LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

Prejudice Adversely Affects How Americans Judge their President

A University of Delaware psychology post graduate student, Eric Hehman, who specializes in intergroup relations focuses on prejudice and discrimination, and recently received a national research award for his work on it. The national award was won for his work on what characteristics of a person caused others to remember or forget having seen their face before. He found that people tend to recognize members of their own racial group better than those of different races, though they are better still at recognizing people of any race when they are considered similar to them in some other way, like being students of the same alma mater.

Following from this, Hehman noticed that the criticisms of Obama seemed to go beyond the kinds of criticisms that are commonly heard about presidents’ policies. He particularly noticed that rumors of doubts about Obama’s birth certificate, his religion and allegations that he was corrupting children with a socialist agenda and seemed not strictly based in reality. Hehman said:

I found these controversies fairly strange and wondered if the impetus behind them was rooted in racism, manifesting and rationalizing itself in accusations of Obama’s “un-Americanism”. Some of professor Gaertner’s previous work had dealt with similar issues of unintentional racial biases influencing behavior, often without the person even being aware of their biases. So investigating this with regard to Obama was a natural step.

Hehman’s hypothesis was that whites’ racial prejudices influenced how American they thought Obama was, and affected how they judged his presidential performance. Hehman predicted that whites would be the only group in which such racial prejudice would affect their judgements of performance, and that it would affect only their judgements of the president because he was black. He hypothesized that when whites judged Vice President, Joseph R Biden Jr, or when African Americans judged either Obama or Biden, racial prejudices would have no affect.

The paper describing the study, “Evaluations of Presidential Performance: Race, Prejudice, and Perceptions of Americanism”, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. UD professor of psychology Samuel Gaertner was Hehman’s adviser and co-author.

Hehman asked about 300 white and black members of the UD community to judge the success in office of either Obama or Biden. He said:

Our predictions were supported. Whites who were racially prejudiced against blacks saw Obama as “less American” and subsequently rated him as performing more poorly as president. Non-prejudiced whites, and both prejudiced and non-prejudiced blacks, did not do so. Additionally and importantly, this relationship was only found with Obama, and not in evaluations of Biden.

Racial prejudice among some white Americans—even though unintentional—influences their views of President Barack Obama’s “Americanism” and how well he is performing in office. Hehman hoped his paper would cause readers to see that:

…even among people who think themselves unprejudiced, unconscious racial prejudices could manifest themselves with important outcomes, such as evaluations of the leader of our country. I hope they examine their opinions and behaviors, both political and otherwise, to ensure they are based on a steady foundation of fact, rather than racial uncomfortability or prejudice.

Empathy—the Hallmark of a Compassionate and Civilised Society

Science is beginning to unravel the mystery of why some people have less empathy than others and the implications are potentially far reaching, not least for the criminal justice system:

Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world. It might even have relevance for politics and politicians, so that when we try and resolve conflict, whether it’s domestic conflict or international conflict, issues about empathy might actually be useful. Given this assertion, it is puzzling that in the school curriculum empathy figures hardly at all, and in politics, business, the courts or policing it is rarely if ever on the agenda. We can see examples among our political leaders of the value of empathy, as when Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk sought to understand and befriend each other, crossing the divide in Apartheid South Africa, but the same has not yet been achieved between Israel and Palestine, or between Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan. And, for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are lost.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen adds:

The hallmark of a compassionate and civilised society is that we try to understand other people’s actions, we don’t try to simply condemn them. There is even a question about whether a person that commits an awful crime should be in a prison as opposed to a hospital. When people commit crimes, there may be determinants of their behaviour which are outside their control. No one is responsible for their own genes.

More at http://mikemagee.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/empathy-the-universal-solvent.

A Better Presidential Electoral System than the US Electoral College

Americans do not elect a president. They elect representatives of their state to an electoral college totalling 538 of them distributed to each state according to the size of states’ congressional delegation, reflecting the population of each state. California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each. The District of Columbia also has 3. It is a uniquely American institution which then elects the vice president and president.

Isn’t this undemocratic? Why not have a direct election? The political controversy surrounding the Electoral College is as old as the republic. In 1969, Congress started to think so. Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey with a popular margin of less than 1 percent. Unlike the crookery of the hanging chads of 2000, the House of Representatives was so shocked that a successful candidate could actually be denied the Presidency that it moved a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The Senate also inclined to support the amendment, and lawyers of the American Bar Association said the US electoral system was…

…archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.

Electing the president by direct popular vote would be simpler and fairer. But the issue lost momentum. In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory over Gerald Ford resurrected it. The League of Women Voters and a majority of Americans, according to pollsters, thought the electoral college should be abolished. In the Senate, although the bill had majority support, it died for lack of the two thirds majority needed to pass it.

In spite of recent contentious elections that raised the controversy to new heights, the debate is unlikely to reach a resolution given the compelling political considerations on both sides. But rarely if ever does the public debate on this subject take into account objective, mathematical considerations. Nevertheless, statisticians can make an important contribution to the debate, for mathematicians have made statistical calculations on voting issues since the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher and mathematician, applied probability theory to voting. In the 1990s, Will Hively, reported that a physicist, Alan Natapoff, had proved the electoral college is better than a simple, direct election, and indeed the success of US democracy depends on it:

Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly.

Alan Napatoff

But more recently, UC Berkeley’s Elchanan Mossel, an associate professor in the departments of Statistics and Computer Science and an expert in probability theory, begs to differ. He believes this system of electing the president is more likely to result in an erroneous election outcome compared to the simple majority voting system. Mossel’s analysis compares the Electoral College system with the simple majority voting system to test how prone to error the electoral system and whether it can change the outcome.

