Green Power

California's open political structure opens the opportunity for the Green party to create a revolution.

A recent op-ed in the local paper by a Republican party official complained about California's open primary system. This system runs primaries and general elections without regard to party affiliation. The top two finishers in the primary run against each other in the general election. In California, this has resulted in many state-wide races being contested between two Democrats. The Republican party no longer has a lock on one position on the general election ballot as they used to, and this naturally rankles. The editorialist complained pathetically about lack of diversity (of all things!), and how the choice between two Democrats was so limited. It was whining at its most exquisite.

California has frequently been in the political vanguard, whether in tax revolts or in progressive climate change policy. The 60s were headquartered here. California has put redistricting on a non-partisan basis. The open primary system has been a dramatic success, giving the best two candidates a hearing before the voters in the general election, and reducing partisanship and cronyism in the state. One side benefit is that voters can register with a minor party without the penalty of being locked out of the key primary races, which are no longer parochial, but open to all. This new political landscape (which was the beneficent and ironic gift of Arnold Schwartzenegger) could lead to another progressive advance, in the form of a revitalized Green party.

Trends in party affiliation in California. Greens come in at 0.62%- currently negligible.

The Democratic regime in California has not been a bad thing on the whole. Under Jerry Brown, who operates as a centrist, the drama surrounding budget battles and other fringe issues has been sharply reduced. Except for the pension crisis, the state has been quite well run, if inefficient. Advances in climate change regulation, marajuana legalization, gun control, and formal resistance to the Trump administration are generally appreciated. Trump is reviled. Education and infrastructure funding remain dreadful. There is little stomach in the state for a return of Republicans as the opposition, (they are now legislatively locked out of veto power), which would bring back endless bickering and corrupt dealing. There is, however, room for less corporatism and more progressivism, which is what a stronger Green party could provide.

The Green party currently is not much healthier than the Republican party, unfortunately. In California, it fields a grand total of 60 office holders, none of which are statewide. Its web sites and organization seem moribund. Due to the two-party structure at the national level, it is unthinkable to support it in presidential races, where it would be a spoiler to benefit Republicans. But with open primaries in California, the party could cultivate a state-wide program and candidates, while vowing to back the Democratic party (or whichever party is more aligned with Green objectives) in races that are significantly contested by Republicans, which is to say, effectively support the left. That would provide a solid platform for activism within the state, building the movement and the party.

Each non-presidential race would have to be carefully evaluated for whether the participation of a Green candidate would raise the chances of Republican / Conservative victory significantly. In primaries, this is likely be a negligible risk as things stand. At least one Democrat will always win in non-rural districts. For the general election, if a Green candidate is not running, Greens would support the Democratic candidate, or whichever one most agreed with the Green agenda. This would make for a sort of mature, parliamentary-style politics, where coalitions are assembled in response to conditions.

Oddly, however, the Green party is officially against the open primary system, mistakenly thinking that the loss of a coveted (though pointless) automatic spot on the general election ballot outweighs the decisive gain of flexibility for their voters and sympathizers in the primary election. They want something still better, like proportional representation, logic that to me seems maybe nice in theory, but self-defeating and irrelevant in practice. Worse, the national Green party is a disaster, indeed a toxic blight on the left, pushing its presidential candidate in the teeth of all logic and experience. That is no way to succeed.

The Republican editorialist bemoaned the lack of competing perspectives and arguments in California politics. But the voters have decisively rejected the Republican program of meanness, business cronyism, labor expoitation, environmental degradation, and xenophobia, which has only become more extreme and blatant on the national level. Maybe the discussion that voters in the state really want is one between Democrats and those who want progress to go even faster- toward single payer health care, faster de-carbonization of the economy, more effective business (and internet) regulation, and more balanced housing and transportation growth, among many other issues. The climate is shifting.

• Change your party registration right now!
• We are choking on zoning.
• CO2 is not only rising, but rising faster than ever.

Heroes, Superheroes, and Saviors

What do we see in the hero myth? With apologies to Joseph Campbell.

I was watching the TV version of Dune, which, while much better than the movie, hardly matches the book. Seeing it again made it painfully clear how this story, so gripping to my younger self, is a formulaic hero tale, just as Harry Potter would be for the next generation, Frodo Baggins was for the one before, and Arthur, Beowulf, Jesus, Buddha, Rama, and Odysseus have been since antiquity. What do we see in them, and why are they so riveting?

Obviously, these tales speak to the meaning of life, in a direct and comprehensive way. Though mostly for males- Heroes and their students are, as a rule, male. They go on adventures, lead others, resolve mysteries, and ultimately solve communal problems. What they achieve is status, renown, and perhaps the hand of the princess, who is the typical hero of the female archetypal tale (though see also Dorothy, Alice, Mulan, et al.).

These qualities have relatively little to do with one's purely individual path through life, judged by, say, happiness, or one's success in earning a living, attending to the humdrum affairs of personal life, comfort, and family. Rather, it is a wider social role and service that is the point, and fame is the coin of this realm. The hero slays monsters that have terrified the people and despoiled their crops. Or he retrieves the chalice that gives everlasting life and salvation. Or he uses a mysterious force to lead a rebel alliance against the totalitarian galactic empire.

Horses? This quest needs no horses!

Hero tales are formative for those in formation- the maturing child, who instinctively yearns to accomplish something significant, which is the path to status in the collective, and thus to relative power and reproductive success. But what defines success and significance? It is necessarily the collective that must define what is important, via its bards who recite its problems both perennial and topical, provide the grist of heroic adventure and conflict, and award fame for their successful conclusion. Whether it is raging beasts in the countryside, Orwellian tyranny, taunting goddesses, or a world-wide conspiracy of death-eaters, the threat is not individual, but collective, and thus the hero serves the collective, something "greater than himself", as many people express their seeking behavior. Success of any kind is attractive, but to be truly compelling, success needs to resolve big problems and be valued by others. (Though in fairness, the hero may toil in obscurity and only be recognized in retrospect, perhaps long after his death, to have solved the momentous problem. Such a tale may have additional romance, and happen in reality all too often, but is not typically what a reader wishes to emulate for her or his own life path.)

One characteristic element of the standard hero tale is the reckoning with the father. Luke Skywalker finally meets his maker in a climactic scene. Jesus naturally has mixed emotions about his father, whoever that might be, who has left him up on the cross. The father represents the existing system, which has formed the hero, but which also perpetuates all the problems that he exists to solve. The father must be transcended for the tale to conclude successfully. Paul Atreides has spiritual and temporal powers far beyond his father's, and succeeds where the father had failed. More interestingly, Jesus, while always respectful of the father and putatively acting in his service, ends up totally upending the father's theology and bringing a new dispensation, whether that was "in reality" his intention or not.

Sometimes the goal of a quest is so abstract and theologically attenuated as to be absurd. Maybe the quest was the important thing after all.

