreme, “others,” be they employees or fellow citizens, are reduced to impersonal objects. If these “others” are employees, they are regarded as units of “human capital” to be replaced by less costly “units” (e.g. “outsourced”) whenever possible. And if they are fellow citizens, they are prospective customers, to be relieved through “creative marketing” of their disposable wealth. Human, social, environmental “external costs” be damned. Witness the tobacco industry.

A “society” of private, egoistic, “utility maximizers,” devoid of empathy and unregulated by law and popular government, without shared values, loyalties and aspirations, is no society at all. It is a Hobbesian state of nature – a “war of all against all,” wherein life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹

As we are now discovering, to our great regret and sorrow.

Progressivism and Empathy

In stark contrast, empathy — awareness of the needs, sufferings, aspirations, rights, and dignity of others — is the unifying theme of the progressive agenda, and of the history of political/economic liberalism (in the traditional sense of the word). The elite and wealthy delegates to the Continental Congress, when they demanded recognition of their rights, did not fail at that time to acknowledge the rights of all persons:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

True, at the outset the full “rights” of citizenship were restricted to white, male, landowners. But through time and constant struggle, those rights were extended to include all adult citizens, regardless of gender, race or creed. These struggles, which continue today, were led by “liberals,” and resisted by self-described “conservatives.”

Joe Conason eloquently describes these struggles and achievements:

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a forty-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights — you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable — you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family — you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn’t black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green — you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same pubic facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society — you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism — with the support of the American people.²

That public support and the consequent liberal reforms issued from empathy: from the awareness throughout the general public that oppressed minorities and economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals, possess the same sentiments, needs, aspirations and rights that more fortunate citizens recognized in themselves.

Regressivism as Psychopathology

Empathy is never totally absent in any functioning human being. A recognition that other persons with whom one deals have functioning minds with ideas, emotions, and aspirations is implicit in game playing, in negotiations, and even ordinary conversation. Self awareness, even that of a thoroughly egoistic, narcissistic and sociopathic self, can only arise out of childhood interaction with others. The self is a social construct.

Thus even such sociopaths as George Bush and Dick Cheney will acknowledge that the bombs dropped on Iraq cause “collateral damage” and thus profound suffering to innocent civilians. They likewise are aware of the suffering in New Orleans caused by the mismanagement of the Katrina disaster. They are, after all, at least minimally sane. Such an awareness of others that is also devoid of feeling we might call “abstract empathy.” The misery to innocent others that they cause simply does not matter to the Busheviks. They do not care, unless these moral atrocities exact political costs to themselves.

This “abstract empathy” is not the sort of “empathy” that Dr. Gustav Gilbert found absent among the Nuremberg defendants. The empathy that he had in mind combines awareness with feelings of concern and with respect for the rights and integrity of the other.

In contrast, the regressivism of the Bush-Cheney administration would have us ignore the economic, social and environmental consequences of unregulated commerce, and also have us dismantle Social Security, impoverish public education, tolerate inadequate health care for millions of our fellow citizens, abolish fundamental constitutional rights, and engage in aggressive wars against unthreatening countries, all of this with minimal regard for the human misery caused by these policies. To do all this, requires a deliberate stifling of feelings of empathy, and what David Hume called the “natural moral sentiment” of benevolence: a genuine concern for the well-being of others.

Regressives who support such policies are, at worst, simply amoral: without moral restraint, “rotten to the core.” At best, they are profoundly mistaken: possibly fundamentally decent individuals, trustworthy, law-abiding, charming friends, devoted spouses and parents, but bewitched by false dogmas. The former are, by and large, beyond redemption and are best isolated from political influence and from positions of public responsibility. The latter might be amenable to evidence and rational persuasion.

How can such an ideology captivate and take political control of a nation once renowned and admired for its generosity and compassion and for its devotion to democracy and human rights?

In part, the rise and dominance of regressivism is the result of a deliberate and opulently funded public relations campaign, supported for the past forty years by wealthy individuals and corporations. This campaign included the establishment of ideological “think tanks” such as The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the abolition of The Fairness Doctrine and the consolidation of most of the mass media into six “conservative” mega-conglomerates, enormous expansion of corporate lobbying of Congress, and a vastly increased corporate involvement in campaign financing, of both major parties. With conservative Republicans in control of the White House for all but eight of the past twenty-eight years, the federal courts have become dominated by right-wing judges.

With these formidable propaganda resources, the resurgent Right has exploited “natural sentiments” equally fundamental to human nature as empathy; namely, ethnocentrism (identification with and loyalty to “our group”) and its negative complement, xenophobia (fear, distrust, and hatred of “outsiders”). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 intensified these prejudices, objectifying and depersonalizing the new enemy (so-called “Islamo-Fascists”) while, at the same time, neutralizing empathetic sentiments toward the residents of these “alien” nations.

With the captive media exploiting and intensifying public fear of “terrorism,” the Bush regime formulated, and the intimidated Congress readily assented to, assaults upon our traditional civil liberties such as the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and now the revised FISA Act.

Finally, regressivism feeds upon greed: the relentless corporate drive for still more profits and political control, and the perpetual cultivation of consumer demand by the multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations industries.

But greed is pitiless and blind to the side effects (“externalities”) of the unconstrained appetite for the consumption of consumer goods and for profit: effects such as poverty, pollution, disease, and the “collateral damage” of war upon innocent civilians.

A political economy based upon unregulated greed has been tried numerous times in the past, and has failed in each and every occasion: the French and Russian Revolutions, the era of the robber barons in the late Nineteenth Century, the Great Depression of the Thirties. They failed because when greed rules, the nation’s wealth inevitably flows from those who produce the wealth to those who own and control the wealth until, eventually, the toleration of the increasingly miserable masses for this economic injustice collapses, and the oligarchic regime is overthrown.

Once again, regressivism is on the brink of collapse.

• Time magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation reported last week that 85% of US population is unhappy with the US economy.
• In April, 80% of Americans believed that the “country is moving in the wrong direction.”
• “During the first six months of 2008, 343,159 Americans lost their homes, up 136% from 145,696 recorded during the same period in 2007.” (CNNMoney.com).
• An alarming and under-reported increase in unemployment and inflation is underway. (US government cost of living statistics do not include food and fuel prices).
• The latest Gallup Poll reports that Democratic party affiliation leads Republican by ten points (47% to 37%).
• George Bush’s approval ratings are at an all-time low at 28% (disapproval from 61%-69%).

This public sentiment should suffice to overthrow any regime that maintains power “with the consent of the governed” and subject to recall by election. Under normal circumstances, these statistics would indicate a landslide repudiation of the regime in the coming national election.

But these are not normal circumstances, for this regime is supported by a formidable array of resources: virtually unlimited financial support, a captive media including a cadre of right-wing pundits, a proven ability to rig elections along with a refusal of the media to investigate and report election fraud, oppressive laws, a ruthless GOP campaign organization unconstrained by facts, fair-play, or even on occasion, by the law. All these resource might once again overwhelm the “consent of the governed,” and prolong the regressive regime for another four or even eight years. But eventually, it must fall. The longer it holds on, the greater the misery and repression that will ensue, and the more violent the eventual overthrow.

Best to end it now.

But it will take an extraordinary effort by an overwhelming number of ordinary citizens to bring it off. There are no guarantees.

1. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan
2. Big Lies, p. 3.

But his politics are abominable! As often as not, when we visit his shop, Rush, or Hannity, or Savage are blaring on the AM radio. In 2000, and again in 2004, a “Bush/Cheney” sign was posted atop his shop.

Just once, I discussed politics with Roy. He let loose with the familiar complaints about how the immigrants were taking all the jobs, the welfare cheats were soaking up the tax money of honest citizens, the “wacko-environmentalists” were stifling growth with their dumb regulations, we had to fight the terrorists over there so that we don’t have to fight them here – the usual, familiar, drill.

I immediately saw that the only sensible thing to do was to back out gracefully. Arguing with a Rushophile is as futile as attempting to talk a Catholic Bishop out of his belief in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, or to convince Rev. Hagee of the scientific foundation of evolution.

Roy’s closing comment, however, was worthy of note. “Look,” he said, “I’m a conservative, and I like to listen to what you call right-wing radio. You’re a liberal, and you read liberal magazines and internet blogs, and listen to Air America Radio. I’m convinced of my views, just as you are convinced of yours. So who’s to say who is right or wrong?”

An excellent question, which I have heard all too often from my college students. It is a question that must be answered by any serious liberal, with explicit and objective reasons. “That’s just my opinion” will not do.

Quoth Jack Cafferty, “so here’s the question:” What is the justification of the liberals’ claim that their sources — the Nation, the American Prospect, the Huffington Post, Democracy Now!, Bill Moyers’ Journal, etc. — are more reliable than the Weekly Standard, FOX (“fair and balanced”) News, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, etc., or even, for that matter, the mainstream corporate media?

And so, Roy, if you happen to read this piece, here is your answer.

Political arguments are not created equal, and do not all have equal merit. Even less so, political rants and diatribes. There are many objective criteria with which an unbiased spectator might judge whether or not an argument is strong or weak, and whether a position is well or poorly defended. Here, briefly, are just a few such criteria. Having taught numerous courses in Critical Thinking, I can testify that this list merely scratches the surface of a vast topic.

1. The Persistence of Memory — and of You-Tube and Google. Remember Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD’s), and the “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud”? Cheney’s assertion that “there is no doubt that Saddam has reconstituted nuclear weapons”? Colin Powell’s “proofs” before the Security Council of Saddam’s WMD’s and his evil intentions, along with the corporate media’s unanimous and uncritical praise of Powell’s performance? The welcoming in Baghdad with candies and flowers? The six-week, self-financed Iraq “liberation?”
The Busheviks and right-wing sycophants would prefer that you don’t remember all this, and more. But the issue is out of their control. All the above claims and predictions are indelibly on the record, justly undermining the credibility of further assurances by the Bush Administration, the Republicans, and their loyal stenographers in the corporate media.

There was a time in recent memory, when a politician could simply deny that he had made an embarrassing remark, and demand that his accusers “put up or shut up.” No longer. You-Tube and Google now provide instant “put-up” of such accusations for anyone with a modicum of computer skills.