Originally the electoral college did not have to choose the winner of the popular vote. In 1888, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote and Benjamin Harrison 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. The college chose Harrison by 233 to 168. The representatives to the electoral college did not have to vote for Cleveland. They chose Harrison, so he was the winner. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and more electoral votes—99 to 84. But 78 went to other candidates, so the House of Representatives picked the winner. They did not select Jackson.

In 1876, Samuel J Tilden lost to Rutherford B Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent. An extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, but Nixon won 26 more states to 24 for Kennedy and others. But Kennedy had won big states, and won the electoral ballot, 303 to 219. A close popular majority had turned into a big electoral college majority.

James Madison, chief architect of the US’s electoral college, wanted to protect the people against the tyranny of the majority—a built in majority for some bloc destroying tolerance so that minorities were no longer free. Madison explained in The Federalist Papers X that a well constructed union must break and control the violence of factionalism especially the force of an overbearing majority. J S Mill explicitly warned of the same thing in his later essay On Liberty.

In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives. Madison and his colleagues, having won the war of independence, wanted an electoral college to avoid internal revolutions, so built a system which made representatives of each state intermediary voters. The representatives, they expected, would be responsible middle class people, like themselves, who would vote for a president like themselves, and so stability would be guaranteed. They were aiming to stifle the “popular will”—they distrusted the mob.

Nowadays, whoever wins the popular vote in any state (except in Maine) wins all the electoral votes in that state automatically, so whole states become blue or red ones, and the large states carry more weight. The representatives to the electoral college have no independence. They must vote according to their state’s popular vote. It means that the popular vote in a few states can overwhelm many others who might dissent. Actual representatives are superfluous. Each state gets a weighted vote for the presidency based on its weighting and the popular vote in it. If the Madisonian system had any original merit by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, it has now been neutralized into a series of popular votes, many of which matter only when the large states balance themselves out. So, the votes in small states and states which go against the trend can only matter on the odd occasions when by chance the large states neutralize each other’s votes.

Natapoff looked into the math, and convinced himself, the US electoral system increases voters’ power. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports—which Americans intuitively understand. In baseball’s World Series, the team that scores the most runs overall does not get to be champion. To do that, a team has to win the most games. In 1960, the New York Yankees scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. The Yankees won three massively (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but lost four close games. Napatoff says:

Nobody walked away saying it was unfair.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

Napatoff argued that under a tyranny, everyone’s voting power is equal to zero. Equality of the vote is not enough. Mossel agrees:

Statistically, the most robust system in the world is a dictatorship. Under such a system, the results never depend on how people vote.

But since most people would prefer an alternative to dictatorship, the question is which democratic voting system will produce accurate results. To that end, Mossel compared different voting systems, including simple majority voting and the Electoral College system, both of which offer voters two alternatives to pick from.

A well designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. In a democracy, as a nation gets larger, everyone’s voting power shrinks. So, the immense size of the US electorate means everyone’s individual vote is of negligible weight, and only counts a little more when the voting in the big states turns out to be tight. In large democracies, with massive electorates, each person’s voting power in direct elections is virtually zero!

Napatoff says people are less vulnerable to tyranny when their voting power increases, and individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts—such as states—than when pooled in one large, national, direct election. Anyone's vote has more chance to determine the outcome locally, in one's state, and thereby anyone has more chance to change the outcome of the electoral college, than when one's your vote is among the many more of a direct federal election. He concludes a voter has more power under the current US electoral system.

Under raw voting in a divided society, a candidate wants to woo a bloc large enough to be the majority. In a two person or two party situation, where each party represents blocs on the right and left respectively, given that neither can expect an overall majority only from its core supporters, then both have to woo the floating voter caught between the two, usually those in the center. Some think this makes for constancy and stability, but it makes for a lot of frustration on both wings., and that is being felt today as the US polarises.

The probability that anyone’s vote will turn the election is the probability that all the other votes balance out. In a small town with 135 citizens, the probability any vote will be decisive because the others are in balance can be calculated as 6.9 percent. The 1960 presidential race between Kennedy and Nixon was one of the closest ever. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and for Nixon. Kennedy got 34,227,096 to Nixon’s 34,107,646. The chance of one vote being decisive is minuscule.

Unfortunately, in such a case, the electoral college system has little or no advantage. Districting never boosts voting power in close elections, the time when you hope it might. It does not help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even. Doing the math shows it slightly reduces individual power. Abolition of the electoral college as it now operates would improve democracy when the votes are close.

When one party or candidate has a landslide, the electoral college, Natapoff says, strengthens the individual vote a little. For a town of 135, the notional crossover point for voting power is about a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, district voting will give individual voters more power—but it matters less, because the result is so lopsided it cannot be affected by one vote anyway! In that town of 135 citizens, when voter preference for one candidate is 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of anyone's vote turning the election, falls below 0.4 percent. The probability that one vote will matter keeps on falling, as a candidate pulls further ahead. For all that math, there is less chance of changing the outcome. Natapoff says:

If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote, in 100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome.

One can imagine an extreme case of district voting where every voter is in a district of their own. Plainly the district voting model becomes the same as a direct election. So extreme districting is no different from direct election, whether the voting is lopsided or close—districting cannot help when the election is heavily skewed, and, as we saw, it is no advantage when the election is close.

