The Unreality of Personal Ambition

Is the realization of self about oneself?  Is the great motivation only about collecting things and changing money?  Or does the essence of satisfaction seem to lay elsewhere? ...

We don’t have a lot of detail on the day to day life of Jesus, unfortunately.  But in one familiar story he overturns the tables of the money changers who had infiltrated the halls of the temple, casting them out with a rare display of anger.  It seems that economics had gained an undesirable preference over morality.

And so it goes with the American system.  A human being, to whom we sometimes refer as labor, is a commodity to be used up and exploited.  We have witnessed exploitation in the form of unsafe working conditions, excessive hours, of a wage below the poverty line.  The idea of a “living wage” simply “does not compute” on Wall Street.  When wage “costs” become excessive, jobs and even entire industries are outsourced to a distant shore.  The displaced worker is not consulted.  When he cannot find a comparable paying job, he is ridiculed for being lazy, lacking initiative.  Moreover, little consideration is given either to the needs or desires of the locals in the new “work force.”  What ever happened to altruistic notions of paying a fair share, giving back and paying forward for the next generation?

Typically, the exploitation of a human being is accompanied by the exploitation of the environment and natural resources, without any thought given to sustainability.  Although global warming is now an in-progress fact of life, the powerful status quo continues to muddle the picture for the ordinary citizen, stubbornly refuting its proven scientific validity.  And as progress stalls, the privileged few who comprise the base of the status quo quietly add to their material conquest.  Conservation as a “National Duty” and policy as expressed by T.R. more than 100 years ago, based on “efficient use of finite resources and scientific management of renewable ones,” remains a utopian liberal plot.  It’s either economic prosperity, or the environment, but not both.

The violence of unregulated capitalism, which is portrayed in too many places in the nation’s heartland, produces sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. Think coal mining ventures in West Virginia, offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, fracking for natural gas in a multitude of geographical locations. Rich natural resources are extracted, yet the money is not funneled back into the communities that are sitting on top of, or next to those resources. Destruction is not limited to the environment. It includes communities, human beings, families. There appears to be no way to control corporate power. The system has broken down, whether it's Democrat or Republican. We’ve all become commodities.

Why is the value of labor in the human condition to be diminished?  Why does labor only seem to be an expense on the economic balance sheet – but not also an asset?  How is human welfare to be fairly measured, and acknowledged?  T.R. had felt that those who gave earnest thought to the matter saw that the problem of labor was not only an economic, but also a moral, a human problem.  A generation later, F.D.R. signaled the primary role of government was help for the dispossessed, especially in time of need.

But the crisis of a Great Depression occurs.  Then, it passes.  The calamity of a Great Recession of 2008 takes place and passes, too.  A sense of normalcy returns.  But no matter how hard we strive to create a more perfect union, collecting things and changing money remain the great motivation which obscures life’s true purpose.

Consider the story of the man who does yard work.  Taking a break, he drops the rake in a pile of leaves.  When the break ends, since it is partially hidden or perhaps forgetting that the rake is there, he carelessly steps on it.  But when the shaft springs up and strikes him square in the forehead, he is immediately reminded.  Startled, he makes a mental note never to do that again.

But inexplicably, we keep stepping on the same rake. In this way, the business of providing a fair shot for the many, of achieving equality of opportunity for all citizens, remains our great unfinished business. The president said as much in his recent remarks on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s march on Washington.

Yes, the challenge can seem daunting.  But can it be any more daunting than that facing the New Dealers who descended upon the grimness of Washington in the midst of 25% unemployment and the corresponding national fear and despair of 1933?  For the best of them, the satisfaction lay

in some deep sense of giving and sharing, … rooted in the relief of escaping the loneliness and boredom of oneself, and the unreality of personal ambition.  The satisfaction derived from sinking individual effort into the community itself, the common goal and the common end.  This is no escape from self; it is the realization of self.

Yet despite the New Deal’s accomplishment, 35 years later, what had really changed, if anything?  “For the many,” said Robert Kennedy, “roots of despair all feed at a common source.  …  Our gross national product … measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth while."

-Michael D’Angelo

When the Moral Issue Is "Secondary" (Part Two)

(Editor’s note:  This is the second and concluding segment in a two part series.  The first segment reflected on how one ordinary citizen’s pursuit of happiness is often at another’s peril.  Historically, this could be demonstrated best, perhaps, through the peculiar institution of slavery, coming as it did from the devil.)

Moral issues:  When are they merely "secondary?"  Although both sides in the Civil War claimed God to be on their side, was it not more important in the end, as Lincoln himself had emphasized, to be on God’s side? …

Lincoln claimed that secession was unconstitutional, since the voluntary "compact" among the states was intended to be a permanent, binding arrangement.  This permanent compact could not be legally broken, absent the unanimous agreement of the states to permit secession.

After the results of the 1860 election were known, some held out an olive branch of compromise to the point of exhaustion to keep the Union intact.  But Lincoln believed that no appeasement should be entertained regarding the extension of slavery, after an election had just been carried on principles fairly stated to the people.  To surrender the government to those we have beaten, "is the end of us."  Lincoln hoped against hope that "right would make might."

