1. SHRIVELING THE FINANCIAL SECTOR AND EXPANDING THE PUBLIC SECTOR
By Marc Batko
Mainstream market-radical economic theory has led to exploding inequality, cynicism and resignation and has no answers to mass unemployment, growing precarious work, global warming and the rights of nature. The time is right for alternative economics, for economics that is part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination.
The market is not self-healing or a panacea but a necessary and helpful instrument after political questions are answered: what kind of society do we want? How can public necessities remain public? How can people be active participative citizens and not mere cogs in the machine? How can nature be protected and nurtured and not trivialized as a free good, external or sink?
Alternative economics is a vital corrective to market radicalism and neoliberalism with unfettered deregulation, privatization and liberalization of markets. While neoliberal mythology insists higher profits bring more jobs and greater investments, profits soar and investments fall by the wayside. Profitable companies speculate on foreign currencies and buy back their own stock while rewarding managers and CEOs with bonuses. As lessons from the 2008 financial meltdown, the financial sector should be shriveled and the public sector expanded.
The 2008 financial crisis led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the destruction of trillions in wealth. The risk managers turned out to be risk creators. The deregulation of the banking industry, the corruption of the rating agencies and the indifference of the federal government enabled speculation to eclipse productive investment. All corporate and personal achievement depends on state investment in roads, schools, hospitals, food safety, water quality and airwaves. Changing economic priorities and policies is vital to fair distribution and generalized security. All people should be assured a basic unconditional income. The 26 community centers in Vancouver Canada have a cushioning and multiplying effect. In times before Reagan, they were bursting with counseling and surrogate classes and living proof that the future can move to generalized security. Reduced working hours could be seen as a socioeconomic investment ensuring long-term health and expanding
The financial sector should be shriveled and the public sector expanded. The myths of self-healing markets, efficient financial markets, nature as a free good, external and sink, infinite growth in a finite world, quantitative growth and the exact sciences eclipsing qualitative growth and the human sciences (history, literature, play, language, sociology, political science, philosophy) and private opulence next to public squalor (cf. John Kenneth Galbraith) must call us to rethinking.
Alternative Austrian, Swiss, Polish and German economists can alert us to the bankruptcy of austerity policy and fiscal policy aiding capital at the expense of workers and the
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environment. The future economic policy must be regional and decentralized. A postmaterialist economy is possible as we transition from excess to access and more to enough. Work, health, strength, security and happiness can be redefined. The rights of nature can be respected in a future of moderation, equality and freedom.
More and more is produced with fewer and fewer workers. Work and income have uncoupled as people cannot survive on their earnings from work and depend on credits and loans. Reducing working hours is a response to increased productivity and is the only way to assure everyone of the right to meaningful work. Reducing working hours, as Michael Schwendinger explains, is a socio-economic investment that protects longterm health interests and gives people more time sovereignty
Peter Ulrich is a Swiss economist. The economy must be embedded in society. Society must not be embedded in the economy. Ulrich Thielemann is a Swiss and German economist. Profit making is not profit maximizing. Studying economics today is like brainwashing. Tomasz Konicz is a Polish economist. The 30 year crisis is not an Obama crisis. Wages were stagnant for 35 years. Credit was expanded. Families worked 3 or 4 jobs. Health care, education and housing became unaffordable. The US became a black hole for the global economy.
Personal performance always depends on the work of past generations and state interventions. Americans fall to a new feudalism with the deserving and undeserving, fear-mongering and racism. Pragmatism or market religion often replaces vision, principle and courage. Confusing speculation and investment makes the next crisis inevitable. Wall Street banks spent $10 billion in campaign contribution and lobbying ensuring corruption, weak financial deregulation and shifting private losses to public taxpayers.
Profits soar and sovereignty is lost. The TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) threatens democracy and the constitutional state. The Investor-State dispute settlement mechanism elevates corporations to the status of nation states. These three judge panels are fronts for corporate investors. 600 corporate lobbyists are discussing the TTIP; senators and the public are denied any transparency! Philip Morris is suing Uruguay and Australia for lost profits through health warnings. A Swedish energy corporation Vattenfall is suing Germany for 1 billion euros for ending nuclear power too quickly! The lessons of NAFTA were repressed: the US trade deficit soared to $180 billion and one million jobs were lost.
How perverse and shameful to ignore facts and blatant failure, to give speculators a free pass for the 2008 crash, to shift costs to workers, the disabled, pensioners and the poor! In post-democracy representatives do not represent the public welfare or public interests. Do you think “public spirit” will fall from the sky without redistribution from top to bottom? Lies are bitter fruits of the unchecked market economy normalizing corruption and cowardice. The human future is really the welfare state where cooperation and competition reinforce each other. The market radical or market fundamentalist are caught in a false triumphalism and decry the welfare state as “Bolshevism.”
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That globalization will benefit everyone is a deadly myth. According to the neoliberal myth, higher profits would lead to greater investments and more jobs. In truth, corporations used soaring profits to speculate on foreign currencies and buying back their own stock!
The US economy amid outsourcing and financialization is kept alive through foreign investments, social security, Medicare and suffers with false identities, the world sheriff, the empire exploiting colonies and continents through “free investment” trade agreements, military bases and indirect threats.
The implementation of social security insurance drastically reduced the poverty rate in the US. The country is strengthened when fellow citizens escape poverty. Most of the money paid in SSI benefits is immediately cycled back into circulation, further stimulating the economy and thereby benefiting all of us. August 14 was Social Security’s 80th birthday and July 30 was Medicare’s 50th birthday.
All personal and corporate success depended on state investments in schools, roads, hospitals, food safety, water quality and airwaves. The Schwabian housewife is a misleading model. Debts to an individual household are different than debts to corporations and states. Debts to corporations and states are necessary to create the infrastructure for future economic activity.
Political will and political motivation are necessary to break with inertia, corruption and lip service. Creating affordable housing and meaningful living wage jobs can’t be left to the market or neoliberal theory. Profit making is different than profit-maximizing. The neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments (Nikolaus Krowall). Private opulence exists alongside public squalor as John Kenneth Galbraith decried in the 1960s.
Don’t hate the media; become the media. Hope is in alternative media, intercultural learning, breaking out of the box of conformity, herd instinct and selfishness. Fear of the unknown and fear of the future can be overcome as prejudice and illiteracy can be overcome in the event of understanding, the fusion of horizons (cf. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method). Fear mongering and fault finding are false securities like cheap grace and cheap citizenship. The church (as in Nazi Germany) can become a husk of hypocrisy and barbarism, a bastion of self-righteousness where social justice and the in-breaking reign of God are trivialized. Our own logs of militarism and exploding inequality must be recognized without magnifying the specks in the eyes of others.
We are called to be subjects in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static. We are invited to abundant self-critical and interdependent life, not a 2-inch world of Ponderosa and Mr. Cartwright, an insular world where nothing is learning of difference and other cultures. where wars of aggression and adventure are normalized and where the outside of the cup is cleaned and the inside remains filthy. “We sit here stranded and do our best to deny it,” “the executioner’s face is always well hidden where hunger is ugly and souls are forgotten,” “a hard rain’s going to fall” (Bob Dylan www.dylanradio.com).
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2. THE NEOLIBERAL INDOCTRINATION
Neoliberalism serves as social indoctrination. It tells the poor and weak they are responsible for their misery. It does its utmost to prevent the true extent of social poverty from reaching the general public. The health system despite ever greater expenditures becomes increasingly inhuman, social work erodes, a “re-feudalization boom” rages along with de-democratization, and investors aim at privatizing the public education system. When the poor and weak blame themselves for social inequality (low motivation, negative attitudes etc), the state and businesses escape their responsibility to contribute to education, community and the infrastructure. Minds are fogged and controlled by neoliberal media, focus on the trivial (celebrity news and sports fixation) and psycho-techniques make resistance against this inhuman ideology largely impossible.
As low profits led to the explosion of the financial sector and financialization around 1980, the financial meltdown of 2008 led to the discrediting of neoliberalism. Homo oeconomicus fades away as an economic theory along with market fundamentalism and market radicalism. Market failure and state violence epitomized by Enron’s expansive accounting method and the aggressive wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria should be lessons if the future is to be worth living.
We live at the close of the neoliberal rollback where universities became profit centers, health care becomes a privilege not a right, where climate change and protection of labor and the environment are ignored in trade agreements while foreign investors can sue states for real and imaginary profits. The threat of lawsuits for lost corporate profits will have a chilling effect on labor and environmental protection.
