Letter to Barack #16: A Principle of Principles

Letter to Barack #16: A Principle of Principles

Dear President Obama,

The hopes of many hang by the slender threads of the pragmatic and communitarian ideals you express in every speech. In a speech to Wall Street financiers early in your campaign you said that Americans have always viewed the economy not as an end in itself but as designed to serve a higher purpose. From time to time Americans have redesigned the economy to improve its service of its higher purpose. You identified the higher purpose by saying, “We are all in this together.” My favorite line from your Inaugural Address was, “We can choose our better history.” You reminded your listeners that history can be read in many ways. We can choose our identity by choosing what we say we have always been. We can project our chosen identity into the future. In your recent Presidential Address to a joint session of Congress, the line that moved my soul was, “Problems are to be solved.” It was a short phrase that is true by definition. It was an invitation to cooperate. It was an echo of the line, “We are not quitters,” penned by a young correspondent who wrote you a letter. A principle of principles.
“Problems are to be solved.” This principle implies a humanitarian solidarity you have often explicitly asserted. You have often said we are going to solve our problems “above all together.” The problem-solving intention is to solve the problems of Main Street, of the people, in short of everybody. We are going to transform America from the bottom up, not from the top down. To drive home the point that you are talking about transforming civil society, not just about reinventing government, you invited to the Presidential Address as special guests a man from Florida who shared his retirement bonus with his employees, and a young lady from South Carolina committed to improving her school. You praised a town in Kansas where the citizens are working together to green and to uplift their community. You made your point even more dramatically when you spent part of the day before your inauguration painting a DC school together with neighborhood volunteers.
Your repeated emphasis and your clarity were lost on the Governor of Louisiana who gave the Republican reply to your Presidential Address. You spoke of “we.” He spoke in terms of them and us, the former being the government and the latter the people. You were talking pragmatism. Problems are to be solved. If Plan A does not work, we go on to Plan B, and if it does not work either then to Plan C, and so on successively until the problem is solved. For the Governor we do not need successive approximations because we already know the correct answer to almost all questions. The correct answer is less government and lower taxes.
My own views concur with those who believe that at this point in time neither the Republican opposition, nor you as President, nor the Congress, nor the majority of academics, nor the majority of the public, is proposing any feasible and sustainable solution for any of today’s major problems. I concur with those who do not on the whole expect Plan A to work, and who do not expect Plan B or Plan C to work either, even though each succeeding plan will have some desirable features. Perhaps Plan P or Plan R will work. Therefore we want your pragmatism and communitarianism to be durable. If your humanitarian open-mindedness endures through seas of troubles, and continues to find broad support in public opinion, then a combination of rational critique by enlightened minorities and learning from experience by suffering majorities may eventually increase the influence of the paradigm-shifting approaches that really do solve problems.
You said in your Presidential Address that problems are to be solved. Our job is to solve the problems. We will pull together. We will take responsibility for our future. We love our country and want it to succeed. Many hopes hang by the slender threads of your words.
Peace and all good,
Howard R.

Letter to Barack #15: Better Science, Better Policy

Dear President Obama,

The questionable epistemological status of mainstream economics is displayed daily in the press and on television as scholars trained in that discipline purport to derive explanations of the current crisis (and associated predictions and prescriptions) from a single prior case or period. For some everything went wrong with the deregulation of recent decades. For others today´s case is comparable to the recession of 1981 and 1982, or to the Great Depression of the 1930s, or to the crisis of 1873. The chairperson of your Council of Economic Advisors distinguished herself by studying monetary and fiscal policy in the 1930s, and she is on record as encouraging graduate students who wish to advance in the profession to do detailed empirical studies of particular historical cases similar to those she does herself.

If one accepts the two premises that (1) Observed phenomena do not reveal the causal powers that produce them, and (2) What is happening now, as we move from a chaotic present to an uncertain future, is not a repetition of any single pattern of past events; then we must conclude that comparisons with the Great Depression or any other period or case are not likely yield reliable guidance as we endeavor to select among the options available to us those present actions which will produce a better future.

To begin to dissolve economics into a broader socioeconomics that will be capable of explaining the phenomena we are experiencing, and of contributing to a more reliable guidance of social reconstruction, it helps to consider circumstances in which it is logically valid to draw general conclusions from a single case. When biologists study a single specimen, they have good reasons for believing that their findings will be true of all individuals of the same species. A beginning student who dissects a frog finds structures common to all frogs of the species dissected. A frog, unlike a Great Depression, is made of bones, tissues, and organs that repeat themselves over and over again in numerous similar cases.

