"Government Will Have To Be Rebuilt"

Jamie Galbraith is not taking any prisoners in his review of two books, Consumed by political theorist Benjamin Barber and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by environmentalist Bill McKibben:

The Sins of Affluence, by James K. Galbraith, Washington Monthly: Overwritten does not begin to describe Consumed, in which Benjamin Barber takes aim at kid culture, mass market juvenilia, and the infantilization of just about everything in American life. A political theorist ... at the University of Maryland, ...[Barger is the] author of sixteen books, including the best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld.... Barber is determined that Paradise has been Lost. ...

Consumed is..., to some degree, an instance of the problem it describes. Barber serves up some of the longest sentences since Proust, yet underneath is largely a simple moral tale, an allegory not more complicated than, say, social Darwinism or Horatio Alger.

Infantilization exists, of course. Dumbing down is big business. In a rare moment of syntactic simplicity, Barber gives the basic contours of the culture: “EASY over HARD, SIMPLE over COMPLEX, and FAST over SLOW.” The stages of capitalism reproduce the stages of physical and psychological development, except in reverse. We are trapped in a world dominated by the reduction of physical and cultural artifacts to the tastes and capacities of children. Fast food, fast sports, cheap love, shout-fest politics. No one with cable television could disagree.

And there are pleasures to be found in this relentless, one-message book. ... But you have to search for these gems, buried as they are in a vast bog of pop sociology and commonplace erudition.... One gets the picture very quickly: Standards have fallen. Yes! We know!

The question is, what are we going to do about it? ... Almost fifty years ago, in The Affluent Society, my father wrote about this problem, which he defined as “private affluence and public squalor.” His solution was “social balance”: public goods, including schools and parks and libraries and higher culture. Liberalism stood ... against corporate dominance, business thinking, and commercial culture. And it was backed by the power of trade unions, of churches, and of the educational and scientific estate.

Barber offers no similar recourse. Everything he would do, he would do through markets, not against them or by bringing them under control. He speaks mainly of the “slow food” movement, of Hernando de Soto’s property-rights-for-the-poor and of the Grameen Bank’s micro-lending programs, each of these ... presupposing that markets can be as much a force for good in principle as they are presently a force for ill in practice. ... The New Deal and the Great Society are not Barber’s antecedents. He seeks merely the willed capacity to conduct one’s own life beyond the reach of mass culture, and offers the wishful thought that sensible people, each acting alone, will somehow manage to do just that. Good luck. ...

Environmentalist Bill McKibben is a better, shorter writer, and in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future he shows himself to be an adept critic of capitalism writ large. That is because McKibben, unlike Barber, drills into the fundamental question of the planet’s physical limits. (The term “climate change” does not appear in Consumed...) For as McKibben points out, the carbon blanket—a “mirror image in the sky” of every drop of oil, every ton of coal ever burned—will change everything, and quite soon.

So what comes next?

Climate change and peak oil ... are inevitable; we will have to scale back. But McKibben has hope, founded improbably on an emerging field within—of all subjects—economics: happiness studies. Here researchers have found (and McKibben accepts) that happiness does not depend on economic growth, after the first $10,000 per capita in GDP. So McKibben sets out to find happiness in simpler, less eco-destructive lives. ...

[A] sphere that both McKibben and Barber largely ignore ...[is] public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.

This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.

Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards—against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture—will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel...

At the same time, a new project of physical, technological, and urban social engineering will have to get under way. I’d rather it didn’t. But, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s famous words, “There is no alternative.”...

Comments

[Lafayette]

JKG: “EASY over HARD, SIMPLE over COMPLEX, and FAST over SLOW.”

To which, one might add: "Selfishness over altruism, individualism over collectivism." But, maybe that is not dumb enough to come across?

I especially liked the bit about "dumbing down America", in light of having demonstrated consummate political ignorance in electing this absurd lead-head, not only once but twice, to one of the most influential positions on this planet.