It was then, and only as a last resort, that Lincoln played his final card, the one that bespoke "morality."  Unlike 1776, the motto, according to Lincoln, was not liberty, but slavery.  Lincoln reasoned that

the right of revolution, is never a legal right.  At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause.  When exercised without such a cause, revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.

The South was not persuaded.  It stuck doggedly to the argument that it was about states’ rights over federal under the constitution and the loss of some $4 billion in property rights (that the slave labor purportedly represented).  An exasperated Lincoln was compelled to pose the direct question:  "How about the morality of slavery?"

But the South remained unmoved.  As even the casual observer of drug and substance abuse addiction well knows, dependency will play evil tricks on an otherwise sensible, rationally thinking mind.  And so the South's response rang with an air of determined finality:  "The moral issue is secondary."

The idea that the South saw the moral issue of slavery as secondary is generally attributed to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the stakes being an Illinois US Senate seat.  Lincoln had won the Republican Party’s nomination for the seat, which put him head-to-head in a race with the powerful US Senator, Stephen A. Douglas, an incumbent, who was running for a third term as a Democrat.  A series of seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas in towns across Illinois ensued over the next 10 weeks.

The debates attracted national attention for several reasons.  First, Douglas had enjoyed a reputation as the “Little Giant” of the Democratic Party and its best stump speaker.  Together with Henry Clay, he had been one of the key figures behind the Compromise of 1850.  The national debate over slavery was also reaching a boiling point.  Responding to the fervor, journalists accompanied the candidates, writing detailed articles and offering editorial commentary that was unprecedented in American political history to that point.  Consequently, the whole country watched the debates unfold.

Lincoln had boldly announced that slavery was simply immoral and had to be dealt with forthrightly by Congress.  For Lincoln, slavery violated the fundamental assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, arguing that its continued existence and support ran counter to the wishes of the Founding Fathers.  Ultimately, only the power of the federal government could resolve the issue by extinguishing slavery from the nation.  Although Lincoln contended that there existed no constitutional way of interfering with slavery where it presently existed, he believed that it should not be allowed to expand westward.  For him, the matter was a question of right and wrong, with Douglas indifferent to a moral wrong.

Douglas met the challenge by trying to portray Lincoln as a radical abolitionist, disagreeing with Lincoln's claim that the Founding Fathers had opposed slavery.  Douglas pointed out that many of them, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had owned slaves.  He played down the moral issue, saying that the power to decide about the existence of slavery should be dealt with on the local level.  And he argued that slavery would never be able to survive outside of the South for simple economic reasons in any case.  He warned the nation not to try to judge political issues on moral grounds, lest emotions spill over into civil war.  Ultimately, Douglas argued that the issue came down to conflicting ideologies: a view of the nation as a confederacy of sovereign and equal states vs. a federalist empire of consolidated states.

Although both sides claimed God to be on their side during the ensuing carnage of the Civil War, Lincoln’s concern was not so much whether God was on his side but, rather, whether he was on God’s side.  As fate would have it, however, his own fame for preserving the Union through perseverance on the side of the right would not be secured in the conscience of the reunited nation until many decades following his death.


-Michael D'Angelo

When the Moral Issue Is “Secondary” (Part One)

(Editor’s note:  This is the first segment in a two part series.)

History reveals how one ordinary citizen’s pursuit of happiness is often at another’s expense …

In the race to achieve material gain, sometimes we neglect consideration of our neighbor.  It’s as if he or she doesn’t even exist.  It’s as if we aren’t all connected.  Is there a moral issue at stake?  If so, a fix is at least plausible.  But how about when we are told that the moral issue is secondary?  What happens then?

The peculiar institution of slavery provides perhaps the best illustration.  Thomas Jefferson once said of the South’s dilemma that the institution of slavery was like holding a tiger by the tail: You can’t let go, but you can’t very well hold on, either.  August St. Clare, the fictional Louisiana master to our friend, Tom, the loyal slave in the 19^th century classic novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had presented the Southern intellectual’s view towards slavery:

It comes from the devil, that’s the short of it; --- and, to my mind, it’s a pretty respectable specimen of what he can do in his own line.

We’ve all heard the expression at one time or another: “Give the devil his due.”  The fictional St. Clare had been frustrated by a moral conflict.  On the one hand was his moral rejection of slavery as an insidiously evil institution.  But it stood against the reality that to stand alone as a pariah in its public rejection or to organize a force in the larger cause of its defeat was all but impossible.

One story in particular relates to Lincoln’s discussions with the political leaders of the various Southern states, as they contemplated secession, at the brink of the Civil War.

What could Lincoln have been thinking about upon his inauguration in March 1861?  Prior to his election, Lincoln’s goal had simply been to preserve the Union.  Whether that meant a Union that was to be all free, all slave, part free and part slave did not matter, that anything would be possible with compromise.  But since the South was economically dependent on slavery, the Southern states were not of a mind to compromise.  “Either slavery grows or it dies,” they reasoned.  And the platform of Lincoln’s new Republican Party to ban its further extension to the western territories meant the death of slavery. 

Consider an analogy involving “the South, slavery and the feeding tube.”  When the feeding tube of a patient who is on life support is removed, the consequences are that the patient dies.  Such was the South’s dilemma in the case of slavery: remove it and the economy of the South would also die.

