freedom and reason

From the transcripts from the Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987. Dialog between Congressman Jack Brooks, Oliver North’s attorney, Brendan Sullivan, and Senator Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Chair of the joint Senate-House Committee:

Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

Sullivan [agitated]: Mr. Chairman?

Inouye [sternly]: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon that?

Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

Inouye [more sternly]: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

This dialog concerns Rex 84 (Readiness Exercise 1984), a detailed plan, developed by Oliver North, deputy director for political-military affairs of the NSC, Louis Giuffrida, head of FEMA, and vice president George H.W. Bush to declare martial law, suspend the United States Constitution, put military commanders in charge of state and local governments, and detain large numbers of citizens deemed threats to national security. All that would be required for this to be enacted is for the US president to declare a “State of Domestic National Emergency.” Listed among activities that could trigger such an emergency is widespread opposition to a US military invasion abroad.

North co-authored the report with John Brinkerhoff, deputy director of FEMA’s national preparedness program. The plan is based on a Army War College template published in 1970 by FEMA chief Louis Giuffrida. The original plan proposed detaining 21 million “American Negroes” in the event that there was a “black militant uprising.”

You can watch the exchange here:

A business is a special class of private property, yet Ron Paul and other self-styled “libertarians” speak of private property as if it were one all-inclusive class of things operating under the same set of rules. In a contentious appearance on the Larry O’Donnell show, Paul claims that forcing a white-only restaurant to serve black customers, which is authorized under Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, hyperbolically characterized as the government “taking over private property,” is like “taking over the bedroom.”

The analogy is absurd. I don’t need a business or any other license or permit to sell my car to the teenager down the block. I just need a title. I can sell that car to anybody I choose. If I want to sell my car to a white person I will. If I don’t want to let black people into my home, I don’t have to. However, if I run a business, I fall under a different set of rules because it’s a different type of property. It’s capital. I must obtain local, state, and, sometimes, even federal and professional licenses and permits. Additionally, I must obtain a state tax license, labor department registration, employer identification number, etc.

If my home is not a public accommodation, then I decide whether blacks can sleep in it. If my home becomes a public accommodation, then I don’t have that choice. This is because it has become a business.

Here’s the essential difference: A person or group of persons who want to go into business must seek the state’s blessing. The state grants a license—a privilege—to a business thereby legitimizing its operation and retaining the express power to regulate that business. (Businesses that decide to operate without the state privilege become part of the black market. Yet when I sell my car, I do not become part of the illegal market.)

When the term “right” is appealed to in the context of the business-state relation, the term is assumed to be a condition legally conferred, not an inherent or natural right. This is because only individuals have inherent rights—and the right to operate a business that harms persons’ civil liberties is not among them. To be sure, businesses have protections in the law, but none of these are allowed in principle to exclude and harm without reason (i.e. rational secular justification). I say in principle because this often doesn’t always work in practice due to the power of capital in influencing government action or inaction (see, for example, mountain top removal). However, just because the state doesn’t act consistently on principle doesn’t mean the principle isn’t well established.

The state has always had the authority to compel establishments serving the public to open their services to everybody. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 confirmed this by providing the machinery to force state governments to recognize the unalienable rights of US citizens—life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness, which are self-evidently compromised by the racist “separate but equal” doctrine—by banning laws permitting or requiring segregation.

Paul and his ilk make two errors. First, they fallaciously separate private and public sectors, as if a public accommodation can refuse to serve black people without that refusal enjoying or suffering either positive or negative sanction by the state. There is no neutral state position relative to business in the concrete—this is to say, any state that permits racial discrimination in public accommodations acts in a racially discriminatory fashion. It is basic to common legal understanding that laws that either require or permit establishments to discriminate against certain group members are themselves discriminatory and must be struck down in order to restore the inherent right. Therefore, discrimination in labor and consumer markets had to fall along with policies and acts of state discrimination; there is no disentangling the spheres; they rise or fall together.

Neoclassical liberal thought is shot through with this error of reification. See the works of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. So busy building ships in bottles were they that it’s comical to watch how confused they could become when trying to talk about the concrete character of actual political economic systems. Friedman looked particularly foolish on a regular basis, since he was keen on getting in front of audiences and challenging college students to match wits with him.

Libertarians (I am talking about true libertarians now), on the other hand, don’t commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness because they consistently operate on the principle of personal sovereignty. That’s what makes it an intrinsically left-wing philosophy and practice: the aim to dismantle all illegitimate hierarchy. Not so with so called “libertarians” like Ron Paul. Paul desires to keep the capitalist hierarchy firmly in place and more: entrench the hierarchy even further by weakening the democratic machinery (the positive freedom side) of the republic.

Second (and this isn’t so much error as it is propaganda), neoclassical liberals want to flip the universe by making the alleged right of business unalienable while characterizing the rights of individuals as apparent privileges. In doing so, they explicitly put property before people; they are essentially arguing that having capital gives one person the right to oppress other persons, and if that person is white, then he is free to oppress black persons. In other words, they use the rhetoric of private property to justify apartheid. I do wish they would finally admit that the inevitable conclusion of their argument is that de jure race segregation is a legitimate outcome of capitalist property relations.

