“a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Edmund Burke
The past teaches for the future, and society, like life itself, must learn from its experience and carry this knowledge forward. Society must both honor its past and adapt for its future. In times of dramatic change, social movements arise, and, like the French Revolution, can advocate radical rejection of the past. The French revolutionaries sought wholesale reconfiguration of all elements of society.
[they] “completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army, their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures” Edmund Burke
The ensuing chaos and tragedy provoked a philosophy of counter-revolution, most notably from Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, a philosophy that we call conservatism, today.
Joseph de Maistre opposed what he called ‘rational’ government, government directed by seemingly reasoning elites, those who say they know best for the rest of us, using the cover of majority rule. Government of ‘reason’, he argued, would lean towards abstract and impossible-to-achieve utopia, and lead to human evil, in its quest for efficiency and to please the whims of the majority. He advocated for a heirarchical authority, in the form of a religious constitutional monarchy. Only allegiance to values held outside the minds of men – including the king – values held in protection by the rights of property, indeed values held with irrational commitment to time-honored tradition, he believed, could rule over time without corruption against the everyday interests of the majority. de Maistre was a privileged aristocrat. He has been vehemently derided, and even credited with creating fascism, but he was not surprised by the Reign of Terror.
Edmund Burke, an Irishman in England, was initially supportive of the French Revolution, but also came to denounce its abstract, metaphysical extremism, its extreme rejection of the past. Democracy can be excessive. He found that a common heritage was best supported with property rights, and by due process of common law, and that change for the future was best cultivated with education, commerce, and free trade. He argued against taxing the American colony, and warned of the inherent dictatorial expansionism of the French revolutionaries. He was not surprised by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
de Maistre and Burke have support in history. Authoritarian regimes that maintain tradition – Japan, Germany, Spain, Chile, South Korea – have been able to progress to democratic systems. Totalitarian regimes which severely reject their past – Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba – have not.
“A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop‘” William F. Buckley, Jr.
Conservatism is evolution, not revolution.
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Vietnam Now, Jonathan Mirsky, a review of Vietnam: Rising Dragon, by Bill Hayton, New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010
Vietnam, now, is ruled iron-clad by a one party Politburo. It is a police state. One in six vietnamese works for state security. Politburo members achieve their position, godfather style, by building guanxi – “a network of supporters and delivering them benefits in return”, essentially protection rackets. The internet is censored, there is a “pervasive sense of fear”. Dissent is severely repressed, dissidents are jailed. Prostitution is everywhere. “On a day to day basis every official transaction is likely to require some form of payment. Corruption is built into every public activity.”
State run businesses, however, are allowing market methods, farmers have been given “control over their fields”, the economy is growing and attracting outside investment. There is extensive environmental degradation, environmental “laws” are widely ignored. Vietnamese logging has taken as much forest as once did America’s agent orange. Hanoi just celebrated its 1000 year anniversary. It is choked in traffic.
It remains a point of pride for the American protest movement that they ‘stopped’ the War in Vietnam. There is no South Vietnam the way there is a South Korea.
Like Vietnam, so like China. The Chinese Communist Party is “like one group in Washington naming the members of the Supreme Court, all the members of the Cabinet, the editors of The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, the heads of all major think tanks, and the CEOs of major companies like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Wal-Mart“. The Party: Impenetrable, All Powerful, Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010
In China, privatization has turned state-owned companies into shareholder-owned companies, but the majority shareholder is the state. All companies, large and small, have a party “secretary” managing them along side their CEO. Party meetings precede board meetings, which then give routine approval to Party decisions. In government, Party “leading groups” instruct and direct government ministers. Contrary to predictions, economic liberalization has increased Party control, not lessened it. Personal liberties have increased but not political liberties.
The Party “has largely withdrawn from the personal lives of Chinese citizens, allowing them to pursue their own ambitions and goals as long as they avoid the high crime of directly challenging the Party.”
The Party has 78 million members, equal to the population of Germany. They are actively involved in all levels of society. The second largest budget category for Chinese government spending – the first is the military and the third is health, education, and welfare – is for “stability maintenance”, monitoring people and preventing unauthorized organization. China, from Famine to Oslo, Perry Link, New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011
China has become the world’s second largest economy. It’s GDP has grown 10 times in 26 years, has overturned Japan’s GDP, and will overtake the US by 2027. It is the largest automobile market in the world, and uses twice as much steel as Europe, the US and Japan, combined. Niall Ferguson, Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2010
“We do not seek to contain China’s rise” President Barack Obama, November 16, 2009, Shanghai, China
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To endure, free societies must foster access to wealth, there must be democratization of wealth. Everyday people must prosper. Their ability to secure the means to achieve their human needs must be available.
