The Progressive movement and its social democratic system put considerable faith in bureaucracy. In part, this was because the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw bureaucracy as improvement over the paternalism of the early nineteenth century, and they were right. However, by 1940 right as the New Deal reforms of 1932-7 were drawing to a close, it had become evident that bureaucracy does not work so well as its proponents thought. In the 1940s the sociologist Robert Merton wrote an article about the rigidity of bureaucracy and bureaucrats' fetishization of rules at the expense of efficiency. In the 1950s Taiicho Ohno of Toyota pioneered the principles of lean production and total quality management. Even going back so far as the 1920s, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, along with executives in other leading firms, pioneered the use of decentralization, federalized organization, realizing that large firms did not permit global or functional forms of organization. The information and flexibility requirements of large firms are too daunting for anyone to handle.
Strangely, though, the Progressive and social democratic movement continued to emphasize centralization. The result is that increasingly, American life has been dominated by unresponsive, unproductive government bureaucracies that spin regulation and do not care what the public thinks. This is the result not only of centralization but also of the increasing emphasis on expertise in the expansion of government at the expense of the spoils system.
The result is a considerable degree of dissonance between the public's experience and the "facts" it is fed in school, through the news media and through public opinion leaders who are committed to the Progressive, social democratic solution because it enforces their status as professional experts, elite business leaders and the like.
The public has become increasingly alienated from public institutions because they are distant; they do not work; and they are held forth as far superior to the processes and systems that in the public's own experience work. As a result, the public experiences what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance". On the one hand, they are taught that "experts" know better than they do. But when they interact with state government, the department of motor vehicles and the like, they experience systems that do not work so well as ones that they themselves could devise. They are taught that scientists can solve problems. But then they hear that cancer has become an industry characterized by avoidance of effective remedies, politics, waste and regulation of innovative ideas out of existence. They are told that the state equalizes inequity, then they learn that the federal government subsidization billionaire investment bankers through direct bounties and a central banking system that sees its primary role as to support stock prices.
Cognitive dissonance has unpredictable effects, but one of them is potentially withdrawal. Others include anger, attempting to intervene and correct the situation, and denial. All of these are present in today's society.
Both left and right have become increasingly strident as the remedies that they advocate, central banking, expertise in government, efficiency, a corporatist state that supports the public interest, have failed to materialize. Political correctness, left wing intolerance of dissent in universities and other institutions, reflects the left's inability to confront the failure of the mercantilist solution to which it has been wedded since the late eighteenth century. Likewise, the right wing increasingly fights within itself, unable to arrive at a coherent picture of reform. As well, much of the right is in denial about its own Progressive spirit. The split between libertarians and conservatives has permitted mercantilists of the Progressive (Republican) and social democratic (Democratic) stripe to dominate the electoral process.
The public faces declining real wages, yet has refused to confront the decline and has borrowed, consuming about six percent more each year than it creates. There is avoidance of the causes of economic decline. Firms have heavily relied on public subsidy, especially through the banking system, yet corporate executives claim prerogatives of private property in extracting ever-increasing salaries that at most weakly reflect corporate performance. Few in the news media suggest that corporations that do not see a public role ought not to be subsidized by the public, and that the Federal Reserve system is little more than a crutch for inefficient American firms.
Americans increasingly feel alienated. The reason is that the obsession with size and economies of scale has been pursued too far. The large scale of industry; the large federal government have not yielded increases in wealth. Rather, they have become vehicles by which corrupt special interests extract wealth at public expense and as the public has reacted to cognitive dissonance by increasingly withdrawing or by becoming ever more strident in its demand for "change", a noun that describes an unnamed verb.
