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I don't know if you're making fun of me or not, peeker, but you know those good old boys take care of each other, and Brownie is still connected, he's still a made man, so to speak.
Brownie resigns from FEMA.
Who wants to wager that he gets a job as a lobbyist for a company that contracts withe FEMA, possibly Halliburton?
Takers?
CONTEMPT-How The Right Is Wronging American Justice
by Catherine Crier
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/catherine-crier/contempthow-the-right-is_b_7199.html)
CONTEMPT—How The Right Is Wronging American Justice is the title of my new book that hits the shelves on Tuesday. In the wake of the Terri Schiavo debacle and the outrageous attack on the nation’s jurists, I wanted to write a book in defense of the federal court system and its judges and to explain how, though imperfect, the system has evolved very much as the founders intended.
But I don’t want that anymore.
Now I want this book to be a wake-up call, a warning flare, a political grenade that provokes the silent majority of this country to stand up and take notice of the attempted coup that is underway in the country.
On August 14, 2005, at 7:00 p.m. EDT, the Family Research
Council aired a television special watched by an estimated
seventy-nine million viewers (twenty-seven million more viewers
than watched the last episode of Friends).
Justice Sunday II was taped at the Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee and featured born-again religious leaders, ultraconservative politicians, and right-wing special-interest-group directors. The promotional flyer proclaimed, “How activist judges subvert the family, undermine religious freedom, and threaten our nation’s survival.” The producers said their show concerned “the absence of evangelical beliefs in our country’s judicial branch.” Their first installment, Justice Sunday, which aired April 24, 2005, had been just as popular.
James Dobson, founder of the fundamentalist religious
group Focus on the Family, wasted no time as the broadcast
began. America’s judges are “unelected, unaccountable, and
arrogant,” he charged, and “…believe they know better than
the American people about the direction the country should go.”
Michael Donohue, president of the Catholic League, demanded
a constitutional amendment that would state that “unless a
[Supreme Court] judicial vote is unanimous, you cannot overturn
a law created by Congress.” The Court, he bellowed, is trying to
“take the hearts and soul of our culture.”
To hear the Justice Sunday people tell it, judges are outlaws and murderers, part of a conspiracy that sabotages people of faith and rejects the sanctity of life. They echo Pat Robertson’s sentiment: “These judges actually despise the country and all it stands for; therefore, they believe that the best way to undermine and humiliate America is to break down its laws, morals, beliefs, and standards, and to bring about as much cultural anarchy as possible, so that the nation will eventually destroy itself. “
Though members of this radical faction constitute a minority in America, they wield a great deal of clout. Their influence is disproportionate to their size; but their power comes from their organization, their commitment, and their unshakeable sense of righteousness.
The extreme Right has conquered the executive and legislative branches of government, but it has not been able to bring the federal courts to heel…yet. Undoubtedly, this group has a prodigious impact on the Supreme Court and the other federal courts, but it wants so much more. Its leaders have taken an entity that innately resists politics and turned it into a highly politicized battle zone. They seethe over this unelected, independent third branch of government, the last bulwark between the American people and their attempted coup. That some federal judges have proven well educated, fair, and unintimidated by these voices and methods has further stymied their best-laid plans. The extreme Right may control a good part of the castle, but they have yet to breach the citadel. Only, make no mistake, they mean to bring every last wall crashing down.
And if they manage this, what will they do?
Most of them would like to see the United States under biblical law. Comparable to countries like Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, all of which live by Sharia (the strict Islamic code of the Koran), America’s right-wing fundamentalists seek a nation governed by Old and New Testament scripture. Born-again Christianity will supplant the Constitution. This is no exaggeration—purchase a DVD of either Justice Sunday event, buy a book by one of their ministers, or simply go to one of their web sites. They do not make a secret of it. What’s more, they demand that all Americans adhere to their rigid and reactionary beliefs.
The Far Right wants to control our federal judiciary in
order to enact this reactionary agenda. At first blush, the focus seems to center on social issues—abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and religion in schools. These items
certainly garner the most press attention, but don’t be fooled.
There is another insidious aspect to their designs. Economic and
political issues are crucial to them as well. If they are successful in our federal courts, this plot will have a profound impact on citizens in every arena. They are making efforts to curtail federal regulation of businesses, environmental protections, worker’s rights, bankruptcy laws, tort liability, and property interests, among other causes.
This radical group also wants much more control exerted by
the states. For over a century, the federal courts have built a safety net in order to protect the constitutional rights of every American. But Edwin Meese began arguing in the 1980s that the Bill of Rights does not apply to the states, and now the extreme Right supports his assertion that such Constitutional protections only exist to inhibit action by the national government. They want our individual guarantees surrendered back to the states, where enforcement will diminish and maybe disappear altogether.
Despite the Far Right’s claims that they want the courts to
leave Congress alone, they actually aim to reduce congressional
authority. They want ultraconservative judges to strike down a
great deal more federal legislation and to negate decades of legal precedent—the very definition of “reactionary.” The extreme
Right may argue against judicial “activism,” but they certainly
know how to practice it. And through it all, they camouflage these issues under a shiny veneer of values, morality, and religion.
Should the nation have minimum wage laws? Should corporations be held responsible when they commit serious wrongs? Should our environment, the air and water, be protected from polluters large and small? Should the Bill of Rights apply to all of the states, or should we have fifty different fiefdoms wherein a simple majority of state legislators can decide our fates?
For the first time since the early twentieth century, these
items are actually in play.
Of course, the key to each and every one of these issues is the federal courts. And this drives the extreme Right to distraction. They have nothing but disdain for the founding fathers’ belief in three branches of government and the prescient system of checks and balances. Indeed, they are rewriting America’s revolutionary history to accommodate their point of view.
For all of those Americans who believe that our democracy
is safe, you are wrong. Today, the radical Right is winning, and
they know it. Sooner rather than later, we may be living in a very different country, a country that had been ours, a country that will be theirs.
The GOP isn't going to waste time playing the blame-game because they see that Katrina offers them opportunity to push through more of their agenda, more of the same anti-government (i.e. anti American) policies that weaken the USA. But, hey, a weak and inefficient American govenment is a small price to pay to get rid of the tyranny of the liberal beauracracy we've all been enslaved and suffering under . . . right, Len?
The Republican Agenda
G.O.P. Sees Opportunities Arising From Storm
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: September 10, 2005
HOUSTON, Sept. 9 - Republican leaders in Congress and some White House officials see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina to advance longstanding conservative goals like giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation.
"There are about a thousand churches right here in Houston, and a lot of them are helping people with housing, but FEMA says they can't reimburse faith-based organizations," Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mr. DeLay, who joined three of President Bush's top economic advisers on a tour of relief efforts near the Houston Astrodome, added that Congress should also allow students displaced by the hurricane to use vouchers to pay for tuition at private schools. Conservatives have championed school vouchers for decades.
Those are only some of the ideas being considered by Congressional leaders and White House officials that could serve the dual purpose of helping hurricane victims and pursuing broader social and economic changes that Republicans have long sought.
The Bush administration has already moved to relax a variety of regulations in areas damaged by the hurricane. Many of the changes are small, like letting people take bigger tax deductions for the miles they drive while doing charitable work. Another change, announced on Friday by Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, will give preference to investment groups from hurricane areas that are seeking tax credits for community development projects.
But other changes are more ideological and more controversial. On Thursday, Mr. Bush issued an order that exempts federal contractors working on disaster relief projects from a longstanding federal requirement that they pay workers "prevailing wages," which are usually pegged to union pay rates.
The exemption strikes at the heart of a requirement that labor unions and Democratic lawmakers have ferociously defended for years.
"There are a lot of opportunities to experiment," said Mr. Snow, who jointed Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez in a rapid trip to highlight the administration's hurricane-relief operations.
Jumping quickly through visits in Houston; Baton Rouge, La.; and Mobile, Ala., Mr. Bush's economic team emphasized the amount and speed of financial assistance being made available to hurricane victims. In Houston, at a tent outside the Astrodome where job-placement services were being offered, the number of job counselors and visitors from Washington greatly outnumbered the number of people seeking help. Thousands of evacuees are staying at the Astrodome, though the number is declining as more people are settled into apartments and other temporary housing. For the moment, administration officials said they were focusing on the immediate job of getting emergency assistance - shelter, medical care and cash assistance as well as unemployment insurance benefits and Social Security payments - to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been dislocated.
In Baton Rouge, officials said they had received 150,000 claims for unemployment benefits and predicted that the number would continue to soar. The Congressional Budget Office predicted this week that 400,000 people would be temporarily jobless as a result of the hurricane.
But beyond the immediate needs, Republican lawmakers and administration officials are contemplating tax cuts intended to draw companies and workers back to New Orleans, regulatory changes to speed the expansion of oil refineries and scores of smaller changes to improve the recovery.
Mr. Snow and other administration officials were noncommittal on Friday toward some of the ideas now circulating in Congress, like offering major tax breaks to companies that set up operations in damaged areas.
But Mr. Snow did announce a change to the Treasury Department's "new markets" program, which provides tax credits to selected investment funds involved in community development projects. About $3.5 billion in tax credits are available, and the investment funds are awarded them through a competitive process on the basis of their proposals.
Mr. Snow said the program would now give special preference to projects in areas affected by the hurricane.
On a serious note:
SALON.COM
What didn't go right?"
President Bush's absurd question underscores the arrogance of an
administration whose "limited government" agenda is responsible for the
disastrous federal response to Katrina.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sept. 8, 2005 | The Bush administration's mishandling of Hurricane
Katrina stands as the pluperfect case study of the Republican Party's theory
and practice of government. For decades conservatives have funded think
tanks, filled libraries and conducted political campaigns to promote the
idea of limited government. Now, in New Orleans, the theory has been tested.
The floodwaters have rolled over the rhetoric.
Under Bush, government has been "limited" only in certain weak spots, like
levees, while in other spots it has vastly expanded into a behemoth
subsisting on the greatest deficit spending in our history. State and local
governments have not been empowered, but rendered impotent, in the face of
circumstances beyond their means in which they have desperately requested
federal intervention. Experienced professionals in government have been
forced out, tried-and-true policies discarded, expert research ignored, and
cronies elevated to senior management.
Before Katrina, the Republican theory received its most apposite formulation
by a prominent lobbyist and close advisor to House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay, Grover Norquist, who said about government that he wanted to shrink
it down to the size where he could drag it down the hall and "drown
it in the bathtub." In relation to the waters that surround it, New Orleans
has been described as a bathtub, and it has served as the bathtub for
Norquist's wish.
