Modern Times

In Response to Sam Harris' Mechanics of Defamation

2014-10-13T21:40:00.002-07:00

The debate about Islam and Islamophobia are back going strong thanks to a recent debate on Bill Maher's show that mostly centered around Ben Affleck and Sam Harris. Whatever your view on the subject, or whose arguments you gravitate towards one thing is clear, the two sides seem to be locked into their positions like this is trench warfare. However, Sam Harris recently posted in his blog about The Mechanics of Defamation making claims that he was being defamed. Defamation is a fairly serious accusation to throw out. Harris accused Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan of "consciously misleading their readers," as well as "increasing my security concerns in the process." Not only that, but Harris claimed that "I have not behaved like that. I have never knowingly distorted the positions I criticize, whether they are the doctrines of a religion or the personal beliefs of Francis Collins, Eben Alexander, Deepak Chopra, Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, or any other writer or public figure with whom I’ve collided."

This struck me as kind of odd since I had previously called out Harris for doing the exact same thing he was accusing Greenwald and Aslan of doing. Using Harris' own definition of defamation "The crucial boundary between hard-hitting criticism and defamation is knowing that you are misrepresenting your target", lets take a look at how Harris responded to Glenn Greenwald's article on Harris' views over a year ago.

Harris tweeted this to his followers after the publishing of Greenwald's article.

This is doing exactly what Harris says he has never done. The link points to an article suggesting that Greenwald supported the Iraq war because of something he wrote in the preface to his first book. I've already written about this so I'll repeat what I've previously written on the subject. "This claim that Greenwald supported the Iraq war by writing in the preface of his first book explaining his apathy towards politics and "coming of age" in political terms - that uses a quote that merely states he gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in his handling on the war on terror- is a mischaracterization of enormous proportions. If you'd read the book you'd know it is anything but a source of support for the Iraq war nor does it give support for Bush's policies."

A simple internet search on the subject would enlighten anyone to Greenwald's opinion. You can read Glenn's response to this willful misrepresentation of his views here. Here's a short quote or two from his response. "The whole point of the Preface was that, before 2004, I had been politically apathetic and indifferent - except for the work I was doing on constitutional law... I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form. Ask anyone who claims that I "supported" the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It's a pure fabrication. "

It doesn't end there. If we look at the definition of defamation which is from the Latin diffamare, or to spread evil report, it means to "damage the good reputation of someone: to slander or libel." In my view personal or ad hominem attacks would fall under defamation because the intent of ad hominem is often, if not always, to damage the character (and thus the reputation) of the person it is directed towards. Then Harris tweeted this.

Calling Greenwald a hypocrite and a liar isn't a rational response to his critique, it was an attempt to damage his character and reputation. This is exactly the kind of defamation Harris supposes (hypocritically) to have never done. It's also not the first time Harris has claimed defamation or libel from his critics as he did in an email exchange with Greenwald quite sometime ago. Harris was upset about his tweeting out a Murtaza Hussain article on him, and claimed it was defamation. Greenwald simply responded "I’m not sure how you can blame me for tweeting an article published in Al Jazeera and written by a respectable commentator, but I’m happy to post your email to me." In his latest claims of defamation, re-tweeting a picture with a quote, it should be stated that just because someone tweets something doesn't necessarily mean they believe or support that statement. Sometimes they just find it interesting. It's much different than using your own words to defame someone.

The defamation by Harris doesn't end there though. He's also gone after Murtaza Hussain by tweeting to him an ad hominem attack here.

I asked him why he seemed to always respond to criticism of his work with ad hominem attacks like this. He responded here.

He fully admitted to the ad hominem attack, and to my knowledge his only response to these criticisms of his work are found here. I've already stated that I found these responses both not compelling as a defense, but the important point here is that he's willing to defame and attack his opponents personally while claiming he hasn't done just that.

Here are a few more quick examples of Harris attacking his critics personally in an attempt to defame their person.

This is Harris in response to Reza Aslan's CNN interview and as you can see calls Aslan a liar, assumes he's being deliberately misleading, and compares him to Genghis Khan saying that he speaks with an air of self-importance. Not only that but he accuses him of having an agenda to shut down debate and deliberately mislead liberal audiences. This is a textbook assault on character and a prime example of defamation. Perhaps Harris should take his own advice, and "Beware of critics who claim to know what you mean better than they do."

Finally there's the recent interview Harris did with Joe Rogan found here. Harris says his image of Greenwald is that of a "guy blogging in his underpants, in Brazil, with his 10 dogs, and his boyfriend." He goes on to criticize him saying "he's not some great journalist who found this (NSA story)... Greenwald was not functioning like a journalist." Essentially what this says is that Harris doesn't understand sources often give people who are gainfully employed at news organizations, like The Guardian, information with which to write stories. In fact, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein two of the most famous names in the history of US journalism had their biggest stories come from a source who handed them information about the Nixon administration. This is again willfully misleading and knowingly misrepresenting Greenwald. It's directed at him in a mud slinging fashion that is plain to see for anyone who watches it. To call a guy working as a journalist not a journalist in order to satisfy a personal dislike of someone is to defame their person.

So whatever side you take in the Islamophobia debate, there is one thing that is patently obvious to anyone without the amnesia required to actually believe Harris' claim that he never defames any of his critics, and that's that he does just that. He has actually been the instigator of this type of attack on his critics and often engages in ad hominem attacks or willful misrepresentations of their character. One would hope that the fans (or perhaps disciples) of Harris upon reading Harris' defamations of Greenwald, Aslan, and Hussain, would stop shouting the battle cry of defamation on these individuals unless they're willing to do the same to Harris for being the first to engage in this type of behavior. Calling foul on something you yourself do is a textbook example of hypocrisy, and as Harris says is "debasing our public discourse and making honest discussion of important ideas increasingly unpleasant." Then again, Harris calling out Muslims for being violent while sanitizing and even lending support to US foreign policy while it's waging aggressive preemptive wars in countries with a Muslim majority (that kill many more of them than they have of us), would make it seem par for the course for him.

Sam Harris' Faith In Secret Government Powers

2013-06-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris' recent Twitter activity on the subject of PRISM (the NSA secret spy program) brings up some important topics I've wanted to further discuss about Sam Harris and the critique of religion and faith. Harris asked on Twitter "What's in your email that you don't want Obama reading it?" And then later asked, "If the risk of nuclear terrorism were 50% over the next decade. What freedom would you sacrifice to diminish it to 5%?" and "We can't idiot-proof the U.S. Presidency. That's why it's important to elect smart, ethical people to the office." What's striking is not just Harris' support for the leaked secret spy program, but that he's putting his faith into an authoritarian system to protect him from terrorist attacks and not to abuse their secret powers. It's interesting that Harris who wrote The End Of Faith is now placing great faith in the leadership of our government which is actually contrary to the philosophies of "the founders" of this republic.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Giving Obama and therefore all future presidents our approval to have secret programs that spy on the US public is to place confidence into men operating outside of known interpretations of law and not abuse these surveillance powers. These programs operate on interpretations of laws that are essentially held in secret from the public that the government derives it's power from (or at least it is theoretically supposed to). Jefferson also wrote "I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." This is the absolute check on abuses of constitutional power, but not the first check. The first check is the rule of law, and more specifically our supreme laws found in the constitution and its amendments.

The constitution is essentially a set of laws to limit the power of those in the federal government. It also holds that an educated public is necessary to defend the constiution and correct abuses of government power. What's striking is that this leak was what allowed the public to have this debate on secret government surveillance programs and the public simply cannot correct a constitutional abuse if no one knows about it. Without the education that came from this leak the public had little evidence of the massive surveillance programs being built. Further, secret interpretations of laws and secret policies which indiscriminately target US civilians and erases the requirement of probable cause force us into simply having faith in our leaders as it's very hard to ascertain a leader's ethics or even how smart they are. Harris himself asked on Twitter "Twitter seems filled with people who know that Obama has been corrupted by power. Is it that easy to get a top-secret security clearance?" The opposite would be hard to prove as well. How do we know he hasn't been corrupted by power? Wouldn't we have to have that same security clearance? Perhaps this is why Jefferson and the other founders understood that men must be bound by laws or we risk these men abusing the powers.

Interestingly there is a history of US government agencies spying on the public in secret and abusing this power. The claim that this NSA program is needed to protect us ignores that these agencies that spied on the US public abused these powers for political ends and weren't just used to keep people safe. They were used to target civil rights groups and leaders like Martin Luther King, as well as anti-war, and environmental groups. For anyone familiar with the Church hearings and the reports that came from these investigations, there is a long list of abuses of power from opening people's mail in secret, to the COINTELPRO project by the FBI that specifically infiltrated and disrupted domestic political activities. In the past when government agencies have been allowed to spy on the US public in secret they have abused it. Not only that but just being able to operate in extreme secrecy also allowed them to commit what are crimes under international law including assassination attempts on foreign leaders such as Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and the Diem brothers of Vietnam. However, Fredrick Schwarz, Chief Counsel of the Brennan Center and lead council for the Church Committee has said, "if you have secrecy and lack of oversight, you're going to get abuse." It's entirely ignorant of history and the constitutional nature of our republic to assume that leaders are acting ethically when their policies are shrouded in secrecy. That secrecy is what creates the need for faith in leaders rather than them having to bear burden of proof to assure us that such authorities are needed. It also erases the knowledge needed by the people to correct our constitutional abuses.

Having an understanding of the actual nature of how our government was constrained after the revelations from the Church Committee is important. For example CIA interceptions of telegrams between US citizens and foreign nationals was deemed illegal. A new check on these powers were created in FISA and now domestic wiretaps had to be approved by secret courts where the government agencies had to provide a probable cause to surveil US citizens. When it was revealed in 2005 that Bush had authorized agencies to spy on US citizens without getting warrants liberals reacted with scorn.

In fact one such liberal, Barack Obama campaigned against such abuses stating "For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants." However, this same liberal senator also vowed to fillabuster any attempt to give the telecom companies that participated in the program retroactive immunity, saying he would "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." He later went back on this pledge and voted against a filibuster, and for the bill after his nomination as the democratic candidate was secured. Perhaps one doesn't need top secret clearance to see Obama's subservience to or corruption by power after all. However, Obama reasoned that once he was sworn into office he would have his "Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future."

This didn't happen. As reported by Bill Moyers, FISA passing meant greater powers for the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence to "approve the international surveillance, rather than a special intelligence court. FISA Court now retroactively oversees government surveillance procedures after it's been conducted. It no longer scrutinizes individual cases. The government can now latch onto large telecommunications switches, allowing for more comprehensive eavesdropping on fiber-optic phone and email lines. Telecommunication companies can be compelled to allow access to switches through order by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence." However, it's important to note that the NSA and other agencies already had the power to surveil who they wanted very quickly simply by asking the FISA court. Over 99% of all FISA requests are accepted by the court and it's almost a rubber stamp process in the first place. Now they have claimed the power to look at anyones digital communications without probable cause, and in passing the FISA amendment ensured that they would never have to let the courts decide on constitutionality by claiming that people have no grounds to sue the government because the programs were carried out in secret, so you wouldn't know if you were spied on. This seems completely contrary to the 4th amendment of the United States constitution which requires probable cause for search and seizures.

As the surveillance state expanded and removed previous checks on executive powers to spy via government agencies the checks against those powers have been eroded. This brings to mind another Schwarz quote: "when you start small, you go big...When you start in a way that seems legitimate, it inevitably goes too far." This was Schwarz speaking on the expansion of government spying as revealed in the Church Report.

Harris is not only asking us to consider that spying is acceptable he is proposing that we should be willing to give up our civil liberties to keep us safe. Benjamin Franklin once wrote "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." However, the threat Harris uses is nuclear terrorism. This is striking not only because Dick Cheney frequently cites nuclear terrorism as a threat, but infamously warned that "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" in order to push for the invasion of Iraq. What this amounts to is a fear tactic well adopted by Harris who has also adopted many other neo-conservative positions such as torture, profiling, and claims that liberals are weak on terrorism.

As it stands your chance from dying in a terrorist attack in the US is 1 in 20 million. There are no known terrorists with nuclear weapons, and if a nuclear strike were to be used, one could argue strongly that the US would be the one to press the button. This is because the US has not only been the only country previously to use nuclear weapons in war, but in 2002 it was revealed that, "The Bush administration has directed the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations, according to a classified Pentagon report... The secret report, which was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, says the Pentagon needs to be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria." This is nothing new as the US repeatedly has drawn up plans for using nuclear weapons in places like Vietnam, Korea, and Cuba, but even Obama has stated, "all options are on the table" for Iran. Perhaps Obama is familiar with Nixon's "Madman Theory." The tactic of portraying government grabs of power as necessary for our own protection is an old one. Fear of communism guided US foreign policy and was the reasoning behind wars in Vietnam, Korea, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and many covert CIA operations to overthrow even democratically elected governments in other countries. In a post USSR world with China as one of our largest trading partners the communist threat has functionally ended. The attacks on the world trade center in September of 2001 gave the Bush administration a new "ISM" to go after trading communism for terrorism. Although it was a horrendous attack the retaliation would let far more blood, killing at least 50 times more civilians in Iraq alone which had no connection to the 9/11 attacks.

Why is Harris is so worried about nuclear terrorism that he is willing to support the build up of a spy state that would make Goring and Himmler's mouths water? The answer brings me to a fundamental difference I have with Harris' critique of religion. Although we are both atheistic his analysis of religion found in The End of Faith seems to focus merely on the nature of belief and how beliefs without evidence can lead to harmful behaviors with a specific emphasis on Islam being a belief that is a "cult of death". I agree with his sentiments on the nature of faith in general, but there are a multitude of beliefs that are not religious and are harmful to people. The problem is not necessarily with the nature of belief itself as at some point we all have beliefs or things we take for granted without evidence, but how those beliefs are used. The most popular form of challenging these beliefs are through testing and becoming aware of systems operating around us. The assumption or belief could be as small as a belief that a light switch when flicked will turn on without previously examining the circuitry or as big a believing science will provide a technology so that we need never decrease our energy consumption. However, the nature of religious belief is different because religions are inherently hierarchal much like governments. The real problem with religions is that they produce religious followers or even servants (of Christ or Allah) which can be exploited by other men convinced of the goodness of the religious organization. This is identical to states or governments in that they produce citizens ready to be exploited by other men in a hierarchy often through nationalism and belief in goodness of the state. In modern history these states have been far more deadly and oppressive than any religion although the two cannot be totally separated.

In fact in study of the development of early religions during the agricultural revolution you'll uncover evidence of religious and political power being one and the same. Often the largest structures where the ruler would reside would be connected to the granary, and the ruler would be granted his authority through god. In fact the oneness of political and religious leadership was still the case in most all of Europe at the time of the French revolution, with most kings claiming their right to rule coming directly from god. Religions of all types, even Buddhism (which Harris has a soft spot for) was used by governments as a state religion in the Mauryan Empire of India. Perhaps this collusion between religion and political leaders is what led the French revolutionaries to issue a law in 1793 making all nonjuring priests liable to death on site. The Catholic Church after all was the largest landowner in the nation at the time and received great incomes from the tenants on the lands. Although it is theoretically true that christians in general seek to deny their own wicked ideas and follow what they believe are the teachings of god by subjecting themselves to the perfect will of god, there always seems to be a temporal structure of power that at least influences this will. Of course many break off from mainstream religious organizations and form their own hierarchies like Lutherans, Protestants, or even Mormons, but there always seems to be a hierarchy of some sorts which guide faith.

These religious and political organizations often have melded with each other and interacted in ways which allow a few to exploit many others. Another thing is that there are social and cultural differences not always caused by religion but taken up by religion. Patriarchy for example is an oft heard complaint of Harris and many other critics of Islam. However, the development of patriarchy wasn't created by Islam or Christianity but was adopted by both.

Anthropologist David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years wrote, "In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 bc, women are everywhere. Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life... Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes. The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women’s role in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women’s independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands. By the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 bc, we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some places, at least), subjected to obligatory veiling." He goes on to explain how this happened writing, "Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations—and by extension, women’s bodies—into potential commodities. At the same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold."

Remember next time someone critiques Islam about their treatment of women (I also object to the religions views of women as well as christian views) that the religion merely adopted and further codified treatment of women as male property, but that until a hundred or so years ago our nations laws did similar things denying women rights to property and voting. The point is that nations and religions grew up side by side using each other to gain power over their subjects (whether you believe for good or bad) and the true problem of belief is not just how bad beliefs can affect people's behavior but how bad beliefs can cause subjugation of our will to other men and their will. One seems to use fear of god or a hell, while one seems to use fear of the other and offers itself as a protection against such evils. It seems as if a religious person would ask us to have faith in a priest to lead us to heaven, but Harris would ask us to have faith in a growing surveillance state to protect us from harm. Both ask for authority on the grounds that they're doing what's right for you or looking out for you.

However, since Harris seems to have little understanding on the nature of the cause of terrorism rejecting again and again that the motivations are political or nationalistic in favor of almost solely religious motivations. While it's obvious that religion plays an often central role to terrorism, the attackers over and over again cite US and western foreign policy such as the stationing of troops on the Arab peninsula and support for Israel. This leads them to believe the US is waging a war against Islam itself. This is a sentiment Harris agrees with stating that he believes we are at war with Islam and not just terrorism. Terrorists often then exploit religious beliefs and believers to achieve political goals just as nations have done for centuries. It still happens today. Murtaza Hussein recently wrote a great piece in AlJazeera about Religious fundamentalism in the 'War on Terror' which exposes christian crusaders like Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, and other US officials stating religious motivations for the war on Iraq and war on terror. It has worked on both sides with reports of US soldiers and even generals believing the war was god's work or sanctioned by god. It's not that shocking though because it's something that dates back early into our wars and civilizations; using religion to justify political ends achieved by killing or attacking the other.

Harris seems to be just another self described liberal now arguing for neo-conservative policies while ignoring age old liberal solutions to policies. If we don't want to be attacked by terrorists perhaps the best method is not by illegally invading and occupying countries or launching secret drone strikes with no accountability that according to Al Muslimi had poor effects on Yemeni's perception of the US. He testified, "What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America." Perhaps instead of pursuing and continuing hegemonic foreign policies we should close our obscene number of military bases which anger and have angered other nations for years, and end the policy of US exceptionalism which Harris and others seem to continuously support. The next century is already poised to be a century with a much larger concentration on the Pacific, specifically in East Asia where the US will continue to use it's military force to enforce it's will on other nations. We cannot afford nor can we allow another century of US dominance by military force. After all the way to stop nuclear proliferation, if we've learned anything from the cold war, is not to goad others on with threats and a showing of force which leaves them feeling threatened and vulnerable to attack, and which in turn leads them to seek more "defensive weapons." The answer lies in cooperation and respecting each others right to life while protecting ourselves to the best of our abilities, but at home not by invading or bombing other nations or hegemonic dominance of any kind. Perhaps it's time to follow Chalmers Johnson's advice and "liquidate the empire."

