It will not make one whit of difference who is elected president in November, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.  Either way, it will be business as usual.  Both the silver-tongued, Nobel Peace Laureate, drone aficionado and the mean-spirited, Harvard MBA, venture capitalist shark are unwavering in their commitment to war, Wall Street, Corporate America, and Israel.  But above all, they are each world class narcissists.

There is but one fundamental question which really matters, and, unfortunately it will not appear on the ballot anywhere.  “Is there any justification whatsoever for the continued existence of the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most environmentally toxic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all-time – an empire which has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable, ungovernable, and unfixable?”

In his recent book Why America Failed, Morris Berman argues that the United States is and has always been about “hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others.”  Economist Paul Craig Roberts has expressed similar thoughts in much stronger words.  “The United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government.  Americans no longer have a moral conscience.  They have gone over to the Dark Side.”  As evidence of the veracity of this statement, our president recently decided that he has the right to assassinate any American citizen anywhere in the world, whom his White House advisors deem to be a suspicious character.

Throughout history those who have been victims of oppression have sought liberation from their oppressors.  One speaks of the liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany, the liberation of China from Japan, and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow.  But unlike these examples, the United States is neither occupied by a foreign oppressor nor seriously threatened by one, unless one believes the myths underlying the war on terror.  America’s enemy lies entirely within.  As Pogo once said back in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

If a state is to remain true to itself, it has no other choice than to maintain its commitment to the humanity of its citizens.  But how does it do this, if its government is too big, too centralized, too undemocratic, too unjust, too powerful, too intrusive, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities?

America was supposed to have been immortal, but in the end it can’t deliver.  There is no longer any moral justification for the existence of a nation that is corrupt to the core.  The only morally defensible alternative to empire is peaceful dissolution.

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…,” said Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.  Just as a group has a right to form, so too does it have a right to subdivide itself, to withdraw from a larger unit, or to dissolve.

This is a call for the liberation of America, the liberation of America from itself.  It’s high time we (1) regain control of our lives from big government, big business, big cities, big schools, and big computer networks; (2) relearn how to take care of ourselves by decentralizing, downsizing, localizing, demilitarizing, simplifying, and humanizing our lives; and (3) provide democratic and human-scale state and local self-governments.

So long as the Empire remains intact, there will be no end to all of the nasty little wars, corporate personhood, Wall Street dominance, and our unconditional support for the Israeli military machine.  These are all gifts from the Empire.

Peaceful dissolution could be initiated at the state, regional, or national level through some combination of demonstrations, strikes, protests, tax revolts, civil disobedience, and eventually secession.  The U.S. Congress could even initiate dissolution, but don’t hold your breath over that option.

Since dissolution would be nationwide in scope, it would arguably be less self-centered and less ethnocentric than if a single state such as Alaska, Texas, or Vermont tries to go it alone.  Everyone has skin in the game so to speak.  The primary focus would be not on “What’s in it for my state?” but rather on ending global dominance and the military madness, stopping the exploitation of the poor and the middle class by the superrich, curbing the use of fossil fuels and other natural resources, curtailing the dependence on economic growth at any cost, reining in corruption and deceit, and ending the suppression of civil liberties.

Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, for example, might join the four Atlantic provinces of Canada to create a little country the size of Denmark and call it New Acadia.  Upstate New York and New York City might split into two separate countries.  Chicago and Los Angeles could become independent city-states.  Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas might go it alone with South Texas and South Florida splitting off separately.  It’s not hard to imagine California being divided into three countries and Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia evolving into Cascadia.  A New South and a Rocky Mountain Republic also seem like likely possibilities.

We have no illusion that a large number of Americans will embrace dissolution any time soon.  Our problems will have to become a lot worse before that happens.  But the time to start the conversation is now!  How many people predicted the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union?  Planned, orderly dissolution is surely preferable to unexpected collapse and utter chaos.

Long live the Disunited States of America!

Thomas H. Naylor

May 2, 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.

When I first read Albert Camus’s The Stranger as a college student in 1957, it went right over my head.  I was clueless as to what this book was about.  When I re-visited it twenty-five years later, I was so taken by Camus that I soon read everything that he had written which had been published in English.

Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus became the editor of the French Resistance underground newspaper Combat in Paris during World War II and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  He died in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.  A card-carrying agnostic, who struggled with Christianity throughout his life, Camus had an uncanny grasp of the human condition and an unwavering predisposition towards rebellion against it.

His English-speaking followers have recently been afforded a long-awaited treat with the publication of a 208-page photograph album (in English) edited by his surviving daughter, Catherine Camus, Albert Camus: Solitude and Solidarity (Edition Olms, 2012).  It is truly delightful.

I believe that Camus figured out many of the important pieces of the puzzle of life, but because his own life was prematurely snuffed out by a tragic accident, he never got around to connecting the dots.  Be that as it may, Camus’s philosophy of life appears to rest on three interconnected theories: a theory of the absurd, a theory of rebellion, and a theory of death.

The Absurd

What we are all up against is the human condition, God’s gift to us in the Garden of Eden from which there is no escape – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death.  Not a pretty sight.  To Camus it was absurd that we are all separated, our lives are meaningless, we are powerless to influence our fate, and we are all going to die and face nothingness.  From the absurd flowed three consequences for Camus – his revolt, his freedom, and his passion.

