The WAWG Blog

Based on the recent writings of Professor George Lakoff and the Newtown statements from our President, I posted the following to FB to contrast the conservative without conscience (CWC) and progressive moral values on the recent shootings in Newtown, CT.

Which moral value would you pick? The individual freedom to own weapons for mass killing or the social responsibility to prevent violence against all our children?

A similar moral value contrast could work for Citizens United. But, what are the CWC/progressive moral choices?

The basic progressive moral value is to both protect and empower while being responsible for both oneself and others. For the family, both parents equally protect and empower each child. For the government, our elected representatives should enable the equal protection and empowerment of all citizens. The opposing CWC value is individual freedom to provide one’s own protection and empowerment. As ‘rugged individualists,’ CWCs don’t need government.

Also, we’ve had decades of CWC dogma about limiting government and absolutely no discussion about limiting corporate governance, which has grown/evolved for decades and now protects and empowers only CEOs and major stockholders at the expense of everything else impacted by corporate governance.

With that in mind, here are some moral value options on governance – as citizens in a representative democracy or as consumers in a corporatocracy. Which would you pick, CWC or P?

CWC: Limiting representative government and privatizing all that is public, or
P: Limiting corporate governance and thus protecting citizen’s well-being, prosperity and safety?

CWC: Maximizing corporate freedom by eliminating governmental checks and balances, or
P: Maximizing citizen freedom by having government check and balance abusers of power?

CWC: Living under corporate governance which is accountable only to the CEO and a few major stockholders, or
P: Living under representative government that is accountable to voters?

CWC: Having corporate governance concerned only about profit at the expense of other stakeholders including customers, or
P: Having representative government concerned exclusively about protecting and empowering all citizens equally?

CWC: Having corporate governance that has bought our representative government, or
P: Having representative governance that is independent of international corporations which are as financially as large as small countries?

What are we willing to pay for the unlimited freedom to own weapons of mass killing – the lives of our own children?

What are we willing to pay for unlimited free enterprise – the loss of our representative government?

Our freedom of speech has reasonable limitations, like talking about “bombs” in a crowded public airport, and we haven’t suffered the “slippery slop.” Our freedom to travel is reasonably limited by traffic control and it hasn’t kept us home bound. Why can’t we accept reasonable limitations on gun ownership and corporate personhood?

“Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” — Barack Obama, Newtown Address, December 16, 2012

In an interview of Henry Giroux about the War on youth in America, Canada and Great Britain, there is a great summary of neoliberalism, its destructive power, and its reliance on an unfettered free market.

Your works speak about an attack on public institutions. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this attack? Why are public institutions being attacked?

Public institutions are being attacked because they are public, offer spaces for producing critical thought, emphasize human needs over economic needs, and because they are one of the few vital institutions left that can function as democratic public spheres.

You have described the phenomena of neo-liberalism as a “terror.” Could you briefly explain what neo-liberalism is and why you called it a terror?

Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit. Neoliberalism is marked by a shift from the manufacturing to the service sector, the rise of temporary and part-time work, growth of the financial sphere and speculative activity, the spread of mass consumerism, the commodification of practically everything.

Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions. Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating the concept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.”

It is a form of terrorism because it abstracts economics from ethics and social costs, makes a mockery of democracy, works to dismantle the welfare state, thrives on militarization, undermines any public sphere not governed by market values, and transforms people into commodities. Neoliberalism’s rigid emphasis on unfettered individualism, competitiveness and flexibility displaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the welfare of others. In doing so, it dissolves crucial social bonds and undermines the profound nature of social responsibility and its ensuing concern for others. In removing individuals from broader social obligations, it not only tears up social solidarities, it also promotes a kind of individualism that is almost pathological in its disdain for public goods, community, social provisions, and public values. Given its tendency to instrumentalize knowledge, it exhibits mistrust for thoughtfulness, complexity, and critical dialogue and in doing so contributes to a culture of stupidity and cruelty in which the dominant ethic is organized around the discourse of war and a survival of the fittest mentality. Neoliberalism is the antithesis of democracy.

Do you believe that neo-liberalism is compatible with some of the more traditional civic and social ethos expounded by more traditional liberal advocates of higher education? If so how, if not, why not?

No, neoliberalism represents a break with older forms of liberalism because it completely abrogates the social contract and leaves no room for meaningful social relationships. Its project has nothing to do with education and everything to do with training.

You have described some strategies to resist neo-liberalism. Your main strategies include new more radical types of pedagogy. Could you explain some of your methods?

My strategies are organized around the need to make pedagogy central to politics itself and to help create the conditions necessary for the development of a formative culture that provides the foundation for developing critical citizens and a meaningful and substantive democracy.

The neoliberal punishing state is at war with our youth:

Neoliberalism is replacing our democracy with a corporatocracy, replacing critical thinking citizens with citizens who are more inclined to shop than vote, replacing care for others with excessive greed, replacing equal opportunity with opportunity only for the wealthy, rewriting laws to favor corporations and the extremely wealthy, converting the middle class to the new poor, and presenting youth, especially minority youth, as an internal security threat rather than a key ingredient in the infrastructure of our democracy.