Moreover, from the South’s perspective dating from the time of Texas statehood in 1845, the idea of the extension or spread of slavery westward flowed quite logically from the concept of Manifest Destiny.  Under that concept, the US had a right and special destiny by the power of God to surge westward, stretching clear across the continent from coast (Atlantic) to coast (Pacific).

But was the land grab in the creation of an empire one for liberty, or for slavery?  For if one adhered to the Southern view, one would also have to consider the following:

Natural rights, of course, are derived from natural law, the author of which is Nature’s God.  Americans might well have believed that God had staked out North America as their Promised Land, but it was a dangerous claim because it implied a responsibility to obey all of God’s other laws.

According to the theory of secession, each state, when it had joined the Union, had authorized the national government to act as its agent in the exercise of certain functions of sovereignty.  However, each state had never given away its own fundamental sovereignty.  Since the agreement or “compact” of the states was not permanent, any state could withdraw from the compact and reassert its individual sovereignty.  In practice, the South was bound neither by national laws with which it did not agree, nor the result of an election (in this case, Lincoln’s election of 1860) which it did not win.  The South was free to secede from the Union and form its own country.

Lincoln was well aware, and Northerners knew, that the South could scarcely be denied the right of revolution.  He knew that the secessionists were attempting merely to follow the example of their forefathers in declaring independence from a government which was threatening their civil rights and liberties.  Lincoln was also well aware that the South was basing its position on a constitutional argument, whose question had yet to be decided on a political basis.

(Editor’s note:  The second and final segment in this two part series encounters an exasperated Lincoln playing his last card.  He asks the South directly:  “How about the morality of slavery?”)

-Michael D'Angelo 

What Is the Social Safety Net?

(Editor’s note:  This is the third and concluding segment in this three part series introducing readers to the differing governmental responses to the Great Depression.  These responses have come to define and shape the new order of national government as it exists today.  Click here to view the first segment and the second segment.)

Through the decades, some have criticized F.D.R., calling him a socialist and the New Deal socialistic.  But the New Deal’s aim, according to F.D.R., was simply to multiply the number of American shareholders.  "Is this socialistic?" he asked with a hearty laugh.

Through the social safety net that is at the base of the New Deal social order, the ordinary citizen has come to expect an expanded sense of entitlement and support from the government to all its citizens, especially in time of need.  It is help for the vanquished, cementing the social contract between the federal government and its citizens.  Its goal, simply stated, is to make capitalism more humane.

The ordinary citizen hears so much these days about the social safety net.  But have we ever stopped to consider what the social safety net consists of in reality, where the rubber meets the road?  Today, the social safety net is understood to contain four main anti-poverty, risk-managing components:

       ·          1.   Social Security (1935), the ordinary citizen’s basic retirement/disability benefit.  The Social Security Act (SSA) requires the states to set up welfare funds from which money is disbursed to the elderly, poor, unemployed, unmarried mothers with dependent children, and the disabled.  By this law the federal government also effectively encourages the individual states to adopt unemployment insurance plans.  It was labeled a triumph of social legislation.  Subsequently, the Truman administration’s "Fair Deal" domestic program significantly increased the level of benefits under SSA, expanding the retirement portions, and extended coverage to more than 10 million people, including agricultural workers.

SSA’s legislative twin, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), delivers the right of every worker to join a union of his or her own choosing and the corresponding obligation of employers to bargain collectively with that union in good faith.

Federal deposit insurance (FDIC) backing the ordinary citizen’s passbook savings account adds a subtle touch.  Almost incomprehensibly, this basic protection did not exist under the old order, although today it is largely taken for granted.  Another is the GI Bill of Rights.  By this public policy enactment, returning World War II and Korean War veterans through the early 1950s received certain government incentives regarding citizenship, education, housing, seed money for business.  Whole groups of then immigrants were able to obtain housing, education, jobs and provide a better future for their families, while assimilating seamlessly into American society.  It was a win, win situation for American society.

·             2.   SNAP, government assistance for the  poor.  According to Milo Perkins, the program's first administrator, the initial program from 1939-1943 built a practical bridge across the chasm "with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other."  In 1961, it was renewed and renamed as the Food Stamps Program.  By 1996, the program was replaced with block grants to states.  In 2008, the name was changed to the current Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and funds could also be used to provide recipients with education and training, career pathways and other public benefit programs.  A USDA summary statistical report indicated that almost 47 million people used SNAP in 2012, up from 26 million in 2007, a 177% increase.  That's roughly 15% of the total US population today.

·            3.   Medicare/Medicaid (1965), health care for older Americans and the ordinary citizen in poverty.  The law was enacted as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and corresponding War on Poverty.  In 2006, the Bush/"43" administration added a prescription drug benefit (not without a total sell out: to the pharmaceutical industry which drafted the legislation - and of the American people, as it was "paid for" on the national credit card).

·         4.   Obamacare (2010), basic security in health care for all Americans.  The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s landmark national health care reform, enshrines "the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care."  The law focuses on reform of the private health insurance market, providing better coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, extending eligibility for coverage of younger Americans on their parents’ plans until the age of 26; improving prescription drug coverage under Medicare and extending the life of the Medicare Trust fund by at least 12 years.

