Three Deprivation Narratives

SUBHEAD: I’d like to think that it possible for everyone to have safe and comfortable shelter.

By Chris Smaje on 7 October 2018 for Small Farm Future -
(https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2018/10/three-deprivation-narratives/)


Image above: Poster from 1974 showing peasant life in rural China titled "Reporting to Chairman Mao". From (https://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-451.php).

I’ve been reading Lynn T. White’s book Rural Roots of Reform Before China’s Conservative Change (Routledge, 2018). I couldn’t honestly recommend it as a light bedtime read, but it’s absolutely fascinating nonetheless.

Here I just want to reflect on the case of a rural migrant mentioned by White thus:

“A twenty-five-year-old legal migrant from Henan to Suzhou explained in 1994 why he was so much more productive on the delta: “We used to spend three months doing farm work, one month celebrating the Spring Festival, and eight months in idle time every year.”

Now he was a restaurant waiter, working fourteen hours each day, seven days a week – but receiving 400 yuan (about US$50 a month, which was four times his previous Henan wage).

When asked whether he thought he was working too hard, he replied with great eloquence….“No, it is better than sitting idly by watching people in cities getting rich. The conditions here are not bad at all.

Color TV, electric heating, free meals – these are great. What I like most here is that I can take a shower every day. I was not able to take a bath during the entire winter at home. It would be too cold to do so in the river.” (p.354)

FIRST  DEPRIVATION
This example poses some potentially awkward questions for those like me who advocate for a small farm future – for more Henan and less Suzhou, so to speak. Could I look this man in the eye and tell him that he should have stayed on the farm? My answer to that, emphatically, is no.

But I think the implications of what he said are worth pondering. The first reason he gave for leaving the farm draws from a relative deprivation narrative – why molder away in rural poverty while city people make so much more money?
 
The last reason he gave draws from an absolute deprivation narrative – back home, he couldn’t even take a shower during the winter!

This individual story fits easily into the dominant narrative of our times – people naturally seek prosperity, and when the opportunity arises will therefore move from countryside to city, and also from poorer countries to richer ones in search of it.

Good luck to them – so long as the national and international economies are structured the way they are, I have zero sympathy for the anti-immigration rhetoric of right-wing populism, and little sympathy for left-populist peasant romanticism either.

But if you aggregate this one man’s journey across the global billions, urban and rural, who share his impoverished starting point, I can’t see this strategy of wealth-through-urbanization-and-economic-growth working.

For one thing, while the global economy is certainly capable of lifting millions of people out of poverty in some places – China foremost among them – I don’t think it’s structurally or physically capable of doing it adequately everywhere.

If, like me, you number among the top few hundred million in global wealth then that may not concern you much. Possibly it doesn’t concern a man like the Henan waiter either.

And much as I’d like to think that such persistent inequalities would prompt the poor into political action to achieve a fairer distribution of the world’s resources, the fact is this only happens in historically unusual circumstances, as occurred in early 20^th century China.

If economist Minqi Li, whose book China and the 21^st Century Crisis (Pluto, 2016) I’m currently ploughing my way through (it’s another bedtime no-no, I’m afraid), is to be believed, these circumstances are also likely to occur in the mid-21^st century, and will probably result in the end of the global capitalist order.

SECOND DEPRIVATION
Let me throw in another China book while I’m at it – David Bandurski’s Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance in Urbanizing China (Melville House, 2016) – a much better candidate for bedtime reading, which shows vividly why somebody like this waiter may get richer in the city but will always be watching other people get richer still.

Having corresponded recently with David (more on that anon), he pronounces himself pessimistic about the opportunities for resistance in Xi’s China. Time will tell.

Quite apart from the limited economic capacity of the global political economy to lift adequate numbers of people out of poverty, the other side of it is the limited environmental and energetic capacities to do so.

If you aggregate the single migrant journey from Henan to Suzhou I’ve described here among all those similarly lacking in the food, shelter, comfort and entertainment that many of us take for granted, the consequences will quite simply be environmentally catastrophic and untenable long-term unless you buy into ecomodernist fantasies that it’s all manageable through nuclear power, GM crops and the like.

THIRD DEPRIVATION
So here we come to a third deprivation narrative – contemporary people pursuing eminently justifiable and personally rational goals deprive others, most especially future generations, of the opportunity to do likewise.

The only way I see out of this morass is to detoxify the first and third of these deprivation narratives while focusing relentlessly on the second.

I’d like to think that it should be possible for everyone in the world to have safe and comfortable shelter (including access to tolerably warm bathing water) and an adequate diet (I’m not so sure about the color TV…or the free meals: isn’t there a capitalist story doing the rounds that the latter are a myth?)

But to achieve that sustainably so that future generations don’t go without I think we’re going to have to let go of the relative deprivation story, the “people in cities getting rich”, by sharing the wealth around much more fairly.

Well, it’s a plan – and it’s been tried before, notably in China by one Mao Zedong. The aforementioned Minqi Li seems to be among the cohort that’s reevaluating Maoism positively, for example analyzing Mao’s Cultural Revolution as an attempt to “save the revolution” through “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p.18).

Personally, I struggle to justify the enormous destructiveness, misery and cruelty of it in those terms, when it seemed to be at least as much about saving the power of Mao Zedong through the dictatorship of Mao Zedong.

I find Lynn White’s analysis more interesting – in his view, the disasters of Mao’s Great Leap Forward followed soon after by the power vacuum created by the Cultural Revolution fostered considerable local economic autonomy in China from the 1960s, and it was this bottom-up economic dynamism rather than the top-down reforms of the post-Mao government that laid the foundation for the country’s transformation into today’s huge industrial-capitalist power.

I do find Li’s prognosis for how that transformation is likely to end in tears quite convincing, however.

So no, I’m not too keen on Maoist solutions to economic inequality. My preference is for agrarian populist solutions to it – which essentially means getting more people into farming and paying them better for it.

Low economic returns to agriculture have often been a historical fact, but they’re not intrinsically an economic one. Still, the questions remain – is such a populist solution likely to occur, and how could it happen?

My answers to that are ‘no’ and ‘with great difficulty’, but it’s the only solution that strikes me as likely to be successful long-term, so the long march back to Henan-with-hot-showers is the one I want to devote my thinking to.

White and Li’s books have helped me to see that a little more clearly, though still through a glass darkly. I’ll try to elucidate it more in future posts.

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The New American Despotism

SUBHEAD: The appropriate work to be done by civilization when faced with numbing retrenchment.

By Jeremy Leggett on 24 April 2017 for JeremyLeggett.net -
(http://www.jeremyleggett.net/2017/04/appropriate-civilization-versus-new-despotism-month-3-21st-march-20th-april-2017/)


Image above: Illustration of the Statue of Liberty being submerged. From (http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Fascism-is-looming-over-the-US-and-its-bad-news-for-the-Jews-454411).

1. Climate Action
Trump endeavours to dig a little coal
President Trump moved to dismantle President Obama’s climate legacy with an executive order that seeks to dismantle the Clean Power Plan. Within a week, 17 US states filed a legal challenge. China immediately pledged to uphold its Paris climate commitments, including considerable efforts not to use coal, accusing the US of “selfish” behavior.

The EU joined the pushback. Miguel Árias Cañete, the EU’s climate action commissioner, said: “The continued leadership of the EU, China and many other major economies is now more important than ever. When it comes to climate and the global clean energy transition, there cannot be vacuums, there can only be drivers, and we are committed to driving this agenda forward.”

Fine sentiments. But whereas China can point to policies consistent with its rhetoric, unfortunately the same cannot be said of much EU national policymaking, as things stand.

Among EU states, only Sweden, Germany and France are pursuing goals consistent with the Paris target of 40% cuts in carbon emissions by 2030, according to a study by Carbon Market Watch.

As ever, much will depend on industry, and one encouraging development this month was a pledge by Eurelectric, a trade body which represents 3,500 utilities with a combined value of over €200 billion, vowing no new investments in coal plants after 2020. Among the 28 EU countries, only Polish and Greek companies did not join the initiative.

2. Energy Transition
Fast, but not fast enough
Record new renewable power capacity was added in 2016, UNEP figures showed: 138 gigawatts of it, up 9% despite investment falling by a worrying 23%. Renewables now provide 11.3% of global electricity. New global solar capacity outpaced wind, IRENA reported, by 71 to 51 gigawatts.

Solar in California exceeded 50% of supply, for the first time ever, causing a net market oversupply resulting in a short interval of negative wholesale prices.

Costs of renewables keep falling. GTM Research predicts that solar will drop below two cents per kilowatt hour in 2017. Offshore wind is the latest renewable to defy predictions. EnBW and Dong won offshore wind tenders in the North Sea with the first subsidy-free bids.