So, when one candidate gains an edge over another, a 1 or 2 percent change in the electoral college system hugely reduces anyone’s chance of changing an election with their solitary vote, and candidates have less incentive to keep the losers happy. We have what Madison wanted to avoid. The larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, so the best idea is not to allow large elections. That is an advantage of dividing the national election into smaller, state contests, but today the states themselves are mainly far too big for this to matter.

The United States is not a perfectly districted nation. States vary enormously in size. The more lopsided the contest, the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best chance of a local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states would have more power, in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states would.

Either the national electorate has to be divided into smaller sizes, preferably all nearer the same size, meaning large and intermediate states themselves have to be split into national voting districts about as big or smaller than the smallest states today, or the electorate must have a greater choice of responses. With a lot of small voting districts, the candidates have a lot more chance of losing and the voting pattern comes more into balance, and, of course, the votes count for more.

But a similar effect can be had in a single national vote by allowing voters to vote for more people, the list of candidates being opened up from just two, to several. By having an alternative vote or, better still, a single transferable vote, everyone can still vote for their preferred candidate, but they can also vote for the others in order of preference, their second and third choices, all the way down the list…or not, just as they wish. When no one has an absolute majority, the least popular candidate drops out and his second choices are redistributed, successively until there is an overall winner. The modern automatic telling machines now used in the USA makes transferable voting (STV) practicable, when once it would not have been.

Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the outcome. But small districts which the math says give a notionally better chance of a tie, so that the individual vote counts, also make it easier for a bloc of big enough size to form and dominate the election.

Mossel’s assumption is that any voting model is subject to error, meaning that the vote cast by a small number of voters in each election will end up being recorded differently from what those voters intended. This may be due to human error, hanging chads, or voting machines that flip some vote randomly.

In 1899, W F Sheppard found that majority voting has an error on a given vote of its square root. So, if the error—say a faulty voting machine—is 1 in 10,000, the chance that the result of the election will be changed is roughly the square root, or 1 in 100. In a landslide election such unfortunate occurrences make no statistical difference. But in a close election, such errors may wreak havoc, even without our knowledge. Mossel uses advanced mehtods like Gaussian analysis, and isoperimetric theory, but he finds that the answer is unequivocal:

We don’t have the best system. Isoperimetric theory tells us majority voting method is optimal. It is the most robust.

Put simply:

With Electoral College voting, in essence you’re doing majority twice. First you do majority in each state and then you do the majority of the majority, so you take the square root of the square root. So you take square root of 1/10,000 once and get 1/100, and then you take square root again and get 1/10.

The Electoral College appears to fail miserably based on the robustness to error criteria, and in comparison with direct elections. If the democratic ideal is for the outcome to reflect the intent of the voter as much as humanly possible, then the analysis suggests a change is needed. If Americans want the best electoral system, they should change the electoral college method to a direct election for president, and to try to achieve Madison's aims, should have multi candidate elections by alternative vote or preferably single transferable vote.

Congressmen Bail Out Firms to Protect their Own Investments

Equity ownership, stocks and shares owned by politicians, influenced their legislative and financial monitoring activities. The financial interests of politicians increased the probability that banks received bailout money, how much support these institutions received and how quickly.

Representatives’ stock ownership influenced members of the US House of Representatives to bailout the financial sector by voting for the bills HR 3997 on 29 September and HR 1424 on 3 October, 2008. In the initial vote, the likelihood of voting for the bailout was 41 percent for non-investors and 58 percent for equity owners. In the final vote, the likelihood was 55 and 69 percent respectively.

Congressional equity ownership in a given firm was also shown to affect the probability of receiving a bailout, the bailout amount and the timing of government support to that firm. Congressional committees with jurisdiction over the finance sector can affect regulatory outcomes. Equity ownership of members of these congressional committees affects bailout decisions, largely due to the powerful members in each committee, the chairs and ranking members.

Lobbying is indubitably an important means of exerting influence in politics. In the United States, campaign donations also matter. What has gone virtually unnoticed thus far though is that politicians also are investors. Part of their wealth rests with firms whose wellbeing falls under their legislative and regulatory influence.

Professor of Business Laurence van Lent of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Ahmed Tahoun of Manchester Business School (UK) drew these conclusions on the basis of an analysis of 555 publicly listed financial sector firms, 295 of which received government support under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Tory Toff Cameron, British PM, Greets His Deputy, Liberal Toff, Nick Clegg

Cartoon by Chris Riddell from Guardian Newspapers and the Observer.

David Cameron is the British Prime Minister. He is a toff, a man with very rich parents who had a very expensive education, the best you can buy in the UK. The British Deputy Prime Minister is Nick Clegg. He is another toff from a banking family, and had a superior education, albeit not quite in the Cameron bracket.

Cameron is a Tory, the traditional conservative party of the UK, while Clegg is a Liberal Democrat, but the two have united in a coalition government against the New Labour Party created out of the traditional Labour party by the machinations of one odious opportunist, Tony Blair. The New Labour Party became unelectable because of the lies, spin, lack of principle, and the general careerism and dishonesty of most of Blair’s pick of grifters who stepped forward to be selected as a candidate for New Labour in the Blair and Brown years.

Clegg’s party pretended to have taken the mantle of the old Labour party in standing up for the ordinary worker and the middle classes, the old, the disabled, the deprived, and generally those struggling to manage in a world increasingly designed to favor the sharks and other financial raptors. But he welched on his promises, and joined David Cameron in the most vicious attack on the standards of anyone less than minted in almost a century.

