Their websites indicate that Tea Party Patriots contrast their backgrounds with those of immigrants. TP Patriots are "home grown" Americans whose number one  political principal is this: "America is good".(see the 9/12 Declaration)

   That's an interesting contention, especially if we recall that our nation opened its doors to the world's immigrants in 1965 only because America was bad, very, very bad.

    More specifically, it was the ideological grandparents of today's home grown patriots who bear ultimate responsibility for forever transforming the ethnic composition of the American people.

     Start in1900, when some angry and anxious Americans sponsored a movement to "Americanize the Immigrant". They even went so far as to "swat the hyphen", i.e., anyone who identified as Polish or Irish or Italian-American. You were 100% red, white and blue or you were nothing.

      By 1924 so called nativists controlled a Congress where Representative Elton Watkins (R., Oregon) openly expressed this belief: "A half caste is a failure in most cases...the half caste Indian is a failure; the half caste black man is very likely to be a failure; but the half caste oriental is worse. He seems in the majority of cases to inherit the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. It makes as a rule, a bad product".

   In response, nativists used the 1924 Immigration Law to deny the right of "Orientals" to ever immigrate to the United States. After 1924, the quota for Chinese, Japanese and other "Asians" was zero. Hate and fear ruled the day, as Congress excluded an entire continent.

      That still left the "locusts", the Italians, Polish, Portuguese, Greeks and Spanish "creeping up in New York, one block at a time". In response, Congress decided to spray "raid" on the ethnic insects. In computing the number of immigration slots in any year after 1924, Congress used 1890 as a benchmark. Theoretically, everyone would be treated equally because any nation would receive a quota of 2% of its 1890 population.

    Since the vast majority of the voracious locusts arrived after 1890, Congress claimed objectivity as it used prejudice to slam the immigration doors in the face of almost everyone on earth. To nurture America's "native" core, from 1924 to 1965 roughly 60% of all immigration slots went to three nations: England, Germany and Ireland. The rest of Europe fought over the crumbs; as late as 1964, Italy received 5666 immigration slots, Greece 308, Spain 250, and Portugal 438.

   John Kennedy inherited an immigration policy rooted in open and poisonous prejudice. Part of his political constituency -especially Italians and Greeks- demanded change while, in forums like the United Nations, "Orientals" accused Americans of hypocrisy. If everyone was created equal,  why did Americans treat Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Indians with so much contempt? Did Congress still believe, as it argued in 1869, that Chinese people were so low on the racial totem pole that they were "incapable of assimilation"?

   Based on an analysis of documents in the Kennedy and Johnson libraries, a reader can make this assertion: Idealism motivated both Presidents to change the nation's immigration laws. They wanted to bring the ideals of the Declaration of Independence in line with the realities of American life. The trick was how to accomplish that goal. What specific rules would make everyone equal?

    Here is rule number one: First come, first served. No one could argue with that, especially those who bore the burden of forty years of open hatred. Waiting lines from countries like Italy and Greece extended back some ten or fifteen years. Potential immigrants saw a wide open door but Kennedy officials saw a problem: With only first come first served, the vast majority of post 1965 slots would go to Europe's Southern core. The rest of the world would still be locked out and America would still be bitterly criticized in any international forum that included officials from, say Asia or Africa.

   Here is principal number two, still in effect in 2010. To compensate for the hate and waiting list consequences of forty years of prejudice from early Twentieth century nativists, Congress set a limit on the number of immigrants who, in any one year, could come from any one nation. Whether Italian or (India) Indian, each nation got the same number of overall slots and none could ever again argue that America's immigration policies were rooted in prejudice against most of the world.

  Documents at the Johnson library indicate that neither the President nor Congress expected the world to accept America's invitation. Johnson told Congress that most immigrants would still come from Europe, only to discover that he was totally wrong. After 1965, England and Ireland rarely filled their country quotas while the previously hated parts of the world flocked to America's shores.

     Here are some of the 2010 consequences of America's 1965 attempt to right forty-one years of wrong.

·         The foreign born population represented 4.7% of America's people in 1970. Today the figure is roughly 12.5% and rising.

·         The overwhelming majority of these new immigrants come from nations and continents negatively targeted by the 1924 legislation. They are "nonwhite" in a society that still uses white as the positive role model.

·         One nation -Mexico- accounts for more than 25% of all LEGAL immigration; following Mexico are China, Philippines, India, Vietnam and El Salvador.

·         Even if "home grown" Americans close the immigration door tomorrow the ethnic composition of the American people has been forever changed. Remember, too, that immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents receive preferences for the immigration of their kin. Thus, in any one year roughly fifty percent of legal immigrants arrive over and above Congress' mandated limit. Unless we are going to stop families from uniting -a cornerstone of immigration policy since 1890- the "nonwhite" parts of the world will still arrive on America's shores for the indefinite future.

      One final point. When Congress passed the 1924 legislation, it now needed to find new people to do America's dirty, dangerous and demanding labor. With Italians, Greeks and Spanish folks no longer available, Congress closed it eyes to the use of Filipinos (until independence in 1946) and Mexicans. They soon "monopolized" stoop and squat" labor, as farmers and other employers rarely worried about a worker's legal status. In fact, if you check the thousands of telegrams sent to Senator Lyndon Johnson in the 1950's, you find one constituent after another demanding that the Senator "keep them coming". With no Europeans to do America's dirty work, Mexicans then became the "only" game in town.

    TP Patriots need to remember their ideological grandparents. Early twentieth century nativists are ultimately responsible for the 2010 ethnic composition of the American people.

    I am delighted by the changes. But, for those home grown patriots who want to point the finger of blame, here is my suggestion. Look in the mirror. Look for your America is good roots in the odious legislation that Congress passed in 1924.

      The 9/12 project represents the credo of the Tea Party Movement. It is nine lines that mention the pronoun "I" ten times and the pronoun "me" four times.

     The words we and us never appear because the Tea Party Patriots are the "me generation" incarnate. This is especially obvious if we compare the Tea Party's celebration of "Me" to America's Best Idea: The National Parks (written by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns).

   Here is Tea Party belief number one: "America is good". This is a blanket statement, thrown over a bed that includes, for example, slavery, colonialism (the Philippines and Puerto Rico), and prejudice so raw and odious that it excluded an entire nation -China in 1882- from any chance to participate in the American Dream.

    A person rooted in reality would argue that the history of any nation includes good and evil; the Tea Party Patriots ignore history, especially the I and We battles central to the creation of America's National Parks.

      Here is a contrast: Traveling in Kansas in 1874, a train encountered a buffalo herd so vast  that the train waited three hours for the herd to pass. Six years later all-American hunters disposed of waiting lines by creating a literal mountain of bison skulls. Untold thousands of heads sit in a heap, waiting to be turned into dollar signs by Michigan's Carbon Works.  Not to be outdone, other hunters slaughtered every Yellowstone elk they could find. In one picture, the dead elk neatly line the long walk of a railroad station. Bystanders celebrate their kills while a young boy of say six stands at the front of the elk carcasses. He is smilingly carrying a shotgun that is bigger than he is.

   Creating the Great Smoky Mountain National Park involved long battles with loggers who put a quick buck way ahead of preserving the forests for us, for future generations of Americans.. Shortly before the park's creation, lumberjacks "frantically cut the old-growth forests" within the park's proposed boundaries at the rate of sixty acres a day. And even after the American people owned the land, some lumber companies continued cutting. As one logger boasted, ""Boys, we sold it. Log her." And they did. Or, as one worker noted, "when we got done with that poor little ridge, there wasn't a toothpick left on it."

   Forget the ugly and there is no way to appreciate the beautiful. The history of the National Parks is constantly contentious because there are always Americans willing to extinguish a species or a forest as they laugh their way to the bank and the next hill of toothpicks.

     America is good. And often wantonly oblivious to anything but what I want, when I want it.

     So, when Congress and the Presidents encountered greed incarnate, they often did something anathema to the Tea Party Patriots: They substantially increased the power of the Federal government. Indeed, the National Parks would not exist without centralization of power in the hands of the National state. For example, when Congress passed the Antiquities Act of 1906, it gave the President "the exclusive authority to preserve places that would be called, not national parks, but national monuments." When some Americans wanted to create a national park at the Grand Canyon, other Americans fiercely resisted any restrictions that hindered ranchers, miners, or settlers who would force visitors to pay for use of a bathroom. President Roosevelt responded by first making the Grand Canyon a national monument and that executive declaration saved the Canyon for its present purpose: A spectacular park that is preserved for "our children's children".

   Reasonable people can argue about the transfer of so much power to one person. But the history of the parks suggest another point ignored by the Tea Party Patriots. When an issue is interstate, when the aim is to create natural, national shrines, how can that be done without ceding power to the only entity with sovereignty across the fifty states?  Moreover, the people with power love America just as much as the Tea Party activists. When park visitation passed two million Americans in 1925, Parks Director Stephen Mather told anyone who would listen that "this will go far in developing a love and pride in own country and a realization of what a wonderful place it is."

        Not bad for a government bureaucrat. Or any real American.

      A final point concerns a visit to Concepción, Chile. My colleagues and I took a group of students to visit a coal mine. Some fainted when they reached the mine's bottom; even for small folks it was a tight and gloomy fit. Meanwhile, upstairs, the grounds outside the mine contained a magnificent park. However, as our guide explained, when the mine operated only the mine owner and his family used the park. Everyone else watched the rich abuse the poor.

   Move from Chile to the Yosemite Valley in 1865 and you immediately understand why the parks could be called America's best idea. As Frederick Law Olmsted wrote, "the enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is  a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few, very rich people." Thus, in establishing a set of ideals for National Parks Olmsted wrote that "it is the main duty of government...to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals is likely to interpose to that pursuit."

      In sharp contrast to the "me generation" of Tea Party Patriots, the National Parks exemplify those who think in terms of us and we. Again quoting Stephen Mather, when a visitor encounters Yosemite or Grand Teton National Park, "perhaps for the first time, one realizes the common America-and loves it...it is enforced democracy and the sense of common ownership that works this magic."

        WE would not have the parks without a transfer of power to the Federal government. And WE could not use those parks to champion America and our common citizenship unless somebody put us ahead of me, me, me.

     We are 300 million strong. Unless the Tea Party focus on the I weakens an ideal that can easily be extended from the National Parks to issues like National Health Insurance.

  We are one, if we want to be.

       In searching the Web one pervasive Tea Party Theme is the urgent need for "limited government". With Glenn Beck happily hosting one Tea Party after another, Washington D.C. has become Public Enemy Number One.        

      In response, recall that, in Peace With Honor, A.A. Milne wrote that a patriot is someone who thinks that someone else is not a patriot. It's a viable definition but the larger problem is that the Tea Party activists ignore history as they thoroughly weaken the democracy they seek to nourish.

   Consider the 1925 request, by prominent American capitalists, for Federal regulation of the aviation industry. After WWI the national government owned some 14,000 airplanes and 12,00 high powered Liberty engines, none of which got to the Western front.  In 1918, supply exceeded any conceivable demand so, while William Boeing switched from manufacturing planes to furniture, the Federal government used its expansive inventory to create and fund the Army Air Mail. Pilots like Charles Lindberg received Federal paychecks as Washington officials, traveling by train, tried to cajole and "bribe" cities to create airports. The Federal government even used $500,000 of the people's money - a considerable sum in postwar America- to create emergency landing fields from one end of the nation to the other. In addition, Washington also supported the manufacture and installation of the night lighting required for safe landings.

    While Air Mail helped get rid of the nation's surplus inventory, the Army could never use 14,000 planes. So, the government sold them to anyone with the wherewithal to buy them. None of these alleged pilots were licensed, they bypassed state sovereignty by flying wherever they wished, and they piloted planes that boasted a number of structural deficiencies. One result -from say 1920 to1925- was a series of frightening air crashes.

·         On January15, 1922, a pilot used New Jersey's ice-covered Shrewsbury River as a landing field.

Tragically the pilot forgot about the skaters. He killed a woman, maimed a man, "and knocked down a score of other spectators".

·         On April 29, 1923, a Grand Rapids, Michigan "pedestrian walked into the propeller of a plane being warmed up in a city alley".

·         On June 23, 1923, the controls "of a government surplus plane did not respond. Pilot, to miss crowd, landed in the wind and crashed.

     Newspapers trumpeted the accidents that made one fact quite obvious: The only thing that reigned in America's skies was anarchy. The fledgling plane and engine industry saw no profits on the horizon because potential customers weren't afraid to fly; they were so petrified that the earliest flight attendants were nurses! Meanwhile, General Billy Mitchell fulminated against the Federal government's lack of support for military aviation. Success in the next war demanded a fleet of the best planes but Washington thoughtlessly supported the huge Navy ships that Mitchell's pilots would easily blast to kingdom come.

   One result of these controversies was a trip to the White House. Angry capitalists demanded Federal regulation of the industry with such force that, in 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act. "This landmark legislation charged the Secretary of Commerce with fostering air commerce, issuing and enforcing air traffic rules, licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, establishing airways, and operating and maintaining aids to air navigation."

       Imagine that! Pilots needed to know how to fly.

     And capitalists charged  and lobbied Washington because the fight for Federal regulation of aviation spotlights a reality the Tea Party Patriots choose to utterly ignore. When the issue is interstate control of  factors like air commerce and safety, simple common sense  requires  that substantial power be channeled to Washington, D.C. Who else has sovereignty across the fifty states?

    Moreover, if we accept General Mitchell's 1920's call for  drastically increased aviation expenditures, can we buy planes that only protect California or Florida? Or, isn't it necessary to channel both strategy and spending into the hands of soldiers who agree to defend all Americans, all of the time?

  It would be nice if the Tea Party Patriots recognized that the "defense and security"  is the Federal government's largest budget item, that the Pentagon is the largest Federal bureaucracy, and that the soldiers patriots rightfully  applaud often act in a manner that is anything but transparent. In the name of national security, the Tea Party activists funnel more power to the halls of Washington and the Pentagon than the most fervent socialist.

    Remember, too, that aviation anarchy highlights a problem that was interstate. Today it's international issues that dominate our attention. Think of the demand  for Federal control of airport security after the hideous 9/11 bombing. Think of the new department of Homeland Security. And ask if we can ever manage to avoid economic catastrophe without regulating the banks and hedge funds who operate in sixty or a hundred nations, moving money as freely and as "safely" as the well regulated planes who now take us from one destination to another?