Moody’s reported that wind is now cheaper to install new than coal is to operate in 58 power plants across 15 Midwestern states, at $20 a megawatt versus $30. Trump told a rally in Kentucky that “the miners are coming back”. But they aren’t. Not even top US coal boss Robert Murray expects that, in the face of real contemporary economics.

As for US renewables companies, they were professing this month that their industries will thrive even without the Clean Power Plan. Their confidence is rooted in record solar installation and above average wind installation in 2016, plus federally agreed tax credits that would be difficult for the Trump administration to dismantle.

The news was also broadly good for EVs this month, with Tesla meeting production targets and its shares soaring to an all time high, for a while making it the most valuable car company in America. Meanwhile Big Oil, facing predictions of significant demand destruction by EVs within just years, is struggling to break even.

Most of the oil majors didn’t even cover their costs in 2016, a Wall Street Journal analysis showed, despite a rising oil price. Some oil companies say American shale will help save them. But of the three main oil-producing shale belts, production has already peaked in two.

The oil industry loves to taunt its critics with the mantra that “peak oil is dead”. For some players, it is clearly not the case. Mexico’s proved oil reserves have declined by more than a third since 2013.

This month its National Hydrocarbons Commission country warned that the country will run out of oil in less than nine years if there are no new discoveries.

What an incentive fast oil depletion like that must be to build a clean-energy economy fast, never mind climate change. (More on this in my keynote to the MIREC renewables congress in Mexico City on 10th May).

And there are many other stand-out non-climate incentives around our troubled world, from air pollution to risk of stranded assets. But new figures showed that clean energy investment dropped 17% in the first quarter of 2017.

3. Tech for Good?
Evidence of effort
Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics outpace even those in clean energy, and continue to be used in many ways for the betterment of society. But evidence that they have profound downsides was everywhere this month.

YouTube and Google’s use of algorithms to automatically match ads with content is the basis for widespread criticism that they fed the spread of fake news in the crucial months running up to both the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, much of it orchestrated by a well organised nationalist-right dark-propaganda network.

The two companies ran into further, related, trouble, with big name advertisers boycotting them for posting ads next to racist and other offensive content. The boycotters included such diverse actors as AT&T, the BBC, the British government, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Verizon, and WalMart.

Google responded quickly, saying it was in a race to ramp up its AI capability to deal with the problem. But that is no easy task. Nobody has pulled off such a feat of megadata sifting before. As part of their effort, they have begun to use outside firms to verify ad standards.

They might want to hurry. The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, argues that concentration of power over information, such as Goggle and Facebook now possess, is dangerous for society. He is plotting, with others in the Decentralized Information Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL), means to decentralise control of data in his creation.

The threat AI and robotics pose to jobs becomes ever clearer. More than 10 million UK workers are at risk of being replaced within 15 years, PwC calculated, some 30% of the workforce. The IPPR estimates a similar figure: robots replacing 1 in 3 UK jobs over the next 20 years.

A report by the US National Bureau of Economic Research goes further, suggesting that large numbers of jobs have already been lost to robotics in America, and are unlikely to come back. Wages have been depressed in the process, they contend.

The question arises, then, as to how much this has been fueling populist rage, on both sides of the Atlantic, making it easier for nationalist demagogues to push their argument that “the other” – immigrants and anyone else who is not in what psychologists call their in-group – is entirely to blame.

Whatever the answer to that question about the past, the additional stress just around the corner will clearly pose a dire threat to social cohesion if nothing is done. The imperative for government and business to act is obvious.

4. Truth
Liars under growing scrutiny
As investigations into the conduct of the Trump election and the Brexit vote continue, it becomes ever clearer that the nationalist right is capable of extraordinary feats of voter manipulation.

A group of UK academics warned this month that dark money is a threat to the integrity of British elections. The Electoral Commission is investigating whether work by Cambridge Analytica, one data firm at the heart of the controversy, constitutes an undeclared donation from an impermissible foreign donor.

Cambridge Analytica is majority owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major bankroller of Donald Trump. Steve Bannon, Trump’s head of strategy, has been a major player in the development of the company and its capabilities.

Filings of White House staffers’ interests this month show he has made millions shaping right-wing thought, via Cambridge Analytica and other organs.
The pushback unfolding against this fast-emerging Orwellian narrative is often extraordinary to behold.

The Los Angeles Times published a series of  essays by its editorial board this month. “Our Dishonest President”, the first was entitled. “Why Trump lies”, the second. They read like a science fiction novel of a dystopian future society. But they are about real-life America, today.

New arenas of corporate responsibility are being stimulated, unsurprisingly. Google announced it will begin to display fact-checking labels to show if news it purveys is true or false. Facebook gave a green light to its employees to protest against Trump on May 1^st. Dramas build slowly in the courts as truth and lies compete. A judge rejected Trump’s defense against a claim he incited violence at one of his rallies.

5. Equality
Talk of cutting aid as famine rages
Meanwhile, though you would hardly know it from mainstream media coverage, we are in the midst of the gravest humanitarian crisis since 1945 – since the creation of the United Nations. 20 million people face starvation and famine in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria, the UN warns.

Drought has descended on Kenya, triggering violence as displaced peoples migrate.

Amid all this, populist nationalists continue to contend that aid budgets should be cut. The UK government, to its credit, is resisting this so far.

As for the considerable potential role of clean energy in building equality and alleviating poverty, an international gathering of the Sustainable Energy for All organisation in New York this month called for more urgent action on progress towards global energy goals.

In SolarAid, my colleagues and I could not agree more. Our work is based on the fact that if you burn oil in a kerosene lamp in Africa and it will cost you almost $80 a year, yet a solar lamp retailing at around $5 will give clean light for free, for 4 years.

So if you were one of the poorest people in Africa, which would you rather do? Save $70 a year to spend on food and other essentials, in a time of famine, or burn a fistful of ten dollar bills each year, and risk your health breathing the fumes? This should be an obvious starting point for a massive programme to free up local money for the necessities of poverty alleviation, SolarAid contends.

But sales of the most affordable of these lights are actually falling in Africa, and in fact the rest of the world too. In Malawi, for example, we are one of only a few organisations working to help. More on that subject, a microcosm of global challenges and opportunities in energy, in an e-mail in a week or so.

6. Reform of Capitalism
Graphic evidence of the need
The Bank of England has admitted to fearing, in the current febrile financial climate, that it may not be able to spot the next global crisis coming. Few who studied the forensics of the last one, and the response – or mostly lack thereof – can be surprised. There are obvious candidates for a trigger in the inflated stock market, and mountainous debt in car loans, credit cards, and mortgages. The Brexit gamble is also potentially on the list. The IMF professes that its unpredictable outcome poses a risk to global stability.

Given the fact that regulators regard another crisis as inevitable, and see an unreadable multiplicity of potential paths to it, who can realistically contend that the unbridled 21st century version of capitalism is anything close to a satisfactory way to run a global economy today?

Root-to-branch reform might take some mapping, but starting points are not too difficult to find. One involves the jailing of executives guilty of gross corruption. Until this starts happening, how there can be hope for wider reform, or the necessary adjustments of cultures? Shell offered up a perfect example this month.

The company is under investigation for one of the most corrupt deals in the history of the oil industry.  E-mails show that top executives handed a billion dollars to the Nigerian government, knowing it would be passed to a convicted money-launderer,  in return for a giant oilfield.

The CEO of the day, Peter Voser, knew of the deal. The current CEO, Ben van Buerden, described the evidence in e-mails as “really unhelpful”, but “just pub talk.”

One might hope that if the forces of the law cannot sort out behaviour of this kind, then investors might be queuing to punish a company as wide of the ethical mark as this using their money and governance power.

Not on recent evidence from Wall Street. The social media company Snap, owner of a popular photo exchange website, went public in February with investors queuing to pour cash into it.

This despite the twenty-something co-founders specifying that investors would have zero voting rights. Far from failing, in the exodus of financial custodians that this dangerous first-of-a-kind should have been faced with, Snap raised $3.4 billion and achieved a valuation of $19.7 billion.

What a gloomy precedent this now sets for the future. It raises the prospect, in principle, of a small cadre of almost unregulated and unconstrained tech billionaires calling the shots on how the AI and robotics innovations of the next few years are deployed.

We had better all hope, if this is the way investors and regulators allow events to unfold, that said billionaires, and investors in them, are not friends of the the populist nationalist right.

Yet the way financiers were lining up to engage with Marine Le Pen as the French Presidential election neared suggests we can far from rely on this.

