Monday, September 10, 2012
How Col Richard Liebert routed Wal-Mart
Col. Richard Liebert, who is presently running for the state legislature - replacing another (Air Force) retired Colonel who successfully repealed Montana's Medical Cannabis Initiative, which was approved by the voters by a 60-40 margin, started the local group to oppose the construction of a second Wal-Mart Superstore (plus a Sam's Club) in Great Falls. That's where I met him, and he went on to chair the Citizens for Clean Energy group which successfully defeated a coal-fired power plant partially owned by the City of Great Falls.
Here is what I wrote about Wal-Mart and that campaign at the time:- March 6, 2006. I hope that everyone who lives in this retired (Army) Colonel's district will vote for him. He is also a cattle rancher and active in AERO and other environmental sustainability groups.
Wal-Mart slaughtered in public hearing
3-06-06, Montana Green Bulletin
"You don't want to reject a Wal-Mart or other large corporations. The word might get out that Great Falls is anti-business, and they'll punish us by not opening any more stores or creating jobs, here."
That was the message in some of the testimony at a public hearing before the City Planning Advisory Board last Tuesday on the matter of opening another Wal-Mart Superstore on the opposite end of town.
Besides the 3 or 4 actual Wal-Mart employees who were allowed to wear us down with a two-hour inane and irrelevant "Power Point" presentation on the proposed new store, Dan Huestis (who sold them the land) and three other people testified in favor of it. Everyone else who testified (15-20 people) were strongly against it. We also turned in 400-plus signatures on petitions against the proposed new Wal-Mart.
As a consequence, the Board voted not to grant Wal-Mart a conditional use permit to begin construction. We anticipate several more rounds of legal and PR sparring before they finally decide that Great Falls isn't worth the trouble of putting another store here.
Malmstrom AFB may prove to be the deciding factor, since development around the new store would impinge on the flight path of the main runway -- in case we ever get another flying mission, here. (The last one, a KC-135 refueling mission, was moved to Homestead AFB, Florida, after which Hurricane Andrew hit, and that base was closed. In effect, they "took a bullet" for Malmstrom).
In the meantime, we might be able to convince a majority of the business community, civic leaders, labor people, and others that not having Wal-Marts here will improve the business climate, increase the number of jobs, as well as the overall prosperity of our local community. Hopefully, we can get some people to invest in a locally owned co-op department store or mall, since rents in those which are owned out of state have become prohibitive. If local business people could reclaim even 50% of the local retail sector, it would do more for our local economy than any number of military bases and coal-fired generating plants.
Most people implicitly know that stores like Wal-Mart aren't good for us. Wal-Mart is headquartered in Arkansas. It sells mostly cheap Chinese imports. It may be marginally cheaper than other large stores, but we know it doesn't allow its workers to organize unions, and that it pays lower wages and benefits than its competitors. And it sucks something like 85% of every dollar spent, there, out of the local economy, never to be seen, again.
The negative economic impacts of Wal-Mart are so bad that the first thing its representatives do when attempting to open a new store is to convince local planning boards that they shouldn't consider the results of any sort of economic cost-benefit analysis. That's what Wal-Mart did here, and that's the main reason that the advisory board was persuaded to refuse them a permit. If they're trying to hide or suppress that information, it must be very negative, indeed.
The City of Bozeman actually commissioned a study which found that it would cost that community $36 million per year in lost jobs and sales for other businesses to put in a Wal-Mart superstore. Wal-Mart fought it, and eventually prevailed and built its Superstore. (We can well imagine some intellectual skullduggery on the part of Bozeman's "free market community" which has no interest in the viability of the local retail sector, and little sympathy for the rights of labor, either).
But Bozeman is growing rapidly and already much more affluent than Great Falls, so Wal-Mart's negative impact would be somewhat less noticeable to the professional class which dominates, there. These elites, who may or may not shop at Wal-Mart (but can often be found sneaking furtively about Sam's Club) often seem to be in favor of a low-wage economy for others, since they benefit from having to pay lower wages to their own employees. That is certainly the case in Great Falls, plus we have a considerable population brainwashed to think that if we had higher wages, we'd have to have higher prices for everything else, and that people would be less eligible for benefits like Medicaid and Food Stamps! I've actually heard this argument several times from people who were paid far less in their responsible jobs than they should have been, but instead of protesting, they had been persuaded to defend the system as it is in order to keep their jobs!
______________
In any case, we got a very interesting live demonstration of how Wal-Mart operates, and what sort of corporate (non-)citizen it is. It panders to the lowest common denominator of intelligence and taste, relies heavily on fraud and advertised "image" of a wholesome, all-American place, while acting to diminish and destroy virtually every American value and principle we can think of -- especially freedom of speech and association, local community self-determination, and the intrinsic dignity of productive work.
The simplest way to explain Wal-mart is to identify it with Chinese communism and American plantation slavery. If those are your kinds of economic and social institutions, then you should be very much in favor of Wal-Mart, and shop there often. Hopefully, we've already experienced "peak Wal-Mart", and we shall be witnessing its decline and dissolution, henceforth. At least we've established the principle that municipalities can take or leave any offers or applications from corporate takeovers of our local economy, and apply whatever taxes or restrictions we decide are in our own best interest. Our municipality is a corporation, too, and just as free as Wal-Mart to take its business elsewhere. If we don't want them, all we have to do is say, "No!" We don't even have to give a reason.
I polled the four city staff planners and eight Citizen's Advisory Board members at the hearing, to determine how many of them had seen the film, "Wal-Mart, the high cost of low prices." Not one of them had. Yet, the Advisory Board voted it down, mostly (if not entirely) on the basis of our testimony and the petitions we collected. News coverage, particularly TV, was ample but dismal in its content. Apparently, the reporters hadn't seen the film, or done any research on the issue, either.
It is vitally important in these grass-roots efforts to arrange for media coverage early. Jo Black, the Tribune business reporter, gave the movie some very good coverage early on, and no doubt contributed greatly to the large audiences for the film. However, the corporate vise seems to have been applied to her reporting of the hearing, since the strength and variety of the testimony against Wal-Mart was not accurately reflected in the stories. KRTV news actually said that the audience was more or less balanced between opponents and proponents, when in fact it was about 9-1 against Wal-Mart.
We've already got some very good alternative strategies working in Montana. Jeff Milchen of Bozeman-based ReclaimDemocracy.org http://reclaimdemocracy.org/ , and the American Independent Business Alliance <http://amiba.net> wrote the following:
"Those who have broader concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of giant corporations should consider where else our dollars could be going. As I argued in an article <http://tompaine.com/Archive/others/beyond_buying_blue.php> for TomPaine.com one year ago, "dispersing economic power among millions of small, independent businesses is one key to restraining corporate power and sustaining democracy."
Working toward that end, some 200 communities, organizations and businesses are participating this Saturday in "America Unchained," a campaign created by the American Independent Business Alliance (disclosure: I'm a co-founder). Unchained and the growing network of Independent Business Alliances seek to go beyond damage control to persuade people to keep their dollars recirculating in their local economy rather than sending them to distant corporate headquarters.
In my home of Montana, citizens of Plentywood, Malta and Glendive all recently decided they had no need to lure a big-box store or drive out of town to shop. Instead, they re-tooled the corporate model of pooling investments in order to build community-owned and operated department stores. These are true anti-Wal-Marts in many ways, promoting democracy, community stability and cohesiveness. All of the profit goes to the locals who invested in themselves and their neighbors."
Read more>> <http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051115/beyond_walmart.php>
*****
What can be done beyond a defensive battle to stop a big box store from opening in our community? here are a few examples.
* Ban or limit <http://www.newrules.org/retail/formula.html> the number of chains in your community.
* Ban subsidies <http://www.newrules.org/retail/news_slug.php?slugid=324> to big box stores.
* Limit the size <http://www.newrules.org/retail/size.html>and/or location <http://www.newrules.org/retail/neighbor.html> of retail development to ensure new stores benefit your community.
* Create an Independent Business Alliance <http://amiba.net> to help community-based business thrive.
* Explore worker-owned <http://clcr.org/index.php> businesses, co-ops <http://www.wisc.edu/coops/>, and community-owned department stores (contact us for more on this topic) as an alternative to absentee-owned chains.