In an address to the nation on January 17, 1961, in the middle of nurturing the greatest middle class this world has ever seen, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned,

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

You may have never heard of Dirk Van Dongen. Well, he is the top corporate lobbyist in this military-corporate complex who President Eisenhower warned us about. Here is a statement from TIMELINE: WHO STOLE THE AMERICAN DREAM about this ONE%er:

May 2003 — At a White House ceremony, President Bush thanks “my friend Dirk Van Dongen” for helping to move the Bush tax cuts through Congress. Unknown to most Americans, Van Dongen is a Washington insider, field marshal of the “Gang of Six” — the six major business organizations that anchor the Tax Relief Coalition that lobbied for tax cuts.

He was not only crucial to getting the initial Bush tax cuts signed into law but he, and his Gang of Six, worked hard in 2010 to force the extension of those tax cuts.

In a September 2005 Bloomberg article, the authors summarized the relationship between Bush and corporate lobbyists:

Since George W. Bush became president in January 2001, it hasn’t been unusual for top-ranking U.S. lawmakers and 59-year-old Bush himself to turn to trade group lobbyists for advice in making legislative decisions. The industry associations have staged successful battles ranging from new laws cutting individual income taxes to reducing tariffs in international trade agreements.

This article described Van Dongen’s Gang of Six in this way:

The groups represent companies that employ more than 22 million people and generate at least $5.2 trillion in goods and services, or almost half of U.S. gross domestic product. If the Gang of Six were a country, it would constitute the world’s second biggest economy, eclipsing Japan’s $4.7 trillion GDP.

The Gang of Six is also referred to as the Tax Relief Coalition. In another Bloomberg article from 2010, the authors quantified the money being invested by these corporate lobbyists to keep the Bush tax cuts in place:

The Tax Relief Coalition brings money to the fight. The management committee groups have spent $3.8 million since Jan. 1, 2009, on candidates and advertising. The Chamber alone plans to spend $75 million on the Nov. 2 elections.

No doubt, Dongen and his team of 1.8 million over paid CEOs are out there right now pushing to keep these cuts in place and promote legislation to further increase their power and wealth. And re-electing President Obama, adding two more Democrat Senators, and dumping a few Tea Party wackos from Congress is not enough to stop this powerful lobbying.

We the people need to lobby hard. There are more of us and we need to speak up.

“I can only do it with the help of the American people,” President Obama said. “Do what it takes to communicate a sense of urgency. We don’t have a lot of time here. We’ve got a few weeks to get this thing done. … Tweet #my2k”

A recent episode of This American Life was about the Dakota War of 1862. This war resulted in the final expulsion of the Dakota Indians from their ancestral home in Minnesota. It took years of lies, trickery, swindles, war, and finally, the hanging of 38 Dakotas.

Hedrick Smith’s new book Who Stole the American Dream is about the economic war against the 99% by the ONE%. It is a very detailed description of the step by step destruction of the American dream by the plutocrats. The book also provides recommendations for what America and its citizens must do to reverse the large losses they have suffered during recent decades, recommendations that should prove more successful than the failed efforts of the Minnesota Dakota Indian’s stand against those in power in the mid 1800s.

The analogies between the downfall of the Dakota Indians at the hands of the powerful sounds remarkably familiar when heard in the context of the war between the two Americas described by Hedrick Smith. In both cases, the powerful dehumanize, imprison, kill, or let die those who threaten their power.

Then, as now, the ONE% see those without power as expendable. According to Hedrick Smith’s book, a 2005 Citicorp glossy investment brochure called Welcome to the Plutonomy stated, “There is no ‘average consumer’ in a plutonomy …. Economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” The Dakotas were part of the expendable indigenous people of the Americas. The poor and middle class are now seen as the expendable “indigenous workers” of the world.

The difference between the Dakota’s abhorrent fate and the unknown fate of today’s 99% comes down to strength in numbers. The Dakotas were slowly outnumbered by the non-indians. They lost all they considered important to their way of life. The losses suffered by today’s 99% are similar and broader in scale. However, the 99% far outnumber the ONE%. The question is, will the 99% stand up and tell the ONE% that their freedom to abuse must end?

According to a 2009 Daily Kos article, the biggest fear of the ONE% is ‘one person – one vote‘ and this fear has escalated after the re-election of President Obama and the election of more women and progressives to our national congress. Voting is critical, but only the beginning to reclaiming the American Dream for the 99%. Mr. Smith and others suggest a “domestic Marshall Plan.”

Below are the 10 steps for this domestic Marshall Plan, which the 99% must require from our elected representatives. The first eight are economic. The last two regain the political center of post WWII America.

