From "The Declaration of Indepence" signed July 4th, 1776 in the then, American Colonies of Great Britain....:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "

Obviously, this is a part of American history which will not be emphasised on "Independence Day". 

For the abolition of wage-slavery,

Mike B)

In 1873, a wise Karl Marx wrote a parody -- a reductio ad absurdum --
of the anarchist arguments and added (my emphasis):

"It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism
were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would
make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these
doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so
naive as to attempt to deny to the working class *any real means* of
struggle. ***For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from
society as it is*** and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the
misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies
which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities,
under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm

I know that this flies in the face of most 'anarchist' thought.  Many self-described anarchists in the USA see non-voting as a measure of how hip people are to the corruption of bourgeois political democracy. 

But.....

Social-darwinism had a lot of adherents in the fascist movement, not the least of whom was Adolf Hitler.  Social-darwinism is a pseudo-scientific theory of human society, one which fits in quite well with capitalist notions of what "freedom" is.  Capitalism is a system which promotes negative freedom i.e. my freedom is your un-freedom.  Capitalism promotes competitive individualism and the sense that in order for someone to win, someone else must lose.   Thus, the dominant Ideology of any society is ever the Ideology of its ruling class, even in today's societies, dominated, as they are, by the ideology of the "free market".

In contrast with this dominant ideology, I think we should be promoting a co:operative view of freedom.  Freedom can be had when we are in solidarity with our fellow workers, when we see an injury to one being an injury to all.  What I'd like to see transcend capitalist class society of competitive individuals is a society where individuals co:operatively own the means of production and decide democratically what to produce for themselves.  What I'd like to see in contrast with the private ownership of the means of production is a association of producers who's moving principle is based on the notion that the condition for the freedom of one of them, is the condition for the freedom of them all. 

***********************************************************************************************************

from a public opinion survey:

Even more worrying, however, is the rise in the values that Adams 
categorizes as "Darwinism and exclusion." Those who embrace these 
values, he writes, demonstrate "a mindset that sees brutal 
competition as a natural, exhilarating, and even cleansing condition 
for human coexistence 'a dog-eat-dog world in which winners win by 
any means necessary, including violence, and losers get what they 
deserve ' and are unworthy of sympathy or help."

In fact, the single fastest-growing value in the U.S. over the 12 
years covered by the study was "acceptance of violence." It, and 
those values that support it, are certainly not the dominant values 
among American citizens at this time " but they are the values that 
are growing in acceptance faster than any others. And they are 
growing fastest among young people. When those aged 15 to 20 were 
asked to agree or disagree with the statement, "It's acceptable to 
use physical force to get something you really want," a full 38 per 
cent agreed. These values are also espoused by much higher numbers of 
the politically disengaged than by either Republicans and Democrats.

The over-all conclusion, Adams suggests, is that Republicans and 
Democrats both believe in the same over-arching vision. They believe 
that the state is a valuable tool to improve life for all citizens, 
that citizens have a responsibility to their community and to the 
larger society, and that the democratic process will lead to the best 
possible outcome for the largest possible number of citizens. They 
disagree, in fact, only on the details, the details of how much the 
state should provide help to the poor or tax relief to businesses, 
how much and what sort of aid should be given to developing 
countries, how far changes should go to guarantee principles like 
gender equity and equal treatment for immigrants.

Haters of politics

The politically disaffected, on the other hand, do not share this 
vision. They see political life as corrupt or ineffective or both, 
and have become convinced that the only person you can or should 
depend upon is yourself in this "survival of the fittest" culture.

full: http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/05/17/NonVoters/

<http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080625-faith-politics.html>

Non-Voters: It's All In God's Hands
By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
posted: 25 June 2008 11:20 am ET

People who believe that God is involved in worldly affairs are less 
likely to participate in national elections than others, according to 
a new survey.

The study, which included nearly 1,700 U.S. men and women with an 
average age of 53, suggests that a person's view of God is a variable 
that determines whether he or she will donate money to a campaign, 
read political news, or even vote.

"It can be reasoned that if one believes God determines worldly 
affairs, then there is little reason for individuals to participate 
in civic events," study leader Robyn Driskell and her colleagues 
write in the June issue of the journal Social Science Quarterly. "God 
is taking care of things."

Do we have inborn, genetic instincts or is everything about us socially constructed?  I mean, do we learn everything after birth or are we genetically endowed with instincts?

I can think of three things in humans which are instincts:

1.  The survival instinct is something we have in common with all animals.  However, we also have reason i.e. the ability to put learning together to create the ability to make e.g.: judgements, bridges and social systems.  Reason is historically tempered thus, at one moment in history, humans can override their survival instinct and go to war for say the glory of a king or a god and at another moment, with historical hindsight, they can see that such acts were absurd.  Think of how future generations may view our relative complacence about the number of nuclear weapons existing in the world today or our continued insistence on burning fossil fuels for energy.  Think about how absurd chattel slavery seems to you today and remember that at one time, only about 200 years ago, it was considered normal for certain people to own other people.

2.  Humans have an instinct for pleasure, at least, I think they do.  The instinct for pleasure, combined with the survival instinct gives us our sexual drive.

3.  I contend that humans have an instinct for freedom.  This instinct plays itself out in the human drama in many ways and as all instincts within the human animal part of the population is colored with reason, again learned cultural behavioural patterns and preferences. But do most animals have an instinct for freedom?  I'd say they do.  It's especially noticeable in wild animals.  In domesticated animals, it is less noticeable.  Humans are extremely domesticated and this relates back to our ability to reason. 