The Google-ization of American politics is proving to be especially troublesome to the “maverick” and “straight-talking” John McCain. Virtually all of McCain’s “maverick” votes and positions have been reversed and thus nullified, as the “straight-talker” has endeavored to set himself straight with his right-wing/regressive base. Count ‘em: McCain on campaign finance reform, tax breaks for the rich, reproductive freedom, offshore oil drilling, windfall profit taxes to support alternative energy. Do any of McCain’s original “maverick” positions remain “unflipped”? None that I can think of. The substance of McCain’s “straight-talk” reputation has evaporated, leaving only an unsupported label.

In contrast, memory and recorded history have caused Barack Obama little lasting damage. The unauthorized recording of his “bitter” remark in San Francisco, and Michelle Obama’s reflection that “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” immediately come to mind. And the latter is more than offset by the recently excavated video clips of John McCain saying “”I really didn’t love America before I was deprived of her company.”

Not surprisingly, the corporate media has amplified Obama’s gaffes and downplayed McCain’s. But media bias aside, an objective assessment of recent history is not supportive of right-wing dogma and rhetoric.

Santayana’s famous maxim has a corollary: “Those who fail to own up to their own history, are clearly trying to hide something.”

2. Sources: More is Better. If your information comes from several independent sources, it is likely more reliable than reports from few self-replicating sources, like wild horses tethered, not to a solid post, but to each other. Now critically examine the sources of right-wing opinion and compare them with the sources in the best of liberal publications, internet blogs, and broadcasts. (I will concede that there is a super-abundance of weak, “off the top” ranting from the left as well as the right). The right, I suggest, is more inclined to cite, if at all, a limited and self-supporting bunch of “conservative” publications and Bush administration press releases. From the left, I submit that you will find more citations of qualified experts, scholarly journals, and credible foreign sources.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself.

3. If it’s not reported by the corporate media, did it really happen at all? The adequacy of right-wing arguments can be assessed not only by what they say but also by what they choose to ignore. Likewise, the reporting of the corporate media. Did George Bush walk away from his National Guard obligations? Were the past two Presidential elections, along with numerous Congressional elections, stolen through election fraud? Has John McCain reversed himself on almost all of his “maverick” positions? Don’t look to the right-wing media for answers. All such embarrassing allegations have been shoved down the Orwellian “memory hole.” Out of sight, out of mind, never happened.

As for the corporate media, they too distort public opinion and understanding through the omission of essential information and through the saturation of print and air time with trivia (celebrity romances, missing blonds, etc.). For example, James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s Pulitzer Prize report on illegal government spying was suppressed by the New York Times until after the 2004 election. Do you know about the July 2002 Downing Street memo that revealed the Busheviks’ determination to “fix the intelligence and the facts around the policy” of an invasion of Iraq? If you do, you did not learn of it through the corporate media. And the coordinated and successful effort of the Pentagon to flood the airwaves with the commentaries on the Iraq war by allegedly “independent” retired generals? Kudos to the New York Times for exposing it, and damnation to the rest of the media for ignoring it. Election fraud through “paperless” (DRE) voting machines and compilers? Faggetaboutit! Any attempt to investigate and report on this issue in the corporate media is a “career-ender.” And important books on the subject, such as Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again, are rarely recognized and reviewed in the mainstream media.

And yet many of us know of such crucially significant facts, despite the blackout of information in the corporate media.

How so? We learn of these things through independent liberal publications, through the small but growing progressive radio talk shows, and of course through the internet — “the America Samizdat.”

4. The Treatment of Dissenters. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John Kennedy saw to it that before any crucial policy was adopted, dissenting opinions would be heard and seriously considered. That decision quite possibly spared the civilized world from nuclear annihilation, as cooler heads prevailed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Contrast this with the Bushevik mode of “decision making,” replicated in the right-wing media. Bush’s “decisions” issue from his “gut,” not from his brain. Dissent is not tolerated, and is in fact a sure-fire guarantee of an early departure from the administration. Witness the aborted careers of Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, and General Eric Shinseki, and the extraordinary retaliation visited upon Joseph and Valerie Plame Wilson.

Likewise, dissenting (a.k.a. “unpatriotic”) opinions on broadcast and cable television have led to the ouster of Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield. Not even Dan Rather was exempt. How Keith Olbermann remains on the air is something of a mystery. Perhaps his spectacular commercial success may have something to do with it.

In contrast, liberal publications acknowledge, and occasionally even publish, opposing opinions from the right. And while Rush Limbaugh’s screeners keep “leftist loonies” off the air, Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann routinely invite “conservative” advocates on to their programs.

5. The Quality of the Arguments. Arguments can be assessed according to their positive and negative qualities. First the positive. (We’ll deal with the negative, the fallacies, in the final two sections below).

Logicians identify three essential criteria of a cogent argument: (1) the availability of relevant information, (2) the truth of the premises, and (3) the validity of the inferences from premises to conclusion. Technical elaboration: “validity” means the “truth preserving” structure of the argument. In “pure” formal logic, this means that if the premises are assumed to be true, then (due to logical form), the conclusion must be true. In informal inference (i.e., most arguments) “validity” is a matter of degree. (Most logicians would prefer to call it “strength of inference”). In a well-formed informal argument, if the premises are true, then the conclusion is highly likely to be true.

A critical assessor of the best of right-wing and progressive discourse will, I submit, conclude that by and large, the progressives offer superior arguments.

Regarding Criterion One, liberals are less tempted to suppress relevant information. (See Item #3, above).

Furthermore, (Criterion Two) because liberal arguments have a broader range of sources of information (Item #2) and are more accepting of historical information (Item #1), the premises (the foundations of the arguments) are more likely to be true. Add to this, the apparent fact that liberals are, by and large, more convinced by the results of scientific investigation, and less convinced by dogma and “faith-based” appeals. Liberals insist that peer-reviewed scientific publications are the best sources of information, due to the discipline and methodology of science. “The best,” but not perfect. All scientific assertions are, in principle, fallible, which is to say, open to revision or even refutation when confronted with new information. Paradoxically, “fallibility,” far from being a weakness of science, is one of its fundamental strengths. (See my “Is Science Just Another Dogma?”).

Finally, (Criterion Three), liberal and progressive arguments will usually incorporate stronger inferences from premises to conclusions; which is to say that formal implications, statistical analyses, and inductive rules all come into play such that it becomes difficult to reject a conclusion once one accepts the premises and assesses the structure of the inferences.

What does the jargon of the preceding paragraph mean? Many ponderous and book-length treatises have been written, elaborating on the meaning of those terms “formal implications, statistical analyses, and inductive rules.” I cannot in this space, add to that shelf in the library. Suffice to say that an intelligent, educated and astute individual, who has somehow managed to avoid a logic class in college, is nonetheless quite capable of asking what some scholars call “the magic question:” Suppose that I accept all the premises, follow the inferences, and discard the fallacies, can I then imagine the conclusion to be false? If it is difficult to do so, then I have been presented with a well-formed informal argument.

6. Fallacies that (Sometimes) Aren’t. Philosophers, rhetoricians, and other such scholars have identified hundreds of logical fallacies, both formal and informal. Logic textbooks routinely list dozens. Obviously, in the remaining space, I can only deal with a very few of these.

The identification of fallacies within arguments can be a very tricky business, for many so-called fallacy forms are quite acceptable in some of their applications.

For example, consider the so-called fallacy of appeal to authority. But 99+% of all that we know, we get from someone else’s “say-so.” If we reject all second-hand, third-hand, and n-hand knowledge, we might as well close up all colleges, universities, and even primary schools, and then return to the caves. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t assess particular claims of authoritative knowledge. In fact, we must. Actors who “play doctor” on TV ads are not authoritative sources of information about drugs. Senator James Inhofe, former real estate developer, is not an authority on climate change. Nor is Michael Crighton, a physician, or most likely the local TV weatherman. But the two-thousand climate scientists who have contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, some of whom have devoted years of their careers to laboratory and field studies, are authorities. Twenty years ago, Al Gore was not an expert on climate change, but after many years of study and the application of his critical skills to an assessment of the data, he may claim some expertise. More to the point, his arguments are grounded in sound scientific research.

Next, is generalization a fallacy? It depends. On the one hand, generalization is the essence of inductive inference, which is to say the foundation of empirical science. All scientific laws are generalizations. Newton’s laws of motion apply to all physical bodies, though obviously not all applications can be observed. Likewise, Grey’s anatomy, drawn from a few specimen cadavers, applies to all human bodies. On the other hand, a “hasty generalization” can be a grievous pitfall in reasoning. Example: Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,” who allegedly gathered in thousands of dollars in phony claims by non-existent husbands and children. Generalization: all welfare recipients are cheats. Of course, Reagan’s example had the further flaw of being totally false – a complete concoction.

How about arguments from analogy? Again, it depends. Animal experimentation with prospective drugs draws warranted analogies from animals to humans. Yet the fallacy of faulty analogy is among the favorite devices of unscrupulous propagandists. Among the most prominent of these is “the Munich analogy”: the claim that the example of the 1938 Munich agreement proves that bargaining with one’s (presumably “evil”) opponent will only increase the opponent’s appetite for more concessions. Yet diplomatic negotiations have prevented far more wars than they have caused. Another faulty analogy, I suggest, is B. F. Skinner’s inferences from laboratory rat behavior to human behavior. The disanalogy? Human beings, unlike rodents, use articulated language, a point that Noam Chomsky expounds upon in his devastating critiques of Skinner. Of course, many experimental psychologists would disagree.

The bottom line: “fallacies that (sometimes) aren’t” must be evaluated individually. Argument from authority? What are the qualifications of the alleged “authority”? Generalization? How adequate is the sample that is being generalized? Argument by analogy? How similar are the two cases, the original and the analog?

7. Fallacies that (Usually) Are. Some fallacies are reliable indicators of bogus arguments. Among these are the false premise and the straw man (attacking a non-existent invention of the arguer).

“Begging the question” (or circular reasoning) is a fallacy that is summarily excluded in courts of law. A simple, obvious, yet widespread example: “I believe the Bible to be the Word of God.” And why? “Because the Bible says so.”

Here’s another example from contemporary politics: When Ed Gillespie, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was presented with exit poll evidence that the 2004 Ohio returns were rigged, he replied that you can’t rely on exit polls because they have been proven time and again to be unreliable.

Trouble is, they haven’t. In fact, in virtually all of their applications throughout the world, exit polls have been “the gold standard” of election verification, generally yielding a margin of error within one or two percentage points. When the returns in the 2004 Ukrainian election were wildly inconsistent with the exit polls, it was generally assumed that polls proved that the election was stolen. The only noteworthy “failures” of exit polls turns out to be in US elections that use unverifiable touch-screen (DRE) machines.