7. Common Security
If you elect nationalist demagogues, you will be more likely to experience World War III
Let me be brief on this final point.

In the Trump administration’s handling of Syria and North Korea, where is there any evidence at all of basic statesmanship?

Of rudimentary strategy even?

Of any thought that there might be lessons to be learned in decades of diplomacy?

Ahead of the election, Trump seemed to grasp the inadvisability of poking a hornets nest with a stick, let alone many millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles. “Again, to our very foolish leader”, he tweeted at Obama (all in capital letters), “do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen.”

Suffice it to say that one particularly bad knee-jerk reaction from Trump and/or those he turns into his adversaries, and all bets are off on the balance of play I endeavour to summarise above.

A message for my senior grandson, if he made it this far in this blog. Sorry fella, I have been trying for a quarter century. But I and all the people like me have pretty much failed, to date. Hopefully there is some comfort in the thought that we are still trying.

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Bernie lead on Trump lead on Clinton

SUBHEAD: In a new national Rasmussen poll the Donald has five-point lead over Hillary.

By Andrea Germanos on 19 May 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/05/19/new-national-poll-trump-increasing-lead-over-clinton)


Image above: Photo-illustration of Clinton and Trump by DonkeyHotey. From original article.

A new Rasmussen poll released Thursday shows Republican front-runner Donald Trump increasing his lead over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The New York billionaire has a five-point edge over the Clinton, with 42 percent of likely voters saying they'd back him compared to 37 percent for Clinton.

The poll also shows Trump now getting 76 percent of the Republican vote; Clinton nabbed 72 percent of the Democratic vote. Thirteen percent of Democrats would prefer Trump in square-off between the two, while nine percent of Republican voters would favor Clinton in such a match-up.

A Rasmussen poll released at the beginning of the month, for comparison, showed the two candidates running neck-and-neck, with the real estate mogul with 41 percent to the former secretary of state's 39 percent, within that poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The new Rasmussen poll, the New York Daily News reports, "suggests Trump could be experiencing a popularity surge as he pivots away from many of the controversial and bigoted statements he made during the GOP primary and embraces more establishment positions as he prepares for the general election."

A separate NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released this week showed Clinton with just a three-point lead over Trump—48 to 45 percent. That poll's margin of error is plus or minus 1.2 percentage points.

And a Fox News national survey released Wednesday also showed Trump leading Clinton 45-42 percent, though that lead is within the survey's 3 percentage point margin of error.

Clinton challenger Bernie Sanders, for his part, has continued to point to polling showing that he's the Democratic candidate able to trounce Trump—and that ability was only further bolstered by the Fox News poll which showed that in a hypothetical general election match-up between the Vermont senator and Trump, Sanders leads 46 to 42 percent.

"If you look at virtually every poll in the last six weeks we do better and often much better against Trump than Secretary Clinton," Sanders said Friday in North Dakota. "So if the goal is to defeat Donald Trump, we are the campaign to do that."

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Sandersism has defeated Clintonism

SUBHEAD: Even if Hillary fixes the delegate count to win the nomination, and goes on to face Trump her faction of the Democratic party has been defeated already.

By Seth Abramson on 18 May 2016 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/make-no-mistake-sanderism_b_10008136.html)


Image above: Photo-illustration of Sanders and Clinton and Trump by DonkeyHotey. From (http://polyconundrum.com/articles/democracy/10833-a-sterling-example-of-democracy-in-action.html).

In 2008, Hillary Clinton — on her way to losing the Democratic nomination — won nine of the final 25 nominating contests. In 2016, she may well — despite being treated as the likely winner of this year’s Democratic primary by the mainstream media — win only seven or eight of the final 25 state primaries and caucuses.

If you’re wondering how Clinton could perform worse in the second half of the election cycle in 2016 than she did in 2008 and still be in a position to win, there’s a good explanation for it that goes beyond the fact that the neck-and-neck Democratic primary race we’ve had for over two months started with a brief but solid run for Clinton.

In 2008, both Democratic candidates were sanctioned by Party elders, so super-delegates were free to pick whoever they thought was the stronger candidate without fear of reprisal.

In 2016, super-delegates are expected to go with Clinton even if the insurgent Sanders has clearly shown himself, by mid-June, to be the stronger general-election candidate in terms of both head-to-head match-ups with Trump, favorability ratings among independent voters, and performance in the second half of the nominating season.

Super-delegates will fall into line — the thinking goes — not because Clinton is a strong general-election bet, or liked by many people, or a real spokeswoman for the ideology of the Party base, or able to win independents, or nearly the same candidate in May that she was in February, or capable of winning over her current Democratic opposition the way Obama did after the primary in 2008, but because Democrats in Washington have made clear that any super-delegates who back the now-stronger horse in Philadelphia this July — Sanders — will be ostracized from the Party.

Fear, then, is what could make Clinton the Democratic nominee even if (a) super-delegates are officially charged with voting for the strongest general-election candidate, and (b) Clinton goes on a historic losing streak in the back half of the primary season election calendar.

But all that’s horse-race nonsense, and won’t matter very much to political historians looking back at this period in American history from the vantage point of, say, 2116.

They won’t care that in 2008 Hillary Clinton won Kentucky by 36 points over then-Senator Obama, but in 2016 only managed to beat a 74-year-old independent socialist with no super-PAC and exponentially less name recognition by 0.4 percent — despite her making 11 trips to the state, having a much larger advertising budget, and daily receiving on-the-stump aid from a popular former President who won Kentucky twice.

We used to say that Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, handily wins closed Democratic primaries.

Well, we can’t say that anymore.

But it doesn’t really matter in the long run.

And it won’t matter in 2116 that Democratic Party elders and particularly former Goldwater-Girl Clinton are so enamored by the idea of a Nixonian strongman that they fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Bernie Sanders to Sandersism. They believe he can direct the movement he lent his name to in the same way Clinton believes progressive Democrats will fall into line no matter how much she disrespects them, but they’re wrong.

And Clinton is wrong to think she doesn’t owe Sanders and his political allies the same visibility and authority in her prospective Administration that she had in Barack Obama’s; she’s also wrong to think that the benefit of rules-fixing at the state Democratic convention in Nevada is worth the November votes it’s going to cost her — especially given her huge delegate lead, which allows her to be a magnanimous rule-follower.

But all that’s only relevant to the Clinton-Sanders and Clinton-Trump horse-races.

Is it a “horse-race” issue that the DNC is publicly representing itself as a “neutral” arbiter in the Democratic primary, and publicly stating that super-delegates don’t vote until July, but according to NBC is in fact “colluding” with the Clinton campaign “behind the scenes” to begin — with millions of votes yet to be cast — the transition of the DNC from an independent operation to one run by Hillary Clinton? No, for the fact that there’s “nothing neutral” about the DNC right now (as David Chalian of CNN put it last night) merely tells you something about the ethics of the Democratic Party in 2016.

After all, this is a Party that has, in 2016, given Debbie Wasserman Schultz a job.

But not only isn’t this an article about horse races, it’s also not about 2016. It’s certainly not about the fact that Hillary Clinton is doing everything she needs to be doing right now to lose the fall general campaign — even as she sets up Bernie Sanders to be the eventual fall-guy for her own failures.

No — this article is about the future.

Conservative Republicans have largely been successful in pulling their party to the right since 1996; the GOP as it is today is almost unrecognizable from the days of George H.W. Bush, who in 2016 terms would be a Democrat.

While conservatives suffered some setbacks over the last few years — owing to their leaders choosing, over and over, to ignore them or even slap them in the face publicly — the 2016 GOP primary has shown us that a party’s “base”, apropos of its name, always get the last laugh. Why? Because it’s what any political party is ultimately founded upon.

Since 1996, progressive Democrats have had their butts handed to them repeatedly by their leaders. The Democratic Party as it is today is almost unrecognizable from the days of Michael Dukakis. Bill Clinton turned out to be a “New Democrat,” in other words a triangulating neoliberal corporatist. Al Gore waited until far too late in his 2000 campaign to unveil his “progressive warrior” persona.

Howard Dean was cut off at the knees by the media in 2004, when somehow everyone who reported on “The Scream” neglected to mention that it was only the media’s turning off of all off-stage mics that made Dean’s speech seem out-of-place in-context. Barack Obama has been a terrific President whose administration has been, nevertheless, not nearly as progressive as the two campaigns he waged to get into the White House led progressives to expect.

When the Democrats did everything in their power to anoint Hillary Clinton before a single American had voted — giving her a 350-superdelegate lead, more than $100 million in super-PAC money, a laughably disingenuous “debate schedule,” and much more — it was presumed that progressives would take a right cross to the chin with the same good grace they always had.

