Fig. 1 Planet Earth (NASA)

Every educated person on the planet has heard about the threats to human existence imposed by Global Warming. Yet, few of us are knowledgeable enough to explain the basic mechanisms that determine our climate, especially when talking to those among whom are doubting members of the choir. Understanding the essential elements of Global Warming requires effort and an intellectual expenditure, but you can converse intelligently on the subject, while stopping short of explaining the situation on the basis of a thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. Besides, the earth’s climate has never truly been in any form of equilibrium–some positive or negative driving force or energy imbalance has always been trying to change our climate, though, until now, such changes have taken place over millenia, not over the two hundred plus years of the industrial revolution.  Our climate has always been changing, even though the time constants for change are way beyond a human lifetime, and lie properly scaled and recorded within the geological and paleoclimatological record, which gives up its secrets slowly. But once properly deciphered that record reveals a surprisingly coherent history for those willing to put the effort into interpreting the scrolls, or to be more accurate, deciphering the core drillings of oceans and glaciers. Of course, we don’t yet have a complete story. There are large gaps in our knowledge, but we know enough already to be mesmerized by our planetary history and the forces that have shaped our climate. And we should know enough to be alarmed and very wary about our future.

It is now clear that never before in our climate history have we witnessed the kind of experiment now underway–the forcing of our planet to go through something it has never experienced before–a sharp, man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that is now taking place and pushing us towards a climatological precipice that we might not be able to escape. But if we act quickly, this experiment is still under our control, depending on whether we can muster the political will to curb our use of fossil fuels and restore energy balance to keep the planet as it was, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (ppm) or less ; it is now at 387 ppm and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The alternative is that we run the risk of higher levels of carbon dioxide that will trigger the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps and eventually raise our sea level by 270 feet! We are probably not at risk for a sea level increase of that magnitude during this century, but we do run the risk of having this kind of sea level rise take place, and once it starts, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Not only will this massive ice melting proceed out of our control, it will cool the local regions where the melting takes place, impact our weather systems and change the driving forces for oceanic currents. The emergency we must address now has been created by the fact that the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere has a very long half-life and its actions on our planet will be with us for a  very long time. Couple this reality to the fact that we are already seeing weather patterns that reflect Global Warming and you inescapably conclude that our short-term climate does not look good–it will inescapably be more violent. But, we can still do something for the long-term, by acting soon and now is not too early. There is little doubt that if we continue to burn fossil fuels through a business-as-usual mode, our planet will be markedly different and our planetary future will be seriously in doubt. In many ways, that’s the shock–not only that the climate is never in equilibrium, but that it is also super-sensitive to the very fuels we have chosen as our cheapest form of energy. For too long we have assumed constancy in our climate lives: that luxury has now gone, at least the assumption part of it.

Until Homo sapiens came along and started adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, climate change took place over thousands or millions of years and every hundred thousand years or so, we would go through another ice age, created by changes in the tilting of the planet on its axis and slight changes in the elliptical pattern of our annual trek around the sun. These two precession parameters change the amount of sun that radiates to earth (insolation), increasing with greater axis tilt and decreasing with less. Planetary alignments within our solar system create these different elliptical shapes and the axial rotational wobbling–the earth spins like a wobbly top–but wobbles on a very long time scale. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is actually becoming more vertical now, so we would normally expect to see another ice age, perhaps in 7,000 years or so. However, our carbon loading of the atmosphere precludes that possibility. Until humans brought the industrial revolution, the planetary environment changed on a very different time scale, usually thousands of years, even though cataclysmic events in our climate history have been known to happen. The question for our generation is whether we have put in motion a new and ultra-rapid set of events that we will not be able to control. Most climatologists say at best, it will be a close call if we are going to avoid a tipping point, after which it won’t matter what we do. But saving the planet as we have known it is still possible and the science is at a point where only non-scientists or discredited ones believe otherwise.

The value of knowing more about climate change is not to convince those like the Tea Party members, because they are beyond hope. The real function of becoming more knowledgeable about this issue is to convince ourselves and other like-minded colleagues that we are facing an imminent global catastrophe if we don’t act quickly. This is one branch of science we can’t afford to be cautious about. We have enough knowledge about our climate future that we should be ready to support a WW II-like mobilization strategy to begin shaping the new economy that will be required if we are going to ride this thing out and eventually reverse the 250 year trend of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  This dire need for a cooperative spirit to save the planet should greatly reduce the international barriers for interactive productivity towards this end.  And we need to get beyond simplicity. You can’t summarize the anticipated changes with simple phrases. Phraseology for climate change is dead–it’s silly to think in those terms. A warmer earth means a drier earth in some places and at some times, but also a wetter earth in some places at some times. And it means rising sea levels because the polar and Greenland ice pacts are melting, even though we don’t understand at what rate that will be happening and over what time–that’s the new threat! Almost none of the projections in our future are what we have been used to in the past and the threats that confront us all point to a fragility of our climate that, until now, completely escaped our attention. Fortunately, the science underlying our climate change has been advancing with new insights and theories appearing on a regular basis. This is still an intense on-going topic of investigation and insight. But, the science has passed judgment on our basic future and now it’s up to the public to catch up with their vision. Although it is already late, it is not too late to save the planet and preserve decent lives for our children and grandchildren. But it is in their future interests and well being that we must act now. So, an essential grasp of these concepts is increasingly important if we, as humans, are going to avoid falling off a cultural survival cliff that lies in our future if we don’t think and act more decisively to curb the new summers of our discontent.  The first person we have to mobilize is ourselves and after that, we can worry about our neighbors and friends. There are plenty of reasonable people out there that need to be convinced about the alarming situation that confronts us and the best way to do that is begin by developing our own educational skills about climate change and the emergency we face. We must quickly rid ourselves of coal-burning sources of electricity and put the kibosh on the use of Canadian tar sand sources. We need to reach a point where we leave the remaining energy in the ground and stop destroying mountain tops for coal.

Although it’s a common default cause for the media, we can no longer blame our current and future weather on El Nino/ La Nino or even a Super El Nino that climatologists talk about. There is some speculation that El Nino could become a permanent fixture to the environmental makeup. It used to be that these special events, which can bring about disastrous drought and flood conditions (depending on where you are), happened every ten years or so, but now they are more frequent, occurring about every four years. We have skewed the climate curve and most of us don’t know how or why, but increasingly we think it’s serious and we have to engage the rest of the world on a rational basis for believing that action needs to begin now and inaction will be a crime against humanity’s future.  Actually, we don’t have to convince the rest of the world–they already get it. We have to convince the rest of America and we have to begin to assume a leadership role in planetary revivalism. The new more violent weather patterns we have been seeing throughout the planet point an uncomfortable finger towards the unavoidable: there is more energy in the atmosphere and that excess energy needs to dissipate itself in some new, often more violent way. A small part of that expression will be in the form of dust storms that we have seen recently in the Phoenix Haboob and before that in the monstrous dust storm that moved across Australia (A NASA image of the Australian dust storm of 2009 is in the second figure). These dust storms are not unlike the dust bowl storms of the 1930s in the American and Canadian prairie lands, though they have a different origin this time around (dust storms of the 1930s have been attributed to soil erosion whereas global warming storms express increased energy in the atmosphere unleashed by condensation). Concurrent collisions between two storm centers can generate massive, uplifting air currents, scooping up dust and throwing it high enough into the atmosphere to be easily seen from satellites. More moisture in the air creates more storms and they will get more violent  In many ways, Australia and New Zealand are like Global Warming laboratories which illustrate both extremes of climate-warming weather gyrations, including severe droughts and record-breaking floods in 2010, in which a region the size of Germany and France combined, was under water, with the storm actions centered in Queensland. Global Warming weather is here and it will not go away.

The concepts that underlie Global Warming need to be learned and instilled among students in all of our public schools at all ages and we need to enlist the young  in experiments that can teach them about climate science and the emergency we find ourselves in. The students then need to bring this scientific knowledge into their homes and educate and invigorate their parents. The new generation needs to face the threats of climate change like no other generation before it. Until now we have assumed planetary constancy but the luxury of that assumption is gone. We need to have this topic constantly on the airways–it’s that serious. On the one hand, it’s like a modern iteration of Galileo telling us that the earth is not the center of the universe (as first suggested by Copernicus), but with one big difference–nothing changed when we learned the new rules of planetary rotations, although Galileo went into house arrest for blasphemy against the church and stayed there until his death.  But except for him and the impact his house arrest had on his young colleagues, the rest of contemporary society could just sit back and claim indifference or belief, without any action required.  The threat of Global Warming is at the opposite end of this analogy spectrum because if we don’t convert this new knowledge of climate change into action, to reduce our carbon emissions, we may be putting all species on the planet at increased risk for survival, including the one we have named  Homo sapiens. Indeed, for some species, such as the polar bear, the possibility of extinction through our greenhouse gas emissions has already been foretold and could be unavoidable; then too, coral reefs  are disappearing as the oceans become more acidic by absorbing more carbon dioxide. We can’t be neutral because the oceans no longer are and they are already talking back to us about we have done to them. Imagine the oceans without any coral reefs: where will all the fish go? We can’t wait to see if the science is wrong or whether some unknown force will emerge to wipe our carbon mess away.  Faux News will have to go–we need nothing but objectivity and action with an arrow pointing in the right direction. Those oars that are not pulling us all in the same direction need to be silenced or nullified. The world cries out for the return simple things like verifiable truth, not the muted information we get from our corporate news media. I agree with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now when she says that “mainstream media” is a misnomer, because they don’t really reflect the views of mainstream America at all. But that’s another story.

While I am a scientist (neuroscientist), I do not feel any special advantage over non-scientists when it comes to learning something about our climate and its history. The topic covers virtually all aspects of our scientific knowledge base, from physics to biology through paleontology,  evolution, geology, chemistry and astrophysics, while at least touching on everything in between. Hanging on the forces that created our climate is the tree of life itself. And increasingly there is the question of human ethics if we don’t act soon in the interest of protecting those that follow. I began reading and writing on this topic as I went along, expressing myself periodically in this forum, at the same time that I was assimilating some of the basics of our climate history and the essential mechanisms of climate change.  At one level, it’s all too simple: the carbon dioxide we have been dumping into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels from the beginning of the industrial revolution reflects heat energy from the earth that would normally go out into space (the shorter wavelengths of light coming from the sun do not interact with carbon dioxide–it’s the longer wavelengths that represent reflected heat (infrared) emission coming from the Earth that interacts with carbon dioxide molecules); part of the energy reflected by carbon dioxide heads back towards the earth and makes our planet warmer, just like what happens in a greenhouse and that’s why they call carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas. However, that’s the easy part–the hard part is understanding how the planet will react to this increased global warmth and those studies are still evolving and being refreshed and updated. But the basics are known–the planet is out of energy balance and it is beginning to speak back to us in predictable ways, few of which are desirable.

As I attempted to learn more about our climate, I took many diversions along the way, reading for example about foraminifera (forams) protists and their role in giving us information about our climate history and the importance of knowing the ratio of oxygen isotopes (O18 and O16) to measure ice and sea levels and ocean temperatures in the past. There is a giant literature on these topics and they all coalesce to give increasing confidence in the reliability of our knowledge about paleoclimatology–the science of knowing our past climate history. One thing seems clear to me: insights from paleoclimatology are essential for understanding our future, even though we have embarked on a climate experiment that is unlike anything that ever took place in the history of our planet. Two divergent methods give us information about the future of our climate. One is through modeling, using large-scale models to predict our climate future. These models are getting better, but they are still deficient in several important respects. The other method is through paleoclimatology, the idea that our climate has gone through many different changes in the past and the analytical techniques, largely applied to core drillings of ice sheets and the ocean floor, have provided us with an increasingly confident if incomplete understanding of our past environment and the factors that influenced our transitions through large climate excursions. It’s very fascinating stuff!

Fig. 2 Dust Storm Over Australia (September 2009)

What Are the Essential Questions? Early on, there was one over-riding question that I felt was an essential element to the core issues of global climate change and how I was going to address it. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate has seen fairly dramatic excursions of global temperatures over the documented history in which humans have provided some record of their presence and the question is what forces were responsible for those temperature excursions? How big were they and how did they happen? Are the same forces at work today?  Modern humans appeared about 200,00 years ago and human activity was observed about 130,000 years ago in Africa, where human evolution began. This time line of the fossil record took place during an interglacial period known as the Eemian, in which the average global temperature was only 1 degree Celsius warmer than what we have today. The warm Eemian period gave way to the last ice age, which developed over a period of thousands of years. However, the final descent into the last ice age happened about 70,000 years ago, was very rapid and coincided with the near extinction of humans. Genetic variance studies suggest that that as few as 1000 breeding pairs of humans survived the precipitous onset of the ice age and went on to procreate our contemporary human population. One theory for this rapid excursion into the ice age was the explosion of the Toba supervolcano which blocked the sun, significantly cooled the earth and challenged human survival by creating a long “nuclear winter.” So we know that our climate has changed quite dramatically, such that at one time it challenged the future of human existence, and perhaps it can change more dramatically than we think. But how do we know that the forces responsible for the last ice age won’t come along and create another one, rendering the issue of Global Warming as an irrelevant topic best left to climatologists and paleoclimatologists? One could ask is there really a need to learn something about climate change? Won’t the earth fix itself as some early climate doubters claimed?

The climate experiment we have embarked on has never been executed before. This is a new experiment. Whereas the Earth’s climate has typically evolved over millennia, we have, during the last two centuries, taken a giant syringe and injected our atmosphere with 130 ppm of additional carbon dioxide (along with some serious levels of methane and other atmospheric contaminants) and now we are waiting for the rest of the experiment to unfold. We finally recognize from early reports about this experiment, that we would like to stop it, remove the carbon dioxide we added and get back to the business of being humans again, but this time without the recent weather patterns that include giant floods, excessive droughts and global threats to our water supply. So that’s the message: how do we stop the experiment we started now that it’s going so badly? Stop the experiment–I want to get off. According to scientist James Hansen, if we eliminated all coal-burning sources of energy, and did so within decades, we would come very close to ending our carbon nightmare. But, right now, the world is building more coal-burning energy sources, so we are still moving in the wrong direction.Then too there is the problem of what we would use to replace this source of energy. Renewable energy sources? Unfortunately, we are a long way from having that as a reliable energy source, so we are left with a miracle biofuel or perhaps nuclear energy. Nuclear energy as we have known it is out of the question, because of our inability to handle the nuclear waste and the accident that took place earlier this year in Fukushima Japan. But fast breeder reactors, that have very little nuclear waste and can use up the nuclear waste we have stock piled, could emerge as an alternative. The plan to build one of those reactors was started under the Nixon administration, but killed under Clinton.

The Human Drive for Knowledge and the Best Way to Get it: The great beauty of the university classroom is that professors stand in front of you and condense vast knowledge into a small crystal that dissolves in your brain and creates an image of clarity, where before there was only confusion and uncertainty. Of course, as we all know, you can’t absorb all this by sitting  passively even if you are on the front row. Everyone who gains through this process has to study, read and ponder things, and all of us know that learning requires dedication to the task. Repetition breeds familiarity with the subject and stimulates the need to know more. We learn far more effectively from a knowledgeable person standing in front of us, engaging our brains on the topic of our mutual interest, when compared to any other forum of learning. Now that this form of learning is under threat, we realize that it has been both under appreciated and not well understood, though it requires human dialogue and interaction to work effectively. After forty years of being a university professor, I profess that this mechanism we have established to transmit knowledge by learned scholars standing in front of us, tickling our brains with integrated facts and a lifetime of research experience, is the highest standard of educational sophistication that we have attained in human history and any efforts to destroy this high form of learning will in turn destroy our culture. We should be expanding that experience not contracting it, as we are doing by such things as “distance learning” and “for profit” educational institutions. It is such a profound mode of learning that every human should have the opportunity to experience it and the intellectual stimulation it evokes; otherwise they are robbed of insight from the best form of education humans have ever developed. If expanding this form of didactic/Socratic learning became a more universal form of education, we might have hope of accommodating the 9 billion people on this planet, the expected population by the middle of this century. But even by then, there will still be more cells in a single human brain than humans on the planet and the lust for knowledge will pulsate within each of them.  It is up to us in the new culture to make sure that the innate thirst humans have for knowledge is met by teachers with expertise and enthusiasm for the work. As parents, all of us had to be teachers to our children and now the demand placed on us is to be a parent to the planet: it has been abused.

A First Among Us–the Tea Party Brain: Tea Party climate denial is hard to understand, for it is in this sector of humanity that the thirst for knowledge has died out, extinguished beyond any hope of repair. We might wonder whether this is a new stage in the human evolutionary experience. Someone must do an fMRI study on these Tea Party members to learn how it is possible for a member of our species to suppress frontal lobe function, when in fact that is what the human brain was designed to engage in–the need to figure things out. Normally, it carries out this function unavoidably–it’s human nature.  Until confronted by this group, I did not know that we as humans came with an off switch for this form of brain activity–I thought the use of frontal lobes for longitudinal thinking was obligatory, unavoidable and indigenous to our species. What surprises me even more, but seems consistent with the facts, is that once you turn that switch off and leave it in the off position for a while, it can’t be turned back to on–there’s no more light in that particular brain cavity. Apparently, for the Tea Party Republicans, energy for frontal lobe brain activity was permanently diverted to other centers that remain active, including brainstem functions. It follows that Tea Party members probably have excellent respiration. If so, they should be our first canary in the coal mine. Perhaps that will be their major contribution in the future. Climate denialists working to promote climate disaster, while steadfastly acquiring emphysema.

Creative Confusion: In the early phase of what I call “creative confusion” over my ignorance about climate mechanisms, I sat in on a class,  Mathematical Modeling of Climate Change directed by Professor Richard McGehee of the Mathematics Department at the University of Minnesota. A linked site provides references to some of the important publications in the field of climate science. If you go there you can get a copy of Jim Hansen’s 2008 paper  Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim. It will be a useful reference for his book which I describe below. The modeling course by McGehee was an excellent learning experience, aided by PowerPoint slides from major scientific studies, it was pivotal in getting me to realize how little I knew about Global Climate Change, even though it was not my first introduction to climatology, as I had read a number of scientific papers as well as some of the published reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is of course a massive literature on the topic of climate change and crystallizing it into a more manageable form is not really possible, so we have to settle for some of the major principles and focus at first on books that have tried to summarize and coalesce the science; then there is the question about how far you want to go, particularly if you still have a day job. I am still on that journey, but I write here to recommend a few books that I have read along the way that others might find useful.

Fig. 3 Mount Rongbuk glaciers in the Himalayas; top is 1968, botton is 2007 (from James Hansen)

Book One: Five different books have given me new insights on global climate change that you might find useful in understanding the problem, its origins, what we can do about it and what is being done today.  I have already reported on one, “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart, Harvard University Press, 2008. This is a short, highly readable book on the history of Global Warming and the mechanisms of climate change. Weart has a website where you can essentially download most of the book and other features, such as a timeline of Global Warming history. If you want to assist the cause, allowing your idle computer to work solving global climate models, you can do that as well by going here. Weart also offers advice on how to talk to a climate skeptic which I am not following in this posting.  His site is worth more than one visit. I always get something new each time I tune-in.