Finally, concerning Paul’s mantra of federalism and strict constructionism, given that the federal government is, according to the Constitution, the supreme law of the land (readers are familiar with the supremacy clause, no?), and the obvious fact that states do not have rights but powers (only individual persons have rights), Ron Paul supporters don’t have a leg to stand on. The bottom line: Paul’s rhetoric is subterfuge in defense of white nationalism. Maybe some Ron Paul supporters don’t recognize that. But it is what it is.

I have reviewed the materials and, as expected, the design of the Junior Achievement program is intended to obscure the true character of capitalist relations in quite profound ways and to the detriment of cognitive and moral development of our children. Corporate propaganda is designed by very clever ideologues to build in at an early age tacit acceptance of an ecologically unsustainable and immoral system of economic exploitation and social injustice. …

In “Sweet ‘O’ Donut,” the lesson on unit versus assembly-line production … there is zero discussion about the consequences of the Fordist and Taylorist model of industrial efficiency being taught to the kids. There are easy-to-grasp consequences of rationalizing production in this way in a capitalist economy, many of them detrimental to the interests of workers, which is the destiny of nearly every child in the public school system. Allow me to explain.

The motive behind the rationalization of production is raising the value of production, or what modern economics calls “value added,” generated during each worker hour, which, under capitalism, means a larger share of (unearned) income for the owners of the means of production, but not more wages for the workers, even though the workers add all of the value generated during their part of production. Put another way, the factory workers produce more commodities in a given unit of time in order to enrich the factory owners who do no productive work. This is the source of inequality in capitalist societies.

I will (briefly) work out this process mathematically to show you how it works. According to the 2006 Survey of Manufactures, conducted by the US Census Bureau, we see that industrial workers (i.e. workers in manufacturing) were compensated for their labor at an hourly rate of $18.33 (this amount is what we call variable capital).  We also see that the hourly rate of value added during production was $122.73. Part of this value added goes to pay for the $18.33 paid to the worker per hour. What happens to the rest of it, to the $104.40, what we call surplus value? It goes to the capitalist.

Let me make this point more dramatically, because this is the essence of capitalist exploitation. If we divide $104.40 (the surplus value) by $18.33 (the variable capital, or wages) we find that the worker produced 5.69 times the amount of value he received in wages in 2006. (Note: the raw materials, machines, etc, what we call constant capital, contribute no value to production, as they are consumed in the production process. These costs occur before the added value component. Here we are looking only at the variable capital input, since this is the sole source of profit in a capitalist market.)

The more productive the process can be made, the greater the surplus value for the capitalist. Let’s look at the 1996 numbers. Value added by manufacture per production worker’s hour was $65.14. Workers received before taxes an average of $12.40 per hour. Using the same formula as above, we find that the worker produced 4.25 times the value she received in wages.  We can see by this calculation that the rate of exploitation increased over the decade in question. Why? Because of increasing productivity with no benefit for the direct producers, precisely what “Sweet ‘O’ Donuts” aims to sell to students as a benefit with no negative consequences. The rising rate of exploitation was the source of the rising degree of inequality and concentration of wealth that contributed directly to the economic collapse in 2008.

Beyond economic calamity, the detrimental consequences are many. The worker’s income declines relative to the capitalist’s (more sharply if she is not a member of a collective bargaining unit). The worker is deskilled through task specialization. Her understanding of the production process is diminished. In the example, rather than each worker knowing how to make donuts, each worker only knows how to make one aspect of the Sweet “O” Donuts donuts. Thus their capacity to think and the extent of their knowledge of production is reduced. In the exercise [the student] was meant to learn the value of this by pitting skilled labor against robotized deskilled labor replete with inspection (“quality control”). This was not in his interests as a future worker or in becoming a complete moral person.

As noted, increasing the productivity of workers – which could, in a democratic economic model, be used to increase wages and benefits and shorten the work week – is the source of unemployment under capitalism, as fewer workers are needed for equivalent production output. Aided by machines, the number of workers can be reduced even more, to the point where many of the workers[/students] … could become unemployed.

I don’t see anywhere in the materials any criticism of assembly-line production. A curriculum could be derived for George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society, in which the detrimental effects of Fordism and Taylorism on society are rigorously documented and analyzed in a clear and concise way. He shows that rationalizing production in these ways diminishes social interaction and alienates workers, deskills them, causes repetitive motion injury, heightens work related stress (as clock time comes to dominate the worker’s daily routine), raises the level of structural unemployment, and increases inequality.

In this and other exercises, the capitalist is never mentioned. For example, in the lesson on government, the children are “paid” five dollars for their productive efforts. The money is said to come from the sale of Sweet “O” Donuts products. Yet the owner of the company is never identified. Nor is profit – or more importantly the source of profit – ever mentioned. It is as if all the money generated by the sale of the commodities is distributed equally among the students. On the contrary, under capitalism the value added by labor is realized as profit in the market and banked by the capitalist, as I demonstrated above. The wages are advanced along with the costs of capital, i.e. materials, machines, etc., all of which were, crucially, produced by previous labor while capitalists profited at every stage.

A realistic and therefore more useful classroom exercise would have the Junior Achievement facilitator/volunteer posing as the capitalist sitting at a table with a large pile of the play money giving orders while the students posing as workers receive but a fraction of the income generated by their labor in exchange for making more donuts. It would be explained to them that they have to sell their labor (i.e. rent themselves) to the Junior Achievement facilitator because they do not themselves collectively own the means of production. It would be explained that the capitalist not only lives off their work, but lives in a much bigger house, eats more nutritious food, wears nicer clothes, receives better health care, and has more leisure time because of the work the students/workers are performing. A classroom could do a similar demonstration of slavery in order to drive home the point of the immorality of such systems.