The people are too big to fail, not the banks. Risks and bailout costs were shifted to taxpayers. When neoliberalism is rolled back and Orwellian distortion of language and democracy is ended, poverty will be ended through the exercise of true democracy. System change, not climate change is the imperative.
As capitalism grows, inequality grows. Capitalism is an inequality machine (cf. Thomas Piketty). Corporations are sometimes more powerful than nations. In addition to buying back their own stock, corporations store $7 trillion in tax havens and deny local, national and international responsibility and liability. A hundred years ago, the French socialist Jean Juares warned: “Capitalism contains crisis as rain clouds contain rain.”
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PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEARCH FOR ORIENTATION: THE FUTURE GUIDES THE PRESENT
Striving for utopia is the hope and motivation of the present. The present transcends itself only when it includes hope and promise. The poor live in two worlds, the world of hope and the world of misery, while the rich live in only one world where the future is only a repetition of the present. Life and reality are not linear or self-evident but pluralist and dependent on interpretation. True wealth is manifest in a larger consciousness of interdependence, empathy, historical awareness and humble openness to liberation.
The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The penultimate draws its strength from the ultimate (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison).
We find ourselves at the end of an epoch without clear signs of the new epoch. How can citizens be promoted and not reduced to consumers? How can the state ensure the food, housing and health necessities and not set corporate welfare and corporate profit above everything? How can education emphasize critical thinking and sustainability and be strengthened with money from a reduced pentagon and a downsized financial sector?
ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS: REDUCING WORKING HOURS, EXCHANGING ROLES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS
Community centers could be a third way beyond the state and the market. Vancouver B.C. has 26 community centers, some with swimming pools that take your breath away. The Carnegie Community Center in the poverty-stricken Downtown East Side is subsidized by the province. There hope is restored and becomes concrete in the real functioning mosaic of interdependence and love of life. Inexpensive meals of casseroles, a library quickly filled to the brim, a computer room offering everyone 3 hours of daily computer use, a basketball gym, a game room, a TV room, a theater and counseling and class opportunities are a life-giving antidote to the non-stop consumerism and cajoling of one-dimensional neoliberal profit worship. The community centers have a cushioning and multiplying effect enabling both working and unemployed to feel integrated and welcomed in the community.
Free Internet books and publishing ebooks at Smashwords.com are examples of the new person-oriented alternative digital economics. The gate is taken away from the gatekeepers; ebooks have a 30% share of new books today that has stabilized over the last 3 or 4 years. People are reading on screens and not only on the printed page. Openculture.com gives us 700 free movies (including the 1915 “Alice in Wonderland”), 700 free ebooks and 450 free audio books (including George Orwell’s “1984”). How can anyone be “hard-nosed” with 700 free movies? Super Amigos is a free Mexican movie from 2007 where the activist refuses anything packaged, goes up against bestial bullfighting, homophobia and eviction of seniors.
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Access could replace excess; enough could replace more. The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way we think (Albert Einstein). Work, strength, health, power and nature must be reconceptualized to avert re-feudalization, destruction of democracy and corporate destruction of the environment. As we move into a digital knowledge-based society, qualitative growth can replace quantitative growth. Instead of gazing at the stories of office buildings, we could become storytellers living double vision, universal and particular history.
Music, dance, poetry and literature deserve important places in a post-material decommodified world. The military-industrial complex and the horror of never-ending war must give way to multicultural interdependence, forgiveness, empathy, surprise, mystery, play and environmental caring.
Reducing working hours, exchanging roles and community centers are vital in a postgrowth, post-fossil and post-autistic economy. Person-oriented work and investments in labor-intensive sectors could mark our transition and end exploding inequality.
The demonized social state can be re-discovered as the future of humanity. We are fulfilled in the other, in expanding possibilities and awareness, not in amassing things. Lakes are more than anti-freeze and mountains are more than landfill.
The state should be the support of the majority, rescuing those who fall under the wheel and blocking private interest from eclipsing public interest. “When the government trusts citizens, citizens trust government,” said Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian Prime Minister. Can we promote the welcoming spirit and not the spirit of fear in a multi-polar world in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static? How can the future become a future of generalized security? How can food, housing, health care be human rights and not privileges? How can sharing replace hyper-individualism, narcissism, selfrighteousness and class immunization?
The state is different than a business or a household. The state can become indebted and borrow money from the future so future generations can share the benefits of social investment. Bernie Sanders wants to return people’s taxes in the form of infrastructure and education rather than transfer hundreds of billions to military contractors and he wants to regulate Wall Street and break up the big banks. Two ways the bomb changed everything is that weapons can be de-stabilizing and security cannot be only military.
Without regulation, there would be no healthy forests or fish in the lakes. Markets are not self-healing or panaceas but tools helpful after fundamental political questions are answered democratically: What kind of society do we want? How can competition and cooperation strengthen each other? How can the market, state and work be redefined? How can nature be protected as our partner and our hope and not reduced to a free good, external or sink?
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THE NEOLIBERAL ROLLBACK AND COUNTERMEASURES
“The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring” (Rilke). “The swan that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory” (Heidegger). “The penultimate depends on the ultimate” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing (Oscar Wilde).
THE NEOLIBERAL ROLLBACK CONFUSED THE GOAT WITH THE GARDENER
The brutal epoch of the neoliberal rollback is ending. State, labor, business, and social myths have caused re-feudalization and destruction of democracy, exploding inequality, insecurity for labor, degradation of the environment and a depressed and cynical populace. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Occupy and Bernie Sanders resisted these myths in their different contexts. In the 1930s Roosevelt brought the economy from ruin to new life by creating four million jobs in two months and building thousands of miles of roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and community centers. Minimum wage, social security and worker protection on the job showed the state could be caring and not only punishing.
Now is the time for counter-measures, for recognizing market failure and state violence, for quantitative easing for the people, for reducing working hours, and abandoning the misplaced trust in profits and corporate beneficence.
A future-friendly and environment-friendly economic policy that abandons myths is necessary along with circulating money. Only then are persons no longer grist to be ground up or “cost factors” to be reduced and CEOs no longer seen as beneficent “job creators.” The social contract and our interdependence are threatened when we tear at each other like rabid wolves and when the public interest is subordinated to the interests of corporations.
Alternative economics emphasizes reducing working hours and investing in the infrastructure. Education spending must be increased to ensure quality of life. Future necessities and the right to work must not be disregarded as labor insecurity becomes more widespread.
Social-economic regulation opposes supply-side trickle-down economics with its social cuts and tax relief for the super-rich. The Asian, Mexican, Argentinean and the Russian crises refute "Forever Number one." The Washington consensus is exposed as a fraud by the latest financial crisis which results from deregulation, privatization, opening markets and attacking unions.
Instead of expanding education and creating community centers with a multiplier effect, trillions are squandered on wars of choice and bailouts to speculators who stylize themselves as "investors" and "system-relevant."
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The crisis is also a chance to abandon the destruction of nature and the hegemony of financial markets and financial products. The "quiet co-op" of Wall Street and the banks could be countered with new models replacing the rapacious business model and the short-sighted privatization model. The state has a social nature and cannot only be a security and power state or a trough for "achievers" and the super-rich and an "activating - punishing" state for the unemployed.
Thirty years of supply side, trickle-down economics favored capital and speculation and harmed labor. The role of the state, reversing inequality and creating meaningful jobs became taboo subjects with the self-healing market. All problems were stylized as interferences with the market. Private vices were said to produce public good. All life was reduced, commodified or instrumentalized to economic productivity.
Herbert Marcuse ("One Dimensional Man"), Erich Fromm ("Escape from Freedom") and John Kenneth Galbraith ("The Affluent Society") could be our mentors as we redefine the economy, the state and future-friendly sustainability. The "Gross Happiness Index" could replace the "Gross Domestic Product." Progress could be redefined as living simply so others can simply live. Maximization of knowledge could replace maximization of profit. The community centers in Vancouver B.C. could be seen as an advance in social evolution with cushioning and multiplier effects reinvigorating public spirit. Ignorance could be fought, not immigrants
The social state, solidarity, justice and sharing, open doors while neoliberal deregulation and privatization lead to exploding inequality, generalized insecurity and disappearancof public spirit. Corporations could be made taxable again since schools, roads and policeprotection do not arise out of the blue. Dishwashers do not become millionaires. The statehas a vital role to protect people from unemployment, old age poverty and abuse of power.
