On race relations

As an Army officer, I was trained to be a race relations educator at the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI) in 1972, and spent a year in Germany leading race relations seminars. I’ve written in a previous post (“Who is a racist”) that it’s not simply a matter of whether one is or is not a racist. Personal racism isn’t a binary, either/or phenomenon. Racism exists along a continuum, between “hardly any racial bias” and “hates people because of their skin color or ethnicity.” Everybody has a place somewhere on this continuum, and where you place yourself may not be where others who know you would place you.

One thing I learned at the DRRI, and still believe, is that you can’t grow up in a racist society such as ours, unaffected by racism. None of us are completely color blind. I’ve known many people who would reflexively deny having any racist beliefs or tendencies whatsoever, because they don’t understand the insidious nature of racism. To admit that you’ve inherited residual racist beliefs or inclinations doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or, if you’re white, that you should feel guilty for being white. Another thing I learned at the DRRI was that guilt is a lousy motivator for change. Despite my personal history of ongoing self-examination and of actively opposing racism since I was a young man, I still can’t claim to be completely free of racism’s taint, myself.

In my DRRI training, I learned about both personal racism and institutional racism. I think that there are still a lot of good, well-intentioned white people who are blind to the institutional racism that still exists in our society; but in this post, I’ll only be writing about personal racism – specifically implicit bias and confirmation bias.

Bias is universal; it’s part of being human. It can be racial, cultural, religious, or political. Implicit bias is often reflexive, unconscious; and it’s not always necessarily a bad thing. I may have a bias for bland food or for spicy hot food, depending on the foods I grew up eating. This may mean that when I eat out, I’m not likely to try a new dish that the menu describes as spicy hot. It may mean that when I choose which movie I want to see at the cineplex, I’m more likely to choose a film whose protagonists resemble me, or who come from my culture. It’s easier to identify with people I see as being like me. It doesn’t mean that I’m racially prejudiced; it’s just my unconscious preference. Being a heterosexual, I may prefer a traditional romantic comedy over a gay-themed love story, even if I’m not homophobic. No matter your race or cultural identity or sexual orientation, you’re biased to choose one thing over another, based on your life experiences.

Confirmation bias is also universal, and usually unconscious. It means that if I’m given new information on a topic that I’ve already formed an opinion about, I’m more likely to believe and remember things that confirm what I already believe, and less likely to have my opinion changed by things that might challenge my belief.

Even if we bear no ill will to persons of a racial or ethnic group other than our own, our beliefs about them may be unconsciously influenced by common stereotypes attached to that group of people. When I lived in Germany, I observed that some of the same stereotypes that have been attributed to African Americans in our society were attached to Turkish “guestworkers” who lived in ethnic ghettos: they were lazy, stupid, untrustworthy, and all the men wanted to have sex with German women.

The biggest remaining fallacy that continues to fuel racial stereotyping is the idea that race is a biological phenomenon. The concept of race as we know it didn’t exist until the era of European colonialism. Race is a social construct designed to justify the exploitation, colonialization and enslavement of that segment of the human race identifiable by the darkness of their skin. Part of the concept is hierarchal: some races are superior to others. In fact, all human beings belong to the same race. If you go back far enough, we’re all kin.

So, now I question whether or not “race relations” is an outdated term, perpetuating the notion of different races. It seems to me that “intra-racial relating” might be more accurate in describing the sometimes troubled relations within the family of man.

Unrigging the System

This will be my first post on a political topic, because of its importance. Like many other citizens – Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents – I believe that the political system is rigged, and is no longer “of, by and for the people.” Two weeks ago my wife Maria and I attended the second annual Unrig Summit, in Nashville. Last year we attended the first Unrig Summit, in New Orleans. The movement seems to be gaining momentum, and there have been legislative victories in several states since the first summit. The movement’s primary goals are to get Big Money and the corruption it enables out of politics, and to hold elections that are free and fair. (One presenter said that the country suffers from “electile dysfunction.”) Regardless of political affiliation, the attendees were united in their conviction that allegiance to country supersedes allegiance to political party. All of us who believe in democracy need to unite, to unrig the System.