What do you think?

A lot of sociologists and psychologists don't think that humans have instincts. 

Click on this chart above, if you can't read it very well.  I couldn't.

Now, from the looking at this chart, one could conclude that we aren't paying anymore at the pump than we were in early 20th Century.  Maybe what's going on is that real wages have more or less stagnated.  I may have run this by you before, but check it out, the average U.S. hourly wage deflated by the consumer price index.

----

Year   average dollars per hour of work

1964 17.07

1965 17.44

1966 17.61

1967 17.88

1968 18.16

1969 18.32

1970 18.33

1971 18.72

1972 19.51

1973 19.48

1974 18.82

1975 18.39

1976 18.61

1977 18.78

1978 18.85

1979 18.29

1980 17.39

1981 17.11

1982 17.05

1983 17.23

1984 17.09

1985 16.99

1986 17.02

1987 16.83

1988 16.69

1989 16.55

1990 16.33

1991 16.15

1992 16.07

1993 16.00

1994 16.00

1995 15.99

1996 16.06

1997 16.30

1998 16.69

1999 16.94

2000 17.02

2001 17.19

2002 17.40

2003 17.48

2004 17.38

2005 17.28

2006 17.38

2007 17.57

Again, it should be remembered that the productivity 

of the working class has increased by leaps and 

bounds since 1964.  Productivity is "output per worker". 

Conclusion, the rate of exploitation

inherent under the wages system, has increased, 

while the wealth which workers produce

has also increased but their share has gone down.

Mike B)

That's right.  Bush lost that election; but went on to become President of the USA in the minds of most voters and of the world at large.  How could it be?

Well, the Ministry of Truth has something to do with this. 

Mike B)

***********************************************************************************************************

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

From George Orwell's 1984

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/1984-1-03.htm

*********************************************

New York Times Perpetuates the Myth that George Bush Won the 2000 Election

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on May 29, 2008, Printed on June 10, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/86585/

"In 2001 painstaking postmortems of the Florida count, one by the New York Times and another by a consortium of newspapers, concluded that Mr. Bush would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted throughout the state had been retallied." Alessandra Stanley, New York Times, May 23, 2008, in a review of the HBO television movie, "Recount"

That's not true.

The New York Times did not do its own recount. It did participate in a consortium. Here's what the consortium actually said: "If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin." Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2001.

Why did Ms. Stanley make such an important and fundamental error?

It is not a trivial matter. It is a common piece of misinformation. Many, many people believe it. Now a few more do, as a result of Ms. Stanley's review. It is not a trivial matter. Because that misinformation was created by one of the most bizarre, and still completely unexplained, journalistic events in modern times.

Here's what happened.

George Bush appeared to have won Florida , and therefore the presidency.

The law in Florida was actually quite simple and direct:

ƒ(4) If the returns for any office reflect that a candidate was defeated or eliminated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast for such office ... the board responsible for certifying the results of the vote on such race or measure shall order a recount of the votes cast with respect to such office or measure.

That is one of the simplest and most clearly written bits of legislation I've ever seen anywhere. The Florida court thought so too and ordered a recount. Then the United States Supreme Court stepped in and shut the recounts down. Bush was left as the victor and became the president. But, presumably, the whole world wanted to know who actually did get the most votes. It would make a great and important story. But getting the truth was too time-consuming and expensive for any single news organization, so a consortium was formed. It consisted of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Company, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times, the Palm Beach Post and CNN. It took almost a year and cost more than a million dollars. All the news organizations had the same information: Al Gore got more legal, countable votes than George Bush. Here are the headlines:

New York Times: "STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE"

Wall Street Journal: "IN ELECTION REVIEW, BUSH WINS WITHOUT SUPREME COURT HELP"

Los Angeles Times: "BUSH STILL HAD VOTES TO WIN IN A RECOUNT, STUDY FINDS"

Washington Post: " FLORIDA RECOUNTS WOULD HAVE FAVORED BUSH"

CNN.com: " FLORIDA RECOUNT STUDY: BUSH STILL WINS"

St. Petersburg Times: "RECOUNT: BUSH."

If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn't get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline, and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph -- if you got that far -- was the statement quoted above:

"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin."

There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcana about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Times dismissed what the consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes." That would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law, and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.

The rest of the story, another four paragraphs, detailed a variety of other possible recounts, all partial recounts -- these counties, but not those counties -- that the Gore lawyers or the Bush lawyers asked for at various times. Bush would have won all of those variations; he just didn't get the most votes in Florida . Not that the all variations mattered much. The Florida court had ordered a statewide hand recount.

The news story spinners hung their hat on a technicality.

Florida law, as affirmed by the courts, says a vote most be counted if there is "a clear indication of the intent of the voter." When the questions and lawsuits started, they were about undervotes. An undervote is when a voter has tried to vote but for some reason the counting machines fail to accept it. The most common cause, in Florida , which used a punch system, was that the punching device did not make a clear hole in the voting card. The piece of paper that was supposed to be knocked out, a chad, was hanging, or only broken on two corners, or merely dented. While the machines couldn't discern the "intent of the voter," the human eye often could. So we had the spectacle, and the jokes, about "hanging chads" as the recounts began. If only the undervotes were counted, by some standards of judging them, then Bush would have won.

