Claim-Jumping the French Revolution

Drawing parallels is a dangerous game, but some parallels are more dangerous than others.
A blog called The Virginian [http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/2010/09/french-revolution-coming-to-america.html] tried to make the case early on that the rise of the Tea Party was inspired by some of the same factors that occurred in the French Revolution. The Virginian argues that the absolute rule of the monarchy in France before 1789 is analogous to Big Government in America today, and that “the people,” represented by the grass roots development of the Tea Party, will rise up and reduce the power of government, thereby allowing the free market to flourish. What finally happened in the French Revolution and this interpretation are miles apart.
Yes, the wealth concentration in France in the 1780’s and what we see in America in the 21st Century are somewhat similar. In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth and the top 1% owned 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth. Distribution has only gotten worse since the Great Recession. In 1785 France, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison to report that “the property of this country [France] is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands.”
In actuality, the Tea Party in America is more like the Jacobins, a second wave more radical that their predecessors, the Girondists, but still an exclusive segment of French society. Furthermore, it is as if The Tea Party is also funded by the American equivalent of the Girondists, the first wave of reformers who represented the wealthier mercantile class mostly from a department (section) in southwest France. Rather than take on the government directly, Big Business [our Girondists] in the form of the Koch brothers, along with other shadowy funders, choose to sit on the sidelines and let the more common Tea Partiers make the ruckus. In France the Jacobins gained power for a while after overthrowing the Girondists, but meanwhile the poor continued to suffer and finally under the name of the Sans-culottes the poor and heretofore disenfranchised masses including small shop keepers rose up and overthrew essentially all privileged classes. The economic trickle down never occurred under the Jacobin or Girondist regimes, and so finally the comprehensive bloody massacre of the privileged ensued.
America is poised to fulfill the promise of the French Revolution in its entirety if it is not careful. The majority of American people feel, according to various polls, that government may be unresponsive, bloated, and deadlocked, but the key issue is that wealth in America is poorly distributed and getting worse. Most Americans feel that rich people and corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes; that corporations and rich people “own” an egregiously disproportionate share of political and economic power; that there is decreasing hope for the little guy to earn an honest living wage in a country that ships so many jobs overseas. The discontent is growing, and the Tea Party’s message is starting to sink in, and not in the way it expects. The Tea Party is looking more and more like the Jacobins or Girondists, just another self-serving elite group that wants to enhance its own position and leave the rest behind to fend for themselves.
America likes to think of itself as “the land of opportunity.” It needs to enhance that opportunity in real terms for all Americans as the major focus of any reform it makes. Balancing budgets and making government efficient and cost effective may be desirable for the long run but does not address opportunity directly. These government reforms mostly serve the immediate desires of the already haves and have mores, not the left behinds.
The assumption so many haves have is that left behinds do not try, do not take responsibility for themselves, deserve to suffer, are a burden to society, can’t find their bootstraps, or are just plain lazy. Let them eat cake. Even if this were true, they are still there. Want a real revolution? Just keep them there, take away any maintenance programs that keep them housed and fed, let them rot, and see what happens. OR figure out what might actually give them hope, a sense of self-worth, a salable skill, and invest in a structured, accountable process that will provide those things successfully.
How a civilization treats its losers is a measure of its relative humaneness. The French in 17 85 were a far cry from serving as a model of goodness. How America handles its poverty in the 21st Century will be watched by the world. Will the challenged but still richest nation in the world lead by example? Can it find a way to reduce poverty, instill or provide a legitimate opportunity for the attainment of self-sufficiency and sustainable solvency among its poor? Will it simply stop trying in the name of balancing budgets over bringing greater socio-economic balance to its culture?