Of course I recognize that, while it is permissible to condemn slavery in contemporary U.S. society, it is not permissible to make the same condemnation about capitalism. At the same, it wasn’t permissible to make that point about slavery back in the days when slavery prevailed. Indeed, back then, a lot of people didn’t see the problem of slavery at all.  They were taught in school that it was an appropriate way to make money.

The exercise I have been detailing could be combined with the assembly-line production lesson to show how capitalists drive other (smaller) capitalists out of business, displace workers through rationalization, and accumulate every larger piles of money, while the students continue working or work not at all, as many will have lost their jobs. Then some of the students assigned to be government workers, which are in the Junior Achievement materials (see “The Role of Government”) portrayed as police officers (whose real world function is to maintain the unjust status quo in property relations, a role that is never explored in the lesson) could pretend to be welfare case workers who will manage the poor and unemployed students – that is, the victims of the actual process of capitalism. I imagine that parents of students of Aldo Leopold would be represented by this exercise. Are not the poor and unemployed members of the community, disproportionately minority and female, important enough to be represented in these exercises? Shouldn’t the link be made between wealth and poverty? After all, we can’t all be wealthy in a capitalist society. In fact, most of us can’t be. The inherent logic of capitalist production precludes it. A simple classroom exercise illustrating this could be derived from Jeffery Reiman’s classic The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison.

Another example of the function of the curriculum to obscure reality is found in the lesson on money, “Money Moves.” The children are instructed to sit in a circle and pass a quarter to each other, each spending it to buy something they need to keep business or other activity going. This is supposed to demonstrate the circulation of money. But this is not what happens in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, money is invested and commodities are sold for more money than the initial investment. What is being described in the exercise is simple commodity circulation (and even here is a mystifying oversimplification), something that happens in pre-capitalist societies where money is merely a symbolic unit of exchange. In fact, make the transfer of stuff in the example direct without money and you have a barter system. Capitalism is impossible under the model the students are demonstrating here. It manufactures the illusion that nobody is benefiting at anybody else’s expense. It avoids having to explain the source of profit.

Now, if the objection be made that what I have written is over the heads of students, I would counter that it is easy enough to create simple models simulating the real world experience of capitalism (I suggested two). In fact, simply setting up a simulation where the Junior Achievement facilitator ends up with a big pile of money at the end of exercise, while students get far less money and are dispossessed and displaced by efficiency regimes, and then asking students if they think that is fair should suffice to make the point. If not, drawing an analogy to slavery would. Despite how odd it sounds to hear such an analogy, it is true that, while capitalism is a different mode of exploitation, capitalism is still an exploitative system, and in fact operates on the same profit-making principle as did chattel slavery in the antebellum southern United States.

To be sure, teaching an alternative curriculum would be a subversive and democratic act that would likely bring an outcry from the business community who would besiege the school board with complaints, organize astroturf letter writing campaigns to smear the teachers, and marshal the power of the corporate media to make public education look anti-business. This despite the fact that it would be to the benefit of nearly every family associated with Aldo Leopold. Then why is it to be accepted as normal and unproblematic for Junior Achievement’s “Our Community” to be taught in schools? Herein resides the tacit and undeserved legitimacy of the corporate capitalist worldview over against the interests of the majority, namely the working class. As one of the most influential of all social scientists once observed, “The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.”

Which brings me to my final point: if you feel you can’t allow teachers and students to speak truth to power at [the school in question], then why allow any economic agenda into the classroom? If the other side is too complicated, too troubling, then why permit propagandists to confuse children about the world they live in? When you think about it, given its detachment from the operation of the real world, “Our Community” possesses a religious quality. Junior Achievement is dogma, not enlightenment. It takes capitalism and elevates it to a virtue and then systematically masks the history and reality of the system in order to brainwash children into accepting a system that exploits them and destroys the environment. As such, it is out of place in a public educational setting and, really, not befitting a democratic society.

Obama isn’t giving ground. He isn’t caving. He isn’t timid, confused, or unsure of himself. He simply isn’t one of us. If he wins re-election, he will become even more of what he is right now and has been for years: a neoliberal globalist. His campaign was a sham. (The great untold story of our age is how millions of left and left of center voters allowed themselves to be so completely bamboozled by an obvious Madison Avenue-style campaign.) Obama’s election sucked much of the energy out of anti-corporate/anti-war movement. The election of Obama to office was a spectacular propaganda achievement by the corporations that own the country.

What the left must now understand (what they should have understood all along) is that Obama is a key player in a structural adjustment program being imposed on the United States by finance capital. Obama had to be the bringer of the austerity phase of the project because the ruling class knew progressives wouldn’t go for it if McCain were president. If it were McCain cutting Medicare, expanding military presence in Central Asia, Middle East, and Africa (imperialism), extending the PATRIOT Act, as well as George Bush’s tax cuts, organizing assassination squads, undermining Social Security, etc., progressives would be howling. But because it’s Obama, they instead rationalize, apologize, make excuses, and blame Republicans.

