From One of Your Voters: Letter to Barack #1

This is me speaking.

I am one of the 52 million people who voted for you, one of the 3 million in your database who contributed small amounts of money to your campaign.

Remember me?

I am writing to make sure I understand our deal. I watched your acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago. I watched many of your speeches.

You said together we are going to transform America and the world. Right? We are going to transform not from the top down but from the bottom up. Did I get that right? It is not you who are going to transform America but we. Is that the deal? You are calling for a spirit of service and sacrifice. That’s what I heard.

In a speech to financiers on Wall Street you said the economy has a higher purpose. The higher purpose is that we are all in this together. From time to time we change the rules of the economic game to make the economic machine serve its purpose better. (I read the speech on your website www.barackobama. com) Your Wall Street friends voted for you even though you told them you would raise their taxes. That sent a message.

So –here is my conclusion, my message: I am not supposed to be just watching TV waiting to see whom you will name to cabinet posts. I am supposed to be out on the street transforming my town and neighborhood. Right?

This afternoon I will donate twelve bottles of cooking oil to our neighborhood food pantry. I will talk up cooperation. I will also work on changing our irrigation system from spray to drip (Drip benefits the environment by producing more food with less water.)

I am copying this to lists of transformers. If I am missing something, or if I have misunderstood something, hopefully somebody will set me straight.

Howard R.

Nov. 6, 2008

Short Term and Long Term: Letter to Barack #4

OK Barack,  I admit that I am one of the millions of people who wish they knew how to read your mind, and I admit that my brother Ken is probably not as good at it as your wife Michelle, but I nevertheless think he has an inside track so instead of guessing myself I will adopt his guess.   Ken has some professional political experience and some high-up contacts and I believe he can assess what you are probably thinking more accurately than average persons, with the possible exceptions of average persons who happen to live in Illinois or Hawaii .    Yesterday my brother expressed the opinion that your mind is probably preoccupied by two questions:

 

One:  How to save people’s 401(k) plans and other retirement assets that are invested in stocks and lose value when stocks lose value.

 

Two:  How to save the American automobile industry.

 

          One might say –I know people who do say—that until these and other short term issues that make up the current economic crisis are resolved, the Obama administration will not be able to turn its attention to the long term.

 

          Indeed you did say –I watched you say it on television—that before implementing some major parts of your program we need to “get past” the current crisis. 

 

          The same day, yesterday, the day my brother expressed an informed opinion concerning what is on your mind, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, reported on what his office is doing to restore confidence in the economy.

 

            Paulson’s office is doing two sorts of things:

 

          1)  It is providing cash to banks and other credit-granting institutions.  For example it has bought preferred (non-voting) stock in banks.   The bank gets the cash and the government gets a right to dividend payments in the future.

 

          2)  It is guaranteeing loans.

 

          The rationale is that if credit-granting institutions have more money and/or run less risk they are more likely to make loans.   Then people can borrow more easily to meet payroll, to buy an automobile, or for any business or consumer purpose.

 

          The Congress has already:

 

          3) Put more money into the pockets of consumers with tax rebates and tax cuts.

 

          The rationale is that the consumers will spend their money buying products, thus making it profitable to produce them.

 

          If I may elaborate a little on what my brother guessed was on your mind yesterday, I suspect that you are thinking of three other ways to stimulate the economy:

 

          4) Subsidies for the automobile, green technology, and perhaps other industries.

 

          5)  Incentives to produce in America rather than overseas.

 

          6)   Massive public works, for example hiring the unemployed to plant trees.

 

          Behind all of these measures is the assumption that the economy runs on profits.  When business stops being profitable it stops running.   The government then takes measures to restore profitability, in order to restart the economy.   Even (6) is about restoring profitability insofar as it expects the workers employed on public works to stimulate business by spending their pay.

 

            Let the above serve as an executive summary of the sorts of measures that are generally expected to “get us past the crisis.”            An element missing in the public debate about these measures is the need for a paradigm shift.

 

          Anybody who does not believe the following should check it out for herself or himself:   Postings on anti-Bush websites and listserves and eloquent print prose pieces in Nation magazine, articulate many arguments in favor of putting money into the pockets of ordinary people and rescheduling their debts to save their homes.  They condemn spending billions to bail out the wealthy.  It is argued that people-oriented stimulus packages are fairer and more effective.   But there is no questioning of the paradigm.  It is taken for granted that the objective is to generate economic activity by making it profitable.

 

          My humble suggestion is to walk on two feet.   One foot moves to restart the economic machine by restoring confidence (not because it is an ideal economic machine, but because it is the one we have).   The other foot moves to diversify the economy, freeing us from our excessive dependence on expectations of profit to motivate production and distribution.

 

          Don’t wait.   Don’t wait to get past the crisis to get started on the transformational agenda.   If we wait for stimulus packages to restore investor confidence (if they ever do); if we wait for gradually rising rates of employment to re-integrate society, we will wait too long.  We need to pick up the slack ASAP with civil society efforts and with public efforts and with private-public partnerships.   A world full of loafers and part-timers (and of people a bit better off who fear crime and despise the loafers and part-timers) is a world that will generate strange and violent ideas.   Before government policies bring about economic recovery (if they ever do), the culture war will be lost.   People will hang on to every word Rush Limbaugh speaks.  They will be attracted to the worldview of Fox News.  On a best case scenario their arms will be tattooed with images of Sarah Palin; in the worst case the image will be a swastika. 

 

          These considerations lead to a renewed appreciation for the work community activists do, not just because they achieve material goals such as decent housing and food security, but also because they engage people in constructive activities.   Organizing, as Cesar Chavez frequently said, means giving people something to do.   A disorganized unemployed population passively waiting month after month for someone to bring them employment is a dangerous population.

 

Howard R.

November 13, 2008

 

 

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.