Monday, September 30, 2019

Three Small Reasons To Smile--AND One Big One

It's an understatement to say that we live in troubled times--a pretty spectacular understatement, as a matter of fact.  But that's all the more reason to look for good news wherever you can find it.  Here are three recent examples.  Actually, it's going to be four--there was one late-breaking development about which we'll all happily know more by the time you read this post.  I'll still save that one anyway, because the magnitude of it outweighs all of the others put together, along with many more added.

First, a little bit of news about "1984."  No, not the year, the book.  It's notoriously famous for its utterly bleak ending, possibly the bleakest in all of English-written literature.  Its last sentence are four words, which I won't repeat here so as not to create a spoiler for all of you who have not yet read it.  And, if by chance you've failed to do so, read it, not in spite of the bleak ending but because of it.  George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian state dedicated solely to preserving its own power into eternity is what all who have written about it have said it is--a cautionary tale about the dangers of such states and the perversion of language in the service of their perpetuation.

And yet, language, which in one sense is the major subject of the book, is also referenced therein as a source of hope, in a time beyond the bleak ending.  I'm referring to the book's Appendix on the principles of Newspeak.

I had read the novel several times, including the Appendix, and cannot believe that I did not pick up on something that, in hindsight, seems blindingly obvious.  Blindingly obvious, that is, after reading articles like this one.

It had never occurred to me that, tucked carefully into what seems like something less of interest to the average reader, and more like something aimed at scholars, that Orwell was sending, even as he was dying, a message of hope to a world he saw as falling apart around him.  Language, in "1984" is the vehicle by which Big Brother and the Party maintain control over Oceania.  But language is also, ultimately, the vehicle by which that control is one day subverted.

This ought not to be interpreted as a "happy ending" to the novel.  Orwell's oppressively bleak view of what might happen to us, if we let it, should always shape our thinking about politics, and life in general for that matter.  If anything, it should be even more reason to fight as hard as possible against the possibility of a totalitarian state, one whose destruction of humanity is as senseless as it is ultimately futile.

And, speaking about the fight against totalitarianism, there's reason to think that we haven't forgotten how to do it.  Not even in ruby red Kentucky.  Take a look.

It's worth remembering in connection with this news that Reagan's first major move was breaking PATCO, the union representing air traffic controllers who had gone on strike.  That move was not about air traffic control, or the safety that the controllers' work provides to million of Americans every day.  It was about creating a template that could be used against any union, against all unions, to blame them for double-digit inflation and interest rates, and to make voters, including many union members, believe that corporations would be their very best friends, as soon as all of that nasty union stuff went away.

And, sadly, people bought it, which is why inflation-adjusted wages have steadily declined over the past four decades.  Thanks, in a signal of the massive level of irony to come under right-wing domination of American politics, to the first President who was also a president of a major union, the Screen Actors' Guild (full disclosure:  I am a member of SAG-AFTRA, its successor).

Even worse, during this same time period, many states enacted so-called "right-to-work" laws, which are in fact right-to-work-for-LESS laws.  By forbidding the collection of union dues from non-union workers in unionized workplaces, these laws dilute the power of unions to act politically outside of the workplace, i.e., to work on behalf of legislation that would promote the interests of employees generally.  These laws, permitted by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, were intended to prevent labor from doing what capital has been doing for centuries--organizing and fighting for its interests.  And this intention has been so fully realized that, thanks to a conservative Supreme Court, corporations are now treated as people--which is much more than can be said for American workers.

If a lesson like that can be learned in Mitch McCONnell's home state, and put to ingenious effect as is the case here, there may finally be hope for those workers.

Changing the subject for a moment, to one that's near and dear to my heart--historic preservation--here is a tale of two New York movie theaters, one that is being renovated and will eventually be re-opened, while the other is being closed forever and is more likely than not to be replaced, given its location, by high-end retail.

The common thread in both stories is that single-screen theaters, after years of onslaughts by television, cable, video recorders/players, and, finally, the Internet, have finally bitten the dust.  This is a sad occasion for folks like me who enjoy movies as both a spectacle and a social experience, and the fact that multiplexes now serve as replacements for many of these lost palaces is thin gruel indeed.  Multiplexes, for the most part, look a lot like each other, a common failing in much of urban/suburban architecture.