Such rationalization as, “We’re stuck with him,” would sound ridiculous to progressives if it were McCain doing all the things Obama is doing. We would instead hear: “We have to get this man out of office.” But it’s just as ridiculous to say shrug off the situation with Obama. In fact, that he commands the obedience of so many citizens makes him worse than McCain. The Obama years will be looked back upon as among the worst in the rollback of democracy gained during the 20th century. The United States is now being fully re-articulated into the global capitalist economy, but this time with a different locus of power: a transnational ruling elite. Both parties are servants of the project. It’s time to withdraw consent from the two-party system. They win. We lose.

There is an argument that hierarchy and inequality are a reflection of human nature, not the result of unjust social arrangements. 

If we are to address this question of a human nature objectively, then we will have to agree that determining our nature requires looking at the history and prehistory of the species scientifically and historically. As a distinct species, Homo sapiens has been around, in its modern form, for at least 200,000 years. The species originated in Africa and migrated outward, reaching nearly every part of the world by roughly 25-35 thousand years before present. Some 6-10 thousand years ago some groups of Homo sapiens began living in large-scale social systems in the Indus, Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, and Yangtze River valleys. Meanwhile, most members of the species continued to live outside the city-state environment for thousands of more years, finally being incorporated (with a few notable exceptions) into modern world-system by the mid-twentieth century.

It is with the emergence of the city-states that we see the regular appearance of the major forms of social segmentation, i.e. class, gender, and ethnic divisions, unjust arrangements which, over time, required, among other things, an ideology claiming that selfishness is part of human nature, which in turn, it was said, explained such things as exploitation, genocide, property, war, and so on (as if these are simply the natural conditions of human existence). However, before the city-state and outside it, human beings for the most part lived in democratic egalitarian social orders, communities based on cooperation, sharing, and compassion. In essence, these societies were based on altruistic relations and behaviors, not on selfish ones.

Let’s do the math: Taking the more generous number of 10,000 years ago to establish the emergence of the selfish conception of human nature, and the conservative number of 200,000 years for the existence of the species (it’s probably longer, and moreover we have earlier hominids displaying symbolic culture who also enjoyed communal existence going back more than a million years), we find, measured temporally, that 95 percent of human beings lived in communist and socialist societies in which either everybody owned everything in common or those who worked kept what they earned for their families (which were extended and essentially covered, through larger familial networks, the entire community). In other words, at best, only 5 percent of human beings have lived in the types of social orders that the advocates of selfishness (and exploitation and inequality) seek to legitimize with their appeal to human nature.

Judging the matter using archeological, anthropological, historical, and sociological facts and analyses, we would have to conclude, from a human nature standpoint, that class-based societies are contrary to human nature, not a reflection of it.

The repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” or DADT, is being hailed as a signature accomplishment by Barack Obama, something akin to Truman desegregating the military. It certainly is a great moment for the gay and lesbian community and those who support them. Any time a form of discrimination is knocked down, those who are discriminated against and those of us who believe in equality win. I have been pushing the repeal of DADT since it was put into effect under Clinton. I’m elated to see it fall (albeit I am concerned about its contingent wording in the bill Obama will sign).

But let’s be honest. The homosexual community and those who support gay and lesbian rights are responsible for this victory. We must not give all or most of the credit to elites when it is the people who did the heavy lifting. The black community and its supporters appreciated Lyndon Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was a brave thing to do and ultimately destructive to the Democratic Party. But it was the civil right movement, led by such moral leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., who deserve the credit. The gay and lesbian community and its supporters have been dedicated to overthrowing this discriminatory policy, and this victory is for the most part theirs.

Moreover, we should never give too much credit to authorities who stop perpetuating an immoral practice. Overturning segregation and, now heterosexism (though not entirely), are morally necessary acts, not favors. It’s about realizing a right, not enjoying a privilege. To be sure, Lincoln freed most slaves; but we should not treat the Emancipation Proclamation as a gift. A representative of the ruling class finally did the right thing (and this was only because he was forced to by circumstance). Therefore, we should ask ourselves exactly why Obama is signing this bill. Is there an ulterior motive underpinning Obama’s support for DADT? He is, after all, opposed to gay marriage.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Obama would not support the repeal if the military were not encouraging him to do so. The country is now spending half of every tax dollar on the war machine. The military needs good soldiers. But the military’s discriminatory policy has made it difficult to recruit on college campuses, many of which bar groups that discriminate from using their facilities or occupying their grounds. Ending DADT makes the main justification for barring recruiters vanish. The military wants young bodies. Recruiters have to go where potential recruits are. Recruiters already work the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Opening up colleges and universities greatly expands the hunting grounds.

Furthermore, repealing DADT is politically useful to Obama. It gives Obama cover for the work he does for the power elite—the corporate bailouts, the wars, the surveillance and torture regimes, and a myriad of other things beneficial to the rich and detrimental to the working class and the poor. When Obama’s loyalty to progressive democratic politics is questioned (and his disloyalty to those further left confirmed), the administration and corporate media will simply trot out the repeal of DADT and say, “Well, if he is such a right winger, then why did he end DADT?”

There is little cost to Obama with DADT’s repeal. Conservatives aren’t going to vote for him anyway, and independents are ambivalent about gays in the military. The single-issue progressive Democrat is positively ecstatic over this action. In a fine display of magical thinking; it confirms his faith in his leader. In the final analysis, this repeal changes nothing about the essential truth of Obama. The president is still delivering the goods for the rich and powerful.

