Nothing but a Revolution can save Us, Part III - The Theology of the 99 Percent

Our previous chippings on the Occupiers concluded that the confluence of impulses which comprise the movement would fail to engage into the prevailing historical cycle if they sought to reform a system which, in our opinion, is beyond transformation.

No one who has applied a cream to an itch can complain of emollients. But palliatives do not deal with underlying causes which, in the case of dying empires, are pervasive and systemic. When the system itself is the disease, applying plaster to rot will not stop the decay.

But history also teaches that new life springs from rot. After all, why not? Why should we think -- other than adhering to some carte blanche notion of free will -- that human events are exempt from processes that apply to all other forms of life?

The “fall” of the Roman Empire and the concomitant “rise” of new racio-cultural, political economies in what became Europe provide an illustrative paradigm of sorts for our own looming future. Two of Gibbon’s three volumes attest to the complexity of the subject; so that apart from sketching some general contours this woodchip will focus on the existential and moral transformation that took place as orthodox Christianity replaced the weltanaschaung of paganism.

A preliminary word. The historical fact of regeneration which took place upon the so-called fall of the Roman Empire has been distorted by the myths of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which were simply the self justifications of a class. In order to see how rot gives rise to regeneration in the human social context, it is first necessary to disentangle from the anti-feudal capitalist propaganda that passes for orthodox history.

The propaganda of a “Dark Age” was first foisted on history by the Italian litterateur, Petrarch, who applied it in 1350 to literature written after the dated fall of Rome in 476. The epithet then got applied to anything ante-dating Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) which is considered to be the herald of the “new” scientific era. Lastly, the term got used as Voltaire’s hachet du jour in his ongoing diatribe against the Church.

Not surprisingly, the agitation for something “new” began by maligning that which was “old” but the agitation rests on a cornucopia of petards. The Middle Ages, it is said, was a time of intolerance and witch burnings. Actually, the (Spanish) Inquisition (1492) was the opening salvo of the modern nation state and the Reformation Wars (1540) exceeded the Crusades in brutality and devastation. The Dark Ages, it is said, was a time of ignorance and superstition. Actually, the 700 years after 476 saw more technological, mathematical, artistic and scientific achievements than the 700 years before. By the time of Augustus (27 A.D.), the towering greats of Ancient intellectual life had been dead 300 years. What ensued for the most part was 400 years of imitation, compilation, tinkering and slow decay. As for superstition, the notion that the ancients didn’t jump for a shadow is laughable.

It is worth mentioning that Reverend Cotton Mather’s treatise on witches and the spectral evidence of ghostly apparitions, (The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)), relied on the Bacon’s new scientific mode of analysis of which Mather was a serious student and proponent. Unless we disabuse ourselves of the anti-medieval canards we will be unable to learn from one of the great transformational events in history.

In this respect, Gibbon’s history was defective; for, as a Son of the Enlightenment, he espoused the prejudices of his Age. Relying on the formality that the Empire legally perdured until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Gibbon dutiful covered all the viscitudes of the fragmented administration of “empire” in the West during the Middle Ages. As a military-political chronology, Gibbon’s account is impeccable; however, it fails in its grasp of the human “impulses” that form the calculus of history.

Gibbon’s central thesis was that the Roman Empire fell because Christianity had sapped what was left of its vital force. Instead of being manly and martial, men became monkish and theological -- prattling nonsense instead of working on practicalities. Gibbon’s sardonic account of the theological controversies that racked the Empire as the very Barbarians stood at the very Gates, is one of the malicious delights of all history.

“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” (Decline, vol. I, ch. 15.)

Gibbon all but feasted in his melancholy and his account will convince the reader that no stupider beast stalks the earth than man, among whom Christian theologians must be ranked as the most deranged.

But Gibbon’s thesis forgot its own best evidence: the “manly” Romans were prattling inanely well before Christianity stalked the globe. They had long ceased to have any useful aim other than maintaining a stasis which evidently wasn’t serving the needs of most people stuck on earth.

The Roman Empire in the West, ended because it had failed to deliver. People turned their backs on an Idea which maintained relevance only for the “inner belt way” crowds at Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. Sometimes people literally packed up to go live with the Barbarians; other times they came to a modus vivendi with the new occupiers.

The non-official reality is difficult to summarize because it occurred beneath the official version of events and was the product of multiple, sometimes parallel, confluences.

Perhaps the first thing to bear in mind was that people did not openly “renounce” the Empire or even paganism. In architecture, art, law and religion they kept familiar and useful bits and pieces of the ancient world. They thought more in terms of practical adaptation. Roman columns and masonry got reused in construction, just as pagan moral codes got reworked into the seven deadly sins and cardinal virtues, and just as ancient learning got redefined into the seven liberal arts.

Secondly, the “fall” of the Western Empire was as much matter of privatizing and contracting-out government than of so-called barbarian conquest. The Vandals, Burgundians and Goths who took over chunks of the West did so as agents or “friends” of the Emperor (then residing in Constantinople). Rome had become an Empire-in-Franchise; a brand name. The avowals continued; the underlying reality transmuted.

This de facto privatisation of empire was not oligarchical but democratic. As a whole, the Empire had come to present the interests of a 1% senatorial class who competed in finding more subtle gradations and high falutin’ titles to distinguish their pecking order. The res publica was their berry patch.

The parceling out of empire to lesser dukes (“leaders”) or counts (“friends”) dovetailed with new arrangements -- new social-contracts -- between those rulers and the occupants. At all levels, people began taking control over their lives working on local, sustainable realities in architecture, political structures, law and religion, as well as the all-necessary economy. The lack of any coordinated program allowed snits like Voltaire sniff to about a “Dark Age” but what the monarchical Enlightenment called “chaos” was actually a social democracy that produced a better and freer quality of life than had been had under the rapacious and heavy hand of Empire.

The point is illustrated by architecture which is the face of a society. For near a millennium the principles of architecture had been settled: row upon row of arches and columns in four orders: doric, ionic, corinthian and composite. The impression was intended: pomp, pride, power in your face -- what we today call a “corporate presence.”

As the empire crumbled, architecture became smaller, more intimate and decorated with popular, Celto-Germanic motifs and patterns. Friezes and columns got illustrated with real and fantasy animals including such in-your-face hilarities as a leering monkey with drooping phallus.

What Petrarch had objected to was that art had become vulgus -- pertaining to the common folk. But the becoming of the folk was far more genuine than the stasis of Augustus.

Were the Middle Ages stable? No. They were chaotic and at times miserable but, despite reduction and rustification, they were vital. Were they classical and polished ? No. But they were colourful and delightful. Did they have a program? No. What they had, however, was Christianity -- a set of moral principles and existential attitudes intended to infuse the structure of the system whatever the system ended up being.

To Gibbon, and for us, the theological quibbles of the day seem like so much stuff and nonesense. But this is only because we do not understand the buzz words and vernacular of the times. Through symbols and metaphors people were arguing about root political understandings at the base of all things.

For Gibbon, the most ludicrous of these existential disputes was the fight between Arius and Athanasius over the “nature” of Christ: Had Jesus been a very exceptional being who became a god or had he always been a part of God from the beginning of time?

In order to understand the social significance of this seemingly pointless debate we have to remember that in the pagan world heroes and emperors were always becoming gods. The “trans-op” was known as an apotheosis and became so routine that the emperor Trajan’s dying words were “puto! fio deo” -- best translated as “Bleh, I’m becoming a god....” .

