Bush Bashing

George Orwell was one of those individuals with a gift for seeing the future (reading the currents in the overdetermined river of social change). In particular, it is easy to think of Orwell when listening to the way words and phrases are used to manipulate the popular consciousness. The Republican Party has been particularly gifted with newspeak advisors. There are lots of examples one could focus on but I was struck, today anyway, by one phrase in particular. Bush bashing. Criticizing the president and his administration (those currently "in power") has always been an important part of the democratic process in the United States. (The special prosecutor law, that Kenneth Starr did such a wonderful job of killing --- in advance of the Bush presidency --- made this American tradition, for a short time, into an investigatory and judicial process with official sanction.) It is by criticizing our political and economic leaders (that includes corporate CEOs, and not just Bernie Ebbers) that we force even greater transparency into the political and economic realm, reducing the possibility of particularly egregious violations of the public trust.

This process of criticizing (even ridiculing, at times) keeps the leaders in their proper perspective --- after all, this nation was founded in a revolution against a royal government that placed itself above the people. Thus, it is very strange that this phrase "Bush bashing" has been coined. It is a sort of virus of the public discourse, attaching itself to any criticism of the current administration. And, man, do these guys deserve criticism. After inheriting a strong economy (and huge budget surpluses that promised to finally end any potential threat to social security or the overall health of the economy), this administration has manufactured, through either malfeasance or misfeasance or both a fiscal crisis that is now being used, by that same administration, as an excuse to further break the social contract between the government and the people governed. They now want to finally begin the process of unraveling social security, a program that the GOP has wanted to kill for years. The real trick will be for the Bush administration to orchestrate a compromise that so damages the social security system that further "reforms" will be all but inevitable, leading to the ultimate demise of the system (an end to the social contract by which the society provides a basic living standard to those who have agreed to spend their productive lives as capitalist wage laborers). This administration has used the military might of the United States to violate international laws: invading and occupying a sovereign nation on the basis of lies (they knew they were lying) and then throwing the Geneva Convention out the window (endangering not only foreigners, but Americans, for years to come). Official corruption has become standard operating procedure: using public funds to generate profits in crony corporations, like Halliburton and Bechtel --- closely linked to the president and vice president. They have wrecked havoc upon the U.S. intelligence community: scapegoating the CIA (which is in no position --- due to secrecy, among other reasons --- to fight back), exposing CIA operatives as political payback, driving good people out of the intelligence agencies and replacing them with political hacks. And speaking of wrecking intel and scapegoating, let us not forget that this administration is responsible for 9/11. Yes, Virginia, the government in power is the one that is responsible for mistakes (even unmitigated, but unnatural, diasters) made on their watch. I know they've done everything possible to shift the blame, but it is quite clear that they ignored warnings from the intelligence community and did absolutely nothing to make use of existing laws and regulations to reduce the possibility of such an attack. And then they shamelessly use these deaths for political purposes (as well as to attack the civil liberties that are the foundation of American society). They have set back environmental protections (promoting the rise of disease and global warming). And, perhaps most disturbing of all, this administration has sewn seeds of disunity and hatred that will continue to grow long after Bush and company have officially retired.

The use of the phrase "Bush bashing" is a sort of blanket dismissal of all criticisms of this administration, the people currently in power in all three branches of government (and to a significant extent in control of the Fourth Estate --- the media). The administration has been elevated above democracy. The president has been made royal, if not imperial. We'll have to wait and see if the GOP feels the same way when the next Democratic Party president is in the White House.

What Happened to Star Trek?

