April 16, 2013

Rationality in the Face of Fear

Typically at times like this, when tragedy has struck and fear and sadness and anger are all justified, those guys will try to tighten the clamps. But in Boston those bombs were in garbage cans at the finish line of a major event. How could that be permitted? It is security 101. This was not a surprising, tricky sort of attack. This was old school. Removing garbage cans or somehow securing them is just basic security practice. Therefore there is no justification to use this as a pretext for expanding the powers of the state. This is essentially a conservative position, but in this topsy turvy world, it seems conservatives are on the other side in this case. Conservatives have abandoned not only conservative principles, but rationality itself. There is no rational justification for more elaborate spying tools when these guys didn't even check the garbage cans at the finish line.

Since 9/11 we've been battered around through this repeating scenario over and over and it is time to react to these kinds of events rationally, not out of hysterical fear. And we need to stop letting politicians browbeat us into accepting whatever they are forcing down our throats claiming it will make us safer. Yeah, right! Like when? What century might we start to see some positive results from this approach? I am not sure what the answers are to all these problems. I would say there are some good places to start. Besides removing garbage cans from places like that that are obvious targets of bombers who want to get lots of people, we might want to give some thought to stopping bombing other countries. Who knows? It might help? There's never been much evidence of any of these attacks originating overseas. But Whatever is causing all the violence in this country, it might be good to consider changing the state policies of violence. If we are bombing other countries, we shouldn't be surprised if someone does want to bomb us back.

But that is beside the point. We likely will never know the truth about this incident, as we don't about so many others. I haven't heard who the media is assigning guilt to at this moment. Someone is probably doing focus groups to see what will have the best effect. But in any case, it is time for some rationality. We should not allow ourselves to be manipulated through fear. Enough already.

March 17, 2013

Back to Blasting

I wanted it to be blunt and irreverent as the underground papers I had seen in the late '60s. As the attack on Iraq approached in 2003, the site got up to almost 30,000 hits a day. The Guardian listed it as one of four "anti-war weblogs" in its special report on the anti-war movement. It was among the sites blocked in China. The Memory Hole had this to say about Headblast: "Host David Cogswell provides head-jarring anti-media media coverage and commentary on passing events in the temporal world. It's like a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which 'is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.'"

The Sideshow said, "There's a maddening lack of permalinks on Headblast's broadsheet-style front page, but it's fun to read and a bit too quotable. Wow, I can remember when I had that kind of energy - and coffee can compensate for only so much. Much is quotable, so here's just one:

Nixon Rises From Hell

Democratic Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, speaking out against Bush administration attempts to seize autocratic power and conduct a war with no consent, said, "For all of their blustering about how al-Qaida is determined to strike at our freedoms, this administration shows little appreciation for the constitutional doctrines and processes that have preserved those freedoms for more than two centuries ... I have not seen such executive arrogance and secrecy since the Nixon administration, and we all know what happened to that group." Interesting choice of words. What indeed did happen to that group? Some of them -- Cheney and Rumsfeld for example -- have resurfaced and are in control of the government right now. "

Around the time Obama was elected I changed my ways and stopped posting every day. For one thing, I had said pretty much everything I had to say about politics. Obama was still doing most of the most despicable things Bush did, extending the Bush overreaches as if the power had not changed at all and the overriding agenda just kept rolling. I got tired of repeating the same warnings when everything I feared most came to pass anyway and there seemed to be little anyone could do to affect it. I used the time instead to publish a few books, Existentialism For Beginners, Zinn For Beginners and Unions For Beginners.

Now it is a whole new period and I'm going to start posting blogs again on this page, but in a different way than before, with a slightly altered set of concerns and focus. So here we go.

March 22, 2013

Shifting Sands

Many predictions have actually come true. The social conditions portrayed by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Philip K. Dick have become real in many ways. The predictions of Marshall McLuhan about the effects of media were remarkably on target. But we've evolved so far now that even his projections are reaching their limit. It is a deeply troubled time. The social and political structures, the financial systems of the past cannot accommodate the realities of the present. They are obsolete, dysfunctional. The economic system has become so perverted that it no longer functions as a viable system of exchange to underlie a civilization. It has become a manipulated tool that undermines the social fabric and is producing an increasingly diseased social organism. Things are vastly out of whack.