But in death and in life, Rome remained the province of the one percent. Its rulers and heroes may have ascended to Olympus but the mass of “humble” people living close to the ground returned to mere mulch, as insignificant in death as they were expendable in life. If Christianity had nothing different to offer, it had nothing better.

Both the Arians and the Athanasians held to much the same liturgical practices and imperatives of moral conduct. They were not enemies; but a chasm separated them on their answer to the fundamental value of human existence.

For the Arians, Christianity was just another religion in the pagan pantheon. This meant that although some men became gods the rest of us nameless mortals could expect from life nothing more than what luck assigned us. Jesus was a very, ultra special person; but so too had been Heracles, Achilles and the great prince of peace, the Divine Augustus.

For the Athanasians, God himself came down -- apoandrosis, as it were -- infinitely validating each and all of us by coming into contact with us down here, in the valley. Not only that but when He did come down his “triumph” was not that of some pretty-boy, gym-toned Apollo but as sorry assed, shameful and pathetic as could be imagined -- God the Defeated One. Nicene Christianity stood for a complete inversion of the pagan cosmological order.

Of course, the pagan gods did participate in human affairs, but they did so at a remove as manipulators, little different from the remove of master and slave. On a primary existential level pagan humanity stood estranged from its gods and alienated from itself.

The dispute between the Arians and the Athanasians was the ultimate one percent - ninety nine percent divide. Once the “theological lingo” is cast in context, we can understand why the orthodox Christians fought with such determination for the Nicene Creed.

They were not interested in formulating a military strategy for defense of the homeland or in coming up with a plan to revive the economy or for political reform. Those problems were so intractable that the best anyone could do was hope that calculus of history would figure it out somehow.

Instead the Athanasians insisted on a change of “root consciousness” from one that worshipped “exceptional cases” into one that insisted that “as you treat the least of these” so you treat the Eternal God himself.

The cynic will rightly remark that Christians have often betrayed their own Gospel. But that does not alter the radical nature of their revolutionary “good news.” The same cynic might justifiably remark that none of this god-stuff is actually true. But that too is not the point. What is important, from an historical and sociological perspective, is that people believed and acted on it and fought for it as if it were true.

In practical terms, the eternal divinity of Christ got translated into what the Church today calls the preferential option for the poor The option was stated in the Gospel of St. Luke:

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. ...
He hath shewed strength with his arm:
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
(Luke: 1:46 55)

St. Luke’s Gospel was written “to the Romans” and once we recall what the Roman point of view was, we can see that the Gospel fell but a little short of a declaration of war against Augustus’ “vital stasis.” The Christian answer to the Ara Pacis was Mary in the Manger:

Nativity by Giotto

But Luke’s focus was less on political structures than on animating attitudes. Throughout medieval literature his Magnificat got restated in tales and lessons that focused on ordinary common mulch people: the lowly shepherd, the monk who falls asleep and awakes in Eden, the prince in unrecognized disguise, the lowly maiden. And it is Luke’s orientation that was carried on in A Christmas Carol, Les Miserables, Huck Finn, and -- it seems to us, the Occupiers.

Today, the motto of the One Percent is, “Wealth makes right.” Perhaps they are right. Obama certainly bespoke a very Roman attitude when he said that he did not begrudge Blankfein his billions.

But what is heard from the 99 Percenters is precisely the cry of the preferential option for the poor. The “option” is not a question of charity but of due and proper inheritance based on the conviction that all are called to the Table, not only those who can afford $35,000 a plate.

The questions that are being directed at the Occupiers are very much the types of questions that the Pharisees fired at Jesus: what is your program? how would you provide...? what do you say to those who ask how you would balance...? And the answers of the 99 Percenters are very much the kind of “irrelevant” non-sequiturs given by Jesus: lower tuition! provide home care to the disabled! get the money changers out of the temple!

But it is precisely the non-sequitur wherein the strength lies; for a sequitur would merely accept and continue the stasis. It seems to us that the worse thing the Occupiers could do would be to come up with a “solution” because, in fact, the political, economic and ecological problems confronting us are intractable.

There is among orthodox socialists the view that the present structures can be kept if only they are correctly inverted so as to benefit the working public instead of private capital. It is an intriguing proposition. After all what is the difference between G.U.M. (Soviet Russia’s All-Commodity Store) and Walmart other than ownership?

We, however, are not so sanguine. Systems are by definition integrated wholes and what is integrated at present is a system of despoliation and destruction that kills off the very insects that give us life. True revolution will come when the system or the climate collapses in such a way that allows and impels people to cobble together their own nearest and best solutions. What matters when they do so is their animating existential imperative.

We do well not to overlook the fact that the protesting “99 Percent” are actually less than 1% of the U.S. population and an infintessimally small sliver of the world population. They are nowhere close to attaining a political threshold that is going to cause any leader to loose sleep. They are but a cry in the wilderness; but from Oakland to Athens, the Occupiers speak the conscience of a new “Dark Age” and therein lies the hope.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011

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Nothing but a Revolution can save Us, Part II : The Cycles of Empire, Applying Plaster to Rot

A hope is abroad in the land that occupying public places is a harbinger of coming change. I am loathe to sour anyone’s apple but these smattering protests will not alter the nation’s trajectory. At most, they will wrest some economic emollients from the gorgons that rule. True revolution comes only from the great cycle of history.

In the Calculus of 99 Percent, we discussed how political movements arose less from platforms than from a confluence of popular impulses in a given direction. We concluded that the success of any confluence depended on whether it engaged into the prevailing historical trend -- what Hegel called the Zeitgeist. In this woodchip we will look at the two halves of the historical cycle.

For, if there is a singular lesson to be learned from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) it is that the past cannot be revived and the future cannot be avoided. While this might seem too obvious for words, Gibbon’s three volumes is testament to how persistently the obvious is ignored. Mankind follows its hopes not the winds.

Reviving the Past

One of the most hilarious statements in all of history was the opening line of the official biography of Caesar Augustus,

“At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.”

Of course, as a master of deceit, Augustus never quite lied. He did not say that he had “restored the Republic” but rather “liberty” to a republic which was simply presumed to exist. The presumption, completely unfounded in fact, was the cornerstone on which was erected the majestic edifice of Augustan statesmanship.

Although the Augustan constitution lasted for near 500 years, it was not a Republic. As Gibbon inimitably put it,

“The system of the Imperial government ... may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world ... concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.”

The Caesars understood that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

But some were not content with the assurance of a farce. At periodic intervals over the next 500 years some reactionary would stir things up with a cry and clamor to “restore the Republic!” One of the most energetic attempts took place in 275 A.D. when, in default of an Emperor, the Senate reclaimed its ancient prerogatives and with ostentatious hustle and bustle occupied itself with the business of governance. Its future pretensions were soon deflated.

“On the slightest touch, the unsupported fabric of their pride and power fell to the ground. The expiring senate displayed a sudden lustre, blazed for a moment and was extinguished forever.”

Well, not quite. It continued to sit, like cows taken out to graze, for another two hundred or so years. But it became so irrelevant that no one knows when it finally closed up shop. One day, it just wasn’t there.

That did not stop people from seeking to revive a dream. A millennium later, some fellow named Rienzi got it into his head to restore the republic even though Rome had by then been reduced to a town of 30,000 and the Forum to a goat pasture.

If the word “Libertarian” comes to mind, that is the point.

