The Tea Party --- a chance to summarize

We often listen to the Diane Rehm show on Reno NPR while driving from Mammoth to Bishop and back. Yesterday, she interviewed three different people about the Tea Party "movement." [I put this in quotes because everyone denied that it is a movement but no one was quite sure what to call it.] Anyway, the interviews were quite good and made me realize that I should give some thought to organizing the scattered arguments that I've placed on my blog during the last few months. So here is an attempt at summary.

According to those interviewed, the Tea Party people are "fiscal and Constitutional conservatives" That is, they care most about having a small government that operates with a balanced budget [just like mom and pop] and they see this connected to a return to the "original Constitution." Supposedly they are not interested in social issues such as abortion, Gay rights, etc, but it seems clear that their position speaks to many social issues implicitly. They fly the flag of liberty and cry for reduction in taxes and restoration of personal choice. If there must be government, it should be at the state and local level where they feel that they have more say in matters. By all odds, the Federal government is seen as the big evil.

It is ironic that most of the Tea Partyers are probably the same 30% of the population who still approved of George Bush when he left office even though Bush was the one who busted the US budget, expanded Federal government, and appropriated tremendous presidential powers out of the hands of Congress and, yes, the democratic voice. Somehow, when Republicans do these things, it's OK. It was also Bush himself who was forced into bailing out the banks and the auto industry, yet another thing the Tea Partyers are angry about.

The tragedy in today's politics is that we have incredibly superficial dialogues. [Actually, I'm being overly generous to suggest that we have any dialogue at all. What we have is slogans shouted back and forth.] Politicians become favorites of the Tea Partyers by spitting their slogans back to them. So it's easy to write speeches. Just listen to the few words in the Tea Party vocabulary and throw them back at them. Watch Sarah Palin to see how this works. [Palin's single talent is knowing what the people like to hear and, I must say, she spits it back to them extremely well.]

What politics requires is a consideration of facts and a serious discussion of what we do about the facts. For instance, one of the undeniable facts of the present is the oil spill in the Gulf. It's amazing how many people want big, powerful Federal government when it comes to the oil spill. But when serious discussion indicates that this type of speculative and untested drilling should be postponed until we can get a better picture of what went wrong, the government is condemned for limiting the activities of corporations and threatening jobs. Is rational political discourse even possible in this country?

I want to summarize my political position in the following way. First, I am happy enough to return to our Constitution. It is a marvelous document and a sound foundation for our Federal government. One marvelous aspect of this document, evidently not subscribed to by the Tea Partyers, is its flexibility --- its ability to change with the times in a peaceful way without the need of revolutions in the streets. Contrary to the Constitution, the Tea Partyers are the ones in the streets.

One of the great expressions in the Constitution is its desire to promote the general welfare of the people. This is a wonderfully vague idea which can only be interpreted as time and conditions change. The strength of our Constitution lies in its ability to cope with new interpretations and, through its Supreme Court, to correct itself when things go wrong.

I believe, consistent with the philosophical basis of our founding political thinkers, that government is formed by the people. Indeed, government is the way in which the people gather to discuss and to solve their problems. In an ideal small democracy this would be literally the way things happen. We, on the other hand, are a very large nation of people and so we have to "gather" through an intricately constructed representative government. One of the huge fallacies in Tea Party thinking is that government is some dominating entity other than themselves. On the contrary, if we don't like government --- namely us --- we need to reform ourselves, which means doing a far better job of informing ourselves and then electing representatives who truly speak for us on the issues that are important. Only a well informed and educated public can make a democracy work. Our current problem is a general lack of truthful and clear information; instead, we have ridiculously simplistic propaganda and generally irrelevant "news". Meanwhile, education is eroded at every opportunity, fiscal, political, and spiritual.

It seems to me that the issue of distributing power between local, state, and Federal government is most reasonably decided by the scale of an issue before us. We should ask whether an issue is something that other people will care about and, hence, whether they will have reasonable opinions about it. If the issue is cross walks in town, it is unlikely that people outside the locality will care or have legitimate opinions. On the other hand, I do care and think that I have legitimate opinions about the treatment of African American people in this country no matter where they may live. That makes Civil Rights a Federal issue. Frankly, the more "global" we become, the more issues there are that we share on a national level and which therefore require us to meet through our Federal government.