In the tumult of social upheaval, two forces stand astride vying for dominance. One is corporatism, what is effectively the ruling order of the world today, though we like to talk a lot about democracy. As the transnational corporate state tightens its lethal grip on world civilization, the democratic forces, the grassroots resistance of freedom loving people against tyranny are coalescing and still very tentatively challenging the corporate world order.

In this confrontation we will discover if indeed Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he said that once the world had crossed from the aristocratic period to the democratic period it could never go back. If he is right, we have reason to be heartened. And we do have some mathematical reasoning on our side -- the side of democracy -- as well. The .01 percent who own and command virtually everything are greatly outnumbered.

The present tendencies do not present a very hopeful picture, however. And the stakes are high. There is a great deal of scientific information (I know, America is anti-science -- ! How did that happen?) that indicates that if the democratic forces do not wrench control from the predatory capitalist forces that are now wreaking havoc on the earth with a virutally free hand, the survival of the species itself is gravely threatened. I know it is almost impossible for human beings to imagine their own death, let alone that of the human species. But Mother Nature is likely to offer a few demonstrations that will remind us of our place in the overall scheme of things.

On the positive side, I was very encouraged by the way people behaved in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. On our present course, further catastrophes will keep coming at least to the point at which people wake up and realize that the world they've been hypnotized to believe in is not real. The real one will come crashing down. And we'll realize that burning up the surface of the earth is too big a price to pay for the enhancement of the corporate balance sheet. That realization will come, hopefully in time for us as a species to save ourselves.

After so many years of not blogging, I feel like Rip Van Winkle coming back to a world I left behind, a vastly transformed world. How much has Facebook changed the world in the last five years? No one really knows. No one yet knows the scope of the change or where it is leading. We can feel the change. We can observe many features of the change, but no one really can see the whole, size it up on a global scale. It's happening too fast, it's too new.

In the wake of Sandy I saw people help each other, care for each other, remember that we are a community and we are connected to all other members of the human community. The value system that bombards us constantly from the corporate media, urging consumption, materialism and dog-eat-dog selfishness, just dropped away. As effectively discredited as social connectedness has been by the corporate state's propaganda machines, it just pops right out again when misfortune strikes on a broad scale. We are socially in denial of the catastrophes we are brewing. Intelligent discussion of climate change is practically verboten in order to protect the oil world order. We have therefore made practically no preparation for dealing with the disasters we are creating. We will, however, change very quickly as those disasters manifest with increasing frequency. It's a mixed blessing, a yin-yang slap in the face, a colossal zen koan. But it's a kernel of hope amid a storm of chaos.

8:59 p.m.

So if you'll permit me to ramble on...

Confronting Corporatism -- In many of the discussions I have with people about the problems Americans are facing now, I find myself coming back to a single, central problem: the expansion of corporate power to the point where it dominates our society and much of the world. I believe that the expansion of corporate power is the central political issue of our time. It is not a partisan issue because one: it is written in the founding documents that power resides in the people, not in an aristocracy corporate or otherwise. And two, because the corporatocracy has coopted both parties. There is no non-corporate party in the two-party system. Both Bush Sr. and Clinton were for NAFTA. There was virtually no opposition. But NAFTA has not lived up to its promise for the people of either Mexico or the US. It has only worked out for Corporate America.

In "Unions For Beginners" I outlined how the biggest corporations in America banded together in the early 1970s and set an agenda to take power over political processes in America. We can easily see how successful their effort has been. But few people are probably aware that the takeover of America by the corporations was not just a natural evolution. It was a planned agenda that succeeded spectacularly.

The problem is that the corporate state operates on the principles of a corporation, to maximize profits only. And corporations are focused on quarterly profits, often at the expense of long-term considerations. It does not work as the guiding ethos of a society. A corporate entity cannot moderate itself. It cannot act on human concerns. A society cannot be run that way.

The rampant abuse of the earth cannot continue forever. Sooner or later humanity is going to confront the devastating effects of predatory industrial capitalism. The sooner we do, the better chance we have of saving ourselves and the quality of life we got used to before we fouled the environment to the verge of inhabitability.