So it comes to this: By claiming that the official election returns “proved” the inaccuracy of exit polls, Gillespie was assuming what he intended to prove: namely, that the election returns were accurate and thus that the election was honest. But that was the very point at issue.

Gillespie might have escaped this fallacy by presenting independent evidence that the exit polls were flawed, albeit exclusively in elections using unverifiable DRE voting machines.

In fact, apologists have done just that by introducing the theory of “the reluctant Bush voter.” Bush voters, they claim, were less inclined than Kerry voters to respond to the exit pollsters.

This leads to the final fallacy on our short list: the ad-hoc fallacy. This is an “explanation” that is concocted on the spot to explain (better “explain away”) some troublesome fact or experience. Trouble is, ad hoc hypotheses “explain” nothing else whatever, and are entirely disconnected from any independent evidence.

My favorite example comes from the “young earth creationists.” Question: If the world was created six thousand years ago, how do you explain the existence of dinosaur bones? Answer #1: Satan put them in the ground to lead us astray from the truth. Answer #2: God put them in the ground to test our faith. Of course, there is and can be no independent evidence whatever to support either “explanation.”

Returning to the 2004 Ohio exit polls: The hypothesis of “the reluctant Bush voter” was in fact tested and found to be without independent foundation. In paper ballot and other verifiable precincts, there was no such bias. Only in precincts with DRE machines. In other words, the “reluctant Bush voter” was an unfounded ad hoc “explanation” of a very suspicious and troublesome voting anomaly, which has been widely and scrupulously studied by numerous scholars and statisticians. But don’t expect to find any curiosity about it in the corporate media.

In sum: We all use fallacies: politicians, journalists, scholars, scientists, and even retired philosophy professors. To err — and to employ fallacies — is human. But just as there are recognizable degrees of virtue and justice (all falling short of perfection), there are also degrees of fallacious argument. And while all informal arguments fail to achieve perfection, they can nonetheless be assessed as to their cogency. In fact, the rules of evidence in law courts and the scientific method are both devised to minimize fallacious inferences.

I submit that the right is much more inclined than the left to utilize fallacies. That’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. Perhaps I should now proceed to write the book that will support this claim. It will take at least that much space to accomplish the task.

But much better than that, why don’t you examine the arguments on the right and the left to see for yourself whether or not I am right?

And while you are at it, ask yourself: (1) Which side is more willing to own up to its past positions, predictions, and assurances? (2) Which side examines the broader field of source material? (3) Which side looks for the most relevant information, even if that information is absent from the corporate media? (4) Which side is more tolerant of dissent, both within and outside of its ranks? (5) Which side uses the more cogent arguments? And (6) which side relies less on fallacious reasoning?

You presumably know my answers by now. But I would not presume to do your thinking for you.

So check out the arguments of the right and the left, and find the answers for yourself.

That’s the first law of practical economics. Everyone knows this to be true, whether or not one has ever taken a course in Economics. Everyone except, apparently, a few Ph.D economists who seem to forget this rule when they are hired by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, etc., from which they migrate, back and forth, between offices in Republican administrations and these right-wing think tanks.

For these worthies, the “first law” is replaced by the dogmas of deregulation, “trickle-down” and market fundamentalism: impoverish the masses, throw money at the rich who will then invest it, and then “the invisible hand” of the unregulated free market will bring forth a cornucopia of goods and services.

Never mind that there will be few if any buyers for these consumer goodies.

Henry Ford saw the fallacy of such a policy when he raised the wages of his workers. His competitors in the auto industry were aghast. “Why did you do that?,” they asked. Ford is said to have replied, “If I don’t pay them more, who will buy my cars?”

It took awhile, but Henry Ford was eventually proved to be right. In 1935, in the depths of the great depression, Congress passed the Wagner Act which greatly enhanced the power of labor unions to bargain collectively on behalf of their members. And after World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed millions of returning war veterans to go to college and then to enter the work force as trained professionals. The ranks of the middle class swelled, and as a result of this gain in disposable income, so did the nation’s economy. In an ongoing and sustainable economic symbiosis, the investments of the capitalists “trickled down” to increase the worker’s productivity, income and purchasing power, which in turn “percolated up” to provide generous returns on these investments. Like the fabled golden goose, this economic arrangement promised a perpetual production of “golden eggs” of shared prosperity.

Then came Reaganomics, which allowed the ruling oligarchs with their insatiable appetites for “more, still more,” to dismantle the unions, to cut back workers’ salaries and benefits, to ship manufacturing and management jobs overseas, to starve the tax base through loopholes, regressive tax rates, and off-shore incorporations, and to strip the government of its Constitutionally stipulated function of regulating commerce. (Article One, Section Eight). As most citizens have consequently drifted toward poverty and serfdom, and the government has been taken “to the bathtub” to be drowned, the upward “percolation” has been drying up. Rather than protect and perpetuate the economic system that produced their wealth, the privileged class is cooking and devouring the golden goose.
Senator Bernie Sanders reports the resulting plight of the American middle class:

The economy is doing great, except for 90% of the people in the economy. The reality is that we have the hollowing out of the American economy. Median family income declined by $2500 in the last seven years. 8 million people lost their health insurance. 3 million people lost their pensions. This is a strong economy? You’ve gotta be insane to believe that.

Meanwhile, the richest one percent of the population possesses more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. (See also G. William Domhoff: “Wealth, Income and Power“).
This is how a once-flourishing economy shrivels up and dies: the few who own and control the nation’s wealth refuse to share that wealth with the many who produce that wealth.

Ahead lies ruin for rich and poor alike.

For those with eyes to see, and a willingness to see, the consequences of this unconstrained and unregulated greed are apparent and irrefutable: a constriction of the economy which, unless met immediately with decisive and painful countermeasures, must lead to economic collapse. We can expect no such countermeasures from the Bush (“the fundamentals are sound”) administration. With the bursting of “the housing bubble,” consumer debt has reached its limit: the national credit card is maxed out. Under Bush, the cost of food has doubled, and of gas has tripled. (Neither food nor fuel are counted in Bush’s phony Consumer Price Index, which consequently understates the gravity of current inflation). As the average family spends more on necessities such as food, medical care, home heating and transportation to and from work, “luxuries” simply must drop out. No more vacations. Fewer trips to the movies and to restaurants. Fewer purchases of new cars (the old one will have to do for a few more years). Businesses fail, workers are fired, stocks plunge, unemployment rises, the dollar falls, the cost of imported goods (which means, due to outsourcing, most consumer goods) rise. Still less disposable income to pay for higher priced goods and services. More businesses fail, more workers are fired, etc. Down, down, down, goes the spiral.

“No sellers without buyers.” It’s so obvious, so indisputable, even tautological. How can anyone doubt this fundamental rule of practical economics, much less promote policies that defy it? Answer: because just as history is written by the victors, political/economic dogma is written and taught by those with great wealth and power. And anti-government, trickle-down, market absolutism are the dogmas of those who own and control the nation’s wealth: dogmas that Friedrich Nietzsche called “a master morality,” and that John Kenneth Galbraith characterized as a “moral justification for selfishness.”

History provides numerous examples of such “justifications” by those privileged with wealth and power. Out of the middle ages came the doctrine of “the Divine right” of royalty to rule in luxury. This was supplanted by the Protestant claim that personal wealth was the sign of Divine grace. In the gilded age of the late nineteenth century, the Robber Barons embraced the theory of “social Darwinism;” their wealth proved their superior “fitness” to survive. And now we have the regressive dogmas of Reaganism, of Bushism, and, let’s admit it, to some degree at least, of Clintonism: “trickle down,” unconstrained capitalism, the wealth of the few as the key to the wealth of all others. “The rising tide” that lifts all yachts, the regressives assure us, lifts the dingys as well.

The fundamental error of “trickle down” economics is not that it is false, but that it is a pernicious half-truth. As noted above, in a healthy economy, investments do in fact yield results that “trickle down” to the benefit of the workers and the public at large. But as Abraham Lincoln correctly noted in his first inaugural address, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.” Thus “trickled-down” benefits of investment presuppose the “percolated-up” wealth that is produced by labor. An economic theory that touts “trickle-down” benefits of investment to the neglect of the production of labor and the well-being of the workers, is a theory that must fail in its application.

The doctrines of regressive economics – “trickle down,” market absolutism, minimalist government – are dogmas in the literal sense of that word: like creationism and dialectical materialism (Marxism-Leninism), they are believed and promulgated independently of evidence and practical experience. If they are applied and fail, there is always an excuse at hand that does not allow a suspicion that the dogma itself may be flawed. In contrast, progressive economics is empirical, experimental and pragmatic: constant in ends, and adaptable in means. As with numerous schemes in FDR’s New Deal, the progressive policy is tried and, if it fails, it is discarded and a new approach is attempted, and so on until policy is found that “works.” (For an expansion of this point, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality.”).

The public must reject these false dogmas of regressive economics, and the sooner the better; better for both the public in general and for the oligarchs. The longer that these dogmas dictate public economic policy, the greater will be the fall and the greater will be the retaliation of the people against their oppressors.

No untried utopian schemes need to be invented to replace the current kleptocracy. Only a restoration of a system that has proven itself in the past: a regulated capitalism combined with a social democracy dedicated to the welfare of all citizens and founded on the consent of an informed public as manifested in honest, accurate and verifiable elections. And that latter condition presupposes the existence of a free, independent and diverse media, along with a public education system staffed with well-paid, competent and dedicated teachers.

In short, what is required is a return to the liberalism — “the New Deal,” “The Fair Deal,” “The New Frontier,” “The Great Society” — that Ronald Reagan and the regressives have abolished in the past twenty-seven years. The programs and policies of Reagan’s liberal predecessors were all imperfect, as are all human endeavors, but unlike the regressive politics of today, these earlier administrations had within themselves the means of adaptation, correction and improvement.

We the people know the way out of the political and economic morass in which we find ourselves. But if we are to escape, we must do so ourselves. We can expect no help from the corporate media or from the politicians of both political parties that have led us into the present crisis.

* Note: These ideas are presented and defended at greater length in “Remedial Economics for Regressives;” Chapter 9 of my book in progress, Conscience of a Progressive).

In 2005, newspaper circulation declined over the previous year by 2.6 percent, with the largest declines posted in the major newspapers. Still worse, in 2007, newspaper advertising revenue fell by 9.4 percent. As a result of this shrinkage, in 2007 2,400 journalists lost their jobs, and 15,000 have been canned in the last decade.

