The arrest of Julian
Assange is of special interest to me for three distinct reasons:-
Along with my
legal colleague, Lloyd Rodney ( activist like his famous cousin, Dr. Walter
Rodney), I was arrested under British jurisdiction
for publicly petitioning against incompetence and corruption within the
judicial system. ( See: Footnote i) ).
When my daughter
was approaching her senior year in high school, the school had a practice of
inviting parents to address the seniors to explain what the parent’s job, profession, vocation or career entailed
and to give a talk on any subject of choice. My choice was the history of the
First Amendment under the US Constitution and its origins dating back to the
Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights 1688.
As defence
Attorney and a human rights activist I am acutely aware of the importance of
legal protection for the right to speak via the media, both print and
electronic, to bring public attention to matters of administrative,
governmental and other official wrongdoings.
So, I have followed Mr.
Assange’s WikiLeaks endeavours and his challenges, pending trial and
tribulations for years.
Before I turn to the meat
of the matter in this article, namely, what I term the Phase 111 stage of
Assange’s ordeal – his arrest in London, I would have found it ironic, if not
amusing, to note the somersaults of President Trump in his reactions to the
WikiLeaks publications. But he is, the one and only, President Donald Trump ( if
I have not come to understand him so well – I would otherwise be taking his
every utterance – totally seriously). First, when candidate Trump, he simply
adored WikiLeaks. It is noteworthy that the Department of Justice under the
Obama administration thought it unwise to prosecute Assange, for reason of
likely First Amendment infringements ( more anon on that legal aspect). Next,
under the Trump administration there is an indictment and in London, the arrest
of Julian Assange, on Thursday, the 11th
day of April, 2019: Trump:
“I know nothing about WikiLeaks”. Now, for clarity’s sake, it helps
to outline the phases that Assange might, or probably most likely shall pass
through in the main:-
Phase 1 – Accusations of
rape against him by two Swedish women ( maybe to be revived).
Phase 11 – His departure from Sweden to London and his long political asylum from 2012 in the Ecuadorian Embassy ended as of the 11th day of April, 2019
Phase 111 – His arrest and
arraignment within the British justice system.
Phase 1V – Extradition
proceedings to a final decision under British justice.
Phase V – An anticipated pre-determined extradition
to the United States of America; and
Phase VI – A further anticipated overloading of the
existing US indictment and a long prison sentence.
N.B. see: conclusion for specific explanation of this Phase V1 legal aspect.
It is Phase 111 that our
attention is here directed to.
Phase 111
The arrest and the
arraignment can be viewed under two discrete headings:-
Arrest:
Already considered in relation to the breach of the UK Bail Act ( see:
Arraignment:
This is where in relation to the US indictment the charge is put to Mr. Assange
in the dock, for his to plea “Guilty” or “Not Guilty”. Then, the proceedings
shall grind on, there having been a “Not Guilty” plea.
The indictment and the
Judge, Michael Snow, hearing the plea, are worthy of special comment.
District Judge Michael Snow: Assange had said nothing during his brief hearing of
15 minute and then the “Not guilty” plea and then the impartial Judge says –
“His assertion that he has not had a fair hearing is laughable. And his
behaviour is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish
interests.”
The US Government has laid
one count in the indictment amounting to a charge for computer hacking to
obtain classified information.
The indictment states that
Chelsea Manning ( assumed then Bradley Manning) worked along with Assange (
‘conspired’ to convey the true criminal allegation of the US Government against
Assange) to hack into US government computers.
So, contrary to US law,
Assange is facing one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
The co-conspirator,
Manning, was sentenced in the US and imprisoned, but had his/her prison
sentence commuted by President Obama. Presently, Manning is back in prison, for
reason of refusing to testify about and/or against WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange.
Do I believe that if
extradited the US Government will add more charges? Answer provided in the
Conclusion below.
Discussion
Above is stated the facts
anticipated to unfold within the existing legal framework and/or frameworks of
justice systems, at Phase 111, if
Assange is to be extradited to face US justice.
Now, my concerns which I
wish to share.
Compromise and/or intimidation of freedom of
expression/speech and of the press:
This specifies my greatest fear and concern, not just for WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange, but for newspapers, writers, journalists, editors, activists, authors,
online and hard copy publishers all the way across the board and right down to
street corner activists across the world. The Assange case has the quite
serious and real potential of sending a resoundingly bad message across the
world – depending on what the UK Court’s decision ultimately is. “Bad message”
admittedly from my perspective and mind-set; “good message” if state wrongdoing
is deemed more important to be protected, such as war crimes ( see: this
video
Paragraph 9 of the
indictment is stating that it was Manning who hacked into the computer. The
charge to be proved is related to these considerations:-
What evidence is there of direct assistance by Assange ( i.e. beyond mere encouragement and/or stated intent – the actus rea of Assange)?
Is it that a ‘long-reach’ US statute, where Assange did nothing directly in the US ( i.e. within and directly under its jurisdiction) – but, as alleged, by an extension from Manning – is that how a cohate crime is to be established?
So Manning through Assange, accessed the Linux operating system, which cracked the password and Manning accessed and Assange published. Is that the publication/journalistic crime?
Question:
How were the ‘Pentagon Papers’ obtained ( legally or illegally) to be published
as a public service to expose the governmental wrongdoings under the Nixon
administration?
Question: Is
what is termed ‘national-defense’ in the US more or less important than
ensuring that the Government itself is not in breach of the law? For, if there
was no breach of the law governing us all under the ‘Rule of Law’, then there
would be no embarrassment and/or need to be overly concerned – correct? To be
fair, maybe spies names are discovered by such exposure, but that is not the
actual gravamen of the Assange case as alleged – is it? It is fundamentally
that US war-crimes and torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, were fully exposed
for the world to see. That seems to be Assange’s greatest ‘crime’ for which he,
with the full force of the US government against him – shall pay for – correct?
Paragraph 16 of the
indictment reads:-
PURPOSE AND OBJECT OF THE CONSPIRACY
“16. The primary purpose
of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of
classified information related to the national defense of the United States so
that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website.”
Cf. For the sake of
historical record, do recall, “The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United
States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of
Defense, were first released on the front page of the New York Times in 1971.
These papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg, an American activist and former
U.S. military analyst.”
I am old enough to recall
the foregoing events. I can safely say that the publication of the Pentagon
Papers had a monumental impact on the views of the American people based upon
the words of their Government, which had
lied to them. Further, having especial regard for the fact that, from President
Truman all the way to Nixon, administration after administration had lied to
the American people about the depth of the US involvement in the Vietnam War;
so national shock waves rebounded.
The New York Times had
started publication of the papers and then the Nixon administration obtained an
injunction. The Court however ruled ultimately in the case of New York Times.
Co. v. United States that the Times was free to publish.
By comparison – is Assange
really doing much more than that ( by
reference to the US case of the Pentagon Papers – simply – exposing and stating
the truth in a similar way – albeit – electronically and via more effectively updated form)?
Legal question
At paragraph 25 of the
indictment, it is confirmed that Assange said to Manning about the cracking of
the code, “no luck so far”.
I don’t get it; did
Assange assist Manning in a conclusive and choate manner to hack into the US
Government’s computer ( based on how the indictment is framed)?
Or, is this a charge for
an ‘inchoate crime’?
So, I ask the questions above
because since the single charge relates to Assange trying to assist and ending
up unsuccessful in his effort – is this analogous to ‘attempted murder’ ( e.g. he,
Assange, ‘attempted computer
intrusion’)?
Conclusion
The legal turf upon which
the Assange case will be fought in England, is the area separating the
solicitation of matters of journalistic interest – versus – commission of a
crime by way of obtaining ‘official secrets’ ( as termed under British law)/
‘national security’ classified information under US law.
In the US, if Assange is extradited, the legal contest shall be framed as First Amendment rights – versus -privacy.
In response to the
obtaining of secret government information, the courts in England and the US
have generally lent on the side of ‘public interest’ and the public’s right to
know over strict privacy.
In this case the US Government is trying to delineate between maintaining and ostensibly upholding the journalistic right to investigate and know and make public – versus – not being seen to be curtailing and/or infringing upon that First Amendment right; hence the indictment’s embrace of ‘conspiracy’ to again prise and delineate to say that Assange overstepped the legal line by encouraging Manning. A thin line indeed – yet to be determined under the law of Britain, which if there is a finding for extradition will unavoidably impinge upon the traditional areas of press freedom, inclusive of, but not limited to, the areas of sourcing, identity protection and secrecy of investigative communications.
From that evidence it
appears that the US Government does not actually know whether or not Assange
was successful in cracking the code , where the Officer states:-
“Investigators have not
recovered a response by Manning to Assange’s question, and there is no other evidence
as to what Assange did, if anything, with respect to the password,” FBI agent
Megan Brown said.
So, without more concrete
evidence, the case at present appears, in technical legal terms, to be one of
reliance upon Assange’s offer to assist Manning as the constituent part of the ‘conspiracy’ to get to illegality under the US Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act. So the wheel turns back to the Manning trial in the US for
reliance on the same evidence that initially
convicted Manning.
On the question of additional
charges being laid by the US, this can be noted. Additional charges may be added before
Assange’s extradition is sought. Once extradition is effected, under treaty and
by reference to the ‘rule of specialty’ then the U.S. cannot change the charge
at a later date. So, if the US is to abide by the rules, then upon extradition,
Assange could only be tried for the charge for which he is extradited.
The Labour shadow Foreign
Secretary, M.P. Diane Abbott, had this to say on the matter, “Julian Assange is
not being pursued to protect U.S. national security; he’s being pursued because
he has exposed wrongdoing by U.S. administrations and their military forces.”
The Assange case is
already of global importance, not least because, there already has been a favourable
legal ruling by the:-
‘INTERAMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS
REQUEST FOR AN ADVISORY OPINION SUBMITTED BY THE REPUBLIC OF
ECUADOR’
Concerning “the institution of asylum in its different forms and to the legality of its recognition as a human right of every individual in accordance with the principle of equality and nondiscrimination.”
Which, at the very least
makes the legal opinion persuasive and informative to other international
courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, of which the domestic court
in England would have to be cognizant.
Put in reverse, if a US
journalist – or, even, US based
journalist ( Khashoggi immediately comes
to mind) – were to report on the wrongdoings and illegalities within a
foreign country, is it to be argued before a US court, upon an application from
the foreign country that for so doing, the US journalist must be extradited to
the offending foreign country? Stated at its simplest, this is the kind of
‘Alice in legal wonderland’ world that the Trump Administration’s extradition
application for Assange is taking the US and the world into.
The British Court may
choose to act as a vassal state subservient to the interests of US foreign
policy. Whatever is the perceived choice of the British Judges ( based on the
example of District Judge, Michael Snow, to date) there nevertheless
remains a real chance for credibility,
rationality, integrity and most of all honesty, decency and independence to
prevail and shine in a case such as this. There is, to my legal mind, but one
core question to be answered:-
“ Is it a crime to expose
crimes already committed?”
That is the question.
The British Court shall in due time inform of precisely what is the extraditable offence and how so in point of existing law and under established journalistic practice.
Footnote i) : It
should be noted, by reference to the issues at hand, that the UK has dropped
eleven places from 29/180 in 2013 to 40/180 in 2018 in ‘Reporters Without
Borders’ World Press Freedom Index’; it is now ranked in between Trinidad and Tobago and Burkina
Faso.
The racist roots of UK colonial
legal provisions were directed against myself and Attorney Lloyd Rodney to
arrest us for having lawfully published a public Petition about the justice
system’s injustices; so we were both charged for ‘scandalising’ the court; an archaic and obsolete legal provision of
which it was said in 1899:-
“ Committals for contempt
of Court by scandalising the Court itself have become obsolete in this country.
Courts are contented to leave to public opinion attacks or comments derogatory
or scandalous to them.”
Case: McLeod v. St. Aubyn [1899] Appeal Cases page 549 at page 561. Per. Lord Morris.
Question: So, why was I
arrested; and- why was Rodney imprisoned?
Answer: And here comes the express administrative racism in answer, that was directed against the contemptnor in 1899 as it was a century later used against Rodney and myself:
“ But, it must be considered that in small colonies, consisting principally of coloured populations, the enforcement in proper cases of committal for contempt of Court for attacks on the Court may be absolutely necessary to preserve in such a community the dignity of and respect for the Court.” Per. Lord Morris.
Question: So Rodney is imprisoned for speaking truthfully; Assange finds himself speaking truthfully – and so – by parity of reasoning, in his ( Assange’s community of investigative journalists) – it becomes “absolutely necessary to preserve in such a community the dignity of and respect for the Court.” ( i.e. substitute there for the word “Court” the word “Country” – and place before the word “community” – “global community” – and the same sentiments and words thus expressed – echo through the ages – and do they not become – colonialism and Empire on the march? :-
“ … absolutely necessary to preserve in such a global community the dignity of and respect for the Country.”
Conclusion: If the UK Courts continue to act as a supplicant to US foreign policy – the pride and vanity of both nations ( shamelessly of the UK Court(s) if that were to be the result) shall presage really bad times for both countries and the world.
(The above referenced events in a UN affiliated report were published in an article entitled “Gadflys in the Turks and Caicos Islands – Lawyers Harassed,” by Laurie Wiseberg, published in the Human Rights Tribune, Vol 5, Nos. 1-2, April 1998. Unfortunately the Human Rights Tribune has been discontinued for lack of funding, not leaving behind a web address; however, the author will furnish as documentation a PDF photocopy of the article (IMG_20190417_0001.pdf) via email upon request at his email address at barnett46@hotmail.com. )
Footnote ii) :
In consequence of the events reported internationally about the imprisonment of
Attorney Lloyd Rodney, I sued on his behalf in two distinct actions, one for
the shackling to his hospital bed, at a time after Amnesty International had
directed that the British Government release him unconditionally; then I sued
for the unlawful arrest. The first case was won and to avoid the further
embarrassment, Her Majesty’s Government did ensure that Rodney received in full
over US$200,000 compensation.
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a
graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political
science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty
years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death
threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and
works in the Caribbean.
There is at core here a moral issue – going well beyond the questions of the legalities involved.
At the juncture of three and a half years of being a ‘political asylum’ refugee in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, a United Nations panel decided that Julian Assange had been subjected to “arbitrary detention” by the Governments of Sweden and the UK. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted Opinion No. 54/2015, on 4 December 2015. Next, Assange’s lawyers called for Sweden’s extradition request forthwith to be abandoned. The extradition request was withdrawn by Sweden.
If the West ( and on this issue – I narrow to the US and UK) are defenders of human rights, I then focus on these three (3) questions:-
Is it that ‘freedom of expression’ ( speech) is one of the significant cornerstones of Western democracy?
Is it a fact, that all decent human sentiment in the world, was outraged at the idea that a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, working for the ‘Washington Post’ could have literally been ‘chopped up’ in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Turkey?
If it is an outrage to have a journalist ‘chopped up’ for reason of his dissident voice against corrupt and dishonest government actions of Saudi Arabia; why then is it not an equivalent outrage for the ‘locking up’ of a journalist, (Editor in Chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange), for his comparable exposure of misconduct, murder and corruption of Western Governments? (Again, I focus on the chief defenders in the world of the human right of freedom of expression – the UK and US).
I believe that I am correct in saying that the American Declaration of Independence declares and acknowledges a right to revolt against tyranny.
If the laws were all to have been upheld during the slave days of the British Empire in the Caribbean, then no Maroons ( i.e. the slaves who revolted and left the plantations for freedom in the mountains ) would have existed; had they simply obeyed the law, they would have submitted to oppression – wouldn’t they?
What about an interesting comparison of the ‘whistleblowing’ former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray? Murray had complained and repeatedly reported to his government that the leader of Uzbekistan, Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov, was torturing dissidents and literally putting some in ‘hot water’ ( i.e. slow boiling them to death in a cauldron). Murray complained that there was widespread kidnapping, torture, rape by the police, murder and extensive financial corruption and added to that – religious persecution and further to that – censorship and other human rights abuses ( but only to mention, but a few, only just a few, human rights violations of which the UK Government via its Ambassador had been made fully aware of). The UK Government told Murray to shut up. He continued to complain and protest and then he exposed the truth to the world. The UK dismissed him from his Ambassadorial post and inflicted some nineteen (19) charges against him. He won all, but one (1). He had to have broken Britain’s Official Secrets Act, to have spoken truth to power and all other eighteen (18) were dismissed. Had he been a good little boy and shut up about substantial human rights wrongdoing in Uzbekistan then the world’s eyes would not have been opened up; consciences would not been moved; right would not have had its voice heard over wrong.
So, we get to the legal issues concerning Julian Assange, and mainly:-
1. State Secrecy; and
2. Bail Act ( under UK law).
State Secrecy versus legitimate criticism: Much wrongdoing by agents of the state would never come to light if journalists did not unlawfully leak confidential ‘classified information’.
