The New York Times Magazine, January 29, 2012, cover-story by Ronen Bergman entitled “Will Israel Attack Iran?” was little short of an official communiqué from the Israeli government to the American people of its intention to attack Iran’s nuclear sites in 2012. Bergman, an Israeli journalist, interviewed “many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence” including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

At the outset of Bergman’s interview with the Defense Minister, Barak specified three sufficient conditions which had to be satisfied in order to justify an attack on Iran. These included:

1. Israel’s ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and withstand a counterattack by Iran.
2. Support from the international community, particularly from the United States, for carrying out such an attack.
3. Exhaustion of all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat.

The entire 9-page article was devoted to the presentation of evidence in support of the efficacy, international legitimacy, and necessity of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. Given that the three sufficiency conditions for attack have all been satisfied, it was hardly surprising that Bergman concluded his piece by saying, “I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

The fact that such a provocative article, based on interviews with high-ranking Israeli officials, with such terrifying implications, appeared as the cover-page article of The New York Times Magazine should not be taken lightly by anyone. Is there any reason to believe that its intended purpose was anything other than to send a very direct message to the people of the United States from Tel Aviv? “Prepare for war!”

After Israel takes out the nuclear sites, then what?

Will Iran retaliate by closing down the Strait of Hormuz and possibly the oil production in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Iraq?

Will NATO respond by annihilating Tehran?

For how long will China and Russia pretend that this is not a blatant threat to their national security? How will they respond – militarily, economically, or both?

What will be the impact on the global economy?

President Obama is fond of saying “All options are on the table.” What options does he have in mind?

Are these same options on the table for China and Russia? Which options will they choose?

What’s the endgame?

Thomas H. Naylor

January 28, 2012

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

Kirkpatrick Sale

Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

Morris Berman

Wiley. 2011

Why America Failed, which this book is not about, is nonetheless a devastating and eviscerating critique proving convincingly that America has failed, and abominably, even tragically.  That makes it a very important book that I hope will find an attentive audience, particularly among those of the media and intelligentsia who need to understand its truths and rid themselves of the increasingly common idea that there is some kind of palliative that will reform and restore American government to some imagined efficient and democratic past. (Please copy, Occupiers, Tea Partyers, Tenthers, and all Democrats,etc.)

I cannot overemphasize how essential this wisdom is to any comprehension of America today, or tomorrow, or how powerfully Morris Berman (an academic historian who has emigrated to Mexico) makes his case.  It is not a long book (196 pages, plus backmatter), but it is replete with overwhelming evidence to support the thesis, as he puts it on his first page:

The principal goal of North American civilization, and of its inhabitants, is and always has been an ever-expanding economy—affluence—and endless technological innovation—”progress.” A nation of hustlers, writes [Walter] McDougall, a people relentlessly on the make.

From the very start, from the Puritans’ shining “city on a hill” and the Jamestown settlement’s conquest and exploitation of Indian lands, this country has been about making and taking, a business culture with a commercial orientation, devoted to growth and power, wealth and property, private advancement and profit, militarism and materialism, expansion and empire. John Adams saw it at the beginning: the U.S. was “more Avaricious than any other Nation that ever existed.”   Or as de Tocqueville was to say later:   “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”

Let it be acknowledged that, given this as its goal and ideal, this nation has done pretty well.  It is in most terms rich and powerful (let us discount the fact that we are $16 trillion in debt and wiped out $14 trillion in household wealth in the last crash), full of comforts and conveniences, food and shelter and plumbing and heat for most, high-tech gadgetry and systems, a developed (if crumbling) infrastructure coast to coast, the largest military in the world, the world’s fall-back currency, an unmatched service industry, and all the rest of what makes up a modern industrial capitalist nation.

But what Berman shows, in fascinating detail, is that with all that concentration on hustling, which makes up our entire lives for our lives, is that we have lost a sense of the public good in the face of private interest, an understanding of community in the face of aggravated individualism, a sense of spiritual well-being in the face of material pressure and stress, an appreciation of the simple life in the face of technological complexity, even a true sense of republicanism and the political commonwealth in the face of  manipulative and intrusive oligarchy and political individual wealth.  Much of what we still think of as in some way valuable—stability rather than progress, face-to-face instead of on-line, family and friends instead of networks and “friends,” craftsmanship instead of mass production, virtue and tradition and honor and simplicity rather than egotism and modernity and self-interest and multi-tasking, gemeinschaft instead of gesellshaft—much of that has been quite lost in the dominant hustling culture.

Not only that, but we have acquired a host of evils and sorrows along with material prosperity.  Berman compiles a whole raft of rather depressing facts that show what the downside of the technocommerial society is: mass unemployment, foreclosures, increasing poverty for the many (with corporate bailouts and bonuses for the egregious few); a criminal culture with the highest rate of homicide in the world and a corrections system that contains 25 per cent of all the world’s prisoners; a high incidence of violence throughout the culture, including crime, domestic violence, and warfare, along with movies, TV, and video games; a social numbness and clinically diagnosed “empathy deficit disorders”; consumption of two-thirds of the global market in antidepressants with at least 164 million users; a rank on the worldwide Happy Planet Index in 2009 of 150^th; fully 25 per cent of American households had only one person, a rate of aloneness probably the highest in the world. Or, as Berman puts it at one point:

The culmination of a hustling, laissez-faire capitalist culture is that everything gets dumbed down, that all significant questions are ignored, and that every human activity is turned into a commodity, and anything goes if it sells. What we have is domination by corporate media, politics via poll-driven sound bites, a foreign policy based on unilateralism and preemptive strikes, a failing newspaper industry, a poorly informed citizenry, the unemployed winding up destitute, weak (or no) mass transit systems, and a health care system that ranks thirty-seventh in the world.  The emperor, and the empire, have no clothes.