Remember when Americans burned draft cards during the Vietnam War, the last time militant collective revulsion in America was witnessed? I suggest everyone today trash the boob-tube - since it is the conduit of much of the rot afflicting America. Either that or somehow fix the frequency control to a public channel of unbiased content. (Or, is that Mission Impossible?)

[Lafayette]

JKG: A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000.

Wow! What a mouthful!

From a guy who teaches at the University of Texas? Very courageous to have said this in the setting-sun days of Big Brother politics ... without a pseudonym.

Anyway, let us take comfort that this presidential duck is no longer lame, but in reanimation.

I suspect, however, that the species is far from extinct.

[Lafayette]

From Jamie Galbraith's original article: Almost fifty years ago, in The Affluent Society, my father wrote about this problem, which he defined as “private affluence and public squalor.” His solution was “social balance”: public goods, including schools and parks and libraries and higher culture. Liberalism stood for its own values. It stood against corporate dominance, business thinking, and commercial culture. And it was backed by the power of trade unions, of churches, and of the educational and scientific estate.

Indeed, in America's mad rush for lucre, born of the Clinton era but perhaps inseminated long before, it has lost its way.

If we have forgot what Galbraith père opined then the present consequences of that lapse of memory is all to evident in terms of:
* Income inequality that incarcerates people in durable poverty or a lower middle-class existence, where job tenure is constantly menaced by global competition,
* Incompetent/corrupt government that squanders resources instead of investing in sectors that promote durable employment,
* Decidedly non state-of-the-art public services,
* A superbly costly health service the leadens manpower costs and thus competitive stance,
* University education that makes debtors out of students and
* Job training programs that do not give those unable to qualify for university a chance to enter the job mainstream (where there is, in fact, considerable demand for professional skills).

That's quite a list, to my mind. A staggering challenge, to say the least.

[elvis]

“EASY over HARD, SIMPLE over COMPLEX, and FAST over SLOW.”
I could make some comment here suitible to the inner 12-year-old boy in me, but I shall resist. Suffice it to say that the wife and I debated these very issues recently.

[elvis]

When down, take a minute to enjoy art:
What a wonderful world
The simple things keep us happy.

[dave p]

It isn't just America: Britain has of course experienced a similar evolution, though from a less fixatedly laissez-faire starting-point. And now France under Sarkozy looks like joining the race to the bottom, doubtless dragging much of western Europe in its wake (the east got there pretty much overnight after 1989).

But it's tragically to the US that most countries will look for their lead. Is there any hope? I'm sceptical: unfortunately the dumbing-down and kneejerk polarisation of political life are now so far advanced that meaningful reconstruction of sound active government will provoke a furious backlash from far-right fundamentalists. And I don't see much fight in the probable leaders of 2009.

And of course there's the changed international climate that US "leadership" created. I guess it never occurred to anyone that poor countries could do this kind of thing far more competitively, sometimes without having to dismantle anything much at all. Perhaps the anti-government lobby's greatest achievement will merely be to make the eclipse of the west more abrupt and less painful than might otherwise have been the case.

[Cyrille]

A major reason why I got so into US politics was that US traits had a tendency to reach us here in France 15 years later.

I am sorry to observe that this time-lag seems to be shortening...

[anne]

http://campaigningforhistory.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/when-government-was-the-solution/

May 21, 2007

When Government Was the Solution
By Jean Edward Smith

For more than a generation, Americans have been told that government is the problem, not the solution. The mantra can be traced back to Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. It provided the mind-set for the Reagan administration, and it has come to ultimate fruition during the presidency of George W. Bush.

On college campuses and at think tanks across the country, libertarian scholars stoke the urge to eliminate government from our lives. This thinking has led to the privatization of vital government functions such as the care of disabled veterans, the appointment to regulatory commissions of members at odds with the regulations they are sworn to enforce, the refusal of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environment, and the surrender of the government's management of military operations to profit-seeking contractors.

