Economic Crisis?

For decades we've watched passively as poor people and people of color have lost jobs, and faced a weakened net of social protection in the U.S. as the conservatives seemed to convince the American majority that the marketplace was fair, and that hence people who were not doing well had no one to blame but themselves. It was wrong to over-tax rich people, we were told, because they had taken the risk of investing in projects that could fail, so the public had no claim on their huge profits when they succeeded. The bailouts that the marketplace have required in the past, and now once again with the bailout of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, demonstrate the emptiness of this argument.

The reality? When poor people fail to flourish economically, the government shrugs its shoulders and gives a pittance of relief. But when super-giant firms fail, and the wealthy are endangered, the government, with the votes of many erstwhile conservatives, jumps to the rescue.
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It reminds me of an old saying: "When is it a "recession?" When YOU lose your job. When is it a "depression?" When I lose MY job!" Too many of the people who are suffering today were all too willing to allow others to suffer when it was "just" in a community of "people of color" or people with a "lower class status." Now, they are upset when it is they who the larger society is abandoning.
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Here we get to the fundamental contradiction of antagonism to "big government." The whole point of having a democratic government originally was to create an institution to provide the kind of hands-on-caring that we couldn't do if we want to keep working and making a living. "Government" then, is the institution that should be the manifestation of our caring for each other. Instead, it has been largely shaped by the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, who use government to protect their own interests and honestly believe that their own interests are the public good. And as more and more people begin to see government failing to give a real priority to being an instrument of mutual caring, they get more and more incensed at having to pay taxes for this king of reality. Unable to imagine any other reality as "realistic," many people decide that their only refuge is to resist taxation and support candidates who promise to lower their taxes. The resentment of government that the Right plays upon is based in a correct assessment that too often it fails to serve the needs of ordinary people but only the needs of the insiders and their friends.
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Is is precisely in these moments that people turn toward fascistic forces that promise order and discipline and control over what seems to be out of control. If they cannot hear a reasonable and common-sense analysis of what is happening to them from the Left, they will turn toward the fantasies of the Right-- a return to less complex realities of small town America, hoping against hope for a return to the "good old days" when (in their fantasy, but not in reality) things were simpler and more straightforward and you could take care of yourself, shoot a moose or deer or buffalo for dinner, and rely on neighbors' generosity when you needed help. But don't blame this on the stupidity of the American people. They are looking for clear answers and solutions, and so far what they hear from the Democrats is confusion and an unwillingness to really confront the real sources of the problem in any straightforward way. They don't want policy wonks--they want someone to name the reality and give an ethically and spiritually coherent vision of what to do about it. Unless they hear that, they will look for others who have some willingness to present a coherent (though in our view, deeply distorted) set of solutions ...

Once again, the responsibility is on ordinary citizens to stand up and talk back to the politicians in both parties, and to do so in a way that demands a new set of values to run our economy, so that materialism and selfishness is put on the defensive and caring for each other becomes the central motif. It is only when some serious political leaders are willing to make that the center of their campaign, to demand that love, generosity and caring for others is the shaping force determining their policies, that the American people will be able to take that part of their consciousness that wants such a world but believes it impossible, and finally transcend their fears and act on their highest desires rather than sinking into the other fearful part of their consciousness that leads them to seek magical solutions in repression and denial of much of what they know about the failures of the economy and of our foreign policy..

By Rabbi Michael Lerner
From The Network of Spiritual Progressives
I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but I think this is a pretty good analysis, and one which reminds us of the ethical and social dimension of economics.

Sorry for all the U.S.- centric posts lately! I know we have our own election going on. Much more to blog on, from puffin poop to sweater vests...

Fighting Amongst Ourselves for the Scraps

One of my favourite Canadian blogs has a very interesting conversation going on in the comments of this post, as explained here. To sum up, there's a Nice White Guy who feels Indiginous peoples have unfair advantages, and Scott has some very compassionate and well-argued points. I urge everyone to go and read.

I've been hearing and reading versions of this conversation everywhere lately. The well-meaning, hard-working white guy has a tougher and tougher time making it these days. He looks back, feeling nostalgic for a time that seems simpler; the time before the women's movement, before civil rights, before various other liberation struggles. There's a tendency among many regular working class people to blame those who are below them in the heirarchy but catching up, rather than those at the top who are keeping everyone down. Thus you have increasing fear, and a huge backlash against so many of the progressive reforms hard fought and won. Vicious anti-feminism, anti-immigration, and that sort of soft reactionary racism that is common these days (such as the belief in reverse discrimination).

See, on the left, we usually see the rise of neoliberalism as one of the main causes of the increasing difficulties for the white middle class. We blame those at the very top, and their cheerleaders and supporters in the market fundamentalist government, corporate media, and think tanks. Most (though not all) of these people are white, wealthy, Christian, hetero men. That doesn't mean we blame white people, the wealthy, Christians, heteros, or men.