The American Republic ended with Franklin Roosevelt. Although the New Deal sounded the death knell of a delimited federal government, it was the World War which actually instituted a bureaucratic imperium. In either event, the Republic ended because economic, social and historical forces were pushing it beyond its 18th century confines. As Roosevelt put it in his inimitably homiletic way, we couldn’t continue living under “horse and buggy” law. (Press Conference 31 May 1935)

Up through John F. Kennedy, presidents dutifully played the part of a republican first magistrate. Since then, they have made Caligula and Commmodus their showier models. But whatever the facade, the functional fact is that the country’s political and economic policies are determined by and for a military-industrial-financial complex. Democratically electing officials does not equate with electoral control over policy.

In striking down FDR’s modern legislation, Justice Sutherland ominously warned that “every journey toward a forbidden end begins with a first step.” Sutherland was indisputably right; he only omitted to note that the first step had been taken during the French and Indian Wars. Back then, Spain’s Count of Aranda, who was a far more astute soothsayer than Sutherland, warned of the threat posed by the England’s “pygmy” which he said would grow into a voracious giant. With crisp clarity, Aranda foresaw what the astigmatism of American self righteousness has seldom grasped: that the country always was about expansion and exploitation. Now, in 1945, the pygmy stood astride the world like a colossus. The raucous and expansionist energies of a republic had achieved empire; and, Empire achieved, there was no returning to the Republic.

Restoring the Future

The Roman Republic’s achievement was likewise Empire -- the unification of the ancient Mediterranean world. Augustus supplied the administration for a reality that the Republic had accomplished.

In critical respects the Empire was as much a sham as the pretence of a republic. It never was a unitary commonwealth existing under universally applicable constitutional norms. That had been Caesar’s goal and the reason for his assassination. Romans were not about to share their rights and status with conquered others.

Augustus dispensed with any notions of multi-cultural egalitarianism. He granted Roman citizenship only as a reward for compliance and service. Under his stewardship, the “Roman Empire” became the formality of a supra national middle class urban band that participated in a certain “international style” and that sponged off the countryside while excluding a massive subclass of slaves, metics, under-employed, unemployed and rural poor. Most excluded of all were the German “barbarians” --- illegal immigrants seeking a better life within Roman confines.

Thus, the Augustan achievement came with a problem: how to protect the homeland from barbarian “assaults” while maintaining cohesion and prosperity in the “civilized” (i.e. urbanized) part of the world. Roman policy became one of containment and stability. It aimed at a vital stasis, the great image of which was Mother Rome, uniting East and West within the winds of trade and amidst a cornucopia of plenty.

Frieze from Ara Pacis (the Roman Twins reflected in the Tradewinds of East and West)

A curious bifurcation arose. The stability of the system reduced politics to the farcical squabble of ambition. The two last contenders of the dying Republic, Marius and Sulla, had both been ruthless and ambitious men, but they each represented divergent interests and real political choices. But Augustus had settled everything. Real political choices did not exist. What other policy could there be but the maintenance of the status quo?

On the other hand, the structural weaknesses of the system meant that no matter who clawed his way to the top he was faced with dealing with the same perennial fissures: the failure of the center to hold while the peripheries gave way militarily, economically and culturally.

In the beginning of empire, Rome plundered the provinces sucking wealth toward the center. However, armies create their own ancillary economies. The maintenance of legions on the frontiers stimulated the growth of cultural hybrids and local economies which drained wealth from the center even as the vital stasis of the center was defended.

The balance of economic vectors was not helped by the massive concentration of wealth in Italy itself. The Roman family farm disappeared with the Republic. Thereafter, the equivalent of “agribusiness” sought ever quicker profits in cash crops displacing more labor-intensive forms of production such as olive oil and wine.

If the word “globalization” comes to mind that too is the point, although the analogy ought not to be pressed too hard. The lesson behind the shadow of analogy is that events are less the products of choice than of cyclical processes at work. The centrifugal forces which ultimately collapsed the empire were not the result of “wrong” choices but rather of choices dictated by circumstance, which were logical and usually necessary at the time they were made.

The Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called “Scientific Revolution” have convinced us that the structure we choose to live in is a matter of choice. It is not. It is a question of the inevitable processes of generation and decay applicable to all things under the sun.

Throughout Gibbon’s work the theme is repeated. A crisis arises, the emperor repairs, revives, reforms, repels. Things look good for a while until another crisis arises and things start to fall apart again. Repeat. From time to time an emperor undertakes to repair matters by launching a major war of conquest, which after an initial success, recoils and leaves matters worse off than before.

The pessimistic lesson is that if the Republic could not be restored, neither could the Empire be saved. Gibbon’s tale cautions us that no movement will succeed if the direction of its impulse goes contrary to the prevailing historical flow.

In the Shadow of Ozymandias

Around the world, people grow up in the shadow of past civilizations. That the American Empire would fall was a fact as certain as her supremacy acquired in May 1945. The question was never “if” but always merely “when”.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

However, there are no such shadows in the United States and this has allowed for a curious disconnect in the American mind. Although Americans were fairly candid about their imperial (“expansionist”) impulses throughout the 19th century, at the moment we conquered (“liberated”) Europe and achieved empire, we relapsed with charming insouciance into thinking we were just a basically “inward” looking nation which was beholden nonetheless to defend others against nefarious aggressions at great sacrifice to ourselves.

Historical accidents in the United States lent credence to the republican fantasy. The Civil Rights Movement allowed the impression that fundamental political choices yet remained to be made and could be brought about democratically. In fact, civil rights for blacks was carried on the back of the Commerce Clause. As the Supreme Court made clear (Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) 379 U.S. 294), national economic integration required social integration. Although the conflict had the appearance of a political choice, segregation embarrassed the flow of commerce and fell before the same necessity which drove the empire itself.

It is somewhat debateable whether the United States could have chosen to be a different kind of empire than it has been. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Inaugural Address proffered that hope, as did the prospect of a “peace dividend” upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. But assuming such choices were possible then, that water has passed the bridge. The U.S. is on an historical trajectory which is by now unalterable. The United States is not going to “change” direction and become a republic again. Nor is it (as we said when Obama was elected) going to “go Swiss”.

However, it was precisely to that nostalgic republican sentiment that Obama played to during his presidential campaign. Obama could provide emollients both in the pursuit of hegemony abroad and in the maintaining a semblance of equity at home. His betrayal, within the greater fraud, was that he provided not even that.

And, it seems to us, that those same nostalgic sentiments drive the Occupiers whose demands net down to calling for the system to be other than what it is.

Some circumspection is in order. The other day we chanced on a photo of an oil rig in the gulf -- a giant crustacean like creature arisen from the deep. As colossal as it was, its size was but a distilled reflection of the vast economic and political complex that produced it. It did not require a Marx to caution that attacking such a giant windmill was an act of folly.

The military-capitalist interests, together with their ancillary camp-followers in academe, the media and cultural institutions are so deeply “invested” in America that they are America. Others are simply tenants in passing.

Occupiers might well look into their own wallets. In it, the majority of them will find a Visa or MasterCard, promoted as “passport to the world” -- an entré into the very supra-national middle-class “band” that was called the Roman Empire. The real 99 percent are lucky if they have a plastic bucket to fetch water with.

If change truly came, we would not recognize ourselves or our surroundings or anything we have come to think of as natural and normal.

This is not to say that the 99 Percenters should not do what they have to do, which is to protest. We chipsters too did our duty; but we did so with the consciousness that what is called “democracy” is simply a cheap (if noisy) way to maintain social peace and compliance; that the financial institutions which raped the world economy and the military-corporate interests that maintain trillion dollar wars are not going to be shamed into peace and equity by a few thousand protestors.