In conclusion, it's important to understand why secret authorities are a threat to not only our civil liberties, but the very nature of our democratic values. If we sign off on this now what limits to authoritarian government are we going to draw up? Liberals like Paul Krugman even have stated, “You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it's doing, or you can have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible, and we are kind of on the authoritarian side.” If you still think this isn't rank authoritarianism or an abuse of constitutional power and your argument is essentially we should trust Obama or any other leader because we have nothing to hide from the government that's been hiding a massive surveillance program from the US public with incredible possibilities for abuse; you're making an argument based on faith not reason and evidence. Historical evidence says we should expect nothing but abuse, and that governments which escape the rule of law by circumventing constitutional protections are not deserving of our admiration. Even if we all should come to find that we want to accept government surveillance as a necessary part of life it should be only after intense critical examination of this claimed power and it shouldn't take place in secret. The FISA amendments were put there to protect the country and it's democratic processes after years of abuse. Recalling them is sure to have the same effect on our society as repealing the financial regulations that we put in place after abuses that caused the depression. Only this time it will be a moral and ethical bankruptcy that could result in an authoritarian government, and will forever blacken the name of America and the freedom its citizens are supposed to have.

Electric Cars ≠ A Green or Sustainable Alternative

2013-05-31T14:53:00.001-07:00

The recent hype around electric cars seems to have mellowed out somewhat, but it appears to have captured enough people's attention that it seems people are seeing electric cars as a viable transportation alternative. President Obama in 2011 announced a plan to have a million electric cars on US roads by 2015, with help from Chevrolet via their Chevy Volt. Others like Tesla Motors have talked up the lower emissions labeling cars zero emissions and stating reduced emissions and better efficiency than gas powered cars. Whatever claims that are being made, this seems to be another example of green-capitalism or green marketing that is doing more to hinder environmental movements and our societies environmental sustainability than helping it. It reeks of technological millenarianism which would have us believe that a quick change to new technologies will alleviate us of a range of environmental issues, but specifically climate change. Lets take a close look at what problems confront those who are pushing an electric car transportation infrastructure and see if it's just baseless hype or if electric cars are really the future.

First, there's no doubt electric cars will be produced, consumed, and that the market for them seems to be getting bigger. However, it is entirely unreasonable to assume that electric cars will replace gas cars. This is not just due to what are seen as short comings of a new technology which can't travel indefinitely with only ten minute or so refueling stops like gas cars, but the reality of energy production in the US and abroad. The amount of energy it would take to power a nation of electric cars would leave us without enough energy to power our homes or other industrial projects, and would increase the demand on electricity which would raise the price. In 2008 alone passenger cars and motorcycles used 8,969 trillion btu of energy. Our electricity production in the US was 4,054 billion kWh. 1,000 kWh is equal to 3.412 million kWh meaning 1 kWh has 3412 btu. So we produced over 13,832, trillion btu of electricity yet just our passenger cars alone would add another 8,969 btu of energy to our power grid. What would the effects of adding 64% more consumption of to our power grid (keep in mind this is all calculated at 100% efficiency so it would actually be a higher percentage)?

37% of the electricity generated is done so with coal, 30% with natural gas and 19% with nuclear power. All three of these are not only unsustainable because they use finite energy sources, but coal is one of the greatest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet. The fact of the matter is that we're going to have to find a way to generate 64% more electricity in order to make the switch to electric cars and we're only projected to increase our renewable energy production from 13% of energy in 2011 to 16% by 2040. So we'll likely still be using coal and natural gas as a primary power source for our homes as well as any electric cars to be built. Therefore, the idea of switching completely to electric cars and their "zero emissions" technology is an absolutely ridiculous project in the first place because the energy itself is not zero emissions. In reality that's not the expected route though as no one expects gas cars to just go away. Instead, what electric cars will really allow us to do is use more energy to cover the lack of energy production growth in the fossil fuel sector. It's obvious when for every one barrel of oil we find we extract five or six, that we're not looking at a rosy fossil fuel future. With oil production going into decline we're looking at a future with less net energy. Simply changing the technology that's using energy won't solve a problem of less net energy.

Second, to replace our gas vehicles with electric cars would require the construction of 254.4 million cars in the US alone while worldwide this would require the production of 1 billion cars. The costs associated with this scale of production and the necessary changes to our infrastructure are large, but the cost to the environment is greater. By the time one electric car is produced it's already responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions. Half of it's Co2 usage will come about simply from production. Then there's lithium mining for the batteries which is less than environmentally friendly. Most of these batteries will need to be replaced after just five years use. This means that according to the WSJ, "If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car."

So essentially what's being marketed as a green alternative to gas powered polluting cars is as polluting or more polluting that gas powered cars. This becomes more clear when we consider just where the batteries go when they can no longer hold a charge. At best they are recycled which is not only an energy intensive process in itself, but few processing plants are in operation and this is because the cost of the materials you get out of recycling is incredibly low. Since they're using less expensive metals for the batteries to cut the cost of making them, chances are they have a much smaller chance of being recycled in the first place. It's not economically feasible to remove the metals if for example one ton of batteries doesn't contain at least 600 pounds of cobalt. This is simply waste pretending to be conservation. Of course the chances that you can afford an electric car in the first place is pretty small. While the Nissan Leaf sells for $28k Tesla's cars go for over $100k.

This is all further evidence of technological millenarianism in which people adopt unfounded and poorly evidenced views of technology solving our environmental problems when it's clear that our environmental problems stem from moral and ethical problems of a culture addicted to growth. Real solutions to these problems simply lie in using less energy, not finding creative ways to market technologies as green while using more energy. Abandoning the building of entire transportation infrastructures built around cars, or our entire car culture for a much more convenient foot based transportation culture where long trips are not required nearly as much are real solutions. However, solutions of using less always upset the economists in all of us because it calls into question the basic economic maxim of more is better. While this is demonstrably false, it has gained traction for centuries, but it's time we focused on the quality of our lives rather than the quantities of what we consume. How long people will hold on to the myths of our times (even when backed by scientific sounding claims) will shape what kind of world we leave to our descendants. In a short time will we be facing a whole new set of problems brought about by unsustainable electric cars or will we realize that cars are simply not sustainable and find ways to have happy lives without them? We must move towards a culture that consumes substantially less energy while keeping up high quality lives or it will be forced upon us in what is often called societal collapse. Rejecting the myth of technology saving us from these environmental and energy crises is the first step towards actually making a change.

Bill Maher: A Principled Liberal or Partisan Worshipper?

2013-05-24T17:01:00.001-07:00

Bill Maher recently tweeted "PS, doesn't Obama have anyone on staff to toss hecklers? If you shut up lady, he's ANSWERING UR QUESTION! Maybe ONE more drone strike..." He was referring to Medea Benjamin's interruption of President Obama on his speech this Thursday the 23rd of May. What was Medea asking though? She asked...

“Can you tell the Muslims that their lives are as precious as our lives? Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA? Can you stop the signature strikes that are killing people on the basis of suspicious activity? Will you compensate the families of innocent victims you have killed?”

Nothing like this is being asked to or answered by the president. The speech Obama gave essentially seemed to address very little specifically, but was meant to defend his use of drone strikes and assure everyone that everything in the land of the free was just and right. For instance...

"We act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured, the highest standard we can set."

"So doing nothing’s not an option."

"I would have detained and prosecuted Awlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot. But we couldn’t. And as president, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took him out."

The speech was an argument for ending traditional boots on the ground warfare and validating the drone program. When Medea Benjamin interrupted the president she did so because she said,

"Sitting at the back of the auditorium, I hung on every word the president said. I kept waiting to hear an announcement about changes that would represent a significant shift in policy. Unfortunately, I heard nice words, not the resetting of failed policies... The bulk of the president’s speech was devoted to justifying drone strikes. I was shocked when the president claimed that his administration did everything it could to capture suspects instead of killing them. That is just not true. Obama’s reliance on drones is precisely because he did not want to be bothered with capturing suspects and bringing them to trial. Take the case of 16-year-old Pakistani Tariz Aziz, who could have been picked up while attending a conference at a major hotel in the capital, Islamabad, but was instead killed by a drone strike, with his 12-year-old cousin, two days later... When the president was coming to the end of this speech, he started talking about Guantánamo. As he has done in the past, he stated his desire to close the prison, but blamed Congress. That’s when I felt compelled to speak out. With the men in Guantánamo on hunger strike, being brutally forced fed and bereft of all hope, I couldn’t let the president continue to act as if he were some helpless official at the mercy of Congress.“Excuse me, Mr. President,” I said, “but you’re the Commander-in-Chief. You could close Guantánamo tomorrow and release the eighty-six prisoners who have been cleared for release.”

Whether or not this type of political action or resistance to those in power is really effective is not in question, but rather the point is that we should respect those who stand up for those who are being done injustice. Maher's response albeit in jest, was not only not funny, but actually provides some light into a subject that I've been wondering more and more about myself; Is Maher even a liberal anymore? It has been argued that Obama is not a liberal and to the right of President Ronald Reagan. However, Maher himself argued that Obama isn't actually a liberal and is "unhappy with Obama."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laxOAV-8Jn4

So why then would Maher give $1 million dollars to Obama's Super PAC for the 2012 election? His argument is essentially that he's better than those "bat shit crazy" GOP Republicans, and that's about all Bill Maher is willing to stand up for. In fact on a previous episode of Real Time Bill actually supported Obama's drone policy saying to Ariana Huffington that, "you'd do the same thing" if she was president when she brought up civilians being "killed again and again." To which Avik Roy responded, "I wish you were saying that 6 years ago." The reason was perhaps that Maher didn't support Bush's war on terror yet seems to support Obama in his war on terror. It's funny that a guy who gets fired over saying "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly," in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks has reversed his position to essentially to "some people need killing" and "That's not to say that all drone strikes are bad." There's not a lot of difference between lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away and ordering drone strikes and it's not like Obama has pulled using cruise missiles from the arsenal. After all a cruise missile strike aimed to kill Awlaki was launched and killed 52 civilians before every "charge" Obama levied against Awlaki in his speech.

So if Maher is convinced Obama isn't even a liberal and yet he donates a million dollars to his campaign then I think we can finally put to bed the idea of Maher being a liberal. He is now a partisan hack. Maher supports the policies he once used to criticize simply because he has tied himself to a party and a president that are not principled themselves. The response to people questioning Obama now is simply to shut up because of course Obama is "rethinking policy". The idea that killing innocent people abroad being cowardly or even wrong is no longer up for debate, but simply it's a "bad world" now so we have to do bad things. This is another prime example of Degenerative Party Syndrome that is destroying not only any semblance of a liberal opposition to the neo-conservative policies of the Bush era, but enabling it. There is no question that without a Democrat in the president's office these policies would be unsupported by Maher and every other Democratic pundit.

Degenerative Democratic Party Syndrome (DDPS)

2013-05-13T13:31:00.001-07:00

Looking back on the Democratic party's recovery in 2008-09 winning both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the presidency there seems to be a peculiar disease affecting those within the party. The party that once championed Social Security, regulation of the financial industry, and assailed those who supported an endless war on terror and the Bush Doctrine; is now looking at cuts to SS, favors only very minimal regulation of the finance industries, and seems to now lend full support to the the war on terror and tenets of the Bush Doctrine. Essentially liberals don't really seem liberal anymore, and it's due to authoritarian blindness and the degeneration of the party. I'm calling this cessation and decay of liberal thought Degenerative Democratic Party Syndrome (DDPS), not to be confused with DRPS (Degenerative Republican Party Syndrome) which seems to affect Republicans when they're in power and causes them to forget every talking point they ever created on fiscal conservatism. Degenerative party syndromes tend to come about mostly when a party comes to power and rather than representing a principled position in line with past positions, they degenerate to positions that serve the established powers, and begin to praise positions that just a few earthly rotations of the sun back would be polar opposites.

When Barack Obama was elected president and began serving in 2009, most people who supported him seemed to genuinely believe that he was a political figure that could set right what had once gone wrong during the Bush presidency while reshaping the very nature of the political system. While he wasn't making a Quantum Leap, his leap as a constitutional scholar to the presidency seemed to capture the hopes of the Democratic Party constituents who expected change. Since I was not an Obama supporter during the 2008 election cycle - because I saw through his marketing campaign and told personal friends time and time again that his plans for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars mirrored Bush's and he supported increasing the size of the military which was a sure sign of business as usual politics no matter what party is in office- I wasn't as taken as his supporters in the hope for real change in the political system. However, I did expect a little more from Obama and the Democratic Party than we've seen over the last 4 years. The primary arguments against Bush seemed to be his unilateral swagger in regards to foreign policy, his curtailment of civil liberties, and a general disgust for his economic and social conservatism. Yet it seems that the Democratic leaders and pundits alike have shifted towards positions that were once loathed by liberals.

For example lets take a look at one of Obama's campaign promises to shutdown Guantanamo Bay's US prison site, famous around the world for torturing its inmates. Recently it's been receiving a little more press with many inmates on hunger strikes to protest the conditions there and that many prisoners cleared for release are still being held. While we can ignore for the time being that his real plan to shut down Guantanamo was really just a plan to create 'Guantanamo North' right here in the US - which allowed them to continue indefinite detention policies- the striking thing is not Obama's failure to close the facility, but the shift in public opinion towards Guantanamo.

In just a few years time Democrats have gone from supporting it's closure to being pro Gitmo. Doesn't it seem odd that one of the greatest stains of Bush's presidency and US foreign policy is now being supported by Democrats? This is an advanced case of DDPS clearly showing the bend in political opinion since Obama stopped pursuing closing the prison. It should be interesting now that Obama has renewed his pledge to "close" the facility to see if opinion shifts back.

Another such example is support for the war on terror. Drone strikes that are being justified by the same old "the world is a battlefield Bush Doctrine" have been embraced by Democrats. "Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35." This means that even self proclaimed liberals support drone strikes against US citizens, giving whomever the current president is the power to secretly kill citizens regardless of geographic location and outside the normative processes of law. Who thinks for a second that if Bush had stepped out with this policy that liberals and Democrats alike wouldn't have supported this policy?

There are so many symptoms of this left wing hypocrisy disease it might be better to list them:

Obamacare reforms actually closely resemble former Republican plans

Obama signed the NDAA and continued the Patriot Act

Obama fought against any meaningful regulation of the financial industry

Obama favored and signed extending the Bush tax cuts

Obama supports cuts to Social Security and Medicaid

Obama supports immigration reform similar to Bush's plan

So how does one treat DDPS? They're called principles and they may work for you. If you believe that invading and occupying countries is a bad idea under Bush, supporting the continuation of those occupations under a new president, principles may be right for you. If you think drone strikes target only terrorists and support the program despite having no knowledge of who is being targeted even when evidence shows civilians are being killed time and time again, principles may be right for you. If you think Obamacare is a step towards a progressive healthcare system when there is no public option, principles may be right for you. If you think that cuts to Social Security and Medicaid are terrible ideas, but voted for Obama, principles might be right for you.

WARNING: Assuming principled arguments rather than partisan worship may cause: scrutiny from both political parties, defending yourself from straw man arguments that your represent the "other party's" views, feeling nauseous every time you hear the words bipartisan cooperation, death to any political career as you can't change your policy with whatever way the wind blows, and upsetting the establishment.

Consult history books, experts, and other evidence before making principled arguments. Do not use while in political office or on national TV or it could result in job loss or controversy.

Sam Harris- Take 2

2013-04-25T19:07:00.002-07:00

Almost two weeks ago in response to the controversy over Sam Harris and Islamophobia, I hastily wrote about my thoughts on Harris' fear of Muslims and why it seems irrational. Since that time I've continued to immerse myself in arguments by both Harris and those who argue against his theses. I've taken the time to read Harris' book The End of Faith, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and a number of recently written articles on the subject. Also, since my initial writing, the Boston Marathon was bombed bringing the subject of terrorism to the forefront of our news-media coverage. It strikes me that a rational understanding of terrorism is both necessary and important in the 21st century especially if we aim to stop such terrible acts from becoming more and more common. We must begin by dispelling the myths behind terrorism and appreciate the complexity of such issues in order to create real solutions to the problem of terrorism.

Harris' book The End of Faith begins by creating a scenario of a man on a bus who blows up himself, the rest of the passengers on the bus, and inflicts further damage on the streets. His parents feel "great pride" and the neighbors gather to celebrate his accomplishment of killing innocent civilians. Then Harris asks "Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on it easy—to guess the young man's religion?" What this scenario leaves out is where this attack is taking place which matters especially when guessing the religion of the attacker. For example, if this story was told in Sri-Lanka, or perhaps even the UK in the 80's, the guesses very well could have been either Hindu or Irish Catholic. Whatever the case, the suggestion that Islam must be behind terrorism is a dangerous proposition, as demonstrated in the aftermath of the Boston bombings when the Washington Post incorrectly claimed that police had a Saudi suspect under guard in a Boston hospital. Now, in the case of the Boston attacks, news reports have claimed that the older of the two Tsarnaev brothers was a radical Muslim, but is it logical to assume that he was, before such evidence had been produced?

Certainly analysis of data and statistical information on the nature of terrorist attacks shed some light on the situation. An article from 2010 at loonwatch.com goes into detail showing FBI statistics on terrorist attacks in the US from 1980-2005. The graph below shows the likely hood of an attack being motivated by Islamic extremism.

That's right 6% of terrorist attacks are committed by Islamic extremists. Why then is it so easy to guess the religion of the attacker? The obvious answer is the over hyped and over inflated connection between Islam and terrorism in the post 9/11 world. After such a dramatic event, it is easy to see why the connections have been made, and coverage of Boston has refreshed that memory with a week of news reports that create a culture of fear within the US public. Meanwhile, it's keeping people glued to the news channels which increases their ratings and their profit margins. So is this guess on religion based on statistical knowledge and projections, or the all too common inference that Islam is the cause of terrorism? Usually in the scientific world we base our hypotheses off of any relevant data we can collect on the subject, but we seem to have a clear departure from any reasoned or scientific view of terrorism and Islam. However, we should follow Harris' further arguments on the subject to ascertain if this is actually the case.

After the first chapter provides a basic introduction of the arguments contained in the book, chapter 2 launches us straight into a well written and conceived analysis on the nature of belief, how beliefs can affect behavior, and how beliefs not based in evidence can even harm us, amongst other things. Outside of a few minor points, I agree with and applaud the work in this chapter. Chapter 3, "In the Shadow of God" is also illuminating on the subject of how religion can and has played a negative role in society over the years and I agree with much of it as well. It's when he launches into the next chapter "The Problem with Islam" that I depart nearly completely from the views held by Harris. While I may not have the space to critique every false argument made by Harris in this chapter I hope to elucidate what I believe to be the most important and most erroneous arguments.

