Inequality And Terrorphobia-- Linchpins Of America's Conservative Consensus

terrorism?

You probably read earlier today that the 85 richest people own nearly half the global wealth, right? The role of conservative government everywhere in the world is to either maintain or increase the share of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. That is the only real reason conservative parties exist. Progressive parties aim to decrease the share of the wealth the elites control and lower economic inequality. Here in the U.S., the Beltway Republicans fit the classic conservative model. The Beltway Democrats, to be fair, are mostly not trying to help the rich grab a bigger share. Most of the party just wants to maintain the status quo inasmuch as it helps their Members stay on their career trajectories. Some Democrats-- progressives-- would like to reform the system, but they're a small, struggling minority. The corporate media makes sure they remain small and remain struggling.

The 85 richest people on Earth own 46% of its wealth-- the same amount as the bottom half of the population-- according to a new report that highlights growing income inequality as political and business leaders gather for the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The findings undermine democracy and make it more difficult to fight poverty, said British humanitarian group Oxfam International, which released the report.

“It is staggering that in the 21st century, half of the world’s population own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all sit comfortably in a single train carriage, said Winnie Byanyima, the group's executive director.

"Widening inequality is creating a vicious circle where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs from the top table," she said.

In a report last week, the World Economic Forum said widening income inequality was the risk most likely to cause serious damage in the next decade.

President Obama recently called the expanding gap between rich and poor a bigger threat to the U.S. economy than the budget deficit.

The United States has led a worldwide growth in wealth concentration, according to the Oxfam report, titled "Working for the Few."

The percentage of income held by the richest 1% in the U.S. has grown by nearly 150% since 1980. That small elite has received 95% of wealth created since 2009, after the financial crisis, while the bottom 90% of Americans have become poorer, Oxfam said.

And that brings us to philosophy professor Peter Ludlow's fantastic essay in yesterday's NY Times, Fifty States of Fear. Ludlow wrote a brilliant OpEd on the surveillance state. What does that have to do with economic inequality and conservatism? Ah, ha! Key question!

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, writing as World War II was drawing to a close in Europe, observed that “neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” Russell’s point was that irrational fear can propel us into counterproductive activities, ranging from unjust wars and the inhumane treatment of others to more mundane cases like our failure to seize opportunities to improve our everyday lives.

…Even democracies founded in the principles of liberty and the common good often take the path of more authoritarian states. They don’t work to minimize fear, but use it to exert control over the populace and serve the government’s principle aim: consolidating power.

Philosophers have long noted the utility of fear to the state. Machiavelli notoriously argued that a good leader should induce fear in the populace in order to control the rabble.

…Since 9/11 leaders of both political parties in the United States have sought to consolidate power by leaning not just on the danger of a terrorist attack, but on the fact that the possible perpetrators are frightening individuals who are not like us. As President George W. Bush put it before a joint session of Congress in 2001: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Last year President Obama brought the enemy closer to home, arguing in a speech at the National Defense University that “we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States”-- radicalized individuals who were “deranged or alienated individuals-- often U.S. citizens or legal residents.”

The Bush fear-peddling is usually considered the more extreme, but is it? The Obama formulation puts the “radicalized individuals” in our midst. They could be American citizens or legal residents. And the subtext is that if we want to catch them we need to start looking within. The other is among us. The pretext for the surveillance state is thus established.

…One way in which our fears can be manipulated by the government is to lead us to fear the lesser danger. Schneier provides a simple example of this: 9/11 caused people to irrationally fear air travel and led them to the much more dangerous route of traveling in automobiles.

Another such example of this misdirection of fear took place in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, in which the Boston Police Department effectively imposed martial law and seized control of people’s homes and used them as command posts in their effort to apprehend the perpetrators. The bombings were terrible (three people died and more than 260 were injured), but just two days later another terrible thing happened: a giant explosion in a fertilizer plant in Texas killed at least 14 people and injured more than 160. For a moment we held our collective breath. Could it have been terrorists?

When we learned that it was probably an accident caused by the ignition of stored ammonium nitrate, a collective sigh of relief was heard, and then not another word about the event. But why? And what if the explosion in that factory was part of a larger problem of industrial safety? In fact, according to a report by the United States Congressional Research Service, thousands of industrial facilities across the country risk similar harm to nearby populations.