Only two people in the light of recent events have had the daring to
articulate a defense of the Republican idea of government. House Speaker
Dennis Hastert, asked about rebuilding New Orleans, volunteered: "It doesn't
make sense to me." He elaborated: "I think federal insurance and everything
that goes along with it ... we ought to take a second look at that." Thus
Hastert upheld rugged individualism over a modern federal union. Just a
month earlier, as it happened, Hastert had put out a press release crowing
about his ability to win federal disaster relief for drought-stricken
farmers in his Illinois district. While he was too preoccupied attending a
campaign fundraiser for a Republican colleague to travel to Washington to
vote for the $10.5 billion emergency appropriation to deal with Katrina's
aftereffects, he did finally return to the capital to push for even more
drought aid from the Department of Agriculture. Hastert's philosophy is not
undermined by his stupendous hypocrisy, for hypocrisy is at the center of
the Republican idea. Hastert simply has the shamelessness of his
convictions.
The second defender was Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, for which he was qualified by a résumé that includes
being fired from his previous job as commissioner of the International
Arabian Horse Association and, more important, having been the college
roommate of Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's 2000 campaign manager and Brown's
predecessor at FEMA. On Sept. 1, Brown stated: "Considering the dire
circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been
destroyed, things are going relatively well." Brown was unintentionally
Swiftian in his savage irony. The next day, President Bush patted him on the
back: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Brown exemplifies the Bush
approach to government, a blend of cynicism, cronyism, and incompetence
presented with faux innocence as well-meaning service and utter surprise at
things going wrong.
Even as the floodwaters poured into New Orleans, unimpeded by any federal
effort to stanch the flow, the White House mustered a tightly coordinated
rapid response of political damage control. Karl Rove assumed emergency
management powers. The strategy was to dampen any criticism of the
president, rally the Republican base, and cast blame on the mayor of New
Orleans and governor of Louisiana, both Democrats. It was a classic Bush
ploy against the backdrop of crisis. The object was to polarize the nation
along partisan lines as swiftly as possible. While policy collapsed,
politics reigned. Once again, Bush the divider, not the uniter, emerged.
The White House released a waterfall of themes. No matter how contradictory,
administration officials maintained message discipline. The first imperative
was to disclaim and deflect responsibility.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admonished
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050901-2.html> the press
corps, "This is not a time to get into any finger-pointing or politics or
anything of that nature." From the president down to the lowliest talk show
hosts echoed the line that criticism during the crisis and reporting its causes
were unseemly and vaguely unpatriotic.
After establishing that line, the White House laid out other messages to
avoiding responsibility. Bush declared, "I don't think anybody anticipated
the breach of the levees." From his bully pulpit he intended to drown out
the reports trickling into print media that he had cut the funding for
rebuilding the levees and for flood control. Then Bush assumed the pose of
the president above the fray, sadly calling the response "unacceptable."
Meanwhile, he praised "Brownie."
After Sept. 11, there was an external enemy, "evildoers" against whom to
summon fear and fervor. Now, instead, the flood has brought to the surface
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/09/01/katrina_race/> the deepest
national questions of race, class and inequality. On Aug. 30, the day after
the hurricane hit, the Census Bureau released figures
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/30/news/census.php> showing that the
poor had increased by 1.1 million since 2003, to 12.7 percent of the
population, the fourth annual increase, with blacks and Hispanics the
poorest, and the South remaining the poorest region. Since Bush has been in
office, poverty has grown by almost 9 percent. (Under President Clinton,
poverty fell by 25 percent.) As these issues began to receive serious
attention for the first time in years, Bush reiterated that it was
inappropriate to "play the blame game."
Meanwhile, his aides sought to blame New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. On Sept. 3, the Washington Post, citing an
anonymous "senior administration official," reported that Blanco "still had
not declared a state of emergency." Newsweek published a similar report.
Within hours, however, the Post published a correction; the report was
false. In fact, Blanco had declared an emergency on Aug. 26 and sent
President Bush a letter on Aug. 27 requesting that the federal government
declare an emergency and provide aid; and, in fact, Bush did make such a
declaration,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050827-1.html> thereby
accepting responsibility. Nonetheless, these facts have not stymied White
House aides from their drumbeat that state and local officials -- but
curiously, not the Republican governors of Mississippi and Alabama -- are
ultimately to blame.
Yet others operated off-message, casting aspersions on the hurricane's
victims. The president's mother, Barbara Bush,
<http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_conten
t_id=1001054719> interviewed on American Public Media's "Marketplace"
program," said of the displaced from Louisiana who are temporarily housed in
Houston's Astrodome, "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all
want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so
many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,
so this -- this is working very well for them."
And Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., suggested
<http://media.vmsnews.com/MonitoringReports/090605/549440/H000361890/> that
the residents of New Orleans who failed to escape the flood should be
punished. "I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then
put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a
need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and
understand that there are consequences to not leaving."
The White House sought to turn back the rising tide of anger among blacks by
deputizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the early days of the
hurricane and flood, she had been vacationing in New York, taking in Monty
Python's "Spamalot" and spending thousands on shoes at Ferragamo on Fifth
Avenue. In the store, a fellow shopper reportedly confronted her,
<http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/342712p-292600c.html> saying, "How
dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" --
prompting security men to bodily remove the woman. A week after the
hurricane, Rice mounted the pulpit at a black church in Whistler, Ala. "The
Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time," she preached, "if we just
wait." One hundred and 10 years after Booker T. Washington counseled
patience and acceptance to the race in his famous "Atlanta Compromise"
speech in the aftermath of Reconstruction's betrayal, the highest
African-American official in the land updated his advice of forbearance.
After a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Bush warned against the "blame game" as
he pointed his finger: "Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of
getting the job done for the people." His aides briefed reporters on
background that "bureaucracy" of course referred to state and local
officials. That night, at the White House, Bush met with congressional
leaders of both parties, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050907/ap_on_go_pr_wh/katrina_washington>
urged Bush to fire Brown. "Why would I do that?" the president replied.
"Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week," she
explained. To which he answered, "What didn't go right?"
Bush's denigration of "bureaucracy" raises the question of the principals
responsible in his own bureaucracy. Within hours of the president's
statement, the Associated Press reported that FEMA director Michael Brown
had waited five hours after the hurricane struck to request 1,000 workers
<http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/sns-ap-katrina-disaster-resp
onse,0,6634603.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines> from Homeland
Security secretary Michael Chertoff. Part of their mission, he wrote, would
be to "convey a positive image" of the administration's response.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune disclosed that Max Mayfield, head of the
National Hurricane Center, briefed
<http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_conten
t_id=1001054595> Brown and Chertoff before the hurricane made landfall of
its potential disastrous consequences. "We were briefing them way before
landfall," Mayfield said. "It's not like this was a surprise. We had in the
advisories that the levee could be topped." The day after Bush's Cabinet
room attack on bureaucracy, the St. Petersburg Times revealed
<http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/30/news_pf/State/For_forecasting_chief.shtml
> that Mayfield had also briefed President Bush in a video conference call.
"I just wanted to be able to go to sleep that night knowing that I did all I
could do," Mayfield said.
After its creation in 1979, FEMA became "a political dumping ground,"
according to a former FEMA advisory board member. Its ineffective
performance after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989 and Hurricane
Andrew struck Florida in 1992 exposed the agency's shortcomings. Then Sen.
Fritz Hollings of South Carolina called it "the sorriest bunch of
bureaucratic jackasses." President Clinton appointed James Lee Witt
<http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/15369.html> as the new director, the first
one ever to have had experience in the field. Witt reinvented the agency,
setting high professional standards and efficiently dealing with disasters.
FEMA's success as a showcase federal agency made it an inviting target for
the incoming Bush team. Allbaugh, Bush's former campaign manager, became the
new director, and he immediately began to dismantle the professional staff,
privatize many functions and degrade its operations.
In his testimony before the Senate, Allbaugh attacked the agency he headed
as an example of unresponsive bureaucracy: "Many are concerned that Federal
disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement
program and a disincentive to effective State and local risk management.
Expectations of when the Federal Government should be involved and the
degree of involvement
may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level. We must restore the
predominant role of State and local response to most disasters."
After Sept. 11, 2001, FEMA was subsumed into the new Department of Homeland
Security and lost its Cabinet rank. The staff was cut by more than 10
percent, and the budget has been cut every year since and most of its
disaster relief efforts disbanded. "Three out of every four dollars the
agency provides in local preparedness and first-responder grants go to
terrorism-related activities, even though a recent Government Accountability
Office report quotes local officials as saying what they really need is
money to prepare for natural disasters and accidents," the Los Angeles Times
reported.
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fema5sep05,1,6530955.s
tory?coll=la-headlines-nation>
After Allbaugh retired from FEMA in 2003, handing over the agency to his
deputy and college roommate, Brown, he set up a lucrative lobbying firm, the
Allbaugh Co., which mounts "legislative and regulatory campaigns" for its
corporate clients, according its Web site. After the Iraq war, Allbaugh
established New Bridge Strategies to facilitate business for contractors
there. He also created Diligence, a firm to provide security to private
companies operating in Iraq. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the
Republican National Committee and now governor of Mississippi, helped
Allbaugh start all his ventures through his lobbying and law firm, Barbour
Griffith and Rogers. Indeed, the entire Allbaugh complex is housed at
Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Ed Rogers, Barbour's partner, has become a vice
president of Diligence. Diane Allbaugh, Allbaugh's wife, went to work at
Barbour Griffith and Rogers. And Neil Bush, the president's brother,
received $60,000 as a consultant
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Diligence%2C_LLC> to New Bridge
Strategies.
On Sept. 1, the Pentagon announced the award
<http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/hurricane_katrina.html> of a major
contract for repair of damaged naval facilities on the Gulf Coast to
Halliburton, the firm whose former CEO is Vice President Dick Cheney and
whose chief lobbyist is Joe Allbaugh.
Hurricane Katrina is the anti-9/11 in its divisive political effect, its
unearthing of underlying domestic problems, and its disorienting impact on
the president and his administration. Yet, in other ways, the failure of
government before the hurricane struck is reminiscent of the failures
leading into 9/11. The demotion of FEMA resembles the demotion of
counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke. In both cases, the administration
ignored clear warnings.
In a conversation with a former diplomat with decades of experience, I
raised these parallels. But the Bush administration response evoked
something else for him.
"It reminds me of Africa," he said. "Governments that prey on their people."
Copyright 2005 Salon.Com
Rogue, check this out:
EXPLOSIVE RESIDUE FOUND ON FAILED LEVEE DEBRIS!
Ruptured New Orleans Levee had help failing
By: Hal Turner September 9, 2005 3:36 PM EDT
http://www.halturnershow.com/DiversFindExplosiveResidueOnRupturedLevy.html
New Orleans, LA -- Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall!