Before callously stating that we are at war with Islam, Harris contends that the views of most commentators on Muslim violence can be ignored, including Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Palestine, collusion of western powers with corrupt dictatorships, and the endemic poverty in the region. He reasons these claims can be laid to rest because there have been and still are groups that are exploited and live in generally poor circumstances beyond those in the "Muslim world" yet they have not resorted to terrorism. Instead he focuses on the doctrine of Jihad found in the Koran and tries to establish the imperialistic ambitions of Islam as a whole, explaining that Islam is a religion of conquest with only some Muslims having overlooked the "militancy of their religion." Harris uses a quote by Bernard Lewis from The Crisis of Islam which states "the presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule." He goes on to cite passage after passage from the Koran and Hadiths on Jihad. His basic argument is that Islam is the primary cause of suicide bombings and Islamic terrorism.

We should analyze these claims though using evidence to see how they hold up. The idea that we can merely ignore what most commentators have said about the roots of Muslim violence because others who are exploited and poor do not commit such acts is false. This argument clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of suicide bombings. While Harris cites Tibetans as a prime example of exploitation not leading to any attacks, we should note that this is a logical fallacy. Further, suicide attacks are nearly all part of organized campaigns which have always targeted democracies, or more precisely states with democratic elections. His argument is essentially that if exploitation and occupation cause suicide terrorism, then all areas that experience exploitation and occupation would use suicide terrorism, and since this in not the case, exploitation and occupation do not cause terrorism. So what causes some exploited people to resort to terrorism and not others? Robert Pape in his thorough case study of terrorism, has analyzed every case of suicide bombing from 1980-2003 - 315 total attacks. He argues that terrorism is a tactic of coercion to achieve nationalistic goals, which as stated, all target democracies. So in the Tibetan example, putting aside belief systems, what strategic logic would attacking civilians or other targets in a non-democratic state have? Would it be likely to bend the resolve of a totalitarian regime?

Pape again has insights to these questions stating: "Suicide terrorism is more likely to be employed against states with democratic political systems than against authoritarian governments, for three reasons. First, democracies are often thought to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment. Domestic critics and international rivals, as well as terrorists, often view democracies as “soft,” usually on the grounds that their publics have low thresholds of cost tolerance and high ability to affect state policy... Second, suicide terrorism is a tool of the weak, which means that, regardless of how much punishment the terrorists inflict, the target state almost always has the capacity to retaliate with far more extreme punishment or even by exterminating the terrorists’ community. Accordingly, suicide terrorists must not only have high interests at stake, they must also be confident that their opponent will be at least somewhat restrained. Democracies are widely perceived as less likely to harm civilians, and no democratic regime has committed genocide in the twentieth century... Finally, suicide attacks may also be harder to organize or publicize in authoritarian police states, although these possibilities are weakened by the fact that weak authoritarian states are also not targets."

So we can move on. Robert Pape goes to great lengths to establish the real motives of suicide terrorism in Dying to Win writing that: "First, although religious motives may matter and although Islamic groups receive the most attention in Western media, modern suicide terrorism is not limited to Islamic fundamentalism. As shown in Table 1, the explicitly anti-religious Tamil Tigers have committed 76 of the 315 suicide attacks, more than any other group; they are responsible for the spectacular bombing of the World Trade Center in Colombo in 1997 and the assassinations of two heads of state, Rajiv Gandhi of India and Ranasinghe Premadasa of Sri Lanka.
Even among Muslims, secular groups account for over a third of suicide attacks. The Kurdish PKK, which has used suicide bombers as part of its strategy to achieve Kurdish autonomy, is guided by the secular Marxist-Leninist ideology of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, rather than by Islam. Even in the conflicts most characterized by Islamic fundamentalism, groups with secular ideologies account for an important number of suicide attacks. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist group, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, with allegiance to Yasser Arafat’s socialist Fatah movement, together account for thirty-one of ninety-two suicide attacks against Israel, while communist and socialist groups, such as the secular Lebanese National Resistance Front, the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Syrian National Socialist Party, account for twenty-seven of thirty-six suicide attacks in Lebanon in the 1980s."

While Harris has argued against Pape's thesis - that terrorism is best understood in terms of nationalistically motivated political coercion- in his response to controversy, he tackled very little of the abundant evidence presented by Pape that had to do with Islamic terrorism. Harris wrote: "I would have made it clear to Pape that I have never argued (and would never argue) that all conflicts are attributable to religion or that all suicide bombing is the product of Islam. I am well aware, for instance, that the Tamil Tigers were avowedly secular. Even in this case, however, it seems only decent to recall that they learned the tactic of suicide bombing from Hezbollah and eventually developed their own quasi-religious cult of martyr worship. One can’t really argue that they were a group of classically rational actors. And even here, in this most secular of cases, always used to exculpate Islam, we find the divisive role of religion—because it seems unreasonable to believe that a civil war would have erupted in Sri Lanka if the Tamils, who are nominal Hindus, had been Sinhalese Buddhists, like the government they were fighting. Again, nothing turns on this point, because I admit that not all terrorism need be religiously inspired."

Pape again and again notes the fact that in nearly every case, religious difference is a contributing factor that leads to pursuing the tactic of suicide terrorism. This obviously has to do with religion being a primary factor in how a person identifies themselves and can then be used to identify the "other", especially when political grievances are at the top of the list. It seems only fair to note that Harris, on the one hand, is saying that we can put all the political exploitation to the side because there is "no shortage of educated and prosperous men and women, suffering little more than their infatuation with Koranic eschatology, who are eager to murder infidels for God's sake." Then on the other hand he says, "not all terrorism need be religiously inspired." So when suicide bombings are done by Muslims, they are evidently religiously motivated, but when done by others they can be and are secular. Even if we except this there's still further evidence refuting such claims. Glenn Greenwald wrote this week about the motives of terrorism giving example after example of the stated motives of terrorists. The main themes are overtly political rather than theological. If that's not enough evidence of nationalistic and political views being the primary concern, then perhaps we can refer to the most famous terrorist in the world, Osama bin Laden.

"It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies... The presence of the USA Crusader military forces on land, sea and air of the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world. The existence of these forces in the area will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings and prides and push them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land; therefore spread of the fighting in the region will expose the oil wealth to the danger of being burned up... It is out of date and no longer acceptable to claim that the presence of the crusaders is necessity and only a temporary measures to protect the land of the two Holy Places. Especially when the civil and the military infrastructures of Iraq were savagely destroyed showing the depth of the Zionist-Crusaders hatred to the Muslims and their children, and the rejection of the idea of replacing the crusaders forces by an Islamic force composed of the sons of the country and other Muslim people."

While Harris contests that the claims Bin Laden made were "primarily theological" he ignores Pape's already stated argument of why this is not the case. Pape writes: "Further, if religious, social, or economic grievances were primary, then al-Qaeda should have been interested in combating three enemies—the United States, Europe, and Israel—with more or less equal weight and with little regard for the target states’ military policies. However, al-Qaeda’s timing and choice of targets shows that religious and ideological factors are not the forces driving the strategic logic of this suicide terrorist campaign.
The United States has been exporting cultural values that are anathema to Islamic fundamentalism for several decades, but bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization did not turn toward attacking the United States until after 1990, when the United States sent troops to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain." This becomes even more important when you consider that attacks against Europe and Australia only happened after they stationed troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, Bin Laden offered a truce if they would remove their troops.

Pape continues on the same subject later in the book in chapter 7 stating, "Examination of al-Qaeda’s pool of suicide terrorists—the seventy-one individuals who actually killed themselves on missions for al-Qaeda from 1995 to 2003—shows that the presence of American military forces for combat operations on the homeland territory of the suicide terrorists is stronger than Islamic fundamentalism in predicting whether individuals from that country will become al-Qaeda suicide terrorists. Islamic fundamentalism may play a modest role in recruiting militants, since al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are twice as likely to come from Muslim countries with Islamic fundamentalist populations compared to Muslim countries with tiny or no Islamic fundamentalist populations. However, al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are ten times more likely to come from Muslim countries where there is an American military presence for combat operations than from other Muslim countries. Further, al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are twenty times more likely to come from Muslim countries with both American military presence for combat operations and Islamic fundamentalist populations compared to other Muslim countries.
Overall, this means that American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11. Although Islamic fundamentalism mattered, the stationing of tens of thousands of American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula from 1990 to 2001 probably made al-Qaeda suicide attacks against Americans, including the horrible crimes committed on September 11, 2001, from ten to twenty times more likely."

For further evidence simply read Pape's books as the examples are too numerous to use. Continuing on in Harris' The End of Faith he tries to convince the reader that Islam is inherently imperialistic. This is a claim which historically and doctrinally can be supported to a degree, but in the modern era it doesn't hold water. Since Harris is essentially arguing that Islam poses a unique threat beyond other religions, it would do well to note that in the US, all our presidents in recent memory have publicly stated a belief in the Christian god, and the US indeed is the largest empire on earth. Remember, the US has 761 military bases worldwide and spends more on our military than the next 13 highest military spending countries do. After he argues for their imperialistic attributes he then tries to explain why the problem isn't just Islamic extremists, but that moderates have accepted this strategy of suicide bombings as well. His strategy seems simple enough, portray the attacks as motivated by religion rather than blowback from western foreign policy. Note his recent twitter post from April 19th 2013

Everything is on the table when it comes to putting down the notion that our foreign policy might actually bear much of the blame when it comes to the root causes of terrorism. We should note that the Washington Post has cited an anonymous government source which has stated that the Boston bombings were motivated by US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What evidence does Harris produce to make these claims of religious motivation?

Harris points to a 2002 poll done by the Pew Research Center that asked the question "Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?" While the number of respondents in many countries in the middle east seems alarmingly high, this also seems to be a loaded question when the purpose is to establish Islam as a greater threat than other religions. First, Muslims, as Harris demonstrates, are commanded to defend their religion. Second, although we don't have polls to verify the responses of Christians in the US, does anyone doubt the number of Christians would be significantly lower than the average number of Muslims that support such violence, specifically if they believed Christianity to be under attack, and that the attack was being done by a foreign country which had been occupying the US and controlling its geopolitics for years? Finally, what was the response to the attacks against the US on 9/11? As I documented in my first posting on this subject the vast majority of Americans supported invading Iraq and Afghanistan even though the case against Iraq was completely based on faith in the US rather than real evidence of any threat. I also noted 93% of Muslims condemned the September 11th attacks. Is it really that astonishing that people who identify as Muslims would use heinous forms of violence if they felt the religion they identify with was under attack?

This brings up another of Harris' arguments. Harris calls Chomsky's failure to recognize the moral difference between us and them a "masterpiece of moral blindness." Although he agrees to an extent with Chomsky's argument that the US is itself a leading terrorist state, he tries to elucidate the moral failing by making the comparison between those who intentionally kill civilians in an attempt to produce maximum damage (the terrorists), and those who unintentionally kill civilians (the US and Israel) which we call collateral damage. After explaining that if we in the US had perfect weapons we would not need to nor would we kill any innocent people, but we would simply target "the bad guys." He even goes on to say that: "Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in
jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as "skiing atrocities." But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter."

This last analogy actually obfuscates the ethics of war and collateral damage more than it does to clarify these ethics, which is the opposite function of an analogy; his perfect weapons hypothetical does the same. Even though Harris admits in his writings that the consequences of war - collateral damage, or in the case of Iraq killing over 100,000 civilians - are well known before we engage in them, he has the audacity to compare this to manufactures of common goods which may unintentionally harm people. First, people who make consumer goods while influenced by profit, are primarily making a good that is well intentioned in its use and that in and of itself is a far cry from war. There is no evidence to suggest the war Iraq was anything but the opposite of well intentioned. It is a well established fact that Donald Rumsfeld on the very day of the 9/11 attack, tried to use the attack as a justification for attacking Iraq. Further, David Frum has stated Chalabi and Cheney "spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia." There is absolutely no comparison to be made between these two types of "collateral damage" unless we turn a blind eye to the imperial motivations for such a war.

Perhaps a better analogy for Harris would be to imagine a police officer on a busy NY street receives a call that a notorious murderer is only a block away and with traffic at a stand still he decides to callously drive on a sidewalk full of pedestrians at a speed which injures and kills well over ten times the amount of people the murder did to capture the criminal. The police officer may not have intended to kill so many, but he would obviously have known the implications of his actions beforehand. This is why almost anywhere in the world the police officer would be tried as a criminal, and it's the same reason why officials in the Bush administration including Bush himself have travel restrictions for fear of being taken before an international criminal court. However, my police officer analogy wouldn't do for Iraq -although it arguably would in Afghanistan - simply because even to capture a criminal could be seen as a well intentioned motive. While a certain amount of subjectivity always exists in examining the motives of others for any action, there is far too much evidence making the case that Iraq was simply a war of aggression that used cluster munitions - which pose an unnecessary and unacceptable risk to civilians and we should note every manufacturer of consumer goods is liable for unacceptable risks - and destroyed civilian infrastructure.

More directly to the point, if we can imagine ourselves in possession of the perfect weapons pursuing a different strategy than a war with collateral damage amounting to far more than the damage terrorists ever inflicted, we should be able to imagine what the terrorists would do with such weapons. Would they pursue a different strategy as well, perhaps targeting the US military and its bases and destroying the western presence in their homeland, or would they simply continue to kill innocent civilians? This is one of the main points of terrorism as a strategy. It is constantly used by the "underdog" in terms of military capability. Even Japan didn't resort to suicide Kamikaze attacks until they were becoming overwhelmed by stronger US military forces. Harris' arguments seem all but paper thin and framed not by rational thinking, but by assumptions of western moral clarity and rightness against what he seems to view as the tribal and barbaric "Muslim world."

This becomes more clear after reading his next chapter - I'd like to note he spends 45 pages on Islam and only 17 on "western civilization"- where his problems with the US, and to some extent Europe, seems to stem more from religious rejection of science and contemporary social issues. He fails to mention the true religion of the US, which seems to be globalized hegemonic capitalism supported by doctrines of economic growth, and often poorly evidenced claims of the righteousness of the western world. While Harris is busy writing and speaking to condemn Islam as a "cult of death," he simultaneously is preaching the goodness of science and civilization. This system of industrialized capitalism, which has brought about more scientific revolution than any other period in history, is also destroying the very earth we live on.

Carbon emissions alone threaten to disrupt the earth's environment in ways that surely are a greater threat than Islam could ever pose. The earth's temperature is projected to rise 4-11 degrees by the end of the century and every degree centigrade the temperature increases is likely to reduce grain yields by 10%. Meanwhile, our ecological systems are already nearing destruction with Ninety percent of all large predatory fish – including tuna, sharks, swordfish, cod and halibut – gone, and more plastic than plankton exists in our oceans. While science is obviously not the root cause of these issues, it's important that we note science is merely a process of inquiry with testable results. If we fail to pose the right questions, science can actually hinder our understanding of the world in some ways. If anything is a cult of death, it is the industrialized system that is destroying our planet and there's no doubt that scientific knowledge has led us not just to greater understanding, but to further exploiting our universe and shaping it to our desires. Indeed, scientific knowledge is often used not merely for understanding nature and its phenomena, but an attempt to control nature with what is shaping up to be mankind's greatest threat. Science has helped us create weapons beyond past imagination as well as cures for diseases, but has it given us the moral clarity to deal with such inventions?

While ecological and environmental issues are not scientific problems, but moral problems, more and more people are slipping into a type of scientific millenarianism in which they believe scientific and modern technological advances are just around the corner to save us. More people are accepting the doctrine of scientific achievement bringing us a better world for tomorrow with electric cars - never-mind that nearly half our electricity comes from coal - and space colonization. Harris himself proclaims such images stating that: "Two hundred years from now, when we are a thriving global civilization beginning to colonize space, something about us will have changed: it must have; otherwise, we would have killed ourselves ten times over before this day ever dawned." While Harris alludes to this change being the end of faith and that technology has created a world where single persons can inflict great damage, he leads us to believe that having aspiring martyrs as neighbors poses the greatest threat. This will be of little importance even a few generations from now. Future generations will likely care little about our religious conflicts, or the deities we worshipped, much like we care little about the pagan deities of ancient times, but they will care more deeply than we can imagine about the condition of their air, their water, and the general environmental destruction of the earth we will be leaving them. We cannot solve moral and ethical problems merely by ridding the earth of religion or accepting science as the path to all knowledge, and as much as I like to see belief systems without evidence challenged, I cannot support ending faith unless we are to simultaneously critique and challenge our own belief systems. We can meditate for our own spiritual enlightenment and try to metaphysically become one with everything as much as we want, but the real truth is that we need to take informed actions in the real world to connect with nature as more than just a controller of nature, but part of a living system that industrial civilization is destroying.

So when we look back at the motivations of what causes people to commit terrible acts of violence and injustice I've discussed, I hope we can take a good look in the mirror. Not just to realize the failings of our own countries foreign policy and the blowback it has created, but our own belief systems and the actions they are responsible for in all arenas, specifically our irrational belief in a system that is currently destroying the very world we live on. Furthermore, the one thing Harris and Islamic terrorists have in common is both believe the US is at war with Islam. This is a dangerous notion as it is the root cause of Islamic terrorism, as well as a justification of US foreign policy which despite Harris' dubious "moral clarity" has been waging an aggressive war that has killed far more than terrorism. I encourage all interested in the subject to read Pape's work, and to take seriously what those who attack us give as their motives.

Epilogue: If you remain unconvinced that Islam is not the primary cause of terrorism or that the US and Harris have an irrational fear of Islam I encourage you to read the articles below, as well as the linked articles in my first post on the Harris controversy.
http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/51653064#51653064
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/01/not-all-terrorists-are-muslims/
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/01/06/muslim.radicalization.study/
http://bigwhiteogre.blogspot.ca/2013/04/harris-vs-greenwald-and-hussain.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/richard-dawkins-islamophobic?CMP=twt_gu
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qasim-rashid/do-you-even-hear-muslims-when-we-condemn-violence_b_3125564.html

Sam Harris Rational or Irrational Fear of Islam?

2013-04-12T11:21:00.001-07:00

Recently the hotly debated topic of whether "new atheists" such as Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have irrationally overhyped the dangers of Islam has broken out on the internet. It all got started when Glenn Greenwald posted a tweet with a link to an article by Murtaza Hussain, and Nathan Lean at Salon.com, which led to Sam Harris emailing Greenwald in response to the tweeting of the aforementioned article. This led to Greenwald posting his exchange with Sam Harris with Harris' permission. Then Greenwald posted an article on Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus. After some back and forth on twitter Harris replied to the claims in Greenwald's article. There was also more twitter arguing and Richard Dawkings chiming in to support Sam Harris. I have been a fairly faithful reader of Greewald's writings first at Salon.com and now at The Guardian as well as reading his book With Liberty and Justice for Some. Since I'm also a (less avid) reader (although I have watched numerous debates, speeches, and interviews) of Sam Harris it took me some careful review to form an opinion on the subject due to my respect for both Harris and Greenwald. However, after reading some of the articles and the twitter fights between the two I must say I'm a little shocked at the whole incident.

