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political scientist
Would You Trust Henry Kissinger with Your Social Security?
Jun 16, 2016
Years ago, a political scientist said that the mass media can't influence what people think, but it can influence what people think about. Today it does both. If you're a billionaire who wants to manipulate public opinion, that means you'll keep feeding it stories that serve your ideology and self-interest.
Hedge fund billionaire Peter G. "Pete" Peterson is a master of the art. At a time when 47 million Americans (including one child in five) live in poverty, when our national infrastructure is collapsing and the middle class dream is dying before our eyes, he's managed to convince a few voters, a lot of politicians, and far too many major-media journalists that our most urgent problem is ... federal deficit spending.
They don't just want you to be concerned about it. They want you to be afraid.
The front for this effort (one of many assembled by the Peterson Foundation) is called "The Coalition for Fiscal and National Security," and they've assembled a list of prominent figures to promote it. Let us consider the message and the messengers.
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The group's mantra is a statement that retired Admiral Mike Mullen first made when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
"The single biggest threat to our national security is our debt."
That's a surprisingly bold and naive proclamation, especially from someone of Mullen's stature. It takes a lot of imagination and some highly implausible assumptions to believe that federal deficits really threaten our national security.
The Peterson Foundation provides both, of course. Unfortunately, its manipulated facts and figures fail to make their case, even when taken at face value.
What would a rational list of nonmilitary risks look like? Climate change would almost certainly top the list. Many military experts already consider it a grave national security threat. A bipartisan group of 48 defense leaders and experts - including, perhaps paradoxically, some of the Peterson group's signatories - signed a full-page ad let year entitled "Republicans and Democrats Agree: U.S. Security Demands Global Climate Action."
One defense expert called climate change "the mother of all risks."
It's easy to see why. Rising sea levels threaten many of our coastal towns and cities, including most of lower Manhattan. Millions of Americans are likely to become internal refugees in their own country, posing the risk of widespread lawlessness and instability.
Climate change is expected to trigger a number of future conflicts around the globe, as nations and peoples compete for increasingly scarce resources. Some scientists believe that climate change contributed to the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Wealth inequality also belongs near the top of the list. Extreme inequality makes a society unstable. Today millions are trapped in poverty while the 20 richest Americans own more wealth than half the entire nation - some 150 million people in 57 million households.
Persistent poverty plagues minority communities, while the 400 richest Americans own more than the nation's entire African-American population (plus one-third of this nation's Latinos). There are growing rates of suicide, opioid overdose, and deaths from alcoholism among lower-income whites. Economist Anne Case calls them "deaths of despair."
What will happen if the middle class continues to collapse, if poverty remains inescapable for generation after generation if most people face working years filled with dashed hopes and retirements plagued by penury?
Despair can turn to rage, sometimes without warning.
That's one reason why it's especially imprudent for the corporate-friendly "Coalition" to target Social Security, along with the rest of the social safety net. Sure, they try to sound reasonable. They even mention cutting the military budget (although they tip their hand by emphasizing military health care and payroll expenses, rather than cost overruns or expensive weapons systems.)
But they always turn to social programs, sometimes with not-so-subtle transitions like this: "Defense spending is the largest single category of discretionary spending... In 2015, it was second only to Social Security spending."
See what they did there?
There's little chance of getting tax increases or cuts in military spending through this Congress or the next, and they know it. The drumbeat for lower deficits only undermines the social safety net - when we should be spending more to rebuild our economy.
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When a group uses prominent people to promote its arguments, it's prudent to ask: Who are these people? Can we trust them? Are they wise and just?
Well, there's former Michael Hayden, who headed both the NSA and the CIA. History will remember Hayden for giving sworn testimony to Congress that contained numerous falsehoods, as documented by the Senate Subcommittee on Intelligence. (Experts say it's very difficult to convict someone for lying to Congress, but it's still wrong -- and illegal.)
Hayden signed off on detainee abuses that he argues were not technically "torture." He insists other torturers have done much worse, in case that's your moral standard.
Madeleine Albright's on the list too. She was widely criticized for answering "we think the price is worth it" when asked about the Iraqi children who died as the result of sanctions against Iraq.
But the most prominent name on the list is Henry Kissinger's. Is Kissinger credible? It's true that he's popular among media and political elites, but that sad fact only serves to remind us that some memories are short - and that, for some people, the ties of social status outweigh those of morality and decency.
It was Kissinger who reportedly fed confidential information to then-candidate Richard Nixon - information that was used to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks, extracting a massive toll in human lives just to boost Nixon's election chances.
It was Kissinger who delivered the illegal order to bomb Cambodia and Laos. More bomb material rained down on these tiny nations than was used in all of World War II. His actions cost countless lives and gave rise to the mad, massacring Pol Pot regime.