The nostalgic past in which life was simple and good for a hardworking everyman was experienced by a minority of white Westerners. The 50s look very different to a black woman in the US, or an aboriginal person in Canada, an Algerian in Algeria, or a Palestinian in a refugee camp.

The last few decades have seen amazing struggles, many successes, and many setbacks. I certainly don't want to bedgrudge any group the rights they fought so hard for. I want them to have more. I want us to have more. That's what social justice is about. If I may use a dog-and-meat-metaphor: we should not be fighting amongst ourselves for the scraps, but going after those who are eating the prime rib. (Well, more precisely those structures that dole out prime rib to some and scraps to the rest.)

On Fear

I just finished reading Barry Glassner's The Culture of Fear. Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & so much more. It's a good read, although being published in 1999 it is now sort of out of date. After all, fear has seen quite an upswing since 2001.

Basically he runs through all of those fears listed above and debunks them one by one. He makes pretty good arguments overall, and I tend to agree with him. I find him a bit patronizing, though. He quickly dismisses people's fears because the causes so often do not merit the reactions. But although the reasons for fear might often be irrational, the emotion is very real. A book which I think treated people's fears with more respect is False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear by Marc Siegel.

Ze Frank shows how trying to curing fear with facts can backfire.

How Cities Help Regulate Fear

Why do people in rural areas tend to be more Right-wing than people in urban areas?

First, Rural and Suburban areas promote fear:

In an open city...people of different colors and incomes must negotiate their mutual fate together. In some respects, they learn to value one another more highly, and social networks are expanded. In socially isolated environments [such as gated suburbs], social distance leads to stereotyping and misunderstanding, which in turn leads to fear and even greater distance. A resident in one of our [suburban] focus groups exemplified this dynamic when she told us that she never left her downtown San Francisco office building, even for lunch, for fear of people on the streets. Her building is located on a central street of department stores and offices, populated at lunch hour mainly by businesspeople and shoppers. But because it is a public space where anyone may go, it is too uncontrolled for her comfort, too unpredictable. Unlike her gated suburb, its openness increases the vulnerability she already feels to an unacceptable level.
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As one citizen told Constance Perin in her study of community and place in American life: "See, you have to understand the fundamental feeling in the suburbs is fear, let's face it. The basic emotional feeling is fear. Fear of blacks, fear of physical harm, fear of their kids being subjected to drugs, which are identified as a black problem, fear of all the urban ills. They feel [that] by moving to the suburbs they've run away from it, in fact, they haven't, in reality they haven't, but in their own mind's eye they've moved away from the problem." From Blakely & Snyder's Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States via Bicycle Fixation

Not only are residents of vibrant cities usually less fearful of crime, they also tend to be less fearful of the big 'T': Terrorism, despite inhabiting much more likely targets than suburb dwellers:

We do not live behind gated communities and we do not have private security forces. We walk by alleys after dark and we dodge mentally unstable people to get to our subways and to make our bus connections. When you neglect the needy, we are the people that suffer. When the dispossessed and alienated riot, they riot in Newark, Detroit, and Watts. They do not riot in Topeka, Boise, or Crawford, Texas. From On Courage

Second, I think the simplistic cliché that the Left is all about hope, while the Right is all about fear holds a lot of truth. The Right Soothes Fear. The Right offers people the promise of security and order in what can feel like a world gone out of control. Witness McCarthy-era anti-Communist hysteria, which is very similar to the current hysteria over "Islamic terrorism". When facing something frightening, it feels good to have a strong, protective big brother.

Right-wing leaders know this, and they use fear as "a way of getting people to act against their own interests to work up hysteria and to get people to do terrible things to other people, because they’ve been made afraid." - Howard Zinn

Fear is one of our biggest challenges. Also see Can Fear be a Useful Tool for Progressives?

An American in Hezbollah's Tent

Excerpts from Rethinking Terrorism: A Jewish American Crosses into Hezbollah Territory:

I found myself in front of a squad of Jordanian police, explaining that I could not share in the bread they were offering because it was Eid al-Pesach, a holiday commemorating the Jewish escape from Egypt thousands of years ago.

They offered me yogurt and a spoon.

In all my travels in the Middle East I have repeatedly received the same welcome response.

This trip to Lebanon was no different than the other trips to the Middle East, says the author, which leads to the question:

How does the bombing start when we can we stand here chatting politely, drinking coffee, asking questions about Israel and Lebanese politics? Who are the people who start the bombing? Who are the kidnappers and the killers? And why can't they talk a little more first?

Why indeed? It is at least partially due to the incredible fear-mongering seen from the government and media. Fear is the most useful tool for governments bent on warmaking, and the media are their echo chamber. There is a dangerous and irrational anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hysteria, mostly fueled by the false, but fear-provoking equation: Muslim = Terrorist.