About separation, Camus wrote an entire essay in 1944 entitled “The Tragedy of Separation.”  “The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions,” he said in The Myth of Sisyphus, but “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.”  No doubt his feelings of powerlessness were influenced by his recurring bouts with tuberculosis which he first contracted in 1930 with relapses in 1936, 1942, and 1949.  As for death, “We know it ends everything,” and results in eternal nothingness.  “Eternal nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be ours.”  But, “There is no freedom for man so long as he has not overcome his fear of death.  One must be able to die courageously without bitterness.”

About the absurd Camus said:

It is only by repeatedly revolting against the absurdity of his predicament, without appeal or hope beyond it, that a human being fully expresses the absurd relationship.  Only the person who sees clearly what in the final analysis is his ultimately tragic and trusting situation relative to his world and remains actively unreconciled to it can be said to “live out the absurd.”

Rebellion

In response to the absurd there are four options – escape, denial, engagement, and confrontation.

First, we may escape the human condition altogether through suicide.  “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” said Camus, “and that is suicide.”  We have to come to terms with the question of  “whether life is or is not worth living.’  To Camus suicide was a complete cop out – the refusal to come to terms with the human condition.  The decision to take one’s own life is tantamount to a decision to leave the game to avoid struggling with life’s tough questions.  To commit suicide is to opt for immediate, permanent nothingness rather than risk experiencing separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of death.  It represents the ultimate form of despair in which our humanity is trumped by nothingness.

Second, we may deny the human condition through a life based on having – owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth.  Through having we try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world.  But the benefits of having may be illusory and transitory suggests Erich Fromm:  “If I am what I have and what I have is lost, who then am I?’

Third, we may choose to engage the human condition through being – by our creations, our personal relationships, our spirituality, our sense of community, and our stand towards pain, suffering, and death.  But being may also be another form of denial of the human condition, a form of escapism – escape from the absurdness of what it means to be a human being.

Fourth, we may confront the human condition and peacefully rebél against separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death.

“Rebellion,” according to Camus, “is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.  It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock.”

To rebél is to confront the human condition head on, to face down separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death.  The problem said Camus is that, “The rebel refuses to approve the condition which he finds himself.”  And, “he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his destiny.”

The rebel, “confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit he can tolerate.”  Continuing Camus says that, “It is those who know how to rebél at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.”

Camus’s rebellion was nonviolent.  He was not into human killing.  In his view killing was grounded in nihilism, and to attack nihilism with another form of nihilism made little sense.  “To kill men leads to nothing but killing more men.”

“Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom is living,” but “The point is to live.”

Unlike Jesus’s rebellion against the human condition which was grounded in hope, Camus’s was not.  Camus frequently reminded us that his rebellion was always without hope of affecting the human condition.  There was no “pie in the sky” in Camus’s world.  “I share with you the same revulsion from evil.  But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.”

No words of Camus were ever more prescient than, “We are suffering a reign of terror because human values have been replaced by contempt for others and the worship of efficiency, the desire for freedom by the desire for domination.  It is no longer being just and generous that makes us right; it is being successful.”  And what should we do about this?  Rebél.

Rebellion provides us with the faith to claw meaning out of meaninglessness, the energy to connect with those from whom we are separate, the power to surmount powerlessness, and the strength to face death rather than deny it.

Happy Death

As Erich Fromm said in To Have or To Be, “We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent – people who are glad when we have killed the time we were trying so hard to save.”  “Men die; and they are not happy,” proclaimed Caligula in Camus’s play bearing his name.  The sense of angst among many is so strong that, “There is only one hell and it is on earth,” said Camus.

Beginning with his first novel A Happy Death, which was not published until after his death in 1960, Camus returned over and over again to the theme that the purpose of life is not to be happy, as many would have us believe, but rather to die happy.  In Camus’s novel The Stranger, as well as in his four plays Caligula, The Misunderstanding, State of Siege, and The Just Assassins, the theme was always the same – die happy.

But if one expects to die happy, one must first rebél.  Above all, according to Camus, there must be “a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I most honor in this world.”  Not surprisingly, Camus was opposed to murder, suicide, and the death penalty.  His sense of personal meaning and values gave high priority to courage, pride, love, community, and social justice.  In addition, Camus felt strong affinity with the poor and the underprivileged.

In no sense is dying happy a euphemism for radical individualism or hedonism.  This is not a superficial self-help, self-esteem, feel-good philosophy aimed at the “me” generation.  To die happy one must first assume personal responsibility for the meaning of one’s life.  Living means coming to terms with, rather than avoiding, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical pain and suffering.  To have a happy death we must confront the human condition through rebellion.

Those who die happy scrupulously avoid being sucked into the seductive lifestyle and subsequent angst of the living dead.  One reason so few of us die happy is that we refuse to plan for the one event in our life which is absolutely certain – our own death.

The punch line is blunt and undeniably clear.  Life is truly absurd and without hope, and there is no rational reason to believe that tomorrow or the day after will be any different from today.  Therefore, rebél, live, and try to die happy.  That’s the sum total of it.

Did Camus die happy?  Catherine Camus’s photograph album suggests that he most likely did.

A salon of eight or ten persons, where all the women have had lovers, where the conversation is lively and anecdotal and a light punch is served shortly after midnight, is the one place in the world where I am most comfortable.

Thomas H. Naylor

April 17, 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.

