Lost in Space

An often used term to describe some of the problems experienced by people today is that they lack the ability to "defer gratification," that is, to delay the pursuit of immediate desires, which although satisfying, can be ultimately harmful. What is never mentioned is the fact that an article published in the American Sociological Review in 1953 was titled "The Deferred Gratification Pattern." The article was written by Louis Schneider and his student Sverre Lysgaard, both of Purdue University, and it anticipated much of what is being discussed today as a "modern problem." The failure of the media to acknowledge the source of many ideas, despite all the new tools provided by the Internet, suggests that we may have a New Columbus problem.   

Washington Hasn't Changed, The People Have.

The most popular theme about politics in the main stream media today is that "Washington is broken." The national television media like CBS and NBC and the national print media like the New York Times and Washington Post all trumpet the same claims made by the national candidates for President. The candidates do it because they say they will fix things when they get to Washington. The media trumpet the same theme because it gets them off the hook for not paying attention to what Washington has been doing for years.

So, let's start at the beginning: Washington is not broken. It has been doing very well at providing the tax codes, and trade policies that serve the interests of the big corporate donors. To spare you the exotic political analysis, it has always been pretty simple-- "He who pays the piper calls the tune." 
So Washington is not broken, but what has changed is that the American people have changed. Many of them are better educated and better informed, and they have learned how to organize to express their grievances. Two of the most successful efforts have been the Tea Party (in 2009) and the Occupy Movement (in 2011). The mainstream media have done their best to portray these two movements as being in opposition to each other. The Tea Party's right-wing populism has received the most media attention, while coverage of the Occupy Movement faded as soon as the movement faded. The most attention to these movements by the media was to ask the question "What do they want?" The second question was "Who are they?" Their ages? Their occupations? Their education? Were they authentic "grass roots" movements or artificial "astroturf" movements, with the latter term referring to fake movements created by wealthy elites hoping to shape their message.

What has been missing from most corporate media reports on these two movements are serious efforts to consider their similarities and the potential that exists for both groups to merge into a single unified movement for change.  While the Tea Party and Occupy Movements appear to differ in important ways, they are unified in their anger about class-based grievances about the demise of middle-class jobs, wages, benefits, and opportunities.

In some ways, the Tea Party and Occupy Movements are similar to populist movements of the past. Both then and now there has been widespread interest among Americans in changing unequal, unfair, and corrupt economic and political systems into forms more consistent with traditional American democratic ideals. However, just as past populist movements rose and then subsided, it may be that the Tea Party and Occupy Movements will shift into a dormant mode, becoming part of what some sociologists have called "abeyance structures." But sometimes new grievances arise that may stimulate new versions of these earlier movements.

1960s Redux?

The current movements on college campuses that focus on racism, sexism, and the lack of diversity in faculty and in programs is somewhat reminiscent of the early 1960s when students who were opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam started to ask questions about their education and about the operation and control of colleges and universities. The response of college administrators at the time  was to try to bring students into the conversation and to get them involved in solving the many problems that they were protesting. At the time, these actions by college administrators would be described as a form of "repressive tolerance" by Herbert Marcuse, a political philosopher. The idea was troubling, because it required thinking about something that was positive--"tolerance"--as a new form of control. Current student activism is limited because it lacks the strong national support of an anti-war movement or a civil rights movement, and it is unclear as to whether the current movement has any 'legs." We do not see any continuation of the current social movement until there appears on the scene a modern-day Mario Savio who will call upon students "to put their bodies on the gears of the machine."

Democracy for Dummies: America's Secret Plan for World Domination

This is a proposal that was written in the year 2000 for a book about American society. Three chapters were written at the time: Chapter One, "Epiphany in the Oval Office"; Chapter Two, "Perpetual Elections"; and Chapter Five, "Location, Location, Location: The Case for Globalization." The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 was the reason that the book project ended. I felt that world events had overtaken the plan to combine political satire with a critical analysis of American Society. I believe that it is now time to present the plan for the book as written in the year 2000. Additional blogs will be added for the three chapters that I wrote in the year 2000. 

Our Plan: Imagine some sort of tip-off to reporters about a secret plan, a conspiracy (if you will) that is the brainchild of the president, but mostly orchestrated by the National Security Agency and the CIA. A break-in possibly, or merely loose lips at a bar on the Hill. Tapes may be found. Or memos and fax transmissions with names disguised, code words used instead. Pictures of memoranda--real names blacked out. Photos of world leaders, handshakes, corporate CEOs with eyes covered so as to hide their identities.

