Et Tu, NATO?
M E D I A R C H Y
Accountable Publishing Inc.
Volume One, Number Two Fall, 2024
Home of THE WRY MAKER
THE LAST ELECTION
THE PROGRESSIVE DISDAIN
FOR DEMOCRACY
EDITORS
As we face an unprecedented election, not only with two clownish candidates, but with nothing but clowns behind them, the Two-Party Cartel has reduced national politics to a mental hospital of incoherence. Our empire no longer represents liberty or democracy: or even international law. Our wars no longer rest on historical claims, but willful forgetting. Our system is breaking down, and our minds. The incoherence is reflected in positions taken; rhetoric and style have been unbundled from action. A great irony; Trump, though acting like Mussolini stylistically, was a less warlike administration than Biden/Harris, with respect to both Russia and China. The “pivot to China” was Obama’s move. Trump, oddly, interferes with the war program of the US, therefore also with the global system, signaling the decline of US global power. Inversions come with collapse. The empire is a psychological crutch, and a trap, for Americans: letting go of Pax Americana, shrugging off envy of China’s newfound (false) glory, and a loss of a (false) sense of U.S. greatness. Though Americans have never held this imperial power, we cling to it psychologically, symbolically, like pretending an abusive parent means well. The totem of our domestic pecking order, this imperial psychosis became our national religion. In the performance of this religion, we have failed to keep its founding principles: freedom, democracy. Not only have we failed to keep the ideals of that order in our foreign dealings, but we have ceased to keep them within our own country. That’s why we have widespread propaganda, surveillance and censorship. We sacrificed our own ideals - allegedly in order to convert other nations to them. When the Cold War ended, the spy state should have stopped, but it didn’t. COINTELPRO became Homeland Security, Facebook, Google. The ongoing Cold War crusade has failed, as a strategy, both to convince the Third World, who now despise us as hypocrites for our endless war, but has also fundamentally undermined America as a coherent civil society with any idea of our purpose. It’s as if a nation created by a statement of principles never had such ideals. They have become platitudes on longer lists of platitudes. This has made our politics completely dysfunctional: a speech disorder jealously guarded by the Two-Party system, as evidenced by having to choose between two presidential candidates who are merely two different kinds of platitudinous liars: one polite and one rude. Our problem is older than this election. It’s older than Trump, older than Biden. Before Trump you had Bush II. Bush II was probably the greatest war criminal in American History, still now painting portraits back in Texas of American soldiers maimed in Iraq, and Secretary Powell who lied about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, recently buried with bipartisan honors, not to mention the Kissenger-kissing Clintons, themselves guilty of illegal militaristic intervention. On the Democrats’ side, before Biden, you had Obama, who strangely got the Peace Prize then invented drone warfare, transforming the global military construct, known for his “Tuesday meetings” and his “kill lists.” Bill Clinton was the destroyer of worlds, the empowerer of China, the betrayer of (briefly) democratic Russia - the framer, in the image of Ronald Reagan, of the No Exit disaster in which all Americans eke out a miserable political existence, while our domestic economic existence continues to degrade into jelly and the world spirals into chaos. You have to be really ignorant not to know how much damage was done under our watch. It took a lot of work to make you that ignorant. It took amnesia. There are those who compare today to World War I: the recurring outbursts of anti immigration political positions to reduce or stop immigration. Immigration was caused before WWI by globalization, particularly in imperial regions like the Habsburg Empire where there was massive displacement of rural peoples in the eastern regions of Europe before and after the dawn of the 20th century: refugees, migrants, and migrant workers who presented a threat to labor unions and rights. But also in Germany. German communities in Vienna and Berlin, with powerful labor organizations were threatened by emigrant labor, decades before Hitler: a precursor. WWI started when the imperial system made possible an incoherent sequence of diplomatic maneuverings that locked the actors into an insanely destructive, uniquely meaningless war. There was no reason for the war. It had no good guys and no bad guys. Unlike WWII, which was centered around ideology, WWI was distinguished by a total lack of ideology. Imperial powers were acting in their strictly imperial interest. They used nationalist ideology. Former socialists in Germany, France, and England, formerly the penultimate enemies of war and nationalism, suddenly lost their religion and marched with their respective armies, annihilating each other in an eclipse of reason. Like the imperial nations of WWI, our endless wars have no reasons or principles, such as freedom, democracy or international law, but instead are merely commercial and annihilative. They are cynical: evil. In our minds, they have betrayed, destroyed, and discredited all the original ideals of the American Republic. In service to the commercial empire of Wall Street, the U.S. government has suppressed our native constitutional traditions, habeas corpus and the freedoms of speech, association and the press. Both by manipulation of the press for geopolitical purposes, and allowing concentration of ownership of the media - from mergers and acquisitions to new internet monopolies and cartels - the political parties have empowered the funders of their political campaigns to have direct control of language itself, now using it to not merely propagandize but censor citizens - and choreograph public discourse. The internet has made it so that you don’t even know when you are censored. You write something and post it, but it is not published due to an artificially intelligent machine’s assessment. It was hard enough to have democracy with the rich owning the newspapers and TV news shows at the top, true for a long time; but today public discourse is broadly controlled down to the lowest level: the level of you, yourself. Anyone who posts anything offensive to the internet program is subject to unprecedented levels and layers of surveillance, censorship, and incrimination, without as much as a person doing it or notice given. You know it changes you. The thought processes and direct speech of every citizen is being controlled. That is why American public discourse is incoherent, and why representative government in America is a sham: because it represents nothing. The Republic has been captured. We are tied into the bound paralysis of our generation and the bureaucracy that it represents, whether in business or government. The deadpan mechanical march toward destruction, the seeming impossibility for anyone to interrupt that march, and the categorical unwillingness of anyone in power to even acknowledge it, traps every American in voyeurism. We watch ourselves marching toward the existential cliff - climate change, WW III. With them, all the different forms of epochal destruction overwhelm the intellect with a sense that it is too late. Human life, animal life, plant life have been degraded in the past century, but even more so exponentially in the last half century and even more than that in the past twenty-five years. As we destroy, we are destroyed, our society and our qualitative existence as humans is our incoherence, depression, fits of hysteria. We have been driven mad. In this final stretch of destruction, our robotic leaders seem determined to make an About Face impossible. Trapped in public hysteria, lost in a TV spectacle that is our death mask, we must find our feet. The evil dream of an American empire - the “Empire of Liberty,” to quote Christopher Britt - led us to this epochal catastrophe. Will you even recognize it before it’s over? Can you snap out of it? We have to wake up and smell the roses. Unlike World War I, triggered by the assassination of an Archduke, the election of 2024 is a crisis of democracy. It is the result of the failure of America’s modern democratic system - its corruption by the rich, its demoralization by imperialism - to poison the American people, toxify the land and water, and annihilate the local economies and communities in every city and town in America, white brown and black. Corrupted by the rich, American society has been irreversibly displaced, its history annihilated, a catatonic Leviathan. For Wall Street, the maiden, we now fail to witness or respond to global extinction and endless wars. Nation states are modeled on the USA, all over the world. Like us, they believe in representation and the abstractions of our mega-states. Our problem is not unique, because we have forced it on the world since the Cold War followed WWII. It is nationalism: the fanatical support of one’s national government against other national governments. Enveloped in the dysfunctional institutional environment of the Two-Party system and corporate media, all we USAers understand about politics is the national, and of that its “highest office.” All we understand, really, is just the presidency. This is a slave’s idea of democracy. Though the world’s oldest Republic, America has rendered its citizens into small children. We’re poorly prepared to participate in self-rule, not only because we are oppressed by oligarchs, but because we don’t really pay attention to ruling ourselves and don’t care about it, in fact. This has been true for generations. I say “we” not I - we as a collective, the normal American people - do not care about the destruction that our nation state has brought about at home and abroad. But Americans do like to chat about the presidential candidates, celebrities and criminals, argue about them but certainly not do anything about them. In all likelihood, you have ignored all real politics utterly, for your whole life: local politics, state politics and the U.S. House of Representatives, which might claime to be “representative” of voters. The past and present of real democracy is obscure to you, while every personal habit or detail about the Presidents and would-be Presidents are familiar to you. These are empty rituals of care, but unfortunately they are also the constitutional basis for all actions of the State. Empty. This is the moral side, the moral problem, for America’s president. When Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact and the communist system in effect put down the gun - we could have reciprocated, and ended domestic spying and social control in the US. We could have acknowledged and responded toTiananmen Square, when the Chinese crushed the democracy movement by killing twenty thousand Chinese democrats with tanks in the middle of the capital. Instead, only months later, Bill Clinton gave China its new role in America, Most Favored Nation status and the deep unraveling of American jobs and producer-status. Americans share a common guilt as we face the end of democracy, what we call the “Last Election,” a crisis perhaps never rivaled in the United States government. But this guilt isn’t just white guilt, it isn’t just European guilt, it’s universal guilt. We have collectively adopted the ideals of democracy and the republic, whether in the 16th century, the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th or 21st. This is not the past. You have not put it behind you. We’re all struggling with so-called “English” patterns of behavior because those ideas - like representative government - are what the modern republic is made of, and your every idea is made of them. No matter what your color, race, or origin, you bow to the idols of the state. What is new is technology, and the destruction it has caused. The industrial power of human populations that the English industrial revolution started, and the anthropocene world it has created, have virtually completed the destruction of the earth. America’s national ideology is in a crisis because we have not internalized the meaning of a man-made world, in our plastic clothes and drug dependent state, we embody it. Increasingly complex problems interfere with just going to work and having a good life, just voting perfunctorily - while corruption and tyranny run violently amok in our names, killing millions and driving hundreds of millions from their destroyed countries worldwide, causing the migrant crises in both Europe and the U.S. The self destructiveness that is demonstrated by the American system is so overwhelming as to cause profound grief, a grief we feel but cannot understand because it results from both our economic policy of globalization and our foreign policy of empire. We are so wrong, and have been for so long, we cannot face it. Meanwhile, failed democracy of the American Republic only increases the danger we all face, from relentless injustice, inequity, liberalization, deregulation, concentration of sectors, financialization of industries, deregulation of finance, resumption of nuclear weapons: it is the unshackling of oligarchic power and the annihilation of basic, original republican and democratic principles. We need to drop the imperial obsession of presidential politics to give our thoughts and feelings to something more real: on something that might succeed, versus 75 years of global overdevelopment to enrich Wall Street. We cannot really complain in this apocalyptic way, because the apocalypse already happened. It was Gulf War II. It is rising seas. It is extinction. We cannot believe our eyes. We are pretending that it