Reich Article (fwd)
This is a longish piece forwarded to me by an FWer. I am passing it along to the list. arthur cordell === The Nation February 16, 1998 Broken Faith Why We Need to Renew the Social Compact By Robert B. Reich Presidents come and go in America these days, but inequality just keeps rising. A few Democrats mutter about it and a few Republicans even praise it, but hardly anyone inside the respectable political spectrum is willing to confront it. In the following contribution to The Nation's "First Principles" series, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich locates political obstacles to tackling the problem and also suggests the economic and political restructuring necessary to redress it. As the postwar social compact grows ever more frayed, Reich notes, the problems of the "down-waging" and "down-benefiting" of America must be placed at the heart of a democratic politics. --The Editors At this writing, Bill Clinton has a headache that may or may not prove fatal to his presidency. But in his State of the Union address he gave a bravura performance, emphasizing everything that is good about America today and, by implication, everything that's good about him. And he has much to brag about: The budget is balanced. Unemployment is down, as is crime. For the first time in history, this nation has no major rival around the globe--economically, politically, even ideologically. We are, indisputably, Number One. What the President failed to mention, understandably, is that almost seven years of economic recovery has done remarkably little for people in the bottom half. Sure, they have jobs, but they had jobs before the last recession, too. The real news is that the median wage--the take-home pay of the worker smack in the middle of the earnings ladder--is still less than it was before the last recession, adjusted for inflation. More people are in poverty. At the same time, the upper reaches of America have never had it so good: Their pay and benefits have continued to rise and their stock and stock options have exploded in value. The President's pollsters warn him not to mention that America continues to split. It's not what people want to hear. Remember Carter's "malaise"? Republicans, for their part, don't feel comfortable talking about it because they don't have any solutions they find palatable. Corporate America isn't particularly eager to talk about it or even sponsor television programs or advertise in magazines that dwell on it. America is strangely immobilized. Rather than giving us the confidence we need to move forward, the overall good economic news, combined with a rare period of world peace and global pre-eminence, seems rather to have anesthetized us. But what happens when the good times are over? Future generations looking back on this era will ask why--when today's Americans had no hot or cold war to fight, no depression or recession to cope with, no great drain on our resources or our spirits--we did so little. Little, that is, relative to what the situation demanded. Little, relative to what we could have done. Did we simply assume that the economic expansion would last forever, and that the disparities would automatically shrink? Did we deny the problem to begin with? Or ha d we simply resigned ourselves to the inevitability of a sharply two-tiered society? The budget deficit began to vanish last year, even before the White House and Congress reached agreement on how to make it do so officially. Corporations and top earners did so well that more tax revenues poured into the Treasury than had been foreseen. But rather than being dedicated to what has been most neglected and is most needed--universal health care, child care, better schools, jobs for the poor who will lose welfare, public transportation and other means of helping the bottom half of our population move upward--most of this windfall went to the wealthiest members of our society in the form of tax cuts. The proposals put forward by President Clinton in his State of the Union speech are steps in the right direction but, in truth, their scale is very small relative to the problems they address. Bolder advances were hoped for. One must be careful not to sound overly critical. Few things grate more unpleasantly upon the ear than a liberal whine. Republicans and many commentators will claim that the President has gone back to his original, liberal agenda, and will attack him for failing to indicate exactly how he will pay for what he proposes. He wants to dedicate any budget surplus to shoring up Social Security. But Social Security is not nearly in the dire straits some have made it out to be. And--dare we say it again?--deficits are not bad in and of themselves, certainly not if the money is spent on making more Americans more productive and fuller members of our society. The most important thing the United States could achieve now is to get back on the track we were on during the first three decades after
FW: The Digital Environment
Hi I am greatly enjoying the wealth of info on this listserv on history, economics, sociology, etc., pertaining to work. When I find something particularly interesting I copy and paste it into my FutureWork document. It now stands at 1601 pages! A search on "digital" brought up material suggesting a bit tax on the global flow of information, digital money linked to LETS and building digital networks. The case may be made that there is a need for policymakers and indeed all citizens to make themselves intimately familiar with the characteristics of the emerging digital environment. As global population becomes deeply aware of what its collective brains are producing then may be expedited the search and discovery of new patterns of work and living. It may then be better appreciated how the goals of the MAI, NAFTA, and other global economic agreements may influence the emerging system. It seems a fruitless exercise to argue the pros and cons of these agreements in the context of a rapidly disappearing age. Well-meaning but misguided criticism based on an outmoded paradigm may result in the classic error of killing the goose that may lay the golden egg! If you have time to browse the Web I've prepared a short document, with hypertext links to supporting materials, at: http://www.geog.uwo.ca/cybergeog/cybintro.html Cheers, Bob McDaniel ,,àà° °±©ÅÅ, ,à)ß±±©ßà,,xààà à©ÅÅűßààx,,,° ,,àß©ÅÅ©, ±ÅűÅÅű±±ß)x° °,à,,xàà, àÅÅàßßxx)ß1±±±Å1)x,° ÅÅÅ ©ÅÅ) °àßßx°x)±Å©ß ÅÅÅ)x11©°x1ß)x°,à)ßß±111x à©ÅÅ) ±Å,x)ß11ß)x° à±Å©±Å©©x ,à1©Åx x)©ÅÅ©ß)à,° ,xßßà ,à )ÅÅÅ©±1ßààßÅÅÅ1,)1±Åűఠ±ÅÅ©°xàß1±ÅÅűßà,° ,x° x1©ÅÅÅ1ßß)x° xß,,ű©x °,1ÅÅ©©Å©1ßßÅÅÅ©xàß©ÅÅÅ1à° à©à ±Åà1ÅÅ) ,x)ß±©ÅÅűx °xààx °©1x )ÅÅ1± ±©±ßÅÅ©àà±Åß)1ÅÅÅ©±©Å©ÅÅÅ©ßß, ,111, àßÅÅ) ±©±©ß ±©©ß° ,)±x°xààà, °1©Åű, ,ßÅÅ, 1ÅÅ°°ÅÅ1 ±ÅÅÅx °x11à,, ,©Åß ,ÅÅ©), x±©Å1,©Å1), xÅ©1x °±Å±àà à©©±Åx xÅ©±±, ß1©Åà°, xÅÅÅ©) xÅ©ÅÅx ±ÅÅ1°xÅÅÅ, àÅÅ©±, °,àà)ß1±Åà )± °±©©Å±x ©ÅÅűũÅÅű1±ÅÅÅà ,)ßà° °1ű±±Å©, ,1ÅÅÅ© 1Å©x )ÅÅÅß ,©Å±x,°,à)ß±±ÅÅ©±1)x° à±Åű11à° °,xàà)ààà,, °xàß±±1±1)ß)ààà,, °ßà °,,àà)ß1±±11 °©±x http://www.geog.uwo.ca/mcdaniel1.html
