America is stalled in its move towards democracy

Here is what John Hank Edison says:

This Fourth of July, let's give America the birthday present she cannot do without. Let's give the people back their Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence sets forth a worldview that, back in the 18th century, served as the foundation of our new nation. This foundation was composed of the principle of human equality and the rights of self-determination implied by the famous phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Back then, this foundation was sufficient to support the society we hoped to build, one free of the economic monopolies, religious authoritarianism and military brutality embodied, respectively, in the English nobility, the Church of England and England's Redcoat soldiers. As large as these forces loomed over the colonists in the New World, these were forces still dwarfed by the Atlantic Ocean, the American wilderness and the sheer number of people they aimed to dominate.

In a day of bayonets, wooden hulls and musket balls, mere consciousness of the principle of human equality was enough to give the people confidence in their ability to rewrite the social contract, even if it had to be written in their own blood. "Give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry cried. In his day, he could calculate the odds of success as reasonable against an enemy that was still on a human scale. He could look his enemy in the eye and say to King George with confidence, our equality is self-evident.

When we won our independence, we dismantled all the power platforms setting some human beings above others. Against the concentration of wealth and power of the classist aristocracy, we built the one-person, one-vote principle. Against the psychological oppression of religious authoritarianism, we constructed the doctrine of separation of church and state. And against the physical domination of mercenary armies, we instituted civilian control of the military.

But then we lost our way.

Think about that. After the slaves were freed and the power of the wealthy plantation owners who had dominated much of America's politics were displaced, the newly developed large corporations (especially the railroads and the banks) marshaled their forces and came back to again dominate American politics. The big banks and corporations quickly took over the Republican Party and effectively dominated America through successive "Financial Panics" that they caused until the massive failure that we now call the "Great Depression occurred.

The period of the 1930's showed a massive uprising of the American people fighting to defend themselves from the corporate and banking would be masters, and they took over the nation. They held it through WW II and the Korean War, and then in the '50's the banks and corporations came back. Their abortive effort to regain control though control of the House of Representative in 1952 was reversed in 1954 after the House performed fully as badly as the Gingrich-dominated House has. Only it was a time of people power and they were quickly replaced. Wikipedia has a pretty good description of what happened in the Republican Party when they chose a Presidential nominee:

The fight for the Republican nomination was between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became the candidate of the party's moderate eastern establishment; Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the longtime leader of the GOP's conservative wing; and Governor Earl Warren of California, who appealed to Western delegates and independent voters.

The moderate Eastern Republicans were led by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the party's presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948. The moderates tended to be interventionists who felt that America needed to fight the Cold War overseas and resist Soviet aggression in Europe and Asia; they were also willing to accept most aspects of the social welfare state created by the New Deal in the 1930s. The moderates were also concerned with ending the GOP's losing streak in presidential elections; they felt that the personally popular Eisenhower had the best chance of beating the Democrats.

So even within the Republican Party the power of the people represented by the northeast moderates dominated the choice of Presidential candidate in 1952. But Ike had to choose Nixon as his Vice President to mollify the Conservatives, much as in 2008 McCain had to choose Sarah Palin. But the expanding Cold War gave force to the militarily expansionist elements that were often represented by the John Birch Society. The closeness of the 1960 Presidential election in part represented the growing power of the Corporate and the Cold War Hawk Republicans. Then the Goldwater takeover of the Republican Party in 1964 represented the victory of the Western libertarian Republicans in a party dispirited and disorganized by the 1960 loss of the Presidency and the general confusion caused by assassination of Kennedy. Goldwater's ideological-based disdain for the Republican moderates doomed his election attempt even before it started.

The Vietnam War, greatly expanded by LBJ to mollify the conservatives so they they would not be able to prevent his passage of Medicare, crippled the American populist movement. The nation coalesced around the hardliners and the military as it always has in time of war, while the Progressives of both parties recognized both the idiocy and the futility of the war in Vietnam. The Banks and corporations went with the Military-Industrial Complex for a variety of reasons. The success of the Civil Rights Movement was cemented institutionally by the Civil Rights act, though, so the weakness of the Progressives was not clear. In the meantime, Medicare removed one of the major problems the Progressives worked to correct. [Before Medicare, when a person reached age 65 the health insurers canceled any existing health insurance. There was none sold to those over age 65, including group policies. All retirees were on their own medically after age 65. LBJ had removed this irritant to the middle class with Medicare.]

