From Guest Blogger Cameron Atwood: What is "Civilization" – and Do We Want It?
What is a society? Is it merely an assortment of separated and competing drives of short-term self-interest, and rights of possession? Is it an orchestra of individuals cooperating to achieve the enlargement and preservation of the Common Good?
Anthropologists tell us that in the dawn of our history, our species consisted of small bands of hunter-gatherers surviving by predation and forage. Even for these small bands to sustain life by that crude approach, it was essential that they share resources and the fruits of their labor and talent.
From our beginnings, sharing has been a basic aspect of even the simplest of human kinships. Over thousands of years, we slowly transformed our strategy with agrarian techniques that expanded upon that sharing. This wiser strategy granted humanity a stability and permanence of settlement that advanced through African and Semitic cultures and flowered in the European Renaissance, when something like the scientific method began to aid in the decisions we humans make.
Humankind’s collective rights – the existence of which were at last recognized formally in written law nearly 800 years ago with the signing of the Magna Carta – began to be more firmly asserted in styles of governance. This was illustrated by Queen Elizabeth Tudor’s public acknowledgement that she ruled only through the continued goodwill of England’s people. The American rebellion then took on the Magna Carta’s mantle far more purely by enshrining inalienable birthrights. The already very old concept of “noblesse oblige” was famously expounded by Honoré de Balzac in 1837 as the obligation of honorable, generous, and responsible behavior associated with high social rank.
People were gradually becoming more civilized. The Geneva Conventions and a body of International Law now seek to restrain and prevent the recurrence of the worst cruelties of human history. Modern government (as was first uniquely envisioned in the U.S. and now commonly across the globe) is the instrument by which the people of a nation act collectively to benefit and protect each other, to defend and preserve the Public Commons, and to effect the enlargement of the common good.
However, there was already a countercurrent early on that found doctrinal grounding, perhaps unintended, in the sixteenth century political treatise Il Principe by Italian Niccolò Machiavelli. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this backflow found cruel expression in the attitudes of another Italian, Benito Mussolini, who distilled his politics thusly, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power,” and the icy amorality of his friend and ally Adolph Hitler, who posited that, “Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.” Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum (a.k.a. Ayn Rand) more recently spread elements of this countercurrent into popular imagination. Rosenbaum’s worldview can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: “The Virtue of Selfishness”. She argued that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism,” to use her words.
Accordingly, we have now in modern life two conflicting philosophies. On the one hand, we have the attitude that one bears responsibility only to one’s own self-interest, and secondarily to the interests of one’s spouse and young children. Such ethics would have been shunned out of existence by our early ancestors. On the other hand, we hold the principle that we each share a combined obligation toward our own welfare, and that of our family, our nation, our species, and all of the life and resources on earth upon which we will always depend for mutual survival and prosperity. These values shaped all our most ancient traditions.
It should therefore come as no surprise that today’s most predatory individuals should do their utmost to discredit and subvert any government of the people, and render it powerless for its intended purposes – especially by convincing the populace of a demonstrated falsehood: that every government venture is inherently inefficient and harmful to freedom. A related central strategy has been to stereotype as thievery all forms of statutory obligation to contribute a share of wealth toward investment for public benefit.
In a superbly revealing moment, Karl Rove said, “As people do better, they start voting like Republicans…unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.” The GOP strategist Grover Norquist famously stated, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Indeed, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, our government was transformed between the mid-Reagan years 1982 – 1987, when we fell from creditor status, to the world’s largest debtor under G.W. Bush.
The most triumphantly greedy individuals, and the largest corporations they control, have recently hoarded trillions in a strategy of offshore tax avoidance. Forbes.com, says, “The number may sound unbelievable, but the study was conducted by James Henry, former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, an expert on tax havens and offshoring.” Forbes goes on to quote an early report on the study in The Guardian, saying that the research, “shows that at least £13tn [$21 trillion] – perhaps up to £20tn [$31 trillion] – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks…”
Forbes further states that the report’s analysis, based on data from many sources including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, indicates that since the 1970’s enough cash has been siphoned off from some developing countries to pay off all their debts to the rest of the world. “The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals, while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments,” the report says. The research shows that if that “at least $21 trillion” offshored earned 3% a year that was then taxed at 30%, it would raise $188 billion annually, more than rich countries spend on aid to the developing world.
Paul Buchheit shares the following related calculation, “The Tax Justice Network estimated that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed. With Americans making up 40% of the world’s ultra-high net worth Individuals, that’s $8 to $12 trillion in U.S. money stashed in far-off hiding places.”