The predicament of network TV evening news programs is still more desperate. In 1980, the combined audience for the NBC, CBS and ABC newscasts was 53 million. Just last month, that audience tallied at 21.5 million: about seven percent of the US population. And the median age of that audience is 60.2, which means that the networks are failing to reach the essential younger age cohorts.

The newspaper and broadcast industries cite a number of alleged reasons for these figures: the internet, competition from cable news programs, and declining literacy and political interest among the public.

Missing from this list is “the crud factor”; namely, that the quality and credibility of reporting has deteriorated so spectacularly that the public, fed-up with the insults and lies, has turned to other sources of news and information. As Newsweek’s Tony Dokoupil reports: “less than one person in five believes what he reads in print… and nearly nine of ten Americans believe that journalists are actively biased.”

The good news: at long last, the mainstream media is being punished for its failure to perform its essential service to the public; which is the presentation of accurate and relevant news along with competent, informed and diverse opinion.

The bad news: as the founders of our republic warned us, access to essential public information and the free publication of diverse opinions are indispensable to a free society. And as Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Jay, “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Fortunately, a sizeable portion of our population, having acquired a healthy contempt for the corporate media, has found more reliable and informed sources of information in the alternative press and in the internet.

This promising development is undermined by the plain fact that the growing use of the internet as a free source of information and opinion is economically unsustainable. Why buy a newspaper or a magazine, when much or most of the content therein can be read for free on a computer monitor? And if so, who then will pay the researchers, writers, investigators, graphic designers, video producers, and publishers who gather, authenticate and then write and publish quality news and opinion?

For as we the “news consumers” too easily forget, quality journalism comes to us at a cost. The all-too-infrequent investigative reports in today’s media often require hundreds of hours of “hidden” labor by reporters and their staffs. The Pulitzer Prize winning disclosures in the Washington Post of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center required months of investigation by Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and Michel du Cille. Likewise, James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s exposure of illegal wiretaps by the Bush administration, and David Barstow’s recent uncovering of the Pentagon’s “hidden hand” inside the sock-puppet media “analyses” by retired military officers, each of which required substantial financial support by the publisher, the New York Times. Exposés such as these are, in turn, the raw material of journalistic scrutiny, and citizen activism and dissent, all of this nourished by the considerable investment of time and money by the publishers. Conversely, the quality of news reporting, in particular foreign reporting, has been severely compromised by the reduction and closing of news bureaus throughout the world.

If independent investigative reporting and responsible journalism are to be restored, how are they to be financed? Not by net surfers like you and me, who enjoy the product of hard journalistic labor for free. And yet, all of the aforementioned “scoops” — about Walter Reed Center, the illegal wiretaps, the retired military “experts” — can be had, gratis, on the internet. Just follow the links.

To be sure, many websites, including those of print publications, are at least partially supported by advertising income. Even so, it is doubtful that advertising alone can support a flourishing alternative independent media. Moreover, if ad revenue is to be the primary support of this new media, then the concerns of the commercial sponsors will all too often trump the public interest — a situation that is today the scourge of “the old media.”

I happen to subscribe to The Nation, the American Prospect and Mother Jones, among other progressive publications, but not because I have to. Most of their content is available on the internet. My subscriptions amount to donations, motivated more by conscience than by necessity. When I download content from publications to which I do not subscribe, I am a parasite gaining free “nourishment” from the labor and costs of others.

So I pose the question anew: with the erosion of paid support of established “mainstream” print and broadcast media, who and what is to pay for information and diverse opinion that is essential to a functioning democracy? If the purveyors of the junk that dominates the mass media today fail to reform themselves and as a result shrivel and die from financial strangulation, we’ll all be the better for it. Good riddance! But the question remains: who or what is to support the indispensable responsible journalism that is the lifeblood of our democracy — in particular, the journalism that appears on the internet, which might well become the next mass media?

It won’t do simply to ignore the question and to go on using the free internet while we have it. Such behavior imitates that of the Grover Norquist “tax reform” crowd, which willingly enjoys the benefits of the common public resources that are sustained by tax revenues — the courts, an educated public, physical infrastructure, regulation of commerce, protected food and drug supply, scientific research and development, etc. — yet steadfastly advocates the abolition of those taxes.

Simple fairness, not to mention economic viability, require that the investigators and reporters of essential public information be compensated, and that the requisite time, energy and expertise required to obtain this information, be financially supported.

But how is this to be accomplished?

I confess that I don’t have a simple answer. If you do, please share it with me, and we will publish the worthier proposals in The Crisis Papers.

But here, at least, is a suggestion, admittedly in need of much elaboration and refinement: adopt a system of financing similar to that of the music and entertainment industry.

As I understand it, most copyrighted music is registered with two agencies: ASCAP and BMI. Radio stations, artists, etc., who perform this music must pay a fee to the appropriate agency but not directly to the composers. The agencies then conduct surveys to determine how often the copyrighted works are performed, and then issue individual payments to the composers in proportion to the number of performances. (In my brief stint as a talk show host, some thirty years ago, I was not allowed to use a BMI tune as a theme, since the station was registered only with ASCAP. If my recollection of the system is incorrect, I am confident that some reader will set me straight). According to this arrangement, neither ASCAP nor BMI exercised any control over the use of titles in their inventories. They were entirely passive; it was up to the performers, station managers, disk jockeys, etc. to decide what was or was not to be performed, and this decision was, in turn, responsive to public preferences.

Might not a similar system be adopted by the internet service providers? A uniform fee might be assessed to each internet user, and the proceeds of that fee might then be put into a general “author/designer/producer/publisher fund.” Content creators might then be compensated according to the number of “hits” recorded for their works. (As any user of Google is well aware, this is a far more accurate system than the surveys conducted by ASCAP and BMI). Since literally millions of individuals post on the internet, there would have to be several “filtering” mechanisms separating the amateurs from the pros. One such filter might be a minimum threshold of “hits” required for compensation. Another would be an annual registration fee to be paid by the authors, with the payment added to the general fund. Suppose that fee were to be one hundred dollars. Since the likely annual payments to the vast majority of amateur bloggers would fall far short of the annual registration fee, most would opt themselves out of the system.

This system, like that of ASCAP and BMI, would be totally passive: no place here for censorship. The public, or if you prefer, “the market,” would rule. Payments would then be proportioned to the individual choices of the millions of users of the internet. And like ASCAP and BMI, the distributing agency would be a private, non-profit association of composers, artists and publishers, regulated by the government.

The cost to each internet user? Negligible, I believe, given the fact that there are now 211 million internet users in the United States, and nearly a billion worldwide, with internet use increasing by about eighteen percent a year. If each US user were to be charged ten dollars a year for payment to the “author/designer/producer/publisher fund,” that would total more than two billion dollars to the fund. An annual fee of one hundred dollars (about eight dollars a month), with revenues of twenty-one billion, would finance a free, independent and diverse media industry that would rival, and perchance supplant through open competition, the rotten-to-the-core corporate media that has betrayed us so spectacularly today.

For one hundred bucks a year, that’s a bargain, any way you look at it.

I rarely write about personalities, being much more interested in issues and ideas. Celebrity-obsession is a major pox on the American body-politic, and I’d just as soon ignore the AAR-Rhodes contretemps. But l’affaire Rhodes bears larger implications that deserve examination.

Quite frankly, I will miss the Randi Rhodes show on Air America Radio. She is smart, sassy, witty, and she deftly stroked my political biases. But a typical RR show was like a feast of carnival junk food: enjoyable at the moment, but devoid of much nourishment. (I exclude from this assessment her interviews with such outstanding guests as John Dean, Jonathan Turley and Brent Budowsky). I prefer to listen to the radio with the expectation that I might learn something. Far better to listen to Thom Hartmann and Rachel Maddow, each of whom possess a high-wattage intellect and awesome critical skills, gained through years of serious study. Plain brilliance is a rare commodity in talk radio, and Hartmann and Maddow both have it in generous abundance.

On the other hand, the Randi Rhodes show was my guilty pleasure, evoking many grins and chuckles, and suitable for multi-tasking: background for housework, driving, or typing and filing at my desk. Yes, I will miss The Randi Rhodes Show, but will be none the worse for her departure.

As I learned long ago, when for a couple of years I had a talk show in Salt Lake City, a microphone can be a mischievous ego-inflator. On Air America Radio, Hartmann, Maddow, Flanders, Kennedy, Papantonio have displayed a commendable ability to keep their egos in check. Sam Seder, on the other hand, might benefit from their example.

Of late, Randi’s ego has got the better of her, as she has become increasingly abusive of her callers, even those who are approximately 80% in agreement with her. Hillary-supporters could expect to be insulted, shouted-at, and cut off at any moment. The number of McCain supporters heard on Randi’s show was roughly equivalent to the appearance of authentic liberals on the Rushathon or the Hannity-Calamity. (This in contrast with Thom Hartmann, who invites conservative guests on his show and puts dissenting callers at the head of the queue).
Moreover, Randi has acquired the strange notion that informed liberals give a fractional goddam about her personal showbiz enthusiasms. OK, so she likes to watch “American Idol.” But enough, already!

Even so, there is an audience for that sort of thing, for, as we were reminded daily, The Randi Rhodes Show was promoted as the “top liberal talk show in the nation.”

While I regret Randi Rhodes’ departure from Air America Radio, I endorse the decision of AAR’s management to suspend her. This incident could have had a better outcome if Randi had used her time off the air to reflect on her performance and her role in the upcoming political contest. Then she might have returned to AAR both a better person and a better performer. The AAR owners gave her that opportunity.

But reflection and contrition are not part of Randi’s moral repertory. So she quit.

Randi’s regrettable “f***ing whore” outburst, aimed at Hillary Clinton, put the AAR management in an impossible lose/lose dilemma. Toleration of such behavior was unthinkable (as I will argue shortly). A summary firing was overkill, which would have outraged her many fans and seriously muffled the already faint voice of liberal talk radio. (Just consider the outcry that resulted from her suspension). But while suspension was the judicious middle-road, this too has had its costs. Once Randi Rhodes uttered those two words in public, there was to be no easy solution for AAR management. Suspension was merely the least-worst alternative.

There is no first amendment issue here, so may we please put that nonsense aside? No one has a “right” to gain or keep a microphone or to demand space in a publication. I have no first amendment claim on the New York Times to publish my essays, nor a first amendment claim on Random House to publish my book. (Alas!) Just read the relevant portion of that amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” This does not forbid AAR from taking the microphone away from Randi Rhodes. It simply forbids the government from telling AAR what it can or cannot broadcast, just as it forbids the government from telling The New York Times and The Washington Post that it can’t publish the Pentagon Papers. (Ah, those were the days! RIP free and independent press).