One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. He secreted a small chunk of the cement inside his diving suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing.
According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn marks on the cement chunks did, in fact, come from high explosives. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity said "We found traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111. This would indicate at least two separate types of explosive devices."
The levee ruptures in New Orleans did not take place during Hurricane Katrina, but rather a day after the hurricane struck. Several residents of New Orleans and many Emergency Workers reported hearing what sounded like large, muffled explosions from the area of the levee, but those were initially discounted as gas explosions from homes with leaking gas lines.
If these allegations prove true, the ruptured levee which flooded New Orleans was a deliberate act of mass destruction perpetrated by someone with access to military-grade UNDERWATER high explosives.
More details as they become available . . . . .
Also from wikipedia:
Corporatism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Corporatist)
The term corporatism has different meanings in different contexts. Most notably, the historical usage of the term is not the same as its modern usage. This article deals with both types of "corporatism".
Historical meaning of the term
Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative power is given to corporations that represent economic, industrial and professional groups. Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the decision-making process. This original meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, being a rather more general reference to any incorporated body. The word "corporatism" is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus.
Ostensibly, the entire society is to be run by decisions made by these corporate groups. It is a form of class collaboration put forward as an alternative to class conflict and was first proposed in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which influenced Catholic trade unions which were organised in the early twentieth century to counter the influence of trade unions founded on a socialist ideology. Theoretical underpinning came from the medieval traditions of guilds and craft-based economics.
Gabriele D'Annunzio and anarcho-syndicalist Alceste de Ambris incorporated much of corporative philosophy in their Constitution of Fiume.
One early and important theorist of corporatism was Adam Müller, an advisor to Prince Metternich in what is now eastern Germany and Austria. Müller propounded his views as an antidote to the twin "dangers" of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith. In Germany and elsewhere there was a distinct aversion among rulers to allow unrestricted capitalism, owing to the feudalist and aristocratic tradition of giving state privileges to the wealthy and powerful.
Under Fascism in Italy, business owners, employees, trades-people, professionals, and other economic classes were organized into 22 guilds, or associations, known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni.
Similar ideas were also ventilated in other European countries at the time. For instance, Austria under the Dollfuß dictatorship had a constitution modelled on that of Italy; but there were also conservative philosophers and/or economists advocating the corporate state, for example Othmar Spann.
In Portugal, a similar ideal, but based on bottom-up individual moral renewal, inspired Salazar to work towards corporatism. He wrote the Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which is credited as the first corporatist constitution in the world.
According to various theorists, corporatism was an attempt to create a "modern" version of feudalism by merging the "corporate" interests with those of the state. Also see neofeudalism.
This use of the term "corporation" is not exactly equivalent to the restricted modern sense of the word. Corporate in this context is intended to convey the meaning of a "body," as in corpus. Its purpose is to reflect more medieval European concepts of a whole society in which the various parts each play a part in the life of the society, just as the various parts of the body play specific parts in the life of a body.
Some elements of corporatism still exist today, for example in the ILO Conference or in the Economic and Social Committee of the European Union, the collective agreement arrangements of the Scandinavian countries, the Dutch Poldermodel system of consensus, or the Republic of Ireland's system of Social Partnership. In Australia, the Labor Party governments of 1983-96 fostered a set of policies known as The Accord, under which the Australian Council of Trade Unions agreed to hold back demands for pay increases, the compensation being increased expenditure on the "social wage", Prime Minister Paul Keating's name for broad-based welfare programs.
[edit]
Contemporary meaning of the term
Today, corporatism or neo-corporatism is used as a pejorative term in reference to perceived tendencies in politics for legislators and administrations to be influenced or dominated by the interests of business enterprises. The influence of other types of corporations, such as labor unions, is perceived to be relatively minor. In this view, government decisions are seen as being influenced strongly by which sorts of policies will lead to greater profits for favored companies. In this sense of the word, corporatism is also termed corporatocracy. If there is substantial military-corporate collaboration it is often called militarism or the military-industrial complex.
Corporatism is also used to describe a condition of corporate-dominated globalization. Points enumerated by users of the term in this sense include the prevalence of very large, multinational corporations that freely move operations around the world in response to corporate, rather than public, needs; the push by the corporate world to introduce legislation and treaties which would restrict the abilities of individual nations to restrict corporate activity; and similar measures to allow corporations to sue nations over "restrictive" policies, such as a nation's environmental regulations that would restrict corporate activities.
In the United States, some [1] claim that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were an unprecedented jump towards a corporate state. However, this ignores the long history of narrow economic interests controlling the decision-making process in America.
In the United States, corporations representing many different sectors are involved in attempts to influence legislation through lobbying. This is also true of many non-business groups, unions, membership organizations, and non-profits. While these groups have no official membership in any legislative body, they can often wield considerable power over law-makers.
In recent times, the profusion of lobby groups and the increase in campaign contributions has led to widespread controversy and the McCain-Feingold Act. American corporatism is evidenced in the close ties between members of the Bush Administration and many large corporations, such as Halliburton.
John Ralston Saul argues that most Western societies are best described as corporatist states, run by a small elite of professional and interest groups, that exclude political participation from the citizenry.
Critics of capitalism often argue that any form of capitalism would eventually devolve into corporatism, due to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. A permutation of this term is corporate globalism.
Some political activists argue that the political economy of the United States is heading toward fascism, which critics say confuse the historic and contemporary uses of the term corporatism. They often cite a quote on corporatism widely attributed to Mussolini. In an article written by Mussolini, and reportedly found in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, Mussolini allegedly says:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
However, the quote does not appear in that book, and is arguably inconsistent with, or contradictory to, Mussolini's writings on Corporatism. [2]
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Other European connotations of corporatism
In the recent literature of political science and sociology, however, corporatism, or neo-corporatism lacks any negative connotation. In the writings of Philippe Schmitter, Gerhard Lehmbruch and their followers, "neo-corporatism" refers to social arrangements dominated by tri-partite bargaining between unions, the private sector (capital), and government. Such bargaining is oriented toward (a) dividing the productivity gains created in the economy "fairly" among the social partners and (b) gaining wage restraint in recessionary or inflationary periods.
Most political economists believe that such neo-corporatist arrangements are only possible in societies in which labor is highly organized and various labor unions are hierarchically organized in a single labor federation. Such "encompassing" unions bargain on behalf of all workers, and have a strong incentive to balance the employment cost of high wages against the real income consequences of small wage gains. Many of the small, open European economies, such as Sweden, Austria, Norway, Ireland, and maybe the Netherlands fit this classification. In the work of some scholars, such as Peter Katzenstein, neo-corporatist arrangements enable small open economies to effectively manage their relationship with the global economy. The adjustment to trade shocks occurs through a bargaining process in which the costs of adjustment are distributed evenly ("fairly") among the social partners. Most theorists agree that neo-corporatism is undergoing a crisis. In many classically corporatist countries, traditional bargaining is on the retreat. This crisis is often attributed to globalization, but this claim is not undisputed.
Some use the term neo-corporatism to highlight what they see as similarities with corporatism in the historical meaning of the word (see above).
Free Market theorists like Ludwig von Mises, would describe corporatism as anathema to their vision of capitalism. In the kind of capitalism such theorists advocate, what has been called the "night-watchman" state, the government's role in the economy is restricted to safeguarding the autonomous operation of the free market. Other critics argue that corporatist arrangements exclude some groups, notably the unemployed, and are thus responsible for high unemployment. This argument goes back to the famous "Logic of Collective Action" by Harvard economist Mancur Olson. However, many critics of free market theories, such as George Orwell, have argued that corporatism (in the sense of an economic system dominated by massive corporations) is the natural result of free market capitalism.
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Related Topics
* Anti-globalization
* Antitrust
* Collectivism
* Corporate nationalism
* Corporate police state
* Crony capitalism
* Globalization
* Plutocracy
* Quango
* New Deal
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External links
* publiceye.org discusses this article, and provides copious references on the subject
* Constitution of Fiume
* Rerum Novarum: encyclical of pope Leo XIII on capital and labor
* Quadragesimo Anno: encyclical of pope Pius XI on reconstruction of the social order
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Sources
On Neo-Corporatism
* Katzenstein, Peter: Small States in World Markets, Ithaca, 1985.
* Olson, Mancur: Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, (Harvard Economic Studies), Cambridge, 1965.
* Schmitter, P. C. and Lehmbruch, G. (eds.), Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation, London, 1979.
the headline: Bush's ROLE in the Drowning of New Orleans
It's a debate in which all of our opinions are irrelevant. What will happen in the national consciousness about this will happen without any of us having a conniption fit about it. I'm the one who's trying to not play the so-called blame-game. Clearly this was a failure of leadership from all the way down to the local police precincts in New Orleans up to the mayor, the governor and onward up to the very top reaches of the federal govenment, at which level GWB is responsible. It is ugly on all sides -- including yours -- to lay all the blame at any one level. I have never said that it all lies at gwb's feet, but for you to place the blame elsewhere and accuse other people of destructiveness for the failures that were gwb's is only further indication of your religious loyalty to this very flawed man and president.
The political appointments of "Brownie" to head FEMA and Chertoff to head Homeland Security, two very important positions, was shameful. Period.
I have other things to do today.
NOW is the time to examine this. Haven't you ever seen CSI? You can't let evidence grow cold. Since the government has not yet been drowned in the bathtub by the right-wing fanatics, it is still large enough to take care of the problems caused by Katrina and to get rid of those people in the government who dealt with it incompetently -- most notably the incompetent political payback appointees to key positions of national security made by gwb.
I have nothing else to say about the "blame" for the management of Katrina, and will not even bother to read others' notes on it.
I'm sorry, otc, I don't see any reason to argue with you about this. The public debate that is being carried on is where the public debate is, and I am not going to get waste time obfuscating things here with you. There are more important issues both in the public arena and in my personal life for me to be concerned with.
OTC -- I don't know what your sources of information are, but you need to broaden them. You are missing the real story here.
67 percent of Americans say Mr. Bush could have done more in handling relief efforts
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4837760&ft=1&f=1001
Croc -- It is vey important that when incompentence leads to a loss of life, it needs to be reproached, and those responsible be removed from the position where they were able to allow it to happen. Public officials, even in the Bush administration, need to be held accountable for their actions.
As usual, you are right, Len . . . Christianity (especially as explained by American evangelicals) is, in your words, "the biggest jumble of nonsensical verbage I have ever heard."