Why? Because living beings are built according to instructions encoded in DNA. In a normal environment, a given seed will grow into a given plant or animal.

The ecohistorican Thomas Berry frequently remarks that the human species is biologically coded to be culturally coded. The same word used in speaking of DNA, the word ¨code,¨ can be employed to refer to cultural codes that organize behavior (norms, rules, customs, habitus). Up to a point the anthropologist can echo the biologist in generalizing from a single specimen, learning about a culture by interviewing and observing a single informant who has internalized its codes.

When applied to economics (or, rather, to dissolving economics into transdisciplinary social science) an approach that starts by detecting and articulating cultural structures built from codes (¨¨symbolic structures¨¨ in the terminology of Jürgen Habermas) calls for giving greater attention to what Joseph Schumpeter called ¨institutional framework¨, and for contextualizing what he called ¨¨analysis.¨ When Smith and Ricardo assumed that society divided into three classes of human beings: (1) the landowners, (2) the merchants and manufacturers, and (3) the laborers; they assumed what Schumpeter calls an institutional framework. When they took it to be the task of the science of political economy to explain the natural and proper division among the social classes of society´s annual produce (or, what for them was the same thing, its annual revenue), they were doing what Schumpeter calls analysis. They were proposing a theory of rent, a theory of profits, and a theory of wages.

In Schumpeter´s muddled mind it was possible to write a history of politically neutral economic analysis, devoted to explanation while rigorously avoiding prescription, while assigning to a separate discipline, sociology, the study of the constitutive rules of the institutions that created the phenomena observed. But we will not make much progress in improving the performance of our institutions until we reform our social sciences to bring the basic rules of institutional frameworks into focus; for they are the principal causes of the phenomena observed.

Dissolving economics into a transdisciplinary social science that studies the causal powers of cultural coding contributes to solving what Michel Foucault called the principal political problem of our times. Foucault remarked that the principal political problem of our times was lack of imagination. His remark describes the debates in the United States Senate and House of Representatives on the stimulus package, which were almost entirely about one or another proposal to get the economy moving again by restoring the confidence of the investors who invest, restoring the confidence of the consumers who buy, restoring the confidence of the bankers who lend, and restoring the confidence of the executives who manage firms.

Retiring economics from its splendid and disastrous isolation, connecting it with sociology and with history and all the arts and sciences, helps to free us in many ways. One of those ways is that it frees our imagination and therefore our vision. We see that basic cultural structures might change; we see that they have changed (“Always historicize!” wrote Fredric Jameson): we open our eyes and see that human behavior is in practice not nearly as dominated by profit-seeking as it has been in mainstream economic theory from Smith to Friedman.

We see the present crisis as an opportunity. It is an opportunity to wean ourselves from our excessive dependence on the for-profit subsector of the private sector. We see that the public sector and the non-profit sector can take up the slack when for-profit private business sags. Instead of chasing the will-of-the-wisp ¨confidence¨, which always depends (as Keynes taught us) not on any rational or objective standard whatever, but on people´s subjective perceptions of other people´s subjective perceptions, we can come down to earth and focus on the physical task before us: building sustainable cultures that mobilize resources to meet needs.

We can be thankful that just as global warming is getting out of control, while human population growth is continuing to spiral out of control, and –to generalize a series of ecological warning signs without naming each specifically—just as we are on the verge of destroying our habitat and therefore destroying our species; a financial crisis has come to save us. The financial crisis is slowing down the profit-driven machine that is destroying us. A better epistemology helps us to see the financial crisis as an opportunity to let the private for-profit economy slow down, as an opportunity to bring that machine under ethical and rational control, and as an opportunity to supplement it with other ways (public and non-profit) to mobilize resources to meet needs. The present crisis is our opportunity to become a sustainable species in a sustainable biosphere.

Peace and all good,

Howard R.

Creating J.O.B.S: Letter to Barack #6

Dear President-elect Obama,

 

     In contrast to what the media portray as an overwhelming urge to take prompt and bold action to restart the economy of the United States , even in the absence of rational grounds for believing that the actions taken will lead to the results desired, here we are systematically going about creating five kinds of jobs.  They are:  (1) Employment in for-profit Business. (2)  The People’s Economy.  (3) Public sector work. (4) Working for non-profits. (5) Community service jobs.   We are aiming for zero unemployment.

