The need to change economic values

Murray Dobbin published an article in Rabble that was republished by Common Dreams yesterday called “Imagine: Prosperity without Growth” that brings up an old, old reflection: how to socialize the economy without jeopardizing civil rights and the possibility of personal liberties like owning things.

There are all sorts of theoretical issues involved like the need to preserve the impetus that Capitalism has given science, invention, industry, and other forms of production. It is possible that all this has just been a medium-term loan from fossil energy sources, but the system of manufacture, distribution, and in general “entitlement” that this economic arrangement has provided has been indeed dynamic and fruitful.

One thing we cannot do is think that things will go on just as they have for the last century. The Left has to get busy and invent alternatives, or we will fall into dictatorships such as the world has never known, together with massive migrations and starvation. Maybe a few of the very rich will find islands or mountain tops to hide on, but most of us will not.

It is amusing when people talk about how we will save ourselves by migrating to new oxygen-based colonies under pressurized geodesic domes on Mars. The image comes to mind of the pictures of people fighting to be included on one of the escaping helicopters leaving the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon way back when: even if these colonies were to be constructed, do all these people from Grand Rapids, Omaha and Little Rock think they will be invited along for the trip?

We have very few answers yet. The Right is bereft of ideas that aren’t dreams of reproducing the good-old-days. Mr. Dobbin said:

“The magnitude of the moral crisis of the political right is staggering. The greed, dishonesty, hubris and psychopathic disregard for the public good renders the whole business elite utterly unfit to pronounce on anything -- not even on the economy, but certainly not democracy or how we run our collective affairs."

I remember reading Paul Sweezy’s and Paul Baran’s book in the 1960´s, “Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order” that was written from a Marxist point of view about how present-day Capitalism must grow to stay alive. The viability of that underlying requirement was also challenged by the “Club of Rome” some years ago when the participants questioned our Planet’s capacity to continue to supply the necessary energy and raw materials on a long-term basis.

One thing is clear: we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the Old Socialisms like the Soviet Union and Cuba. Even China, that calls itself "Communist", is in reality, and from an ecological point of view, an unchained, uncontrolled Capitalist Frankenstein's monster. While the dangers are great, and the threats of famine and political unrest are terrifying, we have, perhaps, time to create another way to live together.

Mr. Dobbin says that we should look toward how the Canadians have solved some health and environmental issues. And he offers an Internet link to a page created by the Sustainable Development Commission. We need to reconsider quality-of-life, peaceful coexistence, health, prosperity and, in general, satisfaction.

Will our Homo-Sapian genes permit us to do this?

References:

Murray Dobbin (Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by Rabble (Canada). “Imagine: Prosperity without Growth”, available on Common Dreams at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/22-8

Sustainable Development Commission, available at: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/prosperity-without-growth-background.html

Image in cartoon taken from Microsoft pop art option in PowerPoint.

Discard the generals

Source of Danziger cartoon


An old question: why do people prefer violent solutions that history shows to be ineffectual? From the earliest times, conquest, colonialism, apartheid, and other forms of violent repression arouse violent liberation responses. And the undoubted heroes that make it into legend are those who find peaceful solutions to injustice: Buda, Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Fehullah Gulen, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, Mother Teresa, the monks in Tibet, the anonymous boy who danced the tank to a stop in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But somehow people continue to think they can accomplish something positive with armament.

From Manifest Destiny to the Alamo, from Korea to Vietnam, and now from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the people who sell us guns want us to use them. We fight “over there” and our kids shoot up their schoolmates "over here".

It’s time to find another way.

If a mouse in a Skinner-box always makes the wrong turn, it is
discarded as an experimental animal. Our generals always advise us to bomb’em back to the stone-age, and we follow patriotically along. Maybe we should discard some of those generals.

Obama and the Dogs of War

here is no end to war.






Chris Hedges in his article, “Becoming what we seek to destroy” says it well: We are

“ … guided by a president who once again has no experience of war and defers to the bull-necked generals and militarists whose careers, power and profits depend on expanded war, we are transformed into monsters.

This is the point: we are becoming the enemy. Every time we are confronted by the atrocities of the past, we chant, “Never again”. But we do not change.

The Pope once again decries the Nazi killings. But in the present-day, living-world the violence is the same, and the excuses are similar.

In Sri Lanka a well-fed government spokesman accuses the Tamil Tigers of killing the Tamils. This may be true, but we have heard authorities from different countries use the “human shield” excuse so many times for their massacres, it has become rhetorically suspect. The Israelis used the same language to justify the slaughter of the Palestinians. Now the United States says the killings and massive exodus en Pakistan are due to the same pretext: the “enemy” seems to practice self-immolation just to give us bad press. It is a problem of PR: the Associated Press went so far as to call the deaths “awkward”.