For the past dozen years I've been working on a book called "Confronting Corporatism: Existential Politics in the 21st Century." It deals with the tendency for capitalism to evolve into corporatism, which is a name Mussolini used to describe fascism, "the merger of state and corporate power."

That evolution has been taking place in the US for a long time and at this point it's no longer a "what-if" proposition. It's more a matter of coming to a reckoning of the fact that the corporate-state merger is essentially a fait accompli, and then look at the ramifications of that. This is our world. This is our time. What do we do now?

When I started working on "Confronting Corporatism," the idea was a little more obscure than it is now. At this point the takeover of the country by a relatively small number of banks and corporations is pretty much common knowledge. The outrage is widespread, whether it's channeled into the Tea Party side or the Occupy side. But few people know what to do about it.

The Tea Party folks just let the situation turn into a boondoggle in which they ended up putting their passion behind the Republican forces who represent the most lethal part of the corporate elite that is robbing them. The Occupy side, on the other hand, has waged an interesting psychological campaign that has produced some creative activism, actions that really touch people's lives, like buying bad debt and canceling it. That kind of thing shows a creative way to confront the power that is so overwhelming and oppressive.

Even as I have left "Confronting Corporatism" idle for periods, the subject becomes increasingly relevant. So I've gotten it out again to work on it one more time. Maybe its time has come, if it's not too late. A dozen years is not a long time to work on a book. "Existentialism For Beginners" took 30 years from the first time I made a note of the idea of the book until its completion.

In all this time of stewing over "Confronting Corporatism" while I watched the increasing momentum and aggressiveness of the corporate juggernaut I did manage to come up with a list of suggestions for actual reforms that need to be enacted to take back for the people the power that has been coopted by corporations employing their lobbyists in Washington.

It's not "10 Easy Steps." It's more like 10 ridiculously fantastic improbabilities in the current climate. But if millions of people changed their minds just a little bit, a different world would be possible in spite of all the biggest guns and bombs in the world. This is the power of an idea.

If people can shake off the fog induced by the tsunami blast of propaganda and misinformation in their faces constantly and begin to understand what has happened, how the power has been shifted through a series of sleight of hand tricks, how they have been robbed and their democracy taken away, the war is won conceptually. The goal is a more democratic and humane government, as opposed to a corporate aristocracy. That's all. It's a matter of re-engaging the democratic process.

So to end the night on a positive note let me pass on to you my favorite quote of the day from one of a handful of people who really give me some hope for the future. Elizabeth Warren: "How many billions have to be laundered for drug lords before we consider shutting down a bank?"

March 22, 2013

Why I Wrote Unions for Beginners

This is adapted from a presentation I made at a book launch party at the Hoboken Public Library

This book became necessary because America had evolved into a sort of post union period where the influence of unions had faded. The awareness of them had been wiped out of the national consciousness to the point where it seems that most Americans had very little idea of what unions are or were and the role they played in our history. Americans took for granted weekends and the eight-hour day and 40-hour week and healthcare benefits. As these benefits slip away, many people have no idea that those benefits only came about through a great deal of struggle over many decades in which many people were brutalized and many killed. It was a struggle that must really be characterized as a long war, a class war.

At the same time that union membership declined to a very small portion of the population, the standard of living of the majority of Americans was slipping year by year and the resources of the country were being controlled by an ever smaller minority. Unions came to center stage of the political arena in recent years when Republican governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin, doing the bidding of rich patrons like the Koch brothers, tried to make it illegal for state employees to bargain collectively, to join forces to defend themselves and negotiate for better pay and working conditions. Unions had pretty much been eradicated from the private sector, but still had a foothold in the public sector and the big corporate forces behind Republicans like Scott Walker wanted to wipe out what was left.

As I looked into the rapidly declining standard of living in America and tried to figure out what had happened to create such a precipitous decline in my country during my lifetime, I kept coming back to the growth of corporate power, the increasing control that major corporations exercise over all aspects of American life. Increasingly big corporations have come to control the political system, the legislative system, the regulatory agencies and the media. They leveraged their financial power to decide who could win elections and when they got their candidates into office they were able to use their financial power to influence politicians through huge donations, which earn them in return much larger payoffs, usually at the taxpayers expense. We were the ones left out. And lately the .01 percent seems to be going in for the kill. Winner take all.