Keeping progressives complacent has been particularly easy for the “New Democrat” philosophy Bill and Hillary Clinton used to take over the Democratic Party because it has, too, the complicity of the corporate media — in much the same way Republican conservatives succeeded because of their absolute dominance of American radio.

Despite being told not to do so by the DNC itself, the mainstream media began tallying superdelegates back in 2015, which ensured that Clinton would not face a real challenger from within the Democratic Party. Until it realized there was real money to be made in cable-sponsored “town halls”, the mainstream media remained largely silent on the laughably sparse debate schedule the DNC had created as a sort of “red carpet” for Clinton. The media gave Sanders only a fraction of the coverage enjoyed by Clinton.

It stacked its permanent on-air “panels” with Clinton supporters, while relegating Sanders surrogates to, at most, brief interviews. And it perpetuated a single master narrative to the point it became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the idea that if a 74-year-old independent socialist from an all-white state couldn’t immediately, even instantaneously, win a majority of the black and Latino vote nationwide, it meant his “appeal” was limited to well-to-do Caucasian hipsters.

That Sanders has doubled his support among blacks and Latinos over the last three months is, in this day-to-day “horse-race” perspective the media and the media alone promulgates, meaningless.

The problem is, “-isms” don’t operate at the level of a year; they unfold over decades.

Sandersism isn’t about 2016; it’s about 2024, 2044, and even — in terms of what it means for the future of this country — 2116.

The point being this: the ideological revolution within the Democratic Party has already happened, and Sandersism won. The only question now is how long Democrats and the country will have to wait to see its gains in real-time.

A Clinton presidency would forestall those gains somewhat less than a Trump presidency would, but the fact remains that either a Clinton or a Trump administration would merely delay the inevitable “New New Deal” America has richly earned and will ultimately receive.

It’s not just me saying this, nor is it merely Sanders supporters. No less a staunch Clinton ally than David Axelrod said on CNN two weeks ago that not only is the “debate over” regarding the ideological future of the Democratic Party, it was actually over a long time ago.

And Bernie Sanders won it.

It was over when a 74-year-old independent socialist with no super-PAC or name recognition went from 4 percent in the polls at the beginning of 2015 to — within 13 months — a statistical dead heat with the most powerful political machine in the history of American democracy.

Let’s be clear: the Clintons aren’t merely the most politically successful husband-and-wife team in American history; they’re not merely the scions of a family that has, for a quarter-century, been the most politically influential in the Democratic Party; they literally remade the party into their own image more than two decades ago.

The Democratic Party today is Clintonism. And when Bernie Sanders declared what was ostensibly a fringe candidacy last spring, he was in no uncertain terms — not even the Clintons doubted it — declaring war on the Democratic Party as the Clintons had made it. He was, in short, declaring a return to the politics of FDR and the Democratic Party of the New Deal.

Contemporary journalists are tasked with seeing beyond the ends of their noses, but rarely do; they’re encouraged in this dereliction of duty by politicians like the Clintons for whom a perpetual focus on the day-to-day horse-race is good for business — specifically, the business of keeping one of the two major American political parties exactly as it already is. (Which, as noted, is exactly how they made it.)

As long as reporters focus exclusively on the horse-race, it’s easy to count delegates properly — though actually, the media struggles to do even this — and see that Sanders remains unlikely to be the lead horse after the current lap is run.

It’s equally easy to see that saying Clinton has “won” obscures not just how bad a politician she is; not just how poor a campaign she has run; not just how disliked she is by the general-election electorate; not just how needlessly close a general-election race her nomination would ensure; but also, and more importantly, how irrelevant her political persona — which she has shed by degrees this election cycle anyway — will be to the future of her Party and the nation.

An obsession with the horse-race — with what happens in 2016, irrespective of what will happen in 2020, 2024, and for decades after that — is the only thing that allows Hillary Clinton to declare victory in the Democratic nominating process.

Any longer view, particularly one that considers that Clintonism and Sandersism didn’t start 2015 at the same starting line — indeed, didn’t even start in the same stadium — will acknowledge that Sanders finishing the 2016 election season with between 46 percent and 48 percent of the pledged delegates means Sandersism has defeated Clintonism.

The Democrats ignore this at their peril.

But make no mistake, they will ignore it — they already are, and with a particularly unpalatable smugness — and so they must therefore, going forward, be considered as existentially imperiled as the Republican Party is right now.

The Democratic Party’s perverse obsession with closed primaries has left them with a likely nominee distinctly unpopular with the independent voters who decide national elections. The Party’s reliance on superdelegates ensured a noncompetitive field of Democratic competitors (Chafee, Webb, and O’Malley) and stacked the deck against a legitimate “movement” insurgent from the ranks of the nation’s progressive-but-independent politicians — an insurgent with the sort of excitement behind him that could drive turnout in a GOTV-oriented “base” election.

Clinton’s continued refusal to release her Wall Street transcripts, and the Party’s broader recalcitrance in the face of working-class suffering, isn’t an instance of Clinton or the Party standing up for itself in the face of unreasonable expectations — rather, it’s a failure to honor the generation coming up, which needs to believe that its politicians mean what they say and really do care about the things they say they do.

Clinton didn’t owe Sanders supporters transcripts of all her prepared remarks on substantive economic and foreign policy, she owed that transparency to her Party and to the nation whose votes she seeks. But the Party’s esoteric fundraising schemes and infrastructure made it impossible for it to stand up to one of its best rainmakers — ironically, in part because the Party has done nothing to get money out of politics via meaningful campaign finance reform.

Finally, the Party’s reliance on a set rather than variable primary schedule means that certain states and votes are every four years privileged over others; concerns about the undue influence of Southern voters on this year’s primary had nothing to do with racial demographics and everything to do with the signal sent when a Party lets its most moderate voters (white and black alike) have the biggest say in its nominating process.

Clintonism supports all of the above structural flaws only because they, in turn, support the election of Clintons to national office.

And that, in a nutshell, is Clintonism: a feedback loop whose motive engine is money and influence and the continued political success of Clintons. In the 90s it was geared toward Bill; in the aughts and tens, Hillary; and we can expect that the same forces will soon be brought to bear for Chelsea, if she desires it. Meanwhile, life has gotten worse for those Americans who don’t attend Clinton Thanksgiving in Chappaqua or help pay for the house in which it is held.

As a broader, more abstract philosophy, however, Clintonism is by no means restricted to the Clintons. All of its most cynical, Nixonian manifestations are iterable, meaning they can be used by any two-bit local, state, or national politician willing to put politics in the way of people — and vanity in the place of principle.

In Sandersism, universal healthcare is a human right that cannot be subjected to the realpolitik of incremental legislation. In this view, Obamacare must of course be maintained until the very moment we switch to a single-payer system, but it is the obligation of every person concerned with human rights to militate for such a system to the exclusion of others.

In Sandersism, a college education is a public good all Americans are entitled to, meaning that whatever funding priorities must be rearranged to make this possible must be rearranged. “We can’t do it” is no more a reply to the Sandersist view of higher education than would be a similar statement with respect to other basic American rights.

In Sandersism, climate change supplants terrorism as the top threat to national security, without degrading any of the current anti-terrorism efforts that respect human rights and appropriately assess the scope (and primary drivers) of our terror risk. In Sandersism, a living wage for all Americans is a human right, not something for politicians to log-roll endlessly about.

A Sandersist’s first offer to her negotiating partner on the subject of a living wage is $15, and her second offer is $15, and her third offer is $15, and every offer thereafter is $15 — for saying $10 or $12 is akin to saying that minorities can sometimes be discriminated against without the immediate and utter disapproval of American law.

In Sandersism you negotiate with any and all parties of good faith up until the moment doing so requires sacrificing a principle. If, under those conditions, not enough parties of good faith remain, you spend all your time and resources writing executive orders and working for an end to gerrymandering and the defeat of all bad-faith politicians in local, state, and national primaries and generals.

In Sandersism politics is an arena where ideas, not bank accounts or special interests, are contested; every American is given every possible opportunity to vote; corporate practices that maim or kill living humans are outlawed; those few economic practices that can terminally endanger basic economic justice are adequately regulated; and we spend as much money making sure our criminal justice system and law enforcement apparatuses are actually just as we do ensuring our military is capable and appropriately fearsome.

Sandersism is a “we” and an “us” movement that transcends the artificial divisions of the party era and the atomization of persons and communities. A Sandersist spends the minimum amount of time running for office and the maximum amount of time doing the difficult work of governing — and in both roles places transparency ahead of political exigency ten times out of ten.

Sandersism is already the philosophy of a majority of Democrats under 45, which means by 2024 it will almost certainly be the philosophy of a majority of Democrats under 55.

