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The Hazards of Ideology When Critical Thinking is Removed: Part II

December 13, 2011

HOW WE GOT TO THIS POINT

In Part I I talked about those elements in free market thinking that puts job creation above other human needs and that those who take this tact use it for persuading voters to keep government “over reach” out of the free markets, a position that presumes that if left alone, an “invisible hand” of the market will create a level field and ultimately make life better for all of us

However the human element of greed has taken root in Capitalism and the vision that Adam Smith spoke to is now being exploited and allowing some to expand their wealth to the detriment of the rest of us.  It has creeped into the very system of government that allowed the free markets to flourish and is changing our democracy to one of a plutocracy

“Yes, our regulatory agencies are incompetent. But they are incompetent by design.” –writer David Goldstein

During the Bush/Cheney years nearly every agency and department was staffed and chaired by people from the very industries they were supposed to monitor and check for abuses and excesses.  Laws were watered down and in many cases overlooked to prevent what they felt was any undue hardship to corporate interests.  One of the most glaring examples was failure of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf last year.  The short cuts and omissions by management helped create conditions that led to this human and environmental disaster  but government oversight was lacking and perhaps led to this lax state of mind by the industry

Bush’s Mineral Management Service Agency Director (now called BOEMRE, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement), Johnnie Burton, and her boss at the Interior Department are but two examples.

In July, Republicans the House Government Reform Committee accused [Ms. Burton’s] agency of stonewalling their investigation. In September, they accused [her] of going too far in making concessions to oil companies. That same month, the Interior Department’s chief independent investigator declared that “short of crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.

Under President Bush, the Interior Department’s top ranks were filled with people with close ties to industry. Most prominent were Gale A. Norton, a strong advocate of domestic drilling who [eventually] stepped down as Interior secretary and subsequently joined Shell Oil, and G. Steven Griles, a former industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and now faces a possible indictment on charges of lying about his dealings with the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In November [of 2006], Interior officials announced that a new task force of outside experts would evaluate the royalty program. Officials named David T. Deal, a longtime lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, to head the panel.

“[Under Bush], there [w]as … a clear agenda to promote oil and gas development wherever and however they can,” said Erich Pica, a policy analyst at Friends of the Earth, an environmental policy group. “Time and again, you [saw] the administration and its political appointees side with the oil and gas companies.”   SOURCE

The problem of corporate cronyism under Bush was so prevalent that the sentiment expressed in 2005 by former EPA toxicologist, Deborah Rice, pretty much sums it up – “They [the FDA] really consider the fish industry to be their clients, rather than the U.S. public.”  But this sort of relationship started long before George W. Bush became our 43rd President and has existed to some degree in most administrations.  Shortly after we became a nation, men like Thomas Jefferson were already concerned about corporations and their influence in government.

 “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”  Thomas Jefferson,  1816

Even James Madison, a favorite of the TeaParty crowd, saw the encroachment of corporate power as a threat to the new republic.

There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses. -President James Madison

The complicity of ardent, laissez faire free marketers to over look the flaws and deception by corporate interests has reached a level that simply defies logic.  The belief that individual liberties always supersede the collective good has led many political leaders paid by corporate lobbyists to promote their concerns even in light of serious issues where better judgement would pause and reflect on the wisdom or the lack thereof to follow through with them.

Take for example the current stand taken by those on the right towards the EPA’s efforts to monitor CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants.  It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt already that such sources of energy production create other toxic emissions like mercury and ash that have caused serious health issues with populations that live in close proximity to these facilities.   CO2 buildup in the earth’s atmosphere is occurring at a faster rate than historical records have shown and yet corporate friendly congress men and women refuse to make provisions to keep in check such emissions from a source known to contribute heavily to this build up.

There are those within the industry that see the need to comply with efforts to keep our CO2 emissions at reduced rates to prevent their further impact on man-made global warming but the ardent laissez faire free marketers within that industry are spending millions to obstruct such efforts based purely on their ideological beliefs that it is not the government’s job to inhibit their production and thus their profits.   Specious arguments are contrived by paid goons to dispel the threats of global warming by presenting arguments that have been aptly debunked by a consensus of climate scientists.

Critical thinking is abandoned by such strongly held views that refuse to look outside the box of their own thinking.  It is one thing to hold to views that don’t require the use of tools at our disposal to attest to the veracity of such claims and another to ignore the body of evidence that reliably shows how the actions of “A” can lead to the consequences of “B”.

In religious views for example there are no measuring devices to better ascertain whether an unseen force uses evil to punish a wayward people as Jerry Falwell claimed on Pat Roberson’s 700 Club shortly following the terrorist attacks on 9/11,  or the belief by many evangelicals that “God causes disasters and sometimes does so as punishment.”   But we have the capabilities and tools to measure global warming’s impact on climate change through an array of measuring devices spread across the globe, on land, under the sea and in the air.   Some skeptics, especially those paid by the fossil fuel industry, may refute or challenge the findings of these measurements but the countless empirical tests of numerous different hypotheses that have now built up a massive body of Earth science knowledge creates a consensus view that only a fool would deny.

” A real free market does not allow one person to damage another person with impunity.” — Michael Rozeff

It is equally dangerous to ignore the bigger picture where only one aspect dominates the thinking of authoritative figures over the total impact of a given decision.  The outcry by ardent laissez faire free marketers regarding the delay of construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that will transfer oil from the Canadian tar sands in Alberta to the refineries in Texas is a case in point.  They claim in this time of high unemployment that we should be doing everything we can to push for the types of jobs this pipeline will create.