A look back at Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency shows how differently Americans once viewed the government's role, how much more optimistic they were and how much more they trusted the president.

F.D.R., like his cousin Theodore, saw government in positive terms. In 1912, speaking in Troy, N.Y., F.D.R. warned of the dangers of excessive individualism. The liberty of the individual must be harnessed for the benefit of the community, said Roosevelt. "Don't call it regulation. People will hold up their hands in horror and say 'un-American.' Call it 'cooperation.' "

When F.D.R. took office in 1933, one third of the nation was unemployed. Agriculture was destitute, factories were idle, businesses were closing their doors, and the banking system teetered on the brink of collapse. Violence lay just beneath the surface.

Roosevelt seized the opportunity. He galvanized the nation with an inaugural address that few will ever forget ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."), closed the nation's banks to restore depositor confidence and initiated a flurry of legislative proposals to put the country back on its feet. Sound banks were quickly reopened, weak ones were consolidated and, despite cries on the left for nationalization, the banking system was preserved.

Roosevelt had no master plan for recovery but responded pragmatically. Some initiatives, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed young men to reclaim the nation's natural resources, were pure F.D.R. Others, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act, were Congressionally inspired. But for the first time in American history, government became an active participant in the country's economic life.

After saving the banks, Roosevelt turned to agriculture. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was selling for less than a package of chewing gum. Crops rotted unharvested in the fields, and 46 percent of the nation's farms faced foreclosure.

The New Deal responded with acreage allotments, price supports and the Farm Credit Administration. Farm mortgages were refinanced and production credit provided at low interest rates. A network of county agents, established under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, brought soil testing and the latest scientific advances to every county in the country.

The urban housing market was in equal disarray. Almost half of the nation's homeowners could not make their mortgage payments, and new home construction was at a standstill. Roosevelt responded with the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. Mortgages were refinanced. Distressed home owners were provided money for taxes and repairs. And new loan criteria, longer amortization periods and low interest rates made home ownership more widely affordable, also for the first time in American history.

The Glass-Steagall Banking Act, passed in 1933, authorized the Federal Reserve to set interest rates and established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure individual bank deposits. No measure has had a greater impact on American lives or provided greater security for the average citizen.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, also established in 1933, brought cheap electric power and economic development to one of the most poverty-stricken regions of the country. Rural electrification, which we take for granted today, was virtually unknown when Roosevelt took office. Only about one in 10 American farms had electricity. In Mississippi, fewer than 1 in 100 did. The Rural Electrification Administration, which F.D.R. established by executive order in 1935, brought electric power to the countryside, aided by the construction of massive hydroelectric dams, not only on the Tennessee River system, but on the Columbia, Colorado and Missouri rivers as well.

To combat fraud in the securities industry, Roosevelt oversaw passage of the Truth in Securities Act, and then in 1934 established the Securities and Exchange Commission. As its first head he chose Joseph P. Kennedy. "Set a thief to catch a thief," he joked afterward.

By overwhelming majorities, Congress passed laws establishing labor's right to bargain collectively and the authority of the federal government to regulate hours and working conditions and to set minimum wages.

An alphabet soup of public works agencies — the C.W.A. (Civil Works Administration), the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration) and the P.W.A. (Public Works Administration) — not only provided jobs, but restored the nation's neglected infrastructure. Between 1933 and 1937, the federal government constructed more than half a million miles of highways and secondary roads, 5,900 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 8,000 parks, 13,000 playgrounds and 1,000 regional airports. Cultural projects employed and stimulated a generation of artists and writers, including such luminaries as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, John Cheever and Richard Wright.

Roosevelt saw Social Security, enacted in 1935, as the centerpiece of the New Deal....

[ECONOMISTA NON GRATA]

Robert's Stochastic Thoughts led me to this story...

Worhtwhile reading..