But the consortium recount came across something else: overvotes. An overvote is when someone punches in the name of the candidate, and then, just to make sure, writes their name on the ballot. The machines could only read that the ballots had been marked in two places and threw them out.

But a human being, who saw that the place to vote for Gore had been punched and then that Gore's name had been written in, could easily determine the intent of the voter. So the reporters for the consortium kept track of those too, and found out that Gore actually won.

Had the people inspecting the votes in the actual recount also noticed overvotes, and would they have done something about them? The answer appears to be yes.

Newsweek has uncovered hastily scribbled faxed notes written by Terry Lewis, the plain-speaking, mystery-novel-writing state judge in charge of the Florida recount -- just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its order -- showing that Lewis was actively considering directing the counties to also count an even larger category of disputed ballots, the so-called "overvotes," which were rejected by the machines because they purportedly recorded more than one vote for president:

"Judge, if you would, segregate 'overvotes' as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter," Lewis wrote in a note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the Charlotte County Canvassing Board on the afternoon of Dec. 9, 2000. "I will rule on the issue for all counties, Thanks, Terry Lewis."

Newsweek, "The Final Word?" by Michael Isikoff, 11/19/01

That leaves us with a big question.

The largest, most prestigious news organizations in the United States -- pretty much in the world -- discovered a great and exciting story: The wrong guy was president of the United States . Also, that the Supreme Court of the United States had interfered in an election to frustrate the actual will of the voters. (Justice Antonin Scalia wants us to get over it.) Why did they so distort the story with misleading headlines, by burying the lead, by blowing so much fog and confusion around it, that almost everybody who read or heard the story walked away with the false impression that they had deliberately created? Created so successfully that the New York Times TV show reviewer is repeating it as fact seven years later.

There is no hard, on-the-record answer to that. None of the editors or publishers have come forward and said, "This is why we spun the story the way we did, even if it meant pissing away the million dollars we spent to get it." Nobody has, and nobody can, sue them for gratuitous misinformation and malfeasance, and put them in the witness box under oath to get to the bottom of it. There is only speculation. The story is dated Nov. 12, 2001, just two months after Sept. 11, 2001. We can imagine that they universally felt it was not the time to announce a pretender was on the throne and that the system was rotten, right to the top. But I sure would love to know how they all got on the same page about it. That would make a terrific story. Not as great as the one they threw away, but good enough.

I wrote to the Times and suggested a correction. At the time that I've submitted this, none has appeared. However, the Gray Lady did correct an article that appeared the same day about "Sex and the City" that got the number of its television seasons wrong. You have to know when accuracy is important.

Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian" and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." All available at nationbooks.org. His new novel, Salvation Boulevard , will be published in September by Nation Books. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net.

There are more than six billion people on Earth today.  I'd like to see that total reduced through family planning to around one billion.  Be that as it may, most of this six billion and growing population would prefer to eat lots more meat than they do at present.  People in the industrialised countries already eat tonnes of meat and the figures for worldwide meat consumption grow by the day. 

Think about it: one cow needs seven acres of land to feed on.  That seven acres could be used in other ways, like producing more plant food or allowing it to remain wild with say, rainforest.  Plants actually take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put oxygen in.  Plants are the lungs of the world.  That's why we don't want to be cutting down the rainforests. 

But of course, there are the capitalists who own things like beef and land and need to cut rain forests down to provide pasture land for use in animal husbandry so that they can make profits. 

I've taken up vegetarianism for over a decade now.  I don't miss meat at all.  I don't even buy those fake meat substitutes.  I didn't  become a vegetarian to save the world or to save the animals or anything like that.  I realise that we have to have power to change the world and that's why I'm in the IWW.  I became a vegetarian because, to my mind, it's the civilised thing to do, if you live in places where you don't have to eat meat.  I realize that Eskimos have to eat meat.  I also realize that Eskimos have way more PCBs in their bodies than I do because they eat the meat of seals and such.  Poor seals and Polar Bears...they're suffering high levels of PCBs and other toxins because of the careless industrialisation processes which have taken place under the rule of Capital.  Hell, lots of fish now have way too much mercury them.  But that's another story.... 

The little piece below is an excerpt from an environmental organisation's web site.  There's no sense in re-inventing the wheel and writing this piece myself.  They do a good job of linking methane to global warming and animal husbandry: 

******************

Methane and Vegetarianism
By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture.

Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. Whereas human sources of CO2 amount to just 3% of natural emissions, human sources produce one and a half times as much methane as all natural sources. In fact, the effect of our methane emissions may be compounded as methane-induced warming in turn stimulates microbial decay of organic matter in wetlands—the primary natural source of methane.

With methane emissions causing nearly half of the planet’s human-induced warming, methane reduction must be a priority. Methane is produced by a number of sources, including coal mining and landfills—but the number one source worldwide is animal agriculture. Animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tons of methane a year. And this source is on the rise: global meat consumption has increased fivefold in the past fifty years, and shows little sign of abating. About 85% of this methane is produced in the digestive processes of livestock, and while a single cow releases a relatively small amount of methane, the collective effect on the environment of the hundreds of millions of livestock animals worldwide is enormous. An additional 15% of animal agricultural methane emissions are released from the massive “lagoons” used to store untreated farm animal waste, and already a target of environmentalists’ for their role as the number one source of water pollution in the U.S.