didn’t happen, and we’re pretending that it isn’t our fault. We voted for that person, and now we’re gonna vote for this person. It’s a failure to realize you are not mentally competent. In this amnesia, this willful amnesia of the American public means never taking responsibility for its mistakes. In a republic, “their” mistakes are your mistakes.You supported the Iraq invasion when you believed in Weapons of Mass Destruction, you supported the Afghanistan invasion for twenty years at a cost of one trillion dollars only to return the country to the control of the Taliban in 2021; you supported the attacks on Serbia, the attacks on North Africa and the Levant. Afghanistan and the Sudan - neutral countries - were attacked with cruise missiles under Clinton on the day his sex scandal was exposed in1997, hunting Bin Laden. This violation of airspace was the model the 9/11 terrorists mimicked. In your name the U.S. military has bombed and starved millions of people, mostly noncombatants. It’s getting harder and harder to deny the apocalypse because of climate change, as it is a visible and felt metric. The knowledge that we have had that it would happen, and the knowledge we have today that it is happening, somehow still prevents us from stopping it. A profound dysfunction is visible. This sleepy, dreamy, imperial, childlike condition persists among us; and it is the real crisis of the 2024 election. It is not simply a Republican problem. it is not simply a Democratic problem. In fact it is a two party system problem, the problem of their duopoly, of our robotic elections, their long-term control of the presidential debates, their long-term control of the choices of presidential candidates, which we allow them to do because we cannot face our own failures - this willful amnesia and social cowardice. In the dream of our amnesia, we pretend to participate in democracy by picking one of two designated candidates - by consenting to Party control, we bow to the unconscious consensus of imperialism. During the Cold War we argued about the Nanny State: the Republicans are for Dad, and the Democrats for Mom. We cannot evolve, let alone imagine transformation, because we are afraid to say no to both of them. So we don’t move. In this sleep of reason, our energy turns inward to the private debates, the quasi-religious debates about culture: Democratic transgenderism, Republican fundamentalism and science-denial, Black Lives Matter vs Proud Boys. The ding-a-ling quality of this utopian fantasy world of a braindead empire, a failing empire as it happens which has provoked imperialism by countries formerly made humble before the threat of our imperialism, actually perpetuates and provokes imperialism by both Russia and China, when peace could have been achieved. America punished Russian democracy, and we rewarded and armed Chinese totalitarianism, locking and loading into the wholesale destruction of the domestic US economy in return for opening the global economy to Wall Street. A sacrifice. Did you feel it? Bush II’s fakery of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in selling Iraq War II following 9/11 being the most obvious fiction, clearly demonstrated the passivity of the American public in not being outraged, not feeling betrayed, not reacting to the betrayal or gaining any knowledge from the disappointment of the betrayal - only mindlessly, increasingly believing every lie: any lie will do. True, the anti-war movement exploded, but as it was vastly underreported by the media, it eventually stopped, with the exception of a few lonely souls shouting at a deaf population. We are facing a moral crisis. It isn’t just an historical or ideological problem. The problem is that we are culturally, highly capable of duplicity, where you say one thing and do another. We all do it, and our leaders do it well. This is a moral failing on a vast and catastrophic scale. We believe ourselves to be one thing, yet do another. Incredibly, after we do this, over and over again, we still don’t alter our self-image in response to moral failing. We maintain the very same self-image of Yankee Doodle, and become hypocritical and empty. We become evil. Now the Chinese and Russians think they can see through us, through the entire Western Tradition, and accuse the founding fathers of America of being somehow flawed. This psychotic reversal, echoed by China and Russia, exposes real hypocrisy on the part of Americans which, if we don’t fix it, proves their argument and cements our guilt. They say if that’s Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, forget it, you can have democracy. If you can’t see your own failing in the American Republic because you are distracted by the unimportance of the Presidential election, then you fail to see the the legitimation crisis that is happening to the US right now: the turn away from NATO in French and German elections in recent months, the growth of the Non Aligned Nations becoming the world’s largest grouping of states worldwide, the growth of BRICs nations, and the alienation of the US from the United Nations and International Criminal Court, the dropping of US treasuries by China, the divestment in US dollars, all threaten America’s economic stability. This is the worldwide crash of American legitimacy that is hardly heard at home. But it’s ultimately about you, American citizen, lying to yourself. En masse. The world sees you. Game’s up. We have no word for the political force that has driven the bipartisan agenda, so we blame “billionaires” or “corporations,” our enablers and corruptors, who willfully assist us in our failure. But they are our foil, as it is we, and not the corruptors, who are responsible for allowing the failure to happen. To survive, we must question ourselves, our self-image and our most basic ideas. Our conception of democracy is a representative one, represented electronically, and our idea of living and survival is proletarian, amoral or immoral. Both need to be revised. Our economy is toxic. We have to learn from the manmade world we have created to be clearer about how it is we intend to survive. Failures have to be admitted to know what not to do again. But first, to acknowledge these failings and adjust our disappointment in Putin, Iran, China, and realize we have to deal with them on an equal level, having forfeited our superiority through hypocrisy, we must try to settle down the foreign activities of nation states which are so destructive. We need to focus the energies of government on domestic economic and civil reinvention, which is a 100% kind of job. We will stop the endless war, by stopping economic expansionism. We can only do this by focusing politics on the local. To change our purpose, we must replace one (war) with another (survival). We need new local economies built on natural resources to discontinue the immense pollution of energy systems. Americans need to deal with reality again; material, local reality, why you are alive, and might not be.
CHRISTOPHER BRITT ARREDONDO
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Second Indutrial Revolution created an enormous upsurge in the size and productivity of the American economy. Despite leading to real wage growth across broad swaths of the labor force, the majority of the profits that were accumulated as a result of this unbridled economic growth wound up being concentrated in the hands of a few entrepreneurial capitalists like Vanderbilt, Wall Street financiers like J.P. Morgan, and other captains of industry, such as Carnegie. While for some observers, these men were thought to embody the American ideal of the “self-made man,” for others, these wealthy men were nothing but the Robber Barons of a Gilded Age. As this moniker suggests, not everything was what it appeared to be during this period of unfettered capitalist expansion. Beneath that gilded veneer, there were tremendous economic disparities, which tore away at the social fabric of American life and threatened to undermine democratic self-governance. The Progressive Movement arose in response to this rapid and rampant destruction. Progressives sought to solve the social and political problems caused by the concentration of industrial ownership in the form of trusts and monopolies. These problems ranged from the industrialization of urban spaces to the urbanization of immigrant laborers, and from the lack of industrial regulation to the corruption of political machines. Progressive reformers, like Jane Addams and John Dewey, were alarmed, not just by the spread of slums, poverty, and the exploitation of labor, but also by the corruption of democratic self-governance and the rise of a plutocracy. To their credit, these progressive reformers did revitalize democracy by achieving women’s suffrage, establishing direct primary elections, direct election of senators, and the introduction of initiatives and referendums at the local and state levels of government. But progressive reformers could also become overzealous, aiming by means of prohibitions—such as the prohibition on the production and consumption of alcohol--, to remake the moral character of American citizens. Ironically, either as a result of the witting cynicism of overzealous moralists or the unwitting naivete of well-intentioned reformers, the Progressive Movement helped to replace the plutocratic tyranny of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age with the bureaucratic tyranny of the expert, the intellectual, the priestly reformer and do-gooder nannies of the Progressive Era. As Christopher Lasch has argued, this bureaucratic tyranny, with its ideological underpinnings moored in socialist idealism, discouraged self-reliance, stimulated new dependencies, and led, ultimately, to a loss of competence, which, in turn, undermined the very same culture of participatory democracy and self-governance that progressives aimed to cultivate. Still, here in America, the emergence of this therapeutic state had less to do with the impact that socialist ideas and practices may have had on the Progressive Movement than it did with the influence of America’s jingoistic Manifest Destiny. The idea, in no uncertain terms, was that the US was on a God-given mission to regenerate humanity. Indeed, prior to nannying the workers in the meat-packing districts of Chicago, or to nagging the immigrants in the streets of New York, or to naysaying the drunkards and prostitutes congregating in red-light districts across the nation, progressives in America had aimed to determine the extent to which people who were assumed to be racially inferior should be incorporated into the ever-expanding territories of the United States of America. This perceived inferiority notwithstanding, progressives believed that these “savage” and “uncivilized” people could be “improved” and that they too might learn to govern themselves and participate as citizens of equal standing in the republic. The key to this transformation, they reasoned, was education, by means of which these groups could be assimilated into mainstream Anglo-American culture. After the Civil War, progressives focused initially on the emancipated slaves of African descent in the South. But after all the well-intentioned progressive educational and political reforms of the Reconstruction Era fell into a state of disrepair and abandon, they were replaced by the Jim Crow laws that legitimized the state-sponsored terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The other, still more populous and ubiquitous group on which progressives focused were the Native Americans or “Indians” from whom the West had yet to be fully won. Indeed, it would not be until well after the conclusion of the so-called “Indian Wars,” and the ensuing failures of the US government to educate and assimilate the Native Americans into mainstream society, that these people, who had been displaced from their ancestral lands and banned from participating in American democratic culture, would be granted full US citizenship with its attendant responsibilities and rights. At the turn of the century, as the US extended its imperium over the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama) and the Pacific (Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, the Mariana Islands), the list of people who would need to be incorporated into the republic suddenly grew exponentially. This was cause for some concern and much debate. Could American society assimilate these culturally diverse and geographically distant peoples and still manage somehow to remain democratic? Should these people, who had never before participated in democratic self-governance, be recognized as full-fledged citizens of the Union and entrusted with the right to vote? These questions and doubts led some progressives, like Theodore Roosevelt, to view America’s expanding overseas empire as an unparalleled opportunity to implement progressive reforms on an imperial scale. Indeed, according to this view, Anglo-Saxon America had the duty to carry out this civilizing mission. It was, as Rudyard Kipling famously put it, the White Man’s Burden. Other more prejudicial thinkers, like Andrew Carnegie of the Anti-imperialist League, instead argued that the incorporation of people who were not of Anglo-Saxon descent into the body politic of the nation would ultimately undermine the republican virtues of American democratic culture. The Supreme Court settled the matter of whether and to what extent Puerto Ricans and Filipinos would be incorporated into the nation with the so-called “Insular Cases” (1901-1914). Much as they had done in Plessy v Ferguson (1896), which established the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal,” in these cases concerning the Philippines and Puerto Rico the justices determined that in fact the U.S. Constitution did not “follow the flag” and that America’s recently acquired territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific should henceforth be considered as being “foreign in a domestic sense.” This meant, in so many words, that these islands and their inhabitants were never going to be fully incorporated into the union and that they were, to all intents and purposes, to remain nothing more and nothing less than colonies. They were not merely “separate,” but they were also denied the possibility of ever being recognized as “equal.” So, would these colonies and their people ever be granted independence? This would depend, reasoned the leaders of US Insular Affairs, on the ability of these colonized people to understand what Taft (who was the first American civil commissioner charged with governing the Philippines) referred to arrogantly as “Anglo-Saxon liberty.” Although Taft viewed the Filipinos as “superstitious and ignorant” and judged them to be unqualified for either universal suffrage or autonomy—reasoning that they “need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is”--he nevertheless believed that under “careful” US tutelage, they could be taught, through “widespread schooling” and “political education” the “possibility of the honest administration of government.” The aim of Taft’s “Policy of Attraction” was to carry out what President McKinley conceived as “Benevolent Assimilation.” Indeed, the educational effort put into practice by Taft proved in time to be the single most important element in reconciling Filipinos and Puerto Ricans to the U.S. presence in their islands and attracting them with promises of eventual assimilation, integration, incorporation: first and foremost, the intellectuals or ilustrados as they were known, who collaborated with the American colonial government, but eventually also vast numbers of ordinary Filipinos and Puerto Ricans who attended American schools. The education they received was not merely a matter of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Taft’s educational initiative involved the moral imperative to enlighten and civilize the otherwise “savage” and “mongrel races” of the Philippine archipelago. Infused with a curious optimism, which was as much the result of the would-be universal principles of Lamarkian evolutionary theory (i.e., the idea that offspring inherit the “improved” structures developed by adapting to environmental changes), as it was the result of the exclusionary principles of eugenics, this educational undertaking was progressive both in content and intent. Taft’s “Policy of Attraction” placed enormous power in the hands of progressive pedagogues, who imagined they could cultivate “progressive improvements” among their colonial students and teach them American republican virtues and democratic self-governance. This culturally and politically transformative education involved, in other words, a process of conversion, a total “remaking” of the Filipinos and Puerto Ricans in the image of America’s Founding Fathers. In this sense, Taft’s “Policy of Attraction” did not constitute a radical break, but rather formed a logical continuum, with the politics of forced conversion that characterized the Spanish conquest and colonization of both the Americas and the Philippines. The Spanish example is pertinent because in 1898, when the US took over from Spain its few remaining colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Americans justified this imperial expansion by claiming that they were liberating the Puerto Ricans and Filipinos from the double tyranny of Spain’s monarchy and the Catholic Church. But what they really did was impose a new tyranny by means of forced conversion: Precisely what the Spaniards had done before them. Consider, in this regard, how Bartolomé de las Casas--an erstwhile conquistador turned Dominican friar, priest, and eventual Bishop of Chiapas, who was popularly regarded as the Defender of the Indians--famously argued against the cruelty of the conquest and in defense of peaceful tactics of conversion. He never, however, called into doubt the need of the Indians to convert to Christianity, nor did he ever stop to question how this process of so-called “peaceful conversion” amounted to a strategy for the psychological, cultural, and societal destruction of the autochthonous civilizations he aimed to convert. Indeed, the success of the conversion depended on the ability of Spanish friars and priests to convince the indigenous people of the Americas to hate themselves and desire to be otherwise. As in Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans” or as is also the case in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, conversion to Christianity has always and already involved the willful destruction of who one has become thus far in life in order to be reborn anew as an improved self. Self-hatred likewise formed the basis of the progressive education that Americans sought to impart to Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Only, instead of becoming members of the Christian community or ecclesia, America’s colonial subjects were supposed to become members of modern civilization. These “savages” would be remade, not in order to save their souls, but in order, ostensibly, to capacitate them for self-governance. Yet, if self-governance had in fact been the ultimate aim, the educational system built in the colonies by the Americans would have encouraged the study of history, literature, and political philosophy. Instead, especially at the high school level, it placed emphasis on the practical and technical knowledge required for the industrialization of agriculture. The true aim of America’s educational undertaking in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, it would seem, was to ready these islands and their people for full incorporation into the modernizing processes of capitalism’s growing world economy. With this imperial context in mind, we are in a better position to see how progressivism actually served to further the interests of empire, and not merely, as it pretended, to cure social ills, lift up the downtrodden, and offer hope to the unenlightened. At home, the educational reforms of John Dewey’s Lab Schools aimed to teach children problem-solving skills and teamwork so that they would be prepared for participation in democratic self-governance; but these progressive educational reforms actually served in the long run to prepare the majority of US students for work in industry and developed in them a new dependency on the sate which bred individual incompetence. Abroad, in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, these same progressive pedagogical principles were adopted and implemented with the aim of converting Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, not into competent and full-fledged citizens, but rather into good laborers and even better consumers of America’s industrially produced goods. This undermining of progressive educational goals was unwittingly carried out by some of the very same Filipinos and Puerto Ricans who, as pensionados, received scholarships to study toward advanced degrees in education in some of the finest universities in the United States. The case of Camilo Osias in the Philippines is especially revealing, given the tragic irony that informed his career as a scholar and educator. He had studied under Dewey at Columbia University and learned to apply his pragmatic approach to education. Upon his return to the Philippines, he was charged by Atkinson, who was the American Commissioner of Education, with editing and curating the Filipino Readers, which would serve as the basis for the “conversion” of Filipinos to modernity and enlightenment. These readers, which placed Greek and Roman mythology alongside Filipino mythologies, sought to inspire the moral transformation of Filipinos, encouraging them to identify with the supposedly universal values of the modern civilized world. When these students graduated primary school and advanced to study at the high school level, they discovered how, in fact, their would-be teachers and civilizers valued them: as workers. This, then, proved to be the ultimate aim of progressive education: to make good workers out of everyone who lived under U.S. sovereignty; to make them conform to the logic of productivity, first as laborers, then as consumers. The idea was never to actually free people so that they might engage in the public life of self-governance, but to keep them perpetually in a state of dependency that cultivates incompetence for democratic self-governance. It is this planned incompetence which reveals the disdain with which America’s imperialists, among them iconic progressives like Roosevelt and Taft, have always regarded democracy not just abroad, but at home as well.
ET TU NATO?
CROSSING THE RUBICON
JULIA PETERS
GEORGE FENN
Up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO had an explicit role in defending against Soviet expansionism. The Warsaw Pact of Soviet countries was counter-formed in 1955 in response to West Germany being allowed to re-arm along the Soviet-defined East German border, thus cementing the Cold War in earnest - until 1989. The subsequent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 at the “end” of the Cold War, signaled what Russians informally understood to be the end for NATO too, or at least an end to the expansion of NATO. NATO is like so many things that we think we understand but don’t, things that have a soft and slightly happy, squishy space in our brain that remains fuzzy and unclarified. In Part I of our look at NATO, we will try to understand better its purpose and structure. In Part II, we will look more closely at conflicts involving NATO. You may be forgiven if you do not really know the difference between what NATO was and what it is. It is less forgivable when you blithely pull up your Black Lives Matter sign and replace it with a home-made blue and yellow painted poster board because you take on faith that what NPR and CNN and the New York Times say is true - that the quasi-Europeanish NATO is clearly a force for good since its formation after the Just WWII, that the US is rightly supporting this international alliance that is sort of like the UN, that it promotes democracy against fascism, communism and the unprovoked incursion by Russia into Ukraine. But this is, as is often the case, a very scant and mostly incorrect view borne out of ubiquitous information dumb-down, oversimplification. Ultimately, it is the dross of the co-opted, highly centralized, corporate media oligarchy that has partnered with the state to become a US apologist machine, whose primary focus is to stop Trump from getting re-elected, and no alternative candidate allowed to come forward. Many people have become their mouthpieces, much as they were for the bombing wars against Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan, until it was way, way too late to make a difference. Growing out of post-WWII European alliances to deter future German aggression in 1949 - there had after all been two instances in the space of some twenty years - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization subsequently set out to confront the growing Soviet threat. A military alliance with explicit focus on deterring the Soviets, the 12 founding mostly European members, with the exception of Canada and the US, agreed to join together to defend against attacks by a third party on any one member nation. Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty states: The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. NATO’s strategy of defense amongst its members was meant to be practiced as its motto describes: animus in consulendo liber or “with a mind unfettered in deliberation.” NATO’s decisions must be unanimous. However, individual states or subgroups of allies can initiate war outside NATO’s auspices and member states are not required to participate in every NATO operation. Therein lies an octopus whose tentacles can sprout new tentacles, or be severed at will. By 1955, NATO added two more countries, Greece and Turkey, in addition to West Germany and remained at 15 members until 1982, when it added Spain for a total of 16 members until 1999. Certainly, it was always the case that the U.S. was clearly leading NATO, by proxy. But the massive expansion after 1999 when NATO absorbed most of the Warsaw Pact nations, has established the US as its largest defense spender, accounting for 68% of NATO’s defense budget, or $860B in 2023, over 10 times that of second-place Germany. Second, the supreme allied commander in Europe who oversees all NATO military operations is always required to be a US. flag or general officer. There is an elected Secretary-General from membership, and; although the alliance has an integrated command, most forces remain under their respective national authorities until NATO operations commence. Moreover, the US is the primary driver of the military alliance, and also the primary supplier both through US “gifts” of arms to nations, and authorizer of US weapons manufacturers selling weapons to other nations. The cumulative financial costs of policing the post-Cold War conflicts exceed $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The US is the top arms exporter in the world, in 2023 reaching a record $238B in sales, a major employer in many US states. Member states’ primary financial contribution is the cost of deploying their respective armed forces for NATO-led operations. These expenses are not part of the formal NATO budget, which funds alliance infrastructure, including civilian and military headquarters, and stands at about $3 billion in 2023. NATO members have committed to spending 2 percent of their annual gross domestic product (GDP) on defense by 2024, and 20 of the 32 members have recently met that threshold, although prior to 2022 that number was far lower, until Trump’s threat to withdraw US support unless member nations ponied up and, of course, Russia’s invasion into Ukraine. There is much debate about promises that may or may not have been made to Gorbachev by President George Bush Sr., Reagan, or Secretary of State Jim Baker following Soviet dissolution to prevent the alliance from moving “not one inch” into former Soviet territory. Many current and former Russian leaders believe the alliance’s inroads into the former Soviet sphere are a betrayal of alleged U.S. guarantees to not expand eastward after Germany’s reunification in 1990. Today NATO has 32 members, but it also maintains relations with more than 40 non-member countries loosely packed into variously named “partnerships,” which brings to mind random gang alliances that are partially based on contrived rationalizations - like the color of sneakers. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen annually rotate among the several hundred U.S. military bases in more than 80 nations around the world, even as NATO enlargement increased by 14 the number of countries they are expected to defend. Called the “Partnership for Peace,” Clinton pushed the idea of NATO expansion to include “partners” along with members of the former Warsaw Pact, and non-European countries. More than two dozen former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine, joined in the following months.“ This was a pivotal maneuver, transforming a North Atlantic post WWII, Cold War alliance to something quite different. As US Senator Richard Lugar said at the time, “The common denominator of all the new security problems in Europe is that they all lie beyond NATO’s current borders.” NATO became the catch-all for US led and financed military incursions in regions across the globe, and in defiance of NATO’s original purpose of defense of the North Atlantic region. After 1999, NATO not only grew but diversified.The partnerships more than anything appear to be a pretext for an international alliance without the international legal framework of the United Nations, but with the US as the driving force of its own geopolitical strategy. The eighteen Partners for Peace were largely former Warsaw nations, including Russia and Ukraine, and some other European nations. In June 2020 NATO made up a new category for Ukraine, Enhanced Opportunities Partner, inching closer to - but not reaching - the coveted membership. Ukraine is now one of six” Enhanced Opportunities Partners” alongside Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan and formerly Sweden, which recently became a member. The “enhanced” status of Ukraine was designed by the US to explicitly move into the defining border with Russia - a border Russia has said for the past 20 years that they would defend if NATO pushed. Ukraine elected a leader in 2014 to repair Russian relations, a country divided between Europe and Russia - a leader removed with the help of the US- and now with a current leader who campaigned on a peaceful resolution with Russia. This is not about whether or not Putin is a bad man, any more than the Iraq Wars were about Sadam Hussein being a bad man. They are bad men. This is about the lack of a rule of law, lack of rules of military engagement, and the highly questionable military decision making of our country, the United States government, by proxy. This is also about the US as the leading arms merchant in the world, selling arms to those same NATO nations, and many others, including dictatorships and theocracies. The “Mediterranean Dialogue” is a partnership forum that “aims to contribute to security and stability” in the wider Mediterranean region, including Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia. The “Istanbul Cooperation Initiative” is a partnership forum that offers non-NATO countries in the broader Middle East region “the opportunity to cooperate with NATO.” To date, the following four countries include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE. Then there is, Partners Across the Globe, or NATO’s “engagement with…global partners…where many of the challenges the Alliance faces are global and no longer bound by geography,” including Afghanistan, Australia, Colombia, Iraq, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Pakistan. This loose alliance represents a strategy not bound by international law, checks and balances, or any form of public review of its decision making process, which is mostly behind closed doors. Part II of our discussion of NATO will delve more deeply into NATO military incursions, including its first combat operation in its 40 year history, when it shot down four Bosnian Serb aircraft in 1994, considered by many to be in breach of international law. September 11, 2001 resulted in NATO invoking its collective defense provision, Article V, for the first time, although no nation was explicitly proven to be the culprit. NATO responded by commanding over 130,000 troops from more than fifty “alliance and partner” countries in Afghanistan, until the United States and NATO allies withdrew their final 10,000 troops in 2021. Ukraine, not unlike Afghanistan, has been heralded as a conflict of brief duration as long as the US, and to a lesser extent other NATO members and “partners” up the arsenal. But it is important to remember, as you fly that blue and yellow flag, that shortly after the US departed from Afghanistan, the Taliban quickly regained the control they possessed twenty years later, after some 1T (trillion) US dollars had been spent. Finally, Part II will look more closely at the chronology of events that resulted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NATO has become an ethereal pretext, above international law, ungoverned and unbound from legal scrutiny or judicial recourse. NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg maintains this absolution from an historically US-led military strategic imperative when he said recently about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, “Stepping up our support does not make NATO a party to this conflict. The alliance does not seek confrontation with Russia.”
Weak or fictional states are the pretext for empire. For the US, it is Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. We are all more or less concerned for our old countries. But as we have been here longer, these ties are weaker. And as the countries are stronger, they are less important. Thus I have no fear that Britain or Germany will be taken. Those from these weaker states feel stronger concern. And some do not hesitate to call on all of us to send aid. Some call for blankets. Others, to send money or weapons. Still others to send in troops: that is to say, you and me. Although annoying, it is understandable. What is less, is the passivity with which the rest of us respond. Are you not aware? Have you any opinion? Do you think that if you do nothing nothing will happen? Or that you can do nothing and so nothing is worth doing? How ridiculous it would be if having done nothing, suddenly we were at war, and you radiated. We escalate slowly. Outcries are followed by money, which is followed by weapons, and finally troops. We were helping the Allies before Pearl Harbor: 77th Cong., 1st Sess., Chap. 10. The time is now. I assume this silence is complacency. Perhaps that is not so, but better to assume the worst. To this suspected audience, then, I say: Be it known that I have no beef with Russia or Ukraine. Whether they settle matters amicably, or it ends in annexation, I would not lift a finger. I am not interested in being the world police; nor in universal justice. If you wish to support her, go there and fight yourself. Please leave me out of it. But it isn’t either/or. First there is the dream, it is only that. Ukraine is too weak to be independent. Instead of fighting for the impossible, it ought to question nationalism. It is a false idol. The US has it, but is nevertheless a no man’s land: party-politics and resignation. Ukraine is still living in an 18th century fantasy: delayed gratification. It must find a way to live in Russia’s sphere of influence. Then there is the general appeal, sickly. The United States has been inclined towards war for a long time. It worked. Before WWII, we were in a depression. After, we experienced a period of affluence never seen before or since. Perhaps the Democratic Party leadership is so desperate for voters that they intend to return us. Neoliberalism has failed, and identity politics driven both halves of the population a bit too mad. What we need is a good old war. That means massive spending by the Federal Government, and when the rest of the world is ruined, like Europe was, they can buy our stuff. Think about it. Let’s kill people so we can get rich. Finally, there is the likely outcome. It won’t work again. When we dropped those two bombs on Japan, our enemies did not have any. Now they do. The Cold War was called that for a reason: nothing broke out. We have never fought Russia, and we have never fought China. We certainly haven’t fought them combined, plus the rest of BRICs. We entered WWII when both sides were broken down. We were the new player, who could undo the balance of power. It was an easy win. Now we are entrenched. And these enemy countries have had plenty of time to know us. For you to mull over. War is theatrical. It is human contrived. There is nothing necessary or judicious about it. The instigation is always insanity. This is now. Soon it could be here. If it happens, at least let it have been after you made an honest effort against it, if but in mere speech.
SHADOW BOXING
CHARLES SCHULTZ
“That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” What “men” are by their Nature! What “women” have been denied of their Nature! Trans-historical concepts are pernicious. Who likes all men? Who likes all women? I once dropped into a birthday party, with a bottle of French champagne, for a one year old baby. The aunt and grandmother of the child had, with pride, presented this unknowing being with “Baby’s First Book of Feminism.” I said, ‘That’s fine, as long as you also give him the Big Book of Bad Mothers.’ Those two women shot laser beams at me from their eyes, but they enjoyed the champagne. If you insist on exposing the nonsense of others, wise also to bring them a drink. ‘You hopeless morons are the craven and depraved subjects of a brutal empire. Yes, it’s a rare highland tequila...’ On the abstractions, an irrational goofball nation needs more: Eternal Racism. Fascism! We have to fight it. We have to. What fight? 10 million Japanese, 2 million Koreans, 3.4 million Vietnamese,1 million Iraqis. What fight against fascism? Well, Trump! We hate him! Here, with his near-set eyes is the tiny-minded Yale-bound Serious Man, Timothy Snyder, who lives in these terms. He wrote recently that one of the things that must happen, to forestall Trump’s fascism, is, “Big business should support democracy.” I’ll call them. If I could reach the late railroad magnate Jay Gould, he might reply with his famous quip, “The great thing about America is that I can pay one half of the working class to kill the other half.” I don’t think Tim wrote that hysterically laughing when he got another check for being vigilant in his fight against “fascism”. When Tim says, “Fascism!”, he is calling to the source of his career to declare his loyalty. He is unemployable if he doesn’t moan about Putin and Trump. Serve power or serve nachos. He’s staying on the right side of New Haven. Fascism? If it has a meaning at all -- endlessly abused as a term by these hustlers who, remember, do not care enough to examine their own prejudices, ever -- we know as the common practice of the endless bureaucracies of the United States of America and its formal, if highly symbolic, democratically elected government. It is unfair to Tim. He is just an Imperial Pervert. He is passionate about what he says. He just doesn’t wonder why Lockheed Martin sends him care packages at the summer camp that is the American University. But Putin! God and Dorks at Yale, shriek! Elites assume that they must control the masses, else chaos. But they forget that the masses can now listen to their plans. Tim Snyder would have lived, and been influential, in exactly the same way as his predecessors, the nightmare McBundy brothers and Walt Rostow (servants of the Democratic Party only because they didn’t know enough Mandarin to get in with Mao) but the internet puts him out there. You can see his position and bent of his interests. I don’t think I am the only American who knows that whenever someone tries to lecture you about any empire but the one we live in, reach for your wallet. Let me explain what happened in 2016. The Clintons thought that there was no chance that their hold on African American voters could slip. For sixty years, the Democratic Party polled around 95 percent of the Black vote. So they thought: they can only vote for us. And the Clintons’ had experience: In 1996, several moribund trade unions, still choking on NAFTA, said they would not vote for Bill Clinton. He replied, “Good for you. Vote for Bob Dole.” And the unions backed down. So given their idea of captive voters, they pursued this strategy: the future of the Democratic Party is white suburban Republican women. And the Campaign, so in touch with reality, went for it. Who didn’t? African Americans didn’t turn out in Philadelphia, and Detroit and Milwaukee. That was it. A Michigan Democrat congressman said that December, “She didn’t do any labor-specific events that I’m aware of.” Lots of those black people that didn’t go out to vote? Some current, many more former: union workers. Hillary ran no ads in Michigan, zero, until the last few weeks of the campaign. This is all very mundane. It would take a miracle not to understand it. At present, Identity performs that miracle. When it fails, you hear things about Russia. Or, the new “two-fer”, Do you know how gay people are treated in Russia?!