And any movement with those demographic internals is already a current and future cultural dominant for the purposes of political planning and action.

That Sanders defeats Trump by more than Clinton in every battleground state and nationally only underscores that Clintonism no longer is a winning formula for a national election. That Sanders likely won’t get to carry the flag for Sandersism this fall — and Clinton will lose unless she carries that flag clearly and proudly — is merely another irony in what has been a veritable landslide of ironies this election season. Clinton saying “I don’t know if he is a Democrat” will certainly be at the top of that irony-pile, now that it’s clear that the Party’s platform will largely be Sandersist.

The Democrats under Hillary Clinton are now a “zombie party”; everyone but their leaders can see that they have the same thing coming to them in (say) 2024 that the Republicans had coming to them in 2016 because of the many slaps in the face they gave their own base in the aughts. Any presidency Clinton has now can be no more than the end of something very old and tired, not the beginning of anything new.

And the best part is, Clinton is telegraphing her own defeat to the media every single day — they’re just not picking up the signal.

Sanders has pulled Clinton to the left on every issue of consequence. Now Clinton opposes all or nearly all of the recent international trade deals; supports a $15 minimum wage; wants a single-payer healthcare option for all Americans over 50; is willing to ban fracking as part of the Democratic Party platform (per reports); opposes the death penalty in all but vanishingly rare circumstances; is committed to breaking up too-big-to-fail banks; and so on.

What’s even more astonishing is that not only has Clinton stolen most of Sanders’ campaign agenda, she’s also stolen many of his best lines. Reporters frequently note that Clinton’s best-received speeches easily could have been delivered (and, indeed, previously had been, to much larger crowds) by Sanders.

It doesn’t even matter that Clinton’s embrace of Sanders’ progressivism is obviously entirely fake, and will disappear into thin air should she ever get into the White House. Sandersists know this, and nothing that happens at the Democratic National Convention will convince them otherwise.

Clinton aides smugly telling reporters that Clinton will concede almost everything to Sanders with respect to the Party’s platform because “the platform doesn’t matter” and “voters don’t care about the platform” are, finally, speaking only to themselves — taking a victory lap during which their zombie appendages fall off one by one.

For the fact remains that, should Clinton win the nomination, she will have done so using Sandersism as her chief philosophical mainstay and bulwark. The fact remains that any support she now has with voters under 45 — which is to say, barely any — was gained on the explicit presumption that she could deliver on a Sandersist legislative agenda in Washington.

Should she do as she definitely plans to do — drop everything she’s adopted from Sanders should she get into the White House — she’ll face another legitimate progressive challenger in 2020, and should she defeat that challenger by again remaking herself as someone totally other than who she is, if indeed she is anyone at all, in 2024 progressives will finally seal the deal and take their party back.

In other words, every action Clintonism takes in the next eight years will be part of a retreating action in the face of Sandersism. The Democratic Party as the Clintons remade it in the 1990s is dead, and the most Clinton can do is steer her little ghost-ship a few more miles until it finally wrecks itself on an offshore sandbar.

Clinton may win the battle in 2016, but only political neophytes — and a few Washington Post columnists, I suppose — fail to see that she’s already lost the war.


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When reform becomes impossible

SUBHEAD: It's cheaper and more effective to let the system collapse than squander treasure attempting reforms.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 5 November 2015 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov15/collapse-cheap11-15.html)


Image above: Album cover from the original motion picture soundtrack from the movie "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by Timothy Leary. From (http://www.crossmap.com/blogs/timothy-leary-and-lifes-meaning-6876).

Collapse begins when real reform becomes impossible. Reforms that can't be stopped by the outright purchase of politicos are watered down in committee, and loopholes wide enough for jumbo-jets of cash to fly through are inserted.

The reform quickly becomes "reform"--a simulacrum that maintains the facade of fixing what's broken while maintaining the Status Quo. Another layer of costly bureaucracy is added, along with hundreds or thousands of pages of additional regulations, all of which add cost and friction without actually solving what was broken.

The added friction increases the system's operating costs at multiple levels. Practitioners must stop doing actual work to fill out forms that are filed and forgotten; lobbyists milk the system to eradicate any tiny reductions in the flow of swag; attorneys probe the new regulations for weaknesses with lawsuits, and the enforcing agencies add staff to issue fines.

None of this actually fixes what was broken; all these fake-reforms add costs and reduce whatever efficiencies kept the system afloat. Recent examples include the banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 meltdown and the ObamaCare Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Back in 2010 I prepared this chart of The Lifecycle of Bureaucracy: as bureaucracies expand, they inevitably become less accountable, less efficient, more bloated with legacy staffing and requirements that no longer make sense, etc.

As costs soar, the bureaucracy's budget is attacked, and the agency circles the wagons and focuses on lobbying politicos and the public to leave the budget untouched.

Since accountability has been dissipated, management becomes increasingly incompetent and larded with people who can't be fired so they were kicked upstairs. Staff morale plummets as the competent quit/transfer out in disgust, leaving the least productive and those clinging on in order to retire with generous government benefits.

In this state of terminal decline, the agency's original function is no longer performed adequately and the system implodes from the dead weight of its high costs, lack of accountability, gross incompetence, inability to adapt and staggering inefficiency.

I've covered this dynamic a number of times:

Our Legacy Systems: Dysfunctional, Unreformable (July 1, 2013)
The Way Forward (April 25, 2013)
When Escape from a Previously Successful Model Is Impossible (November 29, 2012)
Complexity: Bureaucratic (Death Spiral) and Self-Organizing (Sustainable) (February 17, 2011)

This generates a ratchet effect, where costs increase even as the bureaucracy's output declines. The ratchet effect can also be visualized as a rising wedge, in which costs and inefficiencies continue rising until any slight decrease in funding collapses the organization.

Dislocations Ahead: The Ratchet Effect, Stick-Slip and QE3 (February 14, 2011)
The Ratchet Effect: Fiefdom Bloat and Resistance to Declining Incomes (August 23, 2010)
The net result of the Ratchet Effect and the impossibility of reform is this: it's cheaper and more effective to let the system collapse than squander time and treasure attempting reforms that are bound to fail as vested interests will fight to the death to retain every shred of power and swag.

Since the constituent parts refuse to accept any real reforms, the entire system implodes. We can look at healthcare, higher education and the National Security State as trillion-dollar examples of systems that become increasingly costly even as their performance declines or falls off the cliff.

This is the lesson of history, as described in the seminal book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization.

Collapse does not need to be complete or sudden. Collapse tends to be a process, not an event.

Collapse begins when you can't find any doctors willing to accept Medicaid payments, when the potholes don't get filled even when voters approve millions of dollars in new taxes, and when kids aren't learning anything remotely useful or practical despite the school board raising tens of millions of dollars in additional property taxes.

Collapse begins when real reform becomes impossible.


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Spinning Wheels

SUBHEAD: Is any effort to reform the food system is doomed to operate within the confines of the larger system?

[IB Publisher's note: We don't think so - however, unfortunately,  the fledgling small farm movement will not be large enough to serve the middle class when the bottom falls out of the big-ag food delivery system.]

By Brian Miller on 2 November 2015 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2015/11/02/spinning-wheels/)


Image above: A produce booth at the Palm Beach Gardens Farmer's Market. Can this system serve the middle class? From (http://farmersmarketsflorida.com/).

Periodically I feel the urge to write about farm economics, but I never quite figure out where to begin or what it encompasses. If I were to focus strictly on the profit/loss of our 70-acre farm, the picture might be too grim. To focus only on the rewards, the picture would be too rosy.

An endless amount is written these days about the small farm revolution, the explosion of farmer’s markets, and the localization of the American palate — a market destined for a middle class that each year dwindles in size, dwindles in spending power. Which leaves me wondering, who is buying all of these $7 a dozen, specially curated eggs?

Part of the problem with the small farm renaissance, as I see it, is that its success is partly measured by a share in a marketplace created to favor consolidation and lead to practices that are the antithesis of sustainable or at least careful stewardship.

More important, its success seems based specifically on a species of wealth derived from consumerism.

I really shouldn’t compare the prototypical small farm customer to a crack addict. But I will say that so much of our consumer society is built on providing a momentary high.

Which means that any effort to reform the food system is doomed to operate within the confines of the larger system that gave it birth, one based on providing that “high” to increase consumption.

Likewise, the larger economy thrives on providing a purchasable identity.

Create a consumerist buzz centered on small, idyllic plots of land, sustainability, and local food and you risk ginning up interest in hobby farms by bored, wealthy city dwellers, generating a publishing bonanza of how-to books, and building a market for those $7 a dozen, specially curated eggs.