The conclusion is simple: arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products. Simply by going vegetarian (or, strictly speaking, vegan), we can eliminate one of the major sources of emissions of methane, the greenhouse gas responsible for almost half of the global warming impacting the planet today.

full: http://earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm

The thing is that if you're powerless, your mental abilities tend to fail you.  Give you power and "Voila!", an increase in IQ.  Now you know the secret to higher mental powers lies in organisation in the IWW. The power is yours to have. For there is power in the union!  To stay an isolated individual is to remain a subaltern for the rest of your life.  I'd be more afraid of that than the possibility that if you stand up for yourself in union with others of your class that you MIGHT get beaten back by the authorities. 

Mike B)

***********************************************************************************************************

Feeling powerless is no fun. A lack of control can make the difference between contented and unhappy employees. But new research shows that a lack of power doesn't just make people feel disgruntled. It has a more fundamental effect on their mental skills.

In a series of experiments, Pamela Smith from Radboud University Nijmegen has shown that the powerless actually take a measurable hit to important mental abilities. Even if people are subconsciously primed with the concept of being powerless, they perform more poorly at tasks designed to assess their ability to plan, focus on goals and ignore distractions.

According to previous research, a lack of power forces people to constantly re-evaluate their own goals and monitor more senior individuals. Without authority, a person's actions rely on instructions and may constantly change at the whim of their superiors, whose own motives and goals must be guessed at. Monkeys show similar behaviour. Studies have found that subordinate rhesus males follow the gaze of those with higher status, while dominant individuals only look in the same direction as others with greater standing.

Smith reasoned that this constant re-evaluation draws the brain's resources away from other needs, including a set of mental abilities known as "executive functions". The term is loosely defined but accurately named and refers to a set of master processes that govern and control more basic abilities, like attention and motor skills. They allow us to plan for the future, adapt to new situations and carry out our goals. They allow us to carry out actions that further our goals while restraining us from those that hamper them.

"I have the power"

Smith used a variety of psychological tests to investigate how power, or a lack of it, affects executive function. The first of these, a "two-back task", involved watching a sequence of letters flash by and saying if the current letter matched the one shown two cycles ago. The test requires people to continuously work out if new information is relevant to a set goal.

About 100 volunteers took the test and Smith split them into superiors and subordinates. All were told that they would do a practice run, then work together with the superiors in control. After the test, the subordinates would be paid according to evaluations from the superiors, who would themselves receive a fixed payment. In reality, the "practice run" was the real deal and as predicted, the subordinates made more errors than their powerful superiors. It was an interesting first result but didn't account for the possibility that the subordinates were just preoccupied with their impending evaluation.

The second experiment was subtler. No specific roles of authority were dished out. Instead, Smith subliminally influenced the participants' feelings of power by asking them to unscramble a set of innocuous sentences. The scrambled words either related to power (authority or dominate) or the lack of it (obey or subordinate). After this psychological "priming", the volunteers did a Stroop test, designed to ascertain their ability to suppress irrelevant responses that won't help them to achieve a goal.

The goal was to say if different words were written in red or blue ink. If the words were unrelated to colour, the power-priming had no effect on their performance. Likewise, there was no effect if the words were colours written in matching ink (e.g. "red" written in red). In both these conditions, volunteers found it easy to focus on the task as hand. However, if the word and ink were mismatched (e.g. "blue" written in red), the test became more difficult and the low-power group made more errors.

 The third experiment built on the skills needed in the previous tests and looked at the more complex executive ability of planning. Smith used the classic Tower of Hanoi game, where players have to move a pyramid of discs from one pole to another, one at a time, and without placing a larger disk atop a smaller one. 

Again, they were primed beforehand with feelings of high or low power by writing about a time when they had control over someone or when someone had control over them. And again, the low-power group performed more poorly than the high-power one, taking more moves to shift the disks.

"Respect mah authoritah"

The poorer performances of the powerless groups were not for lack of trying. Smith administered a series of questionnaires after the tests in which all volunteers reported making the same amounts of effort and were equally motivated to successfully complete the tests.

The results have strong implications for both societies and businesses. The majority of us would want to avoid a world where social hierarchies are purely based on characteristics like gender or race. We would prefer to live in perfect meritocracies, where even people from disadvantaged groups can ascend to positions of power if they are talented high achievers.

But this mindset is perhaps too facile; if we assume that the powerful are swimming in skill or motivation, it follows that the powerless are lacking in both. That certainly wasn't the case in Smith's experiments. The volunteers were split into different groups randomly rather than based on known skills or talent. Despite this, they still showed more powerful executive functions if they experienced power, or even the mere concept of it.

These results suggest that poor performance of those that lack power does not provide sufficient evidence that power has been allocated fairly. An alternative explanation is that assigning someone a certain position can alter their mental skills in a way that confirms their standing. The powerful retain power because of the improved mental processes that it brings about, while impairments in the same processes keep people without power on the bottom rung. These effects make hierarchies incredibly stable, and lead the powerless into what Smith calls "a destiny of dispossession".

Power doesn't have to come through rank - it can also be assigned on a case-by-case basis. Delegating jobs to people isn't simply about telling them what to do; good managers will hand over not only tasks, but the authority to carry out those tasks. Employees tend to perform better if they have the ability to make their own decisions within certain confines, and take ownership of their own work. The alternative - peering over their shoulders and dictating their every move - is a sure-fire route to poor results.