Practically speaking, there is nothing wrong with upping the price for selling one’s vote. If the ruling gorgons can be forced to disgorge a thicker stream of trickle out, we’re all for it. But true political change will not begin to occur until corporations are de-personalized and the Senate, whose sole purpose always has been to thwart the popular will, is abolished. Even that, would only get us up to the European starting line; and, although European political mechanism are far more responsive to democratic impulses, they too have bowed before the gorgon.

In the end, Obama had he tried and Occupiers were they to prevail can only apply plaster to rot. The good news is that in rot there is regeneration.

©Woodchipgazette, 2011
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Nothing But a Revolution can save Us - Part I: Confluence and Coincidence - The Calculus of 99 Percent

What do the 99 Percent stand for? Since the OWS movement started, that has been the question repeatedly asked, not only by corporate politicians and pundits but also by voices from the progressive-left. The frustrating non answer from “the movement” has been: nothing & everything.

This formlessness makes people decidedly uncomfortable. Geometry is a fundamental construct of the human mind and, as a result, the need to “box things in” becomes a basic intellectual urge. “Ti esti?” -- “what is it?” was the first and most annoying question Socrates kept asking.

Among political analysts and strategists, the Socratic question gets translated into: How can you achieve anything if you don’t lay down goals and demands? The question is certainly not illogical. Apart from boxing things in, if you don’t have a formulated destination, how can you get there, wherever there might be?

Isn’t the calculus of politics all about platforms and goals? It is. But the calculus of history -- that is, of whether movements will be successful or not -- is a different issue. What makes things happen and why do they happen the way they do?

Once Newton had explained the motions of the heavenly bodies and why things fall the way they do, Western philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Marx applied their minds to deducing the laws of history. If we can figure this out, so the thinking goes, we can soothsay the future.

Tolstoy was skeptical. His epic ‘War and Peace’ was an account of individuals within the inexorable flow of events. At the end of the novel he wrote an “Epilogue” in which he sought to explain the “calculus of history.”

Tolstoy dismissed the notion that “the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades” or “the ferment of the peoples of the West at the end of the Eighteenth Century” could be explained by the activities of popes, magnates or kings and “their mistresses and ministers.”

The French, he says, did not invade Russia because Napoleon wrote certain letters to Vienna and issued certain orders on a particular date. “Why then did the French invade Russia?” Tolstoy asks. “Because the impetus of the nation drove them there; and when the impetus was spent they receded back home. The letters and orders of Napoleon simply coincided with the will of the people; other letters he wrote, which did not, are simply forgotten.”

By a confluence of motives, Tolstoy did mean an identity of motives, or in other words, a shared platform of goals. On the contrary, he assumed that the 100,000 individual motives that made up the Army of the French were entirely idiosyncratic. The motives, each different from the other, simply flowed together and gave rise to an impulse in a given direction.


Just as Tolstoy was dismissive of attributed causes which seek to explain an event, he was equally unimpressed by strategies which seek to bring about a result. His hero of the war was General Kutuzof who was excoriated as an incompetent as he retreated before Napoleon’s advance and hailed as a hero as he advanced after Napoleon’s retreat.

Kutuzof understood the “calculus of history;” Napoleon (at that point) did not. In Tolstoy’s opinion, the calculus of history is formed by the swelling confluence of a myriad of individual motives and impulses which are beyond human calculation.

Tolstoy’s Epilogue finds little resonance in an epoch addicted to the scientific method. We want maps not the meandering of a herd. The Occupation Movement, we are told, needs a brilliant, cunning strategist in the order of Carl Rove or at least in the magnitude of Lenin!

The historians among the strategists will argue that the Occupiers will fail unless they come up with a strategy. After all, is it not true that the Peasant’s Revolt in 14th Century England and the Peasant’s War in 16th Century Germany failed for want of a map?

This is not a patently unreasonable argument; but it is based on a false historical premise. The picture painted by the 14th and 16th century feudal-bourgeoisie was that of a rudderless mob of angry, dirty, uppity peasants who, being ignorant, resentful and dirty got what they deserved. Most subsequent historians have simply accepted the propaganda of the triumphant party as fact.

But the propaganda is over-painted. The coming together of English, and later German, peasants certainly was that “swelling of impulses” which Tolstoy says is the calculus of history. But it is incorrect to say that the peasants had no platform. In both cases, the uprising had very specific demands.

The English and German peasant revolts provide a good historical analogy for today’s 99 Percenters. In both cases, the peasant class was being destroyed by excessive taxation and laws which embarrassed their economic development.

In order to see how this was the case, it is first necessary to disentangle one’s thought from the anti-feudal capitalist propaganda that passes for orthodox history.

It is typically said that the peasants revolted against the oppressions of serfdom. But that is incorrect. Since the 4th Century, serfdom had provided much desired economic security. It may have bound the peasant to his land but it also prevented foreclosure on his land. What is called feudalism was a complex balance of horizontal and vertical economic flows. What caused the peasants’ revolt was that, as feudalism gradually gave way to a nascent capitalism, the flows down were all but eliminated by the suck ups.

The unbalancing of the feudal equilibrium was not just a matter of taxation but also of the privatization of common lands. For centuries the common use of fields, forests and streams had served as a kind of “public service” to the peasantry and these were now be foreclosed on and handed over to private individuals. Thus, the Twelve Articles of the German revolt (1525) demanded the return of communal lands.

The disequilibrium was also the result of legal class war. A major cause of the English revolt was the Statute of Labourers (1351) which forbade workers from demanding better pay and working conditions. What was occurring in both England and Germany was a gradual but inexorable dis possession and reduction of what had been a stable and relatively prosperous class.

Of course it was entirely within the interest of the newly emerging feudal-bourgeoisie to mischaracterize the balance they were destroying, so that to this day people are taught and believe what boils down to capitalist revisionism. Feudalism was by no means perfect, but it was a remarkably stable, generally equitable, and culturally democratic system. It did not last near 1000 years by being unremittingly unjust.

Once feudalism is cast in a more balanced light, the analogy between the peasants’ revolts and today’s Indignados and 99 Percenters can be seen. In all cases a defined and previously secured class protests against economic pillage, political disempowerment and cultural monopolization.

In each of these cases, the problem of the movement was not a failure to formulate specific demands. Nor was it a failure of collective impulses. The peasants’ revolts ultimately failed because both the substance of popular impulse and the form of their goals failed to coincide with an historical cycle.


The peasants’ revolts illustrate that Tolstoy’s calculus is only half correct. It is not sufficient to say (as he would) that the revolts failed because the collective impulse “spent” itself. No impulse lasts forever. The question is whether the impulse engages into a wheel that moves events.

Here the prognosis becomes elusive. Whether we regard history as cyclical or progressive, the critical factor becomes knowing where in the historical cycle (or progression) the present moment stands. This in turn becomes a question of knowing whether the present moment is a time to build on pre-existing achievements or to destroy the existing order.

If the confluence of impulses flows in a destructive direction and if the “historical moment” is one which is fertile for destruction, then the “movement” will amount to something. If not, not e converso.

Is all this not just a pompous way of singing Que será, será? I think it’s a tad more than that. It gives us a set of values to balance-out in an historical equation.

The peasants’ revolts failed not because there wasn’t a confluence of impulses among the peasantry, but because that confluence did not coincide with a generative stage as represented by the capitalist movement. The West was not simply destroying something old but building up to something new. The peasants, for all their radical “communistic” articles, wanted to revert to the statu quo ante; a quo ante that itself had started when the collective impulse of the German Barbarians had coincided with the decadence of the Roman Empire in a moment that was fertile for destruction.