   Much more than a necessary evil, the Federal government is absolutely  necessary whenever we seek to resolve problems and issues that cut across the states and the world. Tragically, what's happening in 2010 is that talking swelled heads like Glenn Beck effectively use television and the Web to highlight examples of government corruption or ineptitude, forgetting in the process that they are missing the forest for the trees.

     As with aviation in 1925, the world has changed. The Tea Party Patriots champion limited government in an age when one problem after another can only be tackled -much less resolved- by government agencies with substantial interstate and international power.

      By all means eliminate the Federal government's waste, corruption and ineptitude. The recent fiasco with the "underwear bomber" comes instantly to mind.

      But, to neglect the need for substantial power in the hands of the Federal government is to make American democracy crash land as tragically as those skaters on the Shrewsbury River in 1922. From airport security to banking regulation, from nuclear weapons to the National Guard, from Medicare to Medicaid, from the Pure Food and Drug Act to the Federal Deposit Insurance Administration, from conservation via the National Parks to Washington's funding of the interstate highway system, the Federal government is often the court of first and last resort. Forget that fact and, like the Tea Party Patriots, you deserve to be tossed into the steel garbage dumpsters of history.

          We have a problem: One way to produce serious social change is to use new words, words that  make us uncomfortable because they deliberately collide with the conventional wisdom. To great effect, the women's movement did this with the switch from Miss or Mrs. to Ms.; and one principal theme of this blog is that we need to substitute the word fusion for words like "race", mixed race, half, exotic, tragic mulatto, and god help us, half breed.

  The problem is that, beginning in the 1960's,  the new words soon found themselves married to the supposedly negative notion of political correctness. When activists used Ms. to symbolize and produce social change, the nation's alleged Rip Van Winkles ran the risk of being pilloried or ridiculed if they used fireman instead of firefighter, police officer instead of policeman. Over time, resisters deftly turned the tables by trivializing the call for change. New words meant nothing; in fact they translated into a supercilious demand conjured up by an overeducated elite.

    The result in 2010 is that added to the normal resistance to social change, is the potent charge of political correctness. Demand the use of new words and people often throw darts. We wind up spotlighting assumed arrogance rather than the crucial issues: The need for a transformation and a sociological fact,  no new words, no serious social change.

      The best way out of this Catch 22 is to do two things: Use sociology to trumpet the extraordinary power of words. And then ask people to change by being as empathetic as is humanly possible. Belligerence linked to embarrassment moves people to resist even the most obvious facts; am I supposed to say thank you for calling me a jerk or an asshole? Empathy is no panacea but it is a way to make it much easier for Americans to accept the need for radical social change.

       Begin with the power of words. They are always storehouses of cultural knowledge; they are generally internalized at the level of received wisdom; and they are always glued -simultaneously- to an emotional, an intellectual and an evaluative response. In addition, words are alive; as stimuli, they produce a response but that response is always mediated by a process of interpolation that deeply roots itself in cultural and personal experience.

     Take the word "nonwhite". Americans place everybody from Japanese to Pakistanis in this catch-all category and the word obviously includes an evaluative component. Indians or Koreans are missing something; they are neither black nor white so we make them a "non", a cultural  negative when compared to the enshrined ideal, white folks. The intellectual component includes America's preoccupation with skin color. We use an anemic, binary palette of black and white and are confused by people who challenge that model, e.g., Pakistanis who are much darker than many blacks. Over time American culture socially constructed the label nonwhite. It's absurd from a scientific perspective but intellectually adequate as long as we affirm our cultural inheritance and neglect facts. Finally, the emotional component often includes how I "feel" about nonwhites. If I embrace the culture, nonwhite can produce so much emotional heat that, as with the Chinese in the nineteenth century, we angrily exclude them because they are "utterly  incapable of assimilation".

    Vase was a traditional metaphor for the power of words. A more contemporary -and much better metaphor- is "tag words". Go Daddy wants them when any of us posts a blog; and they are responding to Google and other search engines who use the tags as "metadata", as information about information. Similarly, when I use the word "nonwhite" it instantly triggers preconscious information about, among other things, blacks, whites, race, prejudice and segregation. Like hitting return for the results of a Google or Bing search, words allow us to instantaneously process a mountain of cultural information and respond, at the level of taken for granted assumptions, according to the dictates of the culture.

   Because words channel cultural information so quickly, one marvelous way to produce change is to use new words. Like a car's backfire, new words produce, by definition, everything from curiosity to surprise to anxiety. Especially if they are "tag words" with endless ripple effects (e.g., Ms. or fusion) new words make interaction at best difficult because, instead of confirming preconscious knowledge, the new words deliberately defy the conventional wisdom. Hopefully the other party to the interaction asks you to explain yourself and both people begin to talk about the "information about information" loaded into important cultural words. Without a conversation, one side talks by the other since neither speaks the other's language.  

   Say that you call me nonwhite and I say I am a fusion. Or you call me white and I say I am a lovely shade of beige. Interaction is paralyzed until we move beyond the roadblock produced by the new words. My hope is that those of us interested in serious social change produce those roadblocks on an everyday basis; and that we use the women's movement as a role model.

   In the early sixties, a conjunction of factors allowed activists to seek to overturn endless centuries of sexism. Everything from books to demonstrations and "bra burning" caught people's attention but the real revolutionaries focused on language. They used Ms. to challenge the way men and women processed the culture's information about information. Ms. instantly told me that "you had your head in a different place" and that, unless I was implacably macho, I could no longer treat you in a traditional fashion.

  In 2010 millions of new immigrants offered us an unprecedented opportunity to challenge our most cherished assumptions about race and skin color. Among millions of others, Indians and Pakistanis and Iranians (who hail after all from Asia ) crash our operating system of "racial" beliefs. Many refuse to accept the absurdity of nonwhite status. Meanwhile, a December, 2009 study from the Pew Hispanic Center indicates "that a large majority of young Latinos (i.e., 16 to 25) do not see themselves fitting into the categories of race used by the U.S. Census Bureau." They temporarily define themselves using Census substitutions like  "some other race" or as Hispanic or Latino, a pan ethnic identity. Finally, many immigrants from the Caribbean (say Jamaicans) refuse to use skin color as an axis of personal and social identity. They have a culture; it's Jamaican and that's why they proudly use it for purposes of self identification.

     Thanks to immigrants, revolutionary potential exists from one end of the continent to the other. Imagine if we all got on the bandwagon and created, with new words like fusion, billions of roadblocks to interaction. Say we even argued that words like white, black and nonwhite are obscenities and that anyone who uses them echoes the thinking of the worst representatives of American culture, that is, slave traders and slave owners?

1965: Ebony Magazine included an ad for "Dr. Fred Palmer's Skin Whitener". Available in soap or cream format, the  ad promised "a glamorous new you with a lighter, clearer skin". The ad also featured a handsome, darker skinned African American man intently gazing at a very attractive, much lighter skinned African American woman. The ad stressed "you will love your new look and he will too."

    Given the almost simultaneous publication of books like Black Power and Black Rage, the Ebony ad appeared in the middle of a serious cultural debate about African Americans ending the "self hate" produced by 400 years of white power. Activists demanded that all Americans  immediately replace the word Negro with the word black because Negro was a white word that accurately reflected white prejudice and segregation. Black, on the other hand, could and would reflect the sense of pride that activists so passionately sought.

    So, except for Senator Harry Reid -who apparently pals around with Rip Van Winkle- black replaced Negro around 1965 and ads for everything from skin bleaches to hair straitening creams became a terrible reflection of white control of black self esteem.

2010:. For $3.79 Dr. Fred Palmer's "skin whitener, tone and bleach cream" is available online. In fact, for anyone arguing that that we are moving toward a post racial America, consider our present level of cultural cruelty: Millions of darker skinned Americans still want lighter skin; but, in 2010, they are joined at the cream counter by millions of whites -many in their twenties- who want darker skins.

   Neither side knows where white stops and black begins so they experiment by embracing treatments that threaten their health. Cancer is one result of too much time under the lights at facilities like, believe it or not, "Jungle Tan". Presumably Tarzan appears and he, Jane and the children act as bathing beauty role models for perfect skin color.

    And for those who use lightening creams like "Body Cleaning Milk" -think Ivory soap- the skin does become fairer but in many cases so thin that a mere touch  bruises the face. In addition the capillaries became visible, those capillaries complimented  by stubborn acne. At the Fair and White site, you can actually buy "Black Soap", in a black wrapper as a "mild and effective cleansing bar designed to remove surface impurities without stripping skin of moisture."

       One Google estimate is that 30 million Americans frequent tanning salons; counting creams, it's a $12 billion market! And to my mind whites arguably win the insanity prize. They would never want to be black but they do want to be dark enough "to look healthy." So, as in 1965, white skin remains the color ideal but too white means you need a doctor so if you add a few shades of color, you can resemble President Obama, who is black. 

      I don't know if you get a color palette when you begin the tanning sessions but, after examining more than twenty sites across the country, the preferred target color is bronze. That's an interesting choice since, when asked or forced to make a skin color choice, many Mexican Americans select bronze.  Historically some of the most politically and culturally radical Mexican American websites titled themselves "The Bronze Pages". In short, despite the widespread prejudices against, and depreciation of Mexican ethnicity, many white Americans regard Mexican skin color as the ideal. Perhaps the salons should also offer "Spanish only" sessions for the whites who want to be bronze.

   Incidentally, at New Jersey's "Bella Bronze Tanning Studio" they offer this advice: "If you plan to tan in the nude or have areas of your skin which are typically unexposed to sunlight, we suggest covering previously unexposed areas for the majority of your tanning session for the first few visits. Gradually increase exposure to these areas, giving the skin time to build melanin production."

      Ultimately you could turn a white person into a black person and then, for those skin chefs with an all-inclusive, money making  flair, you could begin to sell formerly white people the expensive creams at the skin lightening sites that actually show "white" women as the ideal.

     Historically people condemned "passing". Now, with modern technology, a person could move -think of the ballplayer Sammy Sosa- from black into white and then back again. This would give new meaning to the notion that, in America, you can be whatever you want to be!

     Let's, please, be serious. The root cause of this cultural perniciousness is our continued willingness to define everyone on earth using one of three colors: White, black or nonwhite. The color scheme preceded the notion of race by hundreds of years. Race simply became, in the nineteenth century, the scientific imprimatur that certified, as one hundred percent pure, our willingness to embrace the notion that seeing is not believing. Thus, I, for example, am actually beige or light brown but called white until people hear my last name. With a name Fernandez, the doubts set in and then, I could be bronze if they see me as Mexican or white if they think my roots are in Spain.

    We can end this insanity. We can stop repeating the 1965 Ebony ads. And the easiest way to do that is to make everyday life impossible for those who wish to label anyone by the presumed color of their skin. Thus, if you ask me if I am white or bronze, I will tell you "no". I am polite and I try to be empathetic but I refuse to endorse a culture that makes skin color the axis of personal and cultural identity.

   We are 300 million people. Suppose that fifty million of us refused -just once a day- to countenance the culture. We moved other people to  think about the sanity of whites who want to be bronze and blacks who risk turning their skins, according to the Times, a shade of blue!

     Fifty million impossible interactions each and every day equals 350 million a week, 1.4 billion a month, and 16.8 billion a year. No guns. No violence. Just pure Dr. Martin Luther King. A forceful rebuke of a culture that teaches people to be painfully uncomfortable in their own skins.

             This entry discusses Gregory Zuckerman's just published The Greatest Trade Ever. It is an intelligent, fair and empathetic analysis of John Paulson, a trader who earned $4 billion in 2 years of betting on the collapse  of  subprime mortgages.

  Surpluspeople. It sounds and is awful. Unfortunately, Marx's enduring insight is thatany society touched by capitalism contains an "industrial reserve army" of fluctuating size. Some workers are "stagnant" orendlessly unemployed; others "float", they seek work wherever they can find it. Either way,  the army's"misery is in inverse proportion to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labor."

   In Russia, floaters from Tajikistan (in Central Asia) pay thousands of dollars for the chance at ajob no one else will do. As the InternationalCrisis Group explained in a January 2010 study, "what sets migrants apart from the local population in their host countries is their willingness towork long hours in the worst conditions. No matter how severe the crisis is, a Russian will never agree to dig trenches and lay pipes in a minus-twenty degreecold."

     In Italy, the surplus people come from, among other nations, Albania, Romania, and Senegal. In the center and North floaters work in the smaller firms, without the protections or salaries offered to Italians. In the South, the need for agricultural stoop and squat labor produces conditions of "semi-slavery". Even the Pope felt tocompelled to remind Italians that "an immigrant is a human being".

    In Postville, Iowa Guatemalan "floaters" labored in a Kosher meat packing plant whereeven the Rabbis were illegal. They blessed the meat, workers suffered many unreported amputations and officials from the host society sent police to arrest the Guatemalans doing work shunned by the vast majority of "real"Americans.

    Institutionalized  misery links illegal immigrants in Russia,Italy and the United States. However, the need for immigrants includes more than a desire to fill jobs no one else will do . In Russia the low birth and very high death rates produce this result:"Between 2008 and 2025 Russia's population will undergo a natural decline of 11 million." Russia either imports people or it will have fewer and fewer workers to fill jobs all across the economy. In Italy, out of a list of 221 nations and localities, the Italians rank 219th. They have close to the lowest birth rate on earth and among the highest percentage of aged on earth. Italy is caught in a double bind. It must import people to fill jobs and to provide funding for the Italians who are and will be retiring. In the United Statesthe birth rate is even (about 1.99 children born for each women) but the aged population is increasing and immigrants -legal and illegal- need to help provide the funding for our seniors to live in Florida, Arizona, and the Carolinas.

   While low birth rates lay out a welcome mat for illegal immigrants, when they come and stay another factor enters the equation. Remittances are an independent variable that create a dependence on the funds in the immigrant's country of origin. A November 2009 study from the World Bank explains that Romanians rank seventh inthe world; they send home more than $9 billion dollars a year. As a percentage of the nation's GDP, Tajikistan ranks number one; an astonishing 50% of its GDPcomes from immigrant remittances. In 2008, a bad year, Mexicans sent home no less than $26 billion dollars.