Nixon became President in 1968 because of the Vietnam War. Nixon was a brilliant but very conflicted man. He was a foreign policy hardliner, but he tried to stop inflation with a price freeze (which didn't work) but which was anathema to the free market Conservatives. It was his personal insecurities and paranoia that drove him to his criminal actions, and as a Conservative he was not restrained by the Rule of Law at all. The Progressive reaction in both Congress and in the media caused him to have to resign or be impeached. Ford had no time in office and no national power base. Carter was elected as a reaction to Nixon but if he ever had a clue regarding the nature of the Progressive American public he never displayed it. Worse, he disdained politics and the political parties, doing nothing to build the Democrats to deal with the Republican-based Corporatocracy. In the meantime the corporation Republicans were building for their comeback with Reagan as the figurehead. Reagan's victory in 1980 (with the assistance of the Iranian Revolutionaries) was a foregone conclusion.

You can tell that the corporations were fighting to come back because since 1970 labor overall has not shared in the profits resulting from the increases in industrial productivity. Those profits, and they are substantial) have all almost totally gone to the wealthiest families in America, and they love it. Beginning when Reagan was in office the cnservatives started eliminating the power of unions to set wages and they started to reduce taxes on the income of the most wealthy. The inheritance tax is a pet peeve of the wealthy families that dominate the conservative movement.

Since 1970 total US consumption has increased because the size of the working population grew and because consumers were extended new forms of credit to make purchasing goods and services easier. This accounts for the rapid expansion of credit cards and their distribution to more and more uncredit-worthy customers, followed by the expansion of equity loans on home mortgages also expanded the consumer purchases. Then when the Asian Credit Crisis threatened the American Economy, the Ayn Randian Libertarian Alan Greenspan started rapidly expanding the money supply to lower interest rates and keep the economy going. Greenspan's refusal to clamp down on mortgage lending practices was another part of this expansion of money to the consumers, just to keep the economy going and avoid Recession. He really believed without evidence that the Mortgage Banks would not intentionally make bad mortgage loans, but the system paid big immediate payments to such loans. They did it without consideration of what happened later to them. Housing, of course, grew to become fully half of Gross Domestic Product (GDP.)

The other thing that happened during the Reagan Regime was that Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition of Evangelical Fundamentalists allied with the Conservative corporate and foreign policy hardliner Republican politicians. This gave the Republicans the foot soldiers to win elections in areas that were not dominated by military and government contracts and wealthy bankers. The corporations and bankers provided the funds to the Republican conservatives needed to win the elections. It was a match made in heaven, if all that matters is winning.

Except, that as part of the deal the Republican Party had to buy the Social Republican issues and implement them. This has been done primarily by packing the federal judiciary with social conservative judges. Other than that, failure to enforce federal laws protecting abortion providers and the slow advance of legal restrictions on abortion, the social right wing has got very little out of the deal. The moderate Republicans who objected to the social conservative issues were driven out of office over time.

The dissatisfaction of the social conservatives themselves was getting clear by the late 1990's (Ralph Reed left the Christian Coalition), until Karl Rove pushed the born-again George W. Bush into the nomination for President in 2000. He had the money from his father's connections and the approval of the social conservatives. The social conservatives and the social conservative-packed Supreme Court gave Bush the election in 2000, but the social conservatives have really gotten very little out of the deal. They are currently abandoning politics as had been characteristic for them before the growth of the Christian Coalition.

Now America has stalled in economic growth, found two wars to fight (one unnecessary) and the threat of the Depression has activated the mass of the population again to fight the Corporatocracy that has brought us all these disasters. Those are the forces that elected Barack Obama.

But they are difficult to keep mobilized without an immediate threat to bring them out and unify them. Obama's efforts to slow and stall the economic dive into deep Depression has removed most of the immediate threat. The mass population is beginning to drop away. Unfortunately, the delay on the dive into Depression has not been accompanied by the necessary structural reforms that would prevent the Depression from happening. The corporatocracy is fighting those reforms like trapped weasels, and being successful at it. The renewal of the dive into Depression becomes more likely every day those financial reforms are not enacted.

Without those reforms the march economically downward into Depression will be soon coming back. The current apparent floor under the financial collapse is based entirely on the government stimuli. The best that can be said about the indications of an economic "bottom" is that it is just that it represents where the economy is currently able to operate. There is little indication that any economic-based recovery is occurring so far. So without the government stimuli the economy is headed further down the tubes. But this time, on Barack Obama's watch, so that he gets the blame. The Republicans are actively opposing all actions that might prevent this in hopes that the march to Depression will resume and that Obama can be blamed.

That's the context within which Obama has presented this challenge to the American people in today's Saturday U-Tube address. If the mass support Obama got that elected him President is not followed by support is the actions Obama has to take to restructure the economy we are in a world of crap. Here's Obama's challenge.