The remedy for too much centralization is decentralization.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Letter to New York State Board of Elections Re Obama Birth Certificate
The New York Secretary of State's secretary has informed me that the Board of Elections, not the Secretary of State oversees elections in New York. I had previously sent the following letter to the Secretary of State. I have therefore forwarded an e-mail and will send a snail mail letter to the Board of Elections in New York as follows:
PO Box 130
West Shokan, New York 12494
August 9, 2008
http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com
mlangbert@hvc.rr.com
James A. Walsh / Co-Chair
Douglas A. Kellner / Co-Chair
Evelyn J. Aquila / Commissioner
Gregory P. Peterson / Commissioner
New York State Board of Elections
40 Steuben Street
Albany, NY 12207-2108
Dear Messrs. Walsh, Kellner and Gregory and Ms. Aquila
I would like to file a public, formal complaint with the New York State Board of Elections requesting verification of the natural-born U.S. citizenship of Mr. Barack Obama, and revocation of the registration and recognition of Mr. Obama’s candidacy for president of the United States if that citizenship is not verified as described below within 7 days of your receipt of this letter. Mr. Obama has not shown that he fulfills the Constitutional requirement for president, to be a “natural born citizen”, Article Two, Section 1.
The basis for this complaint is:
a) Mr. Obama’s refusal to produce a physical certified, stamped copy of his birth certificate, with the Hawaii file number visible, upon my previous repeated request and the requests of others.
b) Significant analysis of the electronically-displayed image displayed by Mr. Obama on his official campaign website as the certificate indicates forgery.
c) The electronically-displayed image displayed by Mr. Obama on his official campaign website has the Hawaii state birth certificate filing number blacked out, eliminating any objective information that links the image to an actual certificate on file (see http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html).
If Mr. Obama produces a certified, stamped copy of the original birth certificate with all information visible, I request as the complainant to see that document in person to examine its authenticity, including electronically, before you finalize its response; and the opportunity to verify the authenticity with the issuing state official. This process should require no more than two business days, and may take place in at your office.
If the certificate is not produced in 10 days and verified by you and myself within another 5 days, this complaint requests that Mr. Obama’s registration as a presidential candidate be rejected by the State of New York because he has failed to document his citizenship.
I ask for expedited formal response and resolution of this request, given that the national convention furthering the candidacy will occur in three weeks, and given that this document is easy to produce upon personal request of Mr. Obama to the Hawaii state government. Please note you can request it directly, as qualifying under Hawaii Revised Statutes § 338-18 has having “a direct and tangible interest in the record.”
This request is made with the utmost respect for New York’s laws, the presidential election process and the candidates involved, in the desire to resolve this question quickly and confirm their integrity. If a similar request is appropriate to be made to all presidential candidates it must not slow down this specific request.
If the you decide that you do not have jurisdiction in this matter, please respond within three business days of receipt of this complaint with the state agency or other governmental organization that is responsible for enforcing Article Two, Section One of the Constitution that requires natural-born citizenship for candidacy for the president of the United States. Please include the basis for such jurisdiction by that agency or organization. Please respond by email to: mlangbert@hvc.rr.com
Sincerely,
Mitchell Langbert
PO Box 130
203 Watson Hollow Road
West Shokan, New York 12494
PO Box 130
West Shokan, New York 12494
August 9, 2008
http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com
mlangbert@hvc.rr.com
James A. Walsh / Co-Chair
Douglas A. Kellner / Co-Chair
Evelyn J. Aquila / Commissioner
Gregory P. Peterson / Commissioner
New York State Board of Elections
40 Steuben Street
Albany, NY 12207-2108
Dear Messrs. Walsh, Kellner and Gregory and Ms. Aquila
I would like to file a public, formal complaint with the New York State Board of Elections requesting verification of the natural-born U.S. citizenship of Mr. Barack Obama, and revocation of the registration and recognition of Mr. Obama’s candidacy for president of the United States if that citizenship is not verified as described below within 7 days of your receipt of this letter. Mr. Obama has not shown that he fulfills the Constitutional requirement for president, to be a “natural born citizen”, Article Two, Section 1.