In successive rulings, the Supreme Court has decided that (1) corporations should have the basic rights granted to actual persons under the Constitution, that (2) money, in the form of political contributions, is a kind of free speech, and that (3) there should be no limit to the amount of “free speech”  rich donors could contribute to political campaigns. The latter ruling is known as Citizens United, and can only be overturned by a constitutional amendment.

To me, the reasons for Citizens United are absurd, because it makes “free speech” quantifiable – a concept that had never occurred to me before. By law, rich people now have more free speech than the rest of us. This isn’t what our Founding Fathers intended in establishing the right of free speech. There are several national organizations dedicated to overturning Citizens United, including Stamp Stampede. I stamp all of my paper money with the message “Corporations aren’t people. Amend the Constitution.” Each bill I stamp will likely pass through dozens of hands, promoting the message that corporate personhood is a legal fiction that should be abolished. Corporations can’t serve time in jails and prisons, let alone be executed, if they break the law. Why should they have all of the constitutional rights that citizens enjoy? Why do giant corporations need to be protected from the rest of us? It makes no sense.

Another continuing threat to our democracy  is gerrymandering – as well as other voter manipulation/suppression schemes. Both Democrats and Republicans have used gerrymandering to allow politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It’s necessary to  re-apportion voting districts every ten years, after the census, as populations change in many districts. The question is, who decides how districts are re-apportioned? Does the dominant party in each state get to re-draw the lines, in ways that benefit their candidates? Or do the people in each state get to decide, via bi-partisan citizen re-districting commissions?

True democracy depends on free and fair elections, and anyone who seeks to skew elections to benefit their party either doesn’t understand or doesn’t trust the democratic process. My fears that we’re already an oligarchy (ruled by an elite, as in Russia), rather than a true democracy, were stoked by the passage of Citizens United. We haven’t been a true democracy for very long. Women weren’t enfranchised nationally until 1920, and Jim Crow laws disenfranchised millions of African Americans until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plutocracy is a form of oligarchy, and I believe that we’re already being ruled by the rich, and not by the electorate. The rich have an army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington that far outnumbers our elected representatives.

Re-claiming (or establishing) true democracy in America isn’t a partisan issue. A solid core of citizens on both the Left and Right advocate unrigging a rigged System. So, how do we go about undoing decades of political corruption, financed by the rich? First, we have to overturn Citizens United, and to establish that corporations don’t have all the rights of actual people. Then we need to close the revolving door between serving as a legislator, and then becoming a high-paid lobbyist for special interest groups. These days, too many people enter  politics with the goal of enriching themselves. Private gain is antithetical to public service, and our national legislators need to stop depending on special interests and powerful individual donors to finance their re-elections, if our democracy is to survive.

All it takes for oligarchies to thrive is ignorance and/or indifference on the part of the electorate. Since the rich control the popular  media, the average citizen is influenced by “invisible” propaganda/PR campaigns that exist to promulgate ignorance on a mass scale. Orchestrated ignorance leads to public indifference, or to antipathy toward the targets of the propaganda campaigns. Back in 1920, Walter Lippman coined the term “manufactured consent” to describe how the electorate can be manipulated into political impotence.

We the people can establish/re-claim true democracy if we have the information and the will. We’re facing a daunting opposition from the plutocrats  who are currently calling the shots, but I believe that it’s not too late to unrig  the System. Check out the Unrig Summit website if you want to find out more about the movement. (Jennifer Lawrence moderates one of the panels.) You can watch all of the plenary sessions in their entirety, get inspired, and get an idea of what you can do to help restore democracy in the United States.  I especially recommend the Saturday morning plenary session, which starts with a stirring oration, and introduces some of the movers and shakers in the movement, who are getting things done in their home states.