Notwithstanding the fact that the United States is the largest, wealthiest, most-powerful, most materialistic, most environmentally irresponsible, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire in history and has shown little or no concern for the distribution of income, wealth, or political power among its citizens, nine years of trying to convince skeptical Vermonters of the merits of secession as an alternative to empire have proven to be quite challenging.  Secession is a very tough sell in Vermont and elsewhere.

Abraham Lincoln really did a number on us 150 years ago.  He convinced most Americans on the political Right as well as the Left that secession is a complete anathema.  Secession is thought by most to be immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional.  Never mind the Declaration of Independence, the fact that the United States was born out of secession from England, the tenth amendment to the Constitution, and the escape clauses which three of the original thirteen states had built into their respective constitutions.  Secession immediately conjures up images of slavery, the Civil War, racism, and violence.  Many otherwise intelligent Americans neither know how to pronounce or spell the word secession.  More often than not it is pronounced as though the correct spelling were s-u-c-c-e-s-s-i-o-n.

Because of the perceived absurdity of tiny Vermont confronting the most powerful empire of all-time, the Second Vermont Republic has arguably attracted more attention outside of Vermont than within.  It’s classic David and Goliath.

Since its inception SVR has employed two quite different parallel strategies in its efforts to promote secession – a hard sell approach and a soft sell approach.  Neither has proven to be particularly effective.

The hard sell paradigm confronts the issue head-on.  Because of its size, the United States government has become unmanageable and unfixable.  Our nation has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable.  A state such as Vermont either goes down with the Titanic or seeks other options.  Secession is one such option. But because of its association with the Civil War, secession is toxic as hell.  The mere mention of the word brings forth the charges of racism from the political left.  It is virtually impossible to have an intelligent conversation about the subject with a liberal ideologue.

The alternative paradigm speaks of political independence as though it were some desired state of being achievable in the future only after a state such as Vermont achieves economic, energy, and agricultural independence.  Middlebury College environmentalist Bill McKibben has wrongheadedly convinced many Vermonters that political independence is an impossible dream without food and energy independence.  McKibben is apparently unaware of the fact that Japan, the third largest economy in the world, imports every drop of oil which it consumes as well as most of its food.  Secession is not a synonym for economic isolationism.

The problem with the soft sell paradigm is that its supporters are so busy planting organic gardens, building root cellars, cutting their own wood, acquiring solar panels, and driving their Priuses that they don’t even notice the nine hundred pound gorilla in the room, namely, the American Empire.  So benign is the soft sell approach that its adherents never get around to talking about political independence.

Nine years of experience with the Second Vermont Republic have convinced me that the real issue is neither Vermont, states’ rights, secession, political independence, energy independence, agricultural independence, nor economic independence but rather the American Empire itself.  In the words of economist Paul Craig Roberts, “The United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government.  Americans no longer have a moral conscience.  They have gone over to the Dark Side.”

There is no longer any moral justification whatsoever for the existence of the United States.  The only morally defensible alternative to empire is peaceful dissolution.

Since dissolution would be nationwide in scope, not state-specific, it would arguably be less self-centered, less ethnocentric, and, therefore, less racially charged and ultimately less toxic than secession.  But benign it would not be.  The primary focus would be on ending global dominance and the military madness, stopping the exploitation of the poor and the middle class by the superrich, curbing the use of fossil fuels and other natural resources, curtailing the dependence on economic growth at all cost, reining in corruption and deceit, and ending the suppression of civil liberties.

Peaceful dissolution could be initiated at the state, regional, or national level through some combination of demonstrations, strikes, protests, tax revolts, civil disobedience, and possibly even secession.  The U.S. Congress could also initiate dissolution, but don’t hold your breath over that alternative.

To be sure we have no illusion that a large number of Americans will embrace dissolution any time soon.  Our problems will have to become a lot worse before that happens.  But the time to start the conversation is now!  Planned, orderly dissolution is surely preferable to unexpected collapse and utter chaos.

If the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street eventually figure out that the U.S. government is unfixable, might they both some day turn to peaceful dissolution as the only game in town?

Thomas H. Naylor

April 9, 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.

“We are you, and you are us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrogantly proclaimed to President Barack Obama in the White House recently.

How is it possible that Israel, a tiny country with only eight million people, can have so much influence over the foreign policy of the most powerful empire of all-time?  Yet Israel played a major role in shaping the war on terror against Islam, the war with Afghanistan, two wars with Iraq, and the annihilation of Libya by NATO.  And now Israel is aggressively doing everything within its power to provoke a war between the United States and Iran – a war which could quite easily precipitate World War III.  That’s a lot!

The $3 billion in annual economic and military aid which the United States officially provides Israel enables it to engage in continuous acts of terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing against its Palestinian neighbors whose land was stolen by Israel at its inception back in 1948.  This process of Israeli expansion into Palestinian occupied territory continues unabated.  The Obama administration pretends to be opposed to further Israeli encroachment into Palestinian lands, but obviously couldn’t care less.

The moral justification for all of this can be traced to the Holocaust.  Because six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II, Jews are entitled to their own country within what was once the Biblical Holy Land.  Never mind the fact that the land happened to be occupied by Palestinians.  For similar reasons, Jews are also entitled to revenge against anyone or any government which challenges the moral authority of Israel.  According to Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon in his provocative book entitled The Wandering Who?, this way of thinking has given rise to a new Jewish religion grounded in revenge, which he calls the “Holocaust religion.”  In the name of Jewish suffering, the Holocaust religion “issues licenses to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse.  It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value.”  According to Holocaust theology a nuclear attack against Iran by either Israel or the United States would be morally justifiable, since Iran has challenged Israel’s right to exist.  “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

Because Americans were slow to respond to the horrors of the Holocaust, they are expected to do penance.  The U.S. government is obliged to provide Israel with unconditional economic and military support.  It must veto all U.N. Security Council resolutions deemed to be critical of Israel and boycott all international conferences which might embarrass Israel.