I believe I made it clear that I agreed with Rogue Dolphin about the rise of fascism in America and I parted company with him in re to the weather, the Masons, and the plane not hitting the Pentagon, etc., but I don't find those things are necessarily more ludicrous than the people who believe gwb is motivated in his actions by a desire to spread freedom and democracy, or that Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and both of the Clintons and a majority of the people in the mainstream media and I are engaged in a conspiracy to enslave America to an amoral socialism, or, once again, that the creator of the universe sent his only son to earth to die for mankind's sins, and then chose the USA to carry the sword of his vengeance, yet the people who believe the latter things have far more power and influence in our beleagured society than the people who think the Masons killed John-John.
Fascism from the right is a greater threat to the "American Experiment" than is communism or Al Qaeda, and the so-called "moderates", who will jump on and criticize anything they can from the Democrats/liberals/progressives (whatever), will allow them (the right) all sorts of semantic liberties.
I would think that you would be a lot more outraged at the orchestrated and increasingly successful assault on science in the Kansas school system than you would be at rogue dolphin who, as you point out, shares some opinions with an infinitismally tiny group of others. And the FACTS are is that he is absolutely right in pointing out the dangers of fascism, and the manner (promoting fear, not controlling the weather) in which it is succeeding.
ksuave
Hey Len -- Why do you throw a tantrum about rogue dolphin posting on a intenet bulletin board that maybe 50 people read that the weather is being controlled by the Bush administration, but you don't show equivalent enthusiasm in debating the people who want the public schools in your home state of Kansas to teach the even more ludicruous theory that a big brown bunny in the sky created the universe, sent his only son to die for our sins, and wants us to kill Arabs for their fossil fuels? Huh?
There are actually -- factually -- some interesting points in this article about Germany in the 30's, Rogue, but I have to part ways with you in regards to many of the implications you draw from it. I won't take point with you about your use of the word "fascism" as it is a far greater threat to the US than is socialism or (laughably) communism, words that are easily banterd about yet very rarely challenged, but I have to disagree with you and your fellow theorists regarding the efficiency of the fascists. They're not that good to have taken care of every litle detail, but unfortunately they don't have to be. They're fuck-ups, and they are still getting away with it, but they're not as totally in control of things as you believe.
What's infuriating about it isn't that they have their defenders who aggresively and ardently argue their cause; what's infuriating is that a large part of the participating population who fancy themselves to be moderate and objective observers probably do more to empower the fascists than do the out-and-out ditto-heads.
This would be a far more interesting point to be pursue on this thread than to partake in the old right-wing vs. liberal scuffle that otcbargain is so quick to want to argue, but to do so would mean one would have to go to the mat with The Tinman, and, Cheeses, who has the time to argue with Len. The guy's on meth (his teeth must look horrible). I don't know about anyone else, but I have got a ton of other things I have to worry about . . . there's my stock portfolio, my other financial obligations, my family, my neighborhood and community obligations, my creative and recreational needs, to say nothing of the all-consuming reality of living in a world surrounded by vagina . . . and I don't have the time it would require to convince Len and stockpeeker and rruff and all the other bemused centrists that they are in fact the ones to blame for the totalitarianism that is not creeping but is leaping upon us, and that they should change, if not their ways, at least their language.
ksuave
Who is this imaginary "we" you refer to, Tinman.
If you only had a heart!
The"blame game" isn't a game, Tinman.
As Jon Stewart asked, "Why is that the people who are opposed to playing the blame-game are always the people at blame?"
http://www.thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline
I generally feel that this board works better when people express their own opinions rather than just paste in articles or urls, but these exerpts from an article I read succinctly state my own personal opinions about the political implications of Katrina. I don't know where the article originally appeared; someone sent it to me.
. . .Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists
have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government
performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans'
flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov.
Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of
feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of
both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of
protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even
after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub
flooded New Orleans "Lake George."
None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a
campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify
the role of government in American life.
Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that
their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government
policies that aid only poor brown and black people -- even as corporate
profits and CEO salaries soared.
For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone -- education,
community policing, public health, environmental protections and
infrastructure repair, emergency services -- in steady, steep decline in the
face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings; it
will certainly cost exponentially more to save New Orleans than it would
have to protect it in the first place.
And, although the wealthy can soften the blow of this national decline by
sending their kids to private school, building walls around their
communities and checking into distant hotels in the face of approaching
calamities, others, like the 150,000 people living below the poverty line in
the Katrina damage area -- one-third of whom are elderly -- are left exposed.
Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of
African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be
remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their
lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend
embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police
protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men.
In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate
Americans is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer
under the leadership of the party of Big Business. As Katrina was making its
devastating landfall, the U.S.
Census Bureau released new figures that show that since 1999, the income of
the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7% in inflation-adjusted
dollars. Last year alone, 1.1 million -- mostly whites -- were added to the
36 million already on the poverty rolls.
. . .
Fact is, most of them, and especially the president, just don't care about
the people who can't afford to attend politicalfundraisers or pay for
high-priced lobbyists. No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the
rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that "floats all boats."
They were left floating all right. Dead and face down in the floodwaters of
New Orleans.
Copyright 2005 Robert M. Scheer
OTC -- Does it bother you that under the Patriot Act the government has the right to arrest you, torture you, and hold you indefinitely without ever charging you with a crime?
Actually, otc, the criticisms against Bush for what happened with katrina are quite substantive. They are less about his lack of immediate personal response than they are about his policies that left the government in a weakened position to deal with this (totally predicted) disaster. By putting FEMA under homeland security and cutting the budget for levee control while simultaneously cutting taxes and sending so much money to Iraq while leaving the homeland less secure. And to top it off, he appointed an old chum of his who is thoroughly unqualified to be the head of FEMA, one of the more important federal agencies. Even you must admit that there can be national emergencies that the federal governement must take the lead in dealing with, and GWB appointed a man who most recently had been fired from a position as director of a race-horse association to head it, a man with zero disaster control experience, a man who had never even worked within such a complex organization as FEMA, much less had experience being the administrative director of one. If GWB owed this man a favor for having raised a lot money for his campaign, ambassador to Lichtenstein would have been more appropriate than a job in which thousands, potentially even millions of American lives would be at stake. It's indicative of GWB's indifference to most of the responsibilities that come with being President of the United States. It can't all be about supply-side economics, corporate deregulation, and placating the Christian right. It's proof positive that we need someone in charge of the government who has a positive vision of government, not someone who hates it and has vowed to starve it.
And, by the way, you're wrong about "liberals" only being concerned about their own rights. The ACLU is famous for defending the right of free speech even when it is being denied to the American Nazi Party, or to opponents of a woman's right to choose. Yes, when acting within their rights -- which doesn't include shooting doctors or jumping on the cars of women trying to enter abortion clinics -- so-called pro-life proponenets have been defended by the ACLU for free. And "liberals" don't fight to outlaw religion, they fight to maintain the notion of separation of church and state. We don't want the edicts of the C of E shoved down our throats, and we don't want no Evangelical Baptists telling everyone else how they must think either. It's one and the same thing. I understandthe instincts behind your politics, but I still fail to grasp how it can lead you to support one the most patrician, elitist, financially irresponsible and anti-populist adminstrations in our history.
FWIW, I have to go to bed, and I have a busy day tomorrow.
ksuave
After making a national sport out of telling the French to go screw themselves, it's nice of them send anything.
I agree with you, otc, that Bush will weather this storm, so to speak, and that very soon the conversation in the media will be about the failure of governors and mayors, and how politically cheap it was for people to criticize Bush while people were dying. I mean, that's what the Bush administration does better than anyone -- slime their opponents and change the conversation. The public's memory is short and New Orleans isn't going to be paramount in the national discussion for very long. The World Series coming up. Can Boston do it again!! And what the hell happened to that pretty girl in Aruba?
After the BILLIONS we spent saving their asses, the best the Kuwaiti shieks -- who are among the richest people on earth -- cough up is a measly 1/2 bil. I hope they just send it straight to Haliburton so that the government doesn't end up wasting it all on itself.
Thank you, otc . . . I'm a Texan, and I'm pleased that you appreciate me so much.
You certainly do hate the government of the United States a lot, don't you? Doesn't that make you kind of a traitor? Are you an American citizen, otc?
otcbargain is al qaeda.
I liked your earlier reference to George Bush representing the vision of rugged individualism in America, but I'm curious about how you reconcile the Patriot Act, which gives the government unprecented power over the rights of individuals with your d]drfeam of individualism. You know, the dreaded liberals (aka democrats, communists, et al) advocate the rights of privacy and due process for individuals and for the government to be transparant, and the we-hate-the-governemt crowd of which you are so proudly a card-carrying member advocate the right of the government to assert its power over individuals, in secrecy if it so wishes. Isn't THAT big government, otc?
Bush doesn't act until his handlers -- Cheney, Rumsfield, Rove, Perle, and probably some people we've never heard of -- tell him what to do. Len, you don't really believe that a C-student slacker is actually the decision-maker in the Bush administration. George exercises, naps, watches sports on tv, and maybe spends a couple hours a day being prepped on how to deliver his speeches and carry himself in public at various functions while the adults make policy. He only does what he is told, and in a crisis, he knows that he needs to look calm, act like nothing is wrong, and wait.
That's right, Olive Oyl, rather than examine what happened, let's just swiftboat the mayor of N.O.
Give it up, the neocons are not going to control the direction of this debate this time simply by slandering others. This is different. Pictures of buses are irrelevant. Pictures of hungry and wet Americans begging for help on TV while George Bush sells his war in San Diego and the chair of the RNC is out calling for the end of the estate tax is not irrelevant. Save your energy.
otcbargain – You’d be funny if what you say weren’t so harmful to the well-being of the country. Bush has been president almost five years, and in that time Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress and a majority of the court, the press has cowered before them, and they have spun their way out of one crisis after another. Meanwhile, America has lost its power and prestige, its surplus, its moral authority and its credibility, and you are outraged that some people want to hold the current administration accountable. Yes, right, it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. Everything you don’t like is.
Fact is, I don’t need to argue with you – you’re defending a position that’s already lost. The moral and leadership failures of the Bush administration have been laid bare for everyone to see, and a heavy majority of the American people see it. Rant and rave all you like. I doubt I will engage with you again.
Len, on the other hand, I got some things to discuss with, but it’s just going to have to wait as I have some other things to do today.
ksuave
Let me see if I got this right, Olive Oyl 11 – you believe that the federal government had no responsibility to prepare for or respond to a well-anticipated (but apparently not prophesied) disaster that devastated one of America’s showcase cities, crossed three state lines to tear up a large chunk of the American south, killed thousands and displaced well over a million Americans. Strictly a problem for local agencies you say.
A clearer example of the paucity of practicality behind the anti-government right-wing could not have rained down upon us from the heavens.
