TheMillerCircle.org

Yesterday, the US stockmarket was closed, while others throughout the World went into a tumble, losing a very substantial part of their net worth. The Honk Kong market lost 5.49% of its total value on Monday and another 8% today. These markets anticipate that the US is in a recession. Investors and the public alike are waiting nervously for the New York Stock Exchange to open today, not knowing what kind of day to expect, but investors anticipate that perhaps the largest drop since the depression may take place before the market closes (in a panic-stricken move, the Fed has, just this morning, shaved the interest rate by 3/4% to 3.5%, but banks have already shown huge losses over the past few months). None of the signs are good in our economy and the way we have been supporting our consumer-based economy in the past decade makes you wonder whether we have many more logs to put on the fire. How is it that the most advanced scientific and technological country in the world had, until recently, its main economic engine run by Americans buying and selling their homes to each other? If that simple fact alone didn’t alarm you and send a disconcerting ripple through your cortex and brainstem, then you must be a real estate agent.

At one time, beginning at the close of WW II, America seemed headed on a new trajectory of its historical development, one based on science and technology. For the first time in our history, Federal investment in research universities began at the close of the war and support for college education through the GI bill helped to create a new, educated middle class in America. All of this was further intensified and expanded following Sputnik in 1957: that led directly to the "Golden Era of the American Research University", from 1959-1969, the very period when I was stimulated to enter science as a career. American research universities began to surge ahead of their European counterparts in prestige and when the revolution in biological research began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, American institutions, both public and private, became the most powerfully dominant research institutions in the world. Molecular biology was an American development and neuroscience is an American word (coined in the mid 1960s when the Society for Neuroscience was formed). The space program, putting a man on the moon to beat the Russians in 1969, seemed like continuity towards a new emphasis on science and reliance on innovation as the driving forces for our economic engine. College tuition in the remarkable University of California system, that was developed by Clark Kerr as a post-war miracle, was free. But something happened on the way to this nirvana force in America. We began to see in the 1970s and 1980s that other countries like Japan were taking advantage of American inventions and research developments in the U.S. more effectively than we were, and we began buying high tech items from them, never wondering why we weren’t making these products ourselves, since we did the research and developed the patents. And in the 1990s, we saw for the first time in our history, that the financial services sector generated more corporate income than that from our manufacturing base. To me this was another shock to the nervous system. Financial services, with hedge-fund managers and a super investment mentality at the top, do not build a country: instead, they tear one apart. Their interest is global and putting companies out of business and making a profit by doing so is one of their most prolific forms of profitability and it matters not whether the company is American or Taiwanese.

Today our country is being run by the financial sector people and you can see that there is no longer any concept of public service. Instead, we have a national greed mentality and feeding at the public trough is the motivation for serving in politics. A president and vice president who could not make it in the real world themselves, have catapulted their corporate associates into high profitability by serving them dinner at the public trough. Haliburton does not even have its corporate headquarters in America and is thus free from US tax obligations. No one seems concerned.

The root cause of our negative economic trajectory was worrying too much about communism and 9/11 terrorism, while failing to understand that the fundamental source of our genius lies within our inventiveness and our scientific achievements and what we do with them when they have been accomplished and become a public domain resource. We tried to explant science on the American culture immediately after WW II. For a period of a few decades, it looked like the patient would accept the graft and that a new era in the American economy was underway, one based on science, technology and an educated citizenry. Ultimately much of this energy had to become focused on issues like the environment, water quality, food reliability, sanitation and disease. But, with Rachel Carson’s publication of "Silent Spring" in 1962 and its aftermath of increased government regulation of the environment and protecting endangered species, a backlash war got started and the Republican mantra of a free market economy was coupled to disassembly of American science and its influence. The explant, which had looked like a viable outcome at the beginning, began to show signs of rejection by the patient. The vehicle chosen by the Republicans for their war on science and regulation, was to build a majority coalition with an appeal to Christian fundamentalism and its antiscience phenotype. Those that designed the strategy (beginning with Barry Goldwater right after his stunning defeat to Lyndon Johnson in 1964) had neither an understanding of science, nor any concept of its growing net worth to our culture and our economy. Militarism was a great substitute for science and sold well to members of the new coalition. It sold so well in fact, that future presidential candidates, who had to be groomed and stroked into this new mold, had also to spring from out national well of those with no technological or scientific receptivity. Thus, Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush were the new banner carriers of the coalition. Reagan was a transitional figure, someone who had likability and seemed friendly, but his actions were below our radar screen.

But Bush brought everything out in the open: he represents the final culmination of the coalition, its ultimate triumph. From Reagan to Bush, we went from the naive to the truly exploited, but exploitation with high profit by feeding at the public trough, a form of parasitic disease for which we do not have a cure, because the disease has yet to be identified. The country that invented modern science has become a third world country in using it. The explant was rejected and removed, leaving an open, festering wound. But, the Republican victory was complete, the party can retire. Even if defeated at the polls this November, the Republican party can claim complete victory over science-based opposition and they will be waiting in the wings, hoping and assuming that whatever the Democrats can mount to counter our great Federal mess, any misstep will be the opportunity to bring back another Ronald Reagan. And, the culture that rejected science has a new well spring of replacements, more so than ever before.
Science once sat and ate comfortably at the Federal dinner table. But increasingly, the science adviser and science itself were progressively displaced until now they are supported by the dinner scraps themselves. The final act in this explant rejection has been the purge of not just science, but scientists themselves who can no longer find support for their research and watch on the sidelines as those who once were attracted to careers in science fade from view to take up their new assignment as a provider through the financial sector of our economy, the only thing that works.