Buchheit then points out, “After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, corporations have paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes. U.S. corporations have shown a pattern of tax reluctance for more than 50 years, despite building their businesses with American research and infrastructure. They’ve passed the responsibility on to their workers. For every dollar of workers’ payroll tax paid in the 1950’s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it’s 22 cents.”
“Based on research by the Tax Policy Center, tax deferrals and deductions and other forms of tax expenditures (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes), which largely benefit the rich, are worth about 7.4% of the GDP, or about $1.1 trillion. Based on a historical stock market return of 6%, up to $750 billion of income is lost to the U.S. every year, resulting in a, annual tax loss of about $260 billion.”
“The world derivatives market is estimated to be worth over a quadrillion dollars (a thousand trillions). At least $200 trillion of that is in the United States. In 2011 the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts. A sales tax of one-tenth of a penny on a quadrillion dollars could pay off the deficit, but the total sales tax was zero.”
Of course, one may fairly ask what claim any ordinary citizen has on any part of the wealth of the rich. Let me elucidate with a simple example reducing the global population and resources to a more easily grasped scenario…
Suppose 10,000 people are trapped in a stadium with 10,000 meat pies, and one person manages to control access to 9,000 of those meat pies. Some may assert that those 9,000 pies belong to that one person, and they may think him worthy to hoard those pies and restrict access to them as he sees fit.
However, when that one person’s hoarding interferes with the ability of the other 9,999 people to survive, it may also be considered justifiable for those 9,999 people to overpower the one hoarder and equitably distribute the 9,000 pies.
Can we honorably say John Paulson – whose income of $4.9 billion in 2010 made him the highest-paid hedge fund manager in that year – actually earned his wealth?
The birthright of one individual ends where another’s birthright begins. It is the deliberated determination of world bodies – and of educated, rational and compassionate people – that unfettered access to healthy air, water, land, food, shelter, clothing, and medical care is a universal human birthright. To the extent that this birthright of unfettered access is infringed by rapacious individuals, it is reasonable and proper that We the People by right and the duty must constrain their hoarding and gouging.
In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress, “The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are: equality of opportunity for youth and for others; jobs for those who can work; security for those who need it; the ending of special privilege for the few; the preservation of civil liberties for all; the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”
Holly Sklar, Director of Business for A Fair Minimum Wage, notes that the whole economy, including small business, relies on workers making a living wage. “Between 1938, when the federal minimum wage was first enacted, and 1968, when it peaked in value, the bottom 90 percent of households shared 69 percent of the nation’s income growth. The middle class was able to grow. The biggest problem for Main Street businesses [now] is lack of customer demand. Low-income workers put pay increases right back into needed purchases at local businesses.” Currently, a bill progressive Democrat Congressmen Jesse Jackson, Jr., John Conyers, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, introduced in the beginning of 2012 to raise the federal minimum hourly wage to $10 remains stalled in the GOP-held House two years later.
As Chris Hedges observed, “There are 47.1 million Americans who depend on food stamps to eat. [Note: Food stamp recipients get $4.30 a day.] The elites are plotting to take these food stamps away, along with other “entitlement” programs that keep the poor from destitution. The slashing of trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, given the political impasse in Washington and the looming “fiscal cliff,” now seems certain. There are 50 million people considered to be living below the poverty line, but because the poverty line is so low – $22,350 for a family of four – this figure means nothing. Add the tens of millions of Americans who live in a category called ‘near poverty,’ including all those families attempting to live on less than $45,000 a year, and you have at least 30 percent of the country living in poverty.
“Once these people figure out that there is no economic recovery, that their standard of living is going to continue to drop, that they are trapped, that hope in the future is an illusion, they will become as angry as protesters in Greece and Spain or the militants in Gaza or Afghanistan… …The longer this worldwide disparity and inequality is perpetuated, the more the masses will revolt and the faster we will internally replicate the Israeli model of domestic control – drones overhead, all dissent criminalized, SWAT teams busting through doors, deadly force as an acceptable form of subjugation, food used as a weapon, and constant surveillance.”
Incidentally, we will do well to be mindful that Chris Hedges is a well-educated and seasoned war correspondent with long experience across the world – he has come to know the foulest side of humanity, and he can now smell it from a distance.
The average CEO in the USA makes over 450 times the average worker’s pay. American labor unions are now a feeble 7% of the private sector and 12% across all US employment. Our domestic manufacturing is long downsized. Our economy is freshly devastated by predatory lending and by a Wild West derivatives market that hollowed out the global economy. Environmental concerns have been increasingly sidelined in politics, as greed exerts its most short-sighted influences. Only about 14% of our electricity is renewable, and growth is slow and sporadic from about 9% in 2002. It was about 30% in 1949, but while total renewable output has more than tripled since then, it is overshadowed by the far larger growth in total output for fossil burning.