Clegg, however, leads the junior arm of the coalition, and hence he is depicted as a doormat by Chris Riddell, having to endure the muck and mud of popular ire, and growing sense of betrayal by the Lib-Dems, because the attack on the people would have been impossible without Liberal help, and their full ire would have been directed against Cameron’s Tories.

As it is, the anger is growing, the pressure is mounting. Already students have wrecked the entrance of the Tory HQ on Millbank in London, knowing that good humored, quiet, and orderly demonstrations never get the demonstrators anywhere. They are ignored or subverted from their original aims.

Look at the orderly million strong demonstrations against the Iraq war. The antiwar feeling was rapidly extinguished and turned, by ceaseless military publicity and propaganda, into pro war sentimentality and “charities” like “Help The Heroes”, a way of keeping in the public eye the “heroism” of our soldiers killing peasant farmers, their wives, daughters and sons, in their own homes and homeland 4000 miles away.

All of this is meant to distract public attention from the way they have been robbed of trillions by the bankers and those who depend upon financial fiddling like Cameron and Clegg, not to mention the creepy Blair, so much admired, it seems, in the Land of the Free. Please take him and keep him, treating him to the same torture that he and Bush have meted out in the world, by Bush’s own admission, when the US eventually gets to prosecute war criminals instead of sheltering them.

How Does Mixing Business with Politics Differ from Corruption and Bribery?

Most people would disapprove of corruption. It is one of those things people think are bad. Yet few of these same people realize that politically connected firms get massive benefits from their sponsoring of favored candidates in elections, once their favorites get into government. The bailouts of the banks deemed “too big to fail” are the latest and most obvious example.

A study by Russell Crook and David Woehr of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, found that when firms engage in corporate political activities, such as lobbying and making campaign contributions, they get roughly 20 percent higher profits. So, to fatten your company’s profits, donate to a political campaign!

The analysis of 7,000 firms over various time periods, showed what led them into corporate political activity. The larger the firm, the more likely it was to be politically active, and politicians closer to power, more able to influence policy and legislation, were more likely to receive corporate donations. Incumbents more often got money than new candidates.

Yet in January 2010, the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission overturned an old ruling limiting corporate donations to politicians. It gave the nod to higher levels of corporate political influence. Consequently, corporate political donations will be subject to less scrutiny and transparency, and it will be all the harder to know who is sponsoring whom, and to what amount. Crook said:

Given this, we think that the Supreme Court ruling means that corporations and politicians will develop closer relationships than ever before.

In fact, corporations have already donated more money to politicians in the recent elections than ever before, despite the parlous state of the US economy. It reflects the money that big political donors seem to find quite readily to support supposedly grass roots Tea Parties, despite the country allegedly being on its uppers. Plainly the rich donors are not on their uppers.

Why then do corporate political donations lead to fatter profit margins? The corporate bosses do not like throwing money away to no purpose, so political corporate spending has a purpose, obviously. It is to get favorable legislation enacted. The donations are actually bribes! Besides the bank bailouts, another example was the “Copyright Term Extension Act”, sarcastically called, the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”, in which Disney successfully lobbied to extend US copyrights by 20 years.

Though Crook and Woehr are careful not to say these practices are corrupt, they plainly think they are a cause for concern to citizens. Sticking with the market model, Crook said:

We do not believe that this activity is illegal, but this activity constrains natural market forces and is thus undesirable. And with the new Supreme Court ruling, it is only going to get worse.

The journal, Financial Management, has also revealed that corruption is widespread in the corporate world, and has confirmed successful corporations are often the ones with the most extensive political connections.

Mara Faccio studied several thousand firms and found:

Politically connected firms have higher leverage in the form of preferential loans, pay lower taxes, have regulatory protection, are made eligible for government aid, and have stronger market power. They differ more dramatically from their peers when their political links are stronger, and in more corrupt countries, although these characteristics can be observed worldwide.

She alleges that connected firms appear to enjoy substantial favors from governments, distorting the allocation of public resources. “Firms with no political ties appear to be at a disadvantage”, so, it seems, the pressure is on for all firms to corrupt government! Her study was not restricted to the USA. She looked at 47 countries all together, but political influence by companies was common in both emerging and developed countries, although the methods of political influence varied somewhat.

These studies show that the ordinary voter is oblivious to the way that democracy is commonly swindled by political bribery and corruption, in the USA and in most other capitalist countries, whether advanced or developing. People consider corruption as wrong, but show no curiosity that it is happening daily, and the one who suffers in the end is Joe and Jane Doe, the common man and woman, you and me.

It is time this corrupt system was ended, and it is certain that right wingers dressing up as Captain America and in tricorn hats—led by the nose by private sponsors from among the rich—will not do it. A genuine grass roots movement is needed, and it will probably be led, as it is in France and latterly in Britain, by serious students and angry unemployed young people.

Where is All the Money? Ask Credit Suisse Bank!

Sam Pizzigati, editor of Too Much, an online newsletter on excess and inequality, reports that the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse has issued for the first time a Global Wealth Report based on financial data from over 200 countries. It shows that total global net worth, despite the 2008 global economic meltdown, has rocketed up 72 percent since 2000. Credit Suisse sums up:

The past decade has been especially conducive to the establishment and preservation of large fortunes.

