Friedman Follies

More bubble-headed nonsense from Thomas Friedman this week. Friedman suggests that poor public schooling is to blame for the Great Recession. Much as I would like to see public schools improved, I'm inclined to think the opposite; that rich, private schooling is far more to blame. I humbly submit that the evidence weighs rather heavily in my favor. No matter. Let's give Friedman the benefit of the doubt for a moment

What is his analysis?

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “

Yes, Friedman has really touched the salt of the earth here, hasn't he? The comedy continues:

When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

And there we have it, the mantra we've been hearing since the dawn of NAFTA - lacking the skills to compete globally.

First and foremost, witness the astonishing proliferation of educational resources already in existence, most notably vocational schools and certification programs. All of these, by most counts, are very well attended by eager and dedicated students - many of them taking night and weekend classes in the noble quest for self-improvement. Never has America produced more degree-earners and professional certifications.

Next consider the fact that those who have suffered the most from globalization are not the middle-class and educated, but rather factory workers and laborers. These are people whose union jobs went to Mexico and China, and who are left to make a living shelving the toxic output of Shenzhen factories at the local Wal-Mart. No amount of education is going to help them get their jobs back, because they cannot compete with workers in other countries who - having been raised in poverty and employed without any labor protections to speak of (much less health insurance plans or unions) - can be had for a mere fraction of the cost of their American counterparts.

But Friedman, one of globalization's greatest champions, does not inhabit this world. He is instead hopelessly smitten with the pseudo-liberal stance that we must all be diligently honing our skills for the global job market. His example:

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

In other words, lawyers who take initiative are more valued by their firms than those who don't. This is gripping stuff, folks. Absolutely shattering. And then:

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today.

What is astonishing about this is that Friedman thinks that the needs of the top 0.1% somehow parallel those of the other 99.9%, and that they must make use of the same solutions.

Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.

But while corporate lawyers might be able to improve their marketability with another degree or an extra language fluency, these things are not realistic options for the vast majority of workers, no matter how dedicated. There is only so much somebody can get done in one lifetime. And frankly, it is wrong and slightly evil to tell people that they have to hold themselves to such a standard in order to survive.

Ah, but Friedman reveals his true colors towards the end of the piece. Quoting from another member of the aggrieved underclass - a Harvard professor this time - he discloses that:

But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly.

and from this pearl of wisdom concludes, with cunning insight:

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be.

Hence:

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Terrific. Let's review here. Friedman, who deigns to address the causes of unemployment in the "global" marketplace, fails to speak to a single American worker of the sort known by you and me and other human beings. Instead, he saves his column-space for three elites from the Empyrean he happened to email on his Blackberry: an international investor, a Harvard professor, and a "Washington lawyer friend." And based on this Studs Terkel-esque survey of the suffering American public, he concludes, in essence, that their woes result from the crime of being average.

I really wish Friedman would just come out and say it - he hates most of humanity that lies outside his social clique, and can only contemplate their well-being when they try oh-so-hard to be more like him and his pals in D.C. and Harvard; whores, in other words, or as Friedman would have it, creative entrepreneurs. The kind of smiley-faced ass-kissers with which the world already teems to the point of breaking. No, thank you.

Oh, and in cases you missed it, Friedman and his Harvard labor guru have no illusions about what public education actually gets you. It's not an appreciation of the humanities, a sense of history and civic responsibility, nor even a love of books and libraries. No, sir. It's..

...the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills [of those] who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations.

Did you catch that? Deal with government regulations. Technocrats, in other words. Professional rule-followers who can "creatively" market for their employers whilst obeying orders.

This is a world that most of us want no part of. It is not the world that most voters of either political party have asked for. It is a world foisted upon us by people like Friedman's cohorts, who routinely speak of the "changing world" as if it is somebody other than they who is driving the change.

Friedman begins his column by observing that our economic boom was driven by Asian debt and financial trickery, and then spends the rest of it explaining why the perpetrators of this mess should be our role models.

Supreme Court Acts to Prevent Voting Terror

On April 28, The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold Indiana's Republican-sponsored voter ID law (SEA 483). The law requires the presentation of a government-issued photo ID at the polling place before one can cast a vote. For those without a driver's licence, a state issued voter ID is available from the BMV if one can present the requisite materials, such as a birth certificate or a passport. Complaints were filed by Indiana Democrats who claimed that the law disenfranchises voters and discriminates against those with specific political inclinations.

The hysteria about voter fraud has reached a preposterous crescendo in recent years. In some vague, unspecified manner, the fight against voter-fraud is sometimes framed as a corollary effort in the "War on Terror." From the manner in which these concerned by pundits - Republicans, mostly - carry on, you'd think that voter fraud is the greatest threat to American democracy out there today.

While fraud has certainly occurred in the past, the number of votes known to be fraudulent in the modern era are dwarfed in number - we're talking many orders of magnitude here - by the number of votes lost due to ballots invalidated on technical grounds (dimpled chads and the like). Sadly, there is all too little discussion of this very serious problem in the mainstream media. The fact that significant portions of the population are denied the right to have their vote count due to inadequate polling conditions seems to be of little concern to either party. America is too busy shaking in its collective boots as Al-Qaida goes to the polls disguised as your deceased Uncle Jebediah to re-elect Ted Kennedy.

Given this hysteria, it is all the more curious that the Indiana law does not protect against most forms of voter fraud. It contains no provisions which would prevent fraud perpetrated via voter registration, nor does it affect mail-in/absentee ballots. It is only concerned with "in-person voter impersonation at polling places," about which even the Supreme Court majority decision admits, quoting directly, "The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history."

That's right. The law is designed with the exclusive intent of preventing the one form of voter fraud known not to be a threat to the State of Indiana.

The decision begins by explaining that, in determining the constitutionality of the law, the Court must weigh its inconvenience, i.e., the new burdens it places upon voters, against the necessity of preventing the criminality it seeks to eradicate. A direct application of this principle would yield this simple result: some, perhaps many, people will be inconvenienced by a law meant to solve a problem which is historically non-existent. Yet the authors of the majority decision avoid making this self-damning comparison by quickly moving on to discuss, in an obfuscatory manner, the numerous examples of voter-fraud perpetrated throughout American history. Reading the footnotes, however, shows that virtually all of these cases involve fraud through means other than in-person voter impersonation. To cite that specific tactic in any widespread scheme, the Court has to go back to 1868. In modern times, it mentions one - one - confirmed example of in-person fraud in the entire country, during a gubernatorial election in Washington in 2004. The rest of the whopping horde of 19 "ghost voters" in that election voted by mail-in ballot.

In essence, this law is correcting a problem that is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent, and which at any rate could be effectively prevented by asking a voter at the polling site to sign a log-book which matches their signature with the one in the voter registry (as is done every time I've voted here in New York, and as was done in Indiana before the introduction of the voter ID law).

Justice Scalia's own addendum to the decision, while citing a long parade of precedents, essentially makes the point that simply because a new voting regulation happens to inconvenience a certain portion of the populations - even if that is a "protected" population - it is not necessarily unconstitutional if the complaining voter cannot demonstrate discriminatory intent.

This seems like sound (if highly debatable) reasoning, so long as you overlook the clearly discriminatory nature of the law. And yet, what is the purpose of the law, if not to discriminate? It does not prevent any form of known fraud. It is universally favored by one party, and universally opposed by the other. Those most affected by it - the poor, aged, and those otherwise immobile - are those most likely to vote Democratic. It has no conceivable purpose aside from reducing the number of voting Democrats.

The motivations behind the bill become even more transparent when one considers the "remedies" offered to citizens of Indiana under the law's provisions to accommodate those for whom obtaining the free photo ID is either too burdensome, or who find having their image taken to be religiously objectionable. They may, it is stated, cast a mail-in ballot, or, if turned away at the polling site, apply for a provisional ballot. The obvious effect of this law will therefore be an increase in the use of such ballots. As journalist Greg Palast has noted in Armed Madhouse and elsewhere, these types of ballots are far more likely to be discounted as "invalid" due to pernicious technical quibbles (stray marks, and so forth) than ballots filled out on site at the polls. In some districts, they are many times more likely to be thrown out. And these ballots, especially provisional ballots, are cast overwhelmingly by minorities in poor neighborhoods.

This is all part, in other words, of a concerted effort on the part of Republican activists to push Democratic-leaning neighborhoods into less reliable and more frequently challenged (and defrauded) forms of voting to suppress their numbers.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Souter, joined by Justice Ginsberg, notes the following:

...a State may not burden the right to vote merely by invoking abstract interests, be they legitimate [...] or even compelling, but must make a particular, factual showing that threats to its interests outweigh the particular impediment it has imposed. The State has made no such attempt here, and as to some aspects of its law, it has hardly even tried.

Poor, old, and disabled voters may find the trip to the BMV prohibitive. Skeptics who argue that "if you can get out to vote, you can get to the BMV," might want to consider the following: there are far more polling places than there are BMV branches. In many counties, the ratio is 1 BMV for every 12 polling places. In Henry County, there is 1 BMV for 42 polling sites, in Lake County there is one for every 70, and in Marion County, the ratio is 1 for every 75. Many Indiana counties have only very limited forms of public transportation, with 10% of all Indiana voters living in counties that have no public transportation systems at all.

And what of the provisional ballots offered to registered voters who present themselves at the polls without a photo ID, or who object to being photographed on religious grounds? After casting their ballot, the voter must appear within 10 days before a circuit court clerk or a county election board, and sign an affidavit. This must done every time such a person wishes to vote. There is only one county seat in each county. Are those dedicated souls willing to make this journey rewarded by having their votes counted? The text of the dissenting opinion notes the following about the 2007 Marion country municipal elections, held under the new ID law:

Thirty-four provisional ballots were cast, but only two provisional voters made it to the county clerk's office within 10 days[...]All 34 of these voters appeared at the appropriate precinct. 33 of them provided a signature, and every signature matched the one on file; and 26 of the 32 voters whose ballots were not counted had a history of voting in Marion County elections.

This is not some aberration unique to Indiana. Across the country, provisional ballots cast by legitimately registered voters are thrown out by the bucketful. Ditto mail-ins. This is why you hear a lot about them, in glowing terms, from the political Right, and why you will not hear much about the need to increase voter-access to on-site polling sites, longer hours, or weekend polls. They, quite simply and blatantly, do not want certain people to have their votes counted.

This Supreme Court decision is not a matter of some hair-splitting quibble over arcane legal theories. Both the majority and the authors of the dissent invoke a very straightforward and well established principle of relative harms. The simple fact is that the authors of the majority opinion are only pretending to apply it, and the dissenters actually do.