It makes a good argument but overlooks the bigger picture we face for potential health and environmental hazards similar to what we suffered from not only the BP Gulf oil disaster but from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, BP’s TransAlaska pipeline, a million-gallon oil spill in Michigan, and a gas explosion that destroyed 37 homes and killed eight people in California.  There are also the “14 other spills that have occurred from Keystone since the first phase opened in 2010”, says Vern Meier, the company’s vice president of U.S. pipeline operations.

“Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype.” –Business Week cover story investigating the impacts of corporate environmental initiatives

The environmental threats are worth noting, especially individual concerns that the pipeline’s path “would threaten the water for people in seven states and a third of irrigated groundwater for U.S. agriculture.”  This could prove to be costly in the not-so-distant future for those municipalities in these areas, eating more into the already dwindling wages of most workers.    There is also the very real possibility that constructing this pipeline as planned “will raise gasoline prices.”   

I have not even mentioned the reality that this project extends our dependence on a source of fuel that directly impacts man-made global warming; warming that will melt the glaciers and arctic ice, raising sea levels that will devastate the world’s coastal cities and cover some nation islands.   When these factors are included into the equation the long term health care and energy cost increases that will result are sure to outweigh the immediate need to create jobs today.  When that time arrives will we have regretted our haste to achieve a short term goal that will leave our budgets even further strained had we thought things through more critically?

“The difference between what we are doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world’s problems.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Job creation from sustaining the finite fossil fuel sources of energy today need to be weighed in terms that look beyond tomorrow.  Increased costs for finding the more hidden remaining sources of oil and coal will not keep these sources cheap and their use will continue to create health issues as they also threaten our ecosystem, creating food and water shortages around the globe and opening us to the hazards of war to compete for these dwindling essentials

When such views hold that violent climatic changes are a sign from God and that immediate concerns should ignore long term consequences, you have to wonder if the thinking of the Dark Ages is not resurfacing.

The real owners of this country, the wealthy business interests … don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.  They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking.  That doesn’t help them.  That’s against their interest.  - George Carlin

RELATED ARTICLES:

What The Founding Fathers Thought About Corporations

30 Major U.S. Corporations Paid More to Lobby Congress Than Income Taxes, 2008-2010 

The Hazards of Ideology When Critical Thinking is Removed: Part I

Posted by in climate change, social security, aging, Corporate Influence, Economy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Some Things Never Change

July 22, 2011

Because some things remain constant, they can serve the self-interests of people in positions of power and wealth to the disadvantage of the very people who are unable to change.

I have as of late been caught up, so to speak, in the pages of history.  Having just about finished my read of Richard Beeman’s great historical account of the men and events that surrounded the 1787 Constitutional Convention,  “Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution”, followed by a review of Ken Burn’s 9 episode Civil War documentaries through my Netflix account, I have discovered a common thread that exist throughout this 230 plus year period.

There has been little changed in the ideologies of those referred to as the Antifederalist of the late 18th century period, those dissenters who supported secession in the mid 19th century, and that mindset carried forward into the 20th century as the civil rights opponents fought against social justice for the poor, elderly, women and minorities, especially blacks in this country.  The sentiments of such people then can be soundly heard even today in those mix of people in right-wing fringe groups, where most seem to coalesce around the modern day Tea Party.

It’s a voice that originally arose out of the need to break from the shackles of suppression from the very real wealthy and powerful autocratic rulers of a bygone era most often referred to as kings, emperors and czars.  These forms of governance arose over man’s long evolutionary expanse from small cave dwellers to vast ancient cultures.   Always a part of this evolution was the strong urge to protect one’s self-interests.

In the beginning small groups always gravitated around the individual who showed the greatest combination of strength, wisdom and courage and the weakest among them were supported by all.  But as civilization expanded and societies developed beyond the small clans of earlier times, the concept of a strongman ruler took off in a direction that tended to forget the needs of the weakest elements in society but always retained a strong sense of self-interests

The strongman ruler concept became intertwined with the religious views of a culture and thus became a positioned supposedly ordained by God himself.  But increasingly over time men began to think outside this box and with the writings of great social thinkers like Hobbs, Rousseau, Burke, Mills and Hegel, notions of democracies and republican forms of government were explored in the hopes that those common people who had always been subject to the whims of monarchies and tyrants could in fact have greater control over their own lives.

For so long ingrained in the minds of people and the writings regarding autocratic rule,  personal freedom was something that few fathomed possible.  But once achieved it persisted heavily in some to the point that any notion of “authority” was viewed as bad or potentially evil.  This was the mindset of most of the men who met at Independence Hall in Philadelphia that summer of 1787.

They came together, many thought, to tweak the Articles of Confederation that would allow the separate states to act more in unison on some issues like trade and defense.  Others though, like James Madison of Virginia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and even Charles Pickney of South Carolina came to form a more centralized authority.  There was great virtue in the need to form a “more perfect union” of states but to many, like Luther Martin of Maryland and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, there was that ingrained fear that certain liberties would be lost and lead to a slippery slope back into the abyss of one man rule.

Though many in the South saw the need to centralize authority they did so only after they had gained exemption for their use of slaves and the provision that export taxes would not be levied on the cotton, rice  and tobacco products that were economic staples for this region.  Their self-interests were in control of any higher notion of free and equal status for all people and much of what was offered to create this government from all the delegates centered primarily around property and wealth, especially that of those who already had much of it.

So determined were those states to preserve slavery and the equal determination of some in the Northern states to abolish it that had their not been some sets of compromises to tap dance around this critical issue, the document that is the law of the land today for us may well have never come about.  By kicking this can down the road however, feelings would mount so strongly on both sides that Southern plantation owners, and by default, almost all white people in the South would feel threatened by  Northern abolitionists.  So strong was this fear that it overflowed into a demonization of all people in Northern states.  To most any white Southerner then all “Yankees” were to be despised,  not just as agents of anti-slavery movements but as everything personified that would take from them their liberties and their very way of life.