From a historical perspective, the broader context reveals a tumultuous trade off.  On the one hand, Republican administrations of Harding/Coolidge/Hoover (1920s), Eisenhower (1950s) and Bush/"43" (2000s) certainly meant well in the ideological expression of liberty via individual initiative and enterprise.  Yet left strictly to their own devices they would devolve ultimately to a damaging personification of individual excess.  As the pendulum swung back sharply in the other direction, each compensatory social safety net enactment followed.

The Bush/"43" administration, in fact, expended whatever political capital it thought it possessed in an attempt to "privatize" Social Security.  Proponents said that individual citizens could more efficiently manage their benefits and maximize their return on investment than "the government."  But in view of the Great Recession of 2008, an ordinary citizen can only wonder what further economic disaster would have been befallen the nation, had that particular "initiative" succeeded.

Similarly, during the presidential election of 2012, Republicans campaigned on a promise to "privatize" Medicare in what they said was an effort to reduce its costs.  Democrats, however, saw it as a veiled attempt to eliminate the popular program.

With the passage of Obamacare in 2010, as with the enactment of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there is little wonder that the Republican Party’s dominant, conservative right wing base is in a dither about the "liberal" President Obama.  The familiar cry can be heard once again of an impending end to American life as we know it.  Strictly from the lens of the class interest of business, Republicans may be "right" once again.  But, fortunately, government under order of the New Deal is about the larger, class interest of the nation.  For the dispossessed in all their ordinary colors, shapes and sizes, the social safety net in a historical context begins to speak rather well of a democratic society in relation to its citizens.

-Michael D’Angelo

F.D.R., the Dispossessed and the "New Deal" Social Safety Net

(Editor’s note:  This is the second and middle segment in a three part series which began last week under the title of “Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of the Old Order.”  This segment introduces readers to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.  To view the first segment, click here.)

Why is a social safety net necessary?  Is there at times a collective revulsion against a competitive system which competes at the expense of human decency?

From the failure of the private sector’s old order and out of its ashes, the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency signified nothing less than a new order.  To be sure, the attraction of Russian communism to the left, and German/Italian fascism to the right, were carefully weighed by Americans but ultimately rejected.  Both are gone, a footnote to the past.  But F.D.R.’s “New Deal” experiment which saved capitalism from itself has survived, now in its 9^th working decade.

Today, some apparently need reminder that we have a social safety net only because the private sector once failed unceremoniously, ceased to operate, then refused to do anything about it.  In 1929, the class interest of business was mistaken for the national interest, resulting in both class and national disaster, which we have come to know as the Great Depression.  It really did happen - to both the vanquished and the dispossessed alike.  But the New Deal changed all that.

It has been proven time and again that the economic system of capitalism is indeed king when it comes to consolidating business systems, increasing productivity, vanquishing competition, establishing and maintaining the victor’s monopoly status.

But there is at times a collective revulsion against a competitive system which competes at the expense of human decency.  In an unregulated system, labor is the first casualty in an economic crisis.  Profits are preserved by cutting costs.  Therefore, the company that works its labor the longest and pays it least gains the greatest competitive advantage.  Cutthroat competition makes the unscrupulous employer the leader in its field.  Think how the Walmart model is (mis)shaping the global economy.  The rest unwittingly follow in a race to the bottom.  It is for others to clean up the mess.  But if others means government, then government means the New Deal.

Perhaps it’s easier to view the Great Depression strictly from the lens of the class interest of business and see in the big picture how that myopic vision leads necessarily down the path to failure.  From this perspective the one and only consideration is profit or private gain.  Neither human welfare in general nor stewardship of the environment is more than a mere balance sheet expense.  The public interest is an annoying distraction.  There is little in the way of a moral compass, such consideration being secondary.

Business leaders seem consistently to miss a critical component.  Today, as was the case in the 1930s, the central idea behind economic expansion is restoring the mass purchasing power of the ordinary citizen, who provides the best and most efficient means, in fact the only realistic means, to jump start the economy.

But the ideology of unregulated capitalism stands opposed, the class interest of business, in turn, foreclosing higher responsibilities to human beings and planet.  This is true in issues ranging from the minimum wage and employer provided health care - to protecting domestic jobs against outsourcing - to safeguarding a worker’s basic retirement benefit - to adhering to the wisdom of progressive income and inheritance tax rates - to stewardship of the environment – to protecting the democratic process at the ballot box through, fair, impartial elections.

The strictly pro-business agenda and the stock arguments behind it have been historically refuted.  For example, the assertion that tax cuts for the wealthy spur job creation is not supported by employment statistics over time.  It simply is not the case, to the chagrin of the sheep who genuflect at the foot of the private sector altar.  But thanks to self-serving, conservative right wing propaganda, these arguments linger with remarkable staying power.  For many, image is reality, and as a result stubborn dogma is propagated through familiar media outlets which are controlled by and for the benefit of the class interest of the profit motive only.

The path for the continuous responsibility of government for human welfare is seemingly barred.  But the ordinary citizen must despair not!  When all appears lost, into this toxic political environment interject F.D.R.’s New Deal, and the social safety net it introduced to American society.

