BOOKS / Bill Meacham : Sam Harris' 'The Moral Landscape'

The Moral Landscape:
Science and human values

Harris is on to something very important here: that careful observation of what actually works has a great deal to tell us about what is good and valuable.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2012

[The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris (2010: Free Press); Hardcover; Hardcover; 291 pp.; $26.99.]

In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris, a noted New Atheist, asks us to consider two lives:

Life A: Imagine that you are an illiterate and homeless African woman whose husband has disappeared. You have just seen your seven-year-old daughter raped and murdered at the hands of drug-crazed soldiers, and now you’re fearing for your life. Unfortunately, this is not an unusual predicament for you. From the moment you were born, your life has been marred by cruelty and violence.

Life B: Imagine that you are a respected professional in a wealthy country, married to a loving, intelligent and charismatic mate. Your employment is intellectually stimulating and pays you very well. For decades your wealth and social connections have allowed you immense personal satisfaction from meaningful work which makes a real difference in the world. You and your closest family will live long, prosperous lives, virtually untouched by crime, sudden bereavements, and other major misfortunes.

Which is the better life? We would all no doubt say Life B. Harris takes this as evidence that there is an objective way to determine what is morally good and bad. In fact, as the subtitle of the book indicates, he claims that scientific inquiry can tell us what we should and should not value.

Harris can say this because he asserts that the proper meaning of “value” with respect to human life -- that is to say, the proper meaning of morality -- is what leads to human flourishing, to living a good, satisfying life. Once he makes that move, the rest of his argument is straightforward and cogent.

Careful observation of what in fact fulfills people is not a matter of religious or philosophical debate; it is a matter of scientific inquiry. We can tell, objectively, what leads to happiness and what leads to misery. Facilitating good lives is what morality is about, says Harris, and that’s why science can tell us what we should value and what we should not.

As Harris says:

“[H]uman well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it.” (p.2) “Once we see that a concern for well-being (defined as deeply and as inclusively as possible) is the only intelligible basis for morality and values, we will see that there must be a science of morality... As we come to understand how human beings can best collaborate and thrive in this world, science can help us find a path leading away from the lowest depths of misery and toward the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people.” (p.28)

There may be problems about the details, but the overall goal of peaks of happiness is quite achievable, says Harris.

Harris’ metaphor of a moral landscape is instructive. By "moral landscape," he means the conceptual space of all possible experience. The peaks represent the heights of well-being, and the valleys the worst suffering. Different cultures and ethical practices are different ways of moving across this landscape -- they can lead either up or down, and their effects are empirically knowable.

Harris notes that there is no single best way for people to live: there are many peaks in the moral landscape, not just one. Morality is here like food. There is no one best food to eat, but there is still an objective difference between poison and tasty, nutritious cuisine. Similarly, there is no one best way to live; but there is an objective, specifiable difference between circumstances, actions, and policies that lead to lives like Life A, and those that lead to lives such as Life B.

If we want a life like B, and if we want that life for others too, then we should pay attention to what scientific inquiry tells us about how to get there, and take action accordingly.


It is a striking and plausible vision. But it depends, as I said, on the initial move, which defines "moral" as that which concerns well-being (and not just human well-being, but that of all conscious creatures: “maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures... [is] the only thing we can reasonably value” (p.11)). To say that morality is exclusively concerned with well-being is a strong claim, and one which Harris does not quite pull off.

Harris certainly recognizes that it is an issue. His argument goes like this:

1. Talk about value makes sense only for conscious creatures.
2. Well-being is all that we can intelligibly value.
3. Hence the only sense the concept of "value" has is the well-being of conscious creatures, and that is what morality should be concerned with.

He starts by claiming that consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value. But he does not so much argue for this proposition as deny its contrary: “I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the (actual or potential) experience of conscious beings.” (p.12) Whatever such a source would be, it would by definition have no effect on the experience of any creature, and hence would be the least interesting thing in the universe.

This first premise is problematic, but the problems are not fatal for his argument. Are plants conscious creatures? No? But adequate sunlight, water, and nutrients are good for plants, and hence could be considered sources of value for the plants. How about amoebas? Adequate nutrients and water of a certain salinity are good for amoebas, that is to say, of value for amoebas.

If plants or amoebas are not conscious, yet can still be subject to things of value to them, then Harris’s first argument fails. (We could be generous here and say that "conscious" means something like "able to take into account one’s surroundings." This would encompass plants and amoebas. But Harris does not say this.)

Harris then asserts, “the concept of ‘well-being’ captures all that we can intelligibly value. And ‘morality’... really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures.” (pp.12-13).

Again, he does not so much argue for this proposition as deny and disparage its contraries. For example, to someone who says that it is important to follow God’s law for its own sake, Harris says they are really acting out of concern for the consequences to themselves, either in this life or another. To someone who says it is important to act according to duty, fairness, justice, or some other moral principle, Harris says that this can be so only because of the consequences of doing so.

But he gives little evidence for these assertions, and in fact admits that he is defining his terms to mean this: “At bottom, this is purely a semantic point: I am claiming that whatever answer a person gives to the question ‘Why is religion important?’ can be framed in terms of a concern about someone’s well-being (whether misplaced or not).” (p.199) or “to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do.” (p.38)


There is a serious meta-ethical issue here which Harris does not adequately address. Throughout the history of philosophy there have been two competing domains of discourse regarding ethics, which have been called the Right and the Good.(1) The Right pertains to duty and obligation -- the obligation to obey moral rules which are taken to be applicable universally and independent of one’s own preferences. The Good pertains to benefits and harms -- that is, to the consequences of actions, which may be good or bad for the moral agent or others.

Harris is solidly in the Goodness camp, and he does an admirable job of spelling out the implications of that position, particularly the value of a careful, disciplined, objective examination of reality, in short, of science, for determining what is good and bad, beneficial and detrimental, for humans and other conscious creatures. But he only asserts that Goodness trumps Rightness -- that it makes more sense or is more cogent to speak of morality in terms of benefits and harms than to speak of it in terms of duty and obligation -- he does not demonstrate his thesis.

To his credit, Harris does address the use of the terms "right" and "wrong." By right he means "factually correct or true," and by wrong he means the opposite: “just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health, it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.” (p.62) Thus, claims about what is good for humans and other conscious creatures can be right or wrong in the sense of being true or false.

So far, so good; but then Harris says that there are “right and wrong ways to move from our current position on the moral landscape toward one peak or the other...” (p.74) Now the term "right" usually connotes one-and-only: there is one right answer to the question "What is 37 times 42?," and many wrong ones.

To say that there are right ways (plural) to move could connote several morally-acceptable methods to get to a happiness peak, but this does not fit the usual concept of rightness. No doubt what Harris really means is that there are more and less workable methods for moving up the landscape to a peak of flourishing.

But what about this? “We care more about creatures that can experience a greater range of suffering and happiness -- and we are right to...”(p. 198) On Harris’ definition of “right” this should mean that caring more about creatures with a greater range of experience is a reliable way to increase our well being. Perhaps it is, but Harris does not make that argument. Instead he equivocates, using the term in a way that in common usage refers to adherence to a moral law.

The most problematic passage is this: “physicians have a moral obligation to handle medical statistics in ways that minimize unconscious bias” (p.143). How does he get from the observable fact that minimizing bias has good effects, to saying the we have a moral obligation to do so?

Unless we radically redefine what we mean by "obligation," we are not morally obliged to minimize harm in Harris’s view. Instead, we are merely better advised to do so. Harris wants to redefine the concept of "moral obligation" in terms of probable benefits and harms, but he does not make the argument for doing so clearly enough.