Meanwhile, 300,000 residents of West Virginia were without safe drinking water last week after 7,500 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol leaked into the Elk River from an industrial storage tank at a plant owned by a company called Freedom Industries. Few, if any, of the Sunday TV talk shows discussed the matter, but imagine the fear that would have been pedaled on those shows if terrorists had poisoned the water of those 300,000 Americans. Of course the danger is the same whether the cause is terrorism or corporate indifference and malfeasance.

Dangers are not limited to large scale events. In 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4,383 workers were killed on the job, and it has been at this level or higher since 9/11. In other words, we suffer a 9/11 every year in terms of workplace fatalities.

But the problem is not limited to workplace deaths. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. estimates another 50,000 die every year from occupational diseases. And none of this accounts for the thousands of workers who are permanently disabled each year.

In total, 54,000 Americans die every year due to work-related illnesses and accidents. This is the equivalent of 148 deaths each day; in terms of fatalities it is roughly a Boston Marathon bombing every half hour of every day.

But while we spend more than 7 billion dollars a year on the T.S.A.’s national security theater in which over 58,000 T.S.A. employees make sure we are not carrying too much toothpaste or shampoo onto airplanes, the budget for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is under $600,000 per year. It seems that our threat assessments are flawed.

We are conditioned to fear persons in caves in Pakistan but not the destruction of our water supply by frackers, massive industrial accidents, climate change or the work-related deaths of 54,000 American workers every year. Fear of outside threats has led us to ignore the more real dangers from within.

…Fear is a primal human state. From childhood on, we fear the monsters of our imaginations, lurking in dark closets, under beds, in deserted alleyways, but we also now fear monsters in the deserts of Yemen and the mountains of Pakistan. But perhaps it is possible to pause and subdue our fears by carefully observing reality-- just as we might advise for trying to calm and comfort a fear-stricken child. We might find that, in reality, the more immediate danger to our democratic society comes from those who lurk in the halls of power in Washington and other national capitols and manipulate our fears to their own ends.

What are these ends? They are typically the protection of moneyed interests. In 1990, the Secretary of State James Baker tried to make the case for the first Gulf War on economic grounds. “The economic lifeline of the industrial world,” he said, “runs from the gulf and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline.”

That rationale, although honest, did not resonate with the American people — it hardly seemed to justify war. The George W. Bush administration abandoned the economic justification and turned to fear as a motivator. We were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. If we did not act against him, the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice argued, the next thing we would see might be a “mushroom cloud.”

This playbook of fear has not been limited to motivating military actions. Environmentalists, once ridiculed as “tree-huggers” are now often characterized as “environmental terrorists”-- as individuals we should fear and neutralize. The hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, who exposed the nefarious dealings of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor and its clients, was characterized as someone seeking to cause “mayhem” by Federal District Judge Loretta Preska when she sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

In each case, the images of mushroom clouds, environmental terrorists and agents of mayhem were used to justify actions that would otherwise seem excessive-- all in the service of protecting corporate interests.

Whatever their motivation, by using fear to induce the rollback of individual rights, politicians, judges and lawmakers are working against the hard-won democratic principles and ideals that we and other democracies have defended for almost 250 years. They are manipulating our fears to undo centuries of democratic reform. And it doesn’t matter if the empowered leader is called a king or a prime minister or a president; the end result is that fear has been used to place us back under the yoke of Hobbes’s sovereign and Machiavelli’s prince.

Admission: over the weekend, my friend David and I went for a hike. By the time we got to the start of the trail, there were hundreds of cars looking for parking spots-- hundreds. David asked if there was some other trail. I have good parking karma so I continued to hunt and boom! the best spot imaginable within a couple of yards from the beginning of the trail, opened up. I zoomed right to it. And test as I got there a woman jumped in front of my car and announced she was saving the spot for a friend. There was no friend in a car and I told her to get out of the way. She was willing to die for the spot and she was soon joined by her husband who agreed they were saving the spot for a friend who they had apparently called on the phone. I demanded they get out of the way. The refused to budge. Obviously it never crossed my mind to run them over, but I was now blocking traffic. I saw two dumb-looking cops standing around under a nearby tree avoiding the sun. I yelled that there were terrorists blocking my parking spot and the two cops swung into action and dragged them away, expelling that parking in the park were on a first-come-first serve basis and that there was no such thing as reserving parking spots. They were pissed... but the cops had uniforms.