The problem of the corporation

Some on the right have reduced the view of us lefties on “the corporation” to this: We think they are evil. This is much akin to saying that predators are evil when they kill prey. It has to be contextualized to be understood.

The problem is one of accountability. The military is the perfect example. Troops on the ground are given orders to carry out atrocities by distant commanders, and are subject to harsh punishment if they do not obey. Resisting is far harder than obeying, and so the town is destroyed, the bombs dropped, the chemicals sprayed on the jungle. Killing another person is hard for just about everyone, and yet in the military it is done routinely (though, to our credit, we have developed elaborate means by which to do our massacres from great distances, making it easier). It could not be so without the command structure.

The corporation offers us a military-like structure. The reason why the structure itself is rightly criticized is because of lack of accountability. Dave Budge recently gave me a heart-rending account of his corporate experience where managers anguished over the necessity of denying or reducing health care benefits for other employees. That’s kind of like the point. The orders came down from above. It had to be done. There was no accountability – the people above answer only to stockholders, who are even less accountable.

Normal people don’t behave well in the unaccountable environment. Sociopaths present an even greater danger. If Martha Stout is right, and if 4-6% of the male population are sociopaths, and if these people are drawn to the business world out of sheer boredom, then the corporation offers the perfect lair for antisocial behavior.

And that is the problem with the corporation. The behavior of people down the food chain is mandated by people at the top who are not accountable, and are often enough sociopaths.

This is why health insurance companies refuse to cover people with preexisting conditions and rescind policies for sick people. It’s sociopathic behavior, but perfectly normal in the corporate environment. This is why corporations should not be in charge of our health care system.

I am not saying that corporations should not exist or that they are no socially useful. I am only saying that they need to be heavily monitored and regulated, and their executives held accountable for antisocial acts. If the day should ever come when they are in charge of most of our affairs, if they ever manage to take over government, then we are in deep, deep trouble.

Colorado Springs goes up in flames!

God, if there is one, will strike me dead one day for repeating quotations from works I have not read, but this one is so delicious that I am doing it anyway. It is from Sir William Osler, and the book that I am reading credits him with being “the father of modern medicine.” Here it is:

“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”

The first to come to mind are the Teabaggers, who are painfully ignorant in all of their public displays. Then come the free market set – the Freidmanites and Randians and their fellow travelers who live in a theoretical world where the worst aspects of human nature are overcome by simply letting that nature go on full display. I suppose there is something to that in the same sense that forest fires self-regulate. They do stop burning when they run out of fuel.

The book that cites Osler is “Why Evolution Works (And Creationism Fails)”, which I just picked up last night. The clerk at the book store said that he had been taught by one of the authors, Paul K. Strode, a local high school teacher here in Boulder.

Amazon.com, where I used to buy books, recently pulled out of Colorado, ditching local distributors, for our state’s attempt to impose sales tax on purchases through them. At that point I realized that I was doing local book sellers a great disservice by using Amazon, and opted to forgo any further purchases via that legal person. Our choices here in Boulder are many – Boulder Book Store, where I shopped last night, is always busy, so I hope they can survive Internet competition. But then, this is Boulder, a college town, a liberal town, so it is natural that books would be a popular commodity.

In Colorado Springs, our conservative mirror image, the most widely read medium is the billboard. They recently, and I am not making this up, censored bus stop posters that had a picture of a female puppet showing cleavage. A puppet! The sexual repression in that town is palpable. It may someday spontaneously combust.

Truly heroic people

I’ve had enough of cruddy people, lowlifes who occupy high office and have glowing pictures taken of themselves as they perform their slimy duties. (Yeah, Max – you.) I need some cleansing.

I’ve been trying to conjure up a list this morning, and it is turning out to be quite a short one. It is a list of courageous people, people who, even though famous, actually embody noble qualities. These are people who took risks that involved great sacrifice and personal peril, and paid a price for their actions. Their actions were for a cause … not for fame, so daredevils need not apply.