So we turn now to those “larger implications” of Randi Rhodes’ outburst in that San Francisco night club.

Like Randi Rhodes, I support Barack Obama, and find much to criticize in the behavior of Hillary Clinton, who, prior to this campaign, I had once greatly admired. But Obama’s advantage today is such that the prize is all-but won. Like the wolf in the Russian tale, “Peter and the Wolf,” Hillary Clinton is trapped: the more she tries to throw off the lasso, the tighter its hold on her. Clinton’s negative attacks on Obama are backfiring: he is rubber, she is glue. Barring a colossal blunder by Obama, anything that Clinton might do to win the nomination will be so destructive to the party and to her reputation that the prize will be worthless.

The wise decision of the Obama campaign, thus far brilliantly conducted, is to hold back while the Clinton campaign self-destructs. All the while, Obama projects calm, poise, and respect for his rival.

Into this well-considered and well-executed strategy, storms Randi Rhodes. With “friends” like this, who needs enemies?

Remember, above all, that while Randi was attacking a fellow Democrat, she was at the same time alienating that candidate’s supporters. In a recent poll, more than thirty-percent of Hillary Clinton’s supporters said that they would not be inclined to vote for Obama if he gets the nomination. If even half of those sore losers feel the same way on election day, John McCain will be our next president. So, at the very least, those two abusive words were tactically stupid.

Next, there is the question of the preferred “tone” of the post-convention campaign. Aside from a small and shrinking contingent of “dittoheads,” the American public has had just about enough of the right-wing screech-merchants. Evidence? Consider the “retirement” of Tucker Carlson, and declining audience of FAUX News and of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, O’Reilly and the other “Lords of Loud.” At the same time, MSNBC, with its emerging contingent of responsible liberals and centrists such as Keith Olbermann, Dan Abrams, and now Rachel Maddow, is overtaking FOX and CNN, while CBS’s 60 Minutes is willing to give air time to an investigation of the Siegelman persecution.

If the public is, at long last, turning away from politics-as-personal-destruction, then it ill-behooves progressive broadcasters to perpetuate this misbehavior by imitating it. The last thing we need this season is a left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. The Republicans, under the tutelage of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, have perfected the art and craft of political skullduggery. If the Democrats choose to play by the rules of these scoundrels, they will lose. But if, instead, the Democrats treat these tactics with the contempt that they deserve, and direct the public’s attention to indisputable facts and compelling issues, they can win in November, and there is a chance that we might take our country back from the outlaws, thieves and oligarchs.

I am not, however, counseling rhetorical disarmament by asking the Democrats to bring bare knuckles to a knife-fight. Al Gore thought that the “inventing the internet” was unworthy of a reply. So too John Kerry when confronted with the “Swift Boat Vets.” And we know how all that turned out. Be assured that this time, Karl Rove, though out of the White House, is still very much in the fight. So we must be prepared for more of the same gutter politics from the GOP.

But while the Democrats need not fight dirty, they must fight smart. They must use “rhetorical judo,” by turning the opponent’s strength to their own advantage. That is precisely what Rove did with the “swift boat” caper. But that attack, like the Bush/Rove attack on McCain in South Carolina in 2000, was based on lies. The Democrats have more than enough truth in their armory to do fatal damage to the Republicans in November.

There is a fine line between well-deserved ridicule on the one hand and abusive insult on the other. Well-crafted ridicule yields political advantage, while insult has a way of backfiring. The Democrats should watch that line very carefully.

Howard Dean says that the Democrats will not use McCain’s age as an issue. Well, yes and no. Calling him “Grandpa” seems out of line. But pointing out, and, better yet, showing video clips of “senior moments,” is fair game. A candidate’s capacity to function as Chief Executive is most assuredly a valid issue.

McCain has acquired the label, “Senator Bomb-Bomb.” Fair enough. He did, after all, sing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” The public needs to be reminded that bombing appears to be McCain’s favored “instrument of diplomacy.” And that photo of McCain hugging Dubya deserves to be shown at least as often as the image of Bill Clinton hugging Monica at the rope line. The media will not oblige, of course, but in a country with a genuinely free press, it could be possible. And, more to the point, the McCain/Dubya hug really happened, and that image conveys a deeper truth: that McCain will do anything to further his career, even cozy-up to the man who insulted his wife and child. Furthermore, it bears repeating that McCain is now up close and personal with the detested George Bush and his policies.

Simply put, that fine line between deserved ridicule and insult is the line between truth and slander. Slander is the mother’s milk of Karl Rove and his kind, and slander and lies are all that the Republicans have left. The Democrats have no need of it, for the truth will suffice. As Harry Truman put it, “I didn’t give ‘em Hell, I gave them the truth and they thought it was Hell.”

Let that “truth” be the truth that cruelly impacts the lives ordinary Americans. The truth that their sons are being sent abroad to fight and die in fruitless and immoral wars. That their country has been demeaned by an illegal war and is being led by war criminals who lied us into that war. That their government’s treasury has been looted, that their jobs have been exported; that they have lost or are about to lose their homes, their pensions and their health care.

If these truths can somehow break through the iron curtain of the corporate media, and if somehow enough votes can be fairly counted, the Democrats can win in November.

This can be accomplished without calling our opponents “f***ing whores,” least of all those “opponents” within our own party. Those who resort to such behavior must be condemned, and the public at large must understand that such behavior will not be tolerated within the ranks of the supporters of the Democratic party.

We are better than that. Let the world take note.

Let’s face it: though there is a light-year’s distance between the intellectual capacities and moral qualities of the presumptive candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, this election campaign promises to be brutal. As Al Gore will testify, a simple “win” will not suffice. GOP partisans own the media and count the votes, and they are even today hard at work throwing millions of Democratic voters off the rolls. Either the Democrats win overwhelmingly or they lose. There will be no photo finish this time.

Even while the pre-convention contest continues, it is not too soon for Democrats to unite. Obama and Clinton must now direct their critical fire, not at each other, but at the presumptive Republican nominee. So too the liberal and progressive advocates on the minuscule authentic “liberal media.” The punditocracy tells us that the early resolution of the GOP contest has worked to the advantage of the Republicans. This need not be so. That same resolution gave the left a singular and very vulnerable target. So have the Democrats used this early decision to their advantage? Don’t be silly!

Leave it the Democrats never to miss and opportunity to miss an opportunity.

It is past time for the establishment Democrats to wise up. Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their chosen supplicant, John McCain, are the enemies, not the Clintons or, alternatively, Barack Obama. The end of the GOP/corporate kleptocracy and the restoration of the American republic and its Constitution are the over-arching issues before us.

Those who promote discord within the party ranks, be they Hillary Clinton or Randi Rhodes, are doing the devil’s work, and they must be marginalized.

If Randi Rhodes uses her unintended hiatus to cool down, reflect, and redirect her considerable talents to an engagement with the appropriate adversaries and issues, then her return to the struggle will be both valuable and welcomed.

We read each others’ papers, we exchange ideas by e-mail, and we invite each other to participate in our seminars and conferences.

On numerous occasions, my libertarian friends have treated me with generosity and respect. I’ve found them to be personable and tolerant of my progressive opinions.

And also unyielding in their convictions.

My libertarian friends, I have discovered, are like the kindly Catholic bishop, who will patiently listen to your heresies, all the while never budging an iota from his absolute faith in the authority of the Pontiff, the truth of the dogma of the immaculate conception, and the sinfulness of birth control.

Likewise, the typical libertarian is steadfast in his beliefs,

* that “there is no such thing as a public” (Ayn Rand) – that (so-called) “society” is nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. It follows that there is no such thing as “the public interest,” “social problems,” or “victims of society.”

* that the profit motive combined with human ingenuity (Julian Simon’s “ultimate resource”) is the primary engine of human progress and the solution to any problems that might arise from industrial civilization.

* that a free market, unconstrained by government regulation, will always produce better results than centrally planned, “collectivized” public enterprises. (“Market Absolutism”)

* that private ownership of natural resources and institutions is always preferable to public ownership: “Whenever we find an approach to the extension of private property rights in these areas, we find superior results.” (Robert J. Smith)

* that the fundamental and exclusive human rights are to life, liberty, and property, and that governments have no legitimate function other than the protection of these individual rights. Accordingly, taxation for any other purposes, such as public education, welfare, promotion of the arts, national parks, or the protection of the environment, is theft.

To yield these principles is to abandon libertarianism itself.

Accordingly, like Ptolemy’s fixed earth around which the sun, the planets, the stars, and the entire universe circulate, these core libertarian dogmas are eternally fixed, and neither, history, practical experience, and occasionally not even science and logic, can be allowed to budge them.

Thus the inevitable collision between libertarianism and climate science over global warming.

This “collision” may be found in the pronouncements and publications of such “conservative” think tanks as The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Never mind that the two thousand scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), along with the vast majority of qualified scientists of The American Association for the Advancement of Science, The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, etc. all affirm the reality of global warming.

(My libertarian friends have never offered me a plausible explanation as to how, if they are right, the overwhelming majority of so many accredited scientists could be so wrong, or what might motivate them to persist in their alleged “errors”).

Secular libertarians are not noted for their rejection of established scientific opinion. They do not, for example, dispute evolution or modern medical science, and in fact their faith in the capacity of applied science (spurred on, of course, by private “competitive enterprise”) to solve any and all pending resource shortages and environmental crises exceeds that of most scientists.

But when it comes to climate science many libertarians treat the results of extensive and lavishly funded research of qualified experts with a skepticism that rivals Bob Jones University’s dismissal of Charles Darwin.

Why is this so?

It is so, because, like Biblical literalism vs. modern biology and structural geology, the fundamental tenets of libertarianism are flatly incompatible with a scientific understanding of the causes of, and the remedies for, global warming. A libertarian who was somehow convinced of these causes and remedies would almost certainly have to give up his or her libertarianism. To be sure, one might maintain one’s insistence upon the privacy rights and the sanctity of individual autonomy, in which case the libertarian might then become a progressive.

Of course, the libertarian, if convinced at last of the validity of the IPCC findings, would have to admit that Al Gore is right, after all. That concession, while painful, would be superficial. Much graver recantations would be in order, involving not personalities but basic libertarian principles.