The results are especially interesting for professions where stakes are high and errors can cost lives, such as medicine, or where critical events are rare and goals must be kept firmly in mind, such as security. In such situations, improving the executive functions of employees by awarding them greater self-sufficiency and authority seems to be a no-brainer.

Reference: Smith, P.K., Jostmann, N.B., Galinsky, A.D., van Dijk, W.W. (2008). Lacking Power Impairs Executive Functions. Psychological Science, 19(5), 441-447.

More here, including links to the Hanoi game:

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/05/feeling_powerless_impairs_higher_mental_abilities.php

******************************************

http://elbo.ws/video/O93YpTYCWRk/

My love's a cantina where I drink with my friends;
I've called her Dolores and sometimes Cheyenne;
I followed her begging all over the West;
My love is a headlight on the midnight express.

My love is Montana and the high Douglas fir,
Many long summers I've labored for her.
My love is the wind-rows of dry Autumn corn
That grew on the land where my children were born.

My love is the life that a boomer will lead,
You have bought her with lies and chained her with greed;
My love is a dreamer, I follow the dream;
You say she's a beggar, I say she's a queen.

Final chorus:
Someday she'll be mine,
Someday she'll be mine,
I've won all her treasures so simple and fine,
I know someday she'll be mine.

Music can be found at: http://www.utahphillips.org/songbook/shellneverbemine.html

Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips (aka Utah Phillips)

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Utah Phillips  May 15, 1935 - May 24, 2008 - Your Spirit Lives On in All of Us

"Friends,

I received the very sad news today that we lost Bruce Utah Phillips.   
There are so very many of us who will sorely miss that utterly unique  
and precious individual that Utah is.

He passed on during the night last night, and his wonderful partner  
Joanna was with him.  It is good that he was at home in the beautiful  
place he lives, with the partner he loves, and good that he has been  
aware of the huge outpouring of love and support for him over the  
last few months, as so many benefits were organized for him, as he  
has struggled with his heart problems.

As it happened, I got the news as we were commemorating Judi Bari  
Day, the anniversary of the bombing that nearly killed Judi back in  
1990.  As many of you know, Utah was with Judi just before, helping  
strategize for Redwood Summer, and when we finally went to trial to  
sue the FBI in 2002, Utah was the most entertaining witness to  
testify, helping bring that irreverent humor that Judi loved into the  
courtroom. I called Utah day before yesterday to tell him we would be  
out in the street commemorating Judi Bari Day, and thinking of him  
too.  So when we wrapped up our event today, I got to say, fist in  
the air, Viva Judi! Viva Utah!

Here is a link for the annoucement on kvmr, the radio station in  
Nevada City, along with his update letter from May 15, just a week  
and a half ago: http://www.kvmr.org/utah_letter.html

We await word from the family regarding what will happen in terms of  
remembrances.  Keep Joanna in your prayers.

love, kp"

http://www.iww.org.au/

and via the Bureau of Public Secrets comes this:

Folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips, a "national treasure" if there
ever was one, died last Friday, May 23.

His performances featured the songs, jokes and lore of hobos, tramps,
cowboys, migrant workers and Wobblies. Although he made a number of fine
recordings, he was most truly in his element in live performances, where he
knew how to draw the audience into a song or story and would leave us
cracking up with laughter at some outrageous punch line that would
unexpectedly pop up in the middle of his apparently rambling reminiscences.

You can get a little taste of this experience from this video of one of his
last performances, posted online in eight parts (totaling about an hour) --
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wsFmcFMeME
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd4yNMo5r14
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D07S-m7h9Q
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks-LmHAGouQ
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cQMvkDU558
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9C93WLtpYc
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOscaTfHLFs
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZtJdNIUcC4

Here is his famous "Moose Turd Pie" story --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSlPJOfnJZk

A few more video clips can be found here, along with various other
performers doing some of his songs --
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22utah+phillips%22

For more recordings and links, see http://www.utahphillips.org/
The obituary below is drawn from that site.


* * *

"Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California:

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed
extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years,
died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small
town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years
with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the
son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early
life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips
demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working
people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early
twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth
in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to
popularize it.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he
would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by
the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the
United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country.
His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning
combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips
was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got
off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a
homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the
Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his
"elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he
later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences
could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were
often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the
ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from
influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas
Tyler.

A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips
the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy
of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and
carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a
surprising variety of fields.

Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran
for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The
race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some
Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the
State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."

Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed
into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena,
operated by Lena Spencer.

"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed
everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in
what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of
thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United
States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie
Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.

"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working
people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by
writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language
so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still
owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was
about."

A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story
about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From
then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording
career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy
nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris,
Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a
Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.

Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage
fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him
improving.

Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004,
and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally
syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM,
and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where
down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at
the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25
to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his
mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.

Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is
survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City;
son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington,
D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and
daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers
David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and
Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a
grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips
and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.

The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223,
Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144
www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org

* * *


****************************************************
Messages such as this are sent out every month or so, usually announcing the
latest additions to the BPS website, but occasionally (as in the present
case) providing other information or commentary about current events. If you
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BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
http://www.bopsecrets.org

Many of us suffer from delusions of immediacy.  If we get a cold day in summer, we think, "What global warming?"

For climate change skeptics, the overwhelming pile of scientific evidence and consensus amongst climatologists, doesn't matter as much as their own personal opinions and observations.  This is part of the phenomenon which is known as 'cognitive dissonance'.  Cognitive dissonance is also at work amongst people who refuse to see how the capitalist system actually operates to underdmine their lives.