THE ARC OF HISTORY BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE!
The arc of history bends toward justice (MLK). The welcoming tradition is also part of American history, not only the traditions of fear and personal enrichment. The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way we think (Albert Einstein).
Corporatist democrats seem to be 100% pragmatists and 0% idealists. Lies and trickery darken much of American history. 7.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, 2.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Laos. According to Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party, Saudi Arabia has purchased $50 billion in armaments over the last decade and Israel receives $8 million of military assistance every day.
The elite never make a mistake; everything is only a learning experience. Bill Clinton said NAFTA would bring 1 million jobs to the US and instead 1 million jobs were lost, subsidized corn was dumped on Mexico and millions of Mexicans could not survive on
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their small farms. Bill Clinton removed the Glass-Steagal fire wall between commercial and speculative banks, encouraged the creation of money out of thin air and had the gall to write “Back to Work.” Life and death matters, economic theory and truthfulness are secondary to financiers and cardboard politicians bent on their own enrichment. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who will not lead us to WWIII, who has principle, determination, consistency, love of life and love of the future and will help end poverty instead of ending democracy!
The TTIP, TPP and TISA are NAFTA on steroids, corporate rule run amok, refusing to live in a multi-polar world where labor and nature have rights, refusing self-criticism and future-friendly economics, refusing to see market failure and state violence and the selfdestruction of profit-worship and the inanity of thinking we are “allbright.” Jean Twenge in her book “The Narcissism Epidemic” explains that narcissism, the cult of specialness, was thought to be the ladder of success while it really is a terrible anti-social blindness that marginalize others and blocks discussion (www.booktv.org).
In Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the state was caring and not punishing and rescued those under the wheel. Minimum wage, social security and worker protection on the job were alternative economic policies in a time of slums and strikes.
Very soon we must find some way besides jobs to distribute the wealth generated by our increasingly automated productivity, something like a guaranteed annual income. But to make any political changes, we have to change the way we think and talk about economic reality. Austrian, Swiss, Polish and German economists can free us from the “one-dimensional” worship of profit and neoliberal indoctrination. Ending poverty, not democracy and system change, not climate change could be our revolutionary songs.
The unexamined life isn’t worth living (Socrates). Truth wells up and cannot be imposed. Soren Kierkegaard saw truth as inwardness wounding indirectly from behind. Self-righteousness is the grand delusion, said theologian Eberhard Juengel. Self-interest means that our will and our perception are curved in ourselves, Martin Luther warned. Narcissism is the unhealed epidemic where Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in the pond and drowns (cf. Janet Twenge on www.booktv.org and Chalmers Johnson “Nemesis”). The ego must die for the self to be born!
Let me share several more philosophical thoughts for your contemplation. By involving and not distracting each other, we become persons of hope, subjects of history and productive creators of a new language and a new mathematics. Hope, promise and vision are goals that shape our today. Secondly, Jean Jacques Rousseau, another great teacher of enlightenment, said “man was born free and is everywhere in chains.” To expect freedom without struggle is as naïve as to expect crops without planting (Frederick Douglas). “We can have democracy in this country or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both.” (Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice)
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By abandoning myths, false promises, half-truths and fables, we change assumptions, priorities and policies and live in a future-friendly world with generalized security. By discarding distractions and by involvement we become people of hope.
3. THREE POEMS FOR THE NEW WORLD
May these poems help in defending the social logic against the profit logic!
As spirituality means letting go (cf. Richard Rohr, Simplicity and the Joy of Letting Go, 2003), Jesus calls us to a new language and a new mathematics, to an ethic of resistance and solidarity and a future of openness and inclusivity.
Joy comes in the morning, not only profit maximization and endless growth!
Burnt Rubber
Instead of radical conversion, sharing work and assets, rewarding poets and writers, not only speculators and con artists, burnt rubber became a language, a leverage and a lifestyle, a false hope and a false security conferred by a false consciousness in a culture of conformity and mutual congratulation where vision and utopia were lost.
Language and community are in permanent crisis amid repressing and fading out everything unpleasant. Was speed glorified by the media so present, past and future dissolve as means are confused with ends and the part mistaken for the whole?
A world of interdependence can be envisioned where stories of liberation eclipse the stories of office buildings, where the market isn’t the omnipotent ruler reducing life to a shopping mall but a means fostering human development.. Change of consciousness from auto-dependence in the car-tastrophe is still in its infancy.
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Intoxicated with itself, the triumphalist culture is threatened with solipsism as vanity and narcissism threatened Narcissus gazing at his reflection.. There is power in our question, our proclamation and our vision!
Are human rights the same as market rights? Do we ever learn from other cultures?
Do we obliterate the memory of other people?
Is growth endless and undifferentiated?
Can market progress threaten human progress?
Can Wall Street overshadow Main Street?
The rich one can lose all things without sorrow.
Buddhist enlightenment like Jesus’ parables can change reality. True wealth is receiving and sharing reconfiguring the plutonium economy of nonstop consumerism where future generations refuse the celebration of burnt rubber.
The Seven Myths
The great myth that individual selfishness becomes public good reflects the displacement of public ethics by personal morality.
The myths of the self-healing market, the ever-larger cake and lifting oneself by one’s bootstraps are economic and psychological like the myths of corporate beneficence, trickle down prosperity and nature as an external.
Who would have thought that Reagonomics would be such an insurmountable virus?
A lie can travel half way around the world before truth gets her boots on! (Mark Twain) Myths and prejudices block the way to understanding.
Economism sets profit and property above human life, degrades labor into a cost factor, and commodifies all life..
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The anthropology of self-interest has its counterpart in the anthropology of receptivity.
We are social beings bound to one another like the waves of the sea. We are dependent and changed by our context and environment, not atomized nomads without connection, history, passion and hope.
The truth will set us free but the truth is a process where life is an unfolding fragment relational and conditional calling us to engagement not self-righteousness or solipsism.
As the end is present in the beginning, the tree in the seed, our fragmentary lives ought to be dialogical and international where we are questions and answers to one another exploding the myths.
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Historical Consciousness and Utopias
Historical consciousness and utopias do not become discredited when little Bart comes home all muddy and twisted. America corrupted by wealth where full employment only occurs through wars is the pioneer of speculation and misfortune.
Capitalism and the last superpower are above the law. Where our footprint is too great and wasted energy is challenged, we use the Creole trick and stylize ourselves as victims, not culprits. Only repression artists could redefine non-stop consumerism and limitless nature as economic laws.
People on the fifth floor congratulate people on the fifth floor.
Rightwing propaganda threatens!
Idolizing the nation or the belt-buckle, the rightwing scapegoat the weak, the immigrants who enrich the materialist North. Triumphant America becomes a buffoon when prosperity is based on weapons exports, redistribution upwards and exploitation of the global South.
The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present. Let us reclaim life and the future and not become buffoons of the mega-machine!
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4. DEAR MATRIOTS
I was overcome by Jurgen Moltmann’s idea that hope sets us apart from all creation in that we can go beyond everything present and past in the power of the coming, the power of the promise (cf. “Theology of Hope”)
Born in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, I attended Northwestern University and graduated from the University of Wisconsin. After completing one year at Rutgers School of Law, I moved from Newark to San Francisco and worked as a desk clerk in a small hotel in Berkeley from 1980 to 1999. In 1999 I moved to Portland, Oregon and have been an active contributor to http://portland.indymedia.org.
Baptized in St. Marks Lutheran Church in San Francisco, I am a Jewish Christian who finds prophetic liberation Christianity as the completion not denial of Judaism. I think of myself as a Kierkegaardian and Bonhoefferian enamored of the wonders of contemplation. Life is full of super nova explosions where stars remain invisible until they find their partner star. Life is full of play, exuberance, and mystery and the future could be full of community centers, free Internet books and soft power.
Dear Matriots, seekers for an alternative economics and an alternative spirituality,
In Kaspar Hauser by Jacob Wassermann, a town was afflicted by drought, the wells were dry and people became angry and violent until a little boy played so beautifully on his flute that water rose in the wells again. Kaspar Hauser is a cultural symbol of our refractory and resistant nature, our questioning and yearning for authenticity., our utopian and future-oriented restlessness. “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser” by Werner Herzog is available as a foreign film/DVD from www.modernrock.com. My other fictional model is Oscar from Gunter Grass’ “The Tin Drum.’ As a protest against the Nazi enslavement and genocide, Oscar refuses to grow up and lives out his life in resistance and solidarity.
