berndt musings: The Quality of life

berndt musings: The Quality of life: February 25, 2005 the quallity of life                                                         By Harry E. Berndt When economists write c...

Thoughts on 2012 Presidential Election

Thoughts on 2012 Presidential Election

by Harry E. Berndt

After two years of interminable campaigning and voter abuse, the presidential election is less than two weeks away. As a serious voter, I watched in wonderment as unqualified candidate after unqualified candidate demanded my attention. These People were obviously so inept that they should never have been taken seriously. Yet, people sent them money to further their campaigns and self-styled pundits held straight faced discussions about their qualifications and chances for election. Many millions of dollars went into the coffers of media, who were delighted to permit this fleecing of the voters.

Finally, the cast of characters is reduced to just two major contenders who continue this charade of democracy; one man or woman and one vote. The cost of the election is now beyond millions and into billions and the electorate knows little more than was known at the start of the campaign. Those who pay for the candidates determine what information is provided and skew it to benefit their interests. Both candidates are supported by huge amounts of PAC money and the public does not know the identity of the PAC donors. That the process of PAC advertising is dishonest and misleading is an accepted fact, and still we speak of the election as democracy in action.

The Obama claim for re-election rests on his first term accomplishments - or lack of. It is a matter of public record and one can agree or disagree with what has been accomplished, and have at least the basis for voting. But, how can Romney be evaluated? The information on Romney is cloudy and incomplete, often obviously in error or purposely distorted. A vote for Romney is either based on faith or on disappointment or dislike of Obama. Although a former governor of Massachusetts, Romney’s professional or business background is as a private equity manager. In his capacity as a private equity manager he cannot legitimately claim the mantle of job creator. His only responsibility was to provide profits for his investors, for which he was amply rewarded. In his quest for profits, he and other equity managers, find it necessary to reduce manpower requirements in order to garner profits for their share-holders and personal gain for themselves. For example, the historic airline TWA no longer exists. A private equity manager, Carl Icahn, sold it off leaving employees high and dry, and walked away with a reported $190 million.

Milton Friedman, in his major work Capitalism and Freedom, stated that social responsibility is “a fundamentally subversive doctrine in a free society”, and that there is only one social responsibility of business – “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”.  The equity manager, to be successful, must embrace that philosophy of business more than managers in any other part of the business community. He is not a factory manager producing goods, but a financier whose sole purpose is the manipulation of resources to produce profits. If he finds it necessary to significantly reduce the number of employees, or necessary to close a plant in a town dependent on the plant for survival, he has an obligation to his investors to take that action. He is not a job creator.

I have thought a lot about this election; after all, it has been nagging me for the past two years. My vote will go to Obama, because I have concluded that his interests are those shared by working people and by women and families. I may not agree, and in fact have not agreed, with all of his policies, but the basic thrust of his administration matches the goals I would wish for in my government. When I think of Romney and the policies he seems to reflect, I think of the three orders of men discussed in The Wealth of Nations. The third order was that of employers and dealers. Adam Smith states, “The interest of the dealers in any particular branch of trade or manufacturers is always different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.”[Sic]  "The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.". Mitt Romney identifies himself as a member of this third order of men, so he will not get my vote.

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Harry E. Berndt, Ph.D.

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NEOLIBERALISM

BY Fish

I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term “neoliberalism” and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition.

I was asking because I had been reading essays in which the adjective neoliberal was routinely invoked as an accusation, and I had only a sketchy notion of what was intended by it. When one of these essays cited my recent writings on higher education as a prime example of “neoliberal ideology” (Sophia McClennen, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Intellectual Engagement,” in Works and Days, volumes 26-27, 2008-2009), I thought I’d better learn more.

What I’ve learned (and what some readers of this column no doubt already knew) is that neoliberalism is a pejorative way of referring to a set of economic/political policies based on a strong faith in the beneficent effects of free markets. Here is an often cited definition by Paul Treanor: “Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services . . . and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.” (“Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition.”)

In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions — questions of negligence law — are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don’t you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory’s operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?

As Ronald Coase put it in his classic article, “The Problem of Social Cost” (Journal of Law and Economics, 1960): “The question to be decided is: is the value of the fish lost greater or less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible?” If the answer is more value would be lost if my factory were closed, then the principle of the maximization of wealth and efficiency directs us to a negotiated solution: you allow my factory to continue to pollute your stream and I will compensate you or underwrite the costs of your moving the stream elsewhere on your property, provided of course that the price I pay for the right to pollute is not greater than the value produced by my being permitted to continue.