Berman spends a good deal of time talking about the “alternative culture” to all this, including “a commitment to craft, community, the public good, the natural environment, spiritual practice, and the ‘simple life,” and he shows that its adherents and champions have existed all along, though of course overwhelmed by the dominant culture.  He cites, for example, Thoreau, Melville, Henry Adams, Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ruskin and Morris and the craft movement, Eric Fromm, Lewis Mumford (on whom he justly spends many pages), the Southern Agrarians, Robert Redfield, Vance Packard, William A. Williams, Marcuse, Ellul, Roszak, Schumacher, Lasch, Wendell Berry, and more recently Jerry Mander, Langdon Winner, Neil Postman, and somewhat surprisingly Ted Kaczynski. This is a distinguished bunch, and they are known today because the work they did was careful and trenchant and exposed powerfully the ills of a material society, but, as Berman notes when talking about Mumford, in the end “you can’t get taken seriously if you point this out.”  How well I know.

And so the alternative culture, though it has always existed on the fringe, and still does even now, has never seriously derailed the steamengine of the hustler civilization nor in fact even slowed it down perceptively.  In fact that civilization will always take steps to marginalize it, even destroy it if necessary, a fact that Berman illustrates in a chapter on the antebellum South.  He shows how the South was “the one example we have of an opponent of [the dominant] ideology that had real political teeth,” and blatantly opted for a life premodern (indeed “neofeudal”), agrarian, slow, conservative, and honoring tradition, honor, chivalry, and hospitality more than making a buck or inventing a gadget.  This ultimately the increasingly industrial and expansive North could not stand and so began a war to destroy it. “The treatment of the South by the North,” Berman says, “was the template for the way the United States would come to treat any nation it regarded as an enemy: not merely a scorched earth policy, but also a ’scorched soul’ policy” that it would use in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else it could achieve it.

Which is why in the end Berman concludes that nothing will ever change our hustling civilization and all attempts at trying to replace it are fruitless: “I regard the fantasy of a recovered future as pure drivel.”  He sees, instead, that it is headed toward inevitable collapse, and not too many decades away.  He quotes a U.S. intelligence report from the Washington Post that predicts “a steady decline” in American dominance in the coming decades, the country eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas,” to which he adds, “Nothing could be more obvious.”

In a rare moment of optimism he goes on to say, “Collapse could be a good thing” if it could ultimately “open the door to the alternative tradition,” a process he admits is “a long shot.”  And here he suggests, and wins my heart as he does so, that one means to that is secession, which holds promise precisely because it has given up on trying to change the industrial society as a whole, across the nation, and picks instead smaller places (such as Vermont) where some version of the alternative tradition might be realized.  At the present time, he says, “this project doesn’t have a hope in hell,” but “in thirty or forty years, it may not seem so far-fetched.”

Well, it may take a generation, but I don’t think so.  The collapse will come sooner than we realize—I have predicted within a decade—and  it will open up secession (or some equivalent such as city-states or medieval walled cities) as the only possible opportunity for a new society with new human-scale alternatives.  I’m not predicting it, mind you,  I’m just saying it’s the only way to go.

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of a dozen books, including Human Scale and Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, and is the Director of the Middlebury Institute for the study of separation, secession, and self-determination.

With the publication of his courageous new book, Why America Failed (John Wiley, 2012), Morris Berman has become one of the very first well-known, left-wing writers to acknowledge that not only is the American Empire in decline, but that it is completely unfixable.  In Berman’s view there will be no rabbit pulled out of the hat at the eleventh hour to save the nation, because “the hat is coming apart at the seams.”

Unlike most of the liberal pundits such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Michael Parenti, Rachel Maddow, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes, Amy Goodman, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, and Paul Krugman, to mention only a few, Berman has given up on America.

According to Berman the seeds of the Empire’s destruction were sewn in the sixteenth century by the early European settlers who were, above all, into “hustling” – looking out for number one.  Ever since then, “hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others” have provided the dominant theme of the American culture.  He or she who dies with the most toys wins the game.  Enough never seems to be quite enough.

The hustler’s credo is “Teach me how to be a moneymaking, moneyspending machine.”  Most hustlers are obsessed with having – owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth.  Through having they try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world.  Their compulsive desire to have leads straight to technofascism – affluenza, technomania, cybermania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.

In response to their insatiable psychological and sensory needs, those who are into having often exhibit behavior patterns which are aggressive, competitive, and antagonistic.  To have something is to take charge of it or to conquer it.  Robbing, destroying, overpowering, and consuming are all forms of having.  Those in the having mode are afraid of losing what they possess either to someone else or to the government or possibly through death.