The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas said that instrumental rationality threatens to colonize all life, relationships and dialogue. Professors lament that they are often only asked whether the question will be on the test and whether it will put money in our pockets.
The future must be open and dynamic, welcoming and dynamic, self-critical and intercultural. The future must be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The Zapatista vision of one world where many worlds fit and where everyone has a place could free us from fatalism, cynicism and one-dimensionality, the bitter fruits of vulgar materialism (cf. Ernst Bloch) and the self-healing market.
A Chinese friend Yu Xia designed a web site for me that now offers 800 translated articles on anti-militarism, economic ethics, political theory, the Jewish-Christian dialogue and liberation theology, http://www.freembtranslations.net..
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Jesus calls us to the creation of a new language and a new mathematics, to be salt, leaven and light. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s perspective, one act of obedience can be more valuable than a hundred sermons. Costly grace to Bonhoeffer and the eternal moment or kairos moment for Kierkegaard is crucial in following the God who as eternal everlasting love calls us to sacrifice, renunciation and abandonment of material cares. Faith is personal but not private and is more interruption than custom. In the words of Soren Kierkegaard, faith is a leap across seventy thousand fathoms of water.
Unlike a chair, an idea can be shared by a whole people. The time is right for alternative economics, reduced working hours, redefining work, security, health and happiness, person-oriented work, labor-intensive investment (not capital-intensive investments) and soft power. The only way to solve the three crises of mass unemployment, environment destruction and trade imbalance is to move from quantitative to qualitative growth (cf. Hans-Christoph Binswanger).
Access could replace excess as enough could replace more. Possessions possess us more than we possess them. The car is more than a metal box but is a whole way of thinking encouraging domination, narcissism, solipsism and self-righteousness. Consumerism goes through the roof, not population. We have enough for everyone's need, not for everyone's greed (cf. Gandhi). Utopia, the place of no-place, is more a goal and objective than a concrete reality. Economics changes with the times. Once savings was the elixir and then spending became the elixir.
States are different than Schwabian housewives. They can become indebted and invest and safeguard their future. What is rational from a microeconomic perspective can be destructive from a macroeconomic perspective. Increasing competitiveness is sensible for an individual corporation or businessperson but may be disastrous if all countries reduce their workforces. Wages are both costs and demand or purchasing power. Neoliberal myths and assumptions give unbounded freedom to capital while demeaning labor as only an inevitable cost. The articles "Learning from History," "Community Centers in O Canada," "Nature as Healer and Teacher," "Cinderella's Sisters and King Midas" and "Shouting from the Caboose" are invitations to ecological, sustainable, respectful and future-oriented change.
"We must be wounded to be healed," Dorothee Soelle said. Have we been sufficiently wounded by materialism, imperial hubris, the financial crisis, deregulation, commodification, instrumental rationality, suburbanization and the work religion? In "Surveying Utopia," the emeritus professor Elmar Altvater shares the Polish proverb: “You can make fish soup out of an aquarium but you can't make an aquarium out of fish soup.” The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present. The future could be full of community centers, free Internet books and soft power if we become active subjects and not passive objects, enthralled in the present and future like children. Music, books and questions make our lives rich and independent of the trickle-down market jingle.
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5. NATURE AS HEALER AND TEACHER
Nature is a healer and teacher, a wounded healer and scorned teacher, a majestic fountain of awe, wonder and inspiration. This essay focuses on the misuse and commodification of nature and calls us to new consciousness and new priorities. Nature, the foundation of economics, cries in pain because she is reduced to a free good, external or sink by a onedimensional economism.
In “One Family”, the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff insists that survival as a species will be easier than survival as a family. This essay seeks to encourage a change of consciousness, a respect for diversity, a commitment to humility and a love for life.
The economy is part of a larger reality or oikos. May we break from the myths of the total absolute market, nature as an external or free good and life as social Darwinism. Living the truths of interdependence means reducing working hours. In a healed balanced perspective urged by Christianity, Buddhism and the Simpsons, the economy is one element of life with especial responsibility to future generations. Without this healed balanced perspective, cultures and the future are sacrificed to the Washington Consensus of liberalization, deregulation and privatization. Without a change of consciousness and priorities, the economy becomes a steamroller with a self-dynamic where nature, women and the third world fall by the wayside.
Human life ought to be dialogical, people relating to one another as question and answer. Gandhi declared that everyone has a wild card in him or herself; only spiritual discipline is necessary for transformation. The truth will set us free but the truth is a process, not a cudgel, a process that can be vitiated by the love of money or the love of power. Life in interdependence with God, contemporaries and nature is life in humility and teachability.
Technology isn’t neutral like an eggbeater but a worldview that envelops. The weaver becomes the web and the machinist the machine (Langdon Winner, MIT). Economic ideology and anthropocentrism have allowed nature to be reduced to a free good, an external and a sink, not counted in economic calculations. The Washington Consensus, the ideology of the total absolute market, is at the root of increasing world inequality and environmental destruction. When profit is made supreme and investors and financiers eclipse workers and consumers, the world is reduced to commodities and merchandise.
Lakes are more than anti-freeze and mountains are more than landfill, First Nations people warn us. Being is greater than having. Hearkening back to an ancient Buddhist saying, a rich one is one who can lose all he has without sorrow.
The malaise of the North could be the harbinger of another world. Overproduction and commodification could be replaced by sharing and sustainability. As crisis and opportunity are represented by the same Chinese letter, people of the North must see their wealth as a gift despoiled by greed and megalomania. Without this new sense of contingency, criticism and intercultural and intergenerational trust become ephemeral.
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As love exists in three forms, Eros, Philatio and Agape, the future is described by three German words, Zukunft, Futurum and Adventus. Will the future be marked by sustainability or ruination? Can we see nature as the foundation of future economics? Can we view the economy as part of a greater reality or oikos?
Hope like the immigrant is often unwelcome, calling us to new priorities and paradigms. Nature has rights in herself as children have rights in themselves. Nature comes to us as a healer and teacher, a majestic source of awe and inspiration, a balm designed to bless the poor and the rich as the sun rises on the good and the unjust. Listening to nature can enable us to understand faith as the balancing act of life, the tightrope walk between privacy and community, between individual realization and social development.
Ends and means are confused as part and whole are often confused. Forgetful of nature and of our spiritual core, the economy often becomes a steamroller driven only by profit and short-term constraints. Instead of being one aspect, economism and instrumental rationality colonize all life. All dialogue and relationships become reduced to materialism. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch inveighed against vulgar materialism where all life is reduced to sky atoms, cloud atoms etc.
Nature calls us to unsurpassable majesty, to the wonder and inscrutability of life and to contemplative life. The simplistic reductionism that denies the complexity and uncertainty of life makes us slaves of the routine and conventional perception, accepting as real only what is calculable and known. Mystery, spiritual nexus, wonder and vision are only troublesome intrusions to the hyper-pragmatic mindset. The farmer rose and slept without knowing how the seed grew, Jesus said (Matthew 13). Can we rediscover our humility and interconnectedness and learn from different spiritual traditions? Perhaps riches are like thorns, a temptation to be overcome on our way to wholeness.
In a complex and uncertain world, we are lured by linear and quantitative interpretations of the world and by simplistic and xenophobic solutions, e.g. might makes right. Rightwing extremism seems naturalized in the America of G.W. Bush. The middle has moved to the right. Communities and continents seem mired in disillusionment and resignation. Private interests and power elites make mockery of sustainability and democracy.
Kairos time, the time of decision, differs from everyday time. The Old Testament prophets and the different resistance traditions tried to warn against the delusions of selfinterest and the idolatry of power and riches. These voices are often continuously marginalized and disparaged as naïve and habitual disgruntlement. Nature strikes back, Eberhard Stammler wrote in Evangelische Kommentare. The overflowing of the Rhine and the earthquake in Japan are cries of wounded nature.
Being sustainable means using only what is necessary and not taking possibilities of life from future generations. Can we learn from First Nations people and plan for seven generations? Can we live in double vision as people of universal and particular history?
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Can we rediscover life as active and contemplative, ready to trade our sport-utility vehicles promoted as “lifestyle” for laptop computers?