In trying to find another creative approach to teaching social science, I came up with the idea of doing a Political Economy and Culture in Star Trek course. This led me to review some of the episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I've also taped and watched a couple of episodes of Enterprise. I was struck by the quality of the scripts from the first two shows and the weakness of the scripts for the most recent (and now cancelled) Enterprise. My nine year old, who watched the episodes with me, independently came to a similar conclusion (Patrick Stewart has a new, next generation, fan). Star Trek: TNG and DS9 included some of the best sci-fi writing to be found anywhere, particularly on television. TNG episodes such as "Measure of a Man" and "The Inner Light" and DS9 episodes such as "Time's Orphan" and "Far Beyond the Stars" stand independently (of the Star Trek universe) as excellent and thought-provoking writing. These were all scripts that did not rely upon special effects, explosions, or video-game like combat scenes. It was clear, however, that at least part of the blame for the serious drop in quality with Enterprise was that writing for the more recent show was dominated by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. For some reason, there was an executive decision not to seek out story lines and scripts from the larger sci-fi writing community, even writers who had penned some very strong sci-fi scripts for TNG and DS9. It reminded me a bit of the movie, The Player, where you get the sense that the suits in the exec suites of the movie studios find writers a pain in the rear and this is epitomized by the main character killing a writer and then rising to the top of the movie studio food chain. I don't know if Paramount/Viacom's decision to eschew writers was meant to be a profit-maximizing decision, but I suspect the result of this strategy has been to lower the value of the entire Trek franchise and reduce the potential cash flow to Paramount (Viacom). Someone who understands this franchise better needs to take control of it, either by buying it from Viacom or by taking over Viacom. The Trek franchise is extraordinarily valuable property but Viacom's executives clearly do not understand this and have completely mismanaged the asset. In any event, I'm still working on the course and have not, as yet, made a decision of whether to offer it. (I currently offer a course called Economics in Popular Film.)

Admitting to Something Weird

A blog wouldn't be a blog without the occasional personal (and weird) admission. I discovered (a few minutes ago, in fact) that I really like shredding paper. I don't know why. We recently bought a shredder, although I was dubious it would be of much use. But now that we have it I just love finding things that are worthy of being shredded. It was only a few minutes ago that it dawned on me that I was actually enjoying watching the paper turn into shreds and that I eagerly look through the mail and any papers on (or around) my desk to find something to shred. There's never enough stuff (although my desk is cleaner than it has been a very long time). No matter how hard I try, I'm not going to find a lot for the machine to shred, unless I lower the standards considerably. And no matter how much I enjoy shredding, I'm not about to lower my standards. Who knows how many shreds this machine has in it. I want to use them wisely. In that, I'm a New Englander. (Actually, that just means I'm like my mother, although I suspect she would rather manually shred the paper than pay for a shredder, even if the prices have dropped.) Okay, so I got that out of my system. I guess that makes this an official blog now.

Thank You to Econ Grad Students

When I was informed that the economics graduate students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst had voted by a four to one margin in favor of me being one of their teachers I was more than flattered. It was an affirmation of the fundamental meaningfulness of choices made, paths traversed. For me, it was better than a Nobel Prize for teaching. Thank you (for the vote, as well for asking me to get involved in this process). Even if the $$$ for the joint appointment never materialize (or it gets vetoed somewhere in the food chain, on one or the other side of the Notch), your vote made this moment of uncertainty worthwhile.

In Dreams . . .

Not long before this academic year began, my father was in an automobile accident that resulted in his going into a coma and subsequently dying. Last night I dreamed I was in an auditorium and that my father was slumped in a chair in the front row. The auditorium was filled with people, by the way. Don't recall what the event was. I made my way up the side aisle to my father, thinking he was dead. But when I touched the body, he opened his eyes and looked up at me.

Left-wing Bigotry?

I recently gave a talk on the "transition from state feudalism to capitalism in contemporary China" before a group comprised primarily of heterodox/radical political economists, some of whom would self-describe as "Marxists" and I was surprised at the discomfort expressed about my applying class analysis to China. In fact, there were virtually no questions about China (or feudalism, for that matter), only about class analysis, and mostly challenging the validity of doing a class analysis of the Communist Party of China-led state and the transformations the party-state has orchestrated over the past half century. Is there some law of Marxian theory that I'm unaware of that says one should not apply class analysis objectively to any social formation, regardless of who rules that social formation (at the level of the state bureaucracy/military), and regardless of the outcome of that class analysis? Some seemed particularly uncomfortable with the idea that a CPC-led state would have orchestrated the creation of a variant form of feudalism (although not a single person offered a challenge to my definition of feudalism or an alternative definition that might allow the CPC to get off the hook for bringing back this form of exploitation), one that continued many of the positive changes in quality of life begun with the 1949 revolution, such as better health and nutrition, improved literacy, longer life expectancy, etc., even as this party-state brought back a form of exploitation (first feudal exploitation and later capitalist exploitation) that the revolution was supposed to end. It's that last part that was irritating for a number of those in the audience. I've encountered a similar resistance when analyzing racism ("Black people can't be racist." "Indian people can't be racist." "Marxists can't be racist." And so on. Racism, like exploitation, is a social process [one cultural, the other economic] and any set of human beings can engage in any social process, if the proper conditions are in place).