More work is being carried out on adaptation than you might realize and future possibilities might work out, but only if we soon begin to mitigate the carbon dioxide levels that we have been adding to our atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. One should no longer be thought of as an alarmist to suggest that the fate of civilization as we know it is at stake, with the serious possibility that our inaction could dramatically truncate the human population to a point where survival can occur but only under very primitive living conditions if at all. Perhaps the most important point that one can make, is that all those who have studied climate change for any significant period in their lives come away from that experience, believing as I do, that our planetary future is in peril and emergency, knowledgeable action is required.  “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet“ by Mark Lynas was published in 2008 by The National Geographic Society in collaboration with HarperCollins. I don’t see this book available on Kindle. To research this book,  Lynas went the to the Oxford library for months and took notes on tens of thousands of articles, reading original, peer-reviewed publications on global climate studies as he classified each paper, based on the degrees with which the study projected the global temperature increase during this century. He also relied on the IPCC report, which in 2007, based its predictions on probabilistic outcomes, and the use of phrases like “Virtually certain = greater than 99% probability” all the way to “Exceptionally unlikely as less 1% probability” and of course, many levels in between. The book is organized by chapters based on projections of the average global temperature increase during the 21st century. It is thus more futuristic and predictive than teasing apart the mechanisms of climate change, though some of that is touched upon. Separate chapters are devoted to (1) One Degree, (2) Two Degrees, (3) Three Degrees…all the way up to (6) Six Degrees. Each chapter describes the kind of climate changes expected if the mean global temperature should reach the degree predictions specified by the chapter title. Every chapter has references in the back “note” section to validate the author’s projections. Keep in mind that these are degrees Centigrade, so remember that 1 degree centigrade=1.8 degrees Fahrenheit; thus the outside projection of six degrees, where all hell breaks loose, would be 10.8 degrees F, a whopping change and one that is hard to imagine, but definitely achievable if we don’t act quickly. At those temperatures, human adjustment is not just a matter of turning up the air conditioner, its a matter that food won’t grow, deserts will get larger, sea levels will rise by more than 270 feet and the polar ice caps and Greenland ice will all be gone. We can’t let that happen, but we have to act now to make sure such a dire projection is avoided.

The One Degree Picture: The minimal One Degree picture for the Southwest United States is not pretty, as drought conditions are projected to increase. Humans have already experienced severe drought conditions in that region, both in the pre-industral era, as well as those taking place today. Lynas describes the Pueblo Indian society that lived in Chaco Canyon, located in New Mexico, where the inhabitants erected the largest stone building on the North American Continent before the European invasion–four stories high with 600 rooms. When a significant drought came to the region in AD 1130 the culture collapsed; many died, while  survivors  eked out a living within the steep cliffs nearby. There is evidence for a violent ending for many in Chaco canyon, attended by cannibalism. In the One Degree future for the Southwest, projections include 40% less rainfall, sustained over decades. The primary reason for drought conditions in these areas is that warmer air can hold more moisture, so that it can further dry the earth surface and make the region more vulnerable to fires and failed crop production. Other problems include water shortages interspersed with flooding and enhanced and more dangerous hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with more widespread, powerful storms that will make many regions of the country far less habitable and living conditions more uncertain. The places on the planet where humans can live comfortably will shrink.

Mount Kilimanjaro: Scientists are now rushing to Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, to obtain ice core samples that provide information about Africa’s geologic past, obtained by dissecting through the ice cores for layers of dust, oxygen isotopes and gas bubbles frozen in isolation within discrete layers. Studies estimate that 80% of the glacier on the top of Kilimanjaro melted during the 20th century and by roughly 2015, four years from now, it will all be gone. The only ice from the mountain that will still be in existence will be in the form of ice cores in the freezers of scientists’ laboratories. Glaciers are melting throughout the globe and cultures that depend on glacier melting for their water supply will face an increasing challenge for water as the glacier runoffs are reduced to a trickle (see figure above on Mt Rongbuck in the Himalayas)

Fig. 4 Surface Greenland Ice Flowing into a Moulin

More Than One Degree: From the one degree scenario things, as you might predict, get much worse and Lynas covers issues like polar bear extinction, which I have touched on previously and failed agriculture in China. At three degrees, an alarming result has been reported in a 2000 paper published in Nature–in which a massive positive carbon feedback forcing was modeled, involving release of huge amounts of carbon from land sources, adding 250 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2100 and adding an additional 1.5 degrees to the global temperature; this model resulted in the creation of a huge desert in the Amazon rain forest! Imagine that–from jungle to desert! According to this model global temperature could reach 4.0 to 5.5 degrees C by 2100 reaching close to the outer limits projected by the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. Lynas’ book does not have many positive outcomes, though there may be some regions that continue to have a climate where humans can survive and maintain the culture we have grown up in, minus of course the luxury of polluting our atmosphere with carbon fuels. The point of all this is that surviving humans need to have access to good technologies for generating heat and cooling while not adding to the carbon load and hopefully reducing it in time to prevent the full blown, worst case scenarios generated by climate science. It is up to us.

Six Degrees: When you reach the outer limits of projected global temperature change, that of six degrees, you can find a period when the earth was that warm to compare with what we might face under the same temperature conditions,  but you need to go all the way back to the Cretaceous period, some 65 to 144 million years ago. At that time the continents were still united into a single land mass (Pangaea), though the Atlantic Ocean was beginning to form–about as big as the Mediterranean–and sea levels were 200 or more meters higher than they are today; only 80% of the current land mass was above water and the average temperature was ten to fifteen degrees hotter than today. Africa, South America and southern portions of North America and Europe were dry and inhospitable, though the northern latitudes were warm and humid and, importantly,  no ice caps were evident at either pole. In the last chapter of his book, Lynas emphasizes that right now, perhaps for a period of only a few years, we have a choice about the world in which we want our children and grandchildren to live. The one degree scenario probably can’t be avoided, or if we did avoid it, we would have to get back to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide (right now we are at 387) and do so very quickly. Even then we would be faced with decades of an altered climate and if we returned to 350 ppm, at the very least there would be fewer non-human species.  The two degree scenario is fast approaching, with carbon dioxide at 400 ppm, a level projected for 2015. Beyond that, all bets are off because we could enter into the carbon-cycle feedback that might generate a potentially disastrous and irreversible climate change–a true tipping point to our climate future. On the whole this is an excellent book which properly frames our future insofar as we can make sound judgments derived from the science and models that are currently available. Lynas closes the introduction to his book by remarking, “Of this I have no doubt: Climate change is the canvas on which the history of the 21st century will be painted. Forewarned is forearmed.”

A Second Book: The second book I recommend is “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth“ by Mark Hertzgaard. This was published a few months ago (2011) and is available on Kindle. Hertzgaard has written extensively on climate change in articles published in The New Yorker, The Nation and Vanity Fair. He has covered global climate issues for years and has traveled throughout the world interviewing scientists, experts, city planners, hydrologists and farmers to learn more about the hardships we can expect from global climate change. He is doubtful that the Monsanto monoculture farming technique, that is widespread in America and China can succeed, and suggests that farmers must increasingly rely on using biodiversity/organic farming techniques. Otherwise there is a risk, like that of the potato famine in Ireland, of having crops wiped out because they are all the same, heat intolerant, drought susceptible, or disease prone. Many farmers are speaking out against the Monsanto strategy of genetically altered crops that are resistant to Roundup, so that the herbicide can be used more effectively against weeds.   One of the positive achievements taking place is that farmers in the Sahel region of Africa, including Kenya, Sudan and Uganda increasingly use a method referred to as “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR) in which they are recapturing and creating fertile, farmable soil by planting trees to help them push back the desert. The mulch generated by the leaves of trees retains more moisture and improves the nurturing quality of the soil, leading to improved productivity of the land. Time will tell whether the pressure of climate change can be overcome with FMNR. It is one of the many fascinating issues currently evolving as one component to the world’s food supply. Manage the unavoidable and avoid the unimaginable is the guiding paradigm of those trying to adapt, but all the while keeping up the pressure for mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases. Without the latter, avoiding the unimaginable is not possible. Right now we are witnessing a human catastrophe in Africa where the most intense drought conditions in decades are forcing mass movements of people attended by widespread starvation. This too is a consequence of Global Warming which works by exaggerating conditions, including desertification,  that have taken place before.

This is a fascinating book and quite different from “Six Degrees.” This book presents an early summary of some of the changes that are shaping our climate, but Hertzgaard quickly moves on to discuss how his daughter Chiara, now five, must adapt successfully and survive the climate changes that are in her future. His thesis is that the intensity of Global Warming has arrived nearly a century before projections and that even if our global society is smart enough to get busy and reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere, we will still have to contend with an excessively warm planet for at least fifty years, because of the long half-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Much of his book covers the success and attempts that others have and are making to adjust to the expected climate change and his book is focused on what his daughter must do to live through what is hopefully a temporary glitch, before our atmosphere returns to the conditions under which we and all other species have evolved and currently survive. The personal touch of looking towards the future, trying to protect a young daughter who is just beginning life and had nothing to do with creating climate change, gives the book a tone of emergency and sensitivity that  would otherwise be lacking. Discussing the impact of our climate future through the eyes of someone trying to protect their child, gives emphasis to the idea that Hertzgaard does not shy away from–those who oppose immediate action on our greenhouse emissions are guilty of crimes, serious crimes against the future of humanity.

Global Warming vs Global Climate Change: like many others, Hertzgaard distinguishes between Global Warming and Global Climate Change. The former is the actual increase in the mean global temperature as a result of greenhouse gases and the latter refers to the planet’s reaction to the increased temperature, or in other words, just about everything else. He also separates the concept of “adaptation,” meaning the things we must do to live through the next fifty years and “mitigation,” the international efforts that must be expanded to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so that the period of adaptation will be confined to fifty years and not much longer. This terminology and distinction is also part of the most recent IPCC report (2007). Many scientists are leery of  adaptation because they fear it will relax the serious efforts we must take to mitigate the problem by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Adaptation by itself will not prevent the problem, in fact, it will get far worse if it leaves us with a false sense of security, feeling that we have done enough and we don’t have to deal further with the problem. Then it will truly get worse and may spin out of control.

Fig. 5 Greenland Ice Breakup

One issue which Hertzgaard addresses is the failure of the fourth IPCC to undertake serious recommendations about sea level rise. When he interviewed one of the reports’ authors, he found out that the fourth IPCC report committee  knew that the models they had been relying on for insights into sea level changes were wrong, so they minimized those aspects of the report and emphasized the need to await better modeling results, which would take into account the new realities of polar ice cap melting and the melting of Greenland’s vast ice stores (Figs 4 & 5). Climate models are furiously being revised to more accurately project sea level rise based on the new realities of massive melting conditions in the three regions of the globe that hold most of the ice and could impose an entirely different future for us if they melt more quickly that we presently assume. In other words, the IPCC fourth report of 2007 is flawed and its projections for sea level changes (which were less than the previous report) cannot be taken seriously. That issue is where James Hansen’s work comes in more forcefully (see below).

This is an informative book that speaks passionately about how it is too late to avoid climate change, so we have to learn to live through decades of these anticipated alterations in our climate, but we can still avoid the full throttle of these effects, unless we reach a tipping point beyond which we cannot escape and, should that turn out to be true, we will watch helplessly as things we do then will have no meaning for our climate future.  Nevertheless, the tone and outlook of Hertzgaard’s message is upbeat: we can adapt, but we have to increase the public pressure for mitigating carbon dioxide down to levels commensurate with a full life, like the one we used to be able to promise to our children and grandchildren. Right now, that promise is up for grabs.

A Third Book: Global climate scientist James Hansen has written a very readable book, “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity”, published in 2009 by Bloomsbury. It’s available on Kindle and was reviewed in the LA Times If you read no other book, this is the one I would recommend because it blends the science of climatology together with Hansen’s personal history in bringing the attention of this threat into the public arena: it combines science with a personal narrative and some of it shamefully recreates how the Bush administration suppressed scientific information that Hansen tried to promote as a climate scientist.  I have commented many times on how the Republican Party and GW Bush have suppressed science to favor their own political interpretation over those generated through the laboratory. I have also provided a little slide show illustrating how we veered off course. Although it is written by an expert, it is done in such a way that you feel well informed and not intimidated by an overwhelming level of science and technogarble. No one in the world is in a better position to write on this topic and use this kind of title than James Hansen. He was the first to testify before Congress in 1988 and warn of the coming weather hardships if we don’t address the issue of greenhouse gases. He has written numerous articles on this topic and has been a leader, both scientifically and sociologically for a good part of his career. Bill McKibben, coordinator of 350.org, has referred to Hansen at “the planet’s great hero.” As the most outspoken advocate of immediate action to avert planetary disaster from climate change, you can imagine that Hansen is one of the prime targets of the climate change denial community. But, to our great benefit, Hansen is fearless in asserting what the science tells him needs to be done.

No scientist feels comfortable predicting and projecting the future, especially if it is something as complex as our global climate and a subject which is likely to attract international attention. We admonish meteorologists who don’t accurately predict the weather a few days in advance, so imagine what many reserve for a climatologist who can’t explain today’s weather hardly at all, but then has no doubt about the future weather trends. So what’s missing? Whereas many climatologists rely on computer models for projecting the future, Hansen instead is committed to paleoclimatology which he feels is on firmer ground, though he does not shy away from climate modeling and his worked has involved both approaches to the problem. However, he is cautious about modeling because models, while getting better, still leave out many important details. One of the model deficiencies that has come to light recently is that of the failure of such models to deal effectively with melting the polar ice caps and Greenland ice. Until recently the models treated these giant structures as ice cubes melting in a glass of water, but it is clear that the these ice sheets are disappearing much faster than this kind of model projects. The moulin figure on the right shows surface melt water that carved a hole into the ice and allows melt water to fall to the bottom, accelerating the ice melting process, including ice sheets that normally resist the flow of a glacier. The elimination of deeply buried ice sheets leads to an accelerated movement and melting of glaciers. As far as models of major ice pack melting goes, it’s back to the drawing board for this aspect of modeling, and while they are still trying to get those models up and running properly, Hansen maintains that the science of paleoclimatology is sufficiently well understood that we can look backwards in order for us to project our future. Although we have been there before, the promise is that the trip we have embarked upon is unlike any trip we have been on before.

Fig. 6 Forest Fires Are Increasing in Frequency and Magnitude

In 1750, the carbon dioxide levels in the air were 280 ppm or .028%; in 2009 the carbon dioxide was 387 ppm or .039%; by 2015 we are expected to hit the magic 400 mark. Imagine that a small change in our atmospheric carbon dioxide could potentially threaten the future of the planet. But that small % change in carbon dioxide, coupled with some of the other greenhouse emissions (such as methane), means that a new net forcing from this factor alone accounts for 1.5 to 2.0 watts of additional energy/for every square meter of the planet, with an error of perhaps a watt. That amounts to turning on a couple of Christmas tree lights for each square meter of the earth’s surface, which seems like a trivial force; in the short run, it cannot interrupt a storm or change a storm path and yet that seemingly minuscule change in net energy is sufficient over a long period of time to effect our climate future. Such an effect pushes the earth’s climate further out of balance. Right now, we are being saved further warming of the planet from greenhouse gases by another factor, also a product of our industrial age, but one whose impact we don’t know a lot about–aerosols. These are man made dust particles, including soot, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorcarbons and many other particulates. Their effect, when put into the atmosphere is to reflect sunlight and in a way protect us from further warming. They do this in a manner similar to what happens when a volcano erupts and spreads ash into the atmosphere. This will tend to cool the air by reflecting sunlight and can do so for a few years depending on the tonnage of ash delivered by the explosion. But, unless replenished (as we are doing with our fossil fuel usage), the ash will be removed from the atmosphere and lead to restoration from the climate trends that were ongoing at the time. So the efforts that are being generated to reduce particulates as part of our overall atmosphere cleanup, may give rise to a new shift in the global warming cycle and that has led some scientists to suggest that we add reflective particles to the atmosphere to achieve cooling by reflection. Many scientists, including this one, do not see this as a sensible way out of our carbon dilemma.

Hansen’s strategy to deal with our carbon footprint is to analyze the carbon levels that are being added to the atmosphere and then ask where they go? His analysis tells us that global emissions of carbon dioxide increased from less than 2 gigatons (GtC) a year in 1950 to more than 8GtC per year in the last few years. Oddly enough, there are two measurable features to the carbon emission pattern, one of which is the global amount of carbon dioxide emission and the other is the carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere–two known quantities. Divide the annual increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the fossil fuel emissions and you get another parameter known as the airborne fraction or the fraction of the emission that is in the atmosphere. Oddly enough, that quantity has remained constant from 1950 to 2010, meaning that a constant fraction of what we are adding to the environment is going into a carbon sink. Carbon sinks include the ocean, forests and soils. Without these sinks our carbon loading of the atmosphere would be much greater that it is today. It has been estimated that the ocean takes up about 3 GtC per year; thus a fossil fuel load of 8.5 GtC per year, which leads to an average 4.5 GtC per year in the atmosphere,  add the ocean sink of 3 GtC per year and we get a net carbon sink for vegetation and soil of about 1 GtC per year. It is encouraging that this land sink for carbon dioxide exists despite the massive deforestation our planet has undergone during the last several hundred years. In the United States, 99% of the old growth forest has been cut down, reducing considerably the contribution from forests which would ordinarily form another large carbon sink. If we continue to use fossil fuels, the land sink for carbon dioxide could become saturated, leading to a much larger atmospheric carbon loading. It is important that we help reforest the planet, for better carbon balance.

Hansen’s book is an educational experience embedded in a fascinating narrative of his scientific life, with stories of his grandchildren added to invoke a proper sense of urgency to our current climate crisis. Hansen travels as a kind of international celebrity and the gold standard for frank discussion of our global threat. He has written letters to leaders of the world, imploring them to take climate issues seriously and begin by eliminating the use of coal. He insists that we must give up on the use of coal immediately–no more mountain tops removed–coal is the worst form of  polluting energy we have. Not only does it heavily pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but coal mining creates huge levels of polluted water and adds toxins such as mercury to our global air supply and the oceans.  Hansen’s idea is that if we could eliminate the use of coal, we would solve the carbon dioxide problem and begin to head back to 350 ppm carbon dioxide by the latter half of this century. He believes that a carbon tax needs to be applied at the source of each form of fossil fuel, with the money generated given back to the public as a dividend.  In that way the “fee-and-dividend strategy,” as models suggest, could reduce carbon emissions by 28 percent compared to what we have today. Hansen is forcefully opposed to cap-and-trade, which he believes is unworkable and nothing more than a political scam. Tragically, cap-and-trade is the basis of the law that is likely to be passed by Congress, though don’t hold your breath when that might happen.

