With this new policy handed down by the Supreme Court,  corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money carrying out political activities. The are many troubling aspects of this situation.  Besides the obvious fact that an artificial socio-economic artifact like a corporation can not possibly be a natural person, there are numerous features of corporations that make them particularly dangerous to us human beings. Corporations never die, excepting the rare death by dissolution. Corporations act globally with many agents in place to carry out policies that favor the corporation wherever and whenever required. Through the wonders of contracts and financialization of assets corporations can appear and disappear from any locality at will. One can observe an example of this phenomenon several years ago when corporations like Tyco International moved its headquarters to an off-shore island to avoid US corporate taxes. This, despite the fact that Tyco had dozens of manufacturing facilities and other operations employing thousands here in the US.

Corporations control far more assets than even the richest of individuals, even whole countries (see the chart below). This means that they have the financial assets to buy anything and anyone they wish. Despite even the protestations of Barney Frank, one of our funniest Congressmen, whose seat is a safe one, it is simply not plausible that he can receive the enormous piles of cash from the financial services industry without him becoming beholden to them. Money is too universally corrosive to support his delusions.

Just to place the power of corporations in an appropriate global context here is some information from a report from the Institute for Policy Studies in 2000:

Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs) (See Table 2). To put this in perspective, General Motors is now bigger than Denmark; DaimlerChrysler is bigger than Poland; Royal Dutch/Shell is bigger than Venezuela; IBM is bigger than Singapore; and Sony is bigger than Pakistan.

Table 2 referenced in this quote is below:²

What might we do to put corporations in a more suitable position in our society and the world in general?

Perhaps we need to follow the same path that those who brought the suit Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee that resulted in the Supreme Court’s ruling. After all, I do not need to pick up the constitution anew to be sure that the word corporation nor business appears in the first amendment. In fact given the position of organizations like corporations during the Founding Father’s discussions leading to the Constitution I am sure that they would never have thought or written approvingly about corporations as natural persons. On the surface then, all we have to do is find an appropriate situation that can bring such an argument before the fundamentalists (literalists, if you like) on the court and it would seem that they would have a hard time justifying even 124 years of precedent. Where are our windmill tilters for this challenge?

1. see the Wikipedia article on this
2. Source: Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies December 4th, 2000. If you can find more recent data please send it along to me. Despite this being a decade old, I feel quite certain that the concentration of wealth in corporate hands has only increased, though some of the players have changed.

Although I seem stuck in a reflexive backward glance towards the eight disastrous years of Bush II whenever I evaluate Obama. I am still amazed at the enormous moral and practical abyss we fell through in those years. Obama brushing his teeth in the morning is reassuring in contrast. Nevertheless,  it is worth looking a bit more closely at what Obama did and did not say here. Much has been said of his straight forward assertion that violence is necessary and even useful in a world inhabited by human beings who seem almost genetically predisposed to killing each other off. And, with the invocation of Martin Luther King and the discussion of just war theory, he covers well worn territory, though it is cheering to have a sitting US President talk in this fashion.

There is much to applaud in Obama’s speech: control of nuclear weapons, assertion of human and civil rights, multilaterialism in conflict resolution and enforcement, denial of religion as a justification  for oppression of others.

But, we come to a significant claim, one that the US government has asserted for my entire lifetime,  and which the US media and populace would support:  “Whatever the mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” And, Obama continues with the summary moral claim that underlies this assertion, “We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest – because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

There may have been some moments after WWII and the ensuing consolidation by the Soviet Union of its hold over Eastern Europe that the presence of the US military in Europe forestalled further Soviet expansion. But it is a little hard to translate that moment in history into the development of a global empire of US military and security bases – officially numbering around 800 and growing even now into Central Asia and Africa.¹ And to compound the external effects of the US empire, we must add the militarization of American life on the home front. In all of US history until WWII, there has been a skepticism and fear of a permanent standing military. Demobilization was the norm until the last sixty years. Now we have an enormous military/police (Homeland Security Dept.)/spy infrastructure that consumes upwards of $900 billion per year.

Even a brief examination of Obama’s claim of a benign, even enlightened, role for the US in the world, seems enormously, and in his case unbelievably, deceptive. We only need to look at examples of direct US involvement in regime change to see that we have not always been doing things for the sake of our children let alone the rest of the world’s children. Pause on US military and quasi-military incursions in Iran, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada, Panama, Chile, and more and this claim seems a bit specious. Then consider the US underwriting of oppressive regimes, Egypt, Israel, Philippines, Indonesia, and more. Again the moral high ground slips away. Finally remember our adventures in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for more than two decades and our more recent Iraq disaster.