I suppose we should not be surprised. The vast majority of discussions and political crusade that emanate from above in the name of "defending democracy" and "making every vote count" are put forth in the interest of subverting democracy. When, for instance, Hillary Clinton wants to "count the votes" in the Florida and Michigan primaries, which she initially agreed would not count (as did everyone else in the DNC), it's not "democracy" that motivates her, but rather opportunism at the cost of democratic fairness. In the disputed 2000 presidential election, both George W. Bush and Al Gore lobbied the Court, not for "democracy" or "making sure every vote counted, " though both disingenuously claimed that this was their goal, but for a standard of vote-counting that would supposedly work out in their favor (neither candidate actually proposed a state-wide recount of all votes - which not only would have been the most fair proposition, but which, we now know, would have resulted in a Gore victory).

In the case of "voter fraud" the non sequitur between illness and remedy is even more "non." More and more discrepancies between exit polls and outcomes, and reports of long lines, accessibility problems, and other forms of disenfranchisement abound on live television each and every election eve. Yet, where does the discussion always turn, within hours, just as the tension and frustration reaches a crescendo? It's that bogeyman du jour, voter fraud. It's almost as if they want us to believe that the reason the lines are so long, and that so many ballots are thrown out, is that there are so many impostors out there.

If the State of Indiana was truly interested in preventing voter fraud, it would have passed a law that actually addresses it. There are a few common-sense methods for doing this. If the state feels that it needs to lay down stricter requirements, these requirements should be applied to new registrants at the point of registration, not to previously registered, legitimate voters, and they should be phased in over a reasonable period of time. Furthermore, the burden is on the state to maintain the integrity of its own records by, for instance, updating the registry database to match it against a list of recent death certificates. Furthermore, any further legal restrictions on voter registration and identification should logically attempt to minimize reliance on those methods of voting most frequently defrauded, not encourage them, which is essentially what Indiana's law actually does. Even if one were to defend Indiana's Voter ID law as constitutional, one would still be faced with the fact that it is, in practice, counterproductive, since it discourages the use of the least-defrauded form of voting (in-person poll attendance) and encourages the use of methods known to be more easily and more commonly defrauded.

But such incompetence, it appears, is not unusual for the government of the State of Indiana, about which the National Government filed a complaint:

Indiana has failed to conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to identify and remove ineligible voters from the State's registration list; has failed to remove such ineligible voters; and has failed to engage in oversight actions sufficient to ensure that local election jurisdictions identify and remove such ineligible voters.

In other words, because Indiana has failed in its obligation to remove dead-people and non-residents from its voter rolls, it has decided to make voting more restrictive for legal, living residents. This is looking-glass legislation at its best.

Thanks to the Indiana government's laziness, incompetence, and disregard for the needs of its most vulnerable citizens, the most right-wing Supreme Court in memory has been handed the means render "constitutional" the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, a de facto poll tax, thus setting a precedent for the rest of the country to follow.

The Abuse of History

Memory and identity are inextricably interdependent properties. One's memories form the narrative of the self, and one's sense of "self" is the primary means by which one's memories are given meaning in the present. Together, these two properties largely determine the choices we make. The primary complication, of course, is that memory is selective, especially when subjected to the biases of perceived needs. Inconvenient disjunctures in the narrative-of-self may be pruned away from consciousness, left to fall by the wayside. This unfortunate fact of human nature explains why we so often see even bright, well-intentioned individuals marching confidently into the viper's nest.

What is true for individuals is also true for nations when it comes to the question of national memory and national identity. A nation may collectively look to the established narrative of the past for guidance in the present, as well it should. But this only works when the past is correctly apprehended. If the historical narrative is false, decisions in the present will be based on false premises.

In seeking the ultimate narrative of American righteousness, and the requisite belief in the inherent tendency of all the world's cultures to naturally prefer American-style, American-friendly democracy, there is no offering that even comes close to the status of World War 2. Thanks to this particular mythos, conveniently unlike all subsequent narratives of military intervention in that it actually seems to have achieved its stated goals, neo-styled interventionists of all stripes have the ostensibly perfect counter-argument to the claims of American hubris and failure. In the abstract, the narrative includes all of the Axis powers, but inevitably the focus comes to one nation in particular: Japan. If Japan could be "democratized," so the narrative goes, so can the Middle East.

This, in fact, was the subject of a recent speech by President George W. Bush, on August 22 at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention. I will quote from the speech at length, as it is the best recent example of a common misapprehension:

Thank you all for letting me come by. I want to open today's speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack -- and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe.

The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.

If this story sounds familiar, it is -- except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I've described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.

Ultimately, the United States prevailed in World War II, and we have fought two more land wars in Asia. And many in this hall were veterans of those campaigns. Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies, or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world's most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom.

The lesson from Asia's development is that the heart's desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free. Today's dynamic and hopeful Asia -- a region that brings us countless benefits -- would not have been possible without America's presence and perseverance. It would not have been possible without the veterans in this hall today. And I thank you for your service. (Applause.)

What is remarkable here is that every parallel Bush is attempting to draw between imperial Japan and Al-Qaeda is based on a demonstrable fallacy.

Take first the issue of threat. Japan in 1941 was an advanced industrial nation which had already established extensive control throughout East Asia. Al Qaeda is a nation-less organization, with a small handful of members and no centralized organizing principle. While Japan, in fact, may have been capable of maintaining rule over a significant portion of East Asia, there is no chance - none - that Al Qaeda could ever establish a caliphate. Bush is essentially comparing one of the most powerful and organized military powers of the past century to a small handful of extremists, operating on a shoe-string budget. Currently, the cadre responsible for the attacks of September 11th has no representation among any of the numerous groups and factions in combat with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush's narrative is essentially assimilating unrelated parties with disparate aims into a single, fictional "enemy" which, even in its most extreme and encompassing aggregate, is not even remotely as powerful as was imperial Japan.

This brings us handily into the next disjuncture - the scale of American response. If Bush views "the terrorists" in Iraq and Afghanistan to be a threat comparable to imperial Japan, why is there as of yet no draft? No nationwide conversion of industry to the war effort? No war bond drives? Why are we "shopping as usual"?

And what, then, of the motivations of the "enemy", and their initial attack? The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was aimed at a military target, not civilians. The Kamikaze tactics which Bush disingenuously refers to, used later in the Pacific War, were also not "terror attacks" on American civilians, but rather a desperate use of planes-as-weapons against military targets, embarked upon after Japan had literally run out of ammo and had no means of producing more. These are not mere quibbles of fact, they describe an "enemy" whose tactics reveal a mindset utterly unlike that of Al-Qaeda. This is the first of many inconvenient facts which render Bush's narrative suspect.

But there is a much greater disunity looming on the horizon. It can be found here: "Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies."

Right. Who could have imagined that a former ally of the United States and Great Britain, which has fought on the side of the Allies in WW1, and which had been a functioning democracy up to the late 1920s, could possibly become a western ally...um, again?

Let's pause for a moment. Does this last historical tidbit surprise you? It shouldn't. And yet, it seems that the vast majority of Americans are utterly unaware of the few essential facts of Japanese history which would belie Bush's narrative of the "transformation" of a tribal, superstitious society into a modern democracy. Specifically, Japan actually began taking voluntary steps towards democracy as early as the late-19th century. Before the ascendancy of Hirohito, Taisho-era Japan was home to numerous liberal, democratic movements and a functioning parliamentary government. Japan was able to become a democracy again after WW2 because, since the birth of its modern era following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it had always wanted to be one. And not only had it wanted to be one, it had been one, and most living Japanese knew how democracy worked and what it meant. This is a little detail about the "transformation" of Japan by grace of America's help which seems to have been left out of mainstream America's amnesiac consciousness.

Japan's expansionist period began with the Meiji Restoration, and for the half-century that followed, its efforts were supported, both materially and ideologically, by western powers. During this period, the majority of Japan's naval fleet was constructed in British and French shipyards, with occasional contributions from the United States. Japan's ambitions in East Asia were, in fact, deemed beneficial for its Western allies, since they countered similar territorial ambitions by Germany, Russia, and China. This situation began to change in 1919 when Japan, then at a cultural apex of liberalism, tried to make use of its position as a permanent member in the League of Nations to propose a Racial Equality Clause to the League's charter. Unfortunately, this was not a time of progressivism in the United States, Britain, or Australia, all of whom rejected the clause, leading to its subsequent defeat. At this time, the U.S. had been barring Japanese immigrants for over a decade, and President Wilson feared repercussions at home - the clause, after all, could imply equality between whites and blacks. Likewise, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes feared for the future of his "White Australia."

The decade that followed was a complex one, and it is naturally impossible to make sweeping generalizations about the causes of the Pacific War. However, it is difficult to escape the recognition that a contributing factor was the Western attitude to Japan - it was no longer a useful subordinate in East Asia, but was proposing to stand among equals. It was the first non-white nation to do so - and this was deeply troubling to nations which openly professed an ideology of white supremacy.

Then, of course, there is the issue of the character of Japanese imperialism itself, of which the opportunity is never missed to remind us that it was brutal and barbaric in the extreme - in keeping, we are often meant to believe, with some bizarre and otherworldly defect in the Japanese character. Here, too, a little historical perspective can work wonders. Without soft-peddling the nature of imperialism and warfare, we can fairly and accurately point to a few revelatory facts in the historical record.

The fact is that when Japan began rapidly acquiring huge swaths of the Asian continent and the various Pacific Islands, it was not invading sovereign nations, but rather the long-held colonies Britain, France, The Netherlands, and (in the case of the Philippines) the United States. Even Korea had been a "protectorate" of China before Japan's occupation. And while the Western narrative of Japanese imperialism employs a well established litany of graphic atrocities (Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, etc.), all in keeping with the notion that no amount of outrage and disgust is enough when contemplating these horrors, a markedly different tone of cool humility is employed when describing exactly the same sort of atrocities which occurred over a period of centuries at the hands of Western colonialism in Asia and elsewhere. The "Nanjing Massacre," it seems, is to be explained by "barbarism", while untidy events at the hands of British rule like the trade in "coolie labor," or the tens of millions starved to death in India, are an example of why history is "complicated".