 

It was this latter feeling about personal freedoms being lost again that became inculcated and eventually became expressed in forms of animosity that often exceeded rationale thought.  It was to become a hot button so sensitive that just the mere mention of it would rile people to action that often ended with property destruction or death for some.

James Wilson, one of the Convention delegates from Pennsylvania, felt this wrath in 1779 from local militiamen because he dared defend some of those people who were viewed as “royalists”.  A crowd attacked his home and killed an associate who was there to help with his defense.  According to the account of the incident by Richard Beeman,  “a melee of confusion, gunfire and bloodshed [ensued] that only ended when the president of the state government, Joseph Reed, appeared at the head of the  city’s elite militia unit, … and moved in to quell the riot.”  In the end 4 militiamen died and 14 others were wounded, including some of those who came to Wilson’s aid.

Skip forward 75 years later and the same kind of hostility exposed itself on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  After referencing several senators who supported slavery as the issue was being debated in Congress, Norther abolitionist, Charles Sumner was attacked by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who had a history of violence, beating Sumner severely with his cain until his colleagues could pull Brooks away.  In 1861, Edmund Ruffin, an ardent advocate for states’ rights, secession and slavery, is said to have fired the first shot at Fort Sumter that started the Civil War.  He hated the yankees so deeply that when Lee surrendered 4 years later, he killed himself and left a note saying that with “my latest breath, I here repeat, & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.

Today, this hate that manifest itself often in violent action towards perceived threats to one’s way of life is aimed at liberals, gays, “godless” abortionist, illegal aliens and the federal government.  The states’ rights mentality that threatened the lives of James Wilson, Charles Sumner and Union soldiers at Fort Sumter lives today by the likes of those who shoot policemen, abortion doctors, and judges who make rulings not to their liking.  But the bigger sin lies in the fact that many who would pretend to be upset over such hostile actions are secretly supportive of such animosity

On the surface it appears that each time there was social change pushed in this nation that those who held the wealth and political power were most likely the ones who felt threatened by it and thus put their financial strength and social status on the line to fight it.  To win people over to their side the notion that states’ rights and personal liberties were being threatened would be invoked by these people.  This strong sense among many that there are those out there trying to destroy their way of life is often used by those who are merely guarding their own self-interests, especially those wealthy individuals that fear mob actions, unless of course it is turned against those who would diminish their vast fortunes.

These special interests have organized and created astroturf organizations to appeal to this base instinct of violence.  We see them motivating this reactionary force in America to cover their need to denigrate those who would impose legislation and restraints on their power moves.  They have bought out major media sources and diminished them to corporate message boards that not only flame the fires of anti-government, anti-gay, and anti-liberal ire but condition viewers to consume junk that floods our landfills and adds to the contamination of air, water and good farmland.

The images of hateful Tea Party types today, exploited by corporate self-interests, have their roots in the vitriol of many states’ rights advocates in early U.S. history.  During the process of ratifying the U.S. Constitution, former delegate to the  constitutional convention and avid anti-federalist, Martin Luther, falsely claimed that some of those founding fathers that framed the constitution were in favor of a “kingly Government”.  John Mercer, who would later become Maryland’s governor also falsely claimed that convention delegate John Langdon of New Hampshire was eager to crown George Washington “despot of America”.

This type of misinformation is alive and well today on right-wing talk shows and especially in the commentaries of many FOX News pundits.  It’s intent then as it is now is to create straw man arguments and a smoke and mirror environment to prevent a unity amongst citizens today that would hold the feet to the fire of those who continue to capitalize off of the special interests of so-called entrepreneurs.

This isn’t about the evils of the profit motive.   Profits in and of themselves are not evil.  It is about those whose industries threaten human health and well-being -  from the adverse effects of fossil fuels and bogus financial products to the control of health coverage that promotes profits over people – by spending too much of their profits to sustain their harmful ways.

Their efforts to battle those changes that seek to correct the abuses they have imposed on the general public include the tactics and fear that come from an era when such practices seemed more justified than they do today.  The new despotism however is not monarchy but corporatism and it battles it’s rival, a government “of the people” by suggesting that we all have the same self-interests and share the same risks; something we all know deep within ourselves isn’t true but which many cannot come to admit openly.

Posted by in History, Society and Politics, Wedge Issues Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

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“Founding Fathers” is Not a Single Entity

July 13, 2011

Who and what are Tea Partiers and others referring to when they speak of the original intent of the founding fathers?

Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer

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I’m often perplexed by those people who refer to the founding fathers as a single entity presuming that when some of them came together in the summer of 1787 to write our present day Constitution they were of one mind before they arrived and were of like mind when they left.  Actually the opposite is true.  There is also the belief by those who use “founding fathers” in singular terms that there was some singular “original intent”; a perception that holds the view that there are no dynamics or evolutionary processes within human social structures.

A letter to the editor contributor to my local newspaper initiated this train of thought for me this morning by expressing his view that “we have disregarded original intent” and, using culinary vernacular, suggested that we “get back to ingesting the ‘original-intent’ diet the framers cooked up for us”.  The writer at the onset informed us that for years he has “been reading and studying our U.S. Constitution. And as yet [had] not been able to get a clear picture of what the framers’ intent was in our following its formula.

Are these people referring to men other than the framers of the constitution as the founding fathers as they should with people like Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry, who were not there when the Constitution was conceived, documented and signed?

These people might find it disturbing that the 55 men who originally signed in for the commencement of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in late May of 1787 were of varying opposing views; perhaps less so than when they left in September of that year.  Most had come believing that a new, stronger central government was vital for the survival of the new confederation of states.

Secretary of State James Madison, who won Marb...