Does the press, Editors and investigative journalists across the world, not report on Governmental corruption and wrongdoing everyday? Do those journalists get prosecuted? Chopped up as did Khashoggi or locked up as Assange – yes?
What a legal farce when the U.K. Supreme Court ruled 5-2 in favor of recognising Sweden’s arrest warrant concerning allegations of rape made against Assange. To facilitate Sweden’s ordinal extradition request, Their Lordships made an interpretation of the term “Judicial authority” by reference to the 2003 European Extradition Act. But, the law too is that extradition orders are not granted for politically motivated reasons. The Swedish legal system could have moved to interview Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy, but they let their statute of limitations run out. At the time, albeit not a Swedish lawyer, I read the evidence and then mockingly wrote a piece entitled: “Captain Cocksman in blonde land” – see; commentary of mine below:-
The ruse is revealed and Sweden ( based on available evidence; want thereof, to be more accurate ) withdraws the extradition request. But, now that the original consideration related to the Swedish authorities investigation of allegations of rape is not active, then is it still that Assange in the UK remains a “Wanted man”? The plot thickens.
Bail Act: Clare Montgomery is the name of the UK lawyer, who prosecutes on Assange’s case, had before been paid by the UK Government to defend against the extradition of then Chilean leader, General Pinochet. It gets worse – for the costs of each proceeding was/has been paid for from the UK public purse; the British tax-payers. Add to this the costs of laying siege to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It does not stop there with the Assange case, for again the UK public purse had to bear the costs, paid to the Swedish Government, related to the Swedish prosecution’s costs. Corruption – or – corruption in the extreme?
Just read what the Guardian newspaper in England reported:-
“The former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was immune from prosecution outside his homeland because the crimes and human rights abuses he is alleged to have committed fell under the category of “acts of government”, the House of Lords heard… Clare Montgomery QC told the panel of seven law lords that as a head of state he was entitled to “absolute immunity”, even if the charges at the centre of the allegations included torture. “States and the organs of state, including heads of state and former heads of state, are entitled to absolute immunity from criminal proceedings in the national courts of other countries,” she said.” ( i.e. the same lawyer the UK Government found suitable to defend a man who was complicit in murder, rape and torture and have him released: now is again found to make a case against a man who has not murdered, not raped not tortured – but has spoken the truth for the world to read through his news organisation – WikiLeaks.)
But, more to the point, is it true, or is it untrue, that the press in the UK and US also publishes classified materials; are the Editors and/or investigative journalists then hounded and/or prosecuted in the same manner that Assange has been?
From 2012 Assange, with a grant of political asylum by Ecuador, has been living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Fast forward to the specific UK Bail Act violation.
Assange was busy obtaining political asylum at the time and could not be in the Ecuadorian Embassy while at the same time surrender to UK authorities; and so thereby not be breaching his bail. “Failure to surrender” in those circumstances, on the bail aspect, is a minor offence. At least the UK Government and the police knew his place of permanent residence, which he has not vacated for quite a few years now. The law in England, if I know it at this time, I think for such violation is a prison term of three months and/or a level 5 fine ( is that about approximately £5000?). But wait – didn’t Assange spend 10 days in Wandsworth Prison in 2010 and 550 days at the home of a supporter while on bail, which could be deducted from any custodial sentence? I suspect that 30 x 3 = 90 days as the maximum sentence. Or, do Courts in the UK no longer consider the real and evident and obvious and just and practical considerations of the case? Or, does the UK justice system now want to take it another way and contend that there is “contempt of court”?
Cf. Craig Murray did what he did; but, could not so have done without breaching the Official Secrets Act. Was he morally right – or – merely legally wrong?
The US might presently have sealed indictments and might be awaiting for the appropriate time to request Assange’s extradition to the US from the UK. Ms. Montgomery, no doubt knows that the Bail Act violation, might merely be a stepping stone for arresting Mr. Assange and then facilitating the UK being ‘President Trump’s poodle’ in an extradition application.
Up and down the UK in courts and across the British Commonwealth in courts each day, and in the US too, persons fail to show up for their hearing date. Magistrates or Judges will weigh the circumstances and many such Magistrates or Judges re-list in the criminal justice system for another hearing date – or – depending on the circumstances, issue a Bench Warrant. The operative factor is “ the circumstances” explaining the absence:-
In the Pinochet case there was the equivalent of the man is seriously ill Mi Lord ( or – in the US – Your Honour ( Honor) )and needs to be released on humanitarian grounds – or tomorrow he will be undergoing surgery – was the kind of approach taken with General Pinochet; or
The CIA director, Mike Pompeo, simply does not like the truth coming out and being exposed globally – so WikiLeaks is termed by him, “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
As best I understand the situation; if the US proceeds with an application to the UK for extradition, then it would be the UK Extradition Act of 2003 which would be the applicable law. The traditional approach under international law is one of there being decisions to be made by the judicial authorities alone and no political considerations are to be involved.
This all comes down to the real question:-
“Which countries have falsely claimed superior human rights and moral authority on the world stage?”
Pinochet had been released for return to Chile by the UK, for reasons of illness; what of Julian Assange’s condition ( both mental and physical after almost seven (7) years of confinement)? Pinochet was a known mass murderer and torturer; what charge to date has emerged publicly that Assange ever is alleged to have committed a serious criminal act? Surely, Sweden dropped their allegations.
It seems to me, a lawyer, that the following can safely be concluded of the UK’s justice system:-
Pinochet: the charges of murder, rape, genocide and other significant abuses under both domestic and international law, go unpunished.
Julian Assange: Presently charged for?
Page 5 of the UK Select Home Affairs Committee has this to say on the UK-US Extradition Treaty 2003:-
“Concern about the operation of the current extradition arrangements between the USA and the UK should not be allowed to obscure the fundamental point that it is firmly in our national interest to have effective, fair and balanced extradition arrangements with the United States and our other international partners. Criminals must not be allowed to evade British justice by fleeing the country; nor should the UK become a safe haven for those who have committed crimes in other territories.”
I seriously suspect that if one simply substituted the words ‘Saudi Arabia’ everywhere there is reference to ‘UK’ – then as in the recent case of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi – the UK must likewise designate Julian Assange a criminal journalist for purposes of extradition to the US. It shall be truly of jurisprudential importance under extradition law, within the context of international law, to read what the UK authorities next do and how any decision is reasoned by the judicial authorities.
What next?
Yeah – lock him up indefinitely ( like Chelsea Manning) for telling the truth – indeed – not one word ever published by Wikileaks has been contented to be a falsehood.
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and works in the Caribbean.
By Richard John Stapleton,
PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher
Our truth supply system may be the biggest problem we have. How do you know if you know something? How do you know if something is relevant? How do you know what’s the probability of something existing, doing something, causing something, on a scale of zero to one (0 – 1), zero probability being there is no chance something is true; one probability being something is certainly true; .5 probability being there is a fifty-fifty chance; all other points between zero and one being all the chances, odds, probabilities, etc. something is true.
Precise arithmetic and
deductive logic are almost useless making most major decisions about economic,
social, and political states of affairs.
Excellent knowers dealing with economic, social, psychological, and
political states of affairs know more precisely what the probabilities of
things are than poor knowers; and excellent knowers know more somethings exist
or don’t exist than poor knowers; but they know very little for sure.
Good probability estimating ability, that is guessing about the truth of something, is more valuable than ability to precisely add, subtract, multiply, and divide when making decisions about economic and political affairs, except when billing and paying for things, and figuring income taxes, when not being able to do math exactly can get you in trouble.
Those who can assign the best
probabilities to things, that is guess and make the best estimates about things
being real and relevant, and what they cause, generally win biggest in economic
affairs, which explains how inexact seeming nincompoops like Donald Trump may
have much more money than most people.
If you inherit enough money and if you hire smart people to help you
look out for it you might wind up a billionaire even if you never learned your
multiplication tables. I’ll bet Trump
has done almost no arithmetic for himself throughout his life, with the
probability of that proposition being true being at least .8 in my estimation.
Excellent knowers are better
than poor knowers at figuring out what is fake and what is real, a skill useful
when running for president of the US.
Did Trump win in 2016 because he knew more than all his opponents in the
presidential race? Or did it happen by
accident?
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
considered by some to have been the best philosopher, or knower about knowing,
of all time, in one of his propositions, in his magnum opus, Prototractatus, said, “Everything that
happens happens by accident.”
It seems to me what he was
saying here is that nobody knows what all the causes of things are, which does
not mean there are no probabilities or chains of causation: it just means there are so many causes and
probabilities of events in economic and political affairs that no one can keep
track of or predict all of them with certainty, so you might as well say
everything that happens happens by accident.
On the other hand, if
everything that happens is caused by something, regardless of whether anyone
knows what all the causes are, and all caused things includes all human
feelings, thoughts, decisions, and behaviors, then free will does not exist,
and everything that happens is not only accidental but inevitable.
Another of Wittgenstein’s
famous propositions was, “The case is all there is,” which means humans can
only know about cases they construct for themselves. According to Wittgenstein, good knowers have
better “pictures” in their minds than poor knowers about what is really going
on in states of affairs.
What is the probability
global warming and climate change will seriously disrupt human economic and
political affairs within twenty years?
Fifty years? Etc. Nobody knows for sure, but some people know
much more about the probabilities of various states happening than others,
based on the pictures they carry around in their heads regarding what is really
going on.
I still think the Internet is disseminating more truth to ordinary humans than was heretofore disseminated to ordinary humans during pre-Internet days, helping them develop better pictures in their minds about what is really going on; but there is a lot of chaff (fake crap) among the wheat (truth) disseminated on the Internet, way more chaff than wheat in my opinion; but it seems to me it would be a serious mistake to abolish the Internet or create a new class of gatekeepers, aka editors, to accept or reject what ordinary humans want to say on the Internet. It’s better to know what ordinary humans think about economic and political affairs than not know it, however distorted it might be, in my opinion. It’s true they said what they said, however distorted or irrelevant what they said might be. Only by putting all forms of truth on the table is there any hope, it seems to me, of modifying false and harmful pictures in the minds of humans so as to create consensual pictures that will cause states of affairs to happen that will lead to a sustainable Spaceship Earth.
One can build a case things are getting crazier on the Internet, including Facebook. Presumed adults are posting more and more off the wall things on it, it seems to me, crazy stuff any grade school student should know is absurd nonsense. Most posts depicting Trump and his voters make them look dumb as doorknobs, which surely is not the case. Trump and his voters are just having naughty fun, exercising their legal right to display the power of their Rebel Child ego states, telling Be Perfect-driven Adapted Child/Critical Parent prudes with more education and money than they have to go screw themselves, with raised middle fingers.
Our cellphone system is now contaminated with robot scam calls having zero respect for truth, automatically and promiscuously dialed to lists containing millions of telephone numbers. These electronic vandals and jackals use pre-recorded happy, chirpy, up-beat robot Child/Rescuer voices, preying on would-be suckers/Victims who are promiscuously dialed without conscience as many as eight or ten times per day each in their homes and businesses, rampantly and wantonly disturbing the lives of humans, reducing their enjoyment of life and inflicting frustration and time and money losses, as they reduce the productivity that might have occurred had they not made their calls.
There is apparently at
present no way to stop this menace. The
human operators of these automatic telephone systems inject absolute nonsense
and frustration into the lives of fellow humans and they get away with it Scot
free, since apparently there are no governmental agencies that can or will
control their unethical anti-social behavior.
Is it impossible to establish this sort of regulation? If not why is it governments do not get on
with the job?
The Mueller investigation is nauseating. After two or so years what do we really know? Almost nothing. And what did the report cost taxpayers? Two million dollars? Mueller produced a three hundred page report and turned it over to Barr, the current attorney general, Trump’s latest attempt to install another paper-pushing lackey who will do what he wants him to do in the Attorney General’s office. So far Barr seems to be doing his job well in Trump’s eyes, not exactly saying the report exonerated Trump, and not saying it did not either, merely saying it proves there was no collusion with the Russians, which a lot of us already knew. Barr says he will release the report to the public later.
Trust me, he seems to
say. What a crock.
The Muller investigators
supposedly had access to classified documents they read during the course of
their proceedings. As I understand it Trump
at any time could have declared those documents to be unclassified to exonerate
himself. Why didn’t he do that if he was
innocent? Seems to me his not doing this
proved he was guilty of something in the report he wanted to hide. I have said all along based on what I had
seen in Mainstream Media and on the Internet that Trump did not collude with
officials of the Russian government to hack Hillary’s servers to get dirt to
help Trump get elected. Did he collude
with some Russian citizens? You
bet. He did this selling condos and
apartments in New York City to Russian oligarchs, helping them launder dirty
money, and trying to get another Trump Tower built in Moscow, the biggest ego
trip of his entire ethically challenged venal (and possibly criminal) career.
So here we are now with the
Mueller report supposedly finished and we still know little or nothing as a
matter of fact about what they studied and discussed. The problem now is whether one human being,
Barr, will allow the report to be released, and how much stuff in it will be redacted. Boy, talk about a doublespeak Orwellian word. Redact.
Sounds like they intend to do precise technical surgery on the report,
when in plain English they are just deleting or cutting crap out of the report,
stuff they want to keep secret to protect the guilty, even if the report is
supposedly “released” to the public.
It’s pathetic. Like living in an
insane asylum.
How to correct such a truth
problem is super problematic. It’s not
just a matter of corruption and dishonesty in government but problems with news
media suppressing real news for political reasons attempting to curry favor
with ordinary people and the deep state to maximize their readership, views,
subscriptions, and advertising revenues.
It seems posts on the
Internet keep getting more off the wall but censuring the Internet is not the
answer in my opinion. I recommend that
the Internet remain as free as possible with everyone having a chance to speak
their minds with posts no matter how poorly informed or corrupt they might be. While purposely lying is categorically wrong
as a moral and ethical principle, it’s better to let liars lie on the Internet
than censure them because of the freedom it would destroy, reducing the total
amount of truth available for people to see and hear. On the other hand, it’s far better to be
honestly wrong than to be dishonestly wrong.
For sure there are some excellent Internet journals and writers that rarely if ever flinch telling the real truth as they see it, Counterpunch, Truth-out, Intrepid Report, RollingStone, ZeroHedge, Noam Chomsky, Paul Street, John Chuckman, Patrick Cockburn, Wayne Madsen, Chris Hedges, Douglas Valentine, Paul Craig Roberts, Matt Taibbi, Henry Giroux, Tyler Durden, Ellen Brown, William John Cox, Courtenay Barnett, to name a few.
Yet it seems to me the Earthian
truth system is generally corrupt, and always has been, with everyone mainly
saying what will enhance and preserve their vested interests, whether
individuals or institutions, whether corporations, governments, militaries,
religions, schools, or universities. Of
course there are many standards for not lying built into various levels of
these institutions, but the main thing for them is to tell the public things
that will maximize their own security, budgets, or profits, preserving their
status quo gravy trains as best they can.
The US military is one of the
biggest gravy trains out there. How can
you cut military expenses during peacetime?
There appears to be no way. The
biggest problem the US military-industrial-corporate-intelligence establishment
has right now is finding or creating and defining enemies sufficiently
plausible and threatening to give them justification for their receiving almost
one trillion cash dollars of taxpayer money and Federal Reserve funny money per
year from the US federal government.
One easy and inexpensive
military thing to do I recommend is getting back in as many nuclear non-proliferation
treaties as possible and not manufacturing any more nuclear weapons. The same goes for nuclear power plants in my
opinion.
Unfortunately, human migration problems around Spaceship Earth have increased in recent decades because of the US’s overt military destruction of regimes and governments in the Middle East and North Africa and its covert clandestine destabilizing and destruction of Latin American regimes and governments, often replacing socialist governments with right-wing dictators and fascist regimes who terrorize their own people, causing them to flee, causing them to flood European countries and the US, or at least try to. Whether Trump’s wall or anything else can keep them out of the US remains to be seen.
So
far Trump seems to be having little or no real success in this regard. About
one hundred thousand illegal immigrants entered the US in the last month. If this continues, annualized this will be
over one million in one year, way up from what happened under Obama. Thousands are still coming through the porous
US southern border every day, as if to spite Trump, as if caused by Trump’s
Rebel Child ego state fantasies, rhetoric, and tweets about walls and other inhumane
cures for the immigration problem, their way of using their own Rebel Child ego
states to tell Trump to go screw himself, with raised middle fingers.
In
recent days, again using his impetuous Rebel/Free Child ego states, Trump told the
Mexican government if they did not stop the immigrants from reaching the US
border he would just “shut down” the entire border.
Using contrived Critical Parent ego state imagery, Trump sometimes creates poses for cameras as if mimicking Mussolini, clenching his jaw, jutting his chin up and out, squinting his eyes as if looking at something in the distance, as if he were a wise and benevolent visionary. Apparently he covets the respect fascist and communist dictators for life such as Hitler and Kim Jong Un were and are shown by their subordinated enslaved populations.