* Deny claims to "corporate personhood " that allow corporations to challenge citizens' authority.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Blame it on high school
Being Roundup Ready
Blame it on high school
I recently acquired my own graduating Class of 1965 Great Falls High School yearbook, "The Roundup" - reflecting our sports team name, The Bison. We were definitely "Roundup Ready." Except for me. I only appeared in it as part of a blurry group picture of National Merit Scholarship Finalists - although I never even applied for any "scholarships," and thought it was insulting and degrading to do so - like hitch-hiking, which I also considered "begging." I was a fair student, if I liked the teacher, but I was there to learn, not get "good grades" or "scholarships", which one might naturally assume has something to do with intelligent study rather than money, but that is not the case. In short, I was a "rebel."
My grandmother did pay for a senior picture from the Nebel Studio (having both studied German, we knew what "Nebel" meant), but I never submitted one to the Roundup, nor did I reserve a copy for myself. I'd had bad experiences with my sophomore and junior Roundups, with no more than 5-10 signatures of (mostly elementary school) friends and associates. You see, I was not socially "well-adjusted." I did not have a successful adolescence. In fact, I was not "well-adjusted" at all.
I found the Roundup I recently purchased at an antique store, and since it was water-stained, as though it had been in a flood or something, I only paid $8 (2012 dollars) for something which had cost something like $45 (1965 gold standard dollars, when the price of silver was $1.29/oz - now $30+). In those days, you could buy a real $20 gold piece for $48-50, and silver coins were still in circulation at face value. So, the depreciation on this year book (and undamaged ones usually sell for about $20 today) was something like 99%. The 45 silver dollars (or other silver coins) or $20 gold piece used to buy it would now be worth over $900. Imagine a kid asking his parents for $900 to buy a high school yearbook!
Only medical procedures (and some military contracts) have inflated that much. I just read that the going price for infant circumcision is now $400-600 (in addition to other pediatric care), and I imagine it was $5-10 back in 1965. My whole birth cost (doctor and hospital) was just over $100 in 1947. The same amount of care, including 2-3 days in hospital (which was then routine) would now easily cost $15,000 most places.
I've probably spent 10 hours or more perusing this yearbook which I had previously only glanced at in libraries or friends' houses. I found that I knew hundreds of people, with a half-dozen or more being present "Facebook" friends and comrades-in-peace and justice. If FB wasn't seen as a "Jewish" project, there would no doubt be many more.
Last night, I saw a very good episode of "Freaks and Geeks" from 2000 - one of the best accounts of teen-age life (this looking back to the 1980's) ever made. I've also recently seen several John Hughes teen films from the 1980's - Hughes having recently passed on. "Pretty in Pink" is absolutely right-on as an account of class conflicts in high school, and it was this that made me an enemy of large "consolidated" high schools. The Molly Ringwald character is very close to a female version of me, and I wonder if that wasn't intentional, although I don't know any of the film-makers or actors.
I remember one girl, Tracy ----, daughter of one of the largest landowners in Cascade County, who I knew as a sophomore (and who went on the Norway Summer School trip in the summer of 1963, which subsequently defined our high school class "elite" - everyone who went mentioned it in their senior picture comments), and then disappeared from GFHS. I also remember the sophomore boys in the locker room scheming about seducing her - the most prominent one being a Mormon of Greek descent. I imagine that her father placed her in the local Catholic high school for that very reason, and I later heard that she died young as a drug addict. And this a person from the highest elites whom I wouldn't have dreamed of asking out or "fraternizing" with. The one "date" I had in highschool (as a sophomore) was with the sister of my sister's best friend, and I never repeated that trauma.
There was a huge Catholic-Protestant rivalry going on in those days, difficult to even visualize, today. And there was also a class stratification in this mostly working-class and small business town which, if it exists today, is well-concealed and never talked about. The rich people mostly departed long ago, or send their kids to private schools. Central Catholic High School, which then had some 600 students in Great Falls, actually closed for more than 20 years, but has re-opened in this century, and now has more than 100 students, with high academic achievement.
The strange thing about 1960's public school life for me was that I was both an aristocrat and leading role model, yet a total outcast in my own mind - hating school and nearly everyone in it. This I now attribute to the fact that I was an "adult child of alcoholics", but I didn't learn about that syndrome or condition until I was in my 30's. Although my family was prominent, the men were mostly alcoholics, while the women had married into the working class and remained responsible church-goers and conformists to the status quo, without any intellectual or cultural pretensions whatsoever. They did maintain the puritanical, Protestant attitudes of blaming the victims, however, and whatever happened to me had to be my own fault, since I was obviously "gifted" and the favorite of our grandmother, who promoted me as the sole male Stephens of our generation, and thus in line to inherit a 1200 acre ranch along the lines of primogeniture and entail (which no one else had ever heard of, of course).
I've often wondered how much our civic condition has to do with environmental factors in Great Falls. We were home to large metal smelters and refineries for more than 70 years, which peaked during World War II and were still dominant in the 1960's. The fact that I spent my first 6 years 30 miles downwind from Great Falls, in the foothills of the Highwood Mountains, is of little help, since we have determined that the heavy metals pollution might, if anything, be even worse there than in Black Eagle, where the Anaconda Smelter was located.
Teenagers tend to form into gangs, which may be engaged in drug trafficking or some other predatory behavior, but are mostly concerned about controlling the sex lives of their sisters and other females in their territory. And we know that heavy metal poisoning leads to all sorts of mindless, aggressive behavior, as well as autism, madness (the "mad hatters" used mercury compounds in their trade), etc. Surely there is more than an average amount of this in Great Falls, and those of us in my generation were especially susceptible to it.
Unfortunately, the same veterans of war and heavy industry still control the school system and local politics, and if possible, they want to re-establish the rule of Heavy Metal and other fascist institutions - especially in the schools, libraries, and other parts of the "cultural infrastructure." No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that we were home to the first nuclear-armed Minuteman strategic missile base - Malmstrom - which still exists a half-century later with the same mission.
Blame it on high school
I recently acquired my own graduating Class of 1965 Great Falls High School yearbook, "The Roundup" - reflecting our sports team name, The Bison. We were definitely "Roundup Ready." Except for me. I only appeared in it as part of a blurry group picture of National Merit Scholarship Finalists - although I never even applied for any "scholarships," and thought it was insulting and degrading to do so - like hitch-hiking, which I also considered "begging." I was a fair student, if I liked the teacher, but I was there to learn, not get "good grades" or "scholarships", which one might naturally assume has something to do with intelligent study rather than money, but that is not the case. In short, I was a "rebel."
My grandmother did pay for a senior picture from the Nebel Studio (having both studied German, we knew what "Nebel" meant), but I never submitted one to the Roundup, nor did I reserve a copy for myself. I'd had bad experiences with my sophomore and junior Roundups, with no more than 5-10 signatures of (mostly elementary school) friends and associates. You see, I was not socially "well-adjusted." I did not have a successful adolescence. In fact, I was not "well-adjusted" at all.
I found the Roundup I recently purchased at an antique store, and since it was water-stained, as though it had been in a flood or something, I only paid $8 (2012 dollars) for something which had cost something like $45 (1965 gold standard dollars, when the price of silver was $1.29/oz - now $30+). In those days, you could buy a real $20 gold piece for $48-50, and silver coins were still in circulation at face value. So, the depreciation on this year book (and undamaged ones usually sell for about $20 today) was something like 99%. The 45 silver dollars (or other silver coins) or $20 gold piece used to buy it would now be worth over $900. Imagine a kid asking his parents for $900 to buy a high school yearbook!
Only medical procedures (and some military contracts) have inflated that much. I just read that the going price for infant circumcision is now $400-600 (in addition to other pediatric care), and I imagine it was $5-10 back in 1965. My whole birth cost (doctor and hospital) was just over $100 in 1947. The same amount of care, including 2-3 days in hospital (which was then routine) would now easily cost $15,000 most places.
I've probably spent 10 hours or more perusing this yearbook which I had previously only glanced at in libraries or friends' houses. I found that I knew hundreds of people, with a half-dozen or more being present "Facebook" friends and comrades-in-peace and justice. If FB wasn't seen as a "Jewish" project, there would no doubt be many more.
Last night, I saw a very good episode of "Freaks and Geeks" from 2000 - one of the best accounts of teen-age life (this looking back to the 1980's) ever made. I've also recently seen several John Hughes teen films from the 1980's - Hughes having recently passed on. "Pretty in Pink" is absolutely right-on as an account of class conflicts in high school, and it was this that made me an enemy of large "consolidated" high schools. The Molly Ringwald character is very close to a female version of me, and I wonder if that wasn't intentional, although I don't know any of the film-makers or actors.