• Creating Infrastructure Jobs to Regain Our Ability to Compete in a Global Economy
• Pushing, Led by the Federal Government, for Innovation, Science, and High-tech Research
• Generating a Manufacturing Renaissance for good paying jobs
• Making the Nation’s Personal Tax Code Fairer – reducing the power of the ONE%.
• Making the Corporate Tax Code Favor Job Creation IN America
• Getting China to Live by a Fair Trade Policy
• Reducing Spending on Wars and Weapons
• Supporting Home Owners and Funding Our Citizenship Benefits (SS, Medicare, and Affordable Care Act)
• Rebuilding the Political Center and Ending Partisan Gridlock – The elections of 2006, 2008, and 2012 were a good start.
• Mobilizing the Middle Class to Do More than Vote

It will take time but implementing this plan will protect and empower the middle class and keep the ONE% in check – just as the Greatest Generation did in post WWII America.

I’ve sent the following to President Obama via the White House contact web site:

You might consider doing something similar to counter all the fiscal cliff fear mongering we will hear for the next several weeks.

—————————————————————————————-
RE: Fiscal Cliff Fear Mongering and Sacrificing the Public Good

Mr. President,

Between now and the end of the year there will be a lot of fanciful fear mongering over the fiscal cliff. Please stay cool and don’t agree to replace representative governance of citizen benefits with corporate governance where accountability shifts from our elected officials to major stock holders.

Just like the family’s moral purpose is to protect and empower their children, our government’s moral purpose is to protect and empower its citizens. Transferring this moral function to local daycare centers or multinational corporations, who must put profit before protecting or empowering their customers, harms both our children and our citizens. As George Lakoff puts it, ” ‘Smaller government’ means making the public good secondary and abandoning the sacred moral mission of the government.”

More specifically, it is the moral obligation of our government to provide and manage the Social Security and Medicare programs for the citizens. These programs are especially critical for protecting and empowering senior citizens. Without representative governance, the freedom of seniors will be severely restricted as they unnecessarily suffer from shrinking incomes while trying to pay for increasing medical costs during their retirement years.

Privatization of SS only benefits Wall Street while it robs Main Street. Wages, which haven’t grown for decades and have become insufficient, are then subjected to the vagaries of the irrational and inherently selfish free market. This exacerbates the decades long transfer of wealth from most Americans to the ONE%.

Privatization of Medicare only benefits the insurance industry while robbing elderly citizens of their right to healthcare – a moral responsibility of our government. Insurance companies cannot compete with Medicare with their higher administrative costs and profit requirements, and elderly citizens can’t afford the insurance premiums of totally privatized health care that has no moral concern for the health of its customers.

What we need, instead of privatization, is additional revenue to properly fund these citizenship benefits. All citizens need to pay, as most currently do, citizenship dues for these future benefits. This includes paying dues on all pre-retirement income, not just income from employment wages.

Here is a portion of the transcript from the June 13, 2011, Republican presidential primary debate where Romney is asked about transferring disaster relief to the states – a conservative, anti-federal government idea.

KING: What else, Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut—we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…

KING: Including disaster relief, though?

ROMNEY: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all. [emphasis added]

What is it about authoritarian conservatives without conscience (CWC), like Romney and Ryan, that lead them to make statements like the ones above, and others?

These statements do make sense to those whose moral values result in the following conservative principles:

• Direct causation – each reaction is the result of only direct action,
• Rugged individualism – believing that self-discipline and moral correctness leads to individual success, and
• Privatization – a self-correcting tool for problem solving that also replaces representative governance with corporate governance.

The strict father, authoritarian, family model teaches direct causation starting from a very early age. The strict father dictates what is morally correct and reinforces that correctness with direct and strong physical punishment. What is right is a direct result of what the strict father mandates. Indirect influences are, by definition, irrelevant. With a brain programmed for direct causation, some beliefs come down to ‘gut feel’ or ‘common sense.’ Critical thinking about causation not required and never taught.

Direct causation provides the foundation for the principle of rugged individualism. The authoritarian strict father defines reality which includes being responsible only for oneself. Others are responsible for themselves in a direct causation world. Rugged individuals are also taught both moral correctness and self-discipline and that the lack of self-discipline is immoral. Effective self-discipline produces a rugged and moral individual who is the master of his own fate. Such individuals can handle any situation or national disaster. If they aren’t prepared, then they have no one to blame, or to count on for help, but themselves – “you’re on your own” and “you deserve what you get.” If they lack moral correctness and self-discipline, they especially don’t deserve help when the federal government ‘steals’ from truly rugged individuals, like ‘small business job creators,’ to ‘give’ the help to the undisciplined and immoral. Such large-scale federal help, like disaster relief or saving the auto industry, is immoral for the CWC.

In the worldview of the authoritarian CWC, their cherished moral value of self-discipline is key to their love of free enterprise – the free market will take care of itself and self-correct. CWC’s believe self-discipline is an innate part of capitalism. This is why they believe privatization is necessary for all government functions, except national defense, which provides a powerful punishment tool they need for bringing the world under their control. Thus, privatizing FEMA is morally the right thing to do. If it’s privatized you can buy the services you need to survive – if you can afford it.