Don’t be naive. He didn’t do this for gays and lesbians or because he opposes inequality and discrimination. As Obama demonstrated during the campaign with Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United, he is prepared to throw under the bus any constituency in the progressive community that gets in the way of meeting the demands of the ruling class. Obama has demonstrated time and time again as president that his behavior during the campaign is standard operating procedure. Where’s card check? Where’s the public option? Where’s the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy? Why aren’t our troops home from Iraq? Why is the Guantánamo Bay detention center still open?

Just got back from seeing Avatar. Great movie. It was a bit deliberate in the beginning as the director sought to have characters explain elements of the premise to the moviegoer, information that every character in the movie already knew and therefore didn’t need to hear again, but I guess the reasoning was that enough people would be too slow on the uptake – you know, with the general ignorance of colonialism and all – that it would be better just to clarify matters at the outset. Hand holding aside, it was a gorgeous and emotionally potent movie (I hope Roger Dean gets some credit for the visual elements he inspired).

One of the criticisms I am reading is that the movie is racist. The argument is that a great white warrior arriving to save the primitives from the colonizers, who happen to be his race of people, is a white supremacist trope. But this interpretation ignores one key fact: the main character becomes the “other” by transferring his consciousness into his avatar. And long before that he identifies with the other – and with nature. He is, as the antagonist puts it at the end, a race traitor. He rejects the colonizer identity and embraces the identity of the colonized. This is analogous to a white man rejecting his whiteness and identifying with oppressed peoples of color. This is ant-racist, not racist.

The whole point of the movie is that, when a man comes to know a people, lives with them, cries with them, bleeds with them, he no longer sees them as big blue monkeys but rather as living sentient moral beings like himself. He is able to judge right and wrong not from the colonizer’s point of view but from a universal point of view, wherein it is always wrong to destroy a people and plunder their resources and it is always right to side with the colonized against the colonizer. The corporation after the treasure of the indigenous beings is soulless. It only sees profit. And this is always the way of the colonizer. To find morality, one must stand against that, and in so doing, one becomes the other, since the other is the organic enemy of colonization and exploitation.

The movie is anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist. If the message wasn’t clear enough in its premise, the dialogue certainly made it brutally obvious. By having the audience side with those whom the colonizers label “terrorists,” just as the transnational capitalist class operating through the United States and other western powers define those resisting occupation, the director is saying that it is okay for third worlders to go to war against the global corporation and its military. I am pleased this movie was made and that so many people are watching it. Let’s hope they get the point. 

The world just got wackier. The NAACP was way out of line. And Obama proved in the most blatant way that he’s the white man’s black president. At least the NAACP has retracted its criticism and apologized to Shirley Sherrod. They admitted they were snookered by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger and confirmed serial liar. He edited the tape to make it appear as if the U.S. Department of Agriculture official was discriminating against white farmers. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it’s because of Sherrod’s efforts that the white farmer kept his land. And that was twenty-four years ago, years before she worked for the Department of Agriculture.

It would be nice if the NAACP would release the full tape they admit vindicates her (as if she needs vindicating from the tactics of a right-wing provocateur). Indeed, the white family whose farm she saved is shocked by the way she is being treated. Her story is one of understanding – that white people are just as screwed by capitalism as black people are.

Suppose we believe what we are being told to believe, that this is racism. But racism is a social system in which one racial group benefits systematically at the expense of another. It has never been true in the United States than blacks have benefited systematically at the expense of whites. It follows that her comments cannot be racist. To call this racism is to falsely reduce racism to race prejudice. Racism doesn’t even require race prejudice, and, these days, racists prefer its absence. This is a decades old project to change the meaning of racism to legitimate the false concepts of “reverse racism” and “reverse discrimination.”

That Obama caves every time the right wants him to participate in the white power project to dissimulate racism tells us the reason his election to office was desired by the powers that be.

The end goal of this political project is to make any form of racial consciousness equivalent to racism, no matter whose consciousness it is. It is, in essence, a project to cloak group power in egalitarian rhetoric in the absence of actual egalitarian arrangements. It is a manifestation of racist ideology.

This is the source of these terms “colorblind” and “postracial.” Colorblindness turns the struggle against racism into racism itself; if you accept the propaganda that racism reduces to race prejudice or individual acts of discrimination then you can falsely portray any individual as capable of being a racist.

Colonizers design ideological systems to rationalize oppression. Different rhetoric works at different times. Instilling in everybody’s mind the idea of black inferiority is one strategy. This has two dominant phases: The first is religious, where black skin is depicted as a curse from God. The second is scientific, in which blacks are said to be less evolved than whites. When people rise up and convince enough of their brothers and sisters that the prevailing ideology is a myth, then the oppressor is forced to develop a new strategy. But the myth is always structured in a way that rationalizes the power of the colonizer over the colonized. This is no less true of colorblindness. Beneath all these phases is the material fact of structured racial inequality.

Critical race theorists call these phases reflections of the “perpetrator’s perspective.” Because the oppressor commands social structure and shapes dominant ideology, the perpetrator’s perspective prevails in our institutions, law, education, etc. This is why, in law these days, one has to prove intent – and a very narrow conception of intent as the knowing purpose of an individual – in order to prove discrimination. Law school in most places is a system of indoctrination in which the perpetrator’s perspective is taught as the only legitimate perspective. 