Perhaps you haven’t heard – the South surrendered, the Civil War is over. You’re like one of those Japanese guys on an island after World War II.
And you display a thorough ignorance of the history of the United States.
The government is required to fulfill some necessary obligations to the citizenry that private enterprise and free trade simply will not or cannot fulfill, and if it doesn’t, the citizenry isn’t then really required to honor its end of the deal either. Those wretched souls in New Orleans didn’t break the contract with society, George W. Bush broke it with them. He is supposed to be the President of all the people because, at least symbolically, he IS the government.
I don’t believe that he (and his entire administration) conspired to leave those poor people in N.O. to their paltry resources so as to make them look uncouth in comparison to well-dressed, mild-mannered white male neocons, and thus usher in a new era of fascism, but I DO believe that the failure to respond is evidence of their (possibly correct) assumption of the inevitability of their success in establishing their total, unaccountable control of government.
They didn’t do anything about Katrina because they didn’t think they needed to do anything. They’ve established that their role as overseers of the government is to facilitate the profits of big business and funnel as much government resources to the upper-class as possible, and it didn’t occur to them that they had some responsibility to help a million of its poor black and cracker citizens who were abandoned in the unprotected streets, stuck on their rooftops or starving in their attics. They’re about cutting taxes and cutting government spending on programs that don’t benefit them, their business associates or their old school chums, they’re not about spending money on the poor.
Besides, it was their last week of vacation before labor day, certainly a couple solemn words about how their hearts go out to the victims would suffice, and they could worry more about it next week when they got back to work. Damn it, there were still bike rides to go on, rounds of golf to shoot and pheasant to slay. As George W. Bush recently said, just because he’s president doesn’t mean that he doesn’t get to go on with HIS life. And as far as lawlessness and loss of life . . . well as Donald Rumsfield so famously said, “Stuff happens.”
It’s an arrogance unbefitting the leaders of society.
I wasn’t talking to you, Len, but I’m going to soon. Now I’m going to bed.
ksuave
Rogue – I’m not the conspiracy-devotee that you seem to be, but there is far more truth in what you see and say than in what the right-wingers here have to offer.
They call you nuts because you label as fascistic a government that seeks totally unaccountable, authoritarian control, yet they believe that the Arab nations are going to burst out into freedom and democracy because a group of American oilmen have employed the US army to invade them, kill their citizens, and pirate their oil.
After depleting the treasury, alienating our allies, breaking international law, wanting to remove science from our schools and replace it with fairy tales, shaming us a la Abu Graib and disregarding the most basic tenets of the social contract between a government and its citizens a la Louisiana (to horrifying consequence), these brain-washed, kool-aid guzzling bozos think that George W. Bush belongs on Mt. Rushmore. And then, when you suggest there is some method to his madness, they call you crazy!
It would be funny, if people weren’t dying.
ksuave
REPOST:
SAY ANYTHING
Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault.
by JIM HOLT
Issue of 2005-08-22
Posted 2005-08-15
People have been talking bull, denying that they were talking bull, and accusing others of talking bull for ages. “Dumbe Speaker! that's a Bull,” a character in a seventeenth-century English play says. “It is no Bull, to speak of a common Peace, in the place of War,” a statesman from the same era declares. The word “bull,” used to characterize discourse, is of uncertain origin. One venerable conjecture was that it began as a contemptuous reference to papal edicts known as bulls (from the bulla, or seal, appended to the document). Another linked it to the famously nonsensical Obadiah Bull, an Irish lawyer in London during the reign of Henry VII. It was only in the twentieth century that the use of “bull” to mean pretentious, deceitful, jejune language became semantically attached to the male of the bovine species—or, more particularly, to the excrement therefrom. Today, it is generally, albeit erroneously, thought to have arisen as a euphemistic shortening of “bullshit,” a term that came into currency, dictionaries tell us, around 1915.
If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry G. Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit.
Frankfurt's own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented two decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal, and then in a collection of Frankfurt's writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. Earlier this year, it was published as “On Bullshit” (Princeton; $9.95), a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that has gone on to become an improbable best-seller.
Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities.
Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree. To push the analysis in a new direction, he considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. “You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like,” he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt guesses, was its mindlessness: “Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
Frankfurt's account of bullshit is doubly remarkable. Not only does he define it in a novel way that distinguishes it from lying; he also uses this definition to establish a powerful claim: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.” If this is true, we ought to be tougher on someone caught bullshitting than we are on someone caught lying. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar at least cares about the truth. But isn't this account a little too flattering to the liar? In theory, of course, there could be liars who are motivated by sheer love of deception. This type was identified by St. Augustine in his treatise “On Lying.” Someone who tells a lie as a means to some other goal tells it “unwillingly,” Augustine says. The pure liar, by contrast, “takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself.” But such liars are exceedingly rare, as Frankfurt concedes. Not even Iago had that purity of heart. Ordinary tellers of lies simply aren't principled adversaries of the truth. Suppose an unscrupulous used-car salesman is showing you a car. He tells you that it was owned by a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays. The engine's in great shape, he says, and it runs beautifully. Now, if he knows all this to be false, he's a liar. But is his goal to get you to believe the opposite of the truth? No, it's to get you to buy the car. If the things he was saying happened to be true, he'd still say them. He'd say them even if he had no idea who the car's previous owner was or what condition the engine was in.
Frankfurt would say that this used-car salesman is a liar only by accident. Even if he happens to know the truth, he decides what he's going to say without caring what it is. But then surely almost every liar is, at heart, a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter typically have a goal. It may be to sell a product, to get votes, to keep a spouse from walking out of a marriage in the wake of embarrassing revelations, to make someone feel good about himself, to mislead Nazis who are looking for Jews. The alliance the liar strikes with untruth is one of convenience, to be abandoned the moment it ceases to serve this goal.
The porousness of Frankfurt's theoretical boundary between lies and bullshit is apparent in Laura Penny's “Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit” (Crown; $21.95). The author, a young Canadian college teacher and former union organizer, begins by saluting Frankfurt's “subtle and useful” distinction: “The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by such concerns.” She then proceeds to apply the term “bullshit” to every kind of trickery by which powerful, moneyed interests attempt to gull the public. “Most of what passes for news,” Penny submits, “is bullshit”; so is the language employed by lawyers and insurance men; so is the use of rock songs in ads. She even stretches the rubric to apply to things as well as to words: “The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit,” she writes. At times, despite her nod to Frankfurt, Penny appears to equate bullshit with deliberate deceit: “Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue.” But then she says that George W. Bush (“a world-historical bullshitter”) and his circle “distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit,” which suggests that they themselves are deluded.
Frankfurt concedes that in popular usage “bullshit” is employed as a “generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning.” What he wanted to do, he says, was to get to the essence of the thing in question. But does bullshit have a single essence? In a paper published a few years ago, “Deeper Into Bullshit,” G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri—“Marxism without the shit of the bull.”
Anyone familiar with the varieties of “theory” that have made their way from the Left Bank of Paris into American English departments will be able to multiply examples of the higher bullshit ad libitum. A few years ago, the physicist Alan Sokal concocted a deliberately meaningless parody under the title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and then got it accepted as a serious contribution to the journal Social Text. It would, of course, be hasty to dismiss all unclear discourse as bullshit. Cohen adduces a more precise criterion: the discourse must be not only unclear but unclarifiable. That is, bullshit is the obscure that cannot be rendered unobscure. How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense. And how could one prove the opposite: that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a “not” to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn't, that statement is bullshit. As it happens, Heidegger once came very close to doing this himself. In the fourth edition of his treatise “What Is Metaphysics?” (1943), he asserted, “Being can indeed be without beings.” In the fifth edition (1949), this sentence became “Being never is without beings.”
Frankfurt acknowledges the higher bullshit as a distinctive variety, but he doesn't think it's very dangerous compared with the sort of bullshit that he is concerned about. While genuinely meaningless discourse may be “infuriating,” he says, it is unlikely to be taken seriously for long, even in the academic world. The sort of bullshit that involves indifference to veracity is far more insidious, Frankfurt claims, since the “conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false.”
How evil is the bullshitter? That depends on how valuable truthfulness is. When Frankfurt observes that truthfulness is crucial in maintaining the sense of trust on which social coöperation depends, he's appealing to truth's instrumental value. Whether it has any value in itself, however, is a separate question. To take an analogy, suppose a well-functioning society depends on the belief in God, whether or not God actually exists. Someone of subversive inclinations might question the existence of God without worrying too much about the effect that might have on public morals. And the same attitude is possible toward truth. As the philosopher Bernard Williams observed in a book published in 2002, not long before his death, a suspicion of truth has been a prominent current in modern thought. It was something that Williams found lamentable. “If you do not really believe in the existence of truth,” he asked, “what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for?”
The idea of questioning the existence of truth might seem bizarre. No sane person doubts that the distinction between true and false is sharp enough when it comes to statements like “Saddam had W.M.D.s” or “The cat is on the mat.” But when it comes to more interesting propositions-assertions of right and wrong, judgments of beauty, grand historical narratives, talk about possibilities, scientific statements about unobservable entities—the objectivity of truth becomes harder to defend. “Deniers” of truth (as Williams called them) insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others.
The battle lines between deniers and defenders of absolute truth are strangely drawn. On the pro-truth side, one finds Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that moral truths correspond to divine commands and rails against what he calls the “dictatorship of relativism.” On the “anything goes” side, one finds the member of the Bush Administration who mocked the idea of objective evidence by declaring, “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Among philosophers, Continental poststructuralists like Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, and the late Jacques Derrida tend to be arrayed on the anti-truth side. One might expect their hardheaded counterparts in Britain and the United States—practitioners of what is called analytical philosophy—to be firmly in the pro-truth camp. And yet, as Simon Blackburn observes in “Truth: A Guide” (Oxford; $25), the “brand-name” Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years—Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty—have developed powerful arguments that seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality. Indeed, Blackburn says, “almost all the trends in the last generation of serious philosophy lent aid and comfort to the 'anything goes' climate”—the very climate that, Harry Frankfurt argued, has encouraged the proliferation of bullshit.