First I'm an atheist in that I don't worship any gods or attribute natural phenomena to some sort of spiritual deity. I believe Islam is deserving of harsh and precise critiques due to the obvious abuses and the behaviors it can create in its adherents. People can and should be able to criticize the religion without fear of being labeled bigots or racist simply for critiquing a religion. However, Harris' critique of Islam and Muslims is often overblown in terms of having a rational fear vs having an irrational fear of Islam.

While Harris has taken the time to clarify some quotes that were perhaps misconstrued (albeit confusing in the first place), Greenwald and Hussain were not the only people to complain about his "fascist quote". Christopher Hitchens did as well stating, ""When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders." Harris has explained the remark in his response to the controversy, but aside from this and a few other remarks I find his response unconvincing and failing to rebut many claims made against him. While much controversy has erupted over this singular comment, there hasn't been as much discussion of other damming evidence showing that Harris overstates the threat of Islam and even radical Islam.

Let's consider the article the quote came from. It is a scathing attack on the failure of liberals to realize "a cult of death is forming in the Muslim world," and "the truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology." What is most striking to me in this entire article is the constant dichotomy between western civilization and Islam and his use of this dichotomy to explain the moral failings of Islam while attributing the US and Israel with having a "moral high ground." Since Harris himself uses this dichotomy, I think it is fair to make concrete comparisons between what is being done by the US and Israel (as well as other western states) towards the middle east or "Islamic world" in order to put in perspective just how dire these threats are. Even though Harris makes the claim that "nothing about honestly discussing the doctrine of Islam requires that a person not notice all that might be wrong with U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, the vestiges of empire, or anything else that may be contributing to our ongoing conflicts in the Muslim world." He uses comparisons between the US and Islam writing "they (liberals) ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so," and therefore Harris makes it fair game to critique the rationality of the extremity of his fear of Islam vs fear of the crimes of our own state.

So just how dire is the threat of Islam? Harris states that "The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization." Harris is making the claim that religious affiliation and solidarity with other Muslims who commit "sociopathic behavior" just may be the greatest threat to civilization. Putting aside the facts that civilization actually began in the areas that he calls the "muslim world," often making a sharp distinction between this world and civilization, this is an easily provable falsehood. We can establish this by putting the threat in perspective, much as Harris has done in his article earlier this year on guns and gun control in the US. In the article Harris seeks to put into perspective the true reality of gun violence in the US by stating that there are an estimated 100,000 deaths due to the failure of doctors and nurses to wash their hands properly, which is obviously greater than the number of deaths caused by gun violence. Although he concedes that "A narrow focus on mortality rates does not always do justice to the reality of human suffering" -It should be noted that a mere mortality rate doesn't even come close to doing justice to the suffering caused in Iraq by the US and that it's subsequent foreign policy continues to cause suffering in the region. Between refugees, secret prisons, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and injuries the toll becomes incalculable-. Therefore to put the threat of Islam into perspective we can look at the data on the subject. The odds that you'll die in a terrorist attack are around 1 in 9.3 million worldwide and 1 in 20 million in the US. This puts your odds of dying in an extremist muslim attack behind the the risk of being mauled to death by a dog. It's actually lower since not all terrorist attack attributable deaths were committed by Muslims.

However, if you lived in Iraq your chance of dying from the US led invasion was over 1 in 50, because the US wiped out 2.5% of Iraq's population. So while Harris attributes the US and Israel with a moral high ground for avoiding the killing of noncombatants he fails to note we kill more both in percentage and in number than do Islamic extremists. However, we do have to pay attention to the very high death toll and real threat posed by Islamic extremists, but anyone with any detailed study of the effects of Islamic extremism would have to concede that those who suffer the most from Islamic extremism -in both attacks and other heinous forms of oppression- are those who live in the "muslim world." As Hussain points out in his reply to an article shared by sam harris on twitter, "The simple fact is that Islamic extremism is almost exclusively a threat to people like me- not rich, white, westerners like Sam Harris." This distinction is important because it comes to the heart of Harris' argument for secularism and against Islam. As Chris Hedges put it, "they externalize evil. Evil is not something that you struggle with within yourself. Evil is embodied in religion." This is why Harris asserts that Islamic "benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest threat facing civilization."

Harris' arguments for why Islam is such a threat come off somewhat convincingly unless we apply the same standards to ourselves. Let's be clear that a failure to apply the same standards to our own state result in an externalization of evil and a sanitization of crimes being committed in our own name -Harris himself has argued for US and Israeli rightness while arguing against Islam using this same tactic-. Harris states that "the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam," and that Muslims have "an equally dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one’s faith, both from within and without, is similarly central to the doctrine of Islam."

So how would those claims be applied to the US? The war in Iraq was launched based off of the belief of protecting the US and its interests from the threat or potential threat of Iraq, specifically from the unproven and zero evidence claims that they had WMD. This war was one of many wars where a majority of the US public supported the war at the beginning of the war. Further evidence shows that the US public supported the war even over a year after the conflict began with 54% supporting it in September of 2004. What kind of dangerous dogmatic beliefs would the US public need to have to support a war based on false claims? The answers could be said to be blind patriotism, and viewing all their moral and political questions in terms of their national identity. What's important to note is that the US public adhered to an illegal doctrine of preemptive war, with a dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend our faith that Iraq had WMD, and protect our country from within and without. The legitimization of the use of violence against our "enemies" is no less radical and follows a very similar process to religious indoctrination, whereby the public was indoctrinated to believe in a profound threat to their country with no supporting evidence. It's also worth noting for perspective, that 93% of Muslim's when polled, condemned the 9/11 attacks.

Now we have to pause to concede that Islam and more correctly Islamic extremism poses a threat in more than just one arena to the inhabitants of the globe. This is why it deserves strong critiques from Harris and others. Honor violence and extreme patriarchy are just two cases. It is also in part responsible for over 3,000 deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011. However, Iraq and Afghanistan are the two countries with the most terrorist attacks in the world. This begs the question of what exactly motivates the violence throughout the "muslim world," and whether or not the relationship to Islam is the fundamental factor. Does rationality or religion tend to dominate more of the so called "muslim world"? Dalia Mogahed, former Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, says "Politics, not piety, differentiate moderates from radicals' in the Islamic world."

Still more experts like Tariq Ali (an atheist British Pakastani) have argued, "the "war against terror" is immoral and counterproductive. It sanctions the use of state terror - bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq - against Islamo-anarchists whose numbers are small, but whose reach is deadly. The solution then, as now, is political, not military. The British ruling elite understood this perfectly well in the case of Ireland. Security measures, anti-terror laws rushed through parliament, identity cards, a curtailment of civil liberties, will not solve the problem. If anything, they will push young Muslims in the direction of mindless violence."

This analysis was generally confirmed correct by the CIA, as Greenwald pointed out, back in 2004. "American direct intervention in the muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature and support for radical extremists while at the same time diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies." Another report about the 2008 gallup poll, that Greenwald also pointed out, has Mogahed saying, "Some actually cited religious justifications for why they were against 9/11, going as far as to quote from the Koran -- for example, the verse that says taking one innocent life is like killing all humanity."

This last quote is so poignant to the debate, when you compare what actual Muslims are reported to have said vs the characterization of Muslims by Sam Harris "While there are undoubtedly some moderate Muslims who have decided to overlook the irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the “enemies of God.” Please read the full article so I'm not accused of taking him out of context.

The article goes on to state, "We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq and elsewhere. Our enemies--as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves--are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances." These are assumptions that I have yet to see evidence for, and as a skeptic I think we should ask Harris to provide his evidence. Then Harris continues, "It is not enough for moderate Muslims to say “not in our name.” They must now police their own communities. They must offer unreserved assistance to western governments in locating the extremists in their midst." He's actually advocating that they must without reservation allow foreign governments access to their nation to locate the extremists, although it is a well known fact that the US doesn't just locate extremists. The US kills them, captures them, and even tortures them. Imagine just for a second if we applied the same standards to our own country. We would have to give up Bush and Cheney to the International Criminal Court for war crimes. We would have to submit our country to foreign governments to give up people that other countries decided were criminals outside the normative processes of international law. But this is only hypothetical as they would have to have the most advanced and expensive military in the world, and currently that's our game.

Harris continues in that same article and goes on to say, "However mixed or misguided American intentions were in launching this war, civilized human beings are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on earth, we could still expect tomorrow’s paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself up for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women, and children. The outrage that Muslims feel over U.S. and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns." This in not only in stark contrast to the poll cited above about the middle east, but absolutely ignorant of the history of the middle east. Perhaps Harris is unaware of the use of cluster munitions in Iraq which means "Iraqi civilians will be paying the price with their lives and limbs for many years," according to Steve Goose -This is also evidence contrary to Harris' claim that we avoid killing non combatants-. The part that shows true ignorance however is that the outrage in the middle east is not primarily driven by policies of; aggressive preemptive war, bombing of civilian infrastructure, torture, black op prisons, and just maybe the death of 2.5% of their countrymen after a decade of sanctions that caused the death of children to increase dramatically with reports ranging from 170,000 to 500,000+, but is "primarily the product of theological concerns."

Again, I'm not arguing against criticizing Islam, I'm arguing against using religion as a basis for overtly political arguments in favor of "civilized human beings" (inferring that those in the middle east are less than civilized human beings) that are attempting to improve the lives of Iraqi people when Iraqis are obviously being harmed by policies of continued war waged by these same "civilized human beings." Harris then writes that, "there is, after all, little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death." This brings to mind the question of whether Harris realizes that Pakistan is both an Islamic republic as well as a nuclear state -with the highest levels of support for Islamic fundamentalism-, but again he asserts that because these countries are muslim they are not deterred by the threat of death. Therefore they pose an extreme threat to the country with the most powerful military and intelligence organizations on earth, and with the most advanced nuclear deterrence system on earth that is currently considering investing even more money in nuclear weapons.

While Harris isn't wrong in asserting that religion plays a major role in the politics of the middle east I believe his arguments are a vast oversimplification of the problems with an overemphasis on religion while virtually ignoring the political and social motivations for extremism. After all Harris may be unaware there is a long history of the US supporting religious groups (such as the Mujahideen) to stop Arab socialism and communism, and continues to fund the Taliban. Not to mention US support for Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Indonesia. How this support has in many ways led to the de-liberalization of the middle east is debatable, but dismissing them to focus on motives of faith is irresponsible, and a mischaracterization of the issues.

Harris continually asserts that the problems are overwhelmingly religious rather than rational or political, yet still more experts like the Middle East Research and Information Project claim that, "Because it is associated with Western modes of thinking and behavior, liberal democracy is always in danger of being associated with Western misdeeds, real and alleged. To many Arabs and Muslims, Western economic, political and cultural influence appears more pernicious than ever. The so-called intellectual onslaught (al-ghazw al-fikri) on Arab-Islamic culture and identity is a main theme of the day, and many see liberal democracy as part of that assault... Western debate frequently mirrors the themes, concerns and obsessions of the Islamist one, albeit with different connotations. The more sophisticated skeptics usually refer to Islam as an effective barrier against development, modernity and democracy; the less sophisticated to “the Arab mind,” which is allegedly inclined toward authoritarianism and incapable of accepting pluralism and self-critique." Instead of asserting that religion plays the dominate role in middle eastern politics as well as every area of their life, it is much more correct that religion, poverty, education, as well a foreign political policies all play a central role in the problems facing the middle east. Why Harris places so much emphasis on the religious aspects of these issues is both predictable, as he is mostly preoccupied with religion, but also a mischaracterization of the problems with too much emphasis on religion, while at the same time arguing for many imperialist policies.

The policies Harris has argued for are; torture, saying that, "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror", -the argument that says this is merely a hypothetical and that he has philosophers penchant for controversial subjects or ethics is absurd when he is purposely coming up with outlandish situations to justify the use of torture at a time when torture is being authorized by the US publicly-, profiling of Muslims, "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it... there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.", and to me the most repellant claim that, "there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney." The reason why I find this last claim so repellant is that it is a crime against reason to suggest that tens of millions of people in the muslim world even have a sliver of the destructive force that Cheney had under his influence. This is especially true because Cheney is a radical proponent of preemptive wars which are held by international law to be illegal, and one of the crimes brought up against the Nazis at Nuremberg. The reality is that yes the threat of Islamic extremists are scary, but not nearly as scary as those who have the power to subjugate an entire country to the foreign policy of their making by military force in a preemptive and unilateral invasion. How can anyone not see that a man with a gun is probably more powerful than a man without one, and a man that can influence the most advanced military force the world has ever known to invade a country on false premises (and did precisely that), constitutes more of a threat to the world than Islamic extremists?

While I'm willing to concede that Harris is neither racist or bigoted, it is obvious why he has had to defend himself from such claims. Perhaps with some perspective on the claims Harris makes over and over again about obviously over exaggerated threats of Islam, we can take a step back and see it's a much more complex problem than merely boiling it down to religious extremism. Harris is right to criticize Islam on many fronts including the religious dogmas which have hurt mostly their own people, but he is wholly wrong to use religion as the primary factor in all that is wrong in the middle east while ignoring the crimes of the west, and suggesting the US has a moral high ground in the war on terror. Political motivations as well as international policies -specifically US policies- are just as important if not more important in shaping what seems to be the growing violence of the middle east.

Further, I would also like to say that Harris, and even Dawkins, on this controversy, have not responded with composure or respect at times. Harris and Dawkins have both tweeted "quote mined" attacks against Greenwald which do a great deal more to distort the views of Greenwald.

This claim that Greenwald supported the Iraq war by writing in the preface of his first book explaining his apathy towards politics and "coming of age" in political terms - that uses a quote that merely states he gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in his handling on the war on terror- is a mischaracterization of enormous proportions. If you'd read the book you'd know it is anything but a source of support for the Iraq war nor does it give support for Bush's policies. Harris has also made claims against Greenwald's character which have nothing to do with the debate at hand. Simple vilification of ones critics, while straw-manning, crying libel and slander at your critics, and failing to provide either context or a reasonable rationale for the obviously over inflated fears Harris propagates about Islam -especially in the context of an endless war waged by those who Harris asserts have a moral high ground- are reason enough for rational and reasonable atheists and theists alike to condemn not Harris, but some of his ideas as both irrational and unfounded in reality.

When a person attacks another on character because they have been attacked on their work, is not only disingenuous (as Harris supposes of Greenwald), but more importantly counterproductive to a much needed debate on just what role Islam plays in the middle east and the world in general. Rather than see two (or more) influential writers debate the topic of what does and does not constitute a rational fear of Islam the debate quickly spiraled into attacks on character, accusations of bullying, and claims of being attacked unethically while complaining about having to defend controversial statements -and in my opinion (and others) irrational and contradicting reality-, we as a society benefit from open discourse.

Update: I've written a second post on Sam Harris here.

UpdateII: I came across a gallup poll asking...

Apparently people in the US must be a "cult of death" as well. For more on this see this.
Update III: For more on Sam Harris and his faith in government while criticizing religion read this.

Markets and Art: The Commodification of Music Destroys Art

2013-01-11T18:27:00.001-08:00

"Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity."
— Che Guevara

A recent Truthdig article found here, caught my attention because of the similarities in the views of artist Robert Shetterly, a painter of activists, and my own views on the commodification of art. Although I've already written before on the subject here, in a post about Music and Industry, I have decided to revisit the subject spurred by some very piercing quotes about art by Shetterly.

He says, "Artists today, are using the dominant culture system to determine how they value themselves and I think that’s a very dangerous thing for artists. ... Art is one of the few places where critical voices can live. Even in universities these days it can’t live with so much political pressure. The real voice is lost.”

Shetterly continues, “Art, is one of the last places where people can have the freedom to live outside the system, or at least on its scraps, instead of trying to be one with it, which robs you of your voice finally. It’s so easy to be co-opted. This system will take anything from anybody and if it can commodify it, it will embrace it.”

The general point I think Shetterly is making is that artists are losing their true voice in order to turn their art into a commodity. It's important that we define specifically what we mean by a commodity. A commodity is any good or service that is produced by human labour and offered for general sale on the market. Commodities also have specific characteristics that help us further define, and conceptualize commodities.

A commodity is something that has a value, which can be further subdivided into use value and exchange value, as well as a price. Use value is simply the utility of use a good has, which differs from it's exchange value, although Marx's concept of use value is somewhat different from more classical definitions (I will abstain from going into too much detail on the subject, but highly recommend reading A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx). A common example of this is a diamond which although it may have a high value of exchange, it doesn't serve much of a purpose as a utilitarian item. A commodity has a use value because, by its intrinsic characteristics, it can satisfy some human need or want, physical or ideal. Use value also means that the commodity has social value, or that it is useful not just to the producer itself, but has a use for others generally.

The exchange value of a commodity means, that the commodity can be traded for other commodities, and thus the owner of a commodity can benefit from others labour. It differs from price value which is the monetary manifestation of exchange value. In other words, exchange value could be seen as the trading ratio between two commodities without using money as a medium of exchange. Perhaps a few examples will illustrate these points better.

If I create music with my bass and make it a tradable product of human work (like capturing music on a CD) with social value and offer it to the market, it is a commodity. However, me playing my bass in the music room of my home where no one else can hear, then it has no use to anyone else and therefore is not a commodity. If I invite a friend to listen to me play my bass as a gift to them, it is not a commodity because it has no exchange value even if it serves a utilitarian use to that person (assuming they have a use for what they hear). If I invite many people over to listen to me play a concert and require an exchange of either money or another commodity to play for many people, then the music I produce is certainly a commodity. This is because it is being traded and has both use value, and exchange value that will probably have a set price as well (often called a cover). Even though the act of me vibrating the wooden top of my bass by coaxing my strings to oscillate, a tree consisting of the same type wood as my bass, vibrating because of natural phenomena, which may cause it to creak or fall over, (no matter how pleasant the sounds may be) are not a commodity (unless of course I perhaps recorded and sold these sound recordings). Nor is the bass by itself a commodity if it's only use is for firewood, unless I specifically trade or sell the bass as firewood.

So as artistic as my own or anyone else's playing may be, there is a specific process by which we turn this art into a commodity. However, commodities often have another peculiar characteristic which is the lack of qualitative differentiation. The term fungibility is used to describe this similarity of quality which implies that certain goods or services can have full or partial mutual substitution. As Marx states in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist." Now perhaps this is why I find the blind fold tests in DownBeat (a feature were jazz musicians are played records without being told what is being played, and asked to comment on the music, who they think it could be, and give it a rating) to be so interesting especially in the last ten years. Often the musician being tested doesn't recognize the recording straight off, or a specific individual sound of a musician. Comments along the lines of "it sounds like" or "it could be anyone", or my favorite "it's somebody sounding like..." are all too common. I would wager that in many cases with the amount of technically proficient jazz musicians out there in the world, even the most knowledgeable studied jazz fanatic would have a hard time telling who produced which bit of jazz music, and often (at least with more mainstream or traditional jazz) whether they were French, American, or African in similar sensory tests.