As a nation we are so obsessed with hustling that we have lost our ability to be human beings.  Our happiness depends mostly on our superiority over others, our power, and our ability to manipulate others.  Capitalist America may be the most efficient and productive nation in the world, but it extracts a high human cost.  Conspicuous consumption is no longer a sign of our success, but rather of our spiritual vacuum.  America has lost its soul.

To cope with the powerlessness and our fear of nothingness, many of us spend our entire lives pretending we are invincible.  One of the ways in which we try to convince ourselves that we will live forever is through conspicuous consumption.  We think we can spend our way into a state of never-ending self-actualization without paying any psychological dues for our life of unrestrained pleasure.  We live by the slogan, “I’ve got mine, Jack.”

Even though we live in a period of unprecedented prosperity, it is also the time of the living dead.  Many affluent Americans who deny themselves virtually nothing in the way of material satisfaction seem to be more dead than alive.  As novelist Walker Percy once said, “There is something worse than being deprived of life; it is being deprived of life and not knowing it.”

Many of us behave as though we were spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually dead.  The living dead can be found everywhere – surfing the Internet, checking their e-mail, texting, day trading, glued to Fox News hoping for an event in an otherwise uneventful life, driving alone across town to Wal-Mart in search of more low-priced plastic yuck, stopping at McDonald’s for a quick taste-fee meal, feigning interest in a mindless bureaucratic job, and viewing Dirty Housewives of New York on BRAVO.  Our government, our politicians, and the high priests of Corporate America pull our strings.

Our entire economy is driven by our intense psychological need to fill our spiritual and emotional vacuum with more stuff and our illusion that the accumulation of wealth and material possessions can provide meaning to life.  If we feel down and need a lift, we buy a new dress, have dinner in a nice restaurant, or rent a video.  The less meaning we have in our life the easier it is to be seduced by the materialistic work hard, play hard, be happy syndrome – a syndrome that is based on a lie.

As Berman points out, most American hustlers are always in a big hurry.  It is as though they are in a race to nowhere!

Berman devotes an entire chapter to what he calls the “illusion of progress” and the relationship between technology and progress.  He views technology as a kind of “hidden religion” linked to the notion of  “unlimited progress” and the “perfectibility of man.”  It supplies the “social glue” which hustling alone is unable to provide.

Flying across the Atlantic in a giant jumbo jet engenders feelings of freedom, power, and control – not unlike the feelings experienced by Apollo astronauts, B-2 bomber pilots, high-speed race car drivers, physicians conducting high-tech medical procedures, and genetic engineers creating designer plants, farm animals, and even babies.  High-precision automobiles, high-tech musical instruments, telecommunication satellites, home computers, cell phones, and the Internet all make us feel like we are in charge.  Although technology may increase efficiency, reduce drudgery, and improve the quality of life, it is also one of the most powerful metaphors for the illusion of control.

For some, technology provides more freedom, more time, and an increased sense of community.  For others it sucks up time, reduces freedom, and destroys community.  Technology makes some of us faster, smarter, and richer.  It makes others more materialistic and contributes to our alienation.  Is technology our personal slave, or are we slaves to technology?

Passengers on board Swissair Flight 111 bound for Zurich from New York on the evening of September 2, 1998, thought they were in control of their destiny, when their MD-11 plunged into the Atlantic near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia even though the pilot and the co-pilot spent the final minutes of the doomed flight arguing over whether to fly the smoke-filled plane by the book or by instinct.  John F. Kennedy, Jr., may have thought he was in control of his high-tech, Piper Saratoga when he dove it into the sea off Martha’s Vineyard.  In reality, they were in control of nothing – nothing at all. Swissair filed for bankruptcy three years later.

We place infinite faith in high-tech global communication systems, megacomputer networks, communication satellites, international electric power grids, high-speed planes and trains, and high-precision automobiles.  They are our gods!

To assuage their existential pain caused by the human condition, many are easily seduced by technology – particularly big technology.  Still others use technology such as the electronic media, computers, computer software, and the Internet to manipulate millions of adults and children alike.  “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” sang Janis Joplin in “Me and Bobby McGee.”

We don’t just embrace new technologies, we place them on a pedestal and worship them – always in the name of progress.  The automobile, television, nuclear power, the space program, high-tech weapon systems, the personal computer, and the Internet have all been viewed with God-like awe – the next panacea.  It is as though the frontier spirit of the Old West has been reincarnated in the form of high-tech euphoria.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Why America Failed is the one on the American South.  Berman argues that, notwithstanding the slavery and racism (which he abhors) that existed there, the Antebellum South with its agricultural economy and its traditional culture provided the only alternative to the dominant high-speed, high-stress, high-tech, imperialistic, industrial culture found elsewhere in the United States.  Before the Civil War, the Rural South represented a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized, mass-production, mass-consumption, narcissistic lifestyle that was beginning to permeate most of the rest of America – an alternative to the politics of money, power, speed, greed, and progress.  The Antebellum South discovered the joys of simple living long before simple living came back in vogue in the 1990s.