 

     History and anthropology teach us to believe that there must be a 6^th, a 7^th, an 8^th and an …….  n^th kind of job.   Here and now we are concentrating on the five just listed.   “Here” in a narrow sense refers to a town in Chile with a newly elected mayor and city council.  They have been studying  the social innovations that are so plentiful in South America .   I will be drawing examples to illustrate our thinking especially from Argentina .  “We” includes both them and your faithful correspondent, who is one of their academic advisors.    “Now” officially begins on December 6, 2008, when the new city officers will be sworn in for four year terms.

 

(1)                           Employment in for-profit business.  

 

In our new paradigm town we will concentrate on small businesses because they generate the bulk of employment.  (I will write letters later about big business and about the social functions of profit.)  We will back entrepreneurs.  Like Joseph Schumpeter and the early utopian socialist Saint-Simon we regard the entrepreneur as a member of the productive classes.  We add a fifth factor, “organization” (contributed by the entrepreneur) to the classic trio of factors of production, “land, labor, and capital,” and to the fourth factor added later: “knowledge.”  

 

          An excellent example of local government supporting for-profit business (and thus creating jobs)  is provided by the Municipal Bank of Rosario, Argentina .  That bank’s Mission Statement and Charter provide that the bank’s function is to serve small business and micro business in the local area.  (www.bmros.com.ar)

 

     The Municipal Bank of Rosario does not manage footloose money endlessly roaming the globe in quest of the fastest way to make itself fattest.    It manages money tied to a place.  

 

     When the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001, the Rosario branches of foreign commercial banks closed.   They were there for one reason:  profit.   When there were no profits to be made, they had no reason for being in Rosario or in Argentina .   They left.

 

     The Municipal Bank was there for another reason.  It stayed open.  It bent every rule in the books to make bridge loans so that its small business clients could meet payroll, save jobs, and survive. 

 

     In addition to standing by its small business clients in times of crisis, the Municipal Bank backs entrepreneurs (and through them creates jobs) in many other ways.  In its auditorium and meeting rooms it runs business seminars.    Entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs learn of new opportunities, of new legislation, and of new research findings.   Hands-on classes teach them skills.  

 

     The Municipal Bank uses the information technology expertise it acquired managing the accounts of the city government to help its small business clients calculate payroll deductions, fill out tax returns, prepare balance sheets, and track progress with management information systems.   Entrepreneurs are freed to lead their businesses because the bank’s computers do the routine paperwork for them.   They can pay their employees with a single deposit or transfer.   The employees can withdraw their pay from one of the Municipal Bank’s ATMs.

 

     The profits of the bank go to the Municipal Bank Foundation.  The Foundation gives grants to local musicians and artists.    This recycling of profits creates employment in the arts.   The Foundation also supports studies on solid waste disposal, housing needs, air quality, public transportation, and other topics of local interest.  To some extent the funds granted by the Foundation to do studies create jobs for scientists, but for the most part the grants only cover costs while the scientists voluntarily donate their time to public service.

 

(2)                         The People’s Economy.  

 

The people’s economy creates jobs that do not exist in the for-profit economy.  It is defined by the Argentine socioeonomist Jose Luis Coraggio (holder of a doctorate from the Wharton School and director of the Graduate Program in Social Economics at General Sarmiento University in Buenos Aires )  as an economy where the principal resource is labor and the principal objective is to make a living.   Coraggio contrasts it with the larger scale more heavily capitalized and more technologically advanced economy where the principal resource is capital and the principal objective is profit. (www.coraggioeconomia.org)

 

The workers in the people’s economy are self-employed, whether as individuals, as partners, as members of cooperatives, or as associates in micro-enterprises.   We calculate that about 26% of the jobs in Chile are in the people’s economy.    Many of them are in mom and pop tiny businesses that barely generate the equivalent of a wage and never generate anything that could be called a return on capital.

 

In Argentina today there are some 300 enterprises that used to be in the for-profit sector, and are now in the people’s sector.   They failed to survive as profit-making businesses, but their workers keep them going anyway.   They generate enough income to make it possible for the worker-owners to get by.

 

We believe the people’s economy deserves the support of the for-profit economy.  It sometimes gets it.   For example, at the premises of the Chamber of Commerce in Rosario  major corporations provide training and equipment for women starting self-help micro-enterprises.