More complicated is the role of the special gift. Harry Potter has the mark of the lightning flash, and special powers of leadership and magic. All the Marvel heros have some special power. Heroes are typically born of noble houses, though they may be unrecognized or abused for some of the story. What is the function of all this apparatus? Isn't the point of the hero tale to inspire normal boys to seek glory for themselves from/for their collective? Why start with abnormal heroes? The quest needs to be done in a noble way, morally upright. But that hardly requires a particular form of birth.

I think much of this has to do with the inner quest, which is another aspect of the hero tale. In order to seek outer glory, the hero needs first an inner quest, to find the confidence, knowledge, and personal resources to do extraordinary things. Jesus grappled with satan in the desert, while Paul Atreides grapples with sandworms in the desert (always an epic setting; Lawrence of Arabia grappled there with a recalcitrant, but noble, Arab culture). Each person has some special gifts and skills, and an important aspect of life, particularly adolescence, is to find what those might be. The ability to be clairvoyant, or to accumulate The Force are symbolic of momentous discoveries about the self which happen during growth to adulthood. While few of us will find nirvanna, or that we are the son of god, nevertheless whatever we do find will be the key to our ability to differentiate ourselves from the crowd, while earning its respect. Each person follows this archetypal path, and it is typically a difficult and uncertain one, thus the universal interest it evokes.

The noble house and lineage aspect seems more atavistic. One of the hero's special gifts / typical traits (which is key to the story's cultural and pedagogical significance) is to be naturally noble in deportment, morals, and martial prowess. Given our instinctive racism and appreciation for inheritance of traits, it is then natural to make this occur by having the hero some secret child of the king, or an acknowledged child who breaks out of the mold and takes a different path (Buddha). Or who comes both from a noble family and from the planet Krypton. Surely we could come up with a more modern way to handle this! Even the Black Panther is of noble birth. Tolkein gets points on this score for his low-class heroes in the Lord of the Rings.

But there is also a superstitious element. Luck is one thing the hero needs to have on his side, and this has traditionally been bound up with cosmic forces and mysteries, instinctively (and animistically) personified. Special forms of communication with these forces, or at least encouraging signs from them, would by this primitive instinct, be essential to success. One can take this in more rational way, however, to indicate a certain humility and appreciation before the complex and often inscrutable real forces that form our basis of operations, including the social forces that may not be ready for the hero's revolutionary work and need to be brought along by way of their primitive beliefs, whatever their nature and value.

Maybe a little self-flagellation would help?

It is particularly pathetic when a hero is so venerated and his boons are so attractive that his devotees make a fetish or even religion of him, employing a priesthood to retail third-hand boons of a studiously invisible nature. Generally, the emulation of nobility, and inner quests modeled on that of the hero, are not a bad thing. But the whole point of the tale was to find and develop one's own self and one's own resources- one's unique gifts and path in life- rather than to adopt another's wholesale, or worse yet, to fantasize about fictional powers and benefits that can be cadged via supplication and abasement. That would be to fundamentally misunderstand the point of the hero archetype, going so far as to reverse it as an engine for the most unheroic behavior. Thankfully, such overblown renditions have been relatively rare over the recent centuries (though Scientology, and before that, Mormonism, stand as significant and unfortunate counter-examples). Yet overall, absurd hero-religions, mostly stemming from more distant epochs, remain all too common.

The quality of the hero story plays an important role in its society, of which it is a gauge and exemplar. Just think of the pervasive influence of Homer's epics, or of Christianity. It defines not only the archetypal problems to be faced, but the standard of morality / nobility the aspiring hero must have to engage in its quest / solution. Star Wars cast the enemy as a Stalinist totalitarianism, while Buddhism cast the enemy as Maya and attachment to outer and fleeting things. While moral good and bad are perennial problems of the human condition, other aspects can change. The balance between inner and outer quests is a key indicator of a tale's maturity and spiritual content. Our current tales seem to center on the Marvel universe, of which I know very little. But it seems generally dedicated to extravagant violence and justice, with a somewhat infantile/regressive tone, overall. There is limited inner focus. They seem on the level of the Bond franchise, but without the understatement or style. It was extremely disturbing when, after 9/11, there was a rash of corner-cutting hero tales that supported the use of torture.

John Cleese strikes a heroic pose.

At this time when the actual culture is run by those fitting an antihero archetype, (technically, the heel), and the planet truly in peril, it is even more imperative that the stories that form our hero mythology and guide our questing youth be well-constructed, compelling, positive, and timely in their selection and portrayal of problems. Vietnam was a watershed in this regard, sending us from the morally simple comforts of the old Westerns and Hollywood classics, into self-lacerating work like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, and most recently, Game of Thrones. This depressing trajectory reflects changes in American culture, which has become more complicated and self-doubting, (perhaps mature), even mean. Realistic? That is hardly the point of the hero tale, frankly. Many recent film-makers have tried their hand at the saving-the-planet story, surely the one we need most of all, (from Avatar to Independence Day), but none seem to have become canonical. Someone needs to do a better job painting the deep challenges of the day for tomorrow's heroes.

• Unfit to serve on a sewer board. But then, who helped elect him?
• In praise of curated data. Sort of the opposite of Twitter, Facebook, and the other new news, but not cheap to do.
• New tech, same as the old tech.
• Liberals sometimes can't help drinking the right-wing economic koolaid.

Americans, Plain and Simple

How about doing away with the term "African-American"?

It has taken me a while to realize that African Americans are far, far more American than I am. I am a naturalized citizen and immigrant. Yet the Protestant, white, suburban Boy-Scout culture fit like a glove- I was assimilated into 60's-70's America with plenty of personal and family issues, but no larger political or cultural issues.

How different that is from the black experience, where whole political parties remain dedicated to keeping black Americans down! A small part of that social antagonism and "othering" is furthered by the distinct names that have been applied to the black community. While the term "African American" is about as neutral as can be, in strict analogy to the many other ethnic terms like Irish-American, Jewish-American, German-American, Chinese-American, etc., there have in practice been some distinctions.

First, "Irish-American" is not frequently used. Most ethnic groups, especially those of such long vintage, have simply melted in to the pot of generic Americans- have assimilated or had America assimilate to them. So the continued intensive use of the term "African American" does not flow from a lack of assimilation, at least not from an African originating culture, but something quite different. Second, why is "African" lumped together so promiscuously, as if a continent as large as three Europes contained only one culture? "Latino" suffers from the same syndrome, hiding vast differences and diversity for the convenience of the dominant culture. It is a natural problem with naming and grouping of any kind, but is another sign that the "African" in "African American" doesn't really refer to Africa.

What all this does signify is continued segregation in all sorts of dimensions- social, physical, economic- based on a long cultural history of fear, disgust, hate, and social and economic oppression/powerlessness. Pride in an African heritage is admirable, but that seems so distant as to be mostly contrived; there is very little such heritage afoot in contemporary America, in any way that is distinct to one community, beyond genetics. (Though Wakanda may change all that!) A more accurate designation might be "formerly enslaved Americans", though that hardly trips off the tongue either. There have been many attempts at labels, more or less successful, (Negro, colored, minority, Urban, Afro-American, ghetto, racialized people, diverse, people of color). I would suggest the preferred usage just be "Americans" when and where possible, without further ado or elaboration.