The continual cry for small Federal government and reduction of taxes is completely vacuous unless the Tea Partyers are willing to take the whole thing apart issue by issue and demonstrate better ways of handling things. Let's take inspection and control of processed foods for example. Most processed foods are produced in specific regions of the country and then marketed all over. Can the Tea Partyers show that it would really be more cost effective and efficient to have these food products tested locally? I can't imagine the arguments. And I doubt very much that my local government would be at all interested in taking on this task. But if Federal government just gives up regulation of food production and distribution, how long will it take before we are eating rats in our sausage again?

This is just one issue. There are hundreds more. I'd be more impressed by the Tea Partyers if they would start addressing these and showing us how smaller government would really work. Unfortunately, in my opinion, they really just want their taxes lowered and they don't bother to think about the consequences, except when oil starts rolling onto their beaches and their shrimp smell like gasoline.

19th Century Political Economy

The History Channel was showing a documentary on American presidents the other day and I got to watch from about 1880 to 1910. I wonder how many people realize what life was like back in those days when the big industrialists owned the government, the police, and just about everything else. Yes, it was a wonderful world of "small government" and scarcely no regulations. Children were still working in factories; manufacturers supplied anything they could get away with; and only the rich few could attend a university and potentially become someone important.

If you haven't noticed, this is the world that we are returning to very fast.

Thought for the Day

Now that the second great depression has even threatened the European Union and has put millions of American out of work, I hope that the dirty bastards whose greed caused this epic in our economic history are proud of themselves. Unfortunately, they probably haven't time to even think about it because they are so enjoying their incredible wealth, earned as it was by f__king over the rest of the world. Ah, Capitalism. You've got to love it, don't you.

Oil

Since my discussion with LongShot seems to have ended, I think that I will step aside from political debates and comment, instead, on the current media frenzy associated with the oil catastrophe in the Gulf.

First the media spectacle. As usual, the media is all over this --- this side, that side, and the under-side. Poor dears, they love situations like this because they can just go at it 24/7 and it's really easy pickings.

Second the resentful environmentalists. Now, I don't mean to come down too hard on environmentalists (because I am one) but I can't stand environmental activists who just want to throw torches without really knowing what they are doing. So BP has another deep-water well (Atlantis) and I heard one hysterical environmental activist suggesting that BP should be forced to shut down that well. Of course, this person knows nothing about the possibilities inherent in shutting the well down. For instance, would BP be able to do that without causing the exit-pressure of gas and oil from blowing the top of the well? Just because we're peeved, doesn't mean we are well advised to call for action.

Third is the host of people who want Obama to personally take charge and let the army take over the operation. If the President and the army had been drilling for oil for the last decade and had successfully capped off numerous wells, that might be a reasonable suggestion; BUT that is not the case. While BP may be at fault in the present situation, there is little doubt that they have more expertise, more resources, and more motivation to get this under control. What our government needs to do is make sure that BP is totally responsible for the cleanup of this mess.

And finally the regulatory issue. Can you imagine what the Gulf would be like if oil companies were drilling all over the place without any form of national regulatory authority? Would local groups do much good in controlling things like this? The problem is not the principle of regulation but rather the fact that eight years of oil-owning presidency and vice-presidency created a situation in which there was no effective regulatory authority. Republican administrations do not typically remove regulations; they just make the regulatory agencies impotent either by taking away their funding or by staffing them with the same people they are trying to regulate.

The System

I have read and re-read the last two posts on my blog and there is little there that I would want to retract. What is needed is clarity --- definition.

What is interesting about the present political scene in the US is the remarkable tendency toward extremes. And what are these extremes? They are, as I've suggested, idealistic visions. And, as such, they are mostly so far away from the realities of our situation that they are largely meaningless. What I have been asking myself is who profits from this; hence, what is it that stabilizes this situation.

The answer, it seems to me, is very clear. It is "the system" that profits from this bizarre fighting among extreme positions. The more heat the better! That's because, the more heat is vented between the opposing extremes, the less anyone will seriously notice what really is at work in this country and, for that matter, the world. In point of fact, it is close to irrelevant who is president or what party is in office. Indeed, the more extreme the differences between parties and candidates, the better off the system is --- because the less we will take cognizance of who it actually is that wields power.

Liberals and conservatives, libertarians and anarchists, democrats and republicans, greens and independents would all be a lot better off if they would stop arguing among themselves and would start focusing on the larger system that controls the realities of their world. In my opinion, one does not need to look far. Just look at the very small number of people in the world who own the enormous majority of the world's wealth. Then, try to figure out how they are all tied together. That is "the system." In my opinion, politics is irrelevant; it is simply a way in which the system keeps us all tied into its own stability. So long as we think that we exercise some kind of control, the system is safe. It can continue to function underneath it all.