Israel expects the United States to treat it as its only true ally in the Middle East.  The so-called Arab-Israeli peace process is a complete sham, since the United States always sides with Israel.

In return for the unconditional support which the United States extends to Israel, Israel is encouraged to destabilize the Middle East so as to justify American intervention in the region enabling it to hegemonize the supply of oil.  It’s all a very cozy relationship.

The Israeli military machine is free to invade any country in the Middle East of its choosing and can expect the full support of the Pentagon, no questions asked.  Israel is the only country in the Middle East which has the right to possess nuclear weapons.  Any other country in the region which aspires to membership in the elite club will be demonized and treated as a terrorist state.

Few Americans are aware of the role Israel played in derailing détente in 1974 and prolonging the Cold War unnecessarily for at least fifteen years by accusing the Soviet Union of discrimination against Soviet Jews who wanted to leave.  The charges were a complete fabrication.  The vast majority of Soviet citizens allowed to emigrate to the West between 1968 and 1989 were, in fact, Jews.  By portraying itself as both a victim of communism and America’s only true non-communist friend in the Middle East, Israel extracted billions of dollars from the United States to finance its never ending war with the Palestinians.  This strategy also helped deflect public opinion away from Israel’s own human rights abuses.

All of this is made possible by the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), our nation’s most powerful political lobbying organization. Anyone who has the audacity to challenge America’s foreign policy towards Israel is by definition an anti-Semite and can expect to receive the full wrath of the Israeli Lobby and become the target of a disinformation campaign. Candidates for Congress who are not openly pro-Israel will fall victim to a negative media blitz which virtually assures political defeat.

Nothing better illustrates the power of AIPAC than the invitation by Columbia University to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on the campus on September 24, 2007.  Rather than withdrawing the invitation in response to the political firestorm created by the Israeli Lobby, Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger opted personally to introduce Ahmadinejad.  His introduction took the form of a highly inflammatory, arrogant, insulting diatribe against the University’s guest – all to appease AIPAC and its constituents.  As a graduate of Columbia University, I was overcome by a sense of shame as a result of Bollinger’s demagogic behavior.  He reminded me of white racist politicians such as George W. Wallace and Ross Barnett in the South in the 1960s.  The rage against Iran expressed by Republican Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum is more of the same.

Since President Ahmadinejad is one of only a handful of surviving political leaders in the world who has ever stood up against Israel and the United States, he must not only be demonized but eventually taken out.  Indeed, there is no more important test of one’s Americanism than one’s stand against Iran and its president.

In the eyes of the United States, Iran has been persona non grata since Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy on November 4, 1979.  Few Americans recall that in 1953 when the Eisenhower administration disapproved of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA removed him from office, had him placed under house arrest, and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as head of state.  Most Americans have also forgotten that Ronald Reagan collaborated with his buddy Saddam Hussein to destroy Iran.  All the while Reagan had arranged for the Israelis to sell weapons to the Iranians to finance the Contras in Nicaragua whose aim was to overthrow the duly elected Sandinista government.  Such financial aid had been specifically banned by the U.S. Congress.  Is there any wonder that the Iranian government is not particularly fond of the United States?

Although American politicians like to quote the Founding Fathers, no admonition has ever been more systematically ignored than President George Washington’s warning in his 1796 farewell address, about the inherent dangers of blindly siding with one nation, “a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of ills.”

The U.S.-Israeli relationship gets right to the very essence of what the American Empire is all about.  The United States and Israel are the two foremost technofascist nations in the world.  That’s why there is such a close symbiotic relationship between the two war mongering nations. The answer to the question, “Who controls whom?” remains in doubt.  But as we previously noted, Israel is nevertheless useful to the United States, even though it pulls our string.

About Israel, Human Scale author Kirkpatrick Sale once said, “The original idea of a Jewish state was a mistake, and to establish it in an Islamic Middle East essentially by force and with the immiseration of millions of natives was a tragic mistake.  We are reaping the awful results of that error today.”  Continuing he said, “It is not so easy to know what to do to undo that mistake, but I would argue that a world that can make a state can unmake it.”

Because the compliant American media marches in lockstep to the beat of the AIPAC drum, no change in the U.S. – Israeli relationship is expected anytime soon.

The only way to stop Israeli terrorism is for the U.S. to discontinue all economic and military aid to Israel.  Only then will the fighting cease.  But this will never happen so long as the Empire remains intact.  So strong are the ties between Israel and the United States that only the dissolution of the Union itself could put an end to the relationship.

If there is any hope for Israel and Palestine, it lies in some form of Swiss federalism.  The crux of the Swiss Confederation is a loosely defined three-dimensional matrix consisting of 26 cantons, 4 cultures, and 7 major departments of the federal government.  One could envision Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights as Palestinian cantons which cooperate with Israel, the State which surrounds two of them.

Nothing good can ever come from the confluence of American military might and the lust for revenge of Israel.

Thomas H. Naylor

March 5, 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.