In case you remain skeptical about Hansen’s sense of urgency concerning our planetary future and the need to act quickly, one of his later chapters (10) is titled “The Venus Syndrome,” in which he lays out how Venus, whose surface temperature is currently  +450 degrees C was once a planet, that like Mars and Earth, probably had oceans. At the time Venus was formed, the sun was 30 percent dimmer, so Venus was probably cool enough to have oceans. Mars on the other hand had its water frozen with a surface temperature of -50 degrees C, as its orbit is further out. But as the sun got brighter, the surface of Venus got hotter and the oceans became water vapor while carbon dioxide, from carbon sources of the planet, became the dominant gas, currently constituting about 97 percent of the atmosphere. Hansen argues that the earth could replicate the sequence of events that made Venus uninhabitable by going through a runaway greenhouse gas emission levels that reach 10 to 20 watts per square meter. This level could be achieved with a relatively small increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, though the exact levels required are unknown. But, such levels are in the ballpark of what we might get to by burning every last stitch of our fossil fuel supply and may be unavoidable if we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases before we reach a tipping point where this planetary scenario is unavoidable. Right now we are “enjoying” a minimal period of solar radiation, based on the historical record from satellite data that was first obtained in the 1970s. Should the sun pull out of its current minimum in radiation, it could serve to further accelerate our date with a climate disaster.

Hansen’s final chapter describes the kinds of storms that our children and grandchildren are likely to experience, as he emphasizes that we are already going through these kinds of changes in our weather patterns; he uses concrete examples of past storms to illustrate the connection. Not every storm we see will have an obvious Global Warming signature. But collisions between warm, moist air and cool dry air will increasingly reflect the new energy stored in our atmosphere and released through condensation. His point is that the increase in the violence of the storms we have encountered so far pales in comparison to what we can expect in the near future. The additional energy in the atmosphere will drive larger storms, with more moisture, higher winds, more violent hail storms and give rise to larger and more deadly tornadoes. A mere 10 percent increase in wind speed increases the destructive potential of the storm by one-third. These supercell storms will increase in frequency and magnitude. The devastating tornadoes,  such as those that horrified us this year in Oklahoma, Alabama and Joplin Missouri will only increase in magnitude and destructive force. Thundersnow storms such as the giant cyclonic blizzard  Superstorm that struck the East Coast in mid-March 1993 had 100 mile per hour winds and stretched from Central America to Nova Scotia, Canada. Once the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers begin serious melting, north-south temperature gradients will further increase and likely change the ocean currents with yet more devastating storms like the Superstorm of 1993.  Now add the rise in sea levels anticipated and you have the additional capacity of windstorm floods reaching into new regions, not storm-flooded before. In America, we are not even remotely prepared to face these kinds of forces or admit to their origin.This is a special tragedy, since this country has supported much of the science that went into discovering these man-made threats to our future.

This book is Hansen’s clarion call for action. He advises those alarmed by these environmental threats to join Bill McKibben’s 350.org and participate in the events that are needed to change the way we live and revert the planet to one we can live on in the absence of a man-made threat that will make life on earth virtually impossible if we do nothing about atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite the alarmist nature of Hansen’s message, he remains an optimist about our future and continues to give lectures and advise governments on what lies ahead if we don’t act now. He also has grandchildren that he hopes to help protect from a future that none of us want, but few of us are prepared to help prevent.

RFM

In my opinion, it is not possible to read Chalmers Johnson’s books and not be alarmed and sobered by the third world country attitude that drives our own internal development. It seems like the true sacrifice we make for ruling the world is the increasing destruction of our own social fabric.  A poll taken of Americans  in August of this year revealed that nearly 2/3 of those who responded thought that the United States was in a period of decline. So, where is the investment in our infrastructure and our education system, the things that we will need if we are ever going right our badly tilting ship? It seems the Tea Party has come along at just the right time to, if anything, accelerate our national  decline. What’s the antidote? America must reinvent itself, but we had better get started. It’s not too early. Right now it is the politics of distraction that prevent us from seeing with any clarity the challenge in front of us. Rosy the riveter is not yet on the scene!

RFM

In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

Twain was an avowed anti-militarist and abhorred the empire wars he watched America engage in, including the Spanish American war, in which he describes, in the new biography, American soldiers fighting in Cuba as “our uniformed assassins.” You can see why the author of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” might pause before allowing remarks such as that to come into print during his lifetime. But Mark Twain had a tragic life. He almost committed suicide once in San Francisco before he became a famous writer, after which he experienced serious debt problems and witnessed the loss of many of his family members to sudden illness. Twain was a great humorist, but his sharp sense of humor was the frosting that covered a layer cake of tragedy and worry. Nearly everyone has read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, as it remains required reading in public schools (I hope). Twain once said that he is not an American, he is the American and who can disagree.

As we all await the first of the three new volumes on Mark Twain’s autobiography to arrive, you might find it interesting to review the life of Mark Twain as told in the excellent documentary by Ken Burns, available on Netflix as a DVD or streaming video.

When thinking about human evolution, I can’t help but remind myself of  one of the remarks that Twain made, which  surfaces in the Ken Burns documentary. He said “I think God invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.” As one of Twain’s biographers said, what made Twain unique was space and slavery. The America Twain grew up in was a gigantic space, unrivaled as such in the known world and slavery was a part of that new space, which any humanitarian had to address. Twain did address slavery, after the Civil War in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, published in 1885; in so doing, he changed forever the American understanding of slavery, race and prejudice. It has been argued that without “Huck Finn” the civil rights legislation of the 1960s could never have been passed, or at least it would have been considerably more delayed. The cultural penetration of a great novel, when read by most Americans,  is hard to deny but not easy to fathom.

At the time of his death, Mark Twain, who had struggled all his life against the Samuel Clemens within him, was the most famous writer in the world and, when seen walking the streets of any city in the world, would be surrounded by people hoping to hear a remark from him about any subject. He adored and sought out visible public adulation and was comfortable speaking on virtually anything that pleased him. In general, when he spoke, it also pleased those that gathered to hear his remarks.

RFM

The American press, which normally gives a green light for our national  misadventures abroad, but particularly the New York Times, found itself trying to defend against Chomsky’s analysis about bias of coverage over a brutal war that would have made us look bad, except for the fact that the invasion of East Timor in the 1970s received virtually no attention from the press, with a few rare but notable exceptions. Chomsky knew this, because he counted up the number of newspaper citations and compared it directly with the coverage for the better known atrocities in Cambodia (a right-wing (East Timor)  vs left-wing (Cambodia) government–that distinction also played a major role).  He claims to have learned more about East Timor by reading British and Canadian articles as virtually nothing appeared in the American newsprint or in television coverage. The conflict Chomsky referred to as one left out of media attention, was that of the East Timor invasion by Indonesia in 1975, which we supported, as we looked the other way when mass genocide against the indigenous people of the region was carried out by the invading army, using American made military hardware. Chomsky compares press coverage of East Timor with that of Cambodia under Pol Pot, who came to power after we invaded the country and deposed Prince Sihanouk. When Pol Pot took over, his objective was to install  a harsh, left wing government, which he implemented through policies of dislocation and genocide in what became known as the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Why asks Chomsky, did East Timor get nearly zero coverage from the NYT, while Cambodia got a lot, when both events were associated with mass genocide and were equally indefensible? Chomsky’s critics have always been waiting for him to make some sort of blunder and then pounce on what appears to be a self-inflicted mortal wound, only to discover that Chomsky’s mistake was usually one of misinterpretation on their part,  rather than his lack of consistency or a failure of his encyclopedic knowledge of events and reporting. I don’t think anyone is better at that than Chomsky.

A good example of one interesting case in the documentary took place when a French professor, Faurisson, claimed the holocaust was a hoax; he was put on trial by the French government and found guilty of distorting history. You may remebmer this case. Chomsky, as well as many other academics throughout the world, signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s right to make his statement, without passing judgment on the statement per se. Chomsky’s many detractors seized on this as an opportunity to caste him as an anti-Semite, though he himself is Jewish and was brought up within a strong, liberal Jewish tradition in New York. The documentary showed the numerous engagements he went through to establish the academically defensible point that a person should be free to advocate their position and leave it to the evidence presented to determine whether a rational case was established by the assertion. On other occasions, Chomsky went on to thoroughly destroy the argument that the holocaust did not take place and eventually seemed to win the day over those who thought they had finally caught him in an indefensible position. But as he said, “I defended his right to say it, not what he said.” He then accused the French Government of putting themselves into a Stalinist-like state by making a legal decision about which history was correct and which was not (holocaust or no holocaust) . So he touched on just about everyone. The presence and actions of Vichy France during WW II have made the French very sensitive to this issue, since they participated in the persecution of Jews and helped ship 70,000 French Jews to the “East” as part of the final solution; only about 3% of them ever returned.

Quite predictably, I found myself deeply resonating with Chomsky as he was portrayed, while I was at the same time a bit astonished to see how many of his ideas don’t or didn’t penetrate with sufficient clarity to most people, at least those with whom he interacted on the video clips. Because of Chomsky’s dogged persistence and his unfailing attention to detail (with some lapses), I think we have a much better appreciation of him during the last decade or so and then too, the militaristic nature of our country, thanks to GW Bush, has been much more thoroughly exposed and perhaps revealed as a nation-state, more loathsome to at least some sensible Americans, than one might ever have imagined. At least we better understand Chomsky’s views and his critique on social issues and war. His positions on issues are hardly radical: he believes that a just society should take care of everyone and stay out of conflicts that unnecessarily kill people. He argues that WW II was justified, but nothing since has risen to the threshold requiring military action. Throughout his career as an activist, Chomsky has always harbored a special dislike for governments as well as a particularly strong dislike for our government and our support of vicious,  right-wing governments, who will do the bidding of Corporate America, such as those we helped  establish and prop up throughout South America after WW II, right up to the present day.

Chomsky  is a prodigious writer who gave up a successful academic career as a linguist to pursue the social and political ideology for which he is better known. Yet, eighteen years after the documentary was made, one can see what was missing from Chomsky’s arguments, something for which we have a much better appreciation today, as a result of accumulated studies of the brain, which impact on our views of human brain function and how political bias gets established therein. This new level of understanding, though hardly complete, has come about through contemporary studies in neuroscience as well as the encroachments from molecular biology and brain imaging studies using the methods of fMRI, PET (positron emission tomography) and MEG (magneto encephalography). These insights have established a more solid foundation for further speculation about brain function, bias and the failures of our frontal lobes to be given rational access to our experiences. As humans, we have an enormous capacity for learning and creativity. Chomsky’s “manufacturing consent” needs a redux. Here’s what one might add for a new version of the documentary.

Chomsky was a leader in pointing out that language is not the act of creating utterances on a blank sheet of auditory neurons, but is in fact, a reflection of genetic programming within the brain, which makes a human baby very different from that of an infant chimpanzee for example, or for that matter, any other primate.  At two months of age, a human infant begins to babble language sounds and perfects them through listening to humans around him/her, a process that reflects a voracious appetite for expressing and receiving language, fed by the energy of their pre-programmed neural circuits, highly tuned for language acquisition. Even children who are born deaf, utter language sounds, though their babbling eventually subsides due to the lack of auditory feedback. Different languages have enough similarities such that phonetic rules are learned and the native language is spoken well before our children go to school. Some languages are phonetically easier to master than others and Italian children for example can speak their language two years before children raised in English-speaking families. Eventually humans have a storage capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 words!

“Manufacturing consent” as Chomsky and co-author  Herman point out, paints a picture, not of a conspiracy theory in which some committee in the New York Times editorial office or a government agency meets to shield us from the reality of our atrocities abroad. Rather, the process of bias reflects an entrainment which loads our mental dice, so that when called upon to roll a winner, we mostly get snake eyes!  We tend to look the other way when information flows into our brains that runs counter to the grain of our private national image, as we focus and emphasize instead the affairs that enhance the internal image we  project about ourselves and the views we have adopted that are supposed to guide our international behavior. It runs against our many mental programs to imagine we are out there in the real world somewhere murdering innocent people, or at least facilitating such behavior. We are capable of a search mode that runs beneath the conscious, declarative mode of verbalized behavior. It also helps, that, in the case of newspapers like the New York Times, the paper does better in terms of advertising and their subscription rate when they rock the boat only intermittently or not at all. But, in attempting to describe this reality bias, Chomsky moves from the genetic code of language, where he is obviously very much at home, to a behavioral interpretation, as if we suddenly switched from Chomsky as the genetic linguist to Skinner as the behaviorist, using a slate of blank neurons for encoding. But brain studies have suggested another kind of genetic code for brain wiring and function, maybe several, though each of these additional coding modes is far more difficult to trace when compared to the development of our linguistic apparatus. There may well be many different  language mechanisms for which humans are “primed” for intense learning as part of our adaptive pre-programmed brain structure. Our motor control, sensory integration and emotional make-up may all reflect programmatic coding to start us out on the road to success as an evolutionary wonder!

Humans are born early and mature late. A chimpanzee reaches young adult stage at about 7 years after birth, whereas humans stretch that out to at least 12 years and our brains are still growing and maturing even during our late teen years. There is evidence that brain mechanisms involving the amygdala for example, which helps us avoid dangerous circumstances, may not fully kick-in until the mid-twenties, leading to the irrational behavior, for example, of Olympic competitors achieving sub-orbital heights on a snow board! What adult would do such things?

With the growth of our brain, we stretch the developmental period out, the purpose of which is to enhance our capacity as great, natural learners, full of curiosity and eager to figure out how things work, before full cultural responsibility comes to rest on our shoulders. Anthropologists like to express the problem of prolonged maturity to the limits imposed by our big brains, which  need to go through the birth canal early, because the imposing physical constraints, thus rendering us more dependent at birth and slower on the uptake, when compared to other primates. Our prolonged developmental period was almost surely related to our survival, particularly as the African continent of our origins became less of a tree-filled jungle and more like the Africa of today, during which time, we came out of the trees and, as bipeds, began to compete with other carnivores for food and sometimes as well, we became the target of their predatory behavior. There is fossil evidence to suggest that humans were confronted with new environmental challenges which served as the stimulus for brain growth and enhanced our brain resources for improved adaptability. One issues seems well established: when our ancestor first stood up and walked as humanoids, their brain size was initially small; it was only later that hominid brain size showed rapid growth and development. Whatever advantages we gained by walking upright, it was not the stimulus of bipedalism that began the development of our larger brain size–that came later.

Phineas Gage Head Wound

The main feature of the human brain that we can appreciate today, compared with those of apes and our distant ancestors of several million years ago,  is the growth of the brain in general, but more especially the growth of our frontal lobes. It is this region of our brain that seems to house much of our social skills, personalities and the capacity for long-term planning. These complex functions of our frontal lobes first came to our attention through Phineas Gage, who, in 1848, had a tamping rod explode through his orbit and destroy much of his frontal lobes, reducing his capacity to deal with abstract issues and suffering from a dramatic change in personality. When you read the description of Phineas Gage and his post-accident behavioral changes, you have the feeling that you are reading about contemporary Republicans/teabaggers. Naturally, the Republican brain is quite different from that of normal humans with respect to our frontal lobes. But, we briefly digressed.

As one example of our brain/behavioral repertoire, just thinking about moving our finger let’s say, instead of actually moving them,  switches the prominent activity center of our brain, as determine by fMRI studies, from the precentral gyrus (where motor commands originate) to a more frontal lobe location (supplementary motor area (SMA)), which is one site where planning our motor actions take place, just as the better known Broca’s area of the left frontal lobe serves as the motor planning region for vocalizing language.

Our capacity to rapidly develop language is likely to be only one of many genetic programs that we have embedded within the millions of neural circuits residing in our cerebral cortex, all derived from the process of natural selection, whose original function was that of optimizing our chances for survival. And, it isn’t all just cerebral cortex: lying within the cerebral hemispheres underneath the cortex, the basal ganglia get massive input from the cortex and feed back through cortical projections; the cerebellum receives at least two loops of impulses, one of which precedes our movements, while the second loop modifies our movements once they are being executed. New imaging data suggests that even the cerebellum, once considered to be a strictly motor organ (where much of our motor-based non-declarative memories are formed) may be involved in cognitive functions as well. This story is far from over, as it represents an increasingly expanded view of human cognitive brain functions.

Most of the coding mechanisms in our brains, those outside of language, such as our social interactions, either depend on or are facilitated by language acquisition. So it is natural to ask how long spoken language has been within the hominid ancestral clans? Well, the brain doesn’t leave a fossil record, so one has to rely on other kinds of evidence, like skull size and depressions in the skill to derive the composition of the brain and guesstimate the presence or absence of language. All of this leaves great uncertainty and doubt. Some have speculated that language mechanisms have been with us for perhaps several million years, although, as we know from our social history, the written forms of language have been with us for only 4,000 years or so. If true, it implies that language is an innate, pre-programmed component of our brain structure, while the capacity to recognize written words is a very recent acquisition, too recent to have found an evolutionary niche in our brain structures and programed genetics. Nevertheless, the fact that our visual memory system seems to have created a visual “letterbox” where knowledge of written words is housed, implies that we had to crowd out some other cortical function in order to have knowledge of the written word. As many as 17% of us cannot read normally and fall into the diagnostic category of dyslexia.

In the last few years, enthusiasm has developed over a single gene that some feel might represent a unique gene  for expressive language. The FOXP2 gene was discovered in a group of individuals with an inherited incapacity to develop language and was eventually discovered in the Neanderthal genome to have the exact same form as the normal human. This gene appears to differ in several important ways from the equivalent in other primates. Many took this to mean that Neanderthals used language. Part of the FOXP2 gene appears to generate a transcription factor that controls other genes, but it is still unclear from the studies carried out so far if the FOXP2 gene can serve as the gene for language. Many of the large group that suffered language deficiency with a point mutation in the FOXP2 gene also had low intelligence, which itself can cause language deficiencies. So, at the moment, the scientific community is properly divided on the subject of this gene and how much it has to do with language. Is FOXP2 the the master or merely another slave of speech and language acquisition? We will be hearing a lot more about this gene in the future.

The brain of course is a highly plastic organ and, once we are born, our brains go to work constructing themselves according to the experiences to which we are exposed. This goes on throughout the day and probably takes place during our sleep, as recent studies are beginning to show that sleep is a form of re-practicing what was learned the previous day. Though our retina appears to be a hard-wired structure, the visual cortex behind it is not. The plasticity of the cortex can change connections according to the visual experiences of the individual. As I sometimes have said to my students, we spend the first thirty years of our lives constructing a brain we can live with and the next thirty years trying to figure out the brain we constructed. Some never get it right. During the early growth period of our lives, the acquisition of culture has the same kinds of driving mechanisms we see for language. We intensely absorb the cultural and social elements around us and the behavior and ideas of those with whom we come in contact, as we try to sort out and stamp out our cultural phenotype. Just as surely as a French child growing up in a French family learns to speak French, a child growing up in a teabaggers environment, with both parents speaking cultural teabaggereeze, will become a teabagger child.