Trump
has recently recognized an illegal unelected white fascist coup leader in
Venezuela as a lawful leader of the country, thereby subverting and undermining
democracy in Venezuela. If the upper class fascist pretender does take over,
massive migrations of lower class indigenous and mixed race people from
Venezuela will ensue, far exceeding what is happening now, many of them most
likely winding up in the US, to a large extent caused by Trump’s bombastic Free
Child rhetoric and the almost mute ulterior sanctions US bureaucratic
paper-pushers in the State Department, CIA, and elsewhere have imposed on
Venezuela, to gain control of its oil supply and to keep its white upper class
in power.
Who were the prime allowers of unauthorized immigrants into the US? Clinton, and Bush II. According to the Pew Research Centerunauthorized immigrants into the US increased from 3.5 million in 1990 to 8.6 million in 2000, the Clinton years, and from 8.6 to 12.2 million during 2001 to 2007, the Bush II years, and then declined to 10.7 million in 2016, the Obama years. There are now ten to eleven million unauthorized immigrants living in the US.
At
the same time, conditions have become so agitated and uncertain in some
so-called developed not-yet-collapsed countries that some fairly well off humans
born there would like to migrate to other countries to escape local conditions
in their countries which they perceive to be more onerous and oppressive than
those in other countries, to escape high taxes and social unrest (in some cases
caused by having to live cheek by jowl with recent immigrants who will not
assimilate), feeling and thinking the grass might be greener in several places
on the other side of the fence in other rich developed countries.
In
coming decades if dire predictions about climate change come true, such as the
polar icecaps melting and raising the saltwater level around Earth several feet,
many millions of people, of all socio-economic classes, maybe over a billion,
living on coastal plains will be dislocated, creating migrations larger than
heretofore experienced or imagined on Earth.
Nobody knows where all these people will go.
The US has recently experienced one of the worst environmental disasters in recent history with the flooding of the Midwest caused by a winter cyclone that flooded three or four states, inundating farms and killing millions of farm animals, destroying millions of bushels of stored grain, which will cause farmers not to plant new crops on time this year, which is likely to cause serious shortages of food and higher food prices in the US. If this is not climate change caused by global warming what is? I had never heard of a winter cyclone such as this happening on a landmass such as the US Midwest.
Most
likely the winter cyclone flooding will cause new human out-migration from the
region.
To
solve the Earthian environmental problem a case can be made that the status
levels of agricultural lifestyles should be higher than those of bankers
sitting in offices atop skyscrapers in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Hong
Kong, Moscow, Brasilia, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, Riyadh, Tel
Aviv, or Ottawa, or generals sitting in the US Pentagon and in equivalent
command posts in other countries, or top leaders sitting in the US White House
and in equivalent houses in other countries.
Some
writers have mentioned that some oligarchs are now building themselves
underground bunkers that will enable them to survive a nuclear holocaust. Some people have fantasized about migrating
to and colonizing other planets before what they call “the event” happens,
analogous to what Europeans did in the Americas, which, it seems to me, is a
ridiculous pipedream.
I included and quoted original research data I acquired by questionnaires as well as published academic secondary research and literature in my study of migration in my doctoral dissertation. The management science idea I explained in “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” for ultimately solving the Earthian migration problem, published in 2015, happened to me in 1969 when I was writing my dissertation, and is affixed to the dissertation in an appendix.
You can download a free copy of my dissertation, titled “An Analysis of Rural Manpower Migration Patterns in the South Plains Region of Texas” from Texas Tech University.
It will do little good to play AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game identified and labeled by transactional analysts to stroke humans for being stoic Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political systems manipulated and exploited by rapacious sociopathic Persecutor oligarchs and leaders and their corrupt bought and paid for lackey politicians for selfish gain, however true that might be in reality.
On the other hand, it will do no good for Earthians to stick their heads in the sand to passively pretend everything is just hunky-dory and swell, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game labeled GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive comments about themselves and their environments.
Regardless of the causes of
the Earthian plight, it seems to me individual humans should assume
responsibility and take action for conserving energy as best they can in their
daily lives to reduce greenhouse gases; but especially they should help select
politicians who will create economic and political policies and actions to help
correct environmental and social problems on a mass scale.
In the last seven months I have tried to set up a De-Gaming Democracy group as explained in my article, “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” here in Statesboro where I live, hoping to engage citizens of various persuasions, whether they be red, blue, green, or any other color, in discussions of relevant economic and political problems and opportunities to develop consensual realistic approaches to the environmental problems we face, in what I call the Ogeechee Economic Forum meeting the third Saturday of each month, with little success. It appears most people are not interested in, or are afraid of, transacting in a Game-free Adult way in public dealing with economic and political problems and opportunities. Hopefully interest in this forum will pick up this year, 2019. It seems to me humans all around Spaceship Earth should get busy right now in Game-free groups developing consensual answers to problems threatening their existence
For the first time in March
we had enough participants in the Ogeechee Economic Forum to use a Classroom De-Gamer™
to randomly select the leader of the day to start the discussion by presenting
a relevant problem or opportunity, alternatives, and a recommendation. Game-free discussions are those in which the
psychological Game roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim have been banished
or suppressed in a group in such a way as to cause the cathecting of Adult,
Free Child, and Nurturing Parent ego states in participants, thereby producing
liberty, equality, and fraternity in the group.
As soon as the De-Gamer arrow
stopped spinning in the March forum we got down to business discussing the US
federal debt as a percentage of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, the total
estimated value of goods and services produced in a country in one year,
counting as production not only real goods such as the necessities of life,
food, clothing, and shelter, but also rentier service revenues generated by
banks and others. A relevant consensual
perspective developed that while the US federal debt is indeed horrendous, a
little over one hundred percent of GDP, the worst such ratio among major
countries in the Western World, it’s not as bad as Japan’s, at about two
hundred percent of their GDP; and therefore if Japan can continue to function
with such a debt to GDP ratio, maybe the US can too, giving us more time, maybe
ten years, before an economic collapse occurs, assuming significant changes are
not made in the way the US economic system works, however corrupt and
dysfunctional it may be at present.
See my article“The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” for some management science ideas on how Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic and political system that is viable and satisfying for everyone.
Could not agree more. The real job of teaching and research is getting to the real truth of the matter irrespective of sex, race, gender, age, ideology, religion, and national citizenship, figuring out which teachers and professors have produced the most truth and learning, and which students have learned the most truth, and grading and rewarding equivalently. Read my articles “Games Educators Play,” “Teacher Evaluations,” and “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy” posted at the top of this page.
What
a crock of you know what. How could anyone remember or know who were the good
guys and bad guys in this assortment of facts, allegations, and reported
so-called findings? Comey is one of the more interesting characters. He was not
against Hillary he said, but why did he bring up the matter of her email server?
Before he left the scene. Now here he is giving speeches about the whole thing.
Talking about whether obstruction of justice is a crime, and such, saying he only wanted to know what the true facts were. About who
or what? Trump or Hillary? After millions of dollars spent on this report what
do we know of relevance that we did not already know? Not much. As I have
pointed out for some time on the Internet and elsewhere based on evidence
available in mainstream media and on the Interent Trump did not commit conspiracy
with Russian government officials to get elected. Big deal. But he conspired
with Russian capitalist oligarchs to make more personal money for himself and
his family. Selling apartments and condos and laundering money in NYC. Trying
to build another Trump tower in Moscow. but there was no credible evidence in
MSM or on the Internet I saw indicating he tried to bribe Russian officals to
help get him elected. But Wikileaks got its hands on damaging information about
Hillary from somewhere that hurt her election chances. If the info did not come
from Russian officials and hackers conspired by Trump then from whom or where
did it come? Alleged conspirators on the Internet have said the info came from
Seth Rich, a DNC employee who allegedly downloaded to Wikileaks information
damaging to Hillary’s election chances he downloaded from DNC servers, using a
memory stick, who was shot and killed walking home alone at night in his
Washington neighborhood, whose killer or killers have never been found. What if
anything does the Mueller report have to say about that?
Here is an excellent article by Courtenay Barnett, a distinguished practising international lawyer and social activist, also an Effective Learning Report correspondent living in the Turks and Caicos Islands near Jamaica, in the Caribbean, educating humans on how the rule of law works and does not work internationally.
“Post truth” or “pre truth” it does seem we are now in a space of “no truth” where Trump and his ilk can create truth out of thin air, as if creating money at the Federal Reserve, by simply saying something is true.
Republicans pictured in this article
are having naughty fun operating out of their Rebel Child ego states telling
Adapted Child/Critical Parent prudes who have more education and money than they
have to go screw themselves, with their raised middle fingers.
It amazes me how Trump can get anything
he says or imagines published word for word to be heard and read by millions.
Power talks. I worked thirty five years as an academic attempting to publish
ideas and conclusions supported by facts, evidence, and reasoning in contextual
research journals, with average success, ideas and conclusions rarely heard of
by anyone save a few journal editors and reviewers who read what i wrote. But
this “stable genius” can get any nitwit thing he wants published word for word to be read by millions
just by blurting it out anywhere. Talk about absurdity and injustice. For
whatever it’s worth unemployment is not at a 44 year low. At least twenty
percent of all US citizens who would like to have a decent job are not in the
work force. They are not working. Here it is one more time folks, for those of
you on whom it has not yet soaked in: The US govt only counts as unemployed
citizens who are actively looking for a job, not counting those who have given
up on finding one, and it includes as employed millions with only one or two
jobs who cannot make a living with their so-called jobs, often called “gig”
jobs.
Intelligent well written article,
asserting the increase in white supremacy terrorism is a function of dire consequences
of capitalism and now global warming with the white terrorists attempting to
scapegoat racial and cultural groups.
Why should Iran have to be an enemy of the US, undermined, and goaded into a fight, if not to create a credible enemy for the US deep state to justify its cost to US taxpayers?
“In May 2018, President Trump’s unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, followed by an imposition of draconian sanctions that not only prohibit U.S. companies from doing business in Iran, but threaten all foreign companies and international banks that trade with Iran. The sanctions also severely limit Iran’s ability to sell its major sou…”
It’s possible all the
global warming evidence produced to date does not prove with one hundred
percent certainty that global warming has been caused by the human species
burning fossil fuel.
But it seems to me
anyone should know using common sense that global warming is not a hoax and
scam concocted by government scientists to get recognition and funding to
control human minds, as this article asserts.
Anyone who can read
should have read by now numerous articles written by reputable ethical people,
scientists and non-scientists, asserting there is serious evidence of human
caused global warming, based on honest reasoning about observable facts and
evidence, such as the melting of the polar ice caps, temperature recordings of
the last decade, and measurements of increases of carbon dioxide in Spaceship
Earth’s atmosphere, evidence not mentioned in this article, since it includes
no facts and evidence.
I agree it’s possible
that dire predictions about global warming facts and evidence might be wrong. I
sincerely hope they are, since, if they are not, it’s possible the human
species may become extinct in less than fifty years, joining in a cosmic happy
hunting ground the millions of other Earthian species that became extinct.
But it’s insane to say
ethical scientists and others wrote and published what they wrote about global
warming trying to create a hoax and a scam to control the minds of humans.
The opinions of this
article include assertions by Patrick Moore, supposedly a co-founder and former
president of Greenpeace, the noted environmental protection organization, taken
from a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight interview he had with Breitbart
so-called news’s talking heads Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak. According to
reader comments about the ZeroHedge Internet article, attached below the
article, Moore is now a paid lobbyist for corporations having short run vested
interests that will be harmed by humans taking governmental action to reduce
global warming.
Hopefully there is some
probability the most dire predicted consequences of global warming will not
come true, even if humans take no governmental action to reduce carbon
emissions, however foolish such a bet would be given the probabilities of
possible consequences.
But it seems to me that
to assert with certainty that global warming is a hoax and scam requires
serious greed, venality, and lying, or stupidity.
Having never heard of
Breitbart News before, it seems to me this interview is a shameless example of
fake news propaganda attempting to control minds. Talk about the pot calling
the kettle black.
Hopefully my comment
here will not generate more listeners for Moore or Breitbart to control.
Sounds good to me for the short run for Europe, but the long run should entail a similar system all around Spaceship Earth. Written by a great leader and economist, Yanis Varoufakis, the prime minister of Greece during the recent showdown with the EU and Germany.
Excellent
article with good definitions of Zionism and antisemitism, clearly pointing out
that to be anti-Zionist is not necessarily to be antisemitic.
As usual this month’s THE EARTHIAN links and cites as SOURCES recent articles written and published by clear deep-thinking hard-hitting independent writers in various countries in various fearless Internet journals around Spaceship Earth on ecological, economic, social, political, religious, and military affairs. I generally agree with these writers about what is most relevant about Spaceship Earth states of affairs, but each of them brought up facts, analyses, conclusions, ideas, or perspectives that were new to me when I read them during the last thirty days or so, thereby teaching me something, which is why I included them in this issue of THE EARTHIAN.
It’s
not easy, impossible some say, to separate relevant from irrelevant focal
points to comprehend cases, while being inundated with new noise and facts of
states of affairs generated daily around Spaceship Earth, posted on the
Internet, to see what’s really going on.
If you have ideas on how to democratically discuss in Game-free ways economic and political problems and opportunities in something like the Ogeechee Economic Forum go to my RESPONSES page and let us know about them.
I have no desire to sell subscriptions or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN, but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate go to our Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of my books.
Yes – because without thought there is little understanding; with little understanding there is confusion; with confusion there is then easily manipulated conflict; with conflict there is more arms selling and then those who own weapons have a deadly habit of using the manufactured weapons. With more wars and global instability – there is an ever increasing advance with closer proximity to nuclear war.
Thus said, so what then do the Golan Heights and Venezuela have to do broadly with the Caribbean – and then narrowly with Jamaica?
I shall – or – at the very least – try to ( with some attempt at logical thought) – explain.
Background
I am, by professional training, a lawyer, whose specialist legal subject ( of choice) was international law.
I am, by choice, a person who practises law in the domestic courts ( i.e. I am not in the UN or arguing cases in the Hague) but deal with legal disputes at the national level in my formal professional capacity.
The foregoing thus said, does not mean that I have relinquished all interest in that which I specialised in, nor does it mean, at all, that my mind is not attuned nor enhanced by the exchanges and interchanges with persons who have an interest in global issues of moment – much greater than themselves.
The Golan Heights: What is the main legal issue all about?
Well, we must start with the Rule of International law.
Why do we find that from the date of the establishment of Israel as a state – there has been pivotal conflict in the Middle East?
Why do we find that for all the attempts to challenge – or – even question Israel within the UN General Assembly or in the Security Council – the US has relentlessly vetoed all such questions and/or resolutions?
Was it not – President Barack Obama – who for the first time had the US abstain from vetoing on a certain resolution and thus of some 70 or so prior Israel resolutions blocked by the US – the US for once said – “Israel – maybe this time you are wrong?”
Why is it that the US ( under the Trump administration) is the only country, in all the nation states of the world, which accepts that the Golan Heights is entitled to be occupied via war and then acquired as expanded Israel territory? So, what is the position under international law regarding the Golan Heights?
Let me attempt to answer – only the last question.
The answer can be made by reference to Security Council resolution number 497 which was passed in December 1981. It directly addressed the issue of Syria’s Golan. In effect, the seizure by Israel in June 1967 was illegal. In part this was said:-
“(T)he Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.”
“Demands that Israel, the occupying Power, should rescind forthwith its decision;”
‘Determines that all the provisions of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War…apply to the Syrian territory occupied by Israel since June 1967.”
International Law does not accept that territory acquired during a war by the victor then becomes the victor’s territory. If that were so, one may recall that Germany under the Nazis was defeated by allied forces. There was a divided Germany between East Germany ( supplicant to the then Soviet Union) – and – West Germany ( supplicant to the US). Then, at the time of the US Presidency of Ronald Reagan and Gorbochov in the then still existing Soviet Union, there was a monumental shift and Germany was reunited. At no time was Germany – not Germany – for historical and geographical border lines took it back to a reunited nation and neither did Russia ( within the Soviet context) – nor – the US claim defeated German territory to be their own; the US – did not plant its flag there – nor did Russia proclaim Germany to be a part of Russia. The point to be made is that the overarching international law did not permit nor did it endorse the invalidation of territorial sovereignty of either of the two Germany(s).
The international community has a well based understanding of such principles in operation. Why so?
Well, if it were otherwise – then as in days of old, the colonialists and imperialists would simply continue to superimpose and conquer. The contemporary world – at least in legal theory – seeks not to have a continuation of the ‘conquistador’ past.
Well, let me momentarily divert.
Crimea: Was this conquest or a territorial reclamation?
The background indicates that the Crimea had been Russian. During the Soviet Union era; Stalin ( it is said in a drunken stupor) gave it to Ukraine. *
N.B. Truth be told, the history is a bit harsher than that for there were Tartars in Crimea. Crimea had been a part of Russia from 1783. Subsequently, the Soviet policy of population transfer within the then Soviet Union did itself mirror harsh dictatorial rule. In 1940, the Crimean Socialist Soviet Republic existed. In 1954 Crimea was voluntarily transferred by the Soviet Union to Ukraine ( then – Ukrainian Republic). In 2014 there was a referendum held in Crimea and the result was that Crimea rejoined Russia.