From the very outset I was an enthusiastic supporter of Occupy Wall Street. To me it represented the reawakening of the political left after four decades of uninterrupted slumber.  Maybe the radicalization of America had finally begun.  Americans might soon opt for jobs, health insurance, social security, better education, and a cleaner environment rather than drones, Navy Seals, and Delta Force death squads.

One could not help but be struck by the amount of energy emanating from tiny Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and how this energy had spread to hundreds of towns and cities in dozens of countries worldwide providing the foundation for an international revolt against Wall Street, Corporate America, and the American Empire.  Perhaps a window of opportunity would be opened which would allow consideration of heretofore unimaginable political paradigms such as radical decentralization, direct democracy, secession, or even peaceful dissolution of the American Empire.  But it has not happened.  Why not?  Most of OWS’s proposals for dealing with the American Empire are neither very radical nor likely to see the light of day.  The fundamental premise underlying OWS is that the U.S. Government is still fixable.  But what if that is not true?

Below we outline eight reasons why OWS is doomed to failure.

1. Leadership.  Occupy Wall Street prides itself in the fact that, just like the Internet, it is a leaderless organization.  No one is in charge.  However, one is hard pressed to come up with a long list of successful leaderless revolutions over the span of history.

Although Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the iconic leader of the American Civil Rights movement in the 60s, there were numerous other high-profile, charismatic leaders including Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer, and Fannie Lou Hamer.  The Anti-Vietnam War movement also had multiple leaders such as Dr. Benjamin Spock, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator William Fulbright, though none of the stature of Dr. King.  Lech Walesa and Václav Havel led Poland and Czechoslovakia respectively away from Communism in 1989.

Revolutions need strong leaders.  OWS has no such leaders, and it shows.

2. Organization.  One of the reasons the leaderless Tahrir Square Revolution in Egypt has come unglued at the seams one year later is that there was no political organization in place to monitor the transition government to see that it carried out the mandates of the revolution.

Each separate OWS movement is loosely organized around a consensus based General Assembly which serves as the governing body of the local movement.  Verbal communication is supplemented in all General Assembly meetings by a unique form of sign language by which an individual member expresses his or her approval, disapproval, or desire for more information with regard to a particular issue, for example.  The consensus requirement and the sign language tend to prolong General Assembly meetings endlessly.

Some General Assemblies have a distinct touchy-feely character in which process always trumps substantive discussion.  No one is in charge.  Meeting facilitation is a shared responsibility.  Mutuality, inclusiveness, and political correctness are far more important than political strategy.  Hurt feelings are to be avoided at all cost.  More time is spent on deciding how to process particular issues rather than on the issues themselves.

3.  Political Process. The idea of a mass political movement operating independently of the mainstream electoral politics has considerable appeal.  But to effect change one must have some form of political process, not no political process at all.  Although standing, sitting, or sleeping in a park or some other public space may make one feel good, it is not clear how this helps curb the power of a ravenous empire.

A National General Assembly has been called for July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia to consider a list of grievances and solutions to be presented to the U.S. Government.  Two delegates, one man and one woman, will represent each of the 435 congressional districts in the United States.  What is unclear is why the OWSers believe the U.S. Government would be motivated to respond to such a list?  The U.S. Government marches to the beat of Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby which have their own agendas.

4.  Internet.  Supporters of OWS are unrestrained in the praise which they heap on the Internet and social networks like FaceBook.  They claim that without the Internet OWS would not be possible.  It’s as though cyberspace were their god.

When Lech Walesa and Václav Havel led their respective countries to freedom from Communism back in 1989, they did it the old fashion way.  There was no Internet.  They had to rely on a combination of hard work, person-to-person contact, grass roots organizing, moral suasion, and, yes, political discipline.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates would have us believe that the Internet leads to empowerment and enhanced democracy.  But who is being empowered by whom?  Those transfixed by iPads and iPhones have little time to participate in civic affairs and are a threat to no one.  Above all, what the Internet does extremely well is keep us busy – distracted from noticing what the cipherpriests are doing to us in the name of freedom and democracy.

Proponents of the so-called Arab Spring movement claim that the key to its success was the extensive use of the Internet by protestors.  Unfortunately, the results of the Arab Spring movement have proven to be a very mixed bag.  The Internet has not been able to make up for a lack of leadership and organization skills.

5. Objectives.  From the beginning OWS has attracted a very diverse set of protestors with an equally diverse portfolio of concerns including income inequality, poverty, greed, unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, student debt, health care, environmental degradation, racism, sexism, corruption, violence, and imperialism to mention only a few.

In sharp contrast to OWS the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Polish Solidarity movement, and the South African Anti-Apartheid movement all had very specific, clearly defined objectives.  There was absolutely no doubt about what business they were in.

6. Vision.   Conspicuously absent from OWS is any well-defined vision of the future for the United States.  What would OWSers like to see the United States become when it grows up?

Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the vast majority of supporters of OWS behave as though they believe the U.S. Government is fixable.  Most of them cling to the fantasy that some combination of campaign finance reform or laws banning corporate personhood will solve all of our problems.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

These OWS adherents fail to realize that those who own, operate, and control our government like things just the way they are.  There simply are not going to be any constitutional or legal restrictions limiting the rights of corporations.  Nor are there going to be any meaningful campaign finance reform laws.  It’s not going to happen.