F.D.R. took the oath of office with the simple confession that he did not have ready answers to solve the problems of the Great Depression.  But unlike his predecessor, he vowed that he would at least try to do “something” rather than nothing.  In short, he would improvise, experiment, see how the experiment worked.  And if it didn’t work, he would try something else.  The social experiment would become famous in US History as the “New Deal.”

The constitutional dedication of federal power to the general welfare, or the social safety net as it is better known, began a new phase of national history.  Gradually, the sharpest edges and cruelest effects of capitalism were softened.  The beast of capitalism was tamed, made more humane.  And so capitalism endures, a modified version from that which had existed under the old order to be sure, with modest, sensible regulation of an otherwise harmful concentration of economic power which benefits only the privileged few.  In the class interest of the nation.

(Editor’s note:  The third and concluding segment in this three part series identifies and analyzes what are understood today to be the four main components of the social safety net, as well as the larger consequences for the ordinary citizen.)

-Michael D'Angelo

Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of the Old Order

 (Editor’s note:  This is the first segment in a three part series.)

Some say the best measure of a society’s worth is how it treats its weakest members.  Adversity is revealing...

It’s easier in a sporting event.  Not long after the final seconds tick off the clock, the winning team receives a ticker tape parade through the canyons of --- and keys to --- The City.  The loser, in turn, must accept a bitter pill, the consolation prize of measured reflection.  Where did it all go wrong?  How do we improve our chances of success next time?  In the sports with the good sense to provide a level playing field, a team can and does live to fight another day.  Never is there consideration of whether there will be food enough to eat on the night of defeat.

In a free, democratic society that puts all its eggs in the economic basket of capitalism based on the British model, somehow it’s just not as simple. But the ordinary citizen has come a long way. Trials, tribulations and progress in the pursuit of happiness – real victories - can be quantified with consensus objectivity.

Let’s put economic considerations aside for the moment. It may have cost the nation almost 650,000 lives, but we were finally able to correct the one gaping injustice of our social contract. The simple idea of extending constitutional protection to the black man came to pass. About half a century later, women were granted the full right of participation in the voting booth. In another half century, due process and equal protection of the laws gave these basic civil rights some teeth. Today, we are yet another half century removed.

In economic terms, the Republican administrations of 1920-1932 represented the climax of total cooperation between big business survival of the fittest and laissez-faire government in partnership. A period of unprecedented material prosperity, especially for private business interests, culminated during the 1928 presidential campaign. Then candidate Herbert Hoover had stated that “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land” and “given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” Stock prices were reaching what had looked like a permanently high plateau.

Upon Mr. Hoover’s election it was being said that national leadership could not be in safer or more expert hands.  Respected economists noted that for the first time in the nation’s history “we have a President who, by technical training, engineering achievement, cabinet experience, and grasp of economic fundamentals, is qualified for business leadership.”  For his part, President Hoover in his March 1929 inaugural address stated that “I have no fears for the future of our country.  It is bright with hope.”

No one, perhaps, was better suited to anticipate catastrophe than President Hoover.  Following a successful entrepreneurial career with an engineering background in the private sector, he served for almost eight years as Secretary of Commerce before ascending to the presidency.  This provided him with a unique opportunity to observe the workings and influence the policies of the American business system.  But seeing all problems from the viewpoint of business, the federal government which he now headed “had mistaken the class interest (of business) for the national interest.  The result was both class and national disaster.”

In late October 1929, a matter of just a few months following President Hoover’s inauguration, the stock market crashed, ushering in the greatest economic downturn in US History.  The Great Depression lasted a full, painful 10 years.  How bad did it get?  One statistic is telling.  The unemployment rate rose from 3% in the first year to 9% to 16% to an astonishing 24% in the fourth and final year of the Hoover presidency.  That’s a lot of vanquished ordinary people.  When asked whether he felt the capacity for human suffering to be without limit, a banker reportedly replied, “I think so.”  Invoking moral justification, many conservatives regarded federal aid to idle workers as spelling the end of the republic.

Consistent with these sentiments, President Hoover reminded the ordinary citizen of what had become the basic philosophy of the Republican Party: The Great Depression was nothing more than a “temporary slump in a fundamentally strong economy” and that government intervention to combat its baneful effects was both “unnecessary and unwise.”  Stubbornly, he refused to act.  Vilified over the years for his failure to act, perhaps rightly so, President Hoover believed that relief should come from the private sector, not the government.

As a result, a capitalist system which denied work or relief to the unemployed millions was increasingly called into critical doubt.  But rugged individualism was dead nonetheless.  Both real estate and farm commodity prices had collapsed.  Banks effectively ceased to operate.  While the heart of industry was only beating faintly, the private sector offered nothing.  It had failed.  The 1932 election would provide a last chance for politics.

(Editor’s note:  The second and middle segment in this three part series introduces readers to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the plight of the vanquished and the creation of a new order, which the ordinary citizen has come to know as F.D.R.'s “New Deal” with its accompanying social safety net.)

-Michael D'Angelo

An Independent Voice

"... swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism." Is that what the promised land of America has become? ...