Re: Satanic mills
Mass production and globalisation is necessary if we want to sustain sustainably the earth's population. That is why we cannot go back to some quaint early form of capitalism. Eva [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: More satanic mills
Mike Hollinshead: Capitalist ambition seems to be a transmuted form of ascent, where spiritual ascent is replaced by symbolic ascent or ascent in other forms e.g. progress. Capitalism seems to flourish during periods when there is an emphasis within the culture on people as individuals, deriving from religious doctrine, as in the 11th through 13th centuries as well as the 16th through 17th. See Jean Gimpel The Medieval Machine and Morris Berman Coming to Our Senses. Exceptional periods of inventiveness and innovation derive from this concern with self and the interiority (introspection) which goes with it and the psychological need to heal the gap between self and other with everything from alcohol to self absorbing practices like art and invention and social achievement. In particular there is an efflorescence of ascent practices (body practices such as rhythmic breathing which lead to trance states , designed to heal the gap between the heightened sense of self and other - nature or God - see Berman on this) In the first period, which had all the same characteristics of the second in terms of intense investment in machines (water powered in mining, textiles tanning and milling), factories (Cistercian abbeys of the period were highly integrated and sphisticated factories) supported by a more advanced agriculture (horse collar, metal shod deep plough and triple rotation and new crops like beans which fixed nitrogen in the soil) things were brought to a halt by a combination of Church fiat (the Pope shut up Aquinas and slaughtered the Cathar heretics of Languedoc, the principle source of interiority practice), exhaustion of the ecological niche expoitable with current technology (all the streams were dammed, the accessible forests cut down for charcoal and building construction) and an adverse shift in climate which caused crop disasters and triggered the plague. I agree that the your first period, which began in the 12th Century and continued on into the 13th, was a time of great progress - not only of technological progress, as described by Gimpel, but also one of social experimentation and religious toleration. It was the era of theological scholars such as Peter Abelard and Aquinas, mystics such as Francis of Assisi and Meister Eckhart, and the founding of mendicant orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans (both of which went rather bad later) and of lay orders such as the Beghards and Beguines. We usually think of Protestantism beginning with the 16th Century Reformation, and overlook that fact that the first denomination which could be called "Protestant" was established by Peter Waldo in approximately 1200, a denomination which is said to still exist. The 12th and 13th Centuries were also a bloody time, as exemplified by the Crusades and the slaughter of the Albigensians. It was, as you suggest, an era in which the official church felt itself to be under siege, causing the Pope, in 1277, to slam down the lid by condemning "219 execrable errors" which had crept into European thinking mainly because of translations into the Latin of Greek and Arabic texts. I'm not sure that I agree you interpretation of what brought the era to a close. Certainly, the actions taken by the official church were important, and undoubtedly many an ecological niche was used up by the water and charcoal based technology of the time. However, I would argue that some important natural and psychological factors were also at work. It would seem that the weather turned nasty in the 13th Century, resulting in devastation by famine between 1315 and 1317. The bad weather continued well beyond this time and ultimately led to the "medieval economic depression" which continued to have an effect for the next 150 years. On top of this came the Black Death (1347-50), which, together with wars and famine, may have reduced the population of Europe by one-third or even, according to some estimates, by one-half. All of this suggests that for a century or more the world became a terrible place, battered, it would seem, by satanic forces people could not understand. This was not the kind of climate which would have promoted the speculation, experimentation and learning that had been the hallmark of the 12th Century. On the contrary, it promoted withdrawal, piety, orthodoxy and bizarre religious behaviors such as self-flagellation. I would agree that the 12th and 13th Centuries had many of the characteristics of the industrial revolution, but I would venture that the difference between the factories of the 12th Century and those of the 18th is a quantum leap rather than a progression. If Europe had not shut down in the 14th Century, it is possible that the industrial revolution of the kind experienced in the 18th to 20th Centuries might have come earlier, but this is a matter of pure speculation. What you could do with the horse and the waterwheel is minuscule compared to what could be done with steam power,