Two recent books, Why America Failed by Morris Berman and Deep Green Resistance by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, suggest that at least a handful of writers on the left have begun to question whether or not the Empire is truly fixable.  They are starting to doubt whether President Barack Obama or his Republican opponents have any clue as to how to solve most of our problems.

But if the Empire is going down, which it surely is, and it is indeed unfixable, then what exactly is the point of Occupy Wall Street?  To go down with a sinking ship.

When all is said and done, there is but one morally defensible alternative to a failing evil empire, peaceful dissolution, just like the former Soviet Union.

7. Image.  Although fringe political movements such as OWS, the Alaskan Independence Party, the Second Vermont Republic, and the Texas Nationalist Movement attract some very intelligent people, they also attract their share of crazies.  Until Occupy Vermont came along, I thought surely the Second Vermont Republic had already attracted most of the crazies in Vermont.  I was mistaken.

Somehow, a man running for governor who appears on a TV debate with a fake knife stuck through his head doesn’t do a whole lot for the credibility of the cause.  Nor does a seventy-five year old man with long hair strumming an out-of-tune guitar singing off-key political songs with unintelligible lyrics on a TV show sponsored by Occupy Vermont.

Although Bill O’Reilly’s mean-spirited portrayal of OWS is grossly unfair, some of the TV images of OWS protestors do not instill confidence in their ability to change the world.  Many of them come across as stereotypical radical, disgruntled, hippie malcontents.  The problem lies when they become the defining image of a fledgling political movement.

8. Occupation. Is it possible that the real purpose of Occupy Wall Street has little to do with either the 99 percent or the 1 percent but rather everything to do with keeping the political left in America decentralized, widely dispersed, very busy, and completely impotent to deal with the collapse of the American Empire. The fundamental question is “Who is being occupied by whom?”  A good occupier is someone who is completely occupied protesting, processing, communicating via sign language, social networking on the Internet, and promoting pseudosolutions to problems of an unfixable, failing empire.  Occupiers are all occupied doing exactly what their handlers would have them be doing, namely, being fully occupied.

In summary, Occupy Wall Street represents a huge distraction.  It very successfully diverts attention away from the fact that the United States is the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most environmentally irresponsible, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire in history which does all too little to support the vast majority of its citizens other than the superrich.

What OWS does best is keep hundreds of thousands of people busy, people who might otherwise be a threat to the Empire.

What if President Obama were to convene a secret national task force to prevent the possibility of a revolution in the United States in the event of a collapse of the U.S. economy?  Such a task force might include the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Council, as well as the commanding officers of the Navy’s Seals and the Army’s Delta Force.  It’s hard to imagine the task force coming up with a recommendation to prevent a revolution that would be more effective than Occupy Wall Street.

Thomas H. Naylor

February 17, 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.

From the very outset when Occupation Wall Street was first launched on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan it attracted a very diverse set of participants with an equally diverse portfolio of concerns including income inequality, poverty, greed, unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, student debt, health care, environmental degradation, racism, sexism, corruption, violence, and imperialism to mention only a few.

Within a few weeks the movement spread to hundreds of towns and cities in dozens of countries worldwide.  The staying power of its revolt against Wall Street, Corporate America, and the American Empire has been truly remarkable.

However, OWS has been subjected to considerable criticism from the political establishment for its lack of focus and the absence of a political process for achieving its far-flung objectives.

Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the vast majority of supporters of OWS behave as though they believe the U.S. Government is fixable.  Most of them cling to the fantasy that some combination of campaign finance reform or laws banning corporate personhood will solve all of our problems.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

These OWS adherents fail to realize that our government is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and various foreign interest groups, who like things just the way they are.  Because of its sheer size, the United States is unsustainable, ungovernable, and, therefore, unfixable, just as was the case with the former Soviet Union.  There are not going to be any constitutional or legal restrictions limiting the rights of corporations.  Nor are there going to be any meaningful campaign finance reform laws.  It’s not going to happen.

Thanks to two recent books, Why America Failed by Morris Berman and Deep Green Resistance by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, a growing number of Occupy Wall Streeters are starting to see the light of day and question whether or not the Empire is truly fixable.  They are beginning to note that neither President Barack Obama nor any of his wild-eyed Republican opponents has any real solutions to our endless list of problems.

But if the Empire is going down, which it surely is, and it is completely unfixable, then what is the point of Occupy Wall Street?  To go down with the sinking ship.

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 only morally defensible alternative to a failing evil empire is peaceful dissolution.  Indeed, radical decentralization represents by far the most effective way to deal with the plethora of concerns expressed by Occupy Wall Streeters.

It’s high time the OWSers concentrate their efforts on the root cause of all of our problems, namely, a corrupt, ravenous empire.  There is one and only one objective, the peaceful dissolution of the American Empire. Nothing else matters.

Thomas H. Naylor

February 13, 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.

Who could have imagined back in 2002, when the euro first began circulating, that ten years later, in an act of near desperation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, would travel to Beijing, hat in hand, to seek bailout funds from Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to keep the euro afloat?  But that is exactly what happened on February 2^nd.  In addition, to placate her American handlers, she also delivered a plea to the Chinese to support tough UN Security Council sponsored sanctions against Iran, truly an exercise in futility.

The common currency of the 17-nation eurozone is being kept afloat by a series of lies, leaks, rumors, and smoke-and-mirrors, behind the scenes financial schemes.  Equity markets are pumped up by the expectations of the next meeting of the ECB, the European finance ministers, or German Chancellor Angela Merkel with French President Nicholas Sarkozy.  Each such meeting holds out the hope of a silver bullet fix for the euro.  Most have fixed nothing.