A word-cloud of my own creation, text drawn from Wikipedia and other history sites focusing on the back experience. This  appears to militate against the thesis presented, showing "African" with high usage, and as perhaps the primary locus of identity. But the corpus was a very backward-looking, perhaps not reflective of the current cultural setting.

Obviously, from the very nature of this very article, some term is needed to refer to Americans descended from those were formerly under bondage and even more formerly kidnapped from West Equatorial Africa. "Black" seems to fit that best, if still very uncomfortably. Despite all the etymological / symbological freight, simplification, and label-i-fication, it is simple and widely used. It is also part of a deeply unifying symbology. The Ying/Yang symbol is an example, showing light and dark as part of all things, and all cycles and processes. Ebony, Jet, Black power, Black is beautiful... all have been ways to rectify the dominant-culture valence of this term.

• Another view of police.
• Worse than collusion.
• Why do we have a new nobility & feudal system?
• UBI is a symptom, not a cure.
• A network of deranged people.
• Social conformity is (partly) genetic.
• Consumer protection? Not us!
• Watch Bill Mitchell in lecture.

Profiles in Greed

Ulysses S Grant, Carl Icahn, and the character of capitalism.

Listening to a long podcast series about the Civil War, I was struck once again by the unusual character of our 18th president. Every one who knew him agreed that he had no sense for business. Yet he led the US army to a series of strategic victories, and wrote one of the great military autobiographies, and clearly did not lack intelligence. What makes the difference?

To contrast, a recent profile of Carl Icahn, paragon of US business and hero of Donald Trump, paints a character of quite a different color. Highly intelligent, yes, but with the added characteristics of intense greed and minimal scruples- apparently a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge.

Grant was a forthright person, in love and war. Indeed, the archtypal story of his childhood was about a negotiation for a horse where he told the seller straight out what he was willing to offer, which thus became what he paid. Grant was very good with horses, possibly a mark of a character with less guile than normal. People, with their less scrupulous machinations, were more difficult, which clearly led to many of the disasters of his presidency. Does warfare require guile? On some, very strategic level, yes. But generally, clarity, consistency, attention to detail, and courage are more significant virtues. I don't think his Civil War campaigns were marked by strategic cleverness or deceit, but more by sound military reasoning, siezing strong points, deploying overwhelming numbers, fighting doggedly, and pursuing advantages opportunistically.

Ulysses Grant, colorized

Many of these virtues are relevant to business, but evidently one needs something more to succeed. The profile of Icahn describes in detail how he tried to use his influence with the president and his position as a semi-official economic adviser for personal gain- to rescind a rule requiring oil refiners, one of which Icahn owns, to blend ethanol or else buy offsets on a special market. His refiner could not blend ethanol, so was subject to a quite volatile market in RIN offsets. While unsuccessful, the effort was flagrantly unethical and illustrated Ichan's intense greed, his great skill in manipulating others, and his consistent practice of skirting the law whenever possible and advantageous. What a contrast to Grant! And something of a contrast to our current president as well, who isn't smart enough to be in the same league, and looks up to Icahn as a hero who sits on a far larger pile of money.

There was a brief period in the mid-20th century when business leaders were thought of as civic leaders as well. After the period of the robber barrons and Gilded Age, when the business community had been chastened by the great depression and the spectre of communism, (not to mention bitter union fights), and when the whole country had been brought together by the world wars. There was an ethic of fair dealing and paternalism towards workers, and of viewing the corporation as a public, civic entity, not just there to make money, but to play a supporting role in the American way of life. Perhaps I am looking back with rose colored glasses. At any rate, that period, however amicable, is long over. The captains of our current corporate landscape, especially those in finance, are poor models of any kind of ethics; scofflaws who are fined repeatedly, even in our attenuated enforcement landscape, providing models of greed, entitlement, and callousness.

How anyone could imagine that today's celebrity business leaders would make proper and positive civic leaders, particularly someone as twisted as our current president, is unimaginable (Michael Bloomberg excepted, perhaps). So now we are in an insult contest with North Korea, (among others), at an abysmal level of rhetoric which expresses perfectly the level of intellect and ethics our leader is bringing to the table, but which should surprise no one watching his business career or those of his colleages in the contemporary business world.

• I should be very unhappy right about now.
• Enemies bond groups.
• Francis Crick.
• State's rights, but only for crappy policy.
• Puerto Rico brings to mind.. guns and ammo, of course.

School of Hate

13 Reasons and the dark side of high school.

Why all the hate? Hate has elected a president, and is his tireless message over the twitter-waves. Hate is loose in the Muslim world, in a campaign to instill fear in its enemies. We seem to be prone to it, and can be consumed by it, unawares.

I have been enjoying a Netflix series, thirteen reasons why, which incidentally was partly shot in my city. The titular reasons are ones for suicide, of the main character Hanna. And they are recounted by her in tapes being played after the fact, as the series progresses, by her best friend, Clay. Generally, the production is not very innovative, but the flashbacks and dream sequences are done with great care and style.

Its topic is how horrible high school is in America. Leaders of Britain may be formed on the playing fields of Eton, but American leaders are formed in the hallways and locker rooms of our public high schools. Which are not a pretty sight. The series is a very frank, if lavishly dramatized, look at how teens jockey for power and status, mostly by running down and terrorizing their schoolmates.

Most obvious are the jocks. Having bought into the official / corporate / archetypal system of status through athletics, they are children of privilege, loved by the administration, confident that even if they are not liked, they will be popular anyhow- that is just the way the social system works. They don't come off well in this show, giving in to every amoral whim from booze to bullying to social media meanness, thoughtless when they are not being mean.

From there, we go on to other dramatic dilemmas, of closeted gay students, stalking photographer, catty ex-girl friends, and so forth, salted by a variety of subplots among the adults, like the big-box "Walplex" taking over the town and the school administration covering its ass from Hanna's parents' lawsuit. Hanna was evidently failed, if not terrorized, by a fair proportion of the student body among others. I have not gotten to the end, but she will clearly have plenty of reasons when we get there.

Clay in class

But why is hate so easy? Is hate fun? Is it natural? Yes on both counts. Fascists know well that crowds and hate are a potent, even easy, combination. But it is also one of the most primitive, selfish, and useless emotions. Children hate quite easily, and have grievances that erupt into towering emotion. Growing up means putting a lid on them, so that we can work with all sorts of people, and work effectively without getting side-tracked by emotional baggage. We have created a emotional petri dish for teens by concentrating them in schools, with lots of leisure time, and little serious work. No wonder that the devil finds them such easy prey. Which is to say, their childish emotions, not quite under control or under moral direction. That we elected such an immature person as president speaks to a larger failure of our educational system- that it has failed to advance not just one, but far, far too many US citizens to an emotionally healthy and insightful adulthood.