But the frontal lobes of our brains are always exercising another one of the programmatic options, that of longitudinal evaluation and it is during this period, long after we started school, that the opportunity exists, by sharing information with and through others, that the teabagger children have an opportunity to unteabag themselves. Sometimes this happens through a “Eureka” moment from a memorable teacher and sometimes it occurs when taking a college course. For many of my friends growing up in Salt Lake City Utah and coming from a Mormon background, it was the early interactions with others who had question marks about the validity of Mormon doctrine and the recognition that a demarcation line existed–a line in the sand so to speak. The heart of Mormonism demanded that everyone had to accept things that the church said were true. And, mostly this worked. But, for a few, myself included, we opted, perhaps unconsciously,  for the alternative brain mechanism I refer to as “the frontal lobe longitudinal program option,” which planted little seeds of doubt about the story that was too fantastic to neatly fit into an acceptable belief program–it couldn’t fit into the frontal lobe compartments when such knowledge would then be nominated for long-term memory and reflexive cortical behavior. Compounding this early nugget of uncomfortable disbelief, was the attitude that we didn’t want to believe something that wasn’t true. Suppose for example, you were told that the grizzly bears that have been attacking farmers and killing sheep, sleep in nearby caves and are incapacitated during sleep, such that they can easily be approached and killed. If you were asked to join the party that was going to eliminate the grizzlies one night, you would want to know whether the story was absolutely true and you would certainly want to talk to someone who had been on such a killing trip and even then you might and should be wary, as your very survival would be at stake. If you declined to join the grizzly party and later discovered many were killed by an angry awakened grizzly during the night, it would make survival sense for you to avoid seeking additional knowledge from the group. So too with the Mormons.

Once the seeds of doubt get planted, the analytical programs of our minds begin to reshape our neural circuits, replacing older connections with new ones as the older cultural values get pushed out of the way in favor of the new intellect. It is highly stimulating to our brains to feel we have arrived at this new conclusion all by ourselves, even though it never happens on solo flights alone. But once a transition in brain thinking begins to take place, our physical brain is transformed: new synapses are added and older connections are pruned away. Thus, to some extent, we get to rebuild our brains! The seemingly subtle commitment that we make, when we decide we don’t want to believe something unless it’s true, unless there is some evidence we can verify, that is the first fatal step of demanding that religion convert itself into a science, where it cannot survive and voila! The link is broken. The requirement of “truth” and “proof” brings on a burden of evidence that no religion can meet, not the least of which is the Mormon church, because it is relatively new and a lot of information is available on its origins and deeds. Verifiability with Mormonism is a far easier task than it would be for Catholicism. All religions fall apart once the demand for evidence becomes an essential element for continued subscription to the belief system. I was always impressed that those of us who escaped Mormonism in Salt Lake City, all went on to graduate training or advanced professional degrees and had successful careers in a variety of academic and non-academic pursuits. Yet the Mormons we left behind, those that didn’t exercise their “frontal lobe filibuster toolbox”, remained as those who would accept without failure the teachings of the church, including the absurd ones that the book of Mormon was anything other than a nineteenth century fairy tale. Thus, rather early in my life, I resisted a form of brain development that was best served by the absence of a frontal lobe engagement, which committed the lives of non-doubting Mormons to a kind of self-imposed celibacy against the use of the frontal lobes, at least that’s the metaphorical explanation. Most Mormons are Republicans and the state of Utah overwhelmingly votes Republican, with the few Democrats that get elected also voting along the same conservative party line, at least at the national level.

Our developmental period of brain growth and maturation readily follows from another genetic code we see in the human brain–the need to be creative, social animals, coupled to our thirst for understanding how things work. This is also a gift of our greatly expanded frontal lobes, that have new connections now being described by fMRI, MEG and PET scanning images of the human brain during different kinds of cognitive processing. Whether these techniques can ever decipher the nature and substrate of our consciousness and higher mental capacities remains as a future aspiration. But, we know a little more today than we did ten years ago.

So, what Chomsky should say in the redux  version of his documentary is that the New York Times didn’t publish much on East Timor, while publishing a lot on Pol Pot and the Cambodian atrocities, because, though they were smart and well educated, the editors  didn’t understand that they were the prisoners of their many languages of the brain and had yet to go through a full frontal lobe review of their inconsistent behavior. The non-declarative memory, that parks itself somewhere within the brain, perhaps the cortex and in some cases, for some skills, in the cerebellum, represents a force that encourages decisions like the elimination of East Timor news from the pages of the New York Times. It’s the braining, not the training that eliminated East Timor!

But, while we’re at it, let’s not forget the biggest distortion in U.S. history ever perpetrated by an American President. That happened right after 9/11, when Bush said, referring to the attack,  “the terrorists hate our freedoms.” And that immediately established a political constituency of millions of Americans, including the swift boaters and the teabaggers,  who still believe that Bush identified with clarity the motivating factor of the 9/11 terrorists. To reaffirm this position, Cheney later spoke at the American Enterprise Institute where he said the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences” (what was he smoking?). As we all know, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, khalid sheikh mohammed, the person who probably also beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl, emphasized throughout his incarceration, that he planned 9/11 and other attempts to murder and harm Americans and Israelis, solely because of the way that the U.S. and Israel have treated the Palestinians and occupied their lands.  Bush’s statement makes no sense unless you appreciate the intelligence from which the statement came, whereas khalid sheikh mohammed’s statement will not earn him any relief from trial or outcome, so he has nothing to personally gain by making such a statement, which is  also widely corroborated by what the other plotters and planners have said all along. To swallow Bush and Cheney’s  assertion, you must suffer from severe frontal lobe atrophy and be denied the possibility of ever exercising your “frontal lobe longitudinal program option.”

[Note added: while there are many deficiencies in each of the main brain imaging methods in use today, none of which leads to an unambiguous determination of brain activity or provides us with a simple interpretation of brain function, the confluence of these methods has led to an entirely new culture of science on human brain function in which the efforts of psychologists (cognitive neuroscientists), neuroscientists, physiologists and imaging physicists are collaborating with the belief that their measurements are providing us with new revelations about brain function. Whether this new effort is taking us down the path to greater clarity about human brain function remains to be seen, but one can no longer ignore the fact that this group of scientists, using these methods, are making a significant contribution to clearing up the excessive number of houses on the market. It's a growth industry. One of the best books on this subject, though it is very focused on language and reading is "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. In this book Dehaene discusses the current state of knowledge available to us from these imaging methods, at least as it applies to the subject at hand. I strongly recommend the book if you are looking for something on the modern view of language and brain function revealed by imaging methods.]

RFM

On the front section of Times Science, an article by Tara Parker-Pope, describes “What you need to know in the first year” in which she points out that for starters 32 million, presently uninsured Americans, will eventually be covered under this law, such that 94% of legal residents not covered by Medicare will get insurance, up from what has been estimated at 83%. While only a gain of 11%, there are lots of people that will have to be brought in under this new plan. The extended coverage will not kick in until 2014. This bill cannot help but have an enormous social impact on our country, as we have been the harbingers of nothing less that a disastrous healthcare system–a true nightmare for far too many of our citizens. Shouldn’t that issue be part of our national security?  Some of the most important changes for individuals will kick in this June, while others will be delayed until the end of this year. Look for the nuts and bolts of these changes to be elaborated by the Health and Human Services at a website devoted to healthcare, but the Parker-Pope Q&A section handles some specific issues. In June of this year, denial of coverage by pre-existing conditions should be eliminated. If you currently lack insurance, there will be several different options, depending on your age, financial status and the duration during which you have not been insured.
The Times has gotten pretty slick at providing multimedia graphics to explain and help clarify the issue and with a healthcare bill that has more than 2000 pages, everyone will need a period of accommodation before the impact of the bill can be truly appreciated. If you go to the Times Science Website and click on the Multimedia section in the middle column, it will take you to a brief summary of the options available if you are currently  insured or uninsured. The site also explains what you can expect to pay in taxes, given your income level, when the plan is fully implemented.
One of the horror stories during the build-up to the healthcare legislation was that of a woman who had a previous Cesarean section for child delivery; she was subsequently told that C-section was a prior condition and that she couldn’t be insured unless she was “sterilized.” When she went public with her story, the use of the word “sterilized” served as a key motivating factor for rallying against the gender inequity rules of health insurance companies and some of you may be surprised about the extent of gender prejudice in our healthcare system. Denise Grady describes how the new healthcare bill will “lower the cost of being a woman.” Here, here!
I remember attending a meeting in Boston about a decade ago when I was invited to tell the sad story of the University of Minnesota Medical School under the banner of “How Not to Reform a Medical School, held under the auspices of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors). It was there that I listened to a physician in the Boston area describe an interaction with one of  his patients who had a headache and insisted on having an MRI exam. The physician suggested that she should have some other procedures done first and the patient retorted that he (the doctor) knew that she needed an MRI, but he wouldn’t give her what she needed because he worked for the insurance company and the money for the procedure would come out of his pocket.  It was at that moment that the physician realized his profession had been drafted into the wrong side of the healthcare war: the doctor, who sounded like a well-intentioned, selfless physician was now viewed by at least one of his patients as a corporate shill.

Historically, physicians made it hard on themselves by aligning their position on healthcare largely through the policies of the AMA, who repeatedly fought against the attempts to bring a unified system of healthcare to American citizens. Physicians tend to be Republican, whereas you would have thought intuitively, they should all be Democrats and believe in public policies that make us, all of us, healthier with better access to doctors.  Of course, there are some good, radical physicians who have helped push the issue of a single payer plan and we must be grateful for their voice, just as we should  be grateful to the California Nurses Association for pushing the same agenda. Perhaps someday we will get there–health insurance without health insurance companies. But we have to get through the current bill first before launching the better healthcare system that remains within our sights. The trouble is, we have a history of finding a fix, and no matter how imperfect, sticking with it until the mud flaps come off.

There continues to be something of a sham within medical schools, which have “ethics” programs that you might think should consider our present system of healthcare to fall within their purview. But most “ethics” programs at medical schools deserve to be expressed in quotes because they were really put their to deal with issues like “animal rights activism,” “organ transplant” and  “organ donor” issues and “death and dying” procedures. Only recently have I heard a few ethics members speak out against our disastrous healthcare system and even then it seemed like they were coming late to the healthcare party. So, almost any description of change in our healthcare system would be incomplete without comments on whether this new bill can help heal the badly fractured relationship between a doctor and his/her patient. In that regard, physician Pauline Chen describes an experience she went through with an uninsured patient and how she herself hopes that the new healthcare bill will offer at least the possibility of repairing what has become “a crippled, even broken, relationship between patients and doctors.” I would say to Dr. Chen, don’t hold your breath. As long as we have insurance companies dictating the treatments and drugs that will be given to a patient under their insurance plan and as long as a profit margin must be squeezed out of patient service denial, the doctor will still appear to be the insurance company shill who is denying service and appearing to do so while enhancing his own profit margin. At one time, doctors were in a position of control over the course that a unified healthcare plan might take. But they turned down the opportunity to be the master and instead became the slave of the healthcare industry. Now they are lightly regarded as a source of unbiased expertise on the healthcare debate. Nurses are a much better source of information. After all, they have been underpaid from the get-go.

Yet, we all have hope. Many of us have good physicians, whose passion for medicine is admirably high. My doctor for example donated an extensive period of his time to go to Haiti and treat patients and organizations such as “Doctors Without Borders,” continue to inspire hope that medicine and humanity are really one and the same. But such a unified concept cannot exist when corporate forces are in the way and the money-mad CEO is making the decisions. Many physicians have found their journey hopeless. I have noted in the past,  that for many months, AMWAY, the sales company, had a converted MD as their “employee of the month.” A more decent healthcare delivery system might  slow the rate of such defections, but we must recognize that part of the gigantic profit levels of the for-profit insurance companies, come off the backs of doctors, some of whom labor with huge debts and modest incomes.

Finally, in the same section of the Times, Abigail Zuber, MD reviews a book written by Lionel Shriver entitled “So Much for That.” It’s a story about a middle-class family, whose bread-winner comes down with the dreaded malignant mesothelioma–the asbestos-related cancer of the lining of the lungs. The symptoms of the cancer are generally very subtle, so by the time the diagnosis can be made, treatment is almost entirely palliative. Ms. Shriver details how the treatment causes other symptoms and during the course of therapy, retirement dreams are shattered and financial resources are drained. Shep, the husband-father with the disease is forced to keep working despite his decaying health, to keep his insurance active. Other health-related entanglements in the story reveal what a disastrous health care system we have imposed on our citizens, all for the sake of corporate profit and the unfettered free market system whose chief objective is to create disastrous levels of poverty that society then has to worry about. How about a Superfund from corporate profits to compensate for the widespread poverty the system has created?

RFM

Michelle Alexander has penetrated the origins and nature of our prison system in a new book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Ms Alexander’s summary of her book is the subject of a recent TomDispatch article. Her thesis is quite simple: by creating new repressive laws, include racially biased drug laws, we have moved from slavery, to the post-Civil War Jim Crow era through the Civil Rights movement into the new era of using our penal system as an effective tool of racism through mass incarceration of blacks.  In less than 3 decades we have moved from a prison population of about 300,000 to one that now includes more than 2 million inmates. In short, the idea of a “post-racial America” is pure mythology.  As a country, we remain as racist as ever, but execute our racial bias in ways that have yet to appear on our own radar screen. But that is all about to change.    Here are just a few excerpts from her summary that are notable and shocking, but largely unknown to most Americans:

• *There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

• *As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

• * A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.  The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

• *If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life.  (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status.  They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Alexander attributes most of the dramatic increase in incarceration rates as the result of our “war on drugs.” She states,  “The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought.  This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.  In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data.  White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.”

In some states, the African-American incarceration rates constitute 80-90 percent of the prison population. If we as Americans do not begin to re-balance the aberration in social philosophy that led to our current system of  high rates of incarceration, inequitably and inexcusably targeted towards blacks, where will we put the next wave of Bernie Madoffs? Aren’t the Bernie Madoffs the real criminals in America today? Do you think that robbing people of their entire life savings is not more violent than robbing the cash register? Think too of the families of those incarcerated. Many of them have children. What can we expect of children raised in poverty with a single parent without opportunities for education and living in neighborhoods where unemployment is permanently high with drug laws that selectively punish those in black communities? Have we set the stage for an exponential rise in black crime and incarceration? Is another round of prisons in store for America? Author Alexander suggests that the incarceration rates of blacks in America constitutes the most vicious, but hidden form of racism that America has yet to invent.  Can the expense of incarcerating a prisoner ($50,000/year), compared to the cost of educating him ($12,000/year), be justified when you consider that our drug laws and penal system applied to the black community look more like a form of entrapment?

The California prison system is so overcrowded that prisoners have successfully sued the state because of their exposure to life-threatening health conditions and violations of prisoner’s constitutional rights.  How will we solve the addiction we have to incarceration in the future? More prisons coupled with further reductions in our own system of education and the social safety net to pay for them?

We all know that many of the evils we face today, both economically and socially, can be traced to Ronald Reagan and the modern iteration of Republicanism. Again from Michele Alexander, “President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising.  From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics.  The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action.  In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House. Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks.  The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” To make the drug problem increasingly focused on the black communities, law enforcement is rewarded for the number of arrests they make, not for helping reduce the use of drugs in neighborhoods. Once the Reagan successes took off, the Democrats had to prove that they were not soft on crime; the incarceration rates grew more under Clinton than any other President in history. Almost nothing in government is what it seems at first glance. The American incarceration rates are justified because they help control violent crimes? According to Alexander, “Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity.  In fact, during the 1990s — the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war — nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.“  Our zero tolerance policy was developed for its application to the black community. Our drug laws punish blacks far more than whites and not because of the relative drug usage–it happens to be that the law is applied in black communities.  Now we have the largest population of prisoners of any country in the world and prison overcrowding in places like California has become a new form of our inhumanity towards our fellow citizens. According to Alexander,  1/4 of blacks are below the poverty line today, about the same percentage that were in that category in the 1960s. She points out that the gateway to the modern American black caste system can be found at the entrance to our prisons. Can we overcome the new Jim Crow in America? Have we made this new form of racism so popular in America, that prisons are like the Defense budget–untouchable? It would certainly seem so. What will it take for America to join the other modern civilizations of the world and address crime without biasing our solutions toward racism?

RFM

Lux’s book traces the history of the progressive changes that have made our country advance its basic concepts of freedom, democracy and equality, including the huge anti-slavery movement and civil war of the 1860s, a war that was brought about by the failure to democratize our Federal government when the constitution was first written in 1787.  While the road to achieve these basic principles was bumpy and uncertain, it was entirely driven by the progressives of the eighteenth,  nineteenth and twentieth centuries. None of the great historical achievements, including civil rights of the 1960s, was done without controversy and challenge, and every step of the way, these movements were opposed by the conservatives. Even today, Southern Republicans would vote for a restoration of white-supremacy laws if they could get away with it (it would be hidden in arguments about state’s rights). The Progressive Revolution (PR) identifies the major progressive periods in our history and emphasizes the fact that it is punctuated with spurts of progress, followed by retractions and failures; most of our heroes along the way also had flaws in one way or another that made them less than perfect leaders. LBJ with civil rights vs the Vietnam War for example.  And the progressive advancements, while largely and most recently championed by the Democratic party, at times owed their origins and success to Republicans, such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The uniting theme of the PR is that of democracy, or ruling by direct majority, with an emphasis on the development of the country as an interdependent community. Conservatism on the other hand, that brand that is still with us today, favors representative democracy, rather than direct democracy. The conservatives dominated the constitutional convention and gave us the electoral college because they didn’t trust a direct popular voting option, something that has plagued the country ever since. The electoral college is the system that makes people living in Utah for example, feel that their Democratic vote is meaningless, as the state always votes for the Republicans and their platform. But, a popular election would eliminate that limitation and give every citizen a sense that their vote could have an impact. The conservatives are the traditional party of racism, statism  and corporatism of our past, present and future. And yes, you would have to throw in the party of corruption, where the evidence abounds that conservatives, right down to the era of GWB, brought corruption to a new high with no-bid contracts in Iraq given to friends of Bush and Cheney, and incompetents put into positions of importance in our government, with Katrina and FEMA leader Brown as one glaring example, but there are many others, including government suppression of science.

Lux’s book begins with an appropriate quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The two parties which divide the state, the party of conservativism and that of innovatioin are very old, and have disputed the world ever since it was made. Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.” Lux emphasizes that the Founding Fathers did not create a country out of whole cloth. They were inspired by the Greeks, Romans and the Magna Carta. What made the American revolution unique was that it began with a single idea and threw off the shackles of colonialism, which forced them to invent their own government and do so on the fly. The great liberals identified by Lux are segregated along the timeline of progressivism and include, at the beginning, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Without Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, Lux argues that Thomas Jefferson could never have written the Declaration of Independence, a far more “democratic” document than the Constitution that followed many years later.  It was Paine, a British citizen by birth, who inspired ordinary citizens to think about the possibility of climbing out from underneath British colonial rule and establishing a new country in which every citizen would enjoy freedom, equality and opportunity. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was a liberating document, but due to his absence in Philadelphia, when the Constitutional debate was underway, a much more conservative document came about that was mired in fear of the public and written to preserve slavery as an official government  institution. But, even in his absence, Jefferson’s influence helped pass the Bill of Rights to insure a level of individual freedoms that were opposed by the conservatives of the day.

