The Privilege of Reading

I am privileged. I am white. I am male. I have the time and the ability to read. I've always read, but with each passing year I seem to read more, and more diversely.

It's a privilege to read. I am not constantly worrying about how I will pay for the basics of life - housing, food, health care. I am not worrying about how I will get to work since my car won't start or there is no nearby bus stop to get me there. I'm not seriously concerned about my health or that of those closest to me. I am not employed doing work that adds nothing to my life but a paycheck from which I scrimp by. Yes, in my past I have had to worry about all of those things. But even so I am white and male.

 I learned to read when I was small and I still have my vision - even corrected after cataract surgery two years ago. This ability to read and to explore fantasy or facts at my own pace and interest is a gift granted to me by a society that urged literacy and by parents and a school system that believed in the power of literacy. And since my mind is still hungry for wisdom, I search for it through the writings/thoughts of others who have been brave enough to offer their ideas up for others to consider.

For the past five years I have started keeping a ledger of books that I read each year. 2017 saw me complete 31 books, 7 of which were fiction. There were numerous others that I started and didn't finish. The complete list follows. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me
Bernie Sanders - Our Revolution
Andrew Bacevich - Washington Rules
Michael Connolly - The Burning Room (fiction)
David Duchovny - Bucky Fucking Dent (fiction)
Melvin McLeod - Mindful Politics
Chalmers Johnson - Dismantling the Empire
Jane Mayer - Dark Money
Tom Gallagher - The Primary Route: How the 99% Take on the MIC
Sheldon Whitehouse - Captured: the Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy
N.A. Swanberg - Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist
Thomas Mullen - The Last Town on Earth (fiction)
Mary Robinson - Everybody Matters
Kate Raworth - Doughnut Economics
Norman Thomas - The Choices
Michael Harrington - Toward a Democratic Left
Terry Gibbs - Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist: Buddhism and the compassionate society
Thomas Shapiro - Toxic Inequality
J. Tom Webb - From Corporate Globalization to Global Cooperation
Clair Brown - Buddhist Economics
Naomi Klein - No Is Not Enough
Margaret Wheatley - Who Do We Choose to Be? 
Peter Frase - FOur Futures: Life After Capitalism
Stewart Lansley - A Sharing Economy
Chris Pavone - The Accident (fiction)
Chalmers Johnson - Nemesis: the Last Days of American Republic
John Le Carre - The Night Manager (fiction)
John Grisham - The Chamber (fiction)
Ron Forisamo - American Oligarchy
David Ignatius - A Body of Lies (fiction)
Jeffrey Sachs - Building the New American Economy

Some of these have found their way into this blog but many have not. I picked up four more new books of the new book shelf at MSU Library last week, three of which I have begun and my family added to the pile at christmas with a fresh pile. And I will finish within a week an important work I stumbled upon on the used book sale at the public library "The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon" by Mary Kaldor and Shannon Beebe that I'm pretty certain will make the blog in the coming weeks.

I share this because ideas matter. There is no doubt that who I am and what I think about the world and how I choose to engage with it are different than at the end of 2016 in no small part because of the collective influence of these books I have read. Of course I am shaped by many other things, including all the non-book material I also read.

But the end of this year has me reflecting on just what a privilege it is to read as a way to shape who we become. Margaret Wheatley's book above speaks to that unfinished part of our own individual development that we shape by our choices. Choices that include what we read. I also recognize that each reader brings to the material they read their own constructs about the world and their place in it, that shapes what they absorb from that reading. It has been my intention in this blog over the years of sharing my privilege of reading with others who may find something in it that affirms "Who We Choose to Be?" as Wheatley's title nicely articulates. And more grandly to keep ideas alive so as in the words of Milton Friedman, 

"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.“ 

I know what the reading list looks like as I begin 2018 tomorrow, but I am sure that when I compile it in 365 days, there will be many surprises and I will be further shaped by what I read. And that is a real privilege for which I am forever grateful. May we share ideas that may bring about more  Peace and Justice in 2018!!!

The Possibilities Are There!!!

Love and Peace,

Terry - a Possibilitator

You Can Bank On It

It is pretty difficult to make a non-partisan argument around the recent tax code changes adopted by the Republican Party which owns the government from top to bottom. For it is entirely a partisan idea and decision. Not that the Democratic Party has been the beacon of progressive tax reform.



Ron Formisano, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky indicts the entire 'political class' with our current dilemma. In his new, but seldom read book, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois Press, 2017), he unleashes the muckraking style of the last era of robber barons by famed journalists Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, C. Wright Mills, etc. Through 210 pages of lucid prose supported by another 60 pages of detailed footnotes, Formisano lays bare the corruption endemic to the political class and how its capture of our American Society has established a fully formed oligarchy. For more on the 'capture'  component see also Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's Captured I reviewed earlier this year.

Formisano doesn't just pick on the elected officials and the jurists but the corporate heads, higher education administrators, and even the heads of nonprofits. Of course the grease in the system is money and wealth. The increasing gap between the bottom and top has been expedited by the political class which has no real ongoing connection to the middle and lower classes. Even more telling for Formisano is the capture of the economy by the financial sector. This is a growing concern even for conservative institutions like the International Monetary Forum which noted in a recent report cited by Forisamo that "excessive financialization of the U.S. economy reduces GDP growth by 2% every year...a massive drag in the economy -- some $320 billion per year." (p.194)

And the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows as well as Bloomberg reported today "World's Wealthiest Became $1 Trillion Richer in 2017"





Page after page demonstrates how even persons entering government or nonprofits with good public intentions get absorbed into the political class. The sharing of board members, the lobbyist favors, inside relational contracting, shared vacations and junkets all corrupt any pretension of democratic principle. He notes that while both Trump and Sanders spoke to the idea of corruption of power,  Trump of course has blatantly turned over the executive branch to these same members of the oligarchy. While the book does read in the style of Tarbell, Steffens, Mills, Sinclair, and more recently recently deceased political scientist Chalmers Johnson, he does not offer us any roads out of this mess.