Those who are quick to quibble will point out that every end is a beginning and all creation entails destruction. And right they are. All I can say is that if soothsaying were a matter of mere logic anyone could predict the future. But soothsaying is not mere logic. The one-eyed Russian general sniffed the wind, the world historical Man of the Moment got it all wrong. In this respect, Tolstoy was right.

The absence of a platform by the 99 Percenters is not critical. A platform will eventually emerge from the confluence of impulses assembled; and that emergence will manifest democracy in its most raw and pure form.

But whether the 99 Percenters succeed, depends on whether their impulse is revolutionary or reformist and, whichever it is, whether the present historical moment is one of generation or decay.

That is my calculus.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011
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Bring Back the Bull Moose!

Alas, we are now, once again, entered into the campaign season -- a time when the air will be filled with the sounds of idiocy and ambition distracting us from noble and necessary economic and political reforms.

As usual, the GOP will engage in vicious exploitation of people’s resentments to their own detriment. A sign of the vituperation to come was Texas governor Rick Perry’s opening campaign pledge to "work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can."

Tickled pink, the Wall Street Journal squealed that “Mr. Perry isn't so much promising to tackle the problem of government dysfunction as to make it irrelevant to average Americans.”

In governor Perry’s twisted lexicon, “patriot freedom” stands for nothing less than the complete atomization of society allowing Big Persons to do as they will and letting the weak, the poor, the aged and the average fend for themselves.

Against this assault on social decency, what can we expect from the Democrats? Alas, nothing. It has been said of Obama that he shows up for a game of strip poker in his shorts. Unfortunately the same can be said of the Democratic party as a whole. It is the party of “compromise and cave” -- a gaggle of Quislings

This is nothing new. Most people today have never heard of I.F. Stone, an independent left-wing journalist who throughout the Fifties and Sixties delighted his readers with acute political insights and ironic analyses.

Chief among his exasperations were the Democrats whom, he said, could always be relied on to tag along with the Republicans after issuing a faint and feeble protest that conceded all major points. For a brief moment, under JFK and LBJ, the Democrats summoned up their convictions and enthusiasm only to dissipate both on lies and war.

Alas, the American People are no better than their parties. In actual fact they are divided over rival forms of selfishness. Liberals and conservatives are alike besotted with entitled individualism. They differ only in the objects of their desire, but neither has a true social concept.

Reflecting the country, the major parties are little more than bands of backbiting midgets and bitchy eunuchs. And so, alas, the onslaught of the Campaign Season is also the season of despair.

But quite by chance, we came upon a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, delivered 101 years ago in August 1910 when he was running as a “Bull Moose” Progressive.

It was an astonishing speech not only in the “modernity” of what it said but also in its transfiguring inspiration. It is astonishing to recall that there was a time when political rhetoric could serve up more than popcorn or poison.

The speech is long -- longer than will fit onto the bumber sized patience of most people today -- but it warrants being read by all Americans because 100 years ago one of our own pointed the path to tomorrow’s future.

===================
Osawatomie, Kansas
31 August 1910

We come here to-day to commemorate one of the epochmaking events of the long struggle for the rights of man - the long struggle for the uplift of humanity. Our country - this great Republic - means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

That is why the history of America is now the central feature of the history of the world; for the world has set its face hopefully toward our democracy; and, O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your own country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind.

. . .

In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life. ...

For our great good fortune as a nation, we, the people of the United States as a whole, can now afford to forget the evil, or, at least, to remember it without bitterness, and to fix our eyes with pride only on the good that was accomplished. ... We can admire the heroic valor,the sincerity, the self devotion shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray; and our sadness that such men should have had to fight one another is tempered by the glad knowledge that ever hereafter their descendants shall be found fighting side by side, struggling in peace as well as in war for the uplift of their common country.

I do not speak of this struggle of the past merely from the historic standpoint. Our interest is primarily in the application to-day of the lessons taught by the contest of half a century ago. ...

Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said:

"I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind."

And again:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln's. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear.

Now, let the working man hear his side.

"Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.... Nor should this lead to awar upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world."

And then comes a thoroughly Lincoln-like sentence:

"Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

It seems to me that, in these words, Lincoln took substantially the attitude that we ought to take; he showed the proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights. Above all, in this speech, as in many others, he taught a lesson in wise kindliness and charity; an indispensable lesson to us of today. But this wise kindliness and charity never weakened his arm or numbed his heart. We cannot afford weakly to blind ourselves to the actual conflict which faces us to-day. The issue is joined, and we must fight or fail. . . .



In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next.

One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable.

. . .

Now, this means that our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.

That is one of our tasks to-day. . . . The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; . . . Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of [public] control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations [e.g. railroads] should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, and coal, or which deal in them on an important scale.

I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. . . . We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.

. . . .

I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective - a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

The people of the United States suffer from periodical financial panics to a degree substantially unknown among the other nations which approach us in financial strength. There is no reason why we should suffer what they escape. It is of profound importance that our financial system should be promptly investigated, and so thoroughly and effectively revised as to make it certain that hereafter our currency will no longer fail at critical times to meet our needs.

. . .

Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children.

Moreover, I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few, and here again is another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude. People forget now that one hundred years ago there were public men of good character who advocated the nation selling its public lands in great quantities, so that the nation could get the most money out of it, and giving it to the men who could cultivate it for their own uses. We took the proper democratic ground that the land should be granted in small sections to the men who were actually to till it and live on it.

Now, with the water-power with the forests, with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the special interest should be driven out of politics. Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on.

Conservation is a great moral issue for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part.

Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

But I think we may go still further. The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.

. . .

I have small use for the public servant who can always see and denounce the corruption of the capitalist, but who cannot persuade himself, especially before elections, to say a word about lawless mob-violence. And I have equally small use for the man, be he a judge on the bench, or editor of a great paper, or wealthy and influential private citizen, who can see clearly enough and denounce the lawlessness of mob-violence, but whose eyes are closed so that he is blind when the question is one of corruption in business on a gigantic scale.

. . .

The national government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the national government.

The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism, without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock.

This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. I t demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.

I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare. Normally, and in the long run, the ends are the same; but whenever the alternative must be faced, I am for men and not for property, as you were in the Civil War. I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends; but I rank dividends below human character.

. . .

One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests. I believe that every national officer, elected or appointed, should be forbidden to perform any service or receive any compensation, directly or indirectly, from interstate corporations; and a similar provision could not fail to be useful within the States.

The object of government is the welfare of the people. Let me again illustrate by a reference to the Grand Army. You could not have won simply as a disorderly and disorganized mob. You needed generals; you needed careful administration of the most advanced type; and a good commissary - the cracker line. . . .

So it is in our civil life. No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives, if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation.

You must have that, and, then, in addition, you must have the kind of law and the kind of administration of the law which will give to those qualities in the private citizen the best possible chance for development. The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.

-oOo-

One should avoid over-painting the great Bull Moose into something he was not. “T.R.” was a militarist, an imperialist and something of self-promoting showman. He was a WASP who struggled to be fair with his prejudices. Intellectual progressives such as Judge Learned Hand (“the Tenth Member of the Supreme Court”) considered Roosevelt not too over-bright.

Some of Roosevelt’s policies seem commonplace or dated today. Others, while strikingly prescient, do not go far enough in today’s environment. But in its overall contours, the political concept of his “New Nationalism” remains as striking and relevant today as it was a hundred years ago.

Democrats do not need to “rethink” or “strategize” anything. They need only hearken to an erstwhile Republican.

Bring Back the Bull Moose!!!