A similar type of bigotry was encountered years ago at Food First Publications (Institute for Food and Development Policy) when a group of us (I was editorial director) attempted to expand the Food First lens to include hunger in the United States (particularly in the rural and inner city U.S.). For some reason this attempt to do the same sort of analysis of U.S. social relationships as was done in "Third World" contexts was considered taboo by certain powerful individuals within the organization, so much so that an internal coup d'etat resulted. (In their defense, there were rumblings that a "domestic program" would hurt fund raising.) Most members of the "domestic committee" were dismissed. I was offered a chance to stay but declined. Mother Jones was offered a chance to investigate and write about the events, but declined (out of "solidarity" with another left organization). I cancelled my subscription.

In any event, if the left (what there is of a left in the United States) is just as bigoted about doing social scientific analysis as the right, then we have a long way to go before social science is liberated.

The Motorcycle Diaries/Diarios de motocicleta

Robert Redford continues to leave an enormous and positive imprint on cinema. This time by helping to finance one of the most amazing films dealing with the transformation in the consciousness of a human being (actually, the transformation of two human beings) --- the overdetermined effects of experiences, of nature, of the accident of being in the right place to trigger a powerful, almost magical, opening up of the perception of realities (including exploitation --- a phenomenon that is programmed out of the consciousness of the Norte Americanos) that might otherwise have remained invisible and the way a specific human being (two humans, really) took those realities into his (their) consciousness, made it part of who he (they) was (were) and, in the process, changed the way he (they) acted upon the world. The film in question --- The Motorcycle Diaries/Diarios de motocicleta. It is now available on DVD, so if you have not seen it, I highly recommend it.

More Money to Fund Terrorism?

Yesterday (at approximately 3:25PM EST) Maria Bartiromo reported on CNBC that "President Bush is seeking an additional $80 billion to fund terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan."

And Pat Robertson has called upon God to do some house cleaning in the Supreme Court. See for yourself at http://mediamatters.org/items/200501040010

You'd think Pat would be asking God to save lives or reduce human suffering, but I guess he has his priorities.

Buy Dog Food Stocks

Dog Food.

In that (formerly?) well known scene from The Graduate a college age Dustin Hoffman is pulled over by a middle aged business type who whispers the word "Plastics," indicating that plastics (plastics manufacturing, innovation of plastics in product design, etc.) would be the growth sector in the economy. Invest in plastics if you want to get rich, kid. Perhaps a similar scene in 2005 would have the middle aged guy saying, "Dog Food." If you've been paying attention to the talk of "reforming" social security, then you must realize by now that the future could be quite bleak for the elderly. In yet another breaking of the social contract between the state and the citizenry, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration wants to finally take a shotgun to one of the key programs to come out of the Roosevelt administration's New Deal. Reform social security? More like blast it into smithereens.

The message is clear. Gone are the days when the mark of civilization was the degree to which a society cared for its most vulnerable citizens, particularly the young and the old. If you haven't set aside your own personal fortune by the time of retirement, then it is your own fault and you need to keep working (get thee down to WalMart). You should have done what Dick Cheney did. He's not going to need social security. He's self-reliant.

The funny thing is, social security is already a joke for a lot of very hard working people. They are just not going to live that long anyway. People who work in the low skill trades are particularly vulnerable. They have lower life expectancy, a much higher probability of being disabled, and if they manage to stay alive and able to work into their sixties (Bush wants you to keep working into your mid-seventies), then their skill set and the physical requirements of work are likely to make it very difficult to keep working in any event. This is working out to be quite a cruel social joke on a lot of people. Social security won't be enough to live on but you may not be able to find suitable work either. Then again, you may die long before you ever see a penny of social security.