There is another perspective: the victim’s perspective. Those who are on the disadvantaged end of society’s hierarchy cannot usually point to a specific individual who has purposely put them in the ghetto or in a job serving white folks. The facts that they are disproportionately poor, sick, undereducated, unemployed, arrested, and imprisoned relative to whites are rationalized by the perpetrator’s perspective as not the fault of all those who are affluent, healthy, educated, employed, and free from harassment and jail and therefore the fault of the victim. We are all just individuals, after all, and there is no such thing as group power – so the mythology goes. Even some members of the oppressed group (Obama rarely misses a chance to) blame the victim for the crimes of the white establishment.

Equalitarian rhetoric masks inegalitarian arrangements. This is because racism is fundamentally a problem of the unequal distribution of power  – and power has a direction. MLK argued that the problems of racism and colonialism will never be conquered without “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” 

HuffPost carried a story yesterday, “Orrin Hatch: Drug Test The Unemployed,” that, while troubling in the degree of authoritarian expressed by the senator’s statement, is more troubling in the proportion of the population who supports such a measure—if my students are any indication of popular sentiment. A lot of them think this is a good idea.

It’s not a good idea to drug test anybody. It’s totalitarian. We don’t need bodily surveillance by the state or corporations anymore than we need the state to bug our phones or read our e-mail. It’s not that drug testing the unemployed is unnecessary; it’s that it is discriminatory.

For one thing, it’s classist. The unemployed are no different from anybody else except they don’t have a job. That’s not always or even for the most part their fault. Capitalism causes mass unemployment. Why degrade our brothers and sisters who are victimized by a system designed to benefit the few by making them piss in a cup? Isn’t it bad enough that they have to rent themselves when they’re lucky enough to be rented?

For another thing, by virtue of the fact that a disproportionate number of the unemployed are minorities, it’s racist. “But everybody is being tested!” Yes, but since minorities are disproportionately thrown into the industrial reserve during economic downturns by virtue of history and status, they will be disproportionately impacted by the policy

In a comment concerning this story in a Facebook post, I sarcastically said about the legislation, “Let’s bug their phones and read their email, too. All these unemployed people are probably talking and laughing behind our backs about how they’re bilking the taxpayer out of their money (let’s pretend for the moment that those drawing unemployment aren’t taxpayers themselves). If we’re going to invade a person’s privacy by sampling their urine and blood, then sampling their phone calls and correspondence is no problem at all, right?”

I went on to say, “Let’s all internalize the ethic of the police state and surveil each other and chant together: ‘Death to privacy! Death to privacy!’ We ought to do what they do in China and hire busybodies on every city block to spy on their neighbors and report to the government on their drug and sexual habits or whatever else the moral entrepreneurs desire to control these days. Why presume anybody’s innocent? Why preserve the Bill of Rights? We don’t need it any more. We have the PATRIOT Act. That’s right, the piss test is the new loyalty oath. It’s the new gold standard. Raise your right hand and swear you’re not a communist—er, I mean drug addict, and don’t forget to piss in this cup because we don’t believe you. It’s gold in more than just color and hue.

Here’s a stock tip for you: if this law passes, invest in drug testing corporations. The governments of the United States may be delivering to these surveillance firms millions of your fellow citizens as customers. Even if it doesn’t take off, you can look at to this way: you get some of tax dollars back. You may need them when you’re thrown out of work.

They’re already piss testing the good folks thrown out of work down in the Gulf states, thrown out of work courtesy of BP’s brilliant feats of technological genius. It’s not bad enough that fishers, net makers, and all the other workers in Gulf have to suffer the indignity of seeing their life way utterly devastated by greedy and reckless energy corporations. No, we have to go the extra mile and make them piss in a cup in front of a witness armed with latex gloves before we let them go out in the marshes and get exposed to all those toxins in order to clean up the mess BP made.

This idea is wrong and dangerous for so many reasons.

First, it’s a clear violation of the right to privacy and the presumption of innocence for the government to drug test citizens, particularly in this context.

The Fourth Amendment is quite clear on this matter: “ The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Beyond the problem of authoritarian desire, government drug testing of individuals without probable cause is unreasonable and therefore unconstitutional; I have the right to be secure in my person, and the government is required to protect that right.

The law runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment, as well, which states that no citizen shall be compelled to be a witness against themselves. This is the presumption of innocence which, like the right to privacy, is central to our freedom.

These rights are in principle true also with respect to private business firms, or at least ought to be; here, the government has utterly failed in its obligation to protect the rights of citizens. We don’t lose our civil rights when we go to work—at least we shouldn’t. Yet, the citizen doesn’t enjoy the same freedom of speech or association when she is at work.

This is problem with liberalism: it accepts the priority of capital over labor, representing a grave injustice to humanity. Because most people are forced by structural conditions to rent themselves to capital, and because the capitalist is allowed to use the workers’ labor towards his ends during the time he employs them, workers are less of a citizen during the time the capitalist uses them.