The future of access, not excess, is a future of boundless growth. Materialism pretends to be absolute. Gold is stylized as the quintessence that changes all life, opens all doors, and cures all relationships. Hans Christoph Binswanger, an emeritus economics professor at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland discusses the economic pressure of growth in his book “Money and Magic”. Why did fishermen long content with providing for their families suddenly become obsessed with profit and mammoth output? The turning point came with the purchase of a boat. Can we become passionate about sustainable economics and subsistence economics? Nature will then be the treasure of life and the foundation of economics. KFC cannot bring us together; only a re-visioning of nature as healer and teacher can make our spirits strong and resilient. When the destruction of nature is included in prices and not arrogantly dismissed as an external or free good, we will turn from the temptations of excess and be stewards and partners of living, wounded and resplendent nature.
There is power in our vision, our proclamation, our decision and our passion. In a culture of nonstop consumerism, people become strangers to their gifts and powers. Cities that become gridlock reduce the value of the car. The ladder of success, corporate beneficence and the right of the stronger are slowly discredited as pillars of social Darwinism. Another world is possible where money and power do not disfigure communities and the future.
In the Jewish feast of Passover, families eat bitter herbs to remind them of their ancestors’ painful slavery in Egypt. A place is prepared for the prophet Elijah. Can we make a place for nature, the disparaged and reviled foundation of life?
Nature, women and the third world have been disfigured. Global warming, deforestation, over-fishing and genetic engineering are consequences of misguided economic theories and mythologies. The gross domestic product is gross when traffic accidents, cancer suffering and nuclear weapons are only positive inputs. Adbusters magazine from Vancouver, Canada has insisted that economists must learn to subtract ( http://www.adbusters,org). Rethinking Progress, a San Francisco based think tank on alternative economics offers help in leaving the mirage of unlimited quantitative growth.
As Horst-Eberhard Richter said, we live in a world of mutuality and no individual or nation can steal away without damaging nature. Denial of common guilt is part of the American tradition. St. Paul described our interdependence in unforgettable words: Can the eye say to the hand, I have no need of you? Why are you constantly fighting? Do you not have one Father? Jesus asked the refractory Jews.
The center cannot hold, William Butler Yeats warned. Everyone pursuing self-interest doesn’t bring the common good. The “invisible hand” of the market favors those with better starting conditions and makes health care, housing and water into privileges rather than rights.
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Creating a social net is the prerequisite for reducing working hours or sharing work. Since we clearly lack the capacity to create meaningful work, sharing work becomes an imperative if the right to work should be upheld. Evaluating technology as to naturefriendliness and employment-friendliness is vital in a world of limits and short-term fixation. New priorities displacing profit worship and quantitative growth are necessary, not blaming the victim, selling the silverware, helping those already enriched or cutting down the branch on which we sit.
In an essay “Cooperation not Violence”, the theologian Gottfried Orth explains that cooperation is our true human nature. As carrots and onions thrive together, people in all their diversity and brokenness can cooperate. Out of the cacophony can come a symphony, Martin Luther King proclaimed.
Can we live as broken branches and as bearers of hope? Can we welcome criticism and peaceableness as parts of our being? Can we see the poverty of the global South as the concomitant to the wealth of the North? Can we remove the log of wastefulness and excess from our own eye before removing the speck from our brother’s eye? Can we repudiate life without criticism as arrogance and hubris?
Development can and must be defined differently. As life isn’t linear and self-evident, development is more than a fast-food restaurant on every corner. Being civilized means learning from the past, correcting our errors and beginning again. The North like the Prodigal Son wasted its inheritance in speculative shareholder capitalism. The normalization of war and the militarization of foreign policy are the bitter fruits of megalomania and imperial ambition. Kyrie Elieson! Under the guise of September 11, the Bush administration fell to the Orwellian perversion of calling attack defense and destroying two countries without any evidence of their complicity.
Knowledge is power. The deception that ignorance is strength; the Washington consensus that deregulation, liberalization and privatization would lift all boats has proven to be a chimera or anachronism. Exploding inequality, ruined state finances, corporate welfare and corporate tax evasion are the consequences of market radicalism or market fundamentalism.
Nature falls by the wayside. According to the mythology, increased profits would lead to increased investment and increased jobs. According to reality, helping those who don’t need help, refusing to mend our own pockets and destroying nature, women and the third world are pathological consequences of our pride and impenitence.
Come to the waters of plurality, humility and inoffensiveness! Can the rich see themselves as needy of vision and compassion? Can the poor see themselves as rich in faith and guardians of repressed marginalized voices? When the destruction of nature is included in prices and not arrogantly dismissed as an external or free good, we will turn from the temptations of excess and be stewards and partners of nature. The friendly beneficent face of nature will dawn again when we live as open, welcoming and changeable creatures.
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6. BEING CIVILIZED MEANS LEARNING FROM HISTORY
The hope is learning from others, seeing life as ambivalent and dialectical, facing and not fading out the expansion of the financial sector and speculation and abandoning the myths of the “bubble and credit prosperity” where banks become too big to fail and too big to control. “Forever number one” has also become a black hole for the global economy as Bank of America turned out to be bad-for-America. Investment is not speculation. The Wall St banks spent $4 billion over the last 10 years in lobbyists and campaign contribution and successfully diluted financial regulations like the Dodd-Frank law. The state has become the “errand boy” for the banks (Bill Moyers). The time is right for alternative economics, reducing working hours and reconsidering state and market and the social nature of the state.
The child can always be astonished. To the child, the spinning top or as squirrel can be as fascinating as a sunrise or a sunset. Adults often fall into resignation and nihilism after they reduce life to personal success or vulgar materialism. Fear of the new and fear of the unknown can have paralyzing effects as Erich Fromm explained in “Escape from Freedom.” The whole German society fell into a worship of Hitler and the horror of militarism and scapegoating and demonizing Jews and minorities for 12 years. Restoring the pure German society, idolizing the right of the stronger and blaming the weak led to concentration camps and 50 million deaths in Europe in the horrific World War Two.
Cicero said: Whoever refuses to learn from history remains a child forever. In 2017, America is an empire in decline where 95% of the economic gain in the past decade went to the top 1%. According to a 2016 Oxfam study, the richest 8 persons in the world have more wealth than 90% of the world’s population. A power elite dominates in politics and the media and people feel generally powerless and handed over to profit shifting, tax evasion, tax competition, tax havens and revenue shortfalls. Education, health care and housing should be human rights and yet become unaffordable privileges. The state should represent the public interest and yet special or private interests are often in the driver’s seat with deregulation, privatization, liberalized markets, and speculation.
In Chinese, crisis and chance are represented by the same letter. Hope sets us apart from the rest of creation since we can go beyond everything past and present in the power of the coming, said the theologian Jurgen Moltmann. Faith is like a leap across 70,000 fathoms of water said Soren Kierkegaard. Faith is the death of the ego and the celebration of the infinite selfless God who created out of nothing and describes his reign in the parable of the mustard seed, the smallest seed that grows into the mightiest tree.
What is rational in microeconomics – like competitiveness – can be irrational in microeconomics where countries try to be super-competitive and end up in mass unemployment, 27 million unemployed in Europe and 22 million in the US. Can we find the courage to live in hope, anticipation and promise, to see the future amid the changing and shipwrecked present and to resist selfishness, the herd instinct and conformism?
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7. THE CART IN THE SPECULATIVE MUD
Liberalizing markets leads to instability, not growth. Developing and threshold countries suffer grievously through US speculation. The New Year is a time to abandon the myths of American exceptionalism and corporate beneficence and welcome justice and economic alternatives.
New Paradigms for the New Year
For hundreds of years the US was a source of hope and inspiration for the world, the city set on a hill, the dream of equal opportunity. With the Vietnam War and the Iraq war, the world has come to fear America as unbridled megalomania, a forked tongue power that feigns concern for human rights while enforcing its economic interests. Unwilling to see the log or the militarism in its own eye, the US rails against the speck in the eyes of the developing world and redefines solidarity as compliance with its multinational corporations. Once allies were respected and lip service was offered to self-determination. Now vassals are sought and countries expected to surrender their resources for the profit needs of beneficent corporations.
Liberalization of markets has brought instability, not growth. The Asian crisis followed by the financial crises in Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Brazil and Argentina left behind grievous wounds. The Washington Consensus, privatization, deregulation and opening markets to American finance capital, is discredited. At last a post-Washington Consensus is forming (cf. Jorg Goldberg, "The Cure is the Sickness”). In Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor promised happiness in exchange for freedom. The South is refusing that hoax and demanding its own freedom in forging alternative economic policy. Countries no longer need the dollar to buy oil. Whether the US accepts this new reality and sees the self-destruction in its myopic quest for power and wealth will decide over the future of the planet.