It is certainly easy to confuse the notions of Right and Good because both are used to evaluate, recommend, command, or prohibit policies or courses of action. Despite his best efforts, Harris here falls into that confusion and strays from the paradigm in which his argument makes the most sense -- the Goodness paradigm.


Even within the Goodness paradigm, he does not successfully make the move he wants to make -- to the value of a concern, not just for one’s own self, or for all humans, but for conscious beings generally.

It is clear that a thoughtful and intelligent concern for one’s own well-being would lead one to take actions intended to increase that well-being, and careful observation of what works and what doesn’t would tend to increase one’s skill in doing so. One of the things we observe is that we do not live in isolation: “Our own happiness requires that we extend the circle of our self-interest to others -- to family, friends, and even to perfect strangers whose pleasures and pains matter to us” (p.57).

But what about perfect strangers whose pleasures and pains do not matter to us? And what about dolphins, whales, chimps, elephants, dogs and cats, ants, termites and microbes? (Again, where do we draw the line about which ones are conscious?) It is not at all clear why, starting from a desire to enhance one’s own well-being, we should move to a concern for the well-being of conscious creatures generally. A premise is missing.

The missing premise might be something like an assertion of connectedness among all beings, such that an injury to one is in some sense an injury to all. But Harris does not assert such a premise. Instead he universalizes the concern for one’s own well-being, presumably because of the Kantian belief that moral premises should be consistent and generalizable. But he does not make that move explicit either.


Despite its flaws, at least half this book is worthwhile reading indeed. A quarter, the rant on religion, which takes up a whole chapter, is mere recapitulation of points made elsewhere by Harris and others. Another quarter, the chapter on belief and brain structure, is intriguing and germane, but lacking in some important details. One hopes for a whole book on the subject. As is usual in books like these, the bibliography provides fertile territory for further research.

I do not want to be overly harsh. Harris is on to something very important here: that careful observation of what actually works has a great deal to tell us about what is good and valuable. Thus despite not demonstrating the book’s central premise, Harris provides a thought-provoking and highly readable account of a topic of great relevance: how we can survive and thrive in a world of increasing confusion and complexity.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. A version of this review was published in Philosophy Now magazine, Issue 90. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) Abraham Edel, ‘Right and Good’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas. On-line publication, originally at etext.lib.virginia.edu, now archived at http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/OP/Edel_RightAndGood.htm.

References
Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2010. 291 pages, ISBN 978-4391-7121-91

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Bill Freeland : The Marx Brothers Are Reforming Public Education

Graphic by Bill Freeland / The Rag Blog.
The Marx Brothers are
reforming public education

Hilarious, but as Groucho himself might have observed, the joke’s on us!

By Bill Freeland / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2012

CONCORD, New Hampshire -- While the relentless right-wing war on everyone else’s rights rages on, you may yearn for a moment of comic relief.

To wit I offer the great state of New Hampshire where, with the help of the reincarnated Marx Brothers, its Tea Party-dominated legislature is determined to “reform” the state’s public education system.

But more than that, what follows is, in fact, a microcosmic glimpse of a movement growing in strength all across the nation.

1. Start with a bill that no longer makes public school attendance a requirement for any student. (Parents rule!)
2. If, however, a student actually wants to go to public school, at least postpone the trauma by killing off kindergarten. (All they really need is Sesame Street, right?)
3. But once in school, what if parents disagree with what’s taught -- like, say, that the earth goes around the sun? Give them the right to demand a special curriculum. (Science is for sissies!)
4. Of course, they might not like that curriculum either and decide on a private school. In that case why should they pay taxes to support the public school their child no longer attends? (Tax refund!)
5. But imagine if a student foolishly stays in public school. Then at least we can lower the dropout age. (More time to prepare for a career at McDonald’s.)
6. And what about the millions in education dollars the state gets from the federal “No Child Left Behind” program? Send it back! (The feds can surely find better uses for all that money than we can.)
7. And to make things really simple, why not transfer all rule-making authority from the state’s Department of Education to the legislature. (Obviously that’s where the real experts on our schools reside.)

Hilarious, but as Groucho himself might have observed, the joke’s on us! Because incredibly, bills designed to do all of this and more have been introduced in the New Hampshire legislature in just the last 18 months alone.* And not just in New Hampshire but across the country. (Still laughing?)

Who cares if only bill number three has actually become law. (Apparently there are still enough grownups in the state Senate to rein in the 10-year-olds now running the state House.) But they’re working on more. Much more!

For example, on May 16 the legislature authorized the transfer of up to $130 million of public school funds to private and religious schools over 10 years in the form of tax credits to businesses that provide “scholarships” for students who attend these schools.

These scholarship dollars will be deducted from state funding for the school districts from which these students withdraw. Which means local property taxes will make up for the loss. Or not. The measure passed with a veto-proof majority.

Of course, why pass mere laws when you can do something more substantial, like changing the state constitution!

Under a proposed amendment now under consideration (CACR 12), for example, it would no longer be the state’s responsibility to provide New Hampshire children an adequate public education. Which means that the legislature could change the rules and just, you know, decide to leave it all up to local municipalities -- including funding -- regardless how poor a given community might be. (Shared responsibility? Where do you think you are, Massachusetts!)

So between this amendment and the 50 measures lawmakers introduced during the past year, the direction is clear: starve public schools while subsidizing private and religious schools, even home schooling.

But here’s the point: This push is not coming primarily from people within the state. Lawmakers are responding to some 20 national organizations -- like the Cato Institute, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and FreedomWorks. And these organizations are not just operating in New Hampshire. They have public education in their sights in state houses across the country.

This school year is nearly over. But the fight to make the next year better for our children continues. Which means it’s time we all do some homework -- and then do some real work -- in our local communities!

*To read the bills cited above simply Google “N.H. bill” plus the appropriate number: 1) HB595, 2) HB631, 3) HB542, 4) SB340, 5) HB429, 6) HB1413 and 7) HB1360. For the constitutional amendment, see: CACR 12.

[In the Sixties, Bill Freeland was a contributor to The Rag in Austin and Liberation News Service in New York. Read more articles by Bill Freeland on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : The Ideology of U.S. Hegemony in the Hemisphere

Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge articulated what was to become the new ideology of American empire. Image from the Library of Congress.
The ideological dimension:
U.S. Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere

In relations with Latin America, and particularly Cuba, policy has been built upon economic interest, geopolitics, and ideology.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2012

[The following article by Harry Targ is adapted from a presentation to be given at a conference co-sponsored by the Radical Philosophy Association and the University of Havana in Cuba between June 18 and 22. Revisiting the remarks of key foreign policy elites from the 1890s until now suggests the commonality of outlook that pervades how the United States views the Global South and particularly Cuba. Ironically not much has changed in that outlook.]

U.S. policymakers believe and/or propagate various illusions or rationales for United States foreign policy that become part of common political discourse. In relations with Latin America, and particularly Cuba, policy has been built upon economic interest, geopolitics, and ideology.

The ideological discourse justifying U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Its modern exposition is surprisingly similar to significant declarations by foreign policy elites during the era of the Cuban war against Spanish colonialism.