China has $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves of which over $1.0 trillion is invested in U.S. Treasury bonds.  Merkel would like to persuade Wen Jiabao to use some of China’s excess foreign exchange reserves to bail out financially beleaguered EU countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and possibly others.  All of this makes Washington very nervous. Although the White House wants to see the euro stay afloat, it is neither politically nor financially in a position to do much about it.  On the other hand, it does not relish the thought of the EU becoming financially dependent on Beijing or China reducing its commitment to holding U.S. government debt.

To make the Chinese bailout of the EU more palatable to the United States Merkel was no doubt pressured into playing the Iranian card calling for tough sanctions against Iran, if it does not abandon its alleged plans to develop nuclear weapons.  However, it’s hard to imagine that either China or Germany would be very enthusiastic about such sanctions since both China and many EU countries import oil from Iran.  Furthermore, China and Germany are known to be suppliers of technology to Iran.  On the geopolitical front China may actually welcome a nuclear armed Iran as a countervailing force to American-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

It’s not by chance alone that China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the Syrian government’s bloody response to the regime’s opposition movement.  They see Western intervention in Syria as one step removed from an American led effort to bring down the government of Iran.  Both acts would be viewed as serious threats to Chinese and Russian national security.  China knows that the NATO led overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi was aimed squarely at curbing Chinese influence in Africa, since China was visibly involved in Libyan oil production before the attacks.

The EU may soon find itself in such desperate need of Chinese financial support that China might demand that both Israel and the U.S. discontinue their threats against Iran as a condition for granting the EU financial support.  China could effectively checkmate both Israel and the United States.  On the other hand, if either Israel or the United States or both attack Iran’s nuclear sites, China and Russia might retaliate by taking out Israel, closing the Strait of Hormuz, or attacking the oil production facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Iraq.

Notwithstanding the fact that Merkel’s visit to China barely made it on the national radar screen, the consequences of her visit could have broad based, far reaching implications.  Any decision taken by Beijing will affect all 28 EU countries, China, Russia, Iran, Israel, the Arab nations, the U.S., and probably most of the rest of the world.  The fate of the euro and the fate of Iran are enmeshed in a very complex nonzero-sum, multicountry chess game of our own making.  Sometimes in the process of our perverted attempts to unify and secure ourselves through coercion, collectivism, and the military, “we end up destroying community, scattering ourselves, fracturing into a thousand different voices, falling to earth in disaster.  Meltdown.”  So said William H. Willimon, former Dean of the Duke University Chapel, in Downsizing the USA (1997).

Sometimes, when we make our bed, we actually have to lie in it.  This may be one of those times.

Thomas H. Naylor

February 8, 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.

Ross Jackson is an interesting guy who has just published a very interesting and timely book entitled Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform (Chelsea Green, 2012).  Born a Canadian, Jackson has a PhD in Operations Research from Case Western Reserve University, but has lived in Denmark since 1964.  Not only is he the former manager of a hedge fund, financial derivatives, currency-exchange trading firm, but he currently heads up two international NGOs related to small, sustainable, ecovillages.

According to Jackson, “The current global structure is dysfunctional, undemocratic, corrupt, and exploitive of the environment, the developing countries, and even the citizens of the wealthiest nations.”  He goes on to say,

The current political leadership’s inflexible focus on economic growth makes it impossible to deal effectively with global issues like climate change, ecosystem damage, peak oil, and rationing resources.  Meanwhile, millions, if not billions of ordinary citizens are dissatisfied with the status quo and are crying out for change.  The dilemma seems to be:  those who can, will not; those who will, cannot.

Jackson’s understanding of the economic and environmental forces underlying what he considers to be the collapse of civilization is spot on.  It’s all about globalization!

Globalization refers to the integrated international system of mass production, mass marketing, mass distribution, mass consumption, mega financial institutions, and global communications.  This global 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 their shareholders.

Since globalization is often achieved through coercion, intimidation, exploitation, collectivism, monopoly, and American military might, local cultures, local values, local communities and local environmental concerns often receive short shrift.

Transnational megacompanies not only tell so called emerging market countries (most of the world) what they will produce, how it will be produced, when it will be sold, and at what price, but they also influence local working conditions, wages, benefits, and labor laws.  They often dictate local government monetary, fiscal, trade, and banking policies.  International money managers decide which foreign currencies are overvalued and which are not, as well as which countries should be punished for not playing by their arbitrary, self-serving rules.  This is truly a one-size-fits-all game.

No photograph was ever more prophetic in portraying the future of unfettered capitalism than a picture of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev each wearing cowboy hats taken near the end of their political careers.  So effective were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in convincing governments everywhere to decentralize, to deregulate, to rein in organized labor, and to privatize public enterprises that transnational megacompanies like General Electric and IBM have virtually a free hand to operate globally with little or no interference from government or labor—just like the American West.  They play off one country against the other in pursuit of low-wage, tax-free, regulation-free manufacturing environments.

The U.S. government, Federal Reserve Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization are all committed to transforming the world economy into a giant global growth machine regulated by an international gambling casino in which resource allocation decisions are driven by a high-speed, multinational, high-tech crap shoot.  Satellite communications, fiber optics, and the Internet make it possible to transform small, manageable local problems into unmanageable global problems overnight.