The forced resignation of Cheney would help restore the dollar's stability and the world's respect for the US. Would you lend money to a pyromaniac or a gun-crazed megalomaniac? Blowback and the isolation and fear of the US are defense mechanisms of the world intent on survival and safeguarding law and language. Another analogy would be removing the fly from the soup after the guests complain or throwing out the rotten rancid milk after the rule of law has been spoilt.
Intimidation, might makes right and double standards are false securities like building your house on the hand (cf. Matthew 7). The world should be tilled and preserved and isn't just putty for creating more money out of money and more international fear and loathing out of initial advantage!
The threat of war, war-mongering, violates international law (cf. UN Charter) like stealing the resources of another country. The right of self-determination and reparations are foundations of international law as liberating the world from the scourge of war was the foundation for the United Nations and the UN Charter. The fifty million who died in World War II united the world in outlawing war.
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Interdependence should replace jingoism, ethnocentrism and the cult of the soldier. Nonviolence is stronger than violence as the pen is mightier than the sword. The penultimate should be restrained by the ultimate as short-term necessities should be relativized by the long-term love for life and respect for the planet. Hope and true patriotism (cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison) require tough love, sacrifice and engagement, and may not become justifications for lawlessness and greed for power and wealth.
How do you proclaim costly grace in a culture accustomed to cheap grace and new financial products? How can alternative sustainable economics be heard when criticizing the dominant economic myths, the self-healing market, beneficent corporations and nature as a free good, external or sink, is anathema? Infinite growth is impossible in a finite world. We were told: increased profits would bring higher wages and more jobs. Instead soaring profits brought exploding inequality, destruction of the earth, unbridled speculation on currency markets and the working poor. Private affluence stands opposite public squalor. The average CEO earns $10.4 billion, 640 times the worker's pay. Some CEOs earn more in ten minutes than their workers earn in an entire year and yet those CEOs are given tax gifts and tax subsidies.
"Words mean what I say they mean," Humpty Dumpty said to Alice. Can the US discover interdependence, humility and self-criticism, mend its own pockets and focus on systemic/structural evil instead of scapegoating the weak and confusing its own interests with the interests of the world? The abuse of power in the US, cooking intelligence and exaggerating threats, has inevitable consequences in the mockery and isolation of the US. King Midas must have known that he would die of hunger after the entire world was transformed into gold. The economic and political elites of the US must have known that future peace necessitates partnership and sharing and that the most fearsome military power will not be able to force countries to hold onto an increasingly worthless dollar.
Jesus calls us to new life, to create a new language and a new mathematics, to encourage alternative perspectives and treasure the present in its interplay with the past and the future. We could be internationalistas, zealots for justice with a passion for reconciliation amid social, economic and cultural disconnection. The hope is that we become subjects enthralled with the wonder of life and with spiritual, moral, intellectual and creative growth. In the words of the Zapatistas of Mexico, the hope is one world where many worlds fit, where everyone has a place and where both cooperation and competition thrive.
As the New Year begins, may we see ourselves as part of a larger world and the economy part of the oikos. Politics must have precedence so the economy serves public interests. May we mend our own pockets and discover our gifts and powers repressed in economism. May we overcome the anti-social offensive with its anti-labor bias, its hire and fire, winner take all and right of the stronger. May we overcome the crisis of the welfare state, the crisis in the heads of the economic and political elites.
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Hope comes from below, from the marginalized and excluded, from the grassroots. May community centers open up in every neighborhood. These centers could be oases of counseling and activity, of reclaiming and rediscovering our interconnectedness. The multiplier effects would be positive and breathtaking (cf. the 26 community centers in Vancouver, British Columbia), very different from the negative effects of the Washington Consensus and opening markets to hot money.
How many reasons did the chicken need to cross the road? May the US join the world in living an ethic of resistance and solidarity where human interests finally counter and contain profit interests and life and the future are more than newly packaged financial products!
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8. COMMUNITY CENTERS: LEARNING FROM O CANADA
The mosaic works in Vancouver, B.C. The 26 community centers provide a buffer and cushion from the brutal and commodifying market. In happier days before Reagan and market fundamentalism, the Carnegie Community Center was bursting with activity, counseling, classes and small groups.
Community centers in every neighborhood of Vancouver B.C. make the city livable, friendly and inclusive. The Carnegie Community Center in the poorest part of Vancouver recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. A new patio allows breath-taking views of the mountains. Breakfast and lunch are $1.50 and dinners are $2.10 or $3.50. For a dollar a year, anyone can use the computers three hours a day since the day is divided in three segments. Game rooms, a library filled from the start of the day, a gym, television room, theater make the center vibrant. At another center in the downtown eastside, anyone can bring in their laundry and have it washed the same day. In happier days before Reagan and market fundamentalists, the Carnegie Center was bursting with activities and counseling, classes and circles.
Community centers provide a buffer and cushion from the brutal and commodifying market. When the market is stylized as self-healing, total and absolute, an idol or panacea, all problems are seen as interferences with the market. With the change from the welfare to the workfare state, social exclusion is generalized, spreads to all strata and is no longer a marginal phenomenon. With the capital or anti-social offensive, speculation is directly and indirectly encouraged. Corporations use takeovers and mergers to maintain high profits and repress weak purchasing power and outsourced populations. CEOs are called "job creators" and workers "cost factors."
The mosaic works in Vancouver. People are respected and protected as beings with inviolable dignity, not work machines helping to increase profit. On buses, 20 people aren't enamored with their cell phones and their next three Hawaii vacations. The Sky Train light rail, a computer-operated system without conductors, traverses the whole city and hasn't failed since its inception in 1986. It runs every two minutes in the rush hour.
The principle threat is Americanization. Hire and fire, winner take all and the right of the stronger promote precarious work and generalized insecurity. Vancouver also suffers from problems and myths often originating from the wayward colossus to the south. Social housing funds from Ottawa are delayed year after year. Stephen Harper's recent "throne speech" emphasized the "Violent Crimes Initiative," necessitating expanded police and repression.
Community centers are a way to healing, integration, de-commodification and selfgovernment. Shopping centers are a way to fragmentation and socialized disconnection where the means are confused with the end, the part with the whole, the personal with the public and the imaginary with the real. Community centers remind us that life isn't nonstop shopping and health isn't credit creation.
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As critical thinking and culture shock can be new beginnings, system criticism and intercultural learning can be dismissed as exotic or luxuries. As the truth is not only in English, new priorities and perspectives come from outside market fundamentalism. In "1984," George Orwell warned that wars would become a domestic necessity to divert the people from economic contradictions. Dissent and criticism would be expunged from language so critical thinking would be incomprehensible. Noam Chomsky says information in the US is not censored but filtered. Alternatives are marginalized in different ways in a culture of info-tainment and celebrity news.
Community centers could be a way of re-socializing ourselves and re-claiming life from oppressive marketing, commercialization and commodification. We could see ourselves as story-tellers, as interdependent partners and listeners who are equally needy and fragmentary. In a truly developed society, roles could be exchanged so the teacher becomes the learner instead of weavers becoming the web under the work religion.
Dominant corporate media entertains us to death (cf. Neil Postman). Celebrity news and news-you-can-use (e.g. how to tie your shoes to be cutting-edge in the hyper-individualist, hyper-competitive world) lead to dummification and brainwashing. Economic learning and union hours balancing the endless business hours should be priorities after the horrors of Vietnam, NAFTA, Savings and Loan meltdown, New Economy bubble, De LayAbramoff shake down redefinition of government, Enron, Iraq and the mortgage debacle.
The earth does not belong to people; people belong to the earth (Chief Seattle). It is time to make peace with the earth (Al Gore). Nature isn't an external, free good or sink but our mother and partner, our guarantor of a future that often strikes back in pain and warning. Nature and children have rights in themselves and can not only be instrumentalized and destroyed. When we finally include the costs of environmental caring, we will close one blind spot that allows capital rule to appear beneficent.
Efficiency as the sole imperative in a profit-worshiping economy leads to blindness and one-dimensional life. In a thought-provoking age, we have lost the ability to think (M. Heidegger). In instrumental rationality (Jurgen Habermas), everything inward, spiritual and divine is dismissed and all language and relations are dominated by materialism, what work do you do and what do you own? Fatalism and resignation spread when the mantrathere is no alternative - is constantly repeated.