The basis for this complaint is:
a) Mr. Obama’s refusal to produce a physical certified, stamped copy of his birth certificate, with the Hawaii file number visible, upon my previous repeated request and the requests of others.
b) Significant analysis of the electronically-displayed image displayed by Mr. Obama on his official campaign website as the certificate indicates forgery.
c) The electronically-displayed image displayed by Mr. Obama on his official campaign website has the Hawaii state birth certificate filing number blacked out, eliminating any objective information that links the image to an actual certificate on file (see http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html).
If Mr. Obama produces a certified, stamped copy of the original birth certificate with all information visible, I request as the complainant to see that document in person to examine its authenticity, including electronically, before you finalize its response; and the opportunity to verify the authenticity with the issuing state official. This process should require no more than two business days, and may take place in at your office.
If the certificate is not produced in 10 days and verified by you and myself within another 5 days, this complaint requests that Mr. Obama’s registration as a presidential candidate be rejected by the State of New York because he has failed to document his citizenship.
I ask for expedited formal response and resolution of this request, given that the national convention furthering the candidacy will occur in three weeks, and given that this document is easy to produce upon personal request of Mr. Obama to the Hawaii state government. Please note you can request it directly, as qualifying under Hawaii Revised Statutes § 338-18 has having “a direct and tangible interest in the record.”
This request is made with the utmost respect for New York’s laws, the presidential election process and the candidates involved, in the desire to resolve this question quickly and confirm their integrity. If a similar request is appropriate to be made to all presidential candidates it must not slow down this specific request.
If the you decide that you do not have jurisdiction in this matter, please respond within three business days of receipt of this complaint with the state agency or other governmental organization that is responsible for enforcing Article Two, Section One of the Constitution that requires natural-born citizenship for candidacy for the president of the United States. Please include the basis for such jurisdiction by that agency or organization. Please respond by email to: mlangbert@hvc.rr.com
Sincerely,
Mitchell Langbert
PO Box 130
203 Watson Hollow Road
West Shokan, New York 12494
Contours of American History I
I'm almost done reading William Appleman Williams's 1961 Contours of American History. Williams is considered a New Left historian (how "new" he is I don't know, the book is 47 years old and he died in 1990). I disagree with his ideological orientation, especially his hatred of property rights and his intense dislike of the laissez- faire policies of the Jacksonian period through about 1900. For instance, he refers to the 19th century laissez-faire philosophy as "reactionary" even though he develops the argument that the mercantilist or corporatist philosophy that originated in feudal England is preferable. In other words, he calls a 100 years old philosophy reactionary, but he does not so call, and instead praises to the heavens, a 400 year old philosophy, not considering that it might be reactionary to re institute a 17th century mercantilist model in 1900. Moreover, he expressly notes that real wages and standards of living were going up in the late nineteenth century and that there was a large degree of innovation. Yet, he insists that laissez-faire was a failure because of business "depressions". This was the corporate argument made at the time by economists such as DA Wells, but Williams does not question it.
One question that I am left with is why the left has so obsessed on restoring mercantilism or even feudalism, and accuses anyone who disagrees with the anti-property and anti-individualist stance as "reactionary". This is an illogical, almost insane, position. First, emphasis on individualism and property rights led to innovation and increasing living standards. Second, it is reactionary to advocate an older philosophy, not a newer one, and mercantilism is older than laissez-faire. Third, Williams has no interest in applying his significant and imaginative intellect to attempting to ascertain why laissez-faire was attacked.
That said, this is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Williams said it all in this sense:
1. He outlined how elitist economic interests have advocated mercantilism from the pre-Revolutionary War period through the Federalist era and then renewed them in the Progressive and New Deal eras. He falls down in the Jacksonian period in that he ignores the mercantilist impulse in the Whig philsophies of Abraham Lincoln and the American System of Henry Clay.