The Founding Fathers created this country as an experiment. It chiseled nothing in stone. It left to future generations the opportunity to make adjustments as needed. The Constitution of the United States is not some holy document that true believers must hold sacred in the original or suffer perdition. Conservatives make the mistake of seeing the rules of the American game, the American experiment as finite, a given, a done deal. It is not and never shall be. That’s why George Washington left office after two terms because he knew he needed to turn the presidency over to someone else, to a newly elected group who might have even better ideas. And if they proved wrong, change them again.
The same can be said for economics. For the past three decades we have been taught to believe in the Free Market as the only way to organize economies. That belief is predicated on Adam Smith’s belief that individuals are rational and know their own self interests better than others do. Smith believed that self-interest is the great motivator of human behavior. Unfortunately, as it turns out, that belief is as reductive as Freud’s belief that all motivation is sexual by nature. There are many gods, many motivations, and man is far more complex a being than any reductive analysis has tried to assume. Karl Marx made the same mistake by assuming that man was essentially altruistic by nature.
Therefore, if man is not mostly self-interested or altruistic or sexually driven, no economic system should be organized around any single belief. A more nuanced understanding of man’s motivations and a more nuanced way of organizing human behavior is required. That, in turn, calls for a nuanced system of checks and balances as well as cooperation both in government and in economic organization that addresses a variety of human motivations and assures real opportunity. In America we need to make changes that enable more people to work and succeed, not rely on a system that produces far more losers and “stagnators” than winners.
The Sans-culottes were the lower class French guys who didn’t wear long stockings below their breeches that ended just below the knee. (The French upper class men looked like football players without pads and helmets). In contrast, the lower class wore trousers. They had no finery, nothing but bare essentials and a sense of having everything to gain and nothing to lose. We see the same impulse playing out across Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia today. The masses have reached a critical mass of desperation and a way to organize, thanks to technological innovations like Facebook and Twitter. You don’t find many of these guys in the current Tea Party because the Tea Party membership is mostly have something and are interested in keeping more of their hard-earned assets… although they probably will sooner or later figure out that Social Security and Medicare are pretty good deals that we ought to try to figure out how to sustain rather than throw out with the bureaucratic bathwater.
In any case, like it or not, even if your creed is “do no harm” to the other while you take care of number one, there is the problem of unintended consequences and displaced impact that sometimes results in harm to many and huge benefit to few. Capitalism is now borderless. It no longer is contained and forced to play within nationalistic borders. It is now globally “open range.” It may help a few of the globally poorest people gain a higher standard of living so long as capitalism seeks the cheapest form of labor available worldwide. What has happened, however, is American domestic labor that once enjoyed a higher standard of living is now losing employment ground to cheaper labor elsewhere. The only solution posed by Free Market true believers is to develop a more sophisticated, tech-savvy domestic labor force that stays ahead of the curve globally. That means retooling American education to serve that purpose rather than simply aiming public education toward the lately evolved American dream of attending a liberal arts college and losing a high percentage of kids to school drop-out because they see no way to that future. They also call for a greater emphasis on the teaching of math and science to address our growing need for engineers and mathematicians. Instead, the Free Marketeers are busy cutting spending on education in the name of balancing budgets instead of taxing themselves to make schools better.
Our American-based multinational corporations and rich folks might resurrect the notion of civic responsibility which our Founding Fathers very much had and invest more enthusiastically in American education to help prepare the country for the future. That means doing so at the primary and secondary levels of education, not merely investing in research grants at universities. It also might do everything it can to bring manufacturing back to the United States. If we don’t find a way to enfranchise our 21st Century equivalent of the Sans-culottes, we may be facing a bloody revolution that will make the current Tea Party look more like the one in Alice in Wonderland than the one that happened in Boston harbor.*