The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). Community centers could show us that human and sparkling future focused on simplicity and solidarity, on mending our own pockets and telling our own stories.
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9. FROM OBSCURISTAN TO ABSURDISTAN: BARBARISM OR A HUMAN FUTURE
Individual security can be emphasized so global vision fades. Half-truths and fish stories carry the day. "Communism is oppression of man by man and capitalism is just the reverse." Our challenge is to reawaken wonder and interdependence, to consider the way of nonviolent resistance.
[The following thoughts come from critical theory and liberation theology. Resistance is part of our nature as antibodies are part of our bodies. Dissent like the refractory child can be a new beginning in confronting private opulence and public squalor. Leaving law school and becoming a translator was a triumph of unconditional love. I was overcome by Jurgen Moltmann's idea that hope sets us apart from all creation in that we can go beyond everything present and past in the power of the coming, the power of the promise (cf. "Theology of Hope"). I look forward to your comments on overcoming the fundamentalist traps and our elite democracy.]
“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own” (Wes “Scoop” Nisker)
“Some deep alternative current has been flowing out of the spiritual adventures and identity struggles of recent generations. Of course, we didn’t create the conditions or questions of the new age; we got caught in them. The ground shifted; the old gods departed, the economic and political utopias crumbled, and the traditional answers were washed away. We didn’t leave home; home left us.” (Publisher’s comment on “The Big Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom”)
Wes “Scoop” Nisker, author of “The Essential Crazy Wisdom” and “The Big Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom,” was a radio commentator on KSAN in San Francisco. Nisker takes us on a hilarious wild ride from West to East and back again in his quest for true self and enlightenment. Combining the best elements of memoir and social commentary, Nisker uses his own story to illuminate the Baby Boomers’ roots of spiritual hunger in postwar America.
Nisker coined the word “car-tastrophe,” a helpful description of our short-term fixation where means are confused with ends, where long-term necessities like community centers and sharing wealth are deferred, where dissent and criticism are expunged from memory, where privatization held to be the panacea leads only to the bitter fruits of generational mistrust, generalized insecurity and exploding inequality.
Hope comes from outside the system of short-term constraints and manufactured consent, info-tainment and sports transfiguration, vulgar materialism and turbo-individualism, self-absorption and trickle-down economic mythology. Hope often seems unwelcome like a foreign language or incessantly questioning child. Whether our future can be more human, open and dynamic depends on public consciousness and political mobilization. Let us face the contradictions and myths of our culture and live the new life of the questioning child in the midst of the old. “The old gives way to the new as the snow gives
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way to the spring.” (Rainer Rilke, German poet).
In the movie “Wag the Dog” with Dustin Hoffman, people were easily convinced Albania was a terrorist threat. All that was necessary was imbuing the people with a little philosophy, “You can’t change horses in mid-stream.”
The penultimate needs the ultimate (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer). As time is borrowed from the future, we are interdependent harbingers of the future. Part of nature, we are part of the spirit world with traditions of solidarity and resistance. We are called to live in double vision, in universal and particular history. We are dialogical beings who relate to one another as question and answer. When questions disappear, we enter the fundamentalist trap. Agorophobia is the psychological term for clinging to a black-white monochrome against the daunting moral diversity. Dialogue shuts down as the loudest prevails.
The state has a social nature and cannot only be a power and security state. The free moral state is in tension with the national security state. Rights are balanced and exist in a hierarchy: work and privacy, economy and ecology. Majority rule is only possible with minority protection. All people yearn for freedom and self-determination. The UN Charter sought to outlaw war. International law is based on self-determination and reparations. When these truths are twisted or repressed by nonstop consumerism or corporate elites, we live in a state of manufactured consent, selfishness, herd conduct and conformism. In the US, the fourth branch, the media, has degenerated to non-stop gossip and propaganda. Concentration, mergers and profit worship led to the disappearance of foreign bureaus and international news.
Countervailing narratives challenge the dominant narrative, the US as the city on the hill, the cowboy on the white horse. Critical thinking, culture shock and intercultural learning are antidotes to selfishness, herd behavior and conformity.
Lying into war, lying to the American people and the UN General Assembly follow the Goebbels model as George Orwell warned in “1984.” The big lie relativizes and normalizes the small lies. War becomes a domestic necessity to divert the people from economic contradictions.
In “Nemesis,” Chalmers Johnson explains how the empire like Narcissus falls in love with its reflection and drowns. The US in its epochal system crisis could renounce on empire like Great Britain and become a republic. Recognizing its own hubris as an eternal safe harbor, the US could mend its own pockets, accept new priorities and perspectives and see others as partners instead of vassals and raw material warehouses.
In “The Narcissism Epidemic,” psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me,” shows how self-absorption and self-righteousness become normalized as “natural laws” in a competitive society. Narcissism, overestimation of self or self as center of the universe, is different from healthy self-esteem. Narcissism brings distrust and aversion, not success. Spirituality, inclusion in a greater reality, and gratitude are antidotes. Saying “I love you” is an invitation to connection while repeating “I am special” and “I am a
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princess” foster separation. As prejudice can be gradually overcome, narcissism can be overcome individually and collectively.
The auto-executives who arrived at Congressional hearings in their private jets to plead for billions in bailouts were a tipping point triggering public outrage and cynicism. Private vices do not lead to public virtue. Everyone pursuing profit maximization triggers exploding inequality and social chaos. Private opulence and public squalor exist side by side, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith warned in the 1960s.
The trickle-down myth of corporate beneficence and the myth of the self-healing market were foundations of capital’s neoliberal anti-social offensive. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund used “structural adjustment” to force acceptance of foreign corporations as a condition for loans. The Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation and liberalized open markets led to lost decades and marked declines in gross domestic product. Now the global South insists on food security and sovereignty to put corporate power and mainstream economic theory in its place. Higher profits were said to lead to greater investments and more jobs. Corporations prefer speculation on currency markets and takeovers to job creation and economic democracy.
As self-determination and reparations are foundations of international law, food sovereignty and corporate de-legitimation are vital for a human future that reverses the destruction of nature and exploding inequality of incomes and assets. Economics is too important to be left to economists, as war is too important to be left to the military.
Economics should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing personal initiative and creativity. As the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, institution criticism is part of the journey of democracy and reclaiming life. The church, unions, media and schools are independent greatnesses that often lose their independence in the onslaught of profit maximization and instrumental rationality. Privatism and consumerism seem like “natural laws” in a hyper-individualistic culture that eschews history and intercultural learning. Private and short-term interests drown out public and long-term necessities. The center cannot hold, the poet William Butler Yeats warned a century ago. What is imperative is a change of individual and collective consciousness.
Erich Fromm and the democratic socialist tradition could bring light and dynamism into our frozen overly materialistic culture. Being is more than having. Possessions can possess us. Bereft of spiritual understanding, we can confuse luxury, status and brands with life. Repressing the urgent need for self-criticism, rethinking and reducing our ecological footprint, we can be sedated and narrowed by the nonstop consumer culture with its pictures of success and unattainable wealth.
Double standards and intimidation are false securities as the capital offensive leading to a credit- and bubble-prosperity induced a false economic security. Shareholder value leads to profit worship and the denigration of workers and the environment.
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Anthropocentrism is a blindness like narcissism, prejudice, xenophobia and homophobia. In “Truth and Method,” Hans-Georg Gadamer explained that the human sciences (philosophy, history, language and play) use a different methodology than the natural sciences. Experience differs from experiment as the non-repeatable and inexact differ from the repeatable and exact. Methods of inwardness and listening are necessary rather than measurement and quantification.
If infinite growth is impossible in a finite universe, qualitative growth could supersede quantitative growth. As sickness is not sin and life is not longevity, the universal right to be protected from social risks like poverty is codified in constitutions. The welfare state wrongly stylized as “Bolshevism” is really the human future. The history torn in war, hatred and ethnocentrism could give way to a future of interdependence if the political will and love of life can be mobilized.
If the right to work is to be assured, sharing of income and assets is vital. The earth does not belong to humankind; humankind belongs to the earth, chief Seattle admonished. Nature is God’s gift to be shared by everyone. Nature is not merely a free good, external or sink but the basis of future life and future economics.