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011

Full Text of Osawatomie Speech:

http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/roosevelt_theodore/newnationalism.html

Fauxbama Strikes Again

As everyone not out fishing has heard, the debt ceiling negotiations between President Obama and the Republican leadership have run into a wall. The posturing in Washington is so intense that politicians will need a batallion of chiropractors to realign their spines.

The long and short of the matter is very simple. The current budget deficit and the accumulated public debt arises from two primary causes: (1) a decrease in revenue due to tax cuts for the rich and (2) an increase in expenditures on warfare. The debt is owed to private investors, foreign governments and (due to some fancy fiscal fiddling) by the Government to itself. Obama’s solution for paying down the debt has been to entice Republican support for taxing the rich by offering (3) cut backs to Social Security and medical care. It’s as simple and crude as that. But just in case you didn’t catch the shell game shuffle, we will play it out again in slow motion.

The Posturing

Since April 2011, the President has been pushing for a four trillion dollar “Grand Plan” that will, he says, provide a “balanced deficit reduction framework” and a “pro-growth economic strategy” which “lays the foundation for strong private-sector job growth and ensures that shared prosperity will keep the American dream alive for generations to come.” (White House Fact Sheet, 13 April 2011)[1]

The Republican leadership, on the other hand, is adamantly opposed to any plan that will involve “progressivity” in tax rates no matter what. The “no matter what” includes stabbing the nation’s credit rating in the back.

In response to this stand-off, credit rating agencies have warned that they might cut the government's top-rung debt rating. [2] This past week, an evidently panicked China, which holds one trillion dollars of U.S. government bonds, repeated its June warning not to “play with fire” and urged the United States to adopt “responsible policies... to guarantee the interests of investors.” [3] China was joined by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell who coyly opposes his own party’s brinkmanship stating that default “destroys your brand and would give the president an opportunity to blame Republicans for a bad economy.” [4]

From the sidelines, Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vt) issued a call not to balance the budget “on the backs of the most vulnerable people in this country” with “horrendous cuts” to programs which “working people desperately need [and] that are utilized every day by the elderly, by the sick, by our children.” Deficit reduction, he said, “should be about shared sacrifice” and needed to include cuts in run away military spending and taxes on large corporations. Senator Sanders urged the public to join in and sign his letter to Obama. [5]

In this past weekend’s radio address (16 July), Obama urged an end political posturing, stating that the deficit problem could not be solved “without asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” Obama said that he was “willing to compromise” and “willing to do what it takes to solve this problem, even if it’s not politically popular” but “if we’re going to ask seniors, or students, or middle-class Americans to sacrifice, then we have to ask corporations and the wealthiest Americans to share in that sacrifice.” [6]

So, did Sanders’ call for “shared sacrifice” finally get through to the President? No. He is still "going to ask" seniors and students to sacrifice. The “shared sacrifice” theme was in fact Obama’s, laid out in his April 2011 “Fact Sheet” entitled “The President’s Framework for Shared Prosperity and Shared Fiscal Responsibility.” [1] But whereas Senator Sanders’ puts the sharing where it belongs, in Obamaspeak the words “share,” “consensus” and “compromise” mean screwing the middle class -- “middle class” being America’s euphemism for the working stiff or, as is now more likely the case, the stiff out-of-work.

The Accounting

In principle, calculating a budget deficit and the resulting debt is a simple matter of measuring incomes versus outflows. The projected debt (or surplus) is the same calculation drawn out over a period years and based on assumptions about incomes and outflows in the future. The devil is in whose peas are counted, and it is here that the shell game is played.

There is no question but that the U.S. government over the past decade has overshot its revenues and is currently 14 trillion dollars in the hole. However, neither social security nor medicare are the cause of this deficit which, as we have said, is almost entirely the result of tax breaks for the wealthy and military spending.

Back in 2001, the Bush administration projected a budget surplus of 1.2 trillion dollars through FY 2004. However, at the end of that period the Administration revised its figures so as to show a “deficit estimate of $445 billion for 2004.” ([7] “Mid-Session Review” 30 July 2004, pg. 5.)

According to the Review, 49% of this swing was due to "economic and technical re-estimates," 29% was due to "tax relief," and the remaining 22% was due to "war, homeland security and other enacted legislation." (Mid-Session Review, p. 5.) Although it might take several passes to decipher the burble, the 49% “economic and technical re-estimates” translated into the fact that projected receipts based on the late 90’s dot com bubble failed to materialize. (Ibid., pg. 5.) This could be called the Greenspan Hole.

In other words, in the Administration’s own words, the Bush Deficit was caused by a downturn in the economy (which drove down tax revenues), tax breaks to corporations, investors, speculators and “High Net Worth Individuals” (which drove revenues down even further) and an 85% increase in spending for war.

The Bush Administration’s budget philosophy was trenchantly summarized by its own chart on page eight of the report entitled, “ENHANCED SECURITY -- RESTRAINT ELSEWHERE.”

“Restraint Elsewhere” meant “controlling entitlement spending” coupled with “restraint” on corporate taxes. The report concluded that “by continuing a policy course that promotes economic growth and job creation [through tax breaks] and by restraining [entitlement] spending ... we can maintain the deficit’s downward path and return the budget to economic growth and job creation, and by stronger footing in the years ahead. (Mid-Session Review, pg. 9.)

Nothing could be clearer. Bush’s wars were to be paid for by the elderly, the disabled and the sick.

Around the same time, the Congressional Budget Office published a fiscal analysis and ten-year budget projection which, give or take 10 billion here or there, arrived at the same general results. (CBO-Budget & Economic Outlook (August 2003) [8])

The CBO report noted that defense was the “fastest growing component of discretionary spending” (Ibid, pg. 5.) and that the so-called Bush Tax Breaks (the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003) had resulted in corporate income taxes which were at “their lowest level since 1959 [sic].” (Ibid, pp. 2-3.)

In November 2010, the New York Times published an interactive [9] which challenged readers to balance the budget through 2015 and 2030. The challenge was a cake-walk. The budget was easily balanced by taxing the wealthiest elements of society and reducing military spending from monstrously stratospheric heights to merely "over-the-top" levels.

More particularly, on the revenue side, the budget could be balanced through 2030 by: (1) restoring the estate tax to pre Clinton (i.e. Reagan) levels; (2) raising investment taxes to Clinton era levels; (3) allowing the Bush Tax Breaks to expire; (4) charging social security taxes on incomes over $106,000 and (5) imposing a special sur-tax on incomes over 1 million. On the outlay side, the budget was balanced primarily by: (1) reducing military spending to pre-Iraq and Clinton levels and by withdrawing down Afghanistan and Iraq troop levels to a total of 30,000. Not a penny of entitlements needed to be cut.

This weekend, Bloomberg News broke out the figures of the accumulated public debt. [10] Of the 14.3 trillion the Government owes, 4.6 trillion is owed by itself to the raided Social Security Trust Fund. The remaining 9.7 trillion is owed to holders of U.S. Treasuries; that is, to investors and foreign governments that have loaned the United States money. What was this money borrowed for? Since 2001, the U.S. has gone into debt for the following:

1.----Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich...............................1.6 trillion
2.----Interest Costs ...................................................1.4 trillion
3.----Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan..............................1.3 trillion
4.----Obama “Stimulus” Program...........................800 billion
5.----Obama “compromise” Tax Cuts for Rich........400 billion
6.----Medicare Drug Prescription Plan.................. 300 billion
7.----Financial Industry Bailout..............................200 billion

Those are the figures; and yet, from listening to noise emitted by the Fiscal Commission’s Alan Simpson -- the so called “Gang of Six” created by Obama to come up with solutions to the “debt problem” -- one would think that Medicare and Social Security were bankrupting the county. They are not.