The world has more than enough wealth to ensure no one on the planet need be potless. The study shows the world has 4.4 billion adults and the total wealth they own is $194.5 trillion. Shared out, every adult in the world could have $43,800. The fact is, though, that three billion people, almost 70 percent, have less than $10,000, and 1.1 billion, a quarter of all adults, have less than $1,000. These figures are net worth, meaning their assets less their liabilities. Half the people on earth who are 20 and older have less than 2 percent of global wealth—each less than $4,000.

The world’s richest 1 percent—adults who have at least $588,000—hold 43 percent of the world’s wealth. They constitute the ruling class, the wealthiest class, and they break down as:

• just over 1,000 billionaires, with over $1000 million each
• 80,000 more super rich people worth between $50 million and $1 billion each
• 24 million more people who are millionaires worth between $1 million and $50 million.

Those wealth differences are exacerbated by the local conditions. In uncivilized societies with poor public health care, poor quality public education, and no state pensions, then the poor are hit by ill health, a miserable old age, and ignorance because they cannot afford to pay for the absent public services. Moreover, epidemics like swine flu, natural disasters, like Katrina, and unemploment are additional shocks for which the poor do not have the reserves to survive easily. In a society with the opposite conditions, a history of civilized caring governments which have provided public services and benefits then poverty does not have the stigma and practical horrors it has in poor societies.

No other nation has as much total wealth as the United States, with only 5.2 percent of the world’s population. It has 23 percent of the world’s adults worth at least $100,000 and an even greater proportion, 41 percent, of the world’s millionaires. Yet, it is a society with inadequate social services, so its people need more personal wealth to survive than people in countries like France, Sweden and Germany which have good social services.

Canada has a national public health insurance. Credit Suisse calculates the wealth of the typical Canadian family is $94,700, double the $47,771 US average. It shows that good public services add to a nation’s wealth. Public services provide jobs, and need private business suppliers, and health and pension security means people are less risk averse, and will be more inclined to start up new businesses.

Why then have we given trillions of dollars to the banks, depleting our treasuries so much that we are told we have been living too extravagantly? It is a big lie, and we ought to be taking direct action to change it. But we can do without Tea Party economics. We do not need tax cuts for the rich, we need services for the poor, paid for by taxing the rich. They can afford it, we cannot!

Another Election: But US Voters Still Not Being Heard

A poll in Ohio shows independent voters are unhappy with the political system. Previous polls have already demonstrated a low level of trust, among independents especially. 70 percent of respondents reported low satisfaction with Ohio politics, with higher figures among independents than among Democrats or Republicans. Dr John Green, distinguished professor of political science at UA, said:

This unhappiness raises questions about the legitimacy of the political process.

Independent voters thought the political system has been unresponsive to the public, especially on the economy. Participants had a variety of views about the problem:

• we’re not being heard
• politicians were self-serving careerists
• politicians were arrogant and insulated from the problems of the public
• corruption was a common allegation, symbolized by the large sums of money raised and spent in campaigns
• politicians should “wear patches on their suits from their sponsors” like NASCAR drivers.
• people were alienated from the political process
• public officials were puppets of special interest groups.

In the US political system, the buck stops at the presidency, so Obama carried the can, not just for Tea Partyers, but because he had not done enough to address the problems of the average American. But views on Congress were also negative:

• it needed to be revamped
• anything would be better than the system we have now
• members of Congress did not respond to the needs of the public at large
• we just need new people in government
• parties were viewed as hell bent on their own agenda
• parties too far apart on every issue
• it takes years to get anything done
• parties needed to put America first
• parties needed to stay more to the Constitution
• a third or fourth political party was needed to keep the system honest
• a “common sense” party was needed to revive the economy and limit the size of government.

Some thought additional parties would not be “common sense” parties, but a base for lunatics, and would not be competitive. If any were a base for lunatics, it would have to be competitive to match the Republican Tea Partyists. Indeed, many independents were skeptical of the Tea Party agenda, but others were supportive. Many accepted that problems were partly their own fault for not being more involved in politics, but anger and distrust were strong motivations for political activity:

• the people need to exercise their power
• it is time for a revolution

There needed to be more free access and response from politicians:

• more and regular town hall meetings
• quick and thorough responses from contacted officeholders
• a greater presence of politicians in the community
• being a politician should not be seen as a job choice but a service to the country.

These lists of solutions offered are incoherent and inconsistent, illustrating the voter disunity, and failure to comprehend what is happening. It reflect the sense of being ignored by the government among independent voters. There is no way that Americans can solve the problem. They live in a society in which the ordinary people, workers and middle classes, refuse to accept they live in a class society in which the ruling class, the rich elite, control their system from top to bottom. As long as that is so, there can be no change unless the ruling class volunteer to give up some of their wealth and power in a redistribution for fairness and justice. It is not likely to happen. So, revolution is the only option, but that requires unity, and US workers are utterly divided and will remain so while the right wing media are so influential, and their target audience are so gullible.

Media Manipulation of the Poor Prevents Wealth Redistribution

Nate Kelly, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Peter Enns of Cornell University studied of economic inequality and public views of government redistribution programs by analyzing hundreds of thousands of responses to survey questions from 1952 to 2006.

The results are very revealing about the mentality and conditioning of poor Americans, and poor Americans certainly now includes a large chunk of people who like to consider themselves as middle class! One would imaging that people struggling in hard economic circumstances would appreciate government assistance, but they do not in the US. Kelly found:

When inequality in America rises, both the rich and the poor become more conservative in their ideologies. It is counterintuitive, but rather than generating opinion shifts that would make redistributive policies more likely, increased economic inequality produces a conservative response in public sentiment.