A harsh assessment?

Perhaps, because there are a lot of great small farms and farmers, and plenty of sincere customers supporting their efforts. And there have been some great innovations to provide opportunities to support small farms, like CSAs and farmer’s markets.

And then there are the growing number of rural Americans who already lead a peak-empire life —working ad hoc jobs, bartering, growing their own gardens, raising or hunting their own meat and butchering it, living largely outside of the middle-class matrix of consumerism.

The old Wobblies had a motto: “We’re building the new society in the shell of the old.” Maybe that is the best we can shoot for at this stage in the global economy.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the middle-class small farm economy all seems too little, too late. It is too easily converted into another twee Martha Stewart aspiration for a middle class with dwindling hopes and clout.

The rubber-meets-the-road moment for all of us will be when this consumer-driven small farm moment meets the real small farm movement — a movement of descent, where we get to see who truly has the will and resources to embrace a smaller economic lifestyle, a lifestyle where a more authentic life of hard work powered by necessity shapes what we find valuable, one where identities are not for purchase.

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It's One Indivisible System

SUBHEAD: You can't separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 1 October 2015 for Of Teo Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct15/one-system10-15.html)


Image above: Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone. From (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/505599495638506055/).

The great irony is what's unsustainable melts into thin air no matter how many people want it to keep going.

Disagreement is part of discourse, and pursuing differing views of the best way forward is the heart of democracy. Disagreement is abundant, democracy is scarce, despite claims to the contrary.

If you think you can surgically extract Empire from the American System, force the State to serve the working/middle classes, end the stripmining of financialization, limit crony capitalism/regulatory capture and get Big Money out of politics--go ahead and do so. I'm not standing in your way--go for it.

But while you pursue your good governance, populist, Left/ Right /Socialist/ Libertarian, etc. reforms, please understand the system is indivisible: the Deep State, the Imperial Project (hegemony and power projection), the State, finance in all its tenacled control mechanisms (greetings, debt-serfs and student-loan-serfs), crony capitalism /regulatory capture, money buying political influence, media propaganda passing as "news", and the evisceration of democracy (something untoward could happen if the serfs could overthrow the Power Elite at the ballot box--can't let that happen)--it's all one system.

Should any one organ be ripped from the body, the entire body dies. The entire system defends each subsystem as integral as a matter of survival. As a result, the naive notion that big money can be excised with only positive consequences is false: restoring democracy places the entire system at risk of implosion.

No more bread and circuses, no more Social Security checks, no more state employee pensions--it all melts into air if any subsystem stops doing its job.

The system is interdependent. Each subsystem needs the others to function. I drew up a chart of the major components (but by no means all) of the system:

The system is a machine in which each gear serves the whole. So go ahead and try to "reform" the system by extracting whatever gear you don't approve of: the Deep State components, the Security State organs, the Federal Reserve, cartels/monopolies enforced by the State, the suppression of democracy, crony capitalism, whatever.

The machine will resist your "reform" to the death because should you succeed, the machine will implode. Take out the financialization gear and the financial system collapses.

So go ahead and reform to your heart's content. Go ahead and believe the system is reformable, if it makes you feel better. Vote for Bernie or The Donald or whomever. Go ahead and disagree with me. Prove me wrong.

Prove the State really, really, really wants to serve the working/middle class rather than the Empire that it is. Pursue your Left/ Right/ Socialist/ Libertarian fantasies of righting the Imperial Project by ripping the gears out of the very center of the machine.

It doesn't work that way. We can't remove the gears we find distasteful. Either the machine grinds on and we get our share of the swag--bread and circuses, corporate welfare, State jobs and pensions, Medicaid and Medicare, and all the rest of the immense swag of hegemony and the Imperial Project--or the system implodes and all the swag melts into air.

The great irony is what's unsustainable melts into thin air no matter how many people want it to keep going.

But go ahead and disagree. It's your right, by golly. Go ahead and try to "reform" the system and see how far you get.

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Diggers' History

SUBHEAD: The Diggers - Land reform and direct activism from 17th century England to America today.  

By Dr. John Gurney on 31 August 2012 for STIR - 
(http://stirtoaction.com/?p=2324)


Image above: Members of the Diggers' Mirth Collective organic farm in Vermont was founded in 1992 and farms 12 acres. They stand in front of their biofuel fired delivery truck. From (http://www.healthylivingmarket.com/blog/news/healthy-living-loves-local-diggers-mirth-collective-farm/).

The Runneymede Eco Village has, at the time of writing, continued in being for seven weeks, despite the bad summer weather and the frequent and inevitable attempts by the authorities to move the Diggers on. The action began on 9 June 2012, with a march from Syon Lane Community Allotment towards Windsor, where activists aimed to set up a self-sustaining community on disused land belonging to the Crown Estate.

Eventually they settled on land surrounding the former Cooper’s Hill campus of Shoreditch College of Education and Brunel University, and it was here that they began building a long house, complete with wattle and daub and cob. The published demands of the participants in the venture were simple and direct. Everyone should have the right to live on disused land, to grow food and to build a shelter: ‘no country’, they claimed, ‘can be considered free, until this right is available to all’. As so often in the past, the question of access to land, shelter and livelihood had led people to articulate demands for a radical shift in society’s attitudes, and to engage in constructive and imaginative direct action to advance their cause.

The Runneymede activists’ demands might, at first sight, appear to present something of a paradox. On the one hand, they address very real twenty-first-century problems, among them today’s serious housing shortages and the reluctance of politicians of all major parties to take action to bring rents and house prices down to affordable levels. Allied to this is the issue of how best to promote viable strategies for sustainable living on an increasingly crowded planet.

On the other hand, the activists’ demands very deliberately invoke those of the original, mid-seventeenth-century Diggers, a group of activists whose world was very different from the one we now inhabit. What possible relevance could the example of seventeenth-century Diggers have for activists today?

It was in April 1649 that the Diggers, inspired by the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, occupied waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots and beans. For Winstanley, the earth had been corrupted by covetousness and the rise of private property, and the time was ripe for it to become once more a ‘common treasury for all’.

Change was to be brought about by the poor working the land in common and refusing to work for hire. The common people had ‘by their labours … lifted up their landlords and others to rule in tyranny and oppression over them’, and, Winstanley insisted, ‘so long as such are rulers as calls the land theirs … the common people shall never have their liberty; nor the land ever freed from troubles, oppressions and complainings’.

The earth was made ‘to preserve all her children’, and not to ‘preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the earth from others, that they might beg or starve in a fruitful land’ – everyone should be able to ‘live upon the increase of the earth comfortably’.

Soon all people – rich as well as poor – would, Winstanley hoped, be persuaded to throw in their lot with the Diggers and work to create a new, and better society. To Winstanley, agency was key, for ‘action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’.

Winstanley’s vision was as much religious as political; he was strongly influenced by the mystical writings that were so popular among seventeenth-century radicals, and he shared fully in the millenarian excitement of the age. Yet in many respects the central elements of his programme remained resolutely practical, and it is largely this that explains the continuing interest in his ideas.

 The Diggers were active at a time of severe economic hardship and rapid political change. England had only recently emerged from several years of debilitating civil war, an experience made worse by a series of disastrous harvests in the immediate post-war years. King Charles I had been executed just two months before they began their digging, and England was in the process of being transformed into a republic.

The Diggers’ program was both revolutionary and practical: in occupying the commons Winstanley and his companions hoped both to advance their aim of ridding the land of private property and monetary exchange, and also to provide people with the opportunity to subsist in a time of scarcity.

We should not be surprised to find that many of those who joined Winstanley on St George’s Hill, and who stayed with him until their settlements were destroyed, were local inhabitants. The traditional view that the Diggers were naive urban radicals, who descended upon an unsuspecting rural community before being swiftly driven away by outraged locals, now has little to commend it.

It is clear that Winstanley’s vision, and his astute social criticism, had particular resonance for rural inhabitants whose livelihoods had suffered in the years of war and scarcity, and for whom England’s unprecedented political changes appeared to offer the chance to radically re-order their community.

Digging lasted for just over a year from April 1649. The Surrey Diggers abandoned their St George’s Hill colony in the summer of 1649, after having succumbed to frequent assaults and legal actions, and by late August they had relocated to the neighbouring parish of Cobham. Here they remained until 19 April 1650, when local landowners brought hired men to destroy their houses and burn the contents and building materials.

New Digger colonies had, however, sprung up elsewhere, inspired by the Surrey Diggers’ example and by Winstanley’s extraordinarily rich body of writings.