At the American founding, wealth for everyday people came from farming. The continent presented a vast supply of essentially free, never-tilled land. Political rights and national sovereignty were priorities. Industrialization was not foreseen.
As available land was taken up, farming was less and less a means for acquiring wealth. The civil war led to industrialization, and mechanization decimated farm labor. In TheGrapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, portrays dispossessed farm laborers, watching, as they leave town for California, one tractor, in one morning, do the work that used to take all of them together weeks to do. The Great Depression followed. The industrial era had not advanced enough to take up for the loss of farm labor employment.
The New Deal subsidized employment, directly hired millions, created public work projects, and strengthened worker’s rights. This was successful, for a time, because economic output was labor intensive. Enterprises used hands and backs much more than machines. Building roads utilized thousands of workers. Today, however, economic output has become capital intensive. With stunning engineering advancements, capital – knowledge, resources, technology, machines – has become the vital input. Increasing production does not require commensurate increase in labor and wealth flows increasingly to capital. Employment is failing to provide for democratization of wealth.
Ironically, attempts to increase the value and opportunity for labor – such as with direct government employment, government subsidy, mandated higher wages and benefits – only serve to accelerate the process of shrinking labor value, because they increase the incentive to produce with less labor. The entitlement society, by progressively redistributing income from the employed to the non-employed, accelerates this further as the employed sector is pressed to ever greater efficiency – to use less labor – to pay for the ever growing non-employed sector. In a feedback spiral, the non-employed sector fights for political influence and increases its taxation demands, further pressuring the employed, tax paying sector to produce greater labor saving efficiency.
And so, a new economics is needed. This new economics will somehow have to democratize wealth by democratizing capital. In some new way, individual citizens will need to automatically accumulate capital as they normally perform their life cycle. This capital must be their property, their new kind of seed corn, and it must be unavailable to politicians to use for cultivating their own political popularity. But the state must ensure that it is measuredly utilized rather than consumed. It must accumulate, somehow sequestered to grow, and yet also be available for key life needs.
Capital will be the earner of the future, everyone will have to have capital. It may require a crisis to democratize capital and not labor, and that crisis may be neigh.
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People differ in their need for stimulation. There is the nerdy kid who can’t tolerate a rolling coaster ride or a scary movie, and there is the test-the-limits thrill seeker like John Lennon.
John Lennon relentlessly sought sensation, and defiant self expression. He got himself into trouble, all the time, and pulled others into trouble with him. Paul McCartney’s father called him “that Lennon”. He was precocious – with drinking, with drugs, with sex. He was also intelligent, and artistic. He liked imaginative writing, had a talent for music, and a sense for authentic, emotional expression. He took the time to learn the craft of playing guitar, writing songs, and singing, and he became very good. Rock and roll was it, he went crazy for Elvis Presley. Listen to Elvis in ‘Trying to get to you’, you will hear the Lennon inspiration.
“I was a rhythm guitarist. . . I can make a band drive” . . He rejected any aesthetic of thinking – “that excellentness which I never believed in“. He disliked Paul’s literary songs. “I go for feeling“.
He could also be mean. He truly was “a jealous guy“, ever fearful of being up-staged. He was quick with the verbal put down, and created bully loyalty. He could be violent with alcohol. But he was also an engine for success. He was bold and could drive a crowd. He could be endearing and needy and funny. Women were drawn to want to care for him.
He suffered boredom like some ghastly memory, and seemed haunted by loss. As he achieved phenomenal success, he found himself maddingly unsatisfied. There is a pained disappointment in his best songs. He was just not able to find peace of mind. He descended into out-of-control pill taking, drinking, marijuana, LSD, and heroin. When Yoko first met him, she found he would wake up and take “handfuls of pills”.
His recklessness cost Lennon/McCarthy ownership of many of their songs. He betrayed friends and mentors – Brian Epstein, George Martin, and sadly, Paul. His interviews have blame, special pleading, and self pity. He would both decry fame and stoke it. Being lionized while feeling empty made him cynical.
Who was John Lennon? Creative, engaging, and appealing, but also disturbed, difficult and ultimately tragic. He could not achieve inner reward. For someone fantastically famous and wealthy, one of the luckiest people on the planet, he was unfulfilled.
He’s a real Nowhere Man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
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“Sen. Russell Long (D-La.) has told us that Lee Harvey Oswald. . . trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk during his Soviet stay” Jack Anderson, Washington Post, March 7, 1967
Ion Mihai Pocera defected to the West in 1978. He was head of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, and was responsible for recruiting foreigners – particularly disaffected, low rank American soldiers like Lee Harvey Oswald. In Programmed to kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, 2007, he finds that the Oswald story has very strong signs of Soviet Foreign Intelligence involvement.