CLIMATE SACRIFICE
PAUL FENN
The State of Massachusetts is supposed to be the US leader in renewable energy and climate action, yet is actually a flop; but no one is admitting it because the Commonwealth is supposed to be a national leader. That’s already after it’s having flipped and flopped for nearly thirty years. All that’s left of this simulacrum are a few Draconian, profoundly harmful policies to force utility-scale power facilities onto rural communities throughout the region, such as in our rural communities here in the Northampton-Amherst sphere of influence. Urban areas - the cause of energy demand - remain off limits. This pattern has been underway with large solar projects on farm fields and forests for some years now, and people are fed up. Now transmission lines and energy projects beyond the scale of the communities forced to host them, threaten to make it worse. A very large grid battery array has been proposed in Wendell. Just across the border to the North, a massive new transmission line corridor is being forced on the voters of Maine, who voted against it, apparently thinking they were in charge of their state. Most disastrously, vastly expanded large hydro power is going to be imported into this country. The Governor and Legislature now cling to hydro, transmission and batteries as their climate solutions, happily obliging Massachusetts ratepayers to pay for this on our utility bills for the rest of our lives. We are made to pay to poison waterways and fish just over the border in Canada, where Quebec Indians - Cree and Inuit - have resisted their entire lives, facing yet more generations poisoned by the mercury, lead and arsenic that hydropower dams cause in rivers, lakes and bays (and all fish, their main food source), all around them. Do Red Lives matter? These Indians are the third layer of new sacrifice areas coming from above. Local impacts of conversion of wild lands and farms to grid scale “renewable” energy resources is second. Do Maine lives matter? All are being sacrificed in a compact to save the reputations of politicians and cover up the failure to decarbonize metro Boston and major urban areas - but also the failure of rural communities to get our acts together on climate. New York has joined Massachusetts’ neocolonial move. On December 31, 2020, Quebec Minister of the Environment Benoît Charette used his discretionary power to change regulations that eliminated the obligation of the Quebec government to conduct an environmental assessment in cases of an increase in power generation at hydroelectric facilities. The hydroprojects can now increase the flow of water through their turbines to generate power for Boston and New York without considering the impact of such modifications on traditional First Nations territories, or even consulting them. “This action by Benoît Charette constitutes a major infringement of the constitutional rights of First Nations,” say the First Nation tribes, “but this does not seem to worry the Minister too much. The concerns lie rather with the Anishnabeg of Kitigan Zibi, Lac Simon and Pikogan (Abitibiwini). Since they no longer have a say in an issue that directly affects the exploitation and preservation of their ancestral territory (Nitakinan), where....they asked to be heard in the context of a consultation on the interconnection line project, since the electricity destined to supply the State and the City of New York is produced in part on their territory,” they stated plainly. So rural Massachusetts is not alone in being oppressed by state preemption. Rural communities everywhere face being sacrificed to carbon-belching urban districts. The effort to preempt local community authority over permitting, and the promotion of high voltage power lines, are put forward as emergency measures following decades of federal, state and local inaction on climate. The Biden administration has pushed preemptive measures over Local Control; Massachusetts’ Democrats, presumed leaders in climate policy pretend to demonstrate Biden’s failed, very stupid, originally Republican, idea: that forcing transmission lines and centralized generation on communities is a climate pathway. It is not. Democrats used to protect Indians; Republicans used to protect Local Control. That is over. The State’s policies about how to change the energy system have failed and have now gone postal, but few people realize this disturbing fact. Republicans don’t want to address climate change at all, and Dems won’t admit their efforts have failed. Both parties botched the electricity industry restructuring a quarter century ago, but no one ever bothered to address this “bipartisan” disaster. Slouching forward from 1997 until now, after thirty years, the Massachusetts electricity industry remains in the hands of allegedly deregulated ex-monopolies that continue to control everything, and less-than-scrupulous energy traders and brokers offering fake “consumer choice” under minimal state rules. Stiff-armed by regulators and discouraged from implementing real change through local control, even municipalities with Green Municipal Aggregation programs throughout the state are mostly asleep at the climate change wheel, dreaming of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). Meanwhile, the solar industry, dependent on utilities for subsidies and payments, remains functionally captive to, and imprisoned within a “capped” ghetto by deregulated utility monpoly megalyths. The problem with living in a backward country, is that the most forward thinking people in such places also tend to be backward. A global climate nonperformer, U.S. makes Massachusetts look good. It has never been good. But given the megaproject “solutions” now being forced on rural areas, it’s crecendo of preemptive attack policies is actually harmful: worse than nothing. There’s no one in a void of looking busy who is actually seeking to decarbonize the buildings that are the source and cause of energy demand. Real change is a no man’s land in America. You cannot solve climate change without reducing grid and pipeline demand. To not go to this heart of climate crisis is this Original Sin that pervades all climate collapse: a lie made daily by captured state regulators and corrupted politicians. When states collapses, the people are sacrificed. Denying their ongoing failure to reform utilities, state leaders now see no alternative but to develop power plants out in the farm lands instead of encouraging farmers to farm, and in the forests - the remaining carbon sink, the surviving ecology after sprawl, and the happiness of people here. The First nations of Quebec have it worse. Situated in a huge area where Cree and Inuit live 620 mi north of Montreal, the La Grande River watershed, the Phase II multiterminal is 1,200–1,400 MW will deliver power from Québec’s Baie-James region to Sandy Pond substation just outside Boston. Massachusetts’ Governor and Legislature authorized two long-term power contracts to leverage bank financing to build the transmission lines in Maine. Similarly, Western Massachusetts towns targeted by lithium battery farm developers are ecologically sensitive sites with very small communities using very little electricity. They have no need for this scale of power. It is not for local towns, not for Quebec or Canada, but for metro Boston. And it is for show: by ostensibly “progressive” political elites seeking to prove climate leadership by the darkest, dirtiest, meanest path. Governor Maura Healey will set bad examples for other states to follow. First Nation tribes in Quebec has sued the provincial government to stop construction of the massive powerlines that will bring electricity from dams through Maine into Boston, because it will leverage the further poisoning of their lands and waterways by the Canadian and Quebec government. Similarly, Western Massachusetts towns like Wendell and Shutesbury are adopting local bylaws to block unwelcome large energy facility developers. Both towns are actively opposed by the Governor, Legislature and State Attorney General. Both the people of Wendell and the Tribes continue to fight. Maine seems at a loss what to do anymore after voting against it. We share a common oppressor. The sacrifice policy of Massachusetts is cannibalistic, It all goes back to electric industry restructuring 25 years ago and the imperative to transition the business model of energy for rapid decarbonization to work. Regulation failed, then deregulation failed, too, except for Community Choice Aggregation (“CCA”), which could introduce an authentic decarbonization pathway, and a few have tried under state regulators obstructing their way as these handmaidens to utility control have long done. In the policy stupor on Commonwealth energy hooch, municipalities have been slow to take responsibility, act locally, and really lead. CCA is the green elephant in the room that could make dams, transmission lines and megabatteries obsolete. CCAs are taking big leaps in some places, like in California, smashing national renewable power records of the utilities. But not Massachusetts. A new game is possible in which technologies to decarbonize power, heat, vehicles and waste generate energy at the point of use, not with mega-facilities or new transmission lines. Distributed Energy Resources can be built anywhere, and energy users can own them: not just the utilities and Wall Street. This is what a real energy transition looks like. The falseness of electric restructuring results in a falseness of renewable energy for citizens of the Commonwealth, many of the communities already being CCAs, among them several megabattery-threatened communities. Buying RECs, and well-intentioned, they are fooled by the State’s fictitious certificate trading system. These communities believe they are receiving actual renewable energy supply, when they are, in simple fact, not. They have merely paid for certificates that the State allows them commercially to call renewable energy, legally. It is simply not true, a state-sanctioned lie, another ineffective “market incentive.” The two prevailing methods of buying renewable enegy, solar net metering and RECs, conceal a true deception. Captured by the utility monpolies, the State continues to ignore the basic challenge of climate action, which is getting into the high density areas where people and businesses are, and decarbonizing those places with onsite renewable technologies that shrink grid and pipeline dependency. The State’s solar net metering system pretends that everyone may bank and sell their solar power back to neighbors using the grid, but eligiblity is radically limited to a small minority by both caps and an inherently limited funding source: ratepayers. Not everyone can be on welfare, because then there is no money to hand out. Blindly, a subsidy poses as a physical measure, as if that were a pathway to energy transition. It has brough severely diluted climate benefits. A mental sclerosis of electric restructuring, net metering and RECs define renewable policy today, and both produce a fictional environment with no pathway to energy transition. Change is becoming impossible. Carbon reductions must be physical, not theoretical. They have to be real. They have to actually occur! RECs and incentives, like carbon credits, all amount to carbon fraud, now well into the feared climate crisis. Those municipalities that have sought to administer ratepayer energy efficiency funds controlled by the utilities, have been body blocked by State regulators protecting utility control of the funds in spite of restructuring law provisions for CCAs to control them - not to mention protecting utility control over solar tariffs and other climate-related programs. The resulting failure to reduce energy demand now “requires” self-defeating, destructive megaprojects. In its self-inflicted paralysis, Massachusetts leaders have learned nothing, but instead seek “emergency” powers to force transmission and megabatteries on rural areas: the logic of sacrifice.We are not learning from what was taught by other states with CCA, Massachusetts having the oldest municipal aggregation law, it was called, so have the oldest dumbest version of the idea. If you just look at the landscape of energy policy and climate policy here, typical of US-wide failure, the failure of restructuring has led to a poisoned environment in which actual climate action becomes intellectually difficult. Instead rural towns across the state face these Draconian measures. People need to recognize the destructiveness and threat level of failed states to democracy and meeting addressable carbon by the UN 2030 deadline. That is different. Just not the Same Old Thing turned up to ten: what Governor Healey, Democratic legislators are doing, often with bipartisan support. Not white lies. Real Change.