Blackburn, who is himself a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, wants to rally the pro-truth forces. But he is also concerned to give the other side its due. In “Truth,” he scrupulously considers the many forms that the case against truth has taken, going back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, whose famous saying “Man is the measure of all things” was seized upon by Socrates as an expression of dangerous relativism. In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won't let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser's gripe about pragmatism—which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness—was in the same spirit: “The trouble with pragmatism is that it's completely useless.”) Then, there is the often heard complaint that the whole truth will always elude us. Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau's riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”
If relativism needed a bumper-sticker slogan, it would be Nietzsche's dictum “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche was inclined to write as if truth were manufactured rather than discovered, a matter of manipulating others into sharing our beliefs rather than getting those beliefs to “agree with reality.” In another of his formulations, “Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions.” If that's the case, then it is hard to regard the bullshitter, who does not care about truth, as all that villainous. Perhaps, to paraphrase Nietzsche, truth is merely bullshit that has lost its stench. Blackburn has ambivalent feelings about Nietzsche, who, were it not for his “extraordinary acuteness,” would qualify as “the pub bore of philosophy.” Yet, he observes, at the moment Nietzsche is the most influential of the great philosophers, not to mention the “patron saint of postmodernism,” so he must be grappled with. One of Nietzsche's more notorious doctrines is perspectivism-the idea that we are condemned to see the world from a partial and distorted perspective, one defined by our interests and values. Whether this doctrine led Nietzsche to a denial of truth is debatable: in his mature writings, at least, his scorn is directed at the idea of metaphysical truth, not at the scientific and historical varieties. Nevertheless, Blackburn accuses Nietzsche of sloppy thinking. There is no reason, he says, to assume that we are forever trapped in a single perspective, or that different perspectives cannot be ranked according to accuracy. And, if we can move from one perspective to another, what is to prevent us from conjoining our partial views into a reasonably objective picture of the world?
Today, Richard Rorty is probably the most prominent “truth-denier” in the academy. What makes him so formidable is the clarity and eloquence of his case against truth and, by implication, against the Western philosophical tradition. Our minds do not “mirror” the world, he says. The idea that we could somehow stand outside our own skins and survey the relationship between our thoughts and reality is a delusion. Language is an adaptation, and the words we use are tools. There are many competing vocabularies for talking about the world, some more useful than others, given human needs and interests. None of them, however, correspond to the Way Things Really Are. Inquiry is a process of reaching a consensus on the best way of coping with the world, and “truth” is just a compliment we pay to the result. Rorty is fond of quoting the American pragmatist John Dewey to the effect that the search for truth is merely part of the search for happiness. He also likes to cite Nietzsche's observation that truth is a surrogate for God. Asking of someone, “Does he love the truth?,” Rorty thinks, is like asking, “Is he saved?” In our moral reasoning, he says, we no longer worry about whether our conclusions correspond to the divine will; so in the rest of our inquiry we ought to stop worrying about whether our conclusions correspond to a mind-independent reality.
Do Rorty's arguments offer aid and comfort to bullshitters? Blackburn thinks so. Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between “frivolous” and “serious.” Some people are “serious, decent, and trustworthy”; others are “unconversable, incurious, and self-absorbed.” Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth: serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. Yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement. (This is, for example, something that astronomists do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criterion that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters.
Pragmatists and perspectivists are not the only enemies Blackburn considers, though, and much of his book is taken up with contemporary arguments turning on subversive-sounding expressions like “holism,” “incommensurability,” and the “Myth of the Given.” Take the last of these. Our knowledge of the world, it seems reasonable to suppose, is founded on causal interactions between us and the things in it. The molecules and photons impinging on our bodies produce sensations; these sensations give rise to basic beliefs—like “I am seeing red now”—which serve as evidence for higher-level propositions about the world. The tricky part of this scheme is the connection between sensation and belief. As William James wrote, “A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.” The idea that a sensation can enter directly into the process of reasoning has become known as the Myth of the Given. The late philosopher Donald Davidson, whose influence in the Anglophone philosophical world was unsurpassed, put the point succinctly: “Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.”
This line of thought, as Blackburn observes, threatens to cut off all contact between knowledge and the world. If beliefs can be checked only against other beliefs, then the sole criterion for a set of beliefs' being true is that they form a coherent web: a picture of knowledge known as holism. And different people interacting with the causal flux that is the world might well find themselves with distinct but equally coherent webs of belief—a possibility known as incommensurability. In such circumstances, who is to say what is truth and what is bullshit? But Blackburn will have none of this. The slogan “Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” can't be right, he claims. After all, if “John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason for believing that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge.” Not so fast, a Davidsonian might reply. Sensations do not come labelled as “doggy whiffs” or “butter sighting”; such descriptions imply a good deal of prior concept formation. What gives John a reason to believe that Rover is in the house is indeed another belief: that what he is smelling falls under the category of “doggy whiff.” Blackburn is obviously right in maintaining that such beliefs arise from causal interaction with the world, and not just from voices in our heads. But justifying those beliefs—determining whether we are doing well or badly in forming them—can be a matter only of squaring them with other beliefs. Derrida was not entirely bullshitting when he said, “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text”).
Although Blackburn concludes that objective truth can and must survive the assaults of its critics, he himself has been forced to diminish that which he would defend. He and his allies, one might think, should be willing to give some sort of answer to the question that “jesting Pilate” put to Jesus: What is truth? The most obvious answer, that truth is correspondence to the facts, founders on the difficulty of saying just what form this “correspondence” is supposed to take, and what “facts” could possibly be other than truths themselves. Indeed, about the only thing that everyone can agree on is that each statement supplies its own conditions for being true. The statement “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white; the statement “The death penalty is wrong” is true if and only if the death penalty is wrong; and so forth. As far as Blackburn is concerned, any attempt to go beyond this simple observation by trying to mount a general theory of what makes things true or false is wrongheaded. That makes him, to use his own term, a “minimalist” about truth. By reducing truth to something “small and modest,” Blackburn hopes to induce its enemies to call off their siege.
The problem with this strategy is that it leaves us with little to care about. If truth necessarily eludes our theoretical grasp, then how do we know that it has any value, let alone that it is an absolute good? Why should we worry about whether our beliefs deserve to be called “true”? Deep down, we might prefer to believe whatever helps us achieve our ends and enables us to flourish, regardless of whether it is true. We may be happier believing in God even if there is no God. We may be happier thinking that we are really good at what we do even if that is a delusion. (The people with the truest understanding of their own abilities, research suggests, tend to be depressives.)
However one feels about the authority of truth, there is a separate reason for deploring bullshit; namely, that most bullshit is ugly. When it takes the form of political propaganda, management-speak, or P.R., it is riddled with euphemism, cliché, fake folksiness, and high-sounding abstractions. The aesthetic dimension of bullshit is largely ignored in Frankfurt's essay. Yet much of what we call poetry consists of trite or false ideas in sublime language. (Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” suggests that the proper aim of art is “the telling of beautiful untrue things.”) Bullshitting can involve an element of artistry; it offers, as Frankfurt acknowledges, opportunities for “improvisation, color, and imaginative play.” When the bullshitting is done from an ulterior motive, like the selling of a product or the manipulation of an electorate, the outcome is likely to be a ghastly abuse of language. When it is done for its own sake, however, something delightful just might result. The paradigm here is Falstaff, whose refusal to be enslaved by the authority of truth is central to his comic genius. Falstaff's merry mixture of philosophy and bullshit is what makes him such a clubbable man, far better company than the dour Wittgenstein. We should by all means be severe in dealing with bullshitters of the political, the commercial, and the academic varieties. But let's not banish plump Jack.
SAY ANYTHING
Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault.
by JIM HOLT
Issue of 2005-08-22
Posted 2005-08-15
People have been talking bull, denying that they were talking bull, and accusing others of talking bull for ages. “Dumbe Speaker! that's a Bull,” a character in a seventeenth-century English play says. “It is no Bull, to speak of a common Peace, in the place of War,” a statesman from the same era declares. The word “bull,” used to characterize discourse, is of uncertain origin. One venerable conjecture was that it began as a contemptuous reference to papal edicts known as bulls (from the bulla, or seal, appended to the document). Another linked it to the famously nonsensical Obadiah Bull, an Irish lawyer in London during the reign of Henry VII. It was only in the twentieth century that the use of “bull” to mean pretentious, deceitful, jejune language became semantically attached to the male of the bovine species—or, more particularly, to the excrement therefrom. Today, it is generally, albeit erroneously, thought to have arisen as a euphemistic shortening of “bullshit,” a term that came into currency, dictionaries tell us, around 1915.
If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry G. Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit.
Frankfurt's own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented two decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal, and then in a collection of Frankfurt's writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. Earlier this year, it was published as “On Bullshit” (Princeton; $9.95), a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that has gone on to become an improbable best-seller.
Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities.
Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree. To push the analysis in a new direction, he considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. “You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like,” he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt guesses, was its mindlessness: “Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
Frankfurt's account of bullshit is doubly remarkable. Not only does he define it in a novel way that distinguishes it from lying; he also uses this definition to establish a powerful claim: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.” If this is true, we ought to be tougher on someone caught bullshitting than we are on someone caught lying. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar at least cares about the truth. But isn't this account a little too flattering to the liar? In theory, of course, there could be liars who are motivated by sheer love of deception. This type was identified by St. Augustine in his treatise “On Lying.” Someone who tells a lie as a means to some other goal tells it “unwillingly,” Augustine says. The pure liar, by contrast, “takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself.” But such liars are exceedingly rare, as Frankfurt concedes. Not even Iago had that purity of heart. Ordinary tellers of lies simply aren't principled adversaries of the truth. Suppose an unscrupulous used-car salesman is showing you a car. He tells you that it was owned by a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays. The engine's in great shape, he says, and it runs beautifully. Now, if he knows all this to be false, he's a liar. But is his goal to get you to believe the opposite of the truth? No, it's to get you to buy the car. If the things he was saying happened to be true, he'd still say them. He'd say them even if he had no idea who the car's previous owner was or what condition the engine was in.
Frankfurt would say that this used-car salesman is a liar only by accident. Even if he happens to know the truth, he decides what he's going to say without caring what it is. But then surely almost every liar is, at heart, a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter typically have a goal. It may be to sell a product, to get votes, to keep a spouse from walking out of a marriage in the wake of embarrassing revelations, to make someone feel good about himself, to mislead Nazis who are looking for Jews. The alliance the liar strikes with untruth is one of convenience, to be abandoned the moment it ceases to serve this goal.
The porousness of Frankfurt's theoretical boundary between lies and bullshit is apparent in Laura Penny's “Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit” (Crown; $21.95). The author, a young Canadian college teacher and former union organizer, begins by saluting Frankfurt's “subtle and useful” distinction: “The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by such concerns.” She then proceeds to apply the term “bullshit” to every kind of trickery by which powerful, moneyed interests attempt to gull the public. “Most of what passes for news,” Penny submits, “is bullshit”; so is the language employed by lawyers and insurance men; so is the use of rock songs in ads. She even stretches the rubric to apply to things as well as to words: “The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit,” she writes. At times, despite her nod to Frankfurt, Penny appears to equate bullshit with deliberate deceit: “Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue.” But then she says that George W. Bush (“a world-historical bullshitter”) and his circle “distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit,” which suggests that they themselves are deluded.