I remember one girl, Tracy ----, daughter of one of the largest landowners in Cascade County, who I knew as a sophomore (and who went on the Norway Summer School trip in the summer of 1963, which subsequently defined our high school class "elite" - everyone who went mentioned it in their senior picture comments), and then disappeared from GFHS. I also remember the sophomore boys in the locker room scheming about seducing her - the most prominent one being a Mormon of Greek descent. I imagine that her father placed her in the local Catholic high school for that very reason, and I later heard that she died young as a drug addict. And this a person from the highest elites whom I wouldn't have dreamed of asking out or "fraternizing" with. The one "date" I had in highschool (as a sophomore) was with the sister of my sister's best friend, and I never repeated that trauma.
There was a huge Catholic-Protestant rivalry going on in those days, difficult to even visualize, today. And there was also a class stratification in this mostly working-class and small business town which, if it exists today, is well-concealed and never talked about. The rich people mostly departed long ago, or send their kids to private schools. Central Catholic High School, which then had some 600 students in Great Falls, actually closed for more than 20 years, but has re-opened in this century, and now has more than 100 students, with high academic achievement.
The strange thing about 1960's public school life for me was that I was both an aristocrat and leading role model, yet a total outcast in my own mind - hating school and nearly everyone in it. This I now attribute to the fact that I was an "adult child of alcoholics", but I didn't learn about that syndrome or condition until I was in my 30's. Although my family was prominent, the men were mostly alcoholics, while the women had married into the working class and remained responsible church-goers and conformists to the status quo, without any intellectual or cultural pretensions whatsoever. They did maintain the puritanical, Protestant attitudes of blaming the victims, however, and whatever happened to me had to be my own fault, since I was obviously "gifted" and the favorite of our grandmother, who promoted me as the sole male Stephens of our generation, and thus in line to inherit a 1200 acre ranch along the lines of primogeniture and entail (which no one else had ever heard of, of course).
I've often wondered how much our civic condition has to do with environmental factors in Great Falls. We were home to large metal smelters and refineries for more than 70 years, which peaked during World War II and were still dominant in the 1960's. The fact that I spent my first 6 years 30 miles downwind from Great Falls, in the foothills of the Highwood Mountains, is of little help, since we have determined that the heavy metals pollution might, if anything, be even worse there than in Black Eagle, where the Anaconda Smelter was located.
Teenagers tend to form into gangs, which may be engaged in drug trafficking or some other predatory behavior, but are mostly concerned about controlling the sex lives of their sisters and other females in their territory. And we know that heavy metal poisoning leads to all sorts of mindless, aggressive behavior, as well as autism, madness (the "mad hatters" used mercury compounds in their trade), etc. Surely there is more than an average amount of this in Great Falls, and those of us in my generation were especially susceptible to it.
Unfortunately, the same veterans of war and heavy industry still control the school system and local politics, and if possible, they want to re-establish the rule of Heavy Metal and other fascist institutions - especially in the schools, libraries, and other parts of the "cultural infrastructure." No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that we were home to the first nuclear-armed Minuteman strategic missile base - Malmstrom - which still exists a half-century later with the same mission.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Russell the Revolutionary
Russell the Revolutionary
Charles Marion Russell. Remember that guy? His mother was a Bent, his great-uncle killed at Taos in the territorial transition following the Mexican War. He had just been appointed Territorial Governor (the same position later held by Thomas Meagher in Montana) - "military governor" would be more accurate, or Gauleiter, if you want to to use the Nazi hierarchy as a model.
The Bent's were as important to the development of the Southwest as, say, Pierre Chouteau or Manual Lisa were to the Upper Missouri. And Fort Benton and the American Fur Company were basically just the "Northern Branch" of the same outfit based in St. Louis. These were the first big Metis corporations, in which the company heads and employees were encouraged (and rewarded) for marrying into the indigenous tribes. These were legitimate marriages between practicing Catholics. And the names and companies and tribes still exist, and interact with each other along the same lines.
Thomas Hart Benton was the first and greatest "Senator From Missouri," and a bloody imperialist to the core - John Charles Fremont was his son-in-law, and together, they are credited with securing the conquest of California, among other things. It was for him that the American Fur Company (largely owned by John J. Astor, the man who endowed Central Park in NYC) named Fort Benton. Earlier, there had been a succession of trading forts on the Upper Missouri, including one just downstream from Fort Benton, near Loma.
So, the local "boosters" of economic development, whom Russell vociferously opposed, were none other than Russell, himself, his family and associates. He was at the center of what future sustainability historians might see as a "revolutionary cell" - bent (no pun intended) on overthrowing the natural, sustainable, long-term regime - that of the Plains Indians.
But of course they didn't see it that way, and neither did the Plains Indians. For Indians, just like us, there are "good guys" and "bad guys", and it doesn't matter what race or color you are. The main difference was that the Indians lived artful, natural lives, while we "white people" are basically suicidal and poisoning ourselves in our own pollution.
Charlie rebelled and immediately became a "man of the people" - ALL the people. His family had owned slaves pre-Civil War, although Charlie wasn't born until the end of it, in 1865. Russell is the guy who really "turned Indian." Once he saw the process with his own eyes, he couldn't help but join the Resistance, and defend Native peoples with all his abilities and resources. Think of the film "Avatar" - basically the same story in futuristic terms, and we know James Cameron is a big fan of Montana! He named the nuclear sub in "The Abyss" for us.
And that is why the local Great Falls business community has always hated Russell, and tried to suppress or otherwise get rid of his work. It's worth a lot in oil money, so that's where most of it has gone - to the Oil Barons and the the museums they established. The proverbial "supply and demand."
I finally got a chance to see the current watercolors exhibit at the Russell Museum here in Great Falls. I was attending the Silent Film Festival, which outlined some of Russell's connections with Hollywood. Both were excellent shows. Although I was already familiar with most of the works, there, I hadn't seen many of the borrowed ones "in the flesh", so to speak. Half or more are in Great Falls or Helena permanently, and others borrowed from private collectors. The other big contributor was the Amon Carter Museum, which purchased the Mint Collection in the 1950's.
Russell's last big commission was for Doheny, the Los Angeles oil man whose mansion later became the home of the American Film Institute. There are watercolor sketches for that commission, including the transition from the Plains Indians to oil fields, and we are told that Russell was not happy about having to include the latter for this oil millionaire. (Nancy no doubt said, "Shut up and paint the damn picture. He's paid us a fortune.")
Some of us have been diligently following this process (the expropriation of the Russell Legacy by the Oil Junta from Texas, Oklahoma, and California), and attempting to alter it whenever the opportunity arises. Since I practically grew up playing around Russell's home and studio, and the beginnings of the Museum which now exists, I claim some right to have an opinion on these issues.
Unfortunately, that's just about all that I can have or do. And few, if any, listen. There aren't a lot of people who share a love for the work of CM Russell who also have an understanding of the history and politics behind his work - especially that pertaining to Native Americans and their plight and struggle.
For many, he has simply become a brand name - a "profit center" for our local community so that even something as simple and important as the Russell Auction cannot withstand the pressures of dealers, local convention and tourist businesses, and the demands of political expediency in managing the affairs of the City of Great Falls. Randy Gray, we should remember, was a long-time chairman of the Russell Museum board. And many other prominent local people served on it - few with any distinction or credit to themselves. Replacing these people with a "National Board" (which does include a few wealthier Montanans - basically, you have to buy your way on to it) has been disastrous - even while the bricks and mortar (and debts) pile up.
Several important works from the collection have already been sold, as well as the works of other Western artists closely associated with the Russell Tradition. Imagine Russell as one of the 5 best-known French Impressionists. That was approximately his stature among the Western American painters and sculptors (and writers, film-makers, etc.), and it still is. His work is our greatest treasure, and using and abusing it as has been done in recent years (clearly marked by the firing of Elizabeth Dear and dispersing the archives she assembled regarding the Catalog Raisonne) is simply another sign of the decline and impending destruction of our Satanic nuclear garrison town.
Charles Marion Russell. Remember that guy? His mother was a Bent, his great-uncle killed at Taos in the territorial transition following the Mexican War. He had just been appointed Territorial Governor (the same position later held by Thomas Meagher in Montana) - "military governor" would be more accurate, or Gauleiter, if you want to to use the Nazi hierarchy as a model.