All religious traditions have technologies of controlling hate, even if they then channel it to their own ends. Buddhists take the most uncompromising approach, decyring all such emotions as false, and engaging in lengthy love-inflected meditation to expunge such thinking. Yet Buddhists have had their wars and hate speach all the same- pacifists have a problem when faced with adversaries more willing to hate than to love. Christians have an ethic of love, yet hatred of Jews (how ironic!) flourished for centuries all the same. Muslims have the Sufi branch, their relatively pacifist brethren. But on the whole, Muslims have a simple and straighforward relation to hate- a deeply tribal approach where infidels are hated, and believers are loved. Except when they are of other sects, in which case they are hated anyhow. The Middle East is about to blow up again, along the Saudi Arabia - Iran axis of hate. So religions are a useful source of ideas and methods of human cultivation, but by no means the or a general answer to moral teaching.

Is it good that American school students go through an education in bullying, hate, and power politics? Most make it through OK, and many find highly positive environments where they find support and direction towards a happy adulthood. Does sobering, even terrorizing, interaction with the dark side build maturity, as it does in fairy tales and dreams? Perhaps so, but the costs are enormous, since many children do not make it out whole and unscathed. Simply put, children do not make a mature society when left to themselves. The under-adulted structure of public schools leaves quite a bit to be desired, in that it does not sufficiently occupy or guide young people.

• Are all males this bad?
• Mentally limited. Mentally impaired. Corrupt. Treasonous.
• Krugman- have Republicans no decency, or spines?
• A wildfire on Greenland?
• Are protests with guns different from protests without?
• Corporate concentration and lack of competition has contributed to lagging pay.
• Notes on the conventional view of unemployment.
• Summers- monetary policy can not do it alone.

Welcome to the New Class System

Yes, there is a class system in America, and it organizes our politics.

Communists have spent 150 years trying to convince us that economic status determines class in modern societies. But most people wouldn't have it- neither the diagnosis, nor the prescription of a dictatorship of the proletariat. We are far more complicated than this reduction to the most basic dimension of existence. We have other identities and values that confer status. Who is classier- Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, who is worth many times more?

This seems to inform our recent election, explaining the attraction Trump held on such a large section of the electorate. A section that has felt scorned by the meritocratic elite that has sprung up over the last couple of generations. The bicoastal, college-educated, Whole Foods shoppers who have taken over the Democratic party, the levers of government, and the media. They are the politically correct libtards who have climbed up the class ladder via its new mechanism of ivy league education, rather than old money or blue blood.

People of the heartland have dutifully sent their children off to college, only to see them indoctrinated into the liberal cosmopolitan ethos and turn their backs as they headed off to the coasts. And what has happened? Working class people have been oppressed by the economic system run by this new elite, which is itself under the thumb of the modern corporation, when it is not a unionized cog of a sclerotic public sector.

The resentment, while fueled by economics, is experienced far more viscerally as cultural, as condescension towards "fly-over" country, the South, Texas, religion, State's rights, and any place not "progressive". Obama's gaffe about people clinging to guns and religion was far more damaging than any policy statement. Was it condescending? Yes. Was it true? Of course. Well, the clingers saw their revenge in Donald Trump, a man clearly of their own class, despite his totally different background (New York!). His very classlessness was a marker of a certain class, and his rude comments about the non-whites, his mafioso bling, his religion as thin as a KKK sheet, were all signs of the right class, one that would take power in a new Jacksonian revolution.

Andrew Jackson- true populist, not fake populist.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this supposed populist revolution. It turns out that the Republican coalition, which Trump exemplifies so well, is made up of two classes, not just one. The resentful social clingers are just one part of it. The populous part, but hardly the most powerful. The other part is money. Pure, unadulterated greed. The 1%, and the 0.001% particularly, are the true soul of the conservative movement and Republican party, buying its elections and ordering up its policies. The new administration now has a plutocrat in every henhouse, whose clear goals are to destroy the walls that the government, in its liberal incarnation, has put up against their greed and predation.

These, finally, are the people who exemplify the communist maxim about class being determined by the ownership of the means of production. Despite having all they could wish for, they are defined by their desire to have more. Trump himself lives for the competitive zeal of destroying others, via deals, insults, and bullying. He is also dynastically inclined, grooming his offspring to inherit the empire. Being insecure in their wealth, they also feed endless propaganda about how great they are, how appropriate it is to put the most "successful" people in charge of all affairs, how success in business, or inheritance, betokens public virtue rather than its opposite.

So the test of the new regime, telling us whom it really serves, is coming when they let their money speak, via the budget and tax policies. Will inheritance taxes be eliminated? Who gets the most from the tax cuts? Why destroy the consumer financial protection agency? We know the answers already, and it does not accord in the least with a populist program. Trump has been meeting assiduously with CEOs to ask them what policies they would like, how workers should be treated, and taxes reduced. What can possibly be populist about the outcome? How thoroughly can they entrench a new system, where democracy is fully neutered, in favor of plutocracy?

So, once again, the clingers, true to their social concept of class, are being sold down the river by their comrades in the GOP, whose interests lie precisely in keeping them downtrodden, while throwing an occasional bit of social red meat in their direction, plus plenty of propaganda via the house organs.

In the end, we have three classes in the US, pulling in quite different directions. The downtrodden middle and lower classes, the cosmopolitan liberal middle, and the plutocratic top end. As Hillary Clinton found out, democracy alone isn't enough in the face of an antiquated constitution, shameless opponents, and buckets of money. How the Republican coalition continues to hold in the face of its stark contradictions has long been, and remains, a mystery, especially from the vantage point of California, where that contradiction has doomed it to obscurity. But clearly the social class consciousness of the Republican base is far stronger elsewhere, and can be traded on with what seems like impunity.

• Colleges as class incubators.
• Oh, those out-of-touch technocrats.
• Feelings of white victimhood ... of all things.
• Piracy on Australia: when free markets don't work. "If you decrease your output by half but as a consequence increase your price by a factor of ten, you’re better off decreasing your output."
• Other precedents for Trump.
• Making America great, with BS.
• And lies.
• Swamp draining? More like swamp-a-lago.
• Someone must and will lead on climate change.
• Stiglitz on Trump.
• Black on Arrow: Crime still pays, and economics is not rational.
• Win for inequality- let's repeal fuel efficiency standards!
• Whence Macedonia?
• China rising.
• Everyone deserves a union.
• Wealth distribution is a policy issue, not a technology issue.

Make America Decline Again

Where is Trump going, and where are our institutions going?