In contrast, even a small theater like the Paris had in own quirky personality, in part because of its status in New York as the city's premiere art-film house.  Now, it has the distinction of being the last single-screen movie theater in the city to close.  My father and I went there on the day I moved up there for a civil-service job, and saw "Get Out Your Hankerchiefs."  We were not impressed by the movie, but liked the theater very much.  It's a shame that someone can't find a way to preserve it as an event space, like the former Ziegfeld Theater, perhaps even as one with a film focus.

On the other hand, it's great to see the Sanders/Pavilion Theater in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to something that will at least suggest its former glory, even though it will essentially be a multiplex.  The company behind the theater's new lease (pun intended) on life has committed to restoring the few original decorative elements of the building, which is great news.  There are many more buildings like this one, in New York and around the country.  Preserving them and bringing them back to life has been shown, again and again, to be the key to reviving communities all across the country.  I encourage you to take a look at www.lhat.org to learn more about this.

So, there you have it.  Three small reasons to smile in the midst of the darkness.

And one BIG reason to think that the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is not an oncoming train.

Right here.

Finally.

See you in October.

Monday, September 23, 2019

Is Socialism The Future Of America?

We are now thirty years beyond the collapse of governments in Russia and eastern Europe that were, allegedly, based on communism, a philosophy advanced by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century in which the "means of production" were owned by the workers, and not an exclusively investor class.  That collapse was touted by global media, especially global business media, and the politicians it supports, as settling once and for all the question of which economic system--capitalism or socialism--was history's "winner."  Every major government in the developed world, including the United States, committed itself to expanding the power of market economies throughout the world.  And expand they did--beyond the boundaries of anyone's expectations.

History, however, is never a march in one direction.  It may be useful to think of it as a kind of spiral, one that moves upwards as we learn more about mastering both ourselves and the world around us, but one that touches many basic points over and over again as the spiral goes around and around.  In the current circle, our experience has taken us a long way past the capitalist point on its circumference and back to a word that had been effectively declared a dead letter in 1989:

Socialism.

Socialism has been so often used in our politics as a kind of swear word without meaning or context (except, more often than not, that you should hate people who believe in it, whether in fact they do or not).  So it's useful to take a few moments to discuss what socialism is and isn't.

It's been said jokingly that capitalism is a theory of production without a theory of distribution, and socialism is exactly the opposite--a theory of distribution without a theory of production.  While there's some truth to the joke, it lies more on the capitalism side.  For capitalism truly is a theory of production without a theory of distribution.  At its most extreme, in the late nineteenth century and today, its proponents place their emphasis on the need for all property, or the maximum possible amount, to be owned by private actors and not governments or agencies thereof.  They have absolutely nothing to say about the distribution of products and services.  They simply assume that, so long as private owners are allowed to maximize the profitability, the distribution problem will take care of itself.

But what that latter point means in practice is that distribution "takes care of itself" in the form of excess, excess that has the effect of squandering human potential in both directions.  At one end, many people aren't able to acquire enough resources to live minimally decent lives, regardless of how long or how hard they work.  At the other end, a handful of individuals are able to acquire a share of those resources well beyond what they could rationally use in a dozen lifetimes--and often end up putting those resources into efforts to leverage their existing power to even greater levels.  Sadly, this country currently has a "President" who is the embodiment of this type of individual, as are many of his supporters and many members of his Administration.

Socialism, in contrast to what you may have heard or read elsewhere, is far less interested in the issue of ownership than capitalism is.  The truth is that socialism comes in many different forms of ownership--the key linking these forms, however, is the concept of collective benefits, rather than individual ones.  A privately-owner cooperative, for example, is a form of socialist enterprise, one in which the economic benefits are not inextricably linked to investors, but are shared by the workers.  More common, of course, are democratic socialist economies that use taxation and regulation to ensure the existence of a social safety net guaranteeing that the minimum needs of everyone are met.  But, unlike Marx's concept of socialism, these societies don't ban private ownership of businesses; in fact, many of them are the homes of some of the world's most profitable companies.