Procera proposes that Oswald was likely recruited while stationed at the U-2 Atsugi base, and that Oswald’s information was instrumental in shooting down U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, which resulted in a great PR triumph for Khrushchev. This made Oswald a hero to Soviet foreign intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union was likely his reward (this being a common practice). They wouldn’t have wanted him to stay, his cover would be suspect and he would be more useful in the U.S., but he forced them to acquiesce – ever the loose canon – by publicly revoking his U. S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. While living in Russia, he received extensive espionage training, and was then sent back to the U.S. with an arranged Russian agent wife (another common practice), to function (both of them) as sleeper agents in the U.S.
Pocera doesn’t believe that the Soviet Union ordered Oswald to murder President Kennedy, but he emphasizes that Oswald was a difficult, restless agent, a true believer wanting more heroic work, who became more and more intent on getting into ‘revolutionary’ Cuba. He spun out of control, and possibly into the hands of pro-Castro Cuban agents (whom he met in Minsk?) working in the U.S. Oswald was both deluded enough to allow himself to be lured into shooting Kennedy in order to help Cuba, and gullible enough to allow himself to be set up to play the patsy role in a plot. Adult fetal alcohol syndrome?
Before November 22, Oswald mysteriously does pro-Castro advocacy, and then also mingles with anti-Castro Cubans. He visits Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico. He carries out noticeable and self-incriminating actions – shooting practices, meeting prominent Cuban exiles, hinting at planned assassination, seeking to buy a get-a-way car.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository not accounted for during time the shots were fired.
After the shooting, he seems to improvise an escape from the scene, as if a planned meeting doesn’t occur. He returns to his apartment for his gun – he must have thought he wouldn’t need it, but now clearly thinks that he may. He seems to head in the direction of a small airport nearby, or to a bus station to take him to Mexico (he had made that same bus trip one month before). He calmly murders Dallas police officer Tippett, who alone has threatened his movements. He brazenly re-loads his gun in front of numerous eye witnesses.
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Evolution not Revolution
/in All, Politics“a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Edmund Burke
The past teaches for the future, and society, like life itself, must learn from its experience and carry this knowledge forward. Society must both honor its past and adapt for its future. In times of dramatic change, social movements arise, and, like the French Revolution, can advocate radical rejection of the past. The French revolutionaries sought wholesale reconfiguration of all elements of society.
[they] “completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army, their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures” Edmund Burke
The ensuing chaos and tragedy provoked a philosophy of counter-revolution, most notably from Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, a philosophy that we call conservatism, today.
Joseph de Maistre opposed what he called ‘rational’ government, government directed by seemingly reasoning elites, those who say they know best for the rest of us, using the cover of majority rule. Government of ‘reason’, he argued, would lean towards abstract and impossible-to-achieve utopia, and lead to human evil, in its quest for efficiency and to please the whims of the majority. He advocated for a heirarchical authority, in the form of a religious constitutional monarchy. Only allegiance to values held outside the minds of men – including the king – values held in protection by the rights of property, indeed values held with irrational commitment to time-honored tradition, he believed, could rule over time without corruption against the everyday interests of the majority. de Maistre was a privileged aristocrat. He has been vehemently derided, and even credited with creating fascism, but he was not surprised by the Reign of Terror.
Edmund Burke, an Irishman in England, was initially supportive of the French Revolution, but also came to denounce its abstract, metaphysical extremism, its extreme rejection of the past. Democracy can be excessive. He found that a common heritage was best supported with property rights, and by due process of common law, and that change for the future was best cultivated with education, commerce, and free trade. He argued against taxing the American colony, and warned of the inherent dictatorial expansionism of the French revolutionaries. He was not surprised by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
de Maistre and Burke have support in history. Authoritarian regimes that maintain tradition – Japan, Germany, Spain, Chile, South Korea – have been able to progress to democratic systems. Totalitarian regimes which severely reject their past – Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba – have not.
“A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop‘” William F. Buckley, Jr.
Conservatism is evolution, not revolution.
Asia now
/in PoliticsVietnam Now, Jonathan Mirsky, a review of Vietnam: Rising Dragon, by Bill Hayton, New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010
Vietnam, now, is ruled iron-clad by a one party Politburo. It is a police state. One in six vietnamese works for state security. Politburo members achieve their position, godfather style, by building guanxi – “a network of supporters and delivering them benefits in return”, essentially protection rackets. The internet is censored, there is a “pervasive sense of fear”. Dissent is severely repressed, dissidents are jailed. Prostitution is everywhere. “On a day to day basis every official transaction is likely to require some form of payment. Corruption is built into every public activity.”