Howard Zinn reminded us of this in a recent address, by quoting Göring, who said: "Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war? But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same way in any country." (Emphasis mine)

Filed under Reflection

The World Failed to Change on 9/11

As the world came together in our grief and shock in the weeks after 9/11 did we forge an era of cooperation among the nations of the world? Did the attack on North American soil help us to understand life for those in other nations under attack? Did we remember that just as 3,000 innocent people died needlessly in New York City, tens of thousands of children die needlessly from hunger in a single day? Have we learned that each human life is important, that everybody is someone’s child, or spouse or parent? Have we tried to understand the powerless, the poor and the downtrodden?

Sadly, we have cheapened the memory of those who suffered by using their suffering for selfish reasons. Since 9/11 we have strived to increase Western military and economic superiority. We allow our civil liberties to be eroded in the name of security. Our respect for human dignity has been proven a lie as we have become the perpetrators of torture and humiliation in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Perhaps nothing change on 9/11 but the words we use to justify our crimes. Perhaps 9/11 has become little more than the subject of docudramas that promote a single political view. Perhaps the lessons of 9/11 have been lost on us.

Quoted in full from Political Cycles because I couldn't have said it better no matter how hard I tried.

More on War in the Middle East

Can Fear be a Useful Tool for Progressives?

David Roberts thinks not.

We will build nothing, create nothing, inspire nothing of worth while in the grip of fear.

It is often said that violence 'sends a message' to this or that recipient. Often the alleged message is about the firmness of our resolve -- 'we really mean it!' We send messages of this nature to the Middle East fairly regularly these days; its inbox is full. Israel sends the message to Lebanon. Russia sends the message to Chechnya. Indonesia sends the message to its separatists. And so on.

This is bullshit of the most pernicious possible sort.

Violence sends no message. This is not merely some kind of moral disagreement or metaphor: Violence has no semantic content. Modern civilization has become expert at laying layer after layer of verbiage atop its violence, but it is all rationalization and justification. At root, everything violence 'says' is captured in the famous words of the Incredible Hulk: 'Hulk smash!'

Victims of violence do not sit back and contemplate what they may have done to prompt it. They do not reconsider or learn lessons. They fight back, or they flee. As I said in earlier posts, fear and anger pull us away from ratiocination. They are the affective equivalent of the fetal position, reducing us to pure ego, pure self-preservation.

Excerpt from the fourth part in a five-part series on Fear and Environmentalism. Long, but worth a read.

Filed Under: reflection

UK "Terror Plot" too Convenient

From Democracy Now!:

Meanwhile NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects of the alleged plot. A senior British official said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The British official suggested the attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. Some did not even have passports.

More Detail from Craig Murray:

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

(Thanks to Left I on the News)

Even if it was a real and dire threat, Pierre Tristam puts it in perspective:

Terrorism is by definition a spectacular one-time event, sometimes serialized, always limited by its very strength: it’s only as effective as its intended target permit it to be. Short of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, the downing of planes, the suicide explosions, the hostage-taking is all as immediately disturbing as it is ultimately no more consequential than accidental tragedies that end lives in myriad other ways, but without altering democratic institutions and the constitutional functioning of society.

Ze Frank agrees.

It is not a crime to hate the US, or Israel, or to wish George Bush was dead (heck the CIA "wishes" Castro was dead) and it is terribly irresponsible to suggest everyone should be constantly afraid and give away hard-earned freedoms because "they" hate "us". Who's instilling the terror in the population? Is it the terrorists or is it the governments and media (because "be afraid" sells more papers than "go about your business")? In whose interests is a terrorized citizenry? Don't forget the desire for order and security in a frightening, lawless world is the main reason people vote right wing.

It is simpler to think "they" are evil and hate us, than to look at the extremely complex situation. Simplification of reality is highly marketable, as it also provides a sense of security. People like the tidiness and are often willing to sacrifice the reality. As written by Buber in I and Thou:

Man's world is manifold, and his attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.

They like to be told that there are two worlds and two ways. This is comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be common and the other one is celebrated as superior.

Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life.

Sorry to be so long-winded today, but sometimes there's just a lot to say!

More on the "War on terror" and other reflections

Why Do People Vote Right-wing?

...the political appeal of Right-wing calls to order comes from society's anxiety for the ever-increasing possibility of catastrophic disorder. From the viewpoint of an isolated individual, it makes no difference if disorder is produced by another individual for random reasons, or by a progressive collective that does it as part of a political action. It does not matter if it is a criminal, a madman, a union striking, or an anti-capitalist group doing direct action: whenever there is fear of catastrophic disorder and of the dissolution of social bonds, Right-wing calls to order find a fertile soil. More

This is a thoughtful article that seeks to stop blaming or denigrating people who support what is obviously not in their best interests.

People actually aren't stupid and they generally seek to act rationally and make the best decisions for their particular circumstances. It drives me crazy when progressives talk about the "stupidity of the masses" etc.

In addition, there is a fair bit of psychological study in the scholarly and popular literature about why people are self-destructive. As an example, why do women stay with abusive men?

By understanding this, we can reduce our negative judgements on people, increase the compassion we like to think we feel as progressives, and learn best how to effect change individuals (without being condescending).

More Philosophy & Reflection, General Politics