The real tragedy of the Civil War was that it was not possible to find an alternative way to end the scourge of slavery which did not result in the deaths of 625,000 individuals.  It was a classic case of throwing out the baby (traditional culture) with the bath water (slavery).  What was at stake in the Civil War was nothing less than the clash of two radically different civilizations according to Berman.

Throughout its history America has tried to “fix” traditional societies which it perceived to be obstacles to progress.

What the North did to the South is really the model of what America in general did and does to “backward” (i.e., traditional) societies, if it can.  You wipe out almost the entire indigenous population of North America; you steal half of Mexico; you literally vaporize a large chunk of the Japanese population; you bomb Vietnam “back to the Stone Age” (in the words of Curtis LeMay); you “shock and awe” Iraqi civilians, and so on.

Berman’s chapter on the South is the most insightful piece I have ever read about the region where I spent over a half century of my life.  It reads like a tragic Southern novel entitled What Might Have Been, But Could Never Be.

Most books about the decline of the American Empire conclude with a “happy chapter” explaining how some stupid idea such as campaign finance reform, banning corporate personhood, or a return to the Constitution will guarantee eternal bliss.  Berman makes it very clear that his book has no “happy chapter” because the endgame is not going to be very pretty.

Berman describes life in the United States as vapid, utterly meaningless, and without heart.  “The United States has run out of steam. ”

The culmination of a hustling, laissez-faire capitalist culture is that everything gets dumbed down; that all significant questions are ignored,  and that every human activity is turned into a commodity, and anything goes if it sells.  What we have is domination by corporate media, politics via poll-driven sound bites, a foreign policy based on unilateralism and preemptive strikes, a failing newspaper industry, a poorly informed  citizenry, the unemployed winding up destitute, weak (or no) mass transit system, and a health care system that ranks thirty-seventh in the world.

In 2006, long before things got really bad, Berman concluded that he had, in effect, “outlived his country,” and fled to Mexico.  Just in case you don’t want to escape to Mexico, almost as an afterthought, Berman offers his readers a long shot alternative.  But for that you will have to read the book.

Thomas H. Naylor

January 10, 2012

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

“If you could rape someone, who would it be?”  That was the question which appeared on a survey circulated by members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity at the University of Vermont recently which went viral on the Internet.  UVM had once again lived up to its reputation as a place where wealthy kids from the Northeast, who can’t get into Ivy League schools, can come play in the snow for four years.

But why was this a surprise to anyone familiar with UVM’s culture of violence which dates back at least twenty years?  Who could ever forget the 1999 “elephant walk” in which freshmen members of the UVM ice hockey team were forced to wear women’s underwear, drink warm beer and liquor until they vomited, and parade around like circus elephants holding each other’s genitals? This incident resulted in suspension of the hockey season that year and the resignation of the University’s president.

Back in the early 90s alcohol was a contributing factor in the deaths of four UVM students in five years.  For all too many UVM students their motto is, “You can’t believe how drunk I got last night.”  More recently four officers of another UVM fraternity were charged with violating the state’s new hazing law enacted after the 1999 UVM ice hockey scandal.

UVM’s affinity for violence was reaffirmed by the announcement that it had entered into a partnership with the U.S. government-owned Sandia National Laboratories, known best for the fact that it designs, builds, and tests nuclear weapons.  Although Sandia’s research at UVM will not involve weapons of mass destruction, no one seems to care whether UVM is being used by Sandia to help legitimize its real business, instruments of death.  UVM will receive $9 million from Sandia.  Money still speaks.

Like most universities in the United States, UVM has an active ROTC program whose aim is to train professional killers to support the American Empire’s policy of full spectrum dominance.  Many ROTC students have four-year scholarships.  Upon graduation they agree to go anywhere in the world to which they are assigned by Uncle Sam to kill in the name of the State.  Ironically, UVM also has a premier medical school committed to saving lives rather than destroying them.

And then there is the case of Major General Michael Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard.  For his role in sending young Vermonters to faraway places such as Afghanistan and Iraq to kill or be killed on behalf of the Empire, General Dubie was awarded an honorary UVM doctorate degree by the Board of Trustees.

The most exasperating aspect of UVM’s culture of violence is the indifference expressed towards it by the UVM board of trustees, administration, faculty, and students.  Neither General Dubie’s honorary degree nor the Sandia Corporation were ever discussed by the UVM Faculty Senate.  At most reputable universities, honorary degrees have to be approved by the faculty’s governing body.  Not so at UVM.

The real issue facing UVM is not the Sigma Phi Epsilon rape survey question, but rather how many unreported rapes have there been at UVM over the past twenty years as a result of the University’s benign neglect of its culture of violence?

Thomas H. Naylor

December 26, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

Aric McBay and Lierre Keith’s provocative new book Deep Green Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2011) should be required reading for every Occupy Wall Street sympathizer worldwide.  Disguised as a book about global warming and the demise of life on the planet earth, this book is little short of a handbook for revolution to dismantle the global industrial economy.  It also represents a frontal assault against technofascism – affluenza, technomania, cybermania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.