What does international law have to say on the subject?
Does the UN Charter permit and/ or not recognise a right to self-determination?
If it is so, then:-
Why can Scotland have a right to a referendum to decide whether the Scots will or will not (if they want to) remain with Britain – or – revert to being again an independent Scotland; yet
The people residing in Crimea are not so equally entitled to do?
Back to the Golan Heights annexation issue. UN Resolution 497 is clear:-
“(T)he Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.”
To sum it up – President Trump is one man standing – almost totally alone – seeking politically to prop up his ally, Netanyahu, in Israel – who is accused of serious criminal wrongdoing ( as anyone can discern). Trump himself ( but for his Presidential position) is ironically in a ‘birds of a feather’ situation as his now indicted friend – Netanyahu.
There is no legal basis to profess and/or proclaim the Golan Heights is an acquired territory to be part of Israel as the spoils of war – but who cares?
MIGHT IS RIGHT!
Venezuela: I start with personal commentary.
At the hotel where I eat each morning, I saw from my usual corner, the new face of a young man. That was about a year ago.
He was a Black man and we struck up a conversation.
Turns out he was a consultant and expert in computer technology. He was not more than in his mid- thirties, at my best guess. I questioned him on what he was doing in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI).
His answer came. He was from a poor Venezuelan family and would not, but for the policies of Hugo Chavez, have been able to attend university and he would not have been able to do advanced computer studies in France for the same reason.
So, I asked him about his thoughts on Chavez and Maduro.
He informed me that he appreciated his education as afforded. He went on to say that he did not see either President as corrupt – but – he thought that the people around both of them were extremely corrupt.
So, we continued.
He said that he had a young family to support and was therefore selling his professional services around the world – to Digicel in the TCI – as he was then doing – for he needed to survive.
Very human story there.
Thus, just a few ‘fact checks’ out there:-
“US and European governments have been working on freezing Venezuelan assets in recent months, including CITGO, the US-based subsidiary of state oil firm PDVSA, as well as US $1.2 billion worth of gold held in the Bank of England. According to Washington, these assets are being held to finance a “future government” led by self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guiado and to avoid alleged corruption on the part of the current government. US Vice President Mike Pence recently urged other countries to apply similar measures against Venezuelan assets.”
“The asset freezes have come alongside sanctions, with an oil embargo imposed in late January and sanctions against the mining sector announced earlier this week.”
“The tactic here is therefore to inflict as much hardship and misery on Venezuelans — from systematic power cuts — and then tell them “the price” for relief is to topple President Maduro. That is in spite of Maduro having been elected last year by a huge majority in free and fair elections.”
“Don’t you think it is a bit much for Washington to steal $21 billion of Venezuela’s money, impose sanctions in an effort to destabilize the country and to drive the Venezuelan government to its knees, blame Venezuelan socialism (essentially nationalization of the oil company) for bringing “starvation to the people,” and offer a measly $21 million in “humanitarian aid.”
I checked the top 37 nations on the UN’s list of the Food and Agriculture Organisation ( FAO) of countries in most urgent food need and I did not find Venezuela listed. Food is coming in from the UN and from the Red Cross, but Venezuela is not on the crisis list; but, indeed there is an economic crisis.
(“The 37 countries currently in need of external food assistance are Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland”, Syria, Uganda, Yemen and Zimbabwe.”)
All to say this.
It is about 50 states in the world which have sided with President Trump on his ‘regime change’ posture over Venezuela. So, more than two-thirds of member states of the United Nations do not see Guiado as a legitimate President – or – “interim- President” – so termed) – but President Trump ‘democratically’ tells the world what tune to march to into Venezuela.
Let me ask this:-
In the early 1980s Mr. Edward Seaga was the elected Prime Minister of Jamaica.
Jamaica had Mr. Michael Manley as the leader of the Opposition.
P.M. Seaga and Mr. Manley had agreed that it would be right not to have a General Election before the existing voters’ list was cleaned as there was evident electoral fraud permissible under the old voters’ list.
In Grenada the then Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, was murdered and this politically impacted the English speaking Caribbean in particular, working to the advantage of then P.M. who seized the moment and called a new election on the old voters’ list.
Mr. Manley boycotted the election called by Mr. Seaga.
Mr. Seaga won all the seats in the Jamaican Parliament.
Since Mr. Manley, had not contested the election; had any world power backed him – then proclaimed him “the interim- Prime Minister of Jamaica” – the Jamaican people would have immediately seen this as quite ludicrous. How can you be offered political cake to eat; refuse to eat; then say regardless of the facts and the election, the power still remains mine? From my recollection – and by reference to the Jamaican analogy as I recalled events – that is the equivalent of what Mr. Juan Guiado is seeking to do in Venezuela. There having been some 16 parties which ran in the last Venezuelan election ( with an offer made for international observers to be present) – Mr. Guiado refused to participate – then with the assistance of the US – proclaims himself the lawful President.
How does such a ludicrous situation arise?
I shall share my opinion.
If one, as an economist, would ask the question:-
Prior to the Hugo Chavez Presidency, by reference to the indicia of poverty, nutrition, education, health, housing, employment and income distribution, what were the facts then compared to the crisis situation now in Venezuela? A more honest overall picture might emerge.
Well, the oil was nationalised – and now the self-appointed ‘President Guiado’, wants to return his country to privitisation of the country’s oil and the ‘good old days’ when:-
“More than 70 percent of the Venezuelan population did not meet minimum calorie and protein requirements, while approximately 45 percent were suffering from extreme undernourishment.
More than half of Venezuelan children suffered from some degree of malnutrition.
Infant mortality was exceedingly high.
23 percent of the Venezuelan population was illiterate. The rate of functional illiteracy was of the order of 42%.
One child in four was totally marginalized from the educational system (not even registered in the first grade of primary school).
More than half the children of school age never entered high school.
A majority of the population had little or no access to health care services.
Half the urban population had no access to an adequate system of running water within their home.
Unemployment was rampant.
More than 30 percent of the total workforce was unemployed or underemployed, while 67 percent of those employed in non-agricultural activities received a salary which did not enable them to meet basic human needs (food, health, housing, clothing, etc.).
Three-quarters of the labor force were receiving revenues below the minimum subsistence wage.”
In plain English, the National Security Advisor, John Bolton, said this to Fox News:-
“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,”
And, Mr. Bolton, you should also note that Venezuela is but one of merely seven countries in the world to have reserves of coltan, which is the valuable black mineral that combines niobite and tantalite and is used in cell phones and computer chips. The Venezuelan Minister of Mining gave an estimated value of US$100 billion of Venezuela’s supplies.
Brings back to mind, the 1970s in Jamaica when Jamaica used a Bauxite levy to stop giving away its valuable asset at ‘colonial prices’. To my mind, the issue was not the legal justifiability of the levy, but the manner in which the acquired wealth was spent; not spent wisely ( i.e. viewed through the eyes of an economist).
So, the US in Venezuela – must continue to apply SMDs – ‘Sanctions of Mass Destruction’ to effect ‘regime change’ to achieve the clearly expressed objective, as Mr. Bolton told Fox News.
It is this kind of hypocritical lunacy being foisted off on the peoples of the world ( some who refuse to think independently, question or assess on any basis that may bear reference to the long established principles of law and governance and indeed – international law).
Venezuela bailed out the Jamaican economy at a critical point.
Some – the vast majority of CARICOM (i.e. the pre-eminent grouping of Caribbean nations )- have taken a principled stance on this Venezuelan issue.
Jamaica’s PM Holness sees ( along with 3 other Caribbean leaders ) short-term gain to be had, so sides with President Trump’s ‘regime change’ policies.
Yet – I ask one final question:-
What change to be effected in Venezuela: change like the lied into Iraq invasion and the bombed out Libya- to what long-term benefit for the majority of the people of Iraq, Libya or now – Venezuela whose generous oil gifts via Petro Caribe gave the Jamaican economy urgently needed breathing space?
Those reading my observations simply answer with honesty in your minds first; then your hearts; then express yourselves as you will or may on my commentary on the applicable rules of international law.
Conclusion
Again, it seems to me, as points of international law, as referenced above, that there are two global routes to go. Mine as outlined above….or?
I seem near the end of this, my article, compelled to pause; for it appears that I have been trumped by a great legal scholar of international law who strongly rebuts and questions me.
President Trump thinks, in the interest of international peace and justice, that it far better unilaterally to effect interventions, invasions, and ‘regime change’. His actions, indeed, rebound much louder in the world than do my words.
Intervention ( i.e. which government invited US troops into Syria? A further point of reference under international law); invasion ( i.e. Iraq); ‘regime change’ ( i.e. Venezuela). To be fair to President Trump, it is not all his actions, for there were US foreign policy actions effected before his Presidency; the real point being that there is an identifiable and traceable linkage and continuity in US foreign policy reflecting consistent violations of the Rule of International law.
The world might heed my few simple words; or – it can embrace the legal learning of a Presidential luminary.
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and works in the Caribbean.
Here is my Chain of Ego States diagram, first published in an article titled “The Chain of Ego States” in the Transactional Analysis Journal, vol. 8, no. 3 (Stapleton, 1978).
According to Eric Berne, MD, the euhemerous of transactional analysis, success equals adaptability plus flexibility. What humans have to adapt and flex to are human group imagos and personalities in chains of ego states.
According to Silvia Baba Neal, a certified transactional analyst in the UK, Berne defined a group imago as, “Any mental picture, conscious, pre-conscious or unconscious of what a group is or should be like.”
This definition covers a lot of ground. What is a mental picture, whether conscious, pre-conscious, or unconscious? What is a group for that matter? A mental picture of a group would depend on how a person visualizes things in his or her brain which would be a function of several variables, genetic brain architecture and neurological hardwiring, and also subjective messages exposed to in life plus any decisions made about the messages. Would the picture include colors or would it be purely black and white? Would it be accompanied with audio recordings as in some sort of documentary?
Regardless, it seems to me it is fair to say that all people have fantasies, ideas, and pictures in their brains of what groups are, what they are like, and what they should be like, based on previous experience. Berne published a book titled Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups in which he discussed not only groups but organizations, that is, groups of groups.
So much for group imagos that have to be adapted to if you want to succeed. What about personalities that have to be flexed to?
They are the personalities of the people in the groups and organizations you have to work with. What is a personality? Well, it’s the way people come across to you and others. How many adjectives can you think of to describe someone’s personality? Cheerful? Gloomy? Stingy? Generous? Loving? Warm? Cold? Withdrawn? Engaging? Rejecting? Accepting? Conscientious? Selfish? Introverted? Extroverted? Trustworthy? Untrustworthy?
Most likely if you really thought about it you could come up with a hundred or more adjectives to describe the personalities of individual humans.
Eric Berne was a great believer in using Occam’s Razor when writing, getting to the heart of the matter in the most efficient way, using the fewest words that will get your ideas across, so he comprised all adjectives one might use to describe a human personality into three general concepts: Parent, Adult, and Child ego states. In other words, does someone have a Parent, Adult, or Child personality or persona? Or, in a particular moment is someone coming across as parent-like, child-like, or adult-like?
In transactional analysis (TA) terms flexing to someone’s personality entails trying to satisfy the person by coming across as parent-like, adult-like, or child-like to get along with the person in a congruent harmonious way.
To get along you have to go along, not only adapting to the group imagos of fellow humans but flexing to their personalities, in groups and organizations. Transactional analysis gives you concepts and techniques for discerning where you and others are coming from so as to consciously decide how to maximize your chances of success in organizational situations.
What is success? It’s a matter of achieving your goals and objectives. If you want to feel, think, or do something and you do it you’re successful. Unfortunately what you want to feel, think, or do may not be what someone else wants you to feel, think, or do, which entails frustration, compromise, not being true to yourself, if you want to remain a member in good standing with the individual, group, or organization. The problem is particularly touchy if someone else happens to be your parent in a family or your boss in an authoritarian organization, such as a religion, corporation, military unit, or government. In such cases you have to fake it and pretend you agree if you do not, if you want to get along and go along.
The first group humans become a member of in most cases is a family, composed of a mother and a father, such as Number 1 in the Chain of Ego States diagram above, with various and sundry other kinds of groups and organizations to be encountered later in life with which one becomes a member, friends, churches, schools, universities, clubs, gangs, fraternities, businesses, corporations, military units, governments, a planet.
Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how humans come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like. Humans switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are working, socializing, teaching, training, sitting in a classroom or church, or having fun with friends, hopefully using the ego state most appropriate in the situation. Humans transmit messages from ego states in themselves to ego states in others in various combinations, Parent-Parent, Child-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, or whatever combination. The diagram above applies to situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian organization involved, such as parents dealing with children, or bosses dealing with subordinates in various organizations. Child-Child ego state script messages are known as injunctions, since they forbid feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of various sorts.
Script messages are transmitted socially and psychologically, social messages being represented in the Chain of Ego States diagram by solid lines and psychological messages being represented by dotted lines. Social messages are verbalized overt auditory messages; psychological messages are covert non-spoken ulterior messages transmitted by body language, emotional states, and after the fact positive or negative stroking as people react to situations and feel and do certain things.
Scripts in families are created automatically when parents transmit various messages to their children from various ego states socially and psychologically, in and out of awareness. Scripts are life plans generally decided before the age of eight by offspring based on script messages transmitted to them by their parents. Since parents by and large transmit the same script messages that were transmitted to them before they were eight years old script messages in families can remain intact for many generations. According to transactional analysts script decisions made before the age of eight have lasting effects, determining three general life outcomes: winner, loser, and non-winner. These decisions can be redecided and updated later in life but it’s not easy for most people.
Psychological Child-Child ego state script injunctions are what cause the most trouble for humans in their lives, causing them to inappropriately adapt and flex in various circumstances . Script injunctions are often currently inappropriate and ineffective because ancestors had to adapt and flex to harsh inhospitable environments that no longer exist. While their script feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and messages may have been life saving for themselves in their time they may be detrimental and frustrating for their descendants in the here and now. The problem is most people do not have psychological permission to not obey their Injunctions, which means they cannot adapt and flex appropriately in some organizational situations even if they want to based on their own Adult decision making.
Opposing, or opposite, script messages transmitted by parents can put a child in a Not-OK bind throughout childhood and adolescence, assuming a divorce has not already occurred, causing considerable trouble within a family, since the child cannot please both parents, which can put both parents in Not-OK positions vis-a-vis each other if the child makes a decision about which parent is right, creating Not-OKness in the family system as a whole.
What many humans need is psychological permission to violate and ignore their own psychological outdated obsolete family Child ego state script message Injunctions, not only to increase their own OKness, but the OKness of all living members of the family system. Violating your script injunctions is easier said than done once they become hardwired into your feeling, thinking, and behavioral system, i.e., your life script. Psychotherapy provided by potent psychotherapists is sometimes necessary for individuals to give them psychological permission to disobey one or more injunctions in order to be successful.
I became a certified transactional analyst, a CTA, after passing written and oral comprehensive exams administered by the International Transactional Analysis Association in 1978, after undergoing three years of intensive once a month training, all day Saturday and half of Sunday, at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, working with scores of TA psychotherapists, teachers, and trainers, mainly from around the US, and I still haven’t gotten rid of some injunctions I would like to, which is not uncommon. Eric Berne himself had a Don’t be Close injunction that he never got rid of, despite having a very high IQ, or maybe because of it, dying single after three marriages at age sixty. Living in your head most of your time at home writing best selling books as Berne did is not the best way to maximize your chances of a successful marriage, however rich you get from millions of copies of books sold, as he did. Sometimes you just have to live with your injunctions. Despite them you be successful in some ways if you can find people, groups, and organizations that have scripts compatible with yours.
I have covered ego states and scripts in my books Business Voyagesand Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, listing common Parent ego state script messages and Child ego state injunctions. All parents do not transmit the same script messages creating considerable variety among family scripts and outcomes. Certain life scripts conveniently fit certain roles, jobs, professions, careers, and what have you more than others, providing fresh compatible recruits for open slots generation after generation, assuming the economy does not dramatically change. Unfortunately in recent years in the US the offshoring of high wage blue collar jobs to foreign low wage countries and the use of more and more automation has rendered many family scripts obsolete.
Here are some chain of ego states organizational script messages I observed working in organizations and groups as a professor and consultant taken from a passage on pages 187-188 from Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, first published in 1978:
PARENT CHAIN OF COMMAND MESSAGES: Be productive. Work hard. Make money. Be strong. Hurry up. Be firm. Be slow. Be pompous. Be polite. Be serious and reverent. Be silly and irreverent. Walk fast. Use emphatic hand gestures. Make small talk. Don’t violate the chain of command. Go through channels. Be attractive. Be unattractive. Be short. Be tall. Look harried. Please me. Be perfect. Make the organization look good. Use innocuous, euphemistic words. Take your glasses off, and point with them. Wear a pinstriped suit. Dress nicely. Drive a Buick Electra. Play golf. Drink scotch. Cross your legs nonchalantly. Stroll coolly. Have another beer. Have some wine. Don’t wear a tie or dress nicely. Go bowling with the guys/gals. Ride a bicycle. Get a Toyota. Be a nice gal/guy. Act/be old/young.