State run businesses, however, are allowing market methods, farmers have been given “control over their fields”, the economy is growing and attracting outside investment. There is extensive environmental degradation, environmental “laws” are widely ignored. Vietnamese logging has taken as much forest as once did America’s agent orange. Hanoi just celebrated its 1000 year anniversary. It is choked in traffic.
It remains a point of pride for the American protest movement that they ‘stopped’ the War in Vietnam. There is no South Vietnam the way there is a South Korea.
Like Vietnam, so like China. The Chinese Communist Party is “like one group in Washington naming the members of the Supreme Court, all the members of the Cabinet, the editors of The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, the heads of all major think tanks, and the CEOs of major companies like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Wal-Mart“. The Party: Impenetrable, All Powerful, Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010
In China, privatization has turned state-owned companies into shareholder-owned companies, but the majority shareholder is the state. All companies, large and small, have a party “secretary” managing them along side their CEO. Party meetings precede board meetings, which then give routine approval to Party decisions. In government, Party “leading groups” instruct and direct government ministers. Contrary to predictions, economic liberalization has increased Party control, not lessened it. Personal liberties have increased but not political liberties.
The Party “has largely withdrawn from the personal lives of Chinese citizens, allowing them to pursue their own ambitions and goals as long as they avoid the high crime of directly challenging the Party.”
The Party has 78 million members, equal to the population of Germany. They are actively involved in all levels of society. The second largest budget category for Chinese government spending – the first is the military and the third is health, education, and welfare – is for “stability maintenance”, monitoring people and preventing unauthorized organization. China, from Famine to Oslo, Perry Link, New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011
China has become the world’s second largest economy. It’s GDP has grown 10 times in 26 years, has overturned Japan’s GDP, and will overtake the US by 2027. It is the largest automobile market in the world, and uses twice as much steel as Europe, the US and Japan, combined. Niall Ferguson, Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2010
“We do not seek to contain China’s rise” President Barack Obama, November 16, 2009, Shanghai, China
A New Economics
/in All, Ideas, PoliticsTo endure, free societies must foster access to wealth, there must be democratization of wealth. Everyday people must prosper. Their ability to secure the means to achieve their human needs must be available.
At the American founding, wealth for everyday people came from farming. The continent presented a vast supply of essentially free, never-tilled land. Political rights and national sovereignty were priorities. Industrialization was not foreseen.
As available land was taken up, farming was less and less a means for acquiring wealth. The civil war led to industrialization, and mechanization decimated farm labor. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, portrays dispossessed farm laborers, watching, as they leave town for California, one tractor, in one morning, do the work that used to take all of them together weeks to do. The Great Depression followed. The industrial era had not advanced enough to take up for the loss of farm labor employment.
The New Deal subsidized employment, directly hired millions, created public work projects, and strengthened worker’s rights. This was successful, for a time, because economic output was labor intensive. Enterprises used hands and backs much more than machines. Building roads utilized thousands of workers. Today, however, economic output has become capital intensive. With stunning engineering advancements, capital – knowledge, resources, technology, machines – has become the vital input. Increasing production does not require commensurate increase in labor and wealth flows increasingly to capital. Employment is failing to provide for democratization of wealth.
Ironically, attempts to increase the value and opportunity for labor – such as with direct government employment, government subsidy, mandated higher wages and benefits – only serve to accelerate the process of shrinking labor value, because they increase the incentive to produce with less labor. The entitlement society, by progressively redistributing income from the employed to the non-employed, accelerates this further as the employed sector is pressed to ever greater efficiency – to use less labor – to pay for the ever growing non-employed sector. In a feedback spiral, the non-employed sector fights for political influence and increases its taxation demands, further pressuring the employed, tax paying sector to produce greater labor saving efficiency.
And so, a new economics is needed. This new economics will somehow have to democratize wealth by democratizing capital. In some new way, individual citizens will need to automatically accumulate capital as they normally perform their life cycle. This capital must be their property, their new kind of seed corn, and it must be unavailable to politicians to use for cultivating their own political popularity. But the state must ensure that it is measuredly utilized rather than consumed. It must accumulate, somehow sequestered to grow, and yet also be available for key life needs.
Capital will be the earner of the future, everyone will have to have capital. It may require a crisis to democratize capital and not labor, and that crisis may be neigh.