 

Saving Spaceship Earth

Buckminster Fuller was a great admirer of Leonardo di Vinci, calling him “The outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist.” That’s also a good way of describing Bucky. He was a visionary, who saw things not only as they are, but the way they could be. He wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1969, and was one of the first to warn of our current climate crisis. Citing our over-reliance on fossil fuels, he described our current industrial path as “lethally ignorant and utterly irresponsible.”

At the end of my last post, I wrote about how Fuller challenged the whole modern concept of wealth. Such wealth, we wrote, was “a worthless pile of chips of an arbitrary game which we are playing, and does not correspond to the accounting process of our real universe’s evolutionary transaction.” In other words, our current conception of wealth is arbitrary, contrived and unnatural. Fuller saw constant competition between economies/nation states as a global problem that has to be solved, if Spaceship Earth is to remain sustainable. He called nation states “blood clots” in the global metabolism.

Although he saw us on a lethal trajectory, Fuller believed that mankind could re-design the way the world is run, and that the lives of our descendants depend on doing just that. He believed “(that)  humanity can afford to do anything it needs and wishes to do, and that it cannot afford to do anything else.” He believed that we’re in an era of over-specialization, and that we have to learn to think comprehensively. “All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and coordinator of local universe affairs.”

Observing that the Earth didn’t come with an operating manual, Fuller did his best to remedy that. Actually, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is more like a roadmap than a manual. Bucky first provides an explanation of how we got to where we are. He shows how the Great Pirates secretly ruled the world (from the Renaissance  until WWI) and shaped the modern world order. He then proceeds to show us how we  can “make the world for 100% of humanity,” if we have the will to do it.

A world divided into nation states just seems to be the natural order of things; it’s all we know. But Fuller tells us that it doesn’t have to be that way. Constant economic competition between nation states creates myriad local and national zero-sum games (i.e. in order for someone to win, someone has to lose), all over the world. This is the opposite of synergy. One of Fuller’s long-term goals for our spaceship was “complete world de-sovereignization.” We’re a long way from creating a world without borders and competing sovereign leaders. Will we ever get there? Fuller said that we must, if we want to preserve life on Spaceship Earth.

Even back in 1969, Fuller could see how the use of computers would transform our lives. He characterized the computer as “the evolutionary antibody to the extinction of humanity.” He was an optimist, and believed that computers had a tremendous potential to unite people. He wrote,”. . . we can make all of humanity successful through science’s world-engulfing industrial evolution. . .” Fuller observed that as societies become more industrialized, birth rates inevitably fall. He concluded that world-wide industrialization would result in a significant slowing of population growth.

A world made up of competing economies isn’t conducive to world economic synergy (i.e. doing more with less). “The synergistic effectiveness of a world-around integrated industrial process is inherently vastly greater than the confined synergistic effect of sovereignly operating separate systems.” As an example of synergy within a society, Fuller writes about the synergistic effect of the GI Bill, after WWII. There were too few jobs for the returning soldiers. Both as a reward for their service and as an economic stimulant. the GI Bill enabled thousands of servicemen and servicewomen to attend college. The consequent explosion of knowledge, as well as the increased availability of professional services, enriched our society economically and culturally. The ripple effect is still being felt.

Fuller concludes, “We can no longer wait to see whose biased political system should prevail over the world.” The task we should be about is “making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful.” If we don’t come up with comprehensive, synergistic solutions to our most pressing contemporary problems, we face extinction as a species and, possibly, the death of the biosphere. We’re all astronauts on Spaceship Earth.

If you want to find out more about Bucky, the World Game, or the “comprehensive, anticipatory design science” approach to solving world problems, check out the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s website.

Who decides what your labor is worth?