The fact is that the victors of World War 2 are sorely in need of an honest reckoning with their past, and that this reckoning has importance far beyond mere reflection and penitence. Without understanding that "enemies" do not arise out of nothingness, that they are, indeed, often former allies, we may come to understand that "we" are not as different from "they" as we like to think - as, in fact, our leaders demand that we believe when beating the drums of war. Such a reckoning might lead us to seek after the "lessons of history" at all times, especially in times of apparent peace. Instead, with our starkly-drawn narratives, in which history is conceived of as a series of unprovoked, unexpected crisis, we are taught to pay attention to the world outside only when there is a crisis - a crisis which is always unexpected, and which we assume to be unprovoked.

This misreading of history relative to WW2 extends far beyond the Pacific War, of course. It is surprising to me, for instance, that I occasionally meet fellow countrymen who are unaware that the Soviet Union, under Stalin, was an ally in WW2. Many more who are aware of this partnership in some academic sense manage to completely overlook the scale of Russian sacrifices in the war when compared to America's. This is not, in any way, to dismiss America's contribution, or to belittle its losses. But a sense of proportion is an extremely important thing for a nation that aims to be world-wide supercop in the present era.

America lost about 420,000 of its own in WW2, the great majority of them servicemen. The Soviets, on the other hand, lost nearly 11 million servicemen, and another 12 million citizens. This means nearly fifty dead Soviets for every one dead American. Nearly two-thirds of everyone who died as a result of WW2 was a Soviet, whereas American deaths count for less than 1% of all worldwide losses. The great majority of Soviet losses occurred in the Eastern front in its battle with Germany. Without the Soviet Union's relentless military onslaught - which dwarfed the combined efforts of the United Kingdom and United States - it is almost inconceivable that Germany's imperial ambitions could have been stopped.

And yet, tragically, this definitive and humbling historical truth remains more or less invisible in modern American narratives of unilateral nation-building and mass-produced democracy. Our leaders still exploit this fantastical picture of American influence in WW2, in which "we" did it largely by ourselves (and, oh, yeah, the British and a handful of reluctant European surrender-monkeys). Given the great unlikelihood that America or Britain would have accepted the massive compulsory conscription which made Stalin's successes possible, and the near-certainty of death that came with it, there is indeed something to be learned about the incompatibility of democracy with absolute military invincibility. To bring to the world a lasting peace, we as a nation must cease the cynical, immoral gamesmanship of Machiavellian power politics, assured of a ready and able default to brute force whenever one of our chess-pieces begins to move from square-to-square of its own accord.

The history that has been hidden from us has been hidden in plain view. It is not the absence of the true narrative, but rather the relentless repetition of the false one that has deceived us. If nothing else, the true history demonstrates the power of spin and propaganda. Japan, a former ally, once deemed inconvenient, become demonized on the home front with some of the most appallingly racist propaganda ever produced for any purpose. By these same methods, truly repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia can be turned into cozy neighbors. Likewise, mediocre crackpots such as Saddam Hussein can be "spun" from angel to demon with each passing decade, and relatively peaceful nations like Iran are portrayed as maniacal and warlike, as the needs and fortunes of American foreign policy change and evolve. We hide our complicity in creating the conditions that come back to haunt us. We continue to exploit a self-serving narrative of Western innocence and benevolence, in which barbarian hordes from faraway lands throw themselves against the walls of our world with malevolence and rancor, and we respond in kind by magically bettering them, by "liberating them." This, then is the alchemy of fictionalized history, the pixie-dust of national self-esteem and hubris. We seem to think it is our national burden to transform base water into blessed wine. We think we are Jesus.

Sicko 2: Moore vs. Gupta

Michael Moore recently went head-to-head with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, over a short, pseudo-journalistic hit-piece crafted by the latter in which Moore is charged with "fudging the facts" in Sicko, his new film about the woeful inadequacy of American health care. Their heated debate on Larry King Live provided little illumination, as both quibbled over figures and source citations. Moore did his best, over the course of five minutes, to refute what amounted to a cheap, underhanded assault on his journalistic credibility, but viewers could easily have come away from the exchange with little appreciation for just how sleazy and manipulative Dr. Gupta's attack on Moore actually was.

What we never got to see was the much-needed debunking of Gupta's piece, which was essentially a series of astonishing non sequiturs unified only by an emotional arc of patronizing cautionary tones. Judging from the strategy taken in this piece - very much in line with what I've seen elsewhere this past week in The New York Times and other publications known for their elitist air of dignified skepticism - the corporate media's spin-strategy regarding Sicko is going to be to 1) admit that the most damning facts are true, and 2) convince the public that the price of correcting them is more than we as Americans would want to pay.

Let's observe how Gupta's short piece, which can be seen here along with the subsequent "debate", accomplishes this. The film begins with a straight-up admission that the U.S. does indeed rank a low #37 in the World Health Organization's world-wide survey for quality of health care. He then continues to show France as #1, Italy at #2, Spain at #7, and the U.K. at #18. But then he "reveals" that Cuba rates a #39, two points below the U.S., as if this fact was somehow concealed in Moore's film (it was, in fact, quite visible on screen). Moore never concealed this fact, nor did he claim that the United States should emulate Cuba except in one noteworthy respect - of "reaching out to our enemies." But right off the bat, we can see that Dr. Gupta is setting up Moore as someone whose sympathies have blinded his capacity for objectivity.

The debate over dollar expenditures on health care in Cuba and the U.S., in which Dr. Gupta calls Moore to task for being "slightly off" in his numbers, is a remarkably disingenuous tactic. Dr. Gupta, a journalist as well as a doctor, must be fully aware of the fact that side-by-side comparisons of per capita expenditures in dollar amounts between vastly different economies are inadequate measures of the actual cost of health care relative to the country in question. In Cuba, one dollar is many magnitudes more valuable to the individual citizen than it is in the United States. I suspect that Moore only brought up the $251 figure (initially quoted erroneously as $25 in Dr. Gupta's piece - probably the work of an inexperienced CNN intern) for Cuba's per capita spending in his film only to illustrate how disparate the two economies are. The point remains completely unchanged if the amount for Cuba is "actually" $229 as Dr. Gupta claimed. The only purpose in bringing these figures up is to attack Moore's credibility - this, even though there is absolutely no substantive difference relative to the argument at hand. At any rate, Moore's charge that Dr. Gupta is using "old data" turns out to be entirely correct - the figures of $6096 per year and $229 per year for the U.S. and Cuba respectively are clearly from the WHO website, which gives 2005 as the date. However, Dr. Gupta's charge is also correct - Moore uses different sources for the U.S. and Cuba figures, and Moore's figures for Cuba are even older, dating from 2003, while his figure for the U.S. is a recent projection of expenditures in 2007. It is possible that Moore considered the 2003 data on Cuba to be "more recent", since it was actually used in the UN's Human Development Report 2006. Moore also explains on his website that "if the Cuban government gave a figure on 2007 projected health spending, we'd have used it" (It is worth pointing out that, in fact, the two Cuba figures appear to show Cuba's health-care expenses trending downwards - either that, or Cuba's economy lost some ground relative to the world economy between 2003 and 2005). But what's truly revealing about Dr. Gupta's "correction" of Moore's figures on Cuba is that they are obviously no more accurate than Moore's, and his attempt to use them as an example of "fudging" on Moore's part is nothing short of low-down character assassination.

The only thing more remarkable about the $229 figure is that, being $22 lower, it makes the U.S.'s performance that much more embarrassing. Moore's recent data on the U.S. demonstrates what has been asserted by policy analysts for some time now; namely, that the cost of health care in the U.S. is growing rapidly ahead of inflation and personal income. Meanwhile, Cuba - a country of comparative poverty and a hobbled industrial base, is able to more or less match the U.S. health-wise. This fact alone should be scandalous - so Gupta's only option in spinning it is to ignore it completely, and distract the viewers (and Moore) with insubstantial quibbles. (In case I hadn't made it clear, this is like weighing an elephant and a hamster, and arguing about whether their weights have been offset by the presence of a flea or two).

But Dr. Gupta's piece only goes from bad to worse on the subject of patient wait- times. Dr. Gupta mentions "non-emergency elective surgery," in which "a study" reveals that Americans have the next-to-least wait time after Germany. He gives no comparative figures (i.e. what is the difference between best and worst - a wide spread or a marginal one?) and also fails to explain why Germany's universal coverage bests the U.S. "That's not something you'll see in Sicko," Dr. Gupta admonishes, referring America's alleged wait-time superiority, "as Americans talk about their lack of coverage, and suffocating red tape." This is truly a dirty tactic. The phrase "non-emergency elective surgery" goes by in a rush, and, juxtaposed as it is against the phrase "That's not something you'll see..." it implies again that Moore has left a crucial flaw in the universal health care systems of other countries out of the picture altogether.

But who did this study, and which countries were involved? The study was done by Commonwealth Fund in 2005, and only six countries were involved. This is exactly the same study Dr. Gupta references a few moments later on, only he doesn't mention until that point that only six countries were involved. In fact, he leaves the viewer with the impression that he's referencing the study for the first time at that later moment - most likely because he wants to imply that the U.S. is second best in the world on non-emergency elective wait-times, not just second best out of the six countries surveyed (here, incidentally, are the six countries involved in the study: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and Germany).

There are some other interesting facts mentioned in the study, which can be found here, that somehow didn't make it into Dr. Gupta's noble fact-finding mission (all text in italics that follows is directly copied from the study):

It singles out the United States for having problems significantly in excess of any of the other five countries.

-"While sicker patients in all countries reported safety risks, poor care coordination, and inadequate chronic care treatment, with no country deemed best or worst overall, the United States stood out for high error rates, inefficient coordination of care, and high out-of-pocket costs resulting in forgone care."

Patients in the United States report the highest number of medical errors.

One-third (34%) of U.S. respondents reported at least one of four types of errors: they believed they experienced a medical mistake in treatment or care, were given the wrong medication or dose, were given incorrect test results, or experienced delays in receiving abnormal test results. Three of 10 (30%) Canadian respondents reported at least one of these errors, as did one-fifth or more of patients in Australia (27%), New Zealand (25%), Germany (23%), and the U.K. (22%).

Patients in the United States spend the most, and get the least access for their money.

As was found in past surveys, the U.S. is an outlier in terms of financial burdens placed on patients. One–half of adults with health problems in the U.S. said they did not see a doctor when sick, did not get recommended treatment, or did not fill a prescription because of cost. Despite these high rates of forgone care, one-third of U.S. patients spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket in the past year. In contrast, just 13 percent of U.K. adults reported not getting needed care because of costs, and two-thirds had no out-of-pocket costs.

But here comes the ultimate humdinger; a trick of editing that is downright diabolical. Dr. Gupta intones: "But in Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the U.S. when it came to waiting for a doctors appointment for a medical problem."

