CRUCIFYING SOCIETY, AND NATURE, ON A 19TH CENTURY CROSS OF MARKET AUSTERITY
The Right Is Trying To Build A Bridge To The 19th Century
Today, we go with a guest post from good friend, citizen, and superb writer, conservationist, and historian, Bill Neil. Bill frequently writes on issues in political economy and intellectual history, an entire field of thought that is virtually ignored by our media, political debates, and anemic civic institutions.
For those that don’t know Bill, he was once director of Conservation at NJ Audubon – before Audubon went corporate and entrepreneurial – when they had a leading voice in the land use and conservation debate. Bill is now retired and lives in Frostburg Maryland (contact info provided upon request).
Feel free to skip this intro and scroll down to read bill’s piece. But if you’re interested, Bill’s old “Green Gram” columns are still on line at the Audubon site – but here’s a taste of Bill’s work: an assessment of a 2001 controversial hearing on Liberty State Park – 15 years later, things actually seem to have gotten worse (an all to frequent story of effective grass roots activism that is either ignored, co-opted, or betrayed by the Foundation funded State groups – emphasis mine):
The Future of Liberty State Park’s Interior
An estimated 600 or more citizens turned out on Saturday, January 27, 2001 for a NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) hearing on the future of the interior of Liberty State Park, held at the theatre of the Liberty Science Center. NJAS staff, board and members were among the hundreds in attendance. The hearing was triggered by a NJDEP committee process (over NJAS protests) which allowed a commercial waterpark option back out on a policy table we thought had been already cleared and restricted to a quiet recreational and environmentally secure green park. Prominent among the early promoters of the commercial waterpark proposal were Jersey City Mayor and gubernatorial hopeful Bret Schundler and Liberty State Park Development Corporation head Peter Ylvisaker. Mayor Schundler, who seems to have badly misread the mood of his hometown base, conceded his proposal’s defeat well before the public hearing – but had to endure hearty booing from the ever vocal Jersey City residents, residents who have become very protective of the great potential of their beloved Liberty State Park. We would say that opponents of the waterpark outnumbered supporters by about 3-1. Some of the loudest cheers were reserved for calls for the abolition of the Development Corporation. NJAS was particularly moved by the standing ovation given to Sam Pesin, President of Friends of Liberty State Park, who delivered the speech of his life to defend the “free and green” park – a park whose genesis lay in the vision of Sam’s father, Morris Pesin. […]
We only wish that the state-wide environmental community could come together to fight for a State Plan with teeth with just a quarter of the spirit, energy and vision that the Jersey City folks have displayed time and time again in defense of their urban oasis. In a political world where environmentalists seem to have been outflanked by big money and the subtle straight-jackets of non-profit politics, and are taken for granted and easily managed by both major parties, it’s nice for once to see the power of direct, outspoken democracy deliver a message: face-to-face, on stage, prime time. When we dare again to dream of an truly environmentally invigorated citizenry, and fully democratic institutions, we will have in mind the two animated, out-spoken public hearings in Jersey City that have helped saved this wonderful park from a commercial golf and water park.
So, with that overly long introduction, here is Bill’s piece – he was responding to this Letter attacking the concept of social justice and government’s role in promoting it, see: Government’s role is to serve, not to create chaos
Dear Editors of the Cumberland Times-News:
Jim Hinebaugh’s Letter to the Editor of April 7 ought to worry every high school and college history teacher in our region, and every citizen as well. It sets out a vast, distorted and simplistic equation that government today is bad, undermining the individual’s “moral compass,” and, by its pursuit of “distributive or social justice,” creating instead general moral and social chaos. Filling in the rest of the equation, it vastly idealizes the 19th century’s small government and entirely virtuous private sector. Given this allegedly “moral” equation, it must therefore demonize the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the 1960’s War on Poverty.
I write as a green New Deal social democrat, and my first response is to ask, “whose government is this?” that Mr.Hinebaugh hates so much, because I am as unwelcome in today’s Democratic Party as I am in the party of the Republican Right and Libertarians. I’ve been no fan of former Governor O’Malley (or of Bill Clinton) who gave the green light to fracking, which can’t be made safe by even the toughest of regulations. He also thinks families can survive at Maryland prices on $10.10 per hour. Both parties are floated by the secular “Great Flood” of corporate money, and they listen to Wall Street’s and Silicon Valley’s fables more than to the vastly diminished voices of labor and the middle class. For the bottom 60% of us, there is no economic ark in sight.