Following the progressive inspiration of Jefferson and Paine, and going through Andrew Jackson, who helped advance progressive economics (but did many other not so great things–like his actions against the Cherokee Indians and the “trail of tears”) we have to jump to Abraham Lincoln and what Lux describes as the “Radical Republicans”, who freed the slaves, established Land Grant Colleges and introduced the Constitutional amendments (13th-15th) that gave emancipation, defined citizenship and the right to vote as a Federal guarantee; these amendments removed these rights from state control. For a while, the conservatives who garnered dominance after Lincoln’s assassination, ignored these amendments and it was not until the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s that these guarantees were more firmly in place. Yet, voting corruption by the Republicans continues to this day. The Republican party of the post-civil war period of reconstruction switched to become the party of big business, the party that we know today. From then on, Republicans were strictly for business interests and wealth accumulation for the few. Republicans of today are only interested in establishing an economic oligarchy, something like what exists in Russia today. In the process of this less than lofty pursuit, Republican administrations have produced the biggest scandals in history, with governments riddled by corruption, deceit and secrecy; the two largest financial scandals since the Great Depression were the Savings and Loan scandal under Reagan and the current crisis generated by GWB.

Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican progressive who took on the robber barons  that emerged in the late nineteenth century and curbed their abusive labor practices, their violation of food safety practices and their complete ignorance and rape of the environment. His work in establishing the national park system, improvements in food safety (inspired by Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle“), the elimination of child labor and the curtailment of corporate trusts were milestones of achievement and set a new tone to the Federal Government and its responsibilities to society.  Lux points out that while we give the political leaders of these progressive periods credit for their initiatives, it is always the provocative citizens of the country that ignite and sustain these movements by dogged persistence and creative argument. Thus for example, it was Sierra Club founder John Muir who was instrumental in stimulating Teddy Roosevelt to form the National Park system and intellectuals such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen helped formulate the principles leading to progressive social and economic changes. The woman’s suffrage movement was instrumental in gaining the vote for women and in reinforcing the idea that democracy was for everyone. Teddy Roosevelt was followed in the progressive tradition by Woodrow Wilson, who, though he too advocated better conditions for the working class, nevertheless needlessly dragged the country into a costly and draining World War I (not named as such of course until after WW II; until then, this was “The Great War”).

But, the Empire struck back and contraction in the early 20th century began to peel away support for the common prosperity, as democracy and economic fairness gave way to Republicans whose objective was the creation of wealth for the few through the traditional mechanisms of corporate greed, speculation and corruption, which ultimately led to the predictable financial collapse known as the Great Depression. Until GWB was elected President in 2000, our biggest dummy of a President was probably Warren Harding, whose corrupt government led to arguably the biggest government scandal in history known as the “Teapot Dome Scandal.”  But, in traditional progressive fashion, it was a liberal Democrat that saved the country from a complete collapse. FDR was  elected during the depression and helped the country to begin the slow process of recovery, through the “New Deal” by stabilizing the banks, providing relief for the unemployed, stimulating the economy directly and establishing regulatory agencies that helped stabilize our economic system and avoid serious economic declines until the Republicans re-worked their magic again with the Savings and Loan crisis under Ronald Reagan and our current economic collapse under GWB. By the way, the Republicans are always trying to minimize the impact of the depression methods used during the New Deal by insisting that it was WW II that pulled the country out of its depression, not the actions of FDR. But according to Lux, when FDR came into office in 1933,  unemployment stood at 24.9 percent and went down every year but one in the period before WW II, ending at 10% at the start of the war in 1941.  The serious economic downturns we have had in this country, and there were many of them in the 19th century, were given to us by the expertise of conservative administrations that favored business interests over the needs of ordinary citizens.  FDR changed the country for good with the introduction of improved labor practices, Social Security, unemployment, jobs programs and most important of all, he provided a national sense that the government was doing something about a terrible depression. Perhaps no President in history did more to bring economic prosperity more broadly to the middle class while reducing the level of poverty in the country. The GI bill established a new, educated middle class, such that by the 1960s, the economy was working better for most people than it ever had before. The legislation under LBJ established improvements in civil rights and race relations, and pushed through two other landmark legislative actions in  Medicare and Medicaid. Tragically, it was the disaster of the Vietnam war and the rise of Republicans, inspired by Barry Goldwater that cultivated the South, leading to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the grip on national politics that the Republican Party has enjoyed for most of the latter part of the 20th century and well into this one. Because of this, no new sweeping progressive legislation has been passed since the days of LBJ. And, we have slipped backwards by relaxing environmental controls and the clean air and clean water acts. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” played a dramatic role in shifting national attention to environmental issues and the eventual elimination the pesticide DDT, which, among other benefits, saved birds of prey from extinction, something of very little concern to conservatives. Lux also gives great credit to the feminist movement and cites Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” as a galvanizing force for focusing  public attention onto the gender inequities embedded in our constitution and reflected in our political history.

For most conservatives, Ronald Reagan is the gold standard of the modern Republican President. Here’s what a gold standard Republican looks like: he kicked off his political campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi in 1980,  the town where the three civil rights workers were murdered fifteen years earlier. Reagan’s message to the white supremacists was clear: I am one of you. What did Ronnie do? Well one thing he did was to bring supply side economics to the country, as he attempted to demonstrate the famous Laffer curve effect in which too much taxation was impeding economic growth and an immediate large tax cut would actually stimulate the economy and lead to near instantaneous new revenues.  But Reagan’s tax cuts did nothing of the sort. They pushed the country into huge deficits, sharply escalated interest rates and brought us a very profound and deep recession.  Reagan’s tax cut was distributed such that low-income Americans received 16 percent of the dollar savings, while the top earners received 84 percent. Reagan turned us from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the biggest debtor nation in the world. Reagan weakened the unions which further eroded middle class income levels and he shredded public safety nets. I lived in St. Louis at the time and was told by one of my physician friends that Reagan’s cuts in healthcare programs for the inner cities would result in a rise in the infant  mortality rate because of reduced prenatal care and that’s exactly what happened. I watched the numbers grow each year. Reagan’s ideology was that of a Social Darwinist. He would have voted to stay with the British in 1776. He slashed Social Security Disability Insurance and school lunch programs. He was a free marketeer from the get go and didn’t hesitate to plunder the country into clandestine wars that were illegal under US law.  When he was first elected, he took down a portrait of Jefferson from his office and replaced it with one of Calvin Coolidge. This seemed like an odd choice on the intellectual and importance scales, but Reagan made the change to remind everyone and himself that he wanted to return the country to a simpler time, when business had a free reign and he began to shut down the vestiges of the New Deal. Carter had started deregulation with the airlines, but Reagan would pursue deregulation with a vengeance. We are still stuck with many judges appointed in the Reagan era that hold firmly to deregulation and free market principles as an ideology.

Imagine meeting a conservative friend for lunch at a cafe in Boston in 1776. You convey your enthusiasm for Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and talk about your new found vision for a country free from British rule, one in which opportunities would be available to all citizens of the country, while freeing the new nation from burdensome taxes and harsh, arbitrary  rules. As soon as you say goodbye to your friend, he marches straight to the British Magistrate’s office and reports you as a suspicious revolutionary. You are promptly arrested and either publicly flogged, imprisoned or hanged, depending on the degree to which the magistrate considers your potential for revolutionary zeal. In one very real way, the Republican party of today is an alien organization in America. They are the party that stood with the British in the revolutionary war, the party of slavery, states rights, Jim Crow, Jesse Helms and they are the party of the most dangerous terrorist organization in the history of the country–the Klu-Klux-Klan. Seeking bipartisan solutions with this party will only serve to weaken the Democratic bills and further disenchant the American public. Obama and the Democrats need to wake up to the new mood of receptivity that the country is in right now for dramatic, progressive change. Going down the bipartisan route is a sure way to lose their votes and diminish their enthusiasm.

While I don’t agree with everything that Lux expresses in his book, he gives us a nice time line description of the major events that shaped our history. I think Lux is naive about the evil threat from communism that we faced with the Soviet Union immediately after WW II. He wants to give Truman credit for facing down the threat of communism. I think of Truman as a fool for exaggerating the threat of communism and siding with the hardliners. Lux  seems not to understand that it was Truman and the hard liners around him that started the Cold War, aided and stimulated by militarists in the government at the time who were only there because of WW II. The Soviets were in fact demobilizing after WW II, not preparing for global hegemony. And, the American Communist Party that our government went after, largely because of the cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia, and that of the House and Senate members he persuaded, was largely a joke–no one could tolerate the militancy of the party, which, at its peak probably had no more than a few tens of thousands of members; many of them had joined the party to give aid to the Spanish Government in the 1930s, since our own government refused to offer assistance, at a time when Germany and Italy were provided horrendous military assistance and direct participation to ensure a Franco victory.

If you consider yourself a progressive or liberal, you will enjoy Lux’s book. It’s a short read, only 224 pages and, if you have those stripes, it’s one of those books you can’t put down. This book should make you more enthusiastic for the overdue changes we need to make in order to overcome what, at the moment, seems like a confused, weird, self-destructive country.

RFM

So, how imminent is the Taliban threat to Pakistan?  Not too long ago, we were only talking about the Taliban as a threat to Afghanistan, but suddenly a new worry is on the horizon. Are they on steroids or something? But, about the time that new war drums start to beat, or a national panic sets in, or Washingtonian hysteria creeps over the horizon, then we should try to search for knowledgeable and objective sources that don’t make a living by rattling swords and removing them from their scabbards. But to whom should we direct our request for objectivity? My perennial favorite  for objective information on Islamic threats and regional history is Juan Cole, who is one of our best informed historians on Islam and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. His most recent posting on Pakistan is reassuring about the makeup of the country that guards against an imminent Taliban sweep and the possibility of a extremist nuclear holocaust. As he points out, the Taliban come from the Pushtun tribal areas that are close to Islamabad and stretch along the border with Pakistan. Indeed many Afghans belong to the large Pushtun tribes, so it is sometimes difficult even to put a strict “Pakistan” identity to the Taliban. But the Pushtuns represent only a small regional part of the Pakistani population: 85% of Pakistanis live in Punjab or Sindh and are largely represented by religious traditionalists, including Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. While these regions also have some Islamic fundamentalist groups, the Pakistani population as a whole has marched towards a more modern society, though serious problems persist. The middle class of Pakistan has doubled since 2000. Furthermore, the military of Pakistan is a large, effective fighting force of 550,000 men who are well trained and well equipped (as they have to be since they have faced off against India for many confrontations). In contrast, the Pakistani Taliban force amounts to a few thousand fighters who don’t have tanks, armored vehicles, or an air force. Last fall the Pakistan military had a major military engagement with the Taliban in Bajaur Pakistan,  where 1000 extremists were killed in a fierce battle in the area. Some identified groups in the area were non-military tribal leaders who were fighting the extremists and also declared that they would fight Americans with the same ferocity if they came across the border into Pakistan. Drug money in the Pushtun tribal areas helps maintain the extremists in arms and ammunition. But even in the Pushtun region of Buner, there was substantial opposition to the Taliban and their recent imposition of Shariah law.According to Cole, the popularity of the Taliban and al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Cole’s best guess is that the alarm for the imminent collapse of Pakistan to the Taliban is being fed by those in Pakistan that want our help in restoring a military dictatorship or want to milk the U.S. for more money. The idea that Pakistan could fall to the Taliban is ranked by Cole as about as likely as Mexico retaking Texas (my interpretation).

But the pessimism about Pakistan’s future won’t go away. A recent article in the Times paints a grim picture of the methods and determination of the Taliban and how their strategy, in the absence of reliable government support for the opposition, can lead to demoralization among local citizens who don’t want the Taliban in the region, but don’t have the means to resist, and don’t receive sufficient outside support from the government. In contrast, one of the largest recent public demonstrations in Pakistan was the turnout in favor of returning the Supreme Court justices to their positions, after they had been dismissed by the military dictatorship–hardly the act of pro-Taliban populists. At the Federal level last year, Pakistanis voted largely for the Pakistan People’s Party or the Muslim League, neither of which are fundamentalists. So, the country as a whole does not seem to be  enchanted by extremists. One must also remember that any military coup that might take place, like the last one, was done with prior approval from Washington. Where would the international support come from if a military coup in Pakistan was initiated by the Taliban? China? Not likely. Iran? No, they are the sworn enemies of the Taliban (in fact Iran let the U.S. use Iranian air bases for our attacks against the Taliban after 9/11).
A different question than one directed towards the internal threats serving to destabilize the government of Pakistan, is whether our presence in Pakistan, with our drones making missile strikes against suspected terrorist groups in the Northwest tribal areas, represents a source of destabilization to the region and the country. Every time a missile fired from a drone hits a wedding party rather than a terrorist camp, our actions contribute to a new recruiting opportunity for the Taliban. To me, it is hard to argue that our campaign in Afghanistan, which has spilled over into Pakistan, has been anything other than a successful recruiting tool for new Taliban fighters.  It seems equally clear to me that the war in Pakistan is indeed America’s war. With support from drug money and new fighters recruited by our own bombings and increased visibility in Pakistan, we continue to dig a much deeper hole for ourselves than the one we had just a few years ago. Polls in Pakistan show that the majority want the United States out of the country completely and they want the U.S. to honor the sovereignty of the Pakistani state. Our presence there further destabilizes the unpopular leadership of Asif Ali Zardari, following the assassination of his wife Benazir Bhutto in 2007. If our presence in Pakistan serves to re-introduce a military dictatorship, then that too will not serve the best interests of the developing civilian government or the U.S. The question we must ask ourselves is this: in order to stabilize Afghanistan, a country of 30 million people, are we willing to risk destabilizing Pakistan, a country of 165 million people and a country with a nuclear arsenal? Isn’t this continued war the creation and propagation of American Hubris on steroids? Haven’t we recited the wrong narrative to ourselves for far too long? Didn’t we learn anything from Korea, Vietnam or Iraq? We have continuously propagated a fictional version of our results in those conflicts in order to preserve a mythical vision of America as an undefeated superpower, a vision that cannot withstand simple tests of reality. But this tiresome, redundant version of our history can only be bought and sold in America. People outside of America now mostly know the truth.

If there is a silver lining to this false version of our own history, least it is one thing we will never outsource and it does provide a significant element to our economy. That way it seems easy for us to continue to purchase military hardware that was designed to confront the Russians during the Cold War (we will see if the F-22 fighter jet will truly be cancelled–it was designed to confront Russian MIGs). We continue with our metaphor of inventive deceit when we hide from our own citizens the reality that, for most of the conflicts we have been engaged in since WW II, we have been big losers; yet the image we portray of ourselves is one of standing up to the evils of communism and finally defeating the multi-headed monster through the triumph of the Cold War. And, then we defeated terrorism  in Iraq even if that country had nothing to do with 9/11. Any other version of our history is perverse and must be one promoted by a bunch of losers who only want to destroy America, not those who want to promote its best interests. The truth is, if we had been honest about Korea, we would never have fought Vietnam or Iraq.

Today, al-Qaeda in Pakistan is apparently reduced to a few hundred fighters who help the Taliban but do not have an operational force that we need to worry about. Unfortunately, Obama has turned the Afghanistan conflict into his own brand of warfare, and while he has smoothed some of the rough edges off of the conflict in Afghanistan, it’s still a brand based on America’s delusional history of itself, with the added expense and long-term commitment towards nation-building. We persist in applying an American model of what we think the region should look like. Yet, our experience in Iraq, if we were honest about what and how we accomplished what exists today, has been that we didn’t really bring democracy to the country, we simply exchanged a Sunni dictatorship for a Shiite government whose closest ally is Iran. If you tell Americans that we fought hard and drained our treasury so that Iran could become a more powerful player in the Middle East, they might have a very different attitude towards what we are doing today in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in a nutshell, that’s what we accomplished.

We do indeed get to pick our wars when we invade other countries, but we don’t get to pick the outcome and we never have. Not knowing our own history is a feature that most Americans share with the citizens of ancient Rome.  If you have followed the recent events in Iraq, you realize that the country, destroyed beyond any possibility of short-term repair, with dispersion of millions of Iraqis that are not coming back to the country, remains as a tinder box, ready to explode if the displaced Sunni minority isn’t brought back into some form of power sharing in the al-Maliki government.
As a country, we have allowed ourselves to be driven to the brink of an economic collapse, with our unwavering insistence on global military hegemony as an non-debatable part of the equation we apply to the world. In somewhat more knowledgeable parts of the country, the argument goes that we have created so many enemies, due to countless blowbacks that are waiting to hatch in the nursery of our future, and possibly carry with them the use nuclear weapons, that, at all costs to our own economy, we must persist in maintaining our military posture. And we need examples like Afghanistan and Pakistan to prove it!
When discussions about Pakistan take place in government today, these apocalyptic story threads we hear about probably seem very plausible to those who ponder the next step in our official response to these “threats.” At the very least these decisions seem to be done to avoid the least resistive among the political options. You can’t make a U-trun when you’re driving on a freeway. But, in the light of day, when we engage in major wars against a few hundred people, destroying millions of lives in the process, if we don’t recognize that the road we are building to our future is the same one that the Romans built to theirs two thousand years ago, then we will surely continue to go down the road we are on that can only lead to more economic hardship and military commitments that we can’t afford. The current trolley car ride of emulating ancient Rome, is void of any vision about who the new Goths or the Visigoths in our future will be–those that sacked Rome after its capitulation. But, let’s face it, we already know the answer to that question as well. The threats of war and external instability that are always over-hyped and over-cooked prevent us from marshaling the resources and focus on the issues we will need to address in order to save the planet and the environment. We know who the Goths are–they are the Republicans!

RFM

Note added: recent reports have suggested that reinforcements into the Buner area forced the Taliban to move their forces back into the Swat area, reversing their recent achievements in Buner.

The cataclysmic economic events of the last few months have renewed my interest in the long-term explanation about how we got to where we are today and why it all happened. Historians like to write about one particular era of history or one politician, usually a President, to insure good book sales,  and most of these historians write to preserve the mythology of America, like cheerleaders who desperately want to keep the false narratives of our past intact, perhaps just modernized a bit, with a new layer added to the multilayer cake of our deceit. Americans have a deep need to believe in a special version of American history and there are plenty of writers to keep nourishing them with the false interpretations on which the current version of America is based. For the author or historian,  it’s money in the bank if they feed the false narrative, but for those who stray away from the party gospel, sales are likely to be disappointing. A less common historian is the one who attempts to integrate history through a more longitudinal exploration of events, seeking to reveal a more substantive trend that accounts for how the country got to where it is today. This approach is more challenging because it is not a snapshot of an era, but a ponderous collection of lots of snapshots, many of which were never adequately stitched into whole cloth. Sorting fact from fiction is usually a process of deep scholarship. That is why academic historians, who never break the sound barrier of popular publications, provide a more accurate and penetrating account of our own history–it’s gratifying to know we have one. Two different accounts, one for popular consumption and the other for historical accuracy, run in parallel and God help us if they ever collide, for it would be like the predicted explosive clash of antimatter colliding with the matter we call America.