In contrast, other nations have pursued wiser courses, and now see quite favorable outcomes. Despite the global economic downturn, Germany still enjoys one of the world’s strongest economies, and one of the most healthy and generally prosperous populations. The ratio of average CEO pay to average worker pay there has been about 12 to 1, their labor unions hold 50% of the seats on the boards of the country’s largest corporations, and they retain a flourishing and vibrant manufacturing base. The Green Party wields substantial political and social influence, the nation has converted 25% of its grid power in 12 years, and they’re now on track to achieve 100% electricity production through renewable resources by 2050.
The most widely successful times in our country were the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when the top tax rate was 90% and more, with heavily government-subsidized college educations (particularly for masses of veterans returning from WWII), and a tax rate of 20% for the lower income brackets. That 90% top rate was continued under Truman, through the two terms of Eisenhower, and the tragically abbreviated term of Kennedy. It was cut to about 70% in the mid-sixties under Johnson, and slashed to 50% in the eighties under Reagan. It was then carved back again under G.W. Bush. This Johnson to Bush era was when wages in America flattened (and they have never recovered), and when we lost enormous swaths of our manufacturing – mostly to China (another nation with a robust renewables program). Our captains of industry chose to pay people in foreign lands far less money for their labor, and they worked those people for long hours in unsafe conditions with no benefits. Were our industrialists fleeing that massive Johnson to Bush reduction in their taxes? …Of course not.
How should we use these taxes? Deliver universal education from preschool through grad school, and vocational training and paid internships. Sponsor public research that yields a new generation of curative drugs (while private research prefers the bonanza in unending pill-a-day treatments). Design and support a rational medical system that lifts the fiscal burden from our corporations – a system that incentivizes doctors, hospitals and pharmacorps to amplify healthy living, rather than to generate gains from illness. Bring new energy efficiencies to market, and fund public research to hone renewable energy technology. Develop and maintain our infrastructure, folding in the adaptations needed to maximize the adoption of renewable energy.
Why the focus on energy and renewables? National security is an excellent motivation, global security is another. Reuters reveals that, following on a new World Bank climate impact report, “A coalition of the world’s largest investors called on governments to ramp up action on climate change and boost clean-energy investment, or risk trillions of dollars in investments and disruption to economies.” These investors, who together manage $22.5 trillion in assets, said, “The investments and retirement savings of millions of people are being jeopardized because governments were delaying tougher emissions cuts or more generous support for greener energy.”
Truthdig.org discussed the World Bank report, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided. “A bleak new report by the World Bank says no nation will be immune to the impacts of climate change. However, the distribution of impacts is likely to be inherently unequal, and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions.”
“The World Bank warns that temperatures on Earth could rise more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) by 2100, bringing along with them some catastrophic consequences. It warns of ecological harms and increased human suffering, noting that the effects of climate change will counteract benefits seen from economic growth and development initiatives.”
So, even the bankers now say we must act to minimize climate disruption. It’s a deadly reality denied only by head burying sand breathers, and by those few denial funders with a heavily vested fiscal interest in the fossil status quo. The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports that. “Between 1990 and 2011 there was a 30% increase in radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – because of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping long-lived gases.” The WMO’s research shows that human activities – including fossil fuel use, cattle breeding, rice agriculture, landfills and biomass burning – all emit the five major gases that account for 96% of the warming climate. The worst of the five – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – all broke new records in 2011. We have been meddling in the primal forces of Nature.
Our choice is clear. Civilization is caring about each other, conserving and sharing from our collective resources, and from the fruits of our labors and talents, and carefully planning together for our mutual prosperity and that of our coming generations.
Avarice lacks even the dignity of the law of the jungle; it is destroying all the progress that our species has ever claimed beyond its prehistoric animal roots, and is digging graves for what’s left. By its blind rape of our Mother Nature, greed is quickly robbing our beloved progeny of their future. Father Time will not be kind.
It is desperately crucial for We the People of this beautiful and bountiful country to band together and rebuild our nation’s status as the beacon of the world – a fair and just society that values active compassion, shared responsibility, and genuine opportunity for everyone – with careful and wise regard for long-term sustainability. That cherished horizon cannot emerge under the current regime of hoarding and deprivation.
The stewardship of society by the whole of the people, through our government, must be authentically reimagined and reassembled. That most essential objective will remain unreachable, until we have decisively and permanently prevented the purchase of our candidates and our legislative processes. We must forever put an end to bribery in all its insidious forms.
Until that task is accomplished, the way forward for civilization is lethally barred.