For example, shortly after the U.S. victory in the Spanish/Cuban/American war, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge articulated what was to become the new ideology of American empire linking economics to Godly purpose:

"We will establish trading posts throughout the world as distributing points for American products... Great colonies, governing themselves, flying our flag and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade, And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted.” (in Greg Jones, Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream, 2012, 93)

In a campaign speech in Indianapolis, Beveridge articulated a spiritual call and rationale for a global policy that transcended mere economic gain. America’s destiny required the U.S. “...to set the world its example of right and honor…We cannot retreat from any soil where providence has unfurled our banner. It is ours to save that soil, for liberty, and civilization" (in Jones, 96). And speaking before the Senate justifying the colonization of the Philippines he proclaimed a U.S. mission that transcended politics:

"It is elemental... it is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth." (Congressional Record, 56 Congress, I Session, pp.704-712)

Within a few years of the U.S. colonization of Cuba and the Philippines, President Theodore Roosevelt elaborated on the U.S. world mission. He spoke of the necessity of promoting peace and justice in the world: a project that required adequate military capabilities both for “securing respect for itself and of doing good to others.”

To those who claim that the United States seeks material advantage in its activist policy toward the countries of the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt responded that such claims were untrue. The U.S., he said, is motivated by altruism: “All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship.”

Cuba was an example, he said:

"If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all questions of interference by the Nation with their affairs would be at an end."

He assured Latin Americans in this address to Congress in 1904 that if “...they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort...” (“Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” President’s Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1904).

During a presentation in Norway in 1910 Roosevelt praised the U.S. for leaving Cuba as promised after the war to return only temporarily because of ...a disaster…a revolution” such that “...we were obliged to land troops again.”

The President proudly declared that:

"And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state among the other nations of the earth. All that our people want is just exactly what the Cuban people themselves want -- that is, a continuance of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.” (“The Colonial Policy of the United States,” an Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910)

Earlier on January 18, 1909, to the Methodist Episcopal Church (“The Expansion of the White Races”) throughout the world. The indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere have been assimilated with their “intruders” with the end result “that the Indian population of America is larger today than it was when Columbus discovered the continent, and stands on a far higher plane of happiness and efficiency.”

And to highlight the missionary message Roosevelt added:

"Of course the best that can happen to any people that has not already a high civilization of its own is to assimilate and profit by American or European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity, without submitting to alien control; but such control, in spite of all its defects, is in a very large number of cases the prerequisite condition to the moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth."

Before the reader dismisses these simplistic, racist statements, it is useful to examine more recent proclamations of the motivations for United States foreign policy, particularly toward Latin America. It is worth remembering that recent U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama, quote favorably from the words of Theodore Roosevelt on various subjects.

For example, in March, 1961, and clearly as a response to the Cuban revolution, President John Kennedy announced the creation of a new “Alliance for Progress” in Latin America, “a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work, and land, health and schools.”

The Alliance was to be a 10-year program of social and economic development that would transform the hemisphere “into an historic decade of democratic progress.” Representatives of participating countries would prepare plans for their own development that would “establish targets and priorities, insure monetary stability, establish the machinery for vital social change, stimulate private activity and initiative, and provide for a maximum national effort.”

JFK promised U.S financial contributions to stimulate economic reform and in the end transform “the fragmentation of Latin American economies.” The variety of programs -- education, land reform, tax reform -- would rebuild the region.

The United States also pledged its assistance to those countries whose independence might be threatened. And, of course, the President proclaimed that the United States supports an alliance of free governments and will work to eliminate “tyranny." JFK expressed “our special friendship to the people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic and the hope they will soon rejoin the society of free men...”

Sixty years after the proclamations of Teddy Roosevelt the United States remained committed to offer the blessings of freedom and democracy to the peoples of Cuba. (President John F. Kennedy, “Preliminary Formulations of the Alliance for Progress,” March 13, 1961)

Twenty-two years later President Reagan again underscored the U.S. presumption of its special role in the Hemisphere, restating the U.S. role more in the language of Roosevelt than the subtler Kennedy. The speech was presented at a gathering of Cuban-Americans. Reagan praised assembled Cuban-Americans, such as Jorge Mas Canosa, who came to the United States motivated by a passion for liberty.

Reagan spoke of descendants of pioneers and emigrants from various locales who started “fresh” in the “New World”; people who “share the same fundamental values of God, family, work, freedom, democracy, and justice.” (“Perhaps the greatest tie between us can be seen in the incredible number of cathedrals and churches found throughout the hemisphere. Our forefathers took the worship of God seriously.”)

Reagan then warned of the “new colonialism that threatens the Americas.” This, of course, was represented by the revolutionary government of Nicaragua, the revolutionaries fighting against dictatorship in El Salvador, and the enduring threat to freedom, Cuba.

In the latter, the independent labor movement was destroyed in 1959, churches suppressed, all free speech eliminated, and young Cubans sent to faraway places to defend unpopular regimes. And remembering the sacrifices of the United States in the Cuban war against Spanish colonialism, Reagan regretted that “Cuba is no longer independent.” He promised that “we will not let this same fate befall others in the hemisphere...”

After endorsing 1980s policies such as the Caribbean Basin Initiative and Radio Marti President Reagan reminded his audience of the perpetual burden Americans face in defending freedom. He quoted Teddy Roosevelt: "We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.”

And Reagan ended: “finally, let us pledge ourselves to meet this sacred responsibility. And let us pledge ourselves to the freedom of the noble, long suffering, Cuban people.” (“Text of President Reagan’s Speech on Threat to Latin America, New York Time, May 21, 1983)

President Obama’s opening remarks at the Summit of the Americas (April 14, 2012) were different in tone than those cited above. He celebrated economic development in the region, encouraged continued economic globalization, praised the growth of Latin American nations such as Brazil and Colombia proving that “a lot of the old arguments on the left and the right no longer apply.”

The challenge for the future, he said, was to continue distributing the benefits of globalization to more and more people and “giving businesses opportunities to thrive and create new products and new services and enjoy the global marketplace.”

The President called on the Hemisphere nations to continue training people to compete in the global economy, stimulate trade, establish more mutually beneficial trade agreements like the one he signed with the President of Colombia, become more energy efficient, and promote education.

He concluded with some of the more traditional presidential language, albeit in less than messianic terms, about core principles of governance: “democracy and rule of law, human rights being observed, freedom of expression.” In addition, he mentioned “personal security, the capacity for people to feel as if they work hard then they’re able to achieve, and they have motivation to start a business and to know that their own work will pay off.”

President Obama emphasized the connections between “clean, transparent open government that is working on behalf of its people.” These features, he said, were important for business.

“The days when a business feels good working in a place where people are being oppressed -- ultimately that’s an unstable environment for you to do business. You do business well when you know that it’s a well-functioning society and that there’s a legitimate government in place that is going to be looking out for its people.”

With that said, Obama praised both the governments of Colombia and Brazil.

The Obama comments at the opening Summit of the Americas in 2012, more paralleling the language of President Kennedy’s Alliance speech than the missionary statements of Beveridge, Roosevelt, and Reagan, still suggest that the United States, and some Latin American political and economic elites, reflect the interests and values of the masses of Latin America’s citizens.

All the speeches offer a common standard to judge what is best for the vast majorities of the peoples of the Hemisphere; whether the region is moving toward or away from God, Democracy (defined in very selective ways), and Markets. And, whether stated or implied, the polar opposite of this standard is most starkly represented by the Cuban revolution.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Peter Dreier : How the Big Bucks Won in Wisconsin

Walker spent 88% of the money
to get 53% of the vote

The real winner in Wisconsin on Tuesday was not Gov. Scott Walker, but Big Money. And the real loser was not Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, but democracy.

By Peter Dreier / Reader Supported News / June 6, 2012

Here's a headline you won't see, but should: "Scott Walker Spent 88% of the Money to Get 53% of the Vote."