But it's not all bad. Privatization of social security should be a boon to asset management and the larger Wall Street community. The big investment banks weren't pumping $$$ into the Bush reelection campaign for nothing. This continues a trend of opening the public coffers to select corporate pirates, made infamous by opening many areas of government (even feeding and providing logistical support for military personnel) to companies like Halliburton. As Willie Sutton reportedly said, "That's where the money is."

So don't despair. There will be winners and losers. Invest in the winners. Short the losers. Buy dog food stocks. Buy investment banks. Buy makers of portable homes. Then again, maybe you'd better not buy the investment banks. If we keep dismantling the New Deal, we may eventually find the right trigger to bring back the deeper business cycles the New Deal was designed to eliminate. This means we may finally get that depression the Grand Old Party seems so nostalgic for. Let the good times roll.

Cultural Lag

I learned about the concept of cultural lag (originating with William F. Ogburn, Social Change) from Richard L. Brinkman, author of Cultural Economics, in his courses (two undergrad and one grad) in U.S. Economic History. Knowledge is understood as akin to DNA, coding human behavior and changing (mutating) as a result of the impact of constantly changing environmental, political, and economic factors. (In the language of overdetermination knowledge is the product of these other factors and necessarily changes as they change, the way a hologram changes as the laser light and mirrors change). What we know is a product of past experiences. Culture is, then, the store of knowledge at any given moment. Societies are porous vessels for this knowledge (knowledge knows no political boundaries). However, the more closed a community, the more its social DNA (culture) will vary from that of other societies. Brinkman (and Ogburn before him) understood knowledge as capable of providing human beings with the ability to solve problems, to make decisions that lead to successful (survival) results, but that the degree to which a culture is permeable to useful knowledge depends upon the store of prior knowledge in that community, as well as existing political and economic arrangements. For example, a community may reject ideas that would help that community to solve problems because of a history of religious belief that the knowledge in question is evil and individuals attempting to spread such knowledge should be silenced and punished. It may also reject new knowledge because parties in the society have an economic interest in blocking the adoption of this knowledge and the political or economic power to squelch it.

The possibility that knowledge could exist that might help those humans living in community A to solve problems but be blocked from being adopted into the knowledge-DNA of community A, even under conditions where the unsolved problems lead to negative consequences, even deaths within community A, while other communities, such as B, accept this knowledge (the knowledge permeates the culture and changes it) and are able to solve the related problems, produces a cultural lag, where A lags behind B in this particular aspect of human knowledge evolution. A concrete example is stem cell research. U.S. culture includes cultural aspects (forms of what Thorstein Veblen would call ceremonial knowledge) that view such research as evil. Those who are most influenced by this particular ceremonial knowledge have sufficient power to block the permeation of stem cell research into many sites in U.S. society, thus slowing the advance of this particular knowledge (both Brinkman and Ogburn would use the teleological term "advance," so I follow their lead in this particular blog entry and welcome post-modern/post-structuralist critiques of that use). China, on the other hand, is more permeable to such knowledge. Stem cell research faces fewer road blocks in China. This creates the possibility for a cultural lag (in this particular branch of human knowledge), with China taking the lead over the United States.

This concept of cultural lag could also be used to make sense of the differences between the former slave states of the United States and many of the so-called blue states (which include the Northeast, the Pacific Coast states, and other states with a longer history of industrialization, higher levels of educational achievement, a longer history of highly organized, skilled self-employed artisans (ancients), and a more constricted or nonexistent slave experience). Past differences in class and other experiences in these sub-societies (of the larger U.S. society) continue to influence life in these states, and not only political life. Slavery is, in that sense, alive and well in the culture of the former slave states (and influences U.S. culture as a whole). What this tells us is that culture is very resistant to change (often requiring a crisis for the cultural lag to come under effective attack). But this should not be so surprising. Culture represents collective habits, reinforced by peer pressure. It is difficult enough for an individual to change an ingrained habit (I once heard it takes about sixteen weeks of continuously doing something (non-addictive) to form a new habit). The habits that comprise cultural behaviors have been shared and passed along for generations. Add to this that it may very well be in the narrow economic interests of certain institutions to perpetuate aspects of culture that block the adoption of certain types of knowledge and it is all the easier to see why cultural lag (in the Brinkman/Ogburn sense) is not only possible but likely.