It is a vicious cycle and for middle class and working Americans it is increasingly a losing battle and a downward spiral. Everywhere I looked as I studied these trends I saw that these patterns have repeated themselves through history and that the rights of working people have never been given through the generosity of the owners and bosses, but have had to be won through bitter struggle. One person opposing the mighty powers that control society doesn't have a chance. But many people joining together can exert a powerful force.

This has proven itself over and over throughout history and in many realms of life. When we think of unions we tend to think of factories and mines and so forth, but this basic principle of people banding together to fight for their rights applies in many spheres. We saw it in action very dramatically in America's civil rights struggles in the '60s and in the struggle to end the Vietnam War. The historical record now makes it clear that the Vietnam War was ended because of the activism against it, which finally became so tumultuous that the war was no longer a profitable venture for the military industrial complex that perpetrated it. The history of the struggle for civil rights is also clear. If African Americans had waited for their rulers to grant them their Constitutional rights they would still be waiting.

The same kind of processes took place earlier in the historical progression of the unions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The right wing corporate powers who now control our media and even our educational system have effectively eradicated this history so people no longer realize where their rights and privileges came from and the struggles that took place to give middle class people the rights and relative prosperity of the late 20th Century.

The old maxim resonates very powerfully today that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, and this is what has been happening in American life. The middle class is shrinking, people are falling into poverty and homelessness in alarming numbers. Our rights and protections are being taken away piece by piece and people see it happening but don't know what to do about it.

The politicians stripped away regulations on banks and speculation that had helped America maintain economic stability since the Roosevelt days, and when that led to the collapse of the world financial system, the politicians bailed out the criminal banks with our tax money and then turned around and started trying to balance the budget by taking away our Social Security and Medicare. They call them entitlements, but we paid for them. They are insurance policies we all pay into. They are contracts with the American people, and the politicians, under the bidding of their corporate sponsors, are now preparing to steal them from us, to break the contracts and take away the retirement funds and medical insurance we have all paid for all our lives. It's clear that something is very wrong, but as Americans watch helplessly as this process unfolds they do not know what to do.

So how do you fight a power that is so strong it controls markets, the government, the politicians, the media and practically every aspect of American life?

In my research for this book as well as for my previous books on Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, I kept coming back to the unions. Before the Civil Rights struggle, before the anti Vietnam War struggles there were the unions. The unions were the forces that laid the groundwork for the empowerment of the working people of America. That struggle created the middle class and the economic infrastructure for prosperity. And what were the unions? They were not some great force that appeared on the scene to rescue the people from oppression, they were the people themselves. They were people who had been empowered by an idea, a principle. It was an idea that was very dangerous to the big capitalist owners who were used to pushing people around any way they wanted and getting their way easily. Since it was such a dangerous idea to the established powers, it was suppressed with great brutality. And believe me that brutality is still there ready to be unleashed at any time that the establishment cannot get its way peacefully by hypnotizing and drugging its subjects into voluntary submission. Unfortunately humanity has not evolved beyond this kind of barbarism.

But unions, the idea of banding together, of collective bargaining, can form the necessary counterbalance to corporate power that can keep capitalism a healthy system. Unrestrained greed is a basic tendency of capitalism, but it is a self destructive force when there is no countervailing force to balance it, to moderate it. When too much is controlled by too few, the system collapses and then everyone loses, even the big capitalists. That's the situation we're in now: an economy that no longer works. People don't have the money to buy the things the big capitalists produce and everything is stuck. There are scores of empty homes foreclosed on by the banks, and similarly large numbers of homeless people living on the streets. Things are out of whack.

It's clear that the time for that great idea has come again. It is time for Americans to relearn their history, in particular this part of history that has been effectively suppressed by those who have profited most by the decline of unions. Therefore the For Beginners publishing company decided to bring out this book. And I was lucky to be the person they chose to do it.

The For Beginners series is designed to take ideas that are considered to be difficult to understand and to break them down, simplify them and discuss them in a way that is understandable and accessible to regular people. The challenge is not to cover a subject exhaustively down to every detail, but to distill the essence of an idea into a 150-page format that is approachable and accessible by people who are not experts or necessarily scholars, but are beginners to the subject.