The following is from a program, I listened to this past weekend on ABC Radio National.  It's a rational explantion of what is going on with climate change and its skeptics.  There is an audio version you can get to via this link:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2008/2249809.htm#transcript

Mike B)

***************

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Robyn Williams: Three weeks ago Professor Don Aitkin presented the first of two talks outlining his concerns about climate change orthodoxies. He's a former Vice Chancellor at the University of Canberra and former Head of the Australian Research Council. He was moved to examine climate when preparing a book about the future, not because he's involved in any special interest lobbies.

This week Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University answers Professor Aitkin. He's a frequent visitor to this country and has been Thinker in Residence in South Australia.

Stephen Schneider: I'm often asked, "Is the science of global warming settled?" And I can't say that it's all settled or all unsettled, in fact it's a foolish question, because when you deal in a complex system science like climate, some parts of the problem are well-established, they are settled. Some parts of the problems have competing explanations-we have two or three ideas, and one of them is likely to prove right-and some parts are speculative. Too often, people confuse the speculative with the well-established or claim that because of the speculative components, nothing's settled.

In his talk, Don Aitkin challenges the well-established, and suggests that most of it is speculative. He admits to not being a climate scientist because of which he says his credibility has been challenged; Aitkin's comment was "either I was trespassing on someone else's patch, that is, only scientists can talk about these issues, and I was not a scientist, or I was a denier, someone who, in spite of the authority of the IPCC and the weight of scientific opinion, was persisting in error. Some of these critiques had a religious tone to them, as though I was challenging central spiritual beliefs."

Because Aitkin challenges the efficacy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), I think it's necessary at the outset to say first who I am and what the IPCC is so that we can put a relative weight on the credibility of independent non-scientific critics and the thousands of scientists associated with IPCC.

Personally, I've studied climate change for over 35 years and participated in all four Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, plus the two IPCC synthesis reports. These reports are peer reviewed by literally thousands of people, and then government approved by 130 governments. Each report is produced by teams of scientists under this extensive review process, and while government representatives may comment, the scientists are actually under no obligation to incorporate these suggestions. But they do have to justify how they deal with each of the many thousands of comments to a series of review editors, who screen all authors' responses to comments to minimise any hints of bias. The IPCC reports which are published every five or six years present the best current approximation of a worldwide consensus on climate change science. With nearly 4,000 people participating from over 130 countries, each new report is probably the most scrutinised scientific document in the world.

I would like to remind people to compare that rigorous process with the individual comments made by people who aren't publishing climate scientists and thus aren't subject to rigorous peer-review.

One important feature of the IPCC reports is the quantified assessment of the likelihood of each major conclusion coming to pass. When the IPCC ascribes likelihood to a scientific finding, it doesn't take those terms out of its left ear, rather the terms used reflect a specified range of certainty, anywhere from extremely unlikely, which is defined as less than 5% chance, to very likely, which is a greater than 90% or extremely likely, which is a greater than 95% chance.

The IPCC reports also include the explicit assignment of the authors' confidence in the underlying science that backs up each of the major conclusions. So IPCC statements are qualified by the degree of confidence that the scientific community can assign to them, given the state of the scientific literature. This is done to separate out the aspects that are well-established from those with competing explanations, from those best labelled as speculative. This practice contrasts markedly from most of the media and political debates in which the well-established conclusions are often mixed together with speculative ones, resulting in public confusion. The IPCC attempts to be an antidote to this frequent misrepresentative presentation of climate change science as largely speculative or at best competing explanations by some, when in fact a large fraction of the primary conclusions are made with high confidence, and only a smaller fraction are properly characterised as speculative.

In 2007, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report said that warming is 'unequivocal', and that's absolutely right. There are multiple lines of scientific evidence that show unequivocally that the earth's global average surface temperature has risen some three-quarters of a degree Celsius since the 1880, the earliest year for which reliable global instrument records were available. Not every part of the planet's surface is warming at the same rate, of course, and some parts are actually slightly cooling. That does not trump the fact that the vast majority of areas are warming, and finding local exceptions does not disprove the global average.

Through 2006, 11 of the last 12 years rank among the warmest on record, and in fact 2005 is in a virtual tie with 1998, as the hottest year on record globally since 1880, despite having a weak El Nino at the beginning of the year and normal conditions for the rest of the year. El Nino is an east-central Pacific Ocean oscillation, a period of warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures that influences weather conditions across much of the globe with major impact on fluctuations in the earth's temperature from year to year, and on regional climates, including droughts or floods in Australia, or in South America.

So, thermometers don't lie. Likewise, plants don't bloom earlier in the spring by accident, nor do birds come back earlier from migration by chance alone. Some don't act in the way you expect, and that's why we average them all up to find out if the climate coin, if you will, is loaded, and it is. It's loaded in precisely the direction one would expect with warming: temperature-sensitive plants are blooming earlier in the spring, and birds are coming back earlier from migration. Those species that are sensitive are changing in the direction expected with warming. This doesn't prove the case, but it's supporting evidence along with thermometers, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other factors that lead the IPCC to conclude that it's unequivocal that warming is indeed going on.