One direction from a recent book, which likewise probably has equally few readers, is offered by K. Sabeel Rahman. In his recent Democracy Against Domination, Rahman, a former Rhodes Scholar who studied economics, political theory and law at Harvard and Oxford  teaches law at Brooklyn Law School. Rahman's style is more turgid and aimed primarily  at other academics I suspect but his argument is fresh and worth pondering.

"This progressive economic vision suggests a radically different approach to financial regulation.  The book argues that our prevailing approach to TBTF [too big to fail] finance relies too heavily on a faith in insulated, neutral, top-down regulation by experts, despite the risks of industry lobbying or the complexities of trying to manage the modern financial system.  Instead, the book suggests that a better approach would place stricter, structural limits on TBTF financial firms, whether by “breaking up the banks” or by regulating finance as a kind of public utility.  Drawing on the latest thinking in economics and law, the book suggests how we need to revamp our financial stability regime."

He sees the failure of leaving the regulating the economy and the corporate sector to 'experts', for which I assume he would include himself, and calls for a much deeper and vibrant model of democracy. I believe his argument on this particular failure is well done - this attack on the "let the experts rule". He shows the underbelly of this flawed approach, but not as poignantly as Sen. Whitehouse did in his book. But his reasoned call for a deeper democracy to address the domination of the 'political class' as Forisamo names it is stronger than what  either Whitehouse or Forisamo offers.

Still I failed to see a systemic plan of specific options to address the flaws. Here's where I would point to the Austrian Economist Christian Felber's remedies he laid out in his 2016 Change Everything: Creating an Economy for the Common Good that I shared in 2016. While the piling  evidence makes crystal clear to anyone wanting to look at it that our economic system as run by the' 'plutocracy' Formisano shines his piercing light on is cascading us towards a twin abyss of increasing inequality and climate destabilization.



While the path out of this is a bit murky, the recent tax law disaster is going 180 degrees in the wrong direction. One promising approach before us in 2018 is following the lead of the youth led Sunrise Movement. One of their suggested strategies is to approach candidates for office at all levels and ask them to pledge not to accept money from the oil, gas, and coal lobbies. I would add the financial industry.

It is our youth who will have to lead us out of this mess as they are the ones that will be forced to live with the worst of what we have sown.

Outrageous!!!

"Outrageous -  Grossly offensive to decency or morality" (American Heritage College Dictionary) 4th ed. 2002, p.989.

Outrageous

This appears to be the appropriate word to describe the tax system bludgeoning recently performed by Republicans (Democrats and Independents were given little time to read, let alone participate in the development of the proposals). To suggest that what greatly reduces taxes for the wealthiest among us in far higher mounts than for the bulk of us is tax "reform", clearly indicates that those who support its adoption are either tools or stooges for the wealthy and powerful. This clearly fills the wealthiest's already well-filled pockets. This so they can use the money to gain even more control over our government that shapes the rules we live by.

This wholesale sellout of our democracy by those elected shows that they really don't represent the bulk of US citizens. The stench of the process by which both houses of Congress worked largely behind closed doors, with little to no public hearings, underlines their lack of interest in democracy. Once elected to join this prestigious club, they are by and large set for a life without economic need, and therefore need to care zilch for those who aren't so fortunate.

That the sprinkling of some small favors to those in the middle and below have expiration dates set for after these sycophants leave office, makes the stench even more offensive. One doesn't need a college degree to recognize that the promise of a faster growing economy and the trickle down benefits promised to those hoping for some crumbs off the table, are a myth. For thirty plus years of this vacuous economic myth being hoisted on us, we see no significant economic growth, while that which did occur has driven us to the highest level of inequality in our history. The robber barons must be jealous.

Nothing shows this failure of supply-side, trickle-down, "voodoo economics" like the numbers. This report, nicely summarized by Sam Pizzigati  here, is just out from noted economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman who study inequality, shows the lie of who benefits from this chicanery. Please share this will all who doubt, especially Republican legislators!!



The demise of the estate tax itself they aim for clearly only benefits the wealthiest 0.2 percent. That's right. The current estate tax does not impact any of the 99.8 per cent of us.

Of course these same legislators waive their concern with exploding the deficit now which all the studies forecast. Deficits only come into play for them when they want to starve a program that helps others. Their bottom line is a total dismantling of government, drowning it in the bathtub after they have starved it of funds to support the public good. Perhaps the most irritating aspect of this despicable act is that the majority of these bullies cloak themselves in a Christian conservative cloak, that is belied by their actions that support unfettered war (oh to be sure money for military will only go up as the recent ante-up passed by both houses exceeded even the Trump administration's request) and enrichment of their wealthy supporters.

This is a dark time in our history. May those of us who recognize the greed unleashed with this administration and Congress, endeavor to unwind it in the weeks and months ahead. Let every elected official that represents you, know how you feel. For now we still have elections. If we don't act, soon, don't be surprised if those too are taken away.

For a little uplift if you've read this depressingly far, click on this brilliant ten minute talk that opened a recent public policy institute for Quakers. We should gather hope from the fire and faith of this young leader