Here’s what I have come up with:

Daniel Ellsberg: Few people remember that prior to Nixon’s people breaking into Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office (thereby destroying the court case against him), that Daniel was on his way to prison. He released the Pentagon Papers to the press knowing that he was breaking the law and that there would be a price to pay. He was willing to pay that price. To this day he claims that his only regret was that he did not act sooner, before so many millions had died. He is publicly asking for someone in the Obama Administration to do the same dirty deed – tell us something true about Iraq or Afghanistan.

Jane Fonda: As the old saying goes, it is dangerous to be right when your government is wrong. Jane was famous, though a bit malleable, and foolish. She didn’t seem to care how her activities affected her movie career – she used her fame to expose wrongdoing. She got up on a platform – a gun turret used to defend the Vietnamese people from American attacks – and that act has defined her. She paid a price – to this day she is hated and maligned by our most dangerous people – right wingers with guns.

Muhammad Ali: Cassius Clay was on top of the world, the best boxer alive, a charismatic and dynamic man who decided to … adopt the Muslim faith? Refuse to be inducted into the military? Go to jail? He had more to lose than almost any man alive, and he put it all on the line.

Philip Berrigan: He willingly went to jail time and again to protest American wars, pouring blood on jets, destroying the killing equipment. He never hid out – he felt it is duty to submit to authorities after defying them. (That part I don’t admire – the willing submission part.) He and his brother Daniel, two Catholic priests, antagonized the government and the Catholic Church by openly involving themselves in war protests. Courage? Yes. Were I Philip, and I am nowhere close to being Philip, I would perform my deeds in Clyde Barrow fashion, hiding out, and giving it up to a hail of bullets in the end. That would be a strong message. (Side note: I imagined Mr. Berrigan in a lonely jail cell in need of human contact, and so wrote to him while he was in prison. He wrote a brief note back saying that it was really hard for him keep up with all the correspondence he was getting.)

Rachel Corrie: This young gal perhaps did not know she was giving it all up that day, but she defied the Israelis by standing in front of a bulldozer that was leveling Palestinian homes. She was 23 years of age on March 16, 2003, the day she was pancaked.

Pat Tillman: He was killed by friendly fire, and not in combat. I know that. But he did something unusual – he left a lucrative career in football to sacrifice himself for a cause. Perhaps he was gullible, perhaps he bought into the wrong cause, but he was courageous. He took a risk, gave up something real and valuable. Perhaps he knew more than we know, but it’s hard to tell. His legacy is being sanitized. However, before his death, he had arranged to have lunch with Noam Chomsky. As Mencken said, … how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

I am trying hard here to come up with people who are courageous in support of right wing causes. The problem is that right wingers seldom have to give up much. If they lose office they go to work for right wing think tanks. There’s always a job and income for them somewhere. Somebody help here … I’m not paying enough attention. Please – a right wing hero or two? Are there any? I can think of only one:

Bruce Bartlett: Employed by a right-wing think tank, and had bad thoughts. He wrote book critical of George W. Bush. He got fired. “Nobody will touch me,” he says. He wrote Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” He was toasted, and not with champagne.

Please add to this list -I have overlooked many, I know.

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I just got done reading Glenn Greenwald, who in a similar vein honors Jerald terHorst, President Gerald Ford’s press secretary, who resigned in protest on the day that Ford pardoned Nixon.

“As your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes — and imprisoned — stemming from the same Watergate situation. These are also men whose reputations and families have been grievously injured. …Try as I can, it is impossible to conclude that the former president is more deserving of mercy than persons of lesser station in life whose offenses have had far less effect on our national wellbeing.”

Indeed, refusal to fight in a war to defend one’s country from aggression might rightly been seen as cowardice, but refusal to fight on the side of the aggressor requires courage. Some Vietnam era draft evaders went into hiding, some went to jail, some went to Sweden or Canada. One, who was not acting out any discernible high principle, became president. One man who was truly unworthy of clemency, Nixon, got it anyway. Jerald terHorst belongs on this list, along with anyone who has ever paid a price for refusal to fight an unjust war.