Let's hit the pause button..the big, evil edit is only seconds away. What has Dr. Gupta just said? Let's paraphrase (and remember also that Dr. Gupta has only just now explained that the study only covered six countries, and creates the false impression that this moment is the first time in his report in which the study is cited). Out of 6 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks number five for waiting periods, and Canada ranks 6th. In other words, the other four countries (Dr. Gupta, incidentally, never tells us who those four contries are, lest we learn that it's those crazy socialists somehow besting us again) have less of a waiting time than the U.S.

A perusal of the PDF file available for download at the link above - remember, this is the same study Dr. Gupta used - reveals the following:

-Roughly one-half of patients in the top four countries featured in the study are able to get same-day appointments when sick, compared to only 30% of U.S. patients and 23% of Canadian patients. In other words, the degree by which the U.S. bests Canada in this figure is much smaller than the degree by which it falls behind any of the other four.

-U.S. patients had the highest rate of difficulty in getting care on holidays and weekends without going to an emergency room. Not surprisingly, the U.S. also had the highest rate of emergency-room use for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor.

-While the U.S. and Germany were the only two countries in which more than half of all patients could see a specialist within one month, Australia was a close 3rd at 48%. In four of the six countries, 80% or more of all patients were able to see a specialist within 4 months.

-The U.S has the largest percentage of people (16%) without a regular doctor. The next-highest percentage was only 8%, shared by Canada and Australia.

-The U.S. had the highest number of "coordination problems" with doctors - including duplicate tests and test data unavailable at the time it was needed.

None of this makes in into Dr. Gupta's fair and balanced "fact-check", of course - only the victory-dance about being number two to Germany, and the out-of-context comparison to Canadian wait-times (which, while it may speak ill of Canada's system, clearly does not refute the success of socialized medicine in general).

Now cut to the whopper - testimony from pro-Bush minion Dr. Paul Keckley to the following effect. This is truly mind-blowing:

"That's the reality of those systems. There are quotas, there are planned wait times, the concept is that care is free in France and Canada and Cuba, and it's not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes, and as a proportion of their household income, it's a significant number."

Let's review and reflect. Even though Dr. Gupta is fully aware - because he read the report - that the U.S. lags behind the other five countries in this study in just about every conceivable aspect of patient access, and even though he came right out and said himself that the U.S. is behind these other four countries which have universal coverage (though, importantly, he doesn't say just how far behind), he still puts up this stink pile of a quote from a Bush-ite corporate lackey, for his "expert" testimony that patients in these other countries suffer under the unpleasant burdens of quotas and planned wait times. Dr. Gupta has performed the ultimate spin trick - one that is used in the mainstream media every day, so we should know how to spot it - of telling a little piece of the truth and then deliberately negating it from the viewers' memory by following it with a contradictory statement that appears to not contradict it. It's a kind of sequential elision. This trick been studied by psychologists and practiced by propagandists for decades, and it exploits a well-known weakness in human short-term memory. Observe this sequence:

Canada has a longer wait-time than the U.S...Canada has socialized medicine...socialized medicine involves quotas and wait-periods...obvious implication: socialized medicine will increase your wait-time. The fact that four other countries with socialized medicine bested the U.S. - which Dr. Gupta deliberately refrains from stating to make this tactic more effective (the viewer must infer it on the spot from the statement "only Canada was worse than the U.S.") is now completely erased from the narrative.

And now onto the dreaded high taxes.

Immediately following Dr. Keckley's testimony, we resume with Dr. Gupta's narration:

"It's true that the French pay higher taxes, and so does nearly every country ahead of the U.S. on that list. But even higher taxes don't give all the coverage everyone wants."

And return to Keckley:

"15 to 20% of the population will purchase services outside of the system of care run by the government."

Here is where the rising arc of bullshit reaches its third-act denouement. You can't begin a report with this magnitude of obfuscation, you have to build up to it, by winning the viewer's trust and hypnotizing him with statistical half-truths. TV journalists know very well that the human brain, when presented with a mixture of information and image, will naturally default to the image for the narrative string, rather than the information. They will follow an easy linear progression as opposed to a non-linear inference. And these journalists also know that there is no better way to lie than by telling a half-truth.

Yes, they pay higher taxes overall, but they spend less money on health care, which means that there the cost to the individual of staying healthy is less, not more, regardless of whether or not they are paying higher taxes for free university education, cleaner air and so on.

The frightening beauty of the half-truth, the reason it is such an effective tool for propagating falsehoods, is that it allows the viewer to make - on their own, thereby implicating them in the thought-process and creating the much-needed illusion that they have come to their own conclusion - an incorrect inference based on an established truth. The viewer is shown something he knows to be true (those countries pay higher taxes), and then reaches "his own" unsubstantiated judgment (I will have less money if the United States adopts a system of universal, free health care). What better subterfuge for the conveyance of falsehood is there?

And, finally, we have these words of wisdom from Dr. Gupta.

"So, there's no perfect system anywhere. But no matter how much Moore fudged facts - and he did fudge some facts - there's one everyone agree on: the system here should be far better."

So, Dr. Gupta tells us he is on our side after all. He sympathizes. Only he wants us to give up on the only solution to our problem that has been demonstrably effective. Bereft of any other expert suggestions, the viewer is once again implicitly re-directed (as always) to some mythical "third way" of health-care which never seems to arrive.

"And he did fudge some facts...." Indeed.

(I must correct a statement made in my previous essay on Sicko, in which I claimed that Moore "appears to be wrong" that Cubans live longer, on average, than Americans. The WHO data which I used gave Americans an average life-span of about six months longer than Cubans, as of 2005. Moore's website, however, references data which puts Cubans ever-so-slightly ahead of American - 77.6 vs. 77.5 years respectively. What this tells me is that, in the aggregate, the U.S. and Cuba are in a statistical dead head for longevity, with minor variations each year in which one country moves just slightly ahead of the other. For all intents and purposes, they can be considered equals.)

Sicko: Framing the debate

The primary means by which any governing power structure controls its populace is by exerting influence over the individual thought-process, influencing how the populace perceives reality. The main channels of control are therefore systems of education and public discourse (i.e., the media), and the primary methods are censorship of ideas, and censorship of facts. If one can accomplish the latter sufficiently, there is little need for the former. Discourse can proceed in the form of ostensibly oppositional debate, while the most crucial questions and realities are hidden in plain view.

Control over what the public knows can be enough to prevent certain ideas from taking root. This method has two advantages. The first is that it provides the illusion, on the part of those controlled, that they have arrived at "their own conclusions" on a particular matter, since they have been presented with two seemingly opposed viewpoints and have been freely allowed to evaluate both critically. The second advantage is a direct consequence of the first - because the audience has inadvertently engaged in what may be a false premise underlying both propositions, they have also internalized and taken as implicit fact a concept which, if stated directly and in the plain light of day, might have been open to question. It naturally follows that such a method of control is wielded most effectively when the visibly state-fashioned controls are at a minimum, and the "voluntary" controls of social self-censorship are at a maximum. This provides in one fell swoop the greatest amount of passively-generated social control with the least-penetrable subterfuge. The greater the number of individuals who unknowingly participate in and propagate the false premise, the more effective the control. As for those who do see past the subterfuge - as long as they are either the direct and guiltless beneficiaries thereof, or are unable, due to social standing or problems of credibility, to effectively alter the overwhelming public bias, the power structure is safe and control is maintained.

As noted by Herbert Marcuse and others, advanced industrial capitalism provides a highly effective vehicle for such a system of control. Its ever-heightening pyramid of merged corporate and government entities, its ever-thinning and increasingly osmotic membrane of separation between "public" and "private" (both as a point of social conduct, and as a point of fiscal practice and law), and its uncanny ability to rapidly adapt to potentially threatening expressions of social rebellion by absorbing them into the mainstream in the form of a sterilized phenotype, result in an environment of discourse that is openly hostile to the unpleasant and discomforting work of rational thought.

This is something to keep in mind, in the weeks and months to come, as we witness what will inevitably be a full-frontal assault on Michael Moore's new film, Sicko. It is especially important, because many of the attacks will come not only from industry giants and political operatives whose biases and motivations are transparently obvious (though of course such quarters have already attacked, and will continue to do so), but from well-meaning, intelligent, literate, and dedicated citizens who genuinely (and correctly) fear a government whose "helping hand" so often wears a poison glove. We must not forget that when we speak of an ideal government, or an improved government, that we mean something radically different from the government we actually have - a government that both red-state and blue-state despises with equal fervor, and for largely similar reasons (though this may not at first be apparent).

That being said, there is no greater public service than the destruction of a widely-held myth. This form of pointed demolition transcends any specific ideology, amounting as it does to a fundamental assertion of the right of all individuals to think and know. Moore's latest film is just such a salvo. Its purpose is to nullify oft-repeated American popular myths about health care as it is practiced in other countries, by providing vivid counter-examples.

What his film does not do, which we should acknowledge up front (because these straw men will surely appear, and Moore will be unfairly blamed for being "deceptive"), is to argue that socialized medicine is a panacea, in which our current problems are magically solved, or that Western Europe enjoys hassle-free health care. Sicko is a demonstration of what is possible, not a comprehensive portrait of what is.

This then is as good a place as any to look at the facts as they stand. We have often heard, from critics and pundits of all stripes, that it is very easy to "lie with statistics." This point is made so often, that we are sometimes loath to admit that we can also tell the truth with them. It is a question of making reasonable comparisons, falsifiable statements, using consistent standards, and then placing them in their proper context.

I refer you now, and hasten anyone who wishes to make an informed commentary on this debate, to visit the official website of the World Health Organization, and click on the tab for "countries." Here is where any admirer or skeptic of Moore's essential thesis - that the American Health Care Industry is a sham deal and that other countries of comparable wealth are able to provide more effective coverage at a lower cost - can put his claims to the test. This should be the starting point for any debate on the subject: pro and con should first generally agree upon the facts as they stand, and only then proceed to debate an effective strategy for dealing with them. It must also be understood that the truth of Moore's thesis depends upon the aggregate of the evidence, and is not disproved by a small minority of exceptional examples.

It will be interesting to see how often this data is mentioned in mainstream debates about Sicko. I seriously doubt that any reputable scientist would actually refute all or most of the WHO data. However, it is quite likely that few major outlets will engage with it directly at all - they will instead complain that Moore's examples of abused and neglected patients in the Unites States are not "representative." This is the most common of straw men - Moore does not in fact claim that they are representative, but rather bemoans the fact that they could happen at all - especially as a natural outcome of the system as it operates normally, as opposed to an aberration in a system that is operating abnormally. They are included here not as representative examples but inevitable examples. He is demonstrating that the system, when operating normally, produces a significant minority of such cases. (This is a very important distinction to remember, whenever someone throws up a catastrophic example of health-care negligence from, say, Canada, in an effort to degrade the debate so that it appears to amount to little more than mutual "cherry-picking").