My recent reading of Medieval history was particularly interesting in its analysis of the growth of institutions in Western / Northern Europe. It was a very slow, painful process, as the vacuum of Rome was replaced first by German kings with very primitive notions of the state and society, co-existing, with monks in their cloisters. Then came nascent states that used more bureaucratic structure (increasingly integrated with services from the church) to provide state services to larger territories and more people. Charlemagne built a great state, but it did not yet have the institutional staying power to last much beyond his sons. But over time, bigger and more effectively run states (Norman England, Capetian France) won the struggle for power in Europe, and generated not only bigger armies and bloodier wars, but also more peaceful and prosperous conditions at home.

Many of these institutions by which we live in peace with each other are written down, in constitutions and laws. But many are not. For example, the fact that a majority of votes in the Senate or House passes a bill is understood and obvious, but not actually written down in the constitution. It appears only by default when a 2/3 majority is required for such things as a passing a constitutional amendment or overriding a veto, and would be implicit in the ability of each chamber to make its own rules for administration. More topically, nothing prevents a president from having all sorts of business interests and foreign entaglements that might corrupt his or her administration. It is merely up to the voters to decide, and later the Congress to take up the matter if they have a mind to impeach.

Institutions live not only in our officials and constitutions, but in everyone's implicit expectations of how their society should run. The town meeting is a hallowed institution, by those who take part in it, as the only reasonable way to run a small political entity. They would not dream to call in a dictator from the outside, as was common practice in Medieval Italy.

Corruption is what happens when unwritten as well as written institutions weaken and go by the wayside, allowing the immediate motivations of greed and ego to replace the carefully honed traditions- if those traditions be worthy- and even common decency. An example is gerrymandering. It is obvious that the original intent, and the intent of any fair-minded person, would be that legislative districts should be evenly and regularly allocated to group together people who live close together. But well-gerrymandered state can scientifically allocate voters such that the party responsible gains far more seats that they deserve, which are then impregnable till the next census and the next exercise in drawing districts.

North Carolina's 12th district.

Corruption is not only an offense against fair play and moral decency, but typically against truth as well. No one is proud of being corrupt and abusing written and unwritten institutions. The trick is to claim one's fidelity while subverting in reality. And the cost of our large political system is that people are so out of touch with each other that they can no longer judge closely, or care to judge, or may not be educationally equipped to judge, the candidates for office, who each make the same claims to fidelity, truth and good character.

Which all makes our recent election so difficult to digest. The Democrats surely had their issues with fidelity to public institutions, with Hillary Clinton eagerly feeding at the golden trough of Goldman Sachs, and her husband raking in (charitably, of course) millions from foreign and other politically interested donors, a haul that one assumes is likely to dry up quite dramatically in the coming year.

However, all this pales in comparison to the orchestrated war on our basic institutions and our very understanding of truth that the Republicans have led for decades. Donald Trump campaigned openly on a platform of lies and execrable character. His business history is one of repeated bankruptcy, betrayal, cheating, and bullying. His knowledge of our institutions, and indeed of reality itself, is marginal. His abilty to articulate rational public policy was and remains nil, suited only to emotional outbursts via the 140-character medium of twitter. His emotional makeup was clearly unstable, and evidently psychopathic. And people voted for him.

Why? The battlefield had been softened up by decades of smear operations mounted by the Republican party through FOX news and other organs of the right. It turns out that hate sells, and thus leads to a sustainable business model of purveying emotionally tinged lies, leading to mis-directed hate, leading to more listener engagement, and more advertising dollars. It is reminiscent of the interwar period in Germany, when scapegoats were sought for: who lost World War I. They came up with the Jews, and a general lack of teutonic authoritanianism, in a self-feeding cycle of hate which polarized society to great, deadly extremes.

For decades, the Republicans have been seeking scapegoats for: who lost the culture war? Why are Americans becoming increasingly compassionate towards blacks, towards gays, towards atheists? What is going on, and could the clock be turned back- to make America great again? The backbone of this movement was naturally the right-wing religious believers, who, being temperamentally authoritarian, and having already swallowed one pack of lies, had little problem with a few more, like the whole wishlist from the business community, that wealthy people are the job creators, that government regulation is the main thing standing between rural people and good jobs, and that unions are evil. And that Donald Trump means anything he says or has an ounce of morals. And that the Clintons are unspeakably vile- far more so than those fine business organizations who sold so many fraudulent loans and other toxic waste that we are barely coming out of the recession they caused. And that global warming is a hoax, and that Bengazi was Hillary's fault, and ... well, the appalling list goes on, ad infinitum. They have a great deal of airtime to fill, after all.

The Republican war on our institutions has had a self-reinforcing quality. Given that they want to debilitate governmental institutions, whenever they get their hands on one, like the House of Representatives or the Senate, they make it non-functional, and in a self-fulfiling prophecy, the government indeed doesn't work, and the base can be riled up all over again to attack their chosen targets of hate. The base doesn't seem to make the connection between cause and effect, except when that connection is glaring, such as the government shutdowns that ultimately damaged Newt Gingrich- perhaps the earliest and most vociferous destroyer of American instutions in our generation.

The vacancy on the Supreme court stands as the absolute lowest point of Republican subversion. A shameless plot against norms and practices in place since the founding, in a doomed quest to reverse the course of social development. For however conservative and extreme the court gets, America at large is never going back to the image that conservatives have of it. Similarly, Donald Trump is busily appointing to each department a head who seeks to debilitate it and subvert its purposes and norms, so that corruption by the business elite can flourish. Education will see corporations in charge of charter schools, the EPA, corporations in charge of climate change policy, and the Labor department will see union busters in charge. The tax system as a whole will doubtless see giveaways to corporations and the wealthy that will make the Reagan administration look like a Trotskyite regime.

Is this what his voters wanted? I would hope and assume not. But they knew they were electing a con man, right? How could a ruthless billionaire with no previously recorded ounce of compassion for anyone outside his family do other than he has, hiring those he likes and trusts to run our country, which already is one of the most unequal in the developed world?

While all of politics is a matter of lies and half-truths; banal rhetoric with maximal tone and minimal content, the degree to which Trump could play this game with complete shamelessness and emptiness is not a matter of his talent alone, but of the decades-long evisceration of our public discourse and institutions, and particularly the Ministry-of-Truth programming that his base has been fed so effectively from the right-wing media. They do it not only in the service of their conservative ideals, but also for their true power base- the wealthy and corporations, who could never carry an election with their own votes, but if they destroy enough of our democratic and cultural institutions, and brain cells, can win anyhow, free and fair.

• Is compassion dead?
• Yes.
• Honestly, do we really need a middle class?
• How about some happy thoughts?
• "Liberalizing policies are justified in theory only by the assumption that political decisions will redistribute some of the gains from winners to losers in socially acceptable ways. But what happens if politicians do the opposite in practice?"
• Christmas is pagan.

Fighting the Civil War, Over And Over Again

Reflections on the election.