The Reagan tax on the elderly, and free-riding on Medicare

From the desk of the lonely tax preparer, here are a couple of items that need fixing, but never seem to be on any agenda – least of all AARP’s:

1. Tax on Social Security recipients: Ronald Reagan was a man for the little guy – that is, whenever he got a chance, that’s who he stuck it to. One of his legacies is the income tax levied on Social Security benefits. For single people, the tax starts at when a person’s income (without excruciating detail) reaches $25,000, and for married couples, $34,000. Up to 85% of benefits are taxable.

The Reaganites in 1983 were upset that employees were never taxed on that 1/2 of FICA payments that the employer pays. After much negotiation they compromised, and levied a tax against benefits for only the wealthiest people of that time – those making more than $25,000 or $34,000 or so. The tax, which IMHO should not even exist in the first place, has never been indexed for inflation, and today reaches just about every senior citizen who has any income outside Social Security. To keep pace, the thresholds today should be $53,750 single, and $73,100 married.

I just did a 2008 tax return for an old gent who got a bill from the IRS for $1,334 for failure to report Social Security benefits. Every dollar of that amount represents a Reagan tax increase. (And before J’accuse, my bill was $0.00.)

(Interestingly, and again without excruciating detail, it is also a back door way of taxing supposedly “tax free” interest – to calculate the amount of taxable income, you must add in any “non-taxable” interest you earned. That is, they are taxing it.)

There is no talk of fixing this anywhere – AARP doesn’t discuss it, nor do those representatives that are responsive to ordinary citizens in other areas. It’s an onerous tax on those least able to afford it, and ought to be eliminated in full, in my opinion. I’ve done too many tax returns for seniors who are perplexed that after retirement their Social Security gets taxed. At the very least, it should be indexed back to 1983. (I tell them to thank The Gipper.)

2. Medicare supplemental insurance: Insurance companies were not as powerful in the 1960’s as they are now, but at the time that Medicare was passed they did manage to wrangle out a provision that Medicare would only cover 80% of medical costs for seniors. To get the other 20% covered, seniors have to buy supplemental policies from private companies.

As you might expect, seniors now spend more on Medicare supplements for the uncovered 20% than they do on Medicare itself. Medicare supplemental insurance is a major profit center for health insurance companies – they now have “Medicare Advantage” – a heavily subsidized private alternative to Medicare – that is even more lucrative. (Even though it’s technically illegal, insurers work subtly and slyly behind the scenes to peel the healthiest seniors off Medicare to M.A.)

Here’s why Medicare supplements are a joke – all of the screening for reimbursement of costs is done by Medicare. If Medicare approves 80%, they will pay 20%. If Medicare does not cover something, neither does the supplemental policy. Their overhead is virtually nil.

I hate to say this about our noblest legal persons, our health insurance corporations, and few would believe it, but they are free-riding on Medicare. (AARP makes a pile on these policies too, partnering with United Health against the best interests of its own members.)

One party, two sets of illusions

I am curious how the “left” is going to react to the latest Obama betrayal, the decision that offshore drilling is, after all, OK. There are no substantive differences between him and the Bushies, only the manner of presentation. Where Cheney might sneer and say he doesn’t care what you think, we’re going to drill, Obama will couch the same policy in different terms … environmentally sensitive places will be avoided, etc. etc. etc.

This is key: Bush could not get away with this. Obama can.

Obama is doing exactly what Bush would have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and now with offshore drilling. Obama did would Bush could not have done in health care – write a monster check to the insurance companies. This gets right to the point that I’ve made repeatedly in other places – that we have one party and two sets of illusions. At this point in time, the Democratic illusion is more effective at achieving elite policy goals than the Republican illusion.