Political pundits will spend the next few days and weeks analyzing the Wisconsin recall election, examining exit polls, spilling lots of ink over how different demographic groups --- income, race, religious, union membership, gender, party affiliation, independents, liberals/conservatives/moderates, etc. -- voted on Tuesday.

But the real winner in Wisconsin on Tuesday was not Gov. Scott Walker, but Big Money. And the real loser was not Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, but democracy.

Walker's Republican campaign outspent Barrett's Democratic campaign by $30.5 million to $4 million -- that's a 7.5 to 1 advantage. Another way of saying this is that of the $34.5 million spent on their campaigns, Walker spend 88% of the money.

Walker beat Barrett by 1,316,989 votes to 1,145,190 votes -- 53% to 46% (with 1% going to an independent candidate).

Here's another way of saying that: Walker spent $23 for each vote he received, while Barrett spent only $3.47 per vote.

But the reality is even worse than this, because the $34.5 billion figure does not include so-called independent expenditures and issue ads paid for primarily by out-of-state billionaires (like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Joe Rickets), business groups, and the National Rifle Association, which were skewed even more heavily toward Walker.

Once all this additional spending is calculated, we'll see that total spending in this race could be more than double the $34.5 billion number, that Walker and his business allies outspent Barrett by an even wider margin, and that he had to spend even more than $23 for each vote.

In other words, business and billionaires bought this election for Walker. The money paid for non-stop TV and radio ads as well as mailers. There's no doubt that if the Barrett campaign had even one-third of the war-chest that Walker had, it would have been able to mount an even more formidable grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign and put more money into the TV and radio air war.

Under those circumstances, it is likely that Barrett would have prevailed.

Pundits can have a field day pontificating about the Wisconsin election, but in the end its about how Big Money hijacked democracy in the Badger State on Tuesday, and how they're trying to do it again in November.

[Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is the co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City." He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect. His next book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, will be published by Nation Books in the spring. This article was first published at and distributed by Reader Supported News.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : 'Flat-Picking Rabble-Rouser' David Rovics

Singer/songwriter David Rovics on Rag Radio, Friday, June 1, 2012. Video produced and edited by Jeff Zavala and filmed by Grace Alfar of ZGraphix at the KOOP studios in Austin.
Rag Radio:
Singer/Songwriter David Rovics
is a 'professional flat-picking rabble-rouser'

Amy Goodman called David Rovics 'the musical version of Democracy Now!'

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2012

David Rovics, noted American indie singer/songwriter and activist for peace and social justice, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 1, 2012, first broadcast on KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station, and streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience. The show included live performance.

You can listen to it here:


David Rovics lives in Portland, Oregon, and tours regularly on four continents, performing at cafes, pubs, universities, churches, union halls, and protest rallies. His music has been featured on Democracy Now!, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and other major media outlets.

His essays have been published on CounterPunch and Truthout, and the 200-plus songs he makes available for free on the web have been downloaded more than a million times.

Rovics grew up in a family of classical musicians in Wilton, Connecticut. By the early 90's he was a full-time "busker," performing in the Boston subways, and by the mid-90's he was traveling the world as a "professional flat-picking rabble-rouser."

Amy Goodman called David Rovics "the musical version of Democracy Now!" And Andy Kershaw of the BBC said, "If the great Phil Ochs were to rise from the dead today, he would probably be hailed as the new Daivd Rovics."

On Rag Radio, Rovics discussed his career and his commitment to social activism, and the relationship between his politics and his art. Rovics, who became involved in the anti-nuclear movement when he was 12, says of his work: "I'm doing what songwriters have been doing for millenia -- which is writing songs about what's happening in the world."

We also covered subjects ranging from the power (and limitations) of computer technology (and why Rovics makes his work available online for free), why he doesn't call himself a "protest singer" ("a white guy with an acoustic guitar"), and the inherent politics of punk rock, which evolved as a response to the highly polished "guitar gods." (Punk was like rock and roll at its most basic, he said: "Three chords and the truth.")

And we talked about Rovics' recent trip to Europe where he toured from Scotland and Ireland to Germany and Scandanavia, playing before crowds ranging from the single digits to the hundreds, in venues with names like the Wee Folk Club and Filthy McNasty's, in school classrooms and at mass political rallies -- including the May Day festivities in Denmark.

In Belfast, he performed in an occupied bank building with legendary Irish singer and activist Tommy Sands, and he did a show with squatters in a dilapidated old building in Amsterdam. And he played at a protest against a coal mine in rural Cologne, where his contact, he laughs, was "a young man on a bicycle wearing a pink skirt."

Rovics, who played at more than 30 Occupy Wall Street camps around the country, says he thinks the Occupy Movement "changed the whole scope of the discussion in the mainstream media" about power and wealth in the country.

About the political scene today, Rovics, who calls himself a "libertarian socialist," told the Rag Radio audience that "both political parties are almost entirely bought and sold by the banks and oil companies. And the banks and oil companies are duking it out to figure out who can dominate the world." He says we face a choice "between a corrupt Democratic Party and an absolutely lunatic -- and corrupt -- Republican Party."

Rovics calls our current options "dismal," and says that our only real solution is to build a mass movement for social change outside the political system.

Find out more about David Rovics -- and download free music -- at DavidRovics.com.

From left, Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer with singer/songwriter David Rovics in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Friday, June 1, 2012. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

[Thorne Dreyer edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]


Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, June 8, 2012: Author and crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger, Founding Editor of The Texas Observer.
June 15, 2012: American Botanical Council Director Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine.
June 22, 2012: Gay Marriage in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

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Lamar W. Hankins : Obama's 'Rage' and Other Fairy Tales

Ragin' Obama: The right-wing view.
Obama’s 'rage' and other fairy tales

When I think of Barack Obama, I never think rage. I have raged against him on more than one occasion, but Obama never rages back. In fact, he is ridiculed by the same right wing for being too cool.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2012

The man with so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it, Joe Ricketts, is bankrolling a documentary based on the book by Dinesh D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage. This book is further evidence that the right wing has no sense of irony.

When I think of Barack Obama, I never think rage. I have raged against him on more than one occasion, but Obama never rages back. In fact, he is ridiculed by the same right wing for being too cool. It appears that the right wing is just confused, in an Orwellian sort of way -- rage is cool, war is peace, etc.

D’Souza’s book posits the thesis that Obama has a “Kenyon, anti-colonial” world view. Republican presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich was channeling D’Souza during his campaign when he said: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

Of course, if Obama really did have an anti-colonial world view, I would be enthusiastic about him, but that is not the case. An anti-colonialist would have already ended the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by American military forces. An anti-colonialist would not have joined NATO in the bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. An anti-colonialist would not be using drones regularly in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

An anti-colonialist would not be continuing the decades-long involvement of this country in Colombia. An anti-colonialist would not maintain the 50-year embargo against Cuba. An anti-colonialist would not be funding the expansion of military bases in the Middle East. An anti-colonialist would not continue funding the wide-spread violation of human rights by the military in Colombia.

An anti-colonialist would not be maintaining 900 military installations in 130 countries around the world. An anti-colonialist would not be expanding the military, whose primary use historically has been colonial expansion on behalf of American commercial and economic interests.

D’Souza, Gingrich, Ricketts, and all the other anti-Obama zealots seem incapable of seeing Obama for what he really is -- a mainstream American exceptionalist with a colonialist mentality. Every president in my lifetime has pursued a colonialist agenda, some more than others. Obama fits right in the middle of this group -- not the most expansionist, but not anywhere close to being the least expansionist.