Why this seems to be the case has to do more with the process of making the music (and the business of recording the music) than it has to do with the end result or product. In Marx's analogy on who grew the wheat, one would have to submit that although different soil types and physical environments would definitely perhaps provide very subtle notes to someone with a very refined palette for tasting wheat, to society as a whole this difference would be nearly impossible to detect. Even if they could distinguish the differences it would be very difficult to assign the wheat with a country of origin. Perhaps it is due to the fact that during the 19th century the process for growing grain was very similar from region to region. Even with the advent of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used to grow crops, in study after study, organic vs. conventional (a qualitative difference in price at nearly any grocery store) consumers given sensory tests usually cannot tell conclusively which is organic or conventional, and the results to which is preferred are pretty evenly mixed. However, I have on a few occasions taken a sip of milk which didn't taste quite right, (I'm an avid drinker of only organic milk) and was able to tell I was starting to ingest conventionally produced milk.

Are the processes by which we make art really coalescing and homogenizing to the point that we can actually say that the qualitative differences between different musicians are being reduced to a point of full or partial mutual substitution? Since commodities are defined not just by the utility that the commodity has to the producer of the commodity, it has to have some larger social value. What's clear, at least within the record industry, is that the company who is financing and distributing a record often could care less about what type of music is being sold, or how artistic the music on the recording is. They simply care about how many units are being sold. Although there may be some record labels that only market specific types of music or music that represents a certain set of ethics (i.e. ECM), but if they want to stay in business they have to factor in how many units are going to be sold. Similarly, a restaurant that has live music or any music venue must concern themselves with how many people are showing up at the door and paying a cover, or patronizing their business in order to continue as a business entity. This in and of itself leads to the disappearance of qualitative differences making music played for the entertainment or enjoyment of others and for money, most definitely a commodity that has at least partial ability for mutual substitution. If one band can draw an audience the same size or of similar size to another, the utilitarian purpose they serve of drawing a crowd is the same as any other no matter how well or artistically they perform.

What this means is that artists survive by adhering to market rules and a market based ideology. This leaves artists to replicate the obsessions of society and popular cultural ideas (even when the dominate culture is a culture that is destroying the very earth we live on). Obsessions of this society may include the extreme obsession with falling in love (often lyrics in music concentrate on gaining or losing someone in terms of a possession with an extremely narcissistic attitude of how this make them feel), or even superhuman musical feats of playing an extremely large amount of notes in a very short amount of time with (and sometimes without) an underlying logical structure. They champion the self and the heroism of the soloist, whether in jazz or in rock, while almost all forms of aboriginal music champion group or communal participation over individual performance. The last point is perhaps best shown by the famous story Dave Liebman tells about when he asked Miles Davis "why he had a saxophone" in his band. Miles responded to Dave, "Because people like to see you move your fingers!” Perhaps that's the reason some people also like incomprehensibly fast "shredding" metal guitar. Mostly in the jazz world at least there is a very heavy concentration on aesthetics.

“But aesthetics are a means to an end,” says Shetterly. “When they become the end themselves it becomes tiresomely academic [which does not] invite us to think and feel about something human. Instead it’s about composition, color and brushstroke. Those things are a means to delivering the message. If a painting is only about its own medium, it becomes very narcissistic and ingrown. ... It is either academic or about titillation ... it’s about flash. It’s about turning our nerves on but not our minds. It’s really about distraction. ... It all goes by so quickly and it’s exciting and feels good, but it also takes us away from what is important.”

I doubt I could begin to count the number of jazz or modern classical music concerts I've been to that Shetterly's quote would be a perfect review for. There is a serious fetishization of the quality of the performance we give in the here and now, with the constant shadow of every other jazz musician and jazz performance ever made (even and especially the recordings) for direct comparison, both within the performer, (often to the point of it being a plague to the music itself amongst the less experienced) and the seasoned listener. Musicians in the field often concentrate more on crushing time feels, face melting solos, and other aesthetic ideals in the music than conveying a sense of humanity or a message greater than the sum of its parts. However, the part that I found most intriguing about his quote is that he calls out most of the commodified art for what it really is, a distraction. Art that expresses little beyond perhaps individual, self reflecting, and inward looking emotional content that also fetishizes mastery of aesthetics, serves little purpose to society at large beyond momentarily distracting us from the real state of the world around us. Further, the musicians who blatantly commoditize themselves and their music, are often those who produce trivial musical content that is mostly about titillating the audience. This can be seen in pop music, as scantly dressed singers dance in an erotic fashion while singing songs that contain the musical and lyrical depth of an emotionally disturbed toddler. Even amongst artists who reach for higher aesthetic beauty and lyricism, the musician is often well removed from the realities of both the world and their culture in favor of creating some sort of transcendent momentary escape from social conditions and even mortality.

Very few artists who are in any way able to make a living within the performing arts, are willing to tell the truths of the world both within and outside of their art. You don't here too many songs about the fact that 90% of the large fish in the ocean are extinct, or that industrial civilization, using the once vast stores of fossil fuels, is leading to severe climate change that threatens life on earth as we know it. The reasons may seem obvious as very few people want to buy this kind of music, and specifically within the more artistic traditions in the US, jazz, and modern classical music, the marketability is already so small it is becoming nearly impossible to survive on their performance "career" alone. There may be something to be said for not just reducing music or art to protest music, but if the music doesn't even serve the purpose of getting the audience to at least begin to question their own existence or self, what purpose does the music serve?

The article continues, "Shetterly says that people who have a genuine interest in art are often beaten down and stripped of their ability to pursue the truth. The commoditization of art, if it hasn’t already reeled you into its arms, exiles you to the world of academic theory and nonreality, where you do not have the capacity to rebel against the free market. Either you adhere to the rules or you are cast into an irrelevant pool of degree-holding artists who have left the real world in search of vague ideas like space, subjectivism and postmodernist expression."

In my own personal experience with music that first sentence couldn't ring in any truer. Whether it's instructors that insisted the music isn't as popular or happening because the players and music today just isn't as good, or whether it's setting aside any personal artistic goals or approaches to the art form, and instead focusing on playing more like the people who they came up listening to on records. However, the blame can't be placed squarely on the shoulders of teachers and professors as usually they're just trying to relate to you the real world facts of the music business, which is that you must succumb to the market and the demands of the field or you will not survive as an artist. People wanted me to play like the guys on the "great" records because that's what everyone is used to hearing and that's what gets you work. They don't beat your individual creativity down for fun, but they realize at least on some level that until you obtain a certain level of respect within the clique of your specific craft and more importantly within the general market for music (the consumers), no one will care about your search for truth. Some of them have spent countless hours pursuing their own musical truth in the face of market conditions that could care less about their art. Not relating that same thing to you in advance would be cheating you of the advance knowledge that it takes adaption to the market in order to make a living, no matter how meager it may be.

Those who have other means of support often find themselves relegated to pursuing meaningless advancements to the tradition, whether it be blending genres or styles, adapting their music to current pop trends, or worse, pursuing total abstractedness that serves not even the producer. It does nothing for bringing people together, but instead pushes people further away from music, partially because it is entirely foreign to the general listener. Those that pursue music along the lines of this total abstraction often are guilty of making it obviously clear that they have little or no purpose for why they produce such music beyond narcissism and to distract themselves and others from pursuing anything meaningful in their lives. It is a music where there cannot be an objective, or even truly a subjective good or bad, but also masks any intent the performer lacks for seeking truth with their art, while at the same time allowing them to claim to be the hippest thing around.

The article continues "If university art departments haven’t already shrunk, they’ve transitioned from the traditional style of instruction to one that is based in abstraction and historiography." The truth is often hard to take, but jazz departments across the US, as well as any modern music department, focuses in on the historical development of music as a linear history leading us up to the current time, not simply to enlighten the student, but to help them find a place to fit into the relevant musical trends. It's focused on helping students find success within the trends and often, as previously stated, pushes aside personal ideals of finding a voice within themselves to finding a niche within the scene. This is purely a market dominated process by which universities seek to help students find a way to achieve marketable success as that is just about the only thing left to be attained. Often, rather than having a student really seek an individual voice, they push homogenizing many voices from within the tradition into some sort of cohesive voice they can label as their own.

“So many people today know that there’s a lot wrong but it’s not being articulated for them so that they can act on it,” Shetterly says about young artists like Samuel Scharf. “Art should do that. It gives you the permission to act. But it’s been removed on purpose because it has an effect on the consciousness of people. It verifies what they sense is wrong, but cannot articulate for themselves.” In other words we can use music to express the wrongness of our culture with purpose, just as we can use music to express the rightness of love or any other thing. However, there is a purposeful denial of using art to express often even purposeful individualistic emotion in favor of a focus on aesthetic and the commonly accepted values of musical traditions as they relate to style.

“A person who painted a portrait for a king,” Shetterly says, “was painting what the client wanted to see. A person who’s painting for the rewards of an economic system is painting, similarly, for what the client wants to see.” The difference between then and now, Shetterly says, is that art today is not about superiority and propaganda, as with royal portraits, but about turning our brains off. It is about silencing pain and suffering, and distracting ourselves with images that bring short-term pleasure, surprise, and satisfaction. Mainstream culture, Shetterly says, keeps us distracted from the fact that our luxury, for example, comes at the expense of cotton farmers in India, garment makers in Bangladesh and Hispanic tomato pickers in Florida. The goods we buy at retail stores and supermarkets are cheap because the labor used to cultivate those products is underpaid. “Our culture has been taking a lot of warmth and comfort from the rest of the world in a very exploitative way,” Shetterly says, “so that we can live that way while other people don’t.”

Once again, the art of today pushes us into the world of the surreal asking us not to engage with either each other, face our own selves, or face the deteriorating planet, but to shut ourselves off to the world in order to use the music like we're shooting up dope. Stick your earbuds in when you're walking in the city to avoid having the homeless ask you for money while you transplant yourself into an individualist pleasure seeking state riding the melodic lines of your favorite artist, while the sounds of poverty and the increasingly disconnected modern age pass you by. Shut yourself in a room and place much of the value of your identity on your ability to make changes on the tunes everyone must know and play at increasingly faster tempo for hours. Forget the fact that without drastic action, climate change will make the earth uninhabitable in any comparable way to its present state, and make sure you transcribe and learn yet another "god of music's" first chorus so you can wow future audiences with stylings you stole from them. Most of all don't focus your music or your life on anything that can't be marketed to others or you risk falling into obscurity.

The article closes with, "Art today is about protecting the consumer. It is no longer propaganda for those in power, as art has been for most of history. It is about reassuring customers that there is nothing wrong, as long as they continue to shop." As some would say, why worry about the real state of affairs when it comes to art. Just escape the harsh realities of the world with your art because after all the world will eventually be swallowed up by the sun at some point anyway, and why spend your life not always trying to be happy? Meanwhile, the same people that espouse this philosophy will continue in a marginally unhappy existence at best, while ignoring the very real steps and actions that humanity could take to erase the causes of much of this suffering. Indeed, it is akin to drug use as more and more youth and adults alike, buy into musical or artistic escapism in order to dull the realities of a world with suffering. I'm reminded of the history of work songs that the African American slaves created in order to make bearable the pain of working as a slave in the fields of the American south. While I do believe that music can and should at times be used in a role of transcending the horrific circumstances of life, the work songs have little in common with modern market driven music that is created not to build a sense of community amongst workers and lend voice to others suffering, but to convince everyone that it's all okay, and if you order another drink the fine establishment we're playing at will be happier.

Also, the fact that the sun will eventually destroy the earth is of little importance or meaning to the fact that the earth is being systematically destroyed by industrial civilization. If I tied down the person you loved most and began to slowly dismember them toe by toe and finger by finger behind a locked door I suspect you would find an object to break the door down and try to stop me, not concede that they're going to die someday anyway. We as human beings need to stand for something (as one of my teachers constantly told me), and the other millions of species on earth along with our future generations of humans that depend on clean air, water, and the planet at large, are worth standing up for.

Before anyone gets too angry at me for attacking either their livelihood, or their probably deeply held views about the importance of their own artistic expression and that of others, I'd like to clarify a few things. First, I don't think it's impossible to receive some sort of exchange for music or art in order for someone who spends much of their time pursuing musical truth to survive in a decent manner. There are plenty of sphere's of non-market based exchanges that happen constantly within our own society and which dominate other cultures. This post is specifically about the fact that we as artists are being forced not to be able to seek truth through music and art, but to conform to market principles in order to get a piece of the ever shrinking music markets, especially for performers of live music.

Second, there is no reason why we should have to subject ourselves, and our art, to being forced into these very same market principles. Although I could write an entirely new entry on this, it is easily imaginable that as a society we could support ourselves with the necessary needs that we have such as food, water, shelter, clothing, and sociable environments needed for proper brain development in a non-violent society with plenty of time left over for pursuing our own artistic truths. There would even be time for exploring both our individual place in the universe, as well as societies through music and art. Aboriginal cultures in many climates spend drastically less amounts of time as do modern cultures providing for their basic needs. It's not impossible for us to adopt a different system.

Third, the thing that is missing from music, despite the constant complaints of those in the music profession about lack of culture and interest in art music, is a sense of community. We do not socialize our music, we market our music. Anyone with more than a few musician friends on Facebook understands the gig-spam problem of marketing themselves rather than sharing and socializing themselves and their music with others. Some people give the gift of music to others and do so out of love for their art. Their songs are about what life in the real world is like to them, only expecting to hopefully affect others with their music positively, and live off any scraps that get thrown their way. Even if I would applaud a musician expressing something beyond their individual feeling about the world it is more commendable than those who are motivated in large part by market forces.

Fourth, if you care about music, whether it's jazz or modern art music, it's up to us to change the culture that surrounds it. I'm reminded of the all too frequent psychosis of the modern parent who seeks to protect and shield their child from anything bad in the world, rather than pursuing the true role of a parent, which is to socialize their child, and turn them into a capable adult. It's ridiculous because even if one does somehow manage the impossible feat of shielding their child from all that is bad in the world, at some point they're going to grow up and leave your house (although that time seems to be coming later and later in life for the youth of today, especially with males). Then they're going to have to step into the real world, sooner or later, and deal with all those evils of the world. If the culture is so bad that we can't entrust our children to it, then perhaps we need to build a culture of resistance towards the destructive dominant culture, and work towards changing our own communities into a place we feel comfortable enough to socialize our children in.

The same could be said of the world of music and art. We may constantly try to protect our music or art from those that seek to profit off it or change our art away from the truth, but the fact remains that if we intend to survive from it, we need a piece of the pie or at least some scraps. If the musical world makes playing art music untenable, we should be actively trying to change the musical landscape that surrounds us. This means that we have to do something about the incredible centralization of capital in the music industry, the centralization of the media that market music in both radio and TV, and that we connect to each other within our community in more meaningful ways than those dictated by market incentives and motives of profit. The musical dumbing down of the populace has not only affected the musical quality within the general popular culture, but as I've argued it has changed the purposes for playing jazz, and even "folk" music, which are two examples of truly american music. It's up to us to realize that music is connected to more than just a tradition of the music itself and it's aesthetic ideals, but that it intertwines itself into everything else about our culture from economics, to social issues. If it's not working, we need to make changes, not just spend our time making the "changes".

Finally, I appreciate, on what I feel is a deep level, the music of jazz and contemporary or modern classical music when it is at it's best and have marveled, at how much of an affect music can have on me personally. It can force me into both self reflective and culturally reflective states which brings about a change not just psychologically, but a change that manifests in my daily actions. However, this is a rare occasion and often I hear/d this type of purposeful music at gigs and venues that were ill attended, with little pay offered for the musicians. The vast amount of vapid jazz and modern music I've taken in over the years since I became somewhat obsessive over music, far outweighs the meaningful music that compels me beyond a sense of momentary titillation. The culture of narcissism and the extreme fetishization of aesthetics are what I want to see gone, not a tradition or musical art form, and it is these things I'm speaking out against. I'm reminded of a jam session I played where a saxophonist called a bebop standard at a nearly unplayable tempo for the rhythm section, not in an order to create music of a high magnitude with the other musicians, but to cut the band members and to provide a sense of self worship and reward for the unnamed musician, who was merely flaunting his daily practice routine. If we're not even interested in making quality music with the people we play with over sounding "good", then we have no right to call ourselves artists let alone perform compellingly for the listeners. While all the aesthetics of music are important we need to realize they are a means to an end and stand for a deeper purpose behind why we create music, and work to install that ethic in our surrounding culture.

The Re-election of Obama: What Forward Means

2012-11-07T12:08:00.002-08:00

Whether you're reading your Facebook stream, or perusing the writing of journalists and pundits alike you're bound to come across a sigh of relief from the liberals in the US that Obama won (or maybe more correctly that Romney did not). The Obama victory, as well as the senate being retained by Democrats, has been the continuation of a Democratic victory that began in 2006 in response to George W. Bush and the Republican party's toxic political legacy. Four years ago a wave of excitement amongst liberals in the US was at it's peak with the election of the man many considered to be the leader to pull the US back from many of the most horrific policies of the Bush era. When Obama claimed his victory in 2008 he did so with so many Americans hoping for change, that he used it as his campaign slogan. It's no secret that there has been a wave of disappointment in the presidents first term among liberals due to things like; signing the NDAA into law, failing to close Guantanamo, and the failure to bring about a real or palpable sense of change.

However, what lies beyond the general consensus of placid dissaproval are the real meat and potatoes issues that the liberal class has all but ignored in this country. These are the direct continuation and expansion of some of the worst Bush era policies which have either gained support or have been consciously ignored by the liberal class in America. These policies include; the continuation of warrantless wiretapping and other domestic spy programs while at the same time immunizing telecom companies as well as the political leadership from any liability whether it be criminal or civil, extrajudicial killings of US citizens expanding on Bush's policy to not only be able to detain citizens without judicial review but to kill them, a war on whistleblowers that has seen more prosecutions under the espionage act than under every other president combined, a continued veil of government secrecy (from a president who promised an open administration), and the continuation of US hegemony in the middle east as well as the rest of the world with continuation of a war on terror and militaristic policies.

So as the Democrats and their supporters across the nation rejoice in the victory over Romney and the GOP keeping out a new era of politics controlled by what have come to be known as "job creators," but are more rightly the wealthy elite, what do we really have to look Forward to? It could be hard for many Americans to remember just what issues are important after an election season of each candidate attacking the other only on issues they disagreed to some degree on while ignoring the issues where their policies were in agreement. It may also be hard for them to decipher just what the president is responsible for as many of the most hotly debated topics in the election were in fact legislative issues rather than executive issues. For example taxes came up in debates over and over again as the candidates argued their views on tax policy and other fiscal issues. However, a quick read of the constitution places all the powers of taxation as well as the ability to spend and borrow money in the hands of the legislative branch. Although anyone familiar with the actual modern process of governance on the federal level will be quick to point out that the government works more along the lines of party organization than individual branches as Democratic and Republican leaders meet secretly to discuss and agree on policy. It should be noted that this is NOT how our government was intended or designed to function. It's these deals off the floors of the house or senate that allow negotiations between the parties and push through legislation that often have no or little support by either party's base. One such issue will be arising very soon.