There- we have had our election, and the rednecks (and orange haired) won. Why the bitterness? Why the perpetual lack of understanding of what the other side values and thinks? Why the deep differences of values in the first place? Coalitions may have always been fluid in the US, but the divides between North and South, and between rural and urban, have been relatively durable. There are differences of interest, of upbringing, of tone, and education reflected in this geographic segregation. It is a typical path for any promising young person to leave the country, go to college, and make a new life in the urban, elite centers, forsaking and perhaps even repudiating the culture she or he sprang from.

On top of that rural/urban, or heartland/bicoastal split is the North-South split, which is more cultural in origin: the culture of slavery, to be specific. The many poisons of slavery- its devaluing of humans and casual terrorism, its terror of disruption of a hierarchical social order, its lazy economics of privilege and stasis, its pathetic, patriarchal, and false romances of militarism, chivalry, and the lost cause, seeped so deeply that we continue to fight the Civil War, over and over and over again.

Many cultures have drawn durable victimization narratives from traumatic loss, such as the Muslim Shia's defeat in the battle of Karbala in 680, or the Serb defeat in the battle of Kosovo in 1389, or the Jewish episodes of slavery in Egypt, exile in Babylonia, and final loss of Jerusalem. Such narratives tend to be pathetic, racist, romantic, unrealistic, and for all those reasons, highly effective.

It is evident that politics is conducted in narratives, not policy. Hillary may have had her 23 point plans, and they surely would have served Trump's voters better than Trump's own policies, which as far as we can tell, consist of giving lots of money to rich people like himself, (no wonder he isn't taking the salary!). But the media decided that the email controversy was a better hook with which to explore her personal narratives of secretiveness and control. How they squared this with a bemused attitude towards Donald Trump, who was actually in court for fraud, among a countless other number of obvious scandals, is hard to understand. The media clearly did not understand the nature of Trump's methods or message. This, after two decades of FOX news.

In the absence of narratives on the scale of world wars, which did so much to unify the country in the 20th century, the US political system is structured in a particularly bad way for a politics of emotional narratives. Our two-party, winner-take all system amplifies very small differences into momentous swings in power, focuses campaigns on only a few swing states and small populations, and sets the two parties as a duopoly that excludes new ideas / narratives and rheifies a binary tribal split in the electorate.

So, the perpetually disgruntled South makes a reliable partner in the modern Republican party for the CEO and financial class, united only in their fear of progress- social or regulatory, respectively- towards a modern state that would foster a fairer, more equitable nation by ameliorating the ravages and inequities of the free market, and the inherited social and economic disabilities that keep the class and racial structure so entrenched.

Barack Obama almost sank his first presidential campaign when he was recorded as saying that the rural folks cling to their guns and religion. It was a classic gaffe- as impolitic as it was true. The divide is real. Is the distain deserved? As a liberal atheist in favor of gun control, my natural inclination is yes, it is deserved. This election proves it yet again, that a tasteless, racist, and shallow blowhard could propose a set of policies almost totally at odds with the interests of his voters, not to mention the country and the world, yet win on narratives of hate and revanchism.

Is the distain from the other side deserved- that the US has become a feckless, feminized country of politically correct pansies? Are the elites incompetent? Yes, that has its truth as well. Just looking at the state of public management, where public employees get over-generous pay and pensions, as though the last forty years had never happened, yet accomplish so little, which is apparent as sclerotic breakdowns of public institutions and infrastructure, and the impossibility (or astronomical expense) of building anything new. It is an easy, perhaps lazy critique, but our infrastructure is symptomatic of a nation whose public policy is not keeping up with public needs, or an optimistic, future- and growth-oriented outlook.

All of which does not justify this step into a political abyss, however. Does progress in reason-, law- and process-based public policy necessarily end up in gridlock, as an excess of process and attention to every possible stakeholder, including corrupt interests and non-human species, extends decision times to infinity? No, it is the political gridlock that is far more damaging, since where there is a coherent will, there is a way. With the (white) South firmly in its pocket due to a hermetic social and media atmosphere, and supporting regressive policies in general, the Republican party has now spent decades as the party of shameless, regressive, and especially, destructive politics. It is an inheritance from Newt Gingrich, and from Roger Ailes at FOX. The refusal to consider Obama's last Supreme Court nominee was the epitome of partisan depravity. The Bengazi investigations were a witch hunt in the purest sense, and have now at long last paid their final dividend.

It is worth noting that during and after the Civil War, the Republican party (what a different party, then!) led a surge of progressive public policy, from land grant colleges and banking to railroads. The nation was suddenly unshackled from the political weight of the South, and though the necessities of war had their dramatic effects, the philosophy of the Republican (prior Whig) party were also an important ingredient. One wonders what might have happened had the South succeeded in its secession. We might have become a spectrum of Americas from the progressive and industrial Canada and Union nations to the more feudalistic Confederacy and Mexican nations.

• We are now a banana republic.
• Krugman, horrified.
• A little history.
• Globalization needs a rethink.
• It has been harder to find a job and switch jobs, as companies have more power in the labor market.
• Even Japanese workers have little bargaining power, despite a tight labor market.
• Who needs banks? The next economic institution of security: blockchain.

Does No One Understand the National Debt?

In the debates, we could have heard adults talking about finances. But instead we heard infants yelling incoherently.

Here is a full exchange from the vice presidential debate:

QUIJANO: According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, neither of your economic plans will reduce the growing $19 trillion gross national debt. In fact, your plans would add even more to it. 

Both of you were governors who balanced state budgets. Are you concerned that adding more to the debt could be disastrous for the country. Governor Pence? 

PENCE: I think the fact that -- that under this past administration was of which Hillary Clinton was a part, we've almost doubled the national debt is atrocious. I mean, I'm very proud of the fact that -- I come from a state that works. The state of Indiana has balanced budgets. We cut taxes, we've made record investments in education and in infrastructure, and I still finish my term with $2 billion in the bank. 

That's a little bit different than when Senator Kaine was governor here in Virginia. He actually -- he actually tried to raise taxes by about $4 billion. He left his state about $2 billion in the hole. In the state of Indiana, we've cut unemployment in half; unemployment doubled when he was governor. 

PENCE: But I think he's a very fitting running mate for Hillary Clinton, because in the wake of a season where American families are struggling in this economy under the weight of higher taxes and Obamacare and the war on coal and the stifling avalanche of regulation coming out of this administration, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want more of the same. It really is remarkable that they actually are advocating a trillion dollars in tax increases, which I get that. You tried to raise taxes here in Virginia and were unsuccessful. 

But a trillion dollars in tax increases, more regulation, more of the same war on coal, and more of Obamacare that now even former President Bill Clinton calls Obamacare a crazy plan. But Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want to build on Obamacare. They want to expand it into a single-payer program. And for all the world, Hillary Clinton just thinks Obamacare is a good start. 

Look, Donald Trump and I have a plan to get this economy moving again just the way that it worked in the 1980s, just the way it worked in the 1960s, and that is by lowering taxes across the board for working families, small businesses and family farms, ending the war on coal that is hurting jobs and hurting this economy even here in Virginia, repealing Obamacare lock, stock, and barrel, and repealing all of the executive orders that Barack Obama has signed that are stifling economic growth in this economy. 