Rule by the arrogant elite

The author/historian Stuart Ewen was writing a book in the late 1980’s about public relations – he had done research before about different decades of the twentieth century, and no matter where he turned, he met “the father of public relations,” Edward Bernays. He was astounded to learn in 1990 that he could meet Bernays in the flesh, as the old man still tottered about at age 99. Bernays lived to be 105, dying in 1995.

The essence of the interview was this: Public relations defines reality. It does not lie to people. It guides them to the proper destination. The average citizen has an IQ of 100, and is not capable of fathoming the depths of policy formation. There is only a small class of people of higher intellect capable of dealing with such matters, and they must do so even as a recalcitrant citizenry is brought along.

Over time, and with the advent of mass media, the elite have settled on the public relations industry to guide the public.

I’ll concede all of that to a point. The public is largely uneducated, even those who go through 16 years of education, as I did. The public is emotional. The public has a short attention span. The idea that the public can rule by voting on occasion does not begin to pass the sniff test. Voting has become an end in itself, while governing goes on in private.

Behind every major issue of the day, if we unbolt a few doors, we will find public relations people. They are manipulating our opinions via images and skilled sophistry. They are allowing us to think we govern ourselves even as they guide us to the ‘right’ outlook. We are allowed to fight out intense and meaningless battles between the “two” parties that are really one. It’s all good fun. The outcome does not matter. It’s merely our playground, a place where we are kept occupied while parents go on about their business.

This is reality. This is necessary as well. It can be no other way. But there are pitfalls with this system – that we exist as we are, weak and malleable, is our greatest defect. We are necessarily governed by people who want power for its own sake, otherwise they would not be governing.

But these are not our best people. Far from it. The best leader is the Cincinnatus, the reluctant general called into service who did his duty, and then returned to farming. Our system demands that we force leadership out of reluctant people of high quality, and then as quickly force them out of service before they become enamored of power.

That’s another reality. It works on a small scale, absent mass media, absent public relations. In this mass reality we are governed by an elite – take George W. Bush as an example, even if he was only a front man for a power bloc. He is a man of privilege, and a man not given to contemplation of important issues. He was granted access to elite universities, forgiven all of his sins, and then steered towards the presidency as if by birthright.

“He”, who really represents a whole class of people of similar privilege and birthright, led us from one calamity to another. This is the problem of aristocracy – excellent people are cast aside, privileged people allowed to govern. These privileged people never give up power. Though they are given our best in terms of “education”, they cannot guide us well, as that education only leads them to carry out their base instincts and motives with a flowery cover of high-sounding words. They are stupid people, but appear otherwise. (I like the phrase “supremely stupid,” borrowed from one of my daughter’s high school teachers.)

Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, lent his high intellect to this class; was actually part of this class. Even at age 99 he self-justified without honest reflection on the results of his life’s work. Far from honor, we need to bestow something less on his legacy – utter contempt.

Health care fixed, Democrats now take on slavery

We are all familiar with the concept of parallel universes, each of us having doppelgängers on other Earth-like planets. Imagine a place that was faced with the problem of slavery, as was the United States in the nineteenth century, but that rather than Abraham Lincoln and the pre-corporate Republicans, Barack Obama and the Democrats of 2010 confronted that problem.

Washington (AP) President Obama, with House and Senate Majority Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid at his side, today signed legislation that he called “a landmark end to slavery in the United States.” The president posed for photographs with other congressional leaders, who had earlier been photographed triumphantly walking down the steps of the Capitol Building.

The legislation was long and hard-fought, and is scheduled to go into effect in four years. Those states that want to immediately free slaves are prohibited from doing so for seven years. President Obama called slave owners “perhaps our most misunderstood citizens, patriotic and proud of their heritage. Not one of them likes slavery – not one. Each is bound by market conditions to own them. This bill at last sets them free.”