On the other hand, in the economies of the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact governments, China and Vietnam, governments made attempts to virtually eliminate private ownership of businesses, attempting to put Marx's idea into practice by acting as a "trustee" of the people that owned the means of production to ensure maximum fairness in the distribution of goods and services.  All of these societies did so, however, without any form of meaningful democratic input that would serve as a check on the self-serving impulses of the governments--and, as a consequence, much of the output of these economies was squandered in fruitless military adventurism, not unlike our own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Ironically, in the end, China was forced to salvage its economy by embracing many practices of market economies, while still doing so under the name of "Communism."  As a consequence, China has the worst of both worlds:  a country controlled by a class of plutocrats pretending to be avatars of the masses, who have no way of influencing the political or economic direction of the country

What can be learned from all of this, and what I've believed for decades, long before the end of the Cold War, is that both extremes are the enemies of a vibrant economy and a world in which the will of the people is a reality.  In both cases, corrupt ruling classes answerable only to themselves sabotage the distribution of goods and services so as to prevent them from reaching the maximum possible number of people.  However, in the case of democratic socialist countries, where ownership of private property is not restricted by state ownership or political freedom by oligarchical investors, people enjoy the ability to freely participate in all aspects of society and receive a share of its total outcome that ensures the means to participate as well.

In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how to organize capital or labor in a nation, so long as the extremes ends of the organizational spectrum are avoided.  Some societies will lean a little bit more toward private economic ownership, and some will lean a little more in the other direction.  Neither is right, and neither is wrong, so long as society is stable and individuals can maintain there own autonomy with it.

What is important to keep in mind, ultimately, is that private ownership of property can never be absolute in any society, if that society is to function at all.  Government needs the ability to contract for services and purchase property if it is to have any chance of performing the functions that everyone agrees it should perform:  providing a criminal justice system, including police, and a national defense. 

And then there's the dirty little secret about property itself:  without the existence of government, property rights would not exist at all.  In a state of nature, which seems to be what most libertarians are aiming for, there would be no true property, for there would be no government to create rights to ownership that could subsequently be enforced.  And, if government is to exist at all, then property rights must give way to that existence, to the maximum extent necessary to maintain it.  Think that this is some bizarre, Marxist concept?  Nope.  Benjamin Franklin, no stranger to property interests, said it himself.  Don't believe me?  Read all about it here, in an article that effectively argues for a balance of interests when it comes to property ownership.

As a society now in the grip of a shrinking number of plutocrats, it's high time we had a robust but thoughtful discussion amongst ourselves about the future of our economy, and focus on the question of whether "socialism" is truly a dirty word, especially in light of the fact that we already have a good deal more "socialism" than we commonly acknowledge---or, perhaps, care to admit.  We are, indeed, an affluent society, to borrow from Galbraith, but that affluence is concentrated in such a way that America may not be the land of the free very much longer.

Our politics, for far too long, has been about labels and personalities, which is hardly the state of affairs the Framers hoped for.  We need, in particular, to get past the idea of socialism as a label for some unmentionable evil.  The truth is that some greater measure of socialism than what we already have may be the only way toward, to twist a phrase, making America America again.

9/11, And What We've Forgotten

Another September has arrived, and, with it, more commemorations of the anniversary of the event that has done more than anything else to define the politics and culture of our current century.  A human tragedy of epic proportions.  A shock to our sense of security.  And a new understanding of the extent to which our planet has shrunken in a globalized, digitalized economy, and of how connected events in the farthest corners of the world are to each one of us.

I remember thinking to myself, and saying to others, as they and I were attempting to pick through the fog of our emotions to sort out the path forward for us all, that you don't measure recovery from a disaster such as this one in days, weeks, and months, no matter how much all of us wanted to somehow feel better than we did.  You measure it in years, and even decades.

Well, we have certainly had years, and almost decades.  Two years from now will be the 20th anniversary of the hijacking of four airplanes and their transformation into human missiles against New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and yet another target that was never reached because of the courage of the passengers on the fourth plane, as well as the cellphones that gave them the information they needed to act on their courage, and say goodbye to those who meant most to them.