Notice that “value” in this example (which is an extremely simplified stand-in for infinitely more complex transactions) is an economic, not an ethical word, or, rather, that in the neoliberal universe, ethics reduces to calculations of wealth and productivity. Notice too that if you and I proceed (as market ethics dictate) to work things out between us — to come to a private agreement — there will be no need for action by either the government or the courts, each of which is likely to muddy the waters (in which the fish will still be dying) by introducing distracting moral or philosophical concerns, sometimes referred to as “market distortions.”

Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state interventions — governmental policies of social engineering — are “presented as the problem rather than the solution” (Chris Harman, “Theorising Neoliberalism,” International Socialism Journal, December 2007).

The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan “let’s get governments off our backs”), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.)

The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are temporarily disadvantaged, let’s say by being deprived of their fish.

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture’s way of thinking, institutions that don’t regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles — privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in the 21st century university, where (according to Henry Giroux) the “historical legacy” of the university conceived “as a crucial public sphere” has given way to a university “that now narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical.” (“Academic Unfreedom in America,” in Works and Days.)

This new narrative has been produced (and necessitated) by the withdrawal of the state from the funding of its so-called public universities. If the percentage of a state’s contribution to a college’s operating expenses falls from 80 to 10 and less (this has been the relentless trajectory of the past 40 years) and if, at the same time, demand for the “product” of higher education rises and the cost of delivering that product (the cost of supplies, personnel, information systems, maintenance, construction, insurance, security) skyrockets, a huge gap opens up that will have to be filled somehow.

Faced with this situation universities have responded by (1) raising tuition, in effect passing the burden of costs to the students who now become consumers and debt-holders rather than beneficiaries of enlightenment (2) entering into research partnerships with industry and thus courting the danger of turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of profits and (3) hiring a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts who as members of a transient and disposable workforce are in no position to challenge the university’s practices or agitate for an academy more committed to the realization of democratic rather than monetary goals. In short , universities have embraced neoliberalism.

Meanwhile, even those few faculty members with security of employment do their bit for neoliberalism when they retire to their professional enclaves and churn out reams of scholarship (their equivalent of capital) that is increasingly specialized and without a clear connection to the public interest: “[F]aculty have progressively . . . favored professionalism over social responsibility and have . . . refused to take positions on controversial issues”; as a result they have “become disconnected from political agency and thereby incapable of taking a political stand” (McClennen, Works and Days).

Of course that’s what I urge — not an inability to take political stands, but a refraining from doing so in the name of academic responsibility — and it now becomes clear (even to me) why McLennen would see in what I write an implicit support for the neoliberization of academic life.

When I say to my fellow academics “aim low” and stick to your academic knitting or counsel do your job and don’t try to do someone else’s or warn against the presumption of trying to fashion a democratic citizenry or save the world, I am encouraging (or so McLennen says) a hunkering down in the private spaces of an academic workplace detached from the world’s problems.

And when I define academic freedom as the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to expand it to the point where its goals are infinite, my stance “forecloses the possibility of civic engagement and democratic action.” (McClennen)

That’s not quite right. I don’t foreclose the possibility; I just want to locate it outside the university and the classroom. But for McClennen, Giroux, Harvey and many others, this is a distinction without a difference, for the result of what I advocate would still be faculty members who are “models of moral indifference and civic spectatorship,” at least when they’re being faculty members. (Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, “Take Back Higher Education.”)

By defining academic freedom narrowly, as a concept tied to a guild and responsive only to its interests, I am said to ignore the responsibility academics have to freedom everywhere, not only in the classroom or in the research library but in the society at large and indeed in the entire world. In the view of the critics of the neoliberal university, a limiting definition of academic freedom forfeits the good that academics, highly trained and articulate as they are, might do if they took a stand against injustice and unfreedom wherever they are found.

That line of reasoning leads directly to the academic left’s support for the boycott of Israeli academics, an issue I shall take up in my next column.

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Top of Form

Election 2012 Frontlilne

Had I tuned in late and not known the source, I would have concluded that the program was a paid political advertisement of the National Republican Committee; not the balanced view of the presidential campaign that I expected. There is more and better information in the public domain than was provided by this poorly researched presentation. A program I occasionally watch and respect, Frontline was in this instance a sad disappointment.

Harry E. Berndt

In Search of Answers From Mr. Romney

Mitt Romney mounted a big foreign policy display on a flag-draped stage at the Virginia Military Institute on Monday, serving up a lot of tough-sounding sound bites and hawkish bumper stickers, some of them even bumping up somewhere close to the truth, to give the appearance that he would be stronger and more forceful on international affairs than President Obama.

He seems to consider himself, ludicrously, a leader similar to the likes of Harry Truman and George Marshall, and, at one point, he obliquely questioned Mr. Obama’s patriotism. The hope seems to be that big propaganda, said loudly and often, will drown out Mr. Obama’s respectable record in world affairs, make Americans believe Mr. Romney would be the better leader and cover up the fact that there is mostly just hot air behind his pronouncements.