*although the one in Boston were actually white guys dressed as Indians in order to make it look like an “act of savagery” rather than a frustrated group of colonials rebelling against British imperialism. It is interesting how they hid behind the guise of poorer Native Americans who never got the opportunity to drink imported tea.

Donald Trump Song

(to be sung to “Old Macdonald had a Farm”)





Donald Trump is on a stump

EIEIO

And on his stump he’s got a bump

EIEIO

With a rating here and a rating there

Here a stat; there a stat

Everywhere a stat, stat

Donald Trump is on a stump

EIEIO



Donald Trump the big tycoon

EIEIO

Is now a GOP big buffoon

EIEIO

He’s a birther here, a birther there

Here a birther, there a birther

Everywhere a birther, birther

Donald Trump the big buffoon

EIEIO



The falsehood Trump must keep alive

EIEIO

From where does the President’s birth derive

EIEIO

With a trump up here, and a trump up there

Here a trump up, there a trump up

Everywhere a trump up

It’s the only way Trumpster will survive

EIEIO



Questioning Obama’s birth

EIEIO

Shows just how much Trump’s thoughts are worth

EIEIO

With a small thought here and a small thought there

Here a lie, there a lie

Everywhere a lie, lie

Donald Trump is just a chump

EIEIO



Now Trump’s “truth” shows great fatigue

EIEIO

He wants Obama out of the Ivy League

EIEIO

With a “why Columbia?” here and a “Why Harvard?” there

Here a degree, there a degree

Magna cum laude at Harvard Law? Gee!

Trump makes shit up but that’s his creed

EIEIO


Right now Trump’s in second place

EIEIO

This is the fact we all must face

EIEIO

With a billion here and a billion there

Here some bucks, there some bucks

Everywhere some big bucks

Trump could win the Republican race

EIEIO



The only way to stop Trump cold

EIEIO

Romney shows he’s bright and bold

EIEIO

With a trump Trump here and a trump Trump there

Here a trump, there a trump

Everywhere a trump Trump

Romney forces Trump to fold

EIEIO


Alas, the Mormon’s tongue got loose:

EIEIO

He says Obama should wear a noose

EIEIO

With a cinch knot here, and a lynch knot there

Here a cinch, there a lynch

Everywhere a cinch lynch

Romney really cooked his own goose

EIEIO

The Truth in an Easter Egg

Easter is just around the corner and it reminds me that one of the great traditions connected to that event is the Easter egg hunt. I have a suggestion: let’s all write our congressional representatives and senators and invite them to an Easter Egg Hunt on the Washington Mall. The purpose would be to condition them to actually look for an answer instead of assuming they already have one. Somehow they all seem to have lost their way to the truth and have lost the capacity to actually discover it. Since the truth is often hiding in the tall grass of doubt, maybe the Mall is not such a good place because the grass is too short to make the search an adventure. Maybe we need to move it out of town to some neutral ground where green blades of grass outnumber greenbacks. Maybe some farm in West Virginia could host the event. It could be a kind of Woodstock event for congress.

In any case, we need to encourage both Republican and Democratic congressmen and senators to cast off their cloaks of certainty and re-learn the scientific method of searching for truth they supposedly learned in high school. The scientific method, for the most part, is based on trial and error. You set up an experiment; you try out a hypothesis; it works or does not; and then you make adjustments and try again.
Right now both sides are approaching problem-solving entirely wrong. The Democrats come up with social programs and then sit on them like brooding hens, regardless of whether or not they will hatch some real results. The Republicans, rather than proposing fixes, simply want to burn down what they see as hen houses of brooding Democrats sitting on rotten eggs. Neither side continues to tinker, to experiment, to improve, to progress.

The whole process is a false binary in which conflict is supposed to result in the production of truth, when, in fact, the process always leads to merely a temporary victory for one side that will soon be reversed when the other side obtains a majority. Majority rule does not result in truth. The majority is almost never right no matter which side wins. Consensus is the only process that leads to truth because consensus is the only way a body of people can actually get there. Here’s why.
Back in 1906, an in-law of Charles Darwin named Francis Galton, the coiner of the term eugenics, of all things, went to a fair in western England where he tabulated the guesses by the participants in a guess-the-weight-of-the-ox-carcass contest. When all 800 of the contestants had finished guessing, none had come very close to the actual weight. When Galton calculated the mean of the guesses, the contestants as a body had come within a pound of the actual weight: 1,198 pounds. The mean was 1,197 pounds. Ironically, the guy who believed in eugenics had actually shown that a large body of regular folks could actually ascertain the truth while none of them could do so alone.