See, the rub is that, as with the slave, a worker’s labor comes with her (and the choice between working or not working, i.e., being used or being starved, is not validly rendered as the “freedom to choice”). This is why it is imperative to always keep in mind the struggle to abolish the system of wage labor so that all individuals can work for themselves and their families and their communities rather than for private interests (that is, the aristocracy).

Second, the attitude that underpins the pro-testing argument is authoritarian. In the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working people had to endure the social Darwinistic eugenicist claptrap of “scientific charity,” where the workers were divided into two categories: the “deserving poor,” e.g., the widow of a factory manager killed in war, and the “undeserving poor,” e.g., industrial workers disemployed by machinery either by accident or productivity gains. This was the method for selecting the majority for elimination from the public assistance rolls (and even elimination from society altogether through preventative incapacitation and sterilization).

The state’s claim was that this strategy would lessen the burden on the taxpayer by weeding out fraud and abuse, which, for the record, constitutes only a fraction of the paltry sum spent on public assistance and social insurance, especially compared to subsidies to business and spending on the military.

But the state’s claim is a lie. The reality is that scientific charity was shrewdly pushed by the industrialists and progressives as a method of labor control. It functioned in this capacity in several ways. For example, it kept the working class squabbling amongst itself, pitting one group of worker against another, often majority against minority and native against immigrant. This function was especially pronounced during periods of capitalist crisis when it was imperative to stifle class consciousness and labor solidarity and keep workers disorganized (like today).

This was also true for another of its functions, namely depressing wages. By throwing large numbers of people into destitution, the capitalist and his functionary forced workers still toiling in the factories to accept lower wages, lest they, too, be thrown into destitution. Yet another function was reinforcing the bourgeois ideology that people succeed or fail on account of their efforts and talents, obfuscating the reality that capitalism cannot employ all workers all the time, and sometimes it employs far fewer than at other times.

Still, even then, back then, the working people who were lucky enough to escape poverty weren’t eagerly prepared to sacrifice their civil liberties—privacy rights, the presumption of innocence, the right to remain silent—just to punish the so-called undeserving poor.

This is in stark contrast to today, where, with the death of the labor movement and the overgrowth of conservative religious ideology, much of the public is prepared to spite itself to derive some satisfaction from screwing over the poor. When a person says “we’re talking about druggies not those in need of assistance,” as a person said to me in defending this dreadful legislation, that man is not speaking truthfully (even if the falsehood comes honestly), since he is precisely talking about those in need of assistance.

Dazed by reactionary hatred for the least fortunate, it is often the case that folks making this argument don’t realize that if the government drug tests unemployed persons, then they will themselves be drug tested when they’re thrown out of work and seek assistance, an increasing possibility with the mounting capitalist crisis. At the same time, I often hear this when I ask them why a working person should want to be drug tested: “If you got nothing to hide you got nothing to worry about.” Every commissar in every totalitarian state rejoices hearing such slogans uttered by the people he seeks to control.

But this is not the way it works in free societies. In free societies, the state must have probable cause to harass citizens (you know, those people whose rights the state is supposed to be protecting). And the state’s burden must be great. There must be substantive probable cause, not “I think I smell pot” or “Why are your eyes so red?” We simply cannot allow the state to go on fishing expeditions, randomly drug testing people who are in a tight spot to see what turns up.

Advocates of piss testing represent an internalization of the authoritarian mentality. I know people bristle when I say this, but it must be said if we are to vigorously defend freedom. It’s tragic to see citizens manipulated into believing the greatest threat to their life chances come from beneath them, from the least powerful people, instead of above them, from the powerful people who really control their destinies (exploiting their labor, waging imperialist war, and wrecking the environment).

This false consciousness is evidenced by inverted priorities. Instead of getting exercised over the fact that the United States military budget exceeds a trillion dollars every year in pursuit of securing global capitalism, the taxpayer gets all worked up over a small portion of revenues going to unemployed workers—workers who pay taxes.

What every worker who loves her freedom ought to tell Orrin Hatch: “I’ll be damned if you’re going to piss test me. I pay taxes so that the state will be there for me when I need help. Now I need help, so don’t make my jump through a bunch of hoops that are popular among reactionary types who don’t have my interests in mind. I’m not a criminal. I’m a citizen and a human being.”

This brings me to the third point, namely this business about the perils of drug use. This exposes a bit of fallacious reasoning and, for many of those who oppose drugs, hypocrisy. We have a saying in science that, while you are entitled to your opinion, such as it is, you are not entitled to your facts. Here come some facts: The worst drugs in our society are cigarettes and alcohol and prescription drugs. Around half a million Americans die every year from tobacco consumption (some five million around the world die from smoking this weed). Some 85,000 Americans die every year from alcohol use. Deaths from cocaine are a fraction of the deaths attributable to alcohol. In fact, deaths from all illicit drug use combined runs around 15,000 persons annually, and many of these deaths are caused because these drugs are illegal (making them illegal makes them more unsafe). Nobody has ever died from smoking marijuana.

Do we kick people off of unemployment insurance because they smoke tobacco or drink alcohol? Of course not. You can answer that question by asking this question: “Do we live in a totalitarian society?” Moreover, almost as many Americans die from poor diet and physical inactivity every year as die from tobacco. Are we going to kick these folks off of unemployment insurance? Are we going to force them to stand on scales or run a bit on the treadmill to see if they’re short of breath?