An independent voice is not charged with engagement in a popularity contest. Since it is not owned, an independent voice has no obligation to maintain neutral positions on important issues for the sake of parity. The charge is to answer the following question: Which is the correct position? Theodore Roosevelt once reflected that

Personally I have not the slightest sympathy with debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given proposition and told to maintain it without the least reference to whether those maintaining it believe in it or not.  I know that under our system this is necessary for lawyers, but I emphatically disbelieve in it as regards general discussion of political, social and industrial matters.  What we need is to turn out of our colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of the right; not young men who can make a good argument for either right or wrong as their interest bids them.  There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction.  On the contrary, the net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions have nothing to do with their arguments. 

Today, many of the positions of one of the two major national political parties are to such an extreme, out of touch with mainstream reality, that moderate voices within the party like Bob Dole and Olympia Snowe say it should “close for repairs.” Can an independent voice be fairly accused of a fatal bias or undue influence in favor of the other party for consistently bringing out the same point?

What does an independent voice sound like? And not sound like?

Take the example of an Exxon executive, dependent upon the company’s fortunes. Would that executive be the optimal source from whom to get an objective handle on the public environmental safety considerations of fracking, absent empirical proof? Or whether Canadian Tar Sands oilfields should be developed for US consumption through the mechanism of the Keystone Pipeline? Take another example of the entrepreneur, who happens to deploy outsourced human labor in far away factories to “make a living” here in the US. Is this the ideal critic of the bottom line performance of the Obama administration's policies on domestic jobs creation? Or the pace of economic recovery, which historically depends upon the mass purchasing power of the ordinary citizen?

Commercial allegiances aside, can a political party influence an independent voice, thus negating it? In answering this question, would it be helpful to know whether the individual behind the voice is employed by or otherwise beholden to party due to considerations of position or patronage?  Would it also be helpful to know whether the party’s influential ideas have been de-commissioned for over a century?

What is the essence of an independent voice? Does it not tow its own direction on the path less traveled? Perhaps the views of a political party which happen to be in alignment merely strengthen the validity of a position taken. And on issue upon issue, if it seems to turn out that way consistently, perhaps it is not an independent voice which is biased but rather the bankruptcy of the other party's views. Do we sometimes mistake the difference?

Where do our beliefs come from? Is the pursuit of happiness genuinely concerned with helping people first? Or does self-government have some other primary calling? Was the ordinary citizen placed upon the earth to collect things and change money? Or to serve?  America cherishes a storied tradition of individual initiative, incentive based. But doesn’t our political creed hold out the promise of such things only in the larger context of a collective social identity - that we are all in this together? How about the psychology of support for the weakest link?

Unbridled selfishness, ambition and greed are necessary ingredients to unlock the fantastic material successes of capitalism.  They also expose the darker side of human nature, personal achievement and private reward notwithstanding. More than a hundred years ago, T.R. understood that the “Material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens.”

But what happens when purely business or political decisions clash with considerations of morality? Does business utilize a moral compass? Are the twin pillars of "continuous responsibility of government for human welfare" and stewardship of the environment, especially "efficient use of finite resources and scientific management of renewable ones," merely expenses on a cold financial balance sheet for private gain?

Notions of rugged individualism pretty much went out with the Great Depression of 1929, until President Reagan resurrected that nostalgic notion in the 1980s. But here we are in the 21st century, our national life, T.R. having forewarned, “bringing nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.” It is here that an independent voice cannot forever remain silent.

Weren't material possessions conceived to serve us? Then why does it appear that we are enslaved to them? Are we both daring and foolish enough to consider a more sanguine approach? If in T.R.’s words the “conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress,” then is it yet time for a new epoch in American history?

-Michael D’Angelo

The Hundred Yard Dash

Has the black man caught up?  Consider the metaphor of the hundred yard dash...

White men like me from the south (of Europe, that is) stand accused of breeding a race of human beings decidedly inferior to those from Europe’s western and northern sections. Still, I suppose I’m not completely in tune with the plight of Latinos, African Americans, Asians, the so-called “people of color.” Or women, for that matter.

By way of example, one day an African American student asks me a simple question. “Why is it,” he begins, “that a black person has to be wildly successful, beat insurmountable odds, fly like superman, to become that nationally popular one-in-a-million hip hop artist, before he is able to afford what is to most white people the common luxury to reside in an affluent southern California neighborhood like Beverly Hills? While, for example, his white neighbor on one side just has to be a dentist - his white neighbor on the other side an insurance salesman?” Frankly, I have never looked at it that way before.  But, of course, once I do take the time to think it through from the student’s perspective, I surmise he has a point.

And if those are the odds for the plight of the ordinary black man, then just where does the “lower” class of white men, like me (the ones who are not white Anglo-Saxon protestant), slot in? Many white people today resent the fact that blacks receive at least a perceived, unfair advantage through the mechanism of affirmative action. This controversial program gives a hiring preference based on race, ethnicity or gender over the application of a similarly situated white male citizen. Many white men, especially on the lower rungs, believe that, perhaps, it is time to reverse or undo affirmative action, that enough has been done, that blacks, anyway, have effectively “caught up.”