Such strategies of attack against Moore are also in keeping with the almost surreal stubbornness of American mainstream media in its imposition of a kind of statistical isolationism upon policy discussions of any kind (in essence, a pathological unwillingness to measure our prospects for social problem-solving against similar problems faced in other countries, as well as the possible merits of the solutions proposed for them). This is a dangerously disingenuous tactic for a society so firmly committed to imposing its own social models upon the world beyond its borders. While it occasionally leaks through that European and Asian countries far surpass America in terms of the quality of public education and environmental policy (and now, thanks to Moore, in health care), it is apparently still impermissible to ask, in any public forum, "how do they do it?". And any suggestion through mainstream channels that we might try to emulate them amounts to public political suicide. It seems that the illusion of American superiority in all things is an illusion still too cherished to be widely challenged. This is perhaps Sicko's most valuable contribution: it dares to suggest that we, as a society, might benefit from a little more humility.

But let's return to that WHO data. If you have IE7, you can easily use the "tabs" feature to do side-by-side comparisons of the United States to any other country listed on the WHO website. Let's look at Moore's most impressive claims. Do Canadians live 3 years longer? Click along with me...yes, they do. Is their child mortality rate lower? It is. Do they spend less on health care - hold on, we must be careful with this question. We cannot necessarily use dollars, even with the "international $" which lists the per-capita expenditures of each country on health care, because it will not actually provide us the answer to what we are looking for. We want to know how much it costs one country relative to itself to pay for their health-care system. The better figure to use is "% of GDP". So...do Canadians pay less? Hell yes.

Do the French live longer? Less child mortality? Less a % of GDP? Yes, yes, and yes. The British? Yes, cubed. We are not talking about statistically negligible differences, either, but about longer lives of two or three years. We are taking about 10 to 30% reductions in child mortality (given in numbers-per-thousand). We are noting that while the U.S. spends %15.4 of its GDP on health care, the next-highest expenditure is around 10%, and it goes down from there. At this point it seems as though, since we're willing to spend so much on health-care, we could easily blast the rest of the world out of the water by spending it correctly, should we chose to do so.

But, does it hold true elsewhere? Indulge me as I do some more tab-clicking. Here goes the backwards-alphabet challenge: Switzerland? Yes. Sweden? Yes. Spain? Yes. Switzerland spends 11.5% of its GDP - quite a bit above the others but still well below the U.S. In all three countries, I'm seeing life-span gains of 3 or 4 years, and child mortality rates that nearly halve the U.S.'s. Sweden does halve them, while spending only 9.1% of its GDP.

Perhaps the S's are lucky. I continue. Poland? Worse, at a third of the cost. Norway? Yes - better and cheaper. Ditto Netherlands. And Luxembourg. Italy, too, similarly leaves us in the dust. Also Ireland. Iceland, as well, kicks our ass. Hungary, however, does worse, if that makes anyone feel better. Greece - much poorer than the U.S. - does better. Germany does better. This is getting a bit boring....but I press on. Finland is better. Denmark has the same life-expectancy, but far fewer dead children and half the cost. Czech Republic does worse than the U.S. Belgium is better and cheaper.

In almost every case since the S's, we are looking at drastically reduced rates of child mortality(30-60% lower), longer life-spans by at least 2 years (and more often 3 or 4 years, with the difference especially noteworthy among women), and GDP figures that almost never peak 10%, and are usually about half of what we spend in the United States.

Now, of course, there is much more to Europe than the countries listed above. And, indeed, as we continue East, into regions of significantly less wealth, we do find numerous countries where the public health statistics are quite a bit worse than in the United States. But the fact remains that, not only are we surpassed by every comparable Western economy, we are matched by several poorer countries.

Well, what about our dreaded enemy, Cuba? Surely Mr. Moore was fibbing when he said Cuba has bested us? Let's look:

CUBA:

Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 75/79


Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2002): 67/70


Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 7


Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 128/83


Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2004): 229


Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2004): 6.3


UNITED STATES

Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 75/80


Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2002): 67/71


Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 8


Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 137/81


Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2004): 6,096


Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2004): 15.4


Moore appears to be wrong that Cubans live longer. We live longer, by about six months. But, alas, our child mortality rate is still higher. And we find that, by spending only 6.3% of its GDP, Cuba essentially matches the U.S. in terms of the basic health indicators of it citizens.

These, then, are the facts as they stand. Our health care system is appallingly expensive, and it returns meager results. Any honest debate on the topic must address this data. If it does not, it is not an honest debate, and facts are being withheld for the purpose of controlling the debate. If we hear the charge that socialized medicine is associated with higher taxes, we can now rightly rebut that this is "guilt by association." Whatever other expenditures exist in these countries, the cost of health care is less.

We must also be on guard against the charge that single-payer health care reduces "choice." While I have no doubt that this could be the case in some countries, the only relevant question is whether it is necessarily so. There is clearly no reason why it must be so, especially when so many other countries accomplish such remarkable results while spending so much less than we do. We should be able to provide exemplary universal health care to every single American, and make private, "luxury" services available to those wealthier individuals who simply "must have it."

Take, for example, the French system, as recently lauded in a radically left-wing publication called Business Week:

France relies on a mixture of public and private funding, as does the U.S. But unlike Americans, every French citizen has access to basic health-care coverage through national insurance funds, to which both employers and employees contribute. Some 90% of the population also buys supplementary private insurance to provide benefits that aren't covered, and the government picks up the tab for those out of work who cannot gain coverage through a family member. "We pay higher taxes in France, but at least we get something for our money," says Leslie Charbonnel, an American who has lived in Paris for two decades.

The key to France's success is that its system, like the U.S.'s, values patient choice and physician control over medical decision-making. But France does it for far less, with per capita health-care spending in 2004 at just $3,500, compared with $6,100 in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. All told, France spends 10.7% of gross domestic product on health care, vs. 16.5% in the U.S.

Keeping Rates Low
"The French model suggests that you can have universal coverage without relying totally on the state, without restricting patient choice, and without abolishing private medical practice and the insurance industry," says Victor G. Rodwin, a professor of health policy and management at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

(The article also notes that the UK's health care system is problematic mess, a perception which I'm sure many of Moore's critics will be quick to assert. So be it - at least it is a mess which provides longer lives and healthier children than our mess currently does).

Here is another charge which we must be on guard for - that the higher cost of health care in the U.S. is somehow related to our being on the "forefront" of medical research from which the entire world benefits. That we are at the forefront is an arguable point and worth considering, but, unfortunately for those professional obfuscators wishing to scare the public away from demanding socialized medicine, medical research accounts for only 5.5 cents out of every health care dollar. (Source). Forefront or not, research cannot account for our bloated expenditures on health-care.

Ultimately, the debate about U.S. health-care will bump up against a greater, uncomfortable truth, one which - unless meticulously handled by corporate spin doctors, employing endless smoke and many well-placed mirrors - threatens to undermine edifices aside from those erected by the health care industry. Namely, that even our most basic assumptions about our rights and privileges as Americans in a free society have been bought up and cashed in by a corporate class whose greed is unbounded, whose reach of power has penetrated and assimilated every public institution we deem essential to the democratic process, and which continues to manipulate the very means by which we perceive reality itself. We, as a nation, may soon be approaching a "blue pill vs. red pill" moment of public consciousness.

Outing the L-Word, Part 3 - What is Money?

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

We wish to live in a world where our wages have some objective meaning, and are not simply reflections of unthinking market relativism. But we live in an age of post-modern money, in which our currency - be it paper, plastic, or figures recorded in computer memory - serves as a re-writable "open text" for those to whom the world's treasuries are entrusted. Its value can be altered by decree, trimmed and nudged with exacting precision in studied correlation to events throughout the world marketplace. As international banking is now completely reliant on electronic credit, we find that money is only sustained as a fact of reality by our own collective belief in it.

And yet, the bills and coins in our pockets feel so damn real. They work flawlessly for their intended purpose in our daily lives, and in these functions they are irreplaceable. Who has not at some point lost a $20 bill to a wayward breeze, and experienced that unique form of despair as it flutters away? In the backs of our minds, we know that the paper itself is worth next to nothing, but that what it represents is something intimately connected to our lives as individuals. It is for this reason that tax-time is such an emotionally difficult period for us - we feel (correctly) that something essential to our livelihoods is being forcibly extracted from us.

We console ourselves with the belief that the government need to take "our" money to pay for the many social services that keep society going. But, how much must it take, and what stops it, in principle, from taking much more than it currently does? In these moments, we might be inclined to sympathize with the Libertarian position that, in essence, all taxation is theft, and that as long as we as a people submit to compulsory taxes, we have engaged in a Faustian deal whereby no moral imperative exists to prevent our total exploitation by the IRS - that only their scruples stand between us and forced poverty.

The Libertarian argument with regards to taxation and money is attractive because, in its talk of gold-standards and de-regulation, it seeks in principle to restore objectivity - a very important word here - to the currency we use. Surely, they say, the dollar must reflect something beyond the mere whims and machinations of social engineering. It must measure some aspect of reality that exists outside of government designs. This would then provide an epistemological basis by which the concept of currency could be once again directly wedded to the notion of rights.

Let us examine the word "objectivity," and then, in seeing how it applies to money, determine if the Libertarian arguments regarding currency (and our right to possess it in any amount, no matter how extremely huge) do in fact lead to greater objectivity. Specifically, is the money we earn a true and accurate measure of our rights to procure goods and services from society, in all cases? The crucial thing to keep in mind here is this: for the Libertarian argument to be epistemologically and ethically correct (ethically, because money is a direct expression of the fact that we participate in a social contract), the absolute value of a dollar at any moment would have to be more than an emergent fact of "the marketplace." It would need to be an objectively accurate measure of the means by which the dollar was earned. If a dollar does not accurately represent, for any holder of that dollar, a reasonably precise measure of the work that went into procuring it, then the dollar is not an objective measurement, but rather a structurally mutable fiction that changes its meaning with every human palm it graces. This latter scenario might benefit certain individuals and harm others, but, most importantly, it robs money of any possible ethical meaning.