We propose to write the book  Democracy for Dummies-- the expose of the secret plan. Part transcript, part visual elements, mostly narrative: the overall conspiracy and the country-by-country plan for the U-S-ification and domination of the entire globe. G-L-O-B-E! God Love Our Big Empire!!! Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? This would be up to the readers to decide. Perhaps it would be stocked in both sections. Confusing? Maybe. Controversial? Yes! Noteworthy? Definitely!

This book combines political satire with critical analysis of American society. It is a blend of fact and fiction and we expect it to be read on two levels. First, as satire, when a team of left-over Cold Warriors, policy wonks, and national security state commandos, take a harmless speech by the President and turn it into a plan for reestablishing order in the global system. On a second level, it can be read as critical analysis because the key elements of the "secret plan" are exaggerations of the "normal" aspects of the U.S. political, economic, and social systems.

Chapter One: Epiphany in the Oval Office

The PLAN appears as Revelation in the form of American Eagles, the globe, and breaking CNN news. The President and one of his top aides, meeting to prepare a routine speech to the United Nations, stumble upon a plan to reestablish world order.

Chapter Two: Perpetual Elections            

A team of NSA-CIA operatives is assigned to develop strategies to implement the PLAN. They are central characters in the book, and their work is a combination of Keystone Kops and serious intelligence activities. The first step in the plan is to extend democracy around the world in the form of mind-numbing elections that give the illusion  of democracy, while raising the level of boredom such that civic participation is low.

Chapter Three: The Truth is Out There

When a group of pseudo-scientists threaten to blow the whistle on an Air Force cover-up of a possible alien abduction, CNN was there. Learn how the Assistant Press Secretary spins the bogus story of "the threat from above" to invoke unifying fear (a la the Green Menace) and disband the international threat from below.

Chapter Four: Bridging the Digital Divide Worldwide

Silicon swindlers cast their nets to the Third World to increase their share of the global pie. Half-baked partnerships between industry and indigenous peoples result. 

Chapter Five: Location, Location. Location: The Case for Globalization

Who needs borders, or even citizens, when you have the not-so-hidden-hand of the market, multinational corporations, and the WTO. This chapter features the worlds most watched TV show "Who Wants to Have a Job?" This show brings workers and community leaders from around the world to compete in a game-show format to get a new multinational sweatshop in their town. A second feature is the "privatization workshop" run by Harvard economists and aimed at Third World political and economic leaders. The goal is to bring everyone into the neoliberal global economy.

Chapter Six: Cultural Development: Modernization theory in Living Color

The CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom is resurrected from the 1950s to produce state-ordered reports on how television tastes correspond with stages of cultural development in "Maslow Meets the Boob-Tube." The relationship between media and social control are exploited to produce mono-cultural mayhem, and a distinctively American world order.

Chapter Seven: Spiritual Technology: A Digitally Enhanced, Kinder, Gentler God 

Religious difference is minimized, if not entirely ignored, in modern day Western democracy. An outrageous plan to export political correctness and tolerance along with New Age truths is revealed to the President and a team of spiritual advisers at a Camp David weekend retreat, The resulting Chicken Soup for the Global Soul becomes a best seller on Oprah Winfrey's Book of the Month club.

Chapter Eight: Counter Hegemony or Hegemony Counter

Three characters introduced earlier in the book--Charlie W. Trash, Emma Golden, and Ibafemi Offolawa--return to center stage in a comic effort to subvert The Plan. Readers are left to ponder the question of who has been marginalized and who has been absorbed into the emerging social order.

Populism?

The campaigns of Sanders and Trump has led the mainstream media (msm) to a frequent use of the term "populism" to describe them--they are the "populist" candidates. But true to form, the msm are good at injecting a new idea into the media mix, but they do little to inform the audience as to the meaning of "populism." So we will give it a try.

The early moments of populism was experienced through the People's Party at the end of the nineteenth century and found expression in the twentieth century in different bases of discontent shared by different groups. Throughout the twentieth century, populist rhetoric and movements have embraced an array of moral and political crusades, beginning early in the century with the prohibitionists' war against alcohol and closed out the century with the religious Right's attacks on the amoral elites, who, it was claimed, were undermining the core values of the majority. The targets of populist attacks are superficially the same: entrenched irresponsible elites. But for the early leftist populists, elite targets were symbolized by "fat cat" and "plutocrat" labels, whereas for contemporary rightist populists, evil is represented by "cultural elites," as represented in Hollywood, the media, and governmental elites who administer the growing bureaucratic state.