The means of the distribution of wealth is an important factor in any society, and the “redistribution” of wealth isn’t just a socialist or communist agenda, as some would have you believe. Redistribution of wealth works both ways – downward and upward. We have a finite pie (wealth) to distribute. What portion goes to the rich, and how much is left for the rest of us to distribute? Who decides?

When the rich get richer relative to the rest of us, that’s a redistribution of wealth. In the past thirty years , we’ve seen the most massive redistribution of wealth in our history. Upward. The rich have taken more and more of the pie, leaving less for the middle- and lower-class to share. Executive pay continues to rise, while the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in ten years. Some very wealthy people advocate a flat tax on income as the fairest way to tax. That may seem logical – if you’re rich – but the flat tax is a regressive tax that would result in even more of a redistribution of wealth to the rich. Progressive taxation (i.e. the more you make, the higher your tax bracket) shares the wealth more fairly. It can be used to create economic democracy in America.

The free market, we’re told, determines salaries. But the deck is stacked by the dealer in the casino of the American economy. In the private sector, the relative worth of a person’s labor is decided by the very people who stand to benefit most from having that power. They’ve created and sustained an inflationary spiral of executive salaries with the aid of an army of corporate lawyers and lobbyists, whose job it is to shape fiscal policy to the benefit of their employers.

It’s no accident that the rich in our country continue to prosper at the expense of the lower- and middle-classes, and top executives are frequently given bonuses on top of their exorbitant salaries. In 1978, CEOs might earn 38x more than their average employee’s salary. Today, CEOs have been estimated to “earn” over 300x the salary of their average employee. Even CEOs who have to resign in disgrace often get “golden parachutes” of millions of dollars – a reward for incompetence or malfeasance.

The perception managers of the Right have found that labeling someone with the L-word -liberal – doesn’t have the punch it once did. So now they use the S-word – socialist – to describe all people who don’t unquestioningly worship at the altar of laissez faire capitalism. It’s a continuation of their politics of fear, where liberal equals socialist equals closet communist.

In my opinion, Soviet communism inevitably collapsed because it was an unworkable system. It operated on the idealistic but false assumption that the one-party State, owning the means of production, would distribute the wealth fairly, because it’s an embodiment of the collective will of the people. It didn’t work out that way. Laissez faire capitalists, on the other hand, contend that the free market shouldn’t be regulated at all by the State, as supply-and-demand is an economic Law of Nature that shouldn’t be tampered with by governments. Socialists believe that the people should have a say in determining the relative worth of labor. Sure, some people should get more than others for their labor; but how much more? We needn’t leave it to the plutocrats to decide what is fair. We’re supposed to be a democracy.

A fairer distribution of wealth can be achieved within a democracy by a combination of effective government regulation of the market, and fair progressive taxation. Our current crisis came about because politicians – many of whom are themselves rich – decided that they could trust the richest capitalists to regulate themselves. Congress is a partially-owned subsidiary of the corporate state.

If we raise the highest tax brackets sufficiently, there would no longer be an incentive for a CEO to make hundreds of times more than the salary of his average employee, because most of the excessive remuneration would only generate revenue for the IRS. The capitalists who benefit most from being American citizens should be required to pay their fair share.

I believe than an important part of true democracy is economic democracy, which means that all workers get fair wages for their labor – a living wage. This means increasing the minimum wage substantially, and indexing it to inflation (i.e. it goes up automatically to keep up with inflation). Every full-time American worker deserves a living wage. Without a living wage, many workers are virtual wage slaves, sometimes forced to work two or more jobs to support their families, often one paycheck from homelessness. We can’t afford to let the rich get ever richer.

Why I’m a socialist

Not that kind of socialist! I don’t believe in the abolition of private property or in state ownership of the means of production. Like most American socialists (or social democrats, or democratic socialists) that I know, I believe in democracy, and believe that the people should have some say in how wealth is distributed in our society. Economic democracy means fair compensation for work: a living wage for all. The growing income gap between the rich and the poor can be brought under democratic control simply by establishing a fairer system of progressive taxation. (The more money you make, the higher your tax bracket.) In the fifties – a time of thriving prosperity for our economy – the top tax bracket for the very wealthy was over 90%. Now it’s 37%, but many of our richest citizens complain that even that is an unfair tax burden.

