Dear Ray:
I have touched on some of the ideas you mentioned but I wonder if you could
suggest a reading list on the Cherokee History and on Georgist Thought.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
-----Original Message-----
From: Ray E. Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Caspar Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Thomas Lunde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
System Politics <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Future Work
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: December 31, 1998 11:07 PM
Subject: Re: Citizens on the Web: Growing Gap
>This particular Georgist (Casper Davis) finally answered a question that I
>posed on this list a couple of years ago to one of his colleagues from
>California. In the 1880s the politician Henry Dawes visited the Cherokee
>Nation in Oklahoma where there was no poverty and more than a little wealth
>as well as universal education, health care and suffrage. Not a person was
>in debt and everyone owned their own house. More than a few were
>mansions and some were millionaires, today they would be considerably more
>than millionaires. All of this in a population of under 50,000 people.
>
>Dawes reported back to Washington that they were followers of Henry George
>and would never progress further until the "common" was broken up and
>"every person learned the virtue of selfishness" which Dawes considered to
>be the root of all human progress. Ten years later the federal
>government used Dawes' report not only to justify breaking up the Cherokee
>lands but to dispossess all indigenous nations of their lands and self
>government. They created the state of Oklahoma and after giving a
>pittance to each Indian citizen they dispersed the rest in a land rush to
>the local European immigrants. After the state of Oklahoma was formed it
>was the Cherokee Lawyers who formed the Oklahoma Bar Association and not
>the immigrants the same was true for the medical doctors, teachers and the
>State's Baptist Newspaper which all came from the then defunct Cherokee
>nation and culture.
>
>I asked two years ago how we (my Cherokee ancestors) were followers of
>Henry George, and today Casper explained it. I would say that Henry George
>was "following" us considering that our structure was older but nonetheless
>it did seem to be the same. Dawes was at least right about that. I did
>not realize how hostile American Society was to George in the 1890s.
>
>I would suggest that it might behoove economist Angell to study the
>Cherokee Nation from 1846 to the Congressional Curtis Dissolution Act in
>the 1890s to understand why the TNCs and Information Revolution are such
>delicate affairs. It is the foreign policy of governments that has
>destroyed the best ideals of Utopian thought and schemes. Companies do
>not have that possibility even when they have yearly budgets that far
>exceed the budgets of most world governments. Indeed China has a limited
>GDP but its land and people mass could obliterate Bill Gates and friends
>small universe if they were placed in competition without outside
>governmental help going to Gates.
>
>Would the Soviet Union have collapsed if it had not had a virtual embargo
>by the West for almost the entire seventy years of its existence? How
>about Cuba? We have not had a fair competition with any of the Communist
>systems compared to the Capitalists without government embargo and military
>pressures applied on both sides thus far.
>
>There is very little that was practiced by any of the communist countries
>that was not practiced by this country in its first seventy years of
>existence. Would the U.S. have collapsed on itself if it had not committed
>genocide for its frontier expansion and had first an owned work force of
>human slaves from 1776 to 1860 and then an oppressing apartheid policy to
>protect the European minority in the South from 1865 to 1954?
>
>Would the South have been America's Chechniya (sp?) with legislatures
>elected by the Black majority across the South that were hostile and thus
>drove the Europeans both North and West? Would these reverse
>carpetbaggers have created a hostile underclass that would have devoured
>the democracy from within its white ranks and created the kind of cynical
>laissez faire attitude that is prevalent in Russia today but without the
>cultural glue thus driving the wealthy back to Europe from whence they
>came?
>
>Well, just some thoughts on these last few hours of 1998. I would suggest
>that another traditional process might be in order for many of the problems
>that have been discussed thus far on this list. Recently there has been a
>revival of religious programming in the U.S. with even the medical
>profession suggesting that prayer, even from a distance, can heal people
>who are connected to each other.
>
>Being both a pagan and a priest, this might seem strange to some that I
>would suggest a possible answer within such a thought but nonetheless I am
>offering the thought. It is said that meditation is the highest form of
>prayer amongst my people. I would suggest a meditation on the balance of
>things for this new year. Meditate on your neighbors, not from the
>standpoint of conversion to your way of thought, but with the idea that a
>healthy neighbor is less likely to be a destructive one. If you pray for
>the balance of human societies, the health of their children and the
>development of their potential as humans, and then you do the same for the
>rest of life on the earth and the earth itself, then at least within
>yourself you will grow more aware. And who knows what will happen if we
>all grow more aware and less anesthetized by both the pace and demands of
>the world that we have decided to dream into place up until the
>present? Happy New Year!
>
>Ray Evans Harrell
>
>
>Caspar Davis wrote:
>
>> This article gives a good description of the growing gap between the
>> rich and poor, and of the shrinking middle class.
>>
>> I was taught and firmly believe that the health of a society is
>> indicated most clearly by the size and well being of the middle group.
>> After the second world war, there were almost 30 years of unprecedented
>> prosperity during which the wealth (at least in the "developed"
>> nations) was distributed more equally than at almost any time since
>> tribal times. Since 1972, that trend has reversed. GDP, which measures
>> economic activity regardless of its environmental or social
>> consequences, counting the money spent on cancer treatment, oil spill
>> clean up, divorce courts and prisons in just the same way as it counts
>> the money spent on education or food, has continued to increase, but
>> almost every other measure of well-being has declined, and the social
>> consequences are very palpable.
>>
>> The author asks, "What is the relationship between equity and economic
>> growth?" This is the central question asked by Henry George 120 years
>> ago in Progress and Poverty. His answer was that all livelihood
>> ultimately depended upon access to land (in which he included all
>> natural resources, and ALSO such things as government-created
>> monopolies (i.e. things like salt in Gandhi's India, taxi cab licences,
>> radio and TV licences, and all patents). Where those resources, which
>> were provided by nature as commons for the good of all, are held in a
>> few hands, the holders of them can and do claim all the value of both
>> labour AND capital, leaving the labourer or ordinary businessperson no
>> more than they need for elementary subsistence. George's answer was for
>> society to charge those who benefitted from the exclusive use of land
>> or any other part of the commons the full economic rent therefore, and
>> to distribute the rent equally to all so that all might benefit.
>>
>> Since George's time, the enclosure of the commons has gone on apace.
>> The electromagnetic spectrum has been given free of charge to the
>> holders of TV and radio licences; patent laws have been dramatically
>> strengthened, and lately even life forms and genetic material have been
>> privatized for private profit. Government funding, paid by the taxes of
>> all, has been diverted from the needy to profitable corporations,either
>> to help them become "more competitive" or often as outright bribes to
>> induce them to locate fcilities within or not to take facilities away
>> fom a particular jurisdiction. As Time magazine recenbtly showed, they
>> often take the (public) money and run. Therefore government revenues
>> must be included in the modern definition of "land", as must the
>> ability of the earth, air and watrer to absorb and neutralize
>> pollutants.
>>
>> I have sent for the full report to see what the author's prescription
>> is. I believe that Henry George's solution is still the best that I
>> have seen, but whether I am right or not, it is clear that the
>> Neo-Liberal "trickle down" theory results only in the sucking up and
>> retention of wealth by those at the top.
>>
>> Caspar Davis
>
>
>