ADULT CHAIN OF COMMAND MESSAGES: Hiring costs are $100; firing costs are $97. We need one thousand more units a month to keep up with the present sales rate. Enrollment increased/decreased X percent. X percent of our students /trainees report back that our teaching/training was beneficial to them. X percent of our students think they learn valuable, relevant learning in our classes/courses/programs. X percent of our customers rate our products or services as excellent, good, average, poor, or unsatisfactory.
CHILD CHAIN OF COMMAND MESSAGES: Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t be powerful. Don’t feel what you feel, feel what I want you to feel. Don’t be close. Don’t be you, be what I attribute you to be. Don’t belong. Don’t be well or sane. Don’t be sexual. Don’t be intelligent. Don’t be imaginative. Don’t make it. Don’t feel glad. Don’t learn. Don’t achieve. Don’t grow up. Don’t be energetic and confident. Don’t be spontaneous.
Some of the above script messages are easy to adapt and flex to and some are not. Most firings in organizations come about, not because of technical Adult incompetence, but because subordinates are unwilling or unable to adapt and flex to ego states and script messages flowing on the organization’s chain of command using their Adapted Child ego states, caused by messages rightly or wrongly put there over time mostly unconsciously by the organization’s leaders to gain the group imago and personality satisfactions they thought best and craved, however just and fair they were.
Witness the hirings and firings of immediate subordinates of the current Number 1 leader of the US government, Donald John Trump. One has to wonder about the script messages his parents transmitted to him. It seems to me most people could not successfully adapt and flex to them, and it seems to me most of the people who voted for him did so out of a Rebel Child ego state, caring less about the real truth of anything.
It seems to me Donald Trump operates out of a Free Child ego state about ninety percent of the time, coming from a life position of I’m OK, My voters are OK, but everyone else is Less OK or Not OK, and I am going to make the world pay, living in a fantasy world in which he feels and thinks anything he imagines or says is possible, as if he had been scripted before age eight in a family with almost no Parent or Adult script messages. It seems to me this is possible for someone with aloof wealthy parents growing up in New York City parented primarily by nannies who are afraid of losing their relatively well paying jobs, who assiduously cater to the whims of their charges, doing everything they can to please them.
It’s not that easy for most humans to take care of Number 1 in life much less look out for everyone; but given global warming and economic and political problems around Spaceship Earth one can build a case humans should at least give the idea of looking out for everyone some thought. The capitalist economic system based on the premise that always looking out for Number 1 is always the best ethical policy no longer works for most people.
Are there now more unsuccessful people than successful people aboard Spaceship Earth? Based on incomes and wealth alone so it would seem. If so, what should be done? One idea is to get as many humans as possible from all OK positions involved in bottom-up Game-free discussion groups to think about and discuss what humans might do to increase the success of everyone and to increase the survival chances of the human species threatened by global warming and nuclear war.
To cope with problems and threats such as global warming, nuclear weapons, poverty, and income inequality, it seems to me a sensible doable strategy would be for humans to get together to discuss script messages using their Adult, Nurturing Parent, Free Child, and Rebel Child ego states to develop consensual ideas to be used by all humans aboard Spaceship Earth to adapt and flex with political parties and nations. A serious problem around Earth is separating relevant focal points from irrelevant noise in order to comprehend what is really going on, best accomplished in Game-free script-free group discussions.
It will do little good to play AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game identified and labeled by transactional analysts to stroke humans for being innocent helpless Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political systems manipulated and exploited by rapacious sociopathic Persecutor oligarchs and leaders and their corrupt bought and paid for lackey politicians for selfish gain, however true that might be in reality.
On the other hand, it
will do no good for Earthians to stick their heads in the sand to passively
pretend everything is just hunky-dory and swell, with everything coming up
roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible
worlds, playing a psychological Game labeled GREENHOUSE by transactional
analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making
nonsensical positive comments about the environment and their lives.
Regardless of the causes
of the Earthian plight, it seems to me individual humans should assume
responsibility and take action for conserving energy as best they can in their
daily lives to reduce greenhouse gases; but especially they should select
politicians who will create economic and political policies and actions to
correct environmental and social problems on a mass scale.
An existential question
right now is whether humans can learn how to look after everyone, not merely
number one, to prevent the extinction of the human species.
In the last six months I have tried to set up a De-Gaming Democracy group as explained in my article, “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” here in Statesboro, Georgia, USA, where I live, hoping to engage citizens of various persuasions, whether red, blue, green, or any other color, in discussions of relevant economic and political problems and opportunities to develop consensual realistic approaches to the environmental problems we face, in what I call the Ogeechee Economic Forum Hour meeting the third Saturday of each month, with little success. So far four participants have shown up. It appears most people are not interested in, or are afraid of, transacting in Game-free script-free Adult ways in public dealing with environmental, economic, and political problems and opportunities. Hopefully interest in this forum will pick up. It seems to me right now that humans all around Spaceship Earth should get busy in Game-free script-free groups right now developing consensual answers for problems threatening their existence as a species.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc. for some management science ideas on how Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic and political system that is viable and satisfying for everyone.
One can build a case that humans are not only born to learn but born to live in groups and organizations, the first group exposed to being a family, with additional groups and organizations being joined throughout lives, with the major requirement for newborn humans being to successfully adapt and flex to their family script messages and ego states as they exist, primarily using their Adapted Child ego states; but it seems to me the time has now come for grown-up humans to change existing planetary script messages and ego states used to manage the most comprehensive organization on earth, the United Nations, using their Adult, Nurturing Parent, Free Child, and Rebel Child ego states, to cause all nations united with each other to create an organization similar to what I have visualized in my planetary group imago, what I have called Spaceship Earth, Inc.
Please forward, share, copy, print, or reprint this article any way you see fit. We welcome your comments, but please no ad hominem attacks. Just go to our RESPONSES page at the top of this page and let us know what you think. Don’t worry about being “right”. Just come out with it. Nobody knows what the right answers are for problems such as these in this article. Most likely there are no “right” answers for these problems, and the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers, right or wrong, that enable them to muddle through as they have been since time immemorial for more centuries. Unfortunately those answers cannot be the same ones humans have been using to manage Earthian states of affairs in recent centuries, especially in the last six decades, since it now appears that those answers could cause the extinction of the human species in the not too distant future.
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Report and The Earthian.
Dear beloved we are gathered once more at the altar of the Almightytruth. The sermon for today reflects on a few aspects of world affairs.
In the official global narrative it is said that the United Kingdom and the United States of America are bastions of freedom, rights, justice and democracy. These two countries are also projected and portrayed as respecters and upholders of the rule of international law. Really?
In the immediate post World War 11 period the United Nations was established as a global institution for the peaceful resolution of international disputes and issues affecting the nation states of the world.
Within that UN system exists the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In 2003, contrary to Article 2 of the UN Charter, the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, lied to the UN Security Council that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction ( WMDs) in Iraq; upon that fictitious basis the US accompanied by the UK illegally attacked Iraq, causing the deaths of over one million Iraqis.
In 2011 Libya was the most prosperous state on the continent of Africa. By measures of overall prosperity no African country was close. The measures of GNP per capita, levels of infant mortality and standard indicia for objectively measuring a country’s socio-economic status and global ranking confirmed that observation. Additionally, Libya did not owe at the time of the attack on the Libyan state any external international debt. The US and the UK illegally bombed and succeeded in destroying Libya to reduce the country to the status of a poverty stricken ‘failed state’ burgeoning terrorists.
In 1973, there was a democratically elected government in Chile and the US enabled the overthrow of its elected leader, Salvador Allende.
In 2019, the US, as it had sought to do in Syria, is trying to supplant the Venezuelan government and implant a ‘regime change’ supplicant willing to do the bidding for the US in Venezuela.
That is the world in which we live, and as wars, interventions, and intelligence services events unfold around the world, this all happens within the midst of a global arms bazaar.
Just recently, as of 25th February, 2019, I read a Judgment/’Opinion’ ( i.e. there is a technical legal difference between one and the other – and the UK government shall contend that it is an ‘Opinion’ that was delivered by the ICJ and as such is not binding ) : “LEGAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE SEPARATION OF THE CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO FROM MAURITIUS IN 1965” the Opinion is entitled. The ICJ ruled by a majority of 13 to 1 ( of the total 15 judges sitting in the permanent ICJ for a 9 year term) that having regard to international law, the process of decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence in 1968, following the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius. In consequence the UK has no colonial authority over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The one dissenting Judge on the main point was US Judge Donoghue.
In a more technical legal sense the issues went deeper as to whether the Court would be effectively deciding on a bilateral dispute between states over territorial sovereignty. Judges Tomka and Donoghue were in agreement on that point contrary to the majority decision. The main legal question framed by Mauritius was however one of ‘decolonization’ as follows:-
“Was the process of decolonization of Mauritius lawfully completed when Mauritius was granted independence in 1968, following the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and having regard to international law, including obligations reflected in General Assembly resolutions 1514 (XV) of 14 December 1960, 2066 (XX) of 16 December 1965, 2232 (XXI) of 20 December 1966 and 2357 (XXII) of 19 December 1967?”; A bit of history is necessary to comprehend the depth of injustice inflicted upon the Chagossian people by way of the combined efforts of the US and UK.
In the 1960s, at a time when some 1,500 people were living as families inhabiting the Islands, with homes, villages, schools, cemeteries and communities in situ, the US noted that the largest island within the group of the Chagos Islands, Diego Garcia, was of military strategic importance for the US. Britain controlled the islands as a colonial territory, and the US made a deal with the UK. At a discounted price and in exchange for a Polaris nuclear submarine the UK agreed to permit the islands to be militarily used by the US. The US made one stipulation; that the islands would be depopulated.
The UK rounded up all the islanders, depopulated the islands, then dumped them first in the Seychelles Islands, and there imprisoned them, and then further removed them all and abandoned them in Mauritius.
The Chagos islanders first made efforts in the domestic courts in England, seeking justice.
The UK High Court in 2000, ruled that the depopulating of the islands was illegal. By route of the Royal Prerogative, then Prime Minister Tony Blair, bypassed both Parliament and the Court’s Judgment to ensure that the islanders could not return to their homeland. Blair was effecting superimposition of political contrivance and convenience over established law.
In 2008 the matter returned to court on appeal by the UK government and the English court at the highest level, the Supreme Court, demonstrated what Professor J.A.G. Griffiths of the London School of Economics had termed, ‘the politics of the judiciary’ and ruled in favour of the UK government. Yet the legal issue did not end there.
Domestic law is subsumed under International Law, and it is expected that the rulings of domestic courts should be congruent with legal standards existing under International Law. So, the matter ended in the ICJ at the Hague and the Chagossian people had their further day in court and won, being found legally entitled to return to their homeland.
The UK had fought strenuously to restrain and jurisdictionally restrict the ICJ from proceeding to exercise any jurisdiction and thus not give its legal opinion. Here is how the ICJ ruled on that aspect of the case:-
“88. The Court therefore concludes that the opinion has been requested on the matter of decolonization which is of particular concern to the United Nations. The issues raised by the request are located in the broader frame of reference of decolonization, including the General Assembly’s role therein, from which those issues are inseparable (Western Sahara, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1975, p. 26, para. 38; Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 2004 (I), p. 159, para. 50).
89. Moreover, the Court observes that there may be differences of views on legal questions in advisory proceedings (Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970), Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1971, p. 24, para. 34). However, the fact that the Court may have to pronounce on legal issues on which divergent views have been expressed by Mauritius and the United Kingdom does not mean that, by replying to the request, the Court is dealing with a bilateral dispute.
90. In these circumstances, the Court does not consider that to give the opinion requested would have the effect of circumventing the principle of consent by a State to the judicial settlement of its dispute with another State. The Court therefore cannot, in the exercise of its discretion, decline to give the opinion on that ground.
91. In light of the foregoing, the Court concludes that there are no compelling reasons for it to decline to give the opinion requested by the General Assembly.”
Even US Judge Donoghue voted with the unanimous majority on this aspect of the case concerning jurisdiction. Yes, she did dissent on the main point of the case. It is therefore expected that the government of the UK will honour the decision; ‘expected’. The nature of such an international decision is that it is treated as advisory. Some legal scholars have argued that the Court needs always instead to examine critically why the request had been made and what the effect of giving an opinion will be. It seems that the ICJ in this decision headed in that general direction. For, the member states of the UN are expected to act in accordance with findings of that authority as a duty imposed by the UN itself. At paragraph 182 of the ICJ’s ruling stated:-
“182. In response to Question (b) of the General Assembly, relating to the consequences under international law that arise from the continued administration by the United Kingdom of the Chagos Archipelago, the Court concludes that the United Kingdom has an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, and that all Member States must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Mauritius.” My emphasis “ … that all Member States must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Mauritius.”
Also, learned Judges of the ICJ, might I respectfully add that standards of ‘good governance’ in countries such as the UK and US would suggest the need for such compliance.
One might even go further, myself a mere student of international law, observing, quite factually, that the language deployed in international law, references ‘civilized nations’; indeed – invading, bombing, kidnapping, and capturing territories would appear more the conduct of criminals who consistently ignore well established law than the lawful conduct of ‘civilized nations’.
It can further be noted that WikiLeaks published a US Embassy diplomatic cable from 2009. It stated, “Establishing a marine reserve might indeed, as the FCO’s [Colin] Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or descendants from resettling.”
The people of the Chagos Islands had remained as a possession of Britain and those people therefore were a British responsibility throughout their entire ordeal. However, the ICJ judgment/opinion also found that at the time of the expulsions to Mauritius, Mauritius had been unlawfully coerced to give to Britain, its territory of the Chagos Islands. As the court said:-
“…this detachment was not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned.” ( ICJ)
Seems that legally, there is more than a little returning to be done.
Some of us in the congregation of humanity understand the good sense of standing with this Altar’s message of the importance of remaining within the flock of the rule of international law; others outside ( who I still invite in to this beloved ‘civilized’ congregation of all humanity) embrace ‘Empire’, ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘exclusivity’ – while we the faithful, the humane, the peace loving – reject those options.
One more easily might summarise the entire case from a simple and balanced perspective of a human being invoking the meme: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. How would the entire population of Wiltshire feel if they were kidnapped and placed in a strange land? A ‘little bit mistreated’ I suspect. Should it therefore be construed as permissible, humane or somehow legal for Britain to be permitted to kidnap and depopulate for the sake of its profiteering in the Chagos Islands? Thus, with legal reason, the ICJ Judges in the majority concluded at paragraph 178 of the Opinion:-
“Accordingly, the United Kingdom is under an obligation to bring an end to its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, thereby enabling Mauritius to complete the decolonization of its territory in a manner consistent with the right of peoples to self-determination.”
To my mind, the British Government’s conduct in the Chagos Islands was, quite literally, criminal. Calculatedly criminal conduct as is evident. The UK did not just ignore economic justice; social justice; racial justice; but conjoined those injustices with violations of the right to family life and the right to self-determination and more. It simply acted as a law unto itself, having abused state power and not even post-judgment in 2019 is accepting and/or understanding that by reading between the lines of the decision, the ICJ is indicating all those violations. Respecters of ‘The Rule of Law’?
Having carefully read the ‘Opinion’ I can only conclude that the Court and the Judges sitting there did the best that they could do to obtain and deliver justice. For, in the final analysis, it cannot be expected that more be delivered in this case, such as it was structured; the Judges could only have merely done what they clearly stated as that which honest government should otherwise never have done. The Judges themselves cannot be asked further to do the jobs of politicians, who ultimately are left to honour and implement the Court’s decision.
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and works in the Caribbean.
Dear beloved we are gathered once more at the altar of the Almighty truth.
Today’s sermon is entitled ‘Lessons from my mother’. It concerns the building of character and the importance of personality development as each of us mature and advance through life. The list is not intended to be exhaustive but hopefully is instructive. These were the lessons I learned from my mother ( long since deceased but still lovingly recalled):-
One should tell the truth and not lie.
There should be room for compassion, in one’s thoughts and deeds.
There should be understanding on several levels. One such is for an understanding of our human differences as to our different human features; the tolerance of different cultures and religions. In short we should not be ‘racists’.
By extension of cultural and religious tolerance we should not be xenophobic.
We should show humanitarian decency and not mock others less fortunate than ourselves in life and show understanding about poverty, need and uninvited suffering which either our fellow human beings are born into or which at some uninvited point in life befalls them.
In our professional work and/or business life we should be honest.
Our language should be modest, tempered and balanced and restrained to give consideration to and for the person(s) we are addressing and the situation(s) in which we speak.
In our success, if we are so fortunate, we should be humble and modest, and should not be braggadocios.