Are you ready to take up the challenge? Your decision will make or break America.

The global economic order needs a dominant economy to function well. The U.S. is abandoning that role and there is no other economy to replace us.

Dani Rodrik posted a very interesting blog at TPM Cafe today that included this line:

...global economic order is difficult to establish and maintain in the absence of a dominant economic power.

That statement crystallized a number of ideas I have been playing with.

The idea that for a stable and effective global economic order to exist it demands a dominant economic power explains a great deal. It would suggest that the long period of global stability and economic order in the 19th century was brought about by the dominance of Great Britain (at first with its contra-Napoleonic allies) as it underwent industrialization, and that the rapid industrial growth of Germany in the late '80's and '90's and years prior to WW I was a major contributor to the outbreak of WW I itself. A war, I might add, that effectively destroyed the economy and global dominance of the British Empire.

After that there was no single dominating economy following WW I although Britain, France, and the distant, reticent and isolationist U.S. were all duking it out for dominance. (The economic power of the U.S. was already obvious, but it was not applied to international politics. The German nationalists, of course, greatly resented that they were excluded from the club they knew they belonged in. The resulting economic and political turbulence combined with militant nationalism that saw all international power as based in the military led almost inevitably into resuming the Great War on a much wider scale. The German dominant social and political class had never matured (the British upper class were no better.) That same immaturity also was a key factor in starting WW II. In both cases they "knew" they could assert their national power (by military means) and regain the status they demanded. It was a reaction from weakness.

WW II then proceeded to destroy every industrialized economy of any size in the world outside the U.S., leaving the U.S. as dominant by default - as much by the accident of isolation more than any other single factor. Since the 60's the rebuilding of most of the rest of the world has placed the continuation of that U.S. dominance in severe doubt. So has the overvaluing of the dollar and the resulting shift of the American economy from predominantly production to predominantly banking. Essentially America has abandoned much of its basis of economic dominance other than geography. It doesn't help at all that we have long outstripped our oil resources, the single most important basis for an industrial economy after coal. We have joined Japan and Europe in our need for imported oil to fuel our industrial economy.

The U.S. power is now maintained by super aggressive spending on the military(with its associated industrial complex), but it also is maintained by having the dollar as the world's reserve currency and the oil trading currency. Unfortunately the previous relative dominance of our educational and university systems and our willingness to take in students from anywhere in the world has been allowed to decline badly. That and the economic innovation it caused was one of the pillars of our dominance of the world economy, but in the name of "fiscal restraint" we have abandoned it. Such expenditures do not present a predictable short-term gain the markets can recognize to justify those such investments, you see. But innovation is inherently unpredictable and depends on smart, motivated and well-educated individuals free to apply their ideas. So it is necessary to find, educate and motivate such individuals and permit them the relative freedom to put their insights into effect.

Couple those international factors with the effective monopoly control of oil resources by the middle east (Saudi Arabia still the dominant nation) as well as Russia along with the rise of the European Union, Japan. China and India, and there's not much left to support American global economic dominance beyond a set of international banking institutions badly infected with the idiocy of the absolute Free Market- small government ideology which operates efficiently only by abandoning large swaths of poor populations.

Only governments can modify the structures of the economy that keep those populations unable to participate in the economy to their fullest extent, but government actions to bring those populations into the economy and society costs the entrenched powers big time. The biggest price the entrenched power pay is dealing with problems and the innovations by those segments of the population as they become more integrated into the economy. That rocks the stability the the financial markets strive for, no matter how many people are benefited. They'd much rather lock in the existing social and economic system in which they dominate and never let it change.

Since banking is the last major element of American dominance (other than the ability to rapidly extend military power to anywhere in the world), I'd guess that we really stepped in it by profligate and ignorant banking processes that created the current severe Recession that may be the beginnings of Depression. Worse, we rapidly spread both the failed management of banking and the associated economic woes to the rest of the world. That gives the rest of the world a really strong motivation to kick us off our privileged economic perch. America's attempt to spread the often unworkable "Free Market" ideology gives them good reason. (Free Markets work for the winners, but abandon the losers. That creates both social and political problems. that makes the absolute free market unworkable.)

Unfortunately, as was true after WW I, there is no replacement in the wings for U.S. dominance. That puts the world back into the lack of a dominant economy that uses its power to control the global economy that preceded both WW I and WW II.