Regarding the causes of the climate crisis: The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is “anthropogenic;” i.e., caused by human activity, which means largely by industrial activity. The primary chemical culprit is carbon dioxide, released by the consumption of fossil fuels: coal, natural gas, and petroleum. CO2 build-up is a giant-size example of what economists call an “externality:” a effect of economic transactions on unconsenting “third parties.” And externalities are the No.1 nemeses of libertarianism: the compelling justification, time and again, for the regulation and intervention of private enterprise by governments, acting in “the public interest” – which is to say, in behalf of all those unconsenting “third parties.” In this case, those “third parties” are nothing less than all of mankind today and in all succeeding future generations.

With the onset of the industrial revolution, some three hundred years ago, wood fuel and human and animal labor were replaced first with coal and later with petroleum. The advantages of this transition were enormous and therefore irresistible. The effects of this transition upon the global climate (i.e., the “externalities”) were unknown, and until very recently, unknowable. But now, at last, we know.

Simply put, global warming is the by-product of the unconstrained “free market” that is celebrated by the libertarians. Also, let us not forget, it is the by-product of the command economies of the Soviet Union and China, whose governments were as unconcerned about externalities as any of the capitalists.

The industrial revolution, while it has caused untold misery among the working classes, has also brought about incalculable advantages: advances in medicine that have more than doubled the human life span, ease of communication and transportation, material abundance, and an explosion of scientific knowledge and technological capacity. Seated at this computer, with instant access to multiple libraries of information, having just enjoyed a meal of salmon from Alaska, oranges from Florida and avocados from Chile, and hale and hardy past my biblically allotted three-score and ten years, I should be ungrateful indeed if I were to disparage the bounties of industrialization.

But all this does not mean that mankind, upon releasing the fossil energy accumulated through millions of years, was not therefore obliged to study, forecast, and act upon the consequences of that release.

Those consequences fall not simply upon isolated, enterprising individuals, they fall upon a global collective entity — a “public,” a “society,” the existence of which, let us recall, the libertarians refuse to acknowledge. And they also fall upon future generations, who do not vote and do not participate in today’s markets. Moreover, that study, forecasting, and action, by their very collective nature, can not be done by individual entrepreneurs and private corporations, for “where’s the profit in it?”

No, the task of responding appropriately to the gathering climate emergency must fall upon non-economic entities, acting in behalf of mankind at large. Such entities are called “governments.”

Well, those governments have responded, in internal agencies such as the NAS, NCAR, NOAA, and in the United Nations agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Add to these, non-profit non-governmental organizations, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The response of the libertarians to this informed consensus is denial. But how could it be otherwise? Accepting the conclusions of IPCC and the virtually unanimous opinion of climate scientists throughout the world would entail the conclusion that unconstrained market forces, privatization, and moral atomism have brought human civilization to the brink of unspeakable catastrophe.

Regarding the remedies to the climate crisis: Don’t look to private enterprise for a solution to global warming. The fundamental responsibility of the private corporation is to protect investments and ensure the survival of the enterprise. If science won’t serve the corporate interests, then public relations will have to do the job. Case in point: the tobacco industry. So too, “global warming skepticism,” lavishly funded by the coal and petroleum industries. In both cases, the “science” is reversed and therefore fatally compromised, as the corporate order is given: “these are our ‘conclusions,’ now it’s your job to come up with some ‘evidence’ to support them.”

Individual self-interest, the libertarians tell us, is the engine of progress. And it is both spontaneous and sufficient. No need for governments to “plan” or interfere; just leave progress to the benevolent “invisible hand” of the marketplace.

Tragically, those with eyes to see, can see where that approach has led us. Those who cannot see, should look at the satellite photos of the Arctic ice cap, the Antarctic ice shelves, and then learn from the trained eyes of the scientists who have measured the CO2 levels at Mauna Kea, who have examined the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, who have measured the declining volume of the Greenland ice shield, etc.

All these researches have been sponsored and funded by governments.

Quasi-market solutions, such as carbon trading, while not totally useless, have proven at last to be too little and too late.

And so, some enlightened economists have finally if reluctantly come to the forced conclusion that only a massive, international government effort can avert the looming global catastrophe.

In a New York Times article, published just two days ago, Andrew C. Revkin reports a growing consensus opinion that

What is needed … is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which … will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak….

In an article in the journal Nature last week, researchers concerned with the economics, politics, and science of climate also argued that technology policy, not emissions policy, must dominate.

“Policy” means guidance “from the top.” No place for an “invisible hand” of the market here. “A Manhattan-like Project” means government funding and administration today, just as it did sixty-five years ago at Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos. Exxon-Mobil won’t do it. Why should they? They are flourishing quite well, thank you very much, in the “awl bidness.” Global warming is a public emergency, requiring a public response.

“Market forces” are not irrelevant to this vast undertaking. Tax incentives and competition for government contracts can stimulate incentive, innovation, and enterprise. For example, windfall profit taxes could be levied on the oil companies, with the proceeds directed back at them earmarked for alternative energy research and development. But market forces, thus utilized, are subordinated to public policy. And the libertarians will have none of it.

It is this uncompromising market absolutism that disqualifies the libertarians from a seat at the table where climate control and remediation policy is to be deliberated.

And so, we arrive at last at the logical crux of the libertarian’s denial of global warming: If the retrospective and prospective conclusions of the IPCC and other scientific bodies are essentially correct, then the core principles of libertarianism are practically unworkable and morally untenable in modern industrial society. The logically valid implication must be that if the fundamental libertarian doctrine is to be maintained, then the multi-million dollar findings of thousands of expert scientists must be summarily rejected. (QED: Modus tolens, for you logic students).

There is an equally valid response for the libertarians: Accept the scientific consensus and abandon your dogmas. (QED: Modus ponens).

C’mon, my libertarian friends, give it up and join the rest of humanity in our common struggle to save the planet for human habitation. I promise, you’ll feel good about it once you’ve taken the plunge.

The monkey is then faced with two choices: let go of the bait and go free or hold on to the bait and be captured. Escaping with the bait is not an option. African monkeys, determined and single-minded critters that they are, usually hold-on until captured.

Hillary Clinton, it seems, is consumed with a monkey-like determination to become the 44th President of the United States, and with that consuming objective in mind, she fails to perceive the context and the likely consequences of her behavior. She has essentially two options: hang on to her determination to win the nomination by any and all means necessary, which, as I will explain below, will almost certainly result in the election of John McCain, or let go of her personal ambition and join a united effort to elect a Democratic President in November. Winning both the nomination and the general election is apparently out of the question.

Most objective observers of the campaign agree that Barack Obama has a near-mathematical lock on the nomination, provided the contest continues according to the party’s rules. In compliance with a signed agreement by both candidates, the unauthorized and uncontested Michigan and Florida primaries are out of play. Any likely compromise resolution of the Michigan and Florida controversies will be of negligible advantage to either side. Obama’s 150 pledged delegate lead can only be overcome by unobtainable two to one Clinton majorities in all the remaining primaries followed by the support of a majority of the super delegates.

Clinton can play fair, or she can play dirty. If she plays fair by following the rules and refraining from smear tactics, she will surely lose the nomination. Given Barack Obama’s unassailable lead among the pledged delegates, it is clear that the super-delegates will not overturn the people’s will as expressed in the primaries and the caucuses. Nancy Pelosi, who leads more than two-hundred super-delegates, has recently announced as much.

So if Clinton is to be nominated, she must overturn rules that she has agreed to, persuade most of the super-delegates to ignore the will of the voters and caucus participants, and to accomplish all this she must diminish Obama’s stature through negative campaigning. Because such tactics also devastate the public opinion of her (not very high to begin with), those same tactics employed to gain the nomination will almost certainly deprive her of the presidency in the general election.

In sum, this is Hillary’s dilemma: Hold on to the bait, and both Clinton and the Democrats lose. Let go of the bait, and Obama wins. Hillary Clinton’s victory in November is not an option.

Clinton began her campaign with the pollsters projecting that about half of the voting population would not vote for her under any circumstances. So to win the presidency, she must somehow reverse a widespread negative public perception of her. And what is this perception? Among other things, that she is shrill, self-serving, unprincipled, manipulative, and untrustworthy. And yet to win the nomination, how must she behave, and thus appear to the public, if she is to overcome Obama’s commanding advantage? She must be, as she now appears to be, shrill, self-serving, unprincipled, manipulative and untrustworthy. In short, in order to win the nomination, she must behave in a manner that will validate a public opinion of her that will surely deprive her of victory in the general election.

And even if her negative campaign against Obama, both overt and covert, fails to capture the nomination, it might well sufficiently damage Obama’s stature to deprive him, along with numerous Democratic Congressional candidates, of success in November. Hence Obama’s guilt by association with Pastor Jeremiah White, and her favoring of McCain’s “experience” over Obama’s “speech-making.” Justly or not, there is a suspicion spreading among rank-and-file Democrats that Hillary’s attitude is “it must be me, or nobody!” Meanwhile, as this bitter rivalry continues we can see a fracturing of the party: Support Clinton? “You’re a racist.” Support Obama? “You’re a sexist.” It’s nonsense, of course. Most of Clinton’s supporters are not racists, and most Obamaphiles have no objection to a woman president; just not that woman. It’s all nonsense, but mischievously divisive nonetheless.

Then there is the issue of “playing by the rules.” Early in the campaign, Clinton, along with the other candidates, signed a statement agreeing not to recognize the delegates of, or to campaign in, the rule-defying states of Michigan and Florida. Now that she desperately needs these votes, she is ignoring her agreement and is demanding as her own the delegates in Michigan, where she was the only candidate on the ballot, and in Florida where Obama, by agreement, did not appear. Having lost in the Texas delegate count, she is attempting to overturn this result in the courts, perchance to be eventually bailed out by the Supreme Court, as was George Bush.

Not content to defy these party rules, she now proposes her own rules. For example, because the “caucus delegates,” have been chosen by an allegedly “less democratic process,” they should not be regarded as equal to “primary delegates.” It just happens that Obama has been more successful in caucuses than in primaries. And now we are told by the Clinton campaign that the Pennsylvania primary should be treated as decisive. Fortunately, not many Democrats seem to be buying that one.

After seven years of Bush/Cheney violations of treaties and international law, of trashing the Constitution, of defying Congressional subpoenas, and of nullifying acts of Congress with signing statements, it is not likely that the American public will have much stomach for another President that regards herself as unbound by rules or, by implication, by laws.