 

We believe the people’s economy deserves the support of government.   In Chile the national government has a program that favors making government purchases from the tiny firms we and Corragio place in the people’s economy category.  (www.chilecompra.cl)

 

We believe the people’s economy deserves the support of volunteers.   I doubt that any of the 300 new worker cooperatives in Argentina could have survived without the volunteer help they received from engineers, lawyers, and accountants (many of whom were associated with universities, political parties, and/or churches).

 

Many retired business people around the world regularly lend a helping hand to people who are struggling to get started in the people’s economy and/or in small business.

 

     Among the plans we have for supporting the people’s economy in our town are deliberate support for traditional family businesses now on the wane.   For example, there are some beleaguered ones that have been making fruit jams and/or raising chickens for generations, which we believe could thrive in today’s environment with support from a sympathetic municipality and its associated citizens movement.    We have a plan for city certification of the purity and authenticity of traditional herbal medicines.    The herbal medicines are produced (and more could be produced) on small plots within the town’s limits.   ( Chile is divided into towns as Connecticut is, in such a way that even rural areas are in towns.)

 

             Employment in for-profit business tops out when it hits the profit barrier.  No profits, no jobs.  You will only be hired in a for-profit business if the cost of hiring you is less than the value of the product you produce.   However much good will and social responsibility an entrepreneur may have, she or he still needs to make a return on the capital invested.

 

             The people’s economy breaks the profit barrier.   It creates jobs where there are no profits (although revenue still has to be sufficient to purchase inputs other than labor and to amortize equipment).     But the people’s economy tops out when it hits the market barrier.  No market, no jobs.   If the product or service cannot be sold, then nobody can make a living producing it.

 

             The third, fourth, and fifth kinds of job creation break both the profit barrier and the market barrier.    I will discuss them in another letter.

 

Peace and all good,

 

Howard R.

Non-Profits: Letter to Barack #8

Dear President-elect Obama,

 

          Let me start my letter on working for nonprofits (the fourth of the five sectors in which we are creating jobs here in our town in Chile ) by defining two pure types: for-profit business and non-profit business.  I provisionally omit the businesses that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these two categories.

 

          The purpose of a for-profit business is profit.  (Academics will notice that I am not distinguishing profit properly so-called from return on capital; I do not think this distinction is needed here.)   The financial economy drives the real economy.  Investment decisions are made by calculating probable yields taking risks into account.  

 

          Question:  What goods and services will be provided?

          Answer:  Those that can profitably be sold.

 

          Question:  What determines whether the economy will go or stop?

          Answer: Confidence.

 

          Question: Confidence in what?

          Answer:  Confidence that consumers will spend, confidence that credit will be available; and in the end, in sum, in short, confidence that profits will be made.

 

          You have now chosen an economic team (Paul Volcker, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer and others) and a security team (Hillary Clinton, General Jim Jones, Robert Gates, Admiral Mike Mullen, Susan Rice, and others) whose overall objective is to restore confidence.   I am suggesting that at least a major part of the nation’s military objective is the same as its economic objective.   Confidence.   In practice and in official declarations the military and its civilian chiefs seek a world in which business people will have confidence in the safety of  their investments, in access to markets, in access to energy and other inputs, and in being able to count on the normal working of the international economy. (See  www.dtic.mil. searching under “national interest”)

 

            I would suggest that if your advisors were to give nonprofits due weight in their deliberations they might well improve the quality of their advice.   Nonprofit business is the conceptual twin of for-profit business.  The cart becomes the horse.   The horse becomes the cart.  First the social entrepreneurs (people who organize nonprofits) are motivated by perceiving a need.   Then they raise funds to meet the need.   The real economy drives the financial economy.  

 

          Coraggio and his colleagues at General Sarmiento University have studied nonprofits in Argentina using a concept of “hybrid financing” developed by Brazilian socioeconomists.   The “club” is an emblematic Argentine nonprofit.  “Clubs” began as mutual aid societies bringing together people of one or another common ethnic origin who immigrated to Argentina during the 19^th century.   Clubs have proliferated, evolved, and metamorphosed so that today they do many things, but one thing virtually all of them do is play soccer.   Diego Maradona got his start in a neighborhood club.

