Neither Left, Center Nor Right

NEITHER LEFT, CENTER NOR RIGHT

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 4, 2011

I’ve recently been chastised for being left, for being Marxist. I’m a deviant. I aim to minimize the harm my deviance does to others. At the same time, in defense of my ego, I insist that I am simply myself, not a conformist within any group seeking political patronage.

If I’m on the left, how come I side with the late great political conservatives William Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman on ending drug prohibitions? If I’m on the right, how come I favor public employment over privatization? If I’m in the center, how come I take any political stands at all in principle?

Political labels have no appeal to me. They call on me to subjugate my feelings and beliefs to a larger political platform. That amounts to asking me to join an established religious army in pursuit of some higher truth than I have been able to work out for myself

Charles Darwin pointed out that diversification of adaptation promotes survival of my species and our terrestrial ecosystem. I figure that humanity that I worship is better served by me the more I resist pressure to conform politically and professionally. In her research my mother Pauline Pepinsky distinguished negative conformity—oppositional politics—from nonconformity—forging one’s own path independently of social expectations. It turns out that she has captured my imagination. I welcome nonconformity wherever I encounter it; I strive to resist conformity in my life as a contribution to life potential for my species and the capacity of our environment to sustain us.

I was trained in sociology that deviance is bad. In my mother’s terms, I resist by seeking productive nonconformity. I am neither left, center nor right. Love and peace--hal

Adam Smith on Corruption

CORRUPTION

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 3, 2011

I’ve been thinking about the lesson Adam Smith taught me about the limits of freeing trade and allowing the invisible hand to serve the common good. In book 4, chapter 2, Smith introduces the invisible hand, and then at paragraph, explains that free trade will never happen:

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia*64 should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the public, but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it. Were the officers of the army to oppose with the same zeal and unanimity any reduction in the numbers of forces with which master manufacturers set themselves against every law that is likely to increase the number of their rivals in the home-market; were the former to animate their soldiers in the same manner as the latter enflame their workmen to attack with violence and outrage the proposers of any such regulation, to attempt to reduce the army would be as dangerous as it has now become to attempt to diminish in any respect the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us. This monopoly has so much increased the number of some particular tribes of them that, like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature. The Member of Parliament who supports every proposal for strengthening this monopoly is sure to acquire not only the reputation of understanding trade, but great popularity and influence with an order of men whose numbers and wealth render them of great importance. If he opposes them, on the contrary, and still more if he has authority enough to be able to thwart them, neither the most acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest public services can protect him from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists. (quoting from http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN13.html#B.IV,%20Ch.2,%20Of%20Restraints%20upon%20the%20Importation%20from%20Foreign%20Countries ).

Smith was writing about the effect of government-granted deals where to encourage private investment, the liability of investors was limited. If the enterprise folded, investors were legally shielded from losing more than the money they paid for shares. The East India Company was a leading place to invest at no personal risk in an enterprise where to encourage investment beginning with Queen Elizabeth in 1600, where English corporate monopolization of markets was encouraged by tax incentives: Your tea gains exclusive exemption from import taxes to stimulate tea drinking.

Smith noticed that the privilege of incorporation corrupted legislators. Now in the US where the supreme court has given corporations all the constitutional rights of just plain people, legislators who amass mightier campaign funds become indebted to for-profit corporate forces that drown out constituent initiatives. When legislators introduce legislation written for them by lobbyists, when they make external blanket pledges as on taxation, I join Adam Smith in observing that domestic practices are as corrupt as practices in any country US politicians and media point fingers toward. Why pretend to have risen above crime and corruption? Love and peace--hal

Privatization as crime

THE MOVEMENT TO PRIVATIZE

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 2, 2011

The movement to sell off state assets to for-profit corporations at bargain basement prices took hold when Margaret Thatcher became British prime minister in 1979. I ask my criminological self how to label this privatization movement, and I call it criminal in its real world effects.

From my own Anglo legal tradition, this movement constitutes organized robbery of state resources. That is, politicians force sale of public assets with threats that unless public services are sold to private investors, no one will feed and satiate the political appetite of youth who compete for jobs with their elders. And so prevailing politicians from Ms. Thatcher forward have accelerated global ripoffs of state services.