Where are we today?

Are we safer, stronger, freer, and more compassionate than we were on the day before September 11, 2001?

I wish I could say we were.  But I can't.

Because I have seen this nation descend from that day into a cesspool of profiteering and paranoia that threatens the survival of our democracy and our civilization more than any terrorist ever could.

We have seen the need to arm ourselves against new threats turn into an unending stream of public money for a war in Afghanistan that seems without end or achievable goal, a war against Iraq that was based on lies and gave birth to ISIS, and a potential war with Iran that seems perpetually ready to start at any minute.

We have seen a newfound respect for the role that government plays in our everyday lives, as a direct result of the sacrifices made by first responders and their families, disintegrate into the same endless battles about the size of the government that we need.  Even though the answer to that question is obvious:  In a democracy, the size that the people decide it should have, for the purposes they choose to pursue.  People.  Not money.  And yet, with each passing day, we continue to confuse the two more and more.

Perhaps worst of all, we have allowed the religion and ethnicity of the hijackers to reinforce--and perhaps, to some extent, revive--the bigotry towards people of color and religions other than Christianity that existed long before Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.  (Even that limitation to "men," and the omission of a clause denouncing slavery, is a testament to that existence.)  We have, in fact, carried that bigotry to the point that we are presently caging children, and allowing them to die, for the sake of a security that does not need to be obtained by those means, which should never be tried in the first place.

And the fear that allows a sizable minority of Americans to make war on anyone who doesn't look, sound, or act like "them" is also allowing moneyed interests--here and elsewhere--to distract us from taking care of each other, and to take from us the means by which to build a better society, and line their already overstuffed pockets with it.

How did we get here?

As Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg pointed out, by forgetting how we felt on September 12, 2001.  When we felt we were willing to work together at any cause to protect each other, and to rebuild a better America from the ruins of the attacks.  When we looked at each other and saw allied Americans, not partisan enemies.  When, for a moment, we understood the fact that, in a democracy, the only opponent who could defeat us was ourselves.

And then, slowly but surely, we set out on the path to defeat.  By outsourcing our willingness to sacrifice to an all-volunteer army.  By believing in an long-discredited theory about self-paying tax cuts.  By failing to understand that we are not fighting a race, or a religion, but an ideology that can only be undermined from within, not by fighting on the front lines, but through covert operations that get inside the other sides' operations and planning, and take it apart far more effectively that a clip of bullets ever could.

I'll be blunt.  All of this is due in part to a lack of political leadership at all levels of this country, and there is blame on both sides for that lack of leadership.  But, far more importantly, it's due to us.

To all of us.

For failing to go beyond jingoistic, once-a-year graphics on social media to stay engaged in what is obviously a complex, stress-inducing issue, and to be willing to give more in time and in treasure.  For failing to understand that when a nation goes to war, the whole nation goes to war, and does whatever it has to do to win it.  It shouldn't take an entertainer masquerading as a journalist to remind us of our most basic obligations to serve and protect us.  But, apparently, it does.

Most of all, for failing to understand what our enemies understand:  that fear is a weapon, and it can be weaponized against a nation like ours, one that has taken a long holiday from history in terms of understanding what it takes to protect a civilization, and the ideas that built it.

The War on Terror, as it has been called, will require paying for the government services that protect us on the front lines, and operate behind them and within the enemy camp itself to undermine and ultimately defeat them.  It will require political leadership that both requires that level of sacrifice, and offers transparency with regard to its own actions in leading the fight.  Perhaps most of all, it will require us to pay not only with our wallets, but also with our hearts.  The last thing that terrorists want is an America that continuously strives to live up to its ideals of equality and freedom.  They want an America filled with fear, willing to give up those ideals forever if doing so will buy even a little bit of safety.

It won't buy any at all.

We are at the precipice of destruction by our enemies, despite all of the annual exhortations to "Never Forget."  We have, sadly, forgotten what we felt on September 12, the day after.  We desperately need to remember it, before we let indulgence and fear consume our existence, our legacy, and our place in history.

In other words, before the terrorists have won.