In our failures we should be willing to accept our shortfalls and/or failings giving rise to same and be instructed by our mistakes. We should always accept personal responsibility when it is our action to be blamed and not seek to transfer blame to the blameless other(s).
One should have a sense of humour and be able to laugh at one’s self when stupid mistakes are made.
These are ten injunctions to help guide one through life by application of sound, sensible thoughts and proper and appropriate actions. Those who are Christian know of the Ten Commandments. But, these are ten injunctions learnt from my mother via her words as well as her conduct and consequential examples taught to me throughout her life, which are intended both for the ‘churched’ and the ‘unchurched’ alike; in other words, I believe that my mother’s lessons can usefully be applied by all of humanity.
And, then I thought, whether there is one human being dead or alive who represents the epitome and opposite of my mother’s lessons.
I reflected from my early childhood through to school and higher education and business and professional life. So far no such person.
Then, I thought about friends and associates in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. No such person.
Then I reflected on Canada and there was still no such person who came to mind.
I went as far as historical figures and contemporary leaders and I began getting a bit closer.
Finally, I reflected on the United States of America and there I found the perfect match. The thought then sprang to mind, that if I could ask but one question, it would be this:-
“ Please Mrs. Trump, when you were raising your son, Donald, could you kindly share with us – what lessons did you actually teach him?”
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and works in the Caribbean.
By Richard John Stapleton,
PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher
It’s not as easy as you might think for someone like me to write this monthly column. You might have noticed I tweaked the title some in this issue, changing today to right now. I did this because I more and more write what I think right now, not what I thought I might write two weeks ago, or last week, or six hours ago. This is happening because of changes in the way my brain works. It no longer stores and retrieves words and thoughts as well as it used to. It used to be I could write something in my head and retrieve it pretty much word for word whenever I wanted to, or thought about it. Not so anymore.
Anymore I more or less just write what pops into my head as I write, sometimes recalling sentences and paragraphs I have previously written in my head or vague semblances of them, but sometimes not. In a way, this makes writing more interesting, not knowing what will pop up in your working memory on your brain’s computer desktop from your subconscious memory files, to be typed into your real computer, visible on its screen right in front of your eyes.
I remember during the last month since the publication of The Earthian — 6 that most of my thoughts about what to write in this issue have not been upbeat and cheerful. How could they be given the facts, events, and reading matter I expose myself to?
One can build a case it’s
better not to expose yourself to such things if you want to be happy, that it’s
better to be blissfully ignorant of what is really going on than to try to
understand it. So far I have not agreed
with this argument.
But the problem of what to try to understand remains. It’s not too difficult to understand what is going on in small systems, say relations between two people; but it’s more difficult by several orders of magnitude to understand what is going on within larger systems, say a government; and it’s almost impossible to understand what is going on among national governments around Spaceship Earth, largely because they often hide relevant things they do, especially unlawful things, as classified state secrets, as they try to dominate and take advantage of their enemies and competitors.
Unfortunately, it seems more and more I am primarily interested in understanding what is going on within and among governments, however difficult it is to achieve such a thing, however great the probability is reading about such things will result in unhappy thoughts being created in my brain, however well my brain still works relative to the way it used to.
Your brain is just another biological organism, you know, that weakens as you age just like the muscles in your arms and legs if you live long enough.
My mother came down with a case of dementia or Alzheimer’s a few years before she died at ninety-two. She and my grandmother on my father’s side were the only ones of my parents and grandparents to suffer such a fate, so far as I know. One never knows I suppose what will happen in his or her particular case in old age. According to an article published by the Alzheimer’s Association, ten percent of all people over the age of sixty-five will suffer from Alzheimer’s dementia, two-thirds of whom will be women, and one in three will die from the disease. My mother was one of them.
One can consult professionals on how to ward off or reduce the effects of senility, Alzheimers, and the like, adding one more regimen to those s/he already has accumulated warding off other biological threats such as diabetes and heart disease. It seems to me right now that doing so may or may not be worth it for me.
What good is life if you have to constantly worry about something that might kill you, wasting your remaining time and energy worrying about extending life rather than enjoying it right now? As one of King Henry VIII’s wives put it shortly before he had her head lopped off in the Tower of London, “Fie on life.”
My blessed Grandmother, Darlie Brown Walker Coston, who always said, and apparently really believed, that “Everything always turns out for the best,” who was never sick a day in her life to my knowledge, who never went to a doctor for anything except to get a set of false teeth, told my mother shortly before she died at ninety-four: “If I had known I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
She really said that, a
cliché she remembered word for word, just before she died. At the rate I’m going, having survived
seventy-eight years aboard Spaceship Earth, if I make it to ninety-four, like
Moma did, sixteen more years, I’ll be happy if I can remember things half as
well as she did then.
OK, so much for the merely
personal, as Albert Einstein called it.
What is really going on around Spaceship Earth?
For whatever it’s worth, here
is what I “think” is going on.
It’s depressing for a long-time patriotic US citizen like me to learn that the US government has not been especially ethical or productive conducting its national and international affairs since its inception, while also learning in the process that all other nations are also pretty much the same way, looking out only for number one, with the stronger mercilessly taking advantage of, sometimes murdering, the weaker, sometimes violating international laws and treaties with impunity to advance their own interests.
It seems to me throughout history leaders and owners of nations (kings, queens, emperors, the elite rich, presidents, priests, etc.) evolved that fostered the development of grandiose stories to be believed by followers to create group cohesion, thereby creating organizations with hierarchies of master-servant relationships, including large numbers of subordinates (prime ministers, lords, serfs, knaves, slaves, vice presidents, CEOs, employees, generals, sargeants, workers, etc.), who obeyed their beliefs, sayings, and commands, who fought wars and economically competed with other rulers and owners to acquire more power and wealth, not only for themselves but for their hereditary descendants, in the process forgetting about necessary moral and ethical principles, such as doing unto others as you would have others do unto you, and not doing things that if done by everyone would result in harm for everyone.
It seems once the human race got off on the wrong foot onto the wrong path in international unfairness thousands of years ago it stayed that way; and humans learned to live with unfairness, often considering unfairness and unethical behavior as natural and normal, even learning to enjoy it in some cases, doing unethical things to others before others did it to them, considering it smart, successful, winning, even heroic behavior, rationalizing unethical actions by asserting that anyone else would have done the same thing, and therefore it was OK, especially given the dire straits most humans always faced, always wanting and needing more wealth and power.
I descended from ancestors who immigrated into what is now the US from Europe, for various reasons, as I documented in “A Synopsis of my Family Background.” Most of them came to America to escape poverty and religious strife in Europe, but some came to increase their social status, power, and wealth. They started migrating to Virginia before the American Revolution in the 1700s, and according to Ancestry.com my gene pool is composed of genes similar to those of humans now living in Ireland (about twenty percent); Scotland, Wales, and England (about fifty percent); France, Holland, and Belgium (about twenty percent); Spain, Italy, and Greece (about five percent); Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland (about five percent); and Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and Russia (about two percent).
My ancestors in what is now the US were mainly farmers and ranchers generally producing families of six to ten offspring per family, but some were teachers, professors, preachers, generals, lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs. They were freedom lovers. I am not aware of any ancestors down the branches of my family tree that did the bidding of a boss in an authoritarian non-military organization to make a living.
There was never enough land where they were to support all their children and grandchildren when they grew up, so some offspring in most generations had to migrate to the western frontier of their recently conquered country to acquire enough cheap undeveloped land to make a living as independent Calvinist patriarchal landowners. My ancestors on the North American continent created two main paths on their westward journey across what is now the US, winding up were I grew up, some migrating from Virginia to North Carolina to Tennessee to Texas, with most of the rest migrating from Virginia to South Carolina to Georgia to Alabama to Mississippi to Texas, generally staying in each state for a generation or so before someone in the family had to move farther west to pioneer new territory to act out their family scripts.
Yes, some of them owned slaves and some were Indian fighters, not something to be proud of. Like humans in general since time immemorial they did what they had to do to survive in their environments, given the requirements of their family scripts. In my opinion not enough attention has been paid to the significance of family scripting as a determinant of human behavior. For more on this read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. In most cases script messages are automatically introjected into the brain cells of humans before the age of eight and they largely determine what humans learn and do afterwards, significantly influencing the outcomes of not only human individuals, but nations, and Spaceship Earth.
It seems to me right now that what is going on now is pretty much the same as what has been going on for a long time. All species of flora and fauna are doing what they can to survive. Some are successful; some are not. I just asked Google how many species become extinct aboard Spaceship Earth every year? And here’s an answer: “According to the UN Environment Programme, the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago,” HuffPost, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/17/un-environment-programme-_n_684562.html
Do
the math. What is 175 species becoming
extinct every day times 352 days per year?
That’s 61,600 species becoming extinct every year. How long at that rate would it take for all
Earthian species to become extinct?
It seems to me right now that homo sapiens are largely responsible for this state of affairs. They became so successful that they developed mechanized production systems requiring the use of fossil fuels to generate sufficient energy to produce prodigious supplies of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine and other necessities of life so a burgeoning population of humans could stay alive for a normal lifespan of, according to one famous religious book, threescore and ten years, with many of us now living even longer than that, requiring more energy and production of goods and services per life than people who lived back when that religious book was written.
Many people think homo sapiens breeding as many children as possible and maximizing life spans is a good policy because it causes economic growth by creating customers and workers for the capitalist economic system, enabling the owners of capital to get richer and richer, with no work, as the poor who work get poorer.
It seems to me right now that a solution to the Earthian plight entails homo sapiens of all socio-economic classes willingly and peacefully significantly reducing their numbers aboard Spaceship Earth by holding birth rates below natural death rates for several generations.
Capitalism is often considered a “natural” economic system having always been used by humans to survive, by selfishly looking out for number one, number one being you, your family, your group, your country, your government, your religion, your nation, your race, your sex, your gender. It seemed, say for four or five thousand years, that capitalism really might be the best system, maybe optimal, enabling humans to survive about as well as you might expect under the circumstances, leading up to today, enabling about 7.5 billion humans to stay alive for relatively long life spans in various degrees of comfort and satisfaction, irrespective of the hundreds of other less intelligent species that became extinct during that time, who could not compete with the burgeoning population of homo sapiens, caused by excessive fecundity.
But, now, alas, capitalism seems not only sub-optimal but inequitable: It has enabled about one percent of Earth’s human population to gain ownership control of about half the wealth on Earth, enabling them to live lifestyles replete with almost unlimited options to enjoy luxurious goods and activities, including having almost unlimited options for travel, entailing the consumption of abnormally large quantities of energy, say more than one hundred times as much per year per person as the least fortunate; while billions of humans aboard Spaceship Earth are food insecure, malnourished, poorly clothed, poorly housed, poorly educated, and poorly socialized, with little or no opportunities for travel, living cheek by jowl in cramped quarters, or on the streets, while millions prematurely die every year of starvation, disease, and other causes stemming from wars, sanctions, and other tactics used by powerful nations to insure that Earth’s resources are accessible for large corporations, the elite rich, and a majority of humans living in rich countries.
One nation on Earth, the US, has accidentally become so powerful through time looking out for number one that it can now manipulate and control most other nations for its own selfish benefit, in the process invading, dropping bombs, and enforcing sanctions to cripple and undermine various nations competing for Earth’s scarce resources, especially oil. How much longer it can keep this up remains to be seen, especially considering the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground to combat global warming.
And to top it all off it seems to me right now that burning fossil fuel necessary to power the Earthian production and transportation system necessary to partially satisfy the needs of 7.5 billion humans has caused global warming and climate change and might render homo sapiens itself extinct within fifty or so years, thereby sending homo sapiens off to a cosmic happy hunting ground to join the millions of other extinct Earthian species already there.
An existential question it seems to me is can the capitalist system be changed to thwart this outcome?
Human migration is now on the mental radars of most humans around Spaceship Earth, and much has been researched, written, taught, and published about human migration problems in academia. One of the pioneers in the migration academic field is Kurt Lewin, who published Principles of Topological Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936). Lewin pointed out human migration happens because of push and pull forces, or vectors, propelling and compelling people to move from one country to another. Few would move from their country of origin if the place enabled them to get their natural human needs met, physical needs for food, clothing, and shelter, and social needs for safety, love, acceptance, belonging, and self-actualization.
A relevant consideration is what causes push factors to become so powerful that they cause people to migrate? A simple answer is that support systems in a country were purposely collapsed by the wars, intrigues, and machinations of imperialistic nations to acquire cheap resources in the country. Other causes include overly fecund natives producing more offspring than the natural resources of their countries can support, while other causes include the greed and callousness of upper class leaders who hog most of the resources for themselves.
Unfortunately, human migration problems around Spaceship Earth have increased in recent decades because of the US’s overt military destruction of regimes and governments in the Middle East and North Africa and its covert clandestine destabilizing of Latin American regimes and governments, often replacing socialist governments with right-wing dictators and fascist regimes who terrorize their own people, causing them to flee, causing them to flood European countries and the US, or at least try to. Whether Trump’s wall or anything else can keep them out of the US remains to be seen.
Trump in magisterial fascist dictator fashion has now recognized an illegal fascist coup leader in Venezuela as the leader of the country, thereby subverting democracy in Venezuela and undermining/hopefully deposing its democratically elected leader. If the upper class fascist pretender does take over Venezuela massive migrations of lower class indigenous and mixed race humans from Venezuela will happen, far exceeding what is now happening, to a large degree caused by sanctions the US has imposed on Venezuela to gain control of its oil supply and to keep the white upper class in power.
Who were the prime allowers of unauthorized immigrants into the US? Clinton, and Bush II. According to an article by the Pew Research Center, unauthorized immigrants in the US increased from 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million in 2006, the Clinton and Bush II years, and then declined to 10.7 million by 2016, during the Obama years. Most of the buildup was from Mexico with more Mexicans in recent years returning to Mexico than entering the US. Most of the migration pressure now is from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
At the same time, conditions have become so agitated and uncertain in some so-called developed not-yet-collapsed countries that some fairly well off humans born there would like to migrate to other countries to escape local conditions in their countries which they perceive to be more onerous and oppressive than those in other countries, to escape high taxes and social unrest (in some cases caused by having to live cheek by jowl with recent immigrants who will not assimilate), feeling and thinking the grass might be greener in several places on the other side of the fence in other rich developed countries.
If dire predictions about climate change come true, including developments such as the melting of the polar ice caps causing the salt water portion of Spaceship Earth’s surface to rise several feet, millions, if not a billion or so, humans, of all socio-economic classes, living in coastal plains, will be dislocated, creating mass migrations larger and more disastrous than any heretofore experienced or imagined on Earth.
To solve the Earthian environmental problem a case can be made that the status levels of agricultural lifestyles should be higher than those of bankers sitting in offices atop skyscrapers in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Hong Kong, Moscow, Brasilia, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, or Ottawa, or generals sitting in the US Pentagon and in equivalent command posts in other countries, or top leaders sitting in the US White House and in equivalent houses in other countries.
Humans need to get back to small farms and organic farming operated by independent entrepreneurs.
Some writers have reported that some billionaires are now building themselves underground bunkers that will enable them to survive a nuclear holocaust, with others reporting various humans, rich and poor, have fantasized about migrating to and colonizing other planets, much like the Europeans did in the Americas, which, it seems to me right now, is a foolish pipe dream, there being no escape for humans now living aboard Spaceship Earth.
I included and quoted original research data I acquired by questionnaires as well as published academic secondary research and literature in my study of migration in my doctoral dissertation. The management science idea I explained in “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc” for ultimately solving the Earthian migration problem, published in 2015, happened to me in 1969 when I was writing my dissertation, and is affixed to the dissertation in an appendix.
You can download a free copy of my dissertation, titled “An Analysis of Rural Manpower Migration Patterns in the South Plains Region of Texas” from Texas Tech University.
It will do little good to play AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game identified and labeled by transactional analysts, to stroke humans for being innocent helpless Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political systems manipulated and exploited by rapacious sociopathic Persecutor oligarchs and leaders and their corrupt bought and paid for lackey politicians for selfish gain, however true that might be in reality.
On the other hand, it will do no good for Earthians to stick their heads in the sand to passively pretend everything is just hunky-dory and swell, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game labeled GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive comments about the environment and their lives.
Regardless of the causes of the Earthian plight, it seems to me individual humans should assume responsibility and take action for conserving energy as best they can in their daily lives to reduce greenhouse gases; but especially they should select politicians who will create economic and political policies and actions to correct environmental and social problems on a mass scale.
An existential question right now is whether humans can learn how to look after everyone, not merely number one, to prevent the extinction of the human species.
In the last six months I have tried to set up a De-Gaming Democracy group as explained in my article, “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” here in Statesboro, Georgia, USA, where I live, hoping to engage citizens of various persuasions, whether red, blue, green, or any other color, in discussions of relevant economic and political problems and opportunities to develop consensual realistic approaches to the environmental problems we face, in what I call the Ogeechee Economic Forum meeting the third Saturday of each month, with little success. So far four participants have shown up. It appears most people are not interested in, or are afraid of, transacting in a Game-free Adult way in public dealing with environmental, economic, and political problems and opportunities. Hopefully interest in this forum will pick up. It seems to me right now that humans all around Spaceship Earth should get busy in Game-free groups right now developing consensual answers for problems threatening their existence as a species.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc. for some management science ideas on how Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic and political system that is viable and satisfying for everyone.