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One of the strongest proponents of this view was James Madison, the singular figure that many on the right hold as “the acknowledged father of the Constitution”.  They would be right in that his contribution was the basis  for the constitutional context.  It derived from his “Virginia Plan” that both he and fellow Virginian Governor Edmund Randolph had fashioned earlier.  But Madison’s vision also held that the president should be elected by a newly formed “national legislature”, not the people, and that he originally nixed the proposal by fellow Virginian, George Mason, as the Convention was about to close to add a “Bill of Rights”, similar to the one that was eventually added two years after the Constitution was ratified by all 13 states in 1790.

Madison and many of those who came to Philadelphia were, in historian Richard Beeman’s word’s, concerned about the “weakness in the Confederation government that allowed the self-interests of any one state to overwhelm the public interests of the nation.”  This view seems to be in direct conflict with a lot of those people who associate with the newly formed Tea Party of today as they give overbearing credence to the states rights’ position addressed in the 10 amendment, thus the term “Tenthers” for those who oppose most everything the central government represents.

Of the 55 that started, only 41 remained by the time the Convention delegates had concluded their business in September.  There were those alliances between small Northern states and some Southern states that wanted to continue the states equal representation found in the older Articles of Confederation as opposed to Madison and others who wanted representation of the states to be based on population, a plan that would benefit populous states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina.

There were those, especially from non-Southern states that did not want to count slaves as “legitimate” people to base representation on; partly for moral reason but equally for their reluctance to consider the black race equal to the white man in most if not all respects.  Those in the Southern states of course wanted to count their slaves amongst the representative population but if they could not have that, then most wanted to base representation on property ownership, which of course there too slaves would be considered highly valuable.

Delegates like purse-lipped Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Pierce Butler of South Carolina were suspicious of the democratic process by which each citizen had a say in who their elected officials were.  Some like Alexander Hamilton wanted to give great amounts of authority to the Executive branch where others were reluctant to let any single individual have greater authority than the individual state legislatures.  Virginia’s James McClurg proposed that the president could serve for life, provided he displayed “good behavior” at all times.

Today we hear many within the Tea Party pummel listeners with comments about their distrust of the federal government and how Washington wants “to tell us how to run our lives”.  These people might be shocked to find that one prominent “founding father” at the Constitutional convention, George Mason (yes, the same man that fought for an inclusion of a “Bill of Rights”) wanted to establish sumptuary laws, laws that would restrict the personal consumption of luxury items.  In today’s terms that would be mansions, yachts, private airplanes and fully loaded Cadillacs.

So how does one so easily conclude that there was a singular mindset explicitly implied in the Constitution?  We must all keep in mind that the framers of the Constitution were by-and-large wealthy aristocratic white males whose primary focus was to protect the nature of property, primarily theirs.  How does the intent of such men reflect the values of hard-working property-less people, including women and children and of course slaves and the minority races that were sparse then but would ultimately come to grow in large numbers.

Based on but this brief summation about some of the founding fathers I think we can safely assume that there was no singular mindset that existed amongst them.  And we can further conclude that the notion of an “original intent” that did not allow for a changing world is also unfounded within the full context of that document.

Edmund Randolph

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When Virginia’s governor Edmund Randolph assisted others within a Committee of Detail to write a first draft half way through the convention, he “laid down two principles that, while they never appeared in the final report of the committee, seem extraordinary in their wisdom and foresight more than two centuries later.” They were

  1. to insert essential principle only, lest the operations of government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable, which ought to be accommodated to times and events, and
  2. to use simple and precise language, and general propositions, according to the example of the constitutions of the several states. (For the construction of a constitution of necessarily [sic] differs from that of the law)  *

I noted this component about the document in an earlier article and stated that the first gives credence to contemporary jurists and constitutional scholars who argue that ours is a ‘living constitution’ that must be interpreted in the light of changing times and circumstance, while the second supports the notion of those today “who argue for an ‘originalist’ interpretation of the Constitution.

I think the letter writer to the editorial column I mentioned earlier sums up the problem many today have with this concern.  Reading the Constitution alone will not convey what the framers as a unit or as individuals “originally” intended.  Nor will gleaning selected passages from the writings of preferred delegates who attended that convention in 1787.

Most who exposed their thoughts on this historic event did so many years after the Continental Convention concluded.  Reluctant to allow the minutes of their meeting to be made public for fear they would be exploited by some for nefarious reasons, agreement was made amongst them to keep them secret for a while.  They ultimately handed them over to George Washington, the  convention’s chairman, who in turn conveyed them to the new Department of State in 1796.  The new Congress prohibited their publication until 1818.

Madison, the so-called “father of the Constitution”, did so only after his death in 1835.  For those who rely too much on Madison’s perceptions alone, expressed in the Federalist Papers, it would behoove them to know that though he kept copious notes for the most part in his role as a Constitutional framer, the Federalist Papers were written years after the fact, with reflections that changed somewhat from some initial views he expressed several decades earlier; probably “refined” overtime to reflect contemporary realities.  What then would you call his “original intent”?

* Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman,  page 270.

Posted by in History, Social Discourse, Society and Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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Demagoguing the Constitution

July 7, 2011

When people preface their remarks with words that essentially demean and denigrate the ones they are fixing to disparage, it’s usually a pretty good indicator that they lack an all-encompassing view of the subject matter themselves.  It further indicates that the writer is about to make us aware of how superior he or she is to the one who has incurred his or her ire.  Such is the case with conservative columnist Walter Williams’s recent attack on the what he sees as part of a “leftist agenda”.

To undermine the comments of someone and assume their take on things is from some less intelligent and informed mindset is to presume that there are absolutes that are easily perceived and capable of being clearly defined.  This is seldom the case and most surely is in Mr. Williams attack of Time Magazine’s piece by Richard Stengel, “One Document, Under Siege”.