President Bill Clinton called for a New Global Financial Architecture.  But what he proposed was nothing new at all—more trade, more budget cuts, more privatization, more foreign investment, more megamergers, more computer networks, less government control, lower interest rates, more IMF bailouts, and, as always, more economic growth.  He wanted everything to be bigger, more complex, more high-tech, and more interdependent—bigger markets, bigger trade agreements, bigger loans, bigger bailouts, bigger  banks and financial institutions, and bigger telecommunication networks.  Our government’s cryptic message to the rest of the world is, “Just be like us.”  One-size-fits-all!

Economists justify globalization on the basis of the so called “trickle down effect,” in which the benefits of global trade to the superwealthy eventually trickle down to the poor. But half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 per day, and many of these people have no access to clean water, electricity, or sanitation.  World Bank figures suggest that the trickle down effect may not be working so well.  In 1987, 1.2 billion people in the world were trying to survive on $1 a day.  Now over 1.5 billion are trying to do so.

Jackson correctly places a lot of the blame for the destruction of the planet on neoclassical, free-market economics.  He correctly notes that economics is not a science but rather a pseudoscience pretending to be a science.

British economist Joan Robinson got right to the heart of the problem in her 1962 book Economic Philosophy when she said, “Any economic system requires a set of rules, an ideology to justify them, and a conscience in the individual which makes him strive to carry them out.”  In other words, underlying every sophisticated economic theory and mathematical model lies a political ideology.

Since the 1980s the prevailing ideology in economics has been the free market, globalization ideology of University of Chicago economist Milton Freidman.  Although Ronald Reagan popularized this ideology in the 80s, it was Bill Clinton and his Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin along with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan who presided over its implementation in the 1990s.  They created a regulatory environment which enabled globalization to thrive.  George W. Bush was little more than a naïve cheerleader for globalization, who failed to notice when it started to unravel.

The problem of economics according to the high priests of the free market can be summarized as follows:  Given the distribution of income and wealth, how do we achieve global economic growth in such a manner that we simultaneously allocate resources worldwide in a socially optimal fashion with a minimum of interference by government and organized labor?  The underlying premise of this paradigm is that, if consumers, managers, employees, and stockholders do their own hedonistic thing, their interests will converge in the long run and society will evolve toward some form of socially optimal equilibrium.  “This is an ideology to end ideologies,” said Joan Robinson.  Tinkering with the distribution of income or wealth is strictly taboo.  So too is questioning the sustainability of never ending economic growth.

There is absolutely nothing new about economists providing the economic underpinnings to support the prevailing ideology.  Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have supplied the rich and powerful with the kinds of answers they wanted to hear.  As John Maynard Keynes once said, “Practical men…are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.  Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Today it is hardly surprising that few economists feel any discomfort whatsoever in justifying hedonism.  Most of the funding for economic research comes from large corporations and the federal government, both of whom have a strong vested interest in promoting greed so that the economy does not collapse.  While posing as objective social scientists, all too many economists are willing to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

Many believe that the meltdown of the U.S. economy was caused by too much credit and too much easy money.  Yet the government’s strategy for dealing with the problem seems to be more of the same.  If China or Japan were to pull the plug on their investments in U.S. Treasury bonds, the U.S. government could become insolvent.

Economics has long been known as the “dismal science.”  We believe this is a complete misnomer.  Economics as practiced in the United States today is no science at all, but rather a political ideology disguised as a science.  Economics is the “abysmal science,” and that’s a problem for all of us.

The broken integrated global economy is uncontrollable, unstable, unsustainable and unfixable.  It will continue to meltdown until it reaches a state of disintegration which is sustainable, and that could take a long time.

I believe that the global economy that reemerges after the disintegration of the old economy is complete will be a radically different kind of economy.  It will be a highly localized, decentralized economy.  Interestingly enough, the problem of peak oil will play an important role in preventing the reintegration of the global economy.  As the global demand for crude oil begins to increase after meltdown is over, the price of crude oil will once again skyrocket upwards imposing a very high cost on long distance trade flows. Ironically, in the post globalization era crude oil, or the lack thereof, will help keep the world decentralized and localized, and that may not be all bad.

While there may be little we can do to stop this process, there is a lot to be learned from the experience.  Now is the time to begin thinking about how we want to live, love, work, play, and do business in a more localized world.  It could prove to be a much more meaningful experience than life under globalization.

Jackson would replace all of the existing multinational organizations such as the UN, WTO, IMF, and World Bank with what he calls a Gaian World Order “to reflect the focus on the oneness of all planetary life in the emerging holistic worldview.”
The Gaian World Order would be launched by a dozen or so small nations which would constitute what Jackson calls the Gaian League.  The Gaian League might include such countries as Bolivia, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Iceland, Norway, Venezuela, Senegal, Bhutan, New Zealand, Maldives, Tunisia, Mauritius, Malaysia, and Switzerland.  Once established, other nations would be invited to apply for membership.  The first order of business for the League would be the founding of eight other multinational organizations:  the Gaian Trade Organization, the Gaian Clearing Union, the Gaian Development Bank, the Gaian Congress, the Gaian Commission, the Gaian Court of Justice, the Gaian Resource Board, and the Gaian Council.  That’s a lot.

For those concerned with where life is going on the flagship earth and whether or not they want to go there, Occupy World Street is not only a wake-up call but also a call for action and a strategy for changing course before it’s too late.

Thomas H. Naylor

February 5, 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.

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.