As usual this month’s THE EARTHIAN links
and cites as SOURCES recent articles written and published by clear deep-thinking
hard-hitting independent writers in various Internet publications on ecological,
economic, social, political, religious, and military affairs around Spaceship
Earth. I generally agree with these
writers about what is most relevant about Spaceship Earth states of affairs,
but each of them brought up facts, analyses, conclusions, ideas, or
perspectives that were new to me when I read them during the last thirty days
or so, thereby teaching me something, which is why I included them in this
issue of THE EARTHIAN.
It’s not easy, impossible some say, to separate relevant from irrelevant focal points to see what’s really going on while being inundated and bombarded with the incredible volume of noise (aka fake news) and facts of states of affairs now generated daily around Spaceship Earth.
If you have ideas on how to democratically discuss in Game-free ways environmental, economic, and political problems and opportunities in something like the Ogeechee Economic Forum go to my RESPONSES page and let me know about them.
Never
read an article quite like this one, by Jim Kavanagh. Gets to the nitty-gritty
in Venezuela. Hope he’s wrong about the outcome: another civil war.
Very sad. I interviewed at Youngstown State Univ in 1981 for a chair of entrepreneurship position in the business school. It looked like apocalypse now in downtown Youngstown. There were tall buildings vacant with plywood nailed over their windows. A faculty member in his office pointed out to me through his window the steelmills shut down in the Mahoning valley that he said used to be lit up at night like Christmas trees, but were dark at night now. The business school and university liked my credentials and we talked. I told them it seemed to me they were looking for some sort of superman in the form of an entrepreneurship professor that would fly around in his cape in the valley to make everything right. I knew I was not up to the job. As a former economic history instructor at Texas Tech I was aware of how things had evolved in Youngstown. There were rivers and canals to bring iron ore down from Minnesota and coal from Kentucky and West Virginia in the early days giving the region a competitive edge making iron and steel, prime ingredients for cars, tractors, and trucks powered by the newfangled internal combustion engines that evolved about 1900. But the competitive edge was largely gone by 1981. Youngstown State did not find a magical superman entrepreneurship chair person to turn the negative trend around. And for sure Trump can’t either, wearing a cape or not. What will turn it around? Nothing. Spaceship Earth has got to co-construct a new system to accommodate all Earthians, including humans living in the rust belt of the US.
I remember this case well. a sad story. As a retired university professor I can tell you grading students is not an easy thing to do. In this case teachers were changing answers to fairly hard standardized test questions. But what happens if you do not use standardized tests? Teachers can dumb the questions down they use for grades to not only make their students look better but themselves, leading to a phenomenon known as grade inflation. Here is a research article I published in 2001, titled “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production, and Expected Grades ,” dealing with grade inflation, published in the Journal of Management Education, in which I presented a new metric for teacher evaluations I invented, a Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity, or CITP. “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations,” has since been cited in sixty-eight refereed journal articles in several disciplines concerned with grade inflation and teacher evaluation issues.
Interesting article. Assumes free will, which is questionable. Unfortunately most of reality cannot be fitted to a Procrustean bed of facts capable of being decided by deductive logic. We are at the mercy of ideas that just pop into our conscious minds at various times caused by various causes. One can build a case that only trivial decisions can be solved by facts and deductive logic, that most important decisions such as the type of person to marry, what to do for a living, and who will be there when we die are sub-consciously decided by scripts, life plans gradually created in the brains of humans as they live. For more details about human scripts read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Rather than reason to the correct alternative most people reason to the first available alternative that will enable them to act out their life scripts.
Yeah, right, rah rah
rah, Maybe so, maybe no. I too “believe” in empiricism, that is
knowing the facts of states of affairs as best you can before jumping to a
conclusion, never allowing, if you can help it, simplistic beliefs, dogmas,
doctrines, procedures, etc. to determine your decisions; but so what. Will
empiricism, as much as you can make it happen (since almost no one has access
to all the relevant facts in a relevant situation), make things turn out better
than would otherwise have been the case? Maybe so, maybe no. Hume was right
about one thing: human reasoning, at least up to now, is limited, especially
when it comes to solving real world problems. Just look at the insane state of
affairs now rampant in the US with Trump as its elected president.
If true how long will the Fed and other central banks keep it up? How long can they keep it up? Forever? If so does that mean the market will never crash again? Pundits such as this one wind up saying the next crash will be ugly, if and when it happens. What a world. It’s almost like we’re all financially dependent on a random number generator in the head of the Fed chairman, Powell.
Yes, econ 101 is a
good course. Everybody should take it. But would it soak in? Unfortunately most
people are more interested in doing what they have to do in their personal
environments to survive rather than learn the truth, no matter how crazy it is.
A must watch and listen to video featuring a twelve year old Swedish girl lecturing the UN on the problems of global warming and the environment and what to do about it. The video has already had over seven million views. An amazingly effective speech telling it like it is.
More light and light
it grows, more dark and dark our woes…Shakespeare…and the more innocence we
lose as writers like this tell the whole story. What can be done about it now?
That is the question.
Great article by Ellen Brown, the most sensible money and banking expert I am aware of. Her basic idea is very simple: We need a national bank owned by the people that can issue its own money to foster the interests of the people as a sovereign nation. Since 1912 or so the US has been in the clutches of the Federal Reserve System, owned by private banks, that issues money that has to be paid back. A national bank could issue money for the government that would not have to be paid back. Brown and Michael Hudson, maybe the world’s best economist, both assert MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, will not result in Venezuela like inflation since the US can issue its own money, even using the Federal Reserve. Better to do it with a national bank owned by the people, but the Federal Reserve is better than what Germany or Venezuela had and have. As Brown points out about what causes hyperinflation, whether in Weimar Germany before WWII or Venezuela now is problems with the exchange rate, a country having to convert its money into the money of foreigners to pay off foreign debts, import food, or buy or service whatever foreign goods or obligations they have to have. That won’t happen to the US because foreigners have to accept dollars, at least for now, because the US dollar is the global currency most countries have to use to pay their bills internationally, being the only fiat faith-based currency most humans trust.
Best article I have read on why Medicare For All or a single payer system
would be better by far for most US citizens than what we have now. Unfortunately
those who would not become better off because of it make a lot of money in the
healthcare industry, including health insurance companies, drug companies, and
hospital companies, enough money to buy the votes of politicians to make sure
we the people never get it.
Hard to believe he would have psychological permission to do
this. End the drug war now. Put these creeps out of business. Legalize,
control, and tax all drugs like booze and cigarettes. Al Capone was an altar
boy compared to these monsters.
Replace Maduro with Guaido to get rid of socialism in Venezuela? Better think again. Socialism might help keep Venezuelans in Venezuela rather than joining the flock from Central America already heading for the US looking for jobs. How many Cuban immigrants have you heard about lately?
Could not agree more. Here’s what we need, Game-free
economic and political discussion groups: Ogeechee Economic Forum Hour at
Stapleton Learning Company. Open for business the
third Saturday of the month, 10-11 a.m.
Learn how to feel better about economics and politics through Game-Free
discussion by learning how not to play psychological Games such as BALANCE
SHEET, AIN’T IT AWFUL, GREENHOUSE, MINE’S BETTER, NIGYSOB, KICK ME, POOR ME, IF
IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT, DO ME SOMETHING, I’M ONLY TRYING
TO HELP YOU, and GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL PROFESSOR.
This is one thing I agree with Trump about. I never did understand why the US foreign policy establishment thinks the US needs to undermine, sanction, or destroy other countries, be they capitalist, socialist, religious dictatorships, fascist, or whatever, to control their oil supplies to favor the US. These countries are so poor they would have to sell their oil on the world market, and if capitalism is as good as oligarchs say it is, poor countries selling their oil on the world market would naturally drive through free competition the world price of oil down to a rational and fair price. Is it the US foreign policy establishment really does not care about a rational and fair price; is it they want to militarily force an abnormally low unfair price for US oil companies?
Is there nothing governments can do to stop this? These invasive robots and call center talking heads are seriously reducing human peace and tranquility. In addition to being disingenuous and insulting they are causing agitations, frustrations, disruptions, and productivity losses in millions of cases per day. We need a national call center disconnection agency to deal with this. I get called on average about eight times per day by these mechanical creeps.
The problem is somewhat analogous to the enclosure movements in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England in the 17th – 19th centuries in which callous landowning aristocrats forced people from their dwellings and small plots of ground on what had been for centuries land in common by simply telling them to get out, backed up and enforced by the laws and police power of the state, so they could raise sheep and do more profitable agricultural things on “their” land, which had been given to their ancestors in the past by conquering kings, fueling massive migrations to the New World, to mainly what became the US and Canada in North America; except today in Central America people that were habituated to tending land in small plots have been forced off the land so a callous elite class legally owning corporate shares of stock could take over their economy using global business procedures and modern technologies, and there is no more cheap undeveloped land for them to take from North Americans in the US should they be able to migrate there. In most cases, should these Central Americans get in the US, they will take over low status, low paid, arduous, onerous jobs that most US citizens do not want to do and will live in high density residential areas. They were dislodged from their agricultural ancestral sinecures by capitalistic global trends and practices set loose aboard Spaceship Earth starting around 1970, practices such as oligarchs sending high wage jobs in rich countries to poor countries, where they became low wage jobs, setting in motion a lowering of real wages and quality of life for most people in most countries, while enriching the rich in most countries, at least in monetary terms. Given the threats and risks of global warming and climate change and financial manipulations it seems the quality of life for all classes has declined since 1970.
Who said. I sure as hell want the idea. We were doing pretty well in the US before Reagan and company lowered the top tax rate from seventy percent or so to thirty percent or so in 1980. Sure, we had some stagflation, but that was nothing compared to what we have now, inequality to the max, with the rich getting richer every year, and the poor getting poorer, with increasing social unrest. That’s when all hell broke loose, in 1980. The corporations started sending manufacturing jobs to low wage countries (pure greed), the federal debt tripled, Bush II in 2001 following Reagan’s precedent cut taxes for the elite rich even more (political payoffs), and here we are now with nouveau corporate riche like like Schultz trying to take control of the whole country. You’ve now got to be a billionaire to even think about becoming president, unless you’re a Repug or Demo apparatchik, or a socialist promising free money and pie in the sky for the hopeless; but would socialism be worse than what we have now? Fascism. Probably not. h
“Echoing what Jerome Powell first realized in March 2013, Wouter Sturkenboom, Northern Trust Asset Management’s Amsterdam-based chief investment strategist for Europe and Asia said that the Fed is ‘at the mercy of the markets’ and ‘that’s why we have re-instigated a risk position’ across stocks in the U.S. and emerging markets at the expense of investment-grade bonds. Naturally, the firm which oversees $1.1 trillion in total assets, sees clear sailing for the rally for now.” Taken from the below article.
Here is the crux of the article:
“What Might Have Been?
“And now that I’ve left you with a completely bad taste in your mouth, let
me bring up another small forgotten memory, one that might qualify — in an
alternate universe of memories at least — as utopian, rather than dystopian.
I’m thinking about “the peace dividend.” You don’t remember it? Well, that’s
not surprising. But after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 (something
official Washington hadn’t faintly expected and initially greeted in a kind of
stunned silence), it briefly seemed as if the great-power struggles that had
preoccupied history since perhaps the fifteenth century were finally over. The
US was the lone superpower left on planet Earth. Enemies were beyond scarce. A
judgment of some sort had been rendered and, for a brief moment, even in
Washington, people began talking about that most miraculous of things: a peace
dividend.
“The staggering sums that had gone into the Pentagon and the rest of the
national security state in the Cold War years were visibly no longer necessary.
So it was time to bring it all — billions and billions of dollars that had long
been invested in the militarization of our American world — home. There was,
after all, nothing left to build up military power against and so that money
could now be put into what wouldn’t for another decade be called “the
homeland.”
“In fact, though modest cuts were made in US forces and military spending
in those years, they would prove to be anything but a dividend and would soon
enough simply evaporate in the face of the military-industrial complex and, of
course, that “axis of evil.”
“In the years that followed, the very idea of a peace dividend, even the
phrase itself, would simply vanish. Still, just for a moment, in a country
whose infrastructure is now crumbling, whose teachers are underpaid, whose
health care system is under siege, it was possible to dream about a world in
which the bleeding wounds of the planet might begin to be staunched. Imagine
that and think about what the future might have been.”
Excerpted from the bottom of the following article.
Population aboard spaceship earth will continue to grow putting more stress on the ecosystem causing more global warming if these sorts of restrictions on population control become law around Spaceship Earth.
Why should anti-birth control and abortion people care how
many births other people prevent?
Is it they think eliminating birth control pills and abortions will get them brownie points with their father god for a better seat in heaven who has an insatiable need for more children to live with him in his heaven above even if humans having children without limit on earth will ultimately cause them to live in misery down here on Earth, maybe causing them to become extinct?
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Report, www.effectivelearning.net, January 24, 2019
Yes, the Earthian debt increase since 1971 mainly benefited large corporations and the elite rich; but we the people can take some satisfaction that even large corporations and the financial elite did not get as much better off as most people think. What good is larger numbers in their bank and investment accounts if they can’t buy anything they need with them, having no real needs to satisfy, having already bought everything they need, especially considering that when a true global financial collapse occurs half or more of the numbers in their accounts may vanish? Numbers in computerized bank accounts and financial accounts called money do no social good if they cannot be converted into something real before they vanish in depressions, and real things such as houses and land require property taxes to be paid, however much their values too have vanished. About the only satisfaction to be gained from seeing financial numbers in financial accounts get larger year after year (called “making money”) after you get really rich is to win a psychological Game transactional analysts call BALANCE SHEET, wherein winners (like Warrren Buffett, who said money has absolutely no utility for him) simply accrue larger numbers in their financial accounts than losers year after year (as if playing bridge, Warren Buffet’s favorite pastime), and find this satisfying. Regardless, in general large corporations and the elite rich would rather see their numbers called money get larger in their bank and investment accounts doing them no real good than to transfer a significant percentage to the poor who could get a lot of good from increasing numbers in their bank accounts, by using them to buy needed goods and services right now, before a significant percentage of the numbers in the bank and investment accounts of the elite rich vanish in the next global financial collapse.
Unfortunately humans having very real unsatisfied needs, especially those now living on less than 5.5 dollars per day, were also not made much better off by the debt that grew at faster rates after the US Nixon administration eliminated the gold standard for global banks in 1971, rates of debt increase that increased even more after the US Bush II administration during 2001-2008 popularized the notion that digital government deficits and debt recorded in computers don’t matter. Note that this debt increase was caused primarily by supposedly conservative Republican politicians in the US (it’s a farce to say they are real financial conservatives, considering they have been much more profligate than Democrats since 1980), and the current Republican US president (another farce) is hastening the rate of debt increase even more. The budget deficit in the US in fiscal year 2019 will exceed one trillion dollars and will be financed by selling US treasury notes and bills to domestic and foreign citizens, government agencies, and central banks, especially the US Federal Reserve System, which can purchase its treasury bills with funny money it creates by simply punching more digits into its computers and calling the resulting numbers money, of which there is no theoretical limit. Central banks around Spaceship Earth have also learned how to do this, which explains how Global Debt can now be as high as the equivalent of 244 trillion US dollars.
It’s unclear when capitalism started, possibly as soon as humans aboard Spaceship Earth learned enough to trade among themselves using some sort of money, sea shells, special rocks, wampum, maybe gold nuggets; but whenever that was by then humans had learned to selfishly look out for their own interests and those of humans closest to them as individuals. When hoarding of food and other goods started was a major milestone in capitalistic evolution; when ownership of land and buildings started was another; when cultivating crops and manufacturing started were others.
But the milestone that really got the capitalistic process going probably occurred around 1850 with the development of the steam engine, that enabled humans to move matter around and do work by boiling water to produce steam power, that entailed burning wood and coal, that soon led by 1900 or so to the widespread burning of oil to power internal (or infernal) combustion engines; and away capitalism went, to humans driving cars, trucks, and tractors; to generating and transmitting electricity and flying airplanes; to where we are today, dealing with global warming and climate change, that threatens human survival.
Experts now say if significant reductions in the production of carbon dioxide and methane released into the Earthian atmosphere as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels are not made within ten years irreparable harm will be done to all Earthian species, including homo sapiens.
It’s possible capitalism will evolve new technologies, structures,
institutions, policies, practices, procedures, customs, and laws necessary to
enable the human species to continue indefinitely aboard Spaceship Earth; but
maybe not.