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27698

Econolicious

[robertdfeinman]

I read McKibben's book and agree with most of his analysis (especially his critique of excessive materialism). Unfortunately like all social critics these days he is weak on solutions.

Those offering fixes fall into one of three camps, in general:
1. Private enterprise will find the solution
2. Government will find the solution
3. Individuals will find the solution (or "the public")

History has shown that finding the solution before things get out of control has a poor track record. Dams get built after floods, fire safety system get installed after the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster, food safety gets implemented after Upton Sinclair and so on.

We are currently facing the first global disaster. Call it climate change or overpopulation or resource depletion, they are all part of the same challenge. Not only have the problems been detailed numerous times, but even the costs of attacking them have been discussed as in the recent Stern report. What has been the international response?

On a personal level, buy a CFL and keep driving your SUV.
On the corporate level, drill deeper.
On the government level, promote growth instead of restraint.

We have had cascading environmental disasters for a century now, starting with things like the shellfish collapse in the 1920's in coastal waters, to the near extinction of cod (and soon tuna), to die offs of a number of important tree species (elm, chestnut, hemlock, dogwood, etc). In addition we have had beach erosion and devastation by hurricanes on an unprecedented level. Then there are the disease threats, HIV, TB, flu, mad cow disease, etc.

Not one of these is being approached pro-actively. The only consistent growth sector in the 20th Century was militarism. More people were killed in conflict in the 20th Century that in the previous millennium. And still the human race hasn't learned - military spending continues to rise and conflict continues. More and more of it is ethnic cleansing and economic disruption rather than overt attack, but the effects are the same.

Hoping that wise leaders will lead us to a better tomorrow seems utopian at best and naive at worst. Is there a solution? Don't ask me, I'm a born pessimist.

[Bruce Wilder]

elvis: "When down, take a minute to enjoy art"

a good thought, and, in that spirit, I suggest,

dance

And, when you are done, remember that, though collective choices are frustrating, they are still choices. Lend support to a (Democratic) political candidate -- actually donate a bit of money. Write a letter to the Editor. Confront that moron over the water cooler.

[Lafayette]

rdf: Hoping that wise leaders will lead us to a better tomorrow seems utopian at best and naive at worst. Is there a solution?

Vox Populi

Perhaps we've been attributing a wee bit too much wisdom to "our leaders"? LBJ thought massive government programs could provoke the Great Society. Richard Nixon was lauded for his opening of China. Jimmy Carter was amongst one of our most intelligent, but his presidency was belittled by Iranian fundamentalists.

I suspect Donald Duck could have been president at each of the above cited presidencies and the final consequence would be about the same. It's the post and fate that makes the president, not the reverse.

I cannot help but think that, in face of an entirely lackluster leadership in most Western Democracy, we have placed far too much importance in both the legislative process and republican representation. Power seems to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

People should be given back the referendum, the right to decide their destiny in matters of importance. It is nearing high time ... people must learn to help govern, that is, make difficult choices and be able to rescind obvious mistakes. Share the burden of decision making as well as the glory or the shame.

But, have they the maturity to participate in governing that would be required? I'm not so sure ... but that question is better answered AFTER they try than BEFORE.

After all, it took us more than two and a half centuries to learn how to manage democracy ... and what has it got us? A lead-head for PotUS. It's possible that the fourth balance of power (referendum voting) could be just as feckless as the present republican government, but that doesn't mean we should not try.

[Bruce Wilder]

L: "I suspect Donald Duck could have been president at each of the above cited presidencies and the final consequence would be about the same. It's the post and fate that makes the president, not the reverse."

After six and a half years of G. W. Bush, you can make this comment? You need to give up political commentary, and spend more time in your garden.

(For those more interested in careful, detailed examination of facts, I would recommend Cactus' series contrasting Presidential performance at Angry Bear.)

[Lafayette]

BW: You need to give up political commentary, and spend more time in your garden.