Without going item by item on Mr. Williams assertions about what the Constitution does and doesn’t say as he attacks Stengel’s piece, I would like to point out his overall shortcomings on a single aspect of this revered document that Mr. Williams addressed in his previous column here.

My column last week addressed the compromise whereby each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives and Electoral College. Had slaves been counted as whole people, slaveholding states would have had much greater political power.

This is pretty much a fact based on what I have read concerning the issue.  What Mr. Williams seems to be getting his dander up about is that Stengel and others appear to be using this status given to slaves by some of the founding fathers as a derisive commentary aimed at their moral character, at least as we understand slavery today.  This may have been assumed in Mr. Williams “absolutist” take on such comments but it is far from an objective perspective.

What Richard Stengel and others are referring to when they point out that our constitution was written by less than perfect people, who were none-the-less “plain, honest men”, saw things then as their world allowed without much condemnation.  Many of those who proposed the 3/5’s allotment for slaves were themselves slave holders but were opposed to the institution of slavery.  Yet all of them held heart-felt views then about blacks that would undoubtedly be viewed as extreme racism today, even by the likes of Walter Williams.  None of these white aristocrats felt that blacks were capable of becoming the white man’s equal.

In his excellent book – Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution – about the 1787 Consitutional Convention and the delegates who assembled there, Richard Beeman points out a factor that Walter Williams either overlooks or expediently dismisses:

“The three-fifths compromise was, fundamentally, about states individual interests, not the morality of slavery.  Those few Northerners like Gouverneur Morris, Rufus King, or Elbridge Gerry who voiced unhappiness with the idea of counting the slave population in apportioning representation did so either out of a fear that Northern interests were being sacrificed to those of the South or, as James Wilson phrased it, the ‘disgust’ that their white constituents may have felt about being considered even in the same category as slaves.  [...]  many Northern delegates were merely uncomfortable with the idea of being associated in any way with slaves.  That uneasiness was generated at least as much by a deeply seated racism as by any humanitarian concern about the plight of enslaved Africans.” (p. 214)

This is not to discredit these men whose intelligence and insights were formidable and rose above many of their contemporaries.  It is merely to point out, as Richard Stengel does quite capably, that had these men the power to see the future as it is today, they would be astonished at how far we’ve come and how puny their notions were in comparison.  This concept will apply to our best and brightest today by those who look back at us 230 years later and wonder why we held women in such low esteem and treated homosexuals as inferior, much like Madison, Washington and Jefferson did with the black people during their time.

Stengel’s argument, that William’s has lost sight of, is to remind us all that the Constitution was written at a time when the things we need to address today were not even around to consider back in 1787.  It was also written by a select group of white males who were for the most part well-educated and wealthy land owners.  Not exactly a representative sample of the general population then or now nor one by which all factors could be evenly weighed.

But Mr. Williams, in his absolute certainty about “liberal leftist comments” and their agenda to destroy his sense of American values, has refused to consider this perspective.  He misses Stengel’s argument that this great document which opened the door for personal freedoms around the world, was much more a compromise document than he seems willing to acknowledge and was meant to correct the major deficiencies of the earlier Articles of Confederation.

In it is the room to expand the rights of it’s citizens and check the abuses by self-centered interests of the states and powerful individuals, a condition that drove all the Constitutional Convention delegates, especially Mr. Williams’ favorite – James Madison – to form a more perfect union by creating a central government with broader powers than the states had allowed following their defeat of the British army.

The fact that they compromised and allotted a 3/5 human status to slaves then does not make these men monsters, considering the social and political environment of their day.  But noting that they felt superior to blacks does indicate that had we continued to hold such wrong and dated views today, we may not have become that “shining light on the hill” conservatives are eager to promote.  This attitude changed as a result of the social dynamics we faced as a nation.  A document that doesn’t recognize that need to change is not worthy of the esteem Mr. Williams feels it deserves.

Posted by in Society and Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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The Tea Party, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers: An Argument Without End

June 30, 2011

To listen to many within the movement that has become the Tea Party in this country you would think that they have an inside track into the thinking of all those responsible for founding this country, especially those 55 men who sat in Liberty Hall in Philadelphia for 4 months in 1787 and composed the document that is the basis for the laws of our land today – the Constitution.

In general the Tea Party is basically right when they say that many 18th century Americans were concerned with a strong distant, centralized power and decided their rights would be better represented closer to home in state government, but their fear centered around the British Royalty they had recently won their freedom from, not an elected government.  After forming a confederation of independent states it became clear to astute men of politics then that the loosely aligned “countries” were actually weaker than if they were more united under the auspices of a central power.

Much of what we hear from Tea Partiers today about James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington reflect a pre-revolutionary attitude about states rights.  Once they had gained their independence from Great Britain however it became apparent that commerce, infrastructure and dealing with a foreign threat needed a cohesive front from all of the states and a power that would over-ride parochial concerns and interests.

A closer look at history will reveal that a degree of chaos and uncertainty plagued the new states and many of the leaders who would later call for a central, National government.

The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything. Never has the country produced a more brilliantly argumentative, individualistic or opinionated group of politicians. Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day.   SOURCE

Richard Beeman, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, has authored an excellent account of those summer days nearly 230 years ago when, in the words of Pennsylvania delegate Gouveneur Morris, “plain honest men” met in Philadelphia in 1787 to give us a national republican-form of government.  Beeman reveals much about the time and the people of that age, but it also provides some great profiles on most of those 55 delegates from 12 states (Rhode Island refused to participate at the Constitutional Convention) who hammered out compromises to form a document that has endured the test of time.  But endured though it has, it seems to be little understood by many today, especially by those who never tire of telling us what the founding fathers intended.

Secretary of State James Madison, who won Marb...