     One unintended consequence of the remittances (and other variables, e.g., border enforcement) is that "contrary to World Bank expectations, there is little evidence of return migration as a result of the financial crisis in the United States and Europe." In fact, "there are widespread reports that migrants are unwilling to return to their countries of origin fearing that they may not be able to re-enter once they leave because of tighter immigration controls."

  So, Russia, Italy and the United States want the immigrants. When things get bad -or some of their constituents complain about foreigners stealing jobs- they try to get rid ofthem. But, if only because of the need for remittances at home, the immigrants must stay where they are longer wanted. Even the lowest of wages in Russia arebetter than no wages at home. Remember, too, that some of those who remain inthe "host" society, abandon their first families for a second one in Russia or Italy. Remittances stop coming and the first family now needs to find a new floater if it is to survive.

  Whether birth rates,death rates or remittances, we are discussing structural variables in each ofthe three societies. An effective and moral response requires facing the structural truth. Unfortunately, another factor that links the three receiving nations is rank hypocrisy. In Italy, "industry would close without them, especially the Romanians and especially small and medium firms...Business owners are really worried about this campaign (to get rid of the illegals) because they need this workforce - they are good workers."

   In the United States, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders or overstaying their visas, our City'seconomy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported. The same holds true for the nation."

   Employers want the workers and governments want the taxes. But another sector of the society takes charge and blames the victim. The platform of Italy's People of Liberty Party is "never again, illegal immigrants under your house...empty illegal camps and get rid of nomads who have no residence and no means of subsistence." Similar rmovements exist in Russia and the U.S. Indeed, to the extent the Christian right is involved in closing the U.S.' doors to illegals, the degree of hypocrisy reaches new levels: What happened to do unto others as you would have them do unto you?

   Here is my conclusion: A commonality of  response to illegal immigrants is what links the three societies. Employers and the rest of us exploit the reserve industrial army; no American shopping at Whole Foods avoids eating vegetables produced by illegal stoop and squat labor. Meanwhile, locals who do not need floaters express their prejudices, and "surplus people" endure misery in many forms.

    In response, let's at least admit that in all three nations we turn a blind eye to endless exploitation and that if this is"civilization", imagine barbarity.

          In his Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said: "...make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

     The President's right. Evil exists and war is, however perversely, a necessary evil.

   But even the most "successful" war never offers bulwarks as strong as a culture's taken for granted assumptions. Think of the injunction against incest or the sexual abuse of a child. Obviously violations -evil- occurs every day but, for the vast majority of us,  even the imagined abuse of a child produces instant revulsion.

     Build that kind of prohibition into the brain of a human being and you need neither war nor a police department. People police themselves because cultural beliefs act as an effective and extraordinarily cheap form of social control.

    Enter Dostoyevsky and Durkheim. They both knew evil existed but each reacted to the threat in a very different manner. In novels like Crime and Punishment and The Idiot Dostoyevsky struggled with everything from nihilism to Rashkalnikov's pronouncement that, in the absence of God, "everything is permitted". Even in the best of times, people behaved badly; tragically, atheists and agnostics assured moral chaos . So, whether God did or did not exist, God served a useful purpose because, without the fear of hell, people would lack any form of personal and social control.

      As a boy attending Catholic schools in 1950's Brooklyn I remember nuns who apparently read Dostoyevsky's work. Taking lit matches, they placed them under our fingers to dramatically display the hell that awaited any sinner.

  The "delicious" irony about Dostoyevsky's approach to evil is that, instead of nihilism's triumph,  we live in a world where God is more important than ever. Think of the thriving evangelical movements throughout Latin America or the Saudi funded madrasahs in Pakistan. In 2010 atheists have made way for billions of  true believers; across many religions, hell and its variations are a threat as wide as the reach of the Internet. Yet evil still thrives on each and every continent.

    Fear failed.  Or, as Durkheim suggested, God may help us in the next life; in this one we are on our own. Only people can create the forms of human solidarity that make war an unnecessary way to eliminate evil.

   Durkheim wrote about a world in transition. Whether in the  religious or economic spheres the widespread weakening of  traditional beliefs - i.e., mechanical solidarity-  promised  an anomic, a norm less future. To avoid the anarchy that both he and Dostoyevsky feared, Durkheim ended The Division of Labor of Society with a passionate call to action. He wanted to create a form of organic solidarity because "our first duty at the present time is to fashion a morality for ourselves."

   Durkheim outlined that morality in a marvelous 1898 essay entitled, "Individualism and the Intellectuals". His specific background for the essay was the Dreyfus case; how could France or any society avoid treating a person as hideously as the French system of "justice" treated Alfred Dreyfus? It was a question with only one answer: Embrace the "cult of individualism". Deliberately using religious symbols, Durkheim tried to create a universal sense of social solidarity, a morality that, like a spring sky, always transcended the religious, ethnic, "racial", tribal and class differences that divide societies, not to mention the world.

   Durkheim unequivocally stressed that "individualism never meant a "glorification of the self", an egoism that by definition excludes a warm and compelling concern for the rights of others. Instead, if you became a member of Durkheim's cult, you "glorified the individual in general". With no altars or prayers, you displayed "a sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for social justice."

     In sociological circles, Durkheim is somehow labeled a conservative. In reality, he is as progressive and idealistic as Marx; but, instead of a labor theory of value, Durkheim roots himself in the provable power of human beings.

    People can fashion a new morality any time they please; indeed, if they are successful they can make the cult of individualism a "social fact". That's a way of thinking that, without violence or war, acts in a coercive fashion. Embedded in the brain, the ardent and admirable thirst for social justice allows no one to endorse, acquiesce, or remain mute in the face of the evil.  It stops before it starts since the "new morality" produces revulsion long before we read about the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus, or, in our time, the water boarding of "unlawful enemy combatants", the wanton slaughter of innocents in Mexico,  or the genocide in Darfur or Rwanda.

     In 2010 individualism is synonymous with human rights. Activists like Durkheim actually succeeded in creating the set of values and principles so clearly displayed  in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..." this new morality serves "as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations...."  

      On paper and in principle Durkheim won the day. Th problem, of course, is that we never deeply embedded these beliefs in the brains of enough human beings. For all the beauty of the Universal Declaration or the 1994 Treaty against torture, the distance between ideals and reality is as wide as ever.  

     So, here is an idea for the Noble Committee. The next time the Committee awards its prize select a person who does two things. First, he or she must follow Durkheim and explain, once again, the urgent need for a universal morality. A passionate commitment to human rights is the best way to unite us because it transcends the particularities produced by religious, ethnic or other divisive loyalties. Second, he or she must also offer a way to embed, at the level of incest and child abuse, our "new" commitment to human rights. This is a gargantuan task because, especially with God in the saddle in so many 21st century societies, how do we convince people that man made rules are more important than those of the Bible or the Koran?

   One suggestion is to focus on evil. God is silent in the face of the most terrible atrocities. People speak out; and they do have the power to socially construct whatever world they wish.  Let's give the next prize to someone who empowers our children to take charge of a world where evil produces -as a spectacular social fact-  instant revulsion.

  Idealistic? Utopian? Perhaps. But we do have the power. And the alternative to exercising it is to be modern, to "go online" and read about the biblically evil world in which we now live.

      Max Weber's work still spotlights -quite accurately- the significance of a society's deepest taken for granted loyalties. I do not mean to tribe, ethnicity, or religion but to an all-encompassing way of thinking that legitimates tradition or charisma rather than law; incompetence rather than a skill set developed though education, experience and commitment to shared professional standards.

   This is an old problem. Think of Richard Glover's Peninsular Preparation, a book about Reform of the British Army in the late nineteenth century. By definition officers were aristocrats, so bound by traditional authority that a sergeant actually whispered the words of command into an officer's ear when he drilled his troops. Aristocrats never learned such necessary knowledge; that info belonged to the rank and file, all commanded  by hopeless officers and their retinue of servants, fine food and a string of useless yet prestigious horses.

   England changed. America's predicament is that when we most need a determined  commitment to law, reason and competence, we face in Yemen and Afghanistan societies that remain deeply dedicated to traditional beliefs, values and practices. In laying out plans to transform everything from the police, to the army, to the political system, American policy makers confidently proclaim goals and the means to attain them. In military briefings the computer based Power Point slides look like a puzzle that is already solved. Here is what we are going to do; and here is how we are going the do it. We will of course encounter resistance from Yemen and Afghanistan but they will ultimately bow to common sense and accept the changes that make law and competence the order of the day.

    This is nonsense. As if Humpty Dumpty, Yemen and Afghanistan are fractured by religious, tribal, and ethnic loyalties, all rooted in  a passionate, even sacred commitment to tradition. As with England's army in 1800, changing these societies requires a willing constituency, not to mention a century or more of effort. The problem is that we want change yesterday, we are not going to get it and that raises the question of whether we are squandering lives and treasure in a fruitless effort to square the circle.

   Consider a New York Times article (dated January 4th, 2010) about the nature of Yemen's government. Steven Erlanger writes that "the government is practically caged in the capital". In the rest of  Yemen traditional tribal and religious loyalties rule the day, while President Ali Abdullah Saleh fills the most important government posts with one family member after another. This guarantees a modicum of loyalty but if the issue is competence and a commitment to law, the gap between the Power Point slides and the Yemeni countryside is as wide as the 550 mile Gulf of Aden.

    Here is a question. Perhaps, instead of trying to change societies that could be resisting us in 2110, America should focus its efforts on what is actually under its aegis and possibilities? Read, for example, the White House review of the December 25th, 2009 attack by Mr. Abdulmutallab and a reader is struck by the incompetence of our highly educated, well trained CIA and State Department officials. Close to a decade after 9/11 no one "connected the dots" even though the information was readily available. We blew it and changing the nature of the organizations and personnel responsible for these failures is something we can actually effectuate. Similarly, if protecting the home front is the goal, we also have the power -and presumably the will- to train and provide airport personnel with a professional commitment to the highest standards, all efforts assisted by the latest technology.

   Unfortunately, a commitment to traditional authority is only part of our problem in nations like Yemen and Afghanistan. Weber also wrote about charismatic authority and one of its most peculiar attributes: The charismatic figure could be dead! Think Jesus or Mohammed. That's trouble enough but as Marc Sageman explains in Leaderless Jihad the Internet makes it quite easy for potential terrorists to identify with the charismatic authority of an individual they never met.  In silent and secret commitments established via computer screens, potential terrorists attach themselves to individuals who -however bizarre to the rest of us- are treated as "though endowed with supernatural, super human or at least specifically exceptional qualities." Ultimately a person uses the very latest technology to obey orders from a type of authority that is, if not irrational, at least not rational.

   In response, we have the admirable and effective efforts of organizations like the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point or the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College. Especially at West Point, analysts have tried to understand the nature of an Internet threat over which we actually have some control. With its Islamic Imagery Project, the West Point Center rightfully stresses that "visual imagery provides a key aspect of the terrorists’ message in that it allows these groups to paint a picture of their objectives, their enemies, and their strategy through graphics, photographs, and symbols." 

     In trying to explain what is actually going on the Center offers policy makers the tools required to counter the appeal of charismatic and traditional authorities. For example, to many Americans Bin Laden seems to have a strange and peculiar affinity for caves. But, as the Center stresses, recall that Mohammed made many of his most important pronouncements from a cave and Bin Laden is identifying with the traditional symbols that must be understood by anyone trying to effectively counter his appeal.

   The Center's efforts suggest what American power can achieve. In fact, instead of butting our heads against the stone wall of tradition, perhaps we need to look at ourselves and the failures we could have prevented. For example, months before the invasion of Iraq the U.S. Army War College published a superb study about what not to do in a subsequent occupation. In No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson writes that while the report reached the White House, it was ignored by everybody from the President to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Ultimately looters literally stripped Iraq of everything imaginable and we paid a huge price for failing to listen to the professional advice that was actually available.

    So, as with the President's review of Mr. Abdulmutallab's attack, perhaps we should spend far less time trying to transform intrinsically resistant societies and more time trying to understand why, even when our professionals provide the necessary information, we consistently fail to "connect the dots".

   Tongue in cheek, Weber might even suggest that we need to reinvigorate the professional standards that are not outside the limits of American power.

   .

      Actually this is not an either/or situation. The traders at Goldman Sachs are great capitalists and amoral users.

       Let's start with a December 23rd story in The New York Times. Traders at Goldman Sachs created exotic financial "products"(i.e., Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations), sold them to eager investors and then bet against the clients they convinced to buy the profitable and allegedly secure bond offering. The reporter seems surprised at the behavior of Sachs' staff.  He searches for a moral compass but my advice is to "get real". Sachs' traders understood that capitalism is heartless and so should we.

      To grasp the mercilessness at capitalism's heart, begin with Georg Simmel's explanation (in The Philosophy of Money) of the creation of economic value. Marx was wrong. Instead of labor being the bedrock of economic value, people -and only people-created value when they compared one glass vase, one car or one bond to another. Without the point of comparison, it was impossible to establish value and watch the process of "lively interaction" that always occurred when people decided the economic worth of anything on earth. For lively interaction think of the controlled pandemonium in the pits of a futures exchange; and for the points of comparison that create economic value think of the Antiques road show. Whether a toy, a sword or a Tiffany necklace, the item is worth more if it is in pristine condition and in the original box or scabbard. Add in the authentic signature of the maker, and, during the lively interaction of an auction, the item's value could skyrocket.

    Simmel argued that people created value in any economic system, be it mercantilism, feudalism, or capitalism. However Sachs' traders  operate under the mantle of capitalism and, as Robert Heilbroner told us in The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, the system's principal demand is to make money that will make more money. Under capitalism wealth is never an end in itself; instead wealth is part of a continuously dynamic process that expectantly produces more wealth ad infinitum. Thus, it is beside the point to ask if anyone can spend, need or use forty or fifty billion dollars. More is always better and the winners in capitalism appear in the Forbes magazine lists of America's or the world's richest people. They are exemplars -role models- because they have a mountain of money that will get bigger and bigger if they continue to profitably create the products that consumers want and need.