Those are the implications that I drew from the line quoted above. Mind you, I am not a historian. I am a retiree with an academic background in economics and business (an MBA with extensive study after that in Management, Economics and Finance) as well as having retired as an Army Reserve Logistics Officer. (That means I operated or planned for maintenance, supply and transportation systems for Corps and Field Armies in the field. That's a hell of a lot of people and equipment operating in places where there is no outside economic or legal or civil government support at all.) When I retired from work a few years ago I started reading all the history I never had time to read while I was working. I soon developed a focus on the question of how Europe took 400 years and somehow came to dominate the world by the late 19th century. Interestingly the whole process of slavery in America, the Caribbean and northern South America is included. It was firsts and foremost an economic thing as world commodity markets developed, but it warped the societies where it was practiced in way still very recognizable - as well as socially dysfunctional. I'm also still looking for the basic causes of WW I, because it destroyed that domination and its aftermath set up the international game as it is played today.

My question is whether I have this analysis above right. It seems reasonable to me, but how do I know? I'm no historian, so I am looking for feedback and criticism.

So I just thought I would throw this out for consideration. Comments from readers would be greatly appreciated.

A brief survey of slavery and White Supremacy in America

This is something I wrote and posted elsewhere, and wanted to keep on my own blog. Where did American slavery and white supremacy come from? Consider this a thumbnail description. Slavery was a solution to labor problem, and it created the social system of the South to accommodate it. But to maintain both slavery and the Southern social system that maintained it, the South had to expand Slavery into western territories which were gained by the Louisiana Purchase, by taking over Texas, by negotiating with the British (Oregon and Washington) and by invading Mexico. That expansion led to the Civil War. the Civil War did not solve the problems created by the social system the South created to maintain slavery, however.

The first slaves were sold into Virginia along with indentured servants in the 17th century. The purchaser bought the individual by effectively paying their ticket to the U.S. It was an investment in labor.
at first. The difference between slaves and indentured servants was that a slave had a black skin and indentured servants did not. When such a person skipped out on the owner before completing the contract it was clear which one was the slave, but the indentured servant was a lost investment in labor. Guess what the social system and the legal system did to protect the purchasers? Slavery of Black-skinned people became economically successful for some strange reason while indentured servitude sort of trailed off. But then in 1791 the Dominican slaves revolted and killed off almost every French person on the island of Haiti. Slave owners everywhere lived in fear of their slaves from then on.

The Southern plantation owners needed a labor force they could force to work for subsistence wages and move at will when the cotton growing land wore out. During the first half of the 19th century Cotton was the major single international commodity, much as oil is today. This was a major spur for British industrialism. The only way for Americans to get rich growing cotton was to farm it using slaves because the work was too difficult to hire labor at fair rates. In Texas any hired white laborer simply left to start his own farm on free land. Only slaves remained for plantation farming - and only plantation farming for the international market made a farmer wealthy.

A side effect of that, particularly in the older slave states, was that white labor was always competing with slave labor that worked at subsistence pay rates. The plantation owners played off the slave labor against the white labor, and the exchange was White Supremacy. Every White man was required to belong to the militia, and the primary purpose of the militia was to prevent slave revolts. White Supremacy didn't pay any better, but it proved to be a major social step up for white men.

People know what they are worth in the market because they look at what their next door neighbor earns. The system that holds labor rates down is not obvious. But White Supremacy is obvious. So the fact that a white guy was required to carry a gun to church on Sunday for fear of a slave revolt made the white guy superior to the Black guys. It was not clear to White Yeoman farmers that this was the situation created by the plantation-owner class, but it was. Before the Civil War, most of the wealthy individuals in the U.S. were southerners.

An interesting side note is that every white male attending college was required to study military science in the South because they were all part of the militia to protect their society from slave revolt. This is in part the source of the superior military capability of the South in the Civil War. But this was a form of keeping the wealthy in control of the society.

Public education was started primarily in the North, as were most of the earliest public colleges and universities. That, too, is a way of protecting the wealthy class. Make higher education a requirement of joining the upper class and make it expensive.

After the Civil War, the fact that the Yankees had destroyed the Southern culture was considered the fault of the Blacks, the carpetbaggers and the scalawags. But Congress was still controlled largely by the Southerners, so (with the assistance of President Andrew Johnson) local segregation laws were established.

Sharecropping replaced slave based plantations (not nearly as profitable as slave-based plantations.) The new wealthy elites became those who owned the company stores that sharecroppers were required to buy from. Usually these were people who still owned the land that was farmed. For cases when the segregation law wasn't enough, there were the terrorist night-riders and a sharp increase in lynchings. Voting by Blacks was effectively eliminated by law and terrorism. White Supremacy became more important than economics.

Industrialism and WW II were the big changes that revised the South. But the Southern social system permitted long-term congressional and Senate terms that more competitive parts of the U.S. did not. The South kept national power because of Congressional tenure.

