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Thomas Paine Would Have Loved Van Jones

Thomas Paine Would Have Loved Van Jones
Monday 14 September 2009
by: Kelpie Wilson, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

It's been a nail-biting time for liberals, wondering if President Obama would have the strength to take on the right-wing bullies who ran amok in our public life throughout August's Congressional recess. It was a relief to hear the president in his health care address confront the lies directly and to hear him stand behind his preference for a public health care option. But Obama's failure to defend Van Jones, his green jobs adviser, is still a big disappointment and we need to understand why it happened.

Why was Glenn Beck able to drive Van Jones out of office? Jones did nothing that was illegal or immoral. Some of his views and opinions, now or in the past, are not popular with some people, but that doesn't make them "fringe" or "crazy" or "reprehensible," all epithets used to describe them. "Crazy" is more applicable to Beck, who seems to believe he is channeling the American revolutionary Thomas Paine: Beck titled his own book "Common Sense"; Beck produced a series of nutty videos where an actor portraying Tom Paine spouts angrily about taxes and illegal immigrants; Beck has Tea Party protest signs that say, "Tom Paine Rocks."

Let's take a look at the charges against Jones and try to understand why the president couldn't just ignore Glenn Beck. Then let's look at how we can reclaim the spirit of this country and make progress toward a more just, free and secure life, in accordance with the ideals of Thomas Paine.

Women’s Café

Here in Takilma, Oregon, we have an amazing event every year on International Women’s Day called Women’s Café. Women from all over the valley get together to applaud each other's efforts at everything from poetry and music to bellydance. Barbie dolls, bible stories and excerpts from The Vagina Monologues have all shared the stage. This year, my friend Deb Murphy, who is the indefatigable organizer of this event and its terribly amusing emcee, asked me to get up and talk. Some years I yak and some years I bellydance. This was a year to talk. Here are some excerpts from my riff on “Women and the Earth,” the theme of this year's International Women's Day:

It would be nice if I could just talk about women and the earth tonight, but I can’t. I have to include a third party that keeps butting in here and that’s the economy.  I’ll start by telling you about my favorite woman economist and end with some inspirational words from the deep ecologist Joanna Macy.

Women’s concerns are very much like environmental concerns. They are continually relegated to the status of a “special interest” and placed outside the central concern of the economy which is making money. …

I quoted from an article I wrote in 2006 about Hazel Henderson, the “housewife economist” who is famous for her quip: “economics is a form of brain damage.”

Then I told the story of the women in Iceland who are not concerned with "stimulating" their economy to “rise again,” but are focused on restructuring it to work better for society.  I love their idea of doing “emotional due diligence” on the companies they invest in. Toxic corporate culture and greed have been our downfall. Let’s leave it to women to get us out the mess. I sure wish Obama would put a bunch of sharp women like that in charge of the US Treasury.

I closed with some words of encouragement from the deep ecologist Joanna Macy from our interview in Yoga Plus Joyful Living:

KW: Your book World as Lover, World as Self is subtitled Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Is courage what we need in these times?

JM: Yeah. I’m a sucker for courage. We are naturally courageous because we naturally love life, just as we thirst for water to drink, air to breathe. We have a battery of senses with which to engage our world. We have minds that can choose, and we want to be alive. Life wants to go on, and so we can feel the currents of life carrying us into fresh, original, unexpected paths of healing, if we’re not closed down. To overcome fear you have to look at what you’re afraid to see.

In central myths of our world’s traditions, the journey of the hero is to go down into the dark and face the monster, face what he doesn’t want to see and then, breaking through that, realize that he is strong enough to face what has appeared so terrifying to him. Then, he comes into his full magnitude and power of being.

Courage Of The Shambhala Warrior

KW: When you recover this courage—is that when you become what you call the Shambhala Warrior?

JM: I use that metaphor from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. We need to find and we can find those qualities of the warrior within us, the courage. I’m not afraid to use warrior language because it summons up keen attention and strong will and spunk and passion for life. We’re much tougher than we think.