Would it not be a wonderful development if our elected representatives put away their one-sided certainty and actually did their own thinking, worked as a body, and reached consensus? We’d all be so much better off in developing and improving successful government programs rather than sitting on failures or throwing out the whole idea of government programs as a waste of money. Right now it’s a lose-lose deadlock.

There is too much emphasis on conflict in American culture and therefore in government as well. Our justice system is meant to operate on the principle that out of a fair and thorough conflict between prosecution and defense will result a fair verdict. However, we all know that the side able to afford the best lawyers has a better chance of winning regardless of the truth. We also know that the lobbyists with the most money have greater influence over congress than do the regular folks. If we could somehow find a way to elect politicians who can and will think for themselves and not be influenced by big money and party line then we have a chance of getting ourselves governed well rather than governed least or big, a Morton’s Fork at best. If we truly want to move away from adversarial thinking, we need to stop electing so many lawyers and start electing more scientists. Science is the most uncertain discipline where theories don’t pass for fact. That’s why there is considerable humility among scientists who seldom argue their case by ignoring evidence in order to maintain a belief.

The Easter egg hunt is a good place to start. Those congressmen who collect the most eggs get to lead the discussion and present their best legislation for consideration. It would be a far better system than the one we have now.

The Audacity of Cuts

Young Paul Ryan has a plan
EIEIO
And In that plan he has some Cuts
EIEIO
With a Cut Cut here, and a Cut Cut there
Here a Cut, there a Cut, everywhere a Cut Cut
Young Paul Ryan has a plan
EIEIO
Paul Ryan should work in a deli. He can deliver cold cuts faster than a baloney factory. But he’s not alone by a long shot. He is simply the point man for the Republicans who think cold cuts are the answer to America’s woes because to suggest that increasing taxes might be part of the answer is to fly in the face of conservative ideology: taxes are bad; tax cuts are good; government is bad; free enterprise is good.
If their god “Free Enterprise” aka “Free Market” were such a great, all-worthy god, why are so many people out of work two years after the economic meltdown? Why are the rich getting richer during this same period? Why is there so little trickle down? And why do Free Market worshippers continue to believe that by making the rich even richer that somehow that will result in a better life for the masses?
Blind faith in a system, any system, is a mistake. To believe that a final answer has been reached economically and that answer is Free Market Capitalism is simply dead wrong. Anything man invents or evolves is simply a link on an evolutionary chain, not a Nirvana. There is no perfect plane or car or atomic power plant. Tinkering must continue. Rethinking must occur if things are to improve. To make an economic system a holy untouchable is to render it a god. As Robert Frost said in his poem “The White-tailed Hornet,” “Won’t almost any theory bear revision?”
What Free Enterprise advocates do not take into account are the losers. They ignore losers; they blame them; they fail to take them into account; they let them eat cake. And eat cake they will. As George Orwell once said, “When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty.” And you end up with an obese nation, but that’s another topic even if it signals the essential difference between the rich and poor modes of thinking.
Rich people or winners have the privilege of being able to think long term and are patient about the future which will also belong to them if they play their cards right. Poor people are so focused on survival and instant gratification today that long term thinking is sheer luxury. Planning for the future is something to get around to tomorrow when there is enough food around for beyond today.
There was a time when poor people left home, even left their country to find a better life. It is still true for people who immigrate to America today. In the past when the United States was still being settled, if you ran into trouble, you could go west, find land, homestead it, and start a new life. Today there is no land to homestead. The West is settled. If you were a southern black, you could move north and find a job in a factory. Today, there are fewer factory jobs because many factories have moved abroad where cheaper labor can be found. The poor are essentially stuck without resources or wherewithal to make a move to a better life. They have mostly terrible schools in their neighborhoods, a fact which signals they have little means of escape even for the next generation.
Conservatives are all about conserving the status quo whereby they remain the winners and losers just need to find their bootstraps. Losing has to do with individual character and slothfulness, not a structural flaw in the system. After all, if the poor just started to develop some long-range plans, they too could succeed. The problem is you need to believe that tomorrow can be better in order to even consider long-range thinking. If you are just scraping by, a long range plan is less realistic than winning the lottery. That’s why the poor per capita are the most frequent players as a group. In many cases winning the lottery is their only hope.
Meanwhile, we’ll watch the Republicans try to save one of their own, this time Congressman Ryan rather than Private Ryan, as they foolishly and consistently tear down all those liberal bridges to nowhere called entitlements while their constituency, the Haves and Have Mores, bask in the sunlight of the conservative spirit.
Robin Hood must be rolling in his grave.