The longest lasting was probably the one established at Iver in Buckinghamshire, but we know of others too at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and at Barnet, Enfield and Dunstable. Further colonies – most of them unspecified or difficult to identify – were reported elsewhere in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire as well as in Gloucestershire, Kent, Nottinghamshire and possibly Leicestershire.

Clearly Winstanley’s ideas had – for a brief time at least – fired the imagination of significant numbers of radicals and country people.

After Winstanley had completed his last major work in 1651, his writings were little read for more than two centuries. It was not until the 1890s that they were picked up again, first by Marxists and then, significantly, by land reformers. Today knowledge of Winstanley is widespread, and he has become one of the best-known figures from the period of the English Revolution.

There have been numerous plays, novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often been cited as an inspirational figure by politicians of the left. It is, however, for modern activists that his ideas and achievements have come to be seen as particularly relevant, and the Diggers have become one of the historical groups with which activists today are most likely to identify.

From the 1960s Haight Ashbury Diggers, through Britain’s Hyde Park Diggers and Digger Action Movement, to The Land is Ours, G20 Meltdown and Occupy movement activists, one finds frequent echoes of Winstanley’s writings in modern social movements.

His memory, and that of his fellow Diggers, has in recent years also been invoked by freeganists, squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs, greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists and libertarians have laid claim to him as a significant precursor.

Video above: Diggers' Mirth organic farm was founded in 1992 and currently has five members farming 12 acres in rural Vermont. This is a worker-owned and operated farm. Their name was derived from a British agrarian collective that operated in the mid-1600s. From (http://youtu.be/eYsgLfecCs4). 
 
Last year’s Land and Freedom camp on Clapham Common included a timely showing of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s classic 1975 film Winstanley, and independent socialists in both Wigan (Winstanley’s birthplace) and Wellingborough (the site of a Digger colony) have begun holding annual Digger festivals. Even well-heeled Cobham now has its Winstanley Walk and Winstanley Close.

The best-known attempt in recent years to draw on the example of the Diggers was the campaign launched in the 1990s by The Land is Ours. In 1995 TLIO activists set up camp at the disused Wisley airfield in Surrey and briefly invaded the fairways of St George’s Hill golf course. Four years later, on the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Digger experiment, activists marched to St George’s Hill – now an exclusive housing estate – and set up their tents, yurt and compost toilets on North Surrey Water Company land near the summit.

The occupation lasted for just under a fortnight, when the site was abandoned before a possession order could be put into effect. Other land occupations soon followed. TLIO’s activities and their thoughtful publicity material helped draw attention both to pressing land-access issues, and to the continuing relevance of the Diggers’ example for modern activists.

It is often thought that TLIO were among the first activists to make the connection between modern land rights campaigns and the activities of the Diggers. Others had, however, got there some years before.

More than a hundred years ago Stewart Gray, a mystic, hermit and former Edinburgh lawyer – and a figure now almost completely forgotten – travelled to Cobham to honour Winstanley, who had, he said, ‘grabbed a piece of land and taught the people how to grow their own food’.

While living in Manchester, Gray had thrown in his lot with the unemployed and had become a pioneer of land grabbing. In 1906 he and others had seized church land at Levenshulme in Manchester, where they set up camp and hoped to ‘teach the unemployed to dig’. Soon other camps had appeared in Manchester, Bradford and Poplar. Gray later invaded the pulpit of Manchester Cathedral and led an unemployed hunger march – one of the first of its kind – to London.

He planned, in anticipation of the 2012 Diggers, to settle part of Windsor Great Park as a colony for the unemployed, but when this failed to materialize he announced instead his intention of going on hunger strike. It was at this time, in February 1908, that he arrived at the gates of St George’s Hill.

Finding the hill closed to himself and his companions, he took a growing cabbage from a cottage garden and planted it in protest outside the entrance to the hill.

Gray was not alone in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain in invoking Winstanley’s memory in connection with modern land-access campaigns. Lewis Berens, who in 1906 published the first full-length study of Winstanley’s life and ideas, had for many years been active in land nationalisation campaigns in Britain and South Australia, while Morrison Davidson, whose The Wisdom of Winstanley the Digger appeared in 1904, was also heavily involved in the cause of radical land reform. In 1910 Joseph Clayton could claim that Winstanley’s ‘social teaching on the land question has thousands of disciples in Great Britain today’.

We should be careful not to assume that the popularity of Winstanley and the Diggers has persisted unabated since their rediscovery just over a century ago. The ‘land question’ that so exercised Edwardian radicals has never fully gone away, but by no means every land activist in the last hundred or so years has claimed to draw inspiration from the Diggers or been aware of their story.

As Alun Howkins and others have argued, the many generations of activists that have addressed land-rights issues since 1649 have often responded to familiar problems in very similar ways, without necessarily being conscious of the example of their predecessors. But the place of the Diggers in modern popular memory is striking.

In part this derives from the work of the historian Christopher Hill, who first wrote about Winstanley and the Diggers in the 1940s, when he was active in the Communist Party, but who presented a rather different, and to modern readers more sympathetic, view of Winstanley in his classic The World Turned Upside Down, published in 1972.

Here for the first time Winstanley was portrayed as the articulate representative of an early modern counter-cultural radical underground; Winstanley’s insights into the corruption of the earth were also now seen to have profound contemporary relevance for a generation alarmed by the destruction of the environment and by threats of nuclear war.

Hill’s Winstanley could be seen to speak powerfully to the new social movements of the 1960s and 70s, and to those members of a younger generation who increasingly questioned the achievements of post-war capitalism and rejected its values. Others too helped to forge this image of Winstanley, most notably George Woodcock, whose influential book Anarchism contained an important section on Winstanley which portrayed him as a figure who ‘stood at the beginning of the anarchist tradition of direct action’.

David Caute’s 1961 novel Comrade Jacob, and the radio and theatre plays it inspired, also helped to bring Winstanley and the Diggers to new audiences, as did Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s film. All these brought home the importance of Winstanley’s attempt to deal with the land question of his day, in ways that continued to resonate across the centuries.

Most influential, however, was Leon Rosselson’s song ‘The World Turned Upside Down: Part 2’. Rosselson wrote the song after reading Hill; it has since been memorably recorded by Dick Gaughan and Billy Bragg among others, as well as by Rosselson, and has been regularly sung by Roy Bailey in his performances with Tony Benn on their ‘The Writing on the Wall’ tours. It has become one of the best-known protest anthems of recent times, known to activists not only in Britain but across the world.

Over the years it has been adopted by activists at Greenham Common, by miners’ support groups, by land campaigners and by campaigners in the United States, Australia and Nicaragua. The BBC is even said to have once broadcast it as a traditional anthem of Nicaraguan coffee bean pickers. At Occupy London last year, Rosselson sung it memorably, and appropriately, at the camp at the foot of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Rosselson’s song brilliantly captured Winstanley’s message, and articulated it for a new generation that could easily identify with the Diggers’ spirited aims and their sufferings at the hands of their opponents. ‘To make the waste land grow’, the slogan adopted by the Runneymede Diggers in 2012, echoes Rosselson’s song more directly than Winstanley’s own writings, and reminds us of the ways in which the arguments of 1649 have been so importantly refracted through Rosselson’s 1974 words.

As long as Rosselson’s song continues to be sung, the memory of Winstanley and the Diggers will no doubt be kept alive, and future generations of activists will be reminded of the example and relevance of their seventeenth-century predecessors.
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Skeleton Dance

SUBHEAD: The central truth that reflective persons can take away from these shenanigans is that American polity is unreformable.  

By James Kunstler on 11 April 2011 for Kunstler.com -  
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/04/skeleton-dance.html)


Image above: Tinted still frame from video below. Cue the xylophone.

Like the dancing skeletons of film history, here come the elected office-holders of the US government cutting their capers in the graveyard of empire, giving the paying customer - er... citizens - a nice case of the Friday night heebie-jeebies in a mock battle over inanities. It made for a few hours of diverting theater, with an emphasis on diversion - since the whole gruesome melodrama of the US budget finally hinged on a ploy to de-fund the Planned Parenthood organization, one of the few useful endeavors left in this land of depravity, monster trucks, and microwaved cheese snacks.

I don't believe for a moment that the political right cares about the well-being of fetuses, anyway. The abortion issue is just a convenient cudgel to bash their political adversaries on the left. Karl Marx, a useful polemicist if a hinky guide in practical politics, had an apt term for what has become the ideology of the American right wing: "rural idiocy."