   The process of creation (Marx's M-C-M dialectic) is integral to capitalism because, if you want to earn more bucks than anyone else, you must constantly fabricate investments that promise a greater return than other options, e.g., U.S. Treasury or municipal bonds. So, "with housing prices soaring and the mortgage mania in full swing", Goldman Sachs began creating the offerings known as Abacus in 2004. Over four years Goldman issued 25 Abacus deals; they had a total value of nearly $11 billion dollars and, if they offered a better point of comparison to pension and mutual funds, they offered an even better point of comparison to the Goldman Sachs traders who thought the housing market would soon crash. Again, the only standing order in capitalism -and especially on Wall Street- is to earn money; you think the bonds will decline in value so you "short" them and reap a bonanza when, as expected, "just five months after Goldman had sold a new Abacus C.D.O.in 2007,  the ratings on 84 percent of the mortgages underlying it had been downgraded."

    One critic noted that "the simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen...When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

    Meanwhile, the traders at Goldman Sachs had their own response: Burn baby burn! Their task was to produce profits based on the creation of new points of comparison. Outside investors bought the Abacus bonds because they offered greater rates of return and Goldman Sachs traders shorted them because that bet promised even more loot than that imagined by the Abacus buyers. Goldman Sachs did tell the Times that buyers knew about the firm's short bets and, as such, they also knew that some investors won while others lost.

     The rule is "buyers beware" and the rewards, besides lots of money, included a prestigious and profitable promotion for the trader who managed the short bets. He hoped for catastrophe and damn the fools who never learned how to use an abacus.

   In fashioning a society's defense against Goldman Sachs and its trades, consider a complaint made by economist Thorstein Veblen . In The Theory of the Business Enterprise Veblen said that "by and large, it was a matter of indifference to the captain of industry whether his traffic affects the system advantageously or disastrously; his gains (or losses) are related to the magnitude of the disturbances that take place rather than their bearing on the welfare of the community."

   Veblen published that line in 1904. By 1920 he wanted to put the engineers in charge of America's economy because he saw no captain of industry who worried about the system as a whole. Was capitalism producing more jobs? Was it spreading the wealth in something resembling an equitable manner? And, to move to 2009, did the creation of exotic financial instruments threaten everyone as they simultaneously benefitted the traders who deftly managed their sales and distribution?

   Remember this: Goldman Sachs and its staff are not going to change. They are great capitalists who understand the nature and logic of an amoral economic system. To add heart to that system we need, not the engineers, but politicians who will ask questions like these.

   Is it the government's role to bail out the banks only when their trades produce the disasters foretold by critics like Thorstein Veblen?

  Or, should the government closely regulate the bankers before they produce a disaster? And, even more important, should politicians argue to their constituents that the rights of private property are less important than the obligations of capital to the larger society?

     I vote for obligations. And I would vote for a politician who demanded that, as a society, we specify the precise obligations that capitalists have to the rest of us. The alternative is to watch the smiling traders cash their hefty bonus checks in January of 2010.

    On December 21, 2009, a Syracuse University research center released a report summarizing the number and type of  federal criminal filings. It noted more prosecutions than ever (169,612 in FY 2009) and the report stressed that "the major factor driving the overall increase was the sharp rise in individuals prosecuted for immigration offenses." Fully 54% of all federal filings occurred because of immigration prosecutions. Drug cases came in second; but someone called a truce in the war on drugs because, from 37% of filings in 1997, drug cases represented only 16% of federal filings in FY 2009.

     Simultaneously, the number of federal filings for non-immigration offenses "actually dropped over the past five years." With newspapers reporting one multimillion dollar Wall Street scam after another, federal prosecutors spent more than half their time on illegal immigrant workers.

   Here is the most telling number of all: "Of the 91,899 immigration prosecutions (in FY 2009) only thirteen employers in eight cases were prosecuted for the felony offense of illegal hiring of undocumented workers."

     These results give new meaning to the phrase misplaced priorities. For example, documents at the Reagan library indicate that when Ronald Reagan tried to deal with illegal immigration in the early 1980's he worried about "corrupting people who have for the most part revealed a strong devotion to the work ethic." Mexicans and other illegal immigrants did yeoman's work for American employers; they exhibited laudable character traits and we would corrupt them if we offered them the welfare benefits to which they were unaccustomed.

          President Reagan was correct. Mexican and other illegal immigrants are all-American; they manifest a praiseworthy work ethic yet we prosecuted more than 90,000 of them in FY 2009. Meanwhile, as we have for more than sixty years, the American judicial system ignores the employers and we focus so much effort on the employees that we neglect another farcical result of  fencing off the border. We now have more and more of the latest Border Patrol agents working for the Mexican drug cartel.

   As Gordon Hanson notes in a just released study from the Migration Policy Institute the federal government increased the number of Border Patrol agents from 11,000 in 2004 to 20,000 in 2009. To achieve this mammoth increase in agents the Border Patrol cut lots of corners. It hired so many questionable characters that the New York Times just published a series of articles about a now "familiar pattern". Scout out the border and watch "customs officers wave in vehicles filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband." To facilitate this process "a Border Patrol agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall prey to temptation and begin taking bribes." They make out like bandits and, meanwhile, federal prosecutors "push the cattle through the chutes". Tragically the cattle are people who often illiterate and do not know the meaning of the documents they are asked to "sign".

    This is institutionalized stupidity. We are making it easier to smuggle drugs as we wickedly focus on the most helpless cogs in the illegal immigration machine. We literally put the workers in chains, we spend enormous amounts of money and time to incarcerate and prosecute them, and we leave the employers to do what they have always done: Hire the new illegal immigrants who now pay double the fee to the thriving smuggling industry that, in general, also escapes prosecution in the United States and in Mexico

                   From a moral standpoint it's obscene to spotlight the workers. But, for those who want an analysis rooted in economic benefits and costs, consider the evidence cited by Gordon Hanson. In 2008, illegal immigrants accounted for 5.4% of the U.S. civilian work force. That's it. They are concentrated in low-skilled jobs (i.e., construction, horticulture, agriculture, meat and poultry processing) "and illegal immigration has a small net impact on US native income." Hanson estimates that (exclusive of the wages paid) the net gain to US workers and employers is "approximately 0.03 % of US GDP." So, federal prosecutors spend 54% of their time on 5.4 of the work force; that work force provides an infinitesimal gain to the U.S. economy and, equally important, "the share of the low-skilled in total US employment is on the wane." 

     Illegal immigrants are crucial to the employers we fail to prosecute but, overall, they have a small positive or negative impact on the economy.

   One caveat: the money is crucial to the illegal immigrants themselves, Hanson notes that the wages paid "raise global economic well-being"; and I would add that they, in all likelihood,  decrease the number of illegal immigrants coming to the United States. That is, if we continue to prosecute the workers we may exacerbate our illegal immigration problems because those who rely (e.g., in Mexico or El Salvador) on the remittances sent home may need to go north of the border in order to survive. Or,  they can stay home and use the remittance money to purchase, among other things, a variety of "made in America" goods and service. Think, for example, of Western Union's attitude toward illegal immigrants.

    My conclusion: It would be hard to find a more absurd and wicked situation than our present policies toward illegal immigration. None of us drinks a bottle of wine from California that does not rely on the stoop and squat labor of illegal immigrants; and here in West Hartford, Connecticut, we built a huge new shopping complex with laborers named Jesus, Pedro and Miguel. The Italian-American foreman of the crew spoke only in Spanish to workers who achieved beautiful results with bricks and mortar.

   Figure it any way you wish. From a moral or from an economic perspective. But to devote 54% of federal filings to illegal immigrants leaves the employers smiling and the rest of us impoverished because we are complicit in blaming and incarcerating those who seek to better their lives through hard and tedious labor.

       Beginning at the end, here is my conclusion: In any public policy debate, the facts are not irrelevant; but to accord them too much significance is to refuse to face the facts: Many people don't give a damn about reality.

   As a young man I honestly believed that truth was the crucial variable in any policy debate. So, for some of my books about Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, I went to as many as fourteen different libraries. With the university's generous support, I traveled to ten of the Presidential libraries and happily performed the extraordinarily boring task of combing through thousands of documents, hoping to discover how and why our Presidents made policy.

     In many cases, the research uncovered evidence that overturned the conventional wisdom.  Readers instantly argued that I had a deliberate political bias. To counter that argument, whenever I made presentations about Puerto Rico I brought copies of documents from the Presidential libraries. For example, when I said that Puerto Rico was a U.S. colony, I ever so confidently passed around documents from the Nixon and Carter archives that, in clear black and white, described Puerto Rico as a U.S. "colony".

   I expected audience resistance in the United States. We believed in our "exceptionalism" and documents from the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations showed a level of cynicism and hypocrisy that would be hard for many Americans to swallow. But, what truly floored me was the resistance in Puerto Rico. I thought that audiences there would be wide open to the facts. Instead, many members of the university audiences refused to accept the validity of the White House documents. Rationalizations won the day to such an extent that a high ranking member of Puerto Rico's independence party scoffed at a till then unknown offer (in 1953) of independence from President Eisenhower. The document is stamped "top secret" and, when Governor Muñoz rejected the offer, President Eisenhower added a handwritten order to "send it to the secret files". When I explained to my skeptical listener that the Eisenhower Library archivists confirmed the authenticity of the President's handwriting I naively thought I won the day. But my "independentista" acquaintance said "no way". It didn't happen. The documents proved nothing.

      These are personal anecdotes. I grant their subjectivity. But, if we move from my experiences to many of today's most controversial public issues -say global warming, financial regulation of Wall Street, "race", illegal immigration- reality often seems like a distant cousin. Think, for example, of what it took for former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to finally realize that markets do not automatically self-regulate!

   In confidently handing out the Presidential documents I made a crucial error about human beings. I assumed we were rational. Instead, we are at bottom rationalizing creatures and if the facts threaten what we want or need to believe, we will generally distort or ignore the facts in the service of lying to ourselves and anyone else in earshot.

   You can certainly argue that I am slow on the uptake. My conclusion is rooted in cognitive dissonance theory and Festinger and his colleagues wrote those books more than fifty years ago. But, my conclusion also leaves me with a conundrum: Especially in relation to "race", ethnicity and immigration, I am an advocate of radical social change who believes that people will often do almost anything to avoid changes that threaten their world view.

     Take something like skin color. Theoretically anyone's eyes should be opened when we ask this question: Since many (India) Indians and Pakistanis are darker than many so called black people, why aren't they black? And, since many Chinese and Japanese Americans boast lighter skins than so called whites, why aren't the Chinese white? We can literally see these facts with our own two eyes but we utterly ignore them when, as a civilization, we refuse to give Indian or Chinese Americans a skin color. We call them "nonwhite", an identity that underlines our cultural confusion. Pakistanis and Chinese contradict what we learned to  think so, rather than confront reality, we place them in a category that is part of, yet outside the conventional wisdom.

   The sociologist Robert Nisbet argued that people change only when they are confronted with a crisis. We need a life threatening kick in the butt to confront the world that is actually there. While this seems plausible when I see our so far pitiful reactions to "race", global warming (i.e., the Copenhagen conference) or the financial regulation of Wall Street, I would argue that crises are less important than rationalizations. Rationalizations act like comfort food: We gobble up the anachronisms that allow us to do anything but confront the world that is actually there.

   Remember President Obama. He is supposedly an agent of change but when he self defines as black he is embracing the "one drop" rule created by slave traders and slave owners. If that's serious social change, only ultra conservative Americans are clapping.

    So, here is one suggestion. Before we discuss "race" or Wall Street, let's make us the problem before we discuss any specific problem. Is my "mature man" pessimism justified? Do we more often use our intelligence to deny reality rather than confront it? And, if we do, is there a way to honestly argue that serious social change is possible? Isn't more rational to be politically indifferent and, for example, forget about the possibility of ever eliminating our moronic classification of humanity into three colors: White, black and nonwhite?

         I am only certain about one thing.  Trying to open ourselves to truth is not a hopeless task because we know, for a fact, that some people can successfully challenge and change even their most cherished beliefs. Think of the autobiography of Malcolm X. After so many years as an incredibly devoted Muslim cognitive dissonance theory would argue that the last thing on earth he should have done was face the truth about Elijah Mohamed.

   But he did. So, here is one starting point for my proposed national debate: Was Malcolm X "only" a brilliant, idiosyncratic exception to the rule? Or did he  know something that the rest of us do not?

     In December of 2009, the Pew Hispanic Center published a report entitled Between Two Worlds. Spotlighting "how young Latinos (defined as men and women between 16-25) come of age in America", the report's section on identity unintentionally underlines a crucial fact: When it comes to "race", Americans have to more to learn from Latinos then they have to learn from us.

   Here is the key "racial" question asked by the Pew Center: "What race do you consider yourself to be? White, black or African American, Asian, or some other race?" Following the assumptions of the Census Bureau and U.S. culture, the question mercilessly confuses "race" and pan ethnic identities. "Race" is allegedly a biological category, Asian, for example, a word that somehow harbors cultures as different as Afghanistan and Korea, Bangladesh and Japan.

    Boxed in by the question, young Latinos suddenly need to think in black and white and/or they need to identify with a pan ethnic identity even though the study shows they display "a strong preference for their country of origin." Open ended answers might have given us insight into the real reactions of young Latinos. For example, did they ask, "why do Americans confuse apples and oranges? And why do Americans demand that we erase our country of origin and embrace something they call Hispanic?"

    Unfortunately, instead of empathizing with the young women and men,, the Center's question acts like a boomerang: It echoes the culture and reports these pre-assimilation responses.

   Fully 76% of the respondents define themselves as members of "some other race" (36%) or "volunteer that their race is Hispanic or Latino (40%)." The report does not indicate if the young people actually see Latino or Hispanic as a "race". The Pew Center question makes that assumption and, in an effort to cooperate, the young people respond to the only options provided.

     Here is what should be a very happy conclusion: "Very few young Latinos/as identify their race as white or black." Still rooted in cultures like Mexican and Colombian, the young people do not yet divide the entire world into three colors: White, black and nonwhite. To the extent it is understood by their original cultures, "race" is a heterogeneous rather than a homogenous category; and there is 76%resistance to accepting the literally white and black categories offered by American culture.

      For those over 25 the resistance continues but dissipates with time in the United States. If you are 26 or older, 30% of Latinos now identify as white. That's double the rate of young Latinos and the study assumes a slow assimilation into American culture. In essence, the longer Latinos stay, the whiter they get.

     The process ends when, in the third generation, Latinos begin to identify as "American" (50%). The study does not indicate the meaning of American but, in terms of "race" it presumably includes an acceptance of our anachronistic and ultra conservative manner of "racial" thinking. For example, when President Obama defines himself as black he not only subordinates his mother's heritage, he echoes the thinking of slave traders and slave owners. "Got one drop of black blood? Then you're black".