The bill creates a new class of citizen, the “unpaid employee,” and mandates that all Americans employ such citizens by 2014. The classification was hard-fought. Abolitionists faced entrenched opposition, some even being arrested after demanding of Senator Max Baucus (D-Mars), head of the Senate Slavery Committee, that he allow the negro freedom system to be considered with other options.

“Negro freedom is off the table,” said Baucus.

With Republicans threatening to filibuster if certain marginal Democrats got their wish that Negroes simply be set free, President Obama stayed out of the fight. His mother was a slave and was beaten to death by her owner, a deed he often mentioned during the presidential campaign. The candidate Obama said in campaign addresses that he favored freedom in general for Negroes, but changed course after election, saying that he had never embraced the idea of total emancipation. “I never said the words ‘Negro freedom’ during the campaign”, he said.

Both Democratic and Republican legislators enjoyed financial support from the slave-owning industry, and Obama met with slave owners repeatedly throughout the debate. Many in the Democratic Party favored the “free state option,” where Negroes who managed to make their way to non-slavery states would be allowed to stay there as free citizens. Under a compromise brokered by Sen Baucus, those slaves would be allowed to stay in free states, but only if employed as unpaid citizens. States harboring unpaid citizens would be required to pay plantations for lost labor.

But Obama apparently struck an agreement in secret meetings months ago that such an option was not “politically feasible,” and dropped the demand in exchange for a plantation industry promise not to run a “Jermain and Shashawn” – type ad campaign against the legislation. (The legendary ads are credited with having stopped abolitionist legisation in the early 1990’s.*) As before, those states that harbor fugitive slaves will be required to return them to their plantations, but under their new “unpaid citizen” status.

Democrats throughout the country are celebrating the landmark victory. Political blogs have widely praised the legislation as a sense of achievement settles in. Many wanted to see Negroes set free, but in the end realized that it would create competition in the job market. “It’s not really in the best interest of Negroes to be thrown into the competitive job market”, said Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the widely read Daily Kos blog. He said that Representative Dennis Kucinich, who fought hard for freedom for Negroes until yielding to pressure at the end, “needs a primary opponent.” Presidential adviser Rahm Emmanuel, himself a slave owner, called abolitionist senators and representatives “retarded” and “niggers in whiteface.”

Others hailed the legislation as landmark, and claimed that whatever defects contained in the bill could be “fixed later.” Dissenters, who claim that that the legislation actually strengthens slave owners, were cautioned to “not let the perfect interfere with the good.” Slave-owning Democratic Senator Evan Bayh of Illinois reminded Democrats in an email circulated to state central committees that “80 per cent is better than nothing.”

As querulous Democrats slowly began to assimilate and internalize the legislation, there was a sense of relief that the fight was finally over, and that they could move on to solving other problems. Said John Firehammer, a real person who is a Democratic spokesman in Montana, “at last we can move on. Slavery is fixed. Now we need to concern ourselves with child labor.”

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*Slave owners did in fact run television ads against the legislation in the waning days of the congressional battle, but the ads were seen as weak an ineffective, even driving some anti-slavery citizens to support the bill.

The new stone age

It was a visit to a bygone era. We ran across one of those stoner stores in Santa Fe. It was loaded with hemp and post cards and bumper stickers, but, I am sorry to say, no lava lamps. Among the treasures I found were a post card of a grandma with over-sized glasses as grandmas tend to wear, a delightful smile, and a sticker affixed to her blouse that says “Fuck your war.”

Another is a bumper sticker with words by Abbie Hoffman:

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

That’s a well-known quote. We supposedly have free speech here. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had to come to the U.S. to speak freely … about the Soviet Union. If he had unkind words to say about the U.S., he would have died in obscurity. In the post below, Paul Craig Roberts whined about how he ceased to matter when he became critical of the wrong people.

In this country fame is reserved for actors, athletes and apparatchiks. Dissidents need not apply.

Except … for the curious case of the Tea Baggers. This movement has gained considerable momentum and enjoyed wide publicity on cable news casts and in newspapers. Why does our media not ignore this movement as it does all other dissidents?