The Bent's were as important to the development of the Southwest as, say, Pierre Chouteau or Manual Lisa were to the Upper Missouri. And Fort Benton and the American Fur Company were basically just the "Northern Branch" of the same outfit based in St. Louis. These were the first big Metis corporations, in which the company heads and employees were encouraged (and rewarded) for marrying into the indigenous tribes. These were legitimate marriages between practicing Catholics. And the names and companies and tribes still exist, and interact with each other along the same lines.
Thomas Hart Benton was the first and greatest "Senator From Missouri," and a bloody imperialist to the core - John Charles Fremont was his son-in-law, and together, they are credited with securing the conquest of California, among other things. It was for him that the American Fur Company (largely owned by John J. Astor, the man who endowed Central Park in NYC) named Fort Benton. Earlier, there had been a succession of trading forts on the Upper Missouri, including one just downstream from Fort Benton, near Loma.
So, the local "boosters" of economic development, whom Russell vociferously opposed, were none other than Russell, himself, his family and associates. He was at the center of what future sustainability historians might see as a "revolutionary cell" - bent (no pun intended) on overthrowing the natural, sustainable, long-term regime - that of the Plains Indians.
But of course they didn't see it that way, and neither did the Plains Indians. For Indians, just like us, there are "good guys" and "bad guys", and it doesn't matter what race or color you are. The main difference was that the Indians lived artful, natural lives, while we "white people" are basically suicidal and poisoning ourselves in our own pollution.
Charlie rebelled and immediately became a "man of the people" - ALL the people. His family had owned slaves pre-Civil War, although Charlie wasn't born until the end of it, in 1865. Russell is the guy who really "turned Indian." Once he saw the process with his own eyes, he couldn't help but join the Resistance, and defend Native peoples with all his abilities and resources. Think of the film "Avatar" - basically the same story in futuristic terms, and we know James Cameron is a big fan of Montana! He named the nuclear sub in "The Abyss" for us.
And that is why the local Great Falls business community has always hated Russell, and tried to suppress or otherwise get rid of his work. It's worth a lot in oil money, so that's where most of it has gone - to the Oil Barons and the the museums they established. The proverbial "supply and demand."
I finally got a chance to see the current watercolors exhibit at the Russell Museum here in Great Falls. I was attending the Silent Film Festival, which outlined some of Russell's connections with Hollywood. Both were excellent shows. Although I was already familiar with most of the works, there, I hadn't seen many of the borrowed ones "in the flesh", so to speak. Half or more are in Great Falls or Helena permanently, and others borrowed from private collectors. The other big contributor was the Amon Carter Museum, which purchased the Mint Collection in the 1950's.
Russell's last big commission was for Doheny, the Los Angeles oil man whose mansion later became the home of the American Film Institute. There are watercolor sketches for that commission, including the transition from the Plains Indians to oil fields, and we are told that Russell was not happy about having to include the latter for this oil millionaire. (Nancy no doubt said, "Shut up and paint the damn picture. He's paid us a fortune.")
Some of us have been diligently following this process (the expropriation of the Russell Legacy by the Oil Junta from Texas, Oklahoma, and California), and attempting to alter it whenever the opportunity arises. Since I practically grew up playing around Russell's home and studio, and the beginnings of the Museum which now exists, I claim some right to have an opinion on these issues.
Unfortunately, that's just about all that I can have or do. And few, if any, listen. There aren't a lot of people who share a love for the work of CM Russell who also have an understanding of the history and politics behind his work - especially that pertaining to Native Americans and their plight and struggle.
For many, he has simply become a brand name - a "profit center" for our local community so that even something as simple and important as the Russell Auction cannot withstand the pressures of dealers, local convention and tourist businesses, and the demands of political expediency in managing the affairs of the City of Great Falls. Randy Gray, we should remember, was a long-time chairman of the Russell Museum board. And many other prominent local people served on it - few with any distinction or credit to themselves. Replacing these people with a "National Board" (which does include a few wealthier Montanans - basically, you have to buy your way on to it) has been disastrous - even while the bricks and mortar (and debts) pile up.
Several important works from the collection have already been sold, as well as the works of other Western artists closely associated with the Russell Tradition. Imagine Russell as one of the 5 best-known French Impressionists. That was approximately his stature among the Western American painters and sculptors (and writers, film-makers, etc.), and it still is. His work is our greatest treasure, and using and abusing it as has been done in recent years (clearly marked by the firing of Elizabeth Dear and dispersing the archives she assembled regarding the Catalog Raisonne) is simply another sign of the decline and impending destruction of our Satanic nuclear garrison town.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Question Authority - and oppose it
Who are the Agents of Authoritarianism?
The Law of Unintended (or concealed) Consequences
A phenomenon of great importance
Few people seem to recognize this "category", but it is part of the ethical "dark matter" which seems to permeate our positive moral universe. We can see it everywhere, from drug prohibition (actually designed to maximize both criminal activity and the state police authority which supposedly "opposes" it) to our health care system, which is surely a disease and revenue producing system (actually designed to cause and perpetuate illnesses and unhealthy lifestyles), since doctors and other providers are now paid on the basis of how many "treatments" they provide, and thus have little or no incentive to actually make people healthier. Indeed, that becomes a threat to their economic survival, which is compensated for by decreasing supply and increasing the monopoly power of the providers, thus leaving half or more of the population untreated or underserved.
The very principle of "insurance" is based on this. Essentially, we are betting that bad things will happen. And it is very difficult to prove causality when they actually do. Thus, insurance is way more expensive for the prudent and safety-conscious than they would otherwise pay in a pool made up entirely of people like themselves.
It used to be hard to get insurance if you are a "high risk" person with lots of claims. The idea of compulsory insurance actually negates the very idea of insurance and risk-pooling, on a voluntary and market-regulated basis. Instead, it becomes a government diktat which costs everyone two or three times more than an optimal distribution of the same resources and services would provide. And so it goes with almost everything these days.
Public education is the most significant manifestation of this phenomenon. I'm not talking about real public, community-based education. I'm talking about our present system of vicious, coercive state monopolies utterly controlling a unified content of obedience, ignorance, and subservience, with some sort of lip service to "human rights" and "job training." Our public education is so bad that many of us, when it was only 20% as bad as it is, today, despaired of ever fixing it, although we certainly had dozens of excellent plans and policies which could have transformed it into something approaching the "real public community-based" system.
Site-based management (each school being autonomous and run by those on site, not a central bureaucracy), parent-teacher co-ops, neighborhood open schools where learning is available for everyone of all ages - these are just a few of the cogent and workable solutions which various groups and scholars have supported consistently for as long as there has been "public education."
The fact is, American public education is based on an earlier Prussian model, which derives from the post-Napoleonic paranoia to create superstates with super armies to either be like Napoleon's Empire, or to be able to effectively counter and oppose it. The educational arms race was on. And it has never been more focussed than it is, today, with the competition between China and the US for global hegemony.
The role of economists
Economists exist to sort these things out, and make the proper, scientific and rational determinations of what our economy should and must provide, and how best to go about it. Economists agree among themselves much more than the general public might suspect. And we are not "socialists" or "free-marketeers" or even "pro-business." We are SCIENTISTS - observers, researchers, predicters, truth-seekers, not dictators or "sycophants of the bourgeoisie," as Marx, himself a philosopher and economist, put it. But of course we are. Someone has to pay us, and it is, by definition, the bourgeoisie who control the money, jobs, and the rest of the economy.
Another way to look at it is that economists are "engineers of the economy." We're supposed to understand the nuts and bolts of how the economy works, so we can maintain it, and protect it from the many assaults, both foreign and domestic, which are launched against individual firms, sectors, or the economy as a whole.
Perhaps we should pause a bit and consider the idea of "whole" and "parts". Most people have heard of something being "more than the sum of its parts." Yet, all the parts together must equal the whole. That's a definition. So, if more comes out of the "whole" than might have been predicted merely by looking at the parts, that is called "synergy" - created energy and power (wealth, influence, healthfulness - whatever we are dealing with). It is something that entrepreneurs as well as social engineers accomplish regularly.
The genius of the market (which hardly any leftists understand at all) is that it's all voluntary, and it coordinates all the disparate supplies and demands for goods and services. YOU, the individual, decide what you want to do, what kind of education you want, what sort of transportation, food supply, health care system, retirement plan, etc. And you get a fixed quantity of resources (called the "social product") - the earth itself, the free energy all around us, etc, plus the legacy of knowledge and techniques which is our common inheritance.