Women's Economic Choices

A couple of interesting news items today about women and the slumping economy. Women in Iceland are not focused on "stimulating" their economy to rise again, but rather on restructuring it to work better for society. This is extremely refreshing and reminds me again how I wish Obama would include more women in his economic team. I wouldn't mind either if he would ditch the sexist Larry Summers who doesn't seem to have any great new ideas.

Here's the article in Guardian. The singer Björk is involved in setting up a green investment fund as part of the recovery effort. Here's what the fund manager, Halla Tómasdóttir, said:

"Our Björk fund is to focus on sustainable growth. Iceland was the first in the world into the crisis, but we could be the first out, and women have a big role to play in that. It goes back to our Viking women. While the men were out there raping and pillaging, the women were running the show at home... We have five core feminine values. First, risk awareness: we will not invest in things we don't understand. Second, profit with principles - we like a wider definition so it is not just economic profit, but a positive social and environmental impact. Third, emotional capital. When we invest, we do an emotional due diligence - or check on the company - we look at the people, at whether the corporate culture is an asset or a liability. Fourth, straight talking. We believe the language of finance should be accessible, and not part of the alienating nature of banking culture. Fifth, independence. We would like to see women increasingly financially independent, because with that comes the greatest freedom to be who you want to be, but also unbiased advice."

Then there was this item from US News and World Report:

Lost Your Health Insurance? Consider Planned Parenthood Clinics

It's no surprise that as the economy falters, many women are praying that their birth control doesn't fail, and some women have consciously decided to postpone having a baby in this recession. Many of those without insurance have been swarming into Planned Parenthood clinics to get free or subsidized contraception, Deborah Kotz reports. In fact, a spokesperson from Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania says it has seen a 10 percent increase in the number of women coming into its local centers in the past three months, and many of them are recently unemployed. The Yuma Planned Parenthood in Arizona saw 260 new patients from November 2008 to January 2009, up from 171 new patients during the same period a year earlier. And the affiliate in east-central Iowa now adds about five or six women each day to its patient roster where it used to add about that many a week.

Well, with Planned Parenthood laying off workers, they are not going to be well-equipped to handle the rush for their services. The "gender stimulus gap" means that new federally funding for women's reproductive health is not on the way... yet.

I found the bit about postponing babies due to the bad economy very interesting. This is at the root, I believe of the extreme negative reaction to "Octo-mom," Nadya Suleman. Sensible people don't see this as a good time to add more economic burden to their own families, so they are outraged that someone would add such a burden to taxpayers.

Development vs. Growth

The conversation about energy and population continues at Dot Earth. Here is my latest post there:

Dear Steven,

Thank you for your challenging assignment (post #151) to think about growth vs. development. I agree with your association of growth with bigger and development with better. Ed Abbey put it this way: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

I also look at growth as the ideology of the predator class. If you are a wolf you will favor unrestrained growth of the sheep. If you are a master you will bank on the proliferation of your slaves. Capitalism justifies the growth ideology in Ponzi scheme terms: if the growth is great enough, a little of it will trickle down to everyone.

So, we understand now that infinite growth on a finite planet is madness. What then, is the alternative? What is development and can it substitute as an economic driver for physical growth?

We already see that a lot of what constitutes GNP is not growth in any beneficial sense. The example of the Exxon Valdez oil spill is a good one. Exxon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a "clean-up" of Prince William Sound. A lot of idled fishermen were employed and a lot of filthy crude was pushed around, but nothing was produced and nothing was even really cleaned up, yet those dollars all counted toward the Gross National Product that year.

Given that "growth" doesn't always produce anything useful, what would constitute "development?" I used the term "de-development" as a prescription for the "over-developed" nations like the US. But perhaps "re-development" is more inline with our needs. For instance, heating, cooling and powering 100 million US residences accounts for 20 percent of our energy use. Our houses are less efficient than they were 40 years ago. Re-development would retrofit these houses with better insulation and energy efficient appliances. This would put a lot of people to work. The Obama administration is counting on it.

But we have to go a lot further down the re-development path than that. We need to re-localize and build community at the neighborhood scale because village level organization of food and energy production is the level at which the best efficiencies can be had. For example, a small combined heat and power system could provide a city block of houses with heating, hot water and backup electricity on a couple hundred pounds of wood chips a day. Central power plants would just waste the heat. And electricity generated right at home has no transmission cost.