Frankfurt concedes that in popular usage “bullshit” is employed as a “generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning.” What he wanted to do, he says, was to get to the essence of the thing in question. But does bullshit have a single essence? In a paper published a few years ago, “Deeper Into Bullshit,” G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri—“Marxism without the shit of the bull.”
Anyone familiar with the varieties of “theory” that have made their way from the Left Bank of Paris into American English departments will be able to multiply examples of the higher bullshit ad libitum. A few years ago, the physicist Alan Sokal concocted a deliberately meaningless parody under the title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and then got it accepted as a serious contribution to the journal Social Text. It would, of course, be hasty to dismiss all unclear discourse as bullshit. Cohen adduces a more precise criterion: the discourse must be not only unclear but unclarifiable. That is, bullshit is the obscure that cannot be rendered unobscure. How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense. And how could one prove the opposite: that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a “not” to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn't, that statement is bullshit. As it happens, Heidegger once came very close to doing this himself. In the fourth edition of his treatise “What Is Metaphysics?” (1943), he asserted, “Being can indeed be without beings.” In the fifth edition (1949), this sentence became “Being never is without beings.”
Frankfurt acknowledges the higher bullshit as a distinctive variety, but he doesn't think it's very dangerous compared with the sort of bullshit that he is concerned about. While genuinely meaningless discourse may be “infuriating,” he says, it is unlikely to be taken seriously for long, even in the academic world. The sort of bullshit that involves indifference to veracity is far more insidious, Frankfurt claims, since the “conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false.”
How evil is the bullshitter? That depends on how valuable truthfulness is. When Frankfurt observes that truthfulness is crucial in maintaining the sense of trust on which social coöperation depends, he's appealing to truth's instrumental value. Whether it has any value in itself, however, is a separate question. To take an analogy, suppose a well-functioning society depends on the belief in God, whether or not God actually exists. Someone of subversive inclinations might question the existence of God without worrying too much about the effect that might have on public morals. And the same attitude is possible toward truth. As the philosopher Bernard Williams observed in a book published in 2002, not long before his death, a suspicion of truth has been a prominent current in modern thought. It was something that Williams found lamentable. “If you do not really believe in the existence of truth,” he asked, “what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for?”
The idea of questioning the existence of truth might seem bizarre. No sane person doubts that the distinction between true and false is sharp enough when it comes to statements like “Saddam had W.M.D.s” or “The cat is on the mat.” But when it comes to more interesting propositions-assertions of right and wrong, judgments of beauty, grand historical narratives, talk about possibilities, scientific statements about unobservable entities—the objectivity of truth becomes harder to defend. “Deniers” of truth (as Williams called them) insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others.
The battle lines between deniers and defenders of absolute truth are strangely drawn. On the pro-truth side, one finds Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that moral truths correspond to divine commands and rails against what he calls the “dictatorship of relativism.” On the “anything goes” side, one finds the member of the Bush Administration who mocked the idea of objective evidence by declaring, “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Among philosophers, Continental poststructuralists like Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, and the late Jacques Derrida tend to be arrayed on the anti-truth side. One might expect their hardheaded counterparts in Britain and the United States—practitioners of what is called analytical philosophy—to be firmly in the pro-truth camp. And yet, as Simon Blackburn observes in “Truth: A Guide” (Oxford; $25), the “brand-name” Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years—Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty—have developed powerful arguments that seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality. Indeed, Blackburn says, “almost all the trends in the last generation of serious philosophy lent aid and comfort to the 'anything goes' climate”—the very climate that, Harry Frankfurt argued, has encouraged the proliferation of bullshit.
Blackburn, who is himself a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, wants to rally the pro-truth forces. But he is also concerned to give the other side its due. In “Truth,” he scrupulously considers the many forms that the case against truth has taken, going back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, whose famous saying “Man is the measure of all things” was seized upon by Socrates as an expression of dangerous relativism. In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won't let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser's gripe about pragmatism—which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness—was in the same spirit: “The trouble with pragmatism is that it's completely useless.”) Then, there is the often heard complaint that the whole truth will always elude us. Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau's riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”
If relativism needed a bumper-sticker slogan, it would be Nietzsche's dictum “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche was inclined to write as if truth were manufactured rather than discovered, a matter of manipulating others into sharing our beliefs rather than getting those beliefs to “agree with reality.” In another of his formulations, “Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions.” If that's the case, then it is hard to regard the bullshitter, who does not care about truth, as all that villainous. Perhaps, to paraphrase Nietzsche, truth is merely bullshit that has lost its stench. Blackburn has ambivalent feelings about Nietzsche, who, were it not for his “extraordinary acuteness,” would qualify as “the pub bore of philosophy.” Yet, he observes, at the moment Nietzsche is the most influential of the great philosophers, not to mention the “patron saint of postmodernism,” so he must be grappled with. One of Nietzsche's more notorious doctrines is perspectivism-the idea that we are condemned to see the world from a partial and distorted perspective, one defined by our interests and values. Whether this doctrine led Nietzsche to a denial of truth is debatable: in his mature writings, at least, his scorn is directed at the idea of metaphysical truth, not at the scientific and historical varieties. Nevertheless, Blackburn accuses Nietzsche of sloppy thinking. There is no reason, he says, to assume that we are forever trapped in a single perspective, or that different perspectives cannot be ranked according to accuracy. And, if we can move from one perspective to another, what is to prevent us from conjoining our partial views into a reasonably objective picture of the world?
Today, Richard Rorty is probably the most prominent “truth-denier” in the academy. What makes him so formidable is the clarity and eloquence of his case against truth and, by implication, against the Western philosophical tradition. Our minds do not “mirror” the world, he says. The idea that we could somehow stand outside our own skins and survey the relationship between our thoughts and reality is a delusion. Language is an adaptation, and the words we use are tools. There are many competing vocabularies for talking about the world, some more useful than others, given human needs and interests. None of them, however, correspond to the Way Things Really Are. Inquiry is a process of reaching a consensus on the best way of coping with the world, and “truth” is just a compliment we pay to the result. Rorty is fond of quoting the American pragmatist John Dewey to the effect that the search for truth is merely part of the search for happiness. He also likes to cite Nietzsche's observation that truth is a surrogate for God. Asking of someone, “Does he love the truth?,” Rorty thinks, is like asking, “Is he saved?” In our moral reasoning, he says, we no longer worry about whether our conclusions correspond to the divine will; so in the rest of our inquiry we ought to stop worrying about whether our conclusions correspond to a mind-independent reality.
Do Rorty's arguments offer aid and comfort to bullshitters? Blackburn thinks so. Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between “frivolous” and “serious.” Some people are “serious, decent, and trustworthy”; others are “unconversable, incurious, and self-absorbed.” Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth: serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. Yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement. (This is, for example, something that astronomists do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criterion that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters.
Pragmatists and perspectivists are not the only enemies Blackburn considers, though, and much of his book is taken up with contemporary arguments turning on subversive-sounding expressions like “holism,” “incommensurability,” and the “Myth of the Given.” Take the last of these. Our knowledge of the world, it seems reasonable to suppose, is founded on causal interactions between us and the things in it. The molecules and photons impinging on our bodies produce sensations; these sensations give rise to basic beliefs—like “I am seeing red now”—which serve as evidence for higher-level propositions about the world. The tricky part of this scheme is the connection between sensation and belief. As William James wrote, “A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.” The idea that a sensation can enter directly into the process of reasoning has become known as the Myth of the Given. The late philosopher Donald Davidson, whose influence in the Anglophone philosophical world was unsurpassed, put the point succinctly: “Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.”
This line of thought, as Blackburn observes, threatens to cut off all contact between knowledge and the world. If beliefs can be checked only against other beliefs, then the sole criterion for a set of beliefs' being true is that they form a coherent web: a picture of knowledge known as holism. And different people interacting with the causal flux that is the world might well find themselves with distinct but equally coherent webs of belief—a possibility known as incommensurability. In such circumstances, who is to say what is truth and what is bullshit? But Blackburn will have none of this. The slogan “Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” can't be right, he claims. After all, if “John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason for believing that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge.” Not so fast, a Davidsonian might reply. Sensations do not come labelled as “doggy whiffs” or “butter sighting”; such descriptions imply a good deal of prior concept formation. What gives John a reason to believe that Rover is in the house is indeed another belief: that what he is smelling falls under the category of “doggy whiff.” Blackburn is obviously right in maintaining that such beliefs arise from causal interaction with the world, and not just from voices in our heads. But justifying those beliefs—determining whether we are doing well or badly in forming them—can be a matter only of squaring them with other beliefs. Derrida was not entirely bullshitting when he said, “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text”).
Although Blackburn concludes that objective truth can and must survive the assaults of its critics, he himself has been forced to diminish that which he would defend. He and his allies, one might think, should be willing to give some sort of answer to the question that “jesting Pilate” put to Jesus: What is truth? The most obvious answer, that truth is correspondence to the facts, founders on the difficulty of saying just what form this “correspondence” is supposed to take, and what “facts” could possibly be other than truths themselves. Indeed, about the only thing that everyone can agree on is that each statement supplies its own conditions for being true. The statement “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white; the statement “The death penalty is wrong” is true if and only if the death penalty is wrong; and so forth. As far as Blackburn is concerned, any attempt to go beyond this simple observation by trying to mount a general theory of what makes things true or false is wrongheaded. That makes him, to use his own term, a “minimalist” about truth. By reducing truth to something “small and modest,” Blackburn hopes to induce its enemies to call off their siege.
The problem with this strategy is that it leaves us with little to care about. If truth necessarily eludes our theoretical grasp, then how do we know that it has any value, let alone that it is an absolute good? Why should we worry about whether our beliefs deserve to be called “true”? Deep down, we might prefer to believe whatever helps us achieve our ends and enables us to flourish, regardless of whether it is true. We may be happier believing in God even if there is no God. We may be happier thinking that we are really good at what we do even if that is a delusion. (The people with the truest understanding of their own abilities, research suggests, tend to be depressives.)