Housing as a human right is often eclipsed by the right of speculation (cf. Arnold Kunzli, “Housing as a Human Right”
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/06/266635.shtml)
Rights are balanced and exist in a hierarchy, work and privacy, economy and ecology.
Wall Street oligarchs and speculation threaten the real economy. Financial markets capture the government, as former IMF economist Simon Johnson explains (cf. “The Quiet Coup” in The Atlantic, May 2009
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200905/imf-advice?x=36&y=1)
Confusing offense and defense is a perversion like conflating public and private. Turning the government into a trough for the super-rich, encouraging politicians to be “moneychasers” (Bill Moyers) and lobbyists to be legislators are ominous signs of an elite, protofascist monopoly economy that immunizes itself from criticism. With the myths, the system of “minority consumption” (Robert Kurz) stylizes itself as a natural law, represses criticism and alternative economics.
What seemed utopian in the past, turning away from the worship of profit and pursuing steady-state zero-growth stewardship economics, proves to be necessary for survival. Infinite growth is impossible in a finite universe. Increased gross domestic product in the short-term can entail destruction of the foundations of life in the short term (cf. Thomas Fischermann, “Better Growth,” http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/05/391533.shtml)
Consumption, not population, has gone through the roof. The earth has enough for the needs of all, not the greed of all (Gandhi). With the encouragement of advertising and credit, needs and wants are confused and unnecessary ostentatious consumption is promoted. Possessions can possess us where the meaning of life mutates into the accumulation of things. Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism agree that riches can
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be thorns and that simplicity, enlightenment and conversion are ways to life.
Inequality has also gone through the roof, especially since Reagan extolled greed and shifted taxation from corporate taxation to individual taxation. Three-quarters of the income growth in the US from 2002 to 2006 went to the top 1% (cf. “Economic Crisis and the Crisis of Neoliberal Ideology” by Vladimiro Guacce http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/06/391987.shtml). While the top 1% had 15-18% of total assets in 1968-1970, its share soared to 55-58% by 2007. Over the past 10 years, the financial services industry (banks, insurance, investment firms) contributed over $5 billion in campaign contributions and lobbyists.
May the love of life unite us against the maladies and myths of the past so production can be for needs and not for profits. The system of elite democracy and shareholder rule could give way to decentralization, regionalization and the sovereignty of human rights. The horse must be set before the cart and our own pockets mended! May we take the hard path of system- and structural criticism and refuse the path of least resistance, scapegoating and blaming the weak!
“When the state trusts citizens, citizens trust the state” (Justin Trudeau).
The 26 community centers in Vancouver B.C. could represent a third way beyond the state and the market. The centers have a cushioning and multiplying effect as surrogate counseling and classroom opportunities. Anyone can use the computers for three hours a day and caserolle dinners are only $4. The Canadian spirit, the thankfulness of being protected from cradle to grave, is encountered everywhere. Do we have anything to learn here?
The Sky Train, the Canada line, and the Evergreen line in Vancouver B.C. are computeroperated light rail lines connecting the whole city, magic trains running every four minuters some since 1986.
When will the US recognize and congratulate Canada and Vancity and break out of its insular, exceptional hubris?
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Victory of the Loud Little Handful
by Mark Twain
The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object... at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it."
Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men...
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger" (1910)
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10. SHOUTING FROM THE CABOOSE
Hope lies beyond Social Darwinism and hyper-individualism. As the end of cheap oil could be the beginning of community, the end of everyday time could be the beginning of kairos time, the time of decision. Black is a new consciousness, not a skin color (Steve Biko).
There are solutions to the banking-credit crisis but they are painful. A dual key currency of the dollar and the euro may be inevitable along with adoption of a subsistence and sustainable economics (cf. Fred Bergsten from the Peterson Institute for International Economics in "Droht die `Mutter aller Finanzkrisen'?" in Telepolis, 2/6/2008 http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/02/372229.shtml).
Our footprint is unsustainable. For a long while, our imports have been double our exports. Our grasping and greed, stylizing desires as needs and all products as products with inelastic curves, are unsustainable in a world of limits and shared responsibility.
Poverty can evoke sympathy or fear as world collapse can evoke alliances or withdrawal. The melting of the dollar is a result of the twin deficits, the balance of trader deficit ($800 billion in 2007) and the federal budget. Countries do not need dollars as in the past to buy oil. The weak currency means it's harder to earn euros to buy imported oil. These are the new realities in our brave new world calling us to changed priorities and perspectives.
Radical solutions are different than rhetorical or cosmetic solutions. We are all called to be transformational agents and to pressure Obama to radical progressive policy on militarism, health care, housing, job creation and poverty. Martin Luther King taught us that there is good in every person. This could be the cornerstone for a healed understanding of security. Valuing all persons including enemies is crucial for a healed world. Reconciliation means finding a new unity relativizing differences.
Empires like Narcissus fall in love with their reflection and perish. We could become a republic rather than an empire if we follow Britain's example and not Rome's selfdestruction (cf. Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback," "Sorrows of Empire," and "Nemesis"). Consumerism is an anxiety religion that sets having over being. Advertising is based on convincing people of their inadequacy.
World civil civil society directly and indirectly fights empire-building and its veilscorporations, myths and lies, long-lasting and multi-purpose lies. People who spend their lives glorifying sales and profits are living pseudo-lives in cultures of denial and diversion.
World depression is a bitter fruit of market fundamentalism and economism where economic corruption and pandering are made practical necessities. The free moral state is
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in a tension to the national security state. The state has a social character and can't be reduced to a power and security state.
Denial like showmanship is a short-term palliative or sedative sometimes spread by all the media and disguised or justified as a natural law. Being upbeat becomes the alldetermining criteria when advertisers rule over audiences. From a liberation theology perspective, we are called to create a new language and a new mathematics, a language that is inclusive and affirming and a mathematics that respects the past, present and future.
Let me give a few examples of concrete existential resistance. Californians live in internalized rage with the succession of republican governors (Reagan, Dukmajen and Wilson) each one vetoing more bills than the ones before. Students and mountain people in Chile formed the real government when Pinochet - their US-sponsored Nazi partyonly served the tiny elite. Bonhoeffer organized an underground Confessing Church when Hitler appointed a Reich church bishop whose only interest was in making the church subservient to the Fuhrer. In "Ethics," Bonhoeffer after excoriating "cheap grace" distinguished penultimate and ultimate when the church was perverted or instrumentalized to legitimate dictatorial rule.
Civil society is the counter-power to the dominant trickle down mythology. in resisting the world depression! We are called to an ethic of solidarity and resistance, to work inside and outside the system for peace justice and integrity of creation. As the left needs celebration and organization, we should congratulate one another and become interdependent "internationalistas." We should learn to empathize, to live in and from other people and other cultures and free ourselves from work coercion, myopia, narcissism and apathy. We are not here to be "entertained to death" (cf. Neil Postman) but to be transformational agents working against the spirit of this world, the spirit of greed, over-accumulation and conspicuous consumption. Non-stop consumerism and corporations promote false consciousness in status-symbol land. Chevrolet doesn't mean revolution. Possessions can possess us as the helping professions can help themselves. The car is promoted or glorified as a lifestyle, a validation of power and status while its destructiveness is faded out.
Together we can repair the broken language where offense is called defense and dependence is called independence. There is power in our decision, our proclamation and our vision. The Great Upheaval brings forth the Great Refusal (cf. Paul Krugman). Rewriting history is as perverse as using religion to justify the national security state.
In Kaspar Hauser by Jacob Wassermann, a town stricken by drought fell to violence, mistrust and fatalism until a little boy plays so beautifully on his flute that water rose again in the wells.
The West is "arrogant, greedy and self-absorbed." This was one of the lessons learned from 9/11 by Jean Chretian, former Canadian prime minister. Hell is being without alternative, resigning and acquiescing to political, economic or spiritual corruption.
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In a cable public access TV program on "Spirituality and Healing," sharing resources, listening to all viewpoints and opening our hearts were emphasized as crucial for truthtellers and liberators. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, agnosticism and atheism can help change our paradigms from excess to access. As crisis and opportunity are represented by the same Chinese letter, times of upheaval should be times when we recognize the many efforts and campaigns. Diversity is a strength and enrichment, not a threat or false security.
In a three-hour CSpan Book TV program, David Lewis, Pulitzer prize winning author and black historian, said he felt like one warning from the caboose that the train's speed was wrong and that the wrong men were in control.
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