We can get America moving again. Put on top of that the kind of trade deals that'll put the American worker first, and you've got a prescription for real growth. And when you get the economy growing, Elaine, that's when you can deal with the national debt. When we get back to 3.5 percent to 4 percent growth with Donald Trump's plan will do, then we're going to have the resources to meet our nation's needs at home and abroad, and we're going to have the ability to bring down the national debt. 

QUIJANO: Senator Kaine? 

KAINE: Elaine, on the economy, there's a fundamental choice for the American electorate. Do you want a "you're hired" president in Hillary Clinton or do you want a "you're fired" president in Donald Trump? I think that's not such a hard choice. 

Hillary and I have a plan that's on the table that's a "you're hired" plan. Five components. First thing we do is we invest in manufacturing, infrastructure, and research in the clean energy jobs of tomorrow. Second thing is we invest in our workforce, from pre-K education to great teachers to debt-free college and tuition-free college for families that make less than $125,000 a year. 

Third, we promote fairness by raising the minimum wage, so you can't work full-time and be under the poverty level, and by paying women equal pay for equal work. 

Fourth, we promote small business growth, just as we've done in Virginia, to make it easier to start and grow small businesses. Hillary and I each grew up in small-business families. My dad, who ran an iron working and welding shop, is here tonight. 

And, fifth, we have a tax plan that targets tax relief to middle- class individuals and small businesses and asks those at the very top who've benefited as we've come out of recession to pay more. 

KAINE: The Trump plan is a different plan. It's a "you're fired" plan. And there's two key elements to it. First, Donald Trump said wages are too high. And both Donald Trump and Mike Pence think we ought to eliminate the federal minimum wage. 

Mike Pence, when he was in Congress, voted against raising the minimum wage above $5.15. And he has been a one-man bulwark against minimum wage increases in Indiana. 

The second component of the plan is massive tax breaks for the very top, trillions of dollars of tax breaks for people just like Donald Trump. The problem with this, Elaine, is that's exactly what we did 10 years ago and it put the economy into the deepest recession -- the deepest recession since the 1930s. 

Independent analysts say the Clinton plan would grow the economy by 10.5 million jobs. The Trump plan would cost 3.5 million jobs. And Donald Trump -- why would he do this? Because his tax plan basically helps him. And if he ever met his promise and he gave his tax returns to the American public like he said he would, we would see just how much his economic plan is really a Trump-first plan.

One can see that the question is heavily weighted, and Pence laps it right up, going the moderator one better by calling the national debt "atrocious". Then he spins a total fantasy about how trillions on tax breaks for the wealthy will bring it down.

Kaine on the other hand does not address the question at all.

What was so unfortunate about this whole exchange is that it failed to give Americans an adult discussion about what the debt is, and its role in the government and the economy. And moderator Quijano led the way into this infantilism, though she is far from alone in sharing this tired, conventional wisdom.

Firstly, the federal system and debt are nothing like state debts or household debts. States do not issue currency and do not print money. Like the various Euro countries, states are bound by an income/outgo ledger. They have to fund their budgets from taxes, or if the federal government is generous, grants and other aid from above.

The Federal government uses taxes as well, but it has the additional job of running the whole economic system, including the currency. The national debt is in truth an economic management tool, whereby growth is accommodated and inflation managed by creating money to spend more than it receives in taxes. Yes, there is, and should be, a perpetual deficit so that economic growth can be met with the issuance of new money. Who gets that new money? The federal government does, to spend into the economy. Treasury bonds represent a legalistic (and in actuality unnecessary) tool to avoid issuance of more currency (which is also a debt/liability of the federal government) using the issuance of a longer-term debt that rewards rich people for saving, presumably with less inflationary impact than currency, but in practice with little different impact at all.

We have been brought up to think that the Fed manages the money supply. But it only controls interest rates, and even there can not get very far ahead of or behind the market. Interest rates have a profound impact on the money creation by banks. Yes, private banks create money too. Every new loan is a creation of new money, and every payment you make on a loan disappears into a monetary black hole. Banks can create money/loans on the strength of their capitalization, and on their regulatory authorization from the government, and lastly on their estimation of market conditions and the worthiness of particular borrowers.

But this new money is very unstable, as we learned in the last financial panic. Private loans can be called in, bank capital can vaporize, borrowers can skip town, and glitzy real estate developers can go bankrupt ... multiple times! Thus we need someone else and some other mechanism to keep the monetary system stable, and that is the federal government in its spending and money creation capacity, which is shared between the Fed and the Treasury.

The federal debt represents that part of the national liability pool that is stable, and is managed in part with an eye towards economic growth and inflation. If inflation and growth are both low, as they are now, the proper federal policy is to spend more money while taking in less tax. Which in turn implies growing the federal debt. The textbook case was in the depths of the banking meltdown, when congress reluctantly approved almost a billion dollars of extra spending and debt. That was far from enough, but certainly helped stabilize the monetary system and economy.

As Alexander Hamilton first said (or did he sing it?) "A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a blessing". This was in the context of the new federal government taking on the various war debts of the former colonies, now states, in both a political sense and in a financial sense, that a well-managed debt is (as England had shown) a tremendous benefit to the national state and economy.

Secondly, the debt is not something that anyone has to "pay off". The calculations that state it in terms of each citizen's personal share are wildly off the mark. We may in sum have a cultural debt to our predecessors for creating that much wealth (the obverse of debt) that is now circulating through the hands of bondholders, other investors, our infrastructure, etc., but it is not a weight hanging over anyone's head. Even if interest rates were to rise, so would inflation and GDP, making the effective debt and its debt service little different. Bondholders like their bonds, roll them over perpetually, and would dislike being paid off in cash.

The real danger of excessive spending by the federal government is inflation. If federal spending (enabled by borrowing/printing in excess of taxation) rises too much, that excess money drives prices up, in a process that may be pleasant and politically easy at the beginning, but becomes very onerous to unwind later on. So there is certainly a point to keeping a lid on inflation, via Federal Reserve independence, etc. But of late, we have been too focussed on fighting the last war (that of the 70's inflation) and not enough on the current one of restoring growth and fighting deflation in the US (see also Japan on how diffucult this fight can be).

What is so ironic about all this is that during our painful recession, it has been the Republicans in congress who have been most vociferous in fighting more spending and debt (at least when a Democratic president is in office; otherwise, debt and spending go up dramatically). They are the ones who have put the brakes on macroeconomic management and growth, all in an effort to pin the resulting poor economic performance on Barack Obama. Well, we have eeked out a little growth anyhow, and Obama easily gained a second term, with a protoge ready to be shoed in to boot, so their destructive efforts have not, thankfully, been sufficiently effective politically, though they have been extremely damaging economically and socially.