Mr. Romney’s stated policies in Monday’s speech, just as they have been in the past, are either pretty much like Mr. Obama’s or, when there are hints of differences, would pull the United States in wrong and even dangerous directions. His analysis of the roots of various international crises is either naïve or deliberately misleading.

One new element is Mr. Romney’s assertion that the threats have “grown worse.” He desperately wants to undercut the edge that voters have given Mr. Obama on foreign policy, even before he ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden. But he offers no real evidence to back up that particular claim, and if it were true that the threats have been so much worse for so long, it’s odd that Mr. Romney hasn’t really talked about them before.

Militancy in the Arab world is a serious issue that needs to be addressed by both candidates. The Obama administration has been seized with the challenge of extremists from Yemen to Somalia to the Philippines and beyond since taking office and has used various strategies to deal with it. But, as much as Mr. Romney wishes voters would believe otherwise, it was President George W. Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq that gave Iran more room to maneuver and fueled anti-Americanism.

The situation has become more complicated since the Arab Spring revolutions that brought Muslim countries more freedoms — and more turmoil and more ways for extremists to create trouble.

But it is not, as Mr. Romney seems to think, one big monolithic struggle against those who are seeking to wage “perpetual war on the West.” There are different strains of Islam and many kinds of Muslims with different political agendas. To create smart policy, American presidents have to see the nuances, not just the slogans, and be willing to work with many different kinds of leaders.

Mr. Romney seized again on the Sept. 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the murders of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others, to make cheap political points. He said the attack “was likely the work of forces affiliated with those that attacked our homeland” on Sept. 11, 2001, an exaggeration that he can be making only for political effect.

The administration initially characterized last month’s attack as a spontaneous demonstration gone awry, but, within two days, described it as an organized terrorist act by extremists with possible links to Al Qaeda. But that organization has changed so much, and splintered so much, since 2001 that to suggest a link to the attacks in New York and Washington seems untenable. In any event, in times of crisis, as Mr. Romney must know, it is not unusual to modify an analysis when new intelligence is obtained.

One of Mr. Romney’s main complaints is that Mr. Obama hasn’t helped America’s friends. In Iraq, Mr. Romney is right when he points to rising violence and the rising influence of Iran. But when Mr. Romney faults Mr. Obama’s withdrawal of American troops from the country, he never says what he would have done as president, or what he would do. Would he have refused to withdraw forces, or would he redeploy them now, even though the Iraqis did not and do not want them? It was not Mr. Obama’s withdrawal that left Iraq a political mess. It was Mr. Bush’s reckless invasion and inept running of the war.

Mr. Romney continues to fault Mr. Obama for not leading on Syria, where thousands have died at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. While he says he would make sure the rebels get the weapons they need, he never answers the bottom-line question: Should the United States go to war there?

He said he would toughen sanctions on Iran. If he intends to go beyond what Mr. Obama is already doing with international support, he should say so and spell it out. Otherwise, the only room he leaves to the right of Mr. Obama’s policy is to wage war on Iran — a catastrophically foolish idea that most Americans recognize as folly.

Mr. Romney repeated an outright lie about Mr. Obama’s military spending policy to make himself appear more concerned about America’s defense. He accused Mr. Obama of favoring “deep and arbitrary cuts” to the military when, in fact, those cuts, if they happen, were mandated by a deal demanded by the Republicans to end their trumped-up crisis over the debt ceiling.

One good piece of news is that on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Romney has remodified his position one more time. After telling a private donor party during his primary campaign that “this is going to remain an unsolved problem,” he now endorses a two-state solution, although he never suggests how he would go about this.

Americans deserve an intensive, textured and honest discussion on foreign policy. They did not get it on Monday. Mr. Obama should respond, forcefully, to Mr. Romney on these issues, even before their next debate on Oct. 16, which will include issues of foreign affairs.

In reading Archbishop Carlson’s commentary on Vatican ll in the October 8 issue of the Review, I couldn’t help recalling the work at Vatican ll by Cardinal Joseph Ritter, the then Archbishop of St. Louis. Although he was the youngest member of the cardinalate in terms of tenure, he took leadership roles in Vatican ll on the issues of ecumenism, freedom of conscience and religious liberty, race, and the use of the vernacular in the Mass. He was also a leader on the question of the Jews being responsible for the death of Christ and insisted that the Council absolve the Jews of all blame. He gave the world a new image of the American Cardinal, and in the eyes of the Bishops of the world became the most respected of American prelates of his generation. Honest, open, and devoted to the Gospels, Cardinal Ritter was loved and looked upon by his people in St. Louis as a pastor in the spirit of Pope John XXlll.

Harry E. Berndt