 

          Coraggio studied how Argentine nonprofits piece together their budgets drawing on hybrid sources.    Members pay dues.   Fans pay for admission to games.  Local governments provide subsidies.   Tenants pay rent on buildings the nonprofit owns.   For-profit businesses donate uniforms for the players.   The club runs a restaurant open to the public.   It runs a fundraising dinner dance.    It auctions off prizes at a silent auction, or conducts a raffle.    Decedents leave bequests to the nonprofit in their wills.   Much of the work of the nonprofit is done by volunteers who do not need to be paid.   Etc.

 

          In Argentina and elsewhere nonprofits have shown themselves capable of doing everything for-profits do.   They run schools and hospitals.  They run banks and insurance companies.  (e.g. the Caisses Desjardins of Quebec )   They farm.  (e.g. the farms of the Mormons)  They manufacture refrigerators.  (e.g. Mondragon in Spain )  They build houses.  (e.g. Habitat for Humanity)

 

          Could we then have an economy with no for-profit business at all?  Conceivably such an economy could come into existence if there were social entrepreneurs organizing nonprofits to meet every need.   Our plan here in Chile is not so drastic.   We think in terms of layered job creation.  We support the creation of as many jobs as possible in the for-profit sector.   We go on to support another layer of job creation in the people’s economy.   A third layer of jobs is contributed by government work.    A fourth layer by working for non-profits.   Anyone who still wants and needs a job can participate in a fifth layer, community service.

 

          (Correction:  We do not precisely maximize the number of jobs in the for-profit sector because we insist on decent wages.   Since firms unable to comply with labor legislation must cease to exist, employment in for-profit business falls short of its theoretical maximum.  The other four sectors pick up the slack.)

 

          I would like to suggest that the members of your economic team consider thinking in terms of layered job creation.    At present they seem mainly to think in terms of stimulus packages trying to promote consumer spending, making the government the spender of last resort, loosening credit, and making the government the creditor of last resort.    All of this aims to restore confidence in one sector of the economy, the for-profit sector; it aims to persuade investors and business people to advance funds and hire workers in the expectation that there are profits to be made.  It may well be the case, as the historical studies of one of your advisors (Ms. Romer) show, that increasing the money supply (especially due to the inflow of gold from politically turbulent Europe) helped to restart the U.S. economy during the Great Depression even before World War II.   Nevertheless, no monetary expansion policy is a substitute for a systematic effort to create jobs for everybody, while every monetary expansion policy brings with it the risk of inflation.

 

          I would also suggest to your security team that the currently dominant economic paradigm is not a perfect paradigm.   It assigns to the military the mission of protecting stability and order worldwide for the sake of establishing the confidence required by normal business as defined by the paradigm.      But the paradigm which defines and limits current mainstream thinking may not –I would indeed say it clearly does not— frame a normal science capable of providing  all the needed answers.   It may have something civil to learn from the radicals who at this point in time have been designated as military enemies.  (See www.dtic.mil searching under “radicalism.”)

 

Peace and all good,

 

Howard R.

Community Service: Letter to Barack #9

Dear President-elect Obama,

 

            Since I started writing you letters about how we can all work together to solve our problems, the economic collapse of the United States has become more complete.   Opinions differ concerning its causes and concerning whether it is permanent or temporary.

 

            Meanwhile, in our town here in Chile we continue to practice a philosophy of social integration.  The aim is for everyone to be included in constructive and affectionate (cariñosas) relationships whether employed in “the economy” or not.   We are going about accomplishing this aim rather quietly, in order to avoid immigration to our town from elsewhere.  We know that without a bounded territory achieving our aim will be impossible.

 

            For us community service is not a government program.  It does not rely on public funds.   To some extent it does not rely on funds at all.   We organize our neighborhood somewhat as you organized neighborhoods in Chicago , finding out who has a problem and then looking for ways to solve it with whatever resources can be found or shared. 

 

            You may remember that Martin Luther King Jr. believed that quite apart from business confidence that profits can be made by hiring employees; at a human level there is no shortage of demand for labor.  Any number of workers can be useful in the field of human services, in caring for the young, the old, and the infirm.  Mother Teresa in her writings expresses the complementary insight that to a considerable extent the young, the old, and the infirm yearn not so much for specialized services as for a human being to be there with them.

 

  At most places in the world if one just looks around and sees what is before one’s eyes, one sees that there is no shortage of basic goods either.   There is plenty of food, housing, clothes, etc.  The challenge is to put labor and livelihood together.  It is to create opportunities to serve others that are simultaneously ways to make a living.  It is to include everybody in a supportive community that will assure that its members are cared for.  It is to replace basic stress with what Erik Erikson called basic trust.  