It is the rare historian, writing for lay people, that tries  to find a theme of continuity in the archives and discovers some of the ugly truths of our past, followed by the will to write about them. Those kinds of books that run against the accepted grain of history usually settle on the shelves of academia, often published by the academic presses of universities and if they ever see the light of popularity, they are typically drowned out by public outcry giving them a brief respiratory history. Any historian attempting to reveal a more accurate portrayal of American history, has to begin this more exploratory and factual process with a theory or at least a vague conviction, and then he or she must resist the temptation to deviate from the chosen vector, even though you don’t always end up with the theme that got you started. It is understandable why some historians say there is no history. It’s because  history is a story seen through the eyes of one writer, who always brings a bias of person place and time to the transcribed events and hopes for a preferred outcome–maybe a best seller. They too have mortgage payments to meet. So, history is a stack of opinions written by historians whose judgments change with time to adopt contemporary views which serve as the optical lens through which they evaluate history. As readers of history, we are tossed onto the ocean of thermal currents which provide the continuous disruptive influence of our new horizons. For the author of history, the trick is to catch the subject on the cultural upswing, rather than on the somewhat bleaker downside. Timing means a lot. As a result, some figures judged by our contemporary history will rise or fall depending on the ethical yardstick of the  era and the popularity of the viewpoint.  Because Truman started the Cold War, many Republicans later reached out recidivistically to turn him into more of a hero than his actions would merit.  Chalmers Johnson’s first book of his trilogy “BlowBack” had very meager sales until 9/11 hit and suddenly, it became a best seller (I think it was one of the books that Ron Paul suggested Rudy Giuliani should read following one of their Presidential debates during the Republican primary).  Still, there are differences among history writers, even within the same era.  These differences are sufficient for any member of our culture to choose and find resonating evidence for their own version of American history. Having your own private narrative is now within grasp. If you can’t find your favorite version in a textbook, it will surely show up when Googling. That is one thing the web has done for our culture. It has given stories–like those propagated by the Swift Boaters during John Kerry’s run for the Presidency– a website resource and some sense of plausibility, particularly if you lean in that direction (donations from T. Boone Pickens helped).

Doris Kearns Goodwin (an admitted plagiarist) writes popular history about Presidents and promotes her books as a public cheerleader to keep the American dream  alive and renew the false narratives about contemporary American history. Her subjects are her heroes and she prays at the alter located at the end of the deposit line in the bank.  In contrast, historian Geoffrey Perret in his book “Commander in Chief” achieves a more integrated viewpoint, across the presidential spectrum of the Cold War and beyond and describes those Presidents that took us into unwinnable wars (Truman, Johnson and GW Bush) and through this march, Perret gives his readers a different view of these American leaders. He more properly identifies them as confused, naive Presidents who were sucked into the false narrative of America as the dragon slayer engaged in a life and death struggle with the pervasive communist dragon–the one that McCarthy said could be your next door neighbor. In many ways these three Presidents are victims of America’s propaganda. That propaganda was supposed to be for public consumption only, not for the political leaders that would follow. But oops, that’s how Folly Compounding becomes self-propagating. James Carroll in his book “House of War” provides us with a powerful dialogue, seen through his own eyes, describing how the post-war Pentagon conspired to create and propagate the false narrative about America that we live with today, beginning with the Cold War as the life and death struggle that Americans were asked to believe about their new dilemma in the immediate aftermath of WW II.  That anti-communist narrative,  despite humiliating and falsely identified war experiences in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, seems to get continuously replenished and updated to preserve America as the “shining city on the hill,” the country whose destiny it is to promote justice and save the planet from all forms of evil (while enriching and extending the grip of international corporatism, with new energies devoted to the privatization of water, just as one example of the never ending reach of these international corporations). Perhaps we are witnessing the end of this iteration of America, but it cannot come too soon. The false narrative of America began at the end of WW II. It only took a hand full of men within our government to lurch  us into a new direction that eventually evolved into our current corporatist state and has proven to be the source of our financial ruin: it was the mother of all Follies.  This false narrative elevated a party and a political system that eventually created Reaganism, which started us down the pathway to our current set of crises, including the deregulated nightmare of globalization, excessive military spending, unsustainable health care costs, trade imbalances and diminishing income levels for the Middle Class, the epicenter of our creativity.   If we don’t make these connections and see their initiating events as the mother of present Follies and take the cure by replacing our historically false narrative with a more realistic history, we will surely recreate for ourselves sometime in the future, a catastrophe that will look a lot like what we are going through today. Remember that we just finished one stock market bubble and crash in 2001, and now we have a more serious collapse, only seven years later. We let the fixes provided by the New Deal ebb away and returned our economy to the roller coaster ride of boom and bust cycles, whose excursions are rapidly expanding. If we don’t return to a more sane economy, the one we will have will seem more and more like riding on a roller coaster whose track is a perfect damped to undamped oscillator–each high and low will get bigger and bigger, until something finally shuts it all down. If we allow these economic excursions to continue growing, I see little chance that the true mother of all Follies, global climate change can ever be dealt with to any meaningful degree. We won’t be able to afford it and maybe we can’t afford it now–too many pressing wars.

America’s false narratives created by Folly Compounding decisions in the early aftermath of WW II are like a secret, kept in a vault, waiting for the American maturity to reach a state such that they can accept the real version of what happened to them and why. The real narrative of what happened to America lies in vaults with “top secret” stamped on each envelope.  American politicians of today, those few that truly understand our gnarly past,  are afraid to let American citizens know what really happened during WW II and its aftermath that, in reality, have given us the problem set we find on our plate today. We are a country born in war and we continue to use war as our first response to  any challenge. Today, it is not just bad choices about military options that have purged our treasury, but it is also our financial system and our economic mistakes that sucked the wealth out of the middle class to a point where they cannot afford to be the consumers we need to get the economy back to the one we had just a few years ago. From Challenge Magazine “Today, a male in his thirties earns less after taxes than a male in his thirties in 1970. Wages for women have increased, but women have been closing a historical gap that separates them from male workers and continue to earn 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn. Keep in mind that our wages are no longer the highest in the world; we were the highest in the world…but that ended thirty years ago. We became the biggest economy in the world with high wages, because high wages created demand without over-borrowing.” The wage issue is one head of the two-headed monster we created. But we also began generating  Folly Compounding from militarism and Reaganism and both have arrived simultaneously on our doorstep, each of which demands a solution. We can no longer brag about America and we can’t go on until we fix the poorly tuned machine that runs our culture.  But, any solution we apply that doesn’t address both heads of our problem, our wealth distribution disaster and our excessive military spending,   will only give us marginalized results, fixes at the edges, all distractions from the epicenter of the problem.

Remember when we had a temporary fix from the dotcom collapse in 2001? Does anyone remember the Sarbannes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002? It was the law that was passed in response to the dotcom market bubble and crash of 2001, in response to Enron, Worldcom and others who cooked their books to make the company look good for the devious purpose of elevating the stock value of the corporation. Though considered to be a major reform and a fix to the crooked way big corporations were doing business, and  passed overwhelmingly by both houses in Congress, it was completely  irrelevant for preventing the housing bubble and collapse we are currently in: it was too narrowly focused and did nothing to fix the core problems that produced our current fiscal crisis. If we allow Congress to fix the problem of market deregulation once again, without input from the public, we will see band-aid after band-aid applied to our financial system with another market bubble and crash looming in our near future. But have you noticed how these crashes get bigger and bigger? The Savings and Loan bubble and crash of the 1980s had a price tag in the $ billions, whereas our current fiscal crisis is hitting the $ trillion water mark.  It was only seven years between the dotcom crash and the housing crash we are in now.  If we can understand that the Cold War we launched at the end of WW II, with its militarism and protective corporatism, combined with excessive powers given to our president, with a covert army and budgets that Congress did not oversee, we can begin to see a solution that must go way beyond another version of Sarbannes-Oxley, which in reality, was just another band-aid.  The risks are too high for us to settle for serial band-aids, which is what Congress is considering today. What we have to change is the culture–the culture of corporatism and militarism that grips our society with an iron fist.  It started out in 1945 as a culture of bombs, but evolved into a culture of corporatism and militarism that has turned to feeding on our own society, gaining profits from acts of privatizing government, charging excessive interest rates on housing and credit cards and hiding the true nature of risks in stocks, bonds and the new “securitized” bundles of confusion.  The drug bill for Medicare is one example of how high profits for drug companies will give us an unsustainable health care bill not too far down the road. How will we compensate? Our government (yes the Obama government) is now contemplating cuts in Social Security. If so, the drug companies will continue to see record profits while Americans sink and slide towards a third-world status. Companies worldwide are now working on the privatization of water. Because these trends began in America, we have the responsibility to fix them before they fester into permanent lesions on the world economy. As just one small step, we should stop drinking bottled water, for if we continue massive consumption of bottled water, with huge profits from its sales, it will remove the pressure we should be placing on our public water utilities to rigidly insist on high quality water made available for all citizens, based on costs we all share.  There are still millions of people who inhabit this planet that do not have access to decent water, something that is shameful for an economic system that likes to brag about its achievements. The strategy for privatization of water is already gaining foothold in third world countries and newly industrialized ones as well, including India. Can you imagine a natural resource like water to become the source of multinational corporate profits? The corporations blindly think of themselves as providing a good public service.

Folly Compounding is the concept that when a country makes mistakes, those mistakes get propagated and earn compound interest because they are not recognized as mistakes per se, or, if they are, no one wants to do anything about them because they are too complex or too controversial to appear solvable. The bigger the error, the more it becomes an Untouchable Folly. Hence, no corrective actions are put into play until the issues become consuming of the national focus or menacing to the country’s  future. Postponing a fix for slavery, for example, and the civil war that resulted from it, illustrate how dislocating and destructive  Folly Compounding can become, when the fix is put off indefinitely.  Of course, we might never have had a country if we tried to fix slavery when our nation was first stitched together as there’s no control available to run the experiment.  Sometimes poorly fixing a problem, taking a short cut, or overdoing the fix can add another layer of Folly Compounding on top of the problem you are trying to solve.  A good example of stacking new Follies on top of old ones is how the onerous peace terms of WW I led directly, twenty years later, to WW II, with a far more devastating effect and a higher toll extracted from all participants.

It is the innate nature of the political process to propagate errors, because fixing them along the way admits that mistakes have been made in the past and that kind of pronouncement usually  means that a political party, the opposite of yours of course,  gets  identified as the cause of the problem, thereby  initiating inter-party friction, national distraction and ultimately precipitating a long smoldering need for retribution. But of course neither party wants to admit that serious mistakes have been made in the past, out of fear that the individual pointing at the errors might get labeled as part of the problem rather than part of the solution–sort of the pot calling the kettle black. After all, in a two party system, who wants to believe that one party actually wants to destroy the country! Well, ever hear of the Republican Party and their “starve the beast” theory of government collapse? The idea behind that concept is that you spin the country into heavy debt, so that it cannot provide the services that you find so odious. The concept was the beginning of Reaganism and remains with us today as one big hangover from GW Bush’s attempt to recreate Reagan’s Presidency.  Hasn’t some of that worked as prescribed? As an example of long-term inter-party paybacks, we can ask what part of the motivation for impeaching Clinton reflected payback for the Democratically controlled Congress that forced Nixon from office, more than two decades earlier?

Of equal importance for understanding Follies is the fact that stopping to fix the old mistakes prevents you from working on your own stuff, the new things you promised, the vision that you believe got you elected. Those things by nature need to be worked on first. Indeed, it is often political suicide to continuously look in the rear view mirror, emphasizing the mistakes of the past, so few politicians ever do it.  Even talking about a psychological profile of the present can be politically dangerous, as Carter’s referral to the “American malaise” may have cost him the election against Reagan in 1979, perhaps with the help of the “October Surprise,” engineered by officials  in the Republican Party (including perhaps Bush I?). As George Will would say, it’s just good politics, even if the American prisoners in Iran had to stay captive for a few more months until after the election (the hostages in Iran were released on the day that Reagan was inaugurated as President in 1980).

The great advantage that Obama has over his predecessors, is that he ran on the idea of extinguishing some of our old Follies, so his election is the only opportunity since the election of FDR to deal with and fix old problems, primarily because they have precipitated a new crisis that can no longer be ignored.  But, more generally, it is only when our Follies of the past burst onto the horizon of the present like an uncontrollable flash flood, a sudden surge of undeniable intensity, that its menacing presence grabs our attention in such a forceful way that it brings the issue front and center as the most  immediate concern, demanding our full attention and challenging our wits. If the Folly was only smoldering before, it now becomes an engulfing flame, an  unmistakable  crisis event, riveting our attention, like the grizzly bear who got into the office room and now has to be dealt with before it deals with us: only then do we have a public outrage and fear which leaves us with no choice but to set aside our hoped for priorities and deal with the unleashed Folly Compounding issues that, if unchecked, seem to promise cultural enslavement. This disruptive character of Folly Compounding usually appears as a financial disaster or a major war looming on the horizon. Bush left us with a Bushel full of these Follies, whose true magnitude we have yet to understand, as we are still trying to sort them out and determine their impact;  not all of them have probably been identified. Sometimes, like the current crisis, war and economic disaster go together. Perhaps they are related. FDR got his twin disasters put on his plate in series, first the depression and then WW II.  But Obama has them all in parallel and a different person might just punt, or at least dodge a few of the more onerous Follies. No President in our history has ever been called upon to address so many Folly Compounding issues, most of which, like health care and Wall Street  have been smoldering and Folly Compounding for decades.

The problems we face today seem more like a bundle of major Follies all wrapped into a non-tidy giant pile, surrounded and protected by a swarm of ferocious African bees. It seems like it’s hard to touch the damn thing without getting stung. And if the bees don’t sting you when you touch the mess, there is the mindless, but ever present press who will do it for you!  What is it about our press that cannot see how the problems we face are those of long duration Folly Compounding issues, that cannot be solved without solving the grand dilemma of our culture for the last 60+ years?  What mind-numbing drug keeps their attention span confined to tiny segments of our history–a few days or weeks allotted for each chunk–history by chunks, with only the last few given any real importance. We still live in the Grand Illusion of an early narrative of American history. Who is protecting Americans from knowing the true narrative of their history? The false one is propagated like a religion, or maybe it is a substitute religion or maybe even the real thing–a real religion I mean. Maybe the born-agains need their religion to make it easier to swallow the large capsule of our false history. It is not easily ingested.

Very few components of our culture seem healthy today. Lots of things need fixing. The very fabric of the nation has been torn and like a child learning to walk, we have to learn how to take some seemingly primitive steps all over again. Hopefully we will learn to redo these small steps again much better than we did before, this time with our eyes wide open. About the only things we make these days that other people want is our high tech stuff, but then our own government prevents the sales of these items for fear of contributing to greater sophistication of our enemies and we have a lot of enemies. So, the ships come into our harbors full of stuff, but they leave empty. Sixty years ago, it was just the opposite. That problems needs to be put at the top of the list.

We can also hope that the synapses and neural networks of our brains, that will be called upon to reshape our culture, have sufficient residual plasticity such that we can engage the warped values of our present culture  and mold them into a new one that works for everyone, not just those participating in a giant cultural Ponzi pyramid whose apex serves the upper 1% of our society. We need to replenish our culture and set things right for the first time in 30-40 years. If we go through the pain, we need to see the gain. But, we aren’t angry enough yet, we’re not in the streets demanding a new lurching our ship of state.

What got destroyed in the last 30-40 years was an economy that, at one time, roughly from 1945 to the early 1970s,  worked for most people. It wasn’t perfect, but it had far more equity than the one we have today. At a time when we had a gradual income tax rate and the highest rate on the wealthiest citizens was 91% under the Eisenhower administration, we had a boom economy and our economic pie was divided in a far more equitable way that what we see today. Clearly letting rich people have too much freedom with their money is dangerous to all of us.  Reaganomics replaced that economy that used to work for us,  with one that worked increasingly for the few at the top and, in retrospect, we now  see how it all got started and how the economic  forces that were  unleashed under Reagan’s two terms in office, started the country on its glide path towards a third world economy for far too many citizens of  America. We arrived at our current state through the process known as  incrementalism, meaning that each step was small enough for us to build up tolerance or adapt, making the next small step more palatable, as the total excursion becomes very large and threatening. Present it all at once and there is no way we would agree to the proposition, but get there in 10,000 steps and it seems to pass through out gut without a wrinkle. Looking back at the magnitude of the tumble we took over the last 30+ years,  we can more clearly see the historic nature of our Folly Compounding, and the breathtaking altitude of the fall. If we had maintained Middle Class income levels where they were in 1970, we wouldn’t have as serious a recession as we are going through because the Middle Class would have more money to behave as consumers and they would not have had to borrow to maintain their consumption levels. Although the decline of the Middle Class began in the 1970s, the first elements of that decline can be traced to events which began at the end of WW II and evolved steadily since then. It’s just a matter of connecting the dots.

Today, as more clarity reaches into the inner sanctum of our consciousness,  it appears that finally, the sheer weight of our Follies over the past60+  years, has grabbed our focus to a degree that fully occupies the attention mechanisms of our brains. Perhaps this is the good thing about facing so many crises at once. Perhaps now we can recognize the depth of our problems and the fact that many long standing Follies are at the front of the line, in bad need of identity and repair. We need to address so many things, including our economy, our war costs, empire costs,  health care costs and while doing so, begin to restore our country to the one we thought we had not too long ago. That country, now a distant memory for some, once worked better for most people than what we have today. Many opportunities were presented to us to right the ship along the way, but each time we attempted to deal with one of them, new forces presented themselves to delay our restorative actions. Nowhere was this more apparent than with how the Vietnam war destroyed our greatest domestic President–LBJ–and the unraveling of much of his Great Society programs. Medicare, Medicaid and Civil Rights legislation are the great legislative achievements that survived, but LBJ could have done so much more if the Vietnam War hadn’t destroyed his Presidency.

Our new current President, Barack Obama, will spend his entire Presidency fixing the Follies of the past without ever having time to get to his own stuff, the kinds of things he wanted to do when he first decided to run for President. But, we don’t even remember what those things were, for in the middle of his campaign, the bottom fell out of our culture, even though we think of it as an economic collapse.

Who remembers an America that didn’t manufacture automobiles? Wasn’t the auto industry at one time related to a good portion of the jobs in this country and did we ever vote on whether we wanted a “service economy,” or, for that matter, do we even know what a service economy is? One thing we do know about the “service economy” is that it provides lousy, low wage jobs and curtails workers rights. Our acceptance of a “service economy” as an inevitable component to our financial evolution is pure poppycock, and our slide towards that type of economy has been a major Folly on its own.  At no other time in our history have we had to deal with such a vast array of Folly Compounding issues. Fortunately, we have a young energetic President who might be up to the task of fixing some of the more critical Follies, those that are at least palpable.  Perhaps only Abraham Lincoln had a similar kind of confrontation–a confrontation with past Follies.  Shortly after his election, the Civil War started, representing one of the largest and longest Folly Compounding blunders in our history: Lincoln dedicated himself to managing and winning that war while freeing the slaves in the process. But it was just a short time after the Civil War  ended that Lincoln was assassinated. His entire presidency was consumed by fixing a single Folly Compounding issue, one of sweeping  dimensions. For Lincoln it was a Folly of choice that he decided to tackle the slavery problem. He saw the festering wound and knew that it had to be finally fixed. It was not a Folly that consumed him after he was in office, as he walked into it with his eyes wide open. It almost seems that Lincoln was born to solve the mother of all American Follies of that time– slavery in America. In exchange for his service, we deservedly generated a tableau of mythology about Lincoln and his Presidency. Perhaps we will look back on Obama’s presidency and acknowledge that it seems like he was born to solve our new Follies and the Folly Compounding interest created by them. If so, we picked an able man and hopefully a good President. He will need the energy of his youth and wisdom that is almost out of reach for his age. I think we know that much already. But whether he or anyone can do enough things and do them well,  to avoid the distractions that will reduce his efficiency, remains as his greatest challenge, and ours too. Right now,  I think few people would trade places with Obama.  You might notice however,  that Obama doesn’t have the same friends each day. Some go off the ranch to criticize him for one thing, then come back onto the ranch for dinner. Contemporary politics are like that and, after all, we are all economists. We all have an opinion of what we should do economically. That’s what Wall Street will do to you. Today, however,  most of us are Keynesians. Unfortunately, we also have a large number of Democrats and Republicans who practice “Military Keynesianism.” There will be a major political battle over canceling the F-22 fighter jet, a cold war jet that was designed to pit against Soviet jets. But, when this plane was first introduced, the Soviet threat had disappeared, but the jets continued to be manufactured and Lockheed continued to make $ billions through the standard method of weapons procurements–you bid low and let the cost overruns pick up the slack in the bid.

