Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Human Dynamic


Wealth, Women, and War is released in accordance with the solidarity principals of Occupy Wall Street adopted on February 9, 2012.

Cliff Potts
November 18, 2014



The ramifications of globalization are expressed in local outrage heaped upon those seen as abusers of the privilege of corporate citizenship. The distinction is often made in the name of God.
It is not religion. It is politics utilizing religious labels to form a bonding and identification of alliances along rather primitive tribal boundaries. When one part of a sub-culture feels disenfranchised, it often resorts to the religious expression of antiquity in order to evoke a self-assured moral right to oppose the primary culture. The end goal is to replace the majority cultural expression with a different expression to offset the perceived injustice of the dominant culture to their sub-culture.
This is the culture created when certain factions are allowed to lift one creed of belief over all others, and when that faction is later disenfranchised by the institutions which they had supported. While lost to the mainstream media, the larger resistance movement in Saudi Arabia did not become violent until after the distribution of oil revenue began to diminish. The disparity in the distribution of oil revenue created a cultural climate of relative want, and the method to address the disparity became entwined into the religious expression. This in turn allowed the Islamic fundamentalists to point to the existence of Israel as the manifestation of the controlling culture’s will, and identified the controlling culture as the Western occupiers. They drew upon the history of the crusades to inflame the disenfranchised masses. The internal issues of greed within the royal house were ignored. The internal greed factor was ignored because Islamic believers do not brutalize other Islamic believers, therefore the core problem must be the influence of the West. This, of course, denies what Christianity learned in the 1600s, and is not being learned by Islam in Iraq: religious expressions are of little value when resources become limited.
Politics are the philosophies which we use to determine how we will function within a society in regards to the distribution of scarce resources. Religion is how we justify and moralize those philosophies and identify our right to have the resources in opposition to another group seeking the same limited resources.
The goal of the Arabs, and it is specifically an Arab goal, is the reunification of the Ottoman Empire. Having lost the First World War and the support of the Soviet Union, there is no political will to reunite that dead empire. The territory in question extends from Budapest in Hungry in the North, to the Caspian Sea in the East, to the Persian Gulf in the South, and to Algiers in the West. The declared Islamic Jihad is an attempt to suck in political alliances from around the globe.
There was no outrage when the Ottoman Empire was broken up. People understood that it had acted aggressively against the Entente Powers of the Russian Empire, France, the British Empire, and the United States. The Russian Empire fell to internal turmoil due to this aggression. France, England and the United States (in that order) lost millions of men. There was no political sympathy for the Arabs.
The jihad declared against the west, as described in the work by Walid Phares, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America, has yet to be successful. With each passing decade the ante has been “upped.” That is how the United States ended up being directly assaulted by Islam in 2001.[1] While the Bush administration has repeated that this is not a war on Islam, Islam has declared war on the United States. It has very little to do with religion.
The mass belief in rightness, and justice, focused against a specific institution is a very powerful force to be reckoned with. It is the power which brought an end to slavery in the 1860s, and the end of segregation in the 1960s. Violation of the general population’s sense of right and wrong, especially in a time of war, can have serious repercussions. History tells us that the people’s will wins out in the end. What that will is and how it will be manifested is still a subject of speculation.
While much of the opposition to globalization has been under reported and marginalized by the main stream media, it can be summed up as an opposition to a winner-take-all approach to the capitalistic free market global economy.
Globalization may not be an erroneous concept. It may be a natural economic evolution. It may not be American imperialism as some critics claim. However, as we have seen, it is a business venture closely held by a few corporate entities which are controlled by even a fewer number of human beings. Those few are, at best, looking out for their own interest. As with any human endeavor sometimes they do well, and sometimes they make monstrous mistakes in judgment.
There is some speculation floating around in the intellectual underground that the Bush administration may indeed be preparing the United States for a catastrophic confrontation and possible collapse. How seriously one can take that speculation, is up to conjecture.
In 1949, Pat Franks wrote a book titled Alas, Babylon. The CBS drama Jericho echoes some of the themes in Franks’ early work. Alas, Babylon, detailing life following a full scale nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, eventually became required reading for every Civil Defense Director in the United States. Part of the work details how dependent the rural communities were to the central cities in the 1950s spoke-and-hub distribution system of the era. Since then, with the rise of McDonald’s and, more specifically, Wal-Mart, distribution has been dispersed from the cities and scattered around the United States.