   Suppose, however, that instead of chronicling the new found whiteness of Latinos, we used their preferred choices (i.e., some other race or Hispanic/Latino) to change American culture rather than reaffirm its traditional prejudices? "Race" is, after all, a concept as scientifically bankrupt as the scores of banks closed by the Treasury department. Meanwhile, Latinos come from what José Marti called "our America". Marti understood that "racial" homogeneity only existed in the mind of the beholder; and he stressed that the real world constantly included human couplings that mocked any notion of "pure" racial categories.

    To take a twenty-first century example, Douglas Palmer explains ( in Seven Million Years) that fishermen from the West Isles of Scotland boast DNA links that stretch from Portugal to Finland. The Finnish link actually traces its DNA roots to Siberia (and then Finland and Scotland) while the Portuguese DNA also traces its ultimate origin to Siberia! Ten or twelve thousand years ago people moved over the Bering Strait to America, came down the coast to eventually settle in contemporary Brazil and, from Brazil they carried the DNA to Portugal and then to the West Isles of Scotland. As Palmer rightfully notes, these DNA stories are the norm and "they make nonsense of any biological basis for racial classifications."

   These contemporary facts confirm the insights of those who come from "our America". Indeed, while it may be embarrassing to the advocates of assimilation, Young Latinos who embrace the identity "some other race" are much closer to scientific truth than those of us who blithely accept the one drop thinking of the worst representatives of American culture.

     So, instead of watching young Latinos turn white, let's use their understandable skepticism of American "racial" categories to ask ourselves some profoundly unsettling questions. Do "races" actually exist? What moron or beast (take your pick) divided the entire world into white, black and nonwhite people? And, if the facts are on the side of young Latinos and their cultures of origin, why are so many sociologists still excited by the prospect of a successful assimilation into a culture that incorrectly and poisonously defines Americans by what allegedly divides Americans, "race" and the color of their skins?

       We can learn from Latinos. And we could -300 million of us- all together celebrate the identity American if we are willing to redefine what it means. Rooted in reality we could argue that an American is someone who recognizes that there is one race, the human race.

   More specifically, an American is someone who deliberately refuses to use skin color as a basic category of identity. Americans think that it is ridiculous to key on a physical attribute determined by a miniscule percentage of our genes.

      Americans believe that, instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences are delightful and diverse manifestations of the underlying and indissoluble unity of six billion people

       And finally, walking into a future that defies the mantra of assimilation, American would be  a core identity that happily allows room for other forms of self and group expression. Americans would  think of differences in nationality, religion, ethnicity or geography as potential sources of interest rather than as a reason to discriminate or self-segregate.

   To refuse to challenge our ultraconservative heritage is to accept the "racial" world created by awful human beings. Equally important, it guarantees that as young Latinos become white,  America is literally and figuratively a much darker place..

        We expect stupid people to do stupid things. But why do groups of smart bankers -many with the best educations in America- act like idiots?

   In explaining our economic crisis analysts often cite factors like greed, fraud and lax or absent regulation. Those variables are certainly involved. But, at its investment banking core, our crisis mirrors a phenomenon described by Irving Janis. Groupthink "refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures." In plain English, you can get eight or ten fine minds in a room and nevertheless produce everything from disastrous decisions to a sense of unanimity. (For books used in this entry please see last page.)

   Janis cites variables that, all together, produce Groupthink. First is an illusion of invulnerability, "which creates excessive optimism and encourages extreme risks." At some of the top banking houses -Lehmann, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch- leverage reached, for years at a stretch, multiples of 30 or 40 dollars borrowed for every dollar of actual equity. At Bears Stearns it was "dialing for dollars". Officials borrowed $75 billion a day with no thought to what happened if those loaning the money decided to pull the plug. Meanwhile, on a personal level executives like Joe Gregory at Lehman took a helicopter to work and, when he didn't like the color of his new Range Rover he sold it for half its actual value.

     At the Fed Allan Greenspan finally warned of a bubble fueled by "irrational exuberance"; at the big banking houses the only irrationality stemmed from Greenspan. The bubble would never burst and the firms incredible profits -up to 2007- only proved that pessimists knew nothing about banking - or the future.

   A second Groupthink essential is "self  censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus". In The Sellout, Charles Gasparino discusses one firm after another -Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Bearn Stearns, Lehman Brothers- where the leaders deliberately surrounded themselves with yes men and yes women. The leaders gave marching orders about  "grand strategy" and no one questioned the leader's orders, even when the leaders were AWOL. At Merrill Lynch Stan O'Neal played golf for days at stretch; at Bear Jimmy Cayne literally played bridge before and while his company tanked; and at Citibank Sandy Weill watched the bank's stock prices when he should have been questioning the strategy he set in place. Meanwhile the boards of directors acted like play toys for their masters or, as Cayne pontificated, "My board is my board."

   It's not that many bankers did not see the threats on the horizon; on the contrary, some even warned their bosses. But when they were fired, demoted or pushed to the side for offering alternative views, the understandable -if not brave-response from other skeptics or atheists was to stay below the flak and never bring alternative opinions to the surface.

   A third variable is an "unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality, inclining the members of the group to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions." Financier Teddy Forstmann argues that this dilemma does not exist; Wall Street bankers have no principles! Gasparino claims that bankers slowly lost their ethics over roughly thirty years (1980-2009). The one unquestioned constant -from portraits like Liar's Poker in 88 to Lowenstein's When Genius Failed in 98 to Cohan's House of Cards in 2009 is the need to make money, lots of it and in any way possible. Winners are judged by how much they earn for the bank and how much they make for themselves, not by how the money is earned or whether it does the American or global economy any long term good. So, the "moral" imperative to make money acts as a bulwark to introspection and doubt. As long as the profits roll in, few question the legitimacy of their actions. Bear's mantra was, "you eat what you kill".

     A last variable is "the illusion of unanimity". Given the framework described above, those who do harbor grave or other doubts about strategy and risk are unlikely to raise them in open meetings. You do not want to look stupid. You fear the consequences of the truth. No one else is talking, why should I? Whatever the motives, bosses can rightly argue that everyone was on board. The illusion of unanimity becomes a form of self censorship and self delusion, adding to the perfect storm that makes the most powerful investment bankers oblivious to reality. At Merrill Lynch O'Neil commissioned a study to discover the bank's actual exposure to subprime and other investments only after the firm was already threatened with catastrophe.

     Was Groupthink a temporary aberration? Something that,  like the bubble, is the exception rather than the rule? I don't think so. Combine the unquestioned need to make money with yes men and women; add in gargantuan egos and you get the behavior of John Twain at Merrill Lynch -after the firm was catapulting into oblivion. He spent $1.2 million to redo his office -$35,000 for a commode, $85,000 for a rug- and that kind of unchecked power seemingly remains a powerful force at the major firms. Leaders get away with outrageous behavior, they line the walls with sycophants and the boards still include their pals and other echoes. From the books I have read there is no evidence that these organizations -except perhaps Goldman Sachs- are willingly and deliberately opening themselves to the world that is actually there.

   Groupthink appears to be a systemic variable so, for me, the need for serious government regulation of everything from the banks to the rating agencies is more imperative than ever. To make big money the banks must sell and create old and new financial instruments, even vehicles as bizarre and opaque as CDO's squared. Let another bubble occur and, as Chancellor shows in his excellent history of speculation, Devil Take the Hindmost, investors will forget the past and recreate a sense of  invulnerability and optimism.

  Meanwhile, however much the TARP funds "saved" the system, they understandably created bitter resentments with the general public. Next time it will be much harder for the Federal government to bail out the banks, especially when the billions in bonuses that will be distributed in the coming weeks turn resentment into outright hatred of bankers and their institutions.

     Without new and enforced regulations in place, Groupthink remains such a powerful force that it could, in the next bubble, send America and the globe into a world of depression.

Books Relied On: 

Charles Gasparino, The Sellout

William D. Cohan, House of Cards

Paul Muolo and Matthew Padilla, Chain of Blame

Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money

          Let's start in the past and work our way up to 2009.

     In 1952 Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota called the condition of illegal agricultural workers a form of "economic slavery". Meanwhile, Senator Claude Aiken of Vermont entered the same debate by telling his colleagues that any bill to absolve agricultural employers from hiring illegal workers must also absolve employers in the cities.  "Because I have a suspicion that there may be more illegally employed in the cities of the United States than there are on the farms."

    In the Spring of 1981 Edwin Meese sent a memo to President Ronald Reagan. Agriculture did rely on illegal (especially Mexican) workers but in fashioning new legislation the President needed to remember that "only 15% of illegal aliens are now in agriculture; most are in blue collar and service occupations."

    Two quick conclusions: One, we did not invent the problem of illegal workers in 2009. It is a structural issue of the economy that has, at a bare minimum, a sixty year history in the U.S. Two, there is a direct connection between agriculture and the sixty year existence of illegal workers in blue collar and service occupations."Stoop and squat" labor is so abysmal that workers leave as soon as they can. In 2009 they "move up" to jobs in industries like meatpacking and the hole on the farm is filled -must be filled- by new illegal laborers who will repeat the historical process of endlessly replenishing the stock of  workers needed to pick and harvest, e.g., grapes, cherries,, strawberries, and apples.

     Rooted in the analysis of Philip Martin (See Migration Dialogue, Changing Face))  here is the situation in 2009. Since illegal laborers do not advertise their status no one knows exactly how many illegal farm workers exist. Martin's well educated estimate is that between crop and livestock workers America contains 1.1 million illegal farm workers. That translates into roughly fifty percent of the farm labor force and  "if the status quo persists, future farm workers are growing up today somewhere outside the U.S."

    In addition, the fifty percent figure mocks any claim to being a law and order society. The illegal number has remained more or less constant for sixty years, and, when someone tries to fix it (e.g., Ronald Reagan) the lobbying pressure is so great that documents in the Reagan library demonstrate how Presidents eventually capitulate to the powerful farm constituencies who threaten no money and no votes.

   In many ways the need for illegal farm workers has increased because of what Americans choose to eat and drink. Television happily broadcasts shows about the ascendancy of  the U.S. wine industry, forgetting to mention that harvesting raisins is arguably "the most labor intensive activity in North America." Those of us with the money to buy fine California wines need to remember that, when we say "cheers", half the bottle of wine is cheering the labor of illegal workers.

   Many of us also celebrate the move to organic farming but as Michael Pollan shows in The Omnivore's Dilemma growing "clean" crops produces far more weeds, all rooted out with an increased  stoop and squat labor.

  Finally, the move from meat to poultry increased so much that, in 2009, "half of the meat consumed by the average American is poultry." Pigs and chickens processing is more labor intensive than meat production and  the labor turnover rate often approaches 100%. Some of the turnover is due to the awful nature of the work; some of it is pure exploitation. The fringe benefits that increase labor costs do not kick in for several months so employers get rid of workers before costs rise and then hire the newcomers waiting to leave the farms.

   The need for illegal workers has spread so widely -to states like North Carolina, New York, Florida, Colorado and Washington- that, like the defense industry, the farm industry can now mobilize political resources that include Senators and representatives from throughout the nation. Stereotypes underline the need from California and Texas but the spread to other states gives those seeking illegal labor a distinct lobbying advantage when opponents seek to change the status quo.

    Meanwhile even the best efforts to close the border will not work. Martin correctly estimates that roughly 45% of the illegal workers enter legally. In addition, history shows that programs for so called temporary workers yield a contradiction: temporary workers become a permanent part of the labor force when they overstay their commitments and easily find work, for example, picking cherries and apples in Washington.

   Where do we go from here? That depends on how we deal with the truth. For at least the last sixty years, illegal farm work is a structural issue of the American economy. And it is utterly hypocritical to complain about the problem unless we are willing to stop "pigging out" on the fruits of illegal labor. Boycott grapes, strawberries, asparagus, cherries, apples, lettuce, onions and chickens or decide if you wish to focus on employers, employees, or both. For example, bills now before Congress would allow farmers to "attest" -not prove- that their workers were legal. This resembles the Texas Proviso of 1952; it shifts blame to the employees and allows both employers and consumers to escape the consequences of their actions.

      To begin to square this circle, I would focus on employees, the group with the least power in this perpetual structural situation. I would offer an immediate amnesty to workers who have worked in agriculture for, say a year or more; and I would recognize that this is primarily a way to ease the level of exploitation and hypocrisy. Amnesty will not only not reduce the need for illegal labor; it may actually increase it because as workers stabilize their situation, their children receive the education needed  to never enter farm work in the first place. Amnesty is a moral commitment that focuses on two issues: the level of exploitation that now exists and the need to offer rewards for what President Reagan rightfully called the "strong work ethic" and conservative religious and family values of Mexican and other illegal workers.

     We also need to recognize that illegal farm workers compliment rather than replace or substitute for American workers. As Senator Dianne Feinstein of California told her colleagues in May of 2009, "farmers have tried and tried to hire U.S. workers but found few who are willing to take the job in a hot field, doing backbreaking labor, in temperatures that often exceed 100 degrees." The Congressional Record easily shows similar admonitions that date from the 1920's, although Congress then spoke about "serfdom" rather than illegal or undocumented workers.

   In the 1930's  we sent almost one million Mexicans -many of them U.S. citizens- back to their country of origin. We herded them on trains and we did not worry about the consequences of our actions on the men, women and children shipped to inhospitable communities in Mexico.

   We are once again in the midst of economic turmoil. This time let's not repeat history but demand instead that our Presidents focus the fight for political and economic freedoms, not only in the Mideast, but in the Midwest, the Far West, the Deep South and the Northeast of the United States of America.

             In assessing Afghan policies, let's begin on the right and move left.

             Former Vice President Cheney accuses the President of  "projecting weakness" to the world. Using the "deep bow"  before Japanese Emperor Akihito as an awful symbol, Cheney says the President travels the world "apologizing" for his predecessor's policies. This undermines U.S. foreign policy because this "nuanced and at times cerebral approach" tells the world that we lack both strength and a sense of real commitment. To win in Afghanistan all players need to know that America means to win, whatever the duration of our pledge.

        In the United States, the deepest roots of this type of thinking lay in the duels that characterized early nineteenth century America. A man, a real man, always considered his "reputation". The perceived beliefs of others dominated a man's response; it's what "they" thought or might think that moved an individual to quickly demand a duel to the death as the best means to preserve both reputation and "honor".