30 years ago this was rejected by many, including yours truly. What is new is that back then it was mostly theory, and in the three or so decades since the mid-1970s, when warming became more likely than cooling in most assessments, what we're seeing is that nature has been co-operating with theory-we are observing much more evidence of warming. That is why there's such concern all around the globe that we need to cope with climate change and its impacts. Unfortunately, there are some self-professed climate contrarians who try to discredit the strong scientific consensus, by citing what they believe to be data that disproves the consensus. Rarely are such contrarians front-line climate scientists, in contrast to the CSIRO or IPCC assessors, who are. And too often they indulge in polemical tactics. Some environmental activists also exaggerate the risks by citing false trends. For example, after a big volcanic eruption that took place in 1992, the earth's temperature cooled a few tenths of a degree Celsius globally for a few years; whereas in 1998 it set a warming record because of a Super El Nino event. It would have been irresponsible for any environmental advocate to selectively "cherry-pick" that short-term data time series and claim that warming from 1992 to 2000 is scary proof of accelerated warming. Likewise, there are those like Don Aitkin who unfortunately claim that the few years from 1998 until now, falsifies global warming because there's been little warming trend in the wake of the Super El Nino of 1998. Real climate trends must be defined over decades, not a few years.

That Don Aitkin indulged in such false contrarian science is sad, and I'm afraid is all too representative of the scientific merits of most of his arguments in his talk.

Such contrarians ascribe to the false god of falsification, that is, a critic finding one or even several lines of argument contrary to mainstream consensus who then claims they have falsified the conventional conclusion. That's how simple science used to be done. For example, if you have a liquid in a test tube, and you want to know if it's an acid or alkaline, one piece of litmus paper can falsify a wrong preliminary hypothesis. But in complex system science, like tobacco and cancer, or greenhouse gas build-ups and climate change, hundreds and even thousands of studies are needed to build a consensus. A few dozen exceptions do not remotely falsify the vast preponderance of accumulated evidence. System science is based on preponderance of all the evidence, not on a few exceptions.

A very strong result in the same direction no more proves global warming than one or two exceptions disprove it-rather it requires a look at hundreds and even thousands of studies. It can take decades to reconcile incomplete elements of a complex systems analysis, but rarely do a few contrary results entirely throw out a consensus built on decades of consistent lines of evidence. So the so-called climate contrarians have borrowed this technique of false falsification from the tobacco lobbyists of a few decades ago and still get press out of it, pushing tiny minority opinions, but claiming because of their objections there is thus no scientific consensus. If when defining consensus it is meant that all climate scientists agree, then such a definition is never likely to be achieved, as a few dissenters always inhabit every field. Moreover, there are still many aspects of climate systems science in the competing explanations and even speculative categories. However, if by consensus a much more sensible criterion is used, which points to what the vast bulk of knowledgeable climate scientists believe the preponderance of evidence suggests, then IPCC is clearly representative of a strong consensus that anthropogenic warming is very likely and its consequences include some dangerous outcomes that become much more serious with each additional increment of warming, even though remaining uncertainties are still significant.

Warming is unequivocal. That's clearly demonstrated. But frankly, that's not a very sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much is the climate that Mother Earth reveals to us is due to natural variability (attributable to nature), and how much is caused by us? That's a much more sophisticated, and difficult question.

Is it possible that natural fluctuations of the earth's climate could produce the temperature record since 1880? Using a variety of methods to detect the human "fingerprint" on observed warming trends, scientists are finding overwhelming evidence that the answer to this question is "No." For example, the earth's stratosphere, some 10 to 50 kilometres above the surface, has cooled while the surface warmed. That's a fingerprint of increased atmospheric greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances, not a fingerprint of an increase in the heat output of the sun, which would have warmed all levels of the atmosphere. So claims that "the sun did it," are largely refuted by this lack of a large solar fingerprint in the records of climate change in the past half century, as well as the fact that all the observations from satellites and other direct measures, show very little change in total energy output from the sun-there are no differences that are nearly enough to explain what's been observed.

As I said earlier, "Some climate science is settled, and some isn't." For example, how much will it warm up in 100 years? To address that, we have to consider two fans of uncertainty: first, the earth's natural response to human pressures, like a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide over pre-industrial levels expected some time in this century-that's the so-called climate sensitivity. And there's a second fan of uncertainty: human behaviour. How many people will there be in the world? What will our standards of living be, and what technology will we use to achieve those growth-oriented goals? That determines what our emissions are, which determines how much pressure we put on the climate system.

We have about an uncertainty factor of, say 2 or 3 when predicting the future greenhouse gas emissions based on different scenarios of social and behaviour and technical outcomes, as well as an uncertainty factor of about 2 or 3 when predicting the climate sensitivity, the internal dynamics of the climate system which includes questions about how clouds can amplify or damp the heating from greenhouse gas build-ups and a whole range of processes we call feedback mechanisms. After 35 years of studying this, unfortunately, we're no closer to resolving this uncertainty than we were back then.

Put these factors together and our projection for the future is that it is likely that the best we can do is a temperature increase of about 1-1/2 to 2 times more than the ~.75°C increase in warming that we've had so far. That's the best. Not a wonderful scenario, but certainly much more adaptable than the worst published upper range of the prediction, which is an increase of around 6-1/2ºC by 2100. And I can imagine even worse cases than that which go above 6.5ºC. That kind of change is the temperature difference between an Ice Age and an interglacial cycle. It would be like going from the cold of 18,000 years ago to our current warm period in a 100 to 200 year time span, rather a 5,000 year transition-an outcome that virtually all climate impacts scientists would view as potentially catastrophic.