With the election of Barack Obama, we are beginning to see a national leader who has been forced to deal with a whole host of Follies. He has forced all of us to look through the rear view mirror, although we need to look a little further down the road behind us to fully visualize the distant past that initiated the long smoldering events that culminated in our current set of crises. It seems that Obama got elected precisely because he stated his political objectives of fixing overdue Compounded Follies, though he probably didn’t think he would have quite so many to deal with when he got elected. But, at long last, perhaps we have a President who is willing to call things by their right name and blame those forces that created our current mess and hopefully develop a consensus about the guilty party and their collective actions of national destruction. He’s not there yet. He’s still getting his sea legs and no one has yet been daring enough to mention that the mother of all expenses is our military spending, which is 1/3 of our budget (it’s actually far more than that because of hidden expenses, such as the Department of Energy that runs our nuclear arms program–Chalmers Johnson puts our defense spending closer to $ 1.1 trillion). What’s more, military spending does not stimulate the economy to evolve in a usefully, progressive way. It is a stagnant form of consumption and should be contrasted with spending on research to improve energy efficiencies.  Solving the military spending issue will be more difficult than solving health care and the latter is first up on the can-do list for the country.

We are finally beginning to see that the range of these neglected Follies touches every aspect of our lives with an iron grip.  The excessive motility that we feel surging through our gut, mediates such a strong sensation of discomfort, that it grabs our attention and makes us wonder whether we have seen all the Follies on the list–all those that need to be dealt with, or whether others have yet to be discovered. We know this is the year of crisis. We shudder to think that  it might turn out to be the year of further crisis discovery as well. Are we going to be given all the bad news in drip form, through an I-V?   The daily acts of discovery and those of the recent past have awakened us to the possibility that more things are out there. We notice for one thing, we have had to recalibrate our disaster scale. You might remember the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s. For that scandal, our scale was in the $ billions, but for this catastrophe, you might note that we are using the $ trillion scale. Have you recalibrated your instruments?

Despite the misery index remaining high, there is a strong sense that we have seen this happen before; it was transmitted to us through the lore of our parents and when it did happen in the 1930s, we met the challenge and gained prosperity, but it required good people with strong wills and hopefully we have some of those people in place today, beginning with our new President. In the 1930s we took a small government and made it much bigger. Today we have a much larger government but it has lost its focus, such that it serves primarily very narrow interests–it’s the Predator State of James K. Galbraith. Perhaps this time around, we are less naive, less gullible and more visionary about the difference between a good solution and a bad one, about avoiding solutions that don’t start another round of Folly Compounding, by merely kicking the can down the street. But you can’t change your government overnight with a new President. The government he acquired is on autopilot, still doing the kinds of things that Bush set in place. Obama has to be forced to go down new roads he would not ordinarily venture into without constant public demand and pressure. As far as debt is concerned, it is worth remembering that at the the close of WW II, the country had a debt that was about 130% of GDP and the emergence from the war, thanks to government programs like the GI Bill, the growth of labor unions, investments in research and higher education, all provided a long period of growth and prosperity, where the growth outgrew the debt. The new president is trying to replicate that pattern by rebuilding our economy into something new, one that will produce a significant growth with new economic tentacles that, once again, will hopefully allow us to outgrow the debt created by this undertaking. We owned our own debt in 1945, but today our debt is largely owned by other countries, including China. Ironically, the current economic downturn, according to Paul Krugman,  has increased the savings rate of Americans which is in turn helping to finance this new round of public debt. No one knew whether the end of WW II would lead to prosperity or a return to economic despair. But the key to our recovery was that of creating a prosperous Middle Class, through education and government programs like the GI Bill. The root of our creativity is found within this vibrant Middle Class, so that the replenishment of their prosperity will mean a bonanza of new ideas leading to a more creative type of  growth. To make this work, out consumerism will have to be shifted to planetary salvation items and to make that work, we will need vast improvements in our education system and how we finance education. But, to make it all work, it will probably take more investment than what we have made to date and it is unclear whether the political capital exists to make this new economy work for all of us like it should. FDR’s strategy prolonged the depression because he didn’t spend enough. Will we, in the end, do the same?

The current series of Follies are not just those of our financial system, but in the quality and pay of the jobs that we let get away. We need to recapture manufacturing. But we gave away the toys and plastics and bicycles and a lot of electronics  to Japan, China and South Korea, so we have to be far more inventive than we ever have been before. The world at the close of WWII was devastated and shattered, except for the United States, as we took advantage of a non-level playing field. Today that same field is far more level and there are many signs that we allowed our advantages to dissipate through focusing on the wrong set of problems.  For every $ we spent on increasing American military hegemony abroad, we diminished our domestic economic vitality at home. Now we have to get a little more creative on the high tech side and build a new economy based on saving the planet. Maybe then we will have something that China wants to buy.  An objective like that will get rid of giant Folly Compounding and get us back to mini Folly Compounding which is easier to deal with. Subtle advantages or disadvantages in trade policy, if corrected soon are the stuff of mini Follies.  Spending all your resources on the military, with more than 650 bases extended throughout the world–that’s the stuff of giant Folly Compounding and you may notice that the size of the military budget is not yet remotely present in the national dialogue. The most recently announced changes in military spending are a shift in the military budget emphasis, not a reduction.

The Follies that are demanding a solution today, didn’t begin yesterday, or with GW Bush, or even with Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter, though each of them contributed to the altered state of our economy and income distribution. The great dismantling of  FDR’s America began shortly after his death in 1945 and eventually led to Reaganism which was the beginning of the end of regulatory practices in our financial community, the termination of usury laws, the demise of labor unions  and the beginning of huge budget deficits that allowed  the Republicans to “starve the beast,” and, in the process,  destroy America’s social contract.

The Follies we face today, and we all know there are lots of them, have their origins at the end of WW II, in which a gigantic lurch in our view of the world and how we would face it, was newly and sharply formulated and promptly implemented, penetrating deep into our culture with a seemingly irreversible thrust that permeated our nuclei and changed the American DNA.  This new world view was an ad hoc viewpoint created by the naivete and poor leadership that suddenly emerged on the death of FDR. Immediately after his death, the emergence of a new hard line attitude towards the Soviet Union took shape, and it was this new attitude that would shape our future course, help to destroy the Soviet Union and secondarily render the United States into a confused, bitterly divided and impotent country. If you ask yourself the question that, after WW II, we supposedly turned ourselves into the Juggernaut of the world as a military power and yet how many wars did we actually win since then? Remember Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and where are we headed in Afghanistan, where 80% of the Pakistanis do not want the American presence in their country? Why do we want to stabilize a country of 30 million, while destabilizing a country of 175 million?

The new Post-war cultural format of dividing the world into two camps, the good guys and the commies, turned out to be an easy sell in America because of the public perception that Americans have about their own country as the “shining city on the hill.” If our leaders are asking us to do this it must be right, it must be part of our great American heritage to go down this new path, even though it scares the hell out of us, with atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and Russian bombers.  Perhaps today,  the shining city model of America is coming to an end, at least as far as the internal model to pursue is concerned. If so, the narrative that replaces it can only  serve the national interests if the entire panoply of the national  arrogance and miscues of the last 60+ years is fully understood and recognized for the impact that it had on us and the destructive influence it had on our government and our social contract.

Folly Compounding exists all around us in the form of an economic meltdown, lack of an adequate broad, health care system, a complex of military-industrial waste, medical-industrial waste and stagnation of the earning power of the Middle Class. And these are just for openers. The social contract that was established in the face of the Great Depression under FDR, has been shattered by thirty years of Reaganism and globalization, which is a euphemistic way of describing wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes to the rich. It’s as if we are taking money away from workers at home to subsidize low wages of Chinese workers. In China, WalMart is still trying to get Chinese wages lowered further to reduce labor costs and increase profits. If you look at the labor conditions in China, you realize that “labor camps” like the ones we had for blacks after the civil war are a good description of the conditions that many Chinese workers live under once they come to the big industrial centers.  One could begin this story by also talking about globalization and do so by mentioning that no single country that experienced economic expansion into a global, Western style economy, did so under the banner of free trade–everyone one of them, including Japan, South Korea and China, established their wealth by the same pathway we did–through manufacturing coupled to protected markets and regulated trade. Those countries in South America that went through the “free market” transition saw their country transformed into one of income stagnation for the Middle Class, income decline for the poor, and huge prosperity for the wealthy with the emergence of American companies who bought and sold the nationals. The introduction of this type of “free market” economy was only made possible through the “Shock Doctrine” of capitalism that Naomi Klein talks about in her book, with the IMF in full compliance for the economic changes that each country had to go through to get loans.  For the United States, it was the design of a global military hegemony that cracked the domestic code at home and progressively gave away our candy store.  Of course, that is only part of the story. Along the way to this brave new world, Americans were asked to give up their constitutional  rights, without ever fully recognizing what was being shattered in the process. With such a large and growing military, it was only natural that we would view our international problems as military problems, a view point that is unlikely to change, or will only change with a huge political fight about priorities and the causes of terrorism. As we became a more militaristic country, the roots of transparency in our government were replaced by secrecy and the  “classified” government stamp became a common way to prevent the public from knowing about embarrassing moments, all of which were described as necessary and fundamental for protecting our threatened nation.  Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy of books about the CIA and our military empire, a person who has inside knowledge of CIA operations, claims that the classification of information by the CIA is mostly to cover up embarrassing excesses of the agency. The process of surrendering our rights as citizens over the past 60+ years has become so routine and axiomatic that we no longer recognize the forces at work that have  precipitated these sea changes in our democratic system. Many who look with some insight into our strained culture of today wonder whether we are simply one terrorist attack away from a military dictatorship, with the new NorthCom of the military ready and waiting for instructions to begin policing the entire country under martial law.

Our military strategy of containment against the Soviets, led to reshaping the American corporation into what it is today, with the giant multinational corporations living under a shield of indifference towards the living conditions at home and the plight of workers in America. After all, multinationals don’t really have a home, perhaps just a place of origin and current residence, which is meaningless for their business model. Our militarism became  inseparable from our corporatism: they are now tightly bundled in a seamless package of military hardware, training foreign troops and mercenaries in America and the obligatory purchase of American made weapons and jet fighters. Hot money travels around the world destabilizing the currencies of countries, pushing them into a fiscal crisis for which they need an IMF or World Bank loan to help them right their own ship. Yet, we allow our own corporations and hedge funds to produce these destabilizing events, for in the end, there are huge sums of money to be made. Ending the Cold War had very little impact on our military expenditures or the size of our military reach. Global military hegemony was our objective after the end of WW II created by the U.S. fabrication of the Cold War with the Soviets. As soon as the Cold War was over, we saw how our global military empire has expanded through NATO and other alliances, such as we strongly bonded with Israel, even to the exclusion of our own interests in the Middle East. Though our global hegemony is beginning to unravel in some places, like South America, and perhaps Iraq, we continue to pursue the same strategy and will not stop that approach until our financial collapse makes it impossible to initiate the old reflexes.

Containment gave cover for the multinational corporatist state and the “predator state” of the modern era. It was far too easy to establish Corporatist America: our country will remain in this state until we forcefully demand a return to better days, when clarity of mission seemed so much more in evidence. The time for full citizenship activism is here. We finally have a President in the form of Barack Obama who will listen, but we need to dramatically grab his attention.  A national “New Social Contract Day,” in which we all take to the streets with our pitchforks in hand should work for openers.

We live in a government today that has gone way beyond the Old Republican insistence of  Laissez-faire into the terminal stages of Reaganism, in which the U.S. Government has become what economist James K. Galbraith refers to as the “Predator State.” It is this Corporatist America that has fused its profit motives with control of our government that most clearly defines the present iteration of our country and it has been consumerism by the middle class that has served as the primary narcotic that allowed this transition to go  smoothly, attended by very little debate.  It is the most prevalent form of cultural opium in the country today. But, despite the high level of the misery index readout and the fear that we may have to once again recalibrate the scale of our disaster, we still have a chance to save the country and return it to the one we used to have, the one that is now a somewhat distant memory. We have a President who might be able to do this, but it will only happen with great public enthusiasm and boisterousness for change.

Connecting the early dots. America started its own version of continental drift or Folly Compounding (FC) at the end of WW II, when, without warning, a dramatic shift in political power allowed the new President, Harry Truman,  to assume authority greatly in excess of what our constitution allowed. The main loss to our constitutional authority was created with the formation of the CIA and the black budgets of the military. Our constitution specifically states that Congress must review the budget, but these new federal agencies, under the control of the President, have never been publicly reviewed or discussed and their operations have been highly protected in the name of “national security.” We still do not know the exact funding level of the CIA, or the resources that go into the black budgets of the military or what that money is used for in any detail. All we know is that past performance with all the CIA blowbacks have dramatically increased the size of our military budget to engage in wars and base deployments, the full story of which has never been revealed. The CIA effectively  gave the President a covert army which carried out many military-style operations that generated  highly embarrassing revelations when they were revealed and left America with an odd understanding of its own history: while Americans were denied an understanding of what was done in their name in practically every country in the world, including those of our allies, the indigenous people against whom our actions were carried out, had no doubt who did what and the seeds were sewn for the “blowbacks” that are with us still today, the most obvious of which is 9/11. Today we have a unique feature of American culture: more people living outside the U.S. know the relevant, post-war history better than most Americans. Americans have fallen victims as a country to one that has been denied knowledge of its own history. Perhaps that is the ultimate in Folly Compounding–the lack of knowledge about the very events that are knocking on the door for solutions that we really don’t have or won’t entertain because we don’t know for sure that we did the things of which we are being accused. We don’t know, but they do.

Last year I was in Costa Rica with my wife Rosemary. We took a tour of one of San Jose with a guide, together with several other Americans.  When our guide was asked superficial questions about the relationship between Costa Rica and the United States, he give chrome-polished responses that made Americans feel good about their country. But, if you asked him privately about the history of the US and Costa Rica, he had a well full of knowledge about the Iran-Contra era and illegal bases that the U.S. established on Costa Rica’s northern region, without ever getting permission from the government of Costa Rica. Here was an individual, our tour guide, who knew far more about the role the U.S. played in South American countries than any American present, including me. I learned a lot about American interventions in Costa Rica just listening to him and later checked to see if I could corroborate his stories, most of which I found to be true, while the others I was unable to gather sufficient information to make a judgment. But, his fund of knowledge was not unusual. As Costa Ricans often say, they tend to like Americans, but not the American government.

It was under Truman’s watch that the early shape of America’s future was put into play. Truman was an innate hardliner on foreign affairs, particularly towards Russia, but a more liberal Democrat on social issues; he was a Missouri “buck stops here” kind of guy who would learn the hard way that he couldn’t have it both ways: letting in the hardliners to dominate his post-war foreign policy would let the very people in that didn’t give a damn about his domestic social policies and aspirations. That mistake would cost him his highest priority domestic objective–a single payer national health care system.  Indeed,  Truman left office puzzled and disappointed that the hard-liners had labeled his health insurance plan, which seemed like a no-brainer to him, as “socialized medicine,” the death knell for any program so labeled in that era, given the hardline attitudes that were drumming up support to confront the Soviets as an evil empire. So right away, right out of the starting gate, we turned down a health care plan and substituted it with a patch work of programs that would eventually create the medical-industrial complex that generated huge profits for some, but insufficient health care for much of the nation,  leaving 47 million Americans uninsured, as of 2009. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that 20,000 people die each year because they do not have access to medical care. Some of these stories are heart-breaking and have appeared on PBS’s Frontline in recent weeks. In one of our greatest Follies, that of choosing military containment over health care, we encouraged the development of a health care system that is unsustainable in its present form. It is one of the top priorities to get fixed: let’s hope that for the first time in our history we fix it and do it well. I think if Obama had campaigned on the slogan “Medicare for All” as Robert Kuttner has suggested, he would have been elected with a huge plebiscite, more than just a good sized victory! In many ways Obama is too cautious, uncertain about the meaning of his political victory and still afraid to confront the neoconservatives.

Truman was a dedicated American who loved the military, but was completely naive about the world around him and very untested as an international leader.   His selection as vice president for FDR’s last election run in 1943, was achieved by the hard liners of the party who feared that then vice president Henry Wallace had leanings that were too favorable towards the Russians in the post-war period. FDR had talked about a warm postwar relationship with “uncle Joe” (Joseph Stalin) but the hardliners were infected with anticommunist bias; they feared that Russia had become a superpower as a result of the war and was aggressively pursuing a takeover of the Eastern European countries (many of whom had invaded Russia during the war).  It was hard line pressure that helped  force Truman onto the ticket, displacing Wallace, who later ran as a Liberal/Progressive candidate for the presidency in 1948, but came in a distant third. One factor that determined Wallace’s defeat was his socialist leanings, as the hardliners were trying to sell the country on the communist threat that was all around us and Wallace was too far left to avoid that label. The selection of Truman as FDR’s running mate in 1943, insured that hardline attitudes would assume the Presidency if FDR died in his last term, which many party members felt was likely. Roosevelt looked terrible in 1943. He looked ashen in his face, smoked excessively, had high blood pressure and was in congestive heart failure. But, somehow he dug deep down into his reserves to try and find the energy to finish the job and live through to the end of the war. Eleanor Roosevelt in particular was looking forward to the end of the war, with her husband still at the helm. She hoped that with the war concluded, FDR could begin setting right many of the social injustices in America she had witnessed through her extensive travels which had given her a unique life outside of the normal political life of a President’s wife. On her plate were issues such as poverty and racial divide. But, Roosevelt lived only until April of 1945, just a few months after the beginning of his record fourth term. His death and the rapid transition to the Truman presidency may have been the single biggest tragedy for the postwar nation, though it has yet to be recognized as such. We are still too romantic about our history. On the other hand, Jeffrey Perret’s book “Commander-in-Chief“ goes a long way towards removing the romanticism from the presidency, replacing it with a dash of cold water in our face through a little reality testing about Truman, Johnson and G.W. Bush. One the hardliners had a foothold on the postwar course of our country, they began to shape social policies. The ultimate irony was found with LB Johnson, whose Presidency was one of great domestic progressivism, large parts of which became unraveled by his war in Vietnam, which he pursued believing that the Vietnamese were nothing more than agents of the Soviets. He was so paranoid about the mounting demonstrations against his presidency that he insisted on the FBI finding the connections between student protests and Russian agents and was frustrated when told that no such relationship existed. Johnson pursued a costly war because he swallowed our post-war mythology about the Soviets wanting to dominate the world. It was as if the first generation of hard line Republicans and Democrats created the Soviet threat and the second and succeeding generations actually believed it. Johnson was one of those–he hated communism and the Soviets he thought were responsible for threatening America.

