Society Has Made Important Progress – But Not Enough
I’m spending a bit of time this afternoon helping my daughter with an essay on Pride and Prejudice as a work of social satire. So many of the social conventions that Austen chops up so brilliantly in this masterpiece have changed or gone away entirely, and so much satirical literature written in the last 200 years, that it’s easy to forget how radical Austen’s novel was in its time.
Having said this, so much of this garbage about the social ladder remains in place, and we see this around us every day in pursuit of the things we want for our society — for example, a level playing field for sustainable energy solutions. Here, the will of the people is crystal clear: a huge majority of people – even Republicans – are concerned that our energy policy (or lack thereof) is ruining the planet. But the world is not run by the will of the people; it’s governed by a few extremely powerful elite who honestly couldn’t care less about the will of the people.
If you think that’s a rash exaggeration, try an experiment. Ask a few dozen people if they think that it’s a sound idea to provide the oil companies with the dozen-or-so different types of subsidies – from large sums of cash, to tax breaks, to preferential treatment of government land, to a transportation infrastructure, to a fabulously expensive military that protects access to crude around the globe. You’ll see very quickly that virtually no one supports this blatant corruption. But then realize that we’re still a million miles away from an end to these practices, and that all the satirical novels in the world won’t change that in the least.
Excellent and timely observations, Craig. Here’s some supporting information…
Dave Johnson, of Campaign for America’s Future, wrote today:
“We, the People built our democracy and the empowerment and protections it bestows. We built the infrastructure, schools and all of the public structures, laws, courts, monetary system, etc. that enable enterprise to prosper. That prosperity is the bounty of our democracy and by contract it is supposed to be shared and reinvested. That is the contract. Our system enables some people to become wealthy but all of us are supposed to benefit from this system. Why else would We, the People have set up this system, if not for the benefit of We, the People?”
“We invest in infrastructure and public structures that create the conditions for enterprise to form and prosper. We prepare the ground for business to thrive. When enterprise prospers we share the bounty, with good wages and benefits for the people who work in the businesses and taxes that provide for the general welfare and for reinvestment in the infrastructure and public structures that keep the system going.
“We fought hard to develop this system and it worked for us. We, the People fought and built our government to empower and protect us providing social services for the general welfare. We, through our government built up infrastructure and public structures like courts, laws, schools, roads, bridges. That investment creates the conditions that enable commerce to prosper – the bounty of democracy. In return we ask those who benefit most from the enterprise we enabled to share the return on our investment with all of us – through good wages, benefits and taxes.”
“Since the Reagan Revolution with its tax cuts for the rich, its anti-government policies, and its deregulation of the big corporations our democracy is increasingly defunded (and that was the plan), infrastructure is crumbling, our schools are falling behind, factories and supply chains are being dismantled, those still at work are working longer hours for fewer benefits and falling wages, our pensions are gone, wealth and income are increasing concentrating at the very top, our country is declining.
“This is the Reagan Revolution home to roost: the social contract is broken. Instead of providing good wages and benefits and paying taxes to provide for the general welfare and reinvestment in infrastructure and public structures, the bounty of our democracy is being diverted to a wealthy few.”
Further, Melvin Goodman, in his book American Militarism: Costs and Consequences, makes the following cogent correlations:
“We in the United States have created a land of illusion. We have the world’s best medical facilities, but also its highest medical costs, and we still lack genuine universal health care coverage.”
“Our corporations and the wealthy classes pay the lowest taxes in the industrial world, but we adamantly oppose raising tax rates that could alleviate one-quarter to one-third of our deficit problem. We have the most expensive and lethal military force in the world, but we face no existential threat; nonetheless, liberals and conservatives alike declare the defense budget sacrosanct. A reasonable reduction in the amount of money we spend on defense would enable us to reduce our debt and invest in the peaceful progress and development of a civilian economy.”