When an oil or coal company moves in and strips out a billion dollars worth of oil or coal, and maybe leaves the local community with a few hundred (now redundant) jobs and a mess of pollution, they have looted the "social product." They have claimed our common heritage for their own. And we agree with them - even "liberal Democrats", who trade off such pillage for a stay of execution for Social Security and Medicare.
We need to rethink everything about "property", incomes policy, and what the rightful functions of a just and free state might be (if any). Anarchists have long contended that it is the state, itself, which is the problem. We don't need any "government" bigger than a rural county or urban neighborhood. Anything else is likely to represent "capital" instead of people; war instead of peace, control instead of community.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
More family history - education
Further Confessions
"You can't live in the world as it ought to be. You must live in the world as it is."
This statement, in various forms and contexts, is literally "the story of my life." Like, I'm not the realist. I'm not the one who has lived in grinding poverty in the streets and fields of Amerika all my life.
But I have learned from it.
Of course, most people have no idea. They can't even imagine what it's like to be hungry (something I have admittedly never been - unless, of course, by choice); to have no home, no land, no friends, no "support group", no one who even cares if you live or die. Or to be fighting against an implacable robot army, which kills indiscriminately and without warning or reason. To have your land, your home, your business, your government humiliated and destroyed, replacing it with some sort of "democracy" controlled by the Zionists.
Or to have a family which is so ingrown and reactionary that even one born and raised here has no idea what the hell they are doing except that it's some sort of faux monarchy or theocracy, and somehow, we're part of it.
Such is the reality I inhabit. I didn't choose it; I found it. It was already there. I didn't invent it. Other "realities" I have inhabited include the World of Ayn Rand, which fictionalizes (satirizes) several major Montanans, as well as the Russian-Jewish aristocracy which controls so much of Amerika, today. If you're familiar with the character of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, I know her well. I think she was modeled on my mother, who was Jean Arthur's cousin, and looked a lot like her - an actress very familiar to Ayn Rand.
Just to give you an idea, both Jean and my mother, Vivian, had a favorite aunt, Palma Nelson. Guess what she did? She was the first licensed woman railroad engineer (train driver) in the country, and she worked for the NP out of Billings. I have yet to see an NP museum which displays this fact, or anything about her, but I'm hoping I'll see it before I pass on. We're all counting on Mr. Buffett to save us from The Octopus.
Here is another "reality" I occupy or share.
Perhaps I was autistic (we lived directly down-wind from the Anaconda Smelter in Great Falls, so who knows how much lead and mercury -and even uranium, polonium, etc. - I inhaled and ingested as a child?). Or perhaps I had a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome. I've certainly been a "social moron" all my life, having little or no idea why most people think and act as they do. And this would prevent me from being in the honors math and science classes in high school, even though I tested at the highest levels in those subjects, and desperately wanted to be an astro-physicist until I actually arrived at college, when I changed my major to Economics with a minor in Philosophy. By that time, I had developed severe blocks against learning math in a classroom. The numbers were just not adding up.
From the school's persepective, I was a very slow learner, basically unteachable, yet my first IQ test given in the 2nd grade recorded a score of 145 - well into the genius level. I couldn't read at all until I was midway through the 2nd grade, and only did that by comparing a story (about dinosaurs) I already knew almost by heart with the printed text. I also had an excellent 4th grade teacher who recognized my innate intelligence and potential. It's interesting to reflect that both she and my second grade teacher were Jewish - Miss Green and Miss Amman (are there Jordanian Jews? I think so!).
Of course, I didn't know that I was "a slow learner" at the time, anymore than I knew I was a genius, and only found that score by getting a copy of my GFPS records in the early 1990's. Having come from what was then called "a broken home" and family plagued by alcoholism and other addictions, I was always short on self-esteem. But I was a "gifted underachiever," and once I learned to read, I spent several hours a day on my own researches, and always tested several grade levels above my own.
As with Isaac Asimov, the public library was my salvation, along with comic books. That library no longer exists, so any young person with similar "issues" will be SOL. Of course, they were probably on the internet by the age of 6, so it really won't make much difference, except that they will be cyborgs while I was just a simple American farmer with delusions of grandeur. Not too far from Luke Skywalker, actually.
My handicaps were poor handwriting, lack of physical coordination, and very poor social skills, so I was considered semi-retarded by most of my teachers. And I never participated in sports, nor was I any sort of "team player." I would have liked to skip a grade or two, as my father had in his one-room country school at Upper Highwood, but that was no longer "done". And so, I continued to struggle along, wasting time being taught stuff I had already mastered years before, and being discouraged from pursuing other studies on my own.
Fortunately, I usually had one or more peer friends who was on the same track, and when in high school, my friends were among the elites - both working class and professional - and they were all high achievers. So, it was the books and discussions I shared with them which shaped my later development. And of course I was always part of the "landed aristocracy" as well as Masonic and other societies. That was a time when a political campaign called "the Great Society" could actually flourish and win.
All the more difficult, I suppose, for people I grew up with in Montana (family and friends/associates alike) to understand what I am doing, now. Gone entirely from their view is the young man I was in California, handsome, popular, and even athletic. Or the struggling writer and intellectual I became in Boulder, CO, or the esthete I would become in Missoula 3 years later. In Great Falls, I have worked as a substitute teacher, cab driver, and perhaps best-known of all, a public-interest activist and 3-time candidate for local office (never getting more than 10% of the vote, against people who weren't even born here, and never went to college).
So, you have to call me an abject failure in all worldly respects. The world "as it ought to be" is of no interest to anyone. We just want to play the same old games of "who do you know?" and "how much money do you have?" Those determine everything. And even if I know more people than I thought, apparently I don't know "the right people," although I still know many of the leading families and individuals in town (most of whom apparently have a very low opinion of me, by now).
It always amazes me in these blogs and the comments to news stories just how few of these "bold and beautiful" civic leaders ever say anything at all. Apparently they are all following Lincoln's maxim (or was it Mark Twain's?) that "It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Obama and the Nuclear Conundrum
Obama and the Nuclear Conundrum
[The following essay was written last year, and may have been circulated in a sightly different form]
We are in a war of principles and ideas, and the means to communicate them, yet most of our leaders have no concept of what a principle or idea might be, and how to reconcile it either with personal ethics or public policy. I wonder what Pres. Obama's teachers must be thinking. Is he doing what they taught him, or is he "the bad boy" who is trying to make everyone look corrupt and stupid?
Is he a proud black American, or has he become the weak, fearful, slavish pawn of "the dark side" of town, or the universe? What corporate gang bosses does he listen to, or does he think that he's actually the boss? Is he afraid for his family and reputation? He should be. He is following policies and principles which will allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to wipe him out by contract or some other form of "remote control," since those are the policies and practices he is inflicting on others (targeted assassinations with no legal proceedings or basis in law). As we used to say in the wild west, his life isn't worth a plugged nickle, and in the Nuclear Age, neither is the life of anyone else.
For more than 3 decades, I've been saying that the primary focus of all political action has to be the elimination of nuclear weapons. As long as we have this "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads by a thread, nothing else is worth doing or even thinking about. We are all an hour away from complete annihilation - literally vaporization and irradiation to a level of death within a few week's time. And here in Great Falls, we live, eat, sleep, and dream with the people who are poised to unleash this holocaust. Yet, no more than a few dozen of our "heroic Montanans" have ever been willing to stand up and confront it. Indeed, most of our appointed and elected officials are hell-bent on increasing the risks and even certainty that this will happen.
President Obama spoke out forcefully for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It was the one good reason people had to vote for him. So, who does he appoint as his Secretary of Energy? One of the foremost proponents of nuclear power, Mr. Chu (and this was a fact which was well-concealed in the confirmation process). The same is true of the Pentagon. What used to be a powerful faction there in favor of unilateral or universal nuclear disarmament, with the U.S. taking "the moral high ground" and leading this process, has been totally eliminated. The Nuclear Doctrine reigns supreme, even extending to the further development and deployment of nuclear warheads to counter the various "new members of the club" - Israel, Pakistan, and India. Besides those, there are dozens more countries with mature nuclear power reactor technologies and fuel cycles. It's only a few month's work to re-process or enrich enough plutonium or uranium to make some Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons. And there are still hundreds or thousands of Soviet-era nukes (as well as U.S. stockpiles overseas) which could be (or have been) stolen, diverted, or taken over by local forces and used in a matter of hours or days. So, even if you have total faith in the U.S., Russian, British, French, and Chines governments and military command and control systems, you have not yet begun to understand or appreciate the gravity of the situation.