Nowhere Man
/in All, art, BooksJohn Lennon, The Life Philip Norman, 2008
I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
People differ in their need for stimulation. There is the nerdy kid who can’t tolerate a rolling coaster ride or a scary movie, and there is the test-the-limits thrill seeker like John Lennon.
John Lennon relentlessly sought sensation, and defiant self expression. He got himself into trouble, all the time, and pulled others into trouble with him. Paul McCartney’s father called him “that Lennon”. He was precocious – with drinking, with drugs, with sex. He was also intelligent, and artistic. He liked imaginative writing, had a talent for music, and a sense for authentic, emotional expression. He took the time to learn the craft of playing guitar, writing songs, and singing, and he became very good. Rock and roll was it, he went crazy for Elvis Presley. Listen to Elvis in ‘Trying to get to you’, you will hear the Lennon inspiration.
“I was a rhythm guitarist. . . I can make a band drive” . . He rejected any aesthetic of thinking – “that excellentness which I never believed in“. He disliked Paul’s literary songs. “I go for feeling“.
He could also be mean. He truly was “a jealous guy“, ever fearful of being up-staged. He was quick with the verbal put down, and created bully loyalty. He could be violent with alcohol. But he was also an engine for success. He was bold and could drive a crowd. He could be endearing and needy and funny. Women were drawn to want to care for him.
He suffered boredom like some ghastly memory, and seemed haunted by loss. As he achieved phenomenal success, he found himself maddingly unsatisfied. There is a pained disappointment in his best songs. He was just not able to find peace of mind. He descended into out-of-control pill taking, drinking, marijuana, LSD, and heroin. When Yoko first met him, she found he would wake up and take “handfuls of pills”.
His recklessness cost Lennon/McCarthy ownership of many of their songs. He betrayed friends and mentors – Brian Epstein, George Martin, and sadly, Paul. His interviews have blame, special pleading, and self pity. He would both decry fame and stoke it. Being lionized while feeling empty made him cynical.
Who was John Lennon? Creative, engaging, and appealing, but also disturbed, difficult and ultimately tragic. He could not achieve inner reward. For someone fantastically famous and wealthy, one of the luckiest people on the planet, he was unfulfilled.
He’s a real Nowhere Man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald
/in All, Books, Politics“Sen. Russell Long (D-La.) has told us that Lee Harvey Oswald. . . trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk during his Soviet stay” Jack Anderson, Washington Post, March 7, 1967
Ion Mihai Pocera defected to the West in 1978. He was head of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, and was responsible for recruiting foreigners – particularly disaffected, low rank American soldiers like Lee Harvey Oswald. In Programmed to kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, 2007, he finds that the Oswald story has very strong signs of Soviet Foreign Intelligence involvement.
Procera proposes that Oswald was likely recruited while stationed at the U-2 Atsugi base, and that Oswald’s information was instrumental in shooting down U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, which resulted in a great PR triumph for Khrushchev. This made Oswald a hero to Soviet foreign intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union was likely his reward (this being a common practice). They wouldn’t have wanted him to stay, his cover would be suspect and he would be more useful in the U.S., but he forced them to acquiesce – ever the loose canon – by publicly revoking his U. S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. While living in Russia, he received extensive espionage training, and was then sent back to the U.S. with an arranged Russian agent wife (another common practice), to function (both of them) as sleeper agents in the U.S.
Pocera doesn’t believe that the Soviet Union ordered Oswald to murder President Kennedy, but he emphasizes that Oswald was a difficult, restless agent, a true believer wanting more heroic work, who became more and more intent on getting into ‘revolutionary’ Cuba. He spun out of control, and possibly into the hands of pro-Castro Cuban agents (whom he met in Minsk?) working in the U.S. Oswald was both deluded enough to allow himself to be lured into shooting Kennedy in order to help Cuba, and gullible enough to allow himself to be set up to play the patsy role in a plot. Adult fetal alcohol syndrome?
Before November 22, Oswald mysteriously does pro-Castro advocacy, and then also mingles with anti-Castro Cubans. He visits Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico. He carries out noticeable and self-incriminating actions – shooting practices, meeting prominent Cuban exiles, hinting at planned assassination, seeking to buy a get-a-way car.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository not accounted for during time the shots were fired.
After the shooting, he seems to improvise an escape from the scene, as if a planned meeting doesn’t occur. He returns to his apartment for his gun – he must have thought he wouldn’t need it, but now clearly thinks that he may. He seems to head in the direction of a small airport nearby, or to a bus station to take him to Mexico (he had made that same bus trip one month before). He calmly murders Dallas police officer Tippett, who alone has threatened his movements. He brazenly re-loads his gun in front of numerous eye witnesses.