The Democratic Party is caught in the grips of a tragedy, in the classical sense, described by Alfred North Whitehead as “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things” which rational agents can see at work but are helpless to intervene and avert. Historical examples include the drift of the European powers into the First World War, the uncontrolled growth of world population, and the onset of catastrophic climate change. Now a prospective candidate of one of the major parties, consumed by personal ambition, is set upon a course that might well cripple the party and destroy its otherwise excellent prospects of success in the presidential election.

Or possibly not. But in order to put the brakes on this potential train-wreck, the Democratic party elders, which is to say the super-delegates, must take the initiative and intervene. And sadly, the Congressional members among the Democratic super-delegates have not distinguished themselves through their initiatives and interventions against the Bush/Cheney crime syndicate.

What the supers might do, however much I despair of hope that they will, is announce to both candidates: “Either this orgy of party self-immolation and this violation of party rules ends now, or else we will end it forthwith.” They can do so if a sufficient number of the super-delegates endorse the innocent candidate to put that candidate’s total “over the top.”

Failing that, or perchance in addition, the rank and file Democratic voters must voice their displeasure, loud and clear, at the behavior of Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Only then might Hillary Clinton lose her grip on the prize that she has already lost and cannot regain: The Presidency of the United States.

I suspect that by now those leaders may be having some second thoughts.

For while it was a good thing for the American public to learn about the Mormon faith, Church leaders are now discovering that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

The thirteen Articles of Faith of the Mormon religion enumerate a set of beliefs, some of which are quite consistent with traditional Christianity, and others which, while unique to Mormonism (e.g., the Book of Mormon), are not outlandish or immediately offensive to most ordinary Christians. (The Articles of Faith were written by the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, to a Chicago publisher, John Wentworth, in 1842). The Articles say nothing about God once being a mortal human and being one among many Gods, about the brotherhood of Jesus and Satan, about God inhabiting a planet called “Kolob,” or about the “magic underwear” that devout Mormons are required to wear, etc. Nor are you likely to hear about such things from the Mormon missionaries that might appear at your front door.

However, it now seems naive to have supposed that these and other bizarre Mormon doctrines would not be brought to light by Mitt Romney’s political rivals.

Many faithful Mormons are surprised at the astonishment and derision that some LDS beliefs provoke among the general public. This surprise is likely due to the simple and universal fact that beliefs that are taught in childhood and shared in a community of believers are regarded by the faithful as “obvious” and “ordinary,” while at the same time those same beliefs are considered, “from the outside,” to be weird and outlandish.

I can testify to this fact, for I have experienced Mormon doctrine from both the inside and the outside. From childhood, through high school, I shared Mitt Romney’s faith in the Mormon religion. Then that faith totally vanished during my freshman year in college – at Brigham Young University, of all places!

MORMONISM AND ME

If I might be permitted a few autobiographical remarks, this is how it happened.

My high school education was outstanding. I was among a few students selected to attend a “demonstration” school attached to a state teachers’ college, where we were taught by college professors. There I acquired a precociously secular, scientific, and scholarly perspective on human history and institutions. At the same time, my parents (both graduates of BYU and both post-graduates of Columbia University) saw to it that my two brothers and I regularly attended LDS Sunday services. They accepted the conventional view that “Sunday School” was essential to a child’s moral development — a view that I have since come to seriously doubt.

Accordingly, during my adolescence, I carried about in my head, a bifurcated mind. There was “the weekday mind” of ancient dinosaurs, of evolution, of American Indians as migrants from Asia, and above all, of skepticism, scientific discipline and critical thought. Then there was “the Sunday mind” of the Creation in 4004 BC, of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood, of the Indians as migrant Israelites (the “Lamanites”), and of faith trumping “man’s reason” — faith: “the substance of things hoped-for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews, 11:1). I somehow managed the alternation of mind-sets from weekdays to weekends to weekdays again, without undue strain.

But at BYU the shifting of mind-sets from classroom to classroom to library to study hall proved to be untenable. At the end of my sophomore year, I transferred to the University of Utah and majored in Philosophy. Courses in geology, anthropology, new-world archeology, etc., pounded the final nails into the coffin of my childhood faith. In the words of the apostle Paul: “when I was a child, … I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (I Corinthians, 13:11) In my mind, the Latter-Day Saints, formerly “us,” became “them,” and since then I have never looked back. (Accounts of this “de-conversion” may be found in my unpublished “A Peculiar People” and “Religion and the Schools: A Dialog”).

Today, the polygamous man-God of Kolob, the magic underwear, the Hebrew-Indians, the translating peep-stones and the golden plates, the farm boy and the angel, “the curse of Cain” upon all people with any African ancestors, baptism for the dead (the Creator of the earth and all human souls being incapable of saving those souls all by himself), etc. — all this and more seem as bizarre to me as they do to most non-Mormons. (The essential tenets of Mormon theology are presented in this remarkable cartoon narrative of unknown origin. It is generally accurate, although there are a few identifiable minor errors. For example, Mormons do not believe that God and Mrs. God came to earth as Adam and Eve).

But equally bizarre to me is the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation (the ritual cannibalism of God’s body), the argument that birth control is contrary to “natural law,” the protestant fundamentalist beliefs in biblical literalism, young-earth creationism, and the doctrine of “the rapture,” the orthodox Jewish ban against eating shellfish or wearing mixed fabrics, and the Islamic belief that the Angel Gabriel handed the Koran to Mohammed. Much worse is the plain immorality of many traditional religious beliefs. These include the belief that the genocide, murder and mayhem chronicled in the Old Testament were condoned and even commanded by the Lord God, that God had ordered that disobedient children, blasphemers, unchaste young women (but not men), and those who toil on the Sabbath be put to death, and that a loving God created billions of souls, all but a few thousand of whom He has condemned and will condemn to eternal damnation and torment. Among those condemned are authentic “secular” saints and martyrs such as Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Galileo, Voltaire, Gandhi, Jefferson, Sakharov, who somehow failed in their lifetimes to agree with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.

A “RELIGIOUS TEST” FOR PUBLIC OFFICE?

We Americans are traditionally a tolerant people, who believe that one’s personal religious faith should not disqualify one from public office. It is so stated in Article Six of our Constitution: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Until recently, I endorsed this pronouncement without qualification. Now, after seven years of George Bush’s “faith-based” administration, I have reservations. Thus, I find the prospect of a Mitt Romney or a Mike Huckabee administration to be unsettling. At the very least, the question of a “religious test” for public office deserves some careful scrutiny.

The issue articulates around the meaning of “religious test.” The term can be interpreted negatively: “no Catholics, Jews, Moslems, or atheists need apply.” Or it can be interpreted positively: “these offices are open exclusively to born-again evangelical Christians” (or other religious persuasion). Article Six of the Constitution notwithstanding, there is, practically speaking, a religious test for the Presidency and for membership in Congress; no self-professed atheist has ever occupied the White House, and only one admitted non-believer is now in Congress (Pete Stark of California), although there may be a few more who associate themselves with a religious denomination out of political necessity.

Does “religious test” refer to an individual’s religious affiliation, or to his or her religious beliefs? Despite the close correlation between affiliation and belief, the distinction is crucial. Exclusion from public office on grounds of religious affiliation is a giant step toward theocracy and the establishment of a state religion. The framers of the Constitution were wise to forbid it.

But once you have identified a person’s religious affiliation, what do you have? Perhaps, not much. Consider, for example, “Mormonism.” There are reportedly over twelve million Mormons. Among them are faithful Mormons like Mitt Romney, with uncompromising “testimonies” of the truth of their beliefs in “the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ,” of the Book of Mormon, of the divine mission of Joseph Smith, and of the divine authority of the “prophet, seer and revelator” in Salt Lake City, who leads the LDS Church. There are, I would guess, at least as many “social Mormons,” who have an abiding respect for the history and traditions of the Church and who enjoy the weekend company of other Mormons, while at the same time rejecting the LDS theology. “Social Mormons” admire, as do I, the strong family values, the integrity, and the in-group solidarity and compassion that is conspicuous among the Mormons. But they may be much less impressed with the indifference of the Church and its members to social and economic injustice. Many of my much-admired professors at the University of Utah were non-believing “social Mormons.” So too, as I was eventually to discover, were my parents.

And finally, because it is extremely difficult to remove one’s name from the membership rosters of the Church, those rolls include individuals who are totally alienated from the Church. When the LDS Church proclaims that there are more than twelve million Mormons, the Church no doubt counts me among them, although I have entered a Mormon church just twice in the last forty years, each time for the funeral services of my parents.

So when Jon Meacham of Newsweek writes that “the world’s nearly 13 million [Mormons] … believe that God … [revealed] the Book of Mormon,” Meacham and Newsweek are flatly wrong.

Because John Kennedy was apparently a “social Catholic” rather than an uncompromising believer in the absolute authority of the Pope and the Vatican, his affirmation of the separation of church and state was quite credible and thus he was fully qualified to serve as President of the United States.

Accordingly, an individual’s religious affiliation, per se, should not disqualify one from public office. But should a person’s religious beliefs enter into a public discussion of that person’s qualification for office? Here the issue becomes complicated and controversial, and the distinction between religious affiliation and religious belief comes into play.

Suppose a candidate for public office identifies himself as a believer in the ancient Aztec religion, and thus an advocate of ritual human sacrifice to the Sun God. In such a case, clearly the vast majority of Americans would say that he is unqualified for public office. I’d venture that those who signed the Constitution would agree. However, I would argue that the correct focus of this objection would not be to his religious affiliation but rather to his public advocacy of human sacrifice.

The same argument would apply, I suggest, to those who would promote policies of burning witches, of trial by combat, and of capital punishment for disobedient children, homosexuals, and blasphemers. True, all such policies issue from religious conviction, but it is the specific policies, not the general religious orientation, that should be of most immediate relevance.

What if a Roman Catholic proclaimed that if elected, he would do his utmost to outlaw all birth control drugs and devices, “because the Pope tells me to do so.” If so, then that person should not hold public office in the United States. Not because of a “religious test” against that candidate because of his Catholic faith but rather because of his attempt to “establish” Catholicism as the ultimate source and sanction of secular U.S. law (contrary to the First Amendment to the Constitution) and to impose his religious beliefs upon citizens that do not share these beliefs.

Similarly, if a candidate of any religious persuasion were to suggest that persons of other faiths, or no faith, must be given a diminished citizenship status in our republic, then that candidate likewise disregards the establishment clause of the first amendment. Those who insist that “this is a Christian nation” are of such a type, as is Mitt Romney when he asserts that he would not appoint an Moslem to high office in his administration.

