Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Unfinished business June 2018 in pdf for margin problem

DR AFT Started Oct 13, 2016 revised May and November 2017, now full re-edit June 2018

“It is my hope that this election will serve a great national purpose, that it will remind the people of the United States of the unfinished business before our country …..” JFK at Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, New York, September 28, 1960

In 1960, John Kennedy saw his job as setting before the American people “the
unfinished business of the nation.” In the fifty eight years since then, along with some disasters,
our country has had great achievements and has developed extraordinary capabilities. But we
have just come through the 2016 election of Donald Trump that felt bizarre, even apocalyptic,
and that has left us fallen a long way off Kennedy’s path. It is baffling and troubling that today,
rather than looking ahead, we are being dragged backward into repetitive rear-guard struggles
on old issues, while major forward political and national decisions go unaddressed. It is a
serious matter because the tasks ahead of us that we are not reaching are broad and deep and
consequential for our future.

I see three sets of national “unfinished business.”

Climate Protection

One is a physical task, not actually a political one, but nonetheless
a world-historical imperative, and a test that we are failing. We must do our part to end soon the
grave damage to the earth’s atmosphere from carbon dioxide emissions, coming mainly from
energy production and use. This is a matter of investment and engineering, but nonetheless it
is so broad that the political sector must orchestrate indispensable public support to move
decisively on it, using all of our very large capacity and fully exercising our international
leadership in the decarbonizing direction.

Although government must lead and coordinate the conversion to renewable energy, a
great deal of the investment and work itself will be done by our dynamic private economy. A
substantial carbon tax should steer the energy industries in the right direction, closing the period
in which climate protection legislation, like the Waxman-Markey bill of 2009, has suffered
relentless political obstruction. Carbon emissions should be attacked massively and urgently
with large resources from a carbon tax and from savings from a reduced military budget.

This means national leadership and coordination for a radical modernization of our
power generation and distribution system. It will include broad moves to invest in wind and
solar generation, decentralization of production, and greater efficiency in the use of energy. We
need new ways and new equipment to store and transport intermittent electricity to achieve
smooth and reliable distribution of non-fossil power. This is required not only for existing
traditional uses, which themselves are intermittent, but for thermal pump heating of homes and
buildings. The project certainly includes speeding up the adoption of electric vehicles at the
same time that transportation more broadly, especially urban or metropolitan mobility, is
modernized.

Authorities like Mark Jacobson and his team at Stanford have outlined how this massive
transformation in our economy can be done. “Shovel-ready” projects should be in preparation
now. An intense “war-footing” decarbonization of the economy can make us a leader in the new
technology of renewable energy, possibly including nuclear power generation. As World War II
helped end the Depression of the 1930’s, a major clean energy investment and construction
drive will create large new employment, solving for a time our deep and growing
underemployment problems, while for the longer run, it will give us cheaper (and domestic), as
well as non-polluting, energy.

Reducing Economic Inequality 

We must reverse our society’s evolution toward the highly unequal income and wealth distribution, which Sen. Sanders rightly described as grotesque. As many economic analysts, such as Joseph Stiglitz, point out, the present maldistribution of wealth handicaps rather that supports and stabilizes economic growth. Economic growth is needed to expand the “social space” needed for our society to do well by old groups and identities, such as working class white men, and new ones such as racial and sexual minorities, women, and immigrants.

The United States is an incredibly rich and productive society, as well as a large and
technologically dynamic one. The challenge in front of us could be put, “how do we become
rich?” Narrowly and unequally, or broadly and inclusively? Opportunistically or with a steady
long-term perspective? Do we consume heedlessly, or do we invest as a society for the
elimination of poverty and for future stability and productivity? Do we create a framework of
generosity and cooperation for the broad production, diffusion, and use of many forms of wealth,
or do we allow a self-absorbed financial minority of the prosperous continue to hoard and
dominate? It is clear that a wealthy minority is well fortified politically to avoid better sharing with
the great majority. We know from the work of Richard Wilkinson that the burdens of inequality
are very heavy indeed on those who are economically and socially left behind or kept in a
precarious situation. A fruit of present inequality is that many members of the threatened middle
classes of our society are left deeply ambivalent about modernity, and feel the estrangement
and anger toward establishment elites that came to the fore in the election of 2016.

We should not so much take existing possessions away from the wealthy, a recipe for
bitter resistance and conflict, as rather re-structure the future flow of goods and services so that
they are distributed to a much larger swathe of society, in principle all Americans. This certainly
implies a much more progressive tax system, and could well advance to a society which sees
many basic necessities, such as education, medical care, food, and good housing, as free or
entitlements, rather than having to be purchased in a market. There is a huge literature and a
rich real-life history of struggles and proposals for reform on this subject. Intellectual leadership
is offered by the Roosevelt Institute, and there are many examples of how to achieve an
egalitarian and free society of high production and consumption, notably those of Scandinavia.

Starting from our present position, this task is not easy. Climate protection or national
medical insurance, both politically frustrated for decades, are child’s play compared with
achieving a more equal and balanced society (along with many concomitant cultural changes)
through democratic and peaceful politics rather than through revolution. But the United States
must nonetheless move into and against this distortion of our society steadily and with
unflagging purposefulness on many fronts, including reducing the role of money in politics itself.
Real progress in ending poverty and setting new, more egalitarian patterns of post-capitalist
economic flow should be achievable in the coming decades, and this should ameliorate present
social tensions.

Foreign Affairs--Demilitarizing our Presence in the World 

A third major needed change is also 180⁰ away from the Trump administration’s aims, and may go against the grain of many Democrats.