Truman, who had never been brought into FDR’s inner circle, knew little about the policy discussions that were taking place at the time that FDR suddenly died in April, 1945. He did not know for instance  about the Manhattan project which produced the atomic bomb, despite the fact that the project was nearing its completion.  It is unclear why the Vice President was kept so peripheral to FDR’s political agenda, but then again, it was a short period of time. FDR also kept Truman at arms length during the political campaign of 1943 and Truman was surprised and disappointed that he didn’t have a campaign role of any significance.  But, within weeks of FDR’s death, Truman had started to put his hard line brand on foreign policy issues and did an abrupt turnabout in dealing with Stalin and the Russians, beginning with the issue over Poland. When the Germans opened up their second front by attacking Russia in 1942, then Senator Truman was quoted as saying “good, now we will have Germans Killing Russians and Russians killing Germans.”   He had adopted the hard line attitude towards the Russians because it was regionally endemic to do so and it was immediately apparent when he became president that he was going to tilt the country in a new direction: he was going to lurch our ship of state in a way that had never been done before.  This new direction was, not surprisingly, dominated by the military and individuals, such as James Forestall, who became the first secretary of defense after the war under Truman: he  committed suicide in 1949 by jumping out of the 13th floor of a psychiatric ward in the Bethesda Naval hospital. Many of the emerging militarists that came into authority right after the war  were  in their decision-making capacity only because of the war, not through the electoral process. It was the weakness and inexperience of Truman that allowed these people to convert their private views into public policy.  For that reason, their support of hard line attitudes against the Soviets basically turned the clock back to viewing communism as a mortal enemy to our capitalist system, reaffirming many of the attitudes that had permeated the country during WW I (especially during the Bolshevik revolution, when we sent American troops to fight on Russian soil, in support of the White Russians)  up until the beginning of WW II. It was at the onset of WW II that we had to recognize  Russia as an ally, odious as it might be to some. The two countries were strange bedfellows.  The more liberal voices left over from the FDR administration, including Henry Wallace,  were pushed to the sidelines under Truman. James Byrnes, who became Secretary of State under Truman was a hardliner who made sure that, once successfully developed, the atom bomb would be used against Japan.

One cannot underestimate the importance of the atomic bomb for promoting the cultural lurch that Truman put us through. The sudden availability and use of the atom bomb as our “gadget” for ending the war against Japan, gave us a new weapon. Initially, our military and political leaders regarded the atomic bomb as simply another weapon in the conventional arsenal of weapons, a center piece for the long struggle against the Soviets and their expansionist attitudes towards the rest of the world. The atom bomb was followed by the much more powerful hydrogen bomb and the two together became the fixation center of what we thought would give us long-term hegemony over the Russians. Leslie Groves, the army general in charge of the Manhattan project, argued that the inclusion of the bomb as part of our arsenal would give us a “40 year lead over the Russians who couldn’t build a decent jeep.” Most scientists working on the Manhattan project at the time thought it would take 5-7 years for the Russians to get their own version of the bomb. While Groves represented the military side of the Manhattan program, it was physicist Robert Oppenheimer who directed the scientific and technical aspects of the project until its completion. Later on, by inserting his objections to the development of the hydrogen bomb and trying to warn the country about the dangers of an arms race, he would be censored and removed from influence on government military policies. This was another American Folly that is now coming home to roost, for Oppenheimer’s elimination opened an unfettered path to the beginnings of the giant military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, despite the fact that Eisenhower himself had contributed to that development. With Oppenheimer out of the way, the arms race with the Soviets could begin in earnest and, as the Soviets detonated their atom bomb, followed by the hydrogen bomb, the race was on to get away from bomber delivery to missile delivery followed by  MIRVs and the weaponization of space.

To cement the public attitudes about the need for the Cold War, one cannot overemphasize the importance of George Kennan. He was a member of the Foreign Service, stationed in Moscow at the end of WW II.  Like many Americans, he was instinctively an anti-communist and viewed Soviet Communism as a source of evil and the center piece to elevate his own visibility within diplomatic circles. To this end, he sent the “Long Telegram” falsely elevating the Russian intentions about world domination, portraying the Russians as the future source of a “messianic apocalypse” and outlining his concept of “containment.” This telegram sent a shock wave through Washington. James Forestall, an Admiral in the Navy saw in Kennan a kindred spirit that could be useful for his own strategies in getting Truman to lurch the ship of state. It was Forestall, a knee jerk anticommunist, whose wife thought that the whole family was being followed by communists,  who had encouraged Truman into his early confrontation with Molotov only weeks after FDR died. Many historians look at the Molotov-Truman confrontation as the beginning of the Cold War. Forestall collaborated with George Kennan to expand his Long Telegram into an article published in 1947 in the journal Foreign Affairs, under  the psuedonym “X.” This single article probably had more to do with generating the Cold War than any other. It alarmed Washington and was taken as the gospel about the Soviet intention in dominating the world and spreading the evils of communism to the four corners of the globe. It was, as author James Carroll states in his book “House of War” “the foundational U.S. mistake of Cold War thinking.” It did not properly distinguish between nationalism and the communist rhetoric of world domination, which was, if anything meant for home consumption. Russia had just been through the most devastating war in its history, with 20 million dead, factories and production dislocated, cities demolished and huge sectors of the country experiencing starvation. Russia was in no position to begin hostile actions against anyone. In fact, Russia was demobilizing, something that the authors of “X” did not consider. But “X” achieved something that the Long Telegram did not.  When Kennan described “containment” he was referring to diplomatic containment, not military containment. But, of course Forestall took his message to mean both and for that reason, a stamp of permanence would be placed on that document as the rationale for the Cold War–it would include both diplomatic and military containment efforts.  Later George Kennan, taken into the Princeton Institute by Oppenheimer, would denounce article “X” as one which was used to advocate something he did not believe in–the need for a military component to the containment policy. Even Truman’s Secretary of State Byrnes was troubled by the confrontational approach that was being hatched by Forrestal and Kennan.  But, it was too late. The die had been cast, Truman sided with Forrestal and the Cold War had begun. But the Cold War did not change any borders. When it ended, the line demarcating the arrival of the Russian armies and the U.S. and British forces remained exactly where is was at the end of WW II. What then did the Cold War bring us?

Early during the development of the atomic bomb, several scientists wanted to share with the Russians the information on the bomb, and have oversight given to the United Nations. Russia it was argued was one of our allies and should be a partner in the development of atomic technology. Of course, the military and political leaders of the country  refused to carry out such a plan, as they conceived of a different strategy.  Once the “bomb” was safely in the arsenal, the American planners thought they had a near permanent lead over the Russians, and that the weapon itself would guarantee hegemony over them on a more or less permanent basis. The two Japanese targets for our two atom bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not selected by Truman, but by Groves and to his dying day Truman insisted that both cities were military targets; while these cities did have military troops stationed on them for defensive purposes, the bomb was targeted for the city center, not the military site. The two bombs led to rapid surrender by the Japanese, though they were allowed to retain symbolic leadership by their emperor, their only precondition for surrender before the bombs were dropped. Until the two atom bombs were used, the war against the Japanese homeland had been carried out by the air force, with fire bombing tactics designed  to kill as many civilians as possible. The atom bomb was dropped as a signal to the Russians and Groves admitted as much to the scientists working on the Manhattan project sometime before its completion. There were many attempts by scientists to end the Manhattan project after Germany had lost the war, but Groves managed to thwart those efforts and preserve military control over the weapon. Truman was the captive of the military in terms of strategy for using the new weapon, yet some generals, such as Eisenhower, were against dropping the bomb on Japanese cities. He had seen the carnage of war up close, something air force generals never get to visualize.

Following Truman,  succeeding Presidents have been less and less encumbered by Congress and over time, they have learned that a war footing for the country, a perpetual war state or threat of war, ideally positioned the President in such a way that  he is largely independent of Congress because of the Commander-in-Chief clause of our constitution: under a permanent war footing, based on burgeoning militarism, even a President’s funding demands typically received little scrutiny from Congress. This new environment was initially created by the threat of an everlasting conflict created by dividing the world into two–us and the commies. The last time that any President asked Congress to declare war was FDR and WW II. Truman’s war in Korea was a “police action” and no President since FDR has requested a declaration of war for any one of the many conflicts we have had since. In a way, Congress didn’t mind capitulating because of the presumed titanic nature of the struggle which primae facia demanded secrecy, covert armies, all supported by the black budgets of the CIA and the military. Congressional authority was cumbersome and when you are faced with a cunning enemy, someone that might be your next door neighbor, you needed to have a body of authority that could make quick decisions. You might also note that Bush’s “War on Terror” was designed to be a war without end, designed to confront a human emotion. Fortunately, Barack Obama has officially ended that war and started his own, more limited view of our objectives in the Middle East. Up until the new policy decisions of Obama, we were surely headed for a state of permanent war that Orwell effectively characterized in “1984″–only the timing was a bit off.  Bush’s intention of propagating a never ending war to align the people in favor of the new robber barons of the culture–Enron, Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, together with Blackwater, the latter of whom could make a pretty good impression of Hitler’s Brown Shirts, as they roam the streets of their assignments with impunity from prosecution. Germany in the 1930s? We are partway there–read Naomi Wolf’s articles on American fascism for a little cold water in your face.  Germany in the 1930s; many examples of Ponzi investment schemes such as that of  Bernie Madoff, whose scheme is not altogether different from that of Enron and the economic bubbles that will follow one after the other, now that the principle of Federal bailout for largess has been clearly established. None of this could happen today, if congress had not sold out so willingly and completely to start the imperial presidency through abdication of their constitutional responsibilities, such as reviewing the Federal budget. But many other constitutional freedoms have also been abandoned in favor of state control. The new Department of Homeland Security seems more like a national police force that treats demonstrators at political conventions as if they were terrorist. The introduction of secrecy and devious international schemes to manipulate or topple governments, quickly acquired its true nature and served as the secret American Mantra for our foreign policy:  from Guatemala to Iran to Vietnam to Chile, our policies were always those of supporting hard line authoritarian governments as long as they were against communism. But, of course, we had an economic subscript to all these interventions, so the profit motive was part and parcel of our foreign policy. We supported insurgencies that would topple Democratically elected governments.  And, this war on terror will be difficult for Obama to eliminate from the military roster. His declaration to end the use of  the term “war on terror,” and restrict his actions have given us the prospects of a fresh start on this theme, but these are only prospects. They haven’t reached the substance of reality. Indeed if we could somehow generate a “fresh start” it would mean putting our ship of state into reverse and going back to where we were before 9/11–a still highly militaristic culture with a massive military budget and a long list of military hardware that goes all the way back to the Cold War.

Excessive Presidential Power. The primary reason for excessive presidential power began with the false titanic struggle we created against communism. We entered into this struggle without a significant dialog or debate: we never voted on whether this issue was important to the American Public. It was a hijacking of our government institutions and the ship of state.  No one ever presented a serious alternative.  In the early days of this transition, it was virtually impossible to have a meaningful dialog on the wisdom of this abrupt change in our policies without running the risk of being labeled a traitor to your country. The right wing called all liberals communists and the “Red Scare” under McCarthy stifled any chance of debate. Heavy use of guilt was applied to anyone who doubted the value of the new war, the one that got labeled the Cold War. Most Americans were taught that Russia started the Cold War, without ever reading beyond the milk toast information to learn the real truth, that we started the Cold War, as the right-wing fanatics who had been held in check initially under FDR, suddenly now found a place in policy making and a devotee in the form of one Harry Truman: the Cold War was ours and ours alone. Today, a bronze bust  of James Forestall stands at the entrance of the Pentagon and serves as a reminder to those who understand the tragic paranoia that he inserted into our foreign policy about how few people it took to turn the heat up and produce a fifty year Cold War that became so strongly entrenched in our society, that we have had to continue our military hegemony, primarily because we don’t know how to stop. While we preached that Russia was an expansionist country after the war, Russia was in fact demobilizing–Stalin had to rebuild a badly broken country.

The essence of this article can be summarized in the following way: once we started the Cold War, we had to generate a new mythology about America and the nature of her adversaries. This new mythology, that we were locked into a titanic struggle with communism, with the very survival of our country and our society at great risk, was brought into our purview in such a way that it had a complete victory over opposing  liberals, even though FDR might well have done things very differently. For example to give Stalin reassurance, FDR promised that Russia would have control over the East European states that he had overrun at the close of the war: Churchill was opposed to this, but FDR acknowledged it as reality.  That promise included control of Poland. But, Churchill’s dislike of seeing Britain topple before his eyes as a world power, while Russia assumed the mantra of a superpower, allowed him to take advantage of Truman’s naivete once he assumed office after Roosevelt’s death. At that point Churchill was able to forge a new alliance with Truman to also aid in formulating the Cold War policy. Less than a year after the end of WW II, Churchill gave his famous “iron curtain” speech while visiting Truman in Fulton, Missouri.   But once the false narrative took hold through the force of a major propaganda effort, including the era of McCarthyism, that false narrative then produced a huge transition in Presidential power, as we now needed to rely on the President to carry out all those secret operations that we didn’t want to know anything about. It turns out that the President often didn’t know much about them sometimes either. The war-like state we put ourselves in demanded war-like powers to be assumed by the President. And, “Pow,” we were off to the races. Our style of capitalism was supposedly saved through a hundred thousand episodic assaults on our freedom, our way of government and our way of doing business. The right-wing hardliners that produced this gigantic cultural lurch must have been embarrassed about how easy it was–it was too easy. Where were the liberals? Thus the black budgets of the CIA and the military meant that we began violating our constitution from the get-go because that document calls for a periodic review by Congress of all government expenditures.  But the false narrative cleared the way for Folly Compounding on a scale that can only be appreciated now, as we are finally beginning to drum up the courage to look in the rear view mirror. It is not a pretty picture. Instead of getting a tranquil peace at the end of WW II, we got promised a new form of war of potentially seismic proportions. We lived with a supposed nuclear confrontation for forty years.  We entered into wars that we thought were proxy wars by the Russians, including Korea and Vietnam. Both those wars were unwinnable and notes from Mayo to the Presidents (Truman and Johnson: cites in Perret’s book) convinced them that if it came to a struggle between the Chinese and the Americans, we could not possibly stand up against their army of millions.  To keep the false narrative alive and Folly Compounding moving forward, many naive Presidents who were attracted by the new narrative of America as the world’s only defender of freedom, committed the country and subsequent Presidencies to military expansion and other wars against evil. So, we had Truman, whose decisions were aided by his use of drugs in the White House (as described by Geoffrey Perret’s book “Commander in Chief”), we had Johnson, whose wild excessive patriotism led him into the Vietnam War, even at the cost of destroying his own ambitious social programs; we had Nixon and Reagan who brought and defended shock capitalism and dictatorships to South American countries and finally the Bush presidents, with GW Bush  putting a frightening validity to Orwell’s 1984, as he tried to produce a permanent state of war, a war without borders and a war without end, with him as the only “decider.” A war against an emotion. Even that part of it seemed highly embarrassing to anyone familiar with the English language.

Reaganism started early. Ronald Reagan left the Democratic Party because he sensed a communist threat growing within the party and the screen actors guild of which he was the president. He married a staunch Republican in Nancy and joined the Republican Party to become its standard bearer and the birth father of Reaganism. His anti-communist ideology led him into another ideology that would be named after him, without him ever understanding how or why he did it, or what it really was.  For Reagan, Alzheimer’s was a relief from the excessive toil of looking for the right Rosetta Stone and its associated narrative. He didn’t really believe in the laffer curve and probably didn’t understand it, so Alzheimer’s was his Pepto-Bismol. Yet, all he left behind were supply-siders who believe today that our entire economy is determined by tax policy. How easy was that medication, despite the fact that it has been disproven so many times in so many ways?  But, it remains a narrative for more than half of America.

We moved from an atomic bomb military to an atomic bomb culture to an atomic bomb economy. With the development and dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,  Washington suddenly saw a way, a gift from the scientists, not the military,  to dominate the world. But, the first surrender in the new war needed to come from  the American public, including a surrender of our own constitution and the social fabric we had been weaving under FDR for a more relaxed and contemplative life. This was all accomplished too easily by too few people–a handful really.

A landslide transition into Folly Compounding. During this transitional period in which America formed a new world-wide vision of itself, right after WW II, we had to abandon our intuitive grasp of the world as we thought we knew it and get a new version,  a new narrative borrowed and time-stamped from Washington. It would be the first of many. The new world narrative was that Russia, our strong ally during  WW II, and one of the real heroic countries of Frank Capra’s documentaries in the 1940s,  “Why We Fight” had become, or more appropriately, always was, an evil monster and our mortal enemy.  According to this new view, our alliance with the Russians during WW II was an aberration, an unexpected interruption from a struggle that had to be renewed. But this time the renewal would be on our terms, for we had the secret weapon and we didn’t expect that Russia would have something similar for “forty years.” This transition all took place in a matter of weeks to months after FDR died and Truman became our Commander-in-Chief: it was a gigantic national lurch, the first in our lifetime of such magnitude. Nothing the young American culture had done before, prepared it for the mother of all lurches.  Yet, the country was subdued and in a state of shock at the time this new initiative was introduced. A horrific World War had just been completed, with 40-60 million lives lost world-wide; Russia had lost perhaps 20 million of its citizens and now Washington was telling us that a new titanic struggle for our very existence had to be undertaken. According to this silly notion, the country that was completely decimated and nearly destroyed by WW II, was now prepared to engage in treacherous acts to enslave the world and over run American capitalism. The American public was so naive about its own government, that this interpretation was accepted in short order and became the social fabric of the country. Under Truman we didn’t tear down the Pentagon, as FDR had planned, we didn’t prevent the French from going back to Vietnam, as FDR had promised and we didn’t make any attempt to understand Russia needed and in fact was entitled to have control over the border states it had conquered during the war, including some countries that had participated with Germany during the invasion of Russia and the battle of Stalingrad. The lurch led by Truman was shocking, but it would not be the last time we would face a new, counter-intuitive narrative; in this case it was much different than the world we had been prepared to live with under the national music created by FDR. The songs of FDR suggested that a tranquil, peaceful world awaited us at the end of a disastrous war. Truman would prove otherwise.

Finally, what is missing in this narrative is the more objective account of the connections that made the Cold War decision right after WW II of such momentous and determinant influence. The details need to be filled in, but the sequences are easily understood. Our lack of a national health care policy, the destruction of the New Deal, the dismantling of our financial checks and balances, the decay of prosperity of the Middle Class and the incessant reliance on war and military solutions to our problems, can all be traced to the decisions made during the early period of the Truman administration, months into FDR’s fourth term. It might have been a very different world today and we might have had a very different America if FDR had been able to serve out his fourth term in good health and vitality. We can only dream about that other parallel world that might have been.

RFM