Appropriately, the preface of Deep Green Resistance was written by radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame.  The authors want to stop global warming, end globalized exploitation of the poor, and stop the planet from being devoured alive.  They actually want to bring down civilization.  According to Jensen, bringing down civilization means “depriving the rich of their ability to steal form the poor, and it means depriving the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.”  McBay and Keith add that it also means “thoroughly destroying the political, the social, physical, and technological infrastructure that not only permits the rich to steal and the powerful to destroy, but rewards them for doing so.”  That’s a lot!

The rationale underlying Deep Green Resistance is as follows:

Humans aren’t going to do anything in time to prevent the planet from being destroyed wholesale.  Poor people are too preoccupied by primary emergencies, rich people benefit from the status quo, and the middle class (rich people by global standards) are too obsessed with their own entitlement and the technological spectacle to do anything.  The risk of runaway global warming is immediate.  A drop in the human population is inevitable, and fewer people will die if collapse happens sooner.

McBay and Keith fully grasp the fact that just as the global industrial economy is not fixable in its present form, so too is the United States government unfixable.  Unlike the Occupy Wall Streeters, they have not been taken in by spurious left-wing reform proposals such as campaign finance reform and laws curbing corporate personhood.  Also to their credit, the authors have neither been seduced by pop environmentalists such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben nor the feel good Transition Town movement.

In the first section of the book Lierre Keith sketches out the moral, philosophical, and political underpinnings of Deep Green Resistance.  Her crisp, clear, radical, cogent message has real bite.  There is no doubt about where she stands.

In the second and third sections of the book Aric McBay outlines a series of alternative actions all aimed at “bringing down civilization.”  Some of these actions are acts of omission such as strikes, boycotts, embargoes, tax resistance, conscientious objection, civil disobedience, mutiny, and insubordination.  Others are acts of commission which may be as benign as lobbying, protests, and public education.  But some are not so benign.  These include obstruction, occupation, material destruction, and even violence against humans.  Basically, what McBay is all about is teaching his readers how to plan, organize, and execute a revolution.

In spite of my enthusiasm for this hard-hitting, compelling book, I do have two rather serious reservations about it.  Although I have sympathy with the goal of dismantling the global industrial economy, the global economy is a pretty diffuse target.  It is effectively controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America through their proxy the United States government.  To be quite blunt the role of the U.S. Government is to impose the will of its masters on the rest of the world.

If you want to bring down global capitalism, you target Wall Street and Corporate America, just as the Occupy Wall Streeters are doing.  The focus should be on dissolving the American Empire, the root cause of most of the world’s environmental problems and global warming.  The American Empire is too big, too powerful, too undemocratic, too materialistic, too environmentally irresponsible, too racist, too militaristic, and too violent.  Unfortunately, much of the rest of the world still chooses to emulate its behavior.  When the Empire falls, so too will global capitalism.

My second reservation with Deep Green Resistance stems from its endorsement of violence against humans.  Virtually every political leader throughout history who has ever led his nation into war has framed the problem of war versus peace as one in which there are only two choices.  Either risk being the victim or become the executioner.  McBay and Keith come dangerously close to this position.  In their view we either bring down civilization, even if it involves human violence, or civilization will destroy us all.  French writer Albert Camus argued that such a choice is no choice at all.  We always have the option of refusing to be either the victim or the murderer.

In 1989 Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland brought down their communist regimes nonviolently within a few months of each other.  Romania was the bloody exception to the rule.  Two years later the Soviet Union imploded nonviolently.

Engaging in violence against the American Empire, the most powerful empire in history, would be an exercise in utter futility.

I believe there is much to be learned from Deep Green Resistance, but McBay and Keith should reconsider their position on violence against humans.

Thomas H. Naylor

December 5, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

The euro is going down and will most likely take the 17 nation euro zone with it, if not the entire 27 nation European Union.  Or maybe it will be the other way around?  Does it really matter?

Having never recovered from the 2008 recession, the collapse of the euro will drive the U.S. economy deeper into the quagmire of more unemployment, negative economic growth, schizophrenic fiscal policy, Congressional gridlock, inflationary monetary policy, double-digit interest rates, and the rout of the dollar.  Is it possible that whatever the White House, the Congress, or the Fed may do will make not one whit of a difference?

To deflect public opinion away from their incompetence and corruption the White House, the Congress, the Fed, the European Central Bank, and all of the political leaders of Europe need an international scapegoat.  What could be better than a war against some unpopular rogue state such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela whose leader is considered by many Americans to be demonic.

Enter Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bearing gifts for American and European political leaders. “Have I got a deal for you,” says Netanyahu.  “Why don’t NATO and its Arab allies take out the nuclear weapons program of the terrorist state of Iran?  It would divert the attention of the American and European people away from their economic woes.  Everyone (except the Iranians) would gain.”

With the demise of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Muammar Qadhafi, there are few alleged demons left with whom to wage war.  Bringing down Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would significantly enhance Barack Obama’s chances for re-election in 2012 and help preserve the political status quo in Europe despite the economic turmoil.

And then what?  Iran is no Iraq.  This would not be kid’s stuff.  For starters, Iran has some very influential friends, not the least of which are Russia and China, who would be unamused by such an attack.