Finally, suppose a believer in “the end times” proposes to do nothing about global warming, to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and all environmental protection laws, and to invest nothing in alternative “green” energy sources. He proposes all this because, like Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, he devoutly believes that Jesus will soon return to renew the earth, thus making all such policies unnecessary. Again, such a candidate should be judged as unsuited for public office because of his policies, and not because of his religious affiliation. In fact, many evangelical Christians, such as Jimmy Carter, believing as they do in responsible “stewardship” of God’s creation, have an opposite point of view.

Having thus separated a candidate’s religious affiliation from his public policies, I do not wish to suggest that religious faith is irrelevant to one’s conduct in public office. Quite the contrary. If a candidate wishes to tell the world that he intends to be guided in public office by his religious convictions, then a voter is fully entitled to examine those convictions and to speculate as to the behavior and policies that might issue from those convictions. As we have seen, the professed religious convictions of George Bush, of his appointees to high office, and of his supporters in the religious right, have had profound effects upon public policies and legislation regarding global warming, energy, scientific research and development, public health, and foreign policy towards Islamic nations.

With these considerations in mind:

What About Mike Huckabee? Like Jimmy Carter, Mike Huckabee is a Southern Baptist. But Huckabee is no Jimmy Carter. Carter, a trained and certified nuclear engineer, negotiated an amicable personal peace between his religious faith and modern science, and thus his administration was distinguished by Carter’s support of scientific research and education . Huckabee, unlike Carter, does not accept evolution or the scientific account of the age of the earth, and he believes the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, to be the inerrant word of God.

This is not the sort of leader that the United States requires at this crucial moment in the nation’s and the world’s history. As Al Gore correctly warned us in his Nobel Prize speech, we are facing a planetary emergency. Evidence of rapid and radical climate change comes from data samples that are thousands and millions of years old. Remedial action must take long-term ecological consequences into account. Resources, information and initiatives from the life sciences are urgently needed, and evolution is the central coordinating concept of the biological sciences. The last thing we need in the White House is a man who denies evolution, who believes that the earth is less than ten thousand years old, and who believes that inerrant wisdom resides in a collection of ancient texts by unknown authors.

What About Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney is a man of uncompromising faith in his “restored gospel” and in its living prophet, Gordon Hinkley, the President of the LDS Church. Perhaps Romney believes that he can govern independently of the doctrines of his church and the guidance of its leaders, but I am not convinced. This is a church that proclaims, “when the prophet [LDS President] has spoken, the thinking has been done.” I’d prefer a president who continues to think after an old man in Salt Lake City has had his say.

Romney’s firm grasp on the “iron rod” of LDS doctrine (a Book of Mormon allusion) is not replicated in his announced political and economic policy positions. Far from it. His alternating, weather-vane endorsements and rejections of positions on abortion, gay marriage, etc. have become notorious. We know that Mitt Romney is a faithful and believing Mormon. But what else is he? He gives us little guidance as to his position on public issues, or as to how he would perform as President. In any case, if you don’t like his political position, just be patient. Like Seattle weather, it’s bound to change.

Romney’s so-called “JFK speech” in Texas was alarming to say the least, and had the opposite intention and effect than did Kennedy’s. Bill Curry in the Huffington Post summarized it well: “Kennedy reassured evangelicals that though his faith was different from theirs he’d never impose it. Romney told them his faith wasn’t so different and that in any event he’d be happy to help impose theirs.” Romney, who has announced that Moslems have no place in his administration, effectively demoted non-believers (secularists) to second-class citizenship when he asserted that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish together.” By implication, the irreligious and the non-religious are enemies of freedom.

In that same speech, Romney warned that “in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.” He did not spell out that “original meaning,” nor did he explain how he intends to undo this allegedly excessive separation — how, that is, he would reunite church and state in a Romney administration.

I wonder if Romney has given much thought to the meaning and implications of his reassurances regarding the role of religion in American political life.

I can report that this “secularist” is not reassured.

Faith and dogma have got us into our global trap. Trained intelligence, education, critical thinking and courageous political initiative must lead us out.

These essential assets have been in short supply in this political season.

And almost no one has questioned the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin’s establishment in Philadelphia in 1736, of the first municipal fire department in colonial America.

Not until now.

Before fire-fighting became the business of local and state governments, fire-fighters were employed by insurance companies. Plaques placed on the front of homes and businesses identified the companies that underwrote the properties. If a fire alarm was answered by a cadre of fire-fighters from the “wrong” company, that was just tough luck. “Burn, baby, burn!” Many structures were lost while competing companies tried to sort out which was authorized to put out the fire.

Many more adjoining structures were consumed by fires that were oblivious to property lines.

Fires, as it happens, are not reducible to individual incidents affecting particular structures. They are public threats to communities at large. Accordingly, the task of fighting fires is appropriately assigned to municipal agencies, managed and financed by the community, which means, of course by the government. (See my “Privatization and Public Goods”).

Two hundred and seventy-one years of uncontested validation of this simple truth does not faze the libertarians and the regressives (self-described “conservatives”). Some of them are now proposing a giant step backward to privatized fire fighting. As Naomi Klein reports in The Nation:

Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn’t the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG)–but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company’s Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the “mobile units”–racing around in red firetrucks–even extinguished fires for their clients.

One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. “Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Here’s a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they’re there specifically to protect your home.”

And your home alone. “There were a few instances,” one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, “where we were spraying and the neighbor’s house went up like a candle.” With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection.

Privatized fire fighting? It was a lousy idea in Ben Franklin’s time, and it is lousy idea today.

This is why:

Privatized fire fighting is inefficient. Several separate and uncoordinated fire crews struggling to save separate individual homes are far less efficient than a large, integrated and strategically organized “army” of fire-fighters. Add up the costs of manpower, equipment and losses to the fires, and the latter, coordinated, effort will always win, hands down. This will be so, even if every structure in the area is “protected” by one or another private company of “responders.” Imagine, for example, a street in which a line of houses is insured and protected, sequentially from left to right, by the fire crews of Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc., Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc. — then add a few more companies, in random order, as you continue down the street. See what I mean? It’s far less expensive and more efficient if one agency is protecting the neighborhood as a unit. But more significantly, this example demonstrates that:

Privatized fire fighting is ineffective. The approach described above — several independent companies protecting individual homes, randomly situated — is comparable to opposing an invading army with individual local police and sheriff departments. An invading army attacking with an integrated force and battle plan can only be defeated by an opposing army with a superior integrated force and battle plan. Supply lines, effective use of available equipment, deployment of personnel, geographical contingencies, must all be taken into account by the opposing generals as they plan attacks, defenses and counter-attacks. Indefensible lands must be yielded and their populations abandoned so that forces might regroup on defensible terrain. Command decisions must be communicated intact through the company commanders to the individual soldiers. Decisive advantage is enjoyed by the side with the accurate “Big Picture” of the entire battle, a “picture” that changes as the battle evolves.

Similarly, the massive wildfires that ravaged southern California in October and November, 2003, and again last month, had to be responded to strategically — with a consideration of available resources, of terrain, and of priorities. “The Big Picture.” Thus a dozen homes, located beyond a defensible fire line (a road or a stream), might have to be sacrificed so that several hundred might be saved. Structures close to water sources and to open roads have higher priority than other structures that are isolated and offer poor means of escape for the fire fighters. The wealth or the insurance arrangements of the respective owners are irrelevant to the strategic planning of the fire fighters.

Community pre-planning and preparation are also essential to disaster management. For example, last month, in the “Grass Valley” fire near my home, the mansions of the “have mores” at Lake Arrowhead were protected by the removal of a million dead and diseased trees by order of the “big government” U.S. Forest Service, and by the local government requirement that flammable brush be removed from the modest homes of the “proletariat.” Cooperative community action combined with a large-scale coordinated response by professional fire-fighters saved the day, as the fire was contained to 1200 acres and the loss of about two hundred out of ten thousand homes.. (See “The California Wildfires and Right Wing Smoke”).

In contrast, a private fire crew, “contracted” to save this particular house at 1234 My Castle Circle (not 1232 and not 1236), has no “big picture” in mind. The total concern of the crew is this house, and this house only.

Clearly, it’s a helluva way to fight a fire.

Privatized fire fighting is immoral. The determined regressive might reply that the neighborhood could avoid the “this house but not that house” problem by agreeing to hire a single private fire fighting company. (However, there would remain the “this neighborhood but not that neighborhood” problem. But let that pass). All members of the neighborhood would then be required to pay a fee to the company – “required,” because those who might otherwise not pay would nonetheless be at least partially protected by the fee-payers, i.e., they would be “free riders.” Hence a “coercion” (and implied “theft of property”) detested by Ayn Rand and the libertarians.

But this scheme puts the “regressive” neighborhood perilously close to installing a public fire department. What’s in a name? Call the neighborhood a “town,” the fee “taxes,” and the fire company a “fire department,” and what is the practical difference?

There is this difference: because of the high fees (due to the inefficiency problem, above) the neighborhood described here would have to be comprised of very wealthy home owners. And having paid exorbitant fees for individual fire protection, they would not be inclined to pay taxes to support city, county and state fire fighting agencies. In fact, San Diego County was ill-prepared for the fires of last month, due to successful tax-cutting proposals by anti-tax, anti-government conservative Republicans.

Accordingly, a privatization of fire protection, along with other emergency management services, increases and solidifies the stratification of society into the “have-nots” and “the have-mores.” “I have mine; you’re on your own.” The community then encompasses the neighborhood, but no more. Beyond the neighborhood is another country. Gone is the civic friendship that binds a nation together — the “equal justice under law,” the shared covenant enshrined in the founding documents of the republic, the sense that the national economy is a cooperative venture comprised of indispensable components: workers, investors, managers, and government.

Instead, we have George Bush’s “ownership society,” wherein today the wealthiest one percent of the population owns more than the bottom ninety percent, and that “ownership” of the oligarchs is increasing. Included in that one-percent of the country effectively “owned” by the “have-mores” are privatized fire and other emergency services, the media, the courts, private armies, the paperless touch-screen machines that count our votes and the secret software that compiles election returns, and, finally, via lobbyists and campaign contributions, the Congress of the United States.

This concentration of wealth and this privatization of essential public services and government functions are both symptoms and causes of a failing democracy and a disintegrating nation.

Our history, our laws, and our shared sense of justice all warn us of this.

It remains to be seen whether we the people of the United States, the “proletariat” 90%, have the collective power and resolution to reverse this slippery slide toward despotism.