In the early 1990's, local peace activists held a "Town Meeting" at the Providence Forum at UGF and invited all local political candidates to come and state their views. That was where I first met Stuart Lewin, who gave a very strong and moving statement against our strategic nuclear arsenal, and the dangers it poses both to our local environment and economy, and to the world. Peggy Beltrone, at the same event (it was her first run for County Commissioner) expressed her "support for the base" and maintained that it is a liberalizing and progressive influence on the City of Great Falls and Central Montana. I doubt that she was, even then, an advocate for nuclear weapons or nuclear power generation (they are basically one and the same - you can't have one without at least the potenial for the other). But no one runs for office here without paying lip service to all the "benefits" which our local nuclear arsenal provides to Montanans, if not the rest of the world.
This is the reality we face - people hanging desperately on to a Doomsday Machine in the hopes of gaining wealth or other benefits from it. And that is what must be changed.
[The following essay was written last year, and may have been circulated in a sightly different form]
We are in a war of principles and ideas, and the means to communicate them, yet most of our leaders have no concept of what a principle or idea might be, and how to reconcile it either with personal ethics or public policy. I wonder what Pres. Obama's teachers must be thinking. Is he doing what they taught him, or is he "the bad boy" who is trying to make everyone look corrupt and stupid?
Is he a proud black American, or has he become the weak, fearful, slavish pawn of "the dark side" of town, or the universe? What corporate gang bosses does he listen to, or does he think that he's actually the boss? Is he afraid for his family and reputation? He should be. He is following policies and principles which will allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to wipe him out by contract or some other form of "remote control," since those are the policies and practices he is inflicting on others (targeted assassinations with no legal proceedings or basis in law). As we used to say in the wild west, his life isn't worth a plugged nickle, and in the Nuclear Age, neither is the life of anyone else.
For more than 3 decades, I've been saying that the primary focus of all political action has to be the elimination of nuclear weapons. As long as we have this "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads by a thread, nothing else is worth doing or even thinking about. We are all an hour away from complete annihilation - literally vaporization and irradiation to a level of death within a few week's time. And here in Great Falls, we live, eat, sleep, and dream with the people who are poised to unleash this holocaust. Yet, no more than a few dozen of our "heroic Montanans" have ever been willing to stand up and confront it. Indeed, most of our appointed and elected officials are hell-bent on increasing the risks and even certainty that this will happen.
President Obama spoke out forcefully for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It was the one good reason people had to vote for him. So, who does he appoint as his Secretary of Energy? One of the foremost proponents of nuclear power, Mr. Chu (and this was a fact which was well-concealed in the confirmation process). The same is true of the Pentagon. What used to be a powerful faction there in favor of unilateral or universal nuclear disarmament, with the U.S. taking "the moral high ground" and leading this process, has been totally eliminated. The Nuclear Doctrine reigns supreme, even extending to the further development and deployment of nuclear warheads to counter the various "new members of the club" - Israel, Pakistan, and India. Besides those, there are dozens more countries with mature nuclear power reactor technologies and fuel cycles. It's only a few month's work to re-process or enrich enough plutonium or uranium to make some Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons. And there are still hundreds or thousands of Soviet-era nukes (as well as U.S. stockpiles overseas) which could be (or have been) stolen, diverted, or taken over by local forces and used in a matter of hours or days. So, even if you have total faith in the U.S., Russian, British, French, and Chines governments and military command and control systems, you have not yet begun to understand or appreciate the gravity of the situation.
In the early 1990's, local peace activists held a "Town Meeting" at the Providence Forum at UGF and invited all local political candidates to come and state their views. That was where I first met Stuart Lewin, who gave a very strong and moving statement against our strategic nuclear arsenal, and the dangers it poses both to our local environment and economy, and to the world. Peggy Beltrone, at the same event (it was her first run for County Commissioner) expressed her "support for the base" and maintained that it is a liberalizing and progressive influence on the City of Great Falls and Central Montana. I doubt that she was, even then, an advocate for nuclear weapons or nuclear power generation (they are basically one and the same - you can't have one without at least the potenial for the other). But no one runs for office here without paying lip service to all the "benefits" which our local nuclear arsenal provides to Montanans, if not the rest of the world.
This is the reality we face - people hanging desperately on to a Doomsday Machine in the hopes of gaining wealth or other benefits from it. And that is what must be changed.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Peace, Emerson, Transcendentalism, WWII. Objectivism
Objectivism- A philosophy for automatons - slave labor
It just occurred to me that it is Objectivism, a non-denominational faith system bent on some sort of "aristocracy of ability", which now rules the world. The trouble is, this totally materialistic, life-choking system doesn't agree on what constitutes "ability." Is it the ability to destroy whole species? Is it the ability to melt the polar ice caps? Is it the ability to destroy human civilization entirely? We can sure do that! What kind of "abilities" are we talking about, here?
Or is it the ability (to quote the late Rodney King) to "get along?" Can't we all just get along? Why do we have to fight and destroy each other? And where are our "respectable" philosophers to tell us this, and help us "get it done?" They must be on sabbatical.
"Peace is Our Profession"
(the official "motto" of the USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) until the late 1980's)
It seems that the philosophy and spirituality taught and expressed at our military academies is somewhat different. In the 1980's, "Peace is Our Profession" was posted in huge letters at the Orwellian gateway to our local military garrison - Malmstrom AFB - and its "mission" of being prepared to launch up to 200 Minuteman Missiles, each of them carrying up to three nuclear warheads of 120-320KT yield (I've got the numbers somewhere, but that's close), nearly half-way around the world.
But don't tell anybody. "Ain't gonna study war no more" and all that rot. We need to learn it from direct experience, right?
Launching all (or one "Flight" of 10) only takes about 5 minutes, before any war or attack has actually happened, but if submarines launched a "first strike" attack off the coast near Seattle, it would only take 12 minutes for them to get here. That's how they figure it. It's called "launch on warning" - a doctrine which is now discredited, but still might be implemented in any of the world's strategic nuclear missile facilities, or by whomever ends up with them after a coup or revolution.
Indeed, the whole doctrine of "deterrence" has been utterly discredited, too, but that is still the official Pentagon and Congressional rationale for having a nuclear arsenal here, or having any at all. The classic "Committee of 100" doctrine is that to have developed nuclear weapons in the first place was a mistake, and with the Abolition movement of the 1980's (of which I was a peripheral, and I must say neglected, participant), the use of uranium fission to produce electricity was also thoroughly discredited, once it was understood that any such facility and its associated technologies (like uranium enrichment) are immediately transferable to bomb production.
No amount of "treaties" or "inspections" can conceal or negate that fact. Israel, India, Pakistan, and DPR Korea have all done it. And, indeed, that is exactly the rationale being applied to Iran, today, while all the other nations which have produced bombs out of their "nuclear power industry" are among the accusers and attackers of one country, Iran, which likely has no evil motives whatsoever. Just to shed some light, so to speak, on what everyone else is doing, Iran has become the designated scapegoat for the crimes of Israel, the Baathists, the Saudi's, et al. It's time to stop that nonsense before someone really gets hurt.
The importance of rationality in a world of nuclear hair-triggers
This is why many of us were so taken with Objectivism. Even though it is largely 19th century materialist doctrines which are now exploded, it struck all sorts of responsive chords. We were the new Abolitionists, the Freedom Fighters, the Revolutionaries who ended war and corrupt tyrants in a process of unifying and uniting the entire planet. We were Utilitarians. We were going to fix things that capitalism or Fascism or Bolshevism had thrown askew. It was the Happy Time!
But the discipline of reason, of understanding, remains supreme. It must be this way, or something like this. We can make those kinds of judgements based on reason and science, a sub-category. (Originally, it all came out of theology, so there was no sense that the two were in conflict, except that the theologians felt threatened by findings which questioned their dogmas and practice).
I took enough philosophy to have a minor in it, and one of the Upper Division/Grad courses I took was entirely devoted to Immanual Kant, a philosopher whom Ayn Rand professed to particularly despise. Like so many others, it was her characterization of the History of Philosophy, and many of the great figures in it (indeed, most of them - there are few philosophers whom Rand had anything good to say about, whatsoever) - it was this particularly obnoxious material which drove me out.