Unless the NATO strikes severely inhibit Iran’s ability to respond militarily, one could expect almost instantaneous retaliation by Iran in the Persian Gulf, closing down the Strait of Hormuz as well as oil production in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq.  This would effectively shut down the global economy.  If Iran were not in a position to respond militarily, then either Russia or China would likely do so.  They would perceive an attack on Iran to be a major threat to their national security.  China could always opt to pull the plug on the trillion dollar or so investment which it holds in U.S. Treasury bonds sending the U.S. economy into an even further death spiral.  China could also offer to help refinance the European economy thus driving a permanent wedge between Europe and the United States.  Russia might cut off the supply of natural gas to Europe as well.

And if Russia or China retaliates on behalf of Iran, how might the United States respond?  I think it is quite likely that the American Empire would launch missile strikes against Moscow or Beijing depending on the circumstances.  And since the White House and the State Department love to proclaim that all options will be on the table, one cannot rule out the possible deployment of nuclear weapons by missiles targeted at Moscow and Beijing.

Could this be the beginning of the endgame?  If so, so what?

Maybe Meursault, the Algerian clerk who narrated Albert Camus’s famous novel The Stranger and who was sentenced to death for murdering an Arab, said it all upon the death of his mother:

Mother died today.  Or, maybe, yesterday;

I can’t be sure.  The telegram from the Home

says:  YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY.

FUNERAL TOMORROW.  DEEP SYMPATHY.

Which leaves the matter doubtful;

it could have been yesterday.

Thomas H. Naylor

November 26, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

Notwithstanding the fact that I am a strong supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I believe that two of the ideas embraced by many of its adherents, corporate personhood and political campaign finance reform, are complete no brainers which will lead the movement nowhere.

Corporate personhood refers to the fact that over the past half century or so corporations have managed, in the eyes of the law, to acquire for themselves many of the rights heretofore associated only with humans.  The veracity of this statement is unassailable, but so what?

To curb the power of megacorporations those concerned about corporate personhood have proposed a series of constitutional amendments and changes in the law aimed at making it easier to control their behavior.  These same political activists also advocate political campaign finance reform as a complementary tool for reining in large corporations.  There is only one problem with these Pollyannaish proposals.  Our government is owned, operated, and controlled by Corporate America and Wall Street, who like things just the way they are.  There will be no constitutional amendments or legal changes limiting the rights of corporations.  Meaningful campaign finance reform is utter fantasy.

Unfortunately, all too few of the Occupy Wall Street supporters have come to terms with the fact that the U.S. Government is fundamentally unfixable.  They fail to realize that because of its sheer size, the United States is unsustainable, ungovernable, and, therefore, unfixable.  Just as it was impossible to manage 280 million people in the Soviet Union from one central bureau in Moscow, so too is it impossible to manage 310 million people from Washington.  The United States is simply too big to manage.

Given the lack of feasibility of political reform, that leaves us with only two options – rebellion or peaceful dissolution, otherwise known as secession.  In the words of Kirkpatrick Sale,

So far the level of dissent with the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession–thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of  “homeland security” and to the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor.

Just as armed rebellion gave birth to the United States in 1776, so too could some combination of stock market meltdown, economic depression, crippling unemployment, monetary crisis, skyrocketing crude oil prices, double-digit inflation and interest rates, soaring federal deficits and trade imbalances, curtailment of social services, repeated terrorist attacks, return of the military draft or environmental catastrophe precipitate a violent twenty-first century revolution against Wall Street, Corporate America, and the U.S. Government.  However, we also reject this option, because we are opposed to all forms of violence.

There is, then, just one viable option:  peaceful dissolution, which might plausibly be initiated by the secession of states like Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, or Vermont.  Secession represents the only morally defensible response to the American Empire.

The Occupy Wall Street movement just might create a window of opportunity for a new world disorder – a disorder that rejects cant and dogma; a disorder that fosters creativity, possibility, and seething human enterprise; a disorder, most importantly, that promotes the decentralization of governance.  The term we use to describe this new world disorder is, genteel revolution.

The sooner the Occupy Wall Streeters figure out that the Empire is not fixable, the better off we will all be.

Thomas H. Naylor

October 27, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

The most compelling take away image from a visit to Zuccotti Park, home of the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement, is the almost unbelievable amount of global energy emanating from such a tiny plot of real estate.  How is it possible for the ideas of so few people camped out in a nondescript park in lower Manhattan to spread to hundreds of towns and cities in dozens of countries worldwide giving rise to an international revolt against Wall Street, Corporate America, and the American Empire in just one month?  What has happened there is truly amazing!

What is at stake is nothing less than the fate of two intertwined world class lies – the myth of American exceptionalism and the myth of global capitalism.

“We are the greatest nation in the world,” so say most Americans, “the home of the free and the land of the brave.”  But the message from Liberty Plaza is, “What about the materialism, the greed, the inequality, the unemployment, the poverty, the environmental degradation, the racism, the cronyism, the corruption, the militarism, and the violence?”

The Occupy Wall Street movement is the moral equivalent of the complete and utter denunciation of the myth of American exceptionalism.  The message is loud and clear, “The emperor truly has no clothes.”  It’s all a big lie!

That this message has gone viral on the Internet should come as a surprise to no one.  The only surprise is why it took so long to do so.