2. His exegesis of the frontier hypothesis is wonderful. He points out that Americans traditionally saw expansion to the frontier as a source of economic bounty. This was the famous argument of Frederick Jackson Turner. Then, he pushes the argument further, and this is where I got really excited. He argues that the emphasis of late nineteenth century business executives on large scale industry and state support for large scale industry was a function of the expansionist argument. John R. Commons too argued that "expansion of markets" is crucial to explaining labor relations, but Williams puts the expansionist vision into brilliant historical context. Globalization (he does not use that term as he wrote in 1961) and the emphasis on large scale business is a function of the expansionist impulse, and he documents that well. Thus, Americans have been obsessed with creating big business because they believed that "expansion" creates wealth. The Japanese don't have quite the same obsessions.
3. He argues that the New Deal was the fulfillment of Progressivism. I find this much more believable than the claim that there was a gulf between Progressivism and the New Deal. This leads to the question: if Herbert Hoover was a Progressive, how did the New Deal differ from what Hoover proposed? The National Industrial Recovery Act was essentially the implementation of fascism in America, but the Supreme Court overturned it. Hoover still favored a degree of individualism and property rights, and Roosevelt went a bit further than Hoover wanted to in the social democratic direction. The outlines of most of what Roosevelt did were already discussed in the Progressive era. Roosevelt's most extreme syndicalism was overturned. Hoover did not support the NIRA, which didn't go into effect in any case.
4. Williams outlines the new order as syndicalist, and it is. Economic interests, namely labor and management, were reflected in the new feudal or corporatist order. I quote these two paragraphs
"It is of course essential to evaluate the combined significance of these decisions within the framework of the syndicalist approach that had been present in the Progressive Movement from the very beginning of the 20th century and which the New Deal consolidated...In that system, the citizen was almost wholly dependent upon the definition of public welfare that emerged inside the national government as a consensus among the leaders of the various functional-syndicalist elements of the political economy. The possibility that Hoover had projected in 1921-22 had emerged as reality: the United States was 'a syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale'.
"Yet the citizens' political activity was carried on within a framework that was organized on an entirely different basis: i.e., geographic boundaries which had only the most causal and accidental relationship to the syndicalist structure of the political economy. That discrepancy left the citizen without any effective, institutionalized leverage on the crucial and centralized decisions affecting every phase of his life."*
What Appleman has done is conjoin the special interest theory of regulation with the historical narrative. Syndicalism recreated the mercantilist system of the Federalist period and earlier (and a little later) but it also created a free-for-all whereby those with the best representation would be able to extract the most wealth from the political system. Mancur Olson did not write until a bit later. His point was that special interests gain economic rents through structural advantages.
Although Appleman spiritually supports mercantilism, he does so despite a factual base that points in the opposite direction. The mercantilist model is not appropriate to the modern world because it is not responsive; it does not respond to change; it leads to bureaucracy; and it is not democratic. Most of all, it leads to oppression of less represented groups by better represented groups.
*William Appleman William, The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966, p. 448.
One question that I am left with is why the left has so obsessed on restoring mercantilism or even feudalism, and accuses anyone who disagrees with the anti-property and anti-individualist stance as "reactionary". This is an illogical, almost insane, position. First, emphasis on individualism and property rights led to innovation and increasing living standards. Second, it is reactionary to advocate an older philosophy, not a newer one, and mercantilism is older than laissez-faire. Third, Williams has no interest in applying his significant and imaginative intellect to attempting to ascertain why laissez-faire was attacked.
That said, this is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Williams said it all in this sense:
1. He outlined how elitist economic interests have advocated mercantilism from the pre-Revolutionary War period through the Federalist era and then renewed them in the Progressive and New Deal eras. He falls down in the Jacksonian period in that he ignores the mercantilist impulse in the Whig philsophies of Abraham Lincoln and the American System of Henry Clay.