I'm sure that was intentional, but the deeper or "more structural" reason is that Kant's Categorical Imperative is perceived as the opposite of Rand's "Egoism", which is a later development in ideas culminating in Max Stirner and Nietzsche, as well as the New England Transcendentalists, who were close intellectual cousins. --particularly Margaret Fuller, who translated Kant professonally, and Emerson, who read and studied the complete works of Goethe in the original German.
Was World War II "Emerson's Revenge?"
I was joking the other day (like 5 years ago, maybe) with a descendent of RW Emerson whose father was a Mustang pilot over Europe during WWII. "It didn't get any better than that for the Emerson's," I told her. "That was the culmination of two centuries of history."
Later, reflecting on this exchange, it almost seemed as though WWII was a direct result of the Emerson and Forbes dynasty, and their "construction" of our own Civil War (not to mention AT&T or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Berkshires Railroad).
Most people who read Emerson, today, don't like him. He is far too stiff, condescending, and maintaining the persona of a prophet - truly Nietzsche's Zarathustra. [Oh, and by the way, Zoroastrianism is the ancient, pre-Islamic religion of Persia (Iran), and is practiced in India and elsewhere, today - especially the Parsis (who speak a Farsi dialect) and include many famous people in the West, like Zubin Mehta. So, all this hatred of and threats against Iran is personal for some of us.]
The Mustang pilot's love was - you guessed it - airplanes, so he went to work for Pratt and Whitney after the war. And he married a midwest wind-generator heiress, but the family called him back, and persuaded him to put his 8 children through college by managing the Forbes Bank trust, which the merged family members all participate in. I'd heard of "trust fund babies", but I really didn't have a referent for it until I met these people (who, I think, were considerably burdened by this fortune, although it is now diluted down to maybe half or less of what a working person would earn in a lifetime).
Several other Emerson's I met were pilots, builders, small entrepreneurs, musicians, and the like - not really interested in "academics, " but intelligent and creative (and very morally acute!) in their speech and actions.
What about Fukushima?
As for TEPCO and its Fukushima power plants, the truth has finally been released in an official parliamentary finding. Everything we said all along has been verified - in somewhat muted form, but the main point, that the plants were not well-designed or subject to reasonable oversight and regulation, is well-documented. And it's not over. Nearly every week I read some new story about how the on-site fuel storage could combust at any time, with devastating consequences for the whole Northern Hemisphere. On the Beach, indeed.
===========
Inside the Beltway
It's getting so I can barely stand to watch any TV interviews or discussions emanating from "inside the Beltway" - Washington, D.C. Great Falls (VA) is the richest town in the U.S., now, having recently surpassed the more famous ones nestled in the New York and California suburbs - like Scarsborough or Beverly Hills. But you would never know this in Great Falls, Montana - a far more powerful and visionary city, which is now on its knees to ALEC, the Pentagon, Wal-Mart, and the medical drug rackets which have destroyed our schools and families much worse than marijuana or cocaine dealers could have ever imagined, and paid for with YOUR MONEY (Medicaid, CHIP, etc.).
Notice that Denny Rehberg is now proclaiming his record of support for these kinds of "Drugs in the Schools" programs (and every other totalitarian, mind and thought control measure). He might have said the word "libertarian" a few times, but he certainly doesn't know what it means. Dems and Reps alike are all big fans of Homeland Scurity, and keeping everyone under surveillance lest they look at pictures of naked children, or check out a Koran, or something. And the WWI Sedition laws, never repealed but thought to be dead letters, are being revived to suppress all criticism and dissent.
Seriously, the politicians and their respective power brokers and financial supporters are 90% or more behind all this stuff. Look at the recent Attorneys General, and how they only got worse under Obama. Whatever these people's conception of the law and Constitution, it is very different from what most people understood by them even 30 years ago. It's like the actual meaning and application of our once-fine legal system is now merely a game of social and economic warfare, where the "best-connected" usually win - often by simply avoiding any real legal or moral arguments and decisions, entirely.
I've been intending to write a lot about ethics and how our society's social and economic decline is the consequence of a prior ethical decline, which occurred during and after our participation in World War II. And that, of course, was only a follow-up to World War I, which was itself the consquence of various empires jostling each other over boundaries and treaties, natural resources, and the control of governments which possessed them.
It's been going on for more than a century, if not forever, and we're rapidly approaching the centennial of "the Guns of August" (1914) which began this calamity for Western Civilization and the rest of the planet. The interesting thing for us is that Montana has been in the thick of it since the late 1800's, and perhaps as early as the 1840's and '50's, when the people and landscape of what is now Montana first became known to the rest of the world.
If you've lived anywhere else, and told people you are from Montana, you know what I'm talking about. There's a lot of mystique and status to it, as well as suspicion from more urbane types, who can't help but think we're all gunfighters and savages. If so, we've apparently converted the urban centers and even other countries to our "vision" of a future full of war and barbarism.
Sen. Tester ran, initially, on a platform of repealing the PATRIOT Act entirely, and like Gov. Schweitzer, drew a firm line in the sand against "Real ID" and stuff like that - chip implantation in animals, for example.
Rehberg actually had a better record pre-2008 than Tester has now on this stuff - because of pressure from the Right - the Gun Lobby, military lobbies, TEA's, etc. Tester was doing fine until the Baucus people (including Jim Messina, who was running the Obama Campaign last I heard) started giving "advice." Now, the Baucusite controllers have thoroughly "Borged" him - he was taken over and made to act and speak and vote in ways which didn't "reflect badly" on Baucus's most deplorable record. And so, his record is very similar to Rehberg's, who is the real Republican, while Baucus and Tester are simply pandering to what they take to be the Republican position, hoping to attract Republican voters to their equally "conservative" (totalitarian) policies.
But, hey, one YD Dem is as good as another, right? Meanwhile, the rest will dig in as BD's and make sure that nothing "liberal" or "unpatriotic" gets by them.
I grew up with and still know strong Democrats and strong Republicans - who really believe in and will fight for this stuff - whatever their "side" and its bosses tells them to do.
I have a question. What if it's the same side? What if we're all in this together, and we'd better start listening and thinking straight or there won't even be one side left to hang on to? Most people, I've learned, actually fear one or both parties, and want nothing to do with supporting either of them, or if they are the timid type, will say or do nothing to oppose either "evil." And so, they suffer grievously in silence and submission. Isn't this a great country?
If that's the way people feel, I really have nothing more to say to them. We have to want to fix things and change for the better. If we don't have that, and a willingness to stand up to evil and oppression, then to hell with it. Just have a good time, and don't worry about tomorrow.
It just occurred to me that it is Objectivism, a non-denominational faith system bent on some sort of "aristocracy of ability", which now rules the world. The trouble is, this totally materialistic, life-choking system doesn't agree on what constitutes "ability." Is it the ability to destroy whole species? Is it the ability to melt the polar ice caps? Is it the ability to destroy human civilization entirely? We can sure do that! What kind of "abilities" are we talking about, here?
Or is it the ability (to quote the late Rodney King) to "get along?" Can't we all just get along? Why do we have to fight and destroy each other? And where are our "respectable" philosophers to tell us this, and help us "get it done?" They must be on sabbatical.
"Peace is Our Profession"
(the official "motto" of the USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) until the late 1980's)
It seems that the philosophy and spirituality taught and expressed at our military academies is somewhat different. In the 1980's, "Peace is Our Profession" was posted in huge letters at the Orwellian gateway to our local military garrison - Malmstrom AFB - and its "mission" of being prepared to launch up to 200 Minuteman Missiles, each of them carrying up to three nuclear warheads of 120-320KT yield (I've got the numbers somewhere, but that's close), nearly half-way around the world.
But don't tell anybody. "Ain't gonna study war no more" and all that rot. We need to learn it from direct experience, right?
Launching all (or one "Flight" of 10) only takes about 5 minutes, before any war or attack has actually happened, but if submarines launched a "first strike" attack off the coast near Seattle, it would only take 12 minutes for them to get here. That's how they figure it. It's called "launch on warning" - a doctrine which is now discredited, but still might be implemented in any of the world's strategic nuclear missile facilities, or by whomever ends up with them after a coup or revolution.
Indeed, the whole doctrine of "deterrence" has been utterly discredited, too, but that is still the official Pentagon and Congressional rationale for having a nuclear arsenal here, or having any at all. The classic "Committee of 100" doctrine is that to have developed nuclear weapons in the first place was a mistake, and with the Abolition movement of the 1980's (of which I was a peripheral, and I must say neglected, participant), the use of uranium fission to produce electricity was also thoroughly discredited, once it was understood that any such facility and its associated technologies (like uranium enrichment) are immediately transferable to bomb production.