Even though Don Aitkin challenged the Kyoto process and the need for climate policy, in light of the risks involved, I would argue that we have to have climate policy which requires co-operative solutions-a ton of carbon emitted in Beijing does exactly the same damage to the ecology as one emitted in Boston or in Brisbane. We have to make deals that involve trust and co-operation. We're wonderful at competition, but we're pretty lousy at co-operation.

I do continue to ask the scientific question, "Can we narrow those two fans of uncertainty, human behaviour and climate sensitivity?" Yes, we can, but it's going to take us decades before we narrow the uncertainty very much. What is more important is to initiate co-operative solutions so that we can lower the probability of the highest risks and that keeps me and most of my colleagues very busy.

Is it serious? Aitkin suggested not. He said, "There have been other warm periods in the past, just as there have been other cool periods. Yes, carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing, but it is not plain that they are causing temperatures to rise, and they are not harmful to us, at least yet."

So does it matter if we warm up only 1 or 2 degrees Celcius more, versus say 4 or 6 degrees? If a 2-3 degree warming occurs, the IPCC estimated that there's about a 50-50 chance that approximately 20% to 30% of species known in the world could face extinction. Ecosystems and the important services that they provide humankind are already being significantly modified with the relatively modest increase of ¾ of a degree temperature over the last 150 years. This process will be accelerated with higher temperatures. With the 0.75ºC increase, we've seen more frequent and/or more intense heatwaves like that in Europe in 2003, in which over 50,000 people died. Europeans were completely unprepared; nobody predicted so many people would be vulnerable. We've seen intensification of hurricanes and the destruction of New Orleans, the latter of which is not specifically due to global warming, but rather due to insufficient levees. But global warming adds an increment of extra oomph to the hurricanes, and that extra oomph is predicted to get very significant in the decades ahead resulting in more severe damage.

So let me conclude by discussing the policy implications. A continuation of business as usual raises a series risk management concern, given that the likelihood of warming beyond a few degrees before the end of this century and its associated impacts, is a better than even bet. Few security agencies, businesses or health establishments would accept such high odds of potentially dangerous outcomes without implementing hedging strategies to protect themselves, to protect societies and to protect nature from the risk of climate change in this case. This is just a planetary scale extension of the risk-averse principles that lead to investments in insurance, deterrents, precautionary health services and business strategies to minimise downside risks of uncertainty.

Simply, let's not take the chance. Let's slow it down and fix the emissions balloon over this century at a small fraction of the growth rate of the GDP, though that may still represent trillions of dollars of investments in clean technology. It sounds scary, but it's a small fraction of the rate at which we add money every year to the growth rate of our economy. Though macro-economically it's not a very large reduction in the growth rate of the economy to get unhooked from fossil fuels this century, it will be a big blow to those who mine coal or make overweight cars and trucks. So in addition to protecting the stability of the climate, good governance also has to deal with the people who are hurt along the way by policy, primarily with side payments, job retraining and other actions, so that we can help get them through the transitions to clean technology and not have them endlessly forming political blocking coalitions. In essence, we can't hold the sustainability agenda of the planet hostage to maintaining precisely the same jobs that were always there for everybody in perpetuity, but at the same time we must be fair and help them through the transition.

These are complex issues which should not be simplified by ignoring the vast consensus built in the IPCC, the CSIRO, the US National Academy of Sciences, and challenged by a small band of people who represent only themselves.

Robyn Williams: Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University. Both this talk together with a part broadcast last week on The Science Show, and Professor Don Aitkin's two talks are on the ABC Radio National website. Next week, Mark Dodgson in Queensland on failure. I'm Robyn Williams.

Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.

Beyond Voting

THE LIMITS OF ELECTORAL POLITICS

Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:

        (1) Unrestricted freedom
        (2) Direct democracy
        (3) Delegate democracy
        (4) Representative democracy
        (5) Overt minority dictatorship

The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token
democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .

In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials. The candidates’ stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues — apart from the feeble threat of changing one’s vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician. Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in “democratic” regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don’t even know who they are. . . .

In itself, voting is of no great significance one way or the other (those who make a big deal about refusing to vote are only revealing their own fetishism). The problem is that it tends to lull people into relying on others to act for them, distracting them from more significant possibilities. A few people who take some creative initiative (think of the first civil rights sit-ins) may ultimately have a far greater effect than if they had put their energy into campaigning for lesser-evil politicians. At best, legislators rarely do more than what they have been forced to do by popular movements. A conservative regime under pressure from independent radical movements often concedes more than a liberal regime that knows it can count on radical support. (The Vietnam war, for example, was not ended by electing antiwar politicians, but because there was so much pressure from so many different directions that the prowar president Nixon was forced to withdraw.) If people invariably rally to lesser evils, all the rulers have to do in any situation that threatens their power is to conjure up a threat of some greater evil.

Even in the rare case when a “radical” politician has a realistic chance of winning an election, all the tedious campaign efforts of thousands of people may go down the drain in one day because of some trivial scandal discovered in his (or her) personal life, or because he inadvertently says something intelligent. If he manages to avoid these pitfalls and it looks like he might win, he tends to evade controversial issues for fear of antagonizing swing voters. If he actually gets elected he is almost never in a position to implement the reforms he has promised, except perhaps after years of wheeling and dealing with his new colleagues; which gives him a good excuse to see his first