And effectively, both parties have the same macroeconomic policy on the debt- expand it. Republicans do so by reducing taxes for their friends, and Democrats do so by spending, also often to help their friends. So all the bluster about how terrible the debt is turns out to be a back-door way to screw with the other party's ability to carry out its priorities, ending up in gridlock. We really can do better by having an adult discussion about finances, while judging those other priorities directly.

So to hear this debate moderator going on about the debt, which she, and the whole media, and the candidates themselves, so thoroughly (or willfully) misunderstand, is sad and disappointing, not to mention flagrantly biased. We need higher debt right now, and specifically we deperately need more spending on our infrastructure to get the economy back on track and pointed to the future. That would be far more productive than complaining about trade deals, or the manufacturing jobs that are long-gone, not to mention the immigration crisis that happened over a decade ago.

• "Inflation targeting has become the poisoned chalice of macroeconomic policy"
• Perhaps 2008 was all about a failure to regulate banks.
• Pence- a worthy running mate.
• The Taliban overruns another district in Afghanistan.
• What people need is work.
• Rent: everyone worships the market, but everyone works as hard as possible to get out from under its rule.
• Some more psychoanalysis of Trump.
• And lying analysis.
• Annals of Republican cowardice.

Capitalism is Not a Moral System; Corporations Are Not Moral Entities

Enthusiasm for capitalism sometimes edges into moralism. Why?

I was raised on Forbes, Friedman, and Rukeyser- each one a tireless cheerleader for the moral and practical rightness of capitalism. Back in the cold war days, with Reds breathing down our necks, this was understandable, though if the Communists had such a terrible, unworkable system, why be so worried about it? And how did our marquee accomplishment of landing people on the moon with a massive public / bureaucratic / military program justify a capitalist system? There were clearly other agendas going on, which typically did not come up in the discussion.

The basic case goes back to Hayek and the Austrians- a temperamental antipathy to egalitariansm, the French revolutionary spirit, and particularly to government doing anything significant, because that will land us in bondage to the bureaucrat, who is by definition corrupt. The Russian system, then and (ironically) now, exemplifies this bondage- the process by which the government's control of the economy and media fosters an amplification of political power into despotism and the creeping disenfranchisement of everyone else- workers and owners alike.

On the other hand, slavery and capitalism are hardly antithetical. In the US, slaves were the single most valuable form of property in the pre-civil war South, greater even than land. They were sold and bought like so many bales of cotton and listed, separated, and passed down in estates. They were tortured, mutilated, chased down, and terrorized, all in the service of successful business. They were the soul, one might say, of that system of capitalism which was fervently defended by people who cherished freedom above all things, such that in the Civil War one-quarter of all military eligible men in the South died.

So while capitalism may be a practical system, it is not inherently a moral system. Like Darwinian natural selection, it may build wonderful things, but it is a blind, pitiless and quite amoral mechanism for doing so. Both systems harness greed, competition, and destruction to weed out the weak and enrich the rich. And their blindness means that they may take vastly more time, and induce vastly more suffering, than required to get there. Indeed, even if one brings sanguine thoughts and upright morals to the business world, it will grind them down, for Gresham's dynamic makes sure that, to meet the competition, you stoop to their level and their methods. Nice guys finish last.

Capitalism is thus in principle and in practice, amoral, and efforts to associate it with apple pie and the flag are pure (class-ist) propaganda. Confusion certainly arises from the fact that corporations are made up of people, who are themselves good and moral, so the whole must have some moral character, right? Unfortunately, the whole in this case is less than the sum of its parts. If the system itself is amoral, then the morality of its components is of little avail. And the leadership of the system tends to go to the least moral, most psychopathic types of people, since they are best suited(!) to that system.

Critiques from the anti-corporate left include the Occupy movement, Bernie Sanders, and basic empirical observation of what is going on around us, now and in the past. The left makes its business to poke holes in the narrative of friendly, moral community-upholding companies. Which in turn spend zillions of dollars portraying their moral rectitude in white-washing, green-washing happy-people advertisements. We need to take a more mature approach to this whole relationship.

One problem is assuming that companies are or even can be moral and decent corporate citizens. That is a simple category error. It is certainly nice if a company behaves decently, but the reigning corporate philosophy and legal / fiduciary duty is to increase shareholder value, whether that and the means of getting there is moral or not. And to obey the law, or at least not get caught. Or if caught, to corrupt the justice system and the political system to the extent that it doesn't matter. And so forth. Some business models foster better behavior than others, but even in the most customer friendly, repeated-interaction, transparent kind of business, there is room for assymetric information and reward for immorality.

The point is the we should not rely on corporations to be moral beings, at least under current systems of governance. We need our other institutions to be the moral actors in the system. If global warming is screwing up the future of the entire biosphere, the solution is not to moan about how evil fossil fuel companies are, but to legally circumscribe them to serve the public purposes, such as raising carbon taxes, regulating their direct impacts, and raising investment and incentives for clean energy.

The fossil fuel industry is corrupting the very system that has the role of holding it to account- the political system, which is our expression of our moral and other long-term interests. Surely that is evil, but again, addressing it is a matter of organization and politics, not of trying to convince Exxon to change its stripes from the predatory organization and purpose that it embodies.

The fossil fuel industry is additionally corrupting the very media that we rely on for information and organization in the effort to mount moral political changes that would regulate its activities and reshape our energy system. Surely that is evil, but again, no change happens without conflict with the incumbant, conservative (if wildly non-conserving) powers who like things just as they are.

The upshot of all these digressions is that the access that corporations have to our public affairs is a relic of a past where we assumed (or were brainwashed to think) that they were civic entities with a public spirited morality. That is not the case, and we need to act accordingly to separate them rigorously. They have interests, surely. But they are not public interests. They have legal personhood. But no moral personhood, and thus no proper role in our collective moral deliberations, or media in the form of a blanket constitutional right of expression.

But here we are with our popularly elected legislators and executive officials sucking at the corporate teat. As though that were where the money was. All the while, the government prints money in the billions, but can't seem to stage an informative election, or make election days into holidays, or publically fund the central exercise of democracy.

• Capitalism with a smile- was a political and cultural construct.
• More mistaken cheerleading for capitalism. Certainty is not, generally, a good criterion.
• Another recession retrospective. And why is economics so partisan?
• Stupidity has a large new market, and perhaps the colossal failure of "smart" mainstream economics has something to do with it. Which was, ironically, infected with the same right-wingism that now doubts the "experts". Their own experts! Makes you wonder what their aims were all along.
• A good side of business- the first cool cell phone.
• Secrecy is bad policy, on salaries.
• Trump is a conflict of interest nightmare.
• And a total fraud.
• We are not doing enough: gas consumption reaches all time high.
• Part of a series about the income guarantee.
• China is headed for a fall.
• Shadows of MMT are falling on conventional economics.
• Yet Japan failed to stick with its fiscal policy.
• Mass migration patterns.
• Gun nuts keep misfiring.