Citizens United, Perhaps

One-hundred and three days until the November 2012 elections and everything has settled into a predictable pattern. Unlike the 2008 election cycle when Barrack and Hilary were wedgying each other down to the wire, and John McCain was trying to re-learn how to smile, the nominees of the two relevant political parties have been obvious for some time, which has allowed them to go full bore with expending the gross national product of several South American nations trying to convince us what a turd the other guy is.

The role of money in political campaigns is an issue that is almost as old as the nation itself. Somebody had to pay for the hay for Washington’s horse as he rode around fathering the nation. The National Archives are replete with posters opposing Free Silver, supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act and making fun of Millard Fillmore. Somebody had to pay for that stuff. There has never been a time in human civilization when the wealthy and the powerful didn’t have a disproportionate influence on the development of public policy.

The difference today is the sad reality of who the wealthy and powerful are. A thousand years ago, if you wanted to be the Viking king, you had to at least kick ass on a few dozen big, hairy Vikings and be able to hold your liquor. People listened to you because they knew you would smack them with the broad side of a battle ax if they didn’t, but they also knew that you would kick ass on any unwelcome invaders and that you would bring home the booty. The Viking king would be among the first to die if shit went south; he had not just authority but responsibility and accountability. Certainly he had privilege, but he had earned it by what he contributed to society. Even the 19th Century Robber Barons, with all their unethical and exploitive practices, actually accomplished something positive. They built railroads and steel mills and ships and factories. They got obscenely rich, but their objectives were almost never purely wealth; they had visions and dreams. They may have squashed a lot of decent, hard-working people along the way, but the nation got something in return, including a fresh understanding of how much it sucked to be exploited, which led to 20th Century liberalism.

Wealth in present day America is real mixed bag, but the super-wealthy tend to have one thing in common; they haven’t done shit for anybody, except perhaps their shareholders. The typical billionaire is either an inheritor living off the genius of past generations, has made their money speculating in commodities and stock markets, got rich charging you $30 for every bounced check, or earned hundreds of millions of dollars laying Americans off and exploiting Chinese peasants. While these may be gross and unsupportable generalizations, I am firmly committed to them being correct. There are, of course, always exceptions. Bill Gates, for example, is fabulously wealthy because he transformed civilization as we know it, for better or worse. Interestingly, people who have acquired great wealth through invention and initiative appear to be more likely to use their wealth for positive social change and addressing the needs of the unfortunate, unlike the Koch brothers.

Heaven forbid that we have any class warfare in our classless capitalist utopia, but I just think that if we are going to have people using unlimited wealth to promote political points of view, that it would be nice if they actually knew something or cared about something besides their own economic benefit. Freedom is not any guarantee of quality and no rules or laws are likely to protect us from the cold reality that some pigs are more equal than others, but if we start demanding that people have actually done something worth a shit before we pay any attention to their braying, then things might make a little more sense. As always, we Americans are masters of our own destiny to the extent that we choose to be. We don’t need the Supreme Court to protect us, and they won’t anyway.

It's not the heat, it's the Stupidity

It was hot when I got up this morning. That is probably not completely unusual since it is normally hot in Florida in July, always compounded by the insufferable humidity, but it started me thinking about how hot it has been everywhere for the past few years and why America is no longer capable of exercising productive leadership in the world. “What!?” you say. “Huh?” you reply. Well, I’m having a little internal dialog about global warming and how our treatment of the issue reflects a larger problem with American society.

Climate science, like much of our knowledge of the natural world, is complex. The earth’s climate is affected by a diverse set of variables which range from various cycles of the sun to behavior of ocean currents to the chemical composition of the atmosphere. There is debate about the future of the earth’s climate precisely because it is a complex scientific issue, and complex scientific issues are not generally the province of the untrained layman. Some of you may recall the chewing gum commercial where four out of five dentists recommended a particular brand of gum. This was judged to be effective advertising because the chewing gum company figured dentist ought to know what you should be putting in your mouth and if a significant majority of them thought a particular product was preferred, the buying public would consider this good enough for them. They never said what the fifth dentist preferred, or what his reasoning was, but it was accepted that when experts disagree, you are better off going with the majority opinion. One might term it a sort of intellectual democracy, with the key difference that only people who have legitimate qualifications get a vote.

The current debate on global warming tosses this accepted concept in the dumpster. Fully 95 percent of qualified climate scientists, qualified being having reasonable education and experience in the in the subject area, agree that the Earth’s average temperature is increasing. Perhaps three-quarters of them are in agreement that at least some of this increase is attributable to human action. Almost all of them agree that global warming, if occurring, will have a dramatic impact on human civilization. As with everything from evolution to the theory of relativity, there is dispute among intelligent, qualified experts acting in good faith, and sometimes the lone voice crying in the wilderness is absolutely correct, but there is a reason they have that ask the audience life-line on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  I am not a qualified expert on the Earth’s climate and I will not attempt to debate the science, I just know that if I have a lump on my neck and I consult ten doctors and nine of them say have it removed, I’m having it removed.

Unfortunately, in America we have now largely abandoned respect for education and appreciation for the scientific process and have subordinated our policy decisions to the financial interests of the corporations that fund election campaigns and the strident voices of the extreme. Corporations have no children and therefore cannot reflect upon the moral responsibility we have for how we impact future generations and extremists tend to be either ignorant or emotionally defective, or both, and do not make good leaders. As a society, whether we are progressive, conservative or don’t give a shit, we have abdicated our civic responsibility to educate ourselves on the basics of how the world functions and to select leadership which is capable of understanding complex issues and which has the courage to be honest and make difficult decisions. We no longer trust any opinion except the ones that support what we already thought and we have convinced ourselves that legitimate scientific debate is just a proxy for promoting philosophical objectives. We are so fucked. It’s really sad.

America has probably never been the moral paradise that many nostalgically long for and we have entertained some pretty fucking stupid ideas over the centuries. I’m not saying that our current idiocy represents a dramatic turn for the worse, but we seem to have lost the spirit of inquiry that used to drive our progress. It appears we think we have it all figured out and there is no need to seriously reflect on issues anymore. Few people are curious about anything but the Kardashian’s sex lives. The tragedy of this is that we are approaching a juncture in mankind’s history where thoughtful consideration of our situation will be the only thing that stands between us and unimaginable suffering. My opinion is that if you can’t understand the cause of the heat, then stay the fuck out of the kitchen.