What it all boils down to is that Obama is asking working families, the sick and the elderly to pay “their fair share” of benefits given entirely to others. That is simply not fair.

Obama Plays Abraham - The Slaying of Social Security

By law, social security revenues (“the payroll tax”) are deposited into an “off balance” trust fund. The idea is that government merely manages the monies that we the employers and employees of America have together paid into a fund for our own future benefit. Of course, all “public debt” (whether for roads, wars or parties on the Mall) is a debt we owe to ourselves; but social security is really, really the specially kitty of “we the people” in our old age.

In reality, nothing economic exists in isolation. Social Security funds are not stored under the mattress but are invested. In addition, payments to retirees during any current year are not drawn from a big jar of saved up cookies but from a cookie jar that is being paid into constantly by those who are working -- generation 1 being maintained by generation 2 which will be maintained by generation 3.

Given how the Social Security Trust Fund works, any “projection” can create a “deficit” by making negative assumptions about the future. One could assume that a Black Plague will occur and cut the number contributing payees in half. Alternatively, one could assume that the number of paying workers will be cut in half by a future depression or by the fact that U.S. corporations will have shipped massive numbers of jobs overseas, thereby increasing massive “structural unemployment.”

Further complicating matters is the fact that, against a howl of protest, the Government has been “borrowing” from the Social Security cookie jar in order to pay for other things. It then turns around and speaks with studied ambiguity of the need to “close the deficit” and “make social security solvent.” This sound-good, sound-bite is then used to “justify” cuts to social security.

The core fact is that Social Security is a stable pay-as you-go system. As Senator Sanders has pointed out, Social Security is solvent through 2030, at which time demographic changes might begin to slowly alter the balance. Obviously other economic problems can and do affect the system, but the solution lies in fixing those problems not “cutting back” on social security.

President Obama actually admits that Social Security itself has nothing to do with the deficit. Obama’s April 2011 budget Fact Sheet stated, “The President does not believe that Social Security is in crisis nor is [sic] a driver of our near-term deficit problems.” Well, if it is not part of the problem why should it be part of the “shared” solution? How “fair” is that?

Obama’s reply is that there are “long-term” challenges which are better solved now by “improving retirement security” while “not slashing benefits.” (Ibid) The so-called long term challenges are simply conjured up nightmare scenarios projected out to 2075. As for improving retirement security, the Administration achieves this wonderful goal, not by touching the benefits, per se, but by “adjusting” the cost of living allowances. [11]

The double-talk is exquisite. Social Security needs to be made secure. At the same time it is part of the shared sacrifice -- sacrifice which will miraculously not involve “slashing” benefits. How does this fiscal fantasia work?

At present, Social Security payments are adjusted upwards to keep pace with inflation, so that they remain constant in real terms. Obama’s fidgeting with the math in effect adjusts the payments so as that they decrease with each step up in the cost of living. For example, instead of rising to $15,525 in ten years, the average benefit would fall to $14,572. Benefits haven’t been “slashed.” In fact, technically, they haven’t been “cut” - they just stagnate downwards.

What is particularly cruel about Obama’s proposed cost of living index (CGI) is that understates the expected inflation in medical costs -- an expenditure that obviously hits retirees harder than others. In reality, Obama’s “securitization” of Social Security is a recipe for old age destitution.

And yet, in this weekend’s Weekly Address, Obama disengenuously stated, “I wouldn’t agree to some of these cuts if we were in a better fiscal situation, but we’re not. That’s why I’m willing to compromise. ... even if it’s not politically popular.”

This is the kind of talk that precedes slaying the first born. We are not in this “fiscal situation” on account of Social Security. Period. What Obama is saying is that, in order to get the Republicans to agree to taxing the rich, he is willing to take it out of the hide of the poor.

Just as the polls showed overwhelming support for a public option, they now show overwhelming support for progressive taxation of corporations and HinWis. But Obama is simply a Profile in Cowardice; and to say as much gives him the benefit of the doubt as to whose side he is on in the first place.

A Basket of (Rotten) Fiscal Fruits

When it comes to Medicare and Medicaid the situation is more complicated -- but only because the United States has opted for the most depraved and corrupted method of delivering health care. Politicians disguise the depravity with cunning confusion. When they talk about “Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security” they are simply mixing apples, nectarines and oranges hoping that no one will notice the difference.

Like Social Security, Medicare funded through beneficiary contributions. The difference between Medicare and Social Security is that only part of Medicare is funded on the basis of payroll taxes. The other parts are paid for by ongoing beneficiary premiums in what is, in effect, a government run insurance scheme.

Thus, if you paid into Social Security, your hospital costs (“Part A”) are automatically paid for. They do not count toward the deficit. However, physician fees (“Part B”) and the so-called drug benefit (“Part D”) are paid from the general fund and do count toward the general fund deficit. These expenditures are offset by additional premiums charged to retirees. Ideally, this component of Medicare should be “revenue” neutral; i.e. a kind of shared-risk budgetary pass-through. But because medical costs are soaring, the Government will have to charge higher premiums or control costs or make up the difference out of general funds.

Already for 2011 medicare premiums applicable to anyone will increase 20% from $94.60 to $113.80 per month. Since this premium is automatically deducted from social security benefits, the result is to wipe out the cost of living increase in social security payments.

Medicaid is an entirely different fruit altogether. Medicaid is a program for people who are handicapped or destitute and who, by category and definition, have not paid into any special fund. People on Medicaid may be morally entitled to assistance, but that does not mean that as a budgetary matter they have contributed to kitty. In a word, Medicaid is charity. Lumping Medicaid together with Social Security simply tilts the accounting toward alleged “insolvency” by counting a charitable pay-out program on the same sheet as a pay-as-you-go trust fund like Social Security.

Adding to the obfuscation, government reports habitually state that “non-discretionary” or “entitlement” spending is expected to soar “as” baby boomers retire. To say as much steps lightly over the fact that “entitlements” such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance have nothing to do with aging boomers.

It is true that, as baby boomers hit the intensive care units and as the cost of drugs and fees continue to sky rocket, the costs of Medicare (and Medicaid) will also sky-rocket. But to say as much is merely to look for a difference in repetition. Medicare pays for medical care. As the cost of medical care rises, Medicare has to pay more. Duh. The problem is not with “Medicare” but with “medical costs.” The solution is not to blame boomers for getting sick but to do away with price-gouging monopolies given to Big Pharma, Big Sure, and for profit hospitals.

The obvious solution was and remains a single payer system. Short of that, the next best solution is one that returns medical care to the regulated and non-profit basis it operated under for decades. Germany uses private insurance companies as a delivery mechanism for health care but it does so on a tightly regulated basis that puts the primary goal of care (not profit) first.

Putting aside the very small minority which passes itself off as the American Medical Association, most doctors and nurses in the United States are in favor of a single payer type overhaul of the entire medical care system. But the refusal to push for that overhaul was Obama’s first and foremost betrayal.

Continuing on that path, Obama’s “shared solutions” for Medicare consist in a befuddling maze of cost containments and rate changes, the centerpiece of which is to reduce IPAB’s allowances from 1.5% to .5% in 2018. This is GovSpeak for “deflect and duck.”