I pose this question to a professional colleague whose ethnicity is a mix of African American and Asian. He answers without hesitation: “Hell no! The black man is not even close to catching up.” He proceeds to relate a metaphor I’ve not forgotten. A white man and a black man each line up to compete in a hundred yard dash. The white man is fit and all trained up, with state of the art running gear. By contrast, the black man has a pair of lead shackles locked around his bare ankles. The gun goes off. The race starts. The white man zips along smartly, sporting a huge smile. When he gets to about ten yards from the finish line, someone in the crowd has the decency to call for the black man’s shackles finally to be removed. The crowd waits impatiently, wondering why the black man hasn’t caught up, fully recovered in an instant from deep injuries sustained over 350 years of legally sanctioned subordination. He must just be lazy, they conclude.

It is argued that whites typically lack empathy for their black brethren, taking for granted things that do not come as naturally or predictably for blacks. For example, one of my white colleagues is known to speak rather casually about having inherited his father’s successful printing business. Although it is largely due to his efforts that the business has taken off to the next level, he tends to speak as if such businesses commonly grow on trees. After all, it’s just a printing business, right?

Working people are also rather nonchalant about the financial cost and economic drain of social programs for their dispossessed co-workers. Programs such as workers’ compensation to protect the injured and unemployment insurance benefits to protect those who have been the subject of layoffs are routinely criticized. Even successful, self-employed entrepreneurs tend to complain about the social costs of subsidizing the failed business ventures of others in a brutal, survival of the fittest, take no prisoners mentality.

Of course, the situation changes when the working man loses his own job. Then, as the saying goes, it’s not a recession, it’s a depression. Suppose, for example, the self-employed entrepreneur happens to be a GM dealer, whose father ran the business proudly before he did. For years, all the entrepreneur says he wants is the “government” simply to get off his back and stay out of his life. Until, that is, the music stops playing, GM declares bankruptcy on account of decades of incompetent management, and the entrepreneur is finally left without a chair. All of a sudden, the attitude changes, fundamentally. Then the government must step in, naturally, to help him in his time of dire need.

Lastly, I can only chuckle in considering the story of a woman who tells me she has no idea how she is going to pay for her child’s college education. She is therefore going to vote “Democrat” in the next election, as one of the ordinary people to whom the party has strong appeal. The next time I see her, however, her politics have undergone a complete transformation. Now she is preaching how the Republicans must win the next election. “I thought you were going to vote Democrat?” I interject matter-of-factly. She confides that she has been the grateful recipient of a generous bequest from her parents, which covers the child’s education in full. And all of a sudden, everything changes.


-Michael D’Angelo

What Would Washington Do?

What would Washington do? Not Washington, the city. GEORGE Washington --- the man.

If George Washington knew that the richest 400 Americans today possess more wealth than the bottom half (150 million) of the US population combined, what would he do about it? If he knew that the top 1% possess as much wealth as the bottom 39%, would George Washington take note? Would he show even mild concern? And then there is the matter of the $15.5 trillion national debt.

Surely George Washington would know that the ordinary citizen could trace this situation to his very own decision made long ago. President Washington deliberated the proposal of Alexander Hamilton, his Secretary of the Treasury, for the economic system of capitalism on the British model. Against this he weighed the objection of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State. As was typically the case with Jefferson, his objection to Hamilton’s plan was philosophically based.

Thomas Jefferson saw that Hamilton's plan called for the federal government under the new constitution to create an artificial class of wealth, an “influence” of treasury over the legislative branch, which was inherently susceptible to patronage and corruption. The design was a full fledged system of preference, which flowed from principles adverse to liberty. This would violate the unfettered freedom of the individual to pursue happiness. The author of the document which set forth that “all men are created equal” viewed with consternation a proposed system which would not treat all men equally under the law.

The benefit of hindsight informs the ordinary citizen that George Washington chose to endorse Hamilton’s plan, which would provide the greatest good for the greatest number. But the plan would invariably cause collateral damage, however small it would likely be portrayed. George Washington had known this from the very start.

And so one of the national government's earliest policy decisions has created the system responsible for the growing problem of wealth disparity we are experiencing today, now comprising nearly half the country. So the question is: What would George Washington do? Unfortunately, the question seems to devolve to a smallness debate on the proper size of government.

On the one hand, advocates of big government, so labeled, trace their roots to F.D.R.’s New Deal, a 1930s experiment to offset the economic calamity which was the Great Depression. Capitalism’s private sector had completely derailed, a phenomenon exacerbated by its proponent’s stubborn state of denial. The experiment was a success, restoring the ordinary citizen’s faith in democracy by making capitalism seem more humane. But F.D.R. was a fiscal conservative, too, the idea of a fully engaged, activist government as the great provider not fully maturing until decades later.

On the other hand, proponents of so called small government champion individual initiative and personal responsibility. So determined are they to cut the size of government, their actions are seen by many as reckless. They propose to reduce government revenue by cutting taxes for the affluent, trying to kill the beast by starving it. But they do not propose a corresponding offset in spending. Free of government constraints, the economy grows to make up for the offset, and wealth trickles down to the masses. If only there were some precedent, George Washington could better know if this approach were the holy grail.

So the partisan divide ebbs and flows. Positions become entrenched. The status quo has been set. George Washington was the president who, as he was leaving office, warned of the baneful effect of partisan division, of political parties. But he was the only president who did not have to deal with political parties, as they did not materialize until he had left the scene. So his ability to act was freer, less constrained.