“Those who criticize even these modest reductions fail to recognize that, over the past two decades, the Cold War has ended and the greatest strategic threat to the United States—the Soviet Union—has dissolved. Nevertheless, we barricade ourselves behind a national missile defense, fight wars in which no vital national security interests are at stake, and post hundreds of thousands of troops overseas. U.S. nuclear forces, which have no utilitarian value, remain the same, although President Obama persistently claims to support arms control and disarmament. The United States has become that militarized nation that President Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned against in his farewell address more than fifty years ago.
“The United States lacks a strategic vision for a world without an enemy, and it continues to spend far more on defense, homeland security, and intelligence than the rest of the world combined. We are the only nation in the world that deploys its military primarily to support foreign policy rather than to defend our borders and people. U.S. corporations dominate the sales of military equipment, selling extremely sophisticated weapons to countries such as Saudi Arabia that have the hard currency to pay for them but lack the skill to use them. We have more than 700 military bases and facilities around the world; few other countries have any. We can deploy eleven aircraft carriers; among our rivals only China even plans to deploy one—and that is a revamped Ukrainian aircraft carrier, a carryover from the ancient Soviet inventory.
“U.S. militarization, reliance on the military to pursue foreign policy objectives better achieved by other means, has continued to expand since the end of the Cold War, when we might have expected and experienced a peace dividend. Military expansion during the Cold War, especially during peaks in the U.S. arms buildup against the Soviets and during the Vietnam War, at least had as its rationale the specter of an aggressive Soviet Union. The administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, facing no existential threat, have given the Pentagon an unprecedented position of power and influence, including huge increases in defense spending and a dominant voice in the making of national security and foreign policies. The key contributions to the Pentagon’s enhanced role have been President Bush’s doctrine of preemptive attack and the permanent War on Terror, or the Long War; the misuse of power in Iraq; and President Obama’s initial expansion of the war in Afghanistan. The Bush and Obama administrations have made sure that military figures dominate national security positions, and both administrations have failed to use the tools of diplomacy to deal effectively with foreign policy conflicts in the Middle East or with Iran or North Korea.”
“U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 has brought a new dimension to the national security state: the increase in largely unaccountable security contractors, such as the notorious Blackwater (now brandishing the benign corporate name of Academi LLC), and consulting agencies that act as intermediaries between the federal government and defense contractors. They operate without any apparent code of conduct, and the uncontrolled violence of Xe, another of Blackwater’s incarnations, is well known. Working with these contractors has involved huge payments to consulting agencies managed by former administration officials such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, directors of homeland security Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, and CIA director Michael Hayden.
“More than one-third of the personnel in the intelligence community are private contractors, with the relatively new Department of Homeland Security and Office of National Intelligence relying most extensively on them. Private contracts now consume 70 percent of the intelligence budget, and private contractors represent more than half of the employees at the new National Counterterrorism Center. The overwhelming U.S. presence in Iraq is largely contractual, and in 2011, for the first time, deaths among contractors in Afghanistan exceeded fatalities of U.S. soldiers and military personnel.
“The U.S. reliance on military force has damaged U.S. national interests at a time when the world is facing severe economic stress. The Iraq and Afghan Wars have been costly in terms of blood and treasure, and they have not made America more secure. The war on terror has created more terrorists than it has eliminated, and the war is expanding in the Persian Gulf and Africa, particularly in Yemen and Somalia. The United States is no longer seen as a beacon of liberty to the world, but as an imperialistic bully with little respect for international law. The economic costs of our emphasis on the military have been enormous, coming at a time of necessary constraint for U.S. expenditures and investment policy.”
So… It seems obvious that a wise geopolitical strategy for our nation would be to move rapidly to eliminate our fierce dependence on the filthy and lethal fossil sunlight that resides beneath the feet of other nations’ peoples (a great many of whom we have long made fervently hostile to us by means of our crude theft and callous manipulation), and instead develop the infrastructure from the existing known and proven technologies that harvest that clean safe modern sunlight which pours down on us thousands of times the energy we use every day.
What stands in the way of sanity and self-preservation? The perverse will of a viciously misguided moneyed elite, and the bribery by which they pocket our “public servants”. If we want a future where the word “civilization” applies, we need to get in the way of that insulated and continuing transaction so the public will can be done.