I am outraged, but it seems that power has a “Gatopardo” existence: the term refers to an Italian novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. In this novel the main character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, negotiates and manipulates things so that his aristocratic family can continue to benefit even during Garibaldi's populist changes in the late 19th century.

In the same way, armies and arms manufacturers continue to market their wares and ply their trade even though so many of us scream bloody murder.

As always, let's enthusiastically let lose the dogs of war!

Prosperity and peace ≠ terrorism and war

But misery and revenge does equal terrorism and war


IMAGINE:

1. All that war money had been spent in the Middle East on irrigation, schools, hospitals, and the like.
2. Pakistan (and Afghanistan and Irak) had become prosperous.
3. The people had begun to demand democratic participation in their political and economic systems.
3. The ordinary Taliban supporters had decided that it was better to be prosperous. They had decided to send their kids to school, and had abandoned their armed struggle.
4. The Taliban leaders, responsible for all that violence, had been tried in legally constituted courts.
5. Those in the U.S. administration responsible for indiscriminate killing, torture, corruption, and other violence had been tried in legally constituted courts.

WOULD THE WORLD HAVE BEEN A SAFER PLACE?:

Disobey the wave!

Alter suffering yesterday in a man- (or woman-) eating traffic jam, I thought I’d post some useful techniques for avoiding so much despair.


The first is: disobey the wave!

First, an explanation. Traffic isn’t uniform. It moves in clusters or bunches as can be appreciated in a video that can be seen at this address. In slow-moving traffic the effect is more pronounced. From the air, the long string of cars looks like an expansion and compression wave, even though one’s immediate experience is just of starting and stopping the car.

We might say we obey a physical law just like any other inert particle of matter.

When I realized this, my wounded self-pride made me try to disobey the law. But then I noticed the effect my disobedience had on the cars behind me.


To achieve this we have to adopt a median speed and allow a space between our car and the one in front of us, a sort of an air-bag that grows in fast traffic and diminishes when the cars move more slowly. We are basically transmitting the wave to the empty space and for this reason we don’t have to start and stop so much. Our cars don’t over-heat and we get where we are going with less fuss and bother.

Another result is that all the cars behind us also have a more or less uniform speed.

War on Drugs

This will be a brief note about the "war on drugs".

Obama is disappointing me because I thought he would question dreadful policies like the “wars on…”. They don’t work, and the battle that is going on now in Mexico is just one more tragic example of these failures.

Obama seems to me more naive than cynical about this. For example in the recent on-line question-and-answer session where he accepted questions from the general public, his reply to the requests to legalize marihuana was almost trivial. He didn’t add the traditional “hehehehehe", but his giggling was just about audible. He acted sooo surprised that so many of his following was interested in this dubious topic.

It was not an adequate answer when thousands of Latins are suffering violent deaths related to this problem.

His contribution will be more “Black Hawks” for more war.

Who are happy with this? On one hand Sikorsky Aircraft, the company that makes them. The DEA also benefits because the justification of the whole program is the illegality of the drugs in question. And of course, the drug cartels would loose lots of money if they were legalized.

Who looses?

The victims of all that violence. Just ask the Colombians.

Nuclear Arsenals

Source

Global map of nuclear arsenals

President Barak Obama just made a very important declaration : his desire to eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons.

He admitted that his is the only country to use such arms, but he added that this is the very reason that the U.S. should lead the way to their abolition.

There are moments when one gets depressed and says that democracy doesn’t work. But then again there are luminous and honorable episodes when the system shows its marvelous capacity to correct its error and represent humanity’s most beautiful longings. And President Obama, with his profound belief in the will of the people (“Yes, we can!”) continues to fulfill our hopes.

I’m not naive: His gesture is double edged. While he shows himself to be a man of principles and humanitarian leadership, he continues the war in Afghanistan.

We have every reason to be afraid that the shining knight on his great horse of state that Barak Obama is today will end up like Lyndon Johnson did way back in the 60’s when he pushed on with the Vietnam war. The parallels are frightening: an unpopular war in a country whose corrupt government is not worth defending, an elusive, dedicated and fanatic enemy fighting in its own terrene against foreign invaders, and the inevitability of many dead U.S. soldiers.

It is true that Obama is more charismatic, a Camelot-inheritor who resembles Kennedy more than he does Johnson. And he knows how to make inspiring political gestures. But already there is an humanitarian crisis on the Afghan – Pakistani border caused by U.S., drone-delivered bombs.

I fear for how he will be able to deliver on his many promises if he, too, becomes a “war president”. But I’m not cynical either, and I applaud this man who has become an icon of the Twentieth Century’s conscience.