As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, both oppose government welfare programs. At present, in the US, governments cannot act to change inequality. As Obama is finding out, the poor even oppose measures that help them! Poorly off subjects, asked if they thought the government spent too much money on welfare, inevitably replied “yes”, and still do even though inequality over the last few decades has zoomed in the US.

This isn't because are unaware. They know about the huge wealth differences in the US. The reason is, the authors conclude, because the elites, political leaders and media moguls, distract and shape public opinion. In good economic times the media focus on individual achievement, and so the poor resist government programs. But in bad economic times, the media emphasize government welfare programs as handouts, and no one likes a self image of being a beggar or a hobo down on their luck. Kelly observes that:

What is clear from our work is that the self reinforcing nature of economic inequality is real, and that we must look beyond simple defects in the policy responsiveness of American democracy to understand why this is the case.

He means, of course, that leaders like Obama who would like to redistribute the huge inequalities in US wealth have not been utterly lacking in the US, but the US propaganda machine is so successful that too many people just cannot bring themselves to admit they would welcome it. They are conscious enough about their own poor circumstances, but simply do not realize how the US media manipulate them. Obama and anyone equally public minded are bound to lose until poor Yankees realize the rich and their media are pissing on them from a great height!

Sounds Familiar: Aneurin Bevan in 1959

I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realize that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realize that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realize that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realize all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the Tories who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realize that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realize that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led!

Nothing much changes, or has changed, in the intervening fifty years except that Bevan’s Labour Party was sold out to Blair’s New Labour party, which more appropriately should have been called Not Labour. Blair made the Labour party into a neoconservative party, and brought about the state of affairs Bevan predicted. Now we have five neoconservatives, or at least four and an opportunist, standing for the leadership of the New Labour party. So nothing will change. Labour voters have always mostly been dupes of the Oxbridge middle classes. Maybe, it is time they trusted to a few socialists instead, or even thought about politics instead of watching the “delirium” of reality and “celebrity” TV.

The recent vast bailouts to the world's bankers certainly show that the moneylenders have taken over, and already they are making vast profits and, of course, bonuses. Why should they get bonuses for these profits? The Bank Rate is set in the UK to 0.5 percent, so anyone with money in the bank will get this meagre rate of interest. Yet the bank can lend it to businesses, not usually British ones, at anything up to 10 percent, earning an automatic profit of 9.5 percent, or at least a substantial one for doing nothing to earn it. The bank of England sets the bank rate for the benefit of the banks, and they benefit, but what have they done to merit any bonuses? It is yet another banking scam.

Meanwhile, the new British Tory government, with the help of their chums who own the media, like Rupert Murdoch, propagate the myth that the country is bankrupt, and swinging cuts must be made, notably in unemployment and other benefits for the poor. In this way, the anger of the people at being mugged by bankers is diverted to anger at the unemployed for drawing benefits! How easy it is to manipulate the masses.

No cuts would be needed at all if the government retrieved from the banks what it gave them, if it taxed the billionaire hangers on who come from places like the former Soviet Union with chests of ill-gotten cash—the so-called oligarchs, if it taxed our own British megarich more progressively, and if it legislated against the scams and loop holes that the wealthy use to multiply their wealth at the expense of the lower and middle classes.

There is nothing at all complicated about this. You do not need a degree to understand it, yet the British today claim it is all too complicated. One has to conclude on the contrary that people are too lazy to think for themselves and too ready to accept what they read in their newspapers, and see on the television news.

Bevan saw it all, and sadly, the way the Labour party got taken over by Blair and Brown, there was nothing to stand in the way of it. Resurrecting Labour will be harder than resurrecting Christ, so maybe a new left wing party is needed. The Germans seem to be heading in that direction. It needs to begin with a Clause 4. If anyone does not know what it is, maybe they should Google it!

Protests Make Political Parties More Responsive

Latin American protests have caused deaths and national crises since the 1970s, but democratic reforms too. Moises Arce, an associate professor of political science in the Missouri-Columbia College of Arts and Science, has found that political protests, although they can be violent, can bring about stronger political parties and more responsive policies (published in Party Politics):

Many of these protests in Latin America have led to changes in policies and the direction of the government. In some cases, protests may ultimately be helpful for democracy. The established parties may be taking things for granted. Political protests become forms of street accountability. The change that we have seen after many of these protests is the creation of new parties that better represent the popular interests of society, and, therefore, serve as more effective communication channels for political discourse.

By studying political activity and parties in 17 Latin American countries since 1978, Arce found that most protests were because economic policies favored the business sector. Most recent policies have given Latin America large scale economic stability but little improvement from the general public's perspective. There is still a high level of unemployment, and the public has become more knowledgeable of political corruption:

People have died, so it's unfortunate that government reforms happened that way. Currently, almost all Latin American countries have left or left leaning presidents who tend to be more responsive to popular demands and will create a new political equilibrium between those popular demands and the business sector.

Politicians often argue that protests are disruptive and should be suppressed, and that protests are unnecessary in a democracy, but they are happening and have not damaged democratic stability. Of course, generally the political right are ultimately not interested in democracy, only their own power, and many so called Liberals, and even New Labour “socialists” in the UK, are dupes of the rich anyway, so the trend towards unrestrained global capitalism means that “the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own formal democratic rules”, as Slavoj Zizek puts it. The Patriot Act in the US and similar repressive legislation laid on incredibly thckly by the Blair and Brown governments are far more dangerous to democracy than a few protests, or even the terrorism attacks they pretend to be to prevent.