ADAM SMITH IST EIN RHINELANDER
SCOTT LICHTENSTEIN
Germany is a tainted brand: like ‘Communism’, Marxism’ or ‘Socialism’ these labels are so loaded with baggage they obfuscate rather than clarify. I first became aware of the tainted Germany brand as a young teenager when the rabbi of my reform synagogue in Oakland, CA - wait for it – bought a Mercedes Benz!! The congregation were outraged, including if you can believe it the rich Porsche-driving lawyers and doctors of the congregation - presumably Porsches are too cool to be associated with the Holocaust. No one cared when the rabbi was driving a Ford from Henry who was a notorious anti-Semite - not the current fake kind labelled as such for criticizing Israel’s inhumane abuses but the good ol’ fashion racially prejudice Fascist sympathizing kind. I liked playing a game when I taught leadership & change at MBA level or go to an academic leadership conference: I set my watch to see how long before Germany and Hitler’s name came up (‘a despicable man but an effective leader’) - it usually takes about 10-15 minutes. I’ve come to know the Germany behind the baggage having a daughter brought up in Berlin to my German ex-wife. The more the layers of German’s socio-economic model are uncovered, the more I marvel at the elegance of a model that we helped create after WWII but didn’t bother to use to improve our economic model. And we’ve forgotten what we already know: Adam Smith’s original ideal of a well functioning economy, where all prosper not just the few, gives clues to how to re-imagine it. Based on Adam Smith it’s Germany 1 United States 0. Blank Sheet of Paper After WWII during the Marshall era we helped West Germany set up their management & social-economic model with the purpose of creating socio-economic harmony to avoid the conditions for another Fascist regime. This was done by explicitly creating a socio-economic system based on cooperation, consensus and social justice to serve the interests of multiple stakeholders: a mutualistic system, like bees pollinating flowers allowing bees to feed their colonies and plants to reproduce. Germany has structural systems in place to achieve this, such as Co-determination ‘Mitbestimmung’ whereby employee representatives sit on companies’ supervisory boards. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall of those initial meetings between American Marshall era planners and their West German counterparts to discover why the hell the planners thought it was good enough for Germany but not the US. It would be like building Seattle, the last major city built in the US, and not adopting the latest in urban planning or learning from the experience of other major cities in the US. Why didn’t US policy geeks in Berlin take ‘best practice’ back to DC? Arrogance? Laziness? Complacency? To illustrate elements of the Rhineland model, my ex-wife, let’s call her Helga, was a single mother in her early 50’s when her employer, a corporate publishing company, was bought by a competitor. Amongst other mostly older employees, she was told she’d be fired; the less experienced younger and predominantly 20-30 year old males would be replacing them in the new corporate structure. Not so fast. In Germany, that list of those to be fired has to be shared with the employee representatives sitting on the supervisory board first. The employee representatives reversed the firing list based on German Federal law that stipulates the most vulnerable are fired last; those most able to find a new job are fired first. Helga was reinstated and still works there today. Unthinkable in Anglo-America. The systemic, long-term and elegance of the system is clear: if Helga as a single mother in her 50’s is fired she’ll be a burden on the state and most likely be under employed, i.e. not able to get a job at her current level for the rest of her career due to ageism. She spends her money in the community where she and her daughter lives strengthening the local economy which her job sustains. By keeping her job she doesn’t drain taxpayers’ money and she’s boosting the local economy. Contrast that with the 20 something digerati (digital literati) who not only will find a new job quicker but they don’t tend to spend their money in their local communities; rather, it’s spent on tech-bro city breaks to Barcelona, Paris, Las Vegas and in off-shore tax-‘efficient’ investment schemes thereby contributing less to the prosperity of the local economy. These German structural impediments to short-term bottom-line thinking leads to a far more resilient social economy. Helga had a heart attack a few years ago. The German health system sent her for a 2 month spa retreat to recuperate – I fell off my chair when she told me. Again, unthinkable in the Anglo-American system. Let that sink in the public health care system - not private - sent her on a 2 month spa retreat to get well. During her retreat she attended classes on nutrition, diet, yoga, leading to a much healthier and active lifestyle prolonging her health and sustained productivity. Adam Smith Revisited Socialism you say. Too many damn people in Europe riding in the economic cart and not enough pulling it right? That’s what the free market fundamentalists want you to believe. They tell you about Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ and ‘enlightened self-interest’ from the (1776) The Wealth of Nations and extoll the virtues of the great Chinese Jew ‘Max U’- maximizing utility – which underpins everything (certainly our amoral business school teaching where I work). The free market fundamentalists conveniently either forget or redact Adam Smith’s first book, (1759) Theory of Moral Sentiments, which laid the foundations for his second book. Smith was a moral philosopher first - economists didn’t exist back then, but if they did he would second be a behavioural economist, not the free market fundamentalist kind at all. What Adam Smith actually said was that economic systems based on private property would create social tensions requiring clear governance systems. Markets, like people, are not only not self-regulating, they are prone to excess and abuse. As such, the market requires a moral framework for personal behaviour and a set of governance rules which regulate the relative power exercised within and across social groups. His detailing of such principles called virtues and sentiments are linked to moral judgements. As a practicing Christian his words read like a sermon – an inconvenient truth to the amoral and immoral free market fundamentalist. Without clear guiding principles, rewards from commerce for the few will not sustainable prosperity for the many and prosperity for all would remain illusory and unachievable. He foresaw that ‘mere wealth and greatness, abstract from merit and virtue’ would lead to a gaming of the system. Adam Smith’s first instinct and wish was prosperity for all - the possibility of creating a better future where everyone contributed benefits: the ‘happiness of a great community’. Smith reminds us that since benevolence is the only motive that can make an action virtuous, the greater the benevolence an action shows the greater is the praise that it deserves, i.e. the actions which aim for the ‘happiness of a great community’. The Anti-Smith Shareholder Capitalism If we consider the extent to which organisational ownership structures are designed to deliver ‘happiness of a great community’, America’s ‘Turbo-Capitalism’ juiced by the publicly traded shareholder model is amoral at best, immoral at worst. Under this model, the key decision-makers are the Directors acting solely on behalf of shareholders. The major shareholders of modern corporations are an elite group of the very richest in society including institutional shareholders. In the US, 1% of the shareholders own 2/3rd of all shares. Major shareholders vote - 1 vote for every share - for the Board of Directors, typically comprised of 12-20 Board members. The 1% who own most of the shares decide the outcome. An economic model whereby the mass of people, employees and the communities within which corporations operate are legally and practically excluded from key decisions, by definition, cannot deliver inclusive ‘happiness of a great community’. Nowhere in nature is there an equivalent magnitude of such self-centred exclusive hoarding. Ever see a fat lion? Of course not: nature only takes what it needs. Leave it to humans to break with the natural world that we are part of to create financially obese ‘fat cats’. Adam Smith would argue commerce without morality is like politics without principles, education without character or science without humanity: they are not only useless but positively dangerous. The Hidden Champions At the heart of the German economy is the Mittlestand medium-sized firms which account for the largest share of the country’s economic output, employing about 60% of all workers in Germany. The Mittlestand are known as the ‘Hidden Champions’: ‘hidden’ because they tend to be in business-to-business segments e.g. Hauni (cigarette machines), Webasto (sunroofs and auxiliary heating systems for cars), or Dorma (door control hardware and systems moveable walls), but also because they eschew the aberrant self promotion of their US celebrity CEO counterparts and prefer to role up their sleeves and quietly focus on being #1 or #2 in their global niche, hence, ‘champions’. Most of these companies are family-owned and based in small towns, yet they hold market shares of up to 90% in worldwide market niches. Hidden Champions are like pocket-sized multinationals, with on-average employing 2,037 employees, an average sale volume of $326 million, very high operating profit margins, prize employee loyalty and have an export rate of 66%. And boy do they export: a country ¼ the size of the US has about the same exports as share of world GDP as the US. The dominant discourse of the corporate owned media would have you believe the anti-Smithian US shareholder capital model is the only game in town. Germany’s alternative socio-economic and corporate model is far more aligned with Smith’s concept of a beneficent economy of prosperity for all and serves as a poignant alternative to the mofos that put ‘neo’ in front of a perfectly good word ‘liberalism’ to peddle their propaganda. Making Smith Non-Fiction Again The World Economic Forum back in 2020 proclaimed re-imagining and renewing the American-style broken socio-economic architecture as this generation’s defining task. Nobel Prize winning Joseph Stiglitz economist (2001) and ex-president of the World Bank in 2012 warned about America’s slide from social cohesion to class warfare, “The political system seems to be failing as much as the economic system. (American) Capitalism is failing to produce what is promised and delivering on what was not promised: inequality, pollution, unemployment and the degradation of values and no one is accountable.” This is what Smith predicted of an amoral and immoral system. I disagree with Stiglitz: America’s corpocracy is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. As US President FDR observed as far back as 1936, the financial and corporate elite he termed the “economic royalists” rule with a new despotism: “wrapped in the robes of legal sanction and govern without the consent of the governed putting the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power.” Even back then he could see the political elite would be sock-puppets of the ‘economic royalists’: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by the organized mob.” Could you imagine an American president saying that today? Can you imagine an American president coherently stringing sentences together or not spewing a pack of lies? America’s current corpocracy makes FDR’s 1936 America look like the Archies. If policy makers have the benevolent intention, will and humility guided by Smith’s potent principles, German’s Rhineland model and other such mutualistic regenerative systems can provide potent examples for re imagining and revitalising America’s dysfunctional socio-economic system. Fortunately, there is a new generation of moral and amoral young social and environmental impact entrepreneurs imbued with the spirit of Adam Smith’s beliefs of a beneficent socio-economic and corporate system who are re-imagining and renewing America’s broken parasitic one. There are several practical steps we can begin with now. First and foremost, have the moral develop the amoral to become moral. Next, select out the immoral from organisations and don’t select them in; this will keep them from degrading our systems. Politics is the last bastion of human endeavour that doesn’t use psychological testing to weed out the immoral: the military was an early adopted of this, why not also political parties & government? Moreover, stop wasting valuable time, money, energy and resources trying to develop the immoral: taker’s gonna take. According to neuroscientists, unless immoral taking is detected, and a therapeutic intervention is made before the age of seven years old they cannot be developed; they will never even become amoral. Empaths may squirm at this notion, but moral cowardice, particularly at board level, will only provide more fuel for them. My best guess based on research and anecdotal conversations with therapists is that the immoral make up approximately 30% of the working population. The moral and amoral must cushion themselves from the immoral, as anyone who has been attacked by them knows. To protect yourself from the attacks of the immoral, outsource to a professional hired gun and let them fight it out in the court room, battlefield or (stock) market. So when an immoral taker cries ‘Discrimination!’ as they will because fighting is how they get their kicks, don’t take it personally: leave it to your systems, processes, governance procedures and professional hired guns to insulate you and the organisation. The organisation’s processes and governance systems will be tested, and in the long run this is a good thing. With the right intention, board level ethical fortitude and governance systems, the right tools and implementation plan the anti-Smithian global Corpocracy model can be eclipsed and Smith’s envisioned socio-economic system can become non-fiction.