What would make currency a socially objective measurement of work? And what exactly do we mean by "objective"? When we say that something is "objectively" true - we do not necessarily mean "true" with a capital "T." What the term literally means is this: that there exists an external referent, some standardized unit of measurement, by which the properties of different objects or situations can be compared to one another. "I am tall" is a subjective truth - it is true when I compare myself to other people, but not true when I compare myself to buildings. "I am taller than most children" is objectively true, because I can in principle use a ruler (external referent) to prove it. Likewise, "I am rich" is a subjective statement - it's true if I compare myself to a citizen of Cambodia, and untrue if I compare myself to Bill Gates. It is objectively true that Bill Gates has more money than I do.

BUT...

While it is objectively true relative to monetary currency, the standard of measurement, is it objectively true relative to what money measures, i.e., the extent of one's social entitlements in exchange for the work one has performed? Specifically, do our differences in wealth accurately correlate, with unitary consistency, to what we actually deserve to procure from society with our wealth? This is what we need to remind the Libertarian: if it is not accurate relative to the x property that money measures, then the statement that "Bill Gates is richer than me" approaches tautology. (Imagine that I measured my height with a ruler whose inches changed length every day according to perturbations in the metric system overseas, and that someone who was only a head taller than me found that his "inches" were one-tenth as long as mine - meaning he is more than 10 times as tall!). Sure, he has more money, but does this money accurately represent his entitlements from society? Likewise, does poverty accurately reflect the social entitlements of the impoverished?

There is one other aspect of objectivity which is crucial, but which is often overlooked - the properties being measured and the external referent itself must exist within the same frame of reference. Let’s take brief diversion into physics to illustrate this point. In physics, we say that d=rt (distance equals rate times time). Most of us experience a world easily described by Newtonian mechanics because we co-exist in the same frame of reference. Moving at essentially the same rate relative to one another, standing as we do on the same earth, we avoid any of the "relativistic distortions" predicted by Einstein and can proceed through our entire lives without ever realizing or caring that Newtonian mechanics do not, in fact, describe the world as it is, but rather only as it seems to be within our own frame of reference. Does that mean that it is not objectively correct? No - not if we take "objective" to mean what it should mean; that there may be posited a standardized frame of reference by which differing individual traits may be measured. As long as the frame of reference remains consistent, then the standardized measurement will measure accurately.

Many physicists, however, have bemoaned that the Theory of Relativity is improperly named, because what it in fact reveals about the nature of the cosmos is that there are limits not predicted by Newton's physics. Specifically, that the speed of light is the ultimate standard of measurement. It is not just a "speed limit" - it is the point at which matter and the energy used to move reveal themselves as different aspects of the same property (which is why nothing other than light can move that fast). As we approach light speed, vast amounts of energy are required to produce exponentially smaller increments of increased velocity. Likewise, as objects become more massive and dense, they exert a greater gravitational pull, and the rulers with which we measure our ledgers bend along the contorted contours of space itself. At some point, Professor Hawking intones that we are "crushed to spaghetti."

We can, of course, pretend that Newton's d=rt applies everywhere at all times, and that we can move many times faster than light-speed if only we apply enough force to our chosen vehicle. We can decide to be ignorant, and calculate how much energy is required to reach Sirius B (8.6 light years away) in just under an hour. We could run the numbers - the math works just fine! And we could even chose to believe it. But it would be wrong. The math may work, but the numbers do not describe reality, because the extremes of speed and energy have changed the frame of reference, rendering the traditional means of measurement objectively useless.

How is this dealt with? The only way that it can be - "relativistic" equations are integrated into the Newtonian calculations, to accurately compare one frame of reference to another. Hence, we can calculate that greater and greater expenditures of energy are needed to produce ever smaller increases in speed, and no amount of energy will push a physical object up to the speed of light. These distortions are exponential in nature - the faster you go, the more the traditional measures of time and distance lose accuracy.

Might not something similar apply to monetary currency as an ethically viable measure of social entitlement? While the mathematical possibilities provided by capitalism, and its ability to produce exponentially greater gains upon larger amounts of wealth - to literally use money to buy more money - are technically limitless, does this mean that they are ethically limitless? If money, an immediate expression of our participation in a social contract, is premised on a limited frame of reference, might there not be, in principle, an objective limit to how much money one can ethically retain? Say, even, a maximum wage?

This of course depends entirely on what the x property is that money is truly intended to measure. If we accept the principle of the social contract - of which we give implicit approval by virtue of our participation in society - and we accept as well that the purpose of this contract is to establish and defend those qualities we deem to be intrinsic and inalienable by virtue of our being human (For what other purpose would the social contract exist except to say "We hold these truths to be self-evident"), then the x property must be an essential property, i.e., something accounted for by money but not created by it. The x property must then be a thing which predates all organized economies, all currencies and indeed all technology, and strikes down to the fundamental, raw core of the human condition, to the fact that we are thinking animals for whom food and shelter is not God-given. It speaks to the expenditure of a resource that, as individuals, is for us always limited: the strength of our mortal bodies, the attention and focus of our mortal minds, and the limited time on this earth we have to make our best use of them. It is that very thing every human does, as a fundamental assertion our right to be alive - our labor.

Labor, it bears repeating, and not work. Work is simply a term from physics which refers to anything that results from a productive expenditure of energy. There is no human referent in work. Labor is work performed by a human being. Social value is predicated upon human value, because society is predicated upon the human individual ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"). The social contract establishes itself as a frame of reference, and the human being is the standard of measurement. If monetary currency is to accurately measure the social value of labor, then it must do according to a human scale. A necessary corollary of this is that an individual human life is a thing of fixed value in any social frame of reference. This is what is meant by the term "inalienable." Our labor is therefore also of fixed value in any frame of reference with reference to the individual performing it, since his mortality - the principle and defining fact that his time and energy is limited - is an unalterable and essential feature of being human. Clearly, not every human being is capable of performing the same amount of labor, same quality of labor, or living the same life-span. Abilities and constitutions vary, but the degree of variability is limited. The essential biological differences between the wealthy and the average are marginal (in that there is more overlap than difference - a defining necessity for any single species). It is social circumstance which varies the most.

If the Libertarian argues that, in a free-market capitalist economy, earnings reflect literally and absolutely the actual value of one's labor, then he has walked into a tremendous self-contradiction, because the every defense made of "the market" and its invisible hand, the very "trick" that makes the capitalist mechanism function, is premised on the observation that wages and prices fluctuate according to circumstance. There is, in fact, no objective correlation of wages to labor per se - wages and prices are defined relative only to other prices and wages. They are the products of the economic system and its collective activity. And yet the social contract requires that we participate in this scheme of floating relative values, even though we know ourselves as men and women to be of fixed inherent worth, and the expenditure of our mortal energy to be of fixed and inherent worth to us.

Monetary currency and the values it measures are defined are purely relational properties, but the social contract that makes the economy possible is premised on a constant value - the fixed x property that defines the relationship between our labor and ourselves. How do we account for it in monetary terms? And how does this lead to a measurement of the social value of labor? Values, unlike dollars, are not simply things which exist to describe relationships between human beings - as if human beings exist in a bubble utterly separated and alienated from the natural world as a whole (though in fact the Bible does imply this). They do more than merely describe the opinions and feelings of people relative to one another. But what is the “external referent” by which society establishes a set of objective values? Theologians would like to suggest that it is God, perhaps because a fictional being (and He is fictional, even if real, as we can only know him through our imaginations) may be invented to suit the fancies of an elite, and hence "objective" facts may also be shaped to suit that elite. But in fact, values are inescapably predicated upon the world in which we must live, and the labor which must be exerted to survive it. Values are about the status of the human relative to other humans and the earth. As society alters through history, and the earth changes, the base-line by which we provide the standard of measurement of the social needs of a human life changes relative to history - but the fact that we are locked, as an objective fact of reality, into this earth-society relationship persists. It is our "relativistic equation" whose variable terms may change with time, but whose essential statement about our relationship to reality is fixed.

An individual's value to society is predicated upon the value of the human to himself. It is the relationship of the individual to the earth which renders one's value to oneself absolute. In a "Newtonian" moral world, an individual whose "value" is measured relative to society - as distance, rate and time are measured solely in relation to Cartesian space - would logically and necessarily become less valuable in direct proportion to the extent to which the world population grows. But let us accept, instead, the following - that a human life, like the weightless energy that hurtles through time and space, is a constant property of constant value in any frame of reference, that a human life is worth a human life, and that this is the case irrespective of how many human lives there are.

What this implies is not that we should enjoy a "common wage" of utterly flat redistribution. What it does mean is that the fundamental Enlightenment values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution provide, epistemologically and morally, a defensible social imperative to limit the extremes of wealth and poverty(It is no coincidence that, for the first 100 years following the creation of these documents, corporations were viewed as a social resource which had to be created by public charter, and whose activities were heavily regulated).

And here is the ultimate Libertarian trap. If monetary earnings are purely a relational, emergent phenomenon of market circumstance, without absolute value, then there is no morally absolute imperative protecting them from taxation. But, if monetary earnings do reflect an absolute property, that property can only derived relative to a concept of rights, which are premised on the indivisible self-worth of the individual and his inalienable traits as acknowledged under the social contract, and this necessarily extends to that individual's right participate in society's collective responsibility to set laws and limits. Hence, there is still no absolute moral imperative protecting the individual from taxation. Furthermore, it naturally follows than, human life and being of fixed value, and the social contract requiring equitable recognition of this fixed value, the extremes of wealth and poverty - because they distort the frame of reference upon which all rights relative to society depends - results in the exponentially increasing divergence from ethical accuracy of the monetary unit. Which means that the very notions of rights which make money ethically viable in the first place also require that society make "relativistic adjustments" to correct for the extremes of wealth and poverty, in the form of welfare and progressive taxation.

If a human being's ability to eat, drink, clothe, and shelter himself (all of which do not require participation in an economy in any "natural" state) have been taken from him, because he cannot afford to do these things in the society in which he lives, then society has stolen from him his means to a livelihood, and owes him something in return as a matter of contractual reciprocity. The money in his pocket (if any) is no longer an objective account of his worth as a human being, because his worth as a human being, the fact of his being as a biological entity, requires that he have the means to procure these survival necessities.

At the extremes of mass and energy, space itself literally changes shape. Time passes more slowly for the affected observer relative to the cosmos as a whole. The extremes of wealth and poverty produce similar distortions, rendering the otherwise-trustworthy standard of currency - objective enough a measurement of our social entitlements and expenditures of labor in a middling frame-of-reference, bereft of the severe suffering or decadent luxury - an ineffectual measure of that property it is meant to account for. I can rightly say that no one owes me food, because I can buy food whenever I need it. I cannot say the same of someone who is starving in a Libertarian utopia; they did not choose this society, therefore society owes them the means to their humanity. This should not be a matter of "charity," which is freely given, non-binding, and a matter of personal preference for the giver. It is a matter of necessary social compulsion. A social contract is meaningless if individual members of society may choose, for themselves, whom they wish to recognize as human and who they do not - and the allowance of human starvation is nothing if not a failure to recognize the victim as a human being on a fundamental, biological level.