It included all the familiar superstitions, phobias, obsessions, bugaboos, misconceptions, animosities, and sadistic impulses of simple country folk. Of course, today we'd have to update it as "suburban idiocy," because that is where the simple country folk of yesteryear have transpired to relocate, most traumatically in the Sunbelt, where today's car dealers, franchise moguls, and country clubbers, were only two generations ago digging chiggers out of their bare ankles after long days in the sharecrop furrows.

These folk believe all kinds of things that are not true, in fact lack the mental equipment for measuring the difference between what is true and not true and, having never known it, don't miss it. How else can you account for the burgeoning industry of "creation" museums all across Dixieland? These are the folks who, in the name of "liberty," want to regulate your sex life in accordance with the Southern Baptist Convention, the folks who want to start World War Three in order to promote the mythical "rapture," the folks who don't think twice about destroying the conditions that tend to support life on Planet Earth.

This is not going too end well for us, despite Congressman Paul Ryan's much-applauded "Path to Prosperity" proposal unveiled last week just before the whole battle degenerated into the ruse over abortion. The central truth that reflective persons can take away from these shenanigans is that American polity is unreformable. Nobody elected to congress will have the backbone to manage contraction, especially to cut payments to old people.

The medical system can't be fixed. It is made up of too many rackets benefitting too many enterprises and individuals. It just has to fail completely so that in the rubble of the system doctors and patients can reestablish some meaningful relationship between services rendered and the rate of payment.

The Obama health reform bill only illustrated the fatal weakness of progressive politics these days - the irresistible impulse to address issues of excessive complexity with added complexity. While most of the overt stupidity in our politics resides on the right, an equally disabling hubris and grandiosity reside in the political left. I suppose people who graduate from very selective and expensive colleges, and receive immense reinforcement from colleagues who preceded them there, develop an inflated sense of their ability to effectively manage things, especially complex things.

Many of these young, bright people cannot believe that our creaking and foundering systems won't yield to their managerial tinkering, and the net effect must be to turn them into very cynical careerists with nothing left but personal ladder-climbing and wealth accumulation - hence, the disgusting biographies of figures such as former public servant Lawrence Summers and Mary Shapiro of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The political left in America makes up in cynical cowardly avarice for all the mendacious stupidity on the political right, so we end up at this moment in history with a perfect blend of every bad impulse in human nature and none of the virtues.

Personally, I don't see how breakdown and revolution can be avoided now. Anyway, outside of politics itself is a gigantic realm of other things that are not trending well at all - things that will aggravate and amplify every political blunder we make. The combination of the breakdown in the world's oil allocation system and the disorders in money and banking are sure to obviate any momentary public relations triumph by one political faction over another. Reasonable people should expect turmoil going forward. The spectacles staged in congress are little more than skeleton dances performed by creatures lacking even the verve to be zombies and vampires.

Somewhere - perhaps in the Pentagon, or on some lonely Air Force base in a desolate corner of the nation - a colonel is watching his country collapse and thinking about what can be done. Is it a good thing, or a bad thing, or just something that naturally happens when things are how they are? I don't know.

Media bullshit shout-out of the week goes to the dim James Suroweicki of The New Yorker Magazine, who said, astoundingly, on his political podcast that the nation's dire fiscal condition was "a myth," that "the recovery is underway...things are getting better." Suroweicki, the magazine's economics writer, also sees no problem with rising oil prices.


Video above: "The Skeleton Dance" by Walt Disney, 1929. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h03QBNVwX8Q).

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Kauai Council Rule Changes

SUBHEAD: Consider the following Kauai County Council meeting rule changes. By Ken Taylor and Linda Harmon on 18 March 2011 - Image above: The seal of Kauai County hangs on the wall behinf Jay Furfaro as he chairs a County Council public meeting. From (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_3769fc9a-04d2-11e0-b96d-001cc4c002e0.html). Consider the following Kauai County rule changes regarding how the County Council conducts meetings. Many people have been frustrated by the current Kauai County Council public meeting policies or lack of. Say they may have taken the morning off from work to attend a meeting. Item one on the agenda is of great importance to them. Once the meeting starts they find their agenda item is not handled in order and is bumped from the morning until after lunch. The whole day of work will be lost. After lunch the council decides to go into a closed door session. There is a long break in the meeting. When the public hearing continues it is decided to hit a controversial agenda item that takes the rest of the meeting. The item of importance to you is rescheduled for the next meeting. Ouch! In this article are five ways we suggest for improving the County Council Meeting rules: We think these changes will make Kauai government more democratic and encourage public participation.

1. Regarding closed sessions. Often enough mid way through the meeting the council will decide to break for a closed door session rather than dealing with the matter after or before the public meeting begins.
2. Public comment period. Many councils around the country allow for public comment on matters relevant to the council that are not on the agenda. This is a method of addressing the council as a body and allowing the viewing public to hear both grievance or accolade that otherwise might never get aired. The council is there strictly to listen.
3. Holding evening sessions. Evening sessions allow more public participation. We hear it is too costly to pay personnel over time. We don’t see the need for all the personnel present in the first place. The evening session would be strictly for matters of public concern. The routine communications of the council with different departments would be scheduled during that same morning or during the afternoon along with scheduled closed sessions.
4. Live television broadcasts meetings. This is commonplace in cities and counties across the country and makes for government more accountable and accessible to the public.
5. Following agenda order. The matters of greatest importance to the public should come first to allow more public participation.

Below are excerpts from a few counties and city councils that exhibit items on their legislative body agendas that would enhance our own democratic process at the Kauai County Council level: 1. Regarding closed sessions. Kauai County Council should schedule closed sessions after or before the public hearing so they don't interrupt the public meeting. Require the county attorney summarize the findings of the closed session during the following public hearing. - Goleta, California The City Council will meet in closed session: Conference with legal counsel - Anticipated Litigation, pursuant to the provisions of Government Code Section with respect to potential initiation of one matter of litigation. (Note: In Golita the city attorney regularly reports to the public hearing that follows what transpired at the closed session of the city council.) 2. Public Comment Period Have period for public to comment on Kauai County Council business not on meeting agenda. - Goleta, California At this time the public shall have an opportunity to comment on any non-agenda item relevant to the jurisdiction of the City. It is requested that each speaker complete a "Speaker Request Form" and submit it to the City Clerk. Reasonable time limits are imposed on each topic and each speaker. No action or discussion may take place by the Council on any item not on the posted agenda. The Council may respond to statements made or questions asked, and may direct the staff to report back on the topic at a future meeting. - Napa, California Public Comment: Speaker cards are available; it is requested but not required, to submit a card to the City Clerk before the meeting begins. Speakers will be limited to five minutes and will comply with the City rules of order. If your comments pertain to a specific item on the agenda, reserve your comments until the item is before the City Council Board. Time limits will be enforced by the Mayor to facilitate the fair and efficient conduct of the meeting. - Santa Barbara County, California Persons desiring to address the Board must complete and deliver to the Clerk the form which is available at the Hearing Room entrance prior to the commencement of this comment period. The Public Comment Period is reserved for comment on matters within the subject matter jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors. Each person may address the Board for up to three minutes at the discretion of the Chair, for a total Public Comment Period of no more than 15 minutes. When testifying before the Board of Supervisors, personal attacks and other disruptive behavior is not appropriate. (Note: Public Comment Period is commonly held at the beginning of council and commissions allowing freer flow of concerns by the public.) 3. Evening Sessions or split sessions (1:30 for county business/house keeping...6:00pm for issues that may affect the public.) Hold Kauai County Council meetings in the evening to allow the working public to participate in them. - Goleta, California Council Meeting at 6:00P.M. 130 Cremona Drive, Suite B Goleta, California 4. Live Televised Meetings Televise live Kauai County Council meetings so the public can see what is transpiring in their behalf. - Bozeman, Montana Commission meetings are televised live on cable channel 20 and streamed live at www.bozeman.net. City Commission meetings are re-aired on cable Channel 20 three times per session. Wednesday at 4 pm, Thursday at noon, Friday at 10 am and Sunday at 2 pm (Note: All 5 community councils (or the like meetings) we checked out offered live televised meetings for public viewing) 5. Follow Agenda Item Order The Kauai County Council should follow the order of the written agenda of its meetings in consideration of the attending members of the public. JoAnn Yukimura has been chairing the subcommittee with members Derek Kawakami and Nadine Nakamura. They like the idea of allowing 15 minutes at the beginning of the meeting for comments on strictly agenda items however. This would allow early birds to say their piece and leave. Attached are the rule changes they will vote on at the March 30th council meeting. Now is the time to let your councilpersons know your wishes. If you want to participate in County Council Rule changes email your suggestions to: councilmembers@kauai.gov. To review the submitted changes to rules see this (http://www.islandbreath.org/2011Year/03/110321cok.pdf) 860KB. .