You may have heard the quote, "I'm sorry to have written such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write a shorter one." That is the challenge of the Beginners series, to cover a subject effectively but briefly, to distill it to its essence.

So Unions for Beginners looks at the history of unions and tries to come to grips with the essential ideas that powered that movement as well as the epic story of the blood-and-guts struggle that it took to put that idea into action and make it an effective force for lifting a population out of oppression and poverty. Unions gave regular people the leverage to fight back against the power of big money. And that's why that idea is so important today.

March 20, 2013

Legacy of Shame

Not surprising. The Democrats have plenty of blame to share. They went along with it. They gave Bush and Cheney a free hand to destroy a defenseless people. They might have stopped it. Few of them even tried. It was not hard to see that the drive to war on Iraq was a fraud, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But Bush wanted to be a war president. Cheney wanted to carve up the Iraqi oil fields to distribute the goodies among his friends in the oil industry. It appeared that nothing would stop Bush and the neocons from attacking Iraq. The biggest anti-war demonstration in history took place on the eve of the attacks. People marched all over the world. But it made no apparent difference. The ones who may have had the power to stop it, people like Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, just rolled over and went along with it. Not many have much to be proud of.

The New York Times, in spite of the quality of reporting quoted above, has its share of blame for the catastrophe too, with its fraudulent reporting by Judith Miller, using information fed to her directly by the corrupt Ahmad Chalabi, who gave her false information to promote his own agenda. As the undisputed head of the newspaper world, The New York Times' reporting gave some of the strongest support to the false claim that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Later the paper had to admit its error of publishing false information fed to Miller by the criminal Chalabi and apologize.

Dennis Kucinich on the 10th anniversary of the war's beginning proposed that Americans demand a truth and reconciliation commission such as South Africa had after Apartheid fell. "We must demand that America, our nation, establish a fully empowered Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, so that those responsible for misleading us into annihilating innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere be brought forward to a public accountability in a formal process of fact-finding, of inquiry, of public testimony, of admission, of confession. There is no other way out of the moral cul-de-sac in which reside the monstrous crimes of mass murder, torture, kidnapping and rendition other than atonement."

I think he is right. But it's also very far fetched to think that such a thing could happen in America today. But hey, not long before the Berlin Wall came down, almost no one believed it would happen in their lifetime. So there is always hope. Americans now live in such a fog of fraudulence and lies it's hard to see straight.

Meanwhile, the same shadowy forces that seemed to stay in place as Bush handed power to Obama are trying to cook up another war, this time in Iran, and this one would no doubt be even more disastrous than the one in Iraq. The country spent three or four trillion dollars at least in Iraq, nearly bankrupted America's middle class, though the top .01 percent is doing better than ever.

Besides the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by our "rescue," the depleted uranium US forces scattered throughout the country has left a horrible legacy of birth defects, a term that does not come near to evoking the horror it refers to.

Thomas Young, a veteran of Iraq who is now in hospice, wrote a Last Letter to Bush and Cheney "on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq, ... the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and ... those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives." It's probably the best statement we'll get of the outrage piled upon outrage represented by the Iraq War and all the other Bush disasters that we are now living with.

And I quote: "I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans -- my fellow veterans -- whose future you stole. Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage."

It will take a long time for us to be able to do a true reckoning of the damage of that senseless, horrible war.

In the 21st Century, being naive to the workings of corporate media can get you killed.

Chomsky For Beginners written by David Cogswell, illustrated by Paul Gordon, published by For Beginners LLC, is a documentary comicbook about Noam Chomsky the man, the linguist and the political voice, but more than anything, it is a guide to media propaganda, how the corporate-owned mass media are designed not to inform you but to manipulate you for the benefit of the owners.

Order Chomsky For Beginners from Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com

Interviews with Noam Chomsky

The French language version: La Mort de Jim Hatfield is included in the French translation of Hatfield's Fortunate Son: The Making of an American President, published 2003 in Geneva by EditionsTimeli.

More Book Credits:

AVAILABLE AVAILABLE

Zinn For Beginners. Now available at Amazon.com

Existentialism For Beginners

See review at Playstation.

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