People in Latin America are becoming tolerant of protests. In Europe and the US, politicians are getting more and more scared of it. Democracy needs both parties and protests. We have the duff parties. All we need now, according to Arce, are more and more determined protests.

A Better way of Organising our Politics

Something is profoundly wrong, with the way we live today.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

We have wasted the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have been consumed by the locusts, or more precisely by the shamelessly greedy. It has been the era of all the Dicks, from Cheney to Fuld, politically “an age of the pygmies”. Unregulated markets have crashed. Wars of choice have left bloody destruction in their wake. The snouts have been buried deep in the trough. Beyond the noise of guzzling, we can hear no moral critique of what has happened, no shout of rage that things don’t have to be like this.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed, not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt… encourages dissent from conformity, for which there is much to be said. Blessed are the troublemakers.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

[But] social democracy is not something that Americans can talk about, though there is a bit of cognitive dissonance about their attitudes to the public and private realms of social provision… [In the first thirty years after the War] planning, progressive taxation, high public spending and nationalized services brought inclusive economic growth with increasing equity and social harmony. A mostly benign state provided the security for which people yearn, replacing the market’s invisible hand with more visible supportive direction. Maybe all was not for the best, but it was pretty good all the same—and would have gladdened the heart of that scion of egalitarian Eton, John Maynard Keynes… According to Judt, since the 1980s, from Reagan to Bush, from Thatcher to Brown, it has been downhill all the way, with growing inequity, a declining belief in the role of the state and a falling away from civic engagement.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt is proudly a man of the left… He is intellectually brave—witness his well founded criticisms of Israel’s policies in Palestine. Beyond the imaginings of most of us, Judt is personally brave, too; motor neurone disease has left him quadriplegic.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

From The UK Observer

UK Election: 6 May. Who to Vote For!

The PM, Mr Gordon Brown, has asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament so that there can be an election on 6 May. The electorate now have a month to make up their minds who they want to rule them for the next five years.

They should not vote for any candidate who will not agree to:

• Tax the banks to get back the money New Labour gave them.
• Repeal all the bad and oppressive laws that New Labour introduced and are lying unused until some fascist decides to do so.
• Abandon the neoconservative myth of the War on Terror that Blair got from Bush and Cheney to keep people worried about nothing, and pull out of Afghanistan.

If they don't agree, then don't vote for them. Simple!

In Politics, Money Talks Loudest. What Can Be Done?

Ted Honderich made the opening speech in a debate in the Oxford Union on 29 January 2010, the evening of the day when Tony Blair appeared at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. The motion was that this House believes that in politics, money talks loudest. The motion was carried. Here is a slight synopsis of the full speech online at Ted Honderich’s website.

“The motion before us two parts, one explicit and one implicit. There is the explicit proposition of fact, and there is the implication of it—that it raises a question of rightness, or indeed isn’t right. Talking openly of what is right or wrong is unusual in this time in England, and may seem curious, perhaps moralistic, maybe innocent or immature, anyway not familiar.

Cant, in particular cant by our democratic politicians, is the dismal order of the day, along with the brazen policy that the response to a question is not an answer but an evasion of it. The cant and the evasion have reduced the clarity and hence the intelligence of public discussion, indeed brought it to its lowest state in 50 years. A society in decline since 1979 has declined further.

Instead of speaking of right and wrong, of what ought not to happen, the political class declares or intones the cant that this or that is “unacceptable”. They are saying that is wrong—what we must not do. They prefer to be inexplicit instead. When you say plainly that something is wrong, or right, you are expected to produce a reason, an argument, something clear headed.

So, what are the things that according to the motion money talks louder than in politics? One answer is truth. It is not only the first victim of war. A second thing that money talks louder than is the logic of ordinary intelligence. That consists in clarity, analysis, relevance, consistency, validity, and completeness, not leaving things out. Truth and logic bring along some humanity with them. You can’t be truthful and logical without humanity—humanity being what is right.

Being simple minded, which our political class is, is also to be avoided. One way of being simple minded about the motion in front of us is to think the part that is the factual proposition can be settled just by some figures. It can’t be settled that way, useful as some general figures are.

It is true that the economically best off tenth of population in Britain and America have something like 70% of the wealth, and the worst off tenth has as good as none. As for income, the best off tenth has about 30% or 40%, and the worst off 2% or 3%. That means that the poorest have nothing to spend on politics, indeed no time left to engage in it after getting their 2 or 3%, and the very richest have a lot.

I say, without fear of any economist or student of the dismal science in this house, the dismal science that never gets around to quantifying what is fundamental, that the richest have more than 1000 times the political influence and power of the poorest. Remember that the poorest have as good as no wealth. 70 times zero is infinitely less than 70 times 1. What does the 1000 times more political influence and power do? More than corruption in the House of Commons, and more than the fact of lobbying even on an American scale. More than industries and interests infesting the regulation of themselves.

The 1000 times more political influence and power can make and maintain what can mildly be called a certain convention of thought and feeling in a society, mainly a successful pretense about what is necessary and what is possible. It consists in illusions upon illusions. About war, classes, the economy, public services, private profit and the profitization of things, taxation, banks, competition, co-operation, foreign ownership, utilities, health, education, politics itself, ideologies and religions, terrorism. Today, there is the illusion about the need to reduce public spending rather than reduce private profiting.

Illusions work better than an army and police on motorbikes. Owning newspapers and paying for ordinary advertisements in them is part of the convention. So is a government broadcasting service. A compliant church despite a brave Archbishop is another part. There is no need for conspiracy, although there is some of that, to make the whole thing intentional.