When I lived in Magomeni Makuti on the outskirts of Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam in 1990, young girls walked community streets during the day because their families could not afford the school uniforms required by the International Monetary Fund to secure IMF loans. Now in my country and in Europe in particular, financial “technocrats” are requiring Greeks and Spaniards and Italians and Portuguese and Irish to sell off state assets and workers to whatever private corporate bidder comes along to reduce this or that national debt. What a racket!

I don’t believe in personal blame or punishment. How many of us who can afford it invest in Wall Street to pay for our retirement? Privatization is steeped in innocence and “best evidence” of how to achieve “stability” in our ever-changing world. Still, privatization is a crime.

“Socialism” and “class warfare” have been politically vilified in my country since before Karl Marx started writing. During the Cold War in my country politicians pointed to the Soviet Union as a drab and intrusive alternative to “neoliberalism.” Now when in my part of the world public sector workers are singled out for privatization (as in public schooling), I seek appreciation of public ownership of social assets. Love and peace--hal

Pulling yourself: a thought

If you're going to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, how do you get those bootstraps?

Did the coach at Penn State do it?

I’m responding to your question of the day about whether the former coach at Penn State charged with sodomizing children did it. I speak as someone who for the last 18 years of my career in criminal justice devoted my primary attention and effort to hearing and sharing stories and cases of sexually assaulted children. Overwhelmingly, they were not believed by child service investigators, expert witnesses, and judges when they sought protection. I and my students also celebrated the healing among the many survivors , and thanked them for the evidence and stories they presented to us.

I appreciate the concern for children’s safety represented by the current wave of media/public/political revulsion of child sexual assault and the harm it does indeed do. but I think asking whether listeners believe the coach is counterproductive.

In England, the media are generally forbidden from naming people charged with or arrested for crimes until and unless they are convicted in court. I wish media in the US would follow their example. If I don’t I know whether the coach is guilty, I can’t believe anyone else knows better, including WOSU listeners.

I will venture this hypothesis: that if the accusations charged are true, then the coach is only one actor in locally, possibly nationally and internationally organized child trafficking. In my experience in these cases those who take the fall for serial child rape and torture just enable us to cut off wider investigation of organized traders in children who chalk up the legal loss as a cost of carrying on business undisturbed.

personhood

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF PERSONS: CORPORATE RIGHTS

Hal Pepinsky

November 9, 2011

Yesterday an initiative in Mississippi to make every human embryo entitled to all rights of “personhood” failed, but I’m intrigued by the logic behind the drive to protect persons’ lives.

The US Supreme Court has reaffirmed that for-profit corporations chartered by state secretaries of state have all the rights of “persons.” So I wonder by the logic of rights of persons: Isn’t it the case that once chartered, a corporation (formerly inc now llc) cannot be killed by competitive corporate persons or by state-organized liquidation, who are arguably criminally guilty of voluntary manslaughter? The right to life of persons is huge. Love and peace--hal

re laws to limit public workers' rights

A message sent to npr "Talk of the Nation" this Nov. 2 on Ohio ballot issue 2 to repeal restrictions on public workers' rights:

From: Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 2:18 PM
To: talk@npr.org
Subject: Isn't Ohio sb5 just one of 16 idential bills...

...written by the American Legistlative Council (ALEC) most prominently founded by the Corrections Corporation of America--the world's biggest prison-industrial private prison operator--to wine and dine and supply principally Republican state legislators w/o regard to anything come from their own constituents? We find ourselves in a race to an ALEC-sponsored race to the bottom, where the rationale for Ohio SB5 is for is that public employees ought to be brought down to the level of impoverishment of those who work for whatever pitiful jobs and lack of benefits offer, An ugly ALEC initiative promoting corporate for-profit global greed. regards--hal


Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com, 519 Evergreen Circle, Worthington, OH 43085-3667, 1-614-885-6341


ps--Ohio Gov. Kasich was a Lehman Bros vp and promoter, thence promoted to politics; how's that for knowing how to create jobs?