Which 19th century is Mr. Hinebaugh referring to, the Antebellum society of Lincoln’s boyhood, where 80% of the citizens were farmers, the rest small business owners or craftsmen – or the vast industrial and financial trusts of Mark Twain’s Gilded Age, the late 19th century, when government of, by and for “the people,” and presumably the “public interest,” turned into government of, by and for the predatory capitalism that literally bought governments from Charleston to Harrisburg to Washington, DC. By 1896, Lincoln’s virtuous small producers were not so happy with the exercise of the property rights of the railroads and banks, or the golden monetary system. It led William Jennings Bryan to demand that these powers not “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Today the average citizen, in Annapolis and Athens, is again being crucified upon the cross of fiscal Austerity preached by the banks and practiced in every state capital – the true secular religion of Gov. Larry Hogan as well as Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps, Mr. Hinebaugh, we should all take pride in our international banks and corporations having raised up millions of Chinese peasants out of poverty while sinking our own “rustbelt.” That’s the polite cover story of both parties to the reality: that they wanted to chase the mystical “China Market,” like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, to clamp American labor into the chains of wage penury and vast credit card debt. What a virtuous crew! But they had noble ancestors, didn’t they, in that glorious late 19th century?
We all must ask where your “demon” big government came from, what caused it to rise from its weaker role in the 19 century, a role which still saw the need for large public works to get those small producers’ products to the ever expanding markets, via canals and “national highways,” like Route 40 in the heart of our area? Could a larger role for government have possibly been generated by the failures and power abuses of the private sector economy, the one that produced the Panics of 1819, 1825, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1907, the last resulting, at banker urging, in the creation of the Federal Reserve?
These panics did not stand alone: they were accompanied by years of recession and even depression, and the hard times that followed the one in 1873 led to the great railroad strikes and violence of 1877, after wages were repeatedly cut, yet dividends raised, on the B&O Railroad, our region’s very own, no less. The strike went national and viral, and blood was shed in Martinsburg, WVA, Baltimore, MD and Pittsburgh, PA and great turmoil erupted in Cumberland, MD as well. And relevant to the question of private property and “whose government is it?” the Governor of Maryland in 1877, a famous Carroll family member, John Carroll, was intimately connected to the railroad, committing his own money as well as the public’s to build it. “Ditto” for the City of Baltimore, although I’ve never heard that from “Rush.” No surprise then, when Carroll called Maryland state troops out to defend the “railroad’s” property.
Only the government is sowing moral chaos? The world of MAD Men, of private corporate advertising doesn’t, and doesn’t track us down now through every alleyway of life, from cradle to grave, a private sector version of 1984, worthy of the old Kremlin itself? And when we walk through the doors of our virtuous private sector employers, we can kiss any notion of our Bill of Rights goodbye, just as the coal miners had to in that wonderful 19th century of yours.
What do you suppose President Woodrow Wilson meant when he said in a speech in the 1912 campaign, that “‘the truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless’”? He went on to write that small entrepreneurs would come to him and tell him privately about the aggressive, predatory tactics the robber barons would use to drive them out of business. Wilson said he couldn’t publicly broach the methods, good defender of capitalism that he was, but he didn’t like what he heard. And no one has ever said Wilson wasn’t a grand “moralist.”
And what do you think the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter meant by his term the “creative destruction” of capitalism? He at least knew that private economic power could turn existing moral and social fabrics inside out, create great turmoil, leave whole industries, regions, depressed even as others sometimes boomed.
Karl Polanyi, the other great economist from 1944, wrote The Great Transformation about the rise of industrialism and the character of the 19th century, and then its collapse in the 1930’s. He saw the growth of government as the direct response to the fact that no one, businesses or average citizens, or even nature itself, could survive the workings of the “pure” free market system as presented in the 1830’s and 1840’s in England, birthplace of classical economics, and its demands of “hands off sacred private property, no interventions.”
Finally, Jim, you paint an entirely benign picture of the workings of private property, as if giant economic powers have not grown out of its premises, and dumped their industrial and chemical wastes into the citizen’s commons of the air, the water and into the very food we eat, as well as trying to, under their religiously repeated, ritual calls for deregulation, to make the public pay for the cleanup, if we get any at all. “Deregulate, will you, even as we ‘consolidate.’”
So where do you want to take us back to Jim? I think Polanyi has a great description of where you want to go, that idealized 19thcentury world, on the very opening page of his book:
“Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.”
Under the sway of conservative economic and environmental theology, we’re well on our way again to the catastrophes foreseen by Polanyi in those first two sentences, written well before there was an organized “environmentalism.” Thus it was an early introduction by him to our day’s Austerity, Global Warming and Fracking. He liked the New Deal, the one that the Right and corporate Democrats have buried and distorted. You too. I left in Polanyi’s concluding sentences above to show that he knew that government interventions were not all good, that they could be problematic in a complex world: an honorable concession to a fair historical summary. He reminds us to always ask: “whose government is it?”
Maybe I “Better call Saul” for help.
Sincerely,
Bill Neil, Frostburg Maryland