Like most European nations, the U.S. is already semi-socialist, and that’s the way most Americans seem to like it. If it weren’t for American socialists and labor unions, we wouldn’t have many things we take for granted these days: the 40-hour work week, child labor laws, paid vacations and sick leave, overtime pay and the minimum wage, as well as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t have universal health care. Every attempt to establish a system of affordable health care, from Franklin D. Roosevelt on, has been attacked by those who profit from the current system as “socialized medicine.” The great majority of family bankruptcies in the U.S. are due to medical emergencies. It doesn’t have to be this way. Nobody should have to go broke in order to keep a family member alive.

I grew up knowing what it’s like to live in a socialist society, because I was an Army brat, and later a soldier. Being in the American military means guaranteed employment and salary. It means that you and your dependents get free medical care. (I was treated for kidney disease, my brother had an appendectomy, and my mother was treated for breast cancer, at no cost to our family.) Your military branch either provides housing or a housing allowance. It either provides you with food or gives you a food allowance. Occupational training (and graduate school, if you’re a qualified officer) is free, and if you serve for twenty years or more you get a pension, whether or not you ever serve in a combat zone. When you serve in the military, all of your basic needs are met by the State.

I’ve seen socialism demonized by rich conservatives all of my life. I doubt that the average American could tell you the difference between socialism and communism; but we’ve all been told, over and over, that they’re both BAD, and that they inevitably lead to tyranny. Tell that to the members of the European Union. Right-wing pundits and propagandists have pushed the notion that “liberal” is actually code for “progressive,” progressive is code for “socialist,” and socialist is code for “closet Commie.”

I’ve lived in other semi-socialist democracies for a total of nine years. Austria (where I lived for four years) has multiple political parties, one of the most popular being the Social Democratic Party. One of the most popular parties in Germany (where I lived for three years) is also a Social Democratic Party. Jamaica (where I lived for two years)  doesn’t have a Social Democratic Party; but one of the two parties, the Jamaican Labour Party, is socialistic. The citizens of all these countries have the same basic freedoms that we enjoy.

Austria and Germany both have progressive taxation. The highest tax bracket in Austria is 50%, in Germany 45%. Some citizens of these countries might pay higher taxes than American counterparts, but most find this acceptable because of the benefits, which include affordable health care and housing, fair wages, and free college and university education for students who get passing grades.

Despite decades of smear campaigns by capitalist propagandists, more Americans are coming to realize that socialism is nothing to fear, compared to unregulated laissez faire capitalism. Given the popularity of the Affordable Care Act, it appears that more and more people are realizing that “socialized medicine” isn’t so bad, after all. Recent polls indicate that a growing number of millennials favor democratic socialism over the current dominant model of capitalistic rule. Those who try to conflate socialism with tyranny and economic ruin are blowing smoke. Most socialistic nations are democracies, and tyrants are as likely to come from the Right as from the Left.

It seems to me that democratic socialism is a marriage of the best parts of laissez faire capitalism, with its incentives for innovation and productivity, and socialism, which gives the people a say in what each person’s labor is worth. Most rich capitalists hate progressive taxation and government regulation. Under-regulated corporations often care more about short-term profitability than about people. Under democratic socialism the people have more control over the excesses of greedy plutocrats.

Most (all?) democracies hold that certain things belong, not to any individual or corporate entity, but to all citizens. In the U.S. “the Commons” include public schools, libraries, roads and other infrastructure, public lands and national parks, as well as the air we breathe and the water we need to sustain life. Unlike the other democracies, the Commons in this country does not include medical care or higher education. It’s time to de-stigmatize “the S-word” and educate the electorate about the benefits of democratic socialism.