What would George Washington do, absent the constraints of today's competing ideologies, where sideshows tend to swallow substance?  Perhaps, more than 200 years later, George Washington would know intuitively that in order to aim higher, to progress meaningfully from one stage to the next in an upward course for the greater good, it will become necessary to move beyond a traditional analysis affixed to economic cycles of boom and bust, war and peace.

The lens of the ordinary citizen turns to the legislative branch. Its structure has remained largely intact since George Washington’s time. But many would agree it has evolved into a state of dysfunctional chaos. Examples are abundant --- and ominous.

As our democratic system was designed, voters would choose their legislators at the ballot box. But for many years that is no longer the case.  In a legislative tradition known as gerrymandering, self-serving legislators have long chosen their voters by drawing arbitrary, movable lines around voting districts to make them safe from challenge by the other side. Moreover, a legislative seat, once a post of honor, has been transformed into a place of profit. So pressured is a lawmaker from the corruptive effects of special interests for private gain that public service is no longer seen as a selfless commitment to the welfare of others. It is more like a self-centered establishment paradise. The use of one simple technique, the filibuster, transforms the US Senate from a moderating force into an impregnable wall, blocking the rising demand for social justice. And finally, once elected, lawmakers are set up in office for unlimited term or duration, indefinitely, arguably for life.

So where is the incentive in this structural scheme to change for the greater good, even when its need appears so obvious?   Perhaps, George Washington would consider starting there.

-Michael D’Angelo

Morality and Ethics

 Why is it said that the graveyard of politics is littered with principled men? …

Whatever forces may be in play to attempt to change a powerful and hardened status quo are typically compelled to proceed at their own peril.  President Eisenhower had resisted the change in the law integrating the nation's public schools, the 1954 US Supreme Court's landmark unanimous ruling, as not involving a great moral issue.  Sometimes, that is the way the issue of change is ultimately portrayed.  That is, does the particular situation involve a moral issue which is at stake, or not?  If so, typically, change may be more likely to occur than not.  Otherwise, forget about it.  But it is important to take note that the word is often used as a default argument, when one is trying to articulate the need for change.

We ordinary citizens have all heard the expression: “I can’t do that – it’s the principle of the matter!”  As a lawyer who spent a good deal of time in the courtroom arguing contested cases, if I had a dime for every time I had to defend someone’s principles, I’d be a rich man.

When one thinks of morality, one must also think of ethics.  And the definition of ethics must include the idea of obedience to the unenforceable.  Woodrow Wilson, the highly principled man that he was, once said that “there is a higher law than profit” and that people “should be broader-minded to see what was best for America.”

The political process involves compromise.  But the compromise of principle often comes at the expense of conscience.  Sometimes, particularly when the stakes are greatest, the choice is not pleasant.  For these reasons, it is said that the graveyard of politics is littered with principled men.  Who does that leave us with?

A revealing story about ethics involves the somewhat familiar tale of a man who finds a lost wallet on the sidewalk.  Like a majority of ordinary citizens, the man had a good job but had virtually nothing to spare, once all the bills were paid, until the next paycheck.

Picking up the wallet, he put it in his coat and continued on to work, examining its contents as soon as he got there.  At around $600 in cash, he stopped counting.  His first thought was that he had won a mini lottery.  But he quickly dismissed that foolish notion.  The man called the owner to tell him to come by to pick it up.  The owner spoke gruffly, however, unlike what one might expect from a man whose wallet had just been found.

The owner did come by later that afternoon, turning out to be an older, white man with a permanent scowl.  The man handed the owner his wallet, and the owner immediately began counting his money.  Audibly irritated, the man said it was all there.  The owner stopped counting, grudgingly pulled out a $5 bill and handed it toward the man, who refused to accept it, stating that he hoped the owner would return somebody else’s wallet someday.  The owner turned on his heel and stalked away without uttering another word.

The man learns two valuable lessons from that experience.  The first is as familiar as it is simple: Honesty is what you do when no one is looking.  The second is perhaps more important, and more relevant, described as the defining moment in the man’s ethical development: A need, however great it might be, does not convert wrong to right, or bad to good.  The owner’s wallet was not his, no matter how much the man needed the money, or how rude the owner happened to be.  The man later became a member of the highest court in the land, the US Supreme Court.  The Hon. Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas often had occasion to remind himself in years to come that self-interest isn’t a principle --- it’s just self-interest.

One of Clarence Thomas’ heroes, the late Bobby Kennedy, had said that it was really a moral issue, the continued prosecution of the Vietnam War, against the increasingly violent street protests of the younger generation calling for its end.  The truth is that the US had expended more ordnance on the tiny Asian nation of North Vietnam than all the participants in World War II against each other, combined.  This inspired R.F.K. to pose the following question: “If we bomb every square inch of North Vietnam to rubble, then what exactly have we saved it from?”

Bobby Kennedy had been inspired by the message conveyed in Dante’s Inferno: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”  And so, using an argument inspired by morality, he changed his position on the Vietnam War.  Such can be the power of morality to nudge the immovable object.

-Michael D'Angelo