 

Whatever one’s opinion may be regarding the causes of the collapse, it is fair to say that nobody knows how long a cure will take.    Some of us believe that the system cannot be cured at all.   That is to say, it cannot be cured in the sense of being made to work once again as it used to work (although badly) prior to its collapse.

 

In our town we think of layered job creation; (1) for-profit business, (2) the people’s economy, (3) government work, (4) non-profits, (5) community service.   Neighborhood and family self-reliance in the form of community service is the last of five layers.   It is the guarantee that nobody will be forgotten or abandoned.

 

There are many ways to accomplish what we are accomplishing.  History and anthropology show that.  See www.gift-economy. com   I will try to attach some eyewitness accounts of the ways some Argentines accomplished meeting basic needs during their crash in 2001.  If the attachment does not go through, readers who want it can ask me for it and I will send it to them directly.

 

As the collapse of the American economy continues, it becomes increasingly clear that in the foreseeable future for-profit business will employ only a fraction of the work force.   Consequently, the social integration of the rest must be accomplished in other ways.

 

Peace and all good,

 

                              Howard R.

Michelle Obama's Christmas Letter: Letter to Barack #11

Dear President-elect Obama,

 

It is a tradition among many peoples at the time of the winter solstice to remind themselves that they ought to be acting as responsible members of a cohesive community.   Yes, we could be good.    Sisterhood and brotherhood are possible.

 

In the depths of wintertime we want the sun to return, to bring warmth, growth, and harvests.   Our ancestors perhaps doubted more than we do the regularity of the seasons, and feared more than we do that the sun might die or disappear altogether, leaving us permanently cold, hungry, and ultimately lifeless.   Midwinter was a time to plead with the gods for mercy and to make promises to them.   We promise, if the sun comes back, to be obedient and grateful.   If our tradition happens to be Judeo-Christian promising to be obedient means promising to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

 

Nothing is less outdated or more timely than the ancient wisdom of Christmastime.  Indeed, if we would but cooperate and share throughout the year, we could solve all our social problems.

 

The first-lady elect made us a very timely and practical request in her Christmas Letter:  she asked us to donate food to our local Food Pantry.   Please let her know that I did what she asked me to do.   I gave twelve one-pound packages of noodles,  ten packets of dried soup, ten cans of tuna fish, twelve packages of rice and twelve of sugar each weighing two pounds each, a case containing twelve bottles of cooking oil, and a one hundred pound sack of flour.

 

Many of our institutions are ambiguous because it is not clear whether the spirit of Christmas or the every day spirit of possessive individualism is supposed to govern them.    During your campaign for the presidency you resolved in your speeches an important ambiguity regarding our free market economy.    For several centuries the free market economy has been a set of institutions with an unstable image, now a duck now a rabbit depending on how you look at it.   The duck is Christmas.   As a duck the market is a remarkable human invention which we have constructed to meet our needs. The rabbit is every day life.    As a rabbit the market is simply natural reality which we have to adjust to whether we like it or not.

 

You resolved the ambiguity in favor of the duck by reframing our history.    According to your interpretation the American economy has always been designed to serve a higher purpose.   It has been re-designed from time to time to make it serve its higher purpose better.

 

The higher purpose is  --if I may borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr. to express a communitarian and pragmatic concept embedded in your speeches and in Michelle’s Christmas Letter-- the building of a “beloved community.”     In simpler terms:  we share the noodles.  If there are too few noodles, or if some people are left out and do not get any, then we change the rules to fix the problem.     You did not ask the voters for a mandate to change the system.   You offered them an ethical interpretation of what the system has always been.

 

As you probably already know, there are many good ideas for building a beloved community in Martin Luther King Jr.’s book Where do we go from here: chaos or community?   There are more in Riane Eisler’s recent book The real wealth of nations.

Let me mention a few from our local Food Pantry.   We do not give any food away.   People in our neighborhood do not apply for food stamps.   They do not apply for relief.   Nor have we fallen into the “workfare” trap that Bill Clinton fell into:  we do not try to wedge masses of unemployed poor people into the tiny supply of existing jobs.   Here people apply for community service.    We create the jobs, finding useful things for them to do (for more on how to find useful thing for people to do see the books by King and Eisler).   In our neighborhood unemployment does not exist.  Or, to the put the matter another way, even the unemployed are working.