Unlike the earlier colonialism, where we actually controlled the apparatus of government in other countries, we now use our military might and economic leverage (directly and through the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development) to control the policies of other countries. None of this has changed under Obama.

Ricketts’ other raps against Obama are economic. Ricketts believes that Obama is promoting socialism, driving up the deficit, and spending too much. This view is based on the bank and auto bailouts and a cursory look at spending and debt increases since Obama has been in office.

Ricketts seems to have forgotten that it was Bush who began the auto and bank bailouts, and it was during Bush’s terms that the federal debt almost doubled. Bush also increased entitlements -- mostly his Medicare prescription drug program. Of course, Congress shares responsibility for all of these debt increases.

As the Associated Press has noted, the public debt tripled under President Reagan, and has gone up by half under President Obama. I’m not arguing that debt is not a problem. I am arguing that Obama’s performance is not what his critics claim.

Many economists take the position that debt needs to be addressed, but this should be done gradually. But people like Ricketts, Paul Ryan, and Romney favor austerity at a time when the lack of government spending will keep the economy from recovering quickly. Economists Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Simon Johnson, and others believe that the lackluster economic recovery is due largely to limited government spending where it counts the most, and that declining federal government revenues are a result largely of the supposedly temporary Bush tax cuts that have been continued.

Simon Johnson, an MIT professor with vast worldwide economic experience, has written:

Our modern debt surge is much more about declining federal government revenue than it is about runaway spending... The smart approach is to begin the long and not-so-nice work of controlling deficits while allowing the economy to grow... The kind of austerity now being experienced in Europe is absolutely not what is called for in the United States. We have time and space for a fiscal adjustment, particularly because the world remains favorably inclined to buy United States government debt, and this holds down our long-term interest rates.

Helping state and local governments keep teachers, police, and firefighters on the job, as well as funding infrastructure projects will be a greater boost to the economy than has bailing out the banks.

Ricketts’ (and D’Souza’s) claims that Obama is a socialist and anti-colonialist have been rejected by two bellwethers of conservative thought -- columnist George Will and The Weekly Standard. The oft-cited socialism indicator -- the Affordable Care Act -- is no more socialist than the health care proposals of Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, and its most controversial aspects were originally Republican ideas.

Ricketts justifies his alliance with D’Souza by pointing to what he believes is D’Souza’s great scholarly work. That work is based on a ridiculous syllogism that is partly fact, partly speculation:

1. Obama admired his father and wanted to emulate his views;
2. Obama’s father grew up in Kenya as an anti-colonialist; therefore,
3. Obama wants to be an anti-colonialist and change this country’s foreign policy accordingly.

Even if this syllogism were accurate, it would contradict, not explain, Obama’s pursuit of a colonialist agenda as outlined above. Far from being predictive of Obama’s behavior, as D’Souza claims, it explains nothing about Obama because its base assumptions are wrong: Obama was actually disillusioned with the anti-colonialist ideas of his birth father and has followed a foreign policy path trod by most of his modern predecessors.

U.S. foreign policy would be far different if the U.S. actually respected the autonomy of other countries and engaged other countries through bargaining and mutual benefits, rather than through economic manipulation, military threat, covert interventions, and war.

The arc of justice that Obama likes to talk about is working against the U.S. in many parts of the world. In South America, for instance, countries are electing leaders who are willing to combat colonialism in all of its manifestations. Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and to a lesser extent Chile and Ecuador, are seeking control over their own resources and moving toward greater economic justice and cultural rights for their indigenous people.

Joe Ricketts, Dinesh D’Souza, the Tea Party true believers, and others who despise Obama may have available to them the great wealth that it takes to produce slick video attacks on the objects of their wrath, but that doesn’t give their views authenticity or accuracy.

The one thing that we can know for certain is that their rage is far greater than any emotion or action we have seen from Obama to date, and that rage is directed at their own delusions.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bruce Melton : The Climate Change Awareness Drought is Over / 2

Photos by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
The Climate Change 
awareness drought is over
Part Two: Voices tell us 'the warmists are dead'

Which side is biased and how do we tell with all the noise in the media?

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2012

[This is the second of a three-part series exploring the recent change in public awareness of climate change issues, the causes behind the change, biases, the latest science showing how much our climate has already changed, and academic support for a vigorous change in messaging.]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Polls, surveys and academic evaluations of public opinion are showing a shift in the collective public understanding of climate change. Unprecedented extreme weather and political cues have allowed Americans to begin to disregard what the “voices” have been telling us.

The voices, and their “message,” lack credibility, yet their message is endlessly repeated in the media echo chamber. The brute force of Mother Nature can overcome many obstacles however. The increasing change in awareness is grounds for a shift in advocacy policy towards how we urge for climate change action. It is time to begin anew.

Climate pollutants are just pollutants. They will be no harder to limit and clean up than have been the challenges to find solutions to human toilet pollution over the last century. The voices have no credibility. Their money allows them to speak with millions of voices. The media is not qualified to tell the climate right from climate wrong.

The bias in climate change messaging is well documented in academia. This bias comes from conservative news reporting sources and those institutions like the Heartland Institute or George C. Marshall Institute.

One example of the bias in messaging comes from Stanford in 2010. It found that more exposure to Fox News quite significantly biased the respondents' view against the consensus position on climate change. These researchers found that 82 percent of survey respondents that watched no Fox News believed the Earth’s temperature has been rising while 19 percent fewer Fox News viewers (63 percent) believed this.

They found that 85 percent of respondents that watched no Fox News believed that the temperature increase is caused mostly by things people do or about equally by things people do and natural causes, whereas 25 percent fewer Fox News Viewers (60 percent) believed this.

In this study the authors tell us: “more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists’ claims about global warming, with less trust in scientists, and with more belief that ameliorating global warming would hurt the U.S. economy.”

A more comprehensive study dealing with the reasons behind the different beliefs of viewers predominantly watching the Fox News Channel was presented by Feldman et al., in the International Journal of Press/Politics in 2011. Their findings backed up the Stanford study but went further. They found that Fox News viewers were consistently polarized in their beliefs vs. CNN and MSNBC viewers who showed no polarization.

The campaign to deceive is a monster. All one has to do is pick up a few books to define the magnitude of this concerted effort led by Conservative think tanks and institutions representing big money, fossil fuels, and big business.

The books are becoming endless and among their highly credentialed publishers are: Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science, Columbia University Press, 2011; Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011; Dr. Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Columbia University Press, 2012; Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2009, and Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt, 2010, Bloomsbury.

And to wring this out, a paper in Political Science in December 2010 reviewed 141 books on portraying a skeptical view of the consensus and found 92 percent of them were funded by Conservative think tanks.

Television commercials from sources like Exxon, British Petroleum, and the American Petroleum Institute (there are many more) litter our evening viewing entertainment with proclamations that fossil fuels are good, are central to our society, and that we need more of them in the greatest whole-hearted American way.

This of course (except for the sarcasm) is very valid. Our society has evolved with fossil fuels and it is very obvious that significant changes in the cost of energy can cripple our world.

But the amount of propaganda produced by these sources, vs. the propaganda produced by sources whose message is to address our fossil fuel “addiction” is simply staggering. This kind of messaging influences us tremendously.

Two books that I left off the above list that show the great extent of organized propaganda created to persuade the American public about the dissenter’s viewpoint concerning climate change are Hogan and Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, Greystone, 2009, and Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury, 2010.