AMERICAN POLITICS
IVAN FENN
The institutions that first defined America as a whole - the thirteen colonies, the Constitution, and the whole apparatus of federal republicanism - came into being through a real instance of voluntary association and consensus. This means that the social contract, and in particular the idea of a society based on consent as reflected in the freedom to dissent, was at least partially realized in our history. We take this fact for granted, but it is almost unique to us. In the European tradition, the social contract is merely a theoretical tool, a postulate of reason not tied to any known historical event. The idea of the French Revolution was that French society had to be corrected to better reflect a prior social contract; the French Revolution did not invent France as the American Revolution invented America. Historically, then, this principle of voluntary association is the kernel of our political existence, inseparable from the American identity. Because of this, it continues to exist in our political forms despite being somewhat irrelevant in actual practice. One manifestation of this is the balanced independence that pervades the organization of our government. The separation of powers exists not only within but between each of its three levels. State government is limited by federal government and local government by state government, but they are not unilateral extensions of one another. Each has, in varying degrees, an independent political existence. Local initiative is feasible, not as a form of delegated authority but as an authority unto itself balanced and limited by other authorities. In the UK, bylaws made by town councils are a form of delegated legislation and can only touch on areas not covered by existing laws. Their authority derives from Parliament as the lawmaking power. In the US, on the other hand, many states (including Massachusetts) uphold “home rule”: the municipality which creates a bylaw is the legislating entity, and the approval of the state legislature is not required so long as state and federal laws are not broken. Local law, though not sovereign, lives within its own domain. Towns do not exist simply because the state allows them to exist, as is the case in the UK and elsewhere. There is, I believe, a basic assertion of right in municipal incorporation. This distinction, though subtle, highlights the respect that is given voluntary association by American law, being the historical basis of America’s existence and therefore the core of American legitimacy itself. A municipality is simply a group of people choosing, of their own volition, to form a political relationship with one another; this is the distinctly American “right.” My aim here is not to passively glorify America. Rather, I am making a practical observation about the most effective political channel that is available to Americans. Elections, and representation generally, have proven to be a very ineffectual mode of political participation. In our next presidential election, we will be made to choose between a convicted felon and a party hack stand-in whose winning trait is that she is not decrepit. That is ridiculous. It points either to the complete dysfunctionality of representative democracy, or the utter buffoonery of civil society as a whole. Optimistically, I would assume the former to be closer to the truth. Thus, if we desire some measure of power and self-determination, it cannot be through voting. Voting is unsatisfying because it is abstract and weak, and never ceases to be so in our own experience. Instead of making us all equally powerful, it makes us all equally powerless; thin, like butter scraped over too much bread. What has to be recognized is that you as an individual can only find actual political expression to the degree that you can make your ideas attractive to the people around you while continuing to believe in their validity. If a group of people, even a small town, consent to participate in something that is not clearly illegal under state or federal law, there is a good chance it will be allowed. Considering that this type of association and consensus is America’s inalienable point of origin, it is difficult for the state to justify suppressing it. To oppose the exercise of this freedom is to cease being American in the most basic sense. A point of clarification. The type of political action I am describing is not necessarily initiated or organized by the group, though I have nothing against group politics. Instead, it may be presented by the individual and consented to by the group. The distinction is that this consent must be active, not passive. Passive consent consists merely in the lack of dissent; a decision is made by an established authority, and because there is no show of resistance, the tacit approval of the public is presumed. Active consent, on the other hand, is voluntary and motivated. It requires a real reaction, a positive response. Strictly speaking, this is the only sense in which “consent” ought to be understood. The term stems from com (“with”) and sentio (“to feel,” “to think,” “to desire,” or “to go”); one who does not feel or desire something, who does not actively respond to it, cannot be said to consent to that thing. In this sense, the passive consent of the public is not consent at all; it is simply those in power calling all the shots. Voluntary association presents an opportunity to escape this limbo of political dormancy. It is the only way that those not already established in the halls of power may have political influence, by virtue of the unique dependency that American legitimacy has upon it.
COMMON DEMAND
SURVIVING A MANMADE WORLD
GEORGE FENN
PAUL FENN
Community is universally accepted as a good. But it is often superficially applied. The word means “common”. Thus it can be applied to any instance where people are doing the same thing. Today, these abound. They occur under numerous names, such as: hobbies, clubs, teams, groups, institutions, associations, gangs. And they involve everything from stamp-collecting to motorcycle riding. This is a mistake. It is the dog returning to his own vomit. Each of these activities appear to be of value because they resemble mutual reliance, and because everyone must make a virtue of necessity. We live in a society so large that everyone is anonymous. We run about randomly, hoping to run into the right people, by means of fancies. Instead we should have around us those whom we need, and they us. And when I say “need”, I mean it in the profoundest sense: the support and control of life. I find this acheived in a certain form of local society. It consists of two things. The first is generic, democracy. The second is the structure on which it hangs. This is frequently neglected. I speak of self-sufficiency. Democracy is rule by the people. But most of the time there is nothing important. And it is a lot of trouble to get the people together. Thus most of the time there is no ruling. There must be something to exercise the body politic. Man needs certain things for himself and his family. These propel him to engage other people. In our current state, this drive is wasted. We go to alienated labor and international corporations. These relations without the democratic element remain worthless. Instead of strengthening us politically, we become convinced that we are alone: in this way the body politic remains flabby. To change this, the simplest step is to change how we spend money. But it will still require a paradigm shift. We are currently at the mercy of market-speak. We treat money as eternally useful. We seek to hoard as much of it as possible, for the voracious tomorrow. This is consumerism. The unthinkable is that we would purchase according to need and capacity, decided before the fact. Of course people make lists before they go shopping. But that is already too late. Necessity must be judged outside of the market. It must be done in peace and quiet: What do I need? What can I afford? And each thing considered should be scrutinized. Only by doing this can you maturely suggest what local business there should be. The question then is, how to consume locally? It becomes a reason for democracy. “Buy Local” and “No Farms No Food” are the slogans of private life, and they don’t work. The rich and groovy are a minority, and we speak of no aristocracy. So local business must push beyond. But where are they? Instead of waiting for anyone to come along with the thing you need, demonstrate local demand. Let it precede supply. Many are resigned to the idea that local business is passe. They turn it into a fetish. It comes to superfluity. Thus there are restaurants, cafes and overpriced markets. The principle is spending more. This is a mistake. It should be a question of where. The problem is that most of your money goes elsewhere. You don’t need to invent demand, only to organize it. There is a modern habit of calling people “consumers”. This is to reduce us to mere indolent animals: they too can “consume”. It draws attention from the ways: private and public. When we do things as individuals we are weak. We are swallowed into a niche of “like minded”, from which we never escape. Our right as citizens, however, allows us to organize on a large scale, locally. Form a Town Board of Local Economy. Introduce as an article on the town warrant a program for the aggregation of purchasing power. It might be to learn what necessity the citizens would be interested to buy locally, of what quality, how many or much they would consume annually, and at what price per unit they could afford. Select amounts that would include at least the majority. Nothing need not be final. It is about starting. Then with the population calculate what that would bring. Write a request for proposal. Publicize it throughout the town by all means. Share with neighboring municipalities. See what response you get. By defining demand, you will have a chance at general affordability, and therefore local society.
Per Fluoryl Alkyl Substances (PFAS) are known as “forever chemicals” because they are designed not to break down, and accumulate in the blood of all people, water, soil, and living creatures, causing cancer, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, and kidney disease. The magnitude of exposure through accumulation of PFAS over the entire world make PFAS a public health crisis on the magnitude of climate change as an ecological crisis. They are present in the blood of every American, detectable in all water, huge swathes of US farmland has been contaminated with them, and a substantial percentage of drinking water is considered unsafe due to the levels of them. Whereas we can blame climate change on our “need” for energy, it is impossible to find a “need” for PFAS. They were never needed. They were developed solely for alleged convenience, such as the convenience of a Teflon pan, one of the major sources of PFAS in human blood. There were perfectly good nontoxic alternatives for everything that PFAS replaced by being more convenient. That is all. PFAS contamination of virtually all farm soil, all forests, all rivers, all lakes, all oceans, and all creatures proves the utter uselessness of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), just as climate change proves the uselessness of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both are hobbled by a corrupt and aggressive U.S. House of Representatives, which have used the purse to rein these agencies in, contorting them into monsters whose real function is to legalize toxic products and normalize them in American people’s minds. Ironically, people who distrust government still consume products uncritically, assuming it must be safe if it is allowed to be sold. After all, the same system that allows corporations like 3M to poison everyone also severely regulates small farmers for backward things like cheese and nut allergy safety. While wholesale fraud and assault is allowed in retail markets, severe oversight regulates the little guy. And it’s not like there is any real exit strategy: state governments like Massachusetts not only allow PFAS to be sold but allow garbage haulers everywhere to run landfill leachates full of every imaginable PFAS and other toxics to be run through municipal sewage treatment plants, which not only doesn’t remove or destroy PFAS, but chemically intensifies their breakdown and transforms them into into new, unknown chemical chains. This very day, your own town is dumping this into a nearby river. Your state continues to dump PFAS-laced sewaged as “biosolids” on farms, today! Yet you can fish? Oh yes, the state encourages that, with a few vague safety warnings. After all, the rivers are already contaminated with mercury and other “traditional” toxics from the 20th century. And you can eat it in your food. If you stop consuming PFAS now, you will be less likely to die or get deathly sick from it. So, you will have to discard many of your possessions, or replace and dispose of them, when you can, with traditional nontoxic alternatives that PFAS were manufactured to replace. Don’t believe the hype and buy “new” plastic products. Get rid of: 1. Teflon or any nonstick pans. Use olive oil and coconut oil. 2. Fleece like Patagonia. Cotton inside wool. 3. All plastic and water proof clothes. Get the old oilcloth coats and pants like Filson’s 4. Non-organic food. All else is legally grown with PFAS-contaminated sewage. Everywhere. Try to buy organics from farmers directly, such as a farmers market or subscription. Local is better. Imported food is stupid, even organic. Learn to cook seasonally. 5. All packaged foods. All food containers are highly toxic, shockingly many with PFAS. Buy food fresh. Learn how to cook. 6. Makeup - just stop. It’s almost all contaminated, often making other people sick not just you. 7. Restaurants, nearly all of which continue to use nonstick pans and Teflon tools, and buy cheap ingredients that are more likely to contain toxics. Learn how to cook. It’s actually easier to cook if the food itself is good. 7. All plastic bags. Use paper, wax paper, cloth, etc.. The old stuff. 8. Shoes. Get leather shoes and boots, and put mink oil on them once a month. Check ingredients carefully, some have PFAS. You can ask manufacturers whether they have PFAS. 9. Cooling and heating appliances that leak: since the Ozone crisis and post chlorofluorocarbons, most new refrigerants in AC, heat pumps are so called X Gen chemicals, which are PFAS. Many of these appliances routinely leak. That means PFAS vapor in your home. 10. Plumber’s tape or Teflon tape. PFAS. Learn the old way, with hemp and grease. 11. Papers and inks. Even toilet paper! You have to shop carefully as PFAS are used to control ink drying and smudge resistance. 12. Tell your farmer to spread the word about biosolids and test the soil. If you don’t like it, get cancer. Or get mad. Or both. Tell your state to ban sale and use of PFAS, and to sue companies like 3M for making them and paying for getting rid of 40 years of 70,000 landfills drenched with them and killing us softly.....