We are still working our way out of this disastrous social system.

What is the nature of time in historical and legal research?

Time. We all live through it, but do we understand it? Is there a difference in the nature of time in historical research and physics research? Mary L. Dudziak presents some interesting insights into the nature of time. Here is an example:

In the scholarship on law and war, time is seen as episodic. It is sometimes seen as linear and progressive, but the most common feature is that time is episodic. There are two different kinds of time: wartime and peacetime. Historical progression consists of moving from one kind of time to another. Law is thought to vary depending on what time it is. The relationship between citizen and state, the scope of rights, the extent of government power are thought to depend on whether it is wartime or peacetime.

A central metaphor is the swinging pendulum – swinging from strong protection of rights and weaker government power to weaker protection of rights and stronger government power. Moving from one time zone to the next is thought to cause the pendulum to begin swinging in a new direction. [Snip]

"Like everyone else," she writes, "historians assume that time exists, yet despite its obvious importance to historical writing – what is history but the account of how things change over time? – writers of history do not often inquire into the meaning of time itself." One of the difficulties in talking about time is that the words we use to describe it seem to presuppose an understanding of time. Hunt continues: "Time feels like an essential and defining feature of human life, yet when pressed to define it, we inevitably fall back upon duration, change, and ultimately, the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future."

Time has been central to other fields, especially physics, philosophy, and anthropology. Within fields, ideas about time have been highly contested. "Temporality enters our conceptual framework both as a descriptive component of our immediate experience and as a component of our theoretical description of the world," writes Lawrence Sklar.

Most of us simply believe that time just "IS" and that we understand it. But that assumption simply isn't true. Time is as much a linguistic phenomenon as it is a physical one, as is demonstrated above in its conception as "the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future."

Then you have to look at time in the manner it is applied in the different disciplines such as history and physics. In history time is seen as episodic, but in physics it is considered to be a constant and measurable dimension. Those views of time clearly conflict. Most of us are not even aware of the conflict, let alone which of the views we subscribe to.

Why do those views differ? It's because time performs different functions in the theories of history and of physics. So how is that possible?

It's because we are human beings. We don't ever know everything. We can't - as was described by Herbert A Simon in his theory of Bounded Rationality. We adopt the theory of time that makes the theories we are working in work.

The different views of time are each appropriate to the purposes to which we wish to achieve. The result is that physicists use a view of time as being constant and measurable, while historians and legal scholars use a view of time as being episodic. Very rarely do the two views contradict each other, unless the members on one discipline attempt to apply the theory appropriate to the other.

Since different views of time are rarely stated explicitly, the likelihood of confusion is high. This is especially true when politicians apply an inappropriate view by ignoring the experience of experts in the field without any understanding of what they are doing. Or more maliciously, that kind of confusion makes political propaganda quite easy to sell.

Consider how the Bush administration insists that we are at war with some strange amorphic enemy they call Terrorism - another effort is to create some enemy they call Islamo-fascism. It is blatantly an effort to change the nature of law and the relationship of the Presidency to the Federal Government. That propaganda fiction is what is behind the idea of the so-called Unitary Presidency.

By making the explicit nature of time and its application to theory, along with an understanding of the different possible views of time and when each is appropriate, the propaganda fiction the Bush administration is attempting become clear. There has not been a real shift to a state of war. War requires an existential threat to the nation, one that the various forms of banditry that the conservatives, Neocons and Bushies try to lean on to justify their actions simply don't achieve. That is the real fiction that is being created to justify the criminal actions of the current administration.

Ms. Dudziak's post presents an interesting analytical tool to those of us mere humans who attempt to deal with reality in spite of bounded rationality.

John W. Backus, developer of FORTRAN, dead at 82

John W. Backus, a key early developer of programing languages, has died at age 82. (New York Times.)

For those of us who took computer programming courses back in the 1960's, the first high-level language we learned was FORTRAN. My first computer course provided six weeks of programming in machine language (that's programming in the native zeros and ones that the machine recognizes,) followed by an IBM assembly language called Symbolic Processing System (or something pretty close to that) and finally six weeks of FORTRAN. That was sort of like wriggling forward on the belly, then crawling forward, followed by standing up and walking with dispatch to get to where you wanted the computer to go.

If you have ever programmed a DOS computer in BASIC, you have programmed in the direct descendant of FORTRAN. Assembler and FORTRAN are both compiled languages, meaning that there are two steps involved. You write your program in the high-level language, then run your program through a "compiler," a computer program that translates your program into machine language in ones and zeros that the computer can understand.

Everyone today who works with a computer owes John W. Backus a great debt for his work.