Obama and the Democratic leadership are soon expected to make a deal with Republican leaders to allow for modest tax increases in exchange for significant cuts to social and entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit and possibly even begin to tackle debt in the future. These cuts will no doubt come to programs like social security, medicare & medicaid, as well as other foundations of American liberalism. What's coming to the US in 2013 or sooner is austerity and it's going to be enacted via bi-partisan deals that are going to be hated by what's left of the liberal class, but most likely accepted. This is part of the political process in the US now. First ideas that are raucously disturbing to liberals such as warrantless wiretapping or domestic spying get put into place by the "opposition" party while the Democratic leaders act disturbed and begin to criticize such policies. However, as shown by Obama it's very easy once you assume the mantle of power to not only renege on such stances but to actually turn around and support bills that ensure immunity for those who committed the crimes. Then when he was the one in control of the same programs he continued their expansion under a new veil of secrecy the policy has become a bipartisan policy that gains acceptance not only with the party that originated the policy but is accepted or ignored by the liberal base.

So as US Democrats support a liberal victory, they overlook that they have put into power a Democratic president and senate that will surely bring about cuts to programs they support. What is sure to happen is that the blame for such cuts will be placed on the "evil" GOP because in order to avert massive financial and fiscal damage to our economy and government they had to make a deal with the devil. Keep in mind this comes after a term where Obama has undoubtedly carried out a more egregious attack on our civil liberties than the previous Bush administration and yet has still managed to keep support from his base and the liberal class in general. All this support came in spite of his political failures and anti-liberal policies mostly in fear of having an even more extreme president elected to office. The number of pundits whose fundamental guideline in choosing a new president was to go for the seemingly less crazy of the two, because even though they may have been unhappy about Obama's first term they ran back into his arms after looking at Romney. This type of fear based voting against the other opponent rather than for the true support of the president and his policies seems to have gripped the American public as well. After all most of us accept that it's a choice between the lesser of two evils anyway.

As we move forward from the election season and past the vicious campaign ads and general environment of political division that it creates, it's my hope that the American public wakes up to the fact that no matter who won, we the American public are going to lose. In fact we've already lost. We've lost control of the political establishment because they use money and often brilliant campaign strategies to convince the public to turn a blind eye to their abuses of power and the law as well as our own convictions and ethics. We've lost because now corporations can fund both candidates for elections to guarantee government policies that are friendly to them. We've lost because while the parties make plans to cut spending and tackle the public debt our political leaders ignore the actual causes of the debt problem both publicly and privately. When quantitative easing becomes a normal state of affairs and banks are given over $16 trillion dollars in zero interest "loans" from the federal reserve in order to keep the bloated financial sector of the economy going while US manufacturing continues to suffer losses and lower worker pay rates, we lose. When the economy minus government stimulus programs is actually smaller than it was in 2007 and yet the power to circulate money into the economy is controlled by a private central bank that creates money through debt, we lose. When we continue sanctions on Iran which do little to the leaders but cause food instability, hunger, and general conditions of unrest in order to bring about a more US friendly regime and keep Iran from being able to defend itself against US hegemony, we lose. When all but the smallest minority of climatologists are telling us that climate change is not only real but a grave threat to life on planet earth and no politician will take a stand against oil company lobbied policies to cut back our use of fossil fuels and invest in sustainable energy, even after a decade of increased hurricanes have pummeled the east and gulf coasts, and after a summer of record droughts, we lose.

So instead of celebrating whatever victories the liberal class in America has achieved (of which there are a few victories to celebrate) I recommend a stiff shot of honesty in regards to US politics and doing whatever you can to hold the Democrats whom you voted for accountable. Hold them accountable not just on the issues that the parties disagree on, but specifically on the policies that have now become the norm even though they go against the true ideals of the US liberal class. If we continually allow the Democratic leadership to manufacture consent for policies not in line with our own views then we will have allowed the quasi-aristocratic elite to rise up and take hold of our nation beyond the degree that a peaceful election will be able to restore normative processes of government. We risk allowing such a grab of power that as our world economic system continues to slide into the abyss of a cessation of growth the bankers and elite fat cats will control a system too powerful for the public to defeat.

It may sound alarmist, but when you consider the Walton family of Walmart fame has a net worth greater than the bottom 40% of US families combined and dump millions upon millions of dollars into the political system to support (or more correctly buy) a candidate which will continue to enact policies that benefit the elite, it's not so far fetched. It's time the all too placid liberal class actually organized and took a stand for liberal ideals whether it be defeating charter schools which provide public funds to corporations to educate our children or stopping the vacuous economic policies which are turning the US more and more into the "haves" and the "have nots". Failure to admit to the fact that the corporate state owns our government, and most of us, is not only to be dishonest but it is to be a coward in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, all because we accept their rule. After all congress has been seeing historic lows in approval and yet we voted the vast majority of them back into office. What could be more Orwellian than not only having an unpopular government voted back into office, but accepting that this is the way our democracy works? Doesn't that inherently imply that our democratic institutions and our republic are broken? As Jill Stein (Green Party candidate for the 2012 presidential election) has said "Neither Obama nor Romney has a single exit strategy from the deadly crises we face." This responsibility lies now with the US public and those who have the moral courage to fight back against the corporate state and the government they control by holding even leaders that we supported responsible for our welfare and the welfare of the planet. It's not a victory when the US public loses, and this election won't be a victory unless the US public stands up to hold our leaders accountable rather than continue looking the other way.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any,”
Alice Walker

Economic Growth in the 21st Century

2012-06-07T18:10:00.001-07:00

"As the decline in production begins first in oil and then later this century in coal, the decline and collapse of modern civilization will also occur without a society already adapted to less net energy usage. This phenomenon is known as resource depletion... It's not just energy or erosion we're dealing with, but a crippling combination of things which will make it impossible for economic growth to continue."

The study of economics has become known as the dismal science, a phrase coined by the 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle coined the phrase, most likely in response to a prediction by economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population predicted that, "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." A dismal prediction indeed, and likely one that would cause some sort of cognitive dissonance among those who fully understand just what his essay implies. However, in the modern era of economics, any such notion of a catastrophic or dismal failure of the earth to be able to provide for the needs of man has been removed from thought and theory. This is not true of every economist, but it is far too often true that "legitimate" economists do not believe in such nonsense. These "legitimate" economists are often simply the result of corrupted academe so adeptly described by Charles Ferguson, both in the Academy Award winning film Inside Job, as well as this article. It's not just the corrupt few on the side of wall street, but nearly every mainstream economist has a commonly held belief that economic growth - the increase in the capacity of an economy to produce goods and services - is the proper response to alleviating poverty. In fact, the 21st century will not continue to see this ever expanding increase in goods and services. Here's why...

The basic assumptions of modern economics, going back to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, are flawed. They're based on a scientific paradigm that ignores ecological realities, as well as a flawed view of exactly what is responsible for this production. John Michael Greer in The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered points out this very thing. Greer points to the beginning of The Wealth of Nations which states, "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life." Greer's response to this was that, "left unrecognized is the crucial fact that the annual labor of a nations would be utterly useless without the goods and services provided free of charge by Nature, which enable labor to be done at all by making human life possible in the first place and by providing all that labor with something to labor on." What Greer is referring to are the natural processes which allow us to grow food. These would include the hydrologic cycle, pedogenisis (soil growth), and the large amount of solar energy provided by our center and steward of the solar system, the sun. However, they also include the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms which have become our fossil fuels (such as oil and coal). This would also include ore genesis processes, which create the various mineral deposits in the crust of the earth.

The thesis of The Wealth of Nations asserted that the division of labor increases productivity - and therefore the increase in the capacity to produce goods and services - as well as asserting that a condition of opulence or great wealth would arise. This thesis overlooks the simple fact that increased productivity doesn't necessarily mean better productivity, or a better life for everyone indefinitely, by increasing production. Without the understanding that the economy was both dependent upon the environment that supported it, and limited by Nature, it is easy to ignore that economic production can damage the earth that supports it. This could be seen in early agricultural economies and the great empires of ancient times. For example, ancient Mesopotamia suffered greatly as the increased agricultural production from irrigation caused soil erosion that made farming impossible and caused collapse. Another example would be the economy of ancient Rome which collapsed due to over expansion, which was largely due to resource shortages and environmental degradation. By the CE the Mediterranean basin had been largely deforested, which in turn caused erosion and the need to seek timber for their growing economy elsewhere. The erosion this caused made Rome more and more reliant on the fields of Northern Africa to feed the population of Rome. This was also a case of military expansionism that deforested Northern Africa and turned it into "the bread basket" of Rome. Much of the area once plowed under to raise grain for the Romans has now turned to desert. So in past times there have been collapses due to this increasing capacity to produce goods beyond what the primary economy (the primary goods provided to us by natural processes) can provide. For further evidence of this, or a detailed study of societal collapse for similar reasons, see Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies.

The main difference between the modern economy and the ancient agricultural empires, is that we have used enormous amounts of fossil fuels to power industry and production. Coal literally sprang up as a replacement for fuel for heating homes after timber shortages made this fuel - that was once banned by Edward I (blacksmiths using coal could be hanged) - an in demand item. However, as I've talked about in my early post on Energy and Society these fuels are not a limitless resource, but a finite source of energy that has brought about unforeseen environmental effects like climate change. As the decline in production begins first in oil and then later this century in coal, the decline and collapse of modern civilization will also occur without a society already adapted to less net energy usage. This phenomenon is known as resource depletion, and has played its role as previously stated in the collapse of empires. It's not just energy or erosion we're dealing with, but a crippling combination of things which will make it impossible for economic growth to continue. These include desertification, loss of fresh water sources from overuse and pollution, loss of biodiversity/extinction rates which signal a new era of extinction, depletion of fossil fuels, topsoil erosion, climate change, as well as the limits to a debt based monetary system (more on this later).

With all this in mind and the mountains of evidence that humans are doing seemingly irreversible harm to our ecosystems, why is it that economists continue to propose more growth as the means to help our society? Usually clear headed economists, like Paul Krugman, still throw their weight behind policies to continue or try to continue growth even after writing in a NY Times article: "What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story." It's truly a case of the old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer then everything you see starts to look like a nail. Rather than refocusing our energy towards real solutions to material problems, economists keep positing that more growth can and should be achieved even by the taking on of more and more debt privately and publicly because, well, it will keep the economy growing and unemployment will lessen. Why doesn't he mention that there is simply a class of dependent laborers without access to resources or the freedom to live life without the managers of capital (which direct economic activity in the modern world)? Instead he suggests more economic growth will help alleviate the poverty caused by this second "great depression." Perhaps he is failing to ask whether or not growth in the modern era has begun failing to make us richer (as is it did when the world was not yet entirely conquered by European empires and industrial society), and if it now makes everyone poorer, as we deplete what is left of our resource base.

Of course I'm not alone in saying that the previous trends of growth are not going to continue indefinitely. In fact a recent study at MIT, which set out to re-examine the famous 1972 book The Limits to Growth, has stated that the world could suffer from a "global economic collapse" which could cause "precipitous population decline" if resource consumption was left unchecked. Richard Heinberg has also warned in 9 of his award winning books, about the perils of energy depletion. In his latest book The End of Growth, he explains with detail how policies that once led to prosperity are now leading us to disaster. He also argues that growth in consumption should be dropped for a new goal of improving the quality of life. The problem with this is that the obvious answers to improvement in the quality of life involve sharing, which has become labeled as class warfare. Self interest can only take a society towards the interests of those that come to dominate society and communities when it is not checked by some sort of ethical or cultural standard of caring for the community around you (including not just humans, but rivers, streams, fish, wildlife and Nature as a whole). Without delving too deeply into the subject, it's easy to summarize that there are alternative economic theories and ideologies that involve cooperation, and more local and communal living that probably provide our best chance to stabilize our society.

If resource depletion wasn't bad enough, there is also a very big problem with monetary systems and especially debt. The amount of debt in the world has been growing steadily, especially debt held by sovereign nations. The world debt held just by these nations alone is more than $45 trillion dollars. At the same time, especially within the US and some European countries, the percentage of domestic corporate profits in the financial sector boomed. As Simon Johnson cites "From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007." What this information is telling us, is there has been a serious amount of financialization within the world. Even though resources necessary to the continuation of our industrialized society are beginning to go into decline, the financial sector is claiming greater and greater wealth.

In order to understand this process it's useful to be able to classify the economy into its smaller parts. E.F. Shumacher has classified the difference between the goods and services provided by human labor, and the goods and services provided by nature. He labeled the former secondary goods while the latter he called primary goods. Primary goods in fact, make it possible for the secondary goods to even exist. The world's primary goods like oil or mineral deposits are being depleted. However, there should be a third tier added to the economy above the primary and secondary goods. This is a class of goods that are neither produced by nature or labor, but they are produced by the financial sector. This comes right to the heart of modern monetary policy as it involves all bonds in creation. A bond is simply nothing more than a promise to pay an amount in the future. This is viewed as an economic good as there are those who produce them and those who want to sell them. This good can be passed along from seller to buyer any amount of times and even if it's highly unlikely for this promise to be honored, the chance of collecting is seen as an object of value. As the primary economy begins to shrink in the amount of goods provided, the tertiary or financial economy continues to claim more and more wealth from promises to pay, by selling these debts not just to private citizens, but national governments. Since the world has increasingly come under a debt based monetary system it has become possible and very profitable to exchange money for money. The entirety of the financial sector uses this concept to make its money, and it has created a sort of economic monoculture wherein all economic exchanges are valued by their exchange value for money.

The end result from this is that a collapse in the primary economy (one that many ecologists are warning is coming) would certainly cause a collapse of the secondary economy of goods and services provided by human labor, as the materials to labor on and with become scarce. Such a scenario would surely collapse the bloated financial economy with it's continual growing debts and it's metamorphosis into treating money as a good to be produced and sold. The limit to debt is the ability the debtor has to pay back that debt. Therefore, the economy is going to need to produce a serious amount of goods to pay back the debts already on the books at a time when the amount of goods and services available is on the brink of a serious decline. Our financial sector has been issuing debts that the earth simply cannot pay, especially when these debts are necessary for financial growth on a continual basis. With these simple and logical conclusions about our new economic reality, how can we continue this radical view that limitless growth is not only possible, but desirable and the only way to fix poverty? Any economist that still holds the ability to value human and all life beyond merely its monetary exchange value would tell you that while growth does provide more goods and services in the world, it does not cure poverty because the same economic conditions that produce growth also produce poverty by the distribution of goods and services. It's like building a wall with one hand while the other knocks it down.

The most important thing to take away from this is not some depressing doomsday scenario (although it is important to acknowledge the disaster just around the corner), but to realize that other, better options exist to meet our economic needs than endless growth. Without adoption of the environmental sciences and some simple logic into economics, we are doomed to fail. If we instead adopt more ecological understanding into our economic system, we are destined to change the nature of economic exchange to a nature based system, erase the class of money rentiers which monopolize current economic exchanges, and possibly design a society with the stability needed for a healthy ecosystem with a more healthy and just human society. It's simply a matter of re-framing our view that more is better into one in which we seek improvements in the quality of life. This could also mean reestablishing our connection to the community of people, as well as nature that surround us. None of this will be accomplished though without the diffusion of economic and environmental knowledge to the increasingly radical majority that believe growth can and will continue infinitely.

Obama: LGBT Rights Warrior or Campaign Strategist?

2012-05-30T16:04:00.001-07:00

On May 10th 2012 President Barack Obama on "Good Morning America" stated, “I’ve concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” Before anything else is said on this issue it should be noted that this is important, and I'm personally glad that he supports the rights for same sex couples to marry. However, we have to understand this comes with a caveat; he thinks that states should decide the issue. In other words, he supports states rights to discriminate against same sex marriages as long as that's what the state wants. It seems to me that most people in support of gay marriage would agree, this is historically important. Even if it doesn't mean Obama actively supporting changes to federal laws allowing gay marriage, it is still a step forward for gay rights. The problem is Obama is using this PERSONAL stance on gay marriage to campaign for re-election. Take a look at this "documentary" produced by the Obama campaign.

Documentaries are usually thought to be for instruction or maintaining the historical record, and this is clearly a campaign video. That aside, President Obama assures us he is that strong asset in the white house for the LGBT community, and he can keep us "leaning forward." What does that really entail though? If he supports letting states decide the issue of gay marriage, and would lend support to repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, but is no longer part of the legislative branch then what policies are going to change? Even with the repeal of DADT, (Don't Ask Don't Tell) same sex marriages within the military don't allow a military member's partner the same rights as non same sex marriages when it comes to travel or housing. If a vote for Obama is a vote for gay rights as the Obama campaign is lobbying hard for his base to accept, then what political outcomes is he seeking?

This is not a critique of Obama on his personal stance on gay marriage (which I applaud him for). This is simply a critique on campaign politics and the mindless followers intensive propaganda campaigns (AKA election campaigns) generate, which ruin electoral politics. What I'm saying is, Obama is clearly using and touting himself as being a warrior for LGBT rights, while at the same time refusing to say that he thinks it should be legal federally, or even decided on that level. That to me equates to saying, "well sure even though 12 states prohibit same sex marriage by statute and 30 via the constitution, I think states should decide what right same sex couples should have even though that means nearly nationwide discrimination."

As an exercise in thought if we were to travel back to say the late 1850's when the issue of slavery was a hotly debated topic; imagine a president running their campaign as a warrior against slavery or being a strong advocate for slaves in the white house, by simply stating they personally viewed slavery as an evil, and their view had evolved to say they personally support ending slavery. However, they note that states should decide whether slavery should exist. This at the time was known as popular sovereignty and that was exactly what the Democratic nominee for president in 1860 supported. Although he didn't support ending slavery and his views were considered more moderate on the issue, he supported the right of states to decide. This man was Stephen Douglas of Illinois. The debates in 1858 between Lincoln and Douglas have become somewhat famous, but in these debates Douglas clearly stated attitudes now seen as racist or bigoted. Namely he insisted slavery was not a moral issue, that Lincoln advocated equality of races and even that they should be able to intermarry (Lincoln denounced such radical equality), and the government was drawn up "by white men for white men". What's important is, he used this tactic because he had to walk a fine line to keep the support of the northern states where abolitionism was popular, while not upsetting the southern base of democrats at the time.