Libertarian and Conservative Talk

I think that I am finally getting a handle of sorts on the political debate with Conservatives and Libertarians. That handle is this. Conservatives and Libertarians are actually idealists of a kind and they are talking about something that is so far outside of the realities of our situation that meaning is hopelessly lost. The closest theoretical political ally in the last two centuries would be the Marxists. Marx himself was a blatant humanist idealist who could weave a fine tale about the uprising of the Proletariat and the resulting Communist society in which the state would literally wither away. But even when the revolution was finally carried into a real experiment, as we all know, the reality was far different from the idealistic fantasy.

The fact is that societies change over a very long time scale and rarely, if ever, change dramatically because of an ideal destiny. Marx was probably correct in suggesting that society changes because of the "material conditions" and so long as the material conditions remain more-or-less the same our society will continue on its course. That is not a particularly happy course. I am probably no more happy with the present station of government than are Conservatives or Libertarians.

The material conditions of our society have been, for some time, something that might fairly be called "corporate feudalism." In classic feudalism, government was in the hands of the church and monarchy. Beneath them were arrayed a small host of land-owning nobles and a very tiny merchant class. By far the great horde of people were serfs who lived and worked on land owned by the nobles and paid most of their productivity to the nobles in rent. Today, the plight of most people is no different except that corporations have replaced the nobles. A representative government has replaced the monarchy while church and state have supposedly been separated (though it's hard to convince yourself of that at times). As in classic feudal times, very few individual people actually own very much; the great majority of wealth lies in the hands of corporations to whom we all pay rent (though we may like to call these "mortgages" etc.).

Over the last several decades there have been some interesting changes in the material conditions of our society and I believe that these foretell more about our future than any of the idealistic scrabbling. Corporations have become international in a massive movement we endearingly call "globalization." What is cloaked behind the scenes of globalization is the fact that corporations are no longer responsible (or responsive) to any particular society. Hence, what will the so-called nation state hold in its future? Corporations are already arranging for their own military security and they can hide their wealth in any out-of-the-way place in the world.

In reality, it seems to me, Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, and Anarchists are caught up in a self-destructive fight against each other over something that is quietly fading from view --- civil society in its ideal form. When global corporations rule the roost, none of us will have much to say about the future.

The Problem with Language

The basic problem with language is reference. Nouns, in particular, are supposed to have reference to definite things --- real entities, relations among entities, sensations, ideas, etc. But when we use language do we always know that a reference point exists? Unfortunately, something that philosophers have demonstrated well, we can use nouns as though they have reference, when they don't, and hence make entirely vacuous statements.

I went to Sheldon Richman's article on the BP spill (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/bp-spill/). I found myself in agreement with much of what he said. It is more than clear that corporations and other business interests are thoroughly involved in government --- everything from heavy duty lobbying to staffing crucial government agencies with their own. The US has a long (and sad) history of foreign policy (especially in the Americas) based on supporting corporate interests abroad. It is fairly clear that government spends more time protecting the property interests of corporations than of private individuals. To me, however, that is a fact of the corruption of government and not a reason for abandoning government as such. Unfortunately, with its recent decision, the Supreme Court has managed to make corporations even more powerful in their influence over government.

What interested me, in Richman's article, is the argument for an ideal "free market." Clearly, with all of this government protection (regulation and oversight, when it exists), there is no free market economy in the United States. But that makes it very difficult to argue (as Richman apparently wants to do) that free markets would be the salvation for all these problems. "Free market" has no reference; there isn't such a thing, nor has there been such a thing in centuries. It is not enough to merely call it by name as if it has reference or meaning. One needs a thorough description that would tell us actually how such a thing would work.

Short of that, we are stuck with government protection and regulation. The problem, really, is when government doesn't tend to its proper role --- appoints oil-industry people to serve on oil-industry regulatory boards and agencies, encourages agents to (literally) sleep with oil industry people, cuts off funding for regulatory and oversight activities, and turns to look in the opposite direction. (Remember back in the first year of the Bush/Cheney administration when Cheney met with his "energy team"!!!)

I do not think the problem is government oversight. I think the problem is bad, corrupt government that throws oversight out the window.