There is a point at which personal wealth exceeds, far exceeds, any viable mortal index. When a human is as wealthy and powerful Olympian diety, or as impoverished as a captive zoo creature, they have fallen off the scale, out of the frame of reference upon which money depends to be a viably objective measurement of social entitlement.

This principle can be demonstrated empirically, with real world examples. If the Libertarian thesis were correct, then the wealth of any individual, no matter how great, is justified if that individual earned it legally, in the pursuit of free-enterprise. The assertion suggests, for instance, that the highest-paid CEOs in the world deserve what they were paid on the simple basis that, were their services not "worth" that amount, they would not be paid that amount. The allowances of the marketplace are thereby justified, and any taxation or regulation of this personal income amount to theft. But keep in mind that the Libertarian defends this position not solely on the grounds of non-interference in a private contract. The Libertarian is no mere anarchist. No, the Libertarian asserts that society's "most productive" individuals deserve their wealth - and the tacit approval thereof in the eyes of society. The obvious implication is that there is a social value to individual productivity (which is surely true), and that the monetary reciprocity provided by the social contract in the form of standardized currency guarantees that the individual is receiving his proper due, that he has already "done right" by society by accomplishing whatever it is that earned him the wealth in the first place. The extent of his wealth is therefore a prima facie demonstration of social equity.

If this were true, of course, then the higher CEO payments would result in a corporate culture which produces results, i.e., the best products. And yet any glance at the world market today demonstrates that this is not the case. In Sweden, the typical CEO earns about one-third of what an American CEO earns. In Japan, it is closer to one-fifth. And yet, Japan and Sweden produce some of the most successful and innovative companies in the world (Saab, Volvo, Pfizer, IKEA, Honda, Toyota, Sony, and so on). Japanese cars now outsell American cars in California. Japanese companies have provided innovation and quality, whereas their higher-paid CEO counterparts, despite all the "incentives" they recieve from their higher pay, are mired in backwards thinking. What should be obvious is this - CEO pay in America bears at best marginal, and at worst no relationship to what that individual has produced for society, and is entirely a product of the closed system - the isolated corporate culture - which determines it of its own volition. If the individual does not "deserve" his vast piles of wealth in the eyes of society, why should be entitled to spend it freely in society?

The contradictory philosophical groundings of modern Libertarianism will be the subject of “Outing the L-Word Part 4: Objectivism.”

For some illuminating information CEO salaries in the U.S., in comparison to the world at large, I recommend the following paper. I do not endorse of all the views expressed herein, and find fault with some of the analysis provided in the second half. Nonetheless, the first half of the paper provides a concise store of data tables, and correctly grounds discussion of the issue in the concepts of social reciprocity and fairness.

Outing the L-Word, Part 2: Nature, Power, and Hierarchy

While there are many strains and sub-categories of Libertarianism, each with their own distinct epistemology and nuances, there is one common argument that is shared by all: that laissez-faire capitalism is the most "natural" of all economic systems and that, by extension, systems of redistribution such as communism and socialism are the most "artificial." This argument is sometimes implicit, and sometimes it is quite overt. The purpose of this essay will be to discuss why it is wrong, and to further explain why the way in which it is wrong can lead us to a better, more consistent philosophical construct in defense of social democracy.

It should be clear that, at this point in the game, such a construct is sorely needed. While pundits both left and right are able to appear in various public forums, armed with reams of data and legions of pie-charts in defense of their various positions on pragmatic or empirical terms, only the free-market Right seems able to speak confidently from principle. The mainstream Left, if it is to be truly progressive (which I mean in its most literal sense of aiding human progress), must have a platform and strategy more imaginative than simply waiting for the Right to fail, pointing out the failure, and then "solving" the problem by being slightly less vicious. In the present era, the mainstream Left acquires power when the outrages of the Right leave voters no other choice, and they never retain the confidence of the public for very long because, intellectually, they have become fundamentally vacant. The Left (or those politicians who claim to speak for it) no longer knows why it believes what it believes. The Right does "know," which is why they, even when in the minority, will retain a hold on the American imagination that the Left has long relinquished.

This question is deeply relevant now. We have long lived with the notion - undertaken and popularized in earnest from the outset of the cold war and peaking during the Reagan era - that the American economic system is the most natural and God-given, and that the more taxes are cut, public utilities privatized, and business de-regulated, the more closely we approach some state of grace and harmony with the natural order of things. The rising and falling of the stock-market - is this not like the ebb and flow of the tides? The cycles of the moon? Do not the patterns of the market resemble the gentle respiration, the self-correcting perturbations of the natural world? In this context, we are meant to see the planned economy as something of a straight-jacket, a cage, a crude and mindless apparatus whose purpose is to prevent the growth of life in all its glorious chaos and serendipity. This transfixing vision has a hold on the discourse and platforms of both our major political parties.

But let us blink away the pixie-dust for a moment, and consider an alternate possibility: that capitalism, even in its most laissez-faire and "de-regulated" form, is every bit as much "artificial" as Stalinist communism. I am not making an argument about moral equivalence here, nor am I using the term "artificial" in some pejorative sense. I mean, quite literally, that both economic systems are invented, planned, regulated, and can only function by means of an imposed consensus, i.e., by force. Neither represents an integration of the "natural order" into the lives of humans, though the idea that capitalism does is extremely powerful. This explains why, in America, we are loath to challenge it directly. (If it seems that, on this last point, I am smearing the mainstream with a rightward brush, consider Clinton's widespread popularity with the mainstream Left not in spite of, but rather because of an economic policy more rightward than that of any other post-war president).

It makes sense, of course, that proponents of any economic ideology would want to propose that their system is the most "natural." The west, even at its most modern and secular, is still a culture whose psychology is deeply embedded in Christian mythos, and so our notion of "progress" is often inextricable from the pursuit of Eden on Earth. The struggle towards the ideal economic system, in some sense, registers in the American psyche as a struggle to overcome our spiritually fallen human reality. The old-guard Left is equally guilty of this fallacy, from Rousseau onwards.

The problem for both wings is that no economic system is "natural" because money is not natural. Any economic system is an artificial system, because it must be established and maintained by some degree of force, and relies on a dominant cultural ideology in order to function. Nor can there be any delusion of being able to approach "naturalness" in a structured economy, as if it were some untouchable but virtuously compelling asymptote towards which we might nobly bend. It makes no more sense to talk of degrees of "naturalism" than it does to parse the distinctions between degrees of death. Once you are no longer alive, the possibility of nuance goes right out the window. By the same token, no human societal invention can properly claim greater "naturalness" over any other.

The question in fact is not one of naturalism versus artificiality, but rather one of scale and structure. The moment we begin to organize society according to standardized concepts and abstractions - of which money is one, and the means of distributing and routing it another - we are dealing in artifice. The difference between a capitalist economy (whether ideal, as in the Libertarian model, or actual, as in the American model) and communism as it has been practiced in its many forms, is to be found primarily in the nature of consolidated power, i.e, where and to what extent it is consolidated. Giant corporations and powerful, authoritarian governments internally function according to similar principles of hierarchy. Office politics and government politics use the same social skills and delegation of power through a chain of command. The difference is this - in a capitalist economy, several powerful corporate bodies are rivals, and in statist-communism, one supreme governing body retains an unrivalled monopoly over all resources.

In the modern era, the perceived differences in social permissiveness (free-speech, etc.) between American and Soviet (or Cuban, or even North Korean) society are as attributable to such differences in scale as they are to any supposed cultural tradition of free expression (for, in fact, Americans seem to have internalized so much of the corporate/managerial mindset that self-censorship is possibly the greatest threat to free expression in America today, even and especially among journalists and other framers of public opinion). Much of what remains of our "social freedom" lives between the gaps, narrowing though they are, not currently covered by the numerous corporate and state entities vying competitively for domination. To wit, we might most accurately view American capitalism at the turn of this century as a rivalry between a modest handful of competing totalitarians, whose only check against complete domination over civic life is to be found in the energy they must exert in warfare against one another, and with what remains of our ever-diminishing legal protection against them in the form of government - itself an increasingly corporate entity. The skeptic who doubts this proposition need only consider the almost incomprehensible vastness of energy, resources, intellectual talent, and sheer time and space expended in the realm of pubic discourse by corporations to get every living citizen to think like they do. He or she need only observe how much of this discourse is about the orchestration of dreams, desires, and other preternatural murmurs as opposed to the discussion of empirical fact. And then the skeptic must finally observe that the remaining 1% of this discourse which happens to be somewhat factual is there only because extensive legal regulations still exist which prevent - sometimes - the most harmful and egregious confabulations from passing muster. For now. Even if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are willing to say "when," can anyone rationally doubt that there now exist many corporate overlords willing to seize and exploit any opportunity for greater power over society that presents itself? To whom citizenship and fairness are pitiable abstractions for the feeble-minded and weak? Or are we to assume that, Enron and Halliburton aside, megalomania is a true rarity even among billionaires capable of buying influence in the world's most powerful governments? Of taking over the role of government itself? Considering these question in the light of the evidence presented by our daily lives, by the billboards and commercials and endless parade of banners, by the outsourced "reconstruction" of obliterated societies, does it not seem that corporate propaganda is every bit as concerned with controlling our thoughts as any other totalitarian propaganda? Indeed, is there any other defining characteristic of the totalitarian state than its constitutional tendency, its inherent desire, to be the exclusive colonizer of the human mind?

It seems we can attribute what remains of our freedom to the fact that there is multitude of totalitarianisms currently vying for control. If America were ruled by a single, all-powerful corporation, it would hardly appear different from Soviet Russia. The corporation would have to own everything - housing, the media, all of industry and all intellectual property. It would have crushed its competition from existence. It would exist as a totalitarian state. As the tip of the corporate pyramid sharpens and grows more distant from the base of society, as merger after merger puts a dwindling handful of executives in control, we continue to approach that dreaded singularity known as Big Brother (and take note that the hyper-capitalist society that Russia has transformed into with devastating rapidity is not one iota freer from authoritarianism than it was before).