Another element of US domestic and foreign policy that has had, and continues to have, disastrous results is the longest American war, the War on Drugs. This war began at the initiative of President Nixon in 1969. This war consumes $40 billion of Federal and State resources in the current year and is now destabilizing Mexico while filling American jails with hundreds of thousands of drug users. Every President since Nixon has ended up increasing the budget for this completely ineffective war. Drugs are a global plague as demonstrated by opium being the entire economy of Afghanistan. It is not a simple problem, but 40 years of failure should be enough for some American President to shout, “The King has no clothes!”

Turn for a moment to the US as the world’s leading arms dealer. How is selling $ billions of high-tech war machines every year helping bring about peace? It is easy to see how this helps the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned off in his valedictory Presidential speech. Though the phrase should really be re-phrased as the military-industrial-Congressional complex since every single member of Congress will rush to defend military bases and defence contractor installations that are sprinkled across every Congressional district in every state. But, exactly how does increasing the availability of weapons increase stability and prosperity?

Though not entirely within the control of the US government (as demonstrated by recent events) the financial arm of the US economy has had, arguably, a broad negative impact on the third world. We have seen repeated over extensions of debt to countries that are then burdened with crushing debt service requirements. The US government has repeatedly bailed out US banks that have loaned money to countries in an unsupportable fashion. The banks have done this because, as demonstrated by recent events, the US government will not let the banking sector assume the real risks of their behavior. This is a sector that, unlike US manufacturing, is simply too well connected in Washington to fail.

Well, enough about the moral high ground occupied by the US in the world in last 60 years.

It would have been nice to hear Obama take a slightly more aggressive anti-war, pro-peace stance. He is a person who claims to like practical actions. Here are a couple.

Begin to demilitarize the world. Most of the arms used are produced by a relative handful of countries out of the 190 plus countries in the world.

First, tackle the tsunamis of small weapons that enable mayhem in almost every region of the world. Work through the UN to put in place a ban on the sale of military automatic weapons (UZIs, Kalashnikovs, etc), rocket propelled grenades, shoulder held rockets, grenades, land mines and probably a myriad other small military weapons that I am not aware of. Make it illegal to sell these weapons to anyone except a government recognized by the UN. Take 1% from every UN members’ military budgets and launch an international buy back program. At $200 per weapon, probably 5 million weapons could be bought back and ground up for scrap annually. If the buy back program was targeted to small geographic areas there would be a real impact on the availability of weapons. I must admit that there is an internal US political reality that stands in the way here. That gun culture and strength of gun lobbyists in the US. I can already hear the windy blathering from the NRA now.

Second, call the major arms suppliers of the world together. It won’t be hard to identify them nor require a very large ballroom. USA, Russia, Germany, France, Ukraine, Netherlands, UK, South Korea, Italy, and Sweden are the top ten and undoubtedly represent the vast majority of all arms production in the world. After all, number 10 on this list is Israel.  Set 2009 as the baseline and agree that each country’s exports of military weapons and systems will decrease by 5% of the baseline. Then, follow this with UN mandates that all of the other countries can only produce weapons for their own internal use. Essentially end the sales of weapons across international borders.

Why not announce an objective of denuclearizing the world. Instead of getting joint US – Russian nuclear armaments down to several thousand bombs, why not get them towards a few handfuls, just enough to invoke mutual fears of real retribution, while reducing the risk of mistakes or loss of control. If each country agreed to hold only relatively small warheads, each could build hardened holes where they could be completely assured of survivability and therefore the capability of destroying Washington, NYC, Chicago, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and so on if someone pushed the button. MAD would continue to be operational with only a few missiles to worry about and keep secure. This would make it politically much easier for both countries to be much more vigorous in suppressing the expansion of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world.

Now, all of this may seem monstrously silly and impractical. But, if you don’t take a step, you will never make the trip.