Anyway, to end with a bit of levity (I think), here is an interesting story from one of the red states (by the way, when and why did the Grand Old Party become the party of red, instead of blue?). Categorize it under the heading: Anecdotes of Cultural Lag.

Put Race in Your Face

Homo sapien sapiens are a very complex species. Collectively, we seem to need to take the mundane world and infuse it with magic. The truth is that the mundane is pretty damn complex and that complexity is such that there is plenty that appears magical to beings with our level of knowledge (and, given that reality is most likely multi-dimensional in a way that transcends our ability to comprehend, even as our knowledge grows we may never come to a "general theory" that breaks through this barrier of incomprehensibility). Nevertheless, we must have our magic and one of the most powerful bits of magic is the notion of race. It's pervasive. So much so that racism (the belief that biologically distinct races exist and that the real human beings we confront are members of such distinct races) is probably the most powerful religion on the planet, making Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism pale by comparison. We worship this notion of actual, biologically determined races in our cultural productions, in newspaper articles, television sound bites, motion picture scripts, in daily conversation, in government statistics --- every where. It is relentless. So much so that it is difficult for anyone to escape the enculturation, no matter how insane the notion of "races" happens to be. More people believe in race than believe in Jesus' resurrection or Moses parting the Red Sea.

Don't get me wrong. Race does exist as a social phenomenon, precisely because of the pervasiveness of racism. It does not matter if you believe in biological race or not, you will be classified by others and that classification will have profound consequences on your life and the lives of those you care about. Racism permeates every aspect of social life, especially in the old slave states, like the United States. It shapes the life chances of human beings even before their birth. It is one of the determinants of quality of life and life expectancy. It produces significant differences in blood pressure averages for individuals classified in different racial categories, and so on. And the culture of the U.S., in particular, has spread around the globe, carrying this religious notion as a virus reshaping other cultures, blending with them, and carrying the message of racism even to places where it was not present. The more pervasive the religious belief, the less it appears to be a belief, rather than a reality.

Racism had an immediate impact on the most recent exercise of national "democracy" in the United States, with implications for geo-politics, torture tactics, and civil liberties in the U.S. and beyond. The U.S. presidential race of 2004 was shaped by racism. Everyone knows that, even the neoconservatives who refuse to publicly admit it. Racism is so powerful that it tends to batter down all other forms of identity and to reshape perceived interests. Thus, male homo sapien sapiens who think of themselves as "white men" were far more likely to vote for G. W. Bush than for John F. Kerry, even if it might be in their economic and health interest to have the latter serve as president. But that's how religion works. It drowns out what people like to call "common sense" (common sense is generally thought to be something like the general knowledge that doing x (sticking your finger in the fire) leads to y (getting burned), but of course "common sense" is another fiction, since what is generally thought to be true may, in fact, be completely wrong --- in the sense that, for example, attacking and conquering Iraq may NOT make Americans safer, in either the short or long term. Thus, racism is common sense to the extent racism is pervasive. It is common sense and still wrong. So I guess racism doesn't really drown out common sense, it drowns out reality with a reconstructed and wrong common sense). Racism creates cultural pollution that erodes the intellectual health of the society. I guess the real question is --- who does racism serve? Why is it perpetuated in the practices (and often the rules) of just about every institution in the society? Why do news reporters continue to refer to race in their reporting (as if that man really is a "caucasian (has he any clue where the Caucasus Mountains are?) male" and the world made up of "black" and "white" as clearly distinct categories of being)? Why does the government ask us to self-identify as belonging to one of a small number of distinct racial categories (I either refuse to answer or write in homo sapien and/or all of the above)? Why are discussions of diversity often couched in these same terms (including by those who claim to be struggling against racism -- how can you struggle against racism if you reproduce the lie that race is a biological/genetic phenomenon)?

And what would happen if we abandoned the notion that this concept has a biological reality? What if we actually listened to what genetics has been telling us for a very long time (no matter who you are, your genetic brothers and sisters will include people whose skin pigmentation and other physical attributes would place them in a different one of these constructed racial categories than the one you get dumped into)? What would happen? How would it change the social dynamics? How would it change our identity if racism were finally no more pervasive than a belief in witches (the odds of completely ridding the world of racism isn't very good, but I'd settle for making it marginal)? How would it change the future?