Another opportunity to re-develop America into networked neighborhood virtual villages is the current foreclosure epidemic. About 15 percent of housing stands vacant now. Neighborhood associations should get ownership of some of those houses so they can be turned into community centers and communal kitchens. Neighborhoods that grow some of their own fresh vegetables and dedicate space to preparation and sharing of home-cooked whole foods will produce healthier people.

The eco-village is the green development path that I hope that both rich and poor worlds can converge upon. Perhaps that seems wildly unrealistic, but what if we stopped assuming that population was going to reach 9 billion by 2050? What if we assumed instead that population is going to peak at 7 billion in the next few years and drop back down to 6 billion or less by 2050? We should not treat growth as inevitable. People in the US are already starting to choose a different "small is beautiful" path. Here is one small but telling example: watching videos on cell phones is now just as "cool" as watching them on giant energy hog plasma screens.

By 2050 we need to provide 5 billion people each with a cell phone, access to a computer and the electricity to run it, good quality food, water, health care and shelter, along with some leisure to enjoy life. To me, that is the goal we are aiming for, not unlimited energy and growth.

My Dot Earth Comment - and a response

My comment on Andrew Revkin's NY Times blog, Dot Earth, was selected as an editor's choice comment. Thanks to Lou Gold for alerting me to the thread. Also thanks to Lou for his response to my Dot Earth comment in the comments section below.

I was commenting on this post: Could Energy Success Backfire in the End? Could cheap non-polluting, renewable energy lead to a huge new burst of population growth?

Here's my comment. It's another riff on the Stimulus Gender Gap topic:

Thus far in human history, an increase in available energy has always led to an increase in population growth. There are a few instances where civilized societies have maintained a steady state - these are all island nations. Some were found in Polynesia. Edo Japan is the best example.

So-that means that tackling population growth head on is an absolute necessity, whether we can increase the energy available to us or not, ultimately it makes no difference. Let us heed the words of Engels on this. Engels hated Malthus and thought the idea of population outstripping resources was ludicrous, but still said this:

"There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the producion of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. It does not seem to me that it would be at all difficult in such a society to achieve by planning a result which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning in France and Lower Austria. At any rate, it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ to the purpose. I do not feel called upon to make proposals for giving them advice about it. These people, in any case, will surely not be any less intelligent than we are."

Engels' abstract possibility is very real to most of us today. Some still can't see it, but as food prices climb ever higher, the mismatch of population and resources on our planet will soon be undeniable. We are those people who must decide how to deal with overpopulation. Fortunately, the solution is not that hard. Just give women the choice and the means to prevent or end pregnancies that they do not want. Accompany that with education about ecology and economic alternatives to motherhood and the problem is solved. Unfortunately, regressive patriarchal forces are incapable of conceding reproductive control to women. Maybe that's the best argument there is for "communism" or some similar economic revolution. It may be the only thing that can topple the patriarchs from power and start the flow of funds to women's health and welfare.

Even our beloved Obama administration allowed funds for women's reproductive healthcare to be stripped from the stimulus package. Women's health is not a side issue. It is THE issue of our time.

— Kelpie Wilson, Cave Junction, Oregon

The Stimulus Gender Gap

Move On wants us to sign a petition to Obama asking that he place a real progressive in charge of health care. Here is the message I added to the sign on:

 Please end the gender gap in the stimulus. We need investment in the "soft" parts of life not just the "hard" things like roads, bridges and weapons. We know that government has a crucial role in creating wealth by spending it into existence. As Winston Churchill said: "There is no better investment than putting milk into babies." The same goes for investing in health and education for our people.

NPR's Crude Trashing of John Maynard Keynes

There's nothing that ticks me off more than economists who pretend that their black art is actually a science. Just because they use math, mainstream economists think we will believe that their equations describe the real world of resources and people that makes up the economy. These wizards who in actuality are nothing but casino managers, are especially concerned that we might switch allegiance to a different brand - communism, or just as bad - Keynesianism!