There is a deeper more troubling reality lurking below the surface of Obama’s speech. He represents a very timid and very fractionated coalition within the Democratic party and the ruling elite in the corporate-military-media machine that is our government. This is very clearly demonstrated currently by their inability to face down the corporate interests in the insurance, hospital, doctor, and pharma-medical products sectors. Here is a public problem that has been demanding a solution for several decades, now subject to spiraling costs, a problem for which the US public has been resolutely calling for a fix. Even many elements of the corporate world support the need for a fix. Here is a problem that has been solved in a number of different ways by every other industrialized country in the world. Here is a problem where literally you could roll the dice and just pick one of many known, workable solutions. Yet, Obama and the Democrats do not have the heft and internal cohesion to make a choice and tell the losers to go home. And, there should be losers because we all know the facts that the US health system is 30 to 40% more expensive than other countries’ systems ( see Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and so on) and yet delivers near third world health outcomes.²  One of the painfully obvious facts is that many at the trough of American health care are not only sucking out dollars but also doing bad work at the same time. So, when viewing the lofty rhetoric and general timidity of Obama’s view of the world peace (war) from this perspective, it should be no surprise that he will not really say anything new or challenging concerning what the US might do to further commity in the world. It is a simple fact that he must go on with the general lines of US policy so clearly established over the last sixty years. He does not have the political strength to do anything else nor even to talk about it.

I close with this somewhat apocalyptic observation. The events of the last two years in the world economy demonstrates how fragile human systems really are. We went through a period in which many of the players in the very important global financial services industry simply stopped believing, trusting each other and the machinery of commerce. I don’t think that there are very many, even amongst the true believers in “free markets” (those wonders of self-righting systems), that did not fear that the entire world’s financial system would grind to a halt and shortly thereafter, that a global economic abyss was in front of us. And, now, only a year after the major governments of the world bailed them out, but new regulations have yet to be agreed to and put in place, the banking system has returned to its old ways of applying financial chicanery and leverage instead of earning the keep by loaning money to enterprises that produce value.

Now, I mention this here only to reflect on the fragility of human systems coupled with the propensity of human beings to keep doing what they have always done. We will not invent new ways of organizing ourselves until the existing organizations and practices have so completely broken down that there is no turning back from trying some novel strategies. This truth, and I think it is a truth about us, is exponentially amplified when you talk about the mega institutions, nation states, capitalism, organized religion, war. They are human institutions but ones with their own consciousness and self-fulfilling inertia. Obama is not going to change them. He can not even utter the words. He can not even suggest taking a small practical step towards disarmament,  such as small arms control, because the inertia of the nation state coupled with corporate interests have his mind and mouth muzzled.

1. I have written earlier about this here.
2. See my earlier chart on this.

Meanwhile, the Bamford article mentions the construction boom at NSA (National Security Agency) with a doubling of its headquarters and million sq. feet of data storage in the Utah desert costing some $2 billion. This to store the data from all of NSA’s spying that by 2015 will be spoken of in terms of yottabytes.

Now, before you think that Bamford is mainlining old Star Wars characters, a yotta- is the largest large number prefix officially recognized in the scientific lexicon. At our house we are approaching 1/2 Terabyte (10¹²) in our total digital stores, mostly photos. Really large corporate databases are measured in Petabytes (10¹⁵). A Yotta is 10²⁴.

Are you feeling safer?

Do you really think that any email sent or telephone conversation you have had since 2002 or 2003 is not logged in the vast secret Security State Apparatus??

I guess that a National Security State (Empire) that has had over 800 military bases throughout the world (see an earlier posting on this topic) to assure our influence elsewhere can not resist the opportunity the state of so-called war we have been in since 2001 to penetrate into every American’s life.

Yesterday in a radio interview, “How to conquer health care challenges”, with Professor Glenn Melnick  from the Rand Corporation and USC, we were again offered up “expert” opinion that does not even acknowledge the basic facts about how the healthcare system is working today.

Here are a couple of examples from the interview lead by Kai Ryssdal:

“RYSSDAL: Well, let me make sure I understand that. If doctors and hospitals are making less money, what is that do for the quality of care? I’m just trying to think about the argument that’s going to come up on Capitol Hill on this one.

MELNICK: Quality will have to suffer in some way. Whether it’s through reduced access, whether it’s through slower development of new technology…….”

The US spends nearly 50% more on healthcare than the next closest country (Switzerland) and more than twice most developed nations. Yet our basic outcomes of infant mortality and longevity remain at near third world performance. These are the facts of our situation. Money is not the problem. It is what we spend our money on that is the problem. To say that quality will inevitably decline as a result of spending less money is just nonsense. This flies in the face of the facts of the performance of all of the developed countries in the world, except us.