Illumination

Freedom fighters unite! The damn government is trying to force us to use CFL light bulbs instead of incandescent ones. It’s an outrage. I said outrage, not outage. It’s just another example of creeping socialism that is taking over the country. First it was death panels, now its light panels. Every time the government thinks, an oxymoron if there ever was one, it comes up with yet another regulation to stifle freedom. Now it’s the requirement to use CFL lights because they supposedly save energy. What a crock.
Just because CFLs last ten times longer and use one fifth the energy an incandescent does doesn’t mean they are more efficient. It means they are weak, pusillanimous, pussy-footing sources of light compared to the light bulb our own Thomas Edison invented. If God had wanted a CFL light bulb, he would have made Edison make one in the first place.
I don’t care if a coal plant has to work harder and give off more mercury to light an incandescent. Taking off the top of a mountain to feed a coal plant to light a man’s light bulb and throw off a little mercury in the process just helps the economy, creates jobs, keeps other professionals busy such as doctors who take care of the workers with black lung and such, and the whole economy keeps humming right along just fine. Mountain topping also levels the playing field, which you liberals are always yakking about.
Let’s be reasonable. The CFL has mercury as well, but it can’t compete with the coal plant that puts out 4.65 times more mercury per incandescent equivalent than is contained in that wimpy CFL. Hell, there isn’t enough mercury in a CFL to kill a cat let alone a human being. The CFL just does not have the stuff an incandescent does. If you want a powerful bulb, you go with an incandescent.
Besides, back in the day when men were men and men could swear generously, one of the best of them was Mark Twain. One time he took after an editor and laid into him something fierce. He called him a “quadrilateral, astronomical, incandescent son-of-a-bitch.” Now, did he use the word florescent? Hell no. He picked out the hottest words he could muster and one of them was incandescent.
I rest my case.

The Bully Pulp Pit

Congress is back in session. The Republicans are in charge. Instead of focusing on job creation and budget balancing, they go after the weakest thing they can find and try to squash it because part of its work flies in the face of one of their cherished principles: the rights of the unborn. They are busy swatting flies while the lion roars.
Funding for Planned Parenthood is on the block because it pays for poor people’s abortions. Better to have a child grow up to find out his father was a rapist. Better he grow up in a slum with a single parent who did not want him in the first place. That’s bound to have a good outcome. There may be occasional exceptions, but I will bet there are many more drug dealers than Lions Club members coming out of that scenario. Ensuring unwanted unborn rights and removing the rights of rape victims is small ball with little risk because the oppressed in this case have no political or economic clout. They are usually poor.
It seems that no matter what party is in power, there is a tendency to try for victories over small issues rather than go after big game. Health care was not exactly small game, but it was in comparison to the budget deficit, the recession, and job creation. The form of health care that eventually passed was somewhat flawed, but it still amounted to an attempt to get more comprehensive about health care in America. The way we had gone about it in the past was obsolete. We had to go in a different direction. We did, but not in an effectively sustainable one. The healthcare baby may be worth saving, but the bath water needs cleaning up.
Maybe political bodies and politicians themselves are like some college football programs that begin the season by playing some patsies before getting to the tough league schedule. Or maybe they never get to the tough schedule because they are too busy picking on small adversaries and claiming victory the way a bully does. Planned Parenthood is a small adversary. So are illegal immigrants small adversaries. And so are small town foreclosure sufferers.
A short alert by Freakonomics in the February 4, 2011 New York Times cited a study that links negligent or inattentive fatherhood to a propensity for bullying. Apparently the study points to the role of a child’s perception as to whether or not he or she is being paid enough attention by the father. If a child feels neglected by the father, he or she will have a greater tendency to bully.
If this is true, I wonder how many politicians, particularly Republican politicians, have been the victims of neglectful fathers. If their fathers were so busy making a living or getting rich that they did not spend time with their children, this phenomenon could explain the mean-spiritedness that characterizes some politicians in congress and in state legislatures today. They would rather pick on the little guy than go after big game such as the deficit and unemployment.
Whatever the case, I wish politicians would show a little more courage and go after the big issues rather than beat to a pulp the little issues and little guys that already live on the margin. Beating up little guys takes no courage at all.