     Over time this macho mentality gravitated to foreign policy. To preserve our reputation and deter enemies we needed to project strength rather than weakness, a will to win rather than the softness of a nuanced and -god help us- cerebral approach to foreign and military policies.

     This is a principal problem with Cheney's thinking: In arguing that we will be perceived as weak he is telling us what others think even though he has no proof that others think what we think they think. That sounds silly but it is nevertheless true. Cheney and others like him base their decisions on the perceived beliefs of others who, in fact, might think that an apology is in order or that Afghanistan is such a lost cause that victory is a meaningless aim.

       Bottom line: If you think like Cheney you think like a real man, a man who lets the perceived and unsubstantiated beliefs of others guide U.S. foreign policy. That's nonsense, pure and simple.

     Moving left, the President's commitment of 30,000 additional troops forgets the Pentagon Papers and one of their greatest lessons. You get into a war for one reason, you stay for another. In a memo from early 1965, authors note that "70% of the reason we are in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation". In public President Johnson spoke about freedom and falling dominoes. In private the President's thinking reflected that of former Vice President Cheney. We thought a withdrawal equaled humiliation and, as in 2009, it's what we thought they thought even though we never substantiated that they thought what we thought they thought.

   Even more important, according to the 1965 memo, the major reason for our involvement now revolved around perceived faults in our alleged reputation. So, suppose for example, that the commitment of more troops in Afghanistan produces many more deaths and casualties for American troops. Will we then stay in Afghanistan -forget the promise of withdrawal in 2001- because the loss of so many soldiers demands that we achieve a victory commensurate with the loss of American lives.

    No one knows what will happen. But, at the very least, it would be nice to know that the President understands that the reasons for entering a war may have little or nothing with to do with continuing and ending that war . In addition, it would be nice to know that the President will not respond positively when Cheney and his TV cohorts raise the issue of weakness, humiliation and the alleged reputation of the United States.

      Staying on the left, consider the Marines and the Dominican Republic. On December 1, 2009 the Associated Press reported that the Marines "would be the first wave in the new Afghanistan plan." They were also the first wave when we assumed political and military control of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924. The Marines not only picked Rafael Trujillo to run the country; they did so because he was "the most Americanized of the recruits the Marines trained." Trujillo was a monster; and when President Kennedy cooperated in his assassination, the assassins compared his murder to putting a stake through the heart of Dracula.

      President Obama seems utterly unaware of the results of our past interventions in societies with whom we shared far more cultural similarities (e.g., religion) than we ever will with the recruits in Afghanistan. The Marines can do all the training they wish but if the Trujillo's of the world do not wish to change or they become strengthened by our assistance, we use our soldiers and resources to nourish new monsters, with aims and aspirations that could easily reproduce 9/11.

      The stories about the Marines and our training of the Afghan forces often optimistically assume success. Our competence will become theirs. This is more nonsense. Recall, for example, that besides the Dominican Republic the Marines and other Americans have been training the police in Haiti since 1909. The results of that century long failure should have given President Obama pause for thought; instead we have the contradiction of sending more troops who will be removed as soon as is possible.

    Ending on the left consider the human tools who will supposedly carry out U.S. policy - and any chance of leaving in 2015, much less 2011. As run by President Karzai, Afghanistan (like the Dominican Republic) is very high on the list of very corrupt societies. Why will Afghan forces honestly and efficiently use our human and financial resources rather than continue to act as corruptly as they please. President Obama assures us that he had "an hour long conversation" with Karzai. This time Karzai knows we mean business. But, to quote Max Weber, only a political infant would give any credibility to the assurances of a man who just stole an election.

   Remember, in addition, that Afghanistan has a drug industry every bit as powerful as the one in Colombia. Again, we refuse to learn from history. As in Colombia, all sides in Afghanistan use the drug profits to funds their causes and the lure of huge bribes -not to mention death threats- is so great that it acts in a dialectical manner. The political and military corruption feed into the abuses fueled by drugs and the result is a society with greater and greater degrees of corruption. Mr. President: This is not a breeding ground for success; on the contrary, it represents new killing fields for all concerned.

     As Americans we are often overly optimistic. Thus, my citing of so many intractable. problems may seem like an analysis that lacks solutions. My response is this: We cannot achieve any successes until we first recognize the world that is actually there. We would then base policies on a firm grasp of both history and the nature of Afghanistan. Tragically, we have a President who, for all the promises of new thinking, is repeating history rather than changing it.

     Webster's defines assimilation as "the process of receiving new facts or of responding to new situations in conformity with what is already available to consciousness." From this perspective, assimilation is an arrow that points backwards. Immigrants try to fit into what is already available to consciousness and a successful assimilation means being similar to "native" Americans.

    Some of America's most respected Sociologists (e.g., Portes and Rumbaut in  Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation) argue that assimilation “still represents the master concept in the study of today’s immigrants." I agree. It's so powerful that Portes and Rumbaut  even argue that those who do not assimilate engage in "dissonant" behavior. Synonyms for dissonant include discordant, inharmonious and jarring. So, the norm is to fit in and refusing to embrace the host society implies that there is something problematic with the dissonant rather than with the master concept or with the beliefs, values and practices of the host society.

   Suppose, however, that the host society teaches raw prejudice by absurdly dividing everyone on earth into three colors: Whites, blacks and nonwhites? And suppose that the host society makes "race" such an important variable that it defines 300 million Americans by what allegedly divides 300 million Americans? Would Sociology then argue that a harmonious assimilation occurs when newcomers learn to be as prejudiced and color conscious as the "native" population?

   This is a crucial question, especially if we use as an example data compiled by Helen B. Marrow. Her work appears in the July 2009 number of Ethnic and Racial Studies and it argues that instead of moving toward a Post Racial America, we are still asking newcomers to assimilate into a society where white is good, black is not, and anything else is the experience of Latinos in North Carolina.

   Problem number one is "what am I?" In  a state where the white/black dichotomy functions as the Mason/Dixon line, Latinos are neither this nor that. Thus, Marrow notes that "white racial identification emerged more strongly among light-skinned and middle-class respondents from South America and the Caribbean, while "other" or Hispanic racial identification emerged more strongly among dark-skinned and lower class respondents from Mexico and Central America."

    Black remains the ultimate negative and even a fine social scientist reaffirms America's institutionalized insanity by turning a pan ethnic identity -i.e., Hispanic- into a "racial identification".  From the newcomers perspective, assimilation means that Latino immigrants must try to pick and choose the "right" race as they simultaneously learn and internalize "stereotypical views of blacks as loud, violent, lazy, uneducated, dependent or lacking in family values."

    Marrow notes that Latinos soon learn that the white world is more "permeable" because, as a local attorney explained, you need to "distinguish between the strong and hostile racial hatred many whites feel toward African Americans, versus the more ambivalent cultural xenophobia they feel toward Hispanics, whom they know less well." (Emphasis in original) Latinos soon learn "that the privileges of whiteness are ultimately closer within their reach than that of blacks, providing them with enormous incentives to distance themselves away from blackness to gain upward mobility, which can exacerbate any anti-black stereotypes among them".

   This is certainly déjà vu all over again. In the 1940's LULAC ( League of United Latin American Citizens) argued, not against discrimination, but against discrimination toward Mexicans because Mexicans were white. Seventy years later we see a similar response as we somehow have the audacity to discuss a post-racial America.

     In reality assimilation often produces more whites than ever before and that white gain strengthens prejudice rather than making it dissipate, much less disappear.

   Incidentally, the situation in North Carolina -and many other states- is even more complex because Marrow writes that Latinos often experience more prejudice from blacks than whites. As one Latino respondent put it, blacks feel threatened, they think that Hispanics are going to take something away from them...and they have the tendency to treat Hispanics a little bit wrong." Economic threats help account for the negative attitudes of African Americans, but, whatever the cause, the result for assimilating Latinos is more distance from blacks and the magnetic appeal of whiteness.

   Two conclusions emerge. One is to question the legitimacy of assimilation as a model for immigrant incorporation. North Carolina is only one state but the white/black dichotomy is alive and well throughout the nation; and some sociologists are actually pleased that close to fifty percent of Mexican Americans allegedly identify as white. Assimilation reaffirms the prejudiced past and puts Sociology in the peculiar position of arguing that those who reject the division of humanity into whites, blacks and nonwhites are engaging in "dissonant" behavior. That's as asinine as what's happening in North Carolina.

   Conclusion two is that anyone interested in serious social change needs to recognize that we need, not reform, but revolution. It is still so crazy in America that we call blacks, Latinos, (India) Indians and Asians "people of color"; meanwhile white people do not get a color but white is the color against which the entire world is defined. As Albert Murray noted, the word nonwhite contains all the fundamental assumptions about white supremacy and the segregation that is one result of a "successful" assimilation in contemporary North Carolina.

   Choices exist. Instead of  applauding assimilation we could champion what Fernando Ortiz called transculturation, that is, the cultural creativity that always occurs when two or more ethnic groups interact for significant periods of time. Transculturation treats people as imaginative forces in the reconfiguration of interacting cultures; and, thankfully, there is evidence that, besides the asinine assimilation in North Carolina, cities like New York are experiencing what the authors of Becoming New Yorkers coincidentally call "cultural creativity."

   A response to immigration and the incredible diversity of the city, the identity New Yorker is worn as  a badge of pride. It reflects a positive disposition toward ethnic and cultural differences because  a New Yorker "can come from immigrant groups, native minority groups, and they can be Italians, Irish, Jews and the like." New Yorkers embrace the world and their desire to be inclusive is so admirable that the authors of Becoming New Yorkers argue that the city "may serve as a positive model of creative multiculturalism and inclusion...New York, being the quintessential immigrant city, is in fact at its core very American."

   The question, of course, is what is an American?  Is it the creation of more whites and the need to teach immigrants to use color as a means to define Americans by what supposedly divides Americans? Or, is it the inclusion experienced and relished by New Yorkers?

   The choice is ours. There is no imperative to act in an asinine manner.

     One theme of this blog is that Sociology too often forgets the continuing and powerful wisdom of its founders. It's gotten so bad that so called "classic" Sociological theory is often taught as ancient history; students apparently need to know what was said but in comparison to our contemporary knowledge (and brilliance) a writer like Georg Simmel is a forgotten footnote.

       Simmel's Philosophy of Money is one of the best books ever written by a sociologist. Equally important, it  is as current as the $17 billion in bonuses that Goldman Sachs is about to shower on its theoretically worthy employees.

     Simmel said that money was "interchangeability personified". It owed "its value exclusively to its quality as a means." Money allowed anyone, anywhere to use bills or coins or debit cards to buy whatever they wished.

      From a positive perspective money offered degrees of freedom or "liberation" absent in many civilizations or transactions. Think, for example, of the individuals at the nation's intersections who carry signs:"Will work for food" The individual has no choice about what he will receive or where he will eat it. The food could be leftovers served on the back porch or the garage. But, with money, the individual has the means to buy a meal of  his own choosing or spilt the proceeds and buy food, clothing or even temporary shelter.

      As a perfect means, money also included a variety of negative characteristics. Simmel stressed the blasé attitude that often characterizes those who can buy anything. Rich folk -the poor things!-become indifferent to pleasure or excitement because money allows them to satisfy any excessive indulgence or enjoyment. Thus, those with money need Rodeo Drive in California or the Champs-Elysees in Paris because the stores on these thoroughfares speak to the blasé attitude. They perk up the apathetic  rich by offering the latest, utterly unique watch, gown, spa experience or automobile.

    Simmel moved toward the meaning of money and life when he stressed that money also produced a profound sense of cynicism. As the perfect means, money permitted the world's nastiest specimens to live in utter splendor while "the most worthy" human beings received few or no perks only because they lacked loot. As examples of nastiness, drug lords and dictators immediately come to mind but Simmel also discovered what he called, in 1900, "nurseries of cynicism". The perfect nursery was "stock exchange dealings". Wall Street Traders move everything from stocks and bonds to collateralized mortgage obligations and credit default swaps; in the process "money becomes the sole center of interest, as honor and conviction (think Madoff or the short sellers of subprime mortgages), talent and virtue, beauty and salvation of the soul, are exchanged against money and so the more mocking and frivolous attitude will develop in relation to these higher values that are up for sale...."

    As trader Ted Forstmann noted in The Sellout (just published by Charles Gasparino), some people think that Wall Street sold out its principles long before the crash of 2008, "but I would tell you as someone who knows these guys, they never had principles to sell out in the first place."

        Simmel despised the amorality of the nurseries of cynicism but he also understood that "never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its quality as a means...so thoroughly developed into a psychological value absolute." In 1900 and in 2009 people happily made a mere means the ultimate end of their lives. While that made them "soulless" and "heartless", Simmel reluctantly underlined the undeniable and perpetual appeal of money as an absolute value.  Money could equal incredible power, deference and prestige because "with reference to money we do not ask what and how, but how much." In essence, money's almost lecherous appeal rested on a perverse irony; the quantity of money available to a person conferred a qualitative advantage. It allowed even evil people to buy a Congress, homes on three continents, and the private jets flown by grateful sycophants.

     A special dilemma for Simmel revolved around the death of god. He argued that, in 1900, the loss of religious values and beliefs was replaced, not by higher secular values, but by the stunning victory of money as the ultimate end of existence.

      In 2009 God is back in the saddle- fully 40% of Americans identify as born again Christians- but many of the most successful "mega" churches celebrate the good news of the gospel, including the right or obligation to become as rich as you please. Echoing the Baptist Minister Russell Conwell in his famous "Acres of Diamonds" speech, the loot lays in your own backyard. Just go dig it up and you can please God by becoming as rich as anyone on the planet.

      The problem, of course, is the crash of 2008. With its TARP program, U.S. government officials provided many hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance to some of the most heartless people in the country. Investment houses leveraged at $33 to one happily used taxpayer dollars to offset their losses; and in 2009 Wall Street is once again "betting the bank" on exotic financial instruments but, this time, it is in an economy with an unemployment rate of more than 10%.

     In response, "populist" outrage is expressed from the right to the left of the political spectrum but, because the Federal government allegedly made a rotten deal with the soulless, big government becomes the nation's big problem. Nobody trusts Washington so traders, drooling over their holiday bonuses, laugh out loud since they may very well escape the Federal regulations that are the only check on the pursuit of money and its amoral consequences.