What was a hub-and-spoke centralized distribution system has now become a non-hierarchical center-less matrix. This is just one area where survivability has increased. By moving the production centers outside the United States and scattering them around the globe such supplies are again secured by decentralization. Scattering production centers around the globe insures that most production sub-systems will survive an attack of one location. Sections which have been destroyed, or totally lost due to the use of nuclear weapons, can be swiftly replaced in alternative locations. That, at least, is the theory.
Another speculative argument holds that by moving the nation’s wealth into the hands of a few skilled businessmen who know how to creatively invest it against future loss will insure that in the aftermath of a future global confrontation or catastrophic environmental event they will have the resources to rebuild a stronger and more secure nation.
While all of this sounds good, in light of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, one has to question the validity of such assertions.
The human factor is at the core of much of the opposition to globalization. Do we know we can trust the few to wisely manage the resources of the globe? The captains of industry do not enjoy the divine right of kings, or the divinity of the Caesars. Business skills are a matter of a combination of individual genetics with resources and social opportunity to produce unique individuals who have a gift for business and commerce. Warren Buffett, estimated to be the third richest man in the world, admitted as much in a 2002 critique of the Bush administrations tax cuts.[2]
The globalized executive class can excel at running a business, but are often less than stellar in other areas of human venture. Mr. Gates’ ability to manage the team that first assembled DOS, and manipulate his product through the marketplace to become the dominant supplier of personal computer software in the world, does not mean that he is an excellent spokesman for other human ventures. While he does know the technical industry, and has been remarkably successful within the guidelines of capitalistic venture, he is not yet a gifted humanitarian. As repetitive as it may be, Mr. Gates has directly caused much of the situation which he is now begging Congress to fix. Yet, this is to be expected, Mr. Gates is just a human being. Moreover, he is but one of six million human beings alive on the earth today.
Globalization’s opposition is an opposition to these few men acquiring great amounts of wealth at the expense of the many whose gifts and visions are not in the realm of market activities and manipulations. All people are interconnected. Dysfunctional or not, what remains is a community and it remains interconnected. In the post 1960s environment of recovering addicts and “dry drunks” where bad life choices bred dysfunctional people and distrust, can there be any conjecture why the interconnections are strained, denied, and almost meaningless some forty years after Johnson’s Great Society?
In 1981, with the help of Norman Mailer, Jack Abbott published a series of letters he had written to Mailer while in prison. Mailer assisted Abbott, a life long career criminal, in obtaining a parole. On July 19, 1981, In the Belly of the Beast was given rave reviews by the New York Times. However, the day before, Abbot committed the murder of a waiter in the East Village in New York. He was again tried, convicted, and eventually committed suicide in 2002.
Such events illustrate just how we have become so apathetic about the sufferings of others. We see events like this splash across the headlines, and we think that everyone is somehow just another Jack Abbot waiting to fly into a rage on the world stage. We can no longer make the distinction between a hardened thug like Jack Abbott, and a working man, father, and gifted member of the community. As such we force the latter to break, through indifference to his attempts, and become a thug. And when he does, all we can do is condemn him, and scream for his blood.
All people have a function within the community at large. Sometimes they are icons of selfishness, so others know what not to do. Still others learn from mistakes and achievements of the past and show the way to a better productive future. This is the essence of the functionalist model.
Those who think they live outside the human dynamic, and are strong in their individualism, had best inventory how many ways they are dependent on others for their survival and comfort. Just ask those who invested in Enron, or those who supported Saddam Hussein. It may be cliché to say that no man is an island, but it is also the truth. Only simpletons think they can be successful in isolation, or even survive for that matter. As Ms. Clinton wrote, it does take a village.[3]




[1] Source unknown
[2] If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.Today, many large corporations – run by CEOs whose fiddle-playing talents make your Chairman look like he is all thumbs – pay nothing close to the stated federal tax rate of 35%." (2004, February 27). Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2003ltr.pdf
[3] Clinton, Hillary R. It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.

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