Libertarians: Live Free AND Die

I get a kick out of libertarians, and it’s not where kicks are well received. Libertarians preach rugged individualism and self-sufficiency and rant against Big Government like there’s no tomorrow…and in their view there will be no tomorrow as long as BG gets in the way of individual freedom.
The latest iteration of their uproar over BG is their call to repeal Obamacare because it requires everyone to buy health insurance. One of their representatives, a federal judge in eastern Virginia, recently ruled that requiring health insurance is unconstitutional. Libertarians can take care of themselves, thank you, and no government should be able to require a person to buy anything he doesn’t want. The problem with this thinking is that when the libertarian gets sick enough to go to a hospital, unless he has a lot of spare cash in his mattress, we the people who do buy insurance end up paying higher premiums because the cost of the libertarian’s stay in the hospital is spread among us premium payers. In other words, the libertarian ends up mooching off the rest of us.
Another pet peeve of the libertarians is gun control. However, thanks to them and their great lobby, the NRA, we have loose and easy gun laws in this country. This looseness enables Mexican drug cartels to sneak across the border in Texas or Arizona, but particularly in Texas, and buy all the semi-automatics and ammunition they need to add to the 30,000 of corpses they have already strewn around northern Mexico. Our libertarian-inspired gun laws or lack thereof have enabled drug cartels to assume such power in Mexico that the Mexican government can’t begin to gain control of its own country. No wonder Mexicans want to come to the United States. We have made Mexico unsafe for habitation, thanks to our libertarian gun laws. But that’s just part of the story.
Of course our libertarian attitude toward drug use in the U.S. has also provided the funds for the cartels to be able to buy the weapons to kill their people, but that would be pointing the finger at a whole different species of libertarians who think they ought to be able to ingest any substance they feel like and to hell with the law and the social and economic cost to the rest of the law-abiding public. Drug users are unwittingly willing to sacrifice Mexican lives and the health of American culture for another selfish hit toward personal oblivion. It is their liberty to do so, they insist.
But maybe there is a silver lining in this selfish behavior as other libertarians see it. If the drug-addled libertarians keep buying drugs, most of which come from Mexico, and the cartels then can buy more guns from the U.S., America’s trade imbalance is improved. Moreover, if the cartels help keep down the population in Mexico, we can make those libertarians in Arizona happy because there will be fewer Mexicans crossing the border to take American jobs. It’s a win-win for everyone, except Mexicans. But who cares about them. After all, the libertarian motto, which is featured on the New Hampshire license plate, is “Live Free or Die.” Translated, it means we’ll live free and you’ll die. But that’s your problem, not mine. After all, we’re all libertarians and should look after ourselves. That’s what “real America” is all about.
Then again, if we go back to the libertarian healthcare issue, why not let them have their way and not require health insurance. However, when they show up at the hospital with a life-threatening injury or illness, make them pay up front for any anticipated costs. It may take a while to assess their situation, but they can simply plunk down a $100,000 - $500,000 deposit, depending on the severity of the case, and any surplus left after service will be returned to them. If the libertarian can’t produce the deposit, that’s too bad. He can go take care of himself. In that case, the motto shifts to “Live Free and Die. But a “real” libertarian wouldn’t have it any other way.