It's a very similar situation back here in good ol' 2012. Rather than being hotly debated on the grounds of how this issue should be approached politically or what should be done politically about it, it's being used merely as a social issue, and to show personal virtue to garner support for the president from his lackluster base. The aforementioned announcement of Obama's support for same sex marriage came just before he held a fundraiser at George Clooney's house in which he touted his support for same sex couples and raised a total of $15 million. Remember this isn't a political position, but a personal position as he doesn't support anything more than popular sovereignty outside of his comments of support for repealing the Defense of Marriage Act. This seems to amount to a kind of "progressive" hypocrisy where the left constantly criticizes the right for it's election of government on the grounds that they have similar views on religion, or other social issues. This while ignoring the fact that many of the leaders of the religious right advocate policies that are harmful to their constituents economically, environmentally, and in some cases like abortion and defense, go against the core conservative value of a small government. However, as I've written about earlier, the Hypocrisy of Obama supporters is not a new thing. Electing a president or throwing full support behind a candidate because of a non-political stance on same sex marriage, while at the same time continuing policies which any truly progressive person should find deplorable (and often are illegal or borderline illegal), shows either personal moral decay, or the total corruption of the electoral system.

What it means to support someone because of a personal stance on a social issue, is that we've made a bigger deal out of something that is in fact politically trivial and thus trivialized more important issues. That's not to say that LGBT issues are unimportant by any measure. They are profoundly important issues, but if a president was going to campaign on being a gay rights president than one would expect him to have the courage to say that he believes that the nation should stop discrimination against same sex couples federally. Merely calling on democrats in congress to address the issue and stop discrimination would even suffice. After all, there are federal laws against race discrimination. So what could these more important issues be than the president's personal opinion on same sex marriage? How about you name one; education, energy, agriculture policies, economic solutions to get out of this "Great Recession", foreign policy (which includes global conflicts, drone war campaigns, and making threats against Iran for purportedly manufacturing or seeking to manufacture nuclear weapons), monetary reform, Wall Street regulation, the student loan bubble, domestic spying, and crushing levels of government debt, and that's just to get you started.

Take for example education. Obama and his now official Republican opponent Mitt Romney are nearly identical on education policies except for Romney's support of the voucher system and some small differences on higher education. (There was an interesting Washington Post article about this recently that pointed out their similar stances.) It's also true that Obama's educational policies don't differ from President G.W. Bush in any substantial way. His policy is that of "high stakes" testing which punishes schools and teachers that don't meet standards or show improvement. A mandate that schools be 100% proficient in reading and math by 2014 now has the administration allowing a waiver form for states as no school will be able to reach this seemingly impossible goal. What isn't often stated is, the education reform Democrats aren't really much different than their education reform Republican counterparts that were responsible for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the first place. The biggest problem of NCLB is that it made test scores the ultimate measure of educational quality, ignoring aspects of critical thinking, and providing a liberal sciences education that citizens need to keep a functioning republic. Instead it focuses on education for competition in the global market, re-affirming our deep subconsciously held belief that man's purpose is to participate in global markets. In other words to not work against the global markets that determine your place in the economic hierarchy, but instead support it. Obama's plan goes a step further than NCLB and its obtuse measures of educational quality. His plan asserts that teachers alone are the only thing responsible for whether test scores go up or down. They attribute nothing to poverty, students, parents, or economic status. If there's one thing that can be pointed to as being a factor of lower test scores it's poverty. If you're still not convinced that Obama has an expanded version of Bush's education plan, just think after Obama appointed Arne Duncan to head his education department. Duncan went on tour with Newt Gingrich to promote this "Race to the Top" education plan. Obama however flew to Florida to promote it at a Miami high school with Jeb Bush. If you're still not convinced, just wait a decade and watch how schools privatize as public education continues to become stigmatized as underachieving wastes of money despite this manufactured crisis.

How about another issue like energy. In reality, Obama's energy policy is really no policy at all according to Bill Mckibben. He makes the point, if you think about it, if a president had a foreign policy of everyone is an equal ally, he would be laughed at, but that's precisely Obama's policy for energy. Mckibben said, "Burning all the oil you can and then putting up a solar panel is like drinking six martinis at lunch and then downing a VitaminWater. You’re still a drunk — just one with your daily requirement of C and D." Obama's strategy is to promote that under his administration the US has drilled a record number of oil and gas wells. He also touts the great reserves of natural gas the US has, but fails to state that hydro-fracking practices necessary to get this gas are extremely environmentally dangerous, especially to water sheds and the safety of our water supply. No one is mentioning that at some point all the carbon based fossil fuels are going to be either too expensive, too hard to get to, and simply put, too depleted to power industrial civilization as it currently stands (which is as a society under the yoke of the carbon barons). The most Obama can do is promote fuel efficiency as a solution to the depletion of fossil fuels, which is not a solution, but a continuation of dependency on fossil fuels.

I could go on about every issue including agriculture policies which give large subsidies to Agra-business and helps Monsanto keep it's business up by: not allowing for GMO labeling or banning, keeping a former Monsanto lobbyist as a senior adviser at the FDA, and pushing African countries to accept "investment" by Monsanto in order to start the next "green revolution". Meanwhile his FDA goes around shutting down those who wish to sell raw milk using armed FDA agents to seize goods. Then, we could look at his economic solutions, which amount to take on more debt without providing a meaningful jobs program while continuing with the mindset that an economy is akin to a family budget. This clear in statements like, "We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs." He won't get in to the very complicated subject of resource depletion and an economy that demands constant growth as the norm (which only came about because of fossil fuels). Nor has he clamped down on Wall Street and the financial sector as he continues to give key positions to people within the financial market. Most assuredly we could discuss Obama's foreign policy, which includes his position that as President of the US he has the right to launch drone missile strikes in countries without their co-operation, away from any war zone, even to strike targets they haven't identified by secret executive authority with no review by the legislative branch. Obama has declared himself the judge, jury, and executioner to decide who can be targeted and killed anywhere in the world. Imagine if any other country in the world declared the right to strike with a drone by internal secretive process inside the borders of another country, (or even the US). The US would denounce it strongly. This amounts to a failure to hold ourselves as a country, to a standard we expect of others. We could also talk of his support for the Bahrain-an dictatorship that has been protested against, much like Egypt protesting against the Mubarak regime, or Libya's protests against Gaddafi. The point is Obama doesn't really have a progressive leg to stand on. Many of his own policies go against the heart of progressive thought yet he needs to continually bolster his image as the champion of the people or the champion of gay rights. What's really true is that Obama has a nicely paid team of campaign strategists that promote the president and his persona to pacify the left, while continually caving in to demands of the right, or more accurately big business. So it's worth it to take a look at exactly what his strategies are, even if that means having to think critically about the only person standing in the way of a US with Mitt Romney as president.

One of his big campaign points is he's strong on terrorism, as well as ending the war in Iraq, and putting the steps into place so that down the road the US can leave Afghanistan. What he promotes is that he killed Bin Laden, while he continually leaks more and more information to the press about this otherwise classified operation (as long as it makes him look like a strong leader that's tough on terror). It just seems that no matter what issue you examine, Obama talks a certain talk, but when it comes down to real policy, the talk is replaced with policies that show talk is all it is. The failure of the US public (and specifically the progressive portion of the population) to hold Obama accountable for keeping Bush's policies on warrant-less wiretapping not just intact, but expanded, as well as expanding his ability to wage war without congressional approval and authorize drone killings via a secretive kill list, amounts to a betrayal of not just progressive, but humanist principles that eschew a consistent moral or ethical standard in favor of blind political worship or demagoguery.

This is why The Association of National Advertisers awarded him for marketer of the year in 2008. This is because he got into office convincing the US public that this was not going to be politics as usual, but change was going to sweep the white house and all of government. In the hangover from this progressive orgy of hope without political substance that has become the Obama administration's first term, it has become more and more clear this is not just more politics as usual. The acceptance and now normalization of activities once decried by progressives and even moderate democrats put in place by the previous administration, undermines any moral authority they might have once had as they foolishly support a wolf in sheep's clothing. Citizens that can't demand a president work within the confines of the constitution and uphold the rule of law, but instead insist the president be supported merely because he personally believes in anything, have shirked their duty as citizens of the nation. Isn't this the exact same thing Liberals have decried when it comes to electing official because of religious belief? After all if it really comes down to the lesser of two evils, and Obama's personal stance on same sex marriage is the deciding factor for you, doesn't that analysis also entail that the electoral political system of the US is broken? Maybe the whole point is, while Obama pushes to raise a billion dollars to convince the US he should remain president, we keep accepting a broken system every four years to elect another person to look after the interests of those who paid to get them in office. What remains to be seen is how long the US citizenry is going to keep buying into such ridiculous and trivial campaign tactics while the environment, rule of law, education, and economy collapse around us.

The NSA, Warrant-less Wiretapping, The Big Spy Center, and The Erosion of the Rule of Law

2012-03-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

According to James Bamford of wired.com, "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks." He goes on to say, "In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret."

An ominous sounding project to be sure, but it's very interesting that he brings up Nixon. Although he is wrong that this is the first time since the Nixon administration the NSA has surveilled US citizens, the Nixon administration was important in laying the ground work for the current policies surrounding domestic spying and wiretapping. It's important to start here because this has indeed become one of the slow cons of the business and political elite which is leading the US to a sort of "soft" fascism. The Watergate break-in and the criminality of Nixon and his administration that followed to cover up the break in is standard US history. Part of that illegal break-in or series of break-ins involved wiretapping the DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex. After the "smoking gun" tape revealed Nixon had known and participated in the covering up of crimes being investigated his legal team suggested he resign or he would surely be impeached for obstruction of justice, and conviction seemed imminent. After Nixon's resignation Gerald Ford assumed the presidency and quickly pardoned Nixon for all crimes involved with the Watergate scandal. In other words Ford decided to use his presidential authority to pardon a criminal simply because he was the former president.

The problem is this goes against the very foundation of the USA as stated by John Adams, "The very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men." James Madison argued in Federalist 57 that "I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together... without which every government degenerates into tyranny." Whether it's Adams, Paine, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, or even Hamilton they all favor the rule of law over all citizens equally and warn that privilege or exception from the law will bring tyranny. Without adherence to this rule of law over all they all understood that the constitution and other such laws would become suggestions with compliance by government optional.

So Nixon got pardoned and while many were glad to move on or that the "end of the national nightmare" had come to an end, it has also set a precedence of excusing crime and criminality at the highest levels of US government. For a more in depth look at this process I recommend Glenn Greenwald's With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. The precedence set by this has allowed things once thought to be unconstitutional (i.e. warrant-less wiretapping, assassination of a US citizen by executive decree, extraordinary rendition [torture by proxy], and use of aggressive military force without congressional consent) to become quasi-legal through claimed executive authority. This is true even if they are strictly forbidden within the US constitution. The warrant-less wiretapping of domestic citizens is strictly forbidden. After the abuses by Nixon, and other domestic spy programs used mostly for political purposes, congress decided through the Church committee resolutions to create the FISA court of 3 judges that would issue warrants for domestic wiretaps. However the G.W. Bush administration was committing the crime of domestic wiretaps and collection of data from electronic communications through the NSA.

A NY Times article in December of 2005 by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that the Bush administration had allowed the NSA to participate in this domestic spying ignoring the law that warrants must be obtained. In other words the rule of law was ceded in the name of national security and allowed immunity for such crimes granted by the political class. If the failure to prosecute or impeach Bush for clearly illegal activities seems bad, what about retro-active grants of immunity by congress for those involved in the crimes? It was later revealed by whistle blower Mark Klein that AT&T had, "installed a fiber optic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers, and provides those copies to the NSA." AT&T wasn't alone in allowing the NSA to illegally spy on US citizens, but the list included other telecom giants like Verizon and Bell South. It's important to note that FISA grants the Telecom industry full immunity in the case that they were acting in good faith and not knowingly breaking the law. Qwest at that time decided not to co-operate with the Bush administration because they questioned the legality of such actions even asking the NSA to take their proposal to a FISA court. The above mentioned companies however were all on board with the program.

So once AT&T customers began suing AT&T in court and winning for the illegal release of their private communication data the Telecom companies decided to use their influence on congress to grant the retroactive immunity from all crimes related to the NSA wiretapping scandal. The telecom companies began to use lobbyists to persuade a Democratic congress would concede to voting for immunity for the telecom industry. Glenn Greenwald wrote that in the first three months of 2008 AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast "spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists." The details of how these connected lobbyists used their influence to gain amnesty are in Glenn's aforementioned book. However the lobbying wasn't the only tool the telecom industry used to receive this retroactive immunity. The campaign donations to key Democratic senators and congressmen helped in gaining congressional support of the amnesty legislation. Jay Rockefeller for instance was one of these as he sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was also up for re-election in 2008. As revealed by a Wired.com article Rockefeller saw great gains in contributions from the telecom industry.

"Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).

In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.

But that changed around the same time that the companies began lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions for their alleged participation in secret, warrantless surveillance programs that targeted Americans.

AT&T executives discovered a fondness for Rockefeller just a month after Verizon execs did and over a three-month span, collectively made donations totaling $19,350.

AT&T Vice President Fred McCallum began the giving spree in May with a $500 donation. 22 other AT&T high fliers soon followed with their own checks."

Also according to the watchdog group Maplight:
Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging:
$8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for Telcos (94 Dems)
$4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity for Telcos (116 Dems)
88 percent of the Dems who changed to supporting immunity (83 Dems of the 94) received PAC contributions from Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint during the last three years (Jan. 2005-Mar. 2008). See below for list of these 94 Dems.
All House Members (June 20th vote):
Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging:
$9,659 to each member of the House voting "YES" (105-Dem, 188-Rep)
$4,810 to each member of the House voting "NO" (128-Dem, 1-Rep)

This type of collusion by the corporate and government sectors has become business as normal within the government, but it is especially egregious when it is to retroactively immunize criminal behavior. The elected officials are winning their positions mostly due to fund raising efforts. The Center for Responsive Politics stated that in 2008, "the biggest spenders won 93 percent of House races and 86 percent of Senate races. In 2006, the top spenders won 94 percent of House races and 73 percent of Senate races. And in 2004, 98 percent of House seats went to candidates who spent the most, as did 88 percent of Senate seats." These facts show the role money is playing in our elections, but what goes unseen often is that the push to fund raise can lead politicians to spend most of their time with those who can finance their campaigns. However egregious this type of election process is towards our representative form of government on a regular basis, when they can be seen in collusion on granting large scale immunity retroactively for crimes the rule of law has ceased.

When the FISA amendments act of 2008 passed in the Democratically controlled senate it stamped out the investigations into the warrant-less wiretapping, granted immunity to the Telecom companies who knowingly broke the law, and vastly expanded the wireless eavesdropping powers of the government. The bill passed with support from top democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, and of course Barack Obama who violated his own promise to filibuster any bill with telecom immunity. Instead Obama voted against Chris Dodd's filibuster and for the bill itself. As soon as the legislation was signed into law by G.W. Bush all the suits filed against the telecom companies were dismissed. The NSA and the illegal activities they participated in were codified into law rather than punished.

However a recent whistle blower named William Binney has gone on record for Wired.com which states:
The NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.” ...

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light. ...

The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.
The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

The new spy center is a perfect example of rolling back of personal liberties and the rights of US citizens. It should also serve as a chilling example of the collusion of centralized public and centralized private power working together to ensure their interests are forwarded. It shouldn't come as any shock that in the midst of the scandal that AT&T and Verizon both received government contracts as part of a deal worth $48 billion dollars to provide telecom services to the government and it's agencies for 10 years. For those who have spent anytime studying the rise of fascism in Germany before WWII, one thing that stands out is corporate and government collusion leading to a build up of military and intelligence forces. Now I'm not trying to say that the US is on the verge of a Hilter-ian type of fascist revolution, but there should be no doubt by anyone who has been watching the past 3 or 4 administrations of the presidents that the two greatest centralized powers in history (the US military empire [with it's 737 worldwide bases], and the corporate/financial elite who control much of the world's economic development and market shares) are colluding to each others interests. This great combination of power has allowed them to halt the rule of law for the benefit of an elite that could be called a title-less aristocratic class. Until US citizen demand it's government stay within the powers granted to it by the constitution and not use the constitution as merely a set of guidelines which can be disregarded at will by executive authority, you better watch what you say, because the government is too.

"It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation."
Alexander Hamilton- Federalist No. 15

Obama Supporters and their Hypocrisy

2012-02-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

The beginning of the 21st century in the United States of America with George W. Bush as president quickly became enraptured by issues of terrorism and war after the attacks on September 11th 2001. Bush left office with low voter approval ratings averaging just over 60% disapproval average his last two years in office. This was in part due to a response to terrorism which included an unconstitutional war in Iraq (of course the US hasn't entered a declared war since WWII despite continual conflict) based on false claims of weapons of mass destruction, prisoner abuse scandals, a failing economy, and the loss of liberties by legislation such as the Patriot Act. A very dark spot on the US policy on terrorism was the prison at Guantanamo Bay where prisoners were being subjected to "harsh interrogation techniques" which are more rightly called torture unless you asked the Attorney General at the time who redefined torture. The prisoners were also guilty without the chance to prove themselves innocent which takes away the presumption of innocence that rule of law requires in order to apply to everyone equally.

Obama took on this issue in his 2008 bid for the presidency. Here he can be seen speaking even as president elect in 2008 before taking office.

Obviously Guantanamo Bay hasn't been closed, and for me this comes as no shock, but what's interesting is that even though the prison was so heavily criticized under Bush it now gains acceptance under Obama according to a poll by the Washington Post. 53% of self identified Democrats and 67% of moderate democrats support keeping the facility open. Not only that but 83% of US respondents approve of the drone policy (although I'm sure far fewer understand what that policy entails). On top of that 77% of liberal Democrats are in favor of his drone policy. During the Bush administration one of the most frequent complaints was that he all to often did what he wanted, without approval, and often shrouded in secrecy. The facts are that this is no different from what's happening in the current drone program. Obama has authorized multiple drone strikes inside the borders of countries like Pakistan, where recently there were protests against the US's drone war campaign within Pakistan where epitaphs of President Obama were burned. Also according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, "research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children."

Pakistani Minister Hina Rabbani Khar:"In our view, drones are not only completely illegal and unlawful and have no authorization to be used within the domains of international law, but even more importantly, they are counterproductive to your objective of getting this region rid of militancy and terrorism and extremism, because if one strike leads to getting you target number one or target number three today, you are creating five more targets or 10 more targets, in the militancy that it breeds, in the fodder that it gives to the militants to attract more people to join their ranks."

The problem lies not only in upsetting the autonomy of a country that has nuclear arms and a strong militant right wing influence, but this program has resulted in the assassination of US citizens. Anwar al-Awlaki was a US citizen that President Obama ordered assassinated using the drones. Whether or not Anwar was a terrorist or not if he is committing crimes against the US he should be tried by the due process of the law rather than refused his rights as a US citizen to habeus corpus and assassinated. Had Bush ever claimed the right to assassinate US citizens it would have been used as fodder by the left in the US. However they are perfectly willing to look the other way when it comes to Obama ordering such strikes in countries where no war is declared, even when shrouded in secrecy. The CIA has claimed that disclosure of information on the details of the process of either how the orders are given or how they choose the targets would aid the enemy.