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In honor of the nation’s upcoming birthday where they declared their independence from the British monarchy on July 4th 1776, I have taken some excerpts from Beeman’s book, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, that will generally conflict from what we hear today of those less knowledgable about America’s early history but tend to represent their most vocal contingent.  (All bold emphases are mine)

  1. Nearly all the of the delegates at the convention were somewhat distrustful of giving “the common people” a direct say in the affairs of government.  Though citizens today vote directly for their representative, Senator and their choice for President, this is the only democratic aspect to our form of government.  We are more a Republican form of government whereas once we elect officials we essentially give them the authority to make decisions that will hopefully most closely reflect the voters’ views.
  • Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts feared the common man’s popular passions.  He was deeply suspicious of the “democratic excesses” in the Constitution and ultimately refused to sign the document.
  • Pierce Butler of South Carolina “thought an election by the people an impractical mode” and felt “property, including slaves property, should be the basis for representation in the new government”.
  • Roger Sherman of Connecticut felt “the people at large will never be sufficiently informed to make a wise choice”.
  • Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania said, “Give the votes to the people who have no property and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them”. (p.279)

2. Unlike the stoic images we see of James Madison, his brilliant mind was offset by chronic “suffering from a combination of poor physical health and hypochondria, and [was] painfully awkward in any form of public speech.”  (p. 24)

3. Contrary to what some Tea Party advocates insist today, Madison was convinced that the weak central government of the Confederation posed as serious a threat “to liberty and, equally important, American unity” as those threats they faced by taxation from “a distant, overbearing imperial government and the unbridled exercise of power by royal governors.”  (p. 27)

4. Madison’s efforts to form a national government evolved from his concern for how state governments “had overreacted to prior abuses of power by British and royal governors.  He felt that the states “frequently enacted ‘vicious legislation,’ too often prompted by the whims of public opinion rather than sober reflection”.  One such whim was that of fellow Virginian and patriot Patrick Henry who tried “to derail the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Religious Freedom, a move that threatened to undermine one of Jefferson and Madison’s most cherished principles – the separation of church and state”.  (pp. 27-28)

5. The two-house legislature, the senate and lower House, was a concept derived from the British parliament where there was “an ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ chapter – an elected House of Commons and a hereditary House of Lords”.  Though Madison’s Virginia Plan “rejected the English notion of a hereditary upper chamber”, the concept was appealing to many Convention delegates because “it reflected a continuing belief in the traditional English idea of rule by a virtuous few”.  (p. 89)

6. Originally the democratic practice we exercise today by electing the President through the popular vote was not considered.  Instead the position would be selected by a “national legislature” and it wasn’t clear to all of them whether this should be “a single person or a group of people”.  Again, the founding fathers at the Convention were concerned about allowing the common people to elect “the country’s most able and thoughtful citizens” feeling that only people like themselves, “wise and knowledgable people” would be better suited to select the executive.  In the end they compromised and proposed the electoral college system we now have today where people would vote for their Presidential candidate but selected electors in each state would actually make the final determination.

7. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania was one of the delegates at the convention who felt strongly about a national government.  The weaker Confederation federal government, Morris felt, “ was nothing more than a ‘mere compact resting on the good faith of the parties’ whereas a supreme, national government. would possess ‘a compleat and compulsive’ power.  ‘In all communities’ he contended, ‘there must be one supreme power and one only’.  It was essential to locate sovereign power in the national and not the state governments if America was to be a nation worthy of the name”.  (p. 101)

8. Ron Chernow, the author of “Alexander Hamilton”,says that there’s a belief among “many Tea Party advocates to adhere to the judicial doctrine of originalism — i.e., that any interpretation of the Constitution must abide by the intent of those founders who crafted it.  However, we learn from a rough draft of the Constitution, written by Virginia’s Edmund Randolph, two principles were laid down “that, while they never appeared in the final report of the Committee [of Detail], seem extraordinary in their wisdom and foresight more than two centuries later”.  They were

  1. to insert essential principle only, lest the operations of government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable, which ought to be accommodated to times and events, and
  2. to use simple and precise language, and general propositions, according to the example of the constitutions of the several states. (For the construction of a constitution of necessarily [sic] differs from that of the law)

The first gives credence “to contemporary jurists and constitutional scholars who argue that ours is a ‘living constitution’ that must be interpreted in the light of changing times and circumstance, while the second supports the notion of those today “who argue for an ‘originalist’ interpretation of the Constitution”  (p. 270)

Thus we have clear evidence here that there is and was no absolute rendering of how the founding fathers “intended” the Constitution to be interpreted.  Clearly from Randolph’s view it was meant to be open-ended to a certain degree that would accommodate those situations in the future they assumed would have no bearing to their way of life then.  One delegate couldn’t even envision that the nation he helped found would still be around today.   Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts doubted that the United States of America would remain one nation beyond 150 years.

Ron Chernow tells us in his NY Times Op-ed piece that “Dutch historian Pieter Geyl once famously asserted that history was an argument without an end”.   We see this playing itself out today as those within the Tea Party continue to cherry-pick the information from a select few political leaders in our early American republic who were fearful that a nation ruled through a powerful central government would devolve into a repressive regime as they experienced under George III of England.  Reality has not caved to such fears but that doesn’t prevent them and others from suggesting that such can occur, but only of course when their political opposition have primary control of most or all of the branches of government.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Founding Fathers versus the Tea Party

How the Tea Party’s fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble.

Posted by in History, National Holiday, Society and Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Notes on American Colonial Life and Humor

June 4, 2011

As we approach the 4th of July I thought I would reflect on those people who put their lives on the line to fight the mighty British Empire and win our Independence.  They had a great love of life and a sense of humor that was apparent even when the specter of treason hung over their head.