Within the current US performance there are clear demonstrations of how superior performance is not driven by spending more money

Even within the current US performance there are clear demonstrations of how superior performance is not driven by spending more money. Just read “THE COST CONUNDRUM: What a Texas town can teach us about health care.“ by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. Here is part of Gwande’s discussion of this point:

Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse. For example, Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.

Melnick is not done demonstrating his lack of awareness of further basics about how healthcare works in the US.

There are a number of economists who feel that health-care is expensive for good reason. And the reason is that it’s valuable. That new innovation and new technology, while it may add to the cost of the health-care system, also brings with it tremendous benefits. The real challenge is can we develop a system to do the research to identify those things that are going to be high value in the first place, and to screen out those things that are low value and not adopt them as quickly as we have in the past. And that will be a challenge, but I think there’s potential savings there. I don’t know any country that has done it very well so far, because new innovation is just so complex and hard to predict.

One of the well reported facts about “innovation” in American medicine is that there is no requirement for new technologies, new procedures, new medical devices, or even new drugs to prove their efficacy. This is well known and examples of the consequences are abundant. If we only knew which of all these “innovations” really provided improvements in healthcare outcomes we would all be better of and probably at a lower cost.

I am not sure who Professor Melnick is, but, based on his performance during this interview, he would appear to be another example of that alternative text for PhD.

(revised 1/29/02 – maps added at bottom)

(revised 6/25/03 – map of Angola superimposed on the US)

Michael Crichton’s 1980 pulp novel Congo opens with an introduction that is truly arresting . I quote here the first two paragraphs in their entirety.

This reader was gripped by his own ignorance of the facts and yet skeptical.  He could recall all those geography lessons of grade school. He had traveled a bit. But none of this brought enough confidence to bear for these first two paragraphs in this pulp novel not to send him off to his maps, atlases, encyclopedias, even the internet.

Mercator. Yes, that is the projection so familiar from grade school. It even sticks in the mind that one of its key features is that the latitude and longitude lines are straight lines.  This is convenient for rectangular pieces of paper, but it creates great distortions of area. This rectangular display of the surface of the nearly spherical surface of the earth produces a Greenland that appears almost as large as the US. The farther away you go north or south from the equator the larger this error becomes.

So, OK this Mercator, who on investigation in the ‘97 Grolier CD Encyclopedia, turns out to be a Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), produced cylindrical projections of a spherical surface.  This of course lead to this readers present state of misapprehension.

Well, let’s take a closer look at this matter. A few simple comparisons of territories that he has driven across will put this into better perspective (this reader does have a bit of trouble with abstractions).

So here is a chart neatly drawn up in tabular form (again courtesy of the above referenced CD encyclopedia). The data on Africa seems to hold up Crichton’s assertions. Hopefully the American reader (obviously of the East Coast persuasion) will find some suitable reference point to investigate the data for themselves. The India entry is just for fun and effect.

What strikes this parochial mind is that the Mercator effect is at work even in our views of the United States.

Let’s investigate this a bit.

First a couple of numbers to illustrate my thesis. Texas is 801 miles north to south and 773 miles east to west.

By contrast, think of a car trip from Boston to Chicago. The American Automobile Association preferred yellow-line triptych calls this out at 925 miles. Boston to Washington DC is approximately 600 miles. Do these numbers and our mental images on the map jive?

Let me close this bit of geography with a historical note about Vietnam. During the Vietnam War I found it useful in political discussions, during my college days in Wisconsin, to point out that Vietnam is very close to the combined land area of the states of Wisconsin and Illinois . In this area the US government dropped as much munitions as consumed during all of World War II in all theaters.

	Mercator Projection (circa 1596)
	Robinson Projection(most widely used by National Geographic and others during the 20th centuryh until 1980′s)
Both maps borrowed without permission from geography.about.com

6/25/3

Yesterday I was scanning through the New York Times and saw an article, “Latest Peace Hopes Thwarted on Africa’s Battlefields” by Somini Sengupta. It was accompanied by a series of maps, including this one: (text added by me)

As for the balance of the 314 pages of this pulp novel, it’s entertaining…lots of gorillas and other beasts ………a page turner.