VESTED RIGHT
ENERGY COLONIES
GEORGE FENN
PAUL FENN
Hydro-Quebec, a Canadian public utility, and Avangrid, a national, Iberdrola-owned, publically-traded, sustainable energy company - partnered to supply Massachusetts with electricty generated from hydropower. To this end, Avangrid got Maine government permission to cut a corridor. When the Mainers found out, they demanded the permission be undone. But by that time, it was too late. The judges said no. The developers had a “vested right”. The leaders of the movement are dead in the water. I spoke to one, whose response was dumb amazement. We had a public referendum, and 59 per cent of the population agreed. If that doesn’t work, nothing will. Well, I beg to differ. Perhaps this will: eminent domain. The planned corridor is a chain of parcels. Take one. Eminent domain is revealing of the nature of property. Property means ownership. One has it in a thing. But today everything is had by two persons: you and the state. Officially, it is the town; you pay it a property tax. You pay it more as the real estate you have property in has more value. If you do not pay, it will revert to its original owner. There is some fondness for exaggerating the similarity of municipalities to private corporations. We are paying for services. This is true of water and sewer. But you cannot opt out of roads and school. Nor are these insignificant, as any one familiar with town finances will tell you. School is by far the largest budget item, even while the number of children is not proportional to the aged. In feudal language, the distinction is allodium and fee simple. Either it is held of no superior, or it is held in return for a service. That is to say, it is you who are the servant. “Eminent” is a modern usage, perhaps in an attempt to create a break from the past. It introduced the idea that taking something can be more than a fight between individuals. It is associated with Republics, and has more of a sense of altruism, than tyranny. Now it is the “the people’s”. “Domain”, meanwhile, is ownership. One has dominion over something. It is one’s domain: a synonym of property. Thus it is best understood as a verb. The public takes by virtue of its original ownership. Eminent domain has two sides. On the one hand it is oppression, on the other hand power. If it means taking what you have, it should be minimized. If it means taking what the developers have, maximized. Most people in the US associate it with the former. Idealism frequently stops short of committing that ultimate sin. Far be it from me to suggest a distribution. I think there are few things better than owning your own land. But I also think the fear of losing it is crippling. The general reason to fear eminent domain is that you are politically alienated. You think common actions are more bad than good. You think should a reversion of property occur, it would do you the same. Perhaps it would be direct; perhaps society collapse, indirect. In both cases, you do not have enough control. Three particular reasons make this attitude convincing: Western Expansion, Russian/Chinese Communism and experience. The first because there was a lot of basically free land. On the one hand, all you had to do was remove Indians: the government let you. On the other hand, this disordered acquisition felt unsteady: call it a guilty conscience. But let me tell you something: the Indians are gone. And despite all the publicity, reparations on a large scale will not occur. Second, is the Red Spectre. Neither people was democratic. Both were previously feudal empires. And the slope is not so slippery after all. Communism is rightly named, in preaching common ownership. This was done from the beginning. This is different from doing violence to private corporations of a certain size. The third impediment is the hardest. In my experience, eminent domain has always done more harm than good. The thing taken establishes new conditions, which ruin everything. Thus the railroads received land by eminent domain, and created national society. Powerlines were set down likewise. All so-called “services” tend to include more or less of it. And all of them tend to prop up the potential for centralization: increasing market size. The other eminent domain - it could be said - is the draft. The state is in control of your body. It periodically kills you. But I suspect these are all the result of the size of “the people” and the government, than anything wrong with publically taking something. At the level of hundreds of millions, neither accountability nor individual influence are possible. Your vote is wasted. Parties take over, and we are relegated to spectators. This is especially true for us, a nation of immigrants addicted to religious liberty. But there are also towns. These too are bodies politic. Corporations as persons is a merely legal fact: should not be understood morally. To take from one is not to wound. Perhaps you think the rowdy mob will get you. Remember this: you are the majority. Everyone loves their gun and privacy. Violating a legal fiction needn’t be revolution. Thus if a solar farm or grid battery or any project of a large corporation enter your town, you should be able to seize just enough land to stop it. People are busy. They haven’t time to be on top of everything at the official moment.
Wendell and several other Massachusetts communities are battling pressure from developers, Governor Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell to host utility-scale battery projects whether they like it or not. “No Assault & Batteries” was formed by Wendell residents late last year in opposition to a proposed 105-megawatt battery storage facility, which is given “renewable” status by the state, as are, oddly, huge hydropower projects. Canadian hedge fund-owned New Leaf, which submitted a petition to the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board in January, 2023 seeking exemption from the operation of the Town of Wendell’s Zoning Bylaws, dropped it after the Massachusetts Attorney General disapproved of the 2022 amendment’s addition of a provision to its Bylaw that provided that “stand-alone battery storage facilities” such as New Leaf’s Project are not a subject to local permitting. Now the question is being fought out before a new state entity set up by the Governor to force large energy facilities on communities in the Commonwealth. A 250 MW battery in Medway and 150MW battery in Carver are already in progress. Wendell’s fight will set important precedents for all rural Massachusetts communities in the coming years. A decision will soon be made between systemic change and human sacrifice: to industrialize a newly colonized countryside with megaprojects? or decarbonize the Commonwealth’s eastern urban areas, particularly Boston, that demand the vast majority of energy and cause the vast majority of carbon emissions! To stop them, local communities need to both fight the fight and act positively to demonstrate renewable alternatives to megaprojects. The Governor’s newly formed Commission on Energy Siting, Infrastructure and Permitting (CESIP), held two public meetings, on March 4 and 5, before issuing a series of draft recommendations a week later that push hard for the state to preempt local control over this kind of permitting. Nearly all public participants in these meetings, representing Wendell, Greenfield, Amherst, Leverett, Shutesbury, Montague and Shelburne Falls, as well as communities throughout the state, expressed stong concern about preserving traditional Local Control (home rule) and opposed the state taking this power away, not making all decisions in Boston by long-dysfunctional regulators and moribund Legislature, especially given that responsiblity for oversight of such facilities will inevitably be local. No one at the meetings was for preemption except the megabattery developer and the State’s “leaders.” A resident of Charlton pointed out that large grid battery projects should be sited more in cities and towns in and around Boston, where the energy is most used. Or perhaps nongrid batteries, I would add, such as 50,000 electric vehicles with bidirectional chargers? Greefield Board of Health chair Glen Ayers focused on public health and environmental justice communities, and doesn’t see that the state will protect Wendell residents at the local level: “We might need another Shay’s Rebellion.” Attorney Meg Sheehan of Plymouth spoke of the environmental degradation caused by a similar large battery project in Carver to cranberry bogs, sand removal and industrialization of rural locations. ReGenerationMA stressed that farmland is needed to keep producing crops. Others raised the spectre of new bills in the legislature to get rid of the “Dover amendment,” which is used by megabattery developers to seize the same permitting privileges as home solar photovoltaic owners above municipalities’ industrial zoning decision-making. Another large “dual use” energy project on Northfield farm land by Blue Wave Energy was mentioned by opponents of preemption. Resident Gloria Kegeles wondered why her town would approve an explosive, toxic, industrial-sized lithium ion battery facility in the middle of a 90% forested place like Wendell nearby the Quabbin Reservoir - Boston’s drinking water supply - threatening a forest fire in Wendell State Forest and the State’s largest Audubon Sanctuary. Public comment was overwhelmingly negative. Robotically, despite strong opposition and no supporters except developers, the CESIP Commission’s report to the Governor is nevertheless now calling for “consolidated local review” of battery projects 100 MW in size or bigger at the state level, aka pre-emption of local government permitting authority. One wonders what is the point of public input in this zombie process. Local home rule is proposed to be entirely removed under either scenario, and communities will be at the mercy of utility handmaidens, the Mass Department of Public Utilities. On cue, the Attorney General now threatens to invalidate local municipal bylaws that oppose battery facilities based upon zoning. Do poor lives matter? The Town of Athol appears to have thrown in the proverbial towel, recently adopting a Bylaw that leaves its residents vulnerable to development of a large scale battery. “No Assault and Battery” in Wendell, however, is ramping up efforts to oppose Governor Healey’s misguided climate crusade against Local Control, and will likely find allies in Quabbin, Franklin and Hampshire county communities, and statewide. Meanwhile, Representative Jeffrey Roy (D-Franklin) has sponsored Massachusetts legislation to give such permit authority directly to utilities! We are trapped. In the meantime, Western Mass. towns, better connect the dots, get engaged and make it happen before it happens to you!
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