Not only is the American dream under attack by OWS but the entire American way of life as well.  America’s image abroad has taken a huge hit.  It was not by chance alone that President Barack Obama recently announced that all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by yearend.

Also under siege by the OWS movement is the myth of globalization.  Globalization refers to the integrated international system of mass production, mass marketing, mass distribution, mass consumption, mega financial institutions, and global communications.  Such a network of markets, transnational companies, and information technologies effectively eliminates the need for national political boundaries, since money, capital, goods, services, and people flow freely across national borders.  Political and economic power are transferred from nation-states to transnational megacompanies accountable only to themselves.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street and Corporate America have declared that globalization is good.  Economists justify globalization on the basis of the so called “trickle down effect,” in which the benefits of global trade to the superwealthy are said to eventually trickle down to the poor.

To support globalization and to minimize public scrutiny, government regulation, and the possibility of prosecution Wall Street created a Frankenstein-like monster financial system.  It consists of a complex, ingenious, international network of hedge funds, derivative contracts, credit default swaps, and exchange-traded funds all based on sophisticated mathematical models.  This greed driven maze is supported by a network of interconnected financial institutions linking every country to every other country and everyone to everyone else.  So complex is this unwieldy behemoth that literally no one understands how the separate components fit together. So long as it worked and Wall Street was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, no one complained.  But once the system was broken, neither Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank, nor the Treasury knew how to fix it.  As the Federal Government began pumping hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout funds into the system, no one wanted to acknowledge that it was simply too big, too complex, too inflexible, and too conducive to mismanagement and fraud.

Wall Street protestors and their international collaborators have also figured out that the trickle down effect of globalization is a sham – a fantasy given academic legitimacy by University of Chicago economists and vigorously promoted by the last five U.S. presidents starting with Reagan.  The problem with this remarkably oversold, egregious system is that the rich get richer worldwide and the poor get poorer.  It also encourages the dehumanization of labor and Wal-Mart like race-to-the-bottom wages and fringe benefits.

By exposing the fraudulent nature of American exceptionalism and globalization and broadcasting it to the rest of the world, the Occupy Wall Street movement has taken on a life of its own.  Could it become the American equivalent of the Polish Solidarity movement or the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution?

It is hardly surprising that the protestors have been denied access to Wall Street itself by the New York Police Department.  One can only imagine the international impact of several thousand demonstrators in front of the New York Stock Exchange, the icon of global capitalism.  Such an event has the potential to spawn the moral and political equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  Just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of communism, so too could a group of Wall Street demonstrators completely destabilize global markets sending a chilling effect through the entire international financial system by temporarily blocking the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange.  It would matter not that the Exchange has backup facilities elsewhere.  The symbolism would be truly monumental in scope.

What started with a bunch of scruffy, New York hippies sleeping in an obscure park and ridiculed by most of the media, has evolved into what could become a global game changing force.  OWS is no longer kid’s stuff, and no one understands this better than New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  The real question is what happens when the White House and the Congress figure this out too?

Thomas H. Naylor

October 25, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

Having been to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, interviewed some of its temporary inhabitants, and marched in solidarity with them, I view myself as an enthusiastic supporter of the Wall Street Occupation (WSO) movement.  Because the movement is so broad based in scope, it has the potential to have much greater impact on the United States than either the Civil Rights or Anti-Vietnam movements.

Notwithstanding the fact that some of its critics have suggested it needs a more concrete list of demands and should be better integrated into the traditional political process, the WSO movement has gotten a lot of things right.  For example, most of its supporters understand that:

1. The U.S. Government has lost its moral authority.  It is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America.
2. Our government is run by and for the benefit of the rich.
3. We have a single political party disguised as a two-party system.  Both parties are on life support machines.
4. The U.S. economy is broken and neither the Obama administration, the Republicans, nor the Federal Reserve Bank know how to fix it.

The fact that the WSO is not integrated into the mainstream political process is one of its strengths, not a liability.

Unfortunately, many WSO supporters seem to believe that the United States Government is still fixable.  They fail to realize that because of its size, the United States is unsustainable, ungovernable, and, therefore, unfixable.  Just as it was impossible to manage 280 million people in the Soviet Union from one central bureau in Moscow, so too is it impossible to manage 310 million people from Washington.  The United States is simply too large.

Because the U.S. Government is so big, it is also too powerful, too undemocratic, too insular, too environmentally destructive, too militaristic, too violent; and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and local communities.

Regrettably, many of those in the WSO movement subscribe to the view that campaign finance reform will solve all of our problems.  Nothing is further from the truth.  Those who control our government, Wall Street and Corporate America, like things just the way they are.  Meaningful campaign finance reform is pure fantasy – an impossible dream.

In due course, the supporters of the Wall Street Occupation movement will figure out that the United States is not only ungovernable but also unfixable.

But a word of caution to these idealistic revolutionaries.  Avoid like the plague allowing your movement to be co-opted by the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, George Soros’s moveon.com, or political opportunists such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  Also, resist the temptation to get in bed with some particular political ideology.  No political ideology can save America from itself.