As a history buff much of what I’ve learned is that people of all time periods had a sense of humor that even today can give rise to a grin or even outright laughter.  Much of what we read in high school and even college was often historical  accounts of events that many today have a hard time connecting to.  But humor!  That’s something we can relate to

I am currently reading Richard Beeman’s “Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution”.  And though it too mostly covers the events back in 1787 that led up to, during and after the Constitution that we now know today was written, Beeman does a great job of weaving real life narratives about more personal and intimate details of not only the men who achieved this amazing feat but some of the local citizens in Philadelphia and its environs.

Here are but a few excerpts in the early passages of the book that I found humorous and telling about a people who I have often come to view as haughty and dry witted, with the exception of people like Ben Franklin of course.

In one tale Beeman recounts a story by one of the Pennsylvania delegates, Gouverneur Morris, who lost a leg after it was caught in a carriage wheel at the age of 28.  After strapping a “simple oak peg to the stump of his leg”, he continued his life much like he had before.  A big part of his life until he married late was his sexual associations with the ladies.

Gouveneur Morris and wooden peg leg

According to Beeman’s account of Morris, “he developed a reputation extending to both sides of the Atlantic as a consummate philanderer.  Not allowing his peg leg to interfere with his amorous inclinations, he was a fixture at nearly all of the important events of Philadelphia high society, working his charms on married and single women alike.

Morris’ romantic adventures were so extensive that his friend and mentor, John Jay, was led to comment that though the loss of his leg was a ‘tax on my heart’, Jay was on occasion ‘tempted to wish that he had lost something else.’”

Then there was the story of a slow news day as James Madison, arriving early for the Continental Convention, awaited the arrival of other fellow delegates.  Eager to reform the Articles of Confederation, Madison arrived 11 days before the convention was scheduled to meet on May 14th.  To his disappointment only a few delegates showed up on the appointed day, not nearly enough for a quorum.

“The only interesting thing that happened in Philadelphia that May 14th as reported in the Pennsylvania Herald, occurred about a block from the Pennsylvania State House” Beeman reports in his book.  “‘ ‘A young cox-comb (dapper man) who had made too free with the bottle’ staggered up to a young ‘lady of delicate dress and shape,’ took hold of her hand, and, peeping under the large hat covering her face, exclaimed that he ‘did not like her so well before as behind, but notwithstanding he would be glad of the favour of a kiss.’  The young woman, unperturbed, cooly replied, “With all my heart, Sir,  if you will do me the favour to kiss the part you like best.

There is even subtle humor in the condemnation of John Adams toward his co-hort in France, Benjamin Franklin.  They were both there to gain favors with the French Court to finance the war in America.  Adams was all business and found Franklin of little use, he thought, in gaining the connections they needed to secure loans so the troops back home could get paid.

In Beeman’s conveyance of Franklin during his time in France we find the great man, late in his life, still enjoying the joies de la vie.  “Franklin loved every minute of his nearly nine years in France.  He may well have been the most popular man in all of Paris.  A much-sought-after celebrity among the aristocracy and the literati of the city, his own dinner parties were legendary for the quality of the conversation, food and drink … that he provided for his distinguished guests.”

 

Actors Paul Giamatti as Adams and Tom Wilkerson as Franklin in HBO’s Miniiseries On the Life of John Adams

But all this didn’t set well with John Adams, a man Beeman described at this juncture  as “Franklin’s puritanical diplomatic colleague”.

Found among his letters to friends back in the colonies, Adams fumed about how “the business of our commission would never be done unless I did it.  The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation … It was late when he breakfasted, and as soon as breakfast was over, a crowd of carriages came to his levee … some Phylosophers, Accadamecians, and Economists, some of his small tribe of humble friends in the literary way whom he employed to translate some of his ancient compositions.”

“[B]ut by far the greater part were women and children, come to have the honor to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs among their acquaintances.  These visitors occupied all the time, commonly, till it was time to dress to go to dinner.”

I love those last lines of Adams’ as he pokes fun at Franklin’s balding pate along with his humble beginnings.  John Adams himself was bald much like Franklin but unlike the Doctor, Adams frequently wore a wig which was customary of the gentry at the time.

Adam’s comments are also a wonderful depiction of how the personalities of Ben Franklin and John Adams contrasted so much yet both worked so hard to create a new nation that has survived despite such diversities as it has with those millions who came to inhabit this land long after they were gone.

Our history is full of contrast that created a certain degree of animosity amongst the citizens in those early days.  But they had something to offset anxieties then that we no longer have – room to expand and establish a life far remote from the crowds that were beginning to cluster along the east cost.

We have fulfilled the manifest destiny that Jefferson had in store for us when he purchased the Louisiana territory and we are now one great populated nation that in many locales finds people packed on top of each other.  Now more than ever we need to lighten up and employ non-malicious humor to offset that animosity that has made our society one of the most polarized since the Civil War.

There is no going back to some imagined “better day in America.”  We are where we’re at because the dynamics that made this nation what it has become will not allow a civilization where only white men of property can vote and all others are considered second-class citizens.  And rather than becoming fraught over how different the racial and religious character of this nation has evolved, we need to find harmony in that we are all still one people who derives our national character from that document those men took great pains to create back in the summer of 1787.

P.S.  It would nice if those who like to tell us about how grand our traditons were and how Obama is taking them away from us would simply take the time to review basic American history.

Posted by in History Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

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GOP to American Public: “Don’t Think About It As We Ask You to Bend Over.”

March 18, 2011

The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a … policy [that] would work powerfully to induce the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life, which is the end that society should always have in view, as being that by far most fruitful for the people. Nor need it be feared that this policy would sap the root of enterprise and render men less anxious to accumulate, for to the class whose ambition it is to leave great fortunes and be talked about after their death, it will attract even more attention, and, indeed, be a somewhat nobler ambition to have enormous sums paid over to the state from their fortunes. – Andrew Carnegie on Wealth, 1889


It’s a shame there are few people of great wealth like Andrew Carnegie who shared the values of the capitalism that created wealth and the virtues of charity that felt obligated to dispense vast sums of it to society.  He preferred to do this on his own but should he not be able to give all away that he wanted to and to whom, he was more than willing to accept allowing it to fall to the state upon his death rather than allow his children to inherit the bulk of it.