Sarcasm is the refuge of those who have nothing worth saying.

You can do better. Try harder.

[ErwanB]

"After all, it took us more than two and a half centuries to learn how to manage democracy ... and what has it got us?"

Enormous simplification here, since what we call democracy today has only existed for some 100 years.
no doubt it could be better managed by allocating rights to vote differently, but if you extend this right to anyone,don't be surprised you wind up with a Jerry Springer for president.
The president can only be as good as what the lowest common denominator dictates.
America with it's 300 millions fairly wealthy citizens is headed for a ride.

[Bruce Wilder]

Lafayette, it matters a great deal who is President, how capable that person is. What that person chooses to do, and how that person chooses to act, has serious consequences.

If you cannot figure out that much out, about politics -- that occupying political office and exercising power matters -- then, you should really be quiet regarding political subjects.

[Peter Schaeffer]

JG would have some credibility if he wasn't quite so eager to sell out America to the Chinese... And didn't put quite so much effort into promoting "economics without prices".

[Jim Harrison]

Sheesh! People obsess about markets the way dolphins obsess about fish. Could it be that not every issue in the world revolves around the purported grandeur or, for that matter, menace of market mechanisms? Whether an end is pursued by governmental action or privatization is not obviously the most important question. Both states and corporations can act legitimately or illegitimately and work to either the benefit or the detriment of society. Laws and regulations can be the way in which individuals get together and pursue common ends or means by which interested minorities oppress and exploit majorities. Private firms can serve public purposes as they attempt to maximize their own profits but sometimes they wreck everything in their quest for profits, just as natural selection can turn an animal into a blind worm embedded in somebody's liver or a splendid free-living beast. It depends.

At present, the problem is that governments act like private firms while private firms act like governments. Our political arrangements are anything but democratic—votes trade at a marked discount to dollars. And when natural monopolies are nominal privatized, the resulting organizations are more like fiefs than firms.

[ergastoplasm]

Galbraith is too melodramatic. “face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.” Evolution gave us a mostly short term focus- we run to escape predators, strike quickly lest we be killed, all without weighing the consequences. Politicians with advertising skills constantly jerk the public around and can’t begin to consider long term issues. Our media should protest this, but they are under corporate control - people like Joe Klein and David Broder dance in the extravaganza. We got Bush in 2004 because the anti-Kerry vote exceeded the anti-Bush vote; many of those anti-Kerry voters don’t object to voter suppression and corruption of the DOJ (doesn't apply to us white folk). Our politicians spin a wonderful fantasy tale- why change horses when you’re on top of the world, the only superpower, on the verge of ever-increasing riches?

Congress lacks the guts to even impeach Gonzo, let alone his evil bosses. They jumped quickly however to pass a resolution denouncing Iranian meddling in Iraq, perhaps the cover that the decider wants for air strikes against Iran, about the dumbest thing that the US or Israel could do. Why not a resolution denouncing Saudi Arabia, since far more Saudis are captured and killed in Iraq than Iranians? Which countries are following a semi-sustainable path? Certainly not the US, certainly not Israel. Change won’t come to this country until Americans realize that we don’t hold a winning hand.

[Lafayette]

BW: If you cannot figure out that much out, about politics -- that occupying political office and exercising power matters -- then, you should really be quiet regarding political subjects.

I dislike your condescending manner first all, quite aside from the fact that I disagree wholly with your post.

A presidency depends upon fate/randomness/chance more than anything else, as the examples I gave indicate. This present presidency is prima facie evidence.

Now, if you have a contrarian view, articulate it instead of assuming that your interlocutor is a cretin.

[Paul G. Brown]

Hoping to spur the discussion ....

I'm reading Lawrence Wright's _The_Looming_Tower_ at the moment. It's a joint biography of many of the individuals who came to create al Queda and ultimately launch its jihad against the west.