As part of Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act (ACA), Congress enacted an Independent Patient Advisory Board. The purpose of the Board was to take decisions about how much the Government would pay for health care services out of Congress’ hands. [12]

Historically, Congress has simply “thrown money” at doctors, hospitals and drug companies by paying whatever their going rate for services was. By creating IPAB, Congress admitted, as a matter of law, that it was helplessly subservient to special interests and could not be counted on to make a disinterested decision in the public’s interest.

The purpose of IPAB was to keep the rate of medical inflation to within 1.5% of GDP. If medical care charges exceeded that rate, IPAB could impose the necessary cuts in reimbursements to providers. These cuts would go into effect unless Congress rose to the challenge of coming up with a better way of skinning the cat.

Obama’s Grand Plan budget proposes setting the GDP benchmark lower, at GDP plus .5% in 2018 so that IPAB’s recommendations would kick in at lower levels of spending.

Furthermore, by law, IPAB cannot ration health care, raise revenues, increase Medicare premiums, deductibles, coinsurance, or co-payments, or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria. Thus, in theory, the Government’s medical expenditures will be controlled by controlling the costs of services rendered and not by rationing or by imposing higher premiums on retirees. In other words, the sacrifice here is supposed to be shared between doctors, hospitals and drug companies. So far so good.

However, the fact is that no one knows for sure if that will be the case. The Kaiser Foundation’s evaluation of IPAB’s operation states that it simply impossible to rule out an indirect impact on the quality or availability of care rendered. [13] Put bluntly, no one knows how many care providers will simply refuse to take Medicare patients thus putting added stress on an increasingly crowded system.

Late last week, Obama muddied matters further by stating that he was open to using Medicare’s purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. At the same time, he stated that he was “not adverse” to the idea of charging higher Medicare premiums to so-called “high income” retirees. The difficulty here is that the way the government defines “high income” usually ends up including a large segment of the middle class -- i.e. paying beneficiaries not on Medicaid in the first place.

The hidden potential effects of ObamaShare are simply the result of the policy disaster of ObamaCare. The patchwork of pseudo-automatic mechanisms for indirect control of costs is simply insanity. The foreseeable end result is that quality health care will be reserved for the uber rich either through providers “opting out” of the Medicare system or through beneficiaries “dropping out” because they cannot afford higher premiums. That risk, if it materializes, is an unacceptable sacrifice.

For all that, the basic budgetary facts remain the same. Medicare and Medicaid spending are not currently significant budget busters. Using IPAB to control anticipated future costs is unobjectionable in theory but when coupled to noises about premium increases it becomes yet another instance of unfair sharing.

Sound Bites versus Tax Bites

Lastly, there is the matter of “economic and technical re estimates.” Thus far, we have analyzed the budget mainly in terms of expenditures. But the balance of any budget depends as well on revenues and these are a function of overall economic activity. It is a truism that the more the economy hums, the more government coffers jingle; and this truism gives birth to the neo-liberal mantra that economic growth is stimulated by tax breaks.

The truism is true if but only if it can be assumed that the persons given the tax breaks will (or are required to) invest the gain in the national economy. Otherwise, investors (being investors) follow the yields wherever they may be; and if they go elsewhere they do not generate tax revenues here.

And yet, at least since Clinton, every administration has promoted the disastrous policy of incentivizing American corporations to export jobs and invest overseas. Because these corporations are registered in the United States their profits are included in the country’s GDP. But in fact their profits have nothing to do with the health of the American economy. The money is invested overseas; wages are paid overseas; profits are made overseas; the money is kept overseas.

“Globanomics” creates structural unemployment at home, diminishes consumer demand and, since overseas earnings are not taxed at all, diminish government revenues.

This in turn puts stress on entitlement programs such as unemployment benefits and Medicaid. It also creates a trade deficit. Put simply, the more the United States buys overseas, the more it spends dollars overseas. These dollars are then used by foreign governments to buy treasury bonds. While this “repatriates” the money it does so at a cost because every bond purchased must be repaid in full and with interest. This in turn increases the budget deficit.

Notwithstanding these evident facts, both Bush and Obama adhere to the same basic trickle-down philosophy. Thus, as the Bush 2005 budget spoke of a “policy course that promotes economic growth and job creation” through tax breaks, Obama’s 2011 “Fact Sheet” speaks of a “pro-growth economic strategy” which “lays the foundation for strong private-sector job growth.” This is the same quack and the same duck which requires the same feed.

It is thus hardly surprising that the President’s “Fact Sheet” section on taxes is a marvel of double-talk. In it, Obama calls on Congress “to undertake comprehensive tax reform that produces a system which is fairer, has fewer loopholes, less complexity, and is not rigged in favor of those who can afford lawyers and accountants to game it.” The goal of this loophole reform is "to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years without adding to the deficit.”

Yes, “lower.” And there is absolutely no mention of what corporations owe to the country in return for this Grand Plan lowering.

The Fact Sheet section on taxes goes on to state that Obama “believes” we should not extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest and then concludes by stating that “he also supports efforts to build on the Fiscal Commission’s goal of reducing tax expenditures ....” In other words, Obama’s revenue reform consists in lowering the corporate tax rate and reducing social security and medicare expenditures.

Aside from the stunning shell game, what is remarkable is the lack of detail. Whereas Obama’s “Fact Sheet” went into fairly complex detail about “securing” Social Security and “reforming” Medicare/Medicaid, it is astonishingly short on detail with respect to tax reform or reductions in military spending, choosing instead to serve up general blabber about cutting waste and closing loopholes.

Warped Mirror

As with individuals, a country’s budget is a reflection of society’s character. The image of American under the Bush-Obama budgets is that of a country that spends trillions on killing while feeding the rich and impoverishing the poor. This is the Sin of Sodom whose privileged revelled in a “prosperous ease, which did not aid the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49).

Apologists for the Administration may argue that Obama is simply trying to “tease out” some concession from Republicans on taxing the rich while offering “vague and technical” sacrifices to entitlements.

The problem with the apology is that neither the numbers nor anything Obama has said bears out that view. If anything is vague it is the alleged reform of the Bush's tax "relief" for the rich. The core fact remains that when all is said and done Obama does propose to cut back on social security benefits while, at the same time, retirees will have to co-pay more for medical care. As for the unemployed and disabled, they are already so “triaged-out” that they are only noticed when tripped over on the sidewalk.

The fundamental problem is that no one in Washington (except Bernie Sanders) is being honest. The way to balance the budget is to balance the social compact. This cannot be done with mathematical rhetoric which papers over the failure of trickle-down economics.

Millennia ago, on the eve of Athens’ demise, Thucydides wrote that the Athenians had “lost the habit of simple speech which is the mark of a noble man.” It will be said of Americans that, as they descended into the economic abyss, they had lost the habit of simple counting.

©Woodchipgazette, 2011

References

[1]http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press office/2011/04/13/fact-sheet-presidents-framework-shared prosperity-and-shared-fiscal-resp

[2] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0716-petruno debt-20110716,0,1614179.column

[3]http://www.voanews.com/english/news/asia/east pacific/China-Urges-US-to-Protect-Investors-as-Debt Ceiling-Looms-125556978.html

[4]http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/58942.html

[5]http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=aa0f5904 c400-415e-aaff-86ca62fa2b3b

[6]http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press office/2011/07/16/weekly-address-unique-opportunity secure-our-fiscal-future

[7]http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/pdf/05msr.pdf

[8]http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/44xx/doc4493/08-26 Report.pdf

[9]http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html

[10]http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9OHLRBG0.htm

[11]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/how-much-would a-white-ho_b_891655.html

[12]http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=3478

[13]http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2011/May/09/ipab-faq.aspx

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