Since 1990 we have been the sole world superpower. This has been internalized in the
minds of many Americans as the only way that we can exist in safety and security. That false
national belief has been institutionalized in our pervasive, costly, military-industrial complex, and
in our large “intelligence community.” However we must now educate a broad domestic
American public to set aside illusions of an American exceptionalism, to be less pugnacious,
and to outgrow a misplaced hyper-anxiety about American power and security.
In many cases, the U.S. suffers from too much, rather than too little, concentrated power
in our own hands. Our defense budget has been disproportionate to the military spending of
other countries for decades. The task now, and the real path to national and international
security, is rather to diffuse and spread order-keeping power and responsibility rather than
concentrate it upon ourselves. We need to share leadership and to broaden the collective
international security system’s base so as to increase its stability and durability.

That is not to urge a reactionary neo-liberal alliance of status quo powers. We must
accept that a good international order may well be less based than in the past on our own
American patterns, for example, the corporate-centered market economy with a problematical
distribution of wealth that is often summarized as the “Washington Consensus.”
We must understand the new cyber-environment, with its dangers and vulnerabilities,
(and a perishability of secrets) that are entirely new and unfamiliar.

Critically, our public must come to understand and support foreign policies based on the
reality that our true interest and security lie in a less isolatedly dominant and militarized position
for the United States. We must begin to behave in a different way, and to build an international
politics of such a character that we are not funnelled by our own preconceptions and anxieties,
as if sleepwalking, into a catastrophic conflict with China, or even an extended, resourcedraining
cold war with a rising Asia.

Superpowers can’t retire, it is said. Not so. Superpowers as system creators, like the
founders of a family firm, must retire, and share leadership or pass it on to successors, rather
than cling to it. A patriarch or a hegemon can retire gracefully and gradually, with a voice in a
coherent succession, or can cling to power and be driven from it through force. It’s obvious
which path leads to safety and prosperity, and which to ruin.
We should be a leading participant in the international search for a world order that will
protect us and all countries. There does exist a consciously system-preserving, conflict-abating
role in world politics, above and beyond the preservation of specifically national interests, and
we should do our share in fulfilling it. But beyond the very short range, this function is not one
for a single paramount nation, nor is it uniquely ours. We should continue to invest in an orderly
world system and in its maintenance, but not alone, and not primarily militarily. We need an
order of orderly change and adaptation, a flexible order, open to legitimize and institutionalize
new realities as they emerge, and to discard old ones as they fade or become maladaptive,
minimizing local chaos and violence in transitions.

Concretely, there are four major international issues.

-- The modernization and rise of China, four times larger that us, is endogenous
and inevitable. Seeing it primarily as a challenge to us, thereby imposing reflexively on
ourselves a mission to frustrate or “contain” China, will lead to waste and grief,
potentially on the largest most tragic scale.

-- The Middle East is in modernizing as well as sectarian turmoil, and likely to be
so for many years. Our dependence on this region for energy supplies is waning, but we
are tied to a client state in Likudist Israel which clings to policies of expansion and
confrontation, rather than “two state” conciliation with Arab and Persian populations
around her. This risks drawing us into wars, including the Sunni-Shia conflict, that are
not ours. We must regain our distance and our free hand.

-- Although no longer in the daily forefront of the public mind, there are now in the
world nuclear arsenals in several countries of different levels of stability and technical
capacity to manage weapons of mass destruction. That management is largely done by
computer controls, and the weapons are carried by equally highly technologized delivery
platforms, such as rockets and submarines. In a certain number of cases, weapons are
on hair-triggers and could be put into action, killing millions of people, in time intervals of
hours, even minutes. The possibilities of error, human or electronic or both together, are
almost infinite, so that taken all together and on all sides, this system which has almost
silently grown up over decades, is incredibly dangerous. We felt a tremor of the danger
in the recent, and perhaps not yet finished, confrontation with North Korea. Another way
in which the lethal genie could escape the bottle was shown by the April false
emergency missile alarm in Hawaii. This was a brief, low level human error not in actual
weapons control, but merely in a subsidiary system of public notification, which it
nonetheless took many hours to reverse and control after computerized systems were
activated. President Obama tried to lead us away from the precipice by signing an
international nuclear restraint agreement, but the Administration and right wing forces in
the Congress drove us in the wrong direction by the most recent nuclear policy
statement and by a large increase in the budget for nuclear weapons development,
which President Trump has since backed.

-- Around the world, in perhaps a very large-scale swing of a cyclical pendulum,
we see a growth of right wing and nationalist feeling. It has not become majoritarian and
politically governing in most countries, but it is felt in many. Such “traditional” disgruntled
and indignant mindsets are prone to “traditional” conflict between countries, and to
violence, which surely with new technologies will come in new forms. The re-rise of
populist nationalisms will make the world more dangerous. Apart from managing such
elements within our country, we have to think long and hard about how to reinforce
international peace and cooperation against such a trend.

For the promising but dangerous new world, our American public needs a lot of
education. It must be better prepared and more comprehending, gradually letting go of
traditional casts of mind and naive visceral illusions, such as our own “exceptionalism.” In part
because we are technically and economically far better off than before, we can give up the
practices, privileges and institutions of the 20th and earlier centuries. such as war itself, that are
no longer relevant or needed. To educate and guide the U.S. public toward this maturation and
reform, even softening, of national attitudes on leadership and security is itself a major piece of
“unfinished business” for our political leadership.