If those advocating drug testing were consistent, then they would call for throwing people off the rolls for smoking and drinking and eating, too. That would likely eliminate most people from government assistance. Ah, even better, right? I hope not. Drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition before it, has been a colossal failure—if judged from the perspective of human freedom. You can generalize that result.

As a matter of principle we have to get beyond this desire to micromanage the lives of other people. If people want to smoke pot or sniff cocaine or drink a martini or eat sausage and gravy, then it’s nobody’s business if they do. Nobody should be punished for making such a choice (often such choices carry their own punishments).

Beyond respecting personal choice and privacy, the drug war is a much greater threat to humanity than drug use. This isn’t a matter of opinion. We have tens of thousands of our brothers and sisters languishing in the gulags for drug possession. We have husbands, wives, fathers, mother, sons, and daughters snatched from their families and communities by the police state. Police cruise the inner cities like sharks in search of prey, kicking in doors on rumors and profiles and forcing human beings to the ground to be restrained by shackles and tortured with Tasers.

Of course, judged from the anti-freedom perspective, the drug war has been a tremendous success. It allows for the warehousing and premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of surplus people—millions over the course of years. It allows for the erosion of the civil liberties of all citizens, thus strengthening the hand of the state over the people. But what this represents for us, the people, especially when we internalize it and express our desire for it, is nothing short of catastrophic.

I am not shocked that so many of my fellow citizens agree with Orrin Hatch. Decades of indoctrination in authoritarian thinking has brought the population to this point. I know the power of ideology on the human psyche. I know that efficacy of mind control on the citizen. I know how irrational fear and hatred—of drugs and the people who use them—upend the moral capacities of otherwise decent people.

I am not shocked by it, but I am horrified by it. My horror has noting to do with a bleeding heart. It has to do with love of freedom.

In his April 16 entry at the Thomas Jefferson Street blog (US News and World Report) condemning the March 2 decision by Barbara Crabb of the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, a decision in which the court declared the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional, Fox News and UPI political analyst Peter Roff repeats a mythology about American history, that the United States was founded as a religious nation. Whatever it might have become, the country was not founded as such.

“The men and women who first settled the North American continent were religious pilgrims looking for a promised land,” Roff contends. “Upon their arrival they established compacts and agreements that recognized the power and author of a Creator whom they worshiped and to whom they gave thanks for their safe arrival and survival.”

Roff claims that “the fact that they believed there was a linkage between faith and freedom is inescapable. The Declaration of Independence, for example, makes reference to the importance ‘the protection of Divine Providence’ played in the struggle for liberty against the tyrannical British King.” He continues: “The men who founded this country—those who wrote the documents that set forth our independence and those who established the framework for the national government—were not anti-religion nor were they irreligious. Even Thomas Jefferson, frequently depicted by historians as an unspiritual man, once wrote, ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,’ a phrase inscribed on the frieze that circles the interior of his memorial in Washington, DC.”

Roff claims that the First Amendment contains two components: first, “the right to practice one’s religion without undue interference under the free exercise clause,” and, second, “the right to be free from disfavor or disparagement on account of religion under the establishment clause.”

Roff’s history lesson is typical of the Americanist outlook and his constitutional analysis is just as self-serving. Whatever the character of some of the colonies, the historical fact is that colonization of North America was carried out by the English state using chartered corporations composed of wealthy capitalists and wielding armies of white settlers. The motive was material gain, which required the expansion of the British Empire, albeit sublimated as English nationalist aspiration.

The British crown vested the corporations it chartered with political-juridical authority, and often, as social control agents often do, religion was used to manipulate the settlers. The fact that the settlers brought with them religious sentiment is secondary to the purpose and the function of the colonial project, namely the accumulation of capital, which required the destruction of indigenous populations and the forced servitude of millions of people over the next several hundred years.

Roff (and he’s not alone) invert the causal relation, developing a romantic story of Europeans fleeing religious persecution. Since the settlers were seeking religious freedom, it doesn’t follow that they would create a society in which the supernatural was relegated to the margins. However, once we recognize the primarily motor force of colonization, the romantic construction collapses.

It is simply untrue that the framers meant to put religion central to political life. The Constitution, which is the foundation of the Republic, is a godless document. The only time it mentions religion is to say there can be no religious test for office. And the First Amendment attached to that document creates a wall separating church and state.

Roff should have quoted Jefferson’s statement in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist association of the state of Connecticut rather than Jefferson’s irony-laden line about swearing upon the altar of god eternal hostility toward all forms of thought control. In that letter, Jefferson said, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”

Roff argues, “No one alleges that force was used, that there was any coercion involved, or that anyone was forced to pray. Simply the mere existence of such a proclamation made the plaintiffs uncomfortable, which to my judgment is not exactly a constitutional standard validating the further exclusion of faith from the public square.” But the First Amendment does not say that Congress shall not force or coerce citizens to pray. It says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. Without a law, the president has no Constitutional grounds upon which to declare such a thing as a National Day of Prayer.

Judge Crabb ruled that the National Day of Prayer “goes beyond mere ‘acknowledgment’ of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context.” As she properly noted, “In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.”

She then noted the obvious: that this was not a criticism of prayer or those who pray. “A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant or undeserving of dissemination. Rather, it is part of the effort ‘to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society.’”

Crabb is right. No office of the government can legitimately declare a National Day of Prayer.