This is the perfect demonstration of the blind following or worship of political leaders in which they give their loyalty not to any ideal, but merely the whims of the leaders themselves. This is clearly the case with Republican leaders who supported every expansion to military spending for the war on terror, but now call for fiscal accountability and reigning in spending (just so long as it's not military spending). It's a big problem within the US political system because it has the effect of allowing something that although criticized at first by the opposition party, if continued when that party takes power it receives bipartisan support from the public. Now days both parties both speak for increases in military spending and yet wish to be seen as trying to reduce the deficit. The same is true with starting a war or military operation without congressional consent and now seems to be true with drone assassinations and secret military prisons. It's all part of a broken political system that's going to require more than simply voting for the lesser of two evils or worse yet supporting them even when their policies conflict with a persons own ethics.

Music and Industry: The Consumption of Corporate Culture

2011-10-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

"Modern music is people who can't think, signing artists who can't write songs, to make records for people who can't hear." Frank Zappa

Music developed historically within cultures as traditions which served prominent roles in societies. In ancient Greece music was present for marriages, funerals, and rituals, as well as accompanying theater, and ballads of epic poetry. There were also forms of folk music or music of the common people. In Ancient India, Africa, China, and etc. we see a similar use of music. Often times the purpose of this music was to express not just who we were as individuals, but the culture as well. Irish traditional music is a great example of this. Take a song like The Shores of Amerikay or Dear Old Skibbereen which express not just the individual mourning and loss experienced, but what it was like to be a common person in Ireland during the 19th century in the eyes of the common person. Music itself has undergone many changes in compositional techniques, styles, and instrumentation, but I'd like to focus on the function of music in modern times and the processes by which we make and consume music.

The growth of a real industry of music was originally centered on sheet music publishing for consumption in the home by playing the music yourself. Composers wrote songs to be sold as the emerging middle class were able to purchase instruments, and get musical instruction for playing western classical music that wasn't available to most people before the industrial age. Entertaining in parlours was in fashion, and music was specifically composed and disseminated for this purpose. Eventually in the US, the growth of the industry led to the growth of copyright laws, which led to further growth of the industry. Originally music copyright laws weren't as strict in the US as in Europe and publishers often printed different versions of about any popular song. However late in the 19th century many copyright laws were enhanced and many of the major New York publishers moved over to West 28th street between 5th and 6th Ave. in Manhattan, a place known as Tin Pan Alley.

Here song writers like Irving Berlin and others sold songs to publishers or were hired to write songs by publishers. The firms hired "pluggers" (which included George Gershwin) to demonstrate songs to people, often in music stores. They also gave away songs to popular performers knowing that it would increase the popularity of the songs. The industry eventually even began to incorporate blues, cakewalk, and jazz although since the main purpose of the music was to be sold to amateur musicians they were often just commercial representations of these types of music. The reason for this is that these types of music all involve certain processes of creation (i.e. improvisation) rather than just stylistic differences. It's important to note that originally the publishers did not originally promote music or develop writers. It wasn't until this Tin Pan Era developed after 1880 when "plugging" was developed that promotion really started to expand business. As more pianos were being made by factories, the price came down, and piano ownership rose. In the first quarter of the 19th century 10,000 pieces of popular music was printed. In the first decade of the 20th century 25,000 songs were sold annually. After the Ball by Charles K. Harris sold 2 million copies in 1882 and went on to sell over 5 million. This industry boom was to be short lived in part to a technological innovation known as the Gramophone.

John Philip Sousa had this to say about the new recording technology,

"Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul... Under such conditions the tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises, so important a factor in the curriculum of physical culture, will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink? When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?"

You can read the rest of his 1906 article "The Menace of Mechanical Music," here. Seemingly harsh words for a device that would over time make him a lot of money (although he refused to conduct his band for many of the recordings). With the ability to record performances by the best musicians more people began to consume music not through either playing the music or listening to live musicians but to recordings. Of course this allowed for certain pieces of music to be archived, played anytime, and introduce people to music not heard in their geographic area. Originally many of the recordings of the early 20th century were classical music recordings. In 1910 it is estimated around 75% of recordings sold were classical music. However piano sales in the 1920's dropped while record production rose from 190,000 in 1923 to 5 million in 1929.

Radio also played a part in changing how we consume music. In 1913 there were 322 amateur licensed radio operators in the US. After being closed down for a time because of WWI it wasn't until 1920 that commercial radio began. Eventually more and more people in the US began to tune in to programs of musical variety shows and comedy. It wasn't really till the mid-twenties that radio started to really get big. By the late 1920's there were over 500 stations broadcasting in the United States. Sales of radios went from $60 million in 1922 to $843 million in 1929. In turn money began to be poured into advertising.

Changes in government regulation played a big role in the amount of money that went into the radio business. Although originally radio was to be developed for public good, because of many competing amateur stations, radio interference became chaotic. Also many people who were developing the technology and those financing it were eager for it to begin to pay off. In 1921 Herbert Hoover, then guiding the Department of Commerce, held a conference and in the opening speech he said,

"It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes, to be drowned in advertising chatter."

By the third conference in 1924 Hoover was still speaking out against direct advertising, but he had accepted it as an inevitable. The airwaves had been won for private development to not stifle technological innovation, although there were regulations on the number of stations one could own. This stood till 1996 when the limit to radio station ownership was lifted to allow for virtually limitless ownership of radio stations by a single company. Radio consolidation has become a reality. The Contemporary Hit Radio/Top 40 formats, only four radio station groups - Chancellor, Clear Channel, Infinity and Capstar - control access to 63 percent of the format's 41 million listeners nationwide. For the country format, the same four groups control access to 56 percent of the format's 28 millions listeners.

Consolidation by the recording industry has also occurred. The big 4; Sony, EMI, Warner, and Universal now control 80% of the US market as of 2005. However the music recording industry has been in a steady decline over the last decade and has continued to decline past the period this graph covers.

Reasons for the decline in the consumption of music abound. However people can listen to more types of music more easily in the US than ever before. While this sounds like a great technological innovation there is reason to believe we're actually in effect numbing ourselves. In a recent study it was shown that listening to a favorite piece of instrumental music could raise your dopamine levels by 9%. Another study on the effect of consuming a milkshake on the striatum (the area of the brain that’s rich in dopamine neurons and involved in the processing of rewards) showed obese people had reduced activity in the striatum. Or as science journalist Johah Lehrer put it, "They kept on consuming the milkshake in a manic search for satisfaction.” In a day and age where more music than can be listened to in a year can be transported with you everywhere, and listened to constantly there seems to be a case for music having a similar effect. We consume it more and more, but enjoy it less. What's really important is the process by which we consume this music. Instead of consuming records with friends or family, or enjoying the playing of music by ourselves, or friends and family we consume it individually with headphones more and more. When we share music with friends today more and more it's by copying a playlist, or some other digitally stored information rather than sitting down and listening to a record together. Many people purchase records where recording techniques such as auto-tune have fixed vocal intonation may fear to sing themselves. If 40% of people fear public speaking, then how many fear singing in public? What is playing out is a battle by a few companies to sell the most music which has translated into a battle against human music production, and for consumption of corporate commodity music. In short,

"The contrast between music-as-expression and music-as-commodity defines twentieth-century pop experience. /.../ Read any pop history and you will find in outline the same sorry tale. However the story starts, and whatever the author's politics, the industrialization of music means a shift from active musical production to passive pop consumption, the decline of folk or community or subcultural traditions, and a general loss of musical skill." From Andy Bennet, Barry Shank, Jason Toynbee (red.): The Popular Music Studies Reader

It must be noted that music itself was not commercialized but it was the process by which we create and consume music that was commercialized. Music after all is the finalized product, but what has changed is the process in which music is made. So much of the music consumed today is designed to sell the most units possible, thereby providing the best return on investment for the 4 corporations that control 80% of the music sales. Besides any economic implication this might have, it has changed music from cultural expression to corporate cultural expression. The processes by which people have expressed themselves culturally or socially have been manipulated to the point that consciousness has changed into self expression being a matter of what one consumes rather than what one produces. Simply put the creative process has been removed from your hands and instead your sense of self expression (often told to the others through social media apps like last.fm, your interests section on social media sites, voting for American Idol, or a favorite video back when MTV used to play videos) relies on what type of music you choose to consume.

So although this entry seems to show the negative side of the rise of the music industry, I'd like to end it with a positive message. With the industry in peril, musical knowledge and skill seemingly in decline (per capita), and the expressions of whole generations manufactured for industry profits, the changes needed in the system are ripe. With the advent internet and changes to recording technology which is much more affordable now, you have the option of releasing your own music on whatever terms you want. However I encourage smaller non-signed musicians to look at new ways of distributing music, and new ways of making a living from it. Simply trying to copy the production and sales methods of the already established industry with the re-creation of genre or style will only further us down a path of consumption as expression. You're much better off in this day and age seeking support directly from those who want to support what you do (if you're an up and coming musician or have no major label to support you). Projects like Artist Share or Kickstarter actually allow people to take part in the creative process and support artists rather than major recording companies. You could even make real relationships (not digital) with people in your community that will support your art. What is happening (slowly) is that people interested in real expression are taking back music production and handing it back over to the common people. All of us should work to create a culture wherein amateur music production is en vogue once again, as it only leads to more support of the professional musician as basic musical skill sets are obtained by more people. After all is the point of music how good it is, how many people heard it, and how many units were sold, or the human connection we experience when another human moves us with musical expression?

"A real musical culture should not be a museum culture based on music of past ages. . . . It should be the active embodiment in sound of the life of a community—of the everyday demands of people's work and play and of their deepest spiritual needs." WILFRID MELLERS

Most information in this post besides where it is otherwise cited comes from Radio and television regulation: broadcast technology in the United States By Hugh Richard Slotten
Something I'd like to suggest if the subject interests you- Culture Inc. The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression By Herbert I. Schiller,

Energy and Society

2011-09-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

There is something to be said for understanding energy in both ecological systems and human social systems, as well as its relation to complex economic and political systems. This understanding doesn't seem to be common knowledge and yet the basics of energy seem to be within the grasp of most people. This entry is aimed at providing a basic overview of energy and how energy systems affect our society.

All life depends on energy. Most of that energy comes from the sun (with very little exception). Even though the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun we always have 1,372 watts of energy from the sun per meter hitting the earth. This energy is used for weather systems such as heating the atmosphere and oceans, as well as fueling life by providing autotrophs with energy. As we all learned in biology, photosynthesis is the process whereby plants trap solar energy and chlorophyll molecules turn this into chemical energy. It is because of these autotrophs that us hetrotrophs or consumers can survive. We are locked into a system often called the web of life or food chain which energy is the currency and it is transferred i.e. from green plants to herbivores to carnivores to decomposers. As it is transferred the some of the energy is lost and merely 5-20% of the usable energy can be transferred between members of the food chain. This is why autotrophs account for a much higher percentage of the biomass since they are the energy producers for the rest of the system. If left undisturbed these ecosystems often tend to get to a state of dynamic equilibrium known as climax phase. This means that organisms have adapted themselves to live with relatively constant population levels, to avoid direct competition, and recycling energy as efficiently as possible. In other words they have formed a community. That's all well and good but what does this have to do with human society?

We humans like nearly every other organism are trying to capture solar energy. Although there is much data that shows humans can live as members of the long term climax ecosystems in modern times we have taken more and more of this solar energy acting as a colonizer or invader. Even 60,000 years ago in Australia when humans arrived they used fire to flush out game for hunting, which in turn wiped out the food sources of giant kangaroos, and other large mammals and birds. In fact within a few millennia of human arrival on the island 85% of animals weighing over 100 pounds disappeared. The same kind of trends followed when humans arrived in many new habitats around the earth. However what's really important about this is what happened next. That is that in Australia the Aborigines developed systems of myths, and rituals wherein over hunting was forbidden and fire was only to be used seasonally. They also limited their own population through extended lactation, contraceptive herbs, and even infanticide. In other words they adapted to their surroundings. However this was only after a strategy of takeover had been applied. This strategy of takeover was through tool use in the form of fire. From early in our history most all of our tools were used to gain more access to and get greater amounts of solar energy - or in other words most of our tools have been used for the takeover of ecological systems.

Most of our strategies for takeover come from a culture of agriculture. This is because agriculture is by it's nature a strategy of takeover. Forests are cleared for fields which contain plants only to be used by humans which is a literal takeover of the ecological system which used to provide energy to many different types of organisms. The act of clearing land for use by a monoculture fed on only by humans and their livestock however was not the most startling strategy by which humans seek energy in my opinion. The most startling thing is when humans began to use other humans as tools systematically. This happens through slavery as well as specialization or change to a hierarchical society. Or as David R. Montgomery says in Dirt,

"Class distinctions began to develop once everyone no longer had to work the fields in order to eat. The emergence of religious and political classes that oversaw the distribution of food and resources led to development of administrative systems to collect food from farmers and redistribute it to other segments of society."

Or Richard Heinberg in The Party's Over,

"Some humans could capture the energy of others who had been seized in war, putting them to work at tasks too dangerous, dreary, or physically taxing for any free person to undertake voluntarily - tasks such as mining metal ores from beneath the Earth's surface. Those ores were, in turn, the raw materials from which were fashioned the chains and weapons that kept the slaves themselves in bondage. Eventually, metals also came to be used as money, a tool that would become the basis for a more subtle form of energy capture: wage labor. Through the payment of money, humans could be persuaded to give their energies to tasks organized by - and primarily benefiting- others."

This use of humans by other humans was a cultural of empire as well. This meant that if you had a larger area with which to trade or often steal resources from you had a better chance of surviving local catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, or most likely famines. This system is now known as globalization. We now survive mostly off of goods coming from far away. Even an average carrot comes 1,838 miles to get to you. A t shirt may travel 17,000 miles. Neither of them are the most important good to be shipped around the globe though. The most important goods to modern human society are fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are what make this globalization really possible. The reason is simple, they are packed with energy. A fit human adult can sustain about one-tenth of a horsepower, so a human would have to labor more than 10 years to equal the energy of a barrel of oil. Except for maybe John Henry no human can compete with most any modern machine. Why would you hire workers for tasks like agricultural labor, making cars, t-shirts, band aids, and most all consumer goods when you only have to pay for the energy for the labor of a machine which needs no retirement or other benefits?

The new fossil fuel based economy had dreadful effects on society. With fossil fuels being used in farm equipment it allowed one farmer to farm much more land. Cattle could now be shipped via railway to major cities. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century in the US, cattle often fed on lands that once fed Buffalo that in turn fed Nations of Native peoples. As less people were needed on farms the small farm that was idealized in early US history was almost impossible to keep. There were other reasons though. Soil erosion from farming with the new fossil fueled machinery was a major often caused lower yields as well as the infamous dust bowl of the 1930's.

This came at a time following wheat farming became very profitable because of WWI and price inflation and then very unprofitable as the price collapsed. Farmers had no choice but to plow large acreages in order to get money which led to farming practices that were ruinous. Banks began to seize land and assets from those who could not pay back loans made as the economic depression was setting in. This caused people to migrate to the cities much like English Land Enclosures of the 19th century displacing peasants.

1840
Total population: 17,069,453; farm population; 9,012,000 (est.); farmers 69% of labor force

1900
Total population: 75,994,266; farm population: 29,414,000 (est.); farmers 38% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,740,000; average acres: 147

1930
Total population: 122,775,046; farm population: 30,455,350; farmers 21% of labor force; Number of farms: 6,295,000; average acres: 157; irrigated acres: 14,633,252

1970
Total population: 204,335,000; farm population: 9,712,000; farmers 4.6% of labor force; Number of farms: 2.780, 000; average acres: 390 http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm

Now oil is responsible for harvesting crops which also have to be transported by oil to get to you as in the example of the carrot. Fossil fuels have completely reshaped our economy and now our economies are very reliant on fossil fuels. The only problem is that they're a limited resource. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) world oil production peaked in 2006. Coal is set to peak by 2025. The decreasing supply of fossil fuels with an increase in demand for energy is going to make oil, and coal much more expensive. Some may think what about solar, wind, hydrogen, nuclear, and bio-fuels?

Alternatives to fossil fuel based energy systems exist but, they cannot replace the amount of energy we currently use because of fossil fuels. The main reason can be attributed to a figure known as Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI). First of all keep in mind oil had an EROEI of 100 in 1940, meaning that 100 units of energy were returned for every one invested. By the 1970's the oil EROEI had dropped to 23. Solar photovoltaic can be anywhere from 1.7-10, wind up to 2. Hydrogen is hard to get a real number on but so far it's a net energy loss since it requires fossil fuels to fuel the process to make it. Nuclear plants are about 4-4.5 and bio-fuels about 1.8 at the highest. In other words we're facing a world that in the very near future is going to have more energy demands than can be met. The repercussions this will have on our economy will change our world and force us to change from economies based on continual growth since that will no longer be possible. Our economy will be hampered by the loss of cheap, and easy to get energy to do our work.

So where does this leave us? Undoubtedly although applications of renewable energies could avert a total crisis, although according to the Hirsch report which stated, "Initiating a crash program 10 years before peaking leaves a liquid fuels shortfall of a decade." Prospects of an easy transition don't look good but all is not lost. There are many efforts which can be undertaken to help mitigate the shortfalls in global energy. If we look to Cuba, who after the fall of the USSR, began to grow more and more of its food locally rather than import Soviet grown foods. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90% of their fruit and vegetables. Yields have more than quintupled from 4 to 24 kilograms per meter squared between 1994 and 1999, and currently around a million tons of food per year is produced. This story is well told in the film The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. This type of food production could help to stem off problems of hunger once oil becomes to expensive to be used to transport consumer goods around the world. In other words globalization will peak and recede since it will become more and more expensive to transport goods.

Possibly the best strategy to be pursued by humans in the near future will be to re-examine the fundamental strategies of controlling energy and using it in our culture especially on the ecological level. Many people such as Bill Mollison have done considerable work showing that much energy is required in order to stop ecological succession with agriculture. Creating forest gardens could both reduce the work load and provide an abundance of food. Not only that but the systems are more drought resistant and contain more biodiversity which is becoming more important with the changes occurring in Earth's climate. We also have to confront that working simply for existence and the gain of others is an immoral practice by which one man purchases your energy to sell it's effect at a greater price. In other words we'll probably have to stop the hyper-individualistic lifestyle led in the US in order to make better decisions based on how it affects the community at large. The future maybe bleak if all we try to do is continue with our same system in place, but the collapse of the fossil fuel economy may help the people to win back the power of production away from corporations, machines, and the super rich that own and finance them.

I hope this helps you wrap your head around the energy and it's effects on society. Although it is a short summary if you're interested I will leave a few links as well as books you may be interested in checking out.

http://www.postcarbon.org/end-of-growth-chapters/
http://www.theoildrum.com/
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies- Richard Heinberg
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations- David R. Montgomery
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy- Matthew R. Simmons