I can think of a couple of reasons: One, it is not a spontaneous movement. It is the product of a public relations campaign. This is high-level professional manipulation. (To what end? Violence? To give the appearance of rebellion that covertly achieves other purposes? I don’t know. As with everything else in life, my wisdom will come after the fact.)

Second, the content of the protests, at least what I can make of the gobbledygook, is anti-democratic. Tea Baggers don’t like universal health care or taxation of any sort. They are opposed to “socialism” in much the same way that creationists are opposed to “science.” It is something they don’t understand, but know somehow threatens them.

Tea Baggers are not just dead intellectually, their brains are gone. Watch the manipulators. Why does the phenomenon exist? Why are they not cast out and left to rot away, as our real dissidents are? Why have they been elevated to special status?

One can only guess, and I don’t even have a good guess handy.

Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced. (Bertrand Russell)

Tea Baggers, heed Russell’s words, be not silenced, but for God’s sake, be not fucking stupid.

BBC Stories

A couple of things we heard on BBC as we traveled this week:

First, Russian billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev and his son and Evgeny have purchased The Independent, a UK newspaper, for one pound sterling. Lebedev’s job as a KGB agent was to read British newspapers. He has pledged to “in-depth investigative reporting and campaigns which promote transparency and seek to fight international corruption.” His reputation as owner of Russian newspapers and the the London Evening Star is quite good, according to BBC.

Secondly, the British have announced that they will no longer use, produce or store cluster bombs. Said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, “Cluster munitions cause immense suffering to civilians caught in conflict zones and leave a deadly post-conflict legacy for future generations. I am hugely proud that with this bill receiving Royal Assent, Britain is leading the world in banning the use of these munitions and moving to end the harm they cause.”

I was curious to see what kind of coverage this announcement would receive in the U.S., as our country is among just a few left in the world still using the bombs (Russia, China, Pakistan and Israel are among the others). The bombs are designed to release thousands of bomblets that tear people to shreds. If that were not enough, many of the bomblets are left unexploded and are attractive nuisances for children, who are drawn to their bright yellow colors. Wherever the U.S. and Israel have gone, there are stories for years to come of children losing arms, limbs and sight, if not being killed, by the residue bomblets from these nasty devices.

There is virtually no coverage in the U.S. that I could find. CNN International has it, as does Moon-owned UPI. That’s about it.

Too much tail wagging

In the wake of health care defeat, a couple of movies come to mind. I can’t do any linking so I hope the reader may have seen both.

One is The Sting, from way back. I would urge Democrats to see that movie if only to learn about false agents. People can be very smart – so smart in fact that they can hire other people to pose as things they are not. The various roles played by Obama, Lieberman, Baucus, Nelson, and at the end, Michael Bennet, ought to be examined.

Remember when the Senate parliamentarian said that the insurance rates oversight panel had to be ditched? Turns out that all that needed to be done was for the President of the Senate, Joe Biden, to overule the parliamentarian. Funny it didn’t happen.

But the thing I remember most about The Sting was that, in the end, the “mark” could not know he had been stung. Otherwise he might seek revenge.

Democrats do not realize they have been stung, and so will repeat this pattern again. So it is important now for them to feel victory. They really have to believe they did something meaningful.

The other movie is less popular, kind of a “dog whistle” movie where you either realized that it was not far from reality, as I did, or just thought if was goofy entertainment. It was called Wag the Dog. There the lesson of The Sting was even more emphatic. Dustin Hoffman’s character was so impressed with himself and the work he had done in selling a phony war in Albania that he was going to talk in public about it even though he had been warned not to. They had to kill him.

The sting has to stick. If Democrats question authority or realize they were led like sheep to a predetermined destination, they might rebel.

Fat chance, I suppose. But next year, when the tax cuts are on the table, and party leadership starts the whole song and dance all over again, wouldn’t be nice to think that they actually learned from defeat?