These publishers are not the Academic powerhouses common to the above list, but the authors pursued this issue with a passion only similar to Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring which was published by a trade publisher, Houghton Mifflin, in 1962.

What about prominent scientists with dissenting positions like the Pielkes or Judith Curry? There are a few climate scientists whose views have been significantly reported in the media (and significantly promoted by interests capable of broadly advertising their message) that hold some viewpoints different from the consensus crowd. These scientists are mostly represented by the 2 to 3 percent of actively publishing climate scientists described in Anderegg et al. in their paper from 2010 (see the discussion of this work below as well as Oreskes 2004, Doran and Zimmerman 2007, Bray and Storch 2010 and Farnsworth and Lichter 2011).

There will always be dissenting views in science. Some are valid based on existing knowledge, others are rapidly disproven. Similar controversies in science have been repeated time after time. To name a few: planetary orbital theory, ice age theory, germ theory, continual drift theory, and atomic theory.

Is it weather? Are these public opinions reflecting changes in the weather, not changes in climate? Climate after all, is decades of weather. This change in trend is only a few years. Is it valid? If a doctor warns someone for 20 years that their smoking could give them cancer, and it occurs, was it caused by smoking?

The “weather is not climate” argument is a good argument and one that I use often, but it simply does not apply here. The “weather” has been getting weirder for decades. Now the extremes have become unprecedented and I will discuss this in Part Three of this series: “How Valid is the Trend?”

The findings in these polls and surveys are about respondent’s opinions about weather events, not about weather or climate itself. The validity of the trends in these cases is no different than the validity of public opinion poll trends looking at who is most likely to win a political race.

Statistical validity is based on sample size, sample diversity, and statistical measurements. The statistical validity of short-term opinion polls is little different from the statistical validity of long-term climate data. it just takes much, much longer to accumulate climate data than public opinion data and the data are much different in shape and form.

To lay the “bias” question aside, certainly there is bias. But, it is not coming from the vast majority of climate scientists. To illustrate the extent of the scientific acknowledgment of man's impact on our climate, Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, in a paper in the journal Science, in 2004 (updated in 2005), revealed an astounding truth about academic thinking and current climate changes.

The study analyzes the contents of the ISI database. The ISI database (The Institute for Scientific Information) is an ongoing collection of over 18,000 scientific journals and is the foremost compendium of academic peer reviewed papers in the world. The ISI database provides a comprehensive coverage of the world’s most important and influential research. Oreskes searched the database period 1993 to 2003 for papers with the key words "global climate change" in their summaries.

This search found 928 papers. Seventy-five percent of the papers argued that climate change was caused by man, evaluated the impacts of climate change caused by man ,or discussed alternatives to lessen the impacts of climate change caused by man. Twenty-five percent dealt with scientific methods or the study of our ancient climate and took no position as to whether our current climate change is being caused by man.

 Zero percent of these papers argued that the climate changes we are seeing on our planet today are a natural occurrence. Of course, this research is only related to those papers with the key words “global climate change” in their summaries.

Doran and Zimmerman from the University of Chicago, Illinois, in the publication of the 50,000 member American Geophysical Union EOS, surveyed over 10,000 earth scientists about their professional opinions on climate change in 2007. Of over 3,000 responses, 90 percent (including prominent scientists who disagree with the consensus) say the earth is warming and 82 percent say it is caused by man.

Of those specialists whose work consists of more than 50 percent of their publishing related to climate science, 96 percent say the earth is warming and 97 percent of those say it is because of man. Interestingly, they found only 47% of petroleum geologists and 67% of meteorologists surveyed agreed there was human involvement in global warming.

A study by Bray and Storch (2010) from the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, looked at over 2,000 international climate scientists’ opinions in 2008. The respondents for their study came from the Oreskes study mentioned above, from the authors in ISI database journals showing the 10 highest impact ratings between 1998 and 2007, and from climate or weather related organizations such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the similar Max Planck Institute in Germany, the American Meteorological Society, etc.

They found that 94 percent of 375 respondents answering their survey agreed that climate change was occurring and 84 percent said it was caused by man. This work did not break out the responses per the respondents’ area of scientific expertise.

Farnsworth and Lichter at George Mason University have published a Research Note in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research (Oxford University Press) in October 2011 titled, "The Structure of Scientific Opinion on Climate Change." Their survey list came equally from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, and was limited to individuals listed in the prestigious publication American Men & Women of Science, which is the most widely recognized biographical reference work on leading American scientists.

Their selection procedure did not include media weathercasters and they received responses from 489 of their 998 questionnaires (which is a really high response rate). Why no television weatherpersons? Weather and climate as we are concerned with here are distinctly different.

Weather looks at “climate” for the future in terms of days, maybe weeks, and sometimes months. Climate science is concerned with “weather” from the past and future based on the shortest time frames of years and generally 30 years to centuries and millennia. Weatherpersons are certainly knowledgeable about climate, but no more so than say, pharmacologists are knowledgeable about cancer.

What Farnsworth and Lichter found was that 97% of their respondents agreed that Earth was warming and 84% said it was because of man. Only 5 percent disagreed that it was because of man. They tell us that the greater proportion of atmospheric and metrological scientists in their sample could be the reason why their “belief in man-caused climate change results” was lower than Doran and Zimmerman.

“Surprisingly” (said that in the paper), industry-based scientists were not predisposed to show a preference one way or the other towards man-caused climate change. And tellingly, scientists based in academia were more likely to see climate change impacts more severely than their counterparts in industry and government positions.

Anderegg and colleagues (2010), from Stanford, the University of Toronto, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that between 97 and 98 percent of nearly 1,400 climate scientists’ publications reviewed, published by climate scientists who are most actively publishing findings in their field, support the human-caused climate change consensus. Out of the two to three percent that do not support the consensus, 80 percent have published fewer than 20 papers.

The consensus crowd includes only 10 percent of scientists who have published fewer than 20 papers. Not only do almost all climate scientists support the consensus position, those that do not support it do not have anywhere near the credentials as the consensus crowd.

In the authors’ words: “The relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [anthropogenic climate change -- global warming] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.”

As for the peer reviewed literature that contradicts the above I will just cite one extensive review of the literature against Oreskes (2004) and Anderegg et al. (2010), of about 7,000 words and 58 references (Goot, 2011): “None of the criticisms leveled at Oreskes or Anderegg et al. undermine their findings in any substantial way.”

Scientific discipline does make a difference. Any old scientist can be knowledgeable, but their knowledge may be inaccurate relative to that of the specialists. We need to pay the most attention to the most actively publishing climate scientists. The bias is not in the circles of specialists, it is in the voices of interests capable of widespread advertisement of their message and it is repeated far and wide by the media that knows not what it is about.

The media do their reporting innocently. Or maybe ignorantly is more an appropriate term. They no more know who is correct than the general public, or the vast majority of the signers of the Oregon Petition. They are reporters, not climate scientists. Their principles are based on the Journalists’ Creed. They are vested in the public trust and understand that both sides of the story need to be presented in an unbiased manner. To a journalist, “fair” is not just a motto for a television news program, but a presentation of both sides of an issue.

Our society has taught journalists and their kin to be fair. The Federal Communications Commission created the Fairness Doctrine in 1949 just to be sure. This rule required that media coverage of public issues be covered on the news and contrasting viewpoints were required to be presented. It said that broadcasters were to provide coverage of controversial news and public affairs when appropriate.

This was the way it should be done. It was just and fair. It basically created investigative journalism as we know it today, or as we knew it 20 years ago. The Fairness Doctrine was abolished by President Reagan in 1987.