The illusions bring to mind the other part of the political cant about the “unacceptable”. Our dim but not too dim political class, when they intone “unacceptable”, don’t only mean that something is wrong, they also mean it is somehow unthinkable. Its ambiguity saves them from being challenged either about something’s being wrong or its being or its being believed necessary or impossible by all the relevant persons.

Let us think a little, which you’re allowed to do in a university, even in a debate, by asking what can best be said for democracy. What can best be tried in its justification? The hope is that it is a better decision procedure for a society than any other, for a particular reason—in plain English, it is that two heads are better than one, and more better are than two. What is in heads, according to this argument, is different and compensating kinds of knowledge, different experiences of a society, different wants. But it only works if what is in the heads gets equal and free expression.

In our hierarchic democracies, there is nothing of the sort, nothing remotely like equal and free expression. So there can be no reasonable assumption that our democracies are right about anything at all—social goods, or profitization against co-operation, or terrorism, or our own terrorist war. So put aside the fiction, indeed the illusion, of a democratic guarantee of good policies.

How should we go about judging the result of money talking loudest in our democracy—thinking about that outcome? What principle or other method should we use? Our political class never asks how you should go about judging the outcome. Should we do it by the viciousness of the tradition of conservatism, New Labour wholly being within it? Conservatism is no more a political tradition of self interest than any other, but the politics has no principle of right and wrong at all to support its self interest. Liberalism has better impulses than conservatism, but it is without a real principle to give content to its better impulses. It is without a will to act on those impulses, including its decency in opposing a terrorist war.

Should you judge the result of money in politics by the principle of the Utilitarians, that what is right is what produces the greatest total of happiness, well being or satisfaction—no matter how it is shared out, even if the biggest total rests on some people, a class at the bottom, having lives that are really nasty, British and short? Should you throw psychoanalysis and neuroscience into the plan, as they now say at the London School of Economics, to make people happier without changing the world that was making them unhappy?

Maybe you should try instead a principle of judgement heard of in Cambridge sometimes these days? That is the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. It tells you to treat everybody not only as a means but also as an end. It’s all about respect. Its clearest upshot is that you should nod decently to the homeless fellow in the street when you don’t buy a copy of The Big Issue magazine he sells for a crust.

So, how should we go about judging the result of money talking loudest in our politics? What sums up what is right on any subject anywhere, is the Principle of Humanity. It is that what is right is what according to the best judgement and information gets and keeps people out of bad lives. Bad lives are defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, denial of the fundamental desires of human nature—six of them—a decent length of life, bodily well being, freedom and power, respect and self respect, goods of relationship, the goods of culture.

“Money talking loudest” is a standing violation of the Principle of Humanity. It denies every great human good, every denial aided by suppression of truth and evasion of logic. If you’re not pushy or a pusher, you live less long for a start, you have less consciousness, and you suffer pain, constraint, weakness, disdain, self disdain. Your children don’t learn. You read Murdoch newspapers that stop you from escaping the stupidity owed to your ignorance.

Earlier today Blair, a man who managed this democracy into a terrorist war, the Iraq war, insulting the decency that remains in this democracy, appeared before a weak committee, a wretched committee of old boys neither capable of questioning him effectively nor willing to. Not a court. Not Nuremberg. Blair sought today, by the audacity of a shyster lawyer unconstrained by a judge, his policy in the House of Commons, to blunt the truth that he is a war criminal, a criminal against humanity. Old Germans around Nuremberg can feel less bad tonight about the German past. They can say that Nuremberg happened.

In Blair’s wholly intentional killing of innocents in and after the war, wholly intentional since wholly foreseeable, and in his wholly intentional causing of fear supposed to be the stuff of only terrorism, and in everything else of his New Labour, Blair has been and is a creature of money talking. He has been a creature who listens to it talking, goes to ask for more, and pays for it.

What should we do? What should be done about all the denials of the great goods, about taking from people what we all desire? What should be done about the monstrous selfishness? Truth and logic is all we have to rely on, some say. But surely it can’t be the only hope. That would be too terrible. A colonel of the British Army, at the time of English civil war, said:

For really I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he…

Thomas Rainsborough”

Honderich wonders whether revolution could be an answer, or mass civil disobedience, much more insistent than the large demonstrations at the outset of the Iraq war, or a boycott of the market. Any such insistent demonstrating, or a colonel driving a tank into Parliament Square is likely to be what a neoconservative government like this New Labour one would love. They could institute martial law, and declare plainly the fascism they have hitherto been hiding but preparing for.

Honderich thinks revolution isn’t a rational means to the end of the Principle of Humanity. Nor is it, it is the breakdown of society for the very reasons he is outlining, and the Principle of Humanity can only work in a functioning society—by civilized people! Mass civil disobedience, funded by the US has worked in a few places in the last couple of decades. “It brought down a wall, ended an empire. It has changed governments.” Revolution is getting more feasible as the western powers weaken, the very reason for their drive towards fascism.

The eastern countries India and China are becoming serious rivals to the US and Europe. The financial system, as Honderich shows, is getting more and more openly corrupt, and politics too. Society is crumbling and revolution, consisting of the components Honderich mentioned looking more likely, but it will have to fight off fascism first, or somehow force some government to scrap the mass of repressive legislation New Labour has introduced. At present the British are sleepwalking. Mostly they are ignorant of what is going on as long as they have Murdoch’s media, reality TV and celebrities, and can still borrow on credit. They have a rude shock ahead.