It was Kissinger who ignored the pleadings of a US diplomat and gave the green light to Pakistani atrocities in what is now Bangladesh, praising Pakistan's dictator for his "delicacy and tact" while ridiculing those who "bleed" for "the dying Bengalis."
"Yahya hasn't had so much fun since the last Hindu massacre!" Kissinger said of Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan. (The government of Bangladesh reported that 3,000,000 people died in the "fun.")
Kissinger supported the violent overthrow of the Chilean government by a right-wing dictator. Kissinger gave the go-ahead to the Indonesian government's massacre of from 100,000 to 230,000 people in East Timor. (Estimates vary.) Kissinger's other offenses and blunders are too numerous to list here.
His intellect is overrated, too. Princeton professor Gary Bass writes that "Kissinger's policies were not only morally flawed but also disastrous as Cold War strategy."
Would you trust this man with your Social Security? Do you think he'd make wise and humane decisions about our society's priorities?
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Sure, there are some decent people on the Coalition list. But they've been misled by tricksters and lulled by the groupthink that comes from decades inside a bubble of insular privilege.
And what a bubble it is. It's a glassy gold bubble that filters out every color of the rainbow except its own, bathing its occupants in a warm autumn-colored glow as strangers shiver in the cold blue daylight outside. The bubble speaks with the voice of false authority. It's a floating oracle with the soul of a confidence man.
But the crowd is thinning out. There are real threats to face outside the bubble: poverty, inequality, a crumbling infrastructure, a dying planet. It's time for the bubble to disappear, as all bubbles eventually do, by blowing away on the wind or vanishing with a soft pop in the light of the midday sun.
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Nobel Prize-Winner Elinor Ostrom Dies at 78
Ostrom's work highlighted the power of "the commons"
Jun 12, 2012
Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, died today at the age of 78 from cancer.
Indiana University, where Ostrom had been a faculty member, remarked in a statement on her passing that her Nobel-winning work "showed that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources. Her work countered the conventional wisdom that only private ownership or top-down regulation could prevent a 'tragedy of the commons,' in which users would inevitably destroy the resources that they held in common."
In a 2010 interview with YES! Magazine, Ostrom said in answering what her message to the general public would be, "Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we're helping one another in ways that really help the Earth."
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Indiana University: IU community mourns passing of Distinguished Professor and Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The entire Indiana University community mourns the passing today of Distinguished Professor Elinor Ostrom, who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her groundbreaking research on the ways that people organize themselves to manage resources.
Ostrom, 78, died of cancer at 6:40 a.m. today at IU Health Bloomington Hospital surrounded by friends. She was senior research director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Distinguished Professor and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, and professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
She is survived by Vincent Ostrom, her husband and colleague. She also leaves behind a large extended family of colleagues, collaborators, staff and friends, in Bloomington and on five continents, who worked closely with her during an extraordinary 50-year career.
Ostrom shared the 2009 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, also known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, with University of California economist Oliver Williamson. She was the first woman and remains the only woman to be awarded the prize.
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Jay Walljasper at On the Commons
Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing A Commons
Elinor Ostrom shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her lifetime of scholarly work investigating how communities succeed or fail at managing common pool (finite) resources such as grazing land, forests and irrigation waters. On the Commons is co-sponsor of a Commons Festival at Augsburg College in Minneapolis October 7-8 where she will speak. (See accompanying sidebar for details.)
Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, received the Nobel Prize for her research proving the importance of the commons around the world. Her work investigating how communities co-operate to share resources drives to the heart of debates today about resource use, the public sphere and the future of the planet. She is the first woman to be awarded the Nobel in Economics.
Ostrom's achievement effectively answers popular theories about the "Tragedy of the Commons", which has been interpreted to mean that private property is the only means of protecting finite resources from ruin or depletion. She has documented in many places around the world how communities devise ways to govern the commons to assure its survival for their needs and future generations.
A classic example of this was her field research in a Swiss village where farmers tend private plots for crops but share a communal meadow to graze their cows. While this would appear a perfect model to prove the tragedy-of-the-commons theory, Ostrom discovered that in reality there were no problems with overgrazing. That is because of a common agreement among villagers that one is allowed to graze more cows on the meadow than they can care for over the winter--a rule that dates back to 1517. Ostrom has documented similar effective examples of "governing the commons" in her research in Kenya, Guatemala, Nepal, Turkey, and Los Angeles.
Based on her extensive work, Ostrom offers 8 principles for how commons can be governed sustainably and equitably in a community.
8 Principles for Managing a Commons
1. Define clear group boundaries.
2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.
5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members' behavior.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.
8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.
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