Then there was the Equal Time Rule, established in 1927 and recodified in 1934. It was a rule addressing political issues only, intended to provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates who request it.

These two rules help define ethics, and the morally appropriate way to behave while reporting on television and radio. It is only fair that both sides of the story be heard, that those with different beliefs be given appropriate time to demonstrate their position accordingly. We as a society understand these ethical and moral rights and generally we uphold them to the utmost degree.

But there is a big challenge associated with climate change, or science of any kind really. Most public issues in the past and today deal with beliefs and issues. Climate change is not about beliefs and issues. Beliefs change over time as the public’s perception of an issue changes over time. These are things like: racial issues, alcohol consumption, workers’ rights, child labor laws, women’s suffrage, slavery, right to life, appropriate religious beliefs, separation of church and state, the right to bear arms, nuclear power, national healthcare, birth control, etc.

Climate change is about science. Science has no morals. There are ethics involved in science, but they are the ethics of the industry of science, not the perceived appropriateness of an issue like “the right to life.” Issues can be debated based upon beliefs. There are no “beliefs” in science, only facts or evidence.

So right away, you see that there is a fundamental problem with the way our society is treating climate change as just another political issue. We are treating it like it is another belief; something that can be judged through morally appropriate behavior. We actively seek contrasting viewpoints and consume them with the same weight as the consensus position. Kruger and Dunning, in the Journal of Psychology, put this problem very simply:

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

Incompetent is a harsh word, but how does one know that climate change is real if they do not have the knowledge to understand the science is valid when their authority figures are telling them the science is not valid? Ignorance in many cases is not bliss. The media just reports, but should place more confidence in the vast majority of specialists? Should they be more aware of the sources of the information they are reporting? Or the funding sources of the information sources that they report?

Who gets more credibility, the George C. Marshall Institute or Penn State? The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine or the Woods Institute? If one does not have the knowledge necessary to make decisions on such topics, how does one tell?

A little more knowledge however, may spoil the pudding. From the Yale Cultural Cognition Project we find that a little more knowledge often serves to reinforce the position of social issues of one’s peers. Higher education does not always mean that appropriate climate science is recognized for what it is. More education can enhance what is often described as the Kruger Dunning Effect.

Understanding a few more facts about climate serves to reinforce the well-designed propaganda of the vested interest groups that is so widely distributed to the media. This design specifically enhances commonly understood, intuitive evidence to the contrary of more detailed information understood by specialists.

The media only understand that the public trusts them to be fair, and that the rules their industry evolved under require them to provide equal time to the opposition. But the rules that trained this industry were written for issues-based discussions, not science based discussions. The bias is on the side of the voices. The media faithfully uphold their ethics and report what the voices have to say in ignorant bliss.


A Revelation

But all is not even as the voices themselves believe. In their quest to quell, they have denied the key to the whole conundrum. Authoritative voices tell us climate change is not real, that it is a scientific conspiracy, that it is a natural cycle soon to end, and that it will be good for society. These same voices, that are telling us all of these things at the same time; these are the voices that tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies.

Climate scientists say nothing of the sort. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, one of the lead authors of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Reports, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and one of the pivotal international researchers in climate science, tells us in his book Earth: The Operators Manual, that about 100 reports have been published concerning the economic impacts of the solutions to climate change and they are focusing in on one thing.

The solutions to fixing our climate will cost about one percent of global gross domestic product every year for 100 years. This may seem like a lot of money ($540 billion a year), but it needs to be taken in context. Professor Alley tells us that the cost and effort required to fix our climate will be no more than what has been spent across this planet in the last 100 years installing our human waste collection and treatment infrastructure.

That’s right. The cost and effort required to clean up greenhouse gas pollution is really not so much different than the cost and effort required to clean up human toilet pollution.

It’s time to begin anew. Climate pollution is just that -- pollution. It’s no big deal, and a lot of people are going to make lots of money creating climate toilets to get rid of the climate pollution.

Part Three of this series will look at the validity of the trend: the validity of the public awareness trend and the trend of increased and unprecedented weather extremes caused by climate change. Completing this article, we explore public opinions on how the U.S. government should be treating climate change and some amazing numbers about how an active and vigorous position on “green” issues has been shown to win more political battles and races.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found at this link. More climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]


References

Fox News: Krosnick and MacInnis, Frequent Viewers of Fox News are Less Likely to Accept Scisntists Views on Global Warming, NSF grant, Stanford, 2010. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf
Feldman et al., Climate on Cable, Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, International Journal of Press Politics, XX, 2011. http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf
Scientific American Sidebar on Oregon Petition: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~kotliar/honors/honsem/somalwar/honsem/2002/articles/sciam_uncertainty.html
National Academy of Sciences Statement on the Oregon Petition: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04201998
Of 141 skeptical books on climate sicence, 92 percent were funded by conservative Think Tanks: Jaques, Dunlap and Freeman, The organization of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism, Environmental Politics, June 2008. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09644010802055576
The Bias: Oreskes, “The scientific consensus on climate change,” Science, December 2004. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
Doran and Zimmerman, Examining the Scientific Consensus, American Geophysical Union EOS, January 2009. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/ssi/DoranEOS09.pdf
Bray and Storch, A Survey of the Perspectives of Climate Scientists Concerning Climate Science and Climate Change in 2008, Institute for Coastal Research, Geesthacht, Germany, 2010. http://ncse.com/files/pub/polls/2010--Perspectives_of_Climate_Scientists_Concerning_Climate_Science_&_Climate_Change_.pdf
Farnsworth and Lichter, The Structure of Scientific Opinion on Climate Change, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, October 2011. http://ijpor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/27/ijpor.edr033.short?rss=1
Anderegg et al., Expert credibility in climate change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 2010. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.full.pdf+html
Goot, Anthropogenic climate change : expert credibility and the scientific consensus, Garnaut Review Secretariat, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/159903
Kruger Dunning Effect: Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, Psychology, December 2009. http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~suh/metacognition.pdf
Education can increase bias: Kahan et al., The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons, Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change, Yale Cultural Cognition Project, 2011.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
Toilet Pollution: Alley, Earth: The Operators’s Manual, W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, pp. 209-219.

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Steven Halliwell, To Russia With Love

To Russia with love:
A Rag Blog interview with Steven Halliwell

What Russia shows us is that there’s no easy fix. Getting to a common global discussion is the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2012

Steven Halliwell might be our ambassador to Russia -- had there been a revolution in the U.S.A. in the 1960s.

A member of SDS, and a protester arrested at Columbia in the spring of 1968, Halliwell has long been an outlier. In his SDS days, while most of his friends and comrades were gazing at China, Cuba, and Vietnam, Halliwell learned Russian and turned his eyes on Russian history, the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin.

Revolutions -- Russian and American -- have occupied his thoughts ever since 1963, when he traveled to the U.S.S.R, as part of the first student exchange program between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that helped, albeit in a small way, to end the Cold War.

The names have changed, of course. It’s not the U.S.S.R. or Leningrad anymore. Still, over the course of the past 50 years, Halliwell has gone back to the same familiar and yet not so familiar places dozens of times as a student, tourist, and entrepreneur.

Few Americans in or out of academia and in or out of the diplomatic service know Russia as well as he does, and few are as emotionally and intellectually connected as he is to the land of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, perestroika, Putin, and the new generation that’s demanding human and individual rights.

Born in New Jersey in 1943, Halliwell attended Wesleyan and Columbia, taught college in Vermont, and worked at the United Nations when Andrew Young was President Jimmy Carter’s UN Ambassador. In 1985, he joined Citibank and helped to open the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to American enterprise.