2. His exegesis of the frontier hypothesis is wonderful. He points out that Americans traditionally saw expansion to the frontier as a source of economic bounty. This was the famous argument of Frederick Jackson Turner. Then, he pushes the argument further, and this is where I got really excited. He argues that the emphasis of late nineteenth century business executives on large scale industry and state support for large scale industry was a function of the expansionist argument. John R. Commons too argued that "expansion of markets" is crucial to explaining labor relations, but Williams puts the expansionist vision into brilliant historical context. Globalization (he does not use that term as he wrote in 1961) and the emphasis on large scale business is a function of the expansionist impulse, and he documents that well. Thus, Americans have been obsessed with creating big business because they believed that "expansion" creates wealth. The Japanese don't have quite the same obsessions.
3. He argues that the New Deal was the fulfillment of Progressivism. I find this much more believable than the claim that there was a gulf between Progressivism and the New Deal. This leads to the question: if Herbert Hoover was a Progressive, how did the New Deal differ from what Hoover proposed? The National Industrial Recovery Act was essentially the implementation of fascism in America, but the Supreme Court overturned it. Hoover still favored a degree of individualism and property rights, and Roosevelt went a bit further than Hoover wanted to in the social democratic direction. The outlines of most of what Roosevelt did were already discussed in the Progressive era. Roosevelt's most extreme syndicalism was overturned. Hoover did not support the NIRA, which didn't go into effect in any case.
4. Williams outlines the new order as syndicalist, and it is. Economic interests, namely labor and management, were reflected in the new feudal or corporatist order. I quote these two paragraphs
"It is of course essential to evaluate the combined significance of these decisions within the framework of the syndicalist approach that had been present in the Progressive Movement from the very beginning of the 20th century and which the New Deal consolidated...In that system, the citizen was almost wholly dependent upon the definition of public welfare that emerged inside the national government as a consensus among the leaders of the various functional-syndicalist elements of the political economy. The possibility that Hoover had projected in 1921-22 had emerged as reality: the United States was 'a syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale'.
"Yet the citizens' political activity was carried on within a framework that was organized on an entirely different basis: i.e., geographic boundaries which had only the most causal and accidental relationship to the syndicalist structure of the political economy. That discrepancy left the citizen without any effective, institutionalized leverage on the crucial and centralized decisions affecting every phase of his life."*
What Appleman has done is conjoin the special interest theory of regulation with the historical narrative. Syndicalism recreated the mercantilist system of the Federalist period and earlier (and a little later) but it also created a free-for-all whereby those with the best representation would be able to extract the most wealth from the political system. Mancur Olson did not write until a bit later. His point was that special interests gain economic rents through structural advantages.
Although Appleman spiritually supports mercantilism, he does so despite a factual base that points in the opposite direction. The mercantilist model is not appropriate to the modern world because it is not responsive; it does not respond to change; it leads to bureaucracy; and it is not democratic. Most of all, it leads to oppression of less represented groups by better represented groups.
*William Appleman William, The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966, p. 448.
Monday, August 11, 2008
ContrairiMairi Raises More Questions
Here's a thought I just had.....Remember I had asked, "How did Maya get a COLB if she was born in Jakarta?"
I was just looking at info on your new blog, and a HUGE bell went off in my head!
The two COLB's Patricia Decosta (actual), and Husseins/Maya's (possibly fake) say TWO different Things!
Patricia...Date Filed by State Registrar " a record of birth sent from a local hospital?"
Hussein....Date Accepted by State Registrar "possibly indicating someone born somewhere else and late filed?"
Why else two different statements on the same form????
What do you think?
Maya's would also have to be "accepted" if born out of country as we know she was......
Just a thought
I was just looking at info on your new blog, and a HUGE bell went off in my head!
The two COLB's Patricia Decosta (actual), and Husseins/Maya's (possibly fake) say TWO different Things!
Patricia...Date Filed by State Registrar " a record of birth sent from a local hospital?"
Hussein....Date Accepted by State Registrar "possibly indicating someone born somewhere else and late filed?"
Why else two different statements on the same form????
What do you think?
Maya's would also have to be "accepted" if born out of country as we know she was......
Just a thought
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