He would have favored not only the estate tax today but would welcome taxing it at greater rates than many of his wealthy contemporaries would concede today.  Bill and Linda Gates and Warren Buffet are exceptions to this reality. Mostly what we see today is a growing number of very rich people and those who aspire to emulate them do all they can to not only squeeze less fortunate people of their income but remove those benefits that we all help pay for with our taxes – but to the very rich and their fans, is seen more as a monetary drain.  A bucket of quenching water that whose overflow satisfies the thirst of the people below who depend on it for their life’s sake but is cut off with baffles and other devices by the owner of the bucket to keep it all for himself.

The wealthy and corporate-friendly conservatives in this country keep trying to make a comparison between family budgets and the nation’s budget.  When income is scarce, they say, the family is forced to reduce it’s spending.  The same should apply for the federal government.  And while this makes sense for families, especially those who make under $100,000 (about 85% of American households) it is not the same as the U.S. government which can engage it’s wealthier citizens to cover expenditures that the legislature has allowed for the general welfare of all of its citizens.

Budget deficits for families occur when their source of revenue diminishes through no fault of their own.  The Federal government however can sustain a balanced budget by applying it’s constitutional authority in Article I, section 8 that allows it to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States”,  The law also dictates that such “duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”.  (all emphasis is mine)

The “general welfare” clause had narrow interpretations by James Madison who authored the Federalist papers but was given a broader view by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, Associate Justice Joseph Story and later court decisions in U.S. v. Butler and Helvering v. Davis. Acknowledging that they should “be uniform throughout the United States, reflects at a bare minimum that all should be taxed at a rate commensurate to their income.

In today’s terms that means that the wealthy should not have favorable legislation where they in effect pay less than those low and middle-income families in the 85% range of household incomes.  Reducing revenues through tax cuts or special considerations is a slight of hand by the GOP and conservative Democrats to mask a feigned crisis concerning budget deficits.

The top 1% in this country has always maintained levels where they possessed the greatest portion of wealth in America, even when their marginal tax rates were as high as 91%.  According to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) “the richest 1 percent owns 34 percent of our nation’s wealth — that’s more than the entire bottom 90 percent, who own just 29 percent of the country’s wealth.”

Between 1979 and 2005, the top five percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 81 percent. Over the same period, the lowest-income fifth saw their real incomes decline 1 percent, according to census bureau records.

American CEOs earned 411 times as much as average workers in 2005, up from 107 times in 1990 and according to testimony in hearings before the House Financial Services Committee, Mar 8, 2007, top executives in the U.S. now make about twice the pay of their counterparts in France, Germany and the U.K., and about four times that of the Japanese and Korean corporate chieftain.  Yet the U.S. has extremely generous provisions in the tax code that literally allow the wealthiest in our country pay less than a family of 4 who earns less than $100,000 annually.

On paper their rates are higher than other income brackets but behind this smoke screen are laws and codes that allow many to defer their taxes in special arrangements for individuals with wealthy estates and income from capital gains while for multi-national corporations there are tax avoidance codes like the Offshore Tax Deferral that allows them to delay paying U.S. taxes on overseas profits as long as they keep those profits offshore.  Billions of dollars in tax revenues are lost each year with these exceptions for the wealthy, thus removing the primary capability to balance state and federal budgets; budget deficits that were for many a direct result from tax avoidance legislation favored by Republicans.

Rep. Schakowsky wants to change this arrangement by introducing new legislation that would “create new tax brackets for earners who make significantly more than the baseline for the current top income bracket.  Currently, the top marginal tax rate of 35 percent applies to income starting at $373,650, and the tax code fails to distinguish between earners making a few hundred thousand dollars a year and those making a few hundred million dollars a year.” (Jan Schakowsky Introduces Bill To Raise Taxes For Wealthiest Americans by Lucia Graves, HuffPo, 3/17/11)

Schakowsky’s proposal would create higher brackets for those making over $1 million starting at a rate of 45% and incrementally increasing to a high of 49% for those who make over $1 billion.   These rates are half the amount that existed under Eisenhower in the 1950’s where the wealthiest 1% still owned roughly the same amount of the nation’s wealth as they do today with the lower rate of 35%.

Employment and budget deficits have never suffered under higher tax rates for the wealthiest as Larry Beinhart demonstrates in his article “The Astonishing Stupidity of Not Raising Taxes on the Rich When Budgets Are Tight”.  In fact, as the data shows, economic recoveries are not only likely to occur when we raise taxes on the wealthiest but when we increase, rather than decrease, federal spending during periods of economic recessions.

The Obama administration weakly attempted to take these steps to improve our current economic fiasco with its stimulus recovery plan but has bent too easily in favor of Republican and Tea Party obstructionists in Congress.  These conservatives continue to insist that the same failed policies of lower tax rates under Bush/Cheney along with spending cuts for social programs that benefit the economically disadvantaged in this country will somehow miraculous work now.

We can only hope that the Democrats can get some backbone and hold on until the 2012 elections where hopefully those voters who ushered in a Congress and administration that stood for change in 2008 will return with the emphatic message to elected officials to fulfill their earlier promises .  I shutter to think how much worse it can get for the American worker in this country if they continue to listen to the lie by those on the politIcal Right who insist that we do what they say and ignore what the consequences will be.

RESOURCES:

Inequality.org

THE ESTATE TAX: MYTHS AND REALITIES

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