In 1994, he left Citibank to become the Chief Financial Officer of a U.S. Government-backed investment fund for Russia. From 1997 to 2010, he ran his own investment firm, River Capital International.

With his wife, Anne, he lives outside New York, not far from his children and grandchildren. I’ve known the Halliwells since the 1960s, and, while they’ve moved on from their days in SDS, they’re as much a part of SDS history as the SDS members, such as Mike Spiegel, Bob Pardun, and Carl Davidson, who served with Steve on SDS’s National Interim Committee in 1967-1968.

On the cusp of 70, he might be too old to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Moreover, the current U.S. Ambassador, Michael McFaul, is a friend. Behind the scenes, and at meetings, as well as over the Internet, he provides a living link between New York and Moscow, Americans and Russians, and between the land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the land of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

Steven Halliwell: To Russia with love.
Jonah Raskin: For decades, I’ve been listening to you tell memorable stories about Russia. What really sticks in your mind?

Steven Halliwell: Some moments are fun, others are sad. Lots of people died in the 1990s, including a banker who was a friend. The head of a company I knew was shot leaving his apartment and his seven-year-old daughter was killed. Early on, I took Russians through a Citibank trading floor -- a real market in action -- and inevitably they’d say, “it’s too noisy for anyone to work!”

You were in SDS and part of the New Left. How did that experience help you to understand Soviet communism?

Complete disconnect. Communism was a way to force industrialization and the modernization of agriculture. The New Left was about post-industrial society, and how to manage the incredible surplus created by technology in a democratic order. I found U.S.A. "Communists" – members of the Communist Party and Progressive Labor – to be troglodytes.

How did your New Left experience blind you to Russia?

Despite my training in Russian history in the 1960s, I thought that perestroika could lead to a new democratic political order and a market economy. Russians were more practically minded. They focused on surviving the collapse of the Soviet system and getting goodies -- TV's, laptops, pretty clothes, makeup, and credit cards -- from what they call the "civilized" world.

In 1968 and 1969, when activists and protestors thought of Russia they thought about the Russian Revolution, Lenin, and the Winter Palace. Now, if they think about Russia it’s probably about corruption, vast fortunes, and alcoholism. What’s the real Russia?

Alcohol was always an issue, and Russia has always been corrupt, including during the Soviet period. If a Politburo member needed surgery in London, they’d have an Aeroflot jet ready in hours. Same old same old.

As a student of history in the 1960s what drew you to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union?

Growing up in a WASP family in the 1950's, there was something liberating about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the big questions they posed in their writing. At the same time, Russia was the Enemy in the Cold War. I found the tension fascinating and started to learn Russian at 14.

It must be difficult to obtain accurate information these days from Russians about their own society because it’s closed in many ways. How do you do it?

I could tell you... but then I would have to kill you. But seriously, the blogosphere in Russia is very active. Of course, you never use Putin's name in a phone or Skype call because that's what the monitors are listening for.

I’ve heard you talk about the “backwardness” of Russian society. What do you have in mind?

Russia is so backward it might be forward. Russia, because of its geographical location, has been working for hundreds of years on how to reconcile Confucian, Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian traditions. What Russia shows us is that there’s no easy fix. Getting to a common global discussion is the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

How would you describe the Obama administration’s policy vis-à-vis Russia?

Michael McFaul, Obama's ambassador to Russia and a friend, is smart, pragmatic, and youthful. He and Hillary Clinton have the right mix of pressure and conciliation. The missile shield in Eastern Europe is the most volatile and hardest issue to address.

Is the ruling class of Russia essentially like the American ruling class?

I don't believe there is an American "ruling class." Russia's current rulers are heavily skewed toward ex-KGB people who only know how to take value, not add it. There’s a heavy criminal element at the top.

What does recent Russian experience tell you about democracy as a political system?

The most common slogan in the recent Russian demonstrations was "We are not cattle" -- an indication of the growing sense of individual rights. Russia has no history of incremental reform, which will make getting to democracy very difficult.

What do you love most about Russia and Russians?

Anne and I have met many beautiful, talented, dedicated people. There’s a creative intensity that goes hand-in-hand with hard-nosed survival in a dysfunctional world.

What do you most detest about Russians?

"Detest" is the wrong word. A young Mexican Sovietologist wrote an insightful article entitled "Russia as a Borderline Personality." The damage done by so many years of terror, corruption, absolutism, and murder is still very pervasive.

Did the fall of the Soviet Union influence the lives of ordinary Russians?

It's given the urban younger generation a chance to see how the rest of the world looks. Forty percent of 18 to 24 year olds say they’d like to emigrate. For poorer rural and industrial working people, the loss of the old subsidies (which were unsustainable) has been a nightmare. Essentially, power based on political standing has been traded for power based on money.

Do you see parallels between American and Russian radicals?

The history of the Russian Revolution, which I was studying at Columbia during the heyday of SDS, showed me that a student movement that idealized the downtrodden (in the 1860's) could turn to underground violence (in the 1880's). The same kind of cult-like idiocy in the U.S. destroyed a broad-based movement.

Is it possible for western investment in Russia to benefit Russian society as a whole and not simply a small elite?

There has already been a huge increase in the standard of living in Russian cities, thanks in large part to Western investment. The Russian elite has benefited, not from Western investment, but from stealing export dollars. Russia exports seven million barrels of crude oil every day. At $100 per barrel, that's $700 million dollars a day of hard currency. There are a handful of decent Russians managing profitable businesses that raise the standard of living, but most of the oligarchs with access to the huge flood of resource dollars use it to buy respectability in Europe and the U.S.

How do you feel when you see images and read stories about Russian citizens protesting Putin and his policies?

I hope it continues. Putin can’t tolerate widespread middle class dissent. He will crush the Internet if that proves to be an organizing tool. There are reports that Putin plans to create a National Guard of 300-400,000 troops answerable directly to him. He has also moved the former head of emergency response into the governorship of Moscow. Not good signs.

What kinds of legacies still exist from the days of the Cold War and the U.S./ U.S.S.R. rivalry?

As long the U.S. is a global power, there will always be issues and rivalries. At some point, the overseas Russian communities will play a seminal role in changing the place. As we learned in the civil rights movement, you can never break a police state from the inside alone. Overseas Russians will at some point take on the challenge of bringing Russia into the 21st century.

If you could be in Moscow next week what would a day in your life look like?

I have partners there and there are always interesting projects to consider. Business meetings are pretty much like here, as long as you stay away from government toadies. There are great restaurants now -- when I went to Moscow for Citibank in 1987, there was only one privately owned restaurant in the whole city. Now there are thousands.

You’ve known New York bankers and Moscow bankers? Are bankers more or less the same here and there?

Bankers are people -- some are good guys, some are rotten. During the 1990's, there was much more gangster-type banking in Moscow with automatic weapons at the doors. Today, the biggest growth area is consumer finance -- home mortgages, credit cards. There is still a very stunted corporate lending market, because companies are very opaque and lending is politicized.

What is it that links the Steve Halliwell of SDS days with the Steve Halliwell who has invested money in the Soviet Union and Russia? Are you the same person?

The main link is Anne, my partner and love of 44 years. We came to SDS from very different backgrounds and personal agendas, but somehow it has worked. She and I have evolved in our views over the years, as have our former comrades, but at the core we’re still the same people who fell in love inside the movement. It's been and continues to be a fascinating journey.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. A former Yippie, he is a a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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