The Marx to their collective Lenin was an Egyptian civil servant named Qtub, who lived in the US for several years during the late 1940s through early 1950s. From the extracts of his writings Wright quotes, it's pretty clear to me that his critique of 'the West' at that time is startlingly similar to Barber's. Qtub writes of the US as obsessed with materialism, individualism, juvenile behavior and attitudes, and so on. His response was to embrace radical Islamic values more tightly: to live as a stoic, eschew personal comfort and consumption, and so on. Stripped of their religious trappings, Qtub's 'solutions' seem eerily similar to McKibbens'.

This doesn't imply I have much sympathy with the Islamists. But it needs to be said that for all we decry the 'private wealth and public squalor', this is a consequence of the historically radical personal freedoms we enjoy in the west. The trick, it seems to me, is to come up with some means of preserving these liberties while at the same time saving our collective asses.

[dissent]

I've heard it said that the Bush presidency was America's test of the idea that "It doesn't matter who is president," and his atrocious failure is proof contrary.

I also think the notion that who is president doesn't matter feeds into political apathy in this country, and that apathy has been the essential ingredient in the destruction of America's middle class. In fact it is the sine qua non of politics right now to destroy this apathy - apathy of the middle is the essential ingredient in the ascension of Christianism, neo-cons, market fundamentalism and the like.

[Bruce Webb]

"Roosevelt saw Social Security, enacted in 1935, as the centerpiece of the New Deal."

And I believe it will be seen as the centerpiece of Galbraith's rebuilding of government. Unless you are a total fanatic on the subject (yep, that would be me) you might well miss exactly how deeply invested the Economic Right is in Social Security 'Crisis'. It lurks right below the surface of every claim that markets always deliver better results than government, for much of the last twenty-five years, for that matter much of the seventy-two years from enactment, Social Security has been the poster child for 'Big Government is not the answer, Big Government is the problem'.

Social Security has been consistently used as proof of the failure of the New Deal, much as Medicare is used to show that the Great Society project was unattainable. Whole superstructures of thought and argumentation come crashing down with Social Security Solvency. It would, once widely recognized, tear huge holes in the market purist's case, and they know it.

In May of 2005 someone posed this implied question about Social Security privatization at DeLong.
"What puzzles me is energy and persistence of this propaganda campaign with scant positive results."
The longer answer is at my blog. The short answer is that giving up on this front risks losing the whole battle of ideas. I firmly believe that the road to rebuilding trust in governmental solutions to social problems runs right through Social Security. Moreover I believe that the realization that Social Security is fundamentally healthy cannot be delayed past the 2009 Report, particularly if we have a Democratic President. Because Baker and Weisbrot were not being hyperbolic when they entitled their 1999 Book Social Security: the Phony Crisis. This has been manufactured with malice aforethought. Privatizers, at least the ones like Samwick who actually understand the material, are not wrong, they are not misguided, instead they are carrying out a fully conscious, ideologically driven attack on FDRs centerpiece. This debate is not at basis numeric at all, it is a clash of ideologies.

I am kind of a crank on this topic, on the other hand I am a crank that has been thinking about the political and economic implications of living in a post-SS Crisis world since 1997. They are huge and that all the more because with relatively few exceptions nobody sees it coming, indeed the narrative has been shaped in a way that makes the possibility seem like a self-contradiction. After all "Everybody knows ...."

[demisod]

It seems to me that Galbraith's contention is that resource scarity and havoc due to climate change will make economic growth, at least at current rates, simply impossible in the future. That will be a bitter pill for everyone to swallow. Not only will government need to be retooled, but social norms and expectations will need to be as well. Unfortunately, history suggests that will likely create fertile soil for demagogues to flourish. What crimes will people tolerate for the strong man who convinces them he can keep the economy expanding?

[evagrius]

The best evidence for the infantilization of the U.S. is its current foreign and domestic policy.