     Simmel would argue that it's a question of values. . Heartlessness is normal because the powerful and enduring pursuit of money as an ultimate value is built into the fabric of any modern society. Meanwhile, we live at a time when no American political party wishes to offer a set of alternative, of "higher" values. For example, if the big banks and insurance companies are truly so important that they cannot be allowed to fail, don't those banks and investment houses and hedge funds have some serious and lasting obligations to the rest of us? And, if so, what are those obligations and what are the higher values that shape them.

      It would be nice to hear the President address these issues. Because, given Simmel's crucial insights, no one in their right mind believes that finance capitalists, like Paul on the way to Damascus, are going to see the light and stop making money the ultimate and most important value of their -and our- lives.

       During the Irish potato famine in 1846-7, Lord Lucan received another title: "the great exterminator". He argued that the famine was caused by too many people. So, as Cecil Woodham Smith explains, Lucan cleared his massive Irish holdings of its inhabitants, concluding "that a large part of the population of Ireland must disappear." In response, the people often refused to leave; Lucan then sent in "crow bar brigades" to pull down cabins over the heads of their starving inhabitants; and, if the house proved to be solid, Lucan constructed a "machine of ropes and pulleys", chained to horses. When the horses were whipped, the houses disappeared as quickly as the now discarded human beings.

  Creating an army of unemployed and desperate people, Lucan justly became a model for heartless brutality. He drove his carriage through London with the shades tightly pulled; let someone see his face and Lucan might disappear as fast as his former tenants .

    Compare the response to Lord Lucan to a story in the November 12th, 2009 edition of the New York Times. Timothy Egan writes that the sale of Anheuser-Busch to a Belgian brewer delivered a "kidney punch" to more than a 1,000 longtime employees. In a terrible economy, they received pink slips that drove them into joblessness and they responded with nothing more than a slew of invectives at the executives who cut costs by cutting people. Those folks will never lose their houses to ropes and pulleys; instead, the banks will simply foreclose when the checks stop coming, throwing the people into the streets because capital now exerts its greatest power -the power to withhold investment- with little of the fury directed at a Lord Lucan. Somehow even the workers assume or at least accept that cutting costs is such an economic necessity that capital has the right to callously discard even its best and most loyal workers.

   Here's another example. The Times recently cheered the proposed merger of Stanley Tools and Black and Decker. It's "great synergy" unless you live in New Britain, Connecticut, the home of Stanley Works. I have lived in and around New Britain for forty years and watched Stanly turn the town into a manufacturing shell as empty as the lands cleared by Lord Lucan. Yet again, longtime workers lost their jobs and the city any hope of a future without any of the fierce resistance encountered by the "great exterminator." Apparently, corporations now have the right to cut costs and people, receiving instead of threats and invective, praise for their focus on the only thing that matters: Profits and the moral right of investors to receive them.

   Enter Teddy Roosevelt, in a speech made close to a century ago. In the "New Nationalism" (delivered on August 31st, 1910) Roosevelt offered a group of principles that provide an admirable guide for today's economy. The Republican Roosevelt argued that "the conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned (think Goldman Sachs) and the men who have earned more they possess (think the displaced workers) is the central condition of progress." Long before the New Deal Roosevelt fought for a "square deal". "And when I say that I am for the square deal I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and reward for equally good service."

   Roosevelt boldly argues that, beside the rights of capital, stood capital's obligations to its work force. He explained "that the true friend of property, the true conservative is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making (i.e., corporations, trusts, cartels) shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it."

    To achieve his aim of squaring the circle between the rights of capital and capital's obligations to the rest of us, Roosevelt explained that he begrudged no one who made a fortune "honorably obtained and well used." But, that fortune could only be justified and praised if it benefitted the entire community. Sending Stanley's jobs to Mexico and Asia would be highly questionable using Roosevelt's criteria so he underlined a simple conclusion: :"This, I know implies a policy of far more active government interference with social and economic conditions in this country that we have yet had, but I think that we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

   Roosevelt wrote about an economy dominated by interstate business; he wanted the  Federal government to intervene in issues like fixed and excessive railroad charges across the American continent. Today, we live in a global economy and since corporations can easily make whatever they wish wherever they wish, the need for government control seems more obvious than ever. As Roosevelt stressed, :"No man should receive a dollar unless ...every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered -not gambling in stocks (think derivatives) but service rendered."

   President Obama:  Let's have a serious national debate about the meaning of "service rendered", about the actual obligations of capital to the rest of us. Corporations and their minions will champion the eventual benefits of a trickledown effect but cities like Detroit and New Britain suggest that the water never arrived. They have lived through a drought for a generation and there is no help in sight.

      As an easy initial target, consider usury, Jesus Christ and the Christian tradition that should be quite meaningful to the forty percent of Americans who say they are born again. In Dante's Inferno he assigned usurers (think the credit card companies raising interest rates to nearly 30%) "to the lowest ledge in the seventh circle of hell – lower than murderers". Medieval Canon law excommunicated usurers and the United States followed suit after 1776, when all states adopted usury laws, generally setting the maximum rate at 6%.

    Start the national debate about the obligations of capital by using easy targets like usury and allegedly free trade. Get Americans to embrace a "New Nationalism", rooted in the ideals Roosevelt so admirably underlined. "I am for men and not for property...I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends but I rank dividends below human character." And, in a line that calls to mind the contemporary and great disparities in wealth between CEO's and their work force,  Roosevelt argued "that those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better that swollen fortunes for the few (recall the hedge fund managers who made billions betting that stock prices would fall) and the triumph of both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism."

   We can learn from history. We need not repeat it. Especially if we are willing to reconsider the arguments and priorities of a man who argued that, besides San Juan Hill, it was high time to yell "charge" against the business interests who forget great advice: "The New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people."

  So,  forget FDR for a while. And, as nation let's focus on the arguments of a Roosevelt who asked the crucial questions that are even more relevant today than they were in 1910.

           Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was fascinated. Seated around a nursery school table, he watched 3-5 year olds openly talk to themselves in an animated fashion. Let adults do this and we would assume they had problems in living. But Piaget argued that the "public monologues" -so called private speech- symbolized an important part of human development. Kids practiced the social scripts they learned from adults; they memorized their place in the social order and, by 7 or 8 years of age, the private monologues disappeared. The children had so successfully memorized and internalized the scripts that they no longer needed practice. Buried at a preconscious level, the children could instantly call up the social scripts whenever a particular social situation occurred.

    Piaget's work suggests a variable degree of social determinism. Once buried in the brain, the knowledge will not disappear. As adolescents and adults, that knowledge can be reevaluated and even unlearned but only against the internalized backdrop of  a society's accepted way to think and act. For example, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950's I learned and internalized every imaginable expletive against African Americans. I unlearned that poison but the scripts are still buried in my brain.

    From a different angle, George Herbert Mead used baseball to suggest another way to approach the social scripts imposed on children. Mead argued that social scripts meant learning at least two roles, your own and that of the other. In simple interactions -e.g., a child's behavior in a library- the knowledge could be easily obtained. But, for a society, Mead suggested a time frame similar to that of Piaget. It took seven or eight years for children to learn, as in baseball, the roles of  at least eight other people. You couldn't "play ball" unless you understood and took the role of at least eight other fielders, plus the person at bat. Thus, with a runner on first, and a grounder hit to the shortstop, you immediately knew what the first and second basemen would do.

   Move from baseball to the way in which Americans teach our children about "race" and skin color. Around those nursery school tables, children practice defining Americans by what poisonously divides Americans. In this American pastime, they use three essential words -white, black, and nonwhite- to make value judgments about everybody on earth. Ethnic knowledge is also acquired but skin color remains the ultimate trump card. Thus, an India Indian or a Pakistani is often darker than an African American but the children learn (as with Governor Jindal in Louisiana) that he or she is nonwhite. On an opposite pole, children see that many Chinese or Korean Americans are lighter than "white" people, but "Asians" are also nonwhite.

   To internalize this ugliness requires a great deal of trial and error. For example, children are also learning their colors and they could have a parent who is tan but when they call that parent tan they then learn that he or she is black. Or that a darker skinned Portuguese or Sicilian American is white. In America seeing is not believing. Children must practice for many years to internalize the significance and consequences of our tricolor division of more than six billion human beings. However, once that knowledge is buried in the brain, they can play ball so successfully that the color white is not a color. This is bizarre but as American as apple pie.

      White is not a color because blacks and nonwhites are the only "people of color". This is another tricky distinction for the kids because they must learn that white is a color but not a color when you refer to most people on earth. So, "they" are people of color and I am white and that means that white is the designer original against which all human beings are judged. Indeed, when Albert Murray taught  us that the word nonwhite contains all the fundamental  assumptions about white supremacy and segregation, he meant it in the sense of Mead and baseball. Kids learn and then internalize how the pieces of the "racial" puzzle fit together and they act accordingly. They self segregate themselves from their inferiors, and, since, in 2009, white remains the silent arbiter of supremacy, even parents who try to avoid this insanity cannot do so. By eight or so the kids know the scripts by heart and we then teach them that all people are created equal using the tricolor distinctions that are still firmly rooted in white supremacy.

    A post racial America can never occur using the value judgments and words invented by slave traders and slave owners. President Obama has a "white" mother but, accepting the hideous one drop rule, he is black. If that is progress, I would hate to see failure.

      To actually move into a different future, we must expunge the concept of race and our value loaded tricolor division of the entire world. If not, the kids will continue to sit around those nursery school tables and practice what we teach. By eight or so the knowledge is buried in their brains and we will then have the audacity to be surprised when many millions of Americans argue that their America is disappearing.

     Damn right it is! Masses of those pesky "nonwhites" are everywhere and a so called black man is President of the United States. How can this be happening if whites are the designer original? How can people of color -the racial knock-offs from our tricolor division of humanity- be taking over so many positions of power in politics, business and education?

      It's un-American; or, put differently, it's not how the game is played according to the social scripts I successfully internalized by eight years of age.

    For real change we have only one choice. The President needs to initiate a debate about the concept of race and our ugly and stupid division of the entire world into whites, blacks, and nonwhites.

     Meanwhile, the children are waiting, seated at their nursery school tables practicing what we choose to put in their brains.

            Congressman Fred Crawford (R., Michigan) was an architect of the bill that gave Puerto Ricans (in 1950) the right to create their own constitution. He explained his world view in a Congressional commentary (on May 5th, 1949) that is as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.

    Crawford said: "I do not know of any better time than today, this week and next week, for us to learn something about our colonial possessions and our subjects."

    To my knowledge Crawford never wore a crown; and in 1949 the  contradiction between having colonial subjects and claiming to be the leader of the "Free World" rarely bothered either the House or the Senate. Rooted in Article 4, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution -"Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States;" - Congress did as it pleased. For example, it bluntly told Puerto Ricans in 1945 that they could be neither a state nor independent.  That left no traditional options on the table so the legislation crafted in 1950 and 1952 sought to create the same thing only different.

      Congress repeatedly emphasized that it wanted to be "absolutely clear": The right to create a constitution changed "nothing fundamental" in the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. In fact, when the Puerto Ricans returned a constitution that included a right to work, Congress quickly exerted the plenary power it claimed since 1898. Congress erased the right to work clause and sent the edited document back to the Caribbean. Take it or leave it.

    If nothing fundamental changed, Puerto Rico remained (and remains) a colony. However, despite Fred Crawford's honesty, it was hard for U.S. representatives at the United Nations  to call Puerto Rico a colony when they simultaneously wanted the world body ( in 1954) to make Puerto Rico the first possession removed from the UN's list of non-self governing territories. Behind the scenes Governor Luis Muñoz wanted to use the phrase "Free Associated State". Washington officials said no way; Puerto Rico was neither free nor a state so members of the Truman administration suggested the "commonwealth" label. It placed a wonderful smoke screen over the colonial truth until, at the United Nations, India's Krishna Menon accused the United States of hypocrisy.

    Menon correctly argued that the U.S. Constitution gave plenary power to Congress. So, how could U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge argue that no Puerto Rican laws could be changed without the consent of the Puerto Rican government? In response, Lodge sanctioned a lie. At the United Nations  he allowed the Puerto Ricans to claim rights they did not have; and in private he loudly groused to President Eisenhower about the constant abuse and humiliation from Krishna Menon.

    Documents at the Eisenhower Library reveal the President's profoundly cynical response: Offer them independence. Say that the President supported this option and, in papers marked "top secret", truly offer them independence as a way to win a major public relations coup at the United Nations.

      The only problem with this offer was the political platform of Governor Muñoz and his Popular Democratic Party. When, after 1945, Congress said "no way" to statehood or independence he convinced the Puerto Rican people that his "Free Associated State" was the best of all political worlds. How could Muñoz do a humiliating about face after years of championing Puerto Rico's unique and wonderful political status?

    Eisenhower surrendered. He wrote "send to the secret files" on the offer of independence and Muñoz and his followers began a campaign that continues to this moment. They continually asked Congress to "enhance" Commonwealth status and Congress, just as repeatedly, reminded the Puerto Ricans of its plenary powers. In April of 1974 Senator Henry Jackson publicly told islanders that "they must remain a colony"; and , in documents at the Carter library Zbigniew Brzezinski told his boss that Puerto Rico represented a form of "neocolonialism". However, the Commonwealth mask was a nice touch when, at the U.N., Fidel Castro acted like Krishna Menon; Castro said Puerto Rico was a colony and Brzezinski agreed, as long as it was behind closed doors.

    The first President Bush pushed for statehood. And Congress actually created a bill offering the three traditional alternatives: Statehood, independence or some form of associated state. However, Congress never agreed to abide by the expressed will of the Puerto Rican people. Islanders could vote and Congress, using its plenary powers, would then decide what Congress wanted to do with its Puerto Rican possession.

   The second President Bush was surprisingly honest. In a report issued in December of 2005, he bluntly told the Puerto Ricans that a "New Commonwealth" status was impossible: Echoing Krishna Menon in 1954, Bush explained that "the U.S. Constitution does not allow for such an arrangement."  Moreover, Puerto Ricans needed to remember that, as an unincorporated territory, Puerto Rico was never intended to be a state. In fact, Puerto Ricans only enjoyed their right to citizenship under a law enacted in 1917. Congress could repeal that law whenever it wished and leave the Puerto Ricans where they were in 1900: Denizens, foreigners who lived in a colony owned by a country that waved the flag of freedom everywhere on earth, except in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony on earth.