Just for the fun of it, play like you are a virtual Spaceship Earth, Inc. stockholder, owning one imaginary share of virtual stock, which I hereby figuratively grant you, along with all humans around Spaceship Earth, giving you equal theoretical power to make decisions about how to manage Spaceship Earth, Inc. Tell other stockholders what you think the problems and opportunities are, what the alternatives are, and what you think should be done to make for smoother sailing for everyone aboard.
Also
feel free to write what you think pro or con about anything I or any of the
authors cited above have written in this issue of The Earthian.
Say whatever you want to say in response to the facts, analysis, conclusions, perspectives, etc. offered by the writers, pro or con, but please no ad hominem attacks, i.e., don’t try to prove you are right in your argument by illogically slandering or demeaning the personal characteristics, beliefs, behaviors, or integrity of the person you are arguing against.
Don’t worry about being “right”. Just come out with what you think is the truth of the matter. Nobody knows the full truth about economic and political affairs, and everybody knows something of value for a Game-free discussion of environmental, economic, and political problems and opportunities.
I have no desire to sell subscriptions or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN, but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained some value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate go to our Effective Learning Publications page, the Internet, or any brick and mortar bookstore and purchase one or more of my books.
Feel free to forward, share, print, reprint, copy or otherwise disseminate this issue of The Earthian any way you see fit.
Good day my beloved and welcome once more to the altar of the almighty truth.
Ah! – please, please – no standing ovation – no cheering. Not at this hallowed site. This is not a football game nor is it the American Congress. Please be seated – thank you.
The recent news cycle in America has featured the ‘Blackface’ issue concerning the Governor of the state of Virginia. As this sermon unfolds – and it shall be a long one today – the totality of Virginia’s immediate problems in its political leadership reads more like a soap opera than does it seem to reflect actual events occurring. A good place to start is at the beginning.
So, what is ‘Blackface’?
The idea behind Blackface, in relation to its comedic intent, is that persons of African descent, are such that they represent the epitome of stupidity, laxness, shiftlessness and insobriety. African-Americans were elevated to comedic prominence by a White man named Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-1860). He would place black shoe polish on his face to ascend to the high degrees that his stage character would be at his best. His most famous and popular character, where he, Dartmouth, portrayed the ‘Blackface’ character both in the US and in England, was a stereotype stage figure named “Jim Crow”. A buffoon, a dunce, an ignoramus – and all those wonderful things that all Blacks are and would want their children to grow up to be. Dartmouth, to the amusement of fully entertained White audiences, expressed and explained the true nature of the African -American. “Explained”, for many a Caucasian at the time would not have met nor interacted with a person of colour of direct African descent post-emancipation of slavery – and so they were both informed and entertained by this stage figure’s “explanation”. The term “Jim Crow” became synonymous with the segregation of African-Americans. That is the background.
Now, we fast forward to the Governor of the State of Virginia in 2019 A.D. to one Ralph Northam, a White man who found comfort and pride in his blackfacing. He, in his college days thought that blackfacing with two prominent figures posted in his college yearbook as a ‘Blackface’ character standing next to a hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan ( that all White humanitarian group) was – oh – so funny and was suitable as a picture for his college yearbook. He was found out and then he first profusely apologised. The next day he denied that it was him. He, at a press conference, even thought that having said that he also blackfaced for Michael Jackson was willing do his own little performance with Jackson’s famous ‘Moon walk dance’ moves. His wife thought better of it and reigned him in before he could get ‘on stage’ so to speak.
Are we serious here?
Based on the facts – Governor Northam could never have been. But – I am sure that I am speaking from the altar of the Almighty truth – so I definitely am quite unequivocal in my outright condemnation of Northam and people of his ilk and what they then, as now, represent. I even have gone as far as condemning President Trump for comparable sentiments ( see: below – the article ‘President Trump and past and present cognitive dissonance’). So, if in the largest all Africa online publication, I have so spoken, why then should I not be equally serious when I am speaking of Northam?
But, let me be fair, backtrack to the Caribbean, to Jamaica where I was born, then forward to England where I studied, and cross over to the US for just some quick personal examples of deeply engrained ‘racial attitudes’ then conclude today’s sermon.
My view is that in the Caribbean, when the Europeans were in colonial control there was institutionalised racism. Post-independence, I would say that there still is ‘shadism’. What do I mean?
Slave society in the Caribbean, in economic terms, on the global stage practised the world’s first form of industrialised production. It mass produced mainly sugar cane and cotton by way of utilising in the millions ( both in monetary and in human terms) the physical machinery accompanied by the ‘human manchinery’ of slaves, Africans. And so in the English form of colonial plantation society the slaves, in point of law were actually designated as ‘res’ – things – not people – but – property to be bought and sold with no consideration for separation from loved ones, family, nor having any rights to develop and maintain normal human bonds. For, in point of English law, as the famous ( infamous?) case of the Zong, the jettisoned slaves were treated by His Lordship, the then Chief Justice of England, Lord Mansfield, as property as one might an animal- and – as he so said:-
“… case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard,”
In fact, based on Lord Mansfield’s designation – some 132 “horses” – not human beings, were thrown overboard.
That is where White European sentiments and historically shaped attitudes are coming from.
More specifically, in the Caribbean/Jamaica, post-independence, the plantation society populations had had their attitudes towards ‘race’ historically shaped for them. Whites at the top – owners, overseers and any European riff-raff or vagabonds who happened upon the soil of the West Indies ( you were automatically White and privileged). Next, the offspring of the raped slave women – the Browns (Mulattos) the next step down. Last – the broad base of the majority – the Blacks at the bottom of Caribbean societies. A truly colour coded society of socio-economic demarcations. That is what happened and relating thereto is how Caribbean attitudes on ‘race’ came into being – thus my turn of phrase ‘shadism’ versus overt ‘racism’.
So to my mind, when, as in the current US case, the good Governor is so misunderstood in his conduct, it is to be much ado about nothing, for nothing should so offend the “Negroes” as like animals they are (or should be) devoid of feelings. What about my feelings? Well let me share five racial experiences. Four from England and one from the US.
At age sixteen, my father sent me to England to obtain my matriculation subjects, under the English educational system – then called “Advanced level subjects” – or “A levels” for short. I needed two to enter the Inns of Court and then could proceed to my English Bar examination to become a Barrister (what the Americans call a trial lawyer).
Approaching examination time the college student counsellor, Mr. Gill, a man from the north of England, who had lived and worked in then Apartheid South Africa, did his counselling with me and it went like this, his blond hair and his blue eyes and his pipe being puffed:-
“So laddy, what are you going to do after exams?”
“ I want to be a lawyer, but I think that I want to go to university first”
“Which one do you have in mind?”
“ London University Sir”
“Oh, its very hard to get into London; maybe you should try …” and he proceeded to rattle off a list of ‘no-name’ second to third tier universities.
I listened but did not respond.
At the time I only needed two good passes and London would consider my application. To make sure of my place I sat and obtained four A levels. My thoughts ( never uttered) were thereafter – well fuck you Mr. Gill.
And on to my attendance at a concert in the ‘West End’ ( i.e. London’s equivalent of Broadway) with my then Jamaican girlfriend. I took her to see the African-American soul singer, Lou Rawls.
As these shows go there will be minor pre main show performances.
The curtain was pulled back and there was a man sitting at a piano with a gorilla mask on. He started to play the keys and then began singing the famous Ray Charles song, ‘Take these chains from my heart’ while pulling from his pocket a long chain with a big red heart at the end.
Laugh – it was supposed to be funny, the ‘monkey man’ singing that famous song.
A voice in an America accent blurted out from two rows behind us, “That is disgusting; if this were the States, this could never happen”.
I looked over my shoulder and saw a blond girl who said it sitting next to her blond female friend discussing how outraged and disgusted they were.
Well sweeties, it was the 1970s when I attended London University; the 1980s when Governor Northam went to his college; and it is the year 2019 and he still wanted to do a ‘Blackface’ Michael Jackson for his audience – the people of the US and more particularly the State of Virginia.
So, post- graduate London University and now Law School, still during the days when Apartheid South Africa existed.
Adrienne, was her name, a fellow post-grad student who said to me while we discussed the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of Apartheid South Africa:-
“ Courtenay, you do not understand, the Africans are stupid”.
“Well Adrienne, I am of African descent so I guess I am stupid?”
“I don’t mean you, I mean the Africans in South Africa.”
So, if we reflect on this for a moment – with the then White racist regime spending on average some eight times as much on the education of every White child versus the state expenditure on any Black child – duh – huh?
In effect South Africa constituted an explicit form of ‘racial capitalism’ and Adrienne’s whiteness made her a primary beneficiary. She simply did not comprehend that fact and as with attitudes towards ‘race’ across the ‘white world’ many people still do not comprehend the historical sources of contemporary socio-economic disparities. There has been a colonial process wherein conquest after invasion, led to expropriation of both resources and identity in the Caribbean and similarly elsewhere on the planet.
Law School revelations and learnings did not end there. Now we get to the Dean’s husband, Mr. Jack Phillips, a lecturer in Trust Law and the student advisor. Kathryn Cronyn, an Australian, a bit older than the rest of us, who was in her late twenties and had completed her doctorate came over to a cafeteria table where I was sitting with fellow students and said:-
“ Do you know what Jack Phillips just said to me; Kate why do you worry about them so much and they have only just come down from the trees?”
Well – this ‘monkey’ decided that he would not share any more of the peanuts he had to get from each of us to be a lecturer in the law school; some were on scholarship, others on partial state grant, others paid for by their parents. However received it was our attendance and our ‘peanuts’ that kept him in a job.
So, we called an urgent student meeting which seemed to be a mini-UN. A vote was called and by a majority of one – the vote ended as 18 to 19 and the 19 decision vote ( mine included) ousted him from the Law School and “ta..ta..Jack Phillips and no more peanuts either”.
I am big, I am grown, I am a lawyer, I am earning and I am earning well. So well from an offshore insurance owner who my law firm represented and I had earned some substantial legal fees – not – mere ‘monkey money’ and my US client convinced me to bank and invest in the US in the bank he used in Coral Gables, Miami. I took his advice and he set up some paperwork and my money was wired into account.
The Bank Manager had never met me, but obviously saw some substantial money and a message came to me that when next in Miami, I should come in and meet him. So said, so done, and it was a morning meeting and I was on time. He was in a back room; there was an opaque glass divider for the cubicle where the secretary sat, and in the front were chairs for visitors/attendees to the Manager’s office. There I sat on time all alone and well dressed in a business suit when his secretary looked out and saw me:-
“Mr. Barnett is not here yet Sir.”
About fifteen minutes later with two White males now present she looks out and this time comes out. She goes to the nearest White male:-
“Are you Mr. Barnett?”
Then to the next.
“Are you Mr. Barnett?”
She retreats and her voice is heard, “Mr. Barnett is still not here yet Sir.”
About five minutes later she comes out and – having watched and played the game of assumptions long enough – I simply stood and said, “I am Mr. Barnett”. Says a lot.
Too much money; wrong colour.
I conclude from my years as a youngster until now, with such that I have experienced and/or learned from my tutors, my lecturers and Professors and life itself in its entirety, that a largely victor’s history has been false fed.
The current world does not go as far back as Egypt and beyond, if one listened only to that ‘white narrative’. It starts with Greece and Rome and it advances without any Caribbean labour, as in Haiti having had at the time of its slave revolution contributed and constituted fully 40% of the wealth of France. The industrial revolution in England bears no reference in terms of capital accumulation to the slave labour and its produce exported to Britain to build universities, cathedrals, factories, libraries, schools etc. while the slaves languished in poverty. Oh no! It was Lord Mansfield who set the Black, James Somerset, free. But, only him, Somerset alone, a case specific decision, so that his fellow slaves in the West Indies could continue to labour on to generate more riches for Britain. And so all the accomplishments, the capital accumulation of which Dr. Eric Williams so brilliantly analysed in his tome, ‘Capitalism and slavery’, is to be historically disjoined as irrelevant ‘fake news’ ( in modern Trumpian terminology) and never be acknowledged as the actual monetary umbilical chord linking the development of Western European societies to the slave plantations of the Caribbean. So upset were the British with Dr. Williams revelation, that not one publisher could be found ( not one in Britain from extreme conservative to liberal and even radical left publishers) would embrace at that time, the truth and let it be told and widely known. Dr. Williams had to take the product of his Oxford University doctoral thesis to the US to get it published and he taught there as a Professor for about a decade until he returned to the Caribbean to become the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago.
In our contemporary world the White men, descended from Europe, have been the victors and continue to write and expound victor’s histories and accounts. It is only they who can craft any accurate account of history and thus to them our understanding is beholden. Someone thus wrote this:-
“Using the modern-day weapons of capitalism and war-time technology they have dismissed diasporic Blacks, Indigenous New Worlders, women and the monoliths of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Entire dynasties were eradicated. The number of genders was winnowed down to about one and a half.”
Walter Mosley
I prefer to be the pleasant dissident who speaks of, writes of, experiences his own personal history and understands with open eyes the place, the history, the destiny of my people – then extrapolate therefrom, as did the White men before me, to an epistemological place I designate accurately and truthfully as my own. For, if I did not so do, I would become an apologist for people such as Mr. Gill or Jack Phillips or Adrienne or even for Governor Northam. That is my choice, my place to stand with human dignity intact, my point of departure from the White man’s history. I am aware of race discrimination but can think well beyond that about climate change, nuclear arms, manufactured wars (e.g. war in Iraq or subterfuge in Venezuela for their oil) and many other global issues. For as the famous biologist Edward O. Wilson so eloquently stated:-
“Humanity today is like a walking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.”
And, all said and done, my place on the planet does have room for not just me, for the Asians, the Africans, the White man, and all other life forms, but I do not see as the White man sees ‘others’ – for ‘they’ too are my people; it is as if at my mental best I am one with ‘them’, yet psychologically not one of ‘them’, viewed through my telescope looking back at history and thinking from the past and envisioning a more promising future.
Governor Northam and your associates and people of that ilk – do take advice from a good lawyer and may you one day be redeemed – but only after demitting office and then rejecting racist fantasies. The real world of the UK, the US and the entire planet needs to move on to a better place.
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered today at the altar of the almighty truth to consider a very serious matter. It is the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the potential annihilation of our species. More particularly, the focus is on the conduct of the United States of America and Russia.
Context and a quick grasp of the motivating factors for production of these weapons can be gleaned by listening to President Eisenhower’s warning from the 1960s and then considering the stark clarity of the words of George Kennan ( he was the US architect of the ‘Cold War’).
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
― George F. Kennan
Interesting to note that the foregoing does not comprise, my thoughts or ideas or opinions – but rather the reality as expressed by highly placed US leaders.
The idea and objective of International Law is to provide a framework and set of international rules for nations and persons to conduct international relations by abiding by same ( The rule of International Law). The UN Charter and Treaties are just two demonstrable examples of International Law’ s intention as to how it is intended to work. It is not a perfect system, but without it ( or something close to it in place) – then what is the option for intended civilized and peaceful dispute resolution – brute force – or – war?
Thus, post World War 11, not only the United Nations, but a series of Laws and Treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions, set out to establish the legal new architecture for the world. In the specific context of nuclear weapons the following can be noted:-
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty or ABMT) was signed in 1972 between the US and the then Soviet Union. The terms of the Treaty permitted each side to be limited to two ABM complexes – and – each complex was further limited to 100 anti-ballistic missiles.
In 2002 the US already had destabilised the nuclear balance when they decided to get out of the ABM Treaty. In 2002, and when you look at a map, the United States was putting missile defense bases all around Eurasia, creating a feeling of encirclement in Russia and China.
The US ideology was to put sovereignty above international law, and they wanted to have a totally free hand to keep their supremacy in the world as long as possible, and these Treaties were constraining them.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ( INF Treaty) collapsed; it had been established between the then Soviet Union and the US at a time when Gorbochov and Reagan were leaders of their respective countries. The broad objective, as with the 1972 Treaty, was arms-control. The INF Treaty sought to eliminate all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles and the launchers for such missiles.
Citing Russian non-compliance as the reason for withdrawal, on the 20th October 2018, President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing.
It is not hard to discern the pattern of attempted rationalisation, by way of blaming deviation and/or violations to justify withdrawal. Yet, withdrawal defeats the long-term objective of an intended symmetrical containment under International Treaties.
It is also not hard to discern from the withdrawals, that one nation is seeking superiority and dominance; by placing emphasis on its “exceptionalism” in preference for assertive sovereignty over co-operative submission to International Law.
The waste of global resources and corresponding stupidity should also be noted. That approach places us ( all human beings on planet earth) at risk.
What logical, rational – or – in any way sensible route is it for a nation to squander so much resources on building these nuclear weapons; when – it is known by both sides that direct use, the US against Russia or vice versa is guaranteed Mutually Assured Destruction ( MAD)?
On the 2nd February, 2019 President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was also suspending the INF Treaty.
AMEN – AND INDEED IF THERE WAS EVER SUCH A WAR, THEN MANY OF US READIND THIS – WOULD BE SAYING OUR FINAL – AMEN!
PEACE!
So, endeth my sermon for today.
Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and works in the Caribbean.