However one feels about the authority of truth, there is a separate reason for deploring bullshit; namely, that most bullshit is ugly. When it takes the form of political propaganda, management-speak, or P.R., it is riddled with euphemism, cliché, fake folksiness, and high-sounding abstractions. The aesthetic dimension of bullshit is largely ignored in Frankfurt's essay. Yet much of what we call poetry consists of trite or false ideas in sublime language. (Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” suggests that the proper aim of art is “the telling of beautiful untrue things.”) Bullshitting can involve an element of artistry; it offers, as Frankfurt acknowledges, opportunities for “improvisation, color, and imaginative play.” When the bullshitting is done from an ulterior motive, like the selling of a product or the manipulation of an electorate, the outcome is likely to be a ghastly abuse of language. When it is done for its own sake, however, something delightful just might result. The paradigm here is Falstaff, whose refusal to be enslaved by the authority of truth is central to his comic genius. Falstaff's merry mixture of philosophy and bullshit is what makes him such a clubbable man, far better company than the dour Wittgenstein. We should by all means be severe in dealing with bullshitters of the political, the commercial, and the academic varieties. But let's not banish plump Jack.
Editorials, Including Those at Conservative Papers, Rip Bush's Hurricane Response
By E&P Staff
Published: September 02, 2005 12:30 PM ET
NEW YORK Editorials from around the country on Friday -- including at the Bush-friendly Dallas Morning News and The Washington Times -- have, by and large, offered harsh criticism of the official and military response to the disaster in the Gulf Coast. Here's a sampling.
Dallas Morning News
As a federal official in a neatly pressed suit talked to reporters in Washington about "little bumps along the road" in emergency efforts, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued an urgent SOS. The situation near the convention center was chaotic; not enough buses were available to evacuate thousands of survivors, and the streets were littered with the dead.
Moments later, President Bush took center stage and talked at length about the intricacies of energy policy and plans to keep prices stable. Meanwhile, doctors at hospitals called the Associated Press asking to get their urgent message out: We need to be evacuated, we're taking sniper fire, and nobody is in charge.
Who is in charge?
Losing New Orleans to a natural disaster is one thing, but losing her to hopeless gunmen and a shameful lack of response is unfathomable. How is it that the U.S. military can conquer a foreign country in a matter of days, but can't stop terrorists controlling the streets of America or even drop a case of water to desperate and dying Americans?
President Bush, please see what's happening. The American people want to believe the government is doing everything it can do -- not to rebuild or to stabilize gas prices -- just to restore the most basic order. So far, they are hearing about Herculean efforts, but they aren't seeing them.
***
The Washington Times
Troops are finally moving into New Orleans in realistic numbers, and it's past time. What took the government so long? The thin veneer separating civilization and chaos, which we earlier worried might collapse in the absence of swift action, has collapsed.
We expected to see, many hours ago, the president we saw standing atop the ruin of the World Trade Center, rallying a dazed country to action. We're pleased he finally caught a ride home from his vacation, but he risks losing the one trait his critics have never dented: His ability to lead, and be seen leading.
He returns to the scene of the horror today, and that's all to the good. His presence will rally broken spirits. But he must crack heads, if bureaucratic heads need cracking, to get the food, water and medicine to the people crying for help in New Orleans and on the Mississippi coast. The list of things he has promised is a good list, but there is no time to dally, whether by land, sea or air. We should have delivered them yesterday. Americans are dying.
***
Philadelphia Inquirer (and other Knight Ridder papers)
"I hope people don't point -- play politics during this period." That was President Bush's response yesterday to criticism of the U.S. government's inexplicably inadequate relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina.
Sorry, Mr. President, legitimate questions are being asked about the lack of rescue personnel, equipment, food, supplies, transportation, you name it, four days after the storm. It's not "playing politics" to ask why.
It's not "playing politics" to ask questions about what Americans watched in horror on TV yesterday: elderly people literally dying on the street outside the New Orleans convention center because they were sick and no one came to their aid.
The rest of America can't fathom why a country with our resources can't be at least as effective in this emergency as it was when past disasters struck Third World nations. Someone needs to explain why well-known emergency aid lessons aren't being applied here.
This hurricane is no one's fault; the devastation would be hard to handle no matter who was in charge. But human deeds can mitigate a disaster, or make it worse.
For example: Did federal priorities in an era of huge tax cuts shortchange New Orleans' storm protection and leave it more vulnerable? This flooding is no surprise to experts. They've been warning for more than 20 years that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain from emptying into the under-sea-level city would likely break under the strain of a Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4.
So the Crescent City sits under water, much of its population in a state of desperate, dangerous transience, not knowing when they will return home. They're the lucky ones, though. Worse off are those left among the dying in a dying town.
The questions aren't about politics. They are about justice.
***
Minneapolis Star Tribune
But whatever the final toll, the wrenching misery and trauma confronting the people of New Orleans is much greater than it should be -- as it is, in fact, for tens of thousands of people along the strip of Mississippi that was most brutally assaulted by the storm. The immediate goal must be to ease that suffering. The second goal must be to understand how we came to this sorry situation.
How do you justify cutting $250 million in scheduled spending for crucial pump and levee work in the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), authorized by Congress in 1995?
How do you explain the almost total lack of coordination among federal, state and local officials both in Louisiana and Mississippi? No one appeared in charge.
***
Des Moines Register
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was the first practical test of the new homeland-security arrangements and the second test of President Bush in the face of a national crisis.
The performance of both has been less than stellar so far.
Katrina was a disaster that came with at least two days of warning, and it has been more than four days since the storm struck. Yet on Thursday, refugees still huddled unrescued in the unspeakable misery of the New Orleans Superdome. Patients in hospitals without power and water clung to life in third-world conditions. Untold tragedies lie yet to be discovered in the rural lowlands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054151
Will respond on the weekend to your silly rantings.
ORFR -- I'm back in. All shares sold so far today are mine.
Most of the people still there had no where to go, nor the money or autos to get there if they had. Poor people don't always have the luxury to be able to heed warnings.
Van Jones
09.01.2005
Bush's Role in the Drowning of New Orleans
Don't say that a hurricane destroyed New Orleans. Hurricanes don't drown cities.
It was a "perfect storm" of a different kind that put that great city underwater: Bush-era neglect of our national infrastructure, combined with runaway global warming and a deep contempt for poor African-Americans.
The result: catastrophe. The flooding was not a result of heavy rains.
It is a result of a weak levee -- one that was in mid-repair when the storm hit. And that levee, which has held back floodwaters for time beyond memory, collapsed for one simple reason: Bush refused to fix it last summer, when local officials were begging him to do so. Instead, he diverted those funds to the war effort.
In other words, the dollars that could have saved New Orleans were used to wage war in Iraq, instead. What's worse: funds that might have spared the poor in New Orleans (had the dollars been properly invested in levees and modern pumping stations), were instead passed out to the rich, willy-nilly -- as tax breaks.
With those two simple steps, Bush squandered the hard-won Clinton-era surplus, leaving the national piggy bank empty for fixing and maintaining basic U.S. infrastructure. (And what was Clinton doing next to the president, giving him cover at a time like this?)
Had the levee repairs been completed in a timely manner (two years ago), Katrina would have hit hard, destroyed buildings and probably taken some lives. But it would NOT have cracked open the floodwalls and submerged an entire CITY. It took Bush's criminal neglect of his domestic duties to produce that outcome.
But that is only one area of Bush's culpability. Ross Gelbspan says: "Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, [but] it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico."
In other words, global warming likely super-charged this hurricane. Yet Bush's energy policies amount to an ongoing conspiracy to add even MORE carbon to the atmosphere, further destabilizing the climate.
So get ready for even worse storms next year, and the next. And the next.
And the human suffering was not -- and will not be -- equally distributed.
Poor people and Black people didn't "choose to stay behind." They were left behind. All evacuation plans required the city's residents to have working, private cars -- plus gas money, nearby relatives or funds for a hotel stay. And if you didn't have all those things, tough luck.
Had the responsible agencies valued the lives of the poor, they would have helped the destitute flee in the face of the hurricane -- even those who couldn't afford a car or a motel room. But when the "face of suffering" is Black, somehow our high standards for effective action and compassion begin to sag.
Of course, seeing this, Bush could have taken a strong stand for the suffering. But his half-hearted, emotionally flat statement on Wednesday did little to rally the nation. It seems that, as long as "the terrorists" didn't do it, Bush just can't get himself too worked up about Americans dying by the hundreds.
So tonight Americans are dying in the flooded streets of New Orleans like flies. And many of the men and women in uniform who could help rescue them and restore order are nowhere to be found. Instead of helping their grandparents and aiding their neighbors in this time of crisis, Louisiana and Mississippi guardsmen are half-a-world away, fighting for a lie.
We are witnessing a monumental leadership failure in the Bush White House, on top of five years of foolish policies that set the city of New Orleans up for this disaster in the first place.
We must not be afraid to speak that truth. Some will say that this is no time for playing the "blame game." No time for engaging in "divisive politics."
Pardon me. To the contrary: this is exactly the time to draw a clear line of distinction between those of us who have always fought to invest in this country -- and those who happily squandered the national treasure on give-aways and imperial adventures. Between those of us who have long fought to protect the most vulnerable among us, and those who have worked feverishly to undo those protections.
This is no time for progressives to be hemmed in by some "false unity" with a President whose policies are largely to blame for this disaster. Too much is at stake, going forward.
In the short term, we must exert maximum pressure on the federal government to pull out all stops to rescue people and re-establish peace and good order. And in the weeks to come, we must demand an immediate repeal of the tax cuts -- to enable a massive investment to rebuild New Orleans and repair the nation's crumbling infrastructure. Also, any Louisiana and Mississippi guardsmen who want to return home from Iraq to aid their statesmen should be allowed to do so.
The truth is that the poor people of Louisiana were deliberately left behind -- and not just over the weekend. Our political leaders as a class -- and George W. Bush, in particular -- left them behind a long time ago.
In the aftermath of this wholly avoidable catastrophe, let us do all we can to rescue those have been abandoned. And then let us rescue the U.S. government from those who engineered that abandonment.
And let us recognize our sacred duty in BOTH acts.
As it is, money was cut from environmental projects around New Orleans that would have fortified the levees, because the cash was needed to protect the interests in the Middle East of the oilmen controlling the country.
"It's devastating, devastating, and it's probably twice as devastating on the ground." -- President George W. Bush while looking out the window of Air Force as it flew over the hurricane damage, 8/31/05.
Both threads are great, Ernie. I especially enjoy it when there's consensus on an issue.
BSM – Whereas I’ve ben getting lots of kudos for having been the first on this board to have mentioned BSM, let me give credit where credit is due. I first heard of this stock in the microcap kitchen from Gary Grobbel over 5 years ago when it was trading under .50. I’ve never been without it since and wish I had been selling all of my original shares in the last few days, but I was actually selling the last of my .80 and 1.30 shares. Now, all I have left are some 1.64shares.
With all due respect to hweb and Bobwins – I love this thread – the microcap kitchen is a thread investors here might also be interested in. Especially if you like to to get tipped on companies REAL early.
http://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=50570