Last night NPR aired a totally unbalanced piece on John Maynard Keynes that proved beyond all doubt that Republicans and Wall Streeters can't come anywhere near a scientific or even an intellectual argument challenging the man's ideas, so they are left with attacking his personality. NPR commentators Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg charged that Keynes was an elitist, anti-semite, bohemian pottymouth. Why no mention of his homosexuality? Probably because the gay lobby is too powerful and easily riled. Unlike gays, bohemians still don't get any respect. And the anti-semite accusation? Remember, we are talking the 1930s here. You could tar almost any prominent person in that age with all sorts of prejudices that no polite member of society would admit to today. Does that mean that our current economic leading lights are free of all moral taint? Please, don't make us laugh. It hurts too much.

So, after nearly five minutes of simmering in Adam Davidson's ad hominem stew, did we taste any actual refutation of the Keynesian idea that government spending can help revive a stalled economy? No. After admitting that government spending worked pretty well to get us out of the depression and build the post WWII economy, one commentator said that government spending failed to revive a slowing economy in the 1970s. Therefore, Keynesianism has been discredited.

That's it. That one statement was the entire argument against government spending. That and the goofy assertion that "government consumes wealth" and "only the private sector can create wealth."

These two points reveal the two big failures of mainstream economic theory. First, the economic slowdown in the 1970s had much more to do with the rapid rise in energy costs than with government investment. And second, if, as Jimmy Carter wanted, government had spent lavishly on renewable energy, mass transit and energy efficiency, can you imagine how much better off we would be today? Infrastructure is wealth, and only government can create it.

Despite comparing economists to Einstein, as this NPR piece does, mainstream economic theorists are incapable of understanding the real world of physical resources, especially the reality that there are limits to those resources. In their model, the economy is like a carburetor. If it starts to falter, you tinker with the airflow, that is, monetary policy. There's no possibility in your mind that the fuel could run out. You can't admit that the whole machine might be obsolete and it's time to build a new one because there's no way for private industry to accomplish that feat.

Economists hate government, because in a rational economy, there would be no room at the top for the free-for-all gambling casino that makes their class rich. In their eyes, it is the casino that actually generates the wealth because it draws in the money and money is like the air in the carburetor. So when the Fed opened the throttle wide last fall with zero percent interest rates and it failed to stop the stall, then what? Why is it Keynes who is being discredited now?

When their machine models fail, economists will invoke the Invisible Hand. You can model the economy as a machine or you can model it as a body. If it is a body, then private enterprise is the many hands reaching out to grab resources. The hands don't want to be governed, but in a body, the head needs to get involved or the hands will eventually get the body into big trouble. That's what Keynesianism is, in a nutshell - using your head. And that's not science, it's just common sense.

More Good News - DeFazio Gets Bus Money

The House Rules Committee today approved a bunch of amendments to the stimulus bill for consideration. One of the amendments is Peter DeFazio's provision to increase funding for mass transit investments by 3 billion dollars. It still has to be approved by the full House and the Senate. Keep the pressure on!

Good News for LNG Opponents

Just listened in on a webinar by Platts, the oil and gas industry analysts, on Obama's new energy and climate appointments and the contents of the stimulus package. This group is fighting to get their sea legs as the new approach to energy swells around them. Noting that the stimulus package has a big zero in it for the oil and gas industries and only sequestration research dollars for coal, they remark that renewables advocates are "buoyed." In the mode of "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, they had no comment on Carol Browner as Obama's new energy and climate czar except to say that oil and gas "don't have the same ally they had in the Bush administration. They did discuss Obama's acting FERC director, Jon Wellinghoff,  an opponent of LNG (liquified natural gas). It seems they feel LNG is in real trouble because of Wellinghoff's background as a "consumer advocate." Bad news for companies like Sempra Energy that are counting on LNG for their Southern California electricity market, but good news for consumers and the environment.

I tried to send the post below as a letter to the President, but the comments at Whitehouse.gov are limited to 500 characters!!! At change.gov you could actually communicate with the team. Here's what they say on the input form: "President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history." Just don't try to tell them anything that takes more than 2 or 3 sentences.