An ignorant, selfish, unthinking child couldn't exceed what passes for critical thinking in the U.S.

Barber doesn't have to propose solutions. McKibben doesn't have to either.

Correctly diagnosing problems is half the solution.

What's needed is that citizens of the U.S. have to "grow up".

More material things do not replace mature relationships
with others or the environment.
A simplistic, childlike religion doesn't either.

[prostratedragon]

Thanks for highlighting this issue of restoring an appropriate public-private balance. Every other issue in the country, e.g. the ones mentioned on this thread like Social Security and environmental policy, depends on a recognition of public goods (and ills), and on government as a vehicle for their support.

Also, thanks for the artistic asides. I enjoyed the dance compilation ---West Side Story, Fosse from here and Fosse from there--- but there's one somehow missing. Though the Calloway Orchestra is excellent here, I think it's even better without the sound.

The Nicholas Brothers from Stormy Weather (YouTube)

[James Killus]

Oh good grief. If someone says that draft card burning by a few activists during the Vietnam era was an exercise in "collectivism" while "individualism" is represented by a giant military machine scooping up hundreds of thousands of young men and trying to use them to grind down a foreign country, that someone has lost his way in a fog of Orwellian doublespeak.

And I'm not being condescending; I'm being kind.

I will add a something to what Bruce Wilder says about "confront(ing) that moron over the water cooler."

I have observed that right wing authoritarians in this country are not used to seeing passion in their opponents and are ill prepared when presented with it. So do not be afraid of raising your voice and attacking their morals, because the current regime is the most immoral Presidency in living memory, and I'm including Nixon in that judgment (with some trepidation, remembering Nixon's body count).

Remember this one main point: one cannot rebuild a house, a political party, or a government until the wreckage has been removed, and the demolition job here has not been yet completed. But I saw some drunken frat boys pick up the matches and the gasoline, and I'm waiting outside for when the flames force them to come out...

[bob mcmanus]

Jamie Galbraith is a hero of mine, abd close to sounding revolutionary.

Read a guy over at the Oildrum saying today that we need to cut energy consumption 50% in the next ten years. It is really about Peak Oil, as prices for oil move out of the range of the underdeveloped world, they will butn their forests. And it will be all over.

What kind of political change is required to reduce energy consumption 50% in ten years? President Edwards will not save you, unless he is irrelevant, unless he follows rather than leads.

[Lafayette]

evg: A simplistic, childlike religion doesn't either.

But, to what else can you attach a fundamental belief? When the boob-tube is enticing you into celebrity adulation. When work has you by the short & curlies with stock options. When the bank has the same grasp on your life by means of the house mortgage?

When in-your-face commercials tell you how to become a magician, that is, save "lots 'n lots" of money by spending it! We are living in a full blown consumer society and it is disposable income that propels it. When consumption becomes the "primary cultural value", it doesn't leave room for much else.

So, come a Sunday, when simplistic religion is packaged on one of the n-hundred TV channels ... there, in your living room - in vivid color - is a faith on which one may attach a transcending belief. That life does not stop forever with the very last use of your credit card.

Providing VISA is accepted for entry at the pearly gates.

[James Killus]

Providing VISA is accepted for entry at the pearly gates.

Halleluia, brother, and amen, just don't forget your PIN.

[kthomas]

Perhaps for true capitalists, there is no Heaven and no Hell.

There would be, as the ficitional Star Trek race Ferengi call it, a "Divine Treasury" where only the most successfull capitalist souls reside (VISA accepted). Alternatively, there would be a "Vault of Eternal Destitution", where us less-worthy, less-successfull pseudo-capitalists reside (AMEX only).

[Brenda Rosser]

Lafayette said:
"We are living in a full blown consumer society and it is disposable income that propels it. When consumption becomes the "primary cultural value", it doesn't leave room for much else..."

Well even my consumer-culture relatives are happy to transition to a different way of life. They just want some help to do it.