The most recent examples of populism in presidential campaigns  may be found in the efforts by Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan who managed to attack immigration, trade agreements like NAFTA, and groups like the national Association of Manufacturers and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. They were not treated kindly by the corporate media. Ralph Nader was dismissed as unrealistic, and Perot and Buchanan were presented as "traitors" to the interests of the privileged class that was embedded in the corporate and political worlds. Perot was given the persona of a quirky, eccentric millionaire who had nothing better to do with his time and money, while Buchanan was vilified as a crypto-racist, anti-Semite, and general all-around loose cannon. The media did little to recognize the role of economic change in these populist moments.

Populist rhetoric has been used by labor organizations, social movement leaders, and mainstream politicians to shape and mobilize public discontent. In its classic form, populist messages seek to simultaneously elevate the masses and attack the privileged for their undeserved rewards. But the rhetoric of economic grievances and the defense of small farmers, wage earners, and small business owners were usually not aimed at the overthrow of capitalism, but called for a fair share of the fruits of workers' productive labor. As a noted historian of populist movements Michael Kazin has stated: "Early populist critiques of American society attempted to build new bonds among people by returning to the core beliefs of the new American nation--rule by the people, reward for hard work and diligence, and faith in God." 

As history illustrates, the American populist tradition has been both a powerful and ambivalent instrument for reform. Many real or aspiring leaders have picked up the populist instrument hoping to play a tune powerful enough to stir the sleeping masses into sweeping away corrupt elites. The power of that tradition rests in its roots in the early American experience, stressing the dignity of the common man and a rejection of the "foreign" influences of aristocracy and elitism. The ambivalence associated with the populist tradition stems from its majoritarian beliefs, reflected in its support for direct participatory democracy. The majoritarian emphasis does not sit well with members of religious or ethnic groups that are numerically small and therefore feel that their interests will be ignored by the usually white and Christian majority. The majoritarian emphasis also does not sit well with "privileged leftists" who support populist ideology but whose education and credentialed-class privileges make them wary of "marching with the people."

Free Hard Drugs

In the spirit of the new openness on "soft" drugs and the Colorado experiment, we would like to revive an old proposal we once made about hard drugs. Since the attempt to fight the "war on drugs" on the supply side has not worked, we propose to make hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, meth, or whatever, to be made available free to all users. There would be Federally funded and operated drug centers where any user could obtain as much of a drug as they wish with no time limit. The objective of the plan is to make it very clear to users that they can speed up their most certain deaths with little or no collateral damage. This should result in a decline in most anti-social behavior that is used to support a drug habit (e.g. theft, robbery) and the life style of an addict will not be hampered. The creation of Drug Centers in most large cities would be a job creator for the operation of clinics and would cost fewer tax dollars than are currently spent on the war on drugs. 

Update 1/29/18: It has been a long while since posting this item and during that time the "opioid crisis" has taken over the drug crisis-centered news. Estimates of "opioid addiction" in 2016 indicate that there are 11 million "addicts" (compared to 1 million heroin users). This estimate of opioid addicts far exceeds the estimated number of persons with medical conditions that cause great pain. This suggests that opioid users/addicts are choosing to use the drug when they no longer have a medical condition that requires the pain amelioration drug. So, the bottom line for this post is to welcome the opioid addicts to our government-sponsored drug clinic where they may obtain opioids in amounts sufficient to speed up their most certain deaths. Therefore, our proposal of free drugs until "death do us part" remains in place.  

War Drums and Defense Budget

This post is an early-warning feeling, but we can't shake it and so we say it. It appears to us that an increasing number of political types, in and out of Congress  and the Presidential races, are sounding more bellicose in their statements about potential threats to the U.S. from other nations. The media appear to be featuring stories about possible threats from North Korea associated with claims about their nuclear developments, and the U.S.-Iran agreement on nuclear weapons. (Admission to the Nuclear Club is a very sensitive matter.) And what about those tiny islands in the South China Sea?The media are also doing high-profile stories on Russia and the evil Putin that have the strong odor of the old Cold War days. The latest concern, coming from one of the Congressional Super Hawks, is about the hidden danger of increased cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in areas related to space exploration and the hardware used for such explorations.


Our feelings may be nothing more than the Hawks and their media allies running out of threatening scenarios so they have to do the best with what they have. However, we suspect that it may be a "pre-emptive" strike against the possibility that the current attempts to awaken Americans about our economic problems may lead to efforts to make cuts in a $600 billion defense budget.