        In November of 2009 Puerto Rico remains a terrible symbol of Congressional -and Presidential- hypocrisy. Policy makers talk about bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations but, in the Caribbean, the U.S. sits with two colonies (i.e., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islanders) and no one wants to discuss any bills in which Congress agrees to abide by the democratically expressed will of its colonial subjects.

   So, here is my suggestion. Let's start with the history. Puerto Rico is like a hushed up family secret.  No one knows the truth. In fact, if you talk to a typical U. S. Senator or Representative  the lack of knowledge is appalling. And, if you politely present documents from the Presidential libraries, the response is " that can't be true."

     Yes it is. For 111 years the United States has acted like Fred Crawford in 1949. So, to repeat his words, "I do not know of any better time than today, this week and next week, for us to learn something about our colonial possessions and our subjects."

       "Ramrod straight", President Obama publicly and  solemnly saluted the caskets of 15 Army soldiers and 3 Drug Enforcement Agents on October 29, 2009. In response, the New York Times debated the quality and propriety of that salute, neglecting the far more important story. As the President saluted fallen warriors, the Devil stood at his side, loudly repeating an admonition from Max Weber. Any political leader who uses "power and force as a means" contracts with diabolical powers. Good intentions often produce "evil" results and, especially in the case of the Drug Enforcement Agents, the U.S. is actively supporting (e.g., President Karzai's  brother Ahmed) the heroin dealers who want our agents dead and buried.

    For very visibly saluting the soldiers President Obama deserves great credit. He  deliberately assumed responsibility for death and he reminded the nation of the eternal price paid by those who selflessly obey their Commander-In- Chief. However, in Afghanistan, the President and the nation will salute far more caskets unless he courageously embraces what Weber called an "ethic of responsibility".

   Weber was the best kind of political conservative. Rooted in an accurate reading of history, he  knew that political leaders never wielded as much power as they assumed; and, in a world of "ethical irrationality", Weber argued that trying to justify the means by the end was both fruitless and absurd. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the U.S. uses drones to kill our enemies. We spot the guy on our cameras, we take aim and we often kill children who bear no responsibility for the  sins of their fathers. For Weber the use of force -even including something like a drone- might be necessary but only a "political infant" failed to grasp that, once unleashed, the use of force often produced the unintended consequences (e.g., dead children and bitter Pakistani resentment of the drones) no one wanted or imagined. Thus, an ethic of responsibility firmly grounds itself in skepticism; it leaves moral reasoning to the clerics and it never assumes that the President's best motives have anything to do with the success of policies carried out by others.

    Weber stressed that the President issued orders; others carried them out and that meant that "the leader and his success are completely dependent upon the functioning of his machine and not on his own motives." In Afghanistan the situation is so byzantine that only Pollyanna believes that President Obama is in control.

   Start with a New York Times headline on November 3, 2009. President Hamid Karzai assumes a second term in office; President Obama, after offering congratulations, asks Karzai to finally do something about the profound corruption at all levels of his government; and Karzai refuses to sack the officials in charge of bribe taking. “These problems cannot be solved by changing high-ranking officials. We’ll review the laws and see what problems are in the law and we will draft some new laws.”

     I mean: What a nice guy! Karzai will draft laws no one will ever enforce and President Obama will spend billions to train the police and army commanded by officials who will use their training for goals and aims that have nothing to do with the intentions of Barach Obama and his advisors.

    Mr. President: Remember Haiti. We have been training the police in that nation since 1909. Things are not going well and the same story is repeating itself in Afghanistan. Continue to fund the corruption and you consciously create a lethal disconnect between your aims and those of the officials riding around Kabul in the world's most expensive automobiles.

      Police and military corruption is bad enough. But in Afghanistan the drug traders are so successful that the Taliban resembles the FARC in Colombia. In nations dominated by the drug trade the "bad guys" never need a bank. They sell narcotics to fund the wars they wish to fight and they make threats or offer bribes that are often impossible -for real human beings- to refuse. Thus, even if Karzai actually did something about "everyday corruption", a serious conservative argues that the "ethically irrational" drug trade will thrive and produce yet another disconnect between Washington's aims and those of the people who actually decide the fate of the Afghan people.

    The final nail in the Afghan policy coffin is General McChrystal's request for 40,000 troops. One assumption is that more soldiers will produce the stability needed to at least keep the enemy at bay. That could happen. But, as Weber stressed, a mountain of more soldiers may produce negative as well as positive results. As in Iraq, we could see another Abu Ghraib. Or, our soldiers, trying to defend themselves may produce so much "collateral damage" that we make enemies of the people we wish to embrace. Or, losing even more Americans, public opinion polls suddenly show no support for the young men and women who actually fight and die for the rest of us.

    No one knows for sure. And that was Weber's point. Rooted in an informed skepticism about the ability of political leaders to manage -much less transform -social reality, Weber said to get yourself a "mature" world leader and don't be fooled by his or her age. For Weber maturity meant a steel eyed analysis of the world that actually existed. It meant that the leader considered the limitations of political power and that he or she then made decisions that included a resolution to not waste more lives and treasure in fruitless battles.

   For President Obama this would be exceedingly difficult. His "war of necessity" would now be a war of futility. But, as Weber stressed, it is "immensely moving"  when a political leader follows an ethic of responsibility and declares "Here I stand. I can do no other."

    Mr. President: No American wants to watch you salute more coffins. However, unless you and your advisors grasp the institutionalized limitations of U.S. power in Afghanistan, that is exactly what we will be doing the next time  you assume, "ramrod straight", the deadly responsibilities of being America's Commander-In-Chief.

     In late 2009 the U.S. left seems both irrelevant and defensive. Read  the newspapers or the net and the discussion focuses on the latest comments from Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. They dominate debate while the left rarely takes on the bold challenges that could move people to reassess the nature, tone and direction of public policies.

      Since public opinion revolves the definition of issues, here is my first suggestion. Focus all selected issues around the traditional distinction between the rights of capital versus the obligations of capital to the larger society. Don't get off the dime. Hammer away at rights versus obligations, and use as initial illustrations three key issues: Free markets, free trade; and the proper role of the Federal government.

Free Markets and Free Trade

      A crucial cornerstone of conservative and centrist beliefs is the existence of free markets and free trade. This is an absurd contention. Neither free markets nor free trade have ever existed yet the left rarely uses easily available facts to challenge assumptions that could crumble conservative claims as easily as squeezing a crisp cracker.

       Start before capitalism, on November 5th, 1761. As Eric J. Dolan explains in Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America New England candle manufacturers worried about the excessive competition for the whale matter then crucial to producing candles. Major players wanted to control the market by setting a fixed ceiling price but new and ambitious competitors could always bid more if they wished and thus raise prices for all players. So, the biggest manufacturers formed the "Spermaceti Trust". The manufacturers set a "maximum price" they would pay for the whale head matter and they also tried to deftly destroy potential competitors. They used "all fair and honorable means" to stop competitors from building new candle works and they literally put the screws to the competition by making sure that they never obtained the "screw press" technology needed to process the whale matter.

    The whale trust makes this point: Long before Marx and Engels, manufacturers understood the inherent and perpetual dangers of free markets. Too much competition threatened everyone and the best way to maintain profits was to achieve a business controlled market stability rooted in fixed prices and the destruction of competitors before they even existed.

   Move on to 1911. Under a capitalist system, industrialization greatly exacerbated the dangers of too much supply and no demand. Machines potentially produced an endless supply of  anything so, understanding their relative equality, General Electric and Westinghouse began to fix prices on light bulbs in roughly 1896. And, following the lead of the candle makers, the two giants did everything they could to prevent new competitors. Under orders from their crucial customers, Corning Glass limited its sales to "unapproved" manufacturers and the GE/Westinghouse agreements also included compacts to refuse newcomers the machine tool technology needed to produce light bulbs. By the late twenties, the light bulb cartel achieved such market control that Westinghouse paid GE a kickback if its sales achieved more than its precisely allotted share of the American market.

    Controlling supposedly free markets is never an aberration; it is a perpetual and systemic business necessity that continues through the Archer Midland Daniels global price fixing "scandals" of the late 1990's,  right down to Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire hedge-fund manager now accused (in October of 2009) of insider trading at his Galleon fund. In this instance a literal "fat cat" allegedly received the essential information that turned fictional free markets for stocks into playgrounds for those who understood the way markets actually  work.

    The left has a simple task. Use a Mount Everest of controlled market examples to prove that free markets have never existed and then ask a crucial question: If capitalists must try to control markets, does the general public wants those market decisions made by executives like Archer Midland Daniels Mark Whitacre? As Kurt Eichenwald wrote in The Informant, Whitacre told participants at a global  price fixing summit that "Competitors are our friends. Customer's the enemy".

      The markets will be controlled. The question is by whom. Thus, the left's job is to underline the free market fiction and then begin a debate about the actual obligations of capitalists to the rest of us.

   Free trade is another easy target. Especially in agriculture, the European Union has more trade  restrictions than a maximum security prison. And, when critics point to the obvious contradictions, restrictions on trade become especially creative. The Koreans kept out American cars because they were allegedly too heavy for the fragile Korean roadways; and American producers kept out Mexican avocadoes by arguing -with a straight face- that the avocadoes contained "invisible fruit flies" that could threaten the health of Americans now addicted to guacamole and other Mexican delights. Finally, Mexican truck drivers who supposedly have a right to compete in the U.S. now discover that they cannot do so because their trucks are, like fruit flies, dangerous to old and new Americans.

        Again the left's job is to present the easily available facts and then hammer away at the rights versus obligations dichotomy. Decide that business has obligations to the rest of us and you then move on to the next issue: The systemic need for the Federal government to regulate markets after we have  a national debate about the obligations the Feds will champion.

      The left has been especially weak in failing to underline the incredible hypocrisies of those who make "big government" the people's biggest enemy. For example,  Jared Diamond notes in Collapse  that folks in Montana thrive on the notion of  a self reliance that always wants to keep the Federal government at bay. Meanwhile, for every dollar that Montana sends to Washington, they get 1.5 dollars in return. The difference between "talking head" nonsense and reality needs to be endlessly underlined.

    Take on senior citizens, another group that often denies the substantial assistance they receive. For example, I recently turned 65 and pay Medicare only $80 a month. Meanwhile, Medicare has spent more than $15,000 on my health care over the last three months. I'd say an 15 to 1 "return on my investment" is exceedingly generous yet the left lets too many seniors forget the essential and very beneficial role of the Federal government in providing health care to seniors.

    Other examples of  the Federal government's crucial role easily come to mind: The number of Americans employed in the defense industry;  the farm subsidies that "heartland" states rely on to receive assistance as generous as Medicare; the Pell grants that keep students at universities throughout the nation; the billions of Federal dollars used to build and improve everything from  interstate highways  to the private airports used by executives who avoid the "masses" as they hypocritically land on Federal funded turf.

   My conclusions: Use free markets and free trade as examples of  the chasm between reality and conservative "economic truths".  Focus on rights versus obligations. And proudly use the Federal government to defend consumers from their admitted "enemy":  Businesses who must control markets in the service of successfully screwing  the rest of us.

Criticism of Obama: Of Course "Race" Is An Issue

       Passionate and vitriolic criticism of President Obama often makes no sense. He is, for example, pilloried as a socialist but for anyone interested in facts, the Federal government is massively and intimately involved in the lives of many of the President's most ardent opponents. Medicare, Social Security, Farm Subsidies, Highways, Airports, and Education are obvious examples; but what about defense?  Put another military facility in a state like Georgia and the Peach State will sink. And here in Connecticut both Democratic Senators lobby for useless military projects because that keeps people working at Sikorsky and Pratt and Whitney. Pay your mortgage with Federal defense dollars and it's free market capitalism; fund health care for the uninsured and the President turns into Hitler.

     If Obama abuse and the facts often live in different countries, what's up? Why does the President push hot buttons that generate such outrageous and hypocritical responses?

     Prejudice is only one part of any explanation but Representative James E. Clyburn (D., South Carolina) does, unfortunately, make a good point: “Look at the language they’re using out there: ‘Take America back; take our country back.’ They think they’re losing. You should not simply make a value judgment and say those are bad people. You have to understand where they’re coming from.”

     "They" are coming from four hundred years of venom. We use skin color to define ourselves by what toxically divides us and we have a ladder of superiority and inferiority built into the fabric of American culture. The white/black/nonwhite triad relies on white as the preferred and superior skin color -otherwise why would (India) Indians or Japanese be NONwhite?- and we are actually surprised when many whites still self segregate from the "others" who are by definition contaminated.

   Forget South Carolina. Go to Boston and listen for the frequency and hideous content of the word "nigger". Call folks on their prejudice and they look at you in amazement. We are not prejudiced; it just that they are "niggers".

    Here is where Representative Clyburn makes a cogent point. "They are losing"; and even African American scholars remember a history that falsely and grossly underestimates the extent of the loss. For example, in the August 14th, 2009 edition of the New York Times Orlando Patterson makes this assertion: "At the time of their arrival, Jews, Italians and other Eastern and Southern Europeans — and even the Catholic Irish — were viewed by native whites as belonging to very different (and inferior) races. In fact, they did not assimilate because they were white; they became “white” because they assimilated."

    This is demonstrably false. To be a citizen in early twentieth century America you needed to be white; that was the law and whatever terrible prejudice Jews or Italians or Portuguese experienced they were allowed to be citizens because they were shared America's most important social characteristic: They were white; and they then assimilated with all the rights and privileges that came with citizenship. Among others, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, (India) Indians and Pakistanis were never given the right to be citizens because they were "nonwhite". In the 1924 Ethic Origins legislation the quota for Chinese was zero; they were not European, not white and not capable of assimilation.

   Along with African Americans, nonwhites got screwed and it does us no good to talk about a fictional past because part of the reason "whites are losing" is that after 1965, our immigration laws opened the doors to the nonwhites who were, for most of American history, both despised and excluded. In 2009, Mexicans, for example, are people of color, just the wrong color. Too dark to be white and too light to be black they experience prejudice; but Mexican Americans are simultaneously allowed -imagine the reaction of hardcore whites!- to institutionalize hundreds of Chicano Studies programs that bitterly condemn both whites and the U. S. culture into which Mexicans are to assimilate.