The peacetime-warfare (i.e. warfare through economy and the control of public opinion) of competing interests is what defines a mixed economy. But, in order to secure a free society, it is not enough that the interests merely compete; they must also be fundamentally different externally from one another in form and function if they are to provide checks and balances against each other. This must also be true internally, between their constituent parts. The human animal being what it is (a beast with a recently developed, intelligent fore brain encasing an ancient, hungry reptilian one), the tendency of human groups to organize into leaders and followers must be channeled into institutional structures of highly limited and uniquely defined power, appropriate to their assigned social function. The business model must be different from the government model, and the government model must be different from the military model. The more that the business, government, and military models begin to resemble one another in function and form - whether through cross-pollination (large numbers of individuals moving from one sector to another via professional connections) or through the sheer domination of one model over all others (via a military coup, a repressive political regime, or a robber baron-style wholesale buyout of government), the more a society veers towards totalitarianism, for the obvious reason that "competitors" whose interests are similar or identical are not capable of providing a system of long-term checks and balances. Put another way, powerful institutions are defined by their socially-enforced limitations above all else, by those rights and responsibilities which they are expressly and constitutionally denied. The lack of such clearly-defined boundaries between power-wielding bodies is what leads to totalitarianism. This is what Eisenhower warned us about is his famous speech, referring to the "military-industrial" complex, and it is why more than a few fascist despots have defined their own polity of choice as "the melding of industry and government" or "capitalism run amok."

The danger, then, is not that corporations exist, or that the government and its laws exist, or that the military exists. The danger is that each of these bodies, all of which are hierarchical and which wield great power over society as a whole, have a dependably human tendency to seek more power and control over the material conditions of reality than is healthy for society as a whole. It is therefore crucial that society must ever be on guard against the over-indulgence of any one "model" or the liberal intermixture of interests between industry, government, and the military. Each of these elements of society perform crucial functions, but their different external fucntions increasingly hide internal similarities, and these similarities are the reason that corruption and collusion of power interests across the line of public and private are coming to define our civic life. And, in the era of globalization, it is the business model that it is rapid ascent, with the military model not far behind as the government model recedes back into the pre-dawn horizon.

We must make the following observation of the business model: while businesses may thrive or perish of their own accord in a free society, and the health of business can (though not necessarily) indicate the health of society as whole, the traditional business infrastructure itself is not in any way dependant on social freedom. Instead, the business model is based on rigidly defined hierarchies, much like a comparatively low-stakes military, in which there is a chain of command based on rank, and a pyramid of downwardly cascading delegation of authority. The clerks and low-level managers - the privates and sergeants of the business world - are at best devoted only to the functions of their immediate department, more likely than not existing in a state of rivalry or bitterness regarding the strangers on the upstairs floor. Even fairly small businesses routinely disperse information downwards on a "need to know" basis, keeping the nature of their most important decisions under wraps until the last possible moment - especially those most likely to directly affect their employees, . It is no mystery as to why military training is often regarded as the best preparation in the business world, since the same competence in obeying authority from above and executing it downwards is required in both milieus. The "triumph" of the mixed economy, to the extent that it is a triumph (it is also many other things) is that it keeps its numerous would-be despots and tyrants contained to comparatively small regions of influence, even as within those regions there are endless battles for control of the fiefdom.

This leads us to observe the most important similarity between the military and the business model: it is designed for optimum function in a state of warfare. In other words, it is meant to operate on the assumption that its mortality is daily imminent, that it will be attacked by the enemy/competition at any given moment. It is designed to function efficiently in a permanent mode of perceived existential crisis. Reflection upon the greater meaning of the task is at best useless, and in fact is likely to be counter-productive and inhibit judgment in combat. This psychological stance of fierce "adherence to the task" is necessarily a feature of any social hierarchy. It is, indeed, the whole point of having a hierarchy, which maximizes the number of individuals devoted to the What and How, and minimizes to a tiny, extremely powerful minority those who determine the Why. It is bracingly, awe-inspiringly successful, but it is not democratic, nor is it reflective.

Like the military model, the business model is an effective and powerful tool which in many cases can be wielded to produce, distribute, procure, etc. But you would no more want a government run on a business model than you would want it run on military model, and for precisely the same reason - it is a model which only knows the particulars of the crisis, i.e., the immediate present and the near-term future. It is not a democratic structure, and it does not act with reference to objective social values except to the extent that those values are imposed from without. Both the business and the military exist to perform tasks, and they are designed to do so brilliantly. They were not devised with the intention of defining the public good.

The great problem with the "crisis mode" is that even brute reality has its limits, and if society does not legally intervene, it will be the limits of crisis-mode mentality that will define corporate behavior. Whatever walls are erected to regulate corporate power, the corporation will push against them with all its might, hoping for a crack in the facade. Without laws limiting working hours, setting minimum wage, safety and privacy standards and so on, there will always be someone willing to work for longer and for less, i.e., someone in a greater state of individual crisis. Labor laws, if not set by the state, will instead be set by the limits of desperation. The Libertarian will argue that this is precisely what makes the laissez-faire system "natural," and this of course is hokum of the highest order, because it completely overlooks the fact that the modern industrial corporation, the technology that fuels it, and even the various forms of monetary currency which fund it are not products of the natural world but of human invention. The modern arrangement between employer and employee does not exist in nature. It is a creation of industry. They are human concepts, a product of our modern and artificial social arrangements.

The Libertarian who argues that laissez-faire capitalism is an expression of natural law does so through Darwinian metaphors. They posit the free economy as a wilderness, in which the most "productive" individuals achieve order and through their own egoistic pursuits raise the standard of living for everyone. For instance: without Thomas Edison, no light bulbs. Edison is likened to the alpha wolf most equipped to thrive in the wilderness. The irony here is that the Darwinian metaphor relies on a non-intentional, pre-conscious system - nature - for its referent. The more accurate metaphor is the exact opposite of Darwinism, i.e., agriculture. By means of a systematized, highly refined, and wholly artificial infrastructure of social institutions based on notions of common citizenship, equity, plurality, and commonwealth, people like Edison, and the many thousands who were talented and industrious enough to work for him (and often be exploited by him), were nurtured into being by society's careful ministrations. Schools, educators, keepers of the peace and justice, this is why we have the light bulb. We can credit Edison for being the first without worshipping him for it. Another would soon have followed. One thing Darwin was clear on; wheat and corn do not naturally arrange themselves into tidy, efficient rows for hundreds of square miles as a result of natural selection.

Libertarians argue that the government which governs best, governs least. Yet, having read all-too-many Libertarian essays, discourses, rants, and tracts, I never cease to be confounded by the astonishing rarity with which Libertarians question whether, once government has been drowned in its proverbial bathtub, no other system of repression might arise to replace it, despite the overwhelming historical evidence that this is precisely what happens.

Human society requires structure, and where the structure is not defined by some semblance of consensus before-hand, it is defaulted upon, often with dire consequences. It is true that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in America, "big" government interfered little in the affairs of business. However, businesses were small because corporations were strictly limited in size and scope by the exigencies of public charter, hence there was little to interfere with. When granted their own "personhood" at the end of the nineteenth century, all checks on their growth were undone. Unfettered capitalism, as practiced by the British Empire and later by the United States following Reconstruction, was "tempered" only by a rigidly defined and merciless fatalism regarding the prospects for human happiness on Earth. The Enlightenment-era Aristotelian Deism and the philosophically nuanced Christianity of the founders gave way to those chapters of the Good Book found on either side of the savior, those passages in which plagues of locusts and running sores were either reported or predicted. Christ became the sugar-pill by which Social Darwinism, itself a bleakly Old Testament revelation, was swallowed.

This happened, because laissez faire capitalism places severe demands upon its practitioners. A laissez-faire society cannot and would not "liberate" us to live our lives as we see fit, with no one else legally obliged or permitted to account for us but our own conscience. It is not a free-love, chain-smoking, pot-growing, SUV-driving free-for all. Instead, it would create a series of drastic circumstances to which we would have no choice but to submit. A society with no minimum wage, no mandated health-coverage, no restrictions on the work-week, no checks on the predatory practices of credit-card companies, no required labels on food containers and no FDA at all, is a society in which even the most mundane acts of buying food and finding a job become a constant struggle against the wiles of unscrupulous salesmen.

It is worth considering what businesses already have done in the past few decades. They have demanded that their employees submit to drug tests, they have monitored their private emails and internet usage (a courtesy now recently extended to every American citizen), and they have sold personal information (credit ratings, social security numbers, etc.). Furthermore, they have created an economic situation in which one must be a debtor in order to receive an education and housing, and in which supposedly private matters regarding one's spending habits, previous addresses, and money problems are de facto public knowledge, available for purchase by other creditors. There is little evidence - no evidence - that the major corporations of today have any interest whatsoever in viewing their employees and customers as private citizens with rights. They routinely employ vast armies of lawyers to find loopholes in laws to protect consumers, and employ other, equally vast armies whose sole purpose is to lobby to have those loopholes widened to the point that they swallow all regulation completely. There are no company ethicists on the payroll. Shall we consider a world run entirely by private police forces, private schools, private roads and private prisons, all of whom are free to exclude membership and employment for whatever reason they like? These are all violations of our personal liberty by corporate powers which only a strong democratic government can prevent.

An “excess of government” in a democracy is a logical impossibility, since a democratic government is defined by two essential characteristics: 1) It values the egalitarian over the hierarchical, and 2) its purpose is to enact the will of the people, i.e., to subjugate the hierarchical institutions of business and the military to humanistic value systems and democratic will. A government that has come to insinuate a pernicious level of control over the lives of the citizens it is meant to represent is not an excessively democratic government at all. History will show that such tyrannies are either excessively militarized or excessively corporate. Such governments have retreated from the enlightenment values which seek to free the individual from the strictures of merciless hierarchies. A government that becomes incorporated or militarized, or which succumbs or defers to the corporation or the militant, is a government rapidly regressing into the social psychology of feudalism. The government that refuses to subjugate and regulate corporate power is the government which kicks open the door, welcoming into the corridors of power the divine right of numerous child-kings, despotic accountants, and cool-headed tabulators of human labor.

There is a reason why our society, a century ago, was so fiercely rigid and conservative, and this is it precisely. We were at the mercy of the giants of capitalism. Only God was more powerful, hence He was our only recourse for injustices suffered. This is likely the same reason for the growth of evangelical fundamentalism today. And yet it ultimately matters little whether the worker at the bottom believes in the Supreme Being or not. He should be concerned, gravely concerned, that his masters on Earth, having long lost a fear of the people and their means of representation, know no fear of Him either.

A close examination of the relationship between money and labor will be discussed in part 3.