 

Concerning your more recent speeches, let me congratulate you on your plans for creating more government jobs, especially the ones that get things done that the free market economy does not get done enough (like reforesting the hillsides).  

 

But let me dissent from the “stimulus” packages.   Here the rabbit has blinded the majority of Americans so that they cannot see the duck.

 

America’s situation is one that gives new meaning to the word “absurd.”   There is plenty of food.   There is plenty of housing.   There is plenty of clothing.   There is plenty of almost everything and too much of many things.

 

The economic problems that frustrate America are entirely about legal fictions.  We are frustrated because people do not have money.   Because people are in debt.   Because the values of homes and stock market investments have fallen.   Because people do not have employment.    Because they do not have incomes or because the incomes they have are insufficient to enable them to buy what they need.

 

When physically we have no problems at all, we nevertheless tie ourselves in knots because the economy has ceased generating legal entitlements to participate in the stock of physical goods that is already in existence.

 

We are so blinded by our own ideology that we think the only desirable way to get money to the poor is for them to find jobs, and the only way to create jobs is to make it profitable for employers to hire, and the only way to make it profitable for employers to hire is for employers to find more paying customers.    So we grant huge tax breaks to millions of people whom we fondly hope will be customers of American firms, while borrowing money from China to pay the government’s bills.

 

Time will show, I am sure, that we would have been better off with more imagination, more ancient wisdom,  more listening to women, more character education and moral education,  more neighborhood cooperation, and more private sector charity; we would be better off with an anthropological paradigm instead of an economic paradigm.

 

I do not mean to imply in these letters that big business and the profit motive are irrelevant.    I plan to discuss them later.

 

Meanwhile, I want to congratulate Michelle for her fine Christmas letter and you for your fine reframing of American history.     They are the duck-stuff of which beloved community is made.  

 

Howard R.

Cause and Effect: Letter to Barack #12

Dear President-elect Obama,

 

            I was not disappointed when you said that your foreign policy would be similar to that of previous administrations.   Although I was unhappy, I was not disappointed because what you said was what I expected.    I do not believe you can make big changes in foreign policy.

 

            But when I (no doubt along with three million others) received from you a personal invitation to participate in turning our campaign organization into a social movement I was really happy.   We are going to join you in organizing for change in every corner of America. 

 

 Domestic change might work, and if it does work, we might make it possible to move the reality of foreign policy closer into line with the democratic and progressive ideals Franklin Roosevelt expressed, and which all presidents have expressed to some extent.

 

            Deepak Chopra is another volunteer advisor who has been giving you free advice lately.   In a recent letter to you he pointed out that for over half a century the USA has been functioning as a military economy.   Being a specialist in mind/body relationships he has observed that although at the level of mind American foreign policy is about peace, democracy, and rights; at the level of body it is about how the global economy works, how the USA fits into it, and how the sub-sector of the global economy known as the US economy works.

 

            America has to change before the main features of its relationships to the rest of the world will change.

 

            Cause and effect.   The main cause of what America does is what America is.   Deepak Chopra was quite right to base his letter to you on the premise that our role in the world will not substantially change until we cease to be dependent on the military-industrial complex for our daily bread.

 

            It just might happen.   The collapse of our war economy is an opportunity to create a peace economy.   I do not believe you yet realize how serious the “economic” problem is, nor do you yet realize that it is not in the last analysis an “economic” problem at all but a paradigm problem.  Nevertheless, you are on the right track in moving in the direction of converting big business into public-private partnerships planned for ecological and social responsibility.  

 

            You are also on the right track in repeating frequently that government alone cannot solve our problems.    The real power to change America is in civil society, not in government.

 

            You were on the right track in running your campaign as a grassroots citizens movement, and on the right track in proposing to keep the momentum of that movement going to organize for change.

 

            Cause and effect.   If we want to rewrite America ’s script in the global tragic farce that Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes and others have documented in great detail, we need to begin where you began as a young community organizer in Chicago.   We need to begin with the ethical reconstruction of neighborhoods.

 

Peace and all good,

 

Howard R.

 

p.s. I have posted a document whose relevance the wise will immediately see.  It is located on my main website, http://www.howardrichards.org  It is an account of how ordinary citizens in Argentina worked together to meet each other’s basic needs when the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001.