The Wall Street Occupation movement could be onto something very big – a paradigm shift in the way Americans view the political process.  Is it possible to create a window of opportunity which might be open to heretofore unimaginable political options such as radical decentralization, Internet based direct democracy, secession, and even peaceful dissolution?  Is this the beginning of a degree of radicalization not seen in America since the end of the war in Vietnam?

Thomas H. Naylor

October 17, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

In late 1999, 50,000 longshoremen, steelworkers, environmentalists, animal-rights activists, consumer advocates, Canadians, pacifists, anarchists, isolationists, French cheesemakers, Free Tibet fans, and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence marched on downtown Seattle disrupting the highly secretive meetings of the World Trade Organization.  The so-called “Battle of Seattle” was a repudiation of the policies enacted by President Bill Clinton over the previous seven years.  Clinton, who pretended to be a liberal Democrat, had granted conservative Republicans their every wish – NAFTA, welfare reform, banking deregulation, globalization, and unrestricted economic growth.  Also, every time he needed a blip in the polls, which was often, he would bomb some country – Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, or Serbia.

Throughout the 90s one of the few voices against the American Empire and its underlying ideology, technofascism, was the radical, heavy metal, hip-hop band known as “Rage Against the Machine.”

Rage provided a vivid reminder that since the Cold War had ended, there had been little organized dissent in America protesting our dehumanized, globalized, mass-market, over consumption, technology-driven society.  Its highly politicized, revolutionary music was a parody of the American Empire which it portrayed as “The Machine.”  Racism, poverty, greed, colonialism, and imperialism were targets of the band’s rage.  Rage Against the Machine was the band of choice of many of those on the streets of Seattle.

The band’s CD, Evil Empire, was not about the Soviet Union.  An upside-down American flag and a picture of Che’ Guevara often appeared when the band performed on stage.  The inverted flag was responsible for the band being abruptly kicked off the air by NBC on “Saturday Night Live” in April 1996 after playing the first song.  Shortly after 9/11 Rage was banned from the airwaves by the radio conglomerate Clear Channel.

Rage’s lyrics were written by vocalist Zach De La Rocha.  However, the most creative musician in the group was guitarist Tom Morello.  A Harvard graduate, Morello is the nephew of Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, the George Washington of Africa.  Morello’s father was a Mau Mau and his mother an Italian gun runner.  With a background like that, Morello’s unconventional, innovative style is hardly surprising.  Paradoxically, Rage used its own high-tech sounds to poke fun at technology.

The band identified strongly with the downtrodden and the oppressed – Native Americans, Mexican Zapatista rebels, African Americans, and victims of American and European colonialism.  Death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, Native American Leonard Peltier, and the Zapatista Front for National Liberation were among the recipients of the proceeds from RATM benefit concerts.  Rage was the most politically radical band ever to sell ten million CDs.

Its 1999 revolutionary CD, The Battle of Los Angeles, which inspired many Seattle marchers, included songs like “Guerilla Radio,” “Calm Like a Bomb,” and “Voice of the Voiceless.”

Although the Battle of Seattle was followed by smaller protest demonstrations in other parts of the United States as well as Canada, Europe, and Asia, its long term political impact was minimal.  In 1999 globalization was still a fairly abstract concept.  Few had actually lost their jobs as a result of outsourcing.  Twelve years later millions of American jobs had been outsourced to China, India, and elsewhere.  The pain of globalization had become very real.  Also, with the war on terrorism, new meaning had been given to the term American imperialism.  We were engaged in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.  When Occupation Wall Street began on September 17, 2011, the economic, political, social, and environmental consequences of globalization and American foreign policy were no longer abstractions.

Shortly after appearing at a protest concert held outside the 2000 Los Angeles Democratic Convention, Rage Against the Machine broke up.  Not unlike the Battle of Seattle, Rage was probably a few years ahead of its time. Regrettably, it opted to sit out most of the Bush years.  However, in 2007 the band re-emerged with its loud, high-energy, antiestablishment rap, angry political rhetoric, and riveting guitar sounds.

Then on October 13, 2011, Tom Morello played songs from his new CD “World Wide Rebel Songs” in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  A few days earlier he had played for Occupy Los Angeles.  Rage was back!!

And from the title song of his new CD Morello sang:

We won’t be coming home tonight, Love

The fight has just begun

So raise your voices all together

Motherfucker, here we come

Unlike the Battle of Seattle back in 1999, this time around the protestors, Tom Morello, and Rage Against the Machine are all marching to the beat of the same drummer towards nonviolent revolution.  Ultimately it’s all about the Empire – an empire which is too big, too centralized, too powerful, too undemocratic, too intrusive, too materialistic, too environmentally destructive, too racist, too violent, too militaristic, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens other than the superrich.  It is an empire which has too much unemployment, too many home mortgage foreclosures, too much student debt, too many people living in poverty, too many people without health insurance, and increasingly does too little to support the poor and the middle class.

The radicalization of America may have finally begun.  Americans may soon opt for jobs, health insurance, social security, education, and a cleaner environment rather than drones, Navy Seals, and Delta Force death squads.  Amazingly, it all began with only a handful of protestors in tiny Zuccotti Park.  How it will end, nobody knows.

Thomas H. Naylor

October 15, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.