No amount of "treaties" or "inspections" can conceal or negate that fact. Israel, India, Pakistan, and DPR Korea have all done it. And, indeed, that is exactly the rationale being applied to Iran, today, while all the other nations which have produced bombs out of their "nuclear power industry" are among the accusers and attackers of one country, Iran, which likely has no evil motives whatsoever. Just to shed some light, so to speak, on what everyone else is doing, Iran has become the designated scapegoat for the crimes of Israel, the Baathists, the Saudi's, et al. It's time to stop that nonsense before someone really gets hurt.
The importance of rationality in a world of nuclear hair-triggers
This is why many of us were so taken with Objectivism. Even though it is largely 19th century materialist doctrines which are now exploded, it struck all sorts of responsive chords. We were the new Abolitionists, the Freedom Fighters, the Revolutionaries who ended war and corrupt tyrants in a process of unifying and uniting the entire planet. We were Utilitarians. We were going to fix things that capitalism or Fascism or Bolshevism had thrown askew. It was the Happy Time!
But the discipline of reason, of understanding, remains supreme. It must be this way, or something like this. We can make those kinds of judgements based on reason and science, a sub-category. (Originally, it all came out of theology, so there was no sense that the two were in conflict, except that the theologians felt threatened by findings which questioned their dogmas and practice).
I took enough philosophy to have a minor in it, and one of the Upper Division/Grad courses I took was entirely devoted to Immanual Kant, a philosopher whom Ayn Rand professed to particularly despise. Like so many others, it was her characterization of the History of Philosophy, and many of the great figures in it (indeed, most of them - there are few philosophers whom Rand had anything good to say about, whatsoever) - it was this particularly obnoxious material which drove me out.
I'm sure that was intentional, but the deeper or "more structural" reason is that Kant's Categorical Imperative is perceived as the opposite of Rand's "Egoism", which is a later development in ideas culminating in Max Stirner and Nietzsche, as well as the New England Transcendentalists, who were close intellectual cousins. --particularly Margaret Fuller, who translated Kant professonally, and Emerson, who read and studied the complete works of Goethe in the original German.
Was World War II "Emerson's Revenge?"
I was joking the other day (like 5 years ago, maybe) with a descendent of RW Emerson whose father was a Mustang pilot over Europe during WWII. "It didn't get any better than that for the Emerson's," I told her. "That was the culmination of two centuries of history."
Later, reflecting on this exchange, it almost seemed as though WWII was a direct result of the Emerson and Forbes dynasty, and their "construction" of our own Civil War (not to mention AT&T or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Berkshires Railroad).
Most people who read Emerson, today, don't like him. He is far too stiff, condescending, and maintaining the persona of a prophet - truly Nietzsche's Zarathustra. [Oh, and by the way, Zoroastrianism is the ancient, pre-Islamic religion of Persia (Iran), and is practiced in India and elsewhere, today - especially the Parsis (who speak a Farsi dialect) and include many famous people in the West, like Zubin Mehta. So, all this hatred of and threats against Iran is personal for some of us.]
The Mustang pilot's love was - you guessed it - airplanes, so he went to work for Pratt and Whitney after the war. And he married a midwest wind-generator heiress, but the family called him back, and persuaded him to put his 8 children through college by managing the Forbes Bank trust, which the merged family members all participate in. I'd heard of "trust fund babies", but I really didn't have a referent for it until I met these people (who, I think, were considerably burdened by this fortune, although it is now diluted down to maybe half or less of what a working person would earn in a lifetime).
Several other Emerson's I met were pilots, builders, small entrepreneurs, musicians, and the like - not really interested in "academics, " but intelligent and creative (and very morally acute!) in their speech and actions.
What about Fukushima?
As for TEPCO and its Fukushima power plants, the truth has finally been released in an official parliamentary finding. Everything we said all along has been verified - in somewhat muted form, but the main point, that the plants were not well-designed or subject to reasonable oversight and regulation, is well-documented. And it's not over. Nearly every week I read some new story about how the on-site fuel storage could combust at any time, with devastating consequences for the whole Northern Hemisphere. On the Beach, indeed.
===========
Inside the Beltway
It's getting so I can barely stand to watch any TV interviews or discussions emanating from "inside the Beltway" - Washington, D.C. Great Falls (VA) is the richest town in the U.S., now, having recently surpassed the more famous ones nestled in the New York and California suburbs - like Scarsborough or Beverly Hills. But you would never know this in Great Falls, Montana - a far more powerful and visionary city, which is now on its knees to ALEC, the Pentagon, Wal-Mart, and the medical drug rackets which have destroyed our schools and families much worse than marijuana or cocaine dealers could have ever imagined, and paid for with YOUR MONEY (Medicaid, CHIP, etc.).
Notice that Denny Rehberg is now proclaiming his record of support for these kinds of "Drugs in the Schools" programs (and every other totalitarian, mind and thought control measure). He might have said the word "libertarian" a few times, but he certainly doesn't know what it means. Dems and Reps alike are all big fans of Homeland Scurity, and keeping everyone under surveillance lest they look at pictures of naked children, or check out a Koran, or something. And the WWI Sedition laws, never repealed but thought to be dead letters, are being revived to suppress all criticism and dissent.
Seriously, the politicians and their respective power brokers and financial supporters are 90% or more behind all this stuff. Look at the recent Attorneys General, and how they only got worse under Obama. Whatever these people's conception of the law and Constitution, it is very different from what most people understood by them even 30 years ago. It's like the actual meaning and application of our once-fine legal system is now merely a game of social and economic warfare, where the "best-connected" usually win - often by simply avoiding any real legal or moral arguments and decisions, entirely.
I've been intending to write a lot about ethics and how our society's social and economic decline is the consequence of a prior ethical decline, which occurred during and after our participation in World War II. And that, of course, was only a follow-up to World War I, which was itself the consquence of various empires jostling each other over boundaries and treaties, natural resources, and the control of governments which possessed them.
It's been going on for more than a century, if not forever, and we're rapidly approaching the centennial of "the Guns of August" (1914) which began this calamity for Western Civilization and the rest of the planet. The interesting thing for us is that Montana has been in the thick of it since the late 1800's, and perhaps as early as the 1840's and '50's, when the people and landscape of what is now Montana first became known to the rest of the world.
If you've lived anywhere else, and told people you are from Montana, you know what I'm talking about. There's a lot of mystique and status to it, as well as suspicion from more urbane types, who can't help but think we're all gunfighters and savages. If so, we've apparently converted the urban centers and even other countries to our "vision" of a future full of war and barbarism.
Sen. Tester ran, initially, on a platform of repealing the PATRIOT Act entirely, and like Gov. Schweitzer, drew a firm line in the sand against "Real ID" and stuff like that - chip implantation in animals, for example.
Rehberg actually had a better record pre-2008 than Tester has now on this stuff - because of pressure from the Right - the Gun Lobby, military lobbies, TEA's, etc. Tester was doing fine until the Baucus people (including Jim Messina, who was running the Obama Campaign last I heard) started giving "advice." Now, the Baucusite controllers have thoroughly "Borged" him - he was taken over and made to act and speak and vote in ways which didn't "reflect badly" on Baucus's most deplorable record. And so, his record is very similar to Rehberg's, who is the real Republican, while Baucus and Tester are simply pandering to what they take to be the Republican position, hoping to attract Republican voters to their equally "conservative" (totalitarian) policies.
But, hey, one YD Dem is as good as another, right? Meanwhile, the rest will dig in as BD's and make sure that nothing "liberal" or "unpatriotic" gets by them.
I grew up with and still know strong Democrats and strong Republicans - who really believe in and will fight for this stuff - whatever their "side" and its bosses tells them to do.
I have a question. What if it's the same side? What if we're all in this together, and we'd better start listening and thinking straight or there won't even be one side left to hang on to? Most people, I've learned, actually fear one or both parties, and want nothing to do with supporting either of them, or if they are the timid type, will say or do nothing to oppose either "evil." And so, they suffer grievously in silence and submission. Isn't this a great country?
If that's the way people feel, I really have nothing more to say to them. We have to want to fix things and change for the better. If we don't have